Gray calling the kettle black

The following article is slight adaptation of something I put together and did the rounds with a few weeks ago (namely during Easter Week), when ace philosophical poseur, John Gray, was commissioned not one but two full-length opinion pieces in the Irish Times. It wasn't published in The Irish Times or anywhere else.

Now it may be that I can't write (please let me know if this is the case), but since no other article was later published to rebutt the poisonous tripe contained in the two Gray efforts, I feel the whole episode illustrates my previously expressed contention that people are allowed write any calumny they like in the Irish print media (and particularly in the Irish Times) without having to concede right of reply to those they insult, just as long as the lie is written for the benefit of 'belief'.

The flurry of anti-secular aggression written under the cover of Easter week in the Irish Times is illustrative of the level of absurdity that the debate on the role of religion in society has reached in Ireland. In holy week British celebrity philosopher, John Gray, had not one but two opinion articles hostile to atheism in the Irish paper of record (as usual, you may need to pay your dues to Geraldine to get these links to work). As well as his efforts, our own home-grown scourge of the secular, John Waters, put his oar in, as did Roman Catholic Orthodoxy’s defender of the faith, Breda O’Brien. And what was there in reply for the non-religious? Not a column inch outside of a single rather mild letter to the editor on Easter Saturday.

Blood libel
In his book-length rant against the Enlightenment, “Straw Dogs”, Gray rolled out the old blood libel that has become a weapon of choice for anti-secularists everywhere: i.e. that atheism was at least partially responsible for Nazism. He repeats this ridiculous accusation in the first of his IT articles. (Incidentally, this nasty piece of propaganda was since repeated without a squeak from the media by the Benedict during his visit to the US.) No argument does Gray present apart from the earth-shattering insight that the Nazis foully perverted the discoveries of Darwin to justify their extraordinary savagery.

Gray (and, shamefully, Benedict too) seems to know very little about the history of Nazism, which owed as much to pagan and Christian religious traditions as it did to atheism. Indeed National Socialism’s ideology was informed more by nostalgic anti-enlightenment romanticism than ever it was by any great enlightenment philosophers, as any study of proto-Nazi movements in 19th and early 20th Century will clarify. Indeed it seems it was mainly this Nazi yearning for a non-existent past that attracted the philosopher Heidegger to the ranks of the Hitler’s party (though ambition also surely played a role). It’s ironic now that the same Heidegger is one of the two or three world philosophers most cited by the Irish religious intelligentsia as leaving open a space for religion in a post-enlightenment world.

Schoolyard taunts
Gray’s case against memetics is even worse. Memetics is Richard Dawkins' exploration of the relatively modest and thought-provoking idea that genes may not be the only information storage systems in the world that both affect human behaviour and are capable of reproduction and variation, and are therefore also subject to their own evolutionary pressures. Cultural change, suggests Dawkins, may also be fruitfully be analysed in a similar way, where the concept of genes is replaced by what he calls "memes", which we are to interpret as ideas, opinions, beliefs and other mental artefacts that may be more or less effective in reproducing themselves via communication between human minds. Gray doesn’t even bother to argue with him. Indeed his attack is little more than a series of schoolyard taunts.

In fairness, maybe Gray is responding to Dawkins’ unfortunate metaphor for “memeplexes” (including religious memeplexes) as “viruses of the mind” (this expression has indeed led to much misunderstanding – especially when some of Dawkins’ other undiplomatic pronouncements are added to the mix). However, in neither his books nor his newspaper articles does Gray let us in on his reasoning on the merits of the theory. He limits himself to thumbing his nose at it.

Religions don't make factual claims - Gray
Gray also informs us (amid a diversionary swirl of intellectual-sounding verbiage) that religions do not make any claims about how things are in the world (apparently only “some western Christian traditions under the influence of Greek philosophy” do that), and accuses his scientific opponents of refusing to acknowledge this factoid. He doesn’t mention the oft-repeated assertion by Dawkins that any religion that avoids making such supernatural metaphysical claims is ok with him.

Self-confessed Gray fan John Waters, in his Good Friday article, accidentally illustrates the absurdity of Gray’s position, at least in an Irish context. In time-hallowed, Greek-influenced, Christian tradition, Waters makes the claim that the Resurrection of Jesus was an historical fact. (“… Jesus became, once again, as alive as we are. … This, too, is history”.) ... Well, ahem, on the contrary, a newly released book – “The Resurrection” by biblical scholar and historian Geza Vermes – eloquently argues the already obvious fact that the story in St. John’s Gospel was nothing more than a myth.

Whether or not Vermes is right (and he clearly is), Waters is repeating a (perhaps the) central factual claim of the most influential religion in Ireland. The assertion (to adapt some of Gray’s phraseology) is obviously a proposition struggling to be accepted as a fact. Like any other historical assertion, it must therefore stand or fall on the basis of evidence. In short, nobody has a problem with the Resurrection story as an allegory, but as an historical claim it requires evidence (and, being an extraordinary claim, it needs extraordinary evidence at that).

So, does Gray support Waters’ assertion? He should be forced to answer the question clearly. Does he support the legitimacy of such claims as that Resurrection actually occurred? If his answer is yes, then his argument falls apart immediately, as this is almost the prototypical example of a religion making claims about objective historical fact. If it is no, then Dawkins and others have no beef with him. And there simply isn’t room for a maybe. Either it happened or it didn't.

The myth of anti-religious bias
RTE and the Irish Times are often accused of having an anti-religious bias. Yet the Irish Times provides a pro-religious opinion piece every week (Rite & Reason) which rarely or never invites non-religious contributors. The paper also routinely provides regular space for predictably pro-religious commentators (such as O’Brien and Waters) and yet provides effectively no counterbalancing space for opposing views. In this context, the Holy Week articles were fairly typical of the Irish Times editorial approach. Of course and as usual, RTE provided full coverage of a variety of religious events during the week, reported uncritically on the religious pronouncements of a variety of religious and political leaders. Both organisations clearly have a de facto policy of ensuring that non-religious writers refrain from articulating views critical to people’s religious beliefs (this policy is possibly especially strongly enforced in the time leading up to Easter and Christmas, but clearly applies all year round).

The bias in the Irish media that religious commentators never tire of complaining of on religious matters is obvious to anyone who makes the effort of looking. However, the articles printed in Holy Week 2008 in the Irish Times neatly illustrate the point that this bias is by no means against religious world views. On the contrary, the imbalance is very much against non and anti-religious views, and is largely based on a fear of offending religious sensibilities. Sensitive as the print media are to the feelings of the religious-minded, they seem completely indifferent to the devastating effect their self-censorship has on the freedom of expression of what John Gray calls “proselytising secularists” – i.e. people critical of religion who are unwilling to be shut up.


For an excellent critique of Gray's nonsense, have a look at A.C. Grayling's article on the New Humanist Website.

Waters' watery nonsense

Awed admiration
Sometimes you just have to let the jaw drop in awed admiration at the ability of a very large proportion of the opinion writers in the Irish papers to unblushingly say the most obvious nonsense imaginable.

The moment I saw the first sentence of John Waters' piece in today's Irish Times was one such occasion. When I saw the second sentence was another, and so on for the whole length of the article.

The overall effect is that of a slavish premature obituary for the present pope, with a touch of Book of Revelation, a dash of paranoid fantasy about media conspiracies against religion and topped off with a good old-fashioned whopper of an embarrassing factual error.

The temptation is to take the whole thing apart line by line, but I have neither the time nor the energy to do that, and you probably have neither the time nor the inclination to read the result. Allow me, however, to give you a few of the lowlights of his effort.

Breathless praise for the pope
For hagiographical nonsense, check this out:

If we care to contemplate the irrelevance of chronological age, let us consider that last week marked the 81st birthday of the most radical voice in modern Europe. Benedict XVI, now three years into his papacy, has already confounded his enemies and delighted his admirers in a pontificate that glitters beyond all expectations.

"...the most radical voice in modern Europe"? What is he talking about? This pope has done practically nothing at all in updating the doctrine of the roman catholic church since his elevation to the Holy See (with the possible exception of allowing the publication by a catholic body of a document that made the very unradical claim that limbo, after all, doesn't exist). His encyclicals have been all on subjects carefully selected as uncontroversial and his public statements have been if anything more circumspect than they were in his time as god's Rotweiler.

As for a pontificate that "glitters beyond expectations"? Where does that come from? Even Eoghan Harris wouldn't talk in such terms about Bertie's time as Taoiseach. Perhaps what Waters means is that his first three years on the throne of Peter hasn't been quite the disaster some of the church's pessimists predicted it would be. But his performance wouldn't need to be glittering to have exceeded some of those expectations.

Explaining reference to the pope's "radical voice" later in his gush, Waters tells us that the "baptism of Magdi Christian Allam is an example of Pope Benedict's radicalism" but fails to tell us why (though he does characterise it as a gesture "worth a hundred million words").

Some people become catholics, and if they are prominent enough, get to be baptised by the pope. That the pope did the honours on Allam is supremely unsurprising.

Now if the pope meant the baptism as the ecclesiastical equivalent of a two-fingered salute to islamic absolutists, then bully for him, but it was hardly a particularly radical act for him to personally receive a celebrated journalist into the arms of the church (no more than was his welcome for Tony Blair to the one true religion). The act was far less radical -- not to mention less original -- than the Dutch Liberal Party were when they accepted at least equally brave (but at that time far less prominent) ex-muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a parliamentary candidate. If the Dutch Liberals could be accused of opportunism (an accusation that surfaced more than once -- from christian circles, amongst others), then the same could be more easily said of the Holy See.

Incidentally, Waters crassly misrepresents Allam when he characterises him as believing that Hitchens and Dawkins are leading us blindly to "the suicide of our civilisation". What Allam was in fact referring to when he used the phrase was the awful habit of the liberal left to use an ethic of multi-cultural tolerance as an argument against expecting civilised behaviour from conservative islamic immigrants to Europe (see John Hooper article here, which quotes Allam in context). Allam apparently sees such tolerance of intolerance as extremely dangerous. Waters knows (or should know) that Allam's not the first person to say this. Indeed he's only agreeing with Hitchens and Dawkins, who have both been saying precisely this since well before 9/11.

Here's another piece of breathless nonsense (and there's literally one in nearly every sentence)

...what has emerged is what was implicit in his magisterial writings over several decades: a supreme intellect mounted in a most animated humanity, a man who in his lifetime has watched mankind lurch between great good and the greatest evil, and seeks to reconcile these observations with the truths he has inherited.

On the subject of Benedict's "supreme intellect" and his "magisterial writings" have a look a previous blog of mine, Benedict's love of truth. In this blogger's humble, the material associated with the Regensberg and La Sapienza controversies at least look more like political watchyourbackery than intellectual brilliance -- cuteness rather than acuity. He may have written more interesting stuff, but I ain't seen it yet.

The love and hope apocalypse
For Waters' analysis of where the modern world is going astray, take a look at this:

The two most pressing issues of our time [are] the haemorrhaging from public language of, respectively, love and hope.

No reason to believe this to be a burning issue is offered. He doesn't give us an explanation of what he (or the pope) even means by it. The assertion simply leaves you at a loss. Perhaps there's something poetic going on and he simply wants to paint a picture of hatred and despair in contemporary society, possibly to provide support for his notorious nostalgic streak (which got a withering mention recently in Roy Foster's 'Luck and the Irish'). Personally, I don't see either term being used less often in public than when I was a smaller and less aggressive, but even if it did, I'm not sure it would worry me more than climate change, or the newly emerging global food-supply crisis, or the appalling state of matters in the Middle East, or in Sub-Saharan Africa. The workings of Waters' mind are mysterious indeed.

This bit sounds like a more typical apocalyptic vision, more suitable to the end of the 10th Century than the start of the 21st:

[The 60's revolution] adherents, ... alarmed by the listlessness of their
children and the imminence of the darkness[!] they have themselves summoned, now cry out for reassurance to Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens...

Just who's looking for reassurance here? Is he trying to convince himself that those who agree with Dawkins and Hitchens are in a way religious too, or are at least searching in vain for the religion that Waters has found? Either way, he's fails to offer us any reasons why we should think so too.

The evil media
Waters (despite the fact that his attitudes are typical of a very large part of the Irish journalistic establishment) has it in for the media.

[at the time of his elevation] Benedict was, by the secular media analysis, a stop-gap and a throwback, a "reactionary", a "right-winger", an obscurantist.

Leaving aside who exactly said all this (the majority of the Irish media, despite the misgivings of many, stayed largely, and in my opinion a bit too tamely, silent -- though they did occasionally quote catholic liberals' misgivings on the church's choice of CEO), Waters implies that these secular media were wrong. But if they did indeed have such attitudes then they were pretty clearly right in almost all respects. The pope obviously wants to turn the clock back on many of the achievements of the Enlightenment (or, in Waters' wince-inducing euphemism, to "spearhead a new Enlightenment"). What words other than 'throwback' or 'reactionary' would describe such an attitude better? And the same pope intervened publicly on many occasions in favour of the parties that cluster around Silvio Berlusconi and not once in favour of the Italian left or centre before the recent Italian general election. What expression fits better than "right-wing" for such behaviour?

As for this:

One of the many paradoxes of being pope in the modern world is that you must speak through a megaphone controlled by your enemies.

The pope runs a radio station, effectively controls hundreds of others, has thousands of publications in his pocket, tens of thousands of well-placed friends in the media willing to do all in their power to see that he looks good and is subject to a general (completely unearned) respect from the not-particularly-bothered journalistic majority by virtue of his position at the head of the single most important religious organisation in the world. How he can justify such a melodramatic description of an obviously sympathetic world media as a megaphone controlled by his "enemies" is entirely beyond me. Maybe church 'enemies' Eamonn McCann and Emer O'Kelly are able to pull some very secret and very useful strings in very influential media circles.

Funny thing is, at least in Ireland, the mainstream media is brimming over with commentators (and David Quinn, Breda O'Brien, Waters himself, Rónán Mullen, Mary Kenny and William Reville are just a few of them) who repeat ad nauseam the accusation that the established media have a deeply-felt and completely unfounded hatred of religion. Indeed it sometimes seems that this particular section of the media establishment sees it as its most important single task to inform the general public of this shocking factoid. And they all do it as if they were a frail, ragged figure, calling from the wilderness. Yet they all get to appear regularly on RTÉ.

20th century history according to Waters
Waters' take on the 60's is quite simply as wrong as you can get:

The unarmed coup of the 1960s, ... sought to install scientific rationalism as the guiding light of the age

What the 60's are justly famous for, apart from free love and the Beatles, is a revolution in thinking that was aimed precisely against scientific rationalism. The 60's were the years when the anti-rationalist ideas of post-modernism and its allies reached a tipping point that would eventually result in them becoming mainstream in university humanities departments. It seems to me that part of what Hitchens and Dawkins and Hirsi Ali and the like are attempting to do is to at least partially restore the relationship between reality and truth that seemed to be lost in the 60's. Benedict and Waters claim to want the same, but Waters at least seems mixed up about what he's arguing against -- scientific rationalism or its great opponent, 60's style relativism.

Just as an aside, Benedict and Waters should be careful what they wish for. The defeat of 1960's relativism implies the defeat of the idea that all world views are equally valid. In relativism's hypyothetical absence each world view will need to provide a justification for itself. The most obvious justification of a set of beliefs is evidence and, as Benedict surely knows, evidence is not on the side of roman catholic orthodoxy.

The newspaper of record
Whatever about that, Waters' article is unbearably shrill and full of the most slavish cliché-ridden sychophancy. It also manages to be essentially empty of content and factually inaccurate at the same time. It also contains a nasty misrepresentation of the words of one of its main subjects.

It's what's commonly known as a pious rant. That it appears in Ireland's national newspaper of record is, to put it as delicately as possible, a source of concern. Nor is his latest effort a one-off. Waters' involvement with the Italian-founded catholic charismatic movement, Communion and Liberation (announced in his just-released book and alluded to in his most recent articles) may or may not have something to do with it.

The Irish Times' reputation depends on the quality of its journalism. Articles like the one Waters wrote today (and like William Reville wrote yesterday -- check here) are a threat to the paper's status as Ireland's most serious newspaper simply because they're impossible to take seriously. Geraldine Kennedy should take care if she doesn't want to wake up one morning and realise that her paper has slowly let its reputation for quality opinion journalism ebb away. In this blogger's opinion some serious damage has already been done.

Benedict's love of truth

News on the recent kerfuffle surrounding the Pope's cancellation of his visit to La Sapienza University in Rome seems to have roused John Waters' ample capacity for outrage. In his typically precise fashion, he had a quick look at the internet on the subject, checked that all his prejudices were firmly in place and then distilled the results of this tried and tested workflow into an article the Irish Times (21 January), telling us as usual precisely the opposite of what sensibly needs to be said about the issue.

Some of the academics at the ancient university had apparently been unwilling to provide a platform for Benedict, thus giving rise to the cancellation, and Waters, passionately concerned to defend honest truth-seeking, finds them guilty of making a savage attack on that quest. He is in very good company -- a great number of other people who should know better swallowed the same tired line -- but he couldn't have got it more wrong.

It might be useful to draw in a little background to the story. In March 1990, Joseph Ratzinger (wearing his well-used academic hat) addressed an audience in Parma with a speech (more than a little presumptuously) entitled "The Crisis of Faith in Science", in which he (in a nebulous sort of way) defended his church against that old secularist champion chestnut: viz. the way a 17th Century Pope treated Galileo when the latter stubbornly insisted that the earth orbits the sun rather than the other way around.

Now the secularist legend (as recounted by the then future Pope) goes as follows: Galileo, brave, enlightened and clever scientist, worked out that it made far more sense to follow Copernicus' theory that the sun was the centre of the solar system than to continue to believe the old Ptolemaic system that everything revolved around the earth. As soon as Galileo went public on this, Pope Urban VIII, an opinionated, know-nothing relic of the dark ages, made him take this view back and took away his freedom for the rest of his life as punishment for his presumption.

Ratzinger goes on (albeit extremely fudgingly) to try and debunk this "myth", recruiting for this purpose German Marxist thinker, Ernst Bloch, and firebrand Austrian philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend. Unfortunately for his case, the Galileo myth he outlines is by all serious accounts accurate in all relevant respects (though Galileo's own disastrous lack of diplomatic skills probably contributed to his fate). The truth is that Galileo did indeed write a work defending heliocentrism and ridiculing its rival theory, he did indeed incur the wrath of the Inquisition on this account and was indeed made recant and put under house arrest for the rest of his life. Also clear is that his trial court and the Pope who pulled its strings judged him not on the basis of evidence, but solely by reference to medieval interpretation of scripture.

Now all this is a matter of historical record. It seems strange having to repeat it, but unfortunately the crafty revisionism of the present Pope (amongst others) makes the repetition necessary.

But I jump ahead of myself. Stripped down to layperson's terminology, Ratzinger paraphrases Bloch as saying that Galileo's sun-centred theory wasn't a demonstrable thesis, but merely the result of Galileo's natural (but, it's implied, not altogether reasonable) desire to keep his maths simple. Further, whatever about the tidiness of Galileo's calculations, Einstein's theory of relativity, we're told, "cancelled" Galileo's reasonings anyway.

Therefore, the argument concludes, it's now legitimate to say , for example, that "in relation to human dignity", the sun actually goes round the earth (whatever that means -- apart from being an extremely soggy metaphor).

Ratzinger then goes on to quote Feyerabend's statement (notorious then and now to even the flightiest second-year philosophy student) that the Church at the time was "was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself" and that the trial decision on Galileo was "reasonable and just".

Of course, the then cardinal doesn't explicitly endorse either of these views, as to do so would be to put him in debt both to an important prophet of a heretical view he has been long famous for opposing, i.e. Liberation Theology (Bloch), as well as to one of the most important icons of his diabolical arch-enemy, Relativism (Feyerabend). To agree with them both openly would be equivalent to running with both fox and hare at the same time as chasing both victims in the company of two distinct packs of hounds. He sensibly doesn't attempt this feat and instead very skillfully abandons his "exploration" hanging in mid-air, thus leaving an impression that he takes a dim view of the classic Galileo myth yet at the same time preserving a position of complete deniability (which was to come in handy in the more recent propaganda battle). I don't know what Ratzinger's attitude to the Jesuits is but, to paraphrase James Joyce, he would seem at least as slippery as one.

But it should be emphasised (in contradiction to what Waters and others tell us) that Ratzinger does not disassociate himself from Feyerabend's position, in his speech or anywhere else. He describes the philosopher's position as "drastic", but neglects to give his own opinion on whether the drastic conclusion was justified. Despite the Vatican's subsequent apology for Galileo's treatment (issued by John Paul II in 1992) Ratzinger has still not clarified what his own opinion in fact is.

It was therefore unsurprising, if rather belated in 2008, when a large group of the academic staff at La Sapienza University in Rome took strong exception to the Pope's implicit approval of Bloch's flamboyant scientific illiteracy. In this they were quite justified -- though, as Waters' colleague on the Irish Times, Paddy Agnew, speculates (also on 21 January), their motivation may have been sharpened by an understandable left-wing irritation at the Pope's more recent repetitive one-sided interventions in Italian politics.

But, sticking to the historical facts (or, if you like, to the truth), the argument whether the planets make a regular, stately orbit around the sun or a mathematical rollercoaster ride around the earth has been satisfactorily settled at least since the time of Newton and is hardly affected at all by Einstein's theories of relativity (which, contrary to what Bloch is cited by Ratzinger as believing, have nothing to do with the Newtonian notion that movement can only be made sense of in relation to an object from which the movement is observed). As for Galileo's insistence on tidy maths; that's neither more nor less than his concern to fulfill an essential requirement for valid inductive reasoning (i.e. the famous Occam's razor), without which no useful scientific or even common-sense knowledge of the world would be possible.

But what the same Roman academics concentrated their wrath on was the present Pontiff's inability or refusal to disassociate himself from Feyerabend's extraordinary historical revisionism (to the effect that it was "reasonable and just" to make Galileo a prisoner in his own home for the rest of his life for the crime of openly asserting a position that contradicted revelation as interpreted by Roman Catholicism).

The professors therefore effectively disinvited Ratzinger from their university. The Pope's PR people then responded with the publicity counterattack which was apparently picked up on by Waters, and which very effectively steamrollered the whole theme under the laughably inappropriate rubric of "freedom of speech".

Unconsciously underlining Benedict's mala fides, Waters mentions in passing the Pope's unelaborated comment on C.F. Von Weizsacker, a German philosopher and nuclear scientist: "... Von Weizsacker takes another step forward, when he identifies a 'very direct path' that leads from Galileo to the atomic bomb."

Now neither Waters nor Benedict explain what this sentence was doing in the speech. Its only apparent purpose was to add to the already murky brew an extra tone of innuendo that implicates the Scientific Enlightenment (represented by Galileo) in the very worst that humanity can create. The comment, like the rest of the speech, has no concern with establishing truth under any rubric. Indeed it brings to mind the way various religious and post-modern, full and part-time allies of the Pope's (for example, the Late Cahal Daly or English philosopher John Gray) crassly attempted to blame Nazism on secular Enlightenment values (despite the obvious fact that that foul ideology clearly owed far more to nationalist, anti-enlightenment romanticism than to anything else, and that it was at least as religious as it was otherwise).

The upshot of all this is the following: the whole affair neatly illustrates a few important issues that need to be highlighted in dayglow colour.

Firstly, it exposes a couple of instances of the extraordinary low quality of what in the 20th century all too often passed for philosophy. For a start, it might even be that Bloch's other work was admirable, but his philosophy of science as interpreted by Ratzinger was palpably not so hot. As for Feyerabend, while his philosophy of science was important enough to cause an intellectual battle royal in the 70's and 80's, his sense of proportion and fair play was certainly out of kilter when wrote the line on Galileo that Ratzinger found so fascinating.

Secondly, a further possible reason suggests itself as to why some of the staff of the University of Rome may have felt uncomfortable about Benedict visiting their campus: i.e. they were quite understandably unwilling to lend academic respectability to the Pope's archly evasive and essentially empty verbiage.

The language used by the academics, included a vocabulary of victimhood that they would have done better to avoid (they were, for example, "offended" and "humiliated" by the Pope's comments). However, their observation that it would be "incongruous" for such a figure as the Pope to give a speech at their university is right on the button. Someone who makes guerrilla attacks on scientific method and historical truth with the only apparent purpose of defending a world view he is already unconditionally committed to isn't playing the game of truth-seeking that a university should cherish, but another game altogether.

This brings me neatly to the third issue that this bruhaha has (or at least should have) laid open, and it is the awkward issue of the philosophical merits of the Pope's academic work (both before and after his elevation). The offending lecture still looks much the same as it did in 1990: i.e. a transparent attempt to trawl through the "canon" for quotations that seem to buttress a previously decided-upon position (i.e. the historical correctness of orthodox Roman Catholicism). This approach is depressingly common in contemporary academia, and is the very negation of any truly honest search for truth -- whether scientific, philosophical or moral.

The Parma speech wasn't a once-off either: his side of a famous recent collaboration with Jürgen Habermas, "The Dialectics of Secularisation", is a similar airy blend of the obvious with the absurd and the evasive. And who can forget the infamous 2006 Regensburg lecture? (Reminder for those who have forgotten: that was a predictably destructive speech, in which the Pope quoted one of his predecessors' nasty medieval comments about Islam without bothering to tell his audience what he thought of the opinion quoted, except to say that it was "forceful" -- he could equally have repeated the term "drastic".)

Perhaps one of the greatest shocks of the Sapienza episode is well described by Agnew, "In the end, that which had once looked like a major setback for Pope Benedict turned into a considerable triumph". La Sapienza's academics seem to have underrated the power of the Vatican's massive publicity machine, whose flattening progress was hugely facilitated by the same sort of taboo-revering self-censorship that prevents anyone in the media from questioning the pontiff's academic credentials.

That Benedict's words, "I am linked to [the academic world] by a love of the search for truth, a love of dialogue and confrontation, based on mutual respect for different positions" were taken automatically at face value the world media (despite copious evidence that respect for the rules of honest academic dialogue is not his strong point), is a sure sign that his status as the world's foremost religious leader keeps him effectively above criticism in the minds of far too many influential journalists.

On the basis of this evidence, one begins to suspect that the Pope's reputation as a philosopher of dazzling insight might just be less a product of his work's inherent quality and more the result of the stamp of approval given to his output (and a hell of a lot of output very similar to his) by the powerful organisation he leads. After all, this organisation has very substantial influence over university standards, subjects and appointments all over the world. It is, like its leader, protected by a supernatural force field from all but the most caustic of criticism (this armour apparently doesn't fully protect against accusations of clerical child abuse, for example).

If there is anything in this suspicion (which. drastic as it may be, requires no conspiracy theory, as anyone who's been about in Maynooth, Pamplona or Leuven can honestly confirm), the question automatically arises as to whether and how the church's influence in academia could and should be reduced, especially in cases where public funding is suspected of involvement in propping up either transparent nonsense (for example, that the sun circles the earth "in relation to human dignity") or dangerous demagogery (for instance, that it ever may have been "reasonable" to lock people up for publicly -- even rudely -- preferring to trust their reason than to put their faith in established church dogma).

My own personal response to Waters' bleating, is the following: the Roman academics attempt to prevent Benedict from further reinforcing his unearned reputation as a disinterested seeker of truth should be seen as a service rather than a disservice to that truth. However, it was probably not so politically clever to pick on a 17-year-old speech, however appalling and however unretracted, as the centrepiece of the academics' argument.

Whatever about that, as Agnew says, "... it seemed there was something faintly ridiculous about [La Sapienza being accused of censorship of the Pope] ... Far from being gagged, Pope Benedict has a high-tech [he could have said 'kryptonite-proof'] megaphone trained on the entire world." The professors simply attempted to subtract some academic respectability from Benedict's sly evasions. They were right to make that attempt, and I think it's a pity that their own tactical mistakes, a load of well-aimed Vatican claptrap about truth-seeking and the spineless or credulous swallowing of said claptrap by far too many professional journalists conspired together to stymie their efforts.

Another effect of the affair that will be regretted (at least by Italians more concerned with public ethics than private morality), is the contribution it undoubtably made to putting Silvio Berlusconi's dubious hands back on the wheel of power.