Nullity

Richard Dawkins' continued status as the "the most formidable intellect in our public discourse" notwithstanding, I'm becoming concerned that neo-atheism is a mind-softening ideology. On July 7th, Andrew Brown recounted, at his blog, a chance meeting with Daniel Dennett, who is conducting a pilot study [scroll down] on atheist members of the clergy (Or is he? I've provided a hyperlink to the google cache page, captured on June 15th; Dennett's study does not presently appear on the list of research abstracts on the Tufts University Research News page, though all the other abstracts are the same). These clerics Dennett characterized as "brave" for speaking out, though according to the research abstract, as well as Brown's report they will remain "in the closet" throughout and following their interviews.

We can see the first glimmers of this project, perhaps, in Dennett's remark in the Guardian last year that "The seminaries and churches are full of atheist clergy" who only persist in the charade to keep the masses down. It's a compelling tale; are the only sincerely religious people these days the suckers, after all? Is the robustness of religious adherence today really the result of a Straussian conspiracy to keep Joe and Martha Six-Pack from being more Freethinking?

Much hinges on the meaning of the word "atheist" here, and I fear that Dennett is being somewhat Jesuitical in his usage. The other day I quoted his definition of religion from "Breaking the Spell." Here it is again:

If what [some believers] call God is really not an agent in their eyes, a being that can answer prayers, approve and disapprove, receive sacrifices, or mete out punishment or forgiveness, then, although they may call this being God, and even stand in awe of it, their creed ... is not really religion in my definition.

That such a definition would exclude entire congregations (butts-in-pews, not theologians) who self-report as Christians indicates to me it lacks a certain precision. Last week, reporting from a series of faith symposia at Cambridge's Darwin celebration, Dennett expanded [via Jerry Coyne] on this idiosyncratic notion of what religious "belief" really is, writing that Claremont Theologian Phillip Clayton

astonished me by listing God’s attributes: according to his handsomely naturalistic theology, God is not omnipotent, not even supernatural, and . . . . in short Clayton is an atheist who won’t admit it.

The jig is up, Clayton! Wait... Just what ideology is he not admitting to? Dennett's depiction of "closeted atheist clergy" describes ministers and priests who publicly transmit religious beliefs they do not privately hold. And certainly such clerics exist; Mother Theresa may have been one at points in her life (though we should be careful not to reduce her anguished doubt to simple subterfuge.) But Dennett did not get Clayton to disclose his views at a secret meeting of the Illuminati; they conversed freely at a high-profile event at a major university, covered by the press, and self-reported by both Dennett (at Coyne's blog) and Clayton (at his own). If that's closeted, I can't wait to see his coming out party.

Clayton has also posted to his website the paper that so astonished Dan Dennett, in which he denies anything essentially Christian (or Judaic) in the fundamentalist doctrines of biblical inerrance and literalism, intelligent design, the uniqueness of humanity (that is requiring a supernatural cause), and the direct intervention of a "agent" God. (Dennett might have been less astonished at these assertions if he'd shown more interest in actual theology when writing his "empirical" study of religion rather than relying on his own unsubstantiated folk beliefs).

The part that really makes me worry for Dan's mental acumen, though, comes later in the report, in a swipe at biologist Michael Ruse:

Ruse declared that while he is an atheist, he wishes that those wanting to explain religion wouldn’t start with the assumption that religious beliefs are false. He doesn’t seem to appreciate the role of the null hypothesis or the presumption of innocence in trials.

The null hypothesis is a methodological tool designed to check one's own confirmation bias and other errors in defining the terms of a problem. It has little to do with what working hypothesis a scientist begins with. Whether we begin with the proposition that there are fairies in the garden, or that there are no fairies in the garden, we can temporarily nullify our proposition to see if the data might be consistent with multiple claims.

If we think, for example, that we've verified our hypothesis that there are fairies in the garden because we laid out Turkish delight (their favorite food) at night and found it gone in the morning, we might then test our results against the null hypothesis (that there are no fairies in the garden) by remembering that other entities might also like to eat Turkish delight in the garden at night. On the other hand if we think we've verified our hypothesis that there are no fairies in the garden by setting up surveillance cameras, we would want to allow that the fairies may be away at a fairy convention for the weekend. In each case the null hypothesis helps us clarify the terms of our proposition so that we can draw more valid conclusions.

For Dennett to declare that the null hypothesis would help determine which assumptions we begin with on any particular question makes me wonder if he is just phoning it in these days, or, to borrow a classic Dennettian trope, "playing tennis without a net."

The full text of his abstract follows.

***

PI: Dennett, Daniel
Title: Qualitative Pilot Study - Closeted Non-Believing Clergy
Abstract: The objective of this study is to explore possibilities for a larger study on the disconnect between what closeted atheist clergy believe and what they preach, and the impact it has on their personal lives, their congregations and society. This small pilot study will include three to five respondents, all mainstream Christian clergy, who receive scholarly information about biblical and Christian history during seminary training. A series of individual interviews (IDIs) will be conducted - three 90 or 60 minute interviews with each respondent. These will be strictly confidential, and great care will be taken to ensure the anonymity of respondents in any sharing or publication of the data gathered. The first interview and preferably all interviews will be in person, but for logistical or cost reasons, some may be conducted over the phone.

Initial recruiting attempts will be via personal contacts (e.g., clergy and seminary acquaintances, non-believing clergy who have already made contact). If that is not successful, more public methods will be attempted (e.g., advertising in a clergy-related magazine or journal, mentioning the study during conferences and public talks). Prospective respondents will be asked if they would be willing to be contacted about participating in a study on skeptical clergy (or another benign, non-threatening euphemism), assuring them of confidentiality, etc. Then, they will be asked a few screening questions (based on criteria such as type of academic degree, length of parish experience, denomination) to get some background and make sure they qualify. Typically, a professional recruiter would do this — to keep the researcher from forming a relationship with the respondent before the interviewing begins. However, this is unfeasible in the pilot phase, when we are not completely sure of what we are looking for or will accept, and do not want to dissuade potential respondents by involving additional people in the interviewing process.

Topia

John Pieret has been doing an excellent series at Thoughts in a Haystack on the philosophical over-reaches of (some) incompatibalists, with especial attention on Jerry Coyne, who appears to be stepping up his bid to be the Morton Downey Jr. of the neo-atheists. Over and over again Coyne affirms that he knows the difference between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism (the former a working practice that can be set aside at one's lunch break, the latter a totalizing ideology about what is and is not real in the world), and again and again proceeds do violence to this distinction by calling science a "world view." He has made this mistake so often that even the Discovery Institute has noticed, and it is to the shame of the atheiosphere in general that they have offered one of the most lucid critiques of Coyne's argument.

The whole series is worth reading at your leisure; no post is more than a few paragraphs. The most recent one deals again with the problematic blurring of science as a method and as a metaphysical dispositon, this time as propounded by NYU Professor of "New Media" Clay Shirky. Shirky is arguing against the "Doctrine of Joint Belief" (what divinity school is that from?) and on his way to a head of steam he states:

The Doctrine of Joint Belief isn't evidence of harmony between two systems of thought. It simply offers permission to ignore the clash between them.

"Permission to ignore the clash" is an odd way to single out what is perhaps the most important function of the rational mind. As a good computer scientist like Shirky knows, reasoning is esentially a process of modeling, by which we code our experience according to symbolic categories. It seeks meaning through that symbolic assonance we call harmony. There will always be spoilsport data to remind us that this harmony is symbolic, and not actual, at which point we have two choices: we can revise the model to accomodate the new facts, or we can say good enough; it works. The lunar module lands safely, the medicine works with tolerable side effects, the butterfly-wing crypsis evades predators (differentially). The critic who objects that the models are not perfect in these cases is rightly dismissed as either a wet blanket or an idealist; someone who can't see the pragmatic side of scientific reasoning. (On the other hand, sometimes this wet blanket turns out to be a Copernicus, or an Einstein.)

In either case it is inherent to rationality that it "ignore the clash" (which is always waiting to be discovered by the next spoilsport) at least long enough for us to judge the value of the model. The philosophical model which alleges "compatibilty" between science and religion is in this way an emblem of all rational thought when it "offers permission to ignore the clash" between each party to the agreement. To imply otherwise is to promote very misleading ideas about the function of rational discourse that will only deepen an enchantment we are already too reliant upon.

This is not to argue that there are no valid grounds for judging religion and science "incompatible." But I think it's time for the incompatibalists and other neo-atheist evangelists put whatever pragmatic concerns they have about a future where religon and science co-exist on a level playing field, and contrast them with realistic--that is imperfect--counterfactual futures, rather than idealized fantasies drawn from John Lennon songs.

On Imprecision

Through imprecision, I think I gave the impression, in this recent post, that I believe that Jerry Coyne (or anyone) should respect various religious doctrines. (The ones he itemized were "the theologies of Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam.") I don't believe this. Jerry should respect what he does respect, and nothing more. I'm not his schoolmarm, and even if I wanted to proscribe what he (or anyone) should respect, it would not be respect that filled the empty space, but something much paler, and more rote.

I myself don't respect, in passing, many, or even most forms of the Abrahamic religions. I don't respect, as such, dullness, cravenness, obsequience, and appeals to authority that offer nothing other than security or relief from agency.

What I reject is the idea, so often presented by the neo-atheists, that religous observance is reducible, without closer inspection, to mere superstition, that belief in divinity must be an expression of cowardice, and that someone like Daniel Dennett can, from a distance, liken a believer--on the basis of belief alone--to a frightened cat who needs to be talked down from a tree, when he writes:

Like a revivalist preacher I say unto you, O religious folks who fear to break the taboo, Let go! Let go! You'll hardly notice the drop!

Some religious observance has this quality of grasping and white-knuckling against the breaking of a taboo; perhaps most of it. Freud believed that religion was an infantile projection of our wish for an omnipotent parent who would ensure our safety, in the next world if not in this one, and who can deny that a great bulk of adherence to religious doctrine has something like this within it? But we must oppose the insistence that adherence to religion can serve as a marker for this attitude, that affirmation of doctrine is itself enough information for us to judge an infantile cast of mind. We may disagree with the details of Kierkegaard's ontology, but his expression of faith was manifestly not a reaching out for comfort and security. Nor was Chesterson's or Lewis's.

Dennett writes (this and the former quote are from Breaking the Spell):

If what [some believers] call God is really not an agent in their eyes, a being that can answer prayers, approve and disapprove, receive sacrifices, or mete out punishment or forgiveness, then, although they may call this being God, and even stand in awe of it, their creed ... is not really religion in my definition.

Fair enough; we all reserve the right to fine-tune and negotiate our language for the sake of clarity. But it follows from this that many self-defined religious people are not only excluded from Dennett's definition, but also from the opprobium he automatically attaches to the phenomenon. Is Dennett aware that most Judaic creeds, for example, neither promote nor permit petitional prayer? This obviates, even among deeply pious Jews, a significant part of Dennett's defintion of what true religion is. Similarly, whatever may go on in the Christian megachurches, there are substantial numbers of everyday Christians (not just "theologians") who worship a God who bears few of the traits that Dennett--or Freud--or Coyne or Dawkins, itemize as characteristic.

This wouldn't be a problem if the neo-atheists took more care to (consistently) specify what they were speaking against. Unfortunately it is sufficient only that a person declaim a religious belief, of whatever stripe, to fall under the rubric of "deluded," or "under a spell." Dawkins, in The God Delusion and elsewhere makes some half hearted exceptions for "Deists" but takes no more pains than any of the others to ask what a person might mean that, for example, Christ is his or her savior. There are, after all, mulitple interpretations on offer, and more surely to follow.

All of which is to say that I don't argue that respect is intrinsic to any religious doctrine specifically, or to the religious impulse generally. Rather I reject as sloppy and imprecise (unscientific, one might say) the notion that religion as self-reported is deserving of disrespect, and of disdain. Far from the stereotype of the cowering, sheeplike supplicant, religious adherence can be, and often is, an expression of (among other things) openness, vulnerability, and acceptance of the unknown, all of which indicate to me a courageousness that exceeds the so-called bravery of putting a red "A for atheist" on a blog splash page.

Charles and Percy

Josef Johann takes issue with my recent post asserting that it is some other cultural element, and not science (as we commonly use that term), that orients our interest in, and search for, truth and truths. We might capsulize this view with the line from Shelley that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Johann is not happy with the diminished role this reserves for science, responding that such an impoverished definition omits, for example, "the science that communicates the profound massiveness of Arcturus":

It's not the science that's sensitive to the onslaught of sensory information you experience in a kiss. It's not even the science that elegantly traces the simple net of balancing forces and frictions that somehow hold my stack of books together in my under-shelved room

I sympathize with the sentiment that applied science need not be sterile, and that in practice it must be integrated with the world we are moved by, not just the one we dispassionately observe. It is a kind of apologia one finds in much of Richard Dawkins' writing, most notably Unweaving the Rainbow, and may be summarized in the famous quotation by Charles Darwin that "there is grandeur in this view of life."

This would be an unobjectionable response to a criticism such as Iris Murdoch's, (quoted in my original post) that science must defer to the cultural forms that determine our ethics and metaphysics (namely, philosophy and art). After all, science contributes to our ethical and ontological pictures of the world. The two can hardly be separated. What makes the matter more complicated, however, is that there are two implicit definitions of "science" in play here, and by privately attenuating between them an argument like Johann's tries to have it both ways.

Science, considered correctly, most absolutely has a creative, visionary function. Innovative and revolutionary hypotheses appear to have the same wellspring as poetry and drama (not to mention myth and religion), from which new pictures of reality leap into place of a piece: the Ouroboros of Kekule's benzene rings, the spiral staircase of Crick and Watson's double helix, the critical role of husbandry to Darwin's thought on selection. Though these and other scientific models would later become refined and legitimated through measurement and observation, there is nothing evidentiary within hypothesizing itself. The creation of models in science it itself a poetic function.

The obvious and critical distinction between the visions and metaphors employed by science, and those employed by art or religion is that the former undergo a merciless process of testing that the latter do not. We call the ring structure of benzene a description and not a story. We call the myth of Ouroboros a story and not a description. (It is a matter of debate whether the pre-Christian ontologies which employed the Ouroboros and similar myths such as the Greeks or Norse also literally believed in a giant snake who ate its own tail; if any did, to them it would be both a story and a description). But in each case they are, in the first place, visualizations. This then is the broader definition of science, which shares significant commonality with the realms of poetry and mythography before departing on its own unique excursion of quantification (without which no experiment is possible) and verification.

(If we replace the words description and story, above, with logos and mythos, we have a good case study in the contrast between literal and metaphorical understanding, but the point to remember for this discusson is that an idea must originate as a story before it can become a description).

There is a deep strain of rationalism in the sciences which is more than a little bit sheepish about this poetic element of scientific understanding. Reason does not--cannot--produce the initial visionary flash that generates scientific ideas. It can only take these ideas as given and evaluate them methodologically. The ideas themselves come from elsewhere; from the imagination. (In this sense all great scientists are, we are tempted to say, also great poets. But this conclusion tends to give short shrift to those scientists whose real talents were strictly methodological, like Francis Bacon, who made no real theoretical contributions to our understanding of the world).

This leaves us with a difficulty when talking about the vitally important creative function of scientific discovery. Who gets to claim Einstein, Maxwell, Darwin, or Harvey at that moment when they were revolutionizing the way we picture reality: the scientists, or the poets?

It need not be a zero-sum problem, of course. We only create the dilemma by insisting that poets and scientists are two separate and non-overlapping social roles, or that they call upon separate and non-overlapping forms of cognition. This is, as Johann rightly indicates, a myth:

This is the popular myth that Schoen is invoking- that there is a mutual exclusivity between our sense of humanity and the perspective we obtain by being scientific, and that therefore we must perform a balancing act that involves appreciating religious, poetic, artistic contributions to understanding, as though they presided over ontologically distinct realms.

But to the extent I "invoke" this myth, I only do so to describe it as the natural consequence of pitting science and poetry oppositionally, rather than as different locations on a continuum we all navigate the full length of: When we describe the massiveness of Arcturus as "profound," we have left the language of facts for the language of judgment; of quantity for quality. It's necessary that all of us, scientists included, should do this in the course of our thought and speech. To say, with Murdoch, that quality must precede quantity does not indicate, as Johann takes it to, that they are at odds ("juxtaposed against" each other, in his words)--unless we find ourselves so over-identified with the quantificational aspect of science that the very notion of qualities seems hostile. I think Johann would agree with me that this description paints a Vulcan-like parody of the scientific stance that very few people actually try to occupy (though there are extreme examples like Peter Atkins who deny poetry any valuable function whatsoever).

Scientists are, in other words, as welcome as anyone to make judgments, to speak of qualities, and to offer imaginative visions of how the world might be. They do not, however, have a special right to privilege these kinds of statements on the strict and sole justification that they are scientists. If they want to join the poets as "unacknowledged legislators of the world," they may do so, fraternally, as equals, but certainly not as interlopers.

***

[For a more substantial and lucid examination of the role of science in culture I can't recommend more highly Science and Poetry (2003) by Iris Murdoch's colleague and friend, the philosopher Mary Midgley.]

The Me Delusion

The above ad for Richard Dawkins' upcoming book has not been photoshopped. You can check for yourself by scrolling down on the splash page at his website.

I realize that authors do not generally write their own marketing copy. But they are given a chance to vet it, and perhaps request that a line like "from the most formidable intellect in public discourse" be toned down just a hair. It's one thing to believe you are the smartest person in all the world, quite another to shout this belief from the parapets.

It would be easy

As a break from my criticism of Jerry Coyne here and in comments at his place, I do want to commend him for two posts he's done recently against genetic determinism, here (on the false promises of pinpointing specific genes for complex patterns of behavior like schizophrenia or alcholism) and here (on the false promises of evolutionary psychology.)

Avast!

It's theoretically possible, of course, that Ophelia Benson is making a self-deprecating joke when she calls Chris Mooney her white whale, perhaps even confessing to a kind of humorless monomania that sneaks into her writing from time to (all the) time. But the best I can tell from the piece is that her casting herself as Ahab is just more evidence that our unconsciouses are much, much smarter than we are.

Hang in there, Ophelia!

A simple point

I don't know for certain what Chris Mooney means when he says that "faith and science are perfectly compatible," but when I say a thing like this I mean (and am usually careful to emphasize) that they are compatible all things being equal. Or, more precisely, that they are not intrinsically incompatible, and that nothing in any specific case of incompatibility can be reduced to religion or science generally. (Sean Carroll admitted as much a few weeks back, but then tried to sneak in the same argument in disguise, contending that, while not a priori incompatible, science and religion are actually incompatible in practice because "in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions." I have already discussed why even this is a massive and misleading over-generalization.)

So it is not clear to me what Ophelia Benson thinks she is refuting when she cites, via Austin Cline, the 2006 Pew Center report which found that 42% of Americans reject evolution, even though they know that it is universally accepted by biologists. This is a well publicized study, and it's central to the compatibility debate. Mooney himself is obviously aware of its findings, since he discusses them in his book. Does Benson think Mooney (or any other "accomodationist") is trying to argue that science is always compatible with religion, or that the exceptions are necessarily insignificant? Or that we shouldn't care that just under half of all Americans report that they disbelieve in evolution?

I wonder how Benson or Cline would respond to the assertion that democracy and equal rights are compatible. Certainly the statistics show that there are huge disparities of wealth and opportunity in this country, and anyone who cares to drive through our cities can see the stark, largely racial, contrasts in less time than it would take to look these statistics up. Women still make 75 cents for every dollar earned by men (and the gap is getting worse), although they constitute a slight demographic majority. Does this falsify our thesis? Or is the compatibility between democracy and equality likely to be an incomplete truth, like the one between religion and science--like most interesting truths are? There are, after all, ways in which democracy exacerbates social ills, since it tends to promote (in Sean Carroll's "real world") short term self-interest. This is something with which we all have to contend.

What Benson, Cline, Carroll, or Coyne cannot show is that the fundamentalist rejection of evolution is an essential expression of religion, any more than East St. Louis is an essential expression of racial harmony in a democratic society. Specific conflicts such as these are enormous problems in our culture. They will be difficult to surmount. Drawing sweeping and simplistic conclusions about which social forces are the positive ones, and which the negative, is not likely to be a very successful method of addressing these problems, though it is no doubt satisfying to people who prefer being right to being engaged.

Sock it to me

Jerry Coyne asks a question that deserves a serious answer.

He begins by pulling some Scientologist mythology off of Wikipedia, having to do with the galactic ruler Xenu, who purportedly vanquished, 58 million years ago, some unfortunates called the Thetans, who were then banished to a death camp planet called Teegeeack (our Earth) and ultimately brainwashed and "disembodied." What few bodies were left were colonized by clusters of these brainwashed souls, and we humans are, according to the lore, their descendants, in need of the clarifying power of Scientology to erade the false beliefs of those poor deluded thetan souls who still adhere to our thoughts.

Having recounted this tale, Coyne asks: how does it "materially" differ from the equally untrue narratives of the world religions? Given that religious doctrines are all equally untrue, why are the theologies of Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam deserving of any more respect than the hackneyed sci-fi cosmology of L. Ron Hubbard?

The easy answer is that they are not; that truth is the great equalizer, and that any one falsehood or fantasy is as needless and deluded as another. But I think a thoughtful answer to Coyne's question has to dig a little deeper than this. I won't be able to totally exhume this more thoughtful answer in a single post, but I'll try to at least raise some of the relevant ideas needed in such a reply.

My first response to Coyne would require putting aside, for the moment, the question of veridical truth claims, knowing that we will return to it before we are through. We first must turn to narrative generally--to literature and related forms--and establish right away that in terms of narrative content alone there is an immense difference in "respectability" between great works and doggerel. Even granting "guilty pleasures" (like summer blockbusters, for example) a potentially important role in our culture, most of us are able to make a distinction between art that gratifies our fantasies, and art that communicates some kind of deeper truth about the world that transcends our need for our personal desires to be met.

I lately wonder if the neo-atheist sensibility, with its restricted and constrained sense of what "truth" is, can allow such a statement to pass unchallenged, and perhaps I'll have the pleasure of finding out. Perhaps we will find there is not even a small island of agreement upon which we can say together that Shakespeare (to choose an uncontroversial example) is great at least in part because he portrays the human condition and predicament as it is, without regard to consolation. It's possible this position could be seen as a threat to the notion (approaching a sacred, talismanic status) that science is the only discipline that can reveal anything that would properly go by the name of "truth."

Such a view has come to be common-sensical, and it is instructive to revisit the vigorous and heretical challenge by Iris Murdoch, who wrote in 1962, in a push-back against C. P. Snow,

It is totally misleading to speak of two cultures, one literary-humane and the other scientific, as if these were of equal status. There is only one culture, of which science, so interesting and so dangerous, now plays important part. But the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education on how to picture and understand human situations. We are men and we are moral agents before we are scientists, anf the place of science in life must be discussed in words. This is why it is and always will be more important to know about Shakespeare than to know about any scientist and if there is a Shakeseare of science, his name is Aristotle.

Put in these terms, we must grant poetry a truth function. If poetry were merely beautiful, it would be of interest only to hedonists. It's trivially true that poems are, veridically speaking, "just" stories, but I think we have to doubt whether without these untrue truths we'd even have a culture to conduct science within in the first place. We respect great writers and artists in part because of their considerable technical skill and aesthetic sensibility, but also significantly because they do not shrink from portraying a truthful vision whose price is paid in the personal experience of pain.

(This speaks, incidentally, to another of Coyne's questions: "I am still waiting patiently for someone to tell me one thing that religious people know is true, and that the knowledge whereof came uniquely from faith." One important thing that most major religions can make us know (though they don't always succeed) is that we are all connected. This may sound like an imprecise or wishy washy thing to say, but if we reflect on it it has huge implications for how we think about our lives. Buddhism and Hinduism both teach that we are literally each other, and that our apparent separateness is just an illusion. Certain things follow from this regarding our pursuit of personal gratification. Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions don't make this quite as central, but it's a big part of the Christ myth, for example, which is a paradigmatic example of transcending the self, of being liberated from the neurosis of egoism.)

Against all of this, the patient objection may now be made that whatever meaning a theological doctrine may contain, it is nevertheless not truthful the way physics and biology are truthful. Two rhetorical paths follow from this observation, and only one will be useful here. (The other is the "postmodern" examination of scientific semotics, going back to Heinrich Hertz's discussion of mass and force as "fictions," but this discussion is far too liable to degrade into a referendum on the correspondence theory of truth, of which the ability of a jet airliner to safely fly (and land!) or of some other modern marvel is said to constitute irrefutable proof.) Here the concession must be made that a number of people, possibly a majority of "religious" people generally, do literally hold that the acts of god as revealed in scripture are as true (or more so) as the data in any common science textbook. Is it perhaps not too credulous for a modern mind in this day and age to believe that a shrub "burned" but consumed no fuel, that a man lived inside a fish for 10 days without suffocating or being digested, or that all breeding pairs of all known heterozygous species were able to harmoniously share space on a single ship built according to the technological limitations of the 10th c. BCE? Is there anything inherently respectable in such a belief?

My best answer to this question would probably be that it was still far too generally expressed. It would be easy to conjure in our minds a hypothetical example of an unschooled rube, possibly bigoted, possibly lacking in self knowledge, and shielded from empathizing with his fellow humans by the comforting certainty of his dogma. To Coyne, or Dawkins, or Sam Harris, all literal religious belief is of this stripe. But we also have the benefit of calling to mind the writings of Kierkegaard, who brilliantly anticipated the quandary we find ourselves in now, by reversing the question: what's so respectable, so free-thinking, of believing something simply because it's patently true?

That will sound like a joke to a certain cast of mind; it's not. Whether or not we come away from Fear and Trembling any more convinced that there is a god, or that his will should be obeyed, there is no confusing Kierkegaard's "knight of faith" with the hypothetical rube I just described. Kierkegaard managed to make even an absurdly literal theology something more than a laughing stock, by un-yoking faith from sheep-like authority, and counterbalancing it with a rational faculty that cannot guarantee that even a divine universe is not absurd. We are welcome to disagree with Kierkegaard, but, I would argue, not to sneer down at him.

However, let us recall, here, that Coyne does not stipulate that the religious doctrine in question be taken literally (though that it "typically" is so taken in practice is an article of faith for Coyne, notwithstanding any systematic evidence):

If you respect the theologies of Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam more, or give their adherents more credibility than you do Scientologists, why?

Our burden would seem, then, to be much lighter than Kierkegaard's. By respectable, we need only signify that the theology is meaningful, not that it is "true." We are inclined to say that religion is something much more serious than mere literature, but how much of this is due to its centrality, rather than some intrinsic claim to veridical truth? Even professors of literature encounter writings much more casually than the average Christian encounters his myth, scripture and ritual. A Tolstoy scholar doesn't read from War and Peace at the same time each week, or select different passages to focus on depending on the time of year. To a Joyce scholar, Bloomsday is not the same kind of holiday as Easter is even for the near-atheist member of a Unitarian or United Church of Christ congregation. Perhaps it is not the level of truth-content after all, that separates art and religion, but the systematic and ritual way the latter is observed?

This certainly is what seems to have happened to the "content" (such as it is) of Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard was, famously, a writer of pulp science fiction. He wrote Dianetics in the 1930s and 40s entirely without reference to supernatural content. The "theology" of Scientology (which Hubbard showed no signs of literally believing, or believing "in," came later. It is unknown to me how much new Scientology recruits are encouraged to literally believe the story of Xenu. But I am far less concerned (though not unconcerned) with the fact that many Scientologists may literally believe it, as I am with the fact that it is third rate, hack mythography. My lack of respect for it derives from its utter lack of a sublime quality, whether as sci fi or scripture.

I imagine this line of approach will be less than fully persuasive for readers who are thoroughly committed to a bright line between falsehood and truth, and to science's unique ability to divine the latter. As I've written elsewhere, I think this is itself an unempirical mode of thought, and bears more resemblance to a type of mythography (cf The Ionian Enchantment) than to anything truly scientific. But I nonetheless hope I have begun what may be a necessary challenge to the idea that belief in empirical truth is any more inherently respectable than subscribing to the truth of great art and literature. On what grounds would it be so, that are not self-establishing? Perhaps this question will help to reinforce Murdoch's insistence that "we are moral agents before we are scientists," and that "how to picture and understand human situations" must always precede descriptions from a more putatively objective perspective.

Bug Juice

Via Quodlibeta, Richard Dawkins and A.C. Grayling are currently subsidizing an atheist children's camp, Camp Quest UK, in Somerset, England. "That's fine by me," writes James Hannam, and it's fine by me too. But I thought it was cute that the £10 note awarded to the camp-goer who can prove there are no unicorns in the tents will be autographed by Dawkins himself. Every little boy's and girl's dream! (The director of this particular camp, self-declared "geek" Samantha Stein, has her own blog, on which she casually muses that she can't fathom how any of her friends could fail to adore the affable professor, and how such "Dawkins-hatred" even reduces her formerly high esteem of said friends. But, but: it would be irresponsible to read into these observations that a culture of personality or appeal to authority has anything to do with the type of instruction the camp-goers will receive at Camp Quest UK).

Camp Quest, is not new, though this is the first time a location has been offered in the UK. It was founded in 1996, in Cincinatti, as "the first summer camp in US History for the children of the children of ... those who hold to a naturalistic, not supernatural world view." This is a strange way of putting it, since there are literally thousands of summer camps which not only permit and encourage attendance of children of parents of all creeds, but which entirely refrain from instruction in any faith, or indeed reference to any faith. Perhaps what the marketing department meant to write was that Camp Quest was the first camp exclusively for the children of atheists.

That too, is fine by me. I suppose it keeps out the riff raff (and these days, the problem of fundamentalist gad-flies is a real one). But it leads me to wonder, if the camp is designed to encourage free-thinking and rational inquiry, why need it concern itself to teach "that religious belief and doctrines can prevent ethical and moral behaviour"? This is not a matter of skeptical inquiry and rational thought, but of moral and philosophical disposition, and it bears a passing resemblence to the sort of tribalism that neo-atheists like Dawkins claim not to indulge in. Children who attend these camps are apparently being taught that religious ethics are inferior to secular ones, which is a far different thing than being told that secular ones are as good as religious ones.

The Telegraph article notes that one of the camp activities will be to sing John Lennon's "Imagine." I think it's worth asking how the dream of "sharing all the world," and living "as one" is furthered by a programme which focuses on diferences, rather than similarities, and encourages the view, already far too widespread, that there are manifold ways to be wrong, but only one way to be right. (That this is true for math problems does not make it so for ethics or metaethics). One "imagines" Lennon himself, as a boy, finding such a camp a little too constraining for comfort.

Nervous laughter

This is PZ Myers, not long after the cracker incident, counseling his readers to be more freethinking. I've archaicized some of the language, but changed none of the meaning:

Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not thy lord, thou art not disciples of any charismatic prophet. Thou art all human beings who must make thy way through life by thinking and learning, and thou hast the job of advancing humanities' knowledge by winnowing out the errors of generations past and finding a deeper understanding of reality. Thou wilt not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but ye can find truth by looking at thy world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

(And here's Steve Martin, back when he was funny.

STEVE MARTIN: I promise to be different.
AUDIENCE: I promise to be different.
STEVE MARTIN: I promise to be unique.
AUDIENCE: I promise to be unique.
STEVE MARTIN: I promise not to repeat things other people say.
AUDIENCE: I promise … [Dissolves into nervous laughter.])

Carroll Prevaricates, Kinda

Sean Carroll notices some people arguing in comments at Chris Mooney's blog, as I did here, that not all of what constitutes religion can be typified by the dominant variant of Christianity that commonly surrounds us, or seems to. He replies:

If someone doesn’t believe in the supernatural in any form, including an afterlife or a creator God or any such thing, yet nevertheless prefers to describe themselves as “religious,” there’s nothing I can do to stop them. Such a belief system seems compatible with science, as far as I can tell.

So: Buddhists, Unitarians, and "spiritual" atheists, good news! You've been let into the tent.

But it seems completely crazy to equate “religion” with that kind of worldview as a general principle. It’s not what people think when they hear the word, and it’s not the worldview of the overwhelming majority of people who call themselves “religious.” The vast majority of Christians think that Jesus was standing right there in the room the Sunday after he died; they don’t think it’s an allegory.

I am glad to see that Carroll has replaced his earlier" word "typical with "vast majority." But I'm still not seeing any data here to back it up. That is, how vast does vast need to be before the outliers become statistically insignificant--and--does the set he calls "the overwhelming majority of people who call themselves religious" meet that statistical standard? How atypical, for that matter, is my own anecdotal, personal experience, in which a substantial percentage of my "religious" friends and acquaintances do believe the ascension and resurrection are allegorical events. Well, maybe looking into this problem is just too annoying for science to bother itself with:

Debating about definitions is tiresome. The relevant point is: belief in the supernatural in all its forms, from life after death to the necessity of God to understand the origin of the universe or the special nature of the human soul, is incompatible with what science has taught us about the world. (my emphasis)

Yes, defining one's terms is tiresome. Scientific experiment is tiresome; thankless, in fact! It's much easier to assert things one believes to be true without substantiation, like Aristotle did when he reported that women have fewer teeth than men, or that one can cure insomnia in elephants by rubbing their shoulders with olive oil (actually, maybe that one is true).

But this is not the time or place to resort to an incurious or dogmatic position. We're talking about culture war, after all. Far better, as recent events remind us, to get good solid intelligence on one's supposed enemies before the battles begin, than to have to issue one's half-apology/half apologia over the wreckage, and plead "How could we have known we were wrong? Everyone thought that religion and science were incompatible back then. It was common knowledge!"

Whatever Chris Mooney's shortcomings, he is helping to undermine the kind of plausible deniability that comes from not having asked enough probing questions about a serious matter while one still had the chance.

Is Neo-Atheism a Pseudo Science?

Having argued earlier this week in comments that my main contention with the neo-atheists is not over style (e.g. that they are strident or "shrill,") but over content (they advocate and believe things that seem to me to be not true), I'm going to partially contradict myself here and point to a huge stylistic concern, and that is the tendency for so many neo-atheists to go off half-cocked; how unempirical their claims so often are are. Here, for example, is Sean Carroll, as quoted on Jerry Coyne's blog:

The reason why science and religion are actually incompatible is that, in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions. It’s worth noting that this incompatibility is perfectly evident to any fair-minded person who cares to look. Different religions make very different claims, but they typically end up saying things like “God made the universe in six days” or “Jesus died and was resurrected” or “Moses parted the red sea” or “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility. [my emphasis]

It is striking right off the bat, how loosely these supposed "typical" religious claims are related, and how Carroll fails to tie them to any specific, reducible, religious trait.

Two of Carroll's examples are Judeo-Christian, one is specifically Christian, and the last can be found in a number of the "advaita" (non-dualist) family of religions that includes Buddhism and Hinduism. In the "real world," all four are differently interpreted by adherents to those religions. Does Carroll provide statistics on how many Christians or Jews literally believe the Genesis myth? Does he suggest a certain ratio above above which we can accurately call the literal interpretation of these beliefs "typical" or below which we can say that the minority of non-literal believers are not actually religious? Is there in fact anything scientific about Carroll's statement at all, beyond a broad and vaguely defined hypothesis of religion as a source of unscientific truth claims?

These kind of assertions about the self-evidence of religious incompatibility with science remind me of the pre-renaissance belief that heavier objects fall to earth faster than lighter ones. A casual, unexamined type of empiricism had "confirmed" this suspicion for centuries: just look at how much more leisurely leaves and feathers and snowflakes fall, compared to stones and cannonballs. It took a Galileo to look more closely at the factors involved, to isolate and differentiate mass, acceleration, and resistance from one another to derive a more complex explanation of the factors at work.

To the extent this kind of work is done at all it tends not to support the "incompatibilist" position. Anthropologist Scott Atran has tried to look empirically, scientifically, at the phenomena we lump together under the rubric of "religion." His field study of jihadi suicide bombers, for example, has cast serious doubt on many of the causal factors that supposedly link religious fervor and piety to violence and other social evils. On the other hand I have not seen Carroll, Coyne, Dawkins, Hitchens, Weinberg, or any of the others who make these kind of claims make any appeals to science whatsoever, and I suspect it is because there is no science that confirms the kind of folk wisdom that says it's "perfectly evident" that religion is intrinsically antagonistic to reason and human rights.

Here's Coyne from the same blog post I cited Carroll:

It continually amazes me that theologians like John Haught or scientists like Francis Collins can get away with a definition of “religion” that is completely at odds with how most real non-Ph.D-holding humans practice their faith in the real world. To enforce a compatibility between faith and science, you have to water down “faith” until it becomes a vague deism that doesn’t permit its god to interfere in the working of the universe. And that’s simply not the way that most people construe their faith. Note to accommodationists: religion is NOT NECESSARILY the form of faith practiced by university theologians or academic scientists.

To the extent this is true (note again how vague and un-quantified the claims are) it cuts both ways. Not all religion that deviates from the literalist, fundamentalist view is confined to the ivory tower. There are entire sects of the main world religions that adhere, in part or in whole, to what Coyne dismisses as "watered down" religious belief. Religious branches claiming hundreds of millions of participants who do not believe in "Sky Father" gods, or life after death, or creation myths, or any number of the things that religion is supposed to in Carroll's view, in Coyne's view, "typically" engender.

In order to dismiss this contradictory evidence as just "watered down" religion, we need a confirmation bias. We would have to establish that the cruder, more fundamentalist strains are more "essential" somehow. But what is this "essence" of religion? Is it "blind faith"? Then where are the studies that quantify it, and demonstrate some kind of power law distribution that correlates with the social evils Coyne et al (rightly) deride? Where is the science? Why should I believe any of the vague and fuzzy claims about the ills of this ill-defined thing called "religion?

My skepticism, here, is fueled by an awareness of anomalies too numerous and significant to ignore. If "blind" faith is a "typical" component of religion, why is the Dalai Lama publicly announcing that where science contradicts religious claims, those claims should yield? Is Tibetan Buddhism not a "real" religion? If literal understanding of scripture is more authentic than metaphorical understanding, are the Sufis not an authentic sect of Islam? Is the Catholic Church (or any of the mainline Protestant branches) inauthentically religious because it accepts scientific evolution and not scriptural creation as the literal truth? This is the sort of jumble of terms and propositions we normally have when no one has bothered to make a truly scientific inquiry into the problem.

Too, too many scientists are making too, too many unsubstantiated claims about what religion is and how it functions in our culture for this conversation to be fruitful and increase our understanding of how faith and reason interact. My question to them is this: if the most vociferous defenders of the scientific method won't bother themselves to use it in this passionate defense, then who will?

The Sound of One Meme Clapping

Andrew Brown makes the interesting observation that in the American legal system, the government cannot, constitutionally, privilege the truth.

If the government of some hick state were to decide to teach children that Sweden has the highest suicide rate of anywhere in the world or that America fought alongside Britain throughout the second world war (as Tony Blair suggested in his speech to congress) that would be amazingly stupid, but it would not be unconstitutional. If a democratic majority wanted their children taught these things, there would be nothing for the dissenting minority to do but emigrate. They couldn’t claim that the constitution prohibits the teaching of falsehood in schools.

I'm not entirely convinced by this, since there would presumably be some ideological reason for teaching these things, upon which a constitutional challenge could get some purchase. Nevertheless I think Brown gets at something central--though generally occluded--in the science and religion "compatibility" debate currently scorching hillsides throughout the blogosphere.

Scientific naturalism, almost by definition, valorizes truth above all other virtues. Freedom, equality, justice, and democracy cannot be set in place in a naturalist metaphysics until everything in the ledger of True and False has been properly arrayed. This schema is sensible, not least because these other virtues would have questionable value if they were grounded in lies and delusions. It also, as Brown observes, comprises the structure of a particular metaphysical picture, where reason alone has the power to accurately and intelligibly assemble the world. (The fact that this myth may be true doesn't render it any less metaphysical).

However, the Enlightenment values on which the United States was formed take great pains (and I do mean pains--we all feel them) to balance the ethical primacy of accurate knowledge with the universal right to personal belief and to membership in a minority community, even if those beliefs are in contention, or outright false. This is the function of the establishment clause, a very radical protection (for its day) against the kind of monopoly of belief posed by a national religion such as the Church of England.

Because of this function it is not enough to interpret the establishment clause, as a number of neo-atheists have recently advocated, as strictly prohibiting the establishment of a national religion, and no more. To be consistent and effective it must also prohibit any state actor--such as a public school science teacher--from denigrating or delegitimizing active religious belief systems, because such statements amount to a form of state-sanctioned religious persecution.

James Corbett was one such state actor, who was successfully sued by one of his students for teaching that creationism was "superstitious nonsense," and that (among other things) "when you put on your Jesus glasses, you can't see the truth." The accuracy of these statements is not a defense, under the law, and for good reason. It is one thing to speak truth to power, quite another for power to speak truth back. (As The Friendly Atheist writes, a teacher explicitly linking atheism to genocide would be quickly and roundly condemned by everyone now coming to Corbett's defense.) It would not have been actionable if Corbett had restricted himself to denying specific creationist truth claims, such as regard the age of the earth, or if he had vituperated creationism generally outside the classroom. But he spoke, in his capacity as an agent of the state, against the validity or integrity of a protected belief system, and in our system this is not permitted.

This understandably sticks in the craw of anti-religious writers such as Myers, and Brown's post gets at the reason why. This particular battle in the culture wars is over the relative weight of truth and knowledge in relation to other virtues. In his (rhetorical, not legal) defense of his position, Corbett grandiosely invokes Mr. "Know Thyself" himself:

The only virtue for Socrates was “knowledge.” He reached it by questioning the most deeply held beliefs of his students by which I mean all of Athens and ultimately all of us. What troubled the Athenians about Socrates, however, was not listed in the charges. His crime was that he prompted people to think. [my emphasis]

It is a noble and commendable tale, but it does not, and cannot, exist in isolation. A lot has happened in 2,500 years to change the way we organize civilized society, including the nurture and development of a concept of universal rights that neither the mythical nor historical Socrates would have been likely to embrace, if Plato is any kind of an authority. Corbett is free to live out his Socratic fantasies in private life, but he is not free to impose his notion of a unitary virtue of knowledge upon his students as a state agent. (The common objection that questioning authority and received wisdom is not an imposition of values is philosophically bankrupt, since such a process requires sanctifying knowledge and truth in the first place.)

Mythbusters and gadflies are welcome and valuable roles, but it is important to remember that they introduce powerful new myths and ideas in place of the ones they mean to upturn. If we are explicit about this process it can be a very productive enterprise, but if we deny it we run the risk of falling for the very tricky Myth of No Myth, which is, the evidence is plain, one of the most difficult ones to counter.

Myers, Coyne and the other neo-atheists are welcome to frame the "accomodationist" question as a simple story of truth against falsehood, and science against superstition, but if they continue on this line of argument they are going to need better philosophical justifications for installing knowledge alone as the organizing principle of their worldview, especially within a legal and ethical system which for two centuries has been consistent and clear in its demand for equal protection under the law. Let them explicitly argue against the provisions of the First Amendment, and offer their vision of a republic that manages to be just and equitable without these protections. Appeals to truth as though it were self-evidently the highest Good have long ceased to be persuasive.

Easy Answers and their discontents

If I had time to blog today I'd direct you to these two thoughtful posts at Thoughts in a Haystack. I've written earlier about biologist Jerry Coyne's recent campaign to establish that religious beliefs are, by definition, completely incompatible with the scientific method. As Chris Mooney writes, this is a confusion of "methodological naturalism" (the exclusion of all unempirical facts from scientific inquiry) and "philosophical naturalism" which excludes such facts from reality altogether. (I've had things to say about this doctrine in the recent past).

Pieret notes that if Science is to be considered a worldview, rather than a technique, then teaching it to schoolchildren will amount to government endorsement of a philosophy, which is unconstitutional (to which Larry Moran replies, in comments, "change the constitution!" To my mind this betrays a totalitarian sentiment that has run just under the surface of neo-atheism all along.) Pragmatically, this will reduce evolutionary biology to the status of "just another theory" which is what the Creationists have wanted all along.

The physicist Steven Weinberg has more than once issued the famous aphorism that religion causes "good people to do bad things." It's a specious remark, not least because it assumes we have epistemic access to who the really "good" people are, apart from their actions. At best it is a half truth (as Freeman Dyson observed), unless we can rule out the possibility that religion has ever inspired "bad people" to do good things (or that nothing else save religion has ever corrupted an otherwise pure heart). To the great list of dumb statements by smart people (Weinberg is a Nobel laureate), this must be added at high rank. And yet you will see Weinberg's comment approvingly quoted almost universally among neo-atheists, which makes me wonder if it's not true that Smart People will say Smart Things, and Dumb People will say Dumb Things, but for Smart People to Say Dumb Things: that takes bigotry.

Case Study: The Law of the Jungle

I hope that John Pieret will forgive me for making use, again, of home blog advantage to elevate our conversation in comments into a new post.

My sense, though I am not sure, is that John and I agree on the question of "transcendent" versus "non-transcendent" ethics, and are just talking past each other. Though I have been using the word "transcendent" in a very specific sense, we are all a little bit touchy about ideologues using similar language to smuggle a theophany into ethical conversations, and I don't blame John for being on his guard about this. Very briefly I want to try to re-clarify what I mean by the word, and then move on to a famous case study showing the hazards of ignoring it.

In working toward a definition of human nature and intelligence, Kant drew a distinction between the actual and the potential -- that is, the world as it is, and the world as it might be. Even allowing for some porosity between humanity and the "lower" species, it is not controversial to suggest that such a distinction does not exist in any developed form in non-human intelligences. To whatever extent non-human organisms choose their behavior, they do not so do by reasoning among choices, for this would require a symbolic thought process they do not possess. (An exception may be the cetaceans, but we'll leave that aside for now).

The appearance of humanity's faculty to envision potential alternatives to "what is" marks the origin of (among other things) morality, of "ought." Without a system to order our possible choices as preferences, we would be reduced to paralysis.

So far, so good? What is "transcendent" about this state of affairs is that the world of actuality (as described by biology, for example) is now transected by a realm of thought that isn't confined to its borders, and is often in opposition to it. Highly ordered metaphysical schemes like those of Plato or of Christian theology are specific manifestations of this kind of transcendence, but no system of thought is completely free of it. Even supposedly amoral "anything goes" philosophies, like Nietzsche's or Sartre's, stand in opposition to an "actual" state of affairs they wish to disparage, such as traditional Christianity, or "bourgeois" values.

The question that emerges for an ethical system that purports to be "naturalistic" (that is, "non-transcendent"), is this (very old) one: Given our ability to imagine multiple possible worlds (if not, in fact, our inability to refrain from imagining them), what is to be our rationale for choosing among them? Any answer that appeals to biology alone is an abdication of moral reasoning (if not to culture altogether) since it rejects the world of the possible in favor of the world of the actual.

Before it is objected that no moral philosophy would try to explicate an ethical argument in strictly biological terms, let's look at a famous article by the Australian philosopher J.L. Mackie (1917-1981), titled "The Law of the Jungle," and published in Philosophy in 1978.

This paper was one of the first philosophical responses to Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Dawkins himself was careful in that book not to imply that biological "selfishness" (that is, the persistence of successful traits throughout time) justified psychological egoism. Mackie's take was far less cautious.

The main body of "Law of the Jungle" is a fairly innocuous exploration of a type of group selection that Dawkins overlooked in TSG. But he closes with a palpably ethical conclusion:

What implications for human morality have such biological facts about selfishness and altruism? One is that the possibility that morality is itself a product of natural selection is not ruled out, but care would be needed in formulating a plausible speculative account of how it might have been favoured. Another is that the notion of an ESS may be a useful one for discussing questions of practical morality.

ESS, as readers of TSG know, stands for "Evolutionarily Stable Strategy," which is a type of biological homeostasis worked out by game theorists. ESS theory is called upon to demonstrate why "reciprocal" altruism exists in populations where me might expect a brute selfishness to prevail: since a pugilistic stance is thought to require a huge outlay of energy (having constantly to defend oneself in fights), the smart strategy is suggested to be to lay low and live in harmony until that harmony is disrupted by another member of the population.

Following Dawkins, Mackie cites the example of bird grooming behavior, which ESS theory divides into three types: Sucker, Cheat, and Grudger. The Sucker represents the extreme of complete altruism, removing ticks from other birds without reservation. The Cheat represents pure selfishness, allowing other birds to remove its ticks but never going out of its way to return the favor. The Grudger bridges the difference, grooming other birds with the exception of those who don't reciprocate, who are left out.

Game theory predicts that the Grudger "strategy" of reciprocal altruism will spread through a population, displacing the less sophisticated strategies of pure selfishness or pure altruism. And so it may. And we might pause to notice, as Mackie does, that there is an echo in this strategy of our own concept of fairness.

This is not a problem as far as it goes. Birds have been employed as symbols of justice and wisdom as at least as far back as Athena's owl. We find the flock-as-jury in Farid Ud-Din Attar's allegorical poem "The Conference of the Birds" from the 12th century, and Chaucer's "Parlement of Fowles" 200 years later.

But this is a far different thing than asserting, as Mackie does, that because some birds have evolutionarily developed behaviors which are "healthy in the long run" (whatever that means)and which resemble our own notion of fairness, our notions of fairness are thereby justified. Other far less savory bird behaviors, such as eating the young in a neighboring nest, are apparently just as "Stable" as the grooming example. are they, too, to be adopted? It's not clear why Mackie would single out reciprocal altruism for being stable, when myriad behaviors all across the "selfishness" spectrum persist throughout the biosphere.

After the usual disclaimer that "there is no simple transition from ‘is’ to ‘ought’, no direct argument from what goes on in the natural world and among non-human animals to what human beings ought to do," Mackie goes on to promote exactly that. After linking reciprocal altruism to our modern common sense notions of fairness (although it bears a much closer resemblance to vendetta or blood feud--"An eye for an eye"), he equates the "Sucker" strategy with the philosophy of Jesus, and Socrates, who advocating "repayment of evil with good." Then, switching back to ESS theory, he writes

[A]s Dawkins points out, the presence of suckers endangers the healthy Grudger strategy. It allows cheats to prosper [shades of the "Churchillian atheist" paranoia, here], and could make them multiply to the point where they would wipe out the grudgers, and ultimately bring about the extinction of the whole population. This seems to provide fresh support for Nietzsche’s view of the deplorable influence of moralities of the Christian type.

This attenuation between discussions of biological stability and moral programs happens so quickly it's easy to miss Mackie's move, in this paragraph, of using the "is" of biology to justify ("provide fresh support for") the "ought" of the Nietzschean moral structure. But it's there, in very clear terms.

Mary Midgley, in her famous response to Mackie, which kicked off her ongoing feud with Richard Dawkins (a case study of a "Grudger," in temperament, if there ever was one), points out the fairly obvious shortcomings of such a linkage between evolutionary stability and ethics. Like the birds in the game theorists' model, we appear to be congenitally poised to retaliate against transgressions against us. We need no special help from the world of ideas--the realm of the possible--to remember to do harm to our enemies. As Midgley puts it, "The option of jumping on one’s enemies’ faces whenever possible has always been popular." (We can take "always," here, to mean long before the development of language and reason). She does not, however, suggest we make a wholesale replacement of a strategy of retaliation with a strategy of saintly restraint. She suggests that the ethos of the paying good to evil arose as an intelligent--not dogmatic--response to the limitations of our emotional makeup:

This disregard of the essential emotional context reappears in Mackie’s idea that the undiscriminating ‘sucker’ behaviour is one recommended by Socrates and Christ. Neither sage is recorded to have said ‘be ye equally helpful to everybody’. Both, in the passages he means, were talking about behaviour to one narrow class of people, with whom we are already linked, namely our enemies, and were talking about it because it really does present appalling problems.

She goes on:

Of course charity and forgiveness have their drawbacks too, especially if they are unintelligently practised. As Mackie rightly says, there are problems about reconciling them with justice, and justice too has its roots in our emotional nature. There are real conflicts here as both Socrates and Christ realized. (My emphasis)

The issue becomes one of flexibility and versatility, which are dramatically multiplied in the human capacity to represent things symbolically. Putting this faculty aside in favor of the "wisdom" of our genes seems to me as much a step backward as putting aside Darwinian evolutionary theory in favor of Lamarckianism. Darwin's theory "transcended" the limits of the best explanations of his day, among both proto-evolutionists like Lamarck (and Darwin's own grandfather Erasmus), and theologians, neither of which were adequate to describe the processes he wished to understand. My use of the word "transcendent" in this discussion is not intended to be any more grandiose than that.

Beast and God

In comments, John Pieret of Thoughts in a Haystack writes that our moral systems must derive from empirical sources (such as biology) since we can no longer maintain the illusion of a "transcendent non-empirical framework," (the words are Iris Murdoch's) such as traditional religion.

History has shown that we have never been able to agree on which god [there] might be or what the moral code might look like and that has, as often as not, been the problem, rather than a potential solution. If we can culturally evolve a morality that will let us both deal with our greater abilities to destroy and with each other, so much the better (for us).

A consensus on *a* god -- on *a* "transcendent non-empirical framework" for morality -- is (highly) unlikely to be the solution. [Moral reasoning] has to be a process that looks to reason and our nature as animals as well and evolves toward a consensus -- as we have evolved toward a consensus on, say, the nature of science and the benefits of political freedom. (my emphasis)

I agree with John that a huge problem in ethics is its long standing contamination with the idea that our animal nature is evil--for which we can thank the Gnostic strain in Christianity, as well as the rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment, who could be very squeamish about the passions. (Midgley's Beast and Man offers a great analysis of this problem.) Ethology has shown us just how many of our ideas about primates and other animals were largely just projections of our own psychological fears and drives, and that to be a primate can really be a noble and gentle thing.

But look where this road leads when you take it to its extreme. No philosopher better exemplified human "naturalness" than Diogenes, who taught that civilization itself was irredeemably corrupt. Who among us would want to live in a world proscribed by his philosophy? Our species has taken the path of civilization, which is different from animal sociality not just in the degree of its complexity, but in kind. We are symbol users who live (and die) by and for ideas, not genetic laws.

This brings us to John's other moral indicator, that highly formalized use of symbols we call "Reason." If we are going to declare that we are abandoning "transcendent non-empirical frameworks," then how are we to decide which ideas to serve with this rational faculty? If "The Good" were self evident, or derivable from scientific experiment, we could replace philosophy with an "ethical science"and be done with it (which, one gets the feeling, a number of scientists, especially cognitive scientists, would prefer we do without delay).

Most contemporary moral philosophers in the analytic tradition tip-toe around this problem in two ways:

1). By surreptitiously referencing non-empirical foundational concepts (such as the Social Contract of Liberal political philosophy or the "total freedom" of the Nietzschean/Existentialist persuasion--each of which rest on a type of social atomism that is purely metaphysical), or

2). By invoking a Millsian utilitarianism, where "The Good" is presumed to be whatever people most desire. (Today that often means health and wealth, though neither presents any inherent ethical superiority over its alternative--which is a point made long ago by both the Cynics and the Stoics. As Murdoch asks, why should we think that what people desire by default is necessarily what they ought to desire? If that sounds moralistic or elitist in your ears, travel back in history until you come across a mass movement that you feel comfortable standing in judgment of. You shouldn't have to go too far.)

Neither response sincerely owns up to the problem posed by a post-Theistic world. If it's true that there is no God to instruct us, and we cannot derive ought from is (that is, we can't use science to elucidate our morality), then where do moral systems come from? The answer is complex, but I think a large part of it must include a recognition that we threw out the baby with the bathwater some time in the last couple of centuries. We thought the death of God also indicated the death of Metaphysics--that is, of imaginative world pictures that define the relations of the observable world. A truly honest inquiry has to admit that as long as we trade in ideas and symbols we cannot do without these world pictures, and if we don't consciously examine them, they will continue to operate upon us unconsciously.

That leaves the enormous problem of which metaphysical structures to support, and which to reject--and on what grounds? (The very question sends me to take refuge in the Vedic cosmology, where the world is a drama, with all parts played by the same Godhead). But nobody said that killing god would make life any easier for us.

To be, or

My friend, the writer and seafood-taster Yosephus, objects to my slander of existentialism, which I declared in a recent post incapable of an altruistic impulse. He suggests that what I meant to say was that what he calls "narcissistic materialists" might be guilty of an anti-altruism stance, but that existentialists are not. (We might list a number of related outlooks that are similarly worshipful of selfishness: Objectivists, Spencerians, National Socialists, Straussians, and certain daft Nietzscheans).

I think we need to pause to make a distinction between what a person is capable of, and what is predicated by that person's philosophy. Even Richard Nixon has got soul, as Neil. Young once sang. No one is a perfect egoist, regardless of the perfection of one's egoism. In that sense I was wrong to imply that existentialism, or any philosophy, precluded the performance of unselfish acts. The question that remains to be answered is: to what extend does existentialism, or any philosophy, encourage egoism?

Let me make further use of this pause to note that I don't particularly like the terms in which this matter is cast when we commit to words like "selfishness" or "selflessness." Orienting a moral discussion around the notion of a self bypasses the question of what this self's nature is, and what its metaphysical relations are to other "selves," to non-human organisms, and so-called inanimate objects. The Hobbesean self, ultimately divisible from all other souls, but not divisible in itself, is a very different thing than the Vedic self (Atman) whose true nature is not individuation but unity with the world soul, or Brahman. And these two are both different from the notion of the self described by cognitive scientists and philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, for whom the self is a convenient but misleading name for the synergistic activity of mental modules, each of which is composed of submodules, all the way down to the "stupid homunculi" we call neurons.

My objections lie mainly with the work of Sartre, of whom I'm no kind of scholar, and I'll refine my comments here to his exposition. (Yosephus: if there's another writer who better conveys your understanding of existentialism, please let me know). Sartre wrote, nobly enough, in order to to oppose docility and apathy, which he considered the result of external, "deterministic" influences like duty and social order. He might have enjoined his readers to keep their own counsel, or know their own minds, but by invoking what he calls "total freedom," Sartre goes far beyond this type of corrective. Total freedom involves making moral decisions based only upon the self's power to bind itself to the truth, which to Sartre was a vast one.

It is in this vision of the self as morally and epistemologically complete, without need for other minds (living selves, or ideas bequeathed from dead ones) that I see the seeds of egoism. It contributes to an illusory and puffed up sense of our own personal power and abilities, and, conversely, an atrophied conception of our needs. After we exclude God, Sartre writes, "there must be somebody to invent values." And this is true, but we want to resist the temptation to make ourselves in God's image. Fictional though he may have been, he had the advantage of being able to work truly ex nihilo. We will never have this opportunity, since we live in a world populated by other people, each of whom were taught language and meaning by the generation before. There's no way out of this conundrum. Being human means accepting some degree of indoctrination. Some tinkering is always desirable, of course, but this is a far cry from "total freedom." The death of God is not an opportunity for the kind of advancement Sartre has in mind.

It is worth observing that from his position of total freedom, Sartre takes time to reconsider some things (Bourgeous social values and obsolete moral codes) but lets others stand unchallenged--for example the Social Contract theory of Enlightenment philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke, upon which his notion of total freedom is grounded. This speaks partly to the intellectual blind spots we all struggle with; but apart from this, even a mind of unsullied perception would require many lifetimes to evaluate all the pertinent propositions that affect our decision making. Myths which overlook this limitation are not helpful if we have any interest in participating in the ongoing conversation over what is Good, and in living our lives as though this conversation matters.

To take responsibility for ourselves while admitting our (intrinsic, intractable) debt to others seems like a paradox only under a certain restrictive defintition of who "we" are; of what a self is. That's a topic for another day. Suffice it to say that it is in any event a balancing act. To the extent that Sartre and other postwar existentialists conveyed a greater need for this type of balance, I think they made a positive contribution to Western philosophy. To the extent they swung the pendulum away from our relation as parts of a social and biological unity, I think they sadly contributed to the ever-present and all-too-seductive cause of our own self aggrandizement under the cover of the romantic (and Romantic) myth of the hero.

Strauss at Midnight

If you live in or near Chicago, or could be induced to drive or be otherwise conveyed to Chicago for a weekend, let me tell you about this amazing Theater Oobleck play by Jeff Dorchen (his first since The Problematic Cartoonist in 1998) that opens on Thursday at the Chicago DCA Theater.

It is titled Strauss at Midnight. That's Leo, not Richard or Johann. It's a black comedy, naturally. Or charcoal comedy, anyway, with a dystopian sci fi streak. Besides Leo Strauss (and his protege Allan Bloom), the play concerns the tribulations of Saul Bellow (like Strauss and Bloom, he is dead, but what that indicates for his dramatic arc is not entirely clear), Niccolo Machiavelli, and a handful of fictional characters, mostly from the Neil Simon play "The Odd Couple." It's almost as absurdist as it sounds, but not quite; there are some very resonant explorations of, well, I won't give it away, but it's all connected, man!

The sound design is by yours truly, but that's the least reason you should see it. The script is crackling and improbable, the cast is superb, and the set and design are gorgeous and inspired. A bunch of really, really talented people have been dedicating themselves (I'd say tirelessly, but they're actually all really really tired right now) to realizing this play, for basically no money, which is inspiring in itself.

Jeff has written a series of pieces that discuss the thematic underpinnings of the play, for those that go for that sort of thing. But nothing can prepare you for the fresh orthogonality of his dialogue, or the unlikely places he discovers and unearths patterns and archetypes. Come and see and hear it for yourself. Details here, at the Theater Oobleck website (20 years without a director, and always free if you're broke).

Also, my coffee table and ice bucket play minor roles.

The Quark Awards

Two of my pieces from the last year have been nominated for a Quark Award sponsored by the excellent blog/portal 3 Quarks Daily:

"Everything That Is the Case," and
"Refuting 'It,' Thus."

I'm not persuaded either one of them should be considered "science blogging" (which is the topic of this round of the award) or that either is my best work from the last year, but I was too much of a gentleman to self-nominate, and that's where that will get you.

You can vote for one of them, or for another of the several deserving nominations, here.

***

UPDATE

I've been asked which post I prefer, so that the voting doesn't get split between the two. I recommend picking whichever one you like better, but for those unvirtuous few who plan not to even read them, it's a difficult choice. A prior draft of "Everything that is the Case" was submitted to 3QD when they announced they were adding 20 new Monday columnists. It did not make the top 20. The 3QD editorial board which rejected it will preside as first round judges for the award.

The final round judge is psychologist Steven Pinker, who I single out for abuse in "Refuting It Thus."

I guess I'd pick the latter, which has the virtue of being fresh and new to the 3QD editorial staff/gatekeepers. Either way I think these two posts are the "mud in your eye" nominations. If you go for that sort of thing, then vote your heart out.

What it is like to be a person

Alvin Plantinga, the Christian philosopher who has become known chiefly for his argument that evolution and naturalism are mutually refuting, has a piece in Christianity Today that summarizes this argument in fairly short fashion; short enough for pubertarian science blogger PZ Myers to read it through, and make his usual nonthoughtfully dismissive remarks. (To be fair, Plantinga's essay is from last July, but only through PZ's link has it penetrated it into the Atheiosphere). John Pieret takes Myers to task at Thoughts in a Haystack for not reading Plantinga closely enough. Russell Blackford notes that the anti-naturalistic argument actually has a fairly distinguished history, even if "in the end, it's nonsense."

Put in it's simplest terms, Plantinga's argument states that if evolution is true, it might be just as probable that our knowledge of the world is adaptive, but deceptive, as that it is factually accurate. (Just where the probabilities shake out is a matter of some debate that I find subordinate to the main point. To know how likely our vision of the world is, we would have to know what all the alternate possibilities were, which would only be possible from a position of omniscience. Bayesian probability theory is great for engineering; not so great for ontology).

The first problem with Myers' critique that I see is that he wants to put beliefs and behavior in a single category. To behave adaptively (not to walk through fire or sleep with with pit vipers, say) is a different thing than to have beliefs about that behavior, which could (and do, historically) vary widely and still be consistent with it. Even the behemoth of a belief that stands astride this argument (that there is a god, or that there isn't) doesn't radically divide people into two opposing behavioral camps on the question of survival. We shouldn't let yesterday's tragedy in Wichita obscure from view that most theists are not murderers, nor the recent drama over Daniel Hauser's cancer treatment that most theists want full, healthy lives for themselves and their children. For the majority of decisions we would call adaptive, theists and naturalists can be expected to act in more or less the same fashion (and it is important to note that one variant of non-adaptive behavior--self sacrifice--is the hallmark of moral behavior under most belief systems, with the notable exception of Existentialism.) [In making comments on this topic, which are always welcome, please consider whether your objection to this idea is scientific or merely anecdotal].

No less a prominent naturalist than Richard Dawkins has observed, picking up a thread from the early 2oth century geneticist JBS Haldane, that what we perceive is conditioned by our evolutionary experience:

"Really" is not a word we should use with simple confidence. "Really" is whatever [an organism's] brain needs it to be in order to assist its survival. And because different species live in different worlds, there [is] a discomfiting variety of “reallys."

In Haldane's phrase (which Dawkins employs as the title of the talk from which this quote is culled) the universe is "queerer than we can suppose." Dawkins is aware of the full context of Haldane's quote (in which Haldane ponders what it's like to be a barnacle long before Nagel wondered what it was like to be a bat, as Dawkins references in his book The Ancestor's Tale) but it is not surprising that he omits it:

Our only hope of understanding the universe is to look at as many points of view as possible. This is one of the reasons why the data of the mystical consciousness can usefully supplement the mind in its normal state. Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.

"Mystical data" aside, for the moment, Dawkins could hardly have put Plantinga's argument more elegantly than he did in "Queerer than we can Suppose." If the very organs we rely on for our discernment were crafted by a process with no interest in truth or reality--as such--except as they pertained to a given problem in a given moment in evolutionary time, to the exclusion of "a discomfiting array of reallys" in each of those moments: then on what grounds can we trust any of our beliefs as being more than merely adaptively contingent?

"Different species live in different worlds," by the way, is a restatement of Jakob von Uexkull's notion of the "Umwelt," or "self-world." The question of how human reason can transcend the cognitive limits of our own biologically engendered worldview is not easily shaken off, as Ernst Cassirer made much of in his work on the philosophy of symbolic forms. Attempts to answer this question have led to a rich and fascinating conversation, which I won't try to summarize here except to say that philosophical naturalism is not known for its fruitful handling of the problem. (Ironically, some of the most robust arguments against such a constraint come from theistic quarters, such as in the work of Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper, in an argument that recapitulates Plato's epistemology).

***

Backing off from all of that, for the moment (I sometimes think that life is too short for epistemology), I want to breifly re-approach the question of anti-naturalism from an ethical perspective. In 1957, Iris Murdoch asked in an essay called "Metaphysics and Ethics" the following difficult question: if we deny a "transcendent non-empirical framework wherein morality is to find its place" (referring to either religious or Idealist transcendence), and we recognize logically that "you can't derive 'ought' from 'is'," then what is left to be the source of our moral systems? (Mill's utilitarianism suffers right off the bat from the fallacy that "what is desired is ipso facto what ought to be desired.")

This is a far more important question, to my mind, then whether philosophical naturalism paints a sufficiently accurate picture of the world in the limited sense that emerges in squabbles of the kind here between Plantinga and Myers (or Dennett, who debated Plantinga at the American Philosophical Association this February). What is needed is a commitment to metaphysics, which includes not just an ontological description of the world, but of our place in it and relation to it. After all, what good is epistemological accuracy if it proves our ruin? Folk-science couldn't have cured polio, perhaps, or sent rockets to the moon, but neither could it have engineered nuclear weaponry or accelerated global climate change. Does the state of the world today indicate that we are wise enough for the kind of knowledge and power that naturalism bequeaths, and if not, where is the location of such a wisdom? Right now the only people even attempting to "positively" map the ethical world are theists and a few odd Randian objectivists. Most so-called naturalists seem to have given up the venture altogether, which doesn't leave us with very promising choices.

Link Roundup, Self-Promotional Edition

Posting will remain light over the next week or so, but here are some links to some of the better Underverse pieces from the last year that you may have missed the first time around. Remember, it's never too late to leave a comment! Meanwhile, keep your RSS aggregators running; there will be more soon.

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On Walking and Chewing Gum (April 25, 2009)

An example of the kind of "Chamberlainist musings" John Wilkins was talking about, in response to what seems to be a near hysterical response by biologist Jerry Coyne, and others, to the National Academy of Sciences' reassurance that belief in evolution and belief in religious doctrine need not be hostile to each other.

Aromatica (April 2, 2009)

A follow up to my review of Denis Dutton's the Art Instinct which examines the question of why there is (yet) no language of smell. This is also a companion piece to a posting from March 2008 about the way our descriptions and experiences of the world are interdependent, which I have lightly revised and retitled: Who Is the Master that Makes Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously?

Sticks and Stones (February 16, 2009)

A three-part meditation on Islamophobia, and the non-omnipotence of freedom of speech. Parts 2 and 3 are here, and here.

Just a Fluke (January 17, 2009)

The problem with "memes." Self awarded my own "Well Met, Fellow" award. A companion piece to:

Everything That Is the Case (December 21, 2008)

which is about, among other things, how Richard Dawkins is really a Pythagorean.

That almost takes us back (if you exclude, as I do, the hackish and forgettable political writing I did during the 2008 POTUS campaign) to the Great Excitement of 2008:

The Lout's Complaint (May 28, 2008)

This was my response to PZ Myers' know-nothing essay on why specific theological doctrine is irrelevant to him, as an atheist, "The Courtier's Reply." This got linked to over at Pharyngula and Richard Dawkins.net, leading to an enjoyable hubub in comments.

Enjoy in good health and clarity.

Note: Shirts and Skins

I might have been clearer in my last post about one thing: Even the theorists and writers in biology that I most admire (those, for example coming out of the organismic or "systems" tradition like Brian Goodwin and Stuart Kaufmann, and the revolutionary generation that preceded them of C.H. Waddington, Paul Weiss, and Ludwig Bertalanffy) must resort to discussion of "information" in their theories. Even Rupert Sheldrake--who I admire for his temperament and learning but whose ideas about morphic fields I don't necessarily subscribe to--reserves an important role for information in his theories. They are all, more or less*, dualists--hylomorphists--who need a mechanism to impart form to matter, which would not know what to do with itself left to its own devices.

This is not a problem for me, as far as it goes. A lot can be accomplished in a world that assumes a metaphysical form-substance dualism. My purpose here is (1) to name it for what it is: the smuggling in of "mind" by another name, and (2) to ask what a science that operated within an alternative metaphysical scheme (for example, where matter is just the appearance of form (Buddhism) or nature is self-directing (Taoism) might look like. I'll try to have something intelligent to say about the latter within the next couple of days.

--

*An exception might be Joseph Needham, but I would need to read more by him (which I hope to) to say this with any conviction.

And now we enter into some really fucking thorny territory.

For John Wilkins

Orthodox, contemporary science has drawn, over the last century or so, a picture of itself that rejects a dualism between the "natural" and "supernatural," or, in more general terms, matter and mind. This is the doctrine of physicalism, sometimes also called naturalism, (though as I've written elsewhere there are alternate definitions of naturalism that contain both objective and subjective--and even both real and unreal--subcategories.) By saying there is only one type of thing--the physical entity describable by science--physicalism aspires to a kind of philosophical monism.

But immediately upon having done so it must smuggle in another type of thing: information, which is really just mind by another name. This is especially true in biology, where the chemical rudiments that make up life are considered inert and passive, until given instructions on how to order themselves, in the form of DNA. Information is a tricky kind of thing. Much like God or other supernatural agents, it cannot be directly observed. It has no physical existence; it only has what philosophers call "intensional" existence--which is to say meaning--projected onto it by an observer.

Information, then, serves the same function as the deposed Mind, without needing recourse to a "first cause." It has no origin, not even "natural selection," because it precedes life itself. The array of atoms in a single crystal of quartz provides the information, as the crystal "grows," new atoms need to order themselves. And within atoms themselves, there is abundant "quantum information," communicating whatever it is that subatomic particles need to know.

Like the dream where we "awaken" only to realize that we are still in another layer of dream, physicalism can only pretend to be free of dualism. Rejecting Mind--Descartes' bedeviled res cogitans--is only half the way there. As long as physicalism clings to the notion of res extensa--"matter"--dumb, passive and inert like the clay of the potter, it will continue to require some entity or force to move and shape that matter, like the potter does the clay. But nothing is more sacred to the sciences at the present moment than the notion of physical matter; especially in the life sciences. Without matter, the very substrate of physicalism dissolves away.

One area where this causes particular problems is in the study of biological development, where information theory has to resort to some fairly dodgy recursions. For example, in the nuclei of all the differentiated cells of a vertebrate--liver, bone, muscle, neuron--lie the same genes. How do these cells "know" what proteins to assemble in the differentiation process so that they can be what they are, and not some other kind of cell? How is it that the heart is "made" (a telling figure of speech) of muscle cells, and the femur of bone cells, when each contains the same "blueprint"?

The answer given by contemporary biology is that while genomes remain constant among cells in an organism, their "expressions" differ. Special genes called "regulatory genes" instruct other genes to stay inactive, so that their gene products are not made in the cell. This is a plausible answer, but it raises the question of how the regulatory genes "know" which genes to turn on and off. The standard answer here resorts to an interaction of "networks" and "systems," which, while providing a welcome antidote to reductionism, tends to bury the problem in a near-inscrutable chaos of complexity. On a philosophical level it must be admitted that the "information" model has broken down in this case: the organism begins as a single cell, with a single DNA signature. All "expressions" and "systems" are preceded by the unitary simplicity of this single cell. Where is the "information" that gives rise to all this complexity? Given all the vast potentiality in the genome of an organism (far more than any organism will express in its lifetime), what tells this original single cell to do "this" and not "that," so that two twinned zygotes will have more or less identical form at birth--and beyond?

***

Another way of describing the duality between "matter" and "information" (mind) is the classical distinction, dating back to Aristotle, of substance and form, which we can restate as the effect of mind on matter.

John Wilkins, one of a rare few philosophers of science at the popular ScienceBlogs site, wrote last May on his blog Evolving Thoughts, after observing that this duality owes a specific debt to the metaphor of the ceramics potter:

The basic reason for substance talk is that there needs to be something to bear [...] properties. That is, the reason why those properties are part of that thing and not some other thing with the same properties is that they exist on a different substance..

He went on to argue that "we need to start a new metaphysical set of categories based on (what else?) the best of our current science, not repeat the categories based on the prescientific musings of those who thought knowledge resided in definitions of words." (To John, this "best of our current science" implies atomism, which he defines [in another (excellent and recommended) post] as requiring that "all substrates have innate properties that determine how things that are composed out of them will behave," or, "the properties of the parts fix all the properties of the wholes.")

I suggested to him in comments that he had this process backwards, that scientific inquiry by nature (as a symbolic discourse) must occur within the context of the metaphysical priors which allow it. I apparently failed to comunicate. He responded:

We should start with our best knowledge (i.e., physics) without that baggage because that baggage has only the generation of more problems to recommend it to philosophers and precious little to everyone else.

Perhaps in the year that has passed John can better grok my point, but to breifly recapitulate: The baggage John refers to here is that of concepts, without which: no science, and probably no humanity, generally. To ask for a science without conceptual baggage is to try to bait your hook with the fish you mean to catch. This was Kuhn's fairly modest point in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. We can substitute "metaphysics" for "paradigm" without sacrificing too much subtlety of thought. (John tacitly acknowleges as much when he writes in passing of challenges to "classical" atomism in the development of quantum mechanics in the last century. The great quantum physicists were not coy about their abandonment of the classical notion of physical matter.)

***

Part of our failure to communicate on this may arise from the fact that John seems to want only to allow the two ontological possibilities: hylomorphism or atomism, both of which presuppose a physicalist, billiard-ball type of ontology. In atomism's internal logic inheres the need for a first cause, from which everything since is a traceable effect. Classical atomism just pushes back the substance/form duality to a more primoridial level: there is still a division between properties, and the bearers of those properties. This is a metaphysical stance, which we can more clearly see if we contrast it with ontologies outside the so-called Western tradition; outside, broadly, Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian philosophy.

I am curious to know what a science would look like that is truly non-dual, where nature is not ontologically divided into doers and done-tos, and causes and effects, but is a unity of being, in the traditional Chinese or Taoist sense, where natural events are described in the phrase "wu wei," which we awkwardly translate as "actionless action" or "effortless doing." Numerous philosophers have tried to translate this cosmology into "Western" language--including Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, and countless postmodernists and poststructuralists, but it is the rare translation that doesn't emerge as "pessimism," or as somehow hostile to Western civilization. Need it be?

It gets even thornier when we ask what the implications of such an ontology would be for modern political Liberalism, since so much of our concept of liberty and free will relies upon our sense of individuation and separateness.

But I am scratched enough for now, and these are matters for another day.

The First 60 Days

It's been two months since my review of Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct. He must be giving it a very careful reading. In the meanwhile he has responded at length to Roberto Casati's review at the blog of the International Cognition and Culture Institute. Perhaps he's just replying to his critics in alphabetic order.

The strength of Casati's review is in how it exposes the impoverished and ad-hoc nature of Dutton's definition of art. In order to make the case that art is a biological adaptation, not only does Dutton have reject a lot of legitimate art that can't be explained this way (and, perhaps not coincidentally, that he doesn't like), but he has to smoosh together a lot of works that we all take for granted without defining the common features what makes them great.

The most serious problem with Dutton's definition of art is, to put it bluntly, unashamed normativity. The author is never afraid of selling his personal vision of what art should be like, for a definition of what art really is

Dutton's response is extremely weak, especially in defense of a book that claims to be subjecting art to a rigorous acid test:

I also stand by the cluster definition of art and the perfectly intentional vagueness of how it applies to specific instances: the Mozart 40th Symphony, Groundhog Day, David Copperfield, Les Fleurs du Mal, Pierrot Lunaire, and my favorite episodes of Ren and Stimpy. They are all works of art, but they partake or rely on different items of the list, different aspects of art in general. (my emphasis)

They correspond to "different aspects of art in general," you see, but the reason they are art is not because they do so, but because Dutton says they are. An object or event can meet one or two or five of Dutton's 12 criteria and not be art (a soccer match, to borrow Casati's example), but also need not meet all twelve. Where, then, lies the definition? A scientist or philosopher brings a piece of work to his table, checks it against the list, and when all is said and done still has to ask Denis Dutton whether it is art or not.

Casati is also not happy with Dutton's thesis of "sexual selection" (the peacock feather or "mine is bigger" argument) as the engine of artistic development and preservation. But he does not devote much time to his dismissal, and, if I may invoke the "mine is bigger" argument on my own behalf, I think if you really want to see what is wrong with the sexual selection hypothesis, the line starts here, in my own review. (To be fair, the Washington Post, LA Times, Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, and Philosophy and Literature were not terribly impressed by the sexual selection gambit either).

My remaining hope is that someone with greater blogospheric capital than I will run with the main critique in my review, which is the logical contradiction posed by merging the domains of the biological and the cultural; the "bootstrapping" problem. How can something (art, culture) which is effectively a direct expression of "human nature" also be the evaluator, critic, and foil of that nature? If what we thought was "ought" is really just "is," then where do we turn to when we want to reflect on what might have been, and might yet still be? No serious philosophical discussion of an "art instinct" can omit this question. In Dutton's work it is not to be found.

Welcome Evolving Thoughts Readers

I've been distracted by the month f May and other events, but I'll have some fresh remarks just for you, in nice, tight single single-spacing.

(Thanks to John W. for the link.)

Saturday T'ang Poetry Blogging

Chingting Mountain, Li Bai (3 Translations)


Flocks of birds disappear in the distance
lone clouds wander away
who never tires of my company
only Chingting Mountain

--Red Pine

Flocks of birds have flown high and away
A solitary drift of cloud too has gone wandering on
And I sit alone with the Ching ting Peak towering beyond
We never grow tired of each other the mountain and I

--Shigeyoshi Obata

Flocks of birds fly high and vanish;
A single cloud, alone, calmly drifts on.
Never tired of looking at each other
--
Only the Ching-Ting Mountain and me.

--Irving Y. Lo

Russell Blackford has taken a moment to respond to my last posting over at his place (Thanks, Russell!)

I'm about to have a read. Won't you join me?

Refuting "It," Thus

or, Why I am not a Rationalist

(for Russell Blackford)

Every time we use English (or whatever tongue we may speak) we participate in an enchantment. Under the casual, even flippant definitions currently in use by today's Rationalist Avengers, you could even say that we participate in a religion: in speaking and writing we constantly invoke supernatural entities with apparently unbounded power and presence. The "it" of "it is raining." Is there anything it cannot do, anywhere it cannot be, anything it cannot know? And yet this "it" has no actual discernible existence. It is a phantom, one that we can't stop talking about.

This presents a problem for the insistence, prominent of late, that one can discern the beliefs and dispositions of a mind based upon the texts it uses. Are we all, then, "barking mad?"

English, in particular, is also constructed so that we are dedicated to expressing a particular ontology, or metaphysics, wherein we distinguish between an actor and an act in any given observation. That is to say, in the world, at any given moment, there are discrete "things" that can be found "doing" (or not doing) certain activities, or "having" certain properties. In linguistics this is called subject-predicate structure.

The "it" in "it is raining" is a bookkeeping trick devised to split the event of "raining" into subject and predicate, so it is grammatically expressible. The antecedent of "it" is the rain itself. The antecedent of "it" in the the phrase "it is hot today" is "hot." Translated: rain is raining. Hotness is hotting.

We can avoid the phantom "it" that is raining, and the silly redundancy of rain raining and hot hotting by saying instead "rain is falling," or "rain falls." But what we still have not avoided, and cannot avoid so long as we persist in speaking grammatically, is the division of the rain event into our noun-verb clause, which our English grammar will not allow us to abrogate.

To say, then, that "rain is falling" is to denote a "thing," rain, that has the property of falling or not-falling at any given moment in time; the connotation is that there "is," on a sunny day, "rain not-falling." We might ask, without necessarily meaning to lapse into the idiom of the koan, what is the nature of rain when "it" is not raining? (Or, to borrow an example from philosopher Suzanne Langer, where does the red glow of hot iron "go" when we cool it down to room temperature?)

That language involves reification (at least in English) isn't any kind of deep secret. The noun spell, as in something a witch or wizard might place us under, has the same root as the verb "spell" that indicates we are constructing words. The very act of making words, or employing language, is an enchantment--we're just so accustomed to doing it (we're such accomplished magicians!) that we cannot see what we are doing for what it is.

***

There's an objection to this line of thinking, and it's not a bad one. One is likely to hear it expressed today in terms of an air disaster: if all the apparent world is just a collection of dreams and illusions, in what do we place our confidence when we book seats on a 747? But the argument is much older than jet planes. Sam Johnson said it most pithily, responding to Bishop Berkekey's "immaterialism": I refute it thus!

Or did he? Note what Johnson did not say. He did not tell Boswell, in words, that Berkelean idealism can be falsified by a palpable action in the physical world, such as stone-kicking, which has the clear and reliable effect of moving the stone a certain predictable distance (calculable by Netwonian means), and raising a blister or bruise on one's leading toe. He didn't really say anything at all. He refused discourse altogether, choosing to answer outside of language, outside of the spell. His "thus," here, bears a family resemblance to the Sanskrit concept "Tat," a cognate of our own "that," indicating Being or "suchness." In Wittgensteinian terms, of that which he could not speak, he passed over in silence. But the refutation was still made, and we remember it today, even if often misunderstand it.

***

The spell that today's rationalists and naturalists choose to cast upon themselves has its own special name: the Ionian Enchantment (coined by physicist Gerald Holton , and employed, without irony, by such prominent a figure as biologist E.O. Wilson, in his book "Consilience.") In Wilson's words, the Ionian Enchantment is "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." I don't relate this fact to belittle or diminish this particular spell, merely to observe that it is one. In more vernacular terms, the Ionian Enchantment is referred to as reductionism. As its defenders and practitioners are quick to point out, reductionism works--if by "works" we mean that our airliners go from place to place without incident, with enough reliability to make it a worthwhile endeavor.

But this is a definition that is built into the question. Within it is embedded the supposition that technology makes our lives better. How do we know? Because it manifestly makes our lives "better," where "better" is defined as the thing that technology does.

I do not write against jet planes as such. I am not mounting a Luddite argument, which after all would be the same as the technocratic argument, just backwards. Rejecting technology wholesale is the same as embracing it wholesale. In neither case do we ask any hard questions about value, or meaning. Returning for a moment to the Richard Dawkins quotation that I cited in a prefatory posting, he writes (I have substituted one word):

If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of metaphysicians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar-guided whaling vessels work! The achievements of metaphysicians don't do anything, don't affect anything, don't mean anything.

The word I substituted was "metaphysicians," for "theologians." The latter are simply a subset of the former, and it's important here not to get distracted by questions of Christian theology. Metaphysics is something we all have to contend with, being the study (or lack thereof) of the phantoms in our language that I began this post discussing. So long as we use language we are committing to some kind of spell. Are we to be the enchanters or the enchanted? An active examination of metaphysics would favor the former option. The philosophy of reductionism strongly militates for the latter. Ever since the logical positivists of the early 20th century, who strove to trade only in "verifiable" assertions, metaphysics has been said to be moribund. If something is not demonstrable true, argued the positivists, it is meaningless--a position we might characterize as fully enchanted, since it confuses statements about the world--language--for the world itself. "The map for the territory," in Korzybski's analogy. Once we jettison metaphysics, the map-making ends, and we must get by with what we have, however tattered, or inaccurate, whatever the distortions of its projections.

Dawkins' brief against theology, above, is a perfect totem for this view. It is an epic feat of question begging: if there were no technology, there would be no technology, and, since we begin from the stance that a world without technology would be terrible, wouldn't that be terrible? It's harder to parodize Dawkins' view of theology, since he himself isn't very clear what theology is. To Dawkins, theology is a long and pointless exercise in the generation of false and groundless truth claims, thankfully obviated by the discovery of science. But if we recognize that theology is a subset of metaphysics (without, it is important to remember, actually endorsing any particular theological stance, Christian or otherwise), it becomes something slightly less pointless, and far more essential: it becomes the stance from which we order the world around us.

Remove "the achievements of theology" from history, then, and see how many of "the achievements of scientists" are left standing. We would surely "notice" the absence of Newton (there go all the 747s). The loss of Descartes, and Bacon, would inflict a terrible blow on scientific methodology, making medical science all but impossible. We would also lose the Universal Rights of "Man," which first appeared in our history in a theological context. (Those rationalist philosophers, such as A.C. Grayling, who like to argue that contemporary science and ethics are of a direct lineage back to the Golden Age of Greece, where Abrahamic theology has never been more than a harrying, antagonistic influence, are not so good at connecting the dots on this score). This is not to say that our modern naturalistic worldview could never have emerged had it not been for our European theological past. But neither have we any grounds for saying with any certainty that it would. We cannot know; the histories are inseparable, and there are no covering laws of cultural evolution that demonstrate a path from an alternate Point Then to Point Now.

***

In many cases the theological influences on naturalism are quite stark. This is something that comes into more visible relief only when we compare the metaphysics of naturalism and Abrahamic theology, as contrasted with non-dualist metaphysics, such as we find in East and South Asia (Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism) and in countless "spirit" religions in pre-Christian Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Alan Watts has observed that the naturalist view of the Cosmos as a machine is simply Deism with God removed--the "fully automatic model." But this model is neither neutral nor objective. God was not simply the last bit of residue obstructing a clear view of reality. The fully automatic model retains all the features of the Abrahamic model save the supernatural elements, most notably the dualistic separation of man and nature. This has led to a perceived hostility of "nature" toward those who inhabit the world (us), such that the modern scientific "enterprise" treats the Cosmos as something suspect, to be controlled if not outright dominated--and as though we were not part and parcel of this very same natural world. As though, in fact, we had some other origin, and some purpose at odds with the (base, nefarious) purposes of nature. It is a palpably Christian, teleological way of looking at things.

The dualism of "us" versus "our environment" runs through all the sciences (even, ironically, environmental science), and we see it nowhere more clearly than in our apparent inability to treat anything as "sacred" except our own, inevitably transient, concerns: chiefly, food, property, longevity, physical health. These are the implicit ends of Dawkins' defense of technology, above. And they are not in themselves bad things; but for how much longer can we quarantine them from the reality of our placement in the wholeness of the world? Modern agriculture and transport, in particular, have brought our planet to the brink of cataclysm. It's unbearably sick, today, as no one who concerns herself to pay attention can deny. Computers are interesting, and useful, but was the world a worse place before their development, a less "meaningful" place? How do we reconcile their inherent obsolescence, and disposibility with the relative fragility of our environment? On what altar is all of our technological development to be placed, when it has not shown the slightest signs of being harmonious with the actual world we inhabit? Has anyone in the party of the Ionian Enchantment even paused to ask these questions?

***

In economic terms, this kind of fragmentation affords us a special bucket labeled "externalities." Externalities are just a polite code-word for pollution, which is to say they were never all that external to begin with. They were a bookkeeping trick, and a fairly stupid one, even in economic terms, for being so penny-wise and pound-foolish. What is the point of being rich, when all one has to spend one's money on is poisoned water and air, ravaged vistas, and the increasing impossiblity of avoiding the din of our own endless chatter? We have to suspect again, that some kind of spell is in effect, an enchantment that "where we shit" and "where we eat" are two separate, ontologically distinct domains. It is a rather foolish thing to believe, and while we may forgive ourselves this foolishness as an inescapable side effect of our being human, it might, we hope, move us to adopt a kind of compassionate humility that would restrain us from casting other people's delusions as so much more ridiculous than ours. To invite another koan, Kettle, Unblacken Thyself!

[I cannot resist quoting, for example, eminent rationalist philosopher A.C. Grayling, [via Quodlibeta], reminding us of how craven, dim, and ill-mannered are those religious adherents who deign to walk the same sidewalk as respectable citizens (my emphasis):

Of course the point is that Beale-Polkinghorne and their tuppence-halfpenny religious publishers wish to get as much of the respectability of the Royal Society rubbed off on them as they can. This is the strategy adopted by the Templeton Foundation too, of sidling up to proper scientists and scientific establishments and getting their sticky religious fingers on to respectable coat-sleeves in the hope of furthering their agenda - which, to repeat what must endlessly be repeated in these circumstances, is to have the superstitious lucubrations of illiterate goatherds living several thousand years ago given the same credibility as contemporary scientific research.

Whatever the merits of Grayling's position, dressing it up in the language of the caste system would not seem to be lending it any support.

***

There is nothing wrong with Dawkins, Grayling, or anyone else, putting forth that something works on its own terms, be it science, rationality, naturalism, or reductionism. The problem arises when we pretend there is no longer any possible conversation about what those terms are, or could be; that we have no ability, let alone duty, to evaluate--assign value to--the language and ideas that underlie all formal thought. Rationalists argue that this should only be done on a rational basis. Steven Pinker, for example, writing at edge.org (in support of biologist Jerry Coyne's recent jeremiad against "accommodation" of religion,) writes, paradoxically:

Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.

But can one submit reason to reason? Can one justify use of reason, on reasonable grounds? Can reason, in effect, be both premise and conclusion? This is the place where logic meets the mobius strip, the ouroboros, and "turtles all the way down." Reason itself relies on first principles, of which we are often only dimly aware (and often seem "arbitrary" from other vantage points). It has no independent power to anchor our symbolic understanding of the world absolutely or objectively. To fail to see this is to give up the chase too soon. This sort of meta-rationalism leads Pinker down some very strange rabbit holes, as when he writes, later in the passage:

Moral systems depend on factual beliefs, informed by psychology and biology, about what makes human beings suffer or prosper.

And here we reach into our bag of consolation prizes. To not see that prosperity, or any other moral good we might imagine, can be multiply--perhaps even infinitely--defined, is to come again under the full weight of the rationalist enchantment--to fail to see that we can participate in that defining process, and find out just how much dynamism there is still to be experienced in this life. Or, we can continue along being court stenographers to a dying world.

Preface to a forthcoming post

The great world religions aren’t mainly about literal belief in stories you might read in a book of fairy tales. Instead, they’re primarily about promulgating a holistic worldview and way of life infused with the sense that there’s something beyond the empirical skin of the world, something deeply important with which we can forge a relationship. They teach us that when we do so, our lives will be richer and our character better. At their root, the stories and teachings and injunctions of a religion aim to bring about a transformation in believers, one in which the believers’ lives are informed by a relational connection to an Ultimate Reality that transcends them.

That, put simply, is what religion is about. It’s not about believing that talking snakes or flying horses are real—even if, sometimes, the adherents to a religion insist they are. Even among those who believe that religious stories are historical facts and not just myths, there is also an affirmation that the story is more about theology than about history. The story is remembered because it means something.

--"Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?" by Eric Reitan, at religiondispatches.org.

If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar-guided whaling vessels work! The achievements of theologians don't do anything, don't affect anything, don't mean anything. What makes anyone think that "theology" is a subject at all?

--"The Emptiness of Theology," by Richard Dawkins, at richarddawkins.net.

On walking and chewing gum

Is being trustful "compatible" with being mistrustful? How about being thrifty with being freewheeling? Being happy with being sad, or being angry with being vulnerable? Honest with dishonest?

To the extent we answer no, that these things are not compatible, we mean that they are so not within a single moment or circumstance. We don't mean that operating on one side of these polarities precludes us from later occupying the other, perhaps much sooner than we would expect. In fact it is widely considered the soul of wisdom that we must embody these various states of being as best fits our circumstances at any given moment: intimate and vulnerable in bed with our beloved, for example, but guarded and defensive on a dark unfamiliar street, alone. Or even: guarded and defensive with our beloved if our intimacy takes an unexpected, threatening turn.

Such things are so basic and self evident it would seem needless to type them. But such is the state of our present discourse on the alleged conflict between "science and religion" that when our most learned academics hold forth on the subject they cannot seem to keep in mind this basic mutability or modal aspect of our being as human persons in the world. And so when they ask if religion and science are "compatible" they do not mean it in the way we would when we ask if drinking and driving are compatible, but rather as though an answer of "no" meant that one can choose to drive in this life, or to drink, but not both: one cannot "be" a both a Drinker and Driver.

We can characterize this position as intractable and adamantine. What has made it so? There is a myth at the heart of the orthodox scientific worldview that the discovery of the scientific method has obviated the need for what we commonly call "faith," (in scare quotes because it is a word that may be beyond our rehabilitation). Here's a clarifying example from the blog of biologist Massimo Pigliucci:

But Massimo, people usually ask me whenever the f-word is brought up, don’t you have faith in anything? Nope, I say, a denial that is immediately met with both bewilderment and commiseration. Don’t I have faith in my wife, for example? No, I trust her because I know her and know that she loves me. What about faith in humanity, considering that I profess to be a secular humanist? No, I have hope for the human lot, and even that is seriously tempered by my awareness of its less than stellar record throughout history.

There are a couple of interesting moves here. First, note his substitution of faith with trust: "Don’t I have faith in my wife, for example? No, I trust her..." Is there a significant difference? Don't both words imply an emotional investment in the absence of certainty? Aren't both words profoundly unscientific? Pigliucci's sentence resolves itself as follows: "...because I know her and know she loves me."

What is the nature of this knowledge? Has he ascertained her love via experiment, exposed it to skepticism and scrutiny, compared it in controlled fashion to the "null hypothesis" that she does not in fact love him? One suspects not, that his "trust" is the expression of a reliability determined by other, nonscientific means.

The reason that Pagliucci feels entitled to make a distinction between trust and faith lies in a supposed doctrinal element of "religious" faith that it be maintained in a vacuum devoid of corroboration. And there is some justification for this, though we might want to segregate this meaning into the narrower term "blind faith." Broadly speaking, faith need not be blind: a "faithful" dog may seem unaccountably loyal, but if we starve and beat him we will find the limits of it. A faithful spouse will only put up with so much abandonment or abuse, and many a devout believer has found the events of the world so horrific, as with the holocaust, to necessitate the severing of relations.

But even "blind" faith cannot be written off as pure foolishness. It has a function, and a pragmatic one at that. Our senses will decieve us, and things are not always as they appear. In this context, faith in the absence of "evidence" can actually work to dispel illusions, rather than perpetuate them. Consider any number of scenes from the spy film genre, where true loyalties are only revealed after a necessary leap of faith.

We might make similar remarks about his strange use of the word "hope." Wouldn't the fact that his hope for humanity is "tempered" by his understanding of history imply some kind of dialectical opposition between the two? But none of this is meant to argue in favor of specific faith in anything, especially not religious faith. It is meant only to point out the logical distortion upon which the generic argument against faith rests, one that derives from a myth of scientific omnicompetance. Only with a naive romanticization of empirical knowledge can we say that we have put beside all need for faith in our lives.

And so back to compatibility.

The biologist Jerry Coyne (whose newest book is titled "Why Evolution is True") has been campaigning against "accomodationism," which is his world for the acknowledgment that one can hold dear both science and religion without one's head exploding. (link via Russell Blackford, via John Wilkins)

Coyne takes the National Academy of Sciences to task for making the relatively innocuous statement that not all religious denominations have an internal metaphysical conflict with evolutionary biology.

When a professional organization makes such strong statements about the compatibility of science and faith, and ignores or gives but a polite nod to the opposing view, that organization is endorsing a philosophy. This goes beyond saying that evolution is true. The NAS is saying that most religious people and scientists have no problem with evolution and faith. (my emphasis in bold)

Strong statements? Well, judge for yourself. Here's the text from the NAS website that Coyne cites:

Acceptance of the evidence for evolution can be compatible with religious faith. Today, many religious denominations accept that biological evolution has produced the diversity of living things over billions of years of Earth’s history. Many have issued statements observing that evolution and the tenets of their faiths are compatible. Scientists and theologians have written eloquently about their awe and wonder at the history of the universe and of life on this planet, explaining that they see no conflict between their faith in God and the evidence for evolution. Religious denominations that do not accept the occurrence of evolution tend to be those that believe in strictly literal interpretations of religious texts. (my emphasis in bold)

The NAS has chosen a certain emphasis (that we might negatively characterize as a "bias" if we wanted to evade the fact that we all have them) toward common ground between two important groups. Coyne oddly wants to paint this as an ideological move, though it much less an expression of systematic thought than his own view that religion is "inherently dangerous." This is a view he's welcome to, though his readers may, in time, come to wonder why his argument for the virtue of empiricism and against he vice of faith relies almost entirely upon the latter, with only the smokiest invocations of the former.

Another translation

Winding River (2)
--Tu Fu

I come back from the court each day and pawn some spring clothing,
Every day I return to the river as drunk as I can be.
I have many debts for wine all over the place,
For men to live to seventy has always been unusual.
I see the butterflies go deeper and deeper between the flowers,
And dragonflies in leisured flight between drops of water.
As we're told, passing time is always on the move,
So little time to know each other: we should not be apart.

(Steven Owen, trans.)

Wednesday T'ang Poetry Blogging

While Drinking at Chiuchang Waterway (II)

--Tu Fu

Every day after court I pawn my Spring clothes
every day from the waterway I come home drunk
wherever I go I owe money for wine
but living until 70 has always been rare
butterflies float half-seen among the flowers
dragonflies flit here and there across the water
I urge you to flow with the wind and light
enjoy your time together and don't fight

(Red Pine, trans.)

Aromatica: To smell the world (again!) in a grain of sand

Those two red tubules above are the olfactory bulbs. They're in yer brainstem, sorting yer aromas. But can they has Art?

***

If the sages of Evolutionary Psychology are correct to propose that human culture is an adaptation to the allures and terrors of our distant stone age past, then we might conclude that history, or at least art history, is over. Denis Dutton suggests that it just might be, when he writes that “every known medium that can be manipulated, utilized or adapted to the basic requirements of an art form has already been turned toward making art.” If you were hopefully expectant about the possibility of an olfactory art, a “symphony of smells,” this is especially bad news for you. Sure, “academic theorists” might not have given up the ghost, but the rest of us might as well. We have been given our sandbox to play in, and our “known mediums.” To inquire about other possibilities would just be churlish at this “late stage.”

This wouldn't seem to give modern-day artists much to do. We can't just go out and copy The Mass in C, or the Aeneid, or the View of Delft. Dutton has taken pains in The Art Instinct to show that forgery, however impeccable, has no enduring social value. Whatever it gains through its impressive skill displays, it loses right away by lacking “authenticity,” which evolution has “destined us to want” from the arts. So what then, if we can't move forward and can't go back?

***

One thing the newly idle artist class might do is ruminate on this idea of “known mediums.” What does it mean? Umberto Eco observed in his early critiques of Marshall McLuhan that the word “medium” is one of those seemingly concrete common-sense terms whose center does not hold under any serious scrutiny. What is the “medium” that is “The Message” translated into, say, communications theory? Is it the signal itself? The channel? The code? Eco observes that light can be a “medium” of communication in a least three ways: as a signal (as with the electromagnetic impulses of Morse code), as a semantic message (where leaving the light on in a bedroom window might mean one's husband has gone out), or as a channel (without which one cannot read in the dark.) The distinctions matter, and Eco asks us to consider the repercussions if

my girlfriend uses light as a signal to transmit in Morse code the message “my husband is home,” but I continue to refer to our previously established code whereby “light” indicates “husband absent.”

What, then, our newly unemployed artist class might ask, is the “medium” of literature? They will certainly come up with a different answer than someone who asked the same question immediately before the invention of writing, of printing, of braille, of "books on tape," or most recently the Amazon Kindle. If we asked what is the characteristic medium of literature, we might get an interesting answer, especially if we asked Helen Keller.

***

To understand better why, for example, the Tale of Genji, can be "told" with laryngular vibrations, analog or digital recordings of those vibrations, blobs of ink, pixels of light, or patterns of bumps against one's fingertips, or with mixed media like opera and shadow puppet shows--but not, to date, in smells--we have to look a little closer at the nature of symbolic communication.

A symbol is more than just a sign. All organisms, including plants, interpret and respond to signs in some fashion. A sign is an equivalence: if a bell is ringing, it "means" my dinner must be ready. If a butterfly has a certain pattern on its back, it "means" it's bitter to eat. A sign's intrinsic meaning is only what an organism has reliably "learned" it to mean ("learning," here, should be read to include not just that of an individual, but also of a species, through genetically coded instincts.)

A symbol on the other hand, does not denote a thing, but rather the concept of a thing. A slithering in the grass might indicate a snake. But the word "snake" only indicates the concept. Unless you have PTSD, you are probably not now searching around your feet to ensure that it is snake-free, just because I have written, and you have read, the word s-n-a-k-e.

As far as we know, only humans can reliably create and manipulate symbols, though there is evidence that some Great Apes and other mammals can be taught to use them in rudimentary form. When animals, such as trained pets, respond to words, they do so as signs. When we say "dinner" or "walk" to the dog, the dog will begin to anticipate the expected dinner or walk. He will not contemplate the different dinners he has had in the past, or consider what route the dog-walk will take today. To a dog trained to respond to the word "snake," the sentences "Snakes! Oh my God, snakes!" and "Don't be silly, there haven't been any snakes on this island for thousands of years!" have the same content and meaning. We can contrast signs and symbols by associating them, respectively, with reaction, on the one hand, and contemplation on the other. Cultural forms, then: language, art, myth and religion, science and philosophy--are constructed primarily from symbols.

A crucial step in the development of a symbol is that whatever meaning it might have had as a sign needs to be effaced: We aren't free to contemplate a concept if we are still reacting to the object of that concept. "Language begins," writes Ernst Cassirer, "only where our immediate relation to [sansation] ceases." Human language, for example, is famously derived from babble. Our vocalizaitions with the greatest signal meaning, like gasps and shrieks, have not evolved into meaningful words. Conversely, languages must be learned because most words and phenomes have no innate signal function. To make the journey from sign to symbol, a unit of meaning must pass through a period of meaningless play.

The recognition of this can lead in innumerable fruitful directions. But sticking to the problem of how we might manipulate scents symbolically toward a future "symphony of smells," the question arises, if language comes from babble, art from doodling, music from humming or yodeling, sculpture from whittling, what activity would a neutral repository of smells arise from?

The closest thing to casual "play" with aromas that comes to my mind is perfumery. While there is still a lot of signaling that underlies the aesthetics of perfume and cologne, from the promise of sex, to the neutering of that promise, the enormous technical development and innovation in scent synthesis and individuation has at least begun to create a rich "alphabet" which could plausibly be used to make aromatic nonsense with. The expense of creating and maintaining this alphabet would prohibitive, especially because non-directed scent-play rules out any possibility of recouping ones investment. And it remains to be seen whether such a self-conscious and impatient culture as ours could ever really let go of the signal content of scents. Our sense of smell may be our most visceral, especially in its link to memory, and discovering olfactory elements that we can reliably detect but which carry no more meaning or significance than the color red, or the B below Middle C seems to me a daunting prospect.

In other words I am, like Dutton, "an olfactory art" skeptic. But unlike Dutton I try not to imagine that I can imagine our cultural future by projecting forward an Aesthetics-To-Date, which is bound to be out of date before the ink dries. And what's more, I don't think we're just talking about aesthetics, here. Art, like language and myth, is instrumental to how we know--how we see, hear, feel and even smell--the world. Art is every bit as subject to "progress" as science is held to be, and probably even more primary. Who knows what a symphony of smells might teach us, that we would otherwise never know?

Blogging The Art Instinct, Part 2: The There That Wasn't There

The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton. Bloomsbury Press. 278 pages.

[Note: this is the main course. The appetizer may be found here, the first course here, and the fingerbowl here. Save room for dessert.]

At the end of the introduction to The Art Instinct, Dutton sets himself a curious task. Having established that art is a phenomenon arising from a "universal aesthetic" that has been endowed in us by our genes, he then announces that the purpose of his book is to argue that art is actually the force that liberates us from biological imperatives: "The arts set us above the very instincts that make them possible." He illustrates his stance with the scene from The African Queen where Charlie attempts to justify his drunken fatalism with an invocation to "human nature." Replies Rose: "Human Nature is what we were put on this earth to rise above, Mr. Allnut." Comments Dutton: "This book is on the side of Rose's famous retort."

This may be the most essential statement Dutton makes in the book, as it acknowledges an intrinsic tension between nature and culture that has occupied moral theorists throughout human history. It is also a signal to the skeptical reader that Dutton does not intend to sidestep some of the thornier problems, both ethical and logical, that might arise from a thesis that Art--the apotheosis of culture--is in fact thoroughly biological.

Strangely, in the ten chapters that follow, Dutton never offers a mechanism through which Art's cultural bootstrapping would be possible. In fact, having raised the conundrum, he does not so much as allude to it again. When Richard Dawkins was famously presented with a similar problem in The Selfish Gene in 1976, he took the matter seriously enough to develop a Theory of Memes in his final chapter to keep separate the "ought"of nurture from the "is" of nature. As problematic as this theory was and is, it had the virtue of approaching the charge of Social Darwinism head on. The glaring flaw in Dutton's work is that it cannot do even this. Dutton cannot show how, if culture is instinct, it is so successful at sublimating and otherwise blunting our instinctual nature. He can barely sustain his recognition of this as the paradox that it is; the reader will not encounter this problem again.

The tension between is and ought is where most of the interesting questions about human nature have come from--notwithstanding Dutton's neglect of the issue--and surely a good part of the remainder of our interest comes from the related issue of agency: to what extent are we actors in our own drama, and to what extent puppets? Quite extraordinarily for a professor of philosophy, Dutton doesn't show much interest in this question either. He pauses, in a late passage, to note that our sense organs can consistently lead us to error, as with the Mueller-Lyer illusion, which cannot seem to teach ourselves to overcome. And yet: we are aware that it is an illusion, even if our eyes are not. As Jerry Fodor puts it,

The moon looks bigger when it’s on the horizon; but I know perfectly well it’s not. My visual perception module gets fooled, but I don’t. The question is: who is this I?

Even if our tastes and inclinations are instinctual, then, including perhaps a preference for blue or for "moderately complex" landscapes, does it follow that our consciously created works are fastened to these same instincts? Dutton is interested in this question to the extent that it seems to rescue the author from Barthes' (supposed) attempt to kill him off, and the New Critics' (supposed) interest in marginalizing his role. He champions the I-as-author just long enough to fend off cultural relativism; satisfied that he has done so he returns to his baseline position that the real "author" is the genome.

For example, Dutton suggests that if the intention of the author were not relevant, we could easily ascribe an earnestly schlocky book like Jonathan Livingston Seagull the same ironic function as a masterpiece by Swift, since doing so would paint it in a better light. (We might respond that the mission of art criticism is not to burnish the value of the largest possible number of works, but rather to investigate the success of each work on its merits. Richard Bach's book is not significantly less forgettable even if we read it as satire). Just three pages later, however, we find an examination of the greatness of Pride and Prejudice on the grounds of "innate, spontaneous, Pleistocene values and attitudes." The author suddenly has very little to do with it. In fact, the words "Jane Austen" appear only in passing, at the end of the segment. Whatever her "intentions" in writing the book, they would seem to be helplessly servile before her stone age-forged genome.

***

Neither does Dutton distinguish between the aesthetic forms that come upon us in the shape of reveries, fantasies, tastes, and passions, and the forms we consciously and painstakingly sculpt and fashion--often to try to make some sense of the former. But how can any serious discussion of art avoid this distinction? All definitions of art are probably destined to fail, but surely one mark of true art (unremarked by Dutton) is that it transcends the personal needs of the artist. This is not to say that none of the artist's needs are met in the work's creation and reception; it is merely to say that they are not primary, and this throws a very large and well-tempered wrench into Darwinian logic. This is is the element that divides art from fantasy. We are driven by one, but truly moved only by the other. Whatever else it contains, good art must be a vehicle for love, and for sacrifice, in the truest sense (that is, not in the sense of a mask for some more ontologically real "selfishness.") Real art cannot be uncoupled from its social function as a gift. In the words of David Foster Wallace^[1], good art requires "the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved."

Concerns such as these should have given any thoughtful writer pause before speculating on the role of "sexual selection" in art, where the "skill display" and ornamentation of a work communicate the (generally male) artist's genetic fitness to potential (generally female) mates. I don't mean to impugn Dutton's intelligence here. Rather I think the explanation lies in the incredible seductive power of pseudo-Darwinian myth. Seductive, largely, because it seems to grant permission to turn away from the very difficult problems of ethics and agency, diverting our focus from what we can and may do, to what has been, and what is being done to us^[2]. It is that myth generally, not Denis Dutton's specific version of it, that motivates my response.

***

There is, to be fair, a way in which Dutton's thesis of an "art instinct" is uncontroversially, and unparadoxically true: art-making is a universally and exclusively human endeavor. No other species has engaged in it, and no known human culture has ever gotten by without it. To court a tautology, we would probably say, if we encountered such a society, that it was not actually human, just as we would say this about a hominid culture that was without language, or ontology.

As Dutton would have it, this simple fact is the great anathema of the dreaded "social constructionists" who have dominated scholarship on culture and aesthetics for the last half-century, "preaching pessimism" about one culture's ability to understand another. He invokes, but does not quote, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Benjamin Whorf, Thomas Kuhn, and Margaret Mead, to depict a philosophy of intractable cultural incommensurability. Into this breach, now, finally, march Dutton and the Evolutionary Psychologists, sinews stiffened, to show that art is everywhere the same, because its makers are everywhere the same, in genetic lock-step.

But Dutton's depiction is greatly overstated. It would be an odd anthropology that admitted no access to understanding other cultures, since that lack of access would deny the discovery of whatever difference it based its theory of "otherness" on. It would be an odd philosophy of language or science that presented relational differences between "forms" and "paradigms" as obstacles to communication among them.

Kuhn, in particular, was very explicit that his work should not be interpreted as advocating a hopeless or unresolvable incommensurability of competing paradigms. Dutton's error here does not stand alone. Kuhn notes in the Second Edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that many readers (in particular the philosopher Steven Toulmin)

have reported that I believe the following: the proponents of incommensurable theories cannot communicate with each other at all; as a result ... theory must be chosen for reasons that are ultimately personal and subjective; some sort of mystical apperception is responsible for the decision actually reached.

He goes on to emphasize that there are decidedly non-mystical, impersonal ways to negotiate fissures in scientific understanding, based on, among other things, a shared "neural apparatus" among all parties to a debate, and a shared history and experience (in a general sense). The same process may be engaged between isolate cultural groups-- though the distance may be, at first, much wider than that between scientific paradigms within a single culture. None of the work of Mead or Whorf seriously opposes this possibility. (Whether or not Margaret Mead's "cultural determinism" was as absolute as claimed by her detractors, she never argued that this determinism occulted cross cultural understanding. In fact her chief aim in studying adolescents in Samoa was to gain insight on the phenomenon of Western adolescence, in the hope that some of the "disturbances that vex" Western teenagers--that is, sexual anxiety and repression, might be alleviated.)

The idea that we may have a genetic memory for the Eden of our phylogenetic youth is in itself not particularly surprising. But the significance of this fact remains cloudy. You don't need a Darwinian theory of evolution to imagine that if we were magnesium-based life forms from the planet Xkwyffgestigodt we would have very alien aesthetic preferences. More importantly, what is pleasing to us is known to include not just game-rich hilly landscapes, but also stark lunar scenes, globs of mercury, and the smell of gasoline, not to mention Judith's beheading of Holofernes, so it is an odd rhetorical strategy to try to anchor true aesthetics only to the former. By doing so, and concluding that "the whole idea that art worlds are monadically sealed off from one another is daft," Dutton successfully refutes an argument no influential scholar has yet offered, though the moderately credulous reader would have no way of knowing this.

***

For all of his reverence for the Santa Barbara school evolutionary psychologists, Dutton does not seem to grasp the primary dilemma raised by their hypotheses. As philosopher John Dupre observes, the corollary to the proposition that our minds and brains are adapted to life in the Stone Age, is that they are maladapted to our lives today. There's a paradox in this, to the extent that under a pan-adaptationist programme, there is no possible mechanism that would have allowed human culture to evolve away from its (putatively) optimal fitness landscape. Put another way, if modern cultural forms such as art are Pleistocene genetic adaptations, then how did we arrive at our contemporary present, so out of tune with these adaptations? We would need to invoke a whole second category of non-adaptive cultural and artistic forms to explain this passage. (Or worse--dread!--we'd have to invoke Gouldian spandrels). Not only is this not a very parsimonious story, it would seem to take some of the rhetorical force out of the argument that all human behavior must, a priori, be biologically adaptive. The aphorism issued by evolutionary psychology godparents Toomey and Cosmides that "our modern skulls house a stone age mind," is, like so many sociobiological pronouncements, either a logical impossibility, or a vague banality.

It has been remarked, by Mary Midgley, among others, that the Behaviorists and epiphenomenalists of the 2oth century could not really have believed that consciousness did not exist, regardless of what they put forward in their work. They could not have believed that they themselves were not conscious. Similarly, the evolutionary psychologists of today (and their advocates) cannot really believe that empathy and altruism are really selfishness in disguise, at the gene level, and that our moral agency actually serves biological imperatives directly invisible to us. The idea makes for provocative science, but in doing so it sucks all the oxygen out of the prospect of a meaningful life. It's a recipe for mass stupor, or mass suicide.

We have to also doubt that Dutton believes, when pressed, that the existence of King Lear (his example) is explained by the Darwinian principle of "skill display." Nothing of any interest in Lear is so explained. Nor are the collected poems of Emily Dickinson (his example) in any way illuminated by a genetic propensity to sit around a fire and listen to stories. Every time an English lit undergrad attempts to inject Darwinian logic into a conversation of the meaning of Shakespeare of Dickinson, our culture--our species--gets measurably dumber and shallower, and from here forward Dutton has to share some responsibility for that.

***

"It is time," Dutton announces early on in The Art Instinct, "to look at the arts in light of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution." If that is true, then we find ourselves under a very lax regime of timeliness: The French positivist historian Hippolyte Taine first explored a Darwinian science of literature in the late 19th century. Some of the puzzles that bedevil us in Dutton's work are also presented by Taine's determinist science of culture: what can the laws of art we are uncovering really tell us about ourselves--or about what comes next?

Many reviewers have seized upon Dutton's claim that 12-tone music will not stand the test of time, because it does not have a Darwinian aesthetic foundation. That is, humans innately treasure tonality, and cannot really grok musical forms which abandon it. But it is a dicey thing try to constrain the role of contingency on aesthetics in advance. What might we have made of the fact, in the 10th century, that musical polyphony had not yet been developed? Or, in the 1940s, that theatrical improvization had not? Would we not have been tempted to assert that the failure of these forms to evolve in the millions of years leading up to our "present" moment was an argument for the unnaturalness of these forms? We might even be led to suggest biological laws that had preemptively winnowed polyphony and improv from the gene pool, just as Dutton suggests, late in the book, that the historical absence of any olfactory-based art forms^[3] ("symphonies of smell") is evidence for their impossibility on Darwinian grounds. But cultural laws have no such predictive power, for which we should be supremely thankful, for if they did, it would be grounds for enormous despair.

---

Footnotes

[1] DFW is not one of my favorite writers, but one I admire nonetheless for his doggedly conscious and moral struggle for what we might call right expression. This quote is taken from Zadie Smith's remarks at his memorial service, excerpted in the January 2009 issue of Harpers.

[2] We also can't ignore that Dutton's literary agent is John Brockman, among whose clients are Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan), and Jared Diamond. Brockman's clients get read, and they get talked about.

[3] A more plausible and fruitful examination of why we have no "symphonies of smell" will open my next posting on this subject, discussing the work of Suzanne Langer and Ernst Cassirer.

"A fun game, a lucrative game"

In anticipation of Jim Cramer's appearance on The Daily Show tonight, a reminder of the fullness of the man's depravity.

In this 2006 interview called "Wall Street Confidential" for his financial news site The Street, Cramer explains how a smart hedge fund manager illegally manipulates the market with agitprop, withour fear of prosecution because "the SEC doesn't understand it."

What's important when you are in that hedge fund mode is to not be doing anything that is remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view - it is important to create a new truth to develop a fiction... The great thing about the market is that it has nothing to do with the actual stocks... It's just fiction and fiction and fiction.

Whack-a-mole

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Peg Tuning

Professor Dutton observes, in comments, that one can't judge a book by its first chapter, let alone from a chapter fragment. This is true, and as I responded to him, I do intend to read his book in its entirety.

I do hope he isn't bluffing, however. Dutton has been making the rounds, promoting his book, and while I haven't caught every appearance, in the coverage I've seen and read to date (here, for example, and here, and here) he tends to stick to the same arguments, indicating that he has put some organized thought into how to promote his thesis, rather than just winging it.

Dutton chides me for reading so much into the Komar and Melamid case, when there's a much more serious argument waiting to unfold in the coming chapters. It's notable, then, that this serious argument is not apparent in his own conversations about the book. In each appearance, Dutton tosses off the following examples:

1.) The Inuit "500 words for snow" canard, which Dutton claims he was taught at UC Santa Barbara in the 60s. (This is doubtful. Geoffrey Pullum traces the inflation of the number snow-words in The Great Inuit Vocabulary Hoax, showing that attributions of Eskimo snow-words in the hundreds came not from academics, but from pop culture sources like TV weathercasts and newspaper editorials). Benjamin Whorf himself, the bete noire of "linguistic relativism," never actually mentioned a specific number of snow-words (though he cited Franz Boas's declaration, in the 19th century, of there being four.)

Dutton does not specifically mention any linguists or anthropologists who may have argued from the snow-words myth that we can't communicate with the Inuit, that we don't have enough in common with them. He just asserts that this was the dominant ideology in the social sciences for decades, and we have to take him at his word.

2.) The "Gombrichian" (after Art Historian Ernst Gombrich) story about "the African who for the first time is shown a photograph and ... couldn't see it as a representation of a person." Dutton dismisses this story based on his personal experience in New Guinea which "indicates that's just ridiculous." He doesn't elaborate, and we are left to grapple with common sense and ethnocentrism: How could anyone not see that a photo of a person represents a person? This must be a projection of our own racist "othering" of premodern peoples.

Yet the evidence points to the fact that we (not just tribal humans, but all of us) must learn how to see. For most of us this process is unconscious, and long forgotten. But studies with blind people who become sighted as adults consistently show a difficulty with depth perception, with interpreting smaller retinal images as more distant objects. The same difficulty is observed among forest-dwelling people who have never experienced the expanse of the plains; they consider distant objects to be actually as small as they appear.

If all perception is to some degree constructive or interpretive, it shouldn't surprise us that people with no prior exposure to photographs would have trouble "seeing" them, at first. In a 1972 review study, Jan Deregowski reports upon numerous examples, from anecdotes to formal research, documenting such dificulties. In 1948 Adelbert Ames, Jr. exploited the inherent difficulty of converting 2D retinal images into coherent 3D scenes with the invention of his "Ames room." (Peter Jackson built some of the set interiors of the LOTR trilogy using this technique, so that hobbit and dwarf characters would appear so much smaller than human characters without having to resort to CGI).

The evidence suggests we are not in fact hard-wired to see things "as they are," but must learn to match visual cues with our concepts of reality. Dutton's response to this claim is an unsupported emotional appeal to common sense. In a delicious act of projection, he remarks: "that’s just loopy social constructionist ideology, it’s not serious research on what were then called 'primitive' cultures."

3.) Dutton's third piece of evidence for the pervasive dogma of cultural incommensurability comes from Ravi Shankar's performance at the Concert for the People of Bangladesh in 1971*. As Dutton relates the "myth,"

[Shankar] comes out on stage and tunes the sitar. Now the sitar is a very complicated instrument to tune, and he works on it for about ten minutes. When he's finished, he nods to the audience and everybody applauds thinking that was actually the first piece of music on the program. Ipso facto, people cannot really understand foreign cultures.

Dutton's alternate explanation for the applause is that it "was just relief that the tedious tuning was finished."

Alas for Dutton, this episode is not confined to the dark mists of memory, but actually appears in the concert footage. The tuning lasts for less than two minutes**, rather than ten, which really isn't all that tedious. Shankar himself appears to believe that the audience has taken the tuning to be a performance (as he has since confirmed).

Dutton's interpretation, then, is perhaps plausible, but no more so than the official version, and what's more it is evidence-free. The only substantiation of his version is his own common-sense claim that "no one who has watched [a sitar] being tuned could possibly think [it] is a piece of music." (Ironically, Dutton later claims that 12-tone music, which actually is performed in concert halls across the globe, isn't true music because it doesn't conform to his notions of a "basic human musical psychology." Doesn't this suggest that if he'd never heard of atonal music before, he might misconstrue a performance of it as some kind of warm up exercise or other non-performative event the first time he was exposed to it?)

An author has every right to not give away his trade secrets for free, and if there is more compelling evidence in future chapters against the view that culture informs our sense of what art is, then I'll eat crow over it. But these teasers, drawing as they do mostly on innuendo and hearsay, do not show promise of an intellectual rigor yet to come. If I come at these ideas hard it's in part to counter the immense credulity that seems to rule the day whenever Darwinian explanations are invoked to explain the universality and adaptiveness of human behavior.

* Dutton writes that the lore of this incident "got incorporated into the 1960s zeitgeist," which is a neat trick, seeing how the 60s had just ended. He also erroneously locates the concert in San Francisco, perhaps confusing it with the Monterrey Pop Festival of 1967. Doesn't Bloomsbury Press have fact-checkers?

** This account is from the Wiki page. I just watched the segment of the film; the tuning lasts about 20 seconds.

Blogging The Art Instinct, Part 1

From this excerpt of his first chapter, published in the NYT, as well as from assorted articles on his website, I am able to glean that Denis Dutton finds a great deal of significance in Komar and Melamid's "People's Choice" study on global preferences in art. In the briefest terms: In 1997 Russian emigre artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid polled people from 11 nations to elicit their favorite artistic elements, including color, theme, style, medium, and many more. After collecting the results, they created "most wanted" and least wanted" paintings employing the criteria surveyed. (The "Most Wanted" painting for the US accompanies my earlier post on Dutton.)

Their intent was satirical, intended among other things to comment on democracy and our reliance on statistics. Dutton acknowledges the irony, but points to a relevance for aesthetic studies all the same. He notes:

People in very different cultures around the world gravitate toward the same general type of pictorial representation: a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures, and animals. More remarkable still was the fact that people across the globe preferred landscapes of a fairly uniform type: Kenyans appeared to like landscapes that more resembled upstate New York than what we might think of as the present flora and terrain of Kenya.

He continues, quoting art critic Arthur Danto:

The 44-percent-blue landscape with water and trees must be the a priori aesthetic universal, what everyone who thinks of art first thinks of, as if modernism never happened.

Dutton concludes:

The lush blue landscape type that the Russian artists discovered is found across the world because it is an innate preference.

Specifically, he is arguing, it is the landscape that our hominid ancestors in East Africa would have found most soothing, because it indicated the greatest safety (rolling hills provide places to get the upper hand on both predators and prey), and the greatest promise of sustenance (abundant water, comestible plants, and game). In essence, Dutton is arguing that humans are genetically predisposed to find pleasure in gazing upon our ancestral Eden, or at least depictions thereof.

Let's grant that this is plausible. But before we allow Dutton's conclusion that this aesthetic preference has a direct influence on the symbolic forms we place under the rubric "art," a number of objections must be raised.

The first thing we want to examine is the actual methodology of Komar and Melamid's survey. One thing that is immediately striking about the survey is that in almost every country, a plurality (but never a majority) of respondents preferred the color blue. By country, Ukraine had the lowest percentage of blue-favorers (18%, tied with green), and Portugal the highest (49%). There were some interesting outliers, but this result does seem to point to a universal human preference for the color blue.

On the other hand, in every country polled, a majority of people preferred a color other than blue. In most countries the blue-favorers ranked between a quarter and a third of all respondents--a decisive minority.

We could conduct a similar analysis on some of the other elements; for example, people's preference for scenes of "rivers lakes and oceans" comprised a plurality of responses, by a small margin, for most countries. But in Germany, the most popular response at 37% was "doesn't matter." And in most countries, an obvious choice like "mountains" was not offered as an option. The survey was never intended as serious science, and its lack of rigor and consistency reflects that.

More pointedly, the surveys were performed without any resort to context. Even people with gauche or kitchy tastes respond to whole pieces of art, not to aggregations of art elements (which is, again, part of the point of the exercise). How many respondents truly felt entitled to answer "it doesn't matter" or "none of the above" in regard to theme or subject matter, in the absence of real choices (this versus that painting)? It is very important to keep in mind that no actual paintings were viewed by anyone participating in the study. The blue-green landscape with rolling hills, bodies of water and gentle wildlife that Dutton says speaks to our genetic past was never directly commented on, because it didn't exist until after the poll was conducted.

[As for the similarity among the "most wanted" paintings, it surely owes something to the fact that ... they were all painted by the same two artists. This is true not just as a matter of style and technique (both painters were trained as social realists), but as a matter of interpretation of the data. Is there really a definitive way to turn gradations of aesthetic preferences for color, style and theme into a painting? It is misleading to the edge of bad faith to say that these paintings were "created from the choices of different cultures," as though it were a type of pie chart, automatically generated by a macro from an excel file.]

Here's the strange thing, though. Dutton observes in passing that the Komar-Melamid paintings happen to resemble the style and subject matter of the Hudson River school of the mid 19th century. If this reflects an "instinct," formed in the Pleistocene, for depicting favorable landscapes, then why did the Hudson River school take so long to finally arrive? The earliest human art forms date from up to 75,000 years ago. For most of that time, we have relatively few representations of East African savannas. What we do have is a preponderance of religious and mythical themes for thousands of years, and when landscapes emerge, in medieval China, we get dark, mountainous scenes that seem to studiously avoid the themes and colors that are so apparently beloved the world round.

This conjures an important question: Should we necessarily expect that the art humans have made across the centuries should comport with our notions of pleasurable vistas, whether modern or ancient in origin? The commodified "art" of the postcard and calendar (not to mention advertising) is a recent invention. When resources and distribution channels for the making of images were more scarce, such as throughout all of human history before the last century or so, most art was not intended for so frivolous an end as "pleasure," in the form of a refreshing place to let rest one's eyes. The historical moment of Komar and Melamid's survey, typified by a global and commodified market for pleasing images, has little to do with the creation and usage of the visual arts throughout history, and therefore little to say about any aesthetic "instincts."

Dutton has a second argument for the genesis of his art instinct, though: sexual selection, and it's this I will discuss in Part 2.

[note: lightly copyedited on March 3, 2009. Nothing material was changed.]

Update: "Academic Burlesque"

In my last post I wrote that Dutton's "The Art Instinct" seemed to be garnering mostly positive reviews, mostly on science-themed blogs and sites. That was based on a cursory google search, with Dutton's name as the search string. Using the book's title yields some more heterodox results, such as this fine review by Rochelle Gurstein in Bookforum:

Only someone who has not taken the time to immerse himself in the enormous—indeed, overwhelming—historical record would be so presumptuous as to offer the following definition of “greatness in the arts”: the effort “to create works of aesthetic pleasure that are saturated with emotion, specifically expressing distinct emotions that are perceived as yours.” This would be news to champions of the classical tradition like Sir Joshua Reynolds, who believed that the greatest artists from the Renaissance through his own time (the end of the eighteenth century) were trying to create “ideal beauty” through the imitation of “general nature” or of the Greco-Roman sculpture that exemplified it. No doubt it would also be news to Zola, who thought that Manet was “trying to see nature as it is without looking for it in the works and opinions of others,” and to Roger Fry, who said of Cézanne and other Post-Impressionists: “These artists do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life.”

Schoenberg Take the Hindmost

There is a new Ev-Psych book of the moment called "The Art Instinct." It is by Denis Dutton, a philosopher at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and editor or the libertarian humanities portal Arts and Letters daily.

The book is getting reviewed in most of the usual places, including heavy attention in the scientific blogosphere, which often isn't, unfortunately, able to draw upon the
history and literature of aesthetics (which Evolutionary Psych advocates strangely like to imply began only recently, with "discredited" social constructionists like Derrida and Levi-Strauss). Happily, my fellow commenters at 3quarksdaily are having none of it. (Dutton himself popped in to make a non-responsive response, pointing out that one could read more charitable remarks on his work at his own website. Debaters take note of this wicked kung fu!)

My own comment is below. The article and commend thread to which it refers can be found here.

Off the top of my head I can't think of a single writer who argues that "arts are unique to cultures" in such a way that "we can seldom or perhaps never really understand the arts of other cultures." (Dutton mentions Wittegenstein, but this seems to me a prett profound misreading.) Surely someone has made this claim somewhere, but it's hardly the received dogma of "most aesthetic discourse." If it were, there would be little point in teaching art and literature from other cultures in the college classroom, and if anything, this practice grew immensely in the last 40 years. If academic ideologues truly believed that arts are unique to cultures, there would never have been a backlash against the Great Books canon of "dead white men."

Now, there's nothing wrong with asserting that a phenomenon adheres to Darwinian logic. The question is, what is the explanatory power of this description? In Popper's phrase, the theory that explains everything, explains nothing. We are interested in the origins of our aesthetic sense. Part of the story surely does lie in our evolutionary past. What this has to do with contemporary judgements on Schoenberg is less clear.

Dutton argues that there is a "basic human musical psychology" that will filter out atonal music in time (he suggests half a millenium.) This may be, but we still need to account for the fact that for the better part of a century, the arbiters of aesthetic greatness have raised Schoenberg to Art's highest place of honor. Have they been faking?

It's a dicey maneuver to argue, on the one hand, that culture is subject to decadence, and on the other that history will vindicate one's preferred aesthetic tastes. From what vantage point does Dutton proclaim that Victorian oil paintigs were an exercise in "folly" but that Andy WArhol is for the ages? Darwinian arguments often pretend to a position of objectivity, but, as Keynes famously remarked, in the long run, we're all dead. The only judgments that matter are the ones we make now.

Abbas writes:

[The] evolutionary account ... of why we have certain universal preferences in art ... is no different than claiming that our predilection for eating too many Twinkies comes from an evolutionary past in which sweet things were hard to come by, and in an environment of general caloric lack, it made sense to eat as much of the sweet stuff as we could while we had access to it. Most people don't find this very controversial. No one claims that we are trying to explain everything about the Twinkie solely in terms of evolution. Why then the immediate attack when it is proposed that what we find beautiful may also have a Darwinian basis? I have absolutely no doubt that it does!

The danger is that this way of thinking over-proscribes what is normative. This problem goes back at least as far as Plato. Why do we sometimes sacrifice things that are pleasurable or beautiful for some higher good? Aesthetics do not begin and end at pleasure. Russian novels are a drag, but we read them because they speak a truth beyond beauty. We easily forget how shocking--scandalous, even--Ibsen was, or Walt Whitman. That we have had to learn to find the deeper beauty, beyond our visceral reactions, points to a force that is not "spontaneous," that we don't seem to be "wired" for in a sense analagous to our love of twinkies, such as it is. (Certainly our health-oriented culture has introduced a culinary aesthetic in opposition to that of the twinkie. Whole Foods Markets has made a fortune off this aesthetic.)

Yes, we want to be careful not to make category errors, and dismiss particle physics because it is of no use in an auto repair shop. But Dutton's polemic goes further than this, when he attempts to use pleistocene explanations not just for our our drives and instincts, but also for the symbolic forms we employ to make sense of, and sometimes sublimate them.

[Image: "USA's Most Wanted Painting," Komar and Melamid.]

The Stick and The Stone, Part 3

[Scroll down or click here for part 1, and here for part 2.]

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had something hopeful to say earlier this month about the very issue I wrote about yesterday: the tendency of people to reactively equate the word sharia with its worst excesses. Last year at this time, he started something of a firestorm by suggesting that certain aspects of sharia were compatible with secular liberalism. He now remarks (via Butterflies and Wheels):

It's been quite interesting to see how a number of fairly senior people have observed that certain kinds of limited aspects of Muslim law are imaginable within a British legal framework, without upsetting the apple cart of undermining human rights.

People are maybe beginning to distinguish [between] the general question of Muslim law, and the extremes of appalling practice which disfigure it in so many parts of the world or the extremes of trying to push Sharia law upon an entire society.

Good for him for being optimistic. I can't really join him. The story is still horribly twisted in press reports which make Williams seem to be a spineless appeaser of Islamist tyranny. It's unlikely most critics took the time to read the address that started the fuss, which runs to almost 7,000 words (11,000 if you count the Q & A section), and (thoughtfully, to my mind) anticipates many of the objections later raised in protest, on such issues as the relationship of church and state, the rights of women (specifically, forced marriage and the inheritance rights of widows), and universal human rights generally. Having raised these, he writes:

To put the question like that is already to see where an answer might lie, though it is not an answer that will remove the possibility of some conflict. If any kind of plural jurisdiction is recognized, it would presumably have to be under the rubric that no 'supplementary' jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights. This is in effect to mirror what a minority might themselves be requesting – that the situation should not arise where membership of one group restricted the freedom to live also as a member of an overlapping group, that (in this case) citizenship in a secular society should not necessitate the abandoning of religious discipline, any more than religious discipline should deprive one of access to liberties secured by the law of the land, to the common benefits of secular citizenship – or, better, to recognize that citizenship itself is a complex phenomenon not bound up with any one level of communal belonging but involving them all.

Williams' claim was the modest one that incorporating some aspects of sharia into the British legal system need not compel anyone to adhere to those aspects, nor alienate anyone from the full rights and privileges of the secular law. Being something of a realist, he suggested such incorporation is probably inevitable in any culture with a sizable population that is desirous of supplemental alternatives to secular law.

The day after Williams' 2008 address, he was interviewed on BBC Radio 4. Two points from this bear repeating, because the negative associations of sharia to Western ears are so powerful. The first is about what sharia is not. It is not a fixed of laws, like the code of Hammurabi. That's not to say that it doesn't end up, in practice, as though it were a fixed set of laws, mandating abominations like stoning for adultery, or death for apostasy. This is a Wahabbist interpretation of Islamic law, but it is not intrinsic to sharia, which is a mode of legal practice, a large component of which is independent thought, or interpretation of the facts in context, which goes by the name ijtihad.

Scholars of Islamic jurisprudence observe that in Sunni Islam "the gates of ijtihad were closed" in the 10th century. Let's allow that they might have been, but in any case they were only closed, not dynamited out of existence. No external, Westernized concept of free thought or reason need be introduced to sharia, for it has been a part of it since the beginning.

The second point is about compulsion:

Questioner: So for example one of the examples you give where Sharia might be applied is in relation to marriage; what would that look like; what would that mean for example a British Muslim woman suddenly given the choice to settle a dispute via a Sharia route as opposed to the existing British legal system?

Williams: It's very important that you mention there the word 'choice'; I think it would be quite wrong to say that we could ever license so to speak a system of law for some community which gave people no right of appeal, no way of exercising the rights that are guaranteed to them as citizens in general, so that a woman in such circumstances would have to know that she was not signing away for good and all.

This is England we're talking about, after all. Let us take care to read the fine print, before we start with the OMG!!1! Sharia courts in the UK! Ophelia, I'm looking at you, when you write this:

It remains the case that letting Muslim courts decide divorces and wills is a way to treat women grossly unequally.

The odd thing is that Williams must have been told this. He must have been told it a thousand times, in the strongest possible terms. So why can't he take it in? What is the matter with the man? Apart from the fact that he's an archbishop, of course. What is wrong with him? Why is he so determined to persuade the great British public that unequal rights for women is quite all right as long as the women in question are 'members of the Muslim community'?

I know your reading comprehension is better than that.

Sticks and Stones, Part 2

On January 28, the British Enlightenmentarian writer Johann Hari wrote an article for the Independent titled "Why Should I Respect These Oppressive Religions," in which he called out the prophet Muhammad as a pedophile for having sex with a nine year old girl (his wife, Aisha).

The piece was republished by the Statesman, an Indian newspaper in Kolkata on February 5. Over the next few days, protesters held large demonstrations in Kolkata (Hari calls them "riots" though I cannot find any reports of violence other than by police), and on February 11, the editor and publisher of the Statesman were arrested on the charge of committing a "deliberate act with malicious intent to outrage religious feelings," which is illegal in India (though it is unclear to what extent this law is generally enforced.) The editor and publisher have since been released on bail. Most commentary on this chain of events (inlcuding Hari's own) has focused on the affront to freedom of speech represented by the arrest of the two newspapermen.

It is unfortunate that the Indian statute uses the word "feelings" to convey what I think is intended to be something far more profound. The stature of Muhammad among devout Muslims is immense and primary. The fact that it is taboo to depict his likeness strikes the secular mind as quaint, but we are not without our taboos as well, and we might approach the sense of outrage and revulsion it occasions by imagining a large public billboard of our mother or sister, naked, in a lascivious pose. Or perhaps a realistic depiction of child pornography. Maybe a burning cross opposite the home of an African American family in an all-white neighborhood.

We would experience more than "hurt feelings" at this. We might even consider channeling our outrage into some kind of march or demonstration, as many Muslims did in Kolkata last week. We might call for prosecution of the person who put up the billboard on the grounds of invasion of privacy, or indecency, or on the "fighting words" principle, all of which are lawful and constitutional restraints on free speech in the US.

Would it be much of a defense for the billboard maker to claim he was just excessing his right to criticize our mother for being such a slut?

My intent is not to build the perfect analogy. I don't defend the arrest of the two newspapermen, or the law they allegedly violated. But I do mean to demonstrate how hard it can be to understand the reactions of people whose deepest sensibilities differ from our own, unless we allow ourselves to respect the humanness-in-common at the wellspring of those sensibilities. Value and taboo go hand in hand, and until we transhumanly pass into some Vulcan-like state, we will continue to be outraged by the desecration of our most sacred principles and ideals.

Hari wants to know why he should be expected to respect religion:

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don't respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn't follow him.

This is not because of "prejudice" or "ignorance", but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal.

But is it really possible to separate foolish beliefs from foolish believers? Isn't the holding of a foolish belief the very indicator we use to identify a foolish person? Isn't it a less-than-subtle dig to say that “all people deserve respect, [even the ones whose beliefs will] in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal”?

Whether we like it or not, Muhammad is a supremely sacred figure to many, if not most, of one billion Muslims. Every bit as sacred, if not more, than our own Droits De L'Homme, which Hari takes for granted in his self-declared right to criticize other people's values (not—to be clear—objective facts. The dispute is not over whether Aisha was nine years old; the dispute is over whether consummating a marriage with a nine-year old is an ethical act, or was in 7th century Arabia.) His ridicule is a confusion of categories as much as if he used freedom of speech as the justification to condemn freedom of speech. It is a failure to accept reality. Moral persuasion is always a possibility, but it becomes a diminishing one from a position of absolute hauteur.

Hari comes close to appreciating that the conflict is not between facts but values (and here I must pause to reiterate that these differing values actually point the way to common values, as I laid out in Part One.) But he can't quite absorb that it makes no difference to have the “facts on your side” if there isn't general agreement among all parties on how facts are discerned and adjudicated.

You do not have a right to be ring-fenced from offense. Every day, I am offended -- not least by ancient religious texts filled with hate-speech. But I am glad, because I know that the price of taking offense is that I can give it too, if that is where the facts lead me. But again, the protesters propose a lop-sided world. They do not propose to stop voicing their own heinously offensive views about women's rights or homosexuality, but we have to shut up and take it -- or we are the ones being "insulting."

In short: “I know you are, but what am I?” Or, “Mom, he hit me first!”

It's never too late to put the slap fights aside and be a grownup, whatever the other people around you are doing. It's the reality principle. Shall we give it a try?

***

Hari, in his own defense against being accountable for the “riots” in Kolkata, writes that “he solution to the problems of free speech -- that sometimes people will say terrible things -- are always and irreducibly more free speech.”

This draws upon an enlightenment myth equivocating speech and rational discourse.
But Hari's fellows-in-arms in the war on religion, Professors Richard Dawkins and Nick Humphrey, take a different approach to the sticks and stones problem. Dawkins writes, on page 318 of The God Delusion, that religious speech is intrinsically harmful:

'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.' The adage is true as long as you don't really believe the words.

Along the same lines, Humphrey put forth in his Amnesty address on religion as child abuse:

The fact is that words can hurt. For a start, they can hurt people indirectly by inciting others to hurt them: a crusade preached by a pope, racist propaganda from the Nazis, malevolent gossip from a rival... They can hurt people, not so indirectly, by inciting them to take actions that harm themselves: the lies of a false prophet, the blackmail of a bully, the flattery of a seducer... And words can hurt directly, too: the lash of a malicious tongue, the dreaded message carried by a telegram, the spiteful onslaught that makes the hearer beg his tormentor say no more...

"Words will never hurt me"? The truth may rather be that words have a unique power to hurt. And if we were to make an inventory of the man-made causes of human misery, it would be words, not sticks and stones, that head the list. Even guns and high explosives might be considered playthings by comparison. (My emphasis.)

It's an observation that cuts both ways. Is the Nazi propagandist or slanderous rival also permitted the defense that (quoting Hari again):

When there is a disagreement and one side uses violence, it is a reassuring rhetorical stance to claim both sides are in the wrong, and you take a happy position somewhere in the middle.

I think the law has been extended about as far as it can be in a liberal, secular society in the regulation of speech on the grounds of social harmony. I don't advocate going any further, and think the hate speech laws adopted by most European countries may be a step too far. But morally, and rhetorically, I think we could make a much stronger case for a type of Buddhist respect and humility for our fellow humans when difficult conflicts arise. Nothing is lost in extending one's hand in fraternity/sorority, and everything might be gained.

Sticks and Stones, Part !

Even to my own Chamberlainian, appeasement-minded brain, the word sharia rings something like "barbarism." Images of stonings and genital mutilation arise before me, and decrees and judgments born of hate and fear, rather than justice and harmony, echo forth.

There is a significant amount to condemn in the practice of sharia, primarily in its abrogation of equal rights, and freedom of speech. But I don't think these things alone can account for the dark vitriol we commonly feel at its mention. There is a great deal to condemn in global capitalism, modern statecraft, factory farming and agribusiness, and a host of other evils that appear to us to be more familiarly human. When we protest the WTO, we don't usually imagine a whiff of the smoke of Mordor in our noses.

I think there is a real and profound projection in Western attitudes to Islam. Everything that is dark and savage and unyielding in us finds a sublime expression in the fatwa, and jihad. We squint eastward through swart-colored goggles, and in consequence, everything kind, noble, and vulnerable is filtered out.

The point is not that there are no crimes committed in the name of Islam. The point is that The Muslim community is a human one, every bit as human as the secular West, and its struggles with justice and social harmony come from the same place as our own. How obvious this should be, but it takes a little effort to see, say, Bernie Madoff in the same light (or lack thereof) as some nameless Pashtun mullah.

Neither is my point to argue that several of the punishments of sharia that are employed today are not barbaric. Stoning, and the amputation of hands are abominable. Furthermore, divinely proscribed jurisprudence can never again be tenable in a secularized world. (Though divinely inspired jurisprudence can, and is; In our own founding document we are granted inalienable rights by "our Creator.")

It is crucial to observe that there is nothing inherently barbaric about an Islamic system of justice. Historical forces have, unfortunately, given a strongly traditionalist interpretation of sharia a strong foundation that shows no sign of letting go; but there is nothing intrinsically Muslim (or Arab) about stoning, or subjugating women. Etymologically, the word sharia means simply "the watercourse," employing the same metaphor for natural order as the Tao.

It is also important to keep in mind that Muslim jurisprudence has historical contingents that are very different from those of Western liberalism. In the West, the ever-looming bogey is tyranny, or coercion; and thus the enshrinement of freedom. In Islam, the bogey is anarchy and schism, or fitna, which brings a tyranny of its own; thus Islam has a very detailed and nuanced understanding of justice.

The organizing principles at the heart of sharia are not the stark and brutal penalties we usually associate with the word, but are comprised in the notion that justice is universal and unceasing, and therefore cannot be usurped or exploited by a potentate. The ulama, or community of religious scholars tasked with interpreting sharia, were intended to act, at least in theory, as a foil to political tyranny.

There's a flaw in this system, of course. The ulama are a community of men, and therefore subject to corruption. And when new potentates started making their bids for power, this time colonialists from Europe (the franj ("Franks") in Muslim parlance), the ulama became more intractably and dogmatically entrenched in their ways of life, as human beings will. (This is a factor that the Western liberal tradition has not really had to account for in its own development. There was never a significant existential threat to liberalism in Europe, at least not before 1933.)

The conflict playing out now in Britain, and Amsterdam, Pakistan, and throughout the Middle East, between secular and traditionalist partisans would be greatly alleviated if each could see themselves through the others' eyes. For many Muslims, especially Arabs, words like freedom and liberation recall the terror of fitna. And for the West, words like sharia recall the tyranny of the medieval Church, and of the chaos and bloodshed of the Reformation and Counter-reformation.

What each side seeks--what all human societies seek--is a suitable balance between freedom and order. Too much liberty is, in fact, anarchy, and too much order is, in fact, tyranny. We are characteristically reactionary in our approach to this problem. My suggestion is that, if we're going to view our differences through the prism of the past, let's go all the way, and remind ourselves that we were all born into the same cradle.

Your 2009 Candy Zeitgeist

just a fluke

A fluke (or flounder) is a kind of flat, bottom feeding fish that is, according to lore, easily caught, even with inferior tackle or technique. (In the Gunther Grass novel The Flounder, the fish jumps right into the fisherman's arms). Over time, owing to its near-ridiculous catchability, it loaned its name to a type of billiard shot, by which a shooter, having no good shot to make, sinks the desired balls by improbable or near-random means, much like a Hail Mary in football, or a "garbage" shot in basketball. Eventually it took on the meaning common today of a happy accident, unrepeatable and beholden only to the vagaries of fortune.

A fluke is also a type of flat parasitic worm--one variety of which, the lancet liver fluke--is employed by the philosopher Daniel Dennett to illustrate his theory of memes, an improbable or near-random hypothesis that Dennett has had the happy accident of getting many otherwise intelligent people to believe in. The lancet fluke spends its adult life cycle in the liver of sheep and cattle. To get there, it parasitizes a species of common black ant, taking residence near a ganglia of cells that--somehow--alter the behavior of the ant so that it now spends the cool dewy portions of the day on top of blades of grass, instead of going about its normal business at a safer remove from grazing teeth and gums.

A meme is supposed to be similarly parasitic, spurring its host (a human mind) to behave in ways antagonistic to its real (Darwinian) interest in doing whatever needs to be done to stay alive long enough to breed fecundly. The meme-parasite is thus enlisted to explain all manner of irrational behavior, and the beliefs than underlie them. In Dennett's most recent book, Breaking the Spell (2006), the irrational beliefs and behaviors in question are religious ones, and meme theory explains why they persist.

Many more able critics than I have taken on meme theory for the modern day phlogiston it is (the first ones to come to mind are here, here and here.) I want to limit myself here to this question: If memes were real, how would we know? Put another way, how can we know that our moral imperatives, whatever they may be, are really our moral imperatives, and not the duplicitous effect of some kind of parasitic infection? How can we protect ourselves from "bad" memes, when the whole strategy of bad memes is to appear to be good?

To explore this I want to return to the parasitized ant. Such ants are sometimes called "zombie ants," to indicate that their free will and good sense (or whatever the equivalents of these might be in the ant mind) have been usurped. As a thought experiment, I want to imagine what the experience of a zombie ant might be like as it climbs a stalk of grass to await mastication. Granting formicidae, for the moment, a faculty of consciousness and reflection, how would the ant understand its actions? It might feel guilt over abandoning the important tasks of the hive, but impelled to climb the stalk all the same by some quasi-instinctual engine. But we have to allow that it might feel something like glory in fulfilling a higher purpose than was selected for the normal members of the community. The ant might feel like quite the iconoclast. Obviously we run into immediate problems in ascribing ex nihilo concepts and ethics to a species that has none. The point is that there need not be any conflict in the (hypothetical) zombie ant's mind; indeed there may be no clue at all that anything could be bad or wrong about stalk climbing, despite the high risk of an early death. To the ant, it may feel entirely justified, and morally unimpeachable. Or there may be any number of gradations of doubt, guilt, shame, or confusion associated with it.

I don't imagine meme advocates would have any problem with this thought experiment, as far as it goes. Dennett, in particular, acknowledges that many religious people go freely and gladly toward fates that strike outside observers as absurd, just as the zombie ant seems to. The trouble is, in the case of humanity, who is to act as the outside observer? Who has the perspective to say definitively than any of us aren't foolishly pursuing an absurd fate? Dennett's answer is that rational inquiry can evaluate various beliefs and behaviors and demonstrate which ones are left wanting. His entire project in Breaking the Spell is an appeal to open up allegedly "sacred" beliefs and practices to scientific investigation*, so we can know if they make any sense or not, or have any good in them at all, rather than relying on custom or faith.

We must note, however, that this appeal relies on sacred beliefs and practices of its own; namely that truth is a first-order good, and that science is the best way of revealing that truth. Regular or semi-regular readers will recall from my last discussion of Dennett that scientific inquiry generally yields a certain type of truth--that is a truth of quantities--but is not as adept at teasing out the "truth" of qualities (which Dennett argues are not "really real.") For example, science can verify that a certain light source is emitting wavelengths of 460 or 560 nanometers, but it cannot comment on the light's "greenness" or "blueness."

Very few of us would argue with the idea that science has made positive contributions to our species. But these contributions themselves are evaluated not scientifically, but morally. That is, science and reason cannot provide their own justification, but must refer to some external goal--the "Greater Good," however we might describe it. Since no ethic can be self justifying, we have to ask, if we are going to be intellectually honest, how do we know that these new sacred values (e.g., Truth, Reason, Enquiry and Democracy) which Dennett hopes will supersede faith and tradition and "belief in belief" aren't themselves "bad memes," serving interests antagonistic to our own? How do we know that free and critical inquiry without any quarantine or taboo of the sacred is not our own seemingly purposeful climb up the stalk of grass? How could we know for sure our most prized values are not just flukes?


--

*That Dennett is so bad at this investigation will have to be the subject of a future post.

Kneadless

I've been baking bread consistently (1-2 loaves a week) for the last few months, mostly European style sourdoughs. Last night I baked a loaf of Bittman's no-knead bread for the first time, with very happy results. The crust was thick and perfect, and the crumb structure was better than anything I've been able to manage by any other method.

The flavor was merely very, very good. I qualify it this way because even though the no-knead's 12 to 18-hour rise time is long by yeasted bread standards, it's fairly short for breads using wild yeasts, which can develop for 4-5 days (through a series of refreshments, where flour and water are added in stages to keep the dough "young"). I don't find kneading to be that much of an affliction (usually the Kitchen Aid does most of the work); to most people the novelty of this recipe is the longish development time*, which my breads were getting anyway, so the real takeaway here for me is the baking technique: the no-knead is baked in a dutch oven, creating a microenvironment that retains much more moisture than most home ovens (commercial bread ovens inject steam mechanically), and keeps a much more constant and even temperature. This results in a thick, crackling crust, and a dramatic "bloom" which creates a loose and irregular crumb structure.

For years, home bakers in Europe have baked bread in clay containers (such as the cloche or romertopf). Bittman's minimalism leads him to spurn single-use kitchen tools, which is why he favors the dutch oven. Le Creuzet is a popular choice among foodies. I used a flat-bottom pyrex bowl, with a pyrex pie plate for a lid, at about 1/20th of the price, but I'm thinking it would be nice to have handles. So I'm looking into clay casseroles, which would have the added benefit of encouraging me to make more pot roasts. In the meanwhile, the next loaf to go into the pyrex bowl is a campagne bread (modified from Joe Ortiz's The Village Baker), probably with a little rye flour and a tablespoon or so of coarse cornmeal.

The Bittman recipe really is pretty easy though, and relatively fool-proof, and I recommend it to anyone skeptical that they can bake great bread.

*Actually there is one other advantage to a no-knead bread, and that's that you can make a much moister dough, which is essential to good artisan bread.

very passionate and dark, compared to fish

Reader L. writes, in response to the last post, with this quotation from Nietzsche's Gay Science:

To the Realists: You sober people who feel well armed against passion and fantasies and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and an ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it appears to you. As if reality stood unveiled before you only, and you yourselves were perhaps the best part of it —O you beloved images of Sais! But in your unveiled state are not even you still very passionate and dark creatures compared to fish, and still far too similar to an artist in love? And what is "reality" for an artist in love? You are still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries. Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextinguishable drunkenness*. Your love of "reality," for example—oh, this is a primeval "love." Every feeling and sensation contains a piece of this old love; and some fantasy, some prejudice, some unreason, some ignorance, some fear, and ever so much else has contributed to it and worked on it. That mountain there! That cloud there! What is "real" in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training—all of your humanity and animality. There is no "reality" for us—not for you either, my sober friends. We are not nearly as different as you think, and perhaps our good will to transcend intoxication is as respectable as your faith that you are altogether incapable of intoxication. (my emphasis)

L rightly indicates that one thing Nietzsche is doing here is drawing a comparison between realists and mystics, on the basis of each's "primeval love." We're all kin, if not all the same organism. L also wrote some stuff about Hannah Arendt's discussion of The Real as politically negotiated in The Life of The Mind (which I have not read) that I want to connect to some of Gregory Bateson's ideas in a post to come. All that and more in this newborn year.

* How similar to Alan Watts' observation that play can include seriousness, but seriousness cannot include play.

Everything That Is The Case

One quick and certain way to draw forth a chuckle from a person of the naturalist persuasion is to suggest the existence of a privileged realm, ontologically superior to the world of sense and phenomena. The realm in question might be the one called “supernatural,” whose purported occupants—gods, fairies, or various constellations of “energy”—are unconditioned and undeterred by the observable facts of the cosmos, and thereby free to act magically. (Magic being, in this sense, anything that defies or precedes physical description.) Or it might be the one called the “ineffable,” or “transcendent,” whose purported occupants cannot be linguistically apprehended, only encountered.

It is the rejection of such mysteries that is alleged to make science, along with its underlying philosophy of metaphysical naturalism, an equal-opportunity arbiter of The Real. Like President-Elect Obama, science will sit down, “without preconditions,” with any phenomena that presents itself for inspection in a way consistent with what has already been observed. There is only, in Richard Rorty's words, “a single web of causal relations,” from which nothing that exists can be quarantined.

But Rorty is quick to carve out a subcategory of naturalism that often gets confused for the whole; namely: reductionism, or “the insistence that there is not only a single web but a single privileged description of all entities caught in that web.” Many prominent naturalists protest that this is an unfair charge, and that as long as one refrains from “greedy reductionism” (Dennett, Pinker), or “precipice reductionism” (Dawkins), one can navigate easily among multiple descriptions of reality (physics, chemistry, biology) in accordance with the best possible explanatory power of that description.

A plausible defense; but is it adhered to in practice? Richard Dawkins goes as far as saying that “nobody is really a reductionist in any sense worth being against.” But, much as Milton set out to “vindicate the ways of God to man” only to reveal more than a little affinity for the character of Satan, it is much easier to declare oneself in the service of true naturalism than to actually man the barricades.

***

In a 2006 TED address titled “Queerer Than We Suppose,” Dawkins makes some insightfully cautious remarks about how we determine what is real. “'Really 'is not a word we should use with simple confidence,” he notes. "'Really', for an animal, is

whatever it's brain needs it to be in order to assist its survival. And because different species live in different worlds, there [is] a discomfiting variety of “reallys What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished world, but a model, regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed, so it's useful for dealing with the real world. (my emphasis)

Our astonishment at finding so constructivist a suggestion emerge from the mouth of Professor Dawkins may distract us from noticing the seeming contradiction at the end of this statement. How could we know what was useful for dealing with the “real world,” if we can't encounter the real world in the first place? If the organs we have evolved to sense the world around us, and the very language we use to conceptualize it, arose to interact with only a small slice of everything that is, and to neglect the rest, then with what possible tools can we ever “break out of the box of evolution” and encounter things as they are?

Dawkins is, of course, a biologist, and this, not surprisingly, colors his ontological schema: What is really real is natural selection. Putting aside the epistemological problem of how we could know this when all of our supporting data comes from a “constructed model” of reality which itself is shaped by the thing it sets out to discover, all we need observe for our present purpose is that we have here abandoned the naturalistic democracy of descriptions and begun to establish an ontological hierarchy reminiscent of great Idealists from Plato forward. Some things, this hierarchy announces, are more real than others, and the wise observer is not quick to confuse the merely seemingly real with the really real.

It is, of course, with his renowned theory of the Selfish Gene that Dawkins most vividly flies his Idealist colors. The relevant quotes are now scientific classics, known by heart to fans and critics alike; for example:

[Genes] created us body and mind. [...S]ealed off from the outside world... manipulating it by remote control. [...They] are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. [...G]enes are forever. [...Brains seek] emancipation of survival machines as executive decision-takers from their ultimate masters, the genes. [...Brains] have the power to rebel against the dictates of their genes. [...] The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives. [...] I am treating a mother as a machine programmed to do everything in its power to propagate copies of the genes which ride inside it. [...] Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

Descriptions of the executive power of masters, programmers, designers, creators, and dictators upstage Dawkins' humbler intent to offer a plausible explanation of how selection works. They reorganize reality into categories of real and illusory in a way that is strictly metaphysical, and wholly unwarranted by the naturalist program. Genes, in this telling, have become every bit as unconditioned and eternal as Plato's Forms. Whereas the things we commonly think of as most real—our bodies, our agency, our struggles—are relegated to the status of mere appearances; flickering shadows in the cave. Indeed, Dawkins really does appear to believe that realm of genes is more real than the world of our experience. He closes his TED talk with the proposal that the way that (some) scientists talk about humans, i.e. as “machines,” unaccountable for their actions, is more accurate than the way we describe ourselves in everyday speech:

If we were consistent [with our scientific understanding of biology], our response to a misbehaving person like a child murderer would be something like 'this unit has a faulty component, it needs repairing.' Treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate, but it's a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next. The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal-seeking agent, with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt and blameworthiness. (my emphasis)

We really need to start asking ourselves some hard questions about the naturalist enterprise when our efforts to understand ourselves and our cosmos, efforts which were presumably useful once upon a time toward some desirable goal (which we now declare illusory), have been upended so that they now constitute the true foundation of reality (“This unit has a faulty component”), and the things we used to take seriously—“pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt and blameworthiness”—are recast as quaint delusions useful only so far as they help us get ahead in the great cosmic game of Nature Red In Tooth and Claw.

***

There is a clear love of quantities, and an antagonism to qualities, in the picture we see emerging. Daniel Dennett is very explicit that this should be so. In his famous 1988 essay “Quining Qualia,” he argues that “conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special.” By “special,” Dennett is referring, among other things, to the fact that experiences can never be completely described to a third party; description can evoke the experience of a certain glass of wine, or a certain concert of Bach music, but it cannot reproduce this experience. Dennett finds this unique or “private” aspect of experience to be the defect which illustrates its unreality. If a thing were real, it should be duplicable. In a curious reversal, Dennett's position thereby restricts what is “real” to only what is completely describable. That is to say: to what is abstract, or ideal. The experience of a specific circular object, such as a certain dinner plate, may contain infinite (or at least near-infinite) properties. It is indescribable in any exhaustive way. We might never stop noticing things about it. But if we abstract the plate to a representative of the class of dinner plates, generally, the information about it shrinks magnificently to contain only those properties all dinner plates share. And if we abstract it further to the class of geometric circles, it becomes possible to describe it merely as a set of equidistant points around a center coordinate, with a certain radius=r. With the simplest code, it can be replicated infallibly, by anyone.

It is this encoding of reality which, to a functionalist like Dennett, paradoxically makes reality real. We have by now collided, hard, with the major impediment that scientific omnicompetence hurls onto the path of the good life: for predictability, security, and control we pay the very high price of trading what is actual, what is “given,” for a crude representation of that actuality. We have exchanged the meal for the recipe; and while the recipe may have the advantage of being unlikely to give us dysentery or salmonella, it is also unlikely to be anywhere near as tasty as the meal itself.

This is not to knock recipes all the way down into the mud. Quantification is, in itself, no evil. We certainly couldn't live without it in any way that would be recognizable to us as “living.” But it is a compelling curiosity that in our modern quest to understand the world better it is so jealously dismissive of its opposite (and complement), the study of qualities. Part of the explanation will have to be found in a symmetry with the way we organize our economy. As long as wealth remains reducible to money, we will have a hard time contemplating what we are cheating ourselves out of. But whether or not our economics is a symptom of our modernist metaphysics, or the other way around (or, if they are both symptoms of some third dynamic), will not be easily teased out.

Until it has, I think we have to continually notice that reductionism is always at least a little bit “greedy,” and whatever it offers us pragmatically, it pays for by falling away from, not toward, any meaningful definition of truth. But we need not relinquish naturalism altogether. As a corrective to the reductionist impulse, I want to quote the philosopher Elizabeth Baeten discussing her preferred definition of methodological naturalism in The Magic Mirror (1996):

Nature is a locution meant to convey the contention that nothing need be excluded from inquiry, nothing need be closed to scrutiny because it is metaphysically irrelevant, nothing need be ignored because it is nonreal, unreal, irreal, or quasi-real. There is no term to oppose nature used in this way; it does not function the way most other metaphysical terms function. It does not work to divide whatever is, providing a contrast that can be used in granting ontological priority to one of the divisions. We neither assert nor predicate anything when “nature” is used in this manner. Nor do we accord any honorific status to what is “natural” ( as in opposing it to the artificial). What we claim is that there is nothing that is “ouside” of nature. (my emphasis)

This resembles Rorty's definition above in its inclusivity, but it allows for parallel levels of description to coexist, not merely the physical or causal:

Atoms, ideas, minds, hallucinations, ignorance, chairs and computers are all equally natural, and each is available for philosophical consideration. The task of the naturalist philosopher is not to decide which of these is really real... The task for the naturalist is to investigate the ways in which things exist. (my emphasis)

And finally, from the same passage, this time quoting philosopher Sterling Lamprecht (1890-1973):

[Nature] may of course be, and probably always is, much more than it is empirically found to be. But the point of the argument is that everything is at least what is given in experience.

This is where a contemporary metaphysics must begin if we are going to have any hope of restoring the world-as-it-is, in all its fullness, to its proper status as the sum of all things real and true.

Not all that deep thought

What Would Atman Do?

Storm Window, 12/7/08

"There is an endless supply of white men. There has always been a limited number of human beings" (Old Lodge Skins)

Razib Khan is a geneticist, and I'm not. (Say it in a Chevy Chase voice; it's funnier.) Or maybe isn't one, though one would understandably derive the impression from the authority of his writing on his blog, Gene Expression, that he had some sort of expertise in the field. Something called the Unz Foundation has made him a Junior Fellow, but it's hard to say what that means, since the Foundation does not have a website (though we do know that Ron Unz is an anti-immigration philanthropist and the publisher of The American Conservative.)

We also know that Razib has an interest in population genetics, which he studied at the University of Oregon. Amusingly, he posted to a listserv in 1996 (archived here) that he was considering switching to another discipline, such as physics or engineering, and wondered what other scientists might advise as the most advantageous path. The lone response: "When there is a change of something, we call it a mutation, which generally is believed to be deleterious." That's science humor, folks.

I'm not trying to engage in character assassination here. But I am hoping to undermine, however slightly, any appeal to authority you might be tempted to make after I mention that Razib has favorably reviewed that execrable book "Evil Genes" that we had so much fun discussing last winter.

Those in a hurry or whose mouse-clicking finger is sore from a hard-day's blog surfing can be brought up to speed with the basic summary that while Dr. Oakley's book has lots to say, much of it interesting, about opportunistic behavior, it completely fails to investigate--indeed, hardly even attempts to investigate--the central thesis of its title: that the primary indicator for psychopathy is not environmental, but genetic.

By the same token, Evil Genes hardly even references the fact that there is a long and rich inquiry into the science of socialization and enculturation. To the social influences of human psychology, she devotes one sentence: "Psychology, with explanations founded on 'defense mechanisms,' 'countertransference' and 'acting out' can only go so far." This kind of rank dismissal makes it easy to proceed with the notion that society is essentially helpless in preventing psychpathy. (Tellingly, when Oakley does discuss environmental influences on personality, they are invariably "vicissitudes," such as the polio that allegedly warped Oakley's sister.)

Razib's main takeaway from the book is along these exact lines:

I think a more important point is that a small proportion of humans seem to lack the universal moral sense which we as a species share. These psychopaths are pure Machiavellians, who become expert at manipulating the expectations of other human beings.

This, of course, is non-controversial. Just about everybody that studies behavior and personality agrees that psychopaths exist; and further that by the time a psychopath reaches young adulthood, he or she will likely be impossible to treat successfully. Such is the tenacity of personality. It would be interesting if Razib had cited some evidence from Oakley's book which supported her suggestion that some of us are born, not made, Machiavellian. He can't because there isn't any. But that doesn't prevent him from from reinforcing it:

And it may be that at some point in the near future various neuroscientific techniques such as fMRI along with genetic profiling can allow us to adduce with a high degree of certitude who these individuals are. Explicit in Evil Genes is the idea that in the future these sorts of diagnostic techniques could forestall the emergence of psychopathic demagogues who drag whole nations along their amoral and insane track. (my emphasis)

The review concludes with an element mandatory in all sociobiological polemic: the reaffirmation that biology is destiny. As I have not yet tired of citing Bruce Lincoln as saying: "The misrepresentation of culture as nature is an ideological move characteristic of myth, as is the projection of the narrator's ideals, desires and favored ranking of categories into a fictive prehistory that purportedly establishes how things are and must be." Let's see it in action:

But the flip side of these "pathological" variations in biopsychology is that there is likely an evolutionary reason that these types persist at particular frequencies. The very mental signatures which might make one a high credit risk might also mean that they are a better athlete or foot soldier. The egotism which might make someone a difficult wife or husband might make them an efficient captain of industry [or, we might be tempted to add, an efficient brutal dictator--CDS]. Evil Genes' ultimate morality has less to do with evil and genes than it does with mapping out the what and why of how humans vary, and how that might help us constructing a society which is just to all.

That's a dandy notion, but one that has already been accounted for in psychodynamic theory. Child-rearing is an exercise in sublimating drives that cannot be integrated in human society, so that they can continue to be expressed in less destructive ways. Constructing a society which is "just to all" must begin with the recognition that every child deserves the opportunity to learn how not to be, on the one hand, a jerk, and on the other, an emotionally crippled neurotic. Any talk of genes as prempting that opportunity is a moral abdication of the first order.

Soylent Greenbacks [updated]

To the extent the Republican Party seems to have crawled under a rock somewhere, the real opposition to whatever economic plan the Obama administration tries to implement will probably come from the Policeman Within, the internalized right wing hysteria that we are all conditioned to expect whenever any spending for social programs is suggested. And we'll see how successful was the "FDR made the Depression worse" theory floated by the free market darlings.

What I hope Obama is smart enough to keep in mind, though, is that whether we are experiencing a depression and how we manage that depression are two different things. If the unemployment rate tops 10 percent, as now seems likely, people are going to need relief. Lots of people (10 percent!). To impose extreme austerity on them (maybe you, maybe me) in an attempt to make the investor class more "confident" that its money will bring a high return would be barbaric. Even more so, of course, when it was that same desire for the highest possible return that destroyed all those jobs in the first place.

Update I: My bad. The GOP is out from under its rock and actively agitating for a Neo-Hooverite economic plan (via Yglesias). I have been on a semi-moratorium from political blogs over the last week or so. Still on a mid-November news cycle.

Update II: I love the phrase "Donner Party Conservatism" (also via Matt Y). But to fully work we'd need to imagine a group of cheerleaders who hugely underplayed the risks of crossing the Rockies in winter, and stood to get rich upon their arrival.

And then there's this, from the Wiki page on the Donner Party:

The memory of the Donner disaster prompted Californians to fund relief teams during the gold rush years. They sent men eastward along the trails to take food and water to overland emigrants, saving many lives.

nightingale square

This is a marvelous site. Wonderful writing, beautiful photographs, and extinct species trading cards to boot!

335

Paulson, Pigasus, Palin

This might not constitute evidence for the existence of John McCain's soul, but I think it's significant that he chose to appear alone on SNL last night with Tina Fey playing the role of Sarah Palin. I think this has to be read as a direct shot at her, given her widely reported attempts to "go rogue" on the campaign trail. He can't yet openly concede the election, of course, but his relaxed deameanor in this sketch indicates that he has begun to accept his upcoming loss--he seemed almost relieved at not having to pretend, for a moment, that this is a competative race, or that Palin is anything but a joke candidate.

The Merrie Adventures of Richard the Disingenuous

Richard Dawkins has retired from his post as Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, and plans to spend his golden years, according to a recent TV interview, writing children's books:

I have got a plan to write a children's book on how to think about the world, the universe, science, critical thinking contrasted with mythical thinking. I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales. I would like to know whether there is any evidence that bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards, things turning into other things--it is unscientific, I think it's anti-scientific-- whether that has a pernicious effect, I don't know.

British tabloid headline writers have taken this to mean that Dawkins is "going after" Harry Potter. This sends Dawkins straight to the CAPS LOCK key:

I am sick and tired of being wantonly misrepresented. I have finally managed to listen to the More4 News piece that started all this off [1], and am thoroughly irritated to discover that the commentator said that I am "now going to take on Harry Potter". I NEVER said I was going to take on Harry Potter. I have never even read Harry Potter. All I did was to muse, aloud, on how interesting it might be to do RESEARCH on the possible effects on scientific education of children's stories about magic spells. I had in mind not Harry Potter at all (I've never read him, so how would I "take him on") but Hans Anderson, Grimm, and the Arabian Nights. I never said I was against magic stories, merely that I'd be interested to see some research done. Yet from this -- you might think harmless -- curiosity about possible educational research, I find myself accused of hostility to fiction, hostility to imagination, hostility to children, hostility to science fiction -- all of which I of course love.

This is a classic Dawkins move; mount an earnest appeal, in the full wrath of your indignation, to the pure literality of your remarks. It's true, he never said "Harry Potter." But is anything really relieved, except for maybe the collective blood pressure at Bloomsbury Publishing, by replacing Rowling with the Grimms or Hans Christian Andersen as the subject of his investigation?

It's as though someone said he wanted to explore whether tall buildings had a "pernicious effect," and the headlines ran the next day that he was "taking on the Empire State Building." What kind of defense would it be to say that he had never mentioned the Empire State Building by name, in fact had never been in the Empire State Building, or even walked across its shadow?

Silly as this plea is, it is much easier to swallow than his insistence that he was merely engaging in some idle scientific musing ("all I did was muse aloud ... harmless curiosity..."). Books are hard work, even second-rate polemics like The God Delusion. Science is hard work, and expensive. We prioritize our investigations into the world, whatever form they take (fairy tales included) because there isn't time or money to do them all, and some things are just inherently less interesting than others.

Dawkins knows he has a reputation as a zealot, which is probably why he pedalled back on his description of the fairy tale book, peppering it with perhapses and I don't knows. In this passage you can see this restraint in action:

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.

He starts out talking about his own childhood, obviously with something specific in mind, but lets the thought go limp at the end. He provides, however, in a comment at the Richard Dawkins Forum, some possible insight into the kind of experiential support he was reaching for:

My anecdotal experience of my own childhood points me towards the opposite intuition. Whether I actually believed in spells and magic wands and Genies of the Lamp, I can’t remember. But I do remember spending a lot of time at my infant school trying to call down supernatural forces to protect me from bullies. I had a distinct mental image of a large black cloud with a human face, which would swoop down out of the sky and deal with the bully. I can’t be sure that a diet of Grimm and Hans Anderson predisposes children to such futile imaginings, but at very least it seems plausible enough to be worth researching.

Here is a rare glimpse of the kind of bitterness, and perhaps even trauma, that Dawkins seems to have experienced when one of his childhood fantasies (the common and necessary fantasy that one is protected) failed to see him through. (I'll be accused of speculative pop-psychology, but if we (safely) assume the Big Black Cloud did not swoop down to Dawkins' defense, it is hard to imagine how a tender young psyche ("infant school" is like our kindergarten) would not be profoundly affected by finding itself helpless against bullies.

Note that this disillusionment is exactly the opposite of the effect that Dawkins claims to suspect of fairy tales, namely that they "predispose a child to lazy habits of thought, avoiding the urge to question how and why things really happen." Perhaps we are intended to believe that there were competent grownups on hand ready to stop the bullying as soon as little Richard called it to their attention. But fantasies like these often arise because things have broken down in the real world, and are in many cases essential to the preservation of a child's sanity. Far from being lazy habits, they are in fact active and inventive measures, critical to health and survival.

***

This interpretation might be a tough sell with Dawkins, given his weak grasp of child psychology. At a recent conference of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, Dawkins repeated his thoughtful notion that referring to a child in terms of her parents' belief system is child abuse of a variety even worse than sexual abuse.

It is evil to describe a child as a Muslim child or a Christian child. I think labelling children is child abuse and I think there is a very heavy issue, for example, about teaching about hell and torturing their minds with hell.

It's a form of child abuse, even worse than physical child abuse. I wouldn't want to teach a young child, a terrifyingly young child, about hell when he dies, as it's as bad as many forms of physical abuse.

Without a doubt, the doctrine of hell is probably traumatic for many children. But this is a specific teaching, out of thousands that appear in the world's major religions, and its potential for terror has nothing to do with "labelling." I would also suggest that the number of monotheists today who indicate to their children that they are destined for eternal torment is proportionally small, especially when compared to the days of the Great Awakening.

What Dawkins seems primarily to object to, at any rate, is not the terror of the doctrine of hell, but rather its falsity. Consistently throughout his comments on religion he has asserted (in response to the common argument that religion has value in its "comforting" role) that comfort is of small weight compared to Truth. Peace of mind, security, even happiness, are no justifications for the nurturing of a delusion.

That may be true in the case of well-adjusted adult, who we may expect to "face facts" for the greater good, but is this standard really equally applicable to a prepubescent child? There's a reason we don't send children into mines anymore, and it's not because their hands are too small to grip the shovel properly. There's a reason we wait 18 years to confer the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Dawkins appears to believe that that reason is that it takes 18 years to fill our children's heads with the requisite knowledge to make informed decisions. (Under this model, when Jor-El loads up baby Superman's rocketship with all kinds of instructional videos, this constitutes a normative upbringing).

Compare Dawkins' "religion is child abuse" narrative with the following anecdote from Bruno Bettleheim's Uses of Enchantment:

How upsetting it is for a child to think that, unbeknownst to him, powerful processes are going on within him may be illustrated by what happened to one seven-year old when his parents tried to explain to him that his emotions had carried him away to do things of which they--and he--severely disapproved. The child's reaction was "You mean there's a machine in me that ticks away all the time and at any moment may explode me?" From then on, this boy lived in real terror of impending self-destruction.

Bettleheim is in certain respects a problematic figure, but what is most important here is that the effect of tales on children is not, as Dawkins appears to believe, terra incognita. Rather than "an absence of evidence," there is abundant support for the theory (though not unanimous agreement) that fantastical, mythographic stories are crucial to healthy childhood development. In his comment in response to Libby Purves' article, which I quoted above, Dawkins implies that she is relying on intuition alone, despite the fact that she has cited the work of not only Bettleheim, but also Otto Rank, Charlotte Bühler, and Bruno Jöckel (to which we might add Jack Zipes, Walter Schirf, Alice Miller, and Alan Dundes).

Dawkins' question, however, is not whether it is false that fairy tales are beneficial, but whether it is true that they are pernicious. (After all, they might be neither.) And for his side he offers nothing but intuition of his own.

***

On the nuts and bolts of his hypothesis, Dawkins appears muddled. He takes pains to distinguish fantasy and magical stories from "good science fiction, which "respects scientific principles and never resorts to lazy magic tricks." Elsewhere he expands on this distinction:

They are poles apart, almost opposite. Fairy Tales allow MAGIC, which is arguably lazy because there are no limits to what spells can achieve. Science Fiction (I mean what I think of as good science fiction) is utterly different because it is DISCIPLINED, invoking limited, controlled, thoughtful deviations from the normal laws of reality. I yield to nobody in my enthusiasm for science fiction, and have often thought of writing a science fiction novel myself.

[...]

My tentative view is that the sort of magic spell fiction that I had in mind for research — witches waving wands and turning princes into frogs — is conspicuously UNimaginative, precisely because it is so lazy — too easy to manipulate a plot when you are allowed to fool around with spells.

It seems to me Dawkins should have kept in mind the Arthur C. Clarke quote he has shown such fondness for in the past, pointing out that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." At any rate, wouldn't "controlled, thoughtful deviations from the laws of reality" be in the eye of the beholder? Because so much science fiction is set in the future, we allow that it's plausible our descendents may have developed a means for intergalactic space travel, or encountered alien species, but before we take any of these notions too seriously, we might want to re-read William Gibson's "Gernsback Continuum," whose hero gets stuck in an alternate reality of The Future as envisioned 50 years in the past; that is to say, a future that completely failed to materialize; a future that wasn't all that "scientific" after all.

The speculative nature of "the future" gives the science fiction author just as much to "fool around" with as the animism and sorcery that supposedly runs rampant throughout fairy tales. The fact that these novels and stories are so technocentric is not in itself any hedge against "lazyness," nor any indicator of "discipline." I see nothing but aesthetic bias in this distinction. Notice also how Dawkins makes sure to qualify the Sci-Fi he is defending as "good" science fiction, but makes no parallel allowance for magical fiction. Interestingly, the examples he cites of the kind of tales he wants to research are literary classics: 1001 Nights, The Brothers Grimm, and (drawing from a much different category) Hans Christian Andersen. These stories have endured for decades if not centuries, which does not speak in support of their being either lazy or unimaginative. The jury is still out on what kind of staying power will be enjoyed by the likes of Asimov or Heinlein.

As for magic:

[Interviewer:] Some people might say that you're taking all the magic out of childhood.

[Dawkins:] No, no, because there's so much magic in science.

Now that's deft. I guess magic means something different, here, not literally witches and spells and "things changing into other things" but, wonder and mystery or something. But if Dawkins is permitted to consider magic as a metaphor for awe in this context, then what exactly is his objection to magical fiction in the first place, which also speaks in a metaphorical tongue?

I haven't done much to distinguish between reading ages here, out of respect for your valuable time, but there are big differences between early, middle, and late childhood in the kinds of stories children relate to. Older kids trend far more toward fact-based narratives than younger kids, partly as an expression of their growing psychological and intellectual mastery. In this sense there is no real comparison between the kinds of fantastical stories enjoyed by very young children, and the often more "plausible" stories enjoyed by older children. There's "magic" in Anton Chekov, but good luck getting anyone under age 14 to stay awake for it. If Dawkins is considering some kind of bait and switch here, where science is just as "magical" as Snow White or Hansel and Gretel, he's bound to be just as disappointed as the parent who insists that lima beans aren't just good for you, but delicious too.

***

After all this it is difficult to take Dawkins at his word when he claims "I never said I was against magic stories." Again with the literalism. To be fair, apart from conflating the reading of fairy tales with the "anti-scientific" belief in magic, and casting said stories as exercises in undisciplined laziness, he hasn't in so many words come out "against" them. But does anyone think for a minute that if this book ever gets written, it will come out in support of magical tales for children? (Or, for that matter, that it will contain any more rigorous research than The God Delusion? (Talk about lazy and undisciplined!))





[1] nobody but nobody throws a hissy fit like Richard Dawkins.

Miracle Me

If Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder are such paragons of working class cred, how come they are able to attend all these McCain-Palin rallies, like they're touring with the Grateful Dead?

Downfall

All indications are that the McCain/Palin campaign all going all-in in Pennsylvania. All-in in Pennsylvania. At what point do John and Sarah commit suicide in a bunker under Pittsburgh?

Here's a revealing digression from Zbigniew Brzezinsky's Monday appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe program.



At about the 7:00 mark, in response to a jokey question from Lawrence O'Donnell, Z-big discusses his decision not to anglicize his name when he was just getting started at Harvard, saying, "America is a country where someone with a name like mine should be able to make a name for himself."

O'Donnell rejoins: "Except in show business," at which point Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinsky (who is Z-big's daughter) jumps in to offer herself as an example of this truth:

Lawrence, no joke, one of my first news directors said, "you know, your name, maybe it outta be, you know, Mary Smith"--like, seriously?

Let's let Irving Berlin have the last word.

Theres no people like show people, they smile when they are low!
Even with a turkey that you know will fold, you may be stranded out in the cold
Still you wouldnt change it for a sack of gold, lets go on with the show!

The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the clerk
Are secretly unhappy men because
The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the clerk
Get paid for what they do but no applause.
Theyd gladly bid their dreary jobs goodbye for anything theatrical and why?

The Gourmand and the Gourmet

How much longer, I wonder, can we live under the crippling illusion that money is real? Today the Dow Jones index fell 7 percent, matching similar performances over the last few weeks, and we're all suddenly that much "poorer." Yet the amount of actual wealth in the world--food, land, water, minerals, fuels, human ingenuity and muscle power--has not appreciably changed from one day to the next. And neither do these falling securities prices reflect speculation in long term loss of real (tangible) wealth. We do have an important problem considering diminishing natural resources, but that's not what Wall Street is concerned about. Rather Wall Street is worried about not having enough abstract markers of these resources.

In a 1968 essay called "Wealth Versus Money," Alan Watts compares this tragi-farcical situation to that of a construction site, where the contractor tells his crew they can't build today, because they've run out of inches. We are as liable now as then to find this an unacceptable analogy, so enchanted are we by the social convention of money, but it is hard to find fault with it. Money is, after all, merely the accounting trick we use to distribute goods and services. It has no inherent value, and the abundance or scarcity of it is--unlike actual wealth--a complete and total social construction.

One of the more brilliant turns of Watts' essay is in teasing out the psychological games we seem to play unconsciously with our economic system (without regard to where we might fall on the neoliberal spectrum). When the Federal Treasury creates more money, in effect expanding the amount of spending ability, or credit, conventional economics calls this a creation of debt, since it is reliant on the continuing illusion that money, being real, must "come from" somewhere. So we are said to be borrowing these sums of money from future generations, and we wring our hands about the certain ruin our children will come to if we don't rein ourselves in. There is a palpable protestant guilt entwined with this sensation: We should be more austere, but being fallen creatures, we just can't seem to help ourselves. The exception to these qualms of unbridled profligacy is, naturally, the instance of national security, and we find that the only real excuse for "going into debt" is war, and then we wonder at why the world seems such a violent place. As Watts puts it,

We are reduced, then, to the suicidal expedient of inventing wars when, instead, we could simply have invented money.

Indeed, why don't we? Classical economics has a self-fulfilling "law" that says that increasing the money supply is always inflationary. This is an artifact of a psycho-economic conviction of scarcity which, if it were ever real, is now obviously moribund. Humanity can quite clearly feed, clothe and house itself at relatively modest expense. The rest--medicine, the arts, transportation, the military, and various luxury items--will have to be negotiated on the grounds of how sustainable they are. But that's just as true under the current regime; we're just in denial about it.

We have to imagine what the psychological impact on our culture would be if we adopted a system where every citizen had a modest guaranteed income for life. So much of our current economic motivations are based on purchasing "security" in a way that would be so easily obviated in a guaranteed credit society. Relieved of the burden of having to "provide" for ourselves, we could make far more thoughtful and gentle choices about how we conducted our lives.

Now is the time to take this proposition seriously. (Or as Watts might say, to take it lightly). The delusion of global prosperity through financial capitalism is already threadbare. We have never wanted money; we have wanted wealth, and all capitalism seems to know how to do is destroy it. (Socialism in this regard is just Capitalism with a stupid look on its face. It makes the same error of taking money at, ahem, face value.) Relieved of the restraint on having more, we just may, paradoxically, want less. We may find out that the insatiable greed and selfishness we thought was inherent in humanity, needing the strong arm of a monarch or invisible hand of a monetary system, was based on a large scale misunderstanding of what we thought we wanted in the first place.

James Wolcott adds another avatar to the McCain-Palin totem pole:

Sign of the Moose

The moose is courageous and determined and will make its presence known when it chooses to. ... On the other hand, the moose has an uncanny ability to camouflage itself, in spite of its great size and power. It can move silently through its territory and never be seen. These contradictions help it survive in the wild. It holds the teachings of invisibility and the power of presence.

The moose can appear awkward as well as graceful. Its highly developed sense of smell and hearing is complimented by its excellent depth perception. Its appearance of ungainliness is misleading and deceptive and it is this deception, which enables it to survive so well.

Moose represents self-esteem and is also about the magick of life and death. Late autumn and early winter is her cycle of power.

Of course, Moose is also friends with:

Squirrels are by nature extremely curious and a bit of a daredevil as well. It is important though that Squirrel people not give in to their impulse to challenge those that are rightfully on their own "turf" just for the fun of it. Otherwise, eventually these folks will find that they have gotten themselves in just a little too deep and may have a difficult time scrambling out again.

While Squirrel medicine is excellent for preparing and storing resources away for the future, they also have a quick, nervous energy that indicates they are not really suited for very long term projects. Its much better for Squirrel people as a general rule to seek out advantageous situations where they can get in, get what they need and get out again quickly.

Squirrel people may also need to develop a "poker face" so that they don't give the show away if something needs to be kept quiet. Squirrel people may also find that they have a tendency to chatter on and on about anything and everything. This can be a huge time and energy drain if the person is simply using this as an outlet rather than getting on with preparing for the future and taking the practical actions that need to be taken.

Seldom do you see a squirrel inactive. Although they are always prepared for what may come they have a tendency to forget where they store things. The forgetfulness of squirrel serves as a reminder to those with this medicine to slow down, pay attention and to stop running frantically in several directions at once.

And because of their proximity to Russia, Moose and Squirrel are an excellent prophylactic against:


Now, as we know, myths don't operate in the same logical, strictly analogous fashion as rational thought, so it's more than proper to point out that Squirrel is just another Avatar of:

Capt. Peter "Wrong Way" Peachfuzz was, from his youngest days, an incompetent sailor. As a child, even his toy boats sank. At the age of 18 he joined the navy. He was awarded numerous medals, all of which were donated by the enemy. Sailing the wrong way through the Panama Canal and becoming the only captain of an icebreaker in the South Seas earned him the nickname "Wrong Way". After receiving a large inheritance from an aunt he purchased and took command of the S.S. Andalusia ("Athabaska" in some shorts). His crew considered mutiny but decided rather to install a dummy control room, so that Peachfuzz would think he was in command, while the crew actually controlled the ship from another location. Another example of his more than usual incompetence is when he becomes a Spymaster and tries to confiscate telephone books(because they list his name and telephone number); sets up dozens of pairs of spies (who only spy on each other!); and attacks the Supreme Court Building (thinking they're enemy agents).

The Candidate of Attitude and Experience

John McCain, the candidate of experience:

• Does not know the difference between Fiscal and Financial
• Does not know the difference between Strategy and Tactics
• Does not know the difference between Sunni and Shia
• Does not know who the leader of Iran is
• Does not know who the leader of Spain is
• Thinks there is a country called Czechoslovakia
• Thinks Iraq and Pakistan share a border
• Thinks the President can fire anyone in any government agency (told that he cannot, McCain insisted that if he wanted to fire someone, that person would know he was fired, regardless of his actual authority to do so)
• Thinks FHLMC and FNMA are government agencies
• Thinks General Petraeus is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

If I were Obama, I might consider taking a page from that scene from 48 Hours, outside Torchie's, where Hammond (Eddie Murphy) and Cates (Nick Nolte) argue over which attributes make the cop: A Gun and a Badge, or Attitude and Experience?

HAMMOND
But you can handle it all right,
huh? Real amazin' how far a gun
and a badge can carry some cats...

CATES
Bullshit. Attitude and experience
get you through...

HAMMOND
I been in a lot of bars where a
white cop rousted me and some of
the brothers. All those clowns
ever had going for 'em was a gun
and a badge...

CATES
You need five years training to
handle a joint like...

HAMMOND
Hey, you wanna bet?

CATES
I got two problems. Number one,
I'm not playin' games. Number
two, you got nothin' to bet with.

HAMMOND
If we come outta this joint with
Ganz' phone number, or a dead
Indian, or anything else useful,
then you could turn the other way
for half an hour while I get
laid...

CATES
Why? Anybody that talks about
women as much as you do probably
can't get it up anyway.

HAMMOND
That's never been one of my
problems.

Now, stop stallin', man, or else
admit all this professional stuff
you're talkin' about is a crock of
shit.

CATES
I'll tell you what happens if you
lose... you tell the truth for
once.

HAMMOND
What are you talkin' about?

CATES
You tell me what Ganz busted out
for, he's after a lot more than
just gettin' out of jail. And
whatever it is, you're part of it.

HAMMOND
I don't know what you're talking
about. I just wanna see Ganz
nailed.

CATES
The bet's off.

HAMMOND
Okay, if I lose, I'll tell you
anything you want to know...

CATES
I'm gonna enjoy this ... here,
I'll even loan you my badge.

HAMMOND
I thought you said bullshit and
experience are all it takes.

He takes the badge anyway as they head for the entrance.

Later, inside the bar, after Hammond has subdued the rednecks:

PUNK
What kind of cop are you, anyway?

HAMMOND
I am your worst nightmare: a nigger with a badge.

Is Our Children Learning, from History?

I'm inclined to think that National Review writer Mark Krikorian thought he was just making a snickering, juvenile joke when he posted, under the heading "Cause and Effect?" a recent WaMu Press Release touting corporate diversity. I don't want to link to the Corner today, but Glenn Greenwald summarizes it ably here.

I think it could be argued that Krikorian was merely mocking the Liberal agenda, which (in his eyes) elevates social justice over the bottom line, even in the middle of an unprecedented crisis (WaMu is the biggest bank ever to fail--so far.)

But there's a not-so-subtle second meaning, where it is the "cause" of employing minorities which led to the "effect" of the bank's collapse. Krikorian is the Executive Director of the "Center for Immigration Studies," and shares the same gripping compulsion of many Cornerites that brown people are going to outbreed Real Americans if we don't do something about it. One of the big talking points all across Right Blogistan is that minorities make for particularly risky lending, and it was the Government's iron hand, forcing banks to issue these ill-fated mortgages that led to the present financial crisis. This is a pure delusion, and the racism of it is staggering: there are far more poor and insolvent whites than any other ethnic group in this country. We are to believe that poor whites, putting Country First, nobly turned down any offers of credit they knew they couldn't make good on, but blacks and hispanics loaded up on all the bad debt they could get their hands on--and there was nothing the poor lenders could do to stop them: the Government wouldn't let them.

Nevermind that there are no such racial breakdowns in borrowing practices, or that the universal sales pitch in real estate over the last 10 years was that it didn't matter if you couldn't make your payments when your ARM reset; by then you'd have sold the house for a profit, because home values were going to rise for as long as the rivers run, as long as the grass will grow. The delusion that minorities are fucking up the country for Real Americans is standard issue with the conservative mindset. It's always been pernicious, but as daily life threatens to get harder and harder for most of us, the danger is that it will grow contagious too. Our culture shows no signs of having outgrown the need for a scapegoat.

It's facile to point to Weimar Germany as an analogue, but not totally useless. We don't know how bad things can or will get. But there's no safety net, and among the things we should be on guard for is the old trope that some sectors of the populace, readily identifiable by skin tone or other prominent features, are somehow more defective, more craven, more devious, less honorable, and just less American (if not in fact less human) than other sectors. It can show up in obvious, ugly places like the National Review, but we should be no less eager to call it out wherever it erupts, even if within ourselves.

Ready to Lead

Here's a choice quote from the Politico coverage of Sarah Palin's Ground Zero presser. The speaker is John Morabito, a firefighter who escorted Palin to a 9/11 memorial wall:

She seems to be up to date [with] current events and everything that happened on 9/11. She’s been given enough information. I’m sure she knows as much as the common American.

So, she had to be brought up to speed on the events of 9/11 to rise to the level of the "common American"? A ringing endorsement.

"I'll try to find ya some"

I agree with Glenn Greenwald that Sarah Palin is a piteous sight. She's in way over her head, and she doesn't appear completely oblivious to that fact. Whatever her gifts, Palin cannot think on her feet, at least when the pressure is on, and she must know that her vapid non-responses defy all intelligibility.

How much of a lightweight do you have to be to awaken the killer instinct in Katie Couric, of all people?

COURIC: I’m just going to ask you one more time, not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation?

PALIN: I’ll try to find you some and I’ll bring them to you.

Time magazine is being courtly with this transcript. What she really said was "I’ll try to find ya some and I’ll bring 'em to ya," and the blitheness of her tone is beyond belief. I say it's not too late for her to drop out. They can't quarantine her for 40 days. The allure of her meltdown is too powerful for the press to resist.

UPDATE:

By Crikey, she just keeps getting worse. (Or, CBS news is releasing these segments in such a way as to make it look that way.)

She's really imploding:

So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade — we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.

I'm much less scared by the prospect of her being VP than by the fact this could even be possible. That some significant portion of the electorate either doesn't notice her breathtaking incompetence, or finds this less important than her ideology. Even Rich Fucking Lowry says Obama should be 10-15 points ahead at this point. What is happening?

QOTD

Yglesias:

In the People’s Republic of China they have this crazy system where if a huge problem emerges in an area of policy, the person who was supposed to be in charge of that area loses his job, rather than getting $700 billion to spend at his absolute discretion ... They sure are inscrutable over there.

On Having Wet Feet

"We need as big a stimulus as our foreign lenders will allow us to get away with." --Lee Price, chief economist of the House Appropriations Committee

If I were John McCain I'd start phoning in the campaign from here on in. His desire for presidential power is strictly limited to playing at war. He has no interest in running even a healthy economy, let alone trying to rescue a mortally wounded one. And he must be starting to grasp that even if he were to squeak out a win at this point (increasingly unlikely as the magnitude of our economic crisis becomes apparent) there would be no money for any sexy foreign adventures. McCain's dream is over and the sooner he realizes it, the better for everyone.

Nevertheless, one thing President Obama will not be able to do is prevent our economic collapse, nor keep our "standard of living" from reducing to something far more modest than most of us thought possible, much sooner than we thought possible. This might be catastrophic, or it might be merely a Matterhorn of privation, but either way what we all need to begin to accept is that the US Government can't kiss this booboo and make it better.

Liberals, in particular, tend to look at Imperial America and anguish over what we might accomplish if we'd only use all that capital, might and bravado for the forces of good: nationalized healthcare, fully funded schools, environmental protection, robust welfare programs for the needy, not to mention items deep down on the wish list that no one has dared dream of for decades (undoing the ravages of the Reagan revolution alone would involve re-strengthening the unions, re-regulating the airline and other industries, re-funding public mental health, re-funding the arts, and more).

This is in many ways a noble sentiment, but economically it is a fetish. We are a debtor nation in a global economy. We still grow a little food, and build a few cars, but other than that we produce little of value. 20 percent of our GDP is comprised of the financial sector, which trades only in smoke and chimeras, as we are all becoming painfully aware. Our government is now contemplating a "bailout" that consists of spending $700 billion on valueless "assets" (Jeff Dorchen's Moment of Truth for this week, "Wall Street Celebrates Socialism," is excellent on this subject.) This is on top of the hundreds of billions we owe China in the form of T-bill obligations. The orthodoxy is that China can't call in their chits because if the US economy collapses they'll have no one to sell their tainted toys and medicines to. But if the US economy looks like it's going to collapse anyway...

Wall Street has known this--at least unconsciously--for some time, which is why financial markets have so resembled a Ponzi scheme for the last few decades. Since there is very little "real" wealth underlying our economy, the only sane way to speculate is to perpetuate the myth of increasing returns, and hope that it doesn't blow up until after you've cashed out. As Kevin Phillips points out, there are historical precedents for this: the Dutch of the 18th c. and the British of the 20th, each of whom were top of the heap in their day, until they

shaded away from making and trading things into a prideful emphasis on financial services and debt, and both ultimately took on international and military commitments they couldn't afford. The lesson is that global economic success breeds hubris and that hauteur breeds over-financialization.

During the Great Depression the United States was the world's largest creditor, energy producer, and manufacturer. Today we are largest debtor, the greatest consumer of energy, and the largest importer of goods. We can't spend our way out of this crisis as we did in the 1930s. Regulation will, at best, staunch the bleeding--if we can find the political will for it. A survey of Obama's economic advisors would suggest weak tea and posturing: both his and Hillary Clinton's campaigns have been hugely financed by the financial sector, to a far greater extent than McCain's. There will be enormous resistance to aggressive regulatory measures. There's still money to be made, even in the face of collapse, just as there's still liquor to be drunk, even as one's liver grows cirrhotic and heart weak.

Things are changing very rapidly, and we don't yet know Obama well enough to know how he'll face a National crisis that may be matched only by Lincoln's. But we need to start talking about what we will do when there are food, gas, and heating oil rations, when our retirement accounts (Social Security included) dry up, unemployment hits 20 to 25 percent, and all but the most basic goods-food, clothing, shelter and transportation, become out of our reach. It's a real possibility, and we need to know that we can manage, survive, and perhaps even learn to enjoy a kind of prosperity that is much more humble than the commodity fetishism we've suffered under for the last century or so.