Fun with the Hun
When the Melbourne temperature gets into the mid-30’s for a couple of days running, our house becomes uninhabitable. Today, I’m taking refuge at the Highpoint Shopping Centre, making my once-yearly round of shops selling cheap Chinese clothes to equip myself for the new year. As I write, I’m sitting in a cafe with a Cascade sparkling apple juice, reading the Herald Sun (which is something else I only do in times of emergency).
The pick of today’s paper is the first instalment of their Issues of 2003 Survey. Apparently more than 28,000 readers filled in the questionnaire, the results of which “will be used to help shape how the Herald Sun tackles issues in 2004.” How, I wonder, will this shaping go on? 78% of readers think John Howard will win the next election. How will this affect the Hun’s election coverage? Only 27% think that Bob Brown and the Greens are good for politics. Does that mean we can expect Green-bashing to recommence with renewed vigour in 2004? Maybe they can get Senator Brandis on staff as a guest columnist, perhaps on the page opposite Andrew Bolt, for balance.
Actually, I think the survey results are pretty predictable, and it’s not at all suprising that a tabloid newspaper (in particular) would regard the views and prejudices of their readership as paramount in determining editorial content. The only thing that shits me about today’s two-page spread is the way in which the results of their readership survey are misrepresented as being applicable to Victoria as a whole. They even take the trouble to point out that “[t]he survey sample is larger than those commonly used by pollsters”, ignoring the fact that a large but unrepresentative sample is of much less value than a smaller but representative one. In the text, we are told that “[j]ust one in five Victorians said new Labor leader Mark Latham would claim victory at the ballot box”. No, actually. It’s one in five of the Herald Sun readers who bothered responding to the poll who believe that. It can’t even be taken to be representative of the readership as a whole, let alone Victorians as a whole. Similarly, we learn that “more than three quarters of Victorians” thought John Howard’s performance in 2003 was satisfactory or better. There are at least half a dozen other examples scattered through the various articles.
Call me a pedant, but I think that when things like poll results are published, it’s important not to deliberately alter those results. Every time the paper says “most Victorians” instead of “most respondents”, it’s lying. When it talks up the value of its sample against those of real polls, it’s being misleading. Likewise, this furphy about “An independent survey company analysed the responses and weighted the data to reflect the Australian Bureau of Statistics population figures for Victoria.” I’m guessing what this means is that the value of younger respondents was increased relative to the value of older respondents, since older people were over-represented in the sample group. Of course, what they couldn’t do was give a greater value to non-Herald-Sun-reading types relative to Herald-Sun-reading types (and surely there’s a difference), since the latter were undoubtedly also over-represented.
It might be amusing for Herald Sun readers to see what other Herald Sun readers think. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with that, any more than I think there’s anything wrong with newpaper phone polls (today’s example makes the stunning revelation that 97% of respondents think that public transport should run all night on New Years’ Eve). I think that people are generally smart enough to take these sorts of polls with a grain of salt. But I don’t think it’s right that the paper should try to mislead people about the results or what they mean. Big tables of figures unaccompanied by proper disclaimers can easily lead to false conclusions, moreso when the published interpretation arrives at the fallacy in advance.
Atheistmas
Interesting that The Age should publish an article titled “What meaning can Christmas have for atheists?“. Interesting, also, that they chose to do so without consulting any atheists on the subject. Thanks to the Right Reverend Peter Orchard, the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Victoria, who informs us that
Atheists miss out on those good gifts which God offers his people. The key ones are:
God offers to forgive and reconcile to himself those who turn away from their rebellion against him and put their faith in his Son. Shortly before Jesus was born, Joseph was told by the angel, “you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).
He offers to set his people free from a life centred on self and pour his love into their hearts enabling them to serve others. He offers his people eternal life. Jesus said, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Atheists no doubt enjoy the public holidays at Christmas, but Christians celebrate the birthday of their Saviour.
He left out another key thing that atheists miss out on: the simple pleasure derived from being able to shelter one’s beliefs behind the same nonsensical scriptural quotes and religious clichés that have protected similar beliefs from critical enquiry for the last two millenia. But Peter doesn’t go quite so far as the Catholic Archbishop Denis Hart, according to whom
Christmas acknowledges a historical fact. As promised in the Scriptures, a child was born, God and human. We know Jesus as the Saviour of the world, who became like us to show us he is near.
[…]
Those who cannot accept the reality behind this fact are encouraged to continue their search.
Oh, I see, God and Jesus and the Virgin Mary and the Three Wise Men and the Angel Gabriel actually exist independently of what one happens to believe in. They are, after all, historical facts. And here was me thinking that there was buggerall evidence for any of it. Silly me. Best I continue my “search”, which has for the last fifteen or twenty years become bogged down in a seemingly impassable morass of common sense.
Anglican Archbishop Peter Watson comes up with a response that I’m happy enough with:
We shouldn’t assume atheists miss out on the joy of Christmas. Spending time with family and friends and gift-giving is all part of that as well as the goodwill shown for others.
But Christmas for Christians is a special time of joy because of our belief that God is the source of that joy and goodwill, and that God shared his infinite love by becoming human in the person of Jesus Christ even to the point of being born in the poorest and most vulnerable and marginalised of circumstances. The message of Christmas is for all of us, and especially the most vulnerable.
I’ve emboldened the key words, to distinguish Peter W’s view from Denis’s. I’m quite happy to acknowledge that Christmas is a particularly special time for Christians because of what they believe in, and that they might get more out of it than I do. I’m sure that they get a lot more out of going to church than I would, too. We could argue about whether joy that is sustained by virtue of an illusion is as worthwhile as joy that is grounded in reality, but I’m of the view that they’re more or less equivalent. If someone is able to sustain a particular illusion to the point where they’re able to feel genuine joy about something that doesn’t exist, then good on them. It’s probably cheaper and safer than drugs or alcohol, which serve much the same purpose.
For me, Christmas is a ritual, and I think that rituals have some value. It’s good to have a particular time of year set aside to see family and friends, to think about the year that’s passed and the one that’s coming, to have a heightened awareness of people less fortunate. All of that is perfectly compatible with much of the Christian tradition (and probably with Jewish and Muslim festivals and other religious rituals as well). I don’t think you have to believe in God to think that that’s valuable and worthwhile. Even those aspects of the ritual that carry explicit Christian messages, like the carols, are (to me) inoffensive enough reminders that it’s that season again. I don’t feel as if hearing the Salvos playing “O Holy Night” carries with it any obligation on my part to believe that the night was, in fact, holy. There’s no reason why tunes which may hold a particular meaning for believers cannot still be enjoyed as familiar tunes by those who don’t believe, or who believe something else (this last point borne out by the number of behijabed Muslims who I’ve noticed bopping along to the christmas carols that I’ve been playing in shopping centres this week).
It might be that some atheists might find it hypocritical to be involved with Christmas celebrations. If that’s the case, then I think that falls more into the category of anti-theism than atheism. Surely an atheist should be quite happy to let other people believe whatever the hell they want to believe, as long as they’re not trying to foist their beliefs on him, and I don’t think that Christmas counts in that regard. Christmas doesn’t require any of us to subscribe to any particular belief (although we do have to put up with the odd bit of bleating about the “true meaning” of Christmas from individuals who leave out the proper suffix “as defined by me”).
Non-Sequitur
On newspaper websites, there seems to be a convention whereby the link and precis of a main headline story is followed by a series of smaller links to related stories, indented with little arrows in the case of The Age. Now and then, the relationship between the stories can be a bit hard to fathom:
The Age, 14/12/03
I guess the little grey heading at the top (which I always have to go back and look twice at to actually notice) provides the clue as to how the stories are linked (i.e., they both happened in the United States). But at first glance, it gave me an unfamiliar twinge of compassion for Microsoft. Dropping support for Windows98 is really not quite the same thing as bashing a kid to death with a baseball bat.
Author Gagging
Frank Moorhouse (via Wendy James):
Imaginative writing, the imaginative intelligence, at its highest, and in the western liberal sense, is a different use of the human mind to that of the politician, the academic, the political scientist, the journalist or the visionary. It is a different focal length, goes about different tasks, offers different creative outcomes. But these outcomes are rarely directly related to the issues of the day. Those who commit their lives to full-time serious imaginative writing at this complex level do, as a disparate group, bring to the reader manifold reading experiences that collectively contribute to the readers’ thinking. It is the reader who goes on gaining from their multifarious reading experiences (combined of course with other experiences in life) and who gains a wisdom that exceeds that of any of the individual authors from whom they have taken their reading experiences.
It is the good reader who becomes wise.
I sometimes wonder whether storytellers of high public profile are if anything disqualified from public statement because we are often falsely (but seductively) seen to have, and trusted to have, special insights by the public and media which we do not necessarily have.
Are authors really “seen to have, and trusted to have, special insights”, such that they need to be careful every time they publicly open their mouth in case the adoring masses, hanging on every word, are led astray? Sounds like crap to me. Who is to say that an author is any more or any less able to make a contribution to debate than anyone else? We get plenty of remarks from politicians and lawyers and pundits and religious figures and retired soldiers and crocodile catchers. Why not authors? It seems to me that Frank is indulging in a kind of conceit, imagining that writers occupy a much higher place in the public imagination than they actually do. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to be trained in economics to have worthwhile opinion on economic rationalism, any more than you have to be trained in music to have an opinion on Eric Dolphy, or any more than you have to be a literary genius to have an opinion on Frank Moorhouse. If the public want to listen to David Williamson or David Marr or Tim Winton, then surely that’s up to the public. It’s not as if we’re swamped with the voices of the literary community, to the exclusion of everyone else. And if it’s true that some members of the public mistakenly ascribe special wisdom to writers, then it’s surely no less true that they are inclined to do the same with regard to economists and politicians and journalists, who are much more likely to claim to speak from higher authority, but just as likely to be wrong. If we’re going to have celebrities slinging half-baked opinions around for the naïve to adopt as gospel, then we might as well go for as great a diversity of celebrity opinion as we can muster.