THE UNDESERVING STATE

Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite
Joseph Marie de Maistre, 15 August 1811

Whether or not every country has the government it deserves, there is little doubt that the people of the state of New South Wales must have done something truly, badly awful to deserve their government – something really appalling, and not just once or for a short period, but repeatedly, and for a very long time.

What could it be that has made NSW so undeserving of good government? It clearly isn’t the fault of just one political leader – these have been rotated almost routinely. In a little over three years we have had three Premiers and as many leaders of the Opposition. And it can’t be just one party, or we would have replaced it with the clear alternative.

While NSW has had a Labor government now for over 13 years, the story cannot be told from one side of politics alone. Sure, the party of reform and progress – the party born of a communitarian movement for the betterment of ordinary working folk – has become a macabre corporate parody, subsumed by its internal interests as the only will to power.

But even in opposition, the Tories - the high church coalition of metropolitan individualism and agrarian socialism - have done little more than highlight to the electors the paucity of real choice in NSW. Lacking Labor’s unrepresentative union domination, the NSW coalition makes do with religious activists, business failures and local non-entities.

Both sides are also staffed these days pretty much by career hacks; the only distinction being that Labor has more 25 year olds to draw upon from the union well; before they transfer their meagre gifts to a safe seat or the corporate sector. Yet this can’t be the whole story – the reservoir of talent in NSW politics has rarely been ocean deep.

It can’t even be solely the composition of the NSW Parliament (although this must be part of the story), as we electors had an opportunity to change it dramatically in the last election held only 18 months ago, and we did not take it. So no, there must be a more profound and complex explanation for our undeserving state.

Why are we so unmeritorious, here, now, in 2008? Even taking into account Sydney’s rampant housing costs, we pay our politicians a living wage. If they make it through two terms, they get a fine fat pension. Sure, some of them are jailed, or join Macquarie Bank.

But not all Ministers of the Crown dance around Parliamentary offices in their underpants, with all the panache of Homer Simpson, acting as if their political fundraising from property developers for years has, pari passu, given them title over the joint. Plenty of them go on and do useful work in the community after they’ve left politics.

We’ve got all the usual good governance things, too, like a bicameral Parliament. The government of the day doesn’t control the Legislative Council, so it can function as a house of review. It can, and does, initiate Parliamentary inquiries, which publish reports, and things happen. There is some consequential change, isn’t there?

We’ve got preferential voting and fixed terms, so the Treasury benches don’t get the referee’s whistle to call the end of one match and the start of the next. And we’ve got an anti-corruption commission, an Ombudsman, and more Commissions of Inquiry than you could poke a sharp beak at. So all the bent politicians are now ex-politicians, right?

Is it that we are simply dim or slow? No, I don’t think that’s right or fair. NSW isn’t South Australia or Queensland, after all. And while we may have come in part from convict and trooper stock, we’ve been so well hybridised with indigenous and exotic breeds that now we wear our blended heritage like a stylish tattoo: as a skin deep fashion statement.

So what has the wealthiest, most populous state in one of the modern world’s great success stories – a peaceable, roughly fair, freeish kind of democracy, with admittedly too much sun and barely enough fresh water – done to deserve its government? Wasn’t a history of faltering, lowbrow mediocrity enough? Why this abject and utter disaster?

Is it perhaps because we are all gone mad, or become the victims of post-modernist ennui? No, it can’t be this either, because we should have seen the pattern of disease spreading across state and even international boundaries. And we haven’t – the world may be a stage, but in no other company have we seen the play quite so poorly cast.

There is something peculiar as well as widespread about the political pathology of NSW. Of course, some of the story is just the Rum Rebellion retold – a political virus mutating, ‘flu-like, across the 19th and 20th centuries and into the 21st. Our addiction to grog, gambling and property deals – and their revenues - has hardly changed in two hundred years.

And so we have seen with every year a government more and more dependent on tax revenues – and hitherto, political donations – from precisely these three industries. Indeed, so ugly did this get that one of the last desperate steps of our most recent erstwhile Premier was to introduce public funding of parties’ election campaigns.

Thus, instead of banning spending on high cost political advertising, our taxes will in the future pay for the pleasure of us watching and listening to our political protagonists mislead, dissemble, prevaricate, diminish, exaggerate and distort any factoid, impression or opinion in pursuit of our tick at the polling booth.

But again, important as this is, it cannot be the whole truth of the matter. Other jurisdictions are beholden in part to corporate largesse while funding their campaigns from the public purse, yet some at least manage to conduct their politics in the public interest. Look at Quebec, or Belgium.

Perhaps there is a clue not in the government of NSW precisely, but in its relationship with other Australian governments. Australia is reputed to be the most over-governed country in the western world. Perhaps governmental competition is the real problem.

By way of explaining why so many Australians work in the media overseas, it is said (particularly by Americans) that in Australia there are too many journalists chasing too little news. Maybe Australian politics is like that, too. Maybe there are too many politicians, with too little talent, trying to do too much to too few.

There is something to be said for this assay of our federal system. And it is surely tougher for politicians in the states than in the Commonwealth (or the succubus territories). Resources are not only stretched across the levels of government, powers are fundamentally distorted to the disadvantage of the sovereign states, and particularly NSW.

This is so not only because of vertical fiscal imbalance – the Commonwealth has the bulk of the revenue raising powers; the states the preponderance of the basic (and costly) government responsibilities – but also because of the incessant judicial trend to prefer the Commonwealth over the states in constitutional disputes about their respective powers.

In short, more and more, the Commonwealth is where the action is. Or, more accurately, while the clout lies with the Commonwealth, the hard work remains with the states. This is particularly galling for NSW. The joke not so long ago was, NSW would be in favour of uniformity, so long as all the other the Australian states were uniform with NSW.

Now, the biggest state continues to receive a disproportionately low amount of taxation revenue, but suffers a diminished political influence. While it is perhaps not quite as bad as Bob Carr once joked, that the job of Premier is becoming little more than the Mayor of NSW, it is certainly a less appealing place for an ambitious political operative.

There is no doubt that NSW is attracting less capable political talent. It ranks now down with the pack of mainland states – Victoria and Queensland, and to an extent even SA and WA. And on a per capita basis, NSW may not perform as well as most of the others. Its political talent is trickling elsewhere, and the only elsewhere in Australia is Canberra.

* * *

What is my evidence for this drought of political talent? Careful analysis over many years, coupled with my own professional experience. While not a political functionary, I have worked long enough, and close enough, to see some of the talent in NSW at play, particularly over the last five years. And it has not been an edifying experience.

I have met and advised the last two Premiers, and seen at close call the work of their predecessor and a number of their Ministers. I have worked at various levels with many ministerial advisors in NSW politics. And I’ve socialised with more current and former ministerial staffers than I care to recall. The NSW Parliament and Governor Macquarie Tower are not strangers to me.

So lets talk specifics: Morris Iemma and Barry O’Farrell; Nathan Rees, Carmel Tebbutt and John Della Bosca. We have heard it said that Morris Iemma is quite a personable man, almost decent. And he might well be. He is certainly unremarkable enough to be nice.

When I first had dealings with Iemma and his staff, in 2003, he was the Health Minister. Bob Carr was Premier, and the health system was going through one of its serial bouts of morbidity – this time the symptomatic eruptions were over Campbelltown and Camden Hospitals. Other bureaucrats and I were brought in to manage the crisis. For nine months.

My first impression of Iemma, at a tour of Campbelltown Hospital conducted in a strained attempt to assuage the ropey staff (particularly the nurses), was of a compact introvert – like a quiet but wary pet perhaps, or a loyal retainer with a keen eye. There were, at the time, also rumours of Bob Carr leaving politics (accurate, if premature, as it turned out).

Speculation spread, as it will among staffers and public servants, about the probable and possible contenders to replace Carr, who was seen as a smart issues manager and quick to resolve political problems, but empty of policy commitment. Talk turned to Iemma. All of us, including a future Health Chief Executive, laughed and said, No way, he hasn’t got it.

And so it turned out. Morris Iemma didn’t have it. He really was fit only to be the help. But the Centre Unity faction of the Parliamentary ALP chose him to be Premier, and so he was. For three years he led NSW, without the capacity to do so. Even as a dud Premier, he won an election. So what does this say about the political competition in our undeserving state?

I first saw Fatty O’Barrell (as he was known) in action in 1992 as the Chief of Staff to Bruce Baird – the then urbane if vapid NSW Transport Minister. It was the last days of the Greiner Government. O’Farrell might have been a bit XXXL, and the beard was to a taste acquired only by women named Rosemary, but he was considered an impressively astute operator.

I expected him to do well. After all, once John Brogden’s mental health imploded at the time of Iemma’s elevation, there wasn’t exactly a whole football team of competition on the opposition benches. But somewhere along the way from apparatchik to protagonist, Barry lost his bottle. Did his courage diet away, I wondered, or did he shave it off?

O’Farrell now reminds me of the lion in The Wizard of Oz – he sort of looks the part, except he’s a bit soft around the edges. His paws are clawless; he holds his tail up like he’s worried he’s going to trip over it; his growl just isn’t convincing – he doesn’t seem to be frightening anyone except, perhaps, himself. Maybe he should grow back the beard.

So, no real challenge there yet, but I guess the final visit to the Wizard won’t come until the election in March 2011. In the meantime, we have the newly inserted Nathan Rees.

I’ve met Mr Rees only once, a few years ago in the then Premier’s office. Perhaps he was having a hard day. But I am not at this time in a position to disconfirm the hypothesis that he’s an arrogant bully – a saner, leaner, hirsute version of Michael Costa, as yet un-sacked.

Maybe Nathan has matured. Maybe he will grow into the job. But it worries me (and here I could be showing my age) that at 40 he doesn’t seem to have done much with his life. I shouldn’t be blunt Nathan, but being a union official and political advisor are not enough.

Passions for cycling and literature are meritorious, of course, and honest labour in Granville with the Council Garbage Service no doubt rounds out one’s life experience. Still, I worry about Nathan’s excessively earnest efforts to demonstrate his sleeves-rolled-up Westieness. Like Rees, I grew up in Northmead: there is nothing intrinsically worthy about it. There is little to be ashamed of in being middle class, Nathan. Get over it. Move on.

Actually, I quietly suspect that Rees spent his childhood not in Northmead, but in Pymble – perhaps as the son of an executive in an American chemical company, his mother in reality the proprietor of a trio of florist shops. I can see Nathan, at seventeen, repudiating his days in the Gordon Junior Rugby Club, lured by the socialist romance of humping bins.

So, if Rees doesn’t end up cutting it as NSW Premier, who could? There are in fact now only two members of the NSW Cabinet with any proven ability – Deputy Premier Carmel Tebbutt, from the left, and John Della Bosca, the formerly rotund born-again cyclist of the right - both of whom have just returned to the front bench. Of the rest, who could say?

Perhaps the talent has flowed elsewhere. If this is right, we should detect in Canberra a flood of gifted politicians and staffers pouring in from NSW. So lets examine the evidence. The coalition first: John Howard; Malcolm Turnbull; Brendan Nelson; Tony Abbott; Joe Hockey. All blokes, but not a bad haul if we include the immediate past Prime Minister.

As well as the current Leader of the Opposition, we have the now former leader and - at least in his own mind - a potential leader, as well as an amusing fat guy. But still, whatever your politics, these fellows aren’t duds. The thesis is holding up so far: Not much Tory talent in Macquarie Street might mean more in Canberra.

What about the ALP? Well, here the proposition is promising but a little less certain. Who is there? Tanya Plibesek? Hmmm. Looks good, but time will tell. She’s 38. Will we still admire her political presence when she’s a more dowdy 48? I hope so.

Anthony Albanese? With a face only the aforementioned Ms Tebbutt could love, he’s a quirky performer. Not dissimilar to the tall ex-rock star with the shaved pate. Quirky. And quirky is fine as far as it goes, but good government it does not make.

How about Greg Combet? A Victorian import who could yet end up another Simon Crean. Tony Burke? Too early to say. Bob Debus, perhaps? Surely if one retires to federal politics, it is ordinarily only to the Senate.

Speaking of the Senate, there is John Faulkner and, now too, Mark Arbib, the immediate past General Secretary of the NSW ALP – a high-powered party fundraiser and (I kid you not) the son of a property developer - who was apparently influential in this latest rotation of undeserving Premiers.

Of these eight NSW Labor members, maybe four or five will endure as genuinely worthwhile political participants in Canberra. The evidence at this stage is inconclusive. Still, it’s way better than the situation back in NSW itself.

We established above that, in NSW as at September 2008, there are actually just two members of the Cabinet known to be worth paying: Carmel Tebbutt and John Della Bosca (as long as he agrees to separate from his current partner, who is clearly a bad influence).

While, in the Opposition there are, ummm...I just don’t know if there are any. Maybe Mike Baird (son of Bruce)? Youngish. Eager. Apparently personable. Reasonably articulate. Pru Goward perhaps? No, no, no. We have enough evidence now – Bob Carr; Peter Collins; the inane Maxine McKew - to support a law barring ex-journalists from seeking high office.

Greg Smith, perchance? No way. There is a touch of the Thomas Cromwell about this man. It’s not the sixteenth century. We do not encourage wars of religion here. We have an agnostic state, and a good thing too. We neither want nor need an ultra-conservative Christian lawyer leading us in NSW.

So, we are left with the NSW Labor Party, run from Sussex Street by its General Secretary and a union leader who holds the cards of just 30% of the workers in NSW, via two of the least pre-possessing creatures to emerge from the crevices of the right-wing Centre Unity faction in a generation. A faction that is now the oxymoronic symbol of the Party’s demise.

This is the real reason that NSW politics has so little talent: what intelligent, capable, self-respecting individual, with a genuine interest in public policy and the betterment of society, would subject themselves to the vile and corrosive world of politics not just inhabited by, but profoundly influenced by, Edward Moses Obeid and Joseph Guerino Tripodi?

And what alternatives are there for a centre leftish liberal in NSW? Does the disintegration of the Democrats presage the fate of the self-devouring ALP in NSW? Will Obeid and Tripodi, along with Karl Bitar, John Robinson and Nathan Rees, be the last men standing? What happens if they are? Where does one go? Not to the quasi-religious Greens, the party of Colonic Irrigationists: too Puritan; too communitarian; too brown rice and tofu.

What alternative could emerge in a state where administrative responsibility is borne by those without fiscal power; where the perquisites of office become the only inducement in the competition for positions; where the mechanisms of retention and control of decision making are quietly and insidiously corrupted by union control and corporate allure?

Ultimately, it seems, the only solution is a constitutional reconstruction – one that addresses the vertical political imbalance and recalibrates the powers and responsibilities of good governance between the Commonwealth and the other governments of the country, whatever they are: states; territories; or perchance, regions.

For this, though, we will need to search for leadership in the future not from current or ex-politicians of NSW, but from the Commonwealth. That’s where the merit lies. Unless a real Wizard turns up, it looks like another informal vote in March 2011.

We truly live in an undeserving state.

© ENRICO BRIK, SEPTEMBER 2008

FREE WILL AND THE PROBLEM OF FAT PEOPLE

I know this is going to sound like defensive overcompensation, but I don’t hate fat people. Really. I realise not all of them are lazy and stupid. I’m sure a lot of them can’t help it.

In fact, out of 50 people at my last birthday party, quite a few were overweight, and three were technically obese. We had catered enough. Chubby folk were welcome.

I guess I’m like a priest with homosexuals: it’s not fat people I hate; it’s just their fatness.

And it’s certainly not that I think they don’t have a right to exist – hey, I’m no Fatscist – it’s just that the corpulent can be an unpleasant sensory experience.

They seem like they don’t care about the affect they have on other, slimmer, people. They’re slow. They get in the way. They block aisles. They block out the sun. They occupy more than one seat on public transport. And they wear girth-inappropriate clothing.

You see, while I care about fat people quite a bit, I know most of them also eat way too much crappy food, and don’t do enough, if any, exercise. Like an obese woman’s Lycra, my toleration is strained.

It would be charitable to report that, when I quiz tubby folk about the amount of exercise they engage in, they all tell me they do a good, sweat-inducing workout for an hour a day. But they don’t. Most of them tell me they maybe walk up a flight of stairs. Once a week.

I had a boss once who was so big that fatty flesh sagged down her lower limbs. I kid you not - even her ankles were obese. I’d like to say I enjoyed working for her; and in many ways I did – but it was a near full-time job dragging the cream biscuits out her mouth. And I suspect she is not alone. There are more than a few who quietly relish being big - whose sense of self-worth flourishes in proportion to their size.

Nevertheless, I’m one of those simple folk who reckon what we have here is not principally a psychological puzzle, but a pretty straightforward problem of physics, chemistry and biology – if you devour more stuff than you burn up, you tend to increase in size.

The one sure-fire way to avoid eating too much, and to expend at least as much stuff as you consume, is for we mammals to exercise. There is just no other way around this, except surgery, which is expensive, dangerous, painful and ultimately unsightly.

We being Homo sapiens, our forebears came out of the trees, stood upright, and started walking around. A lot. They did this to gather and catch food. To avoid predators, they even ran. If they failed to do this they died, their offspring went hungry, and they did not become grandparents.

The state of nature was sort of like flying budget airlines – there weren’t just major penalties for carrying excess baggage, you actually missed the 'plane. Being gross did not confer any evolutionary advantages, as the biologists say, except in times of famine.

I am not aware of any recent shortages of food, except in the Sudan or Somalia. In war-torn, sub-Saharan Africa, maybe it is good to be fat. Unless you have to run away from soldiers.

But in metropolitan Sydney, or London, or Birmingham, Alabama, we do not notice any food shortages, let alone famine. Quite the opposite. Even if you’re broke, the challenge is to avoid eating and eating. Just look at all the fat welfare recipients.

We evolved to move around – and without a motor. So, a la Norman Tebbitt, I say get on your bike. Or run. Or swim, or row, or gym. Play football, netball, baseball, anyball. Throw a bloody Frisbee. Chase your children. Or the cat. Just get off your fat arse.

This is not to say everyone should be thin. Like Fats Waller, I enjoy a bit of meat with my potatoes. Clearly, if you look at the lads and lasses in athletics or rugby teams, we evolved a whole bunch of body shapes. Lean and muscular are fine, but chunky and stocky are good, too.

The problem is not shape, or even size, so much as sub-cutaneous composition. It’s not just the corporeal structure, it’s the covering: the gelatinous, blubbery, fattiness of fat.

Speaking of Alabama (as we were earlier) they’ve got the right idea on incentives. Not a jurisdiction we usually associate with progressive social policy, Alabama struggles as the second fattest state in the world’s second fattest country.

Alabama’s State Employees’ Insurance Board thinks you should pay more if you weigh more. In August 2008, Health.com reported that the Board will, from 2011, start charging overweight state workers - those with a body mass index (BMI) greater than 35 - $25 a month for health insurance, which is currently free for all state employees.

This is fair – the porcine bureaucrats of Alabama have nearly two and a half years to get their weight down. And the board already charges extra if you smoke.

Another excellent idea appeared in a piece published in The American on August 8 2007, entitled,Targeting Foods Is a Needlessly Indirect Way of Encouraging Weight Loss. It says:

“Isn't keeping the obese in the lifestyle to which they've become accustomed truly an expensive proposition? If it is expensive - managing chronic diabetes and so on - there is a solution that has received surprisingly little public attention: the fat-person tax.

It’s simple, transparent and neutral. This system would operate smoothly…everyone would submit an official Body Mass Index (BMI) report with their annual tax return, and (the Tax Office) would make the tax calculation for you. It would be a progressive tax: the fatter the taxpayer, the higher the tax. The top of the normal range for BMI is 24. A BMI above 25 would pay a small surtax, say 5 percent, BMI 30s would pay 10 percent and so on…”

You know, it’s really refreshing when you see conservative Americans getting serious about public policy issues like this. No wonder in the USA in 1969 the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) was formed. (No, this is not a parody. It really exists.)

I bet NAAFA has something to say about the article in the July 7-14, 2008 issue of Newsweek entitled, The Obese Should Have to Pay More For Airline Tickets, in which Jerry Adler observed that it is indisputable heavy people are more expensive to fly.

Over the last decade or so, out-size Americans have required an additional 350 million gallons of jet fuel a year, just because of their increasing weight.

And they take up more seat space.

One of the few experts reported to endorse a penalty for fat fliers is Laura Zoloth, who heads the bioethics center at Northwestern University in the USA.

For her, it's a question of fairness to the person in the next seat, rather than carbon emissions. (Right on, Laura. One seat per passenger, or pay double fare.)

By contrast, Jerry tells us, the director of research at Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, a Rebecca Puhl, thinks weight should be a protected category, like race or gender, which would make discrimination against fat people illegal.

"Some people can diet, exercise, do everything right, and still have a tough time losing and keeping weight off," she says. Must be a member of NAAFA.

This is a theme also articulated by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine of 13 August, 2006 – he reported Richard Atkinson, who has been studying obesity, as having always maintained that overeating doesn’t really explain it all.

Apparently Atkinson’s epiphany came when he was a medical fellow at UCLA engaged in a study of people who weighed more than 300 pounds and had come in for obesity surgery.

“The general thought at the time was that fat people ate too much,” Atkinson said. “And we documented that fat people do eat too much — our subjects ate an average of 6,700 calories a day. But what was so impressive to me was the fact that not all fat people eat too much.”

OK. So some fat people are not gourmands, they just have big guts (and butts). But 6,700 calories a day? What’s more, if some people in the study ate normally, others must have consumed more than 6700 calories per day! Riders in the Tour de France, the world’s toughest annual sporting event, wouldn’t come close to consuming that much fuel.

Still, the Australian ABC Online reported on 12 August 2008 that researchers have also shown it may be possible for at least half of overweight adults to be both fat and healthy, with close to a third of obese men and women having normal blood pressure, cholesterol and other measures of heart health.

And being lean does not necessarily protect people, either. Close to a quarter of normal-weight US adults in one study had risk factors for heart disease or diabetes. (Well, du’h.)

"We really don't know as much about obesity as we think we do," said Judith Wylie-Rosett of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, who oversaw the study.

So maybe we should just get over fatness as a problem.

Except of course that, even if a third of obese people have normal health, two-thirds of them don’t. And, as The American pointed out, they have lots of chronic health problems, all of which are slated to rise dramatically in the next five to fifteen years.

We also know a very important social fact, too – poor diet, lack of exercise and obesity are, like smoking, all strongly correlated with class – as I alluded to above, the poor and welfare recipients are unhealthily fat. Far fatter than the middle class and the well-off.

And, in decent western societies (except most of the USA), we end up paying for their health care. So obesity affects us all, if not on our hips, then in our hip pockets.

* * *

In the problem of free will, Compatibilism is the thesis that determinism and free will are compatible. There are differing versions of Compatibilism that need not detain us here – they are all essentially variations on the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too theme; one that is going to be intrinsically appealing to fat people.

Because, of course, if you eat your cake and you still have it, there is in principle no limit to the number of times the one cake can be consumed. (This is just like in the Magic Pudding, which confirms my suspicion that its author Norman Lindsay was not only a fine drafter of risqué art, he also had a philosophical bent.)

There are two other basic positions in the free will debate: Strong Determinism (in which there is no free will, properly called); and Incompatibilism, the thesis that there is free will, and some things are not strictly determined.

One feature of the problem of free will is it seems to come in differing grades: there is FREE WILL, Free Will, and plain old free will.

FREE WILL is the full blown, fuck you, I’ll do whatever I want kind of free will – for instance when, despite years of careful upbringing, your sole heir and successor comes home and tells you they’ve made a really disappointing lifestyle choice - like deciding to become a motor dealer.

On the other hand, Free Will is not as confronting. It’s more the, I’ll just have another slice of pizza with the glass of Chianti and go for a jog after lunch, kind of position. We quietly know we could go for that jog, but after the second glass, and especially the third, the lifestyle benefits can happily be put off until tomorrow.

Little old free will is the weakest of all – it’s the well-known, I’ll just shove this needle in my arm again and I’ll feel better and all the pain and self-loathing will go away for a while, kind of free will. Which is to say, not really free will at all.

So, if some form of Compatibilism is right, which is the kind of free will that best applies to portly people?

Many will want to tell you its just little old free will. And perhaps, for some, it is. Maybe their weight, appetites and incapacity to exercise are strictly determined by genes, hormones or whatever - maybe they couldn’t do otherwise.

On the other hand, anti-Fattists (and, paradoxically, some pro-Fattists) will want to tell you its FREE WILL. Less common, but no doubt there are some whose lifestyle, if not their identity, is bound up in a soft carapace of their own choosing.

For most, though, I reckon its really Free Will. It’s the, Yeah its hard, there are challenges, it requires effort, I could fail, kind of free will.

Well, sure it’s hard. If it were easy, you wouldn’t be tubby. But if it were impossible, smokers would never quit, and fat people would never get fitter and thinner. Yet they do.

So, my findings on the three grades of free will are this – there is the Junkie grade, the Fat Person grade, and the Motor Dealer grade - each with a commensurate level of personal responsibility and blame: low; moderate; and high.

Sadly, however, personal responsibility does not necessarily accord with social acceptance or opprobrium. There may be good reasons to be tougher on some people, even if they can’t help it. Because of the social consequences (and their underclass overtones), we see fit to punish junkies, yet reward motor dealers, even though both are vile but only the latter are responsible for their actions.

And, on the whole, society neither rewards nor punishes, but merely tolerates, fat people, despite the fact that they could take up less space and use fewer resources.

It is through these examples that we see how society is not only unfair, but also capricious, and does not take free will as seriously as we might hope and suppose.

My solution is modest: a formal system of penalties and benefits. As much as I’m attracted the idea, this is not just about a fat-person tax. I think we should use risk profiling as they do in the insurance industry, and impose a social impact charge.

This should be enforced only when there is a negative consequence on others – either individuals or society generally – of a person’s fatness. Like with airline seating or the challenge of negotiating bus aisles. Oh, and the biggies - health costs and fuel imposts.

How could this work? How would we measure people? Sometimes the problem is kilos, sometimes its just size. We need a fair and transparent arrangement, here. We need a system. Enter the bureaucracy: but not fat cats - this time we need the lean police.

The article in The American I referred to earlier has the right idea. BMI helps, because it takes into account both mass and volume. But we need a way of regularly monitoring BMI – and we’ll need to be wary of bulky BMI cheats who, like unclean cyclists swapping urine samples, may try and substitute some scrawny person’s figure for their own.

We could also reward outputs. There could be a range of tax rebates and product discounts, based on the amount of physical energy you’ve expended.

To put this into effect, we could be required to submit a quarterly PAS – Physical Activity Statement – signed off by our registered personal trainer, through which we could earn tax credits or receive discount vouchers for health foods, gym membership and cycling gear.

Plus, we could punish some inputs, like super-taxing junk food products, banning their advertising, and requiring really ugly depictions of obese people on their packaging. It might seem crude and unfair to the free-marketeers at The American, but it’s worked a treat with cigarette smoking.

You know, the more I think about this, the better I like it. This system is going to be really complex. Luckily, I work as a some-time consultant to the government sector, and this could keep my clients, like public health bureaucrats, in business for the rest of my career.

Maybe they’ll need a consultant to work up the project brief - just don’t let the likes of NAAFA know.

© ENRICO BRIK, SEPTEMBER 2008

THE PERPLEXING PERSISTENCE OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF

PART I – THE PROBLEM

I have bad news for all those who think that religious belief is grounded in reason: there is no good argument for the existence of God (or gods).

Actually, this is no news at all, and has not been so for almost 150 years. Why? Because the last good argument for God went the way of all flesh with the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

Supporters and detractors of the idea that came to be known as the survival of the fittest – the combination of population pressure and variation as the key explanation for the evolution of species – almost immediately commenced battle.

Yet not everyone got the significance of Darwin’s work right away. Even Darwin himself thought evolution and religion might in some way be reconciled. But many religious figures of the day recognised it for the serious threat to their spiritual business that it surely was.

Before 1859, intelligent and educated people had at least one rational basis for belief in an all-creating spiritual entity – the teleological argument for the existence of God, or the argument from design.

This is the idea made famous by the natural theologian William Paley in the early 19th century, through his memorably comparing the complexity of the eye with the intricacy of timepieces – as the watch cannot exist without a watchmaker, so we really complicated creatures require an us-maker.

A century or more earlier – before the idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant dismantled a suite of pretty lame arguments for the existence of God – there was a plethora of choice for the intelligent and faithful.

These included two ontological arguments for God – one from the mediaeval cleric, St Anselm, the other by the rationalist philosopher Rene Descartes. Both tried in different ways to fold existence into the very concept of God: but in each case this was too tricky by half and exposed by Kant as simple question begging with his famous conclusion, existence is not a property.

There was the cosmological argument for the existence of God, too – the idea here being that the motion of the spheres (and of us and everything else that moves) requires a first cause or primum mobile.

And there was the moral argument for the existence of God – one approved by Kant (and felt strongly in Darwin’s day) – which involved the idea that moral values require an originating source or even, perhaps, a commander.

But, whether you endorse one God or more, none of these arguments stacks up; not even the moral argument. (Don’t believe me? Try reading Plato’s Socratic dialogue, The Euthephro, then come back for a chat.)

Yet, in all nations, western, eastern and elsewhere, across all races, in both sexes, and at all ages above about six, some form of spiritual belief persists in at least 80% of the population, and often more.

This strikes we atheists as a little weird.

Why, for the last century or more, have intelligent people - men and women and their parents and grandparents before them, beneficiaries (at least in the West) of the highest quality mass education in the history of humankind – persisted in believing in the existence of God? As a matter of reason it is not just weird, it is truly perplexing.

It may be tempting to see this phenomenon just as an outcome of an educational system weak in analytic philosophy or with insufficiently rigorously science. Yet, even though the proportion of analytic philosophers who profess religious adherence is very small, there are still some who cling to faith.

And, though doubtless in the minority, many of those working in the natural sciences continue to believe in some religion or other.

Like bacteria that flourish in the most hostile and caustic environments, spiritual and religious beliefs just keep hanging on.

Religion as a human universal

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that belief in the supernatural or religion is a human universal. First compiled as a list in 1989 by Donald E Brown, these are archetypes of behaviour and language observed by ethnographers in every culture and in all ethnic groups (village atheists notwithstanding).

So, what drives this near universal human belief in religion?

Perhaps it arose simply as an explanation of the unknown in the absence of compelling science. Or can it be explained as a psychosomatic response to the enduring fear of death and a want of immortality? Maybe it’s the idea that we human beings – at least some of us, anyway – are special or chosen. Or could it be the old refrain, refreshed by a century of new age philosophies, that there’s just got to be something more than us in the world…

As these responses suggest, the persistence of religious belief in homo sapiens must have little to do with knowledge and the intellect and a great deal to do with emotion and psychological need. Surely this is at the heart of the spiritual experience to which religious language gives us a clue.

For what is religious belief most commonly called, at least nowadays?

Faith.

And what is faith? It is a form of belief that endures without reason or in the absence of evidence.

In fact we all know that religious beliefs generally are sustained with a swathe of strong emotions: passion; devotion; obedience; love; fear; vengeance…the list goes on and on. This is no automatic criticism, by the way. We are rightly fond of feelings – we wouldn’t be human without them.

Yet there is still a problem for Darwinians. If evolutionary theory is right, how could we have evolved with the psychological function of entertaining beliefs that are not only almost certainly false, but also appear to constrain reproductive success? Think of abstinence, sacrifice, monogamy and duty to the group rather than to the individual. How does all that spread our genes?

Evolutionary theory, by no means a completed project, divides on this key question. As David Sloan Wilson discusses in Darwin’s Cathedral, there are two major schools of thought. One group favours an adaptationist explanation for religion – either by it conferring advantages, particularly at the level of group selection, or as a cultural parasite, the view propounded by Richard Dawkins.

The other major view considers religious belief to be non-adaptationist – either because it is a past adaptation now redundant, or, as suggested by the late Stephen Jay Gould, because it is a so-called spandrel, a mere evolutionary by-product of a conscious and sophisticated cognitive apparatus.

Many of we Darwinians are agnostic on this unsettled debate. But on one point most evolutionary theorists are agreed: whatever the utility or reproductive fitness of spiritual beliefs, the truth-value of religious propositions is zero.

As with the Darwinian revelations, there is nothing new in this observation, yet it is still inclined to send a defensive frisson down the neck of homo theisticus.

Why so?

Because there remains a recherché clique among religious thinkers who continue to seek wiser and more intellectually satisfying grounds for religion than can be found in the depths of mystery and the heart.

They believe what they believe not just because they think it endearing or popular or useful, but also because they believe it to be true, and true in an intellectually meaningful way.

PART II - THE STANDARD DEFENCE

As we have seen, the seriously devoted theists believe what they believe not simply because it is culturally popular or socially useful, but because they consider it to be true.

At this point in the debate with Darwinians, the God-defenders may finesse their argument by interpreting evolutionary theory as a demonstration of intelligent system design, with God not only the first mover but also the primum vitae (or first cause of life).

Or, they might turn from defence to attack.

Are you an agnostic? The theist might ask.

No. I am an atheist.

Ah-hah! What arrogance. How do you know there is no God? How can you prove that God does not exist?

For one good reason this is a laudable attack – it takes the debate about the existence of God back to where we atheists think it should rest: in the field of reason, as a matter to be resolved by the testing interplay of analysis and argument.

But that is as good as it gets for the theist, because the answers go thus:

Well, I do not know that God does not exist, if you use ‘know’ in the full-blown sense of (roughly) justified true belief. I cannot prove that God does not exist; it is something I infer abductively – that is, as the best explanation for the complexity of the world we find ourselves in. What I do know is that there are better reasons for not believing, rather than believing, in God’s existence.

And what could those reasons be?

In short, they are: Occam’s razor and the onus of evidence.

Occam’s razor, named for the 14th century scholastic philosopher, William of Occam, is one of the key principles of analytic inquiry – the principle of ontological economy; the idea that one should not multiply explanatory entities beyond necessity.

And God no longer adds anything as an explanation of the universe or of us, not even as a supremely intelligent system designer.

But how do you think the universe got here? The believer asks.

To which we Occamists reply, how did God get here? The existence of God, as a putative explanation for all that exists, just pushes the problem back a level. Either the universe is a brute fact, admitting of no explanation in itself, or God is.

And the onus of evidence means that those postulating the theoretical entity, God, bear the responsibility of defending the argument for its existence.

With the publication of the Origin of Species, the onus shifted for the first time in the history of ideas from the atheist to the theist. This is why intelligent religionists feared it so.

Why any one religion?

Let’s try a thought experiment. Say I have convinced you that it is at least an even bet that there is no God (or gods). The proposition goes like this: either one religion is true, or no religion is true. In putting it this way I assume you accept that all religions are in some way or other mutually exclusive. That is, each contains some core metaphysical belief or origin thesis that is inconsistent with a comparable belief or thesis in all other religions.

This is perhaps an arguable claim in at least one case: the Baha’i faith, which has at its core a belief in the oneness of religion – the religion of God. Baha’i acknowledges the key tenets of all (or at least most) other religions in its own theological system.

Baha’i’s own website has this to say about the principles and laws of other religions, the so-called firmly established and mighty systems: it says they have, 'proceeded from one source and are the rays of one light. That they differ one from another is to be attributed to the varying requirements of the ages in which they were promulgated.'

While I have never met a Baha’i adherent whose personal qualities I didn’t in some way admire, philosophically I think they’re on a hiding to nothing.

Hinduism is polytheistic, Christianity, Islam and Judaism are not. Buddhism believes in the inner God and the transcendence of self through various reincarnations, the three major monotheistic religions believe in the passage of the immutable soul of the believer from one earthly life to heaven (or wherever). No getting around the fact that these are inconsistent beliefs about core tenets of varying religions.

And (save for Baha’i) the following is a core belief of all religions – that our religion is the one and only right one, thank you, and theirs is not.

To this extent, a Muslim feels just as strongly about any of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and Baha’i – each is an infidel belief.

So, most religious people are right about this point – all religions are mutually exclusive regarding some or other key belief. My proposition must be sound – either one religion is true, or none is. But, if just one is the true religion, how do we pick the right one? There are hundreds, nay thousands, of them and none seems to have any obvious intellectual advantage over its competitors.

Longevity won’t help – scores of them have been around for a very, very long time. Depth and sincerity of belief, perhaps? Forget it: history has too many martyrs, apostasies and religious wars to count, and some of them all too contemporary.

What about novelty? No, novelty is the problem: how do you choose between all those new religions popping up like fast food joints for the soul? How about popularity, then? Sorry, even each of the big four – Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam – individually attracts no more than a sixth of the world’s population.

So, whichever religion you happen to believe in, the overwhelming majority of humanity does not agree with you. Putting it another way, given the huge number of religious faiths that abound, and other things being equal, it is highly likely that the religion you believe in is not the true one.

This is a just a consequence of the laws of probability – I make no judgment about the particular metaphysical claims of individual religions.

Well, actually, I do make one judgment. I note in passing that the dominant religion in one major culture contains a core metaphysical belief which is so close to a logical impossibility that, as an old friend and philosophy professor of mine used to say, it will do until the real thing comes along.

Here is the belief: God is at once both one thing and three things and is whole and indivisible and one of the three things is the progeny of at least one other of the three things and is the same as that other thing.

You’ve correctly guessed the religion, haven’t you? In my view, even if there were one true religion, the likelihood of it being Christianity is vanishingly small. Smaller even than Baha’i.

With all your education, you best believe in naught.

© ENRICO BRIK SEPTEMBER 2008