Pretty Polly falls off the Perch … Again
Tim Worstall has demolished another Polly Toynbee speculation, by applying a few well-targeted facts. Dangerous things, facts - speculation can evaporate like the morning mist:
Polly
It was a piece of breathtaking cheek and bare-faced larceny when David Cameron pledged to “Make British poverty history” this week, stealing Gordon Brown’s slogan and Labour’s policy stronghold. Cameron snatched the starting day of a month of action on child poverty, run by the End Child Poverty campaign, an umbrella group of 90 children’s charities originally assembled by Gordon Brown himself, as a counterweight against other spending demands.Tim
Most amusing. Getting all het up about one pol stealing the policies of another….when said pol hadd just stolen several the other way around, you know, the non-doms thing and so on. Most amusing: but what’s really wonderful is that you’re complaining about Cameron stating that he’s going to do what you want. Is ending poverty something that is only a valid goal when pushed by Labour? How tribal of you!
What is needed now is nothing less than a national culture change, embracing every aspect of life. Step back and look which nations have the fewest obesity problems. You guessed it, it’s the Nordic countries, where social divisions are narrower.
Excellent! We’re going to be more like the Nordics! Vouchers! No inheritance tax! No national minimum wage! No National health service! Be more like Sweden!
President Polly
On a delicious sidenote, Polly Toynbee is now the President of the British Humanist Association, that body well known for its dedication to basing argumentation strictly and rigorously on the evidence - as has long been their claim (yes, that was a sceptical raise of the left eyebrow):
Humanism is an approach to life based on humanity and reason - humanists recognise that moral values are properly founded on human nature and experience alone. Our decisions are based on the available evidence and our assessment of the outcomes of our actions, not on any dogma or sacred text. (Source)
How on earth will they cope with having Polly at the helm?
There’s going to be an interesting “tug of war” here: will Polly start using evidence as the basis for her columns - or will the British Humanist Association stop claiming to use evidence as the basis for its arguments?
Broadcast Polly
The BBC did an interview (acknowledgement: http://richarddawkins.net/).
AM, PM, PP
Perhaps the BHA give Polly a pulpit, and put on a lecture programme on procedure for rational argumentation:
- Get some evidence.
- Analyse the evidence.
- Reach conclusions based on the evidence.
- Write recommendations and proposals based on the evidence.
- Be available to defend your ideas, process and conclusions so that you do not end up looking ridiculous.
Aha. Maybe not.
Wrapping-up
Amusingly, the announcement of President Polly is next to the claims of the BHA that there are (among other things):
17 Million humanists in Britain!
36% of the population!
That statement is based on a survey with this sort of declaration in it:
Humanist outlook on life is calculated as those choosing the following three statements:
* Scientific and other evidence provides the best way to understand the universe
* Human nature by itself gives us an understanding of what is right and wrong
* What is right and wrong depends on the effects on people and the consequences for society and the world
Now, those statements and other questions identifying people as humanists could be answered in the affirmative by perhaps 80%-100% of Christians and other religious people.
In point 1 this example turns on how you interpret “understand the universe” - if it means physical universe, then bingo, I have known full-blown Young Earth Creationists who could affirm it. Why are such people being counted as humanists?
This survey was done early in late 2006, and David Pollock (of the BHA) admits on the comment thread that the survey has “issues” (among them, that the sample size was a whopping great 360. - Edit: David Pollock below informs me that the sample was 975 - my mistake misreading this statement). You should also read a followup post.
The claims are still on the front page of the website of this “evidence-based” organisation almost a year later.
Why?
Tags: polly toynbee, british humanist association, philosophy now, bha, humanism, secularism[tags]polly toynbee, british humanist association, philosophy now, bha, humanism, secularism[/tags]
Article Series - The British Humanist Association
- British Humanist Association Membership discovered: one person in TWELVE THOUSAND in the UK
- Pretty Polly falls off the Perch … Again
Foolish, probably, to rise to your bait, but you should get your facts straight. The poll was done (by Ipsos MORI) in October 2006 with a sample of 975.
And if you think that Christians should be able happily to endorse the statements you quote, it just shows how far they have abandoned the basics of their religion under pressure from broadly humanist thinking.
And BTW our membership may be small but at least it is rising - not 1 in 12,000 now but 1 in 8,400!
>And BTW our membership may be small but at least it is rising - not 1 in 12,000 now but 1 in 8,400!
Congratulations on that! But how many of them are “nominal” ! You’ll be having separate strategies for “flock” and “fringe” before you know it.
>Foolish, probably, to rise to your bait, but you should get your facts straight. The poll was done (by Ipsos MORI) in October 2006 with a sample of 975.
Corrected - I had misread one of your presvious comments over at Philosophy Now. My apologies.
>And if you think that Christians should be able happily to endorse the statements you quote, it just shows how far they have abandoned the basics of their religion under pressure from broadly humanist thinking.
Now that I don’t understand. Your wording of the statements is highly nebulous - and it seems to me that all three are entirely compatible with Abrahamic tradition. In fact, it takes quite a technical intrepretation to remove that compatibility.
And thanks for the comments - which I will reply to, but I’ll do my usual approach and leave a substantive response until the weekend has really started.
I’ m expecting some more comments, as a good number of my political-blogging colleagues are of various kinds of non-theistic view (from agnostic -> via “spiritual” to militantly atheistic). We probably agree that the taxonomy of non-belief is as convoluted as that of religion!
I’ll be covering this subject in at some length over a period of time (my time permitting) - so It’s good to have such a quick response.
> “Congratulations on that! But how many of them are “nominal” ! You’ll be having separate strategies for “flock” and “fringe” before you know it.”
No, that figure is the actual membership. Far from being “nominal” it represents paid-up members of the British Humanist Association.
(And of course, there are many humanists who are not paid-up members of the BHA, and many more who have significantly humanist leanings without any explicit affiliation with the term ‘humanist’.)
> “it seems to me that all three are entirely compatible with Abrahamic tradition. In fact, it takes quite a technical interpretation to remove that compatibility.”
Remember, the various statements of humanistic character in that survey were contrasted with other statements of broadly religious character. You say of the humanistic statements that they could be “answered in the affirmative by perhaps 80%-100% of Christians and other religious people”. Well if that were true, it’s very hard to explain the results of the survey! The actual survey found results which, while still high in the humanist camp, were considerably lower than this. My point is that obviously many religious people are not so comfortable as you think they will be with those statements, so they do form a better contrastive differentiation than you speculate.