One thing that distinguishes humanism from most other world views is that humanists judge situations on their own merits according to standards of reason and humanity and not according to ‘received wisdom’ or their interpretation of some archaic book. This is a basic principle of humanism but, unfortunately, it seems nobody had told the Humanist Society of Scotland (HSS) Board of Trustees this before they sat, early last year, to consider an appeal from one of their members against a decision made by the Society’s celebrant training team. The appeal was upheld.

Earlier this week, that same successful appellant was the subject of a story in a grubby little Scottish tabloid, which the HSS seems keen to promote. That a link to this story appears on the HSS website suggests that the HSS approves of it — and I dare say the story was probably fed to the newspaper by someone on the HSS Board of Trustees. But I reckon the story that appeared in that particularly odious little rag of a newspaper was of virtually zero interest to regular readers and is already wrapping fish suppers.

The story behind the story is a tad more interesting, at least to me. Before I share it, I want to say that I have the utmost respect for the good people in the Humanist Society of Scotland and for the excellent work they do, especially in providing ceremonies. Having some 25 years experience of involvement in charities and other non-profit organisations, I know they are full of unsung heroes who are passionate about what they do and who do it brilliantly.

I also know that charities and voluntary organisations sometimes attract people who are well-meaning but unaware of their own limitations. (Read about the Dunning-Kruger effect here.) In fact, such people have often been successful in other fields of work and think that they can usefully contribute something to the management committees of non-profit organisations. But, all too often, they come heavily laden with the culture and values of whatever sector they built their career in. These are often out-of-kilter with voluntary sector culture and the resulting conflicts can tear small organisations apart unless the people in them can learn from their mistakes and try to rectify them. I believe this is as true of Humanist organisations as it is of any other and I think this story from the HSS is an illustration of it.

(By the way, I think a further, much smaller, category of people attracted to charity membership and volunteer work are entirely self-serving and I guess the subject of the tabloid story — the target of  the HSS Trustees’ wrath — is one of those.)

Here’s the story as told to me by a former HSS member:

The bloke in the newspaper — I’ll call him ‘Noddy’ — is a retired police officer who joined the Humanist Society of Scotland and became a registered celebrant, conducting funerals and weddings. Early last year, his son was convicted of supplying cocaine. This was considered newsworthy by the Scottish press because of Noddy’s high-profile police career and because his son was himself a serving police officer at the time of his illegal activities.

Now it turns out that Noddy has told Funeral Directors that his son — who’d been sentenced to 12 months in prison for the drug offence — is a humanist celebrant. Indeed, he has passed on ceremonies work to his son, even though the latter has not gone through any kind of selection procedure, let alone been trained and approved by the HSS to carry out ceremonies in their name.

Like the British Humanist Association, the Humanist Society of Scotland trains suitable men and women to produce and conduct ceremonies of a high standard. Most celebrants take the work seriously enough to adhere to a code of conduct defining what is acceptable. Funnily enough, that code doesn’t allow for the passing off of one’s ex-convict son as a trained and registered celebrant to Funeral Directors and bereaved families. Presumably this is because it is a betrayal of the trust of the former, cheats the latter of the quality of service they deserve and deprives other celebrants of work they — unlike Noddy’s son — were qualified to do, having each made a personal investment in becoming qualified by paying for and attending the training and having each been assessed as meeting the high standards demanded by the HSS.

According to the newspaper report, Noddy claims he has trained his son much better than the HSS could. I find this hard to believe for reasons that will become apparent.

Celebrant training involves attending a course run by a team of very experienced celebrant trainers. (Indeed, the senior trainer at the time was one of the Society’s most experienced celebrants as well as its most experienced trainer and had worked tirelessly for many years developing the training courses and review scheme for celebrants and establishing high professional standards.) At the end of the course, candidates are required to complete a written assignment — a ceremony script based on a scenario provided by the trainers.

Noddy trained first as an HSS funeral celebrant then, in November 2009, he attended the Society’s training course to conduct humanist weddings. According to a document signed by the four HSS trainers, Noddy’s first attempt at a funeral script was poor and he was given “full and detailed feedback on the areas in the script that did not meet the Funeral Celebrant Standards was given. He was then mentored to raise his standard of work and the second ceremony he presented achieved the required standard.” The same paper describes Noddy as “inattentive” and “disruptive” during the weddings training course; he talked over people and “showed a disregard for his colleagues and the training process.” Of his first attempt at the end of course assignment — a wedding ceremony script — the trainers say they were,

shocked to receive such a poor piece of work from this trainee, particularly given the fact that he had received a great deal of detailed feedback on previous material presented for review, most especially on the ceremony script he submitted for his review to be added to the Funeral Celebrant Register.

So, in addition to his inappropriate demeanour during the training, and in spite of everything he was supposed to have learned with all that extra help from his funeral training, Noddy had produced a terrible wedding script. Indeed, the script he’d produced had such serious flaws that if it were a real marriage ceremony, it would have meant the couple were not legally married! It was the — hardly unreasonable — view of the training team that, as these flaws had since been pointed out to Noddy, he may well be able to produce a script of the required standard now. But the production of a satisfactory script on second attempt and after he’d been told what was wrong with the first one would not, as far as the trainers were concerned, alleviate the many concerns raised overall about his ability and behaviour. The four members of the training team were as one in their opinion that Noddy should not be allowed the opportunity to resubmit his assignment this time. And who, in their right mind, could blame them?

In making this recommendation, we felt that we were acting in the best interests of both the trainee and the HSS as a whole, to ensure the maintenance of the highest professional standards.

That the training team’s recommendation was in the best interest of the HSS is indisputable. That is why it was supported by a majority of the charity’s Ceremonies sub-Committee, who evidently had their heads screwed on properly. All ceremonies are hugely important to the people having them and providers of these ceremonies can’t afford to make serious mistakes. This is particularly true of Humanist marriage ceremonies, which have — thanks to the good will of the Scottish Registrar General — had legal status in Scotland since 2005.

For the good of the HSS, Noddy should have accepted the training team’s decision but instead he complained about it to the charity’s Board of Trustees. I’m told — though I personally find it hard to believe — that Noddy was actually encouraged to do this by a member of that same Board of  Trustees who, as it happened, was another retired police officer. (But I’m not going to go there.)

Now come on, guys! Why would someone entrusted by a charity’s paid-up membership to act in the charity’s best interests, actively encourage someone — even if he is a mate — to challenge a decision that was clearly in the best interests of both the charity and the public it professes to serve? Especially someone who cares so much about the HSS that he’d managed to grab not one but two powerful jobs in the HSS leadership? (Seriously — he was the HSS Secretary and he doubled up as National Ceremonies Co-ordinator. I suspect this is why the HSS are so shy on their website about who they are compared to, say, the BHA. I understand he plays neither role now, however. No idea why.)

Encouraging an obnoxious and incompetent trainee to complain doesn’t make sense does it?

But it gets worse.

The group of four HSS office-bearers tasked with investigating what they called Noddy’s “complaint/appeal”, actually recommended that not only should his request to resubmit be granted but that he be offered mentoring to help him reach the required standard. The Board of Trustees agreed with these recommendations, thereby allowing this disruptive, inattentive, rude individual, whose ceremony script had been so poor it had shocked his trainers, to resubmit the assignment incorporating all the amendments he now knew it needed, thereby getting his name onto the Registrar General’s list of Humanist celebrants who are approved to conduct legal weddings in Scotland.

And they arrived at this decision through a piece of reasoning that a twelve-year-old would be ashamed of.

According to their report, the group “agreed immediately that they did not wish to disagree with the trainers’ evaluation and that there should therefore be no recommendation for approval or otherwise. The single issue facing them was one of fairness, precedent and equity with specific reference to the request to resubmit only.”

WTF???

There was no “issue of fairness, precedent and equity” to be considered here. The HSS isn’t a tribunal or public examination board but a provider of a valued service to the public. The only “issue” was whether or not the candidate was suitable to conduct marriage ceremonies in the name of the HSS. The experienced team entrusted with the task of training and assessing candidates said that he wasn’t and they gave good reasons why he wasn’t. That should have been the end of the matter.

The investigating group, however, thought otherwise. Read this and weep:

“This decision we consider to have been contrary to natural justice, especially in a training situation. We are also aware that in what we consider to have been similar circumstances an earlier candidate was permitted to re-submit work and was subsequently recommended for registration. We do not accept that the differences between the two cases are of sufficient significance to merit such diverse treatment….Our determination is that in denying the candidate an opportunity to resubmit his work after appropriate remediation there is a danger that natural justice might have been denied him, and that humanist principles of fairness, equity, and good practice in this particular regard might have been breached.”

Rational thinkers will instantly spot biggest flaw in this execrable piece of reasoning. For the benefit of any numptyheids, I’ll point it out:

It is the patently ludicrous suggestion that, because an earlier candidate had been allowed to re-submit, Noddy should be allowed to as well. This, evidently, is the ‘precedent’ that the investigating group refer to.

It is normal practice in many training situations to fail no-hopers but to allow candidates who’ve shown promise and whose flaws are considered redeemable in the professional judgement of their trainers, to re-sit. If the earlier candidate’s behaviour and work was as bad as Noddy’s, then he or she shouldn’t have been allowed to resubmit. The fact that he or she was invited to resubmit indicates that, in the professional judgement of the HSS trainers, the earlier candidate wasn’t as bad as Noddy. (The investigating group repeatedly say in their report that they that didn’t assess Noddy’s work and weren’t questioning the evaluation of the trainers.)

So what precedents would be set by the training teams decisions to allow the earlier candidate to resubmit but to refuse Noddy the same opportunity?

That candidates who — unlike Noddy— show promise, should be given a second chance and that candidates — like Noddy — who don’t show promise, shouldn’t.

Anyone see a problem with that? I’m particularly interested in hearing how it breaches “humanist principles of fairness, equity, and good practice”?

In the meantime, let’s consider what precedent has been set as a result of the investigating group’s recommendations and the Trustees decision to endorse them?

That it doesn’t matter how obnoxious a candidate is and how bad their work, they must be virtually spoonfed into passing the course!

Nice one, HSS.

If precedents were as important to humanist principles as the HSS Board of Trustees seemed to think, one wonders how many more hopeless candidates they would have allowed to use up their people’s time and resources, before reason prevailed and they got their priorities right. Fortunately for them, precedents are totally irrelevant and they can ignore the consequences of their stupid reasoning and pretend it never happened (well, apart from the consequences of losing their training team, all of whom resigned in disgust at at the decision and quite right too).

And if they can’t understand why precedents don’t matter, I can do no better than refer them to late Professor Stuart Sutherland’s classic book ‘Irrationality’:

Anyone who has ever sat on a committee will have heard someone say, ‘We can’t do that: it will set a precedent.’ This remark is wholly irrational. The proposed action against which it is directed is either sensible or not. If it is sensible, taking it will set a good precedent; if it is not sensible, the action should not be taken. Whether or not a precedent is set is therefore irrelevant; the decision should be made on its own merits. Moreover, outside courts of law, nobody need be bound by past decisions: the past is finished, it cannot be changed, and its only use is that it may sometimes be possible to learn from it.

I recommend Sutherland’s book to all humanists and — to repeat what I said at the beginning — especially those who aspire to positions of responsibility that affect other people’s lives.

The HSS come out of the Noddy story (as it appears in newspaper) smelling like a rose but they don’t deserve to. Noddy had an unblemished (I presume)  30-year career in the police and who could blame the HSS Trustees for not foreseeing he might pull a stunt like that? Well, anybody who knew the inside story of how Noddy came to feel he could get away with anything, that’s who.

If those who are ultimately responsible for this debacle are seriously committed to humanist principles, they might yet demonstrate this by admitting to those who’ve been hurt the most that the recommendations and decisions made were the wrong ones.

But I’m not holding my breath.

This week is the first anniversary of the report Free Speech is Not for Sale, which highlighted the oppressive nature of English libel law. In short, the law is extremely hostile to writers, while being unreasonably friendly towards powerful corporations and individuals who want to silence critics.

The English libel law is particularly dangerous for bloggers, who are generally not backed by publishers, and who can end up being sued in London regardless of where the blog was posted. The internet allows bloggers to reach a global audience, but it also allows the High Court in London to have a global reach.

You can read more about the peculiar and grossly unfair nature of English libel law at the website of the Libel Reform Campaign. You will see that the campaign is not calling for the removal of libel law, but for a libel law that is fair and which would allow writers a reasonable opportunity to express their opinion and then defend it.

The good news is that the British Government has made a commitment to draft a bill that will reform libel, but it is essential that bloggers and their readers send a strong signal to politicians so that they follow through on this promise. You can do this by joining me and over 50,000 others who have signed the libel reform petition at http://www.libelreform.org/sign.

Remember, you can sign the petition whatever your nationality and wherever you live. Indeed, signatories from overseas remind British politicians that the English libel law is out of step with the rest of the free world.

If you have already signed the petition, then please encourage friends, family and colleagues to sign up. Moreover, if you have your own blog, you can join hundreds of other bloggers by posting this blog on your own site. There is a real chance that bloggers could help change the most censorious libel law in the democratic world.

We must speak out to defend free speech. Please sign the petition for libel reform.

Frank Swain, aka SciencePunk, no longer calls himself a skeptic. This isn’t because he’s become less of one. On the contrary, he described himself as being “born of the skeptic movement” and “hugely enamoured” with it. But he has, in recent years, distanced himself from the “skeptic community” because he doesn’t want to be associated with its attitudes and behaviour.

It seemed a little odd when, towards the end of his talk, he introduced what he described as the most important part of it with the revelation that as a “white, middle-class, college-educated, science-background man”, he wasn’t qualified to talk about it. As it turned out, that was one of the few things Frank said that I agreed with. The topic at this stage was “who we invite and make space for in our community”, the community in question being the people who write or talk or campaign in any way on the kind of issues that skeptics are concerned about; the one Frank is hugely enamoured with but doesn’t want to be associated with.

Before he said that, we’d heard much about how macho, aggressive, arrogant, intolerant and hostile skeptics are and we were treated to a list of quotes of the “quacks are stupid” variety that he’d lifted from various skeptic blogs. We also heard how we were doing things wrong, from what he described as our “evidence or fuck off” approach to debate to our refusal to engage with people’s “scary” emotions. Even the format for skeptics meetings in pubs was “intimidating”. He didn’t pull his punches — here’s a typical quote:

…I don’t want to shoot my load too soon but there is something very important I want to say, which is that arguing from the basis of facts is ineffective and cowardly…

It was obvious that, however enamoured Frank might once have been, he doesn’t love us anymore. Now, in the “most important part” of his talk, he told us of lots of other people don’t love us either. People like women, mothers, humanities graduates and members of the Green party. As for ethnic minorities, “We do fail to take an interest in them, don’t we?” he said mysteriously, before moving swiftly on.

On women he was more forthcoming: women aren’t comfortable coming into “this very aggressive environment”, he claimed. He’d even had emails from women telling him as much.

I wish to goodness those women would email me so I could tell them to get a fucking grip!

As many readers of this blog know, I was not born of the skeptic movement myself. Rather, I am a born-again skeptic, having previously spent many years as a female humanities graduate and occasional user of altmeds, which never failed to disappoint me. I owe a debt of gratitude to the many skeptics who helped me on my path to enlightenment. Having spent some years trying to be all nice and polite and empathic when engaging with promoters of pseudoscience and opponents of vaccines, only to be repeatedly sneered at and insulted while my arguments — whether facts or anecdotes — were ignored, I can’t begin to describe how liberating it was to find all these blogs by people who weren’t afraid to call a spade a spade or quacks stupid.

As for skeptic meetings, I don’t recognise the “very aggressive environment”, Frank spoke of. One of the many ironies about his presentation is that, having attended many different skeptics meetings, I’ve only ever felt uncomfortable twice and both times were during his talk.

He made much of how important it is to think about how you would explain an issue to your mother. I agree. My son is six foot plus and nearly fourteen stone but I’d still give him a slap if I heard him use such a graphically macho expression as, “I don’t want to shoot my load too early”. Is this how Frank talks to his mother?

Worse was to come (no pun intended):

It’s only by understanding mothers and understanding that they are swayed by stories not facts…

Oh dear! It’s been a while since I felt as patronised as I did at that moment. Mercifully, most skeptics don’t say things like that or I wouldn’t touch them with my husband’s lightsaber.

Much of what Frank said came across as either bizarre or gratuitously insulting. Take, for example, his view that that arguing from the basis of facts is ineffective and cowardly. Frank accuses skeptics of fetishising facts and of having “an obsession that you fight based on the factual accuracy of your idea”, which isn’t effective, he says, because people prefer stories and we have to “emotionalise” issues.

OK, I’ll concede there is some truth in that last point, which is why I write as I do. Just look at the colourful and interesting way I am telling the story of Frank’s talk, for example. And I make frequent use of stories of people suffering and dying at the hands of evil or stupid quacks in my blog posts. One of my favourite skeptic websites has an abundance of such stories. Funnily enough, the invariable response from my detractors is to dismiss them as anecdotes.

But what is “cowardly” about arguing from the basis of facts? Here’s Frank:

When you go in with a foregone conclusion and you know your numbers are right, you’re being particularly cowardly and very pedantic in my opinion and the worst thing about that is that you make no attempt to understand where that other person might be coming from.

I think what Frank is trying to say here is that the danger of being sure of one’s position is that we might fail to empathise with the other person and why they take the position they do. If that’s what he meant then it’s a fair point, which applies equally to those we argue against. It probably applies to most people arguing about most things they feel strongly about.

That Frank should make this point in such a hostile and aggressive way by calling it ‘cowardly’ struck me as another of the ironies about his talk. In any event, he is wrong. It is not cowardly to base an argument on facts and the reality is that people respond to both facts and stories, depending on where they’re at.

Here’s Frank on mothers again:

They hear these conflicting stories and above all else they want the best for their kid. They want to protect their child at all cost and it’s only by understanding this that you are then going to convince them that the MMR is the right way to go and you cannot do that with this arrogant attitude that you are right based on facts.

Rhetoric that sounds persuasive when spoken looks pretty empty on the printed page doesn’t it? How silly is the suggestion that skeptics don’t understand that mothers want to protect their children at all costs? And that one shouldn’t try to present them with the real facts because that’s “arrogant”? What are we supposed to do instead? Frank didn’t tell us.

It so happens that back in the mid-eighties when I was having my children, there was a big scare about the whooping cough vaccine. I was swayed by stories of the jab causing brain damage and I was equally swayed by stories of the miseries and dangers of whooping cough. The anti-vaxers caused me a great deal of anxiety and even less sleep than I was getting already with a young baby. So what did I do? I went looking for the bloody facts and I went on looking until I found them (not so easy in those pre-internet days). As a result of what I found out, both my children got all the jabs they were supposed to. I wish to goodness I’d known some of the facts that I know now before I’d been persuaded by people’s anecdotes to waste any time or money trying out quack therapies.

So I wasn’t persuaded by Frank’s argument about arguments. I felt his comments about blogging were a bit loopy as well. After pointing out — presumably for those of us too dim to realise it — that there’s a limit to what we can do on a blog and that a lot of people don’t come to the internet for information, Frank went on to say that the approach we choose to take and the tone in which we do so “narrows down our audience”. This is undeniably true. People who don’t want to read a skeptic perspective on anything will not read skeptic blogs. The danger, argues Frank, is that we only reach the people who think the same way as us; that we’re just an “echo chamber”.

It’s a curious suggestion that people only read stuff they think they are going to like and agree with and I invite anyone who thinks there’s any truth in it to look at the left hand column on this blog and peruse some of the comments that have been made about it — and me — by my readers.

In his introduction Frank had said,

The most powerful thing I can do as a writer is change someone’s mind, shape the way they see the world, change the way someone thinks…

I agree. What Frank failed to do in his talk is explain why he thinks skeptic bloggers aren’t doing this because I know from personal experience that they are and that skeptic bloggers can take a large part of the credit for the recent groundswell of support for skeptic causes from people who’d hitherto taken little or no interest.

My most fundamental disagreement with Frank is over his idea that anyone who promotes a sceptical approach to pseudoscience is a member of the ‘skeptic community’ and answerable for the crimes of any other member of said community. He referred to the recent twitter storm over Gillian McKeith during which somebody apparently called her a “stupid fucking cunt”.

What does it show about a community when we allow somebody to say something like that and they feel comfortable in an environment saying someone is a stupid fucking cunt?

Allow somebody?

I don’t buy into the notion that we are a ‘community’ in any meaningful sense of the word. As far as I’m concerned, the only thing I have in common with most other skeptics is an opposition to the dishonest promotion and public funding of altmed. Being a skeptic is a small part of who I am. Amongst other things, I am also a feminist. I write from a feminist perspective but I’m not in any ‘feminist community’. In common with other secularists, I am opposed to religious privilege but nobody talks about a ‘secularist community’ and I don’t mind standing shoulder to shoulder with feminists and secularists who use quack remedies when we’re campaigning for abortion or against faith schools.

When I see the nasty things that other secularists sometimes say about those with any kind of religious faith, I can get quite offended on behalf of the highly intelligent, thinking and liberal but religious members of my extended family. But I am not responsible for how other secularists behave — they have nothing to do with me and I don’t see why I should feel any different about other skeptics. I don’t defend the way a bunch of people I don’t know behaved over Gillian McKeith on Twitter but I can understand the anger behind it. It wasn’t because McKeith is an enemy of scepticism, as Frank suggested but because of what she did and what she had done before she did that. And if “all” that’s happened as a consequence is that she has stopped promoting herself on Twitter, as Frank lamented, then that sounds like a result to me.

Frank did make the point that skeptics aren’t formally organised and therefore lack the infrastructure of the environmentalists. Nevertheless he constantly referred to skeptics as if we were bound together by something more than a shared interest in promoting an evidence-based approach and critical thinking.

We are a community; we know the same people, we have the same experiences, we read the same things…we have our own particular gods and monsters and we elevate these people who are our gods up to this level where no-one is allowed to criticise… anything that someone like Ben Goldacre or Simon Singh or Evan Harris says is beyond question. There’s this prevailing attitude that you don’t speak out against these top people.

Hogwash. Yes, there are a number of guru-like figures for skeptics but only because they have achieved a high profile by saying and doing things we agree with and because they have been the targets of bullying and abuse from people who stand for what we disagree with. But where does this idea that any individual skeptic wouldn’t speak out if he or she disagreed with anything any of these prominent figures said or did?  Because I certainly would. I am an admirer and frequent defender of Richard Dawkins, for example. Dawkins is said to be a guru for hard core atheists like me. Yet the only blog I’ve written about him was to argue that he was wrong and I’ll do the same favour for Ben or anyone else in a heartbeat should they give me cause to.

I think that’s very dangerous, it’s not a situation I think we should be in…We like to think of ourselves as critical, sceptical people,

So says Frank. Well that’s OK because that situation doesn’t exist outside of his imagination. The reason we think of ourselves as critical, sceptical people is because we are and I hope that nobody was so demoralised by Frank’s talk (which was notably short of constructive suggestions) that they’ll do anything differently.

Here are all the other blog responses that I’m aware of. I think most, if not all, are more sympathetic than mine.

http://myurlisname.blogspot.com/2010/08/prevention-or-cure.html
http://jstreetley.co.uk/blog/?p=303
http://noodlemaz.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/sceptical-about-skeptics/
http://arkadychenko-theblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/on-westminister-skeptic-and-problem.html
http://thethoughtstash.wordpress.com/2010/08/09/science-punk-at-westskep-the-aftermath/
http://thethoughtstash.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/yet-another-blog-post-about-westskep/