Kevin Baldeosingh
Righteousness is the enemy of compassion.
If you have not done so, find the video of Port-of-Spain mayor Raymond Tim Kee and look at it. Print reports do not sufficiently convey the moral certitude with which he linked the murder of Japanese pan player Asami Nagakiya with women's Carnival vulgarity. You have to see his posturing, hear his hands rap the desk as he spoke dismissively about women being able to enjoy Carnival without wining. To see his self-righteous attitude is to understand how he could make such dotish and insensitive remarks: for when a person believes they are absolutely right, they become incapable of seeing other people as having rights. And such moral certitude is always rooted in religion or ideology.
What has passed unremarked, of course, is that Tim Kee was echoing word for word the same Carnival criticisms continually made by religious leaders. These religious spokesmen also link sexual freedom, from wining to sex outside marriage, with rape and murder and even a declining economy. The only difference is that Tim Kee didn't make a general statement, but linked these same moral criticisms to a specific individual who had been murdered.
Science writer Matt Ridley in his book The Origins of Virtue notes: "Religious teaching...has almost always emphasised the difference between the in-group and the out-group: us versus them; Israelite and Philistine; Jew and Gentile; saved and damned; believer and heathen...Religion teaches its adherents that they are a chosen race and their nearest rivals are benighted fools or even sub-humans." This applies equally to political ideologies such as socialism and gender (not equity) feminism, which co-opt religious psychology.
This, I suspect, is why Prime Minister Keith Rowley immediately dismissed any suggestion of dismissing Tim Kee: after all, Dr Rowley hues to the same moral perspective as the PoS mayor, having suggested on the campaign trail that unmarried pregnant teachers should not be allowed into classrooms. Both men's trivialising of the murder is shown by their concern over the "embarrassment" caused by Nagakiya's murder to the capital city and the country.
Nearly all of our public figures pay at least lip service to religious beliefs. In the present Parliament, there is not one MP who affirmed their oath rather than swearing on a holy book. But religion's fundamental failing is the very reason for its success: by providing absolute rules of belief and behaviour, religion relieves the individual of the need to reason morally. This is why believers can commit rape and murder and other atrocities while feeling entirely justified: the Bible and Q'uran and Bhagavadgita make it clear that morality applies only to the believer. Hence the reason Jehovah approved genocide and Islamists can argue that raping non-Muslim women is sanctioned by Allah.
Consider this quote from one of history's best known leaders: "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air...we need believing people." This was Adolf Hitler arranging a concordat with the Vatican in 1933.
Such absolute certainty underlies much of the world's evils. In her book Being Wrong, journalist Kathryn Schulz notes that "Many moral wrongs and supported and legitimised by factual errors...Often our beliefs about what is factually right and our beliefs about what is morally right are entirely inextricable...In daily life, we use 'wrong' to refer to both error and iniquity: it is wrong to think that the Earth is flat, and it is also wrong to push your little brother down the stairs...moral and intellectual wrongness are connected not by mere linguistic coincidence but by a long history of associating error with evil–and, conversely, rightness with righteousness."
This, and not stupidity, is why religious believers continue to insist that the Earth is six thousand years old and not four billion years, and that human beings were created instead of evolving from apes. It is also why socialists ignore the irrefutable historical and economic fact that socialism is an unworkable political system, and why gender feminists insist that patriarchy is a real conspiracy by men to oppress all women.
"Certainty is lethal to two of our most redeeming and humane qualities, imagination and empathy," writes Schulz. In science and ethics, facts and morality rest on evidence and logic. The opposite is the case with religious beliefs and morality. This is one reason why, in all societies, more religiosity correlates with more violence and economic stagnation, while secularism is matched by lower crime, corruption and greater prosperity.
Psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson in their book Mistakes were Made (but Not by Me) write: "The scientific method consists of the use of procedures designed to show not that our predictions and hypotheses are right, but that they might be wrong. Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken...At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control."
Ours is a society in dire need of science.
Kevin Baldeosingh is a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a history textbook.