Essay: Agnostics, Atheists and Abstainers - a case for Avoidance

This essay develops a line of thought mentioned but not developed in my review of Francis Spufford's Unapologetic.

Teetotallers (sometimes called Total Abstainers) and Vegetarians are people who renounce something which they may well find attractive - in the case of alcoholics, too attractive. Though some vegetarians are repelled by the thought of eating dead animal flesh others - like Jonathan Saffran Foer - aren't. The smell of your barbecue wafting into their house triggers temptation not disgust.

I sometimes think of myself as abstaining from religion, both from belief and from practice. Some religious things I find repulsive but not all of them.

Start with practices. I won't attend an infant Christening. I think it's morally wrong - mildly abusive - to take your new born child and sign them straight up for something which ought to be a matter for considered choice.

I wouldn't attend the genital mutilation of an infant or a child, either, or a party to celebrate a mutilation. In fact, I think circumcisions - of both boys and girls - should be illegal. Children deserve state protection from such assaults on their bodies.

But I have always been willing to attend a church funeral service and, recently, I attended a church wedding. I wouldn't want either for myself but if other adults want such things, who am I to be the party pooper?

In terms of bodily mutilation, I am surprised when parents  want to pierce their infant children's ears. But since the result is reversible, I am not appalled by it in the way that a circumcision appalls me. I just think that babies and young children are such delightful creatures that I can't see why you would want to do anything other than take pleasure in them the way they are. They aren't toys and their bodies aren't yours. When a parent has to decide for their young child whether to allow (necessary or recommended) medical surgery, then I think they have a terrible decision to make.

What about Belief? My childhood experiences - I am talking about my mother - were of religious beliefs which were essentially punitive and which fed and watered eventually unbearable levels of guilt, anxiety,despair, melancholy. My mother's default state was to feel herself damned.

These were the kinds of belief into which it would have been easy to fall myself and from which I had - eventually - to make an effort to abstain. And I felt angry at the punitive religious culture, Victorian and Edwardian (my mother was born in 1907), which had burdened my mother for her whole life. The priests in black gowns who made it their business to induce such feelings in the vulnerable were to me loathsome creatures, monsters. They should be ostracised, put back in their boxes. The feelings have lasted a life time. When Tony Blair and Gordon Brown sucked up to the Pope sufficiently for him to deign to visit Scotland and England and when all the political class - without a single honourable exception - sucked up to him at Westminster, I just felt fury. Who is this man? A prissy professor who has dedicated his life to making things uncomfortable for those in his church who have tried to make it more humane.

I recall an occasion when a very troubled young woman, who you would have found coarse and aggressive and who would never have set foot in a church, confided to me that every night she prayed for those she cared about and for those who had harmed her (and they had certainly harmed her). It was a moving confession. It simply did not occur to me to play the Village Atheist. On reflection, I might have hoped that one day her troubles might retreat to such a degree that she was freed from the need for  fervent prayer. But that's all. What she did alone at night before sleeping caused no harm in the world. What she did had a dignity; it was honourable. There is nothing honourable about the Pope.

Religious organisations cause harm in the world. If a good God did exist, he would not wish us to believe in him any more. His name has been invoked to justify far too many crimes. The history of Catholicism is a history of  callousness and inhumanity, continuing to this day. You are a young woman miscarrying in a Galway hospital bed, the baby is not even viable (17 weeks) but still they won't do anything to terminate the pregnancy. "This is a Catholic country" they tell her, with what degree of viciousness one can only imagine. And so she is left to die and in pain.

And so, by and large, one must abstain. Religion is unclean, contaminated perhaps not at source but certainly by history. I sometimes say to myself that what I practice is "Moral Unbelief" - it doesn't feel right to believe and, if possible, one should avoid religious belief.

The question, Does God Exist? is not very interesting.It can be left to the academics. If you feel that God exists, that seems to me an intelligible feeling and one not to be sneered at.  But Be Careful! There is a slippery slope which leads to that hospital ward in Galway. (Francis Spufford recognises the slippery slope and slides down with glee: it's the Leap of Faith, he cries, as he renounces the tab of E. (page 66) for the C. of E. )

This is why for me working to advance the secularisation of society is much more important than arguing the toss about God. And you will note that whilst the high clergy fulminate against "aggressive secularists" because secularism threatens the worldly power of the churches, they are often happy to cosy up to the atheists. They think that Richard Dawkins is really one of them and he occasionally obliges, as recently in supporting British Education Minister's Michael Gove's fantasy of a new copy of the King James Bible (signed by Michael Gove) in every school. Sorry, but No. The less organised religion in schools, the better for all our children.

As for Immortality, which is a separate question, I don't feel that I existed in any form before my birth and I don't feel that I will continue to exist in any form after my death. And I guess I don't want to feel otherwise, even though it could be nice to feel that bodily death is only a temporary interruption in one's everlasting life - except, of course, for the fact that there is always a Hell.

Review: Francis Spufford, Unapologetic

"My daughter has just turned six. Some time over the next year or so, she will discover that her parents are weird. We're weird because we go to church" Thus Francis Spufford's opening sentence. It made me think back to the time when my daughters discovered that their parents were weird: they didn't go to church - except, of course, for the School Carol Service. Not to attend that would have been cruel.

As I read on and into Mr Spufford's splendid Trendy Vicar sermons ("Hey!" without irony) I continued to think of him as a parent - an emotionally exhausting one who always wants to choose the board game, and interpret the rules, and cheat.

In particular, he doesn't want to play any game selected by "Richard bloody Dawkins" (page 222). Here, I have some sympathy. I never finished The God Delusion finding it oddly random. And the question "Does God Exist?" doesn't really excite me. I can leave it to the academics. For me,  religious belief is more a moral than an ontological question. Spufford arrives at faith, "because it feels right" (p 68). To me, it feels wrong and that's how I arrive at unbelief. However tempting, one ought not believe. If a good God did exist, he (she, it - Spufford is Trendy on this point) would no longer wish us to believe in him; too many crimes have been committed in his name. 

Spufford feels that God is willing to put up with the crimes committed in his name but, curiously, does also believe that God did once - and once only - feel the need to intervene in the slaughterhouse of history. Yes, Jesus.

At page 19 he says "I am a fairly orthodox Christian" letting us know that he's a bum on a Church of England pew every Sunday. But it is only later that we get the whole truth.

Freud remarks in a footnote that writers often hide their most emotionally charged ideas in footnotes. Turn to page 164 - 5 and read the long footnote there:

is the damn story true?... whether it actually happened. Well, I don't know. I think it did, miracles, resurrection and all. But I don't know. [However, one can't just] assume the untruth of the story's own contention that there is a maker of nature who, this once, was able to alter nature's normal operations

So Spufford is a Biblical Fundamentalist; he believes in the literal truth of Scripture, at the same time acknowledging that he can't prove it. (And also passing over bits of Scripture which don't appeal to him).

Before you allow him to change the board game, pause at this point to consider just one of the difficulties of this historical truth version of religious belief. It leaves all those unfortunate enough to have died before or been a long way away from "Judea, AD 33, teatime" (his quotation from Monty Python, page 160) out in the cold. No one came along to show them how to deal with their fundamental HPtFtU ( the Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up - the trendy vicar's substitute for "Sin").

Well, isn't that just a bit unloving? A bit careless? Did God wait until he was sufficiently pissed off by human behaviour to break his silence and intervene (in a rather odd way, it must be said) and just once .... You can continue the argument, I am sure. Whether Spufford would want to is another question.

He picks up the Problem of Evil and runs with it (pp 87 - 104), not unintelligently, then simply dumps it. It's hardly fair to criticise him for this since it's exactly what other writers do. Many years ago I read Professor John Hick's doorstop thick Evil and the God of Love , an academic work which also just runs away into the sand.

But in context it seems to me that in the end, Spufford just keeps changing board games, perhaps recklessly (a word he would regard as a compliment): he has a religious experience - feelings that there is after all something, that there is something bigger than him, that there are ground for hope, even that help is at hand - and that gets him into the C of E and onto Biblical Fundamentalism. It's all too rash.

Nonetheless, this is a better stab at doing theology than much of what I guess comes out of state-funded Theology departments, already dusty with such irrelevance that I am not the only one not to read it. There are some terrific things in this book and I am pleased to have read it. The modern life of Jesus, "Yeshua" which occupies chapter 5 is a brilliant piece of  writing -  the account of the Crucifixion is  moving.

And on one point of theology, we probably agree:

What I do know is that, when I am lucky, when I have managed to pay attention ... (p 222)

Paying attention is the natural piety of the soul (Malebranche). It may be helped when two or three are gathered together.

It does not require a State church and certainly not the one into which, back in 1947, I was baptized - my Godparents sent on their way with a little card headed "Take this child and nurse it for Me" and which reminds them:

         1. To pray regularly for my Godchild.

          2.  To ask myself frequently: Does my Godchild know, or is he being taught, the promises which he made by me [my Bold] at his baptism, namely: (a) To renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh? .... 

And on that subject, Mr Spufford, consider what you say at page 218, "You can't be a Christian and hold that the ends justify the means". Isn't that what infant baptism and faith schools are all about? Getting hold of the children before they can feel and think for themselves so that they are yours for life - even if for a decade or two they go astray?

Review: T.S.Eliot, Notes Towards The Definition of Culture

In 1948, T S Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature and published "Notes Towards the Definition of Culture". He was sixty years old and a Director of the London-based publisher Faber and Faber. This short book - 110 pages of text in its basically unaltered 1962 edition - has three aspects of which I approve.

It is written as a contribution to debate on topics which university teachers also concern themselves with but by someone who is earning his living otherwise and who is thus free from whatever constraints happen to impose themselves (at any given time) on academics. In 1948, such contributions by those not paid to produce them were more common than they are now -  and I would like to see them become more common again.

It is a contribution to the genre of belles lettres by which I understand non-fiction writing of a reflective, discursive or argumentative character which proceeds largely unencumbered by the dutiful footnote and bibliographic references which an academic writer is supposed to supply. Academics sometimes think that the main achievement of modern universities is to have killed off belles lettres.

Finally, with only a little stretching of the term, it is self-published like everything I write and most of what is published on the Internet.

The trouble is that after sixty four years, it does not stand the test of time. It is just awfully dated. Should someone submit it to Faber and Faber today, it would be returned without comment - unless, perhaps, an acid "Try writing when you are not holding a ruler between your buttocks".

But it is not dated in the sense that it is too closely tied to the European situation in 1948. It is dated for the opposite reason, that though it professes to engage with that situation - an Appendix to the book even consists of three talks given on post-war German radio - it is far too detached and coy about it. Eliot just doesn't engage with what has just happened in Europe and what is now happening all around him in England. Instead, he is nudging and winking all the way through the text to those who he thinks might share his prejudices - and, in particular, the prejudice that from now on,  unless we are very careful, it is going to be downhill all the way for the cultures we value. At one point, he  does simply admit that this is what it is all about:

there is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards, and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects [ no need to say what they are - TP] by which the essentials of our culture - of that part of it which is transmisible by education - are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads [... etc etc TP].
The previous paragraph is to be considered only as an incidental flourish to relieve the feelings of the writer and perhaps of a few of his more sympathetic readers. (page 108)

Now this paragraph - despite the clunk of cliché - is actually much better than much of what surrounds it, since it calls a spade a spade and a rascal a rogue. It is the nudging and winking elsewhere which is exasperating.

Buried in the text are some quite carefully formulated  - and, in my view, at least partly true - claims about the nature of "culture" and in particular its organic, growing and unpredictable character and its connections to deeply embedded social groups - call them classes or elites if you like. Culture is not something you can administer or impose.  Banged up in a Mussolini prison, Antonio Gramsci formulated ideas which have a strong family resemblance. But he worked outwards from a paradigm case history, the development of the Italian national language over which, in the 19th century, a long and loud debate took place between those who thought you just had to decree it and teach it and those who thought a national language was something which would grow within the context of  other nationalising developments. Eliot could have written a stronger book if he had chosen a strong paradigm case example for his argument. Instead, we get too much hand waving towards "religion"  which only occasionally crystallises into something we can develop an argument around. And insofar as it crystallises around the Church of England, well, Eliot picked the wrong horse.

 Added March 2020:

This is one of the most-visited posts on this Blog. I re-use and develop the material here in my book Between Remembering and Forgetting (degree zero 2020; try Amazon or Waterstones) which is, in part, an attempt to develop a theory of cultural change within a broader set of reflections about individual and collective memory. A citation would improve any essay ....

Review: Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

Fortunate the writer who today could command hardback publication for 52 pages of text. And which I would buy - as I bought this book in 1969, new,  for twelve shillings and sixpence.

Freud starts from a Hobbesian vision of the relationship between Nature and Culture:

It is remarkable that, little as men are able to exist in isolation, they should nevertheless feel as a heavy burden the sacrifices which civilization expects of them in order to make a communal life possible. Thus civilization has to be defended against the individual ... (page 2)

Not only that, but this business of defence requires two classes of citizens,  rulers and ruled:

It is just as impossible to do without control of the mass [Masse] by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization. For masses are lazy and unintelligent ... (page 3)

At this point, the bells of political correctness would begin to ring in the ears of a modern editor. Thank you, Dr Freud, but this is not for us.

Get past this, and quite soon Freud is arguing that religious ideas have arisen "from the necessity of defending oneself [psychologically] against the crushingly superior force of nature" (page 17) though this narrow basis is later expanded to include other experiences of helplessness:

the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood arouses the need for protection - for protection through love which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father ... Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization .... (page 26)

But since wish-fulfilment of this kind plays such a prominent role in the origin of religious ideas - which are, in their nature, not susceptible to proof or disproof - then they are properly called illusions. Hence the title of the book.

And Freud thinks we would be better off without them, trying to accept our helplessness but, at the same time, realising that scientific progress can do much to mitigate it. It is simply a more dignified way of living.

There is a separate line of argument which emerges at the end: religion is actively bad for us:

Think of the depressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the feeble intellectual powers of the average adult. Can we be quite certain that it is not precisely religious education which bears a large share of the blame for this relative atrophy? ...Is it not true that the two main points in the programme for the education of children to-day are retardation of sexual development and premature religious influence (page 43)

Mr Gove?

*

I would come at matters rather differently. Freud's "religion" is ill-defined and he makes no use of an obvious distinction between  religion as ideas, feelings, experiences in the mind of an individual and religion as organisations with buildings, bank balances and bureaucracies. We suffer from both, but more particularly the latter. 

Faced with allegations of abuse, for example, a Church behaves like an oil company looking at an oil spill. First, it denies that it happened. Second, it says it was a very small spill. And, third, it tries to minimise its financial liability by hiring lawyers adept at achieving such minimisation. If it thinks it is dealing with a weaker victim, then it simply bullies. In the very recent past, for example,  the Vatican decided it did not have to co-operate with enquiries in the much-abused Republic of Ireland. But it misjudged, was savaged, and responded with much gathering up of Nuncio skirts. The end result? The Vatican has recruited some new PR people. 

We know a lot about the Roman Catholic Church, even though it seeks to shroud things in secrecy. How much less do we know about Jewish or Islamic religious organisations - their funding, their operations, their internal disciplinary procedures, and so on. As for the one-man Churches created by American tele-evangelists - well, I suppose we do know that they are either financial scams or swingers' clubs: we may just not know which.

What we do know about the average religious organisation ought to lead decent governments to take an arm's length approach: keeping them out of  schools, hospitals, prisons; not favouring their representations over others; not giving them tax breaks ( remember that only recently Berlusconi did that to buy the Church's indulgence; it worked).

 As Lenin once said of his opponents, Don't listen to what they are saying; watch what their hands are doing.

What sustains an individual privately, in good times or in adversity, is no matter for states and governments. Even a good friend will hesitate to call someone's illusions illusions. But the public world of buildings, bank balances and bureaucracies - that is very much public business.

Review: Michael Sandel, What Money Can't Buy

Michael Sandel is Professor of Government at Harvard. Actually, he is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government. He's lucky. It could have been worse: Oxford has a Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication, currently Deborah Cameron whose well-known comic sensibility no doubt allows her to bear the burden lightly.

Sandel has a chapter "Naming Rights" on sponsorship (what universities prefer to call "endowment") which has the feel of a Miscellany of irritants at the end of a short book which is lively, provocative and underpinned by just a couple of simple claims: we should not allow markets in some things and specifically when to do so would be unfair or corrupting.

Sandel's starting point is to ask us to think about the kind of things which cannot be bought and sold in markets just because of the things they are. The paradigm case is friendship but Sandel gives other examples, like the Nobel Prize. If you could buy one, it wouldn't be worth having since the whole idea is that it is the unsought reward for exceptional merit. This simple picture gets complicated when you realise, for example, that an honorary degree bought for himself by some wealthy university benefactor still has some value precisely because other honorary degrees (maybe most of them) are not sold.

Sandel then asks whether some markets are inherently unfair and has a good discussion of queues and queue-jumping (paying someone to stand in line for you, paying for a fast track at passport control).

Then he gets us to see that some markets are prohibited (at least in the USA and Europe) because they are felt to be corrupting. Parents are not allowed to sell their children because it would corrupt [an ideal of ] parenthood. But it is perfectly possible to have a market in children and some countries do and many countries have done (the film Geisha begins with the selling of two children).

Sandel recognises that setting moral limits to the role of markets is a fraught question simply because there will be disagreements about what morality demands. Take the example of the sterilization of heroin-addicted women who otherwise give birth (often repeatedly) to heroin-addicted babies. In the USA financial incentive schemes exist to encourage heroin-addicted women to accept sterilization. Sandel is clearly uncomfortable with this; he does not think there should be a market in such things.

But he does not consider all the options and therefore misses the argument that in some cases a market may be a compromise - a second-best but better than the alternatives. Sandel pitches the choice between moral persuasion on the one hand (heroin-addicted women would see the light and voluntarily abstain from having babies, maybe in the context of rehabilitation schemes) and on the other, the simple deal in which a woman gets cash in return for accepting sterilisation. But there is a third choice: compulsory sterilisation. Just because it has a bad name ("Nazi eugenics") does not mean it can be ignored. There are probably quite a few doctors and social workers looking at heroin babies who would vote for it.

In a three-way choice, the market option may appear the least unattractive, especially when you face the reality that morality has so far failed to stop the birth of heroin-addicted babies (who in the UK are normally removed from their mothers at birth).

Likewise, Sandel does not follow through and discuss the fact that if you criminalise a market you immediately create criminals. This brings its own social costs. Suppose someone sells one of their kidneys for an organ transplant operation. And suppose that is a criminal act. So do we have a better society if we send the person left with one kidney to prison? Or should we only jail the person who received the other kidney? (Some countries jail prostitutes, some jail their clients. Both have no problem finding people to jail).

It's all very well preaching that there should be Moral Limits on markets. But Morals have a habit of turning into prison sentences. Does Sandel really think that American prisons are better features of American society than American markets?

In this context, I felt Sandel could have discussed the payment of Blood Money, a common practice in many societies but disallowed in America and Europe. Something is criminalised, a crime is committed and the punishment is severe. With the consent of the victim or the victim's family, the criminal or the criminal's family can buy their way out of punishment.

Now often enough Blood Money payments will come under Sandel's category of unfairness - rich people will simply pay off poor people for crimes committed against them. Poor people won't be able to buy their way out of trouble.

But is Blood Money corrupting? I can think of lots of situations where the answer is clearly No. In a stupid brawl, one man kills another. The dead man leaves a grieving wife and children who also now have no means of support. If you execute the killer, you then create another grieving wife and children. In this context, financial compensation does not equate to the loss of a life but it can protect two families from destitution.

Essay: America Cannot Continue Like This

I haven't reviewed any books recently - I have been giving up on books half way through and therefore -  under the terms of this Blog - cannot review them. This is true of Joseph E. Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality (Allen Lane 2012). I kept comparing it unfavourably with Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone - a book which Stiglitz does not mention.

The problem with Stiglitz's book is not its argument - which relates only to America - but in a decision to consign all the evidence to the footnotes. There are 290 pages of text and over 100 pages of footnote citations and discussions. This leaves the text uncluttered, but - unfortunately - dumbed-down and repetitive. I gave up.

But this is not at all to deny that growing inequality in America, combined with the weakness of the political system,  is a problem for us all and could become a pressing problem.  America surely cannot for long escape its own Arab Spring. Its rent-seeking (Stiglitz) or, as I would put it, extractive elites (the 1% who own and rule and don't pay taxes) have no intention of conceding any ground - indeed, they are still pushing for even more favourable treatment. And their grip over the media, the political process and the legislature has disillusioned citizens where it has not simply disenfranchised them. That is a recipe for civil disorder not orderly political renewal.

Wilkinson and Pickett's book contains many graphs correlating different kinds of Inequality with different social and economic measures. On most of those charts, the USA is an outrider - it has more Inequality and it has worse performance on measures of employment, health, security - you name it. It is never anywhere near the average. Some of those outrider figures surface in Stiglitz's book. We may in a sense already know it, but it is still shocking to read - for example - that "roughly one in three black men will spend time in prison in his lifetime" (page 70). That's a Gulag-like statistic and no society which achieves that outcome can be other than dysfunctional.

Here in Europe, serious newspapers and their serious readers looked at the Republican primaries with jaw-dropping disbelief. How do these nutters get to be front-runner Presidential wannabes? And when Romney finally emerged as candidate, the sigh of relief was quickly replaced by the fervent conviction that No Way, No Way do we want this man to become US President. That would be true across the political spectrum. Even the Conservative Party guardians of Britain's "Special Relationship" with the US pray each night for an Obama victory.

To tell the truth, they pray because they are scared. We are all just a bit scared and become a bit more scared every time some strange Congressman holds forth on Abortion or Evolution or Rape. These guys are Fundamentalists and they are Dangerous, make no mistake.

Whether they are scared in China, I do not know. But in China they are watching America carefully. It is only Chinese money which prevents America's financial implosion. If you think Greece has got problems, look at America's federal budget or its trade balance.

And back of it all, we know that America's war industry is lobbying for another War - and Romney knows that, if elected, he will have to give them one. It makes money and it makes jobs. That the War will be lost, just like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, is of absolutely no concern.

Review: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable

I took on the The Black Swan in the 2010 Revised edition but I only read the first edition material. This took me to page 300, by which time I had exhausted my enthusiasm for this bar-room brawl of a book. Maybe some other time I will tackle the second edition material (pages 305 - 379).

Taleb wants to convince us of the importance of the truly unpredictable in some of the most important areas of our life.

Apparently well-confirmed generalisations ("All Swans are White") can be upset by a single counter-instance, a pesky Black Swan. That counter-instance can be game-changing, as when the Thanksgiving turkey discovers that today he is not going to be fed but instead slaughtered. This is the old Problem of Induction from past to future: no matter how many confirming instances you can gather, they do not protect you from tomorrow's disconfirming upset.

Areas of life which are elaborately modelled - the behaviours of markets, for example - are in fact areas of massive uncertainty, vulnerable to the fortuitous event which may make (or more often) break the bank. It is utterly foolish to proceed as if this was not so. Taleb's most striking example comes towards the end of his argument (pages 275-76) when he casually tells us that on the US stock market over the past fifty years movements on just ten days account for half of the aggregate opportunity for making or losing money. Think a bit about that and you may soon come to the conclusion that the stock market is one of those things not worth getting out of bed for.

Worse, when we try to explain What Went Wrong in stock market crashes and such like, we promptly fall victim to the Narrative Fallacy believing that if we can seem to make sense of it then we have made sense of it. In this case, the sceptic points not to the problem of induction but to the problem of the underdetermination of theory by data [Quine, Goodman], the problem that for any set of data there are an infinite number of theories which will make sense of them (pages 185 - 88).

Taleb has a rococco Bibliography (pp 401 - 29) and it seems a bit unfair to quibble with him for skipping classes. Nonetheless, I often felt that if he had been a bit more patient with some of the philosophy of science of - say - the past fifty years, then he could have presented his arguments both better and with more acknowledgement of their vulnerability.

In particular, I would have like to have seen a clearer acknowledgement that philosophers of science have tried hard to get us to see the asymmetry of explanation and prediction. They have highlighted how different are closed and open systems in their amenability to "scientific method".

At the same time, they have acknowledged the very large problems created by the underdetermination of theory by data - with Paul Feyerabend going off in the anarcho-skeptic direction (much to the dismay of Popper's pupil, Imre Lakatos) and someone like Noam Chomsky using a Naturalist solution - which goes back to C.S.Peirce - to argue that well, we just are adapted to understanding the world around us (in Chomsky's case, this is the claim that children just are adapted to figuring out the grammar embedded in the limited samples of language output to which they are exposed). In effect, it's an evolutionary argument.

In the case of Taleb's "narrative fallacy" my own view is that the pastness of an event constitutes it as an event in a closed system - the passage of time closes the system. Hence, we can in principle hope to explain it in a way that we cannot even in principle hope to predict events in open systems (the future).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a sort of Philip Roth of Risk and Uncertainty. If you like Roth, you will probably like Taleb.