In this first episode of our podcast "With Reason", anthropologist Joseph Webster discusses his research amongst Protestant groups in Scotland, from devout Brethren fishermen to the sometimes-controversial Orange Order. We talk about apocalypse and conspiracy, faith and fraternity, hate and masculinity – and why it's vital to listen to others, even if we don’t always like what we find.
For fans of Louis Theroux and Clifford Geertz alike. A conversation on ethics and representation, listening, community and more.
Host: Alice Bloch
Co-host: Samira Shackle
Producer: Alice Bloch
Music: Danosongs
Transcript:
Alice Bloch:
Hello, and welcome to with reason with me, Alice Bloch -
Samira Shackle:
- and me, Samira Shackle. This is the podcast from New Humanist magazine and the Rationalist Association, the podcast where you can find radical, exciting and sometimes surprising research and ideas from thinkers who deserve to be heard. But challenged a bit too, of course,
AB:
It's the place where you'll find intelligent thinking in turbulent times. In this series, we're meeting writers and academics whose work prompts questions like: How should we listen to people whose ideas differ from our own? What happens when we cast a critical eye over dominant notions of knowledge? And what could the future of everything from work to relationships look like in this time of massive technological change?
SS:
We're concerned with questions of reason and unreason, religion and secularism, rational debate and ideas. Our guests this series include people like the feminist Minna Salami, who celebrates sensuous ways of knowing in her new book, responding to Euro-patriarchal knowledge. And Kate Devlin, an expert in sex robots who sifts the facts from the moral panic on the subject. But today, we're meeting an anthropologist of religion.
AB:
Yes, our guest today is Joseph Webster. And as I see it, Joe looks at faith and religion in the real world in practice. And what I like about his writing really is that it refuses to bow to cliche or sensationalism. I think there's a real humanity to his descriptions of the people that he studies. He really takes their world seriously, which I think is something that often researchers anthropologists might claim to do, but don't always fully do. I think sometimes journalists are guilty of that also, he's interested in things like apocalypse. So he wrote about people who believe they're living in the end times a very fashionable phrase in 2020, long before the recent rash of books on bunkering and prepping that we've seen this year, especially. More broadly, he studies the rather less trendy subject of Protestantism, how it's actually lived, sometimes in what we might call rather extreme forms.
SS:
Yes, so Joe's first book was based on his time spent with a devout fishing community in northern Scotland. And for his latest work, he stayed in Scotland and studied quite a different group, the Orange Order, which is Scotland's largest Protestant only fraternity.
AB:
Yep, so that's pretty different from the stereotype of anthropology, which you might think of as people going far away to study cockfights in Bali, sexuality in Samoa, the supposedly exotic if you like. So when we talk to Joe, earlier this year, we started by asking why he chosen to stay a little bit closer to home, and whether that was an ethical, conscious decision for him.
Joseph Webster:
I think it's a conscious decision insofar as the phenomena that I'm interested in happens to be closer to home. So I study Protestant fundamentalism mostly in Scotland. But the interesting observation to make from that, I suppose, is that whilst anthropologists do tend to be drawn towards exotic tribes, for want of a better phrase, it's important to realize that the type of exoticism that we associate with anthropology can actually be found much closer to home. So we imagine that faraway places are exotic and our own culture is somehow banal. But actually, the things that we imagined to be the most ordinary and the closest to home can actually present itself as highly exotic depending on your perspective.
SS:
And lots of us probably assume that we basically know what Protestantism is, but could you briefly talk us through its main ideas and pillars?
JW:
So the core principle of Protestantism, I suppose, would be defense of the legacy of the reformation, the Protestant Reformation, which is itself defined by a very particular interpretation of the Bible and seeing biblical authority as the sole authority of faith, that would be an important hallmark. Other features are clearly established in opposition to Catholicism. So the refusal of the mediatory role of priests, the concern about not worshipping images, as certain Protestants would express it - so statues of Mary for instance, not praying to Mary, not allowing a priest to be an intermediary in the confession of sin. So, whilst Protestants say, all we do is follow the Bible, in practice, what that looks like is often the creation of a number of different practices, which take their cue in a negative sense from Catholicism. So for instance, many Catholics would routinely take the mass every single week whereas the Protestant church that I study tend to take communion, sometimes as few as two or three times a year. So you get the idea that, yes, Protestantism is positively defined by a particular relationship to the Bible, but it's also negatively defined in terms of how it isn't a certain expression of religiosity that we would typically associate with Catholicism.
SS:
And you yourself have a Protestant commitment. Is that right?
JW:
Yeah. So I was raised in the Church of England, a kind of moderate Church of England background and having moved to Ireland, I joined a Presbyterian Church - although, I suppose what drew me to the radical apocalyptic and fundamentalist groups that I researched is that they existed as an expression of Protestantism that was so utterly different to my own Church of England upbringing,
AB:
Much of your work is on Protestantism, and how it's defined by believers themselves and what it means to them to be a good Protestant. And we'll talk more about that in a moment when we talk about your book on Orange politics. But first, tell us a bit about your earlier work, for which you spent a lot of time studying a Protestant brethren fishing community in North Eastern Scotland, where people believed they were living in the last of the last days.
JW:
Yeah, so my first book was an ethnographic study of a very small fishing village in the far northeast of Scotland called Gamrie. The village had 700 people and six churches, many of these churches were part of the Brethren movement, which is defined by its eschatology - that means its theology of the end of the world. And they were urgently anticipating the apocalypse. And what that looked like in practice was a very close attention to current affairs happenings in the news, but also local developments in the fishing industry, because they were all fishermen, and trying to draw straight lines often between what they read in the Bible and their own everyday experience. And it was that sign searching, that looking for signs of the end times, that came to define what it meant to be a good Brethren believer in that particular community. And they were often, from an outside perspective, quite unusual expressions of that. So because they were all fishermen, they regarded the European Union, and particularly the Common Fisheries Policy as the "mark of the beast" and the Antichrist. So drawing straight lines between political institutions, and particular end times beliefs was something which really seized the religious imagination of local people in that community.
SS:
And that research gave rise to your more recent work on the Orange Order in Scotland. That's a very different culture, but still one that's defined as Protestant. And members, the way they see themselves is that they're defending civil and religious liberties. But the order is also accused of being sectarian or even supremacist. Could you tell us a bit about its roots?
JW:
Okay, so very briefly, the Orange Order celebrate their own roots through William III, Prince of Orange and the conflict that he had with James II. So James II was a Roman Catholic King, and the Protestant establishment within Britain at the time was very anxious that James II's Catholic commitments could lead to the royal lineage falling into Catholic hands permanently. And as a result, they invited William III, to essentially invade. And that's exactly what he did, in 1688 William lands in Torbay, and by 1690, William III defeats James and is enthroned as King along with his wife Queen Mary. Fast forward 100 years and in Ireland, you have a series of laws which have been designed to secure Protestant ascendancy. So to prevent a kind of second rise of institutional Catholicism within Ireland, and unsurprisingly, the Irish community in Ireland felt aggrieved by these laws, and were fighting back. And the Orange Order as we know it today, is essentially a Masonic inspired secret society, which was attempting to shore up and protect these Irish penal laws. So they attempted to secure Protestant ascendancy. And of course it looks very different today, but its historical roots are designed to secure Protestant ascendancy through this sectarian Civil Defence Force that we saw arise in the very late 1700s.
AB:
And so this this started in Ireland, Joe, but came over to Scotland. You write about how it was brought over, I think by soldiers, then weavers, then those fleeing famine and so on. Today it's known for, or at least associated with, in part, sectarian football chants, support for Rangers football club, ritual, anti Catholicism, links to Ulster unionism in Ireland and of course, parades, which are often in the media, though many of them were canceled this year due to COVID-19. And you studied the Order for five years - going to archives, social clubs, churches, everywhere. And where does Scots Orangeism happen today? What does it look like? It seems it's quite hard to pin down.
JW:
Well, I think it's very diverse, which is the first thing to say and whilst the public encounter Scots Orangeism primarily on the streets during the summer months of June and July, when they parade through Scotland's urban centres, particularly in Glasgow, which is where they're most well known, the life of the Orangemen is much more diverse than just parading on a few days of the year. Indeed, it's tied up with private lodge activities and rituals. So because the Orange Order has some institutional similarities with Freemasonry, you know, you can use your judgment there about what an Orange meeting might look like, in terms of the reenactment of certain biblical passages in this dramatic communal fashion. But also much more mundane activities, like meeting at your local Orange social club, and drinking together and swapping stories and joking and gossiping and watching football matches, all of that then comes to make life in the Order what it is. And of course, the other very time consuming activity that many Orangemen were engaging in during my research was campaigning against Scottish independence. So as well as the ritual side of things, there is this informal social fraternity - but there's also really concerted grassroots political activism. And if you combine all of those ingredients, then I think you get a pretty rounded picture of what life in the Order looks like.
AB:
Yeah, I think that's what your book offers as well. And you talk there also about the different sides to Orange culture. So you describe I think watching a parade, for example, where there's a chaplain, who's really earnestly talking to you about spiritualism, and all these important matters, while two topless men nearby, draped in loyalist flags are smoking joints, getting drunk, etc. I guess you use that as an example, to capture this sense of how heterogenous the culture is, you talk about the rank and file versus a respectable hierarchy, so to speak. Tell me about that, that breadth of membership or type of follower or person?
JW:
Sure. So I think the first thing to point out there is the way in which there is a strong divide between the hierarchy, who regard themselves as eminently respectable defenders of a liberal Protestant tradition. But in contrast to that you have grassroots members, who are suspicious of the non-sectarian claims that the hierarchy want to put forward to the rest of the world. So the hierarchy want the grassroots members to be more respectable, but the grassroots members often - certainly among the men that I spent time among - were skeptical about whether or not the squeaky clean image of Orangeism that the hierarchy wanted to put forward was, in fact, their own Orangeism and whether it was the true version of Orangeism that they valued and experienced. Things get even more messy when you realize that in addition to fully paid up orange members, you also have a much wider circle of Orange supporters. So they're not themselves members, but they are regarded, at least in some contexts by Orange members as what they call loyal Protestant friends. But in other contexts, depending on the behavior in question, they're regarded as less desirable, and that would draw in football supporters and other loyalist groups as well.
AB:
And indeed, I mean, there is this side that we can't ignore isn't there, and that you also don't ignore in your books. You write about a girl struck by a stray bottle during the Order's campaign against Scottish independence. And in the past few years, Glasgow has seen incidents around parades and so on. I think an attack on a Catholic priest by a follower of a parade in 2018. I guess this is the kind of thing we're talking about here.
JW:
That's right. And the Orange hierarchy are right in pointing out that those who are guilty of the most egregious sectarian behavior are often those at the fringes of Orange parades who are themselves not members. And they say, look, we can't control the behaviour of those who haven't signed up to our organization, but happened just to be standing at the edge of one of our parades. The wider debate that gets played out endlessly in the press then is, do Orange parades create an atmosphere, which is conducive to this type of sectarian behavior? And if it does, should those people be referred to as loyal Protestant friends? And answering that question is really difficult. But I suppose my job as an anthropologist, as an onlooker, was simply to point out that these multiple voices, these multiple perspectives existed side by side, but at the same time they existed in tension. The Orange hierarchy don't often agree with the grassroots members, let alone do they often agree with those at the fringes of their parade. So capturing that messiness was really important.
AB:
And I guess just staying with this for a moment, whilst it's hard to control, maybe it is, you'd hope, easy to condemn damaging behavior. This summer, we saw, for example, reports that the leader of the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland had failed to immediately condemn sometimes violent protesters from from loyalists' splinter groups from the far right, essentially, who were ostensibly defending a statue of William of Orange in Glasgow/ That strikes me as a bit of a problem, certainly disappointing.
JW:
So the Orange Order hierarchy are put in a difficult position as those types of events get played out very quickly in the press. And when that statement was made, my understanding is that it wasn't really clear, who was attending those demonstrations and what they were doing. But certainly, the hierarchy have to tread a very difficult line about condemning those who are indeed proven to have behaved illegally, like, for instance, they did with the case of the girl who was struck in the face by that bottle or the parade spectator who spat on the the Catholic priest, you mentioned both of those cases. And in those cases, the Orange hierarchy immediately condemned those actions. What we saw most recently in Glasgow, George Square around these protests was a developing situation where no one was really clear who was protesting and who wasn't. But I agree with you that it probably would have been prudent for the hierarchy to more vocally distance themselves from those protesters. But it's easy for me to say that talking to you in an interview, and it would be harder, I imagine, to make that type of judgment call, as you see events developing before you.
SS:
So you're saying that not everyone associated with the Order engages in violence, and also that not everyone who behaves badly in these incidents is actually a member. But yeah, I think, speaking for myself, I might think twice about joining or staying in an organization where some members have engaged in that kind of behavior or in such sectarian language. So I wondered what you think about those kinds of decisions?
JW:
Yeah, that's a that's a good question. I think there are some Orangemen who do feel very uncomfortable with the kind of outer edges of sectarian behavior that get reported in the press. And for those members. I think if they decide to stay within the organization, what they're doing is they are explaining those events to themselves as highly fringe events, which don't represent the truth of the organization which they've joined. But clearly for critics of the Orange Order, the debate then becomes: are those behaviors fringe or are they actually part and parcel of what it means to be involved in that type of organization? And my sense is, having spent a lot of years with grassroots Orangemen, that there is, again, a range of views. I met with and spoke with Orangemen who were very against the type of sectarian behavior and bigotry that was reported in the press, particularly around these fringe outbreaks of violence. But I also met others who in some instances, and in some circumstances relished the conflict that came with Orange parades, and looking at it from a different perspective, also relish the conflict around Celtic and Rangers in the the old firm football derby. So there's a diversity of opinion there within the Orange Order. And my sense is that whilst some condemn it, others quite like it. And I imagine you would find the same across any number of different organizations which finds itself particularly on the right of the political spectrum.
AB:
So Scots Orangemen are active in opposing Scottish independence, as you've mentioned, seeking to preserve the UK and so on. And I think you met one member who was also a member of the SNP, which is quite interesting. But they're also vigilant against what you discuss, as the menace of Rome, something stretching back to William of Orange. You give examples of how Orangeman see the threats of Catholicism, as they regard it in the everyday, whether it's weeds growing over some neglected Memorial, or whether it's macro issues and education policy. I think it's really interesting that you avoid using the term "conspiracy theory", which is again, a term really thrown around today. Why do you choose to avoid avoid that word? That phrase?
JW:
I guess the term "conspiracy theory" is often a shorthand for a farcical and ridiculous story that no one in their right mind would believe. If we use the word conspiracy theory, often what we're doing is, we're buying into the highly loaded terminology and assumptions that that come with that term. "People who are conspiracy theorists don't believe in the moon landing" would be a kind of classic example of that. Whereas if we use different terms like occluded agency or hidden agency, then suddenly the conversation is able to compare itself to other phenomena. So, you know, maybe it's not a conspiracy theory to suggest that there are financial interests holding back the fight against climate change, maybe some people do profit from fossil fuel industries. And if that's the case, then maybe they are holding back progress on certain technologies, which would allow us to pump less carbon into the atmosphere. I don't think many people would regard that as a conspiracy theory. So if that's the case, then again, maybe we shouldn't use the term for some descriptions of occluded agency and should use it for others. Instead, maybe we should try and find a form of language which allows these cases to be compared and contrasted in slightly more value neutral ways.
AB:
You're listening to With Reason with me, Alice Bloch.
SS:
And me, Samira Shackle. And today we're joined by the anthropologist JW:, who's talking to us about his study of the Orange Order in Scotland. If you'd like to read about matters of reason, belief, community, and much more, why not subscribe to New Humanist magazine? Just like this podcast, it's published by the Rationalist Association. It's a quarterly magazine full of original reporting and fresh thinking on religion, secularism, philosophy, conflict, and much more. I'm the editor, but don't take my word for it, head to newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe, and use the code WITHREASON to get a whole year of issues for just £13.50. So far, we've heard from Joe about the roots of the Orange Order in Scotland, its membership and its followers. We've also talked about how Joe avoids using the term conspiracy theory to describe some of these men's views on volunteerism.
AB:
Yeah, one thing that did really strike me reading Joe's book was that some of the men he spoke to openly describe themselves as bigots. There's a moment where one man is talking about a singer who performed locally, and he basically says, "Well, yeah, he's a good singer, but he's not so good at the bigotry". Joe talks about hate as being part of "the good" for these men, as something that brings fraternity. Really, that could sound quite contentious on the first listen. And so I asked Joe, what he means by that, by this idea that hate is part of "the good" for them.
JW:
So I think what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to push our understanding of what we allow ourselves to include within "the good" in order to better understand what being an Orangeman in some circumstances is about. So if we say that hate is part of "the good", what we mean is that for some people in some contexts, showing hatred to an institution, or in some cases, a group of people, is capable of giving their lives value and meaning in a way that they regard to be ethical and moral. Perhaps we could take a step back and and ask ourselves the question: do we think that most people engage in behaviors, because they think that those behaviors are good? And I think the answer is probably yes. I don't know many people who do what they do with the determined and settled view that their behaviors are bad. So if the Orange Order across the board thinks that what they're doing is a good thing, then as an anthropologist, my job is to make that make sense to me. And make it make sense to my readers. And I try and do that in the book by framing hatred as a key constituent of fraternity, and also a key constituent of love. So you're only capable of loving what you love. Because on the flip side, you also hate what you hate, and trying to allow love and hatred and fraternity and exclusionism, not to be separate categories, but to actually be kind of conjoined parts of human experiences, is what I try and present in the analysis.
AB:
And so you're not saying that hate is good. You're not making a normative claim at all. You're saying it's part of "the good" for these men, it's part of their ethical world. I think one point you've made, either in the book or elsewhere, is the fact that if we look at, say, offensive behavior around football matches, well, yes, that happens at football matches, but it also happens on the bus home. So there has to be something else going on there in the performance of hatreds, when it's in a kind of closed group, if you like. In that instance, it's not about offending the other - something else is going on.
JW:
Yeah, that's right. So if you look at football, chanting, the vast majority of the most strongly sectarian expressions of hatred are offered in the absence of rival fans. So expressing hatred towards an absent other, in that context becomes a key way of expressing your love for your own football team. So chanting about hatred for Celtic, when there's no Celtic fans around, de facto becomes an expression of your love for Rangers. Now, clearly, those expressions can then be recorded and enter different contexts. And the effect then becomes very different. So these events are not hermetically sealed in experience, even if, as they are engaged and the people who are doing those chants, experience them as entirely separate from a different context. So remaining sensitive to what the original motivations were of the people engaging in that type of sectarian chanting is important to better understand why they're doing those things and why they think doing those things is good and right and proper.
SS:
So do you want to make a point about what you call exceptionalism?
JW:
So when I write about exceptionalism in the book, what I'm trying to put my finger on is the way in which the Orange Order regard themselves to be special, they talk about being a chosen few; in some situations, they talk about themselves as being a race apart, and like my analysis of the relationship between love and hate, my framing of exceptionalism or being part of a special group tries to understand what it feels like to be special in negative relation to the group who is being distanced from, or in some cases condemned. So being exceptional for the Orange Order, I think means that not only are they a kind of special and chosen race, but that they are also not part of the group who they regard as problematic. In this case, we'd be talking about Catholics or Irish Republicans. So being exceptional means being a pristine and especially worthwhile human being, but all the time experiencing that claim in negative relation to the group of people who you regard as as disloyal, or as somehow morally worth lesser than your own community.
AB:
And Joe, through what we've been talking about today, and through your book, you make it clear that you're not seeking to sympathize with your informants necessarily but to empathize as a as an academic, and that you're seeking to learn from them, take their life seriously, but not to adopt or agree or agree with their views. But I do wonder, Joe, whether such groups are often let off the hook a little bit too easily. I'm thinking of how far right engagement, particularly by men - and I'm asking this question in a broader sense than just talking about the Orange Order and those who follow them - is often explained away with discussions about emasculation, deindustrialization disenfranchisement. Why should researchers do people the service of theorizing that self-declared bigotry, when I guess those people might not express the same generosity towards others.
JW:
So my job as an anthropologist is certainly not to let anyone off the hook. I think what I'm trying to do is to understand why Orangemen do what they do, from their own, from their own perspective, from their own value system, and then to allow others to read what I've written and come to their own conclusions to make their own assessments. So yes, there's a wider context - whether it's how masculinity has been changed by industrial capitalism, or how indeed, industrial capitalism changes the relationships between the working class and those who are much more privileged. But that context is not enough to fully encapsulate and understand why and how people are doing what they're doing. And as a result, I'm still very much leaving open the possibility that having understood a behavior, someone might then still come to the conclusion that that behavior is is not morally worthwhile, even if the person who is engaging in it thinks that it is. But I think the important work as an anthropologist is to present how from an internal viewpoint, that behavior that we thought might be just blanket immoral, might be more complex than we initially thought it was.
SS:
Okay, so your book is also really about anthropology and research ethics - so how we approach communities and belief systems that are different from our own. And in studying the Orange Order, you use this idea of verstehen, developed by the sociologist Max Weber. And it's about getting a deep understanding of people's worlds, from their point of view. And it seems that you're saying that to do this properly, takes more work than people realize, and is also something that we can maybe be disingenuous about.
JW:
Yeah, I think so. Understanding something from someone's point of view, requires a lot of work, because I think it requires you to be open to the fact that the thing that you thought you understood initially, is actually not what's really going on at all. So remaining open to being wrong. And having your mind changed by the people who you are studying is really crucial to the work that I do. But that's particularly costly when you are spending time with a group like the Orange Order, whose members on occasion, represent a type of morality that many people would find distasteful. So being willing to have your mind changed on the fundamentals of what is good, and what isn't, or how we might even define "the good" is what I'm trying to do in in the book and not pursuing verstehen with that level of effort, I think will simply produce your previously held understanding, with additional justification. You will come to the conclusion that you were right all along. But that having examined it, you've ended up disproving the viewpoint of the local people who you researched. That seems to me not quite good enough. Listening to people to the extent that they are able to teach you and in some cases rebuke you is really what good anthropology looks like.
AB:
So in discussing this idea of open mindedness, essentially, you mentioned a talk called Anti-Antirelativism, given by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in the 1980s. Tell me a bit about that, and what you think we can learn from it. I think it ends with this really nice phrase, "if we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home".
JW:
Yeah, I mean, it's a very famous anthropological essay. And I guess my reason for weaving that into my own work is that Geertz's main concern is to take issue with the development in anthropology. When he was writing that essay about challenges to classic anthropological views of relativism, the idea that particularly cultural relativism is an important cornerstone of how anthropologists think and how they do their work. And that was a new version of the biological theorization being developed. When he was writing that essay, which was really challenging relativists 'assumptions, a version of this anthropology later became militant anthropology: the idea that we should strongly advocate for our informants, that we should study the underdog, that we should contend for what we regard to be their well-being, that we should defend their rights. And therefore, that activist version of anthropology really doesn't allow relativism to exist. And Geertz was concerned about that. And he suggested that there was something worrying about that militant version of anthropology, which was very against relativism. And he wasn't necessarily defending all of the excesses, as people see it, of relativism. He was just more concerned about the way in which relativism was being challenged. And what he saw as being lost, I think, in anthropology was this willingness to listen to everyone, and to potentially learn from everyone, rather than to pick and choose particular voices as worthy of listening to and shutting down others, because they don't potentially fit in with a wider political project of progressive liberal tolerance.
AB:
And it does seem like a lot of the work you do is rather exhausting in a way. It seems like quite a tough gig researching the Orange Order for five years. Not least in the age of the Scottish independence referendum, the Brexit vote, you've picked probably the hardest period in which to study this in recent times. What's next for you? Do you fancy a change of scene maybe, you know, anthropology far away, as we were talking about at the beginning?
JW:
I still think that, for me, staying closer to home is where where I want to be, not least because it's still, I think, an outlier within anthropology. But because I guess staying closer to home to return to what you were quoting from Geertz. You know, staying closer to home doesn't necessarily only produce home truths, right. It doesn't just lead us to reproducing common sense assumptions. I think that the groups, the people that I'm interested in, are still capable of pushing back on what we regard to be unchallengeable or obvious, so called home truths. I enjoyed my time with the Orange Order, I learned a lot, I certainly had to rethink and redefine what I thought Protestantism was. But I think what I would like to do next is return to some of the more explicitly apocalyptic and end times groups, particularly given that that all of a sudden, everyone is talking about apocalypticism. I would like to return to the signs of the times, type research, the idea that many religious groups are fascinated by tracing close links between current affairs and their own prophetic or apocalyptic beliefs, and to try and shine a light on that in a way that doesn't reproduce the tabloid stereotype of the religious fanatic, with the sandwich board on the street corner, declaring the end is nigh, I'd like to try and go back to that religious world and to document it and explain it in a way that didn't let people essentially pigeonhole the theme of apocalypticism as nothing but religious fanaticism.
AB:
Great. Well, I'm speaking of the end times, I guess, it's almost time to wrap up. But before you do go, just time to look at something from the New Humanist archive, something that we thought resonated a little bit with your work. We've talked quite a lot today about changing minds. And in the article, The Sleep of Reason, which was in the magazine in 2019, Eleanor Gordon Smith writes about her research into people who do just that - people change their minds on really quite significant things. As part of that she takes on this assumption that emotion has no place in rational thinking, and that we kind of know, we think we know what rationality requires. What do you make of the piece that we write that it was something that that would probably resonate with you in your work?
JW:
Yeah, I really liked the article. I mean, I think what I found most insightful about it was the way in which Gordon Smith illustrates how what we define as rational thinking is essentially, the preserve of a fairly small number of powerful gatekeepers, who are drawing on some very specific ideas about the way that science and evidence and thinking and decision making occurs. And I like the way the article pushes back on that and says that maybe emotion, maybe even kinship, you know, family connection, are really key ways that people navigate their world. And if that's the case, then maybe we need to think about redefining how we go about the process of changing minds. So I really liked But I think one thing that it left me with was was a question mark about whether we can push the argument even further and whether we can not just question the methods of changing minds, you know, essentially to allow emotion into the room when we when we talk about and think about and try and practice rationality. But also, I don't know, I suppose I was left wondering whether there's also a space to question whether rational decision and rational debate is actually an artifice that that doesn't exist or at least doesn't exist in the way that we think it does. My sense is that Gordon Smith still held up rationality as an ideal, albeit, you know, a difficult one to achieve. And I guess I would want to push back on that and ask ourselves, perhaps it's the case that, you know, rationality is rightly clouded by the messiness of human relationships and all of the complexity that Gordon Smith points out, but But still, could we go further? And could we could we question whether or not the thing that we think is rational, is actually deeply, you know, embedded in all sorts of assumptions about, for instance, the fact that belief and ideas matter most, well, maybe that's not the case, maybe actually, you know, people don't necessarily change their minds, at least not without changing their practices and their behaviors. So those are the kinds of questions that it raised for me, but certainly, I really liked the article.
AB:
plenty to think on there. Thank you very much, Joseph Webster.
JW:
Well, thanks for talking with me. I really enjoyed it.
SS:
Joseph Webster there. Alice, as we said, Joe's book, the religion of orange politics is about exactly that Scots Orangeism. But it's also about that doing research itself. So it's about anthropology and ethics to what struck you most from talking to Joe?
AB:
First of all, for me, it was a bit of an education in Protestantism, something I think I presumed to know about in a kind of background sense, but I hadn't really stopped to think about much before. So Joe gave a really excellent potted history, or slightly more than a potted history. And I hadn't really thought before about how, of course, that word "protest" is right in there, staring us in the face, embedded within the word Protestantism, which really tells us a lot about its history.
SS:
Yeah, I thought it was really fascinating to hear him talk about religious fundamentalism and extremism in the context of Protestantism, because I think when we think of Protestantism, we think of something kind of inherently moderate, that's quite familiar - if you've grown up in the UK - without necessarily knowing very much about it.
AB:
I think what we're talking about there really is this idea of looking at the familiar or what we presume to be the familiar, the taken for granted, and taking a different view on it. I really like Joe's commitment to doing anthropology a bit closer to home than others might. This idea that actually also, we don't always get home truths when we stay at home, you know, we might find something that surprises us, or I think, to quote Joe or to paraphrase him, something that kind of teaches or even rebukes us. I think he's really saying something important there about the value of listening to people, ultimately, and the hard work that actually that takes when you really do it properly and commit to it. Something that I think is really much needed today in the UK and the post-Trump or almost post-Trump, USA. It's something I guess journalists could learn from too?
SS:
Yeah, definitely. I think there's often a sense that journalists might go into something with a preconceived narrative, and then retrofit the material they've got to the narrative. And that's obviously not what you're supposed to do. But I think often it is what happens, perhaps given constraints of time, and pressure to get a certain kind of story and so on, but I think you can really see - obviously, it has a negative impact, I think, on the the quality of material that's produced, and also on the role of the media in terms of furthering public understanding. I think if you're fitting material and interviews to a narrative that you that you've already decided and that you want to prove, then that undermines the whole purpose. I think there's definitely something to take away from Joe's thinking on that, way beyond anthropology.
AB:
I also really like Joe's resistance to the term conspiracy theory. And that certainly made made me think again and made me reflect on I suppose, why we label people people's beliefs with that term. You know, a lot of us might hold beliefs or harbor suspicions that we can't fully back up. And yet, we maybe are in the privileged position of not being branded as conspiracy theorists, where other people might be more more at risk of being labeled as such. And that sense of taking seriously from a scholarly perspective, other people's perspectives -and that's not to say that you have to approve of them or agree with them at all - is also really strong. Joe's early work on the fishing community in Scotland that we spoke about, that I would thoroughly recommend.
SS:
That is all for now. Next up, we'll be talking to Kate Devlin. She's an academic who's hardly in the same field as Joe. She's written a book about sex robots. But she's just as keen to avoid sensationalism in her work.
AB:
You can head to newhumanist.org.uk to read more about With Reason, and to find reading lists linked to each episode and transcripts of them all, too. With Reason it's produced by the Rationalist Association, a charity promoting rational inquiry and debate. And if you want to support the New Humanist magazine, and help us make more podcasts, why not join the Rationalist Association? You can do that at newhumanist.org.uk/support us. This podcast was produced and presented by me Alice Bloch, and co presented by Samira Shackle. Thanks for listening.
SS:
Goodbye.
Further reading:
Joseph Webster (2020) ‘The Religion of Orange Politics: Protestantism and Fraternity in Contemporary Scotland’
Joseph Webster (2013) ‘The Anthropology of Protestantism: Faith and Crisis Among Scottish Fishermen’
Clifford Geertz, "Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti-Relativism." American Anthropologist, New Series, 86, no. 2 (1984): 263-78.
James Laidlaw (2013) ‘The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’
