u n d e r v e r s e

The Paupers' Death

2012-01-10T16:16:00.000-06:00

Over the next two weeks I'm going to mock up some proofs-of-concept in garageband for the Baudelaire CD I'm working on. Here's the first one:

The final product will be much more professionally and lovingly recorded, with a fair amount more instrumental diversity that you'll hear here. I'm picturing strings in the place of some of these guitars, for example. Maybe a horn, maybe an accordion. Hell maybe an oboe, I don't know.

But you can help support the project by pre-ordering your copy through my Kickstarter campaign. $10 for the download, $15 for the physical CD. Or, make my year and give at one of the higher pledge levels. If I can raise $5,000 by January 24, all manner of things become possible.

Thanks, and happy listening!

How His Naked Ears Were Tortured

2012-01-03T12:35:00.000-06:00

Shorter Jerry Coyne:

My meticulous reasoning has allowed me to discard the proposition that we have the ability to employ reason to evaluate propositions. It is abundantly clear that it is not within our power to elect to do anything which might have an impact on the physical world, or on the lives of other human beings. Now let's get out there and make the world a better place.

Seriously. After strenuously asserting that we have no capacity whatsoever to choose our behaviors, Coyne concludes thusly: "With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world." Well OK, then!

Arguments like Coyne's that human agency is an illusion and that we are in fact automatons tend to fall into two categories: those that are self-refuting, and those that have no bearing on anything whatsoever. Because Coyne is such a poor reasoner, he splits the difference. On the one hand he writes that the discovery that we are in fact automatons should powerfully influence how we treat other human beings:

[W]e should continue to mete out punishments because those are environmental factors that can influence the brains of not only the criminal himself, but of other people as well. Seeing someone put in jail, or being put in jail yourself, can change you in a way that makes it less likely you'll behave badly in the future. […] And we should continue to reward good behavior, for that changes brains in a way that promotes more good behavior.

Who is this "we" that "should" thusly modify our systems of jurisprudence--or advocate that others do so? "Should" is a choice-word; it has no place in discussions of deterministic causality. If humans are really no more than "meat computers," if we can't "change our outputs" any more than a computer can "reach inside itself and change its program," then why would we advocate any proscribed behavior at all? We don't reason with our laptops--or our thermostats. What would be the point of reasoning with autonomous "meat computers"? To be logically consistent, a belief system that avows humans have no volition, no choice, and no agency, must refrain from employing any prescriptive moral language whatsoever. If you can't do this, chances are you don't "really" believe that humans are automatons after all.

Elsewhere in the column (and on his blog, the stated purpose of which is to persuade others of the scientific rectitude of evolutionary theory), Coyne retreats to defense that we can never free ourselves of the sense that our agency is real. "We have no choice but to pretend that we do choose," he writes. If this is true, of course, then the hypothesis that we have no ability to choose can never be more than a speculation, entirely outside our ability to evaluate either logically or scientifically. It's like the persistent but ultimately futile speculation that humans are "actually" brains in vats: If everything we believe to be real is actually a simulation, then the whole concept of "evidence" becomes meaningless. It hardly matters what "reality" is if we have no hope of access to it. Likewise, it hardly matters what the truth is about our own volition, if we cannot be brought to "think" in non-volitional terms.

Whatever that might mean. As John Pieret has argued at Thoughts In A Haystack, it would be impossible, without some faculty to select from among rational propsitions, to assign any meaning whatsoever to the content of science or reason:

Certainly Coyne cannot “reason” unless he has the choice to accept or reject arguments on the basis of logic. Heck, he can't even recognize what is logical without the choice to accept good arguments and reject bad ones. Nor can he infer anything based on evidence unless he also has the choice to accept relevant and valid evidence and reject irrelevant and invalid “evidence.”

"Incompatiblism" (the doctrine that determinism precludes contra-causal volition) is not entirely unknown in philosophy. There are a handful of "eliminative materialists" like Paul and Patricia Churchland, but these go nowhere near as far as Coyne in announcing determinism as a choice-defeater. Patricia Churchland, for example, suggests that instead of "free will," (a problematic concept, without any doubt--Just how "free" is it?) we focus on the faculty of self-control, using the example of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship. The question then is just who is doing the controlling? Churchland's answer is that there is a construct of the brain we call the "self," having evolved to solve problems. We can take issue with this explanation (noting, for example, that at first blush it seems awfully teleological), but we observe nonetheless that to Churchland this "self" is "every bit as real as the three-dimensional world we see." This is the strange juncture (we also see it in writers like Dennett and Dawkins) where the hardcore physicalist becomes a Deleuzian constructivist: sure, free will is a construct, consciousness is a construct, but so too is the "middle world" of our experience a construct, including space and time, and motion, and physicality. The only thing that is "really real," is evolution. All else is phantasmagoria.

There is a mystical lilt to this doctrine: as we live and die in the world of Maya, so must we play by its rules. Coyne gives lip service to this view when he talks about contemplating selfhood as a "convincing illusion fashioned by natural selection." But he cannot commit to it. To him, the mechanical billiard-ball world of objects, forces and causes is all that is real. As robotic inhabitants of that world, we have no choice but to disavow any semblance of moral responsibility. We are all "victims of circumstance" without even Churchland's proposed faculty of "self-control." Bernie Madoff is no more responsible for his crimes than Nelson Mandela for his trials and triumphs; in each case their actions were predestined. Criminals who calculate their crimes with cost-benefit analysis "don't differ in responsibility" from those whose capacity for moral reflection is diminished by, for example, a brain tumor. Such is the ethical nuance of Coyneian hard determinism.

I would propose that in the end we take such a doctrine about as seriously as he does himself, when death is on the line. In a recent defense of the infamous (and deadly) vices of Christopher Hitchens, Coyne invoked the spectre of "leisure fascists" who

come out of the woodwork, for example, when I put up a post about barbecue. Tough, I say: life is to be enjoyed, and I’d rather have my tenure on Earth be shortened by a few years if I can sometimes eat barbecue instead of only raw vegetables. Hitch liked his Johnnie Walker and ciggies; he said they helped him think and enjoy his life. (my emphasis)

Note what Coyne did not say in his own (or Hitchens') defense. He did not say "So help me, I just can't stop myself, and I'll be damned if I let anyone hold me responsible for deterministic forces reaching back to the beginning of the universe." He did not say "Leave poor Hitchens alone, he couldn't possibly surmount his biologically determined addictions!" No; perhaps inspired by the example of the magnetic man of action to whom his blog became a temporary shrine after Hitchens' death, Coyne used those magic words "I'd rather." Quality over quantity. Tomorrow Ye May Die. (Etc.) This is Coyne the true philosopher, unburdened by a need to buttress an unsustainable ideology. This is Coyne the Bartlebian Hero. Let these wise words "I'd rather" be the ones we recall, and let's chalk up the others to a failure to lash himself to the mast of True Preference, to stop up his ears against the siren song of reductive scientism.

Postscript: Over at Rationally Speaking, Massimo Pigliucci dives into the Wittgensteinian distinction between reasons and causes. This is the way out of the forest, though Pigliucci takes the wrong fork in the road. (Yes, Wittgenstein wasn't very forthcoming about where reasons "come from," but I think we are too greedy in this day and age for ultimate explanations. We can't presently explain gravity in terms of fundamental physics, but we can feel confident in our right to talk about gravity as a real thing. So too can we talk about the distinction between rational and causal explanations without anyone's head exploding.)

See also Jean Kazez and Russell Blackford.

Pencil Cup

2012-01-02T11:47:00.000-06:00

One large reason posting has been slow over the last year or so is that I've been involved in a large-scale project translating and writing cabaret-style songs based on Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. I've been performing the songs as cantastoria, with the visual component created by my collaborator, Dave Buchen. It looks like this:

And it sounds like ... well, there are links for that too if you click through the links below, or the widget in the top right corner.

This Winter I'm recording an album of these songs, and to the end of making of making this as lovely as thing as it is in my power to make, I'm raising funds through Kickstarter, and you can read all about the project there.

I have a very modest funding vision: If everyone interested in the project gave at the $15 level (which will be the price of the physical CD--and by coincidence, the physical CD is the premium you will receive for donating that that level), I will easily make my $5,000 goal. (Of course you can always give more! -- or less. Every bit helps.)

I hope you'll consider donating. Underverse has very few costs associated with it--just my time, really, which I'm happy to devote when I have it. But making this CD will mean paying collaborators--musicians, engineers, designers, as well as paying for things like replication, mastering, and packaging.

Plus, if it doesn't seem too grandiose, you're also supporting the whole concept of crowd-funding, one of the unambiguously good things to come out of the internet age.

Thanks in advance for your support, and I'll see you back here soon!

Just a Fluke

2011-12-31T16:17:00.000-06:00

[NOTE: This post was originally published in 2009. I've made a few revisions to this version, for the sake of clarity and logical consistency, as well as just plain rhetorical correctness.]

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, the fluke first 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 the teeth and gums of grazing livestock.

A meme is supposed to be similarly parasitic, spurring its host (a human mind) to behave in ways orthogonal to its rational interest. Before parasitization, an organism does what we would expect it to do according to Darwinian logic. After parasitization, all bets are off. The meme might lead to fantastic cultural achievements, cathedrals and sonatas and elaborate cuisines. Or it might lead to tragic cultural afflictions; harmful ideologies and superstitions. In either case the important detail is that the minds hosting these memes have not consciously evaluated or chosen them; rather they were "selected" on the basis of their effectiveness, by Darwinian logic. The meme-parasite is thus enlisted to explain all manner of irrational behavior, and the beliefs that underlie them. In Dennett's recent book, Breaking the Spell (2006), the irrational beliefs and behaviors in question are religious ones, and the primary meme postulated to explain why they persist is called "belief in belief."

Many more able critics than I have taken on meme theory for the modern day phlogiston it is (See, for example, here and here.) I want to limit myself now to this question: If memes were real, how would we know? Put another way, how can we know that our thoughts and values, whatever they may be, are really our thoughts and values, 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 as it climbs a blade of grass to await mastication. Granting formicidae, for the moment, a faculty of consciousness and reflection, how might the ant understand its strange and deviant mission? It might, for example, feel guilt over abandoning the important tasks of the hive, but impelled to climb the stalk all the same by some quasi-instinctual engine--like a gambling addict skulking shame-faced to the casino. Alternatively, 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, much as a martyr might feel. There need be no clue at all that anything could be bad or wrong about grass-blade climbing, despite the high risk of an early death. To the ant, it may feel like entirely justified and morally unimpeachable behavior. Or there may be any number of gradations of doubt, guilt, shame, or confusion associated with it. In any case, the subjective experience of the ant, who cannot know the real reason it climbs the blade of grass, is doomed to irrelevance. It's beliefs about its own motives simply cannot track with reality.

I don't imagine meme advocates would have any problem with this thought fable, 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 in general, who is to act as the "outside" observer? Who has the neutral or objective perspective to say definitively than any of us aren't foolishly pursuing an absurd fate? Once we analogize human belief about our own motives with the zombie ant, on what foundation can we say that any of our thoughts or actions make any sense at all?

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.

But now we have a serious problem. In Dennett's earlier books he has proposed that the mechanism underlying both genes and memes, natural selection, is a "universal acid," that corrodes through everything. Anything which purports to operate by some different means than natural selection is, in Dennett's coinage, a "skyhook:" a miracle or deus ex machina. If we are to break the bonds of belief and "belief in belief," which, we have just finished explaining, are the products of a process so universal it melts away all competing explanations, then how are we to explain the faculty of Reason? It must be either that it is, on the one hand, somehow impervious to the corrosiveness of natural selection, making it just another "skyhook," or, on the other hand, a product of natural selection, making it just another meme, with nothing to privilege it above any belief, delusional or otherwise.

In other words, if meme theory is true, how are we know that our new and improved sacred values of 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? (Whatever that might mean). How do we know that free and critical inquiry, free from fetters and taboo, is not our own seemingly purposeful climb up the blade of grass? Against what do we test our sense that rationality is ... rational? How could we know for sure that our most prized and cherished ideas, values, theories and methodologies are not just flukes?

--

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

Suicide Bombers who love too much

2011-12-26T13:33:00.000-06:00

Shorter Barbara Oakley:

"You know who else was also really into Altruism? The Hutus and Tutsis. (Also, Hitler!)"

(Yes, she really does argue that genocide happens because people care about each other too much. Read it and weep--but not too much! We don't want a body count).

On Comprehension

2011-12-18T16:26:00.002-06:00

While hardly a direct (or even indirect) response to my query, last year, of a suitable term to replace the epithet "scientism," I seem to be, at long last, getting some answers all the same. Not particularly satisfying answers, but answers nonetheless. And so I pick up where I left off.

Jerry Coyne, for example, writes:

If you want to see a philosopher’s justification of scientism—in this case “philosophical naturalism,” read Barbara Forrest’s paper published in 2000 in Philo.

All fine, except that "philosophical naturalism" is not what is usually meant by scientism. Philosophical naturalism just means a disbelief in supernatural entities. Scientism, on the other hand, is the assertion that the only things that count as "knowledge" can be derived from science. An exemplar of this view is the chemist Peter Atkins, who perhaps can be excused for the exuberant characterization of science as "limitless" (we all get carried away), but not for his assaults upon both philosophy and poetry:

Although poets may aspire to understanding, their talents are more akin to entertaining self-deception. They may be able to emphasize delights in the world, but they are deluded if they and their admirers believe that their identification of the delights and their use of poignant language are enough for comprehension. Philosophers too, I am afraid, have contributed to the understanding of the universe little more than poets … They have not contributed much that is novel until after novelty has been discovered by scientists … While poetry titillates and theology obfuscates, science liberates.

Now that's scientism. We also see it in the writings of E.O. Wilson from time to time, as he expresses the conviction that science will overtake all the humanities before we're through--not just philosophy, but literature, economics, jurisprudence, and aesthetics. He calls this "consilience," and means it as a good thing.

Coyne is able to resile to the defense of scientism as merely philosophical naturalism because he has a conveniently pliable definition of what science is depending on who's asking. He twists a magic ring on his finger, and science is the renowned practice that is able, through concise and rigorous methodology, to make reliable predictions about the world. (In WVO Quine's phrase, "a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.”) This kind of science--professional science--has resulted in targeted gene treatments and missions to mars, and is now looking for the Higgs boson in a cave below Switzerland. This definition of science is narrow and rarefied. Only with a great deal of patience and effort is it able to come to any reliable conclusions at all.

Speaking of that cave under Switzerland, for example, there was much to-do recently about preliminary data suggesting neutrinos were traveling at faster-than-light speed, which would cause problems for the Theory of Special Relativity, upon which much of our present understanding of physics relies. Professional science treats this as matter for great skepticism, and we will, I'm sure, be seeing a number of carefully constructed experiments conducted and analyzed before any conclusions are reached that will either confirm or challenge the Theory of Special Relativity on those grounds.

As important and valuable as this type of science is, it has obvious limitations. For one thing, there simply isn't time to apply these methods to all aspects of our lives. We need folk empiricism to get by--to find a good babysitter, to buy food safe from contaminants, to accept a "good" job offer, to pick a good date movie. Even just to confirm rather simple empirical observations, such as "The sun is shining outside my window."

We make decisions such as these with some combination of reason and observation, add in a bit of gut feeling, and hope for the best. We try not to delude ourselves that we aren't putting our trust where it doesn't belong--if we're especially honest and courageous we might examine the flaws in our judgement from past decisions and see if we can find where the distortion lies, but this is not science in anywhere near the same sense as discovering the helical nature of DNA or deriving the combined gas law. Everyday knowledge, that is, employs a great deal of reason and empiricism, but lacks a number of characteristics that professional science is typified by: quantification of terms, articulation of a hypothesis, isolation of variables, experimental design, gathering of data, and applying the "null hypothesis" (where a scientist questions his or her own assumptions by asking how the data might also support a contrary hypothesis.)

The second, and more profound, limitation of professional science as a source of all knowledge is that so much of what we "know" is subjective. We know that we like Woody Allen movies, that we hate humid weather, that we trust certain politicians, are creeped out by spiders, and sexually aroused by (let's say) damsels in distress. The best science can do, here, is verify what we already know firsthand, or will come to know. It cannot contradict this knowledge. No brain scan can tell you, while you are in the heights of delight, or apprehension, or disgust, that you actually feel something other than what you feel, or that you believe other than what you believe. And these too, are important types of knowledge, that we can't do without--they are every bit "facts about the world," just as much as the corresponding states of our neural activity that might be observed by a third party are also facts.

We cannot have "science" both ways as it pleases us. We cannot on the one hand call Intelligent Design, or homeopathy, or telekinesis, or climate change skepticism "unscientific," and in the same breath say, as PZ Myers has done, that courting one's wife is doing science: The methods and rigor (or lack of same) in each case are the same. What is needed is to determine where folk empiricism is appropriate, and where it is not.

***

Coyne's post is a commentary on an earlier post by Jason Rosenhouse, who writes to object that philosopher Michael Ruse has recently unfairly accused biologist David Barash of scientism. Rosenhouse's defense is nearly as silly as Coyne's, but has the virtue of being problematic in slightly more interesting ways. After a frivolous annexation of Rosenhouse's own field, mathematics, yielding "scienceandmathematicism*" as the One True Epistemology, Rosenhouse's principal objection to Ruse is that instead of scientism, what he really means is positivism:

Even if we take that at face value, [Ruse's article is] a refutation of positivism, not scientism. The issue before us is not whether we can make meaningful but nonscientific statements about the world. Moral statements are only a refutation of scientism if you assert that we can learn their truth values by some method that isn't scientific. From the way Ruse phrased this paragraph, it seems clear that he sees it as a statement of opinion, not of fact, that the authorities should be ashamed of themselves in this case. At least in this case, then, he is not asserting that we can have knowledge of, as opposed to strong opinions about, the truth or falsity of moral assertions.

The move Rosenhouse makes here is the very move that makes scientism plausible in the first place (and he's right that there is a direct lineage to positivism), re-defining "knowledge" as "scientifically verified knowledge," making scientism true by virtue of a tautology. This is nothing less than linguistic imperialism, and it is on these grounds that most of scientism''s critics are moved to object to it, myself included.

Such a theory of knowledge is, unfortunately, deeply embedded in mainstream analytic philosophy, most strains of which formally define "knowledge" as a "justified true belief" (JTB). Such a phrasing has a veneer of respectability to it (oh, well if it's justified, then!), but even over the course of its short history this veneer has been laid bare in enough places to expose the rather shoddy construction underneath. Brandon Watson had a post at Siris a couple of years ago critiquing the myth of the timelessness of JTB theory, which he recapitulated on a comment thread at John Wilkins' Evolving Thoughts.

In response, John, citing Quine, reiterated his assertion that "knowledge is a species of belief." But if we take this seriously, it seems to trivialize both concepts. For example, to comment on an illustration by Quine, I can state that I “know” there are no such "things" as Homeric gods, but I also know a great deal “about” the Homeric gods. What is the role of belief in all of this? If it is just that I believe other people told certain stories, then technically my knowledge implies a belief in the fact that these stories were actually told, but it’s hard to see why anyone would ever want to consult or invoke this belief. The question gets even more trivial when we ask what Homer believed he wrote about the Homeric gods (or what Apollonius Rhodius, Ovid, et al, believed they wrote). Such belief has little to no bearing on the meaning or value of these stories—or on the structure of their content.

I propose that the formulation opposite to John's is true. That we "know" things, first, before we believe them. This accords with Brandon's reportage of Locke's view of knowledge as "perception of the agreement or the disagreement between two ideas." To have an idea of something is to know it; the greater we can articulate the properties of it, the better we know it. Belief then follows as a secondary concern. How dedicated are we to an idea, once articulated? I can know a great deal about The Austrian School of Economics, or Epicurianism, or Moral Error Theory, without believing they represent all that much that is true. My belief is a higher order of perception, then, because it attempts to integrate what I know into some kind of coherent picture.

Such a view of knowledge allows us to be much more creative and playful about how we talk about the things that matter. If we can "know about" before we decide that we "know that," we have a huge repository of metaphors to help explicate difficult concepts. (I consider it an open question whether Friedrich Kekule would ever have discovered the ring structure of benzene if he did not "know" the myth of Ouroborus.)

But mythic or metaphorical knowledge is not merely instrumentally important. It is part of the natural way we think about things, which is why literature remains such an important part of our culture. There are things we will always best understand in their guise as stories and dramas, even if later we may try to generalize from them with moral reasoning. This is why it is so alarming that in the case of an extreme scientism like Atkins', we are seriously asked to consider that poetry (or literature generally) can offer us "delight," but not "comprehension." It is a minor relief to this alarm to see that when the chips are down in the contest between poetic and literal knowledge (needless though it be) even such a one as Atkins finds it proper and wise to adopt the language of metaphor--of poetry--over "brute fact" to best make his case.

*Can two play this game? I counter-propose "sciencemathpoetryhistoryalchemymusicmysticismliterarytheorydialecticaestheticsismadvaitism"?

On Not Talking About It

2011-11-07T22:51:00.001-06:00

[I delivered this piece at Lucky Pierre’s “What We Don’t Talk About,” a 12-hour continuous presentation on the War in Afghanistan, in Chicago, on November 5, 2011. Have a read, you might learn something.]

If the basic story of the Afghanistaniad is to be believed, the facts are as follows: some 3,200 years ago, in October 2001 by the old Gregorian calendar, a prince of the Kingdom of Wilusa, named Alaksandu, came over the seas to a land called The United States to claim the lesbian daughter of the Viceroy Dick Cheney. This daughter had been promised to Alaksandu by the goddess Ishtar, or Ashtar, in exchange for a golden apple, the present-day whereabouts of which are currently unknown.

Thus began a bloody 14-year war that claimed many of the most promising warriors and princes of both sides, laying waste to vast and ancient olive groves and opium poppy plantations, and driving terror into the hearts of villagers and townspeople across the Hindu Kush. Terror became a fact of life, perhaps the defining fact of life, perpetrated by a people trying to put up a barricade against their own terror, the terror of having a Babylonian goddess give away your daughters for no reason--or worse than no reason: vain, reactive, thoughtless reason. The terror of vicissitude, of bad luck, or of immortal sociopaths who can neither be stopped nor succored.

Today you have heard many stories from that epic war, how George Bush, the son of George Bush, sacker of cities, poured salt into the furrows of his mesquite plantation, so that the war council would surmise he was unfit for battle, How the boastful General Stanley McChrystal pouted in his tent for days after Barack Obama, deadly archer, seized for himself the war prize slave girl Briseus. You have heard of the conversation that strong-greaved Pat Tillman had with his horse, Xanthus, before leading the Myrmidons into battle, during which Xanthus prophesied the warrior's death from friendly fire, and how the Furies punished Xanthus by striking him dumb on the spot. How in the battle of Wanat, the Waigal River became so affronted by the number of dead piling up between her banks, that she personally appealed to the United Nations for relief, forcing David Petreus, son of Sixtus, to order the destruction of the United Nations with Hellfire missiles launched from rosy-fingered drones, killing everyone inside, including the Waigal River herself. Once considered fanciful, these tales are today regarded as perhaps the best historical document of this period. And yet, even as history, these stories must be given a kind of context. Why should we care—we, with our teleportation machines, our rocket ship public transportation systems, our single unit washer and dryers, our climate controlled pantsuits, our tricorders and phasers—why should we care what happened in a war that ended over three millennia ago?

A contemporary writer from around the time the Afghanistaniad was composed, Simone Weil, who we believe may have been a Queen or regent of a state called either “DeGaulle” or “Bon Appetit,” had this to say. Please note that while we don't know with certainty what this work she calls "the Iliad" refers to, the best scholarship suggests it must have been some kind of precursor to the Afghanistaniad that all of our children know so well today. Queen Simone writes:

The true hero, the real subject, the core of the Iliad, is force. That force which is wielded by men rules over them, and before it man’s flesh cringes. The human soul never ceases to be modified by its encounter with force, swept on, blinded by that which it believes itself able to handle, bowed beneath the power of that which it suffers. Those who dreamt that force, thanks to progress, belonged henceforth to the past, have been able to see its living witness in this poem: those who know how to discern force throughout the ages, there at the heart of every human testament, find here its most beautiful, most pure of mirrors.

If I may enter a side note from my own research, later in the text, the Queen refers to a book or series of books she calls "The Gospels." These, too have been lost to us, and while most scholars today regard “The Gospels” as some kind of sex manual or pillow book, it is our belief that these manuals were never actually written down at all, but were rather a loose, orally transmitted song cycle, performed by wandering bards and troubadours, each of whom added his or her own signature feats of sexual congress to the recitation.

The text continues:

The progress of war in the Iliad is simply a continual game of seesaw. The victor of the moment feels himself invincible, even though only a few hours before he may have experienced defeat; he forgets to treat victory as a transitory thing. At the end of the first day of combat described in the Iliad, the victorious Greeks were in a position to obtain the object of all their efforts, i.e. Helen and her riches. That evening, the Greeks are no longer interested in her or her possessions.
“For the present, let us not accept the riches of Paris
Nor Helen; everybody sees, even the most ignorant,
That Troy stands on the verge of ruin,”
He spoke and all the Acheans acclaimed him.
What they want is, in fact, everything. For booty, all the riches of Troy; for their bonfires, all the palaces, temples, houses; for slaves, all the women and children, for corpses, all the men.

The auditors of the Iliad knew that the death of Hector would be but a brief joy to Achilles, and the death of Achilles a brief joy to the Trojans, and the destruction of Troy but a brief joy to the Achaeans. Thus violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. The conquered brings misfortune to the conqueror, and vice versa.

How tragically this echoes the themes we see treated in that much more famous poem, the Afghanistaniad, not to mention—for those unable to ignore them—recent developments of our own war-torn time, some three millennia later.

We believe that the year Queen Simone wrote these words, the year 1940 by the Gregorian Calendar, was a time of great peace for the nation of Bon Appetit and her neighbors. But we know from fragments of another epic poem called the Annamiad or Vietnamiad, that this could not last. I would like to close with a recently discovered musical fragment of that latter poem—please excuse me while I see if I I can get this ancient 3,000 year old technology to operate properly. This device was called “Your Tube,” which we believe refers to the Eustachian tube in the middle ear, reflecting the fashion of the time for music to sound as though one was hearing it from deep within a long hallway, warm and dark, and covered with fine and sensitive hairs.

Song for the Corpses
Trinh Cong Son

Dead bodies float along the river
They lie in the rice fields, soaked in sunlight
On the rooftops of the city
On the winding, tortuous streets

Dead bodies lying around aimlessly
Beneath the verandas of pagodas
Within the churches of the city
At the doorstep of deserted houses

Oh, Spring, the corpses deliver a scent to the rice paddies
Oh, Vietnam, the corpses breathe life into tomorrow’s soil
The path forward, though full of treacherous obstacles
Because humans have already resided here

Dead bodies lying around here
Beneath the cold, pattering rain
Beside the dead bodies of the old and weak
Lie the dead bodies of the young and innocent

Which body is the body of my sibling?
Within this dark cave
Within the scorched areas
Beside the maize and sweet potato fields.

On Jubilation

2011-08-27T13:49:00.000-05:00

Via Naked Capitalism, this extremely interesting interview with anthropologist David Graeber about the historical development of money, credit, and debt. He begins with the standard story in economics that money was invented to replace an unwieldy barter system:

[This] story goes back at least to Adam Smith and in its own way it’s the founding myth of economics. Now, I’m an anthropologist and we anthropologists have long known this is a myth simply because if there were places where everyday transactions took the form of: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow,” we’d have found one or two by now

[... ]

Think about what they’re saying here – basically: that a bunch of Neolithic farmers in a village somewhere, or Native Americans or whatever, will be engaging in transactions only through the spot trade. So, if your neighbor doesn’t have what you want right now, no big deal. Obviously what would really happen, and this is what anthropologists observe when neighbors do engage in something like exchange with each other, if you want your neighbor’s cow, you’d say, “wow, nice cow” and he’d say “you like it? Take it!” – and now you owe him one. Quite often people don’t even engage in exchange at all – if they were real Iroquois or other Native Americans, for example, all such things would probably be allocated by women’s councils.

[...]

So really, rather than the standard story – first there’s barter, then money, then finally credit comes out of that – if anything its precisely the other way around. Credit and debt comes first, then coinage emerges thousands of years later and then, when you do find “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow” type of barter systems, it’s usually when there used to be cash markets, but for some reason – as in Russia, for example, in 1998 – the currency collapses or disappears.

[...]

But once you understand that taxes and money largely begin with war it becomes easier to see what really happened. After all, every Mafiosi understands this. If you want to take a relation of violent extortion, sheer power, and turn it into something moral, and most of all, make it seem like the victims are to blame, you turn it into a relation of debt. “You owe me, but I’ll cut you a break for now…” Most human beings in history have probably been told this by their debtors. And the crucial thing is: what possible reply can you make but, “wait a minute, who owes what to who here?” And of course for thousands of years, that’s what the victims have said, but the moment you do, you are using the rulers’ language, you’re admitting that debt and morality really are the same thing.

(This last paragraph aligns nicely with a point made by Alan Watts in his 1968 essay "Wealth Versus Money." When the government prints money, instead of properly calling it credit, we immediately redefine it as debt:

No one goes into debt except in an emergency; and therefore prosperity depends on maintaining the perpetual emergency of war. We are reduced, then, to the suicidal expedient of inventing wars when, instead we could simply have invented money.

We were still on the "gold standard" when Watts wrote this. The "Nixon Shock" that ended the Bretton Woods system in 1971, was precipitated, in part, by the enormous expense of the Vietnam War.)

The interview is worth reading in its entirely. One of Graeber's main points is that modern capitalism has found a way to opt out of a historical cyclical pattern attenuating between credit and currency--a cycle which periodically breaks the hold of creditors over debtors with debt forgiveness (the Israelite jubilee, and Babylonian clean slate) or with social injunctions against usury (medieval Islam and Christianity.) Our present direction is precisely the opposite: we now insist that all monetary debts are sacrosanct and must always be paid in full. Not only does this point to an ultimate form of virtual slavery for the mass of humanity, but it violates one of the important axioms of social debt (from which our concept of financial debt has arisen): that forgiveness is often essential for harmonious social relations.

The comments are great, too.

Reliable Wonder

2011-07-05T20:11:00.001-05:00

Shorter Jerry Coyne:

I'm not a Logical Positivist, I just believe that all truth claims are scientific.

Shorter PZ Myers:

I, too, believe that all truth claims are scientific. Also, there is no such thing as math. And computers are empirical.

(These remarks in response to Andrew Brown's criticism of Harold Kroto's remark that "Science is the only philosophical construct we have to determine TRUTH with any degree of reliability." (His CAPS). A few months ago another scientist, Peter Atkins, put forth the same sort of view on the BBC, in a short discussion with philosopher Mary Midgley, who quickly boxed him into a corner. After she pointed out that science's revealed truths were actually relatively small in relation (and subservience) to the truths that concerned humanity the most, the dialogue concluded as follows:

Atkins: But it adds wonder to it.
Midgley: That was there before.
Atkins: But this is reliable wonder.

At which point the moderator quickly ends the discussion before things can get any sillier.

[UPDATE: John Wilkins writes, on this topic:

Now there are those who think that science effectively exhausts our knowledge-gathering. This, too, is a philosophical position, which has to be defended, and elaborated (thus causing more philosophy to be done). I don’t object to that view, but for me, it is better to be positive (say that science gives us knowledge even if other activities may do) than to be negative (deny that anything but science gives us knowledge). It may be that we get to the latter position after considering the former; if so, that would be a philosophical result. (my emphasis in bold)]

Amod Lele on Humility in Science

2011-04-18T16:23:00.000-05:00

I like a lot of the things Amod Lele says here about the Humbler Than Thou stance taken in the conflict of religion and science. Of course anyone who attempts to claim the mantle of humility immediately puts herself in a thorny spot.

Carl Sagan, whose Demon Haunted World Lele highlights in his post, partially dodges this issue by asserting in that book not his own humility, but that of his tribe, the scientists, but I think the effect is the same. (Epimenides, remember, didn't claim that he was a liar, specifically, but rather that all Cretans were.) In particular, I am inclined to be less generous than Lele regarding the following quote, from DHW:

I maintain that science is part and parcel humility. Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take seriously what they find.

This has a mythical flavor to it, that I don't think is borne out by the actual spirit and practice of science. Is it really humble to desire to know the secrets and regularities of nature, in order to render it more predictable, and thus easier to tame and control? Is it humble to build underground caverns the size of a small city, in order to smash particles together at immense speeds? To perform medical research on animals so that humans might be, for a time, spared the ravages of disease? To send manned spacecraft, and unmanned probes, to other planets? To test, develop, and mass produce synthetic materials whose brief usefulness is eclipsed by their long lifespan as detritus (think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, twice the size of Texas.) To genetically engineer crops and livestock?

I am not anti-science; not wholesale, anyway. I don't argue here against the potential benefit of many of these endeavors. But to my ear, "humble interrogation" is just the wrong word for them. And I would argue that in few other areas of life do we "impose our needs and wants on Nature" with as much brio as we do in the scientific arena; our needs and wants not just to understand nature, but to master it, to perhaps even outwit it. A position farther from humility would be difficult to stake out.

Sagan was sincere, I think, in his belief that science was humble, as are, surely, most if not all of advocates for science today. And it's true that the best scientists are always prepared to find themselves in the wrong. Every now and again a scientist will even express the hope that his hypothesis is overthrown, and you can't get much more humble than that. But for each one of these, how many feeding frenzies, such as the one Jerry Fodor stirred up with his recent book critiquing natural selection (which is not to defend his thesis in that book, though the response was instructive.)

Humility isn't everything. Sometimes what is called for is self assertion, sometimes bared teeth. The question is whether, where humility is a virtue, it is in any more ready supply in scientific communities than religious ones (or, since the world not is not actually divided in merely two, in artistic ones, political ones, historical ones, literary ones, etc.) Lele shows that Sagan needs some pretty creative bookkeeping to make his point, by personifying Science. Because of the tenacity and arrogance of a Galileo, for example, "Science" gets the credit for revising its picture of the cosmos from geocentrism to heliocentrism. And while science may, as Sagan claims, bestow its highest laurels on "those who convincingly disprove established beliefs," there are a lot of stops along the way where the incentives run in the opposite direction. You don't make your career by conceding other people's theories.

The basic point being that science is participated in by humans, just as religion is, and it is hard (and not always wise) for humans to be humble. There should be no shibboleth here. Let each tend to his own garden.

Flatland of Dreams

2011-04-05T20:07:00.000-05:00

—For the second time in a week, Jerry Coyne, a secular Jew, has blamed the Shoah on ... Judaism. On April 1st he wrote, in the context of the recent massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif, that Anne Frank was killed "because of religion." When a commenter challenged this idea, Coyne responded, tersely, "Jews are a religion, not a 'race'." Then, yesterday, he blithley caricatured the (correct) view that not all conflicts involving religion are about religion:

We’re all familiar with those people who claim that ... while religion may seem to be involved in today’s horrors and evils, when you look deeper ... you’ll ultimately find the real causes. The Protestant/Catholic fracas in Northern Ireland? A historical squabble—religion was just a “label” for political opponents. The persecution of Galileo? A civil and political affair, not involving faith. The institutionalized slaughter of the Jews during World War II? Well, the Nazis needed a scapegoat somewhere. (my emphasis in bold.)

The notion that Nazi antisemitism was a "religious" matter is, of course, utterly unhistorical; the kind of non-fact one is used to hearing from people like Ann Coulter. The Nazis were concerned with Judaism as a racial phenomenon, not a theological one. The Nuremburg Laws were very clear in defining Jewishness along bloodlines. Even the descendants of Jews who had converted to Christianity in generations past were considered as Jews, and marked for extermination. And while Jews were killed in larger numbers by far than any other group, they were not of course the only victims of the Reich. The Nazis killed Poles for being Poles, Roma for being Roma, homosexuals for being gay, political leftists, the disabled, and many more, adding up to several millions of victims.

There was one group that was persecuted on strictly religious grounds: the Jehovah's witnesses. Unlike Jews, they were allowed to escape persecution by renouncing their faith. In this sense, Coyne is close to being correct—a relatively small percentage of the Nazis' victims were killed "because of religion." But the point is a perverse one. Religion "caused" the death of some 2,500 Jehovah's Witnesses under the Nazis in the same sense that being physically weaker "causes" many women (and several men) to be raped, or that being non-white "causes" one to be disproportionally stopped, harassed, arrested, and jailed. It's just the wrong way to look at causality.

Because Jerry Coyne doesn't value the ideology of Jehovah's Witnesses, or religious Jews, he declares them objectively without value: extraneous, moribund. If these ideologies were absent, there would be no conflict, no bloodshed. Things will be better when we all cleave to the same metaphysical certainties, without dissent or pluralism. Sam Harris makes the case for this state of affairs in The Moral Landscape. Marcuse called such a society "One Dimensional." With less subtlety we could call it hegemonic.

Louis Ruprecht has a piece at Religion Dispatches on the recent study proposing mathematical models to explain the impending extinction of religion, in which he makes an excellent comment on the authors' invocation of enlightened self-interest ("utility") in one's choice of language, and, by extension, religion:

Deliberations over “status” in a colonial context are not matters of utility; they’re exercises in power. [Choosing to speak] Spanish or Quechua was a political decision as much as anything; a decision to accept or reject the new imperial order. Those who chose the more difficult bi-lingual option were often enormously useful as translators, though often deeply unhappy since they effectively belonged nowhere—no longer native and not quite imperial was their tragic new location.

From the point of view of mathematics, it's easy to interpret social change as a function of competing options in the marketplace of ideas, where the fittest wins. The study of social sciences—history, philosophy, anthropology, even literary criticism—is a needed counterweight to this view. It is easy to forget that power and privilege always regard themselves as rightful and inevitable. We abhor "might makes right" as an abstract principle, but in the real world we endorse it every time we neglect to ask if what is happening around us is what should be happening. To describe our moral choices as matters of "utility" gets us nowhere, since we can always rationalize the course of history as furthering the good of something.

The tragedy of social monopoly—hegemony—is patently obvious in the case of the loss of our linguistic diversity (the capitulation of countless indigenous languages to colonial usurpers), making it a strange analogy for the authors of the extinction-of-religion paper to employ. Even in John Lennon's warm and fuzzy formulation, the idea of the world "living as one," with "nothing to kill or die for," has always had a very chilling (and ultimately boring) monotonic quality to it. Lennon, ironically, was a deeply iconoclastic man, who would not have lived comfortably in the "Borg Collective" milieu conjured in his song (another image suggested by the song is, also ironically, the Christian heaven).

Our task on this planet is surely not to end conflict. Manage it, as best we can, yes, but not end it. The call to celebrate ideological diversity is no more a platitude than the call to celebrate, and preserve, genetic diversity. It's more like recognition of a law of nature. Hegemony has never yet ruled the day, and likely never will. It takes two to tango, and, as Emma Goldman is supposed to have said, a revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.

Maybe Michael Ruse is onto something

2011-04-01T16:26:00.001-05:00

One main problem with bias and projection is that it inclines one to believe almost anything without taking time to understand the facts.

Today in Afghanistan, the UN compound in Mazar-i-Sharif was overrun by rioters, who massacred at least a dozen, and as many as 20 people, including several UN workers. Details are still sketchy and forthcoming. Most reports mention that the mob was protesting the recent burning of a Quran by Florida pastor Terry Jones, but in a statement following the attack, UN spokesman Dan McNorton said the situation was “still confusing.” Early press reports after a catastrophe are almost always distorted and incomplete, and we still have a lot to learn about what happened today in Mazar-i-Sharif.

These sketchy details were apparently enough for Jerry Coyne to conclude, less than an hour after the first reports, that “religion” killed those slaughtered there, and that in a world without faith they would still be alive. Coyne then writes:

Can anybody attribute this faith-inflamed murder to mere xenophobia—something that would have occurred anyway had there not been faith? I think not.

Those last words may be more revealing than he means them to be. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that the United States is not the world’s sole superpower, but a small, resource-poor country with the bad fortune to be located on the doorstep of some of the world’s most strategically desirable locations. Let’s further imagine that the United States was currently playing host to the latest in a centuries-long chain of occupiers, a powerful nation, viscerally antagonistic to many of the US’s more popular social movements. It might be helpful to imagine this occupier as Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union--or the much-feared New Caliphate one hears about in certain circles.

Now imagine that, several years into this occupation, a renegade party member or cleric burns the foundational documents of the United States as a piece of agitprop. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and perhaps “Common Sense” and some of the Federalist Papers, all of which are held by this party member or cleric and his followers to wield the most demonic influence on world affairs. Nothing much happens at first, but over time, protests are organized, at town meetings, and in union halls. Some of the rhetoric at these meetings gets heated--perhaps because of the conscious and organized agitation of American ultra-Nationalists, who want to throw off the occupation by any means necessary, or perhaps just because of a spontaneous eruption of emotion. The crowds get stirred up, someone suggests a march on a local outpost. The march turns violent. The outpost is stormed, and several civilians assisting in the occupation are killed. Not a single one of the assailants was religious.

Implausible? The fact is that we just don’t know what combination of factors contributed to today’s rampage. Perhaps without religion it would not, could not have happened. I’m very doubtful of this. But we know for sure it could not have happened if the assailants did not have a sense of outrage, or indignation, a capacity for aggression, or the ability to be moved to action by stirring rhetoric. These are neither good nor evil human qualities in themselves, but how many of us would want to be rid of them? Where are the blog posts speaking out against these dispositions?

This is not, it should be clear, to defend or excuse today’s massacre. Those civilian UN workers did not deserve to die, no matter what the rectitude of the occupation of Afghanistan (or lack thereof), no matter what the actions of a demented preacher in Gainesville (whose church has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.) It is simply to militate against an easy reduction of causes for human behavior, especially when those causes are imputed to come only form outside your own in-group. How easy to say, with Steven Weinberg, that “for good people to do bad things, that takes religion.” How hard to actually account for this causality. How do we explain the restraint of the billion or so Muslims who managed not to kill anyone in retribution for Quran burning?

***

In the end, it’s not fully clear that Coyne has even worked out what he means when he talks about the baleful effect of religion and faith. At the end of his post he invokes Anne Frank, who was also, he writes, “killed because of religion.” What could this possibly mean? Judaism was an ethnic problem to the Nazis, not a dispositional one. A “cultural jew” like Coyne would be just as vulnerable to be rounded up as the most fervent rabbi. And even if the Nazis had cared about the devotional sincerity of their prey, how is it not blaming the victim to say that religion was the cause of Frank’s death, and six million others? We can make all sorts of statements along these lines that have no ethical justification whatsoever. If there had been no Native Americans, for example, there could have been no genocide of Native Americans by Europeans. Does that, too, make them responsible for their own extermination?

There’s been a lot of righteous indignation over Michael Ruse’s recent comparison of neo-atheism to the Tea Party. Maybe on the whole the comparison is unfair. it’s certainly rash. But rushing out to blame a massacre on “religious faith” before the dust has even settled, and then implicitly blaming the victims of the holocaust for their own destruction, these are just as scurrilous as anything in the Fox News playbook. After so many instances of this kind of shallow, reactionary, sensationalist, poorly researched, and outright bigoted analysis of the relationship of religion and society, we have to ask why anyone of any reputation would want to ally themselves with its purveyors at all.

***

UPDATE: Here's Juan Cole on the Mazar-i-Sharif riots:

I think Afghan intellectuals and leaders know that Terry Jones is a minor nut job. But this issue allows some of them to organize to protest the over 100,000 US troops in their country, which is really what they are objecting to.

The decision of the Obama administration to do wide-ranging counter-insurgency rather than targeted counter-terrorism in Afghanistan has left that country full of frustrations with the US heavy footprint.

History is over, if you want it

2011-03-30T14:45:00.000-05:00

A recent paper by is making the rounds, concluding that religion is heading for "extinction" in certain parts of the world. Having built up half a head of steam to write a few words on it I see that Brandon Watson has beat me to much of what I was going to say. (See also John Wilkins and John Pieret, though whom I originally became aware of it).

In brief, the paper, by Daniel M. Abrams, Haley A. Yaple, and Richard J. Wiener, argues that it can be mathematically demonstrated that current declines in religious affiliation in several secular democracies will trend to zero in coming years, owing to the same sort of diminishing returns one sees when fewer and fewer people speak a traditional language (e.g. Quechua).

Brandon begins with the most immediate and obvious objection that religious affiliation is not coextensive with religious belief or observation. To underscore this, I would note the commenter on the BBC website who writes "I don't see the decline of religion to be a particularly bad thing. And I say this as a Born-again follower of Jesus."

We should keep in mind that the study relies on census data to track membership in a religion. This data is probably accurate enough as far as it goes (despite complicating factors like the Jedi Census phenomenon), but it primarily measures social labels, not belief or practice. There is. obviously, a widespread discouragement with "organized religion" in the West, though in it sell this no more signals a disinterest in religion or spirituality than the rise of the political "Independent" in the US signals a disinterest in politics.

I have a little bit more trouble with Brandon's second point, that the authors of the study don't really mean what they say when they suggest religion will trend to zero, because their conclusions are based on an overly idealized model. He writes that their conclusions

should really should be understood to be qualified by "if no significant countervailing factors arise." (The authors are quite above-board about the fact that they are abstracting from things that could have real effect -- this is an 'assume a cow is a perfect sphere' sort of exercise, to get an idealized model that is at least reasonably close to serve as a starting point for further work.)

True, they are "above-board" about the fact that they are eliding any complicating factors, but only deep within the bowels of the paper. In the summary, introduction, and conclusion, they clearly imply that their model validates to the real world, writing, for example, that the "data suggest a particular case of our general growth law, leading to clear predictions about possible future trends in society." (Namely, the "continued growth of non-affiliation, tending toward the disappearance of religion.") This is an extremely strong claim, which the authors take few pains to qualify with disclaimers that it is a preliminary finding.

When we talk about idealized theories that are later subject to fine tuning on the particulars, we usually don't have in mind the kinds of fine tuning that completely shatter the premises of the theory. Copernicus and Galileo, for example, theorized that the earth travelled around the sun in a circular orbit. The math didn't work out, because, as Kepler showed, this orbit was actually an ellipse, not a perfect circle. But the main point, that the earth was not the stationary center of the universe, proved sound.

The main point of Abrams et al is that religion is subject to being driven to extinction by secularism in a Darwinian contest. This presupposes at least two major things that are not controlled for in the study:

(1) That people choose (and cleave to) their religion for its "perceived utility."
(2) That adherence to religion in the general sense can be extrapolated from individual instances, like Catholicism.

Brandon writes that he finds the first assumption plausible (though insufficient.) This seems to me quite an understatement. Granted, there are numerous historical cases of people converting for self-interested reasons. In the 16th century, the upper classes in the Balkans, for example, living under the Ottomans, were able to get a far more favorable tax rate if they converted to Islam, which large numbers of them did. And there is at least one case of even a putative Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, converting from Judaism to Islam to save his neck, in 1666.

But for the model of Abrams et al to work, this motive has to function at the exclusion of all others. This requires stretching the concept of "perceived utility" so that it is all-encompassing. How to explain the martyrdom of so many of the early Christians, when it would have been so much easier to go along as a pagan? We can invoke the rewards of the afterlife in this case, perhaps, but only at the price of the presumption of Darwinian zero-sum competition between social groups. Similar problems are presented by the Falun Gong in China, the Crypto-Jews in Spain and the New World, and myriad similar cases. If "perceived utility" is allowed to become a placeholder for "the rationale for whatever people ultimately decide to do," it loses much, if not all, of its predictive power.

Metaphysical beliefs, whether "religious" or not, indicate one's orientation to the profoundest truths, whether that means that the universe is meaningless, that earthly life is all there is, that there is a loving god, a natural order, that "all is one," that there is an eternal return, or that a race of immortals mocks us from on high. Brandon is absolutely correct to suggest that, under pressure, these beliefs are subject to modulation. Some of these pressures are private--we can "lose our faith" or "get religion." Some are social, as in Brandon's example of anti-Catholic legislation, though I think he overstates this influence on actual beliefs and observances, as opposed to publicly visible religious identification. But "perceived utility" cannot be the primary driver of these beliefs, as I think would become clearer to the authors if they would inquire into their own reasons for believing as they do.

The second assumption is harder to parse, mostly because the very concept of "religion" itself is such a recent one. There is no secular/religious divide in most pre-modern societies. The Greeks had no cognate for it, nor the Chinese. Pascal Boyer goes so far as to suggest there is really no such one thing as "religion," and I while I think the term still has a lot of value, I think Boyer's argument is helpful in pointing out just how many disparate social forms are subsumed in a single word. In a passage that demonstrates just how greatly their work could have benefited with a greater intimacy with the history and sociology of religion, Abrams et al write

We speculate that for most of human history, the perceived utility of religion was high and of non-affiliation low. Religiously non-affiliated people persisted but in small numbers. With the birth of modern secular societies, the perceived utility of adherence to religion versus non-affiliation has changed significantly in numerous countries[11], such as those with census data shown in Fig. 1, and the United States, where non-affiliation is growing rapidly[18].

There's no need to speculate. This account bears little resemblance to the actual history of religious belief and observance. It's important to note here two things: the alleged existence, in "small numbers" of a quasi-atheist vanguard waiting since the beginning of history for the "birth of modern secular societies" to give rise to the conditions of their ascendance, and (2) the implicit fealty among the religiously affiliated, at the time of this birth, not just to their own beliefs but to "religion" itself. Dennett calls this phenomena "belief in belief," a phrase that only makes sense if you subscribe to the notion that to be secular is to have no faith at all--to believe in nothing for which you have no evidence. This is the "post-metaphysical" myth ginned up by the logical positivists a century ago, and still embraced by those in the thrall of the "Conflict Thesis" (among whose number would appear to be the authors of this study), wherein science and reason are the crucibles of truth, and religion is the sum of all the delusional impurities waiting to be boiled away.

I've said more on this elsewhere. I mention it now only to show the unfortunate influence of the Conflict Thesis on Abrams et al's reasoning, leading them to suggest there is something exceptional and irreversible about the transition in Western Europe from Christianity to secular modernism, something that makes it different from (for example) the transition from paganism to Christianity. The authors predict not just the inevitable extinction of the local religion, but the extinction of Religion, period. This would imply that the conditions favoring the perceived utility of secularism, are not, like every ideological movement that preceded it, subject to ebb under the influence of some future scheme--that secularism is not merely non-religious, but post-religious. This assumption may in fact be true, but there is no explanation for it in the authors' model.

Finally, a short word on the strange passivity of Abrams et al's approach to the phenomenon of social change. The existence of religion and secularism are no doubt valuable, in differing ratios, to the readers of their paper, all of whom comprise part of the social ecology that would contribute to the "perceived utility" of adhering to these allegedly competing groups. If the authors had written on the decline of trade unionism in the West over the last half century, and predicted, either blithely or wistfully, its ultimate demise, would we nod sagely at the accuracy of the modeling? Or would we remember that as stakeholders in our own society we can participate in its direction, through rhetoric, political action, economic action, and a number of other social modes (including the writing of scientific papers)? Culture and society are a conversation we have, not a movie or slide show we passively watch. Predicting its trajectory is fine for Vegas oddsmakers, but the rest of us can never have too many reminders that the world is not just the aggregate of what other people do. There is no person named “Society” whose behavior we can observe from behind a two-way mirror. I have no serious problem with the secularization of Europe, nor, depending on how you conceive it, with the end of religion as we know it. But any prediction of what is going to happen by our own collective hand, for good or ill, that doesn’t take into account the facts of agency or intention, is of very dubious worth.

On pausing to grab a robe for the Emperor

2011-02-17T18:41:00.003-06:00

Russell Blackford and Jean Kazez are brandishing competing denouments to the "Emperor's New Clothes," fleshing out what might happen after the brave innocent child says out loud that the Emperor is actually naked. In Kazez's version, meant to analogize what she sees as an over-emphasis on truth without regard for social relations (politics), the brave innocent child inspires a degraded second-tier response among the other children, who somewhat boorishly point out that the Emperor is not only naked, but also tubby to boot. In Blackford's version, meant to warn against a dangerous obsequity to social status, the brave innocent child is shouted down by the adults, who tell her she must never speak certain truths.

I've never liked the analogy of the Emperor's non-existent clothes to religion's supposed non-existent empirical underpinnings (and not just for the obvious reason that a great deal of what goes under the name "religion" does not aspire to empirical truth in the same way that science or history do.) I think the analogy does violence to the story, which (in the Anderson version) is a fable about vanity, not ignorance. The Emperor is able to be so easily swindled because he greedily desires the finest possible garments, and because he desires to maintain his Imperial station even when he appears to himself unfit to rule (inability to see the garments being putative evidence of lack of discernment). The irony is that it is his vanity that makes him unfit to rule. His senses don't deceive him, nor his reason; his insecurity does.

Furthermore, while we, the readers of the tale, know that the King has been deceived, the brave innocent child does not, and cares not. Nor has she heard the lie that not seeing the non-existent clothes is evidence of foolishness. She only knows that he is naked. This simplicity is what makes her innocent, and also what makes her a bad model for any thoughtful social critic, who we would like to have studied the ways of the world, or at least read some William Blake. (I take this to be Kazez's main point: that while calling a spade a spade has value, all things being equal, it is not always the wisest choice. We blunt, temper, dress up, and postpone the truth for a host of reasons, sometimes legitimate, sometimes less so; truth is one value among many.)

Having said that, I can see why Kazez's story rubs Blackford the wrong way, since she explicitly compares the Incompatiblists to children, and the Compatiblists to grownups. This would come off as undeservedly condescending, if Blackford did not reply--in a voice very much like a child's--that his side was innocent and noble, while the other side is mendacious, simplistic, underhanded, and just mean. (This isn't the first time Blackford has assigned the black and white hats thusly):

As far as I can see, the incivility is generally not coming from people who could be considered part of the New Atheist movement - such as Dawkins, or Ophelia, or maybe Jerry Coyne [...] Most of the mockery, name-calling, gotcha rhetoric, twisting of the truth for effect, adopting outrageous and wildly implausible lies as "Exhibits", and various others forms of downright unfairness actually seem to be coming from such people as Chris Mooney and Josh Rosenau, i.e. people who wish that the Gnus would go away.

What we actually tend to see is reasonably civil, courteous, thoughtful critiques of religion from the Gnus being met with the response that it is so far beyond the pale that it should not be said. Thus, the crucial moment that set off the current round of debates was when Jerry Coyne reviewed two books by religious authors who argued for a compatibility of religion and science. The review was as civil as one could expect from any reviewer who disagrees strongly with key elements of non-fiction books that he or she is reviewing. It was thoughtful, detailed, and followed all the courtesies. See for yourself.

The response from Chris Mooney was that such things should not be said.

Without even getting into particulars, this is a suspect stance. It's human nature that one's argument will appear to oneself as highminded, while one's opponent will seem to be illegitimate and sniping. This is one of the tendencies that the best discourse tries to meet head on, and rise above. The same is true of the position that our arguments are in the spirit of debate, dialogue, truth and inquiry, while our opponents arguments are censorious and scolding. "There is no God, and people should not believe there is," is an opinion which may be supported by rhetoric and logic, just as "Attacking religion in a withering, alienating fashion will have undesired blowback" is an opinion which may be supported by rhetoric and logic. Each can be presented in good, or bad, faith.

To be fair, it's true that Coyne's TNR article was pretty measured and tame. And it's true he was gentle and respectful when addressing that group of Methodist parishioners. But before we take these examples as typical and endorse Coyne's self-congratulation for never having "criticized an evolutionist, writer, or scholar in an ad hominem manner," it's worth taking a quick glance at his blog, where it's hard to find a post that doesn't devolve into ad hom (unless it's about kittens). Starting with the most recent example, earlier this week Coyne called Deepak Chopra (not someone I particuraly admire, but a writer nonetheless) "Deepity Chopra," whose significant wealth he calls "an indictment of America."

Prior to this he suggests that the critiques ("tripe") of Phil Zuckerman--writer and scholar--are motivated mainly by jealousy of the New Atheists' book sales. Thomas Jackson writes "babble," Mary Midgley is "dumb" and "superannuated" (Coyne loves the 10 cent words Hitchens and Grayling teach him). Elaine Ecklund is a "disingenuous" "Templeton-funded automaton," (regular readers of Coyne's blog will learn that everyone funded by Templeton has been horribly corrupted) Laurie Lebo has "lost neurons," Rob Knop is "mushbrained, and Josh Rosenau has been taken over by a demon. That's just in the last 3 weeks.

Now, I really do mean to be sociological about this. There are numerous fair, interesting and important criticisms to make about religious belief and practice in this world, and I have no interest in stopping anyone from making them. Some I've even made myself. But do we really need to erect a firewall between these criticisms, and similar good-faith criticisms of science, humanism, or enlightenment values? Debate unavoidably divides people into teams, but we can acknowledge this division as a structural artifact, rather than mistaking it for a carving out of ontological categories. If we're interested in truth, dialogue, learning, and similar values, does it really matter so much where the lines are between us and them?

Not that I have any illusions about our ability to reject shibboleths altogether. But we can periodically direct our attention to the high-amperage jolt of human nature that runs through this debate, fueling (in this case) the self-serving myth of the big bad accomodationists trying to stamp out the decent, unimpeachable, eminently rational arguments of the "Gnus." And yes, there's sanctimony and snark to go around on all sides. That crack above about the 10-cent words, for example. That was jerky of me to say. It was and is an obstacle to clear vision and communication, every bit as much as the vanity of the Emperor in Anderson's story was an obstacle to his own clear sight and judgement.

Update I: Jeremy Stangroom, in response to Blackford's post, calls him out for some choice ad homs of his own. His post is more concise than mine, if also slightly more testy.

Update II: Josh Rosenau chimes in:

But when Russell claims in the post linked above that I "wish that the Gnus would go away," he's wrong. I wish they'd make better arguments, ones which engage the peer reviewed literature in the relevant fields, including philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, science/religion studies, metaethics, and even theology. I wish they cited that literature more, and I wish they published their arguments there and engaged with the relevant communities of scholars that way, rather than just through blogs, and TED talks, and mass-market books and magazines. I wish they'd study the literature of social movement theory, and take what lessons can be learned from past efforts to change society and apply that research to their own efforts. I wish they'd lay out some sort of consensus platform, including both big principles and practical changes to be made. I wish they'd work with, rather than against, their most likely allies. I wish they wouldn't drive wedges within the pro-science movement, and would focus their righteous ire on the religious authoritarians who deserve it, or who at least we all agree deserve it most. I don't want them to go away, I want them to be better at what they're trying to do.

Your 2011 Candy Zeitgeist

2011-02-14T16:24:00.000-06:00

2011-02-11T12:28:00.001-06:00

Posting shall resume. Don't pluck me from your newsreader feeds just yet, vaqueros.

Finally, Localizing the "View From Nowhere"

2011-01-19T12:23:00.000-06:00

It's in the District of Columbia, of course.

Ned Resnikoff has a nice post on the similarities between modern day positivists like Sam Harris and the "No Label" movement in the Democratic Party. Both claim, implicitly or otherwise, to transcend ideology. In the case of Harris' The Moral Landscape, the ideology is concealed in the presumption that no sensible person could argue with his definition of the moral imperative (a rather fuzzy advocacy of "human flourishing" which magically aligns with Harris' own moral preferences.)

Similarly, the No Labels people rally under the seemingly pragmatic slogan "Not Right, not Left, but Forward." But the whole point of the argument between right and left is what just what "forward" means. (It depends on which direction you are facing, and where you stand.) Thus politics is supplanted by the pretense that we all want what the Villagers want; namely, a privileged status for financiers and mandarins, paid for by a nobly suffering indentured middle and lower class.

The objection has lately erupted through many a cyber-fissure that science should not be "politicized." Politics, according to this objection, is getting your hands dirty, making unseemly compromises, privileging social concord over truth, which science is supposed to reside above. This is an understandable objection, given the enormous cover this has provided to, well, our political enemies. But the response to this must be to embrace, not reject, the political nature of science, for it is this political nature which assures our agency. There is all sorts of trivial knowledge that is not worth our time studying (though we may not agree on what this is). We need to prioritize what we know, and how well we know it, and this is a political act.

Ned writes that he doesn't like using the word "scientism" to characterize this attitude, since it implies a critique of science itself, rather than an ideology of the view-from-nowhere. He proposes "reductionist empiricism" instead, which I don't think is such a good candidate to play honey to scientism's vinegar: the same people up in arms about scientism tend to think reductionism is a slur as well. A couple of months ago I asked Russell Blackford if there was a term for the omnicompetance of science he would not consider as pejorative. I have not heard back from him, but others have made some helpful coinages. Marilyn Robinson applies a term I like a lot, parascience, indicating a subjective statement or idea that aspires to the status of objectivity. Brandon Watson proposes "sciencefictionism" suggesting much the same idea. I think all of these notions were captured by the shopworn term "positivism," (which like "bright" seems almost too sunny to be against), but in the spirit of Pound's injunction to Make It New, I support putting them all into circulation.

Ned has a series of posts on The Moral Landscape over at his place. See also John Pieret, who catches Harris in just the kind of logical error you would expect when someone embarks on a philosophical argument with the attitude that moral philosophy "increases the amount of boredom in the universe."

Tuesday Baudelaire Blogging: The Assassin's Wine

2011-01-18T18:24:00.001-06:00

[My adaptation of "Le Vin de L'Assassin." See the original here.]

My wife is dead, I am free!
Now I can drink my troubles hence
When I came home without a pence
Her nagging ripped at every part of me.

Now I'm as happy as a king
The air is pure the sky is bliss
The days were lovely just like this
When I knelt and offered her my ring

This wicked thirst that wracks my thoughts
Could not be sated truth be told
By all the wine her tomb can hold
And my friends you know that that would be a lot:

For I threw her down a well,
And her body I did wedge
With all the rocks around the edge
I still might hope to blot her out in Hell

Thinking of those tender bonds,
Which can never be unsealed,
And hoping to be reconciled
Like we were in drunken days of yon

I implored her in distress
To meet me on a darkened night
She agreed – the crazy wight!
We are all crazy more or less.

She was still my pretty wife
But very tired round the eyes
I loved her too much! that is why
I told her it was time to quit this life!

Above you all I sail like a cloud
How many of you stupid clods
Could ever dream in your wildest thoughts
To make your wine into a shroud?

You scoundrels not worth half a sou
Melodic as a hammer's tune
Not in December or June
Have you ever even known a love that's true

With its fantasies of moans
Its carnival of hellish fears
Its vials of poison, all its tears,
the clattering of manacles and bones

And now at last free and alone!
I will get dead drunk tonight;
And then without a single fright
In the street I will lay down my tired bones

And I'll sleep just like a stray
Though some overburdened cart
So full of stones it falls apart
But not before it rolls my lucky way

To pulverize my guilty skull
Or to cut me down the middle
Of either one I care as little
As I do for Holy Bible, God or Dev-il!

Monday Baudelaire Blogging: The Sick Muse

2010-12-27T17:37:00.002-06:00

[My adaptation of "La Muse Malade." See the original here.]

Oh, my poor muse, what afflicts you this dawn?
Morbid visions have taken command of your gaze
By turns I see cast on your face, pale and drawn,
Madness and horror, ennui, and malaise.

Did the green gremlin and rouge-spattered faun
Empty out love and alarm from their urns?
Have all your nightmares revolted, with sabers drawn?
Banishing you to the depths of Minturn?

I wish for you vigorous breath to exhale
Your breast ever buzzing with every detail
Your fervent blood coursing in metrical waves

Calling forth stanzas from the ancients’ graves
Ruled by Apollo, the father of rhyme
And great god Pan, the lord of the harvest time!

Chimps Love Our Sticks

2010-12-22T17:08:00.000-06:00

Tell it, Echidne:

I have noticed a clear trend during my years as a blogger. Anything vaguely smelling of science which supports traditional gender roles immediately develops humongous wings and flies all over the place, crapping on our upturned faces.

She's talking about a new chimp study in Current Biology, now viral, that purports to show that gender roles in modern human children (girls like dolls, boys like trucks) are hard-wired, rather than cultural. Researchers studied a community of chimps in Uganda, and observed that more juvenile females than males engaged in "stick carrying" behavior that (very loosely) resembles maternal care-giving. In the words of the study's co-author, Richard Wrangham, "What we've got here is evidence that without any kind of socialisation by adults, females seem to be predisposed to react to sticks as though they were dolls."

This is true, in the sense that the sun "seems" to go around the earth, or that sticks "seem" to bend when you plunge them into water. But none of the evidence presented by Wrangham and his co-author Sonja Kahlenberg actually supports this "predisposition." It's a short study, hardly needing my summary, and you can read for yourself that every case of "sex difference" in stick-carrying could just as easily be explained by cultural, as by genetic factors. In fact, given that stick-carrying has not been observed in any other chimp community, the cultural explanation is far more plausible.

What is most striking about this study (apart from how ardently it is being embraced by the popular and social media), is how lax the researchers' reasoning is: Since mothers don't carry sticks (the behavior ceases after a female's first birth), young females can't learn stick carrying from them. Thus, the behavior is instinctive, QED. But there are a number of alternate ways that stick-carrying can be a cultural development. The young chimps can learn it from adult chimps who are not yet mothers, for example, or from older siblings.

But more to the point, it is also plausible that young chimps devise the stick-carrying behavior as a symbolic expression of the maternal act. They don't need to be taught a specific behavior for it to be considered cultural (and the wide variety of "sticks," including "pieces of bark, small logs or woody vine," militates against this being a question of following instructions.) Nobody, for example, taught mother chimps Vire and Vuavua to carry around the corpses of their children, after they died of respiratory disease. And neither would we be quick to say that carrying around your dead infant, grooming it, chasing away flies, was some kind of biological adaptation. (Though it might be).We aren't limited to attributing behavior--human or primate--to strictly passive, mechanical reactions, whether they be rote mimicry, as the behaviorists would have it, or instinctual imperatives, as nativists would have it. We are also empowered to characterize these creatures as actively, creatively engaging with their environment.

There's no real hypothesis testing in the stick-carrying study, just faux-scientific dressing up of a dull and unreflective belief in gender determinism. Studies like these come and go. But as Echidne notes, it's not bad science we should be worried about, but bad journalism. Nobody seized on the report, 3 years ago, that female chimps, not males (in roughly the same female-to-male ratio as in this stick carrying study), were the primary tool users, weapon users, problem solvers, and teachers. It just wasn't newsworthy, for some reason.

Sunday Baudelaire Blogging: Hymn To Beauty

2010-12-19T16:10:00.001-06:00

[My adaptation of "Hymn to Beauty." See the original here.]

Do you come from the heavens or from the abyss,
O Beauty? Your gaze both accursed and divine,
Pours a confusion of virtue and vice,
And for this we devoutly compare you to wine.

You contain in your eyes the sunset and dawn;
You scatter perfume like a nocturnal gale;
Your kisses a potion, your mouth a cauldron;
Which weakens the hearty and ruddies the pale.

Do you rise from the chasm or fall from the stars?
Fate, bewitched, sniffs at your skirts like a hound.
Indifferently doling out kisses and scars,
You govern all things without gesture or sound.

You trod on the dead with disdain, O Beauty!
Yes, Horror is not your least prized bagatelle.
And Murder, your plaything, capricous and broody,
Trots out on your belly a coy tarantelle.

Your candle enchanted the moth to his death
Well he crackled and burned, but the flame he forgave.
The lover collapsing and gasping for breath
Looks to me like a dying man fondling his grave.

Who cares where you come from--heaven or hell?
O Beauty! You monster, macabre and naive
If your eyes, or your glance, or your kick is the spell
To crack open the infinite--when can we leave?

Sent by God or the Devil, are you Siren or Spirit?
What does it matter? You soft-eyed ondine!
Without rhythm and light, and perfume, I might fear it,
But you make life worth living, my singular queen!

Sunday Baudelaire Blogging: The Solitaire's Wine

2010-12-12T14:37:00.001-06:00

[My adaptation of "Vin de Solitaire." See the original here.]

The arresting glance of a lady of pleasure
Like a ray of light on a mountain basin
That the rippling moon lets fall with leisure
When she wants something cool to wash her face in

The last few coins in the gambler's clutch;
A kiss from slender Adeline
Tender music's rousing touch
Fading like a distant cry of pain

None of this compares, oh bottomless bottle
To your bountiful belly where solaces jostle
The poet's thirsty heart to fill

You pour out hope, youth and life,
The pride and treasure of his sacrifice,
Triumphant as a God on Olympus hill!

Sunday Baudelaire Blogging: The Giantess

2010-12-05T22:49:00.001-06:00

[My adaptation of "La Geante." See the original here.]

In the days when Nature in avid largesse
Conceived monstrous children in daily routine
I'd like to have lived with a young giantess
Like a sensuous cat at the feet of a queen.

I'd like to have seen her flesh bloom 'round her soul
And freely expand to a dizzying size
And guess if her heart contained dark smold'ring coals
By the humid vapors that swam in her eyes.

Inspect in no hurry her beautiful shape
Crawl on the slopes of her mammoth kneescape
And then in the summer, in the poisonous heat of the day

She'd drape body across the terrain
In the shade of her breasts I would lazily lay
Like a quiet hamlet tucked into a mountain chain.

Interlude

2010-11-21T14:15:00.003-06:00

Jerry Coyne is neither the best nor the worst expositor of the scientistic (or, in Marilynne Robinson's nice term, parascientific) position. He is, at the moment, one of the more prolific, posting regularly on the subject at his (purportedly evolution-themed) blog. (One thing Coyne and I have in common is we like to say the same thing over and over again). I don't discuss his arguments here to engage them (I have too small a readership here to catch his notice) but to use them as handy examples of what I think is a widespread view, not just among scientists, that scientific descriptions of the world, because of their "success," have demonstrated their superiority over all over all other types of description.

In the end this doesn't have all that much to do with "religion," as such, though religion makes a convenient foil for scientism. Who, after all, will stand to defend superstition, or illogic, or general flakiness? All intelligent people stand to one side in such matters, and the battle is over before it is begun. All that is left to do is name one's interlocutors as either dupes or charlatans, and head home for a hot meal.

Instead, it is about politics. Not the kind on talk radio or cable news, but the kind where we explore and assert our options in how we use language to create meaning. Indeed, the simple fact that we signify only electoral politics with this word is the perfect example of the way we rope off certain discussions as immune to analysis and debate.

See the irony here? In the recent discussions I've cited on whether science can study the supernatural, the objection seems to be that nobody gets to tell scientists what they can and can't study. (I've never disputed this. My point is not that scientists can't explore the supernatural, but rather that if they choose to do so they have stopped doing science.) If this is true, the same principle should, it seems to me, be fairly applied to language and metaphysics.

Good illustrations of this bias are found in the fallacious insistence that "free will" can't be "real" because it can't be observed objectively. Or in the notion that science can tell us what art is really for. But let's here look at a couple of more recent examples. For the first one I direct your attention to a nice post at Thoughts From a Haystack about Coyne's recent defense of academic humanities departments. Coyne hits all the right notes, arguing not just that the humanities have value, but even that they potentiate academic science. But at the end, he reneigs with a tried-and-true phrase: the humanities aren't "ways of knowing," after all. Alas. (Anybody remember that article in the NYT last year, defending the teaching of art and poetry to kids, because it made them better at science and math?)

Another example: AC Grayling (via Russell Blackford) writes, in an otherwise sensible statement observing that rights are what a culture says they are, that

Experience and rational reflection show what is required to give individuals the best chance of making flourishing lives for themselves, and these framework requirements we institute as rights in order to make the chance of that flourishing available. (my emphasis)

Of course, unless we get have an ongoing conversation about what "flourishing" means, we have just arrived at "natural law" through other means--the very thing that Grayling set out to debunk. Being empowered to critique normative views--that's politics.

Religion, then, is just one of several areas that science is poorly equipped to co-opt. (Unless, as Terry Eagleton recently joked, religion is considered to resemble the belief that "at least some goblins are gay.") Given that, why does every observation that "science has limits"--by people who really like science, like Eugenie Scott--get spun as a defense of religion? Here's Coyne in a move that is emblematic of this view:

This accommodationism is most annoying when the NCSE assumes its science-has-its-limits stance, a stance designed to show that beyond those borders lies the proper and goodly realm of religion. Yes, of course science has some limits—it can’t (yet) explain why I love the paintings of Kandinsky and others find them abstract and boring. But how on earth do these “limits” somehow justify belief in the palpable nonsense of faith?

[...]

Let’s not kid ourselves: the implicit point of Scott’s peroration is that because science can’t explain meanings, therefore religion can, and hence is not to be criticized. Talk about belief in belief! Well, it’s not the NCSE’s job to criticize religion, but it sees part of its job as to coddle it. And because of that, I feel compelled to call them out. (my emphasis)

Well, that's one take. We take less liberties, I think if we simply agree that "science can't explain meanings" (better to say that science can't create--or adjudicate--meaning), that some people use religion as their semantic crucible, and some use other metaphysical frames, and that the burden is equally on all of us to "justify" these frames, or not. The truth is that most religious people (and most non-scientistic secular people), are just not very interested in justifying their beliefs in the terms Coyne sets forth. Nor does he seem very interested in justifying his beliefs in terms satisfying to his critics. I hope that will change, because I "believe" in dialogue. But it won't do, in the meanwhile, to pretend that "incompatibility" is anything more than an intellectual tantrum. (I know, that's not very civil of me. But who knows, maybe one day I'll get emails thanking me for taking such a strident, uncompromising stance. That will justify it. Right? Won't it?)

Update: In case this all seems abstract, consider that Coyne recently asked on his blog "Who among us would want to return to, say, 1930, when the smallest infection could kill us?" For a privileged elite of humans alive today, of which Coyne and I are both members, bacterial infections like TB, pneumonia, and even bubonic plague, are not serious concerns, thanks to antibiotic medicines. Some scientists think that we are experiencing only a brief reprieve from these pathogens, and that bacterial resistance will tip the scales in the next few generations. In either event, at this present historical moment, one out of every six human beings lives in an urban slum in the 3rd world. For them it is a moot question, as for the children in India for whom pneumonia is still the number one killer.

Of course actuarials aren't everything. When Native Americans were kidnapped by Europeans and brought back to the Old World, they became instant beneficiaries of an enormous differential in technological development. For many, it wasn't worth much, and they preferred suicide. The fact that it's self-evident to Coyne that American suburbs are objectively preferable to village life elsewhere is another example of how easy it is to confuse what is normative with what is natural.

A Supernatural Travelogue, Part I

2010-11-14T12:20:00.001-06:00

The debate over whether the supernatural can be a "science-stopper" has quickly fractured into several micro-debates, each one reliant upon a different definition of supernaturalism. Before getting back to how this all relates to the main question of whether science is a technique or a viewpoint, I want to try to catalog these several definitions here.

First a brief recap. The germinal question is whether or not science could investigate God, were God real. Here in Anglophone West Blogistan, by God we generally mean the Christian deity, but the question is transferable to, at a minimum, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. We're going to be talking about ghosts and goblins in a moment, but it's important to mention that the political relevance of this kind of supernaturalism is minimal. Nobody is trying to get the Lord of the Rings into the science curriculum.

Jerry Coyne, Greta Christina, and Richard Dawkins (among others) have put forth that if there were clear evidence for God, atheists might reasonably change their mind about the matter. Examples of such evidence might include believers reliably having their prayers answered, or God rearranging the stars to spell out "I Exist." The point is to show that atheists are not dogmatic about naturalism, but have derived this view on examination of all the facts, echoing Laplace: "I have no need of that hypothesis." (Subtext: metaphysics is obviated by empiricism, logic, and reason.)

Those of us foolish enough to engage this position have argued that metaphysics precedes science, which relies upon a presumption of order, regularity, and scrutability--in short, a presumption of naturalism. The best and most consistent arguments for this approach that I have seen in Blogistan have been by John Pieret at Thoughts in a Haystack, and by Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas. Most philosophers who hold this view (which is to say, most philosophers), consider this matter so settled as to be unworthy of comment.

Most but not all. This brings us to the recent paper, now in press, by Boudry, Blancke, and Braeckman. Boudry et al try to show that science need not presume naturalism to function, that it can engage with all contingencies, even the "supernatural." They call this view "Provisional Methodological Naturalism" (PMN), to contrast the "Instrinsic" Methodological Naturalism (IMN) I have been describing.

In Part II, I will come to exactly why Boudry et al are so desperately wrong. But first we need to come to terms with just what supernaturalism is supposed to be.

1. Scooby Doo Supernaturalism. According to this definition, things are supernatural only in appearance. Upon examination, they invariably turn out to be the deceptions of an unscrupulous and corrupt town elder, trying to exploit the fear and credulity of the townspeople. Nobody seriously argues for this definition, which is plagued by question begging, but it marks off one end of the spectrum. (Alternate names: Hound of the Baskervilles supernaturalism, Harry Houdini supernaturalism.)

2. Ghostbusters Supernaturalism. According to this definition, there is a supernatural realm, unknown to most, but studied by elite scientists and engineers (ghostbusters). Spirits and other ectoplasmic entities are known to possess certain regularities of behavior, and the ghostbusters utilize various technologies to control and contain them (e.g. proton pack, neutrona wand).

3. True Blood Supernaturalism. Similar to Type 2, except that the supernatural entities (vampires) have been mainstreamed, upon the scientific development of synthetic blood. The distinction is important in unpacking the nature of "spookiness," which I'll return to.

4. Plagues of Egypt Supernaturalism. In this type, we can see an apparent distinction between natural and supernatural law. Pharaoh's sorcerers (the scientists of their day) are able replicate the first plague (rivers of blood) in its entirety. They can also replicate the second (frogs), but unlike Yahweh, can't undo it. They cannot replicate plagues 3 through 10. This raises the interesting question of why God bothered with the first two. Perhaps he was in a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court situation, and didn't know what the sorcerers were capable of until he tested them? Either way, the interesting feature about this kind of supernaturalism is that there is no obvious boundary between natural and supernatural. God's first few plagues can be replicated by ordinary (though elite) mortals.

5. Empty Tomb Supernaturalism. Similar at first blush to Type 4, in this version it is made clear that there are things God can do that no one else can. Gone are Pharaoh's sorcerer's on hand to try their luck at walking on water, or feeding a crowd on seven loaves of bread.

6. "Mysterious Ways" Supernaturalism. In this version, we know (or assume) that God is real, but claim no epistemic access to that reality. Divine intervention takes the form of ordinary, but unexpected acts, like the remission of dread diseases, improbable military victories, or cataclysmic weather events. Supernaturalism has retreated from effect to cause.

7. Every Blade of Grass Supernaturalism. In this version, the natural and supernatural are entirely coextensive. Whereas in Type 6, there are events that God is presumed not to inverne in, in Type 7 an angel guides every blade of grass, and God moves every electron. Every natural occurance is the manifestation of a supernatural intention.

I've doubtlessly missed a few fine gradations here, and I've left more than a few rabbit holes to go down*. But I think this list broadly covers anything anyone is likely to have in mind when proposing that the supernatural can be scientifically studied. In Part II we'll look at how it all shakes out.

* For example: The Israelites defeated the Amalekites though the instrument of Moses raising up the staff of God on a nearby hilltop. Why was this necessary? Did God not know that his chosen people were interested in winning the battle? And why did Moses keep lowering the staff? Was he trying to give the Amalekites a fighting chance? And if it was Moses' decision to raise or lower the staff at will, then who was really in charge--Moses, or God? If Moses showed poor judgement, would God pull rank and smite the Amalekites anyway? What is all this staff-raising really about?

Within the Prospect of Belief

2010-11-10T11:20:00.000-06:00

Over at his blog, Russell Blackford has a new post up on the use of the word "scientism," partly spurred by my own usage of this word there and elsewhere. Russell considers the word a slur that has no place in respectful dialogue.

Now, I don't personally find it all that offensive--ideological biases need names, after all, so that we can call attention to them. But perhaps this is one of those words, like Yuppie, or Mugwump, that carries too much emotional baggage to be merely descriptive, so I'm happy to replace it in polite company. "Positivist" is a pretty close fit, but it's so moldy that it carries the connotation of old-fashionedness, which may also be unfair. Perhaps Russell will help me find other alternatives. (I also hope he'll consider that accomodationists don't like being called "faitheists" any more than he likes being called scientistic.)

Aside from being impolite, Russell argues that "scientism" depicts a straw man. Most people so tagged do not actually believe in the omnicompetence of science to answer questions of ontology, ethics, aesthetics, and other branches of traditional philosophy*. In comments, Russell goes on to elaborate that "it's difficult to find working scientists who actually do hold those positions."

Well, not that difficult. Here's Jerry Coyne, agreeing with Russell that the term "scientism" is perjorative, and then planting his feet squarely on turf Russell claims to be unpopulated:

[Russell] uses the example of “how sympathetic one should be to Macbeth?”, but can literature really answer that question for us? Or is it an empirical question based on psychology and sociology, sussing out what effects one’s actions have on others? ... I still maintain that every question about how things really are in the universe is a question that demands a science-based answer.

This is precisely the attitude I intend to depict when I, until now, employed the S-word. I want to observe that (a) Coyne rejects the primacy of metaphysics over empiricism and (b) that he is wrong. With what term shall I so do this?

* Russell seems inclined to define "scientism" more broadly as the belief that the humanities have nothing to offer, rather than the specific belief that science can settle metaphysical questions. I don't see it presented that way by philosophers of science (I posted number of examples pulled form the OED) and Russell doesn't cite anything to support this broader definition, so this would seem like a case of double straw man, but I want to extend my request to him to substantiate this definition, and reiterate that I'm open to finding more emotionally neutral language to try to typify his position.

Links

2010-11-06T13:35:00.000-05:00

Some nice stuff on the interwebs.

Eurozine has published an essay by Mary Midgley titled "Against Humanism." I have been wondering about Midgely lately, now 91, and this article assures me she is sharp as ever:

What the positivist pioneers don't seem to have noticed is that if you ditch one of two supposedly fundamental substances you have got to ditch the other. The mistake does not lie in the faults of the rejected substance but in the whole idea of dividing the world in this way in the first place. Body and Mind are not separate entities. The unit is the whole person. "Body" and "Mind" are just names for different aspects of that person which need to be studied in their own distinct ways, as do shape and size or age and position.

(This echoes a point that about naturalist ontology that Alan Watts used to make often, coming out of a very different sort of intellectual lineage.)

John Pieret continues his analysis of Boudry et al, on whether science can ever propose to study the supernatural, worth quoting at length.

After all, an objection to Newton's theory of gravity that was raised immediately was that it proposed an “occult” force that acts at a distance with no known mechanism. For some 300 years we have been looking for a mechanism that enables gravity to do that, without success, but that has not stopped us from continuing to try. At what point does the scientific community throw up its collective hands and say that any phenomena is “supernatural”?

More importantly, what would happen if they did? Would the normal routine of science -- further observations and experiments, the publishing of results and peer review and criticism – continue? Would scientists propose Goditons and quantum spirituality and try to test them? If so, then they would fall afoul of PZ Myers' criticism that they would then be proposing “natural, repeatable, measurable, and even observable…properties” that can no longer be thought of as “supernatural.”

And if the scientific community didn't do those things – if it agreed that the cause of the phenomena is supernatural and nothing further can be said by science about it – how could we characterize the situation other than as science having “stopped,” at least as far as the causes of that phenomena are concerned?

You can also see my discussion with Boudry in the comments of my last post on this topic, and with Russell Blackford over at his place.

Sean Carroll, who weighed in last week on the Science N' Supernaturalism thread, followed it up with a post on reductionism, taking philosopher John Dupre to task for straw-manning the reductionist view, and in the process I think he really steps in it:

A sensible reductionist perspective would be something like “objects are completely defined by the states of their components.” The dialogue uses elephants as examples of complex objects, so Rosenberg imagines that we know the state (position and momentum etc.) of every single particle in an elephant. Now we consider another collection of particles, far away, in exactly the same state as the ones in the elephant. Is there any sense in which that new collection is not precisely the same kind of elephant as the original?

Dupré doesn’t give a very convincing answer, except to suggest that you would also need to know the conditions of the environment in which the elephant found itself, to know how it would react. That’s fine, just give the states of all the particles making up the environment.[!] I’m not sure why this is really an objection. (my emphasis)

Sean appears to endorse, though I don't think he intends to do, the philosophical view that to make statements about something, one must also make statements about its environment--a view touched on in different ways, in the pieces by Midgely and Watts I link to above. Reductionism is a useful tool, but it suffers as an ontological standard because of its tendency to substitute logical abstractions for reality (see Sean's reference to "the same kind of elephant"), which in the end is always relational (as I think Sean unintentionally concedes here).

John Wilkins attempts to settle the muddy waters of the "evidence for the supernatural" debate by proposing a concrete standard for godhood we can all agree on. John has a real gift for taxonomy, and in this post he displays his usual clarity and thoroughness (Lares and Penates, wow.) His linkage of this standard with Justin Barrett's concept of "minimally counterintuitive agents" is particularly interesting in light of trying to get at a definition of supernaturalism. Ultimately, though I think John (and Justin) place too much emphasis on intuition as a dividing point between the mundane and divine. It's counterintuitive that the sun is stationary and the earth is in motion. It's counterintuitive that matter is almost entirely empty space. But we don't accord these facts a separate ontological status on this basis. (Brandon Watson made a similar point in comments the last time John brought this topic up.)

Finally, Massimo Pigliucci and Jerry Coyne have apologized to each other for their rhetorical trespasses, and promised an elevation of tone. Are we all accomodationists, now?

Silent, Hidden, Lawless

2010-11-02T17:54:00.000-05:00

Sean Carroll has posted a thoughtful (and goddamned civil) response to my recent post on science and supernaturalism.

I agree with Sean that the essential quality at issue is lawlessness (though I don't prefer this term, since it implies chaos, rather than a "higher" or otherwise unevaluable type of order--imagine a capricious demon changing the length of your yardstick every night when you go to bed.)

I disagree, however, with his implication that a scientist who settles for a non-naturalistic explanation is still doing science:

There is a perfectly good question of whether science could ever conclude that the best explanation was one that involved fundamentally lawless behavior. The data in favor of such a conclusion would have to be extremely compelling, for the reasons previously stated, but I don’t see why it couldn’t happen. Science is very pragmatic, as the origin of quantum mechanics vividly demonstrates. Over the course of a couple decades, physicists (as a community) were willing to give up on extremely cherished ideas of the clockwork predictability inherent in the Newtonian universe, and agree on the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. That’s what fit the data. Similarly, if the best explanation scientists could come up with for some set of observations necessarily involved a lawless supernatural component, that’s what they would do.

I don't find this very convincing, for several reasons. First, probabilistic science is just as lawful as mechanical science. It just uses different bookkeeping techniques. All Sean's example really points to here is a Kuhnian "paradigm shift."

Second, the "best explanations scientists can come up with" is a moving target. Einstein, who had every right to rest on his laurels after having introduced relativity theory, famously spent the rest of his career unsuccessfully trying to unify the fundamental forces of nature--to find the single and consistent explanation for why different rules govern the interaction of matter and energy at different levels of scale. He could have given up, or answered the question of why there are four forces, "just because." Or, "maybe we'll all wake up tomorrow and there will be three forces, and no one will remember that we ever thought there were four." Or perhaps even "God really likes the number 4." Not being satisfied with these answers is what made Einstein a good scientist.

But most crucially, as I mentioned above with my yardstick reference, studying lawless phenomena (whether chaotic or capricious) with science is logically insensible. It is like trying to translate an infant's murmuring and babbling from Finnish to Greek. I'm happy to agree with Sean that the Supernatural is an empty set, but as a logical category (here defined), it cannot be coextensive with science any more than hot can be with cold.

Friday Winterreise lyric blogging

2010-10-29T13:44:00.000-05:00

The plan is to adapt all 24 of the Wilhelm Mueller poems into English versions, keeping the meter and some of the rhyme scheme so that they remain singable to the Schubert melodies. These are first drafts. Liberties were taken. And, as I do not speak much German, many subtleties were no doubt lost.

Good Night (Gute Nacht)

A stranger I arrived here
A stranger I depart
The Maytime was so kind to me
Spring blossoms filled my heart
My sweetheart pledged her love to me
To the altar we would go
Now all the world is cloudy
The road is shrouded in snow

Of my benighted journey
I do not choose the day
My path reveals itself to me
From in the dark and gray
I'll take as my companion
Moonshadows silver and wan
And search the whitened meadow
For tracks of fox and faun

Why should I stay here longer,
And wait to be driven out
The stray dogs howl the loudest
Outside the master house
Love prefers to wander
Ordained by heaven above
From one to the other
Good night to my dear love

I won't disrupt your dreaming
I won't disturb your peace
You shall not hear my footfalls
My softly turning key
I write Good Night in passing
Through the gate I leave behind
So you may still remember
I had you on my mind

[See the original German lyric here.]

Is "Dark Matter" Supernatural?

2010-10-25T18:57:00.001-05:00

I wasn't going to write about this, partly because I don't have time, and partly because I'd resolved to let old Jerry Coyne be for a while. And because John Pieret has done such an admirable job of treating this topic every time it comes up, again... and again.

But now real-life philosopher Russell Blackford has chimed in approvingly, and, in doing so inserted his foot into the same chuck-hole as Jerry did (and Larry Moran before him), so I thought I'd put in my two cents before any more ankles get broken.

At issue is the oldish question of whether science can probe into "supernatural" questions, the most famous of which is "Does God exist?" Traditionally, the question hangs on the distinction between two kinds of naturalism: methodological naturalism, which excludes supernatural phenomena as out-of-scope, (whether or not they actually exist), and philosophical naturalism, which assumes a priori that supernatural phenomena do not exist.

A number of scientists and philosophers are dissatisfied with these two options, since neither seems to permit the testing of the "God Hypothesis." The solution to this that both Russell and Jerry point to is presented in a new paper in Foundations of Science which proposes to further split Methodolological Naturalism into two more categories: Intrinsic Methodolological Naturalism (IMN) and Provisional Methodolological Naturalism (PMN). IMN is the old way of doing things; PMN the new, improved way, allowing for scientific study of supernatural phenomena, should they happen to pop up unexpectedly in the course of our research.

~~Nowhere do the authors of the paper define just what supernaturalism is supposed to mean.~~The word "supernatural" is commonly used to indicate that which is not subject to "natural" law, that which is intrinsically concealed from our view, which is not orderly and regular, or otherwise not amenable to observation and quantification. That right there should be a conversation-stopper, since these are science's stock and trade, and we've seemed to stumble on a simple logical end to the problem. [Update: In comments Maarten Boudy corrects my opening sentence, now struck. See my reply. See also Sean Carroll's response to this post (which I reply to here) for a more precise definition of what a supernaturalism resistant to scientific enquiry might look like.]

This, though, is unsatisfying to a certain philosophical disposition, since it seems to allow the supernatural free rein to come in and make sneak attacks upon the natural world (through divine intervention, for example), without the possibility of scientific detection. Russell offers what seems to me a very weak response to this problem:

Of course, science cannot investigate the supernatural if we define 'the supernatural' as 'whatever cannot be investigated.' But once we define the supernatural in some other plausible way it is by no means apparent that science can't investigate it, just as it can investigate things that no longer exist (such as dinosaurs), things that are very distant (such as the moons of Jupiter), and things that are very small (such as atomic nuclei).

Well, he doesn't say by what criteria these other definitions are rendered "plausible." But I'll allow that just as it's a tautology to say "if we define the supernatural as that which science can't examine, then science can't examine it," so too is it a tautology to say that "if we include the supernatural among that which science can examine, then science can examine it."

Both of these are word games. The question is whether there is a category of phenomena (empty or otherwise) which science is not equipped to study, and the obvious answer to this is yes. Science can't study what it can't define, quantify and observe. Since it is predicated on revealing laws, science cannot study that which is lawless ("capricious," in Russell's words.) To the extent that there are things left over, after we've filtered these candidates out, that we still want to call "supernatural," then it's fair to say that science can study them. But we've drained the word of a great deal of its meaning. An omnipotent god is lawless to the extent that it is constrained by no law. It is unobservable to the extent that it is not bound by time and space. Perhaps such a god has a "nature," but this would be outside our capacity to scientifically define, since we rely on these parameters to make our descriptions of the world.

But what about these divine interventions? Shouldn't we be able to study the portions that impinge upon our realm--all the plagues and miracles and destroying of cities and cures of diseases--and draw conclusions about their causation? Russell says we can--and I agree--but this is metaphysics, not science. Metaphysics is a perfectly legitimate (and necessary) philosophical exercise, so it's not clear to me why we would want to disown it. Trying to use science to adjudicate supernatural propositions is a little like trying to frame out a door with a stick of butter on a hot day. It's no slander against butter to say this. A better analogy would be one I have poached from Julian Jaynes: it is like trying to find an unlighted spot in a dark room with a flashlight.

There's no shame in all of this, or there shouldn't be. We presume that dark matter --if it exists--is lawful and not in the least bit capricious. In other words, it is--if it exists--a "natural" phenomena. But we can presently make absolutely no statements about it whatsoever, except through the effect it (putatively) has on ordinary matter. Whatever it is made of, and however it interacts with the rest of the material world is purely speculative, an untestable hypothesis (given our present knowledge). Our failure to confirm it with science is not unnerving. The same can be true--should be true--for our stance on the divine, whether it is one of embrace or disbelief. We can have this little bit of ontology. It won't render us credulous, or stupid, or insane. It just might make us lighten up, a little.

You Can't Spell Incompatible Without Combat

2010-10-12T21:59:00.001-05:00

Jerry Coyne's arguments for "incompatibility" are not improving with age--though they continue to provide an increasingly detailed picture of his mindset. Both Jean Kazez and John Pieret note that his latest polemic, "Science and Religion are not Friends," from Monday's USA Today, founders on a double standard (religious scientists, argues Jerry, do not constitute evidence for the compatibility of science and religion, but atheistic scientists do constitute evidence for incompatibility.)

And Brandon Watson writes, today, that Coyne's central metaphor for incompatibility--monogamy and adultery--doesn't scan. Not all monogamous marriages require total fidelity to peaceably endure--"open" marriages are still marriages. Infidelity, whether built into to the arrangement or not, doesn't indicate a "cognitive dissonance." It indicates an unwillingness to be completely romantically exclusive. Many people--perhaps most--can't abide this treatment from their most intimate relation. To them--to us--marital fidelity is essentially a repudiation of the marriage itself. But it needn't be so. Consenting adults can emotionally align themselves in any number of ways, and we might observe that it's not very "freethinking" to imply that "true" marriage exists only between spouses who don't dick around on each other.

Coyne's metaphor is, I believe, a revealing one, coming up as it often does in the context of religious scientists like Francis Collins. It seems clear enough in this case that science is the marriage, and religion is the floozy on the side. There is an air of betrayal in the amazed disbelief that anyone who had studied the ways of science could continue to cleave to religious teachings. How could they? And yet there is no serious evidence that religious people actually make bad scientists. There is only the feeling that they should (As John Pieret characterizes it, New Atheism is essentially emotionalism with intellectual pretensions.)

We might be inclined here, to make a point about a species of intellectual Manicheism, about the sacred integrity of categories, about being on the bus or off. Coyne spends much of his USA Today editorial redoubling his investment in science's incorruptibility ("Science operates by using evidence and reason. Doubt is prized, authority rejected. [By contrast,] faith relies on revelation, dogma and authority."--a distinction which is both self-serving and metaphysically naive.)

In response to his editorial, Cathy Grossman hastily assembles what might seem to be a straw man, accusing Coyne of simplistic black or white thinking on a complex issue:

[Coyne] loathes gray areas... and insists on the black-and-white view that religion is a force for the awful, unlike science's force for the good.

Does your gray matter -- i.e. your brain --see more shading to all this?

But surprisingly enough, Coyne actually endorses this formula on his own website.

"We scientists are always asking ourselves if we are wrong," writes Coyne. If true, this line of questioning doesn't seem to have penetrated very far. His USA Today article is riddled with unsubstantiated assertions. We've heard before that "religion impels [people] to fly planes into buildings," but no study is ever cited isolating this variable from the many possible others. It's plausible, but hardly scientific. Where is the Null Hypothesis when you really need it? Given Coyne's concession that our biases can wreak havoc on our thinking if not checked by painstaking methodology (he quotes Feynmann's remark that ourselves are the easiest people to fool), it is interesting that he feels no compulsion to quantify the claim that religion is a specifically murderous force. Or that religious wars stemmed from a lack of impartial empirical adjudication of metaphysical claims. Or that oppression and discrimination result from an inherently religious refusal to embrace science. (Tell it to Dorothy Day!)

Why should anybody take Jerry Coyne seriously if he cannot be bothered to apply the vaunted scientific method to his own passions? If it's really so critical that science and reason prevail over dogma and appeals to authority, the best place to start would be here. Let he who is without sin, etc. People on both sides of this debate are agitated, encamped. If science is to demonstrate its healing effect (the one so strikingly contrasted with the religious tendency to war), then now would be the time to see it. If we just want more bad logic and unempirical opinion, there's plenty of it to be found in the history books. We hardly need further offerings by the New Atheists to add to an overabundance of half cocked rhetoric. If not we then who? If not now then when?

Friday Proust Blogging

2010-09-17T22:07:00.001-05:00

"I don't deny it," answered Swann in some bewilderment. "The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensées?" He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. "And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years," he went on, shewing that contempt for the things of this world which some men of the world like to affect, "we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Léon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at the right proportion between 'information' and 'publicity.'"

--Swann's Way, from "Combray" (Montcrieff)

On Not Letting Human Feeling Stop You Either

2010-08-26T12:42:00.000-05:00

"What's the point of having freedom of speech," writes Russell Blackford, "if we don't exercise it?" This statement seems have a certain use-it-or-lose-it logic to it (implicit in the metaphor of muscular "exercise"), but it contains an ambiguity that reveals a lot about the present debate over religious freedom.

"If we don't exercise it." This could grammatically mean anything from "if we never exercise it" to "if we don't always exercise it" -- two very different propositions. The accuracy of the first interpretation is obvious. Never using something is tantamount to not having it at all. But the second interpretation sounds like something obsessive-compulsive, as though we risked losing our liberty the second we elected not to employ it.

I don't mean to imply that Russell intends this second, obsessive-compulsive meaning. But it's worth noting in passing that our freedoms are all subject to self-moderation, based on the wisdom of the moment. There are an infinite number of things we might say at any one time. Unless we have Tourette's, we will use discretion to choose what, if anything, to declare.

It is in this spirit that, I believe, Quinn O'Neill writes in the 3 Quarks Daily post Russell is so displeased with. We reserve the right to criticize any concept or ideology that seems importantly mistaken or misleading. Such criticism should not be confused with censorship, which is a curtailment of speech, not a comment on it. But it is equally true that we reserve the right to criticize the criticism. In neither case should we characterize critique as the attempt to get our interlocutor to shut up.

Russell reads O'Neill as promoting "a false and dangerous idea:"

that religious views should be given some sort of special respect by individuals who do not wield the power of the state. No. No. No. Really I'm sorry, but we can't jump hard enough on this sort of nonsense.

It is very important here that Russell uses the word should instead of must, since it seriously undermines his argument. Should is criticism; must is censorship. O'Neill is arguing that there are strategic reasons to be respectful of other people's beliefs. She does not argue that these reasons should be so primary that they sever any dialogue; she argues they should inform the dialogue, so that it remains productive. Russell may remain unconvinced that respect is important (her argument is not very intellectually robust), but it is illegitimate for him to imply she is trying to use respect as a shield to give religious people special rights. O'Neill clearly views respect as a tactic, not a categorical imperative, and it further seems clear (based on her quotation of Michael Shermer that religious toleration protects non-believers too) she means it to apply equally to all parties in this dispute, atheist and religious alike.

In the course of his critique, Russell defines "freedom of religion" down to something much more lukewarm than its full social function.

Freedom of religion is all about - and has always been about* - the state not persecuting people on the basis that they fail to adopt the state's preferred religion.

This is only a partial definition (though preventing state persecution is an important aspect of religious freedom.) What it leaves out is freedom from discrimination by non-state actors--employers, merchants, teachers, landlords and many more--on the basis of religion. This is the importance of the kind of toleration Shermer was talking about in the Scientific American piece O'Neill quotes. If a club can refuse to admit Jews, it can refuse to admit "secular humanists."

This broader definition relates back to the earlier distinction I drew between forbidding certain types of speech (name-calling, for example, and other personal attacks), and rhetorically discouraging them. Our speech is protected, legally, even when intemperate, because to ban such speech throws out too many babies with the bathwater. There is a time and place where intemperance is, perhaps, the best thing we can offer--and even where it is not, our failure to express ourselves better should never be criminalized. But can we not question the wisdom of such expressions, without being accused of a kind of crypto-censorship?

Because O'Neill did an incomplete job of conveying why respect and tolerance may be desirable (let's stress, again, that this is not code for stifling dissent), let me offer the "debate" over Cordoba House as a case study. "New Atheists" like Dawkins and Hitchens rightly emphasize that atheism is a minority position in most of the world, and that criticism of religion very often takes on a character of speaking truth to power. But the question of religious tolerance does not apply to this instance alone, and atheism is far from being the only religious minority. Few of us would quarrel with Pamela Geller's legal right to publish Islamophobic nonsense on her blog, to the effect that Cordoba House "paves the way for an Islamic state," but it's clear to see how volatile such speech is, and how ill-advised she is to publish it, whatever her legal entitlement. Geller is not an emotionally well person, and probably immune to any appeal to be mindful of the way her tone may contribute to anti-Muslim sentiment. But there are many people who employ a similar tone who are not immune to such persuasion. (Jerry Coyne is eminently more rational; and yet how close to Geller's rhetoric is his assertion that "Islam brought down the towers.") It's to those people I would echo O'Neill's basic argument: if something is worth criticizing, it's worth criticizing well, with no more rancor than is necessary, and cognizant of the fact that one's audience may not be feeling quite as high-minded as we would prefer.

*This would be an example of the genetic fallacy, where a thing is said to be no more than its origins.

Ours go to Eleven

2010-08-16T18:02:00.000-05:00

This is really funny, in a Goon Show kind of way. This week the Huffington Post has excerpted some passages by Victor Stenger from his 2009 book The New Atheism, in which he takes umbrage at the charge that "new atheism" is a metaphysical stance. Stenger cites the Christian apologist David Marshall, who has written, reasonably, that

Almost everything we know -- not just about first-century Palestine, but about dwarf stars, neutrinos, state capitals, vitamins, and sports scores -- we believe because we find the person telling us the information is credible.

This is, of course, just a fact of life. The ratio of things we might know that can actually be directly known by any one of us is yawningly vast. Biologists trust physicists--they're way too busy to double check their own work andsomebody elses's. Biologists and physicists both trust weathermen, and all three trust their news organ of choice.

But Stenger is outraged by this unscientific appeal to faith over verification. His response? "Take it from me, we have good reasons for believing the things we do." It's just too rich not to quote verbatim:

Isn't it incredible that someone born of a virgin rose from the dead? To believe that requires far more evidence than needed for a ball score in the newspaper. And, as someone who labored for 30 years to learn the properties of neutrinos, I can tell you that the evidence for their existence far exceeds any evidence that someone rose from the dead*.

Well if you say so, Victor, that's different.

Stenger doesn't stop there, however. He also won't let stand Marshall's accusation that there's no way to verify the accuracy of our sense data:

True, we can't prove our senses are giving us the "real scoop." But we have plenty of personal experience that our senses do a good job of alerting us to oncoming cars, warning us when something on the stove has caught fire, and telling us that the baby needs to be fed.

It would be a crime not to show off one more highlight of such logical prowess, so here's Stenger beating back Jonathan Haught's contention that naturalists have faith in the rationality of the world:

What's the alternative, an irrational world? Science makes no assumption about the real world being "rational." It simply applies rational methods in taking and analyzing data, following certain rules to assure that data are as free from error as possible, and checking the logic of our models to make sure they are self-consistent. The only alternative is irrationality -- error-filled data and inconsistent models. How can irrational thinking with ill-defined words and inconsistent statements lead us to any credible knowledge?

Which is Haught's point. Scientists (as Stenger concedes) can't know whether the actual world is "rational" or not; they can only act as though it is, which is to say, they can put faith into the proposition that it is. Of course neither Marshall not Haught are interested in attacking science per se; they just want to puncture the fallacy that rationality is self-affirming, that it needs no metaphysical underpinnings to proceed--a position abandoned by professional philosophers over 50 years ago after it was conceded that "only scientific statements are valid" is not itself a scientific statement, and therefore self-refudiating.

* Later, Stenger clarifies: "Of course we don't have time to independently test everything we hear, so we take the word of people have already proven to be reliable in the past. That's why scientists and scholars of all kinds work so hard to maintain a good reputation"--which just seems to be a restatement of Marshall's point about "credible sources."

On Not Letting History Stop You

2010-08-15T14:59:00.000-05:00

I had just finished typing out a comment on Thoughts in a Haystack observing that just because Jerry Coyne says half-cocked and irrational things on his blog it doesn't discredit his scientific work on speciation--when a post landed in my RSS feed that could not have been a more perfect illustration of such a half-cocked, irrational remark.

About the plans for Cordoba House in lower Manhanattan, Coyne writes this:

Do I oppose the center’s construction? No. Do I think that building it on that site is a good idea? No. It’s no better an idea than would be building an American cultural center near Ground Zero in Hiroshima. It was Islam, after all, that propelled those planes into the World Trade Center nine years ago.

Let's start out by giving Jerry propers for calling it what it is--a community center, not a mosque--and for defending the Cordoba Initiative's First Amendment rights to build it. He even puts "mosque" in scare quotes in his post's title, much to his credit, and he is unequivocal in his affirmation of equal protection under the law.

If only he could have closed on such an enlightened note. Let's look first at his assertion that "Islam propelled those planes into the World Trade Center." Coyne begins his post extolling "evidence and reason," but it is a hallmark of his lack of seriousness on this issue that he soon after uncritically bemoans the lack of "prominence" of Muslim repudiation of the 9/11 attack.

I saw lots of worldwide celebration after September 11, but few condemnations of the perpetrators, and none from Islamic countries. (Yes, I know there must have been a few of them, but they weren’t exactly prominent.)

How ahistorical can you get? The "worldwide celebration" we saw on cable news channels was--at best--limited to a few demonstrations in Palestinian refugee camps, the authenticity of which has been questioned. Even if the celebrations were spontaneous, however, they don't tell us much more than we already knew about the ugliness of mob behavior. (We attribute the riots and looting in the American inner cities in the 1960s and 70s largely to social conditions, not to the African American character.) Meanwhile, across the Muslim world, the condemnation was universal, as I noted the last time Coyne regurgitated this Fox News-ism, including

The Muslim Brotherhood, the chief Mufti of Saudi Arabia, The Ayatollah of Iran, The President of Iran, the Secretary General of the OIC, and scores of others including every American Muslim organization of note. In fact the Muslim reaction to 9/11 was near-unanimous in its characterization of the attack as profoundly anti-Islamic. It's possible, though, that none of these scholars and statesmen have read the Qur'an, and thus don't know how "belligerent" it is.

With a similar disregard for the facts, Coyne sadly observes (echoing Sam Harris, who Coyne quotes extensively in this post), that the moderate strain of Islam is nowhere to be found, just when we need it most: "I don’t see much evidence of the friendlier, kinder Islam touted by accommodationists." If Coyne is not yet aware that the Cordoba Initiative's founder, Faisal Adbul Rauf, is a Sufi, let his ignorance on this issue persist no longer. Again, one drawback of the evidence-based empirical program is that one must actually take the trouble to seek out new data. Relying only on anecdotes that confirm one's prejudices is no way to promote rationality; sadly it is an all-too common among the New Atheists on this subject (as we've seen many times in the disdain they've shown when their armchair philosophizing bumps up against the facts. Perhaps they've be well-advised to move the armchair into a room with a better library).

It is in Coyne's analogy to Hiroshima, though, that we can really see the logical problems with his essentialist thinking. Coyne writes as an American opposed to the massacre of entire civilian populations. Here he is not alone--many Americans spoke out against the use of the atomic bomb in Japan in 1945, and today it stands in many of our minds as one of the lowest points in American history--perhaps the lowest. We are able to maintain that there is nothing intrinsically American in vaporizing entire cities, and dooming the outlying populations to agonizing long term illness--though the fact that no other people has resorted to such an attack seems to resemble a kind of circumstantial evidence to such an intrinsic quality. By analogizing 9/11 to Hiroshima, Coyne accedes, at least implicitly, that there is also nothing implicitly Islamic about mass-murder by jetliner. (In fact, the disavowal of the 9/11 by Muslims was much more pronounced than American disavowal of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nakasaki, though admittedly this has much to do with the fact that the bombings, unlike the 9/11 attacks, were the actions of a nation-state at war.)

Let's grant that an American outreach center on the outskirts of Hiroshima six years after "Little Boy" might have an uphill public relations battle. But if such a center were dedicated to principles of fellowship and peace, does anyone think such an uphill battle would not be worthshile, even if doomed to failure and misunderstanding? The analogy is not quite apt, because there were no American communities in the Japanese countryside in the 1940s, just are there are none today, whereas lower Manhattan has had a history of Arab and Muslim settlement dating back to the mid-19th century. Whether we like it or not, Muslims "belong" at Ground Zero. It is their own home soil*. Muslims were killed in the 9-11 attacks, and Muslims were among the survivors who still mourn today. The very fact that this needs to be said militates for a dozen Cordoba Houses, if there is any hope that thier construction would help overcome the fear and misapprehension found among well-meaning people like Coyne and Harris that there is something intrinsically alien and dangerous about Islam, and so profoundly so that dialogue itself, in that great city on Manhattan Island, offers no promise.

*Just as the farm and homes of the Nisei in California and the Pacific Northwest were their home soil, regardless of the mandates of Executive Order 9066--another low point in a history with no shortage of things to atone for.

Choosing to Choose

2010-07-31T14:29:00.001-05:00

John Wilkins has suggested (jokingly?) that my response to Galen Strawson was an "argument from consequences," the logical fallacy that takes the form "things can't be such and such a way, because that would suck."

I do indeed flirt with such a fallacy. If things were as Strawson described, it would indeed suck, and suck to the highmost. (There is no worse world than one in which we are morally helpless). But I must reiterate that my argument is not empirical, but ethical, and thereby immune to the fallacy of argumentum ad consequentiam. Our ability to act morally is a thing that comes into being when we move towards it and dissolves when we move away from it. (We can choose to choose). It is not like objective facts of the world, like the combined gas law or Brownian motion, which exist whether we acknowledge them or not.

Strawson's insight that free will is an illusion is in an important sense correct. We can't know all the forces at play in a given moment. Our reason (being incomplete) will fail us, we will err, and it is always possible that what we think we are at liberty to act upon is actually completely bound by circumstance, despite our efforts. This is the difficult logical consequence of our being finite, bounded in time and space. We look to the expansive power of reason, which multiplies the world through symbolic representation, to release us from these bonds, and the moderate success of this approach often over-encourages us to seek complete transcendence of our predicament through reason (Transhumanism, the "Singularity.") This temptation needs to be tempered by common human modesty, and calling attention to our tendency to mythologize the Rational Will into a magical power is not a bad pursuit. We do not have Sarte's "Total Freedom."

But Strawson has no such modest aim. He makes the further (illegitimate) move that because "free will" is not everything we want it to be, it is nothing we want it to be. That because it is not perfect, because it is limited, and even often deceptive, it is useless*. This is the all-or-nothing, "sour grapes" argument of someone who has been deeply disappointed to find that one's wildest fantasies are not to be. We are not gods, as has been hinted at by certain exuberant doctrines (The "Omega Man," and the aforementioned Transhumanist movement), nor are we even the kind of ubermenschen portrayed by some latter-day existentialists.

We all must be disillusioned as we go through life (which is to say we must first be "illusioned," as children, since this is the only way our young and febrile minds can apprehend the world). And it is quite natural and understandable to spend some time sulking as we adapt to the changing picture of the world we inhabit. But we would be well advised to refrain from doing philosophy while we are sulking. Wisdom and petulance do not mix.

Strawson is an object lesson of this injunction. There is the melodrama of unprocessed trauma and despair in his remarks that "it all comes down to luck," and "freedom does not exist." His suggestion that his theory provides a way to "slip out of" our moral responsibility is also revealing, and here it is worth noting that the idea that we are not responsible for our actions is also a powerful, childish, fantasy--one that we all harbor, which is why it is so parlous. We want cake, but there are starving children in need. Well, we'd help them if we could, alas!

As I wrote before, Strawson vacillates. He does concede that he cannot actually live as though his argument were true (though he rather pitifully tries to account for this by characterizing human emotional nature as a corrupting weakness in the face of cold fact, another rationalist myth that should have been thrown over long ago). He endorses Ian McEwan's argument that we "own" our actions and "make ourselves accountable" even if we don't "have control" of them. (Though it's not clear by what means this would be possible if the will to choose to be accountable is not available to us).

But formally, officially, Strawson's "revisionary metaphysics" undermines the truth and reality of moral agency--the only thing that humanity has ever known to generate meaning, from which all other virtues flow. I happen to think this metaphysics is a distortion, for the reasons I've cited, but even if I could find no logical fault with Strawson's thinking, I would--in answer to John W.--seriously consider siding with Plato to say that some doctrines are best kept to oneself. If one feels that in the ultimate truth of things there is no difference between mass murder and a mouse innocently chewing through electrical wires-when this happens to be the secret wish (in less dramatic form, perhaps) of most of us--an argument from consequences matters just as much as a purely logical one.We have a responsibility in philosophy, as in art, to guard against fantasy and wish-fulfillment, since so often nothing seems to be as true as that which we most desparately want to be true.

* As John Pieret notes in comments, this kind of fatalism dooms both scientific and philosophical enterprise to complete irrelevance. If we have no freedom to evaluate propositions on rational or evidentiary grounds, then our beliefs should rank right next to religous ones given through revelation, all the forces governing what we believe being out of our hands in each case. We can see how Calvinist (or bizzaro-Calvinist) such a worldview quickly becomes, where rationalism is a gift given the elect by grace alone, or, in this case, accident. (Which is also a problem for the theory of memes).

We just live in it

2010-07-30T13:24:00.001-05:00

We've been talking (along with much of the blogosophosphere) about free will and determinism because British philosopher Galen Strawson wrote a puerile essay at The Stone on the logical impossibilty of personal responsibility. Sundry writers responded to this essay (including lit critic William Egginton), and others responded to these responses, at which point I jumped in and responded to these responses to these reponses. And I in turn have been responded to, in links and comments.

Strawson has made a name for himself for his argument (the aptly named "Basic Argument") against free will and moral responsibility, which the Stone essay briefly recapitulates: since we didn't create the conditions that constrain our acts, we cannot be "ultimately" responsible for our behavior. We didn't make who we are, so we thereby can't control what we do.

What does "ultimately" mean, here, exactly? It's confusing: in discussions of causation the "ultimate" explanation keeps taking us further and further back to some more primordial cause. But morally the term means the opposite: a refusal to make excuses. "Ultimately, I'm responsible." As John Wilkins observes, Strawson is confusing two very different usages of important terminology. (In some places he tries to gloss "ultimately" with the phrase "buck-stoppingly" responsible; but this seems to further undermine his argument, and highlight its notable buck-passing quality.)

In effect Strawson is making the standard bureaucrat's complaint: I just work here. I don't make the rules. Like the functionaries in Ikiru who use corruption and dysfunction to absolve thier moral inactivity--until Watanabe is jolted by a diagnosis of terminal cancer into realizing he can actually help people.

The only difference between Watanabe pre-diagnosis and Watanabe post-diagnosis is one of attitude and perspective. There is no more (or less) free will empirically "in" the world before or after Watanabe sees the doctor. Helping people does not change his constraints--he still has the same limitations and flaws, and his imminent mortality does not create any new desires in him. But it re-prioritizes them, which changes his life, and the people he helps. Responsibility is a stance, not a fact about the world, and Strawson's blurring of this distinction comes off as nearly petulant, especially when he concedes at the end of his Stone essay that we should behave as if we were responsible. That is, after all, all responsibility is. The decision to be responsible is self-creating.

Strawson calls this decision to act as if we were responsible "weak responsibility," in contrast to his mythical "ultimate" responsibility (which has never played a major role in moral philosophy). But elsewhere he easily drifts into fatalism, saying (in a 2003 interview with The Believer) that "it all comes down to luck," evil-doers are "off the hook;" "no one can be ultimately deserving of praise or blame for anything," and--amazingly--that we should not differentiate between Timothy McVeigh blowing up the Murrah building intentionally, and its being destroyed inadvertantly because a mouse chewed through some electrical wiring. The revulsion we feel at the one, and not the other, is just autonomic, like a gag response.

This is not an intellectually serious position. There may be a sense in which it is true that what happened in the past could not have been different. Certainly the Holocaust was, in part, a matter of "bad luck:" plots against Hitler, for example, seem to have had remarkable poor luck with bombs. Still, we still want to know what attitude we should take about this moment, and moments to come. What can we do that will matter? Strawson's argument will not permit us to take any attitude at all, indeed it calls into question the whole notion of attitude taking.

What follows from this is interesting. Believing that we have no free will, and that we cannot influence our own behavior based on how we consider it, becomes an idea which ends up, in its turn, influencing our behavior. Announcing to ourselves that we cannot freely choose quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The incantation "It doesn't matter what I think I should do" has a profound damping affect on our ability to think creatively about the problems that catch our attention. (Indeed the problem of creativity is a difficult one for anyone who denies free will. It's one thing to blame Stalin's purges on his upbringing, or Vlad the Impaler on his genes, but are we prepared to say that the View of Delft arose on Vermeer's canvas because he couldn't help himself? Is Moby Dick just a spot of good luck?)

It's not always clear how devoted Strawson is to the Basic Argument: he expresses it, then retreats to the position that it's OK to judge immoral acts based on our emotional response (because we can't help it!). That softens the matter some, pragmatically, but it still promotes a pernicious fatalism at the worst possible time--when there seem to be fewer and fewer grounds to make any moral judgements at all, and when we feel remarkably unempowered to have any true volition at all. Strawson's argument would be a curiosity during the ascendancy of Stoicism, Confucianism, or Scholasticism. In our post-existentialist climate, it's more like a menace.

Up On the Sun

2010-07-28T16:10:00.000-05:00

In the past we've observed (hopefully with more humility than derision) how Jerry Coyne has struggled with the fairly elementary distinction between metaphysical and methodological naturalism (the former being the conviction that there are no "supernatural" causes in the universe, and the latter the willingness to act as if there are none, for the moment, in order to ferret out whatever naturalistic causes may be at work.) Coyne is no dope, but he periodically seems to encounter a block when trying to distinguish between acting if something were so, for a practical purpose, and truly and completely believing that it were so.

However many times this block arises, however, I would never want to say that Jerry Coyne is fated to encounter it. I would not want to say that he is a "puppet," or "automaton," since such a characterization would elide the real possibility for change, modification, and development (we might even use the word evolution) that all moral agents--all humans--possess. To reduce human agency to puppetry or machinery confuses determinism (the principle that we can study and understand causes) with fatalism (the moral belief that we can have no influence over our own actions or those of others.) It falsely implies that we can know in advance what a person will do in a given situation; that we can know in just what ways our behavior is determined in the same way we can of a puppet or machine.

Such language is clearly misleading, and in no way necessitated by a commitment to naturalism, but the myth of the human puppet is a seductive one, and Coyne was apparently unable to resist it in his response to a recent Stone post by William Egginton on free will, which he concludes:

We simply don’t like to think that we’re molecular automatons, and so we adopt a definition of free will that makes us think we’re free. But as far as I can see, I, like everyone else, am just a molecular puppet.

The (inescapable) implication of this terminology is that if decisions are made in the course of life, they are made not by "us," but by forces outside us. We can watch, and we can pretend to participate, but it's just theater--all the real decision making is out of our hands.

A strange doctrine for someone like Coyne, who devotes a great deal of time and energy to rhetorical persuasion as a professor, author, and blogger. Is it plausible that he really believes that he, his students and readers, or even his enemies the "faitheists" are puppets in any meaningful sense? I think rather he would agree that he believes that his and their behavior is determined, which is to say constrained or contingent on prior facts. But among those prior facts we must include the rhetorical propositions he has made to them, and their own rational evaluations of these propositions, that is to say moral reasoning. Are our thoughts and feelings not a subset of "the concatenation of our genes and our environment"?

The main problem with the puppet metaphor (as with the "lumbering robots" metaphor from Dawkins' Selfish Gene) is that it only attempts to resolve half of the Cartesian fallacy of the "ghost in the machine." It removes the ghost, but leaves the machine. This is not a serious problem for certain specific biological and medical applications, but as an ontological view it leaves a lot to be desired, especially given the very pronounced agitation that it inspires whenever something "non-material" is offered as a cause. Here's Coyne again, having just seen a ghost:

Egginton goes on to ponder the obvious: if we don’t have free will, then not only conventional ideas about morality but also a lot of religious doctrine—especially the Christian idea of free choice between good and evil—go out the window.

He’s right, of course. How do you deal with this problem? One way is to accept that our behaviors aren’t really affected by some ineffable and non-physical thing called “will.”

There are numerous problems with our concept of the will. Primarily these problems stem from a confusion of our "apparent" selves, the part that is conscious and available to rational introspection, with our total, actual selves (which include, among other things, sensations, instincts, and unconscious desires and aversions, many of which we can never directly know). Psychology has known for over a century that human behavior is only partially explicable in terms of conscious decision making, but our concept of ourselves, philosophically, as rational agents has died hard, or, more often, not at all. (As a result, we are inclined to interpret studies showing that we often make decisions before we are aware of them as meaning that "we" aren't making them at all, when it's more accurate to say that we are making them in a different way than we had thought).

But whatever the philosophical problems posed by questions of the will, being "non-material" is surely not one of them. We need a name for our experience of choice, even if we cannot find this experience in the neurons (whatever that might mean). It is impossible to refute this and remain human, for to do so is to give up the very activity of conception--of visualizing potential alternatives--that permits moral development. To be human is to concede the necessity of the symbolic, which is to say the non-material: laws, customs, economics, values--all have less "materiality" than a memory of a dream of a ghost, but we can live without none of them.

What Coyne means, perhaps, is that "free will" is not a scientific cause, and this is likely correct. But that is not the same question of whether or not we have it, or something like it. It is easy to show the non-existence of money, for example, but we all know how much we have. There is nothing material about time, but we cannot fail to experience it. The truest test of whether something is real is whether it is possible to reject it. (Susan Blackmore stands alone, as far as I know, among scientific materialists who claim not to actually make decisions). To Coyne, "free will" is not a philosophical construct, it is a failed hypothesis:

Indeed, studies of the brain are pushing back notions of free will in precisely the way that studies of evolution have pushed back the idea of a creator-god.

But can he live without experiencing it, the way he lives without experiencing god?

The exasperating thing is that Coyne knows that it takes more than mere determinism to make us into "puppets." It also takes predictability, which is not the same, a mistake he scolds Eggington for making:

It’s clear, in fact, that even if we are molecular automatons, we’ll never know enough to have more than a rudimentary ability to predict people’s decisions. We need to know not only how molecules, chemicals, and neurons interact with each other and their environment, but also how these interactions occur in own own unique configuration of molecules.

And yet even here he can't avoid fatalistic language ("automatons") , perhaps because he feels that anything less would leave the door open for some kind of "woo" (or God). This is unfortunate, as it encourages us to choose between two simplistic philosophies of mind: that we have a soul that decides things, or that everything is decided without our involvement. Neither is satisfying.

***

None of this is to say that our standard notions of free will should not come in for criticism. We in the West tend to suffer from a grandiosity of freedom, expressed most starkly by the French existentialists, like Sartre, who insisted that we are only authentic if we exercise "total freedom"--and that furthermore any failure to act on this freedom in any given moment is a display of "bad faith." It's a notion with romantic appeal--the completely unfettered moral actor--but one also that puts an untenable burden on the ego. In reality it's a sure recipe for delusion and breakdown.

Less swashbuckling, but more human, is a moral theory that recognizes that the life of action must be leavened with a great deal of patience and attention. Iris Murdoch, writing "The Idea of Perfection" (1962), offers this needed corrective to the narcissism of total freedom:

If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. This does not imply that we are not free, certainly not. But it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time and is not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments. The moral life, on this view, is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial.

Thanksgiving in Maccu Piccu

2010-07-21T16:09:00.000-05:00

My good friend, the yoga instructor and designer Sonya Luz, is organizing an eight-day yoga retreat and cultural tour in Peru this November. Proceeds from the retreat will help fund the Kusi Kawsay School, a Waldorf-style elementary school whose mission includes the preservation of Andean ancestral culture.

Sonya has been teaching yoga for almost 20 years, and runs the Morada Lane Yoga Studio in Taos, NM. She's about the finest caliber of person you are likely to meet.

In addition to lots of yoga, of course, the retreat features numerous trips to nearby Incan ruins--including Maccu Piccu on Thanksgiving Day--and encounters with traditional Andean music, dance and craftwork.

Registration closes on September 20, so if you're interested, why not have a look right now?

An Undigested Bit of Beef

2010-07-09T17:59:00.000-05:00

Somewhere on the internet--though I can't find it now*--is an argument I had with Jason Rosenhouse of EvolutionBlog over what evidence Richard Dawkins (this was right after The God Delusion was published) might find persuasive that God existed. I took the view that whatever the "evidence" there would always be a naturalistic explanation: either one was unable to trust his senses and reason, or one was in the presence of some superior technology, like the Star Trek holodeck. Far-fetched explanations, but no more so than Godding up an atheist ontology. (Jason took the view that Dawkins' praise of William Paley's "watchmaker analogy" shows him to be sensitive to evidence both for and against God, which I still find non-sequiturial).

As far as I know Dawkins has never stipulated a particular hypothetical occurrence that would cause him to question his atheism, which is perhaps wise of him, given how anemic the exercise has come off by those who have recently tried it, like the blogger Ebonmuse, or the columnist Greta Christina, the latter coming in for praise by Jerry Coyne (who has his own list) for her broadmindedness.

John Pieret makes the very solid point that abandoning naturalism in the face of such data as the sudden appearance of giant words in the sky, puts one in the mind of the Cosmological Argument, one of the earliest "proofs" of God, which boils down to asserting that some uncaused cause (unmoved mover, in Aristotle's phrase) is necessary to understand all of the contingent facts of the world. Whether or not this argument is sound, it represents a bounding, if not an abandonment, of critical inquiry, whether we apply it to first causes, as Aristotle did or, as in Christina's example, to current events in our own phenomenal world.

Ironically, the evidentiary appeal Christina et al make would probably be less convincing to theists--at least those with some familiarity with basic theology--than to atheists (or at least those who like to compare theology to "fairyology"). Her first example -- the "unambiguous message" ("I Am God, I Exist, Here Is What I Want You To Do") -- might, depending on the fine print, conflict with received theology, and her fourth example ("The One Successful Religion") defintely would. The concept that God would reward his followers with just the things they want -- we all want -- (status, money, health) is not in accord with any of the major religions now practiced, nor with few historical ones.

At the end of her essay Christina defends herself against the rhetorical charge that she has "set the bar too high," when it's obvious she has set the bar far too low. There are naturalistic alternatives to God in each of her hypotheticals, but she throws in the towel on each one. It's discouraging--one wants her to go to the mat for naturalism, to at least put in the effort that Ebenezer Scrooge did.

This is price one pays, in palpable wishy-washyness, for not accepting that even naturalism is an ontological commitment, and that even skepticism requires, paradoxically, a fair amount of faith, which is just to say dedication to truth and meaning even in the face of temptation.

*Oh, wait, here it is.

Throwing Out The Bible With the Bathwater

2010-06-21T00:28:00.002-05:00

On the question of whether there should or shouldn't have been evangelical atheists (those who prefer conversion to conversation) on the recent "science and faith" panel at the World Science Festival, I take the attitude, sure, why not. It may be true that, as Josh Rosenau writes that "someone like Dawkins would stop the World Science Festival panel cold." But that's a risk worth taking. It's difficult to remain rhetorically pure when engaged in dialogue with other people. Whether or not it's fair to call the New Atheists "strident" or "uncivil," one sure way to moot the question is to get them--and everybody else in the room--off script, and maybe even listening to each other.

Josh makes a good point, however, in a follow up to that piece that the reason there were no Dawkinses on that panel was not that evangelical atheism was an excluded viewpoint, but that the panel was comprised of academics specializing in the boundary between science and religion. None of those who fly the flag of New Atheism are especially active in this academic field (though Dennett has dabbled in it), and most show outright hostility to its very existence (in the form of "The Courtier's Reply").

This is a point that anthropologist Scott Atran has repeatedly made, most notably in his exchanges with Sam Harris a few years ago: most New Atheists know very little (and care to know very little) about religion apart form a general sense that it is stupid and dangerous. Where it veers away from stereotype, they tune it out in the interest of doctrinal purity. They consistently choose personal anecdote over rigorous argument, but when pressed to take the matter seriously, and check their folk psychology about it at the door, they protest it's a non-subject after all, like "fairyology."

Here, for example is the blogger ArithmoQuine [via John Wilkins], responding to a Guardian article on this subject by Mary Midgley

The larger question is whether a naturalistic, atheistic worldview can provide as hopeful and happy life as a religious one, and whether that hope and happiness are more rational than the hope and happiness one gets from religion. Although we could not hope for a future afterlife in heaven, we could still hope for human progress here on earth. Theism may, and often does, focus people's attention on that false hope and takes the focus away from the value of life on earth. Not all theists have done this, but I don't think it's a strawman to say that atheism and naturalism more properly focus our attempts at happiness for ourselves and others solely on earth. (my emphasis)

This is now a standard move in this debate, and I'm convinced it is an unconscious one, since it lacks the rational stamp one would otherwise expect from professional philosophers. Establish, for fairness' sake, that "not all" religion prioritizes the happiness of the afterlife over earthly life, while at the same time claiming that such a prioritization is the meaningful essence of the thing we call religion. The only way to maintain the legitimacy of the resulting split is to rig the game by defining "the value of life on earth" in a way that only a naturalist metaphysics can satisfy it. (Note especially the attempt to classify one form of happiness as "more rational" than another. Is our happiness now supposed to be instrumental to some other end?) If we're going to assume, for example, that utilitarianism will be our prevailing ethical scheme, then anything but the strictest naturalistic view becomes instantly obviated. But this is hardly the only metaphysical option available to those who would reject the establishment of a world better than the one we now live in--a category that includes most humans, religious or not, who have ever lived.

ArithroQuine's attitude that religion is reducible to what-bugs-me-about-religion is, let's admit, an understandable one. We humans readily generalize out of our discomfort and disappointment, hoping to find easy patterns that we can evade in the future. While this has obvious survival value, done carelessly it isn't much more than a form of bigotry, which is to say, when our skin is on the line we are not at our most thoughtful. Our politics is currently saturated with this mode of thinking, pointing to a collective sense of insecurity. At such times we count on the contemplative disciplines (like philosophy) to challenge our biases and see the truth of the world in a more complex aspect--which, fortuitously, can often help us out of the binds that seemed to pin down our earlier thinking in such stark and basic terms.

Science, when it is not engaged as merely the technocratic instrument of Capital, has the capacity to be one such contemplative discipline. And indeed, every single one of the New Atheists holds extremely high standards for truth value in the sciences, as they should. We can see this standard being maintained in real time in their present efforts to defend evolutionary theory against proponents of ID and creationism. One reason it is so difficult to wage such a campaign is that evolutionary biology is extremely counterintuitive. Miconceptions abound, are seized upon by ideologues, and become very hard to discredit. Advocacy for the more complex and more nuanced view of life takes a patient and dilgent effort.

Physics, too, has for several centuries now been describing a world very different from the one that appears before our untutored eye. Even something so basic as the fact hat larger objects do not fall to earth any faster than smaller ones must be taught anew to each generation, since our folk wisdom would apparently have it otherwise.

What happens to this patience and rigor when the subject is changed to religion? Suddenly dilletantism becomes respectable again, and personal anecdote is allowed to pass for substantiation. Sean Carroll writes in his blog Cosmic Variance that "It’s somewhat insulting to be told that people like you are incapable of conducting thoughtful, productive conversations with others." I don't think anyone has characterized Sean, whose intellect is prodigious, as being "incapable" of anything, but his unwillingness to be thoughtful on this subject can be seen, for example, in statements like this:

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.”

This meets the ear of anyone who has studied religion even on an amateur basis with the same clattering sound as a generalization like "science typically encourages overdevelopment of intellectual skills at the price of emotional and spiritual atrophy." Even if such a statement were true (it's not completely unfounded, after all), it is "unproductive" in its implication that science is irredeemably out of balance with human needs, and should be gotten rid of before it cripples us irrevocably.

The fallacy, then, is this: religion and superstition frequently coexist, therefore they are inseperable. This is the logic of the sandcastle against the tide.

***

Here one often encounters the objection that where religion does not invoke superstition--the religion of mystics, of theologians, Jungians, Kabbalists and Zen Buddhists--it has become inauthentic, "watered down," in Jerry Coyne's phrase, its truth claims no longer pertain to the events of the world. A religion that offers only stories, instead of facts, objects the objection, is like the proverbial knife brought to the gun fight.

I've written before that the boundary between facts and stories is not quite as impermeable as we like to think. This blog has always cleaved to the aphorism of Muriel Rukeyser that "the world is made of stories, not atoms," expressed in slightly more unpacked form by philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch:

We are ... moral agents before we are scientists, and 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.

One must gird one's loins with such quotations when there are blog posts like this one, by Julia Galef at Rationally Speaking, reminding us that rationalism is prone to superstition of its own, namely that Reason (logos) can divine "truths about the world" on its own, without inter-reliance on a poetic, mythic, or metaphysical function. Like Dawkins with theology, Galef doesn't seem to think that literary theory is a subject worth engaging with, and as a result, her post has kind of a marshmallow quality to it. But she nevertheless manages to strenuously challenge the idea that literature provides "a good source of knowledge about the world."

Galef's argumentum against literature is largely based on a failure of realism, answering the assertion by Harold Bloom and James Wood that literature informs us with this line of thought:

But why would we expect literature to be a reliable source of knowledge about "the way things are"? After all, the narratives which are the most gripping and satisfying to read are not the most representative of how the world actually works. They have dramatic resolutions, foreshadowing, conflict, climax, and surprise. People tend to get their comeuppance after they misbehave. People who pursue their dream passionately tend to succeed. Disaster tends to strike when you least expect it. These narratives are over-represented in literature because they're more gratifying to read; why would we expect to learn from them about "the way things are"?

Just as we saw in the reluctance of the New Atheists to actually study the subject of their dismissal, Galef's analysis here suffers from a lack of intimacy with her target, confusing literature, in the sense that Bloom and Wood mean it, and popular fiction. The latter, seen most often in the form of television drama, but also in genre fiction, serves mostly as a kind of wish fulfillment, where, in Galef's phrase "People tend to get their comeuppance after they misbehave. People who pursue their dream passionately tend to succeed." Whether these things happen in real life (they often do) is immaterial. What matters is that we want them to happen, and by experiencing such narratives we gratify our own fantasy-based needs.

Actual literature, by contrast, shuns such simple gratification. What we want (at first) is not by any means what we get* in Lear, Oedipus, Endgame, or Metamorphosis, but through the author's dedication in painting as truthful a picture as humanly possible, we come to align ourselves with that truth despite our initial distaste for it. If we're sensitive enough (a word Galef treats in this post as a slur) we come to see ourselves and the people in our lives better for having known these stories. If there is a higher aspiration for truth I cannot think offhand what it would be.

***

Which raises the question of whether a religion that is made up "only" of stories is really all that watered down, and whether these stories would be any more full-strength delivered as facts. Stories are (among other things) the vehicles that connect facts to our experience, which is why Plato considered learning as a form of remembering (Anamnesis). We know what we have observed and felt and seen, but this knowledge only takes on meaning when it is formalized, ordered, or re-membered. Logic is the rarefied form of this reassembly, abstract and generalized, but without incarnation in story it is sterile and without life, and because the truth is a living thing, a logical fact can never be really true. To become true, a fact needs depiction.

And yet such depictions are not themselves irrational. A story well told has nothing extraneous in it, and neither does a piece of music well played or a dance well choreographed. It takes a bit of training to see why Lear, or Endgame, or the Moonlight Sonata are "true" (or, to return to an earlier dispute with John Wilkins, why the parable of the talents is true.) Just as it takes training to see why Einstein's field equations or Fermat's last theorum are true (so I hear.) There is no shame in pointing out that to deny the truth value of great art is to deny reason itself, but such is the tenor of the age, that prefers the flat certainties of objectivity, to any real shot at depth.

* Even in the comedies of Shakespeare, where in the end the good prosper and the wicked suffer, it is not cosmic justice that balances the scales, but the relative rectitude of the characters' behavior throughout the play. As in fairy tales, the weddings and riches and improved or restored social standing found in Act Five symbolize inner states of well-being, not material prosperity, and by these signs is a psychological truth expressed.

Fanatics Have Their Dreams

2010-05-30T14:39:00.005-05:00

Who do you suppose PZ Myers is really trying to convince when he writes [via Thoughts in a Haystack], first about the Dalai Lama:

what Tenzin Gyatso is doing is more of that hegemonical impulse — he's seen something he likes, so he rushes to land on it and plant the sacred flag of religion on it, declaring this the property of all the holy people of the world…without noticing all us pagans and infidels already occupying it. Lama go home! We don't need you, or your pious ilk!

Then Franciso Ayala:

Has Ayala read [the Bible]? It's a cacophony of vileness, with god's chosen people raping and murdering for their land, god going off into peevish snits in which he tortures and massacres people, and your purpose is to win a place as god's eternal slave in a 'paradise' where you will spend all your time praising the supreme tyrant. It's a horror.

Here's an example of The Dalai Lama's hegemonic attitude, from the NYT editorial Myers links to:

The pressure [created by the tensions of globalization] tests more than our tolerance — it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding across boundaries.

Finding common ground among faiths can help us bridge needless divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever. As a species, we must embrace the oneness of humanity as we face global issues like pandemics, economic crises and ecological disaster. At that scale, our response must be as one.

Harmony among the major faiths has become an essential ingredient of peaceful coexistence in our world. From this perspective, mutual understanding among these traditions is not merely the business of religious believers — it matters for the welfare of humanity as a whole. (my emphasis)

It seems safe to take it for granted that the DL includes "pagans and infidels" in his definition of "humanity as a whole."

Ayala comes up for abuse because he's a prominent advocate of the reconciliation of scientific and religious worldviews, which Myers considers a terrible threat to... well, to the opposition of that reconciliation. The essays by Ayala that Myers links to do not aim to convert anyone to a general faith-based worldview, let alone to any specific doctrine. They aim only to defend the legitimacy--the reasonableness--of accepting science while remaining committed to a religious worldview. I don't mention this to rehash the endless "incompatibalism" debate, but merely to point out that where Ayala promotes harmony, tolerance, and a vigorous defense of science, Myers sees, again, hegemony:

Now let us admit that in one respect, he's right. Science isn't everything. We don't use science to appreciate a piece of art (although, fundamentally, it is a material object and our brains are similarly natural); we don't break out beakers and bunsen burners to determine if we've fallen in love; calculators have limited utility in writing poetry. That's fine, but it doesn't mean that religion fills in all the spaces! I don't consult a priest to find out what I think of a painting, prayer has bugger-all to do with love, and there is better poetry in the world than what we find in holy books. You don't get to simply assume that if science does something poorly, religion must do it well, and that the universe has to be neatly divvied up into these two mutually exclusive domains. (my emphasis)

There's a hint of claustrophobia, of suffocation, in Myers' concern that religion, if not violently opposed, will "fill all the spaces;" that priests will become our only art critics, scripture our only poetry. This is a real concern for a person (especially a female person) living in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, perhaps. And yes, there are zealots here in the US that would love to see a totalitarian Puritanism supersede our present regime of pluralism and religious tolerance. But for Myers to derive visions of Theocracy from Ayala's bland appeal to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's is--frankly--paranoid.

Ayala assumes and asserts and demands that we privilege religion as the final arbiter of [moral] decisions.

Ayala, to be sure, is a Christian, and writes of religion through this lens:

Religion concerns the meaning and purpose of the world and human life, the proper relation of people to their Creator and to each other, the moral values that inspire and govern their lives.

But we could replace that word "creator" with many things--Cosmos, planet, Tao--and our definition quickly becomes more pliable, to the point that even Myers would agree that "religion" cannot but be the final arbiter of moral decisions. Nowhere does Ayala make an argument that his faith is superior to others, or to secular atheism. (He does, however, ferret out some of the implicit metaphysics that secular atheists like to insist is absent from their worldview, quoting Richard Dawkins' remark that the universe is typified by "blind pitiless indifference"--a religious, not scientific, observation.)

It's time to ask out loud why co-existence translates to war in Myers' mind (or those of the other prominent blogoatheists, such as Coyne or Benson). This often points to a personal struggle--a "shadow conflict" in analytical terms, where what is unacceptable in oneself must be relocated within an external enemy.

***

A clue to this struggle is found in the excessive use of put-downs like vapid, airheaded, inane and the like, which riddle PZ's post. Alternately, as in his characterization of the bible above, religion is cast as monotonically vile and tyrannical. Of course religion is all those things, betimes. And rationalism really is, betimes, reductionist, cold, fussy, and sneering. These are the perils of two very human modes of being, but neither is delegitimized by its excesses. At the asymptotes, Reason is a slavish devotion to certainty, and religion (or, if you prefer the secularized terms, intuition, insight, unconscious, the anima) is an abdication of agency, pure and pointless surrender. It is the harmonization of the two that softens the extremes.

The Jungian analyst Marie Louse von Franz has a passage in one of her lectures that ardently defends the wisdom of the anima (unconscious) in language strongly resonant with Myers' own words (but with a much different aim), writing that its truth

is presented in a bad style, as evidenced by theosophical or popular religious magazines. If you read such literature you see how new ideas are expressed in an undigested form, which is right away poisonous: it is a mixture of emotions and undigested ideas, and the worst of it is that you can neither accept it or reject it. It is contaminated with absolute nonsense, but in it is a kernel of truth with something inspired. A truth-loving and responsible [person] would naturally hate such stuff, but he must do something about it or he will sterilize his own development. ... The poison in the anima is that she always tries to make the man believe that he is the great announcer of a new truth. She is a hysterical liar... full of lies and little twists: that is her poison, which has to be exorcised. (my emphasis)

If we just hand ourselves over to our inspiration with complete abandon, we risk not just flakiness, but megalomania. It takes a great deal of rational discernment to separate the pretty lies and flattery from insight and wisdom. History is full of figures, religious and political, who lacked this discernment in sufficient measure. But Franz is very clear that we cannot evade the risk by ignoring or condemning our own irrationality. If we want growth and maturity, we must have some openness.

This is where the neo-atheist movement does an enormous disservice to humanity: by insisting that faith is an "evil," (perhaps the greatest evil), that holy scriptures have no truth or wisdom in them, that all clerics are charlatans, and that the irrational is a purely negative and destructive force, they steer the smart, perceptive and wary who are best able to integrate the shadowy parts of their psyche toward places they are least likely to encounter them--places that collectively share the revealing name "the Enlightenment."

The lost causes, the less smart, the damaged, the credulous, the insane, are left to claim the mantle of what for lack of a better word we must continue to call "religion," resulting in a tragic self-fulfilling prophecy, where it really does appear that faith is a great evil, that holy scriptures have no truth or wisdom in them, that all clerics are charlatans, and that the irrational is a purely negative and destructive force.

***

Let me close with a token gesture of modesty. Without a doubt I am engaging here in a projection of my own. I have unresolved issues with my own rationalistic side, and my own dedication to certainty and security. There is a sense in which each of my posts on this topic serves partly as a pep talk to the part of myself that craves clear lines, simple answers, tidy solutions, and happy endings for everyone. Perhaps in the end that is the only sense in which they serve, but no writer gets to make that final determination for himself, as Keats wrote in The Fall of Hyperion:

Whether the dream now purpos'd to rehearse
Be poet's or fanatic's will be known
When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

2010-05-16T22:51:00.002-05:00

Three questions have ever vexed the rational faculties of mankind: Life is the beginning of what? Love is the fulfillment of what? Death is the end of what? The essential attribute of an enduring religion or philosophy is the rational solution which it offers this three-fold riddle.

--Manly Hall, 1929

Dolphin Safe

2010-05-10T13:13:00.000-05:00

Now that I've davened and abyed for my misconstrual of John's definition of metaphysics, what about the rest of his response? I think he still can't avoid getting dolphins in his tuna nets.

John takes issue with my proposal that parables are a form of philosophical argument. I concede from the start that they are not "complete" by the standard of something like the Tractatus or the Critique of Pure Reason. They are not "reasoning" as we normally use the term. They don't begin by formally defining premises and working out the logical conclusions that follow. But I think we find if we use this as our primary crucible we run into serious trouble even with the most rationalistic of philosophers.

As I wrote earlier, both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein were quite happy to employ aphorism and metaphor, without (in many cases) bothering to show thier work. John calls these usages "just window dressing," but wherea re the windows? There are not (in all cases) in exposition to be found elsewhere. We could say they are oral or apocryphal teachings (e.g. "the Blue and Brown Books" that contain many of Wittgensteins's lecture notes for his Cambridge students). But is that a door we really want to open? Unless we agree to compare canon to canon, the ante will be next raised with the Gnostic gospels, Pistis Sophia, and all sorts of apocrypha. We'll end up chasing our tails.

Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum, the barricade John wants to erect around Philosophy with a capital-P cordons off an ideal version of the practice no one will ever attain. We can define some of the premises surrounding a problem or concern, but never all of them. In fact we would be hard pressed to identify most of them.This is not to malign precision or thoroughness. It is just to say that these exist along a continuum, and the place where John wants to draw the line between philosophy and not-philosophy is quite literally off the map.

(There is a related question -- "Would Jesus be able to get a tenured position in the philosophy department at a major research institution?" -- that we might disaffirm with more confidence. [But then, would Nietzsche? Would Heraclitus? And would either want the job?])

John seems to agree that he overstated the criteria in his first post, writing:

But we must formalise to a degree. I do not think that reason is formal logic, but I do think it has rules, and I do think it excludes arguments from authority, imagination or revelation. I am perfectly happy to include some who do not even closely approach the formalist ideal of modern logic, such as Hegel (contrary to Priest’s supervaluational and dialethic logic) as philosophers, in part because they engage the philosophical Topics I mentioned as a precondition, but there are boundaries even if they are not hard and fast. Vagueness does not mean we cannot classify.

Of course I am forced to agree that there must be a boundary, unless I am willing to call everyone with frontal lobe activity a kind of philosopher, from Floyd the Barber to Justin Bieber. (Whoever that is.) Philosophy is a semantically important word, if any are. So why lobby for Jesus, who seems to meet so few of the standard preconditions?

Partly just to get John's goat. (I think there are good arguments on both sides for calling Jesus a philosopher, or something else, and I don't in fact think that's the best word for whatever he was.) But more prosaically, I do it because I think he's a little bit wrong about what reason is, (and threby what philosophy is), in a way a lot of very smart people, who care about both, are wrong.

The problem with the common defintiion of reason as the function of weighing premises and conclusions, is that it leaves a gaping hole where we want to talk about other types of discursive forms, which also have a structure, order, and logic. Some of these, are in fact "unreasonable," like propaganda, or even temper tantrums (which have a structure, too and are expressed symbolically). But unless we are going to agree with Plato that poets always mislead, we have to concede that there is something eminently rational, in the pure sense, about great poetry or drama. If we agree that there is nothing arbitrary or out-of-place in a great work of art, every bit as much as a great work of philosophical argument (I'll let the reader fill in those categories with his own favorites), we immediately see the inherent "rationality" of art. (And why great art--even non-verbal art like music or dance--can be said to have truth value).

This may help shed some light on what I mean by parables as "rationally proscribed." If that now seems too undiscerning a term to matter much, this is partly why I also included the word "empirical," which I mean in the sense that we can illumine some observations through the remembrance of others. Data without a story to assemble it is indistinguishable from noise. It is in fact the story that makes data "data," though that doesn't mean the story can't change midway through, which it must if science is to "progress."

John protests that the parable of the talents doesn't prove anything about when the Kingdom of God might or might not come, and I would agree. But it illustrates (I think) a valid philosophical (and psychological) point about retaliation and reactivity. The third slave in the parable bases his decision on what to do with his gold (I will put aside for the moment my discomfort with the analogy of financial investment as moral intelligence) on his hatred of his cruel master, and suffers for it. This seems to me a very apt illustration of the human tendancy to become ensnared in, and deluded by, our own dramas (which reside outside time) so that we can't live well in the time we do have ("stay alert for you don't know the time or the hour.") In one short tale we have an engagement with metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. The trifecta.

(There are more orthodox interpretations of this parable, of course, and mine isn't notably "Christian," but I don't think my case rests on whether I get this parable right or wrong. Daniel Dennett's Wittgenstein is very different than, say, Iris Murdoch's, but no one thinks his right to be called a philosopher hangs in the balance.)

In the passage I quoted above, John allows Hegel special dispensation, despite his love for the unempirical, because he "engages philosophical topics." I support this, even if it's inadequate. Montaigne engaged philosophical topics, as did Pope, but we commonly call neither a philosopher, perhaps because they didn't introduce systematic new ideas into the culture.

Then again, neither did Jesus. What we call Christianity has been massively Hellenized, and most of the metaphysics of it would be quite alien to him. And yet there seems, to my mind, to be a "philosophy"--an articulated world picture--underlying Jesus' parables and sermons. It is not based on arguments to authority that I can see any more than what we find in Plato or (if we're honest) Bertrand Russell, who in the end was forced to declare his metaphysics to be beyond rational inquiry, which is what we all do, until someone comes around with a more compelling (to us!) world picture.

This is just what Jesus appears to offer. He does so in the language of his place and time, which had not yet located a replacement for the role of divine creator/cosmic cop, just as Plato had not (even if his was not omnipotent.) He does so with little regard for proofs (for which, again, there was no cultural precedent available to him). But he endeavors to persuade, not command, and even if his pencil box has fewer colors than we are accustomed to in it, it is his persuasiveness that we should be comparing to the other hallowed names that come up in this conversation.

Intuitively, and pragmatically, I tend to agree with John that philosopher is the wrong job title for Jesus. But his arguments to that end, so far, seem very much to me like special pleading oriented around the fact that a person cannot be both a religious figure and a philosopher. That may be true, but I don't think we've seen why yet.

Damned if You Don't

2010-05-09T17:18:00.001-05:00

[Update: At least one of the bees in my bonnet here was a hallucination. I read "fit" where John wrote "fix" which changes the meaning pretty radically. Thanks to John for being gracious about it. In his response he also disowns some of the implications I was reading into his post, too, about the validity of mystical/poetic statements. I don't think I made up my impressions completely out of whole cloth, but I'm happy to stand corrected.]

Things were going smoothly there for a while, but I can see that the internet is already beginning to strain under the burden of my absence, as evidenced by the following.

John Wilkins writes, in the course of explaining why Jesus was not a philosopher, that metaphysics is "what you are left over with when the facts do not fix the solution." Few blogosophers are better at pithy quintessence than Wilkins, which is one reason his blog is a must-read, but this is just wrong. Metaphysics is partly how we define the facts that fit the solution in the first place, and also how we define "fitting." [See note, above] When we say that "science works," we are making a metaphysical commitment to problem-solving that is, while perhaps preferable to the alternatives, far from unavoidable. Science works in part because we value the kind of solutions it offers, because we have defined our problems as certain kinds of puzzles, because we believe in progress, and because we have faith in the fruits of our own activity.

Making metaphysics contingent on science, rather than the other way around, glazes our philosophical moment in inevitability. But it was not ever thus. Technocracy and naturalism still amount to a brief moment in the human story, and if we want to allow them to continue, we should do so with as full cognizance as possible of what these stances represent compared to their alternates. This is a better exercise in reason than is taking the naturalist world-view as a given. A large part of our modern cultural prejudice is to forget how large a component of reason lies in imagination, and unfortunately I think a position like the one presented here by John maintains a costly division between poets and philosophers (again, all the more ironic given John's gifts with concrete philosophic imagery).

No mystic or poet (Jesus included) will be remembered for ten minutes if there is no reason--coherence, if not outright sense--in her utterances, and neither will the philosopher who cannot paint new pictures in the mind. The roles are unified at the heart, distinguishable far more by emphasis than essence. Today we consider poets, with mild embarassment, as little better than glorified greeting card writers, which is why they remain, in Shelley's phrase, unacknowledged legislators of the world.

John's conclusion is that Jesus is not a philosopher because he "does not reach his teachings via reason." This is also false, based on a very impoverished sense of what reason is, and how it functions (an ongoing injury that dates back to the attempts of the early analytic philosophers to schematize all reason discursively, as formal logic). I'm perfectly happy to agree that Jesus (like any number of "religious" teachers) was not in the technical sense a philosopher, since we have developed very high expectations about the systematic thoroughness of those who take such a name. A professional philosopher needs to protect his turf. A pipefitter is not a plumber, which is important to know when one's basement is flooded.

But having done this, John goes on to argue (implicitly) that as a non-philosopher, Jesus has nothing resonant to say to "the rational hearer" (let's just add "non-Christian," to make the point perfectly clear.) His teachings are just theological dispute, or appeals to authority, or endorsements of traditional values and practices. I'm not sure why this move is necessary. Even to those who don't regard the gospels as infallible there is a great deal within them that is, at the very least, thought-provoking. Most of Jesus' sermons do not actually appeal to divine authority, but to a type of rationally proscribed empirical observation, in the form of parable. This is a much different type of discourse than we see from someone like Moses, who simply passed on God's directives without trying to justify them. Jesus conversed with his disciples, suggesting that understanding was more important to him than obedience.

Nor is it clear that many non-religious thinkers would meet John's definition. I'm not confident that Nietzsche or Wittgenstein would shake out the right way if we applied to them a similar test. In comments John adds this remark:

The very fact that people need to make Jesus a philosopher indicates that they are faintly embarrassed at the lack of status that being, as you say, a simple moralist and religious teacher gives him.

If that's true, it's hard to see how John's post helps matters any.

2010-04-30T13:07:00.002-05:00

Do you hear that--a faint whirring sound, like the sound of a distant pinwheel under a stout breeze? That's the sound of the internet, running smoothly without any interference from me. It's a good sound, especially to a person as up to the gills in non-thoughts and non-reflections as I presently am for much of the day. Will you find your way without me, to all the wrongnesses and incompletenesses, the reductionisms that need unreducing, and the pythons that need umbrellas opened in them? And all the smart and lovely things awaiting your limpid eyes and fertile minds? Will you manage to avoid the distractions--the viral videos, the endless comments threads, gossip, tirades and jeremiads? Yes, you will--or you won't, but then I'll be back and we'll riffle through it all, refreshed, and wiser, and perhaps even lighter of heart.

2010-04-26T14:57:00.003-05:00

To Tu Fu From Shantung

You ask how I spend my time--
I nestle against a tree trunk
and listen to autumn winds
in the pines all night and day.

Shantung wine can't get me drunk.
The local poets bore me.
My thoughts remain with you,
like the Wen River, endlessly flowing.

-- Li Po (tr. Hamil)

On Being a Real Boy

2010-04-11T16:02:00.000-05:00

A.C. Grayling, in a conversation with Tzvetan Todorov in Eurozine, remarks:

I think the proponent of scientism has always been a straw man; I don't think there is any serious scientist or proponent of the Enlightenment who has ever made scientistic claims, which is that science can solve all our problems, or explain human nature, or tell us what is morally good. (my emphasis)

There is the outside possibility that Sam Harris is really just a straw Pinocchio trying, through philosophy, to become a real boy, but parsimony would suggest the more modest probability that scientism is a real temptation in the post-theistic era, one that is sometimes taken seriously by actual flesh and blood intellectuals. It's long since time for humanists to own this temptation. ¹

For their part, a number of bloggers I've criticized in the past for being too sanguine about the Enlightenment's legacy, such as Russell Blackford, Massimo Pigliucci, and Ophelia Benson, have come out against Harris' scientism, though only Pigliucci calls it that. Here he is evaluating Harris' claim in his TED talk that science has shown us that corpororal punishment of children is wrong.

What if a scientific study showed that indeed, hitting children does have a measurable effect on improving [school performance or good behavior]? Harris would then have to concede that corporal punishment is moral, but somehow I doubt he would. And I certainly wouldn’t, because my moral intuition (yes, that’s what I’m going to call it, deal with it) tells me that purposefully inflicting pain on children is wrong, regardless of whatever the empirical evidence says.

Harris responds:

That is not exactly what I asked. I asked whether subjecting children to “pain, violence, and public humiliation” leads to “healthy emotional development and good behavior” (i.e. does it conduce to their general wellbeing and to the wellbeing of society). If it did, well then yes, I would admit that it was moral. In fact, it would appear moral to more or less everyone... The patent immorality of corporal punishment relates to the sense that it is clearly bad for children, both in the moment and in the long run (along with the fact that it is generally the product of anger, rather than benevolence, on the part of the brute holding the paddle). (my emphasis)

Pigliucci has substituted "school performance" for "healthy emotional development," two terms that are hardly interchangeable, and in that sense he does misconstrue Harris's question, but it is interesting to note that Harris does not contest the term Pigliucci gets right, "good behavior." Does anyone doubt that on this score negative reinforcement works, albeit incompletely? Emotional blackmail is a time-honored means to get children to behave the way we want them to, which may or may not be in a way we objectively decide is "good." How to separate these two concerns? Part of it must come from a philosophical investigation of the way that Harris's two criteria in judging corporal punishment come into conflict with either other. What we call "healthy" for the individual may not be conducive to what we call consider healthy for the social fabric as a whole, especially since we are often inclined to define the social status quo as the best arrangement.

To paraphrase Russell Blackford, if you're going to start from the proposition that the way we believe things ought to be is the way things ought to be, then getting an "ought" from an "is" is easy.

The trick is to avoid cheating with stipulative definitions and to avoid relying on human psychology or human institutions. You are supposed to derive that I really, really ought to do X without relying on any of those short-cuts. That is the sort of derivation that so many people want, as it's a derivation that will transcend subjectivity or semantics or culture. If you do the job, you've made normativity "objective".

The error made by "spare the rod, spoil the child" is not a scientific one. We don't have any new empirical data on how much pain, per se, spanking causes children. We were not any time recently operating under a false belief that spanking was pleasurable, or even pain-neutral, but rather that the pain of the moment was outweighed by its future benefits. Such an analysis (which need not be conscious) both informs and is informed by our definition of what "harm" is. We don't have to defend corporal punishment to see that inflicting pain is a tactic we still rush to defend on a host of matters. If anything, child psychology has showed us that toilet training (for example) is far more traumatic than we might ever have imagined (or remembered). There are perhaps more empathetic ways to go about it than others, but the emotional pain itself (which would seem to greatly exceed the physical pain of getting paddled for clowning in class) cannot be avoided if we are going to perpetuate our civilization. Toilet training causes pain, and even lasting harm, but our definition of wellbeing requires us to engage in it all the same.

This is moral relativism of a type, but not of the type that Harris means. It does not reduce to "anything goes." We still have reasons for opposing corporal punishment in schools and homes, but these reasons are contigent--they don't take a general definition of wellbeing for granted. (For one thing, if they did, human culture would be unable to morally evolve.)

Speaking of straw men, Harris has also posted a FAQ on his site on "getting from ought to is" oriented around avoidance of the "worst possible misery for everyone." Does such an end state exist, even hypothetically? Is it possible to be so "wrong" about "moral facts" that everybody loses? When we call the Third Reich an abomination, we do so largely (though not exclusively) because it placed the interests of an ethnic and ideological in-group above that group's supposed enemies. On a basic material level, party members did quite well, at least until the end of the war (which did not go according to plan). I am willing to call life as a privileged elite, in great material wealth and political prerogative, with the great cultural legacies of modern Europe at one's command, a state of the "worst possible misery" only if we allow misery and wellbeing a spiritual and ethical dimension that defy easy utilitarian calculus.

Harris concedes this implicitly in his response to Pigliucci's observation that he does not say why, specifically, women living under the Taliban should not subsume their interests to that of social harmony by wearing burqas.

[I]t is absolutely obvious that no one’s wellbeing is being served by [the hijab]. Granted, there are situations in which it is difficult to decide when an individual’s rights/needs should be trumped by societal concerns, but the treatment of women under the Taliban does not remotely present such a case. Does Pigluicci actually believe that the members of Taliban might be better off than western men for the privilege of having illiterate, disease-ravaged wives and daughters whom they are free to abuse without pity? Life expectancy for women in Afghanistan is 44 years, and their rate of literacy is 12%. It has nearly the highest fertility in the world and nearly the highest infant and maternal mortality. Afghanistan may be the best place on earth to watch women and infants die. In what other sense does Pigluicci think life might be “best” there?

There are two competing moral visions here, one in which men enjoy the domination of women (and as such may simply not care very much about their literacy or life expectancy), and one in which women are entitled to social freedom and empowerment equal to men's. Harris sides with the latter, as do I and, I expect, everyone likely to read these words--but he cannot base this choice on scientific evidence that equality is better than inequality, since "better" is the very term up for arbitration.

In order to say that Western men are better off than the men of the Taliban we have to be able to say, then, that the Taliban are wrong about what they want, which may well be true, but is a very complicated thing to untangle. In The End of Faith, Harris argues that religious beliefs are the source of mental illness that occludes true and accurate judgement of our interests. But this is a grossly unempirical claim. How does it compare to the alternate hypothesis that pre-existing mental illness leads people to use religion (or any ideology) to rationalize their transgressions? On the surface the two etiologies resemble each other, though the first seems to me far less plausible, relying as it does on a psychology based in mimesis rather than inference and metaphor.

Ophelia Benson makes a similar point to Harris in the comments thread:

[I]t's just not all that helpful to come up with facts about what leads to wellbeing, because the real problem is that (speaking generally) we care more about our own wellbeing than that of other people, and we are good at rationalizing systems for doing better by ourselves than we do by other people. It's no good talking about wellbeing for everyone when the whole point of many customs and traditions and religious dogmas is to justify and pretty up (or just to mandate) systems in which (say) men get to say who gets what and women get to obey; and systems in which Our Group gets to make That Other Group slaves; and systems in which God gave all this land to Us and not You. We already know you want the land just as much as we do, but we don't want to share it with you, and we've figured out all sorts of reasons for saying we are not obliged to.

If we were to come up with a slogan for this kind of thinking, where one's in-group is privileged over the rest of humanity, it might run something like "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them."

¹ which Harris hardly invented. He follows in the footsteps of, among others, E.O. Wilson, who wrote in 1975 "Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and be biologicized." Or Peter Atkins, from 1995, "Philosophers have not contributed much that is novel until after the novelty has been discovered by scientists."

Freddie DeBoer on Moral Realism

2010-04-03T20:03:00.000-05:00

But suppose my intuition is wrong. Suppose there is, actually, a transcendent morality, a right and wrong that is capital-t True, that is non-contingent, not temporal, that applies to each and every person and situation: then totalitarianism must become the truth of man. If Sam Harris emerges from his lab with his beaker and his chart of what is right and what is wrong-- cast the human question onto the fire. There could be no difference, no diversity. Say goodbye individualism, say hello to the jackboot, and knowing that it is all the worse for being objectively true. To Harris's credit, he acknowledges in the video that there will never be some moral calculator that empowers us to make every minute moral decision with objective certainty. But as soon as we remove doubt, as soon as there is a moral framework that is endless and timeless, fascism has become the truth of man. Nazism was not a moral obscenity merely because it got the answer so terribly wrong, but also because it thought to give the whole answer entirely. Harris gives himself an out by talking of peaks and valleys of moral behavior, but as long as he and his fellow philosopher-kings are holding the measuring tape, that is the end of human freedom. Harris is no fascist, not at all, but fascism is at the heart of his project, his "moral realism." (my emphasis)

More here.

The End of Pluralism

2010-03-30T13:43:00.001-05:00

Sam Harris has doubled down on his claim that science can tell us what to value, largely in reaction to critiques by Sean Carroll (who has responded) and Russell Blackford (whose response for now is nominal). He does seem to have picked up one convert, a certain Richard Dawkins, who is apparently some kind of biologist.

Since Harris, in common with his detractors, values science, this puts him in the unenviable position of having to defend the proposition that science tells us to value science. If there is no other supervening influence, his moral schema must then bear a strong resemblance to such forms of divination as consulting oracles.

The bulk of Harris's elaboration doesn't bother to address this logical prickle. Rather, it goes like this: You had better hope I'm right that there are universal moral values discernible scientifically, because otherwise we will have no way to objectively separate good people from psychopaths.

What if a man like Jefferey Dahmer says, “The only peaks on the moral landscape that interest me are ones where I get to murder young men and have sex with their corpses.” This possibility—the prospect of radically different moral preferences—seems to be at the heart of many people’s concerns.

[...]

The fact that it might be difficult to decide exactly how to balance individual rights against collective good, or that there might be a thousand equivalent ways of doing this, does not mean that we must hesitate to condemn the morality of the Taliban, or the Nazis, or the Ku Klux Klan—not just personally, but from the point of view of science. As I said at TED, the moment we admit that there is anything to know about human wellbeing, we must admit that certain individuals or cultures might not know it.

What Harris really means is that he wants to give up on the project of having to defend moral stances by delegating the questions to a neutral referee, namely, objective science. This is an appeal to ultimate fairness of a kind we haven't seen in the West since the death of God. Harris' exasperation that we should have to waste any time articulating why Nazis are wrong is understandable. But it is rather chilling to imagine Harris' alternative in practice. What happens to pluralism in a society where certain belief systems can be declared objectively, scientifically wrong?

A glimpse at this prospect is offered by this controversial statement from The End of Faith:

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people.

According to this view, empirical fact (an "ordinary fact about the world") mandates killing people because of their beliefs. This is apparently one of the values that science bequeaths. The rule of law and principle of freedom of conscience would instantly wither under such a regime. Will science show us that we were wrong, after all, to value liberty and equal rights?

If there is really "no talking to some people," Harris would not have bothered to write "Letter to a Christian Nation." We don't actually know how susceptible to persuasion many fervent radicals are, or what forms of persuasion might be most effective. Persuasion is one of those things whose success can't be known ahead of time. It's hard work, thankless work. But we should be wary of any philosophical position that argues for abandoning it as moribund, in favor of a certainty in its futility.

Seeking an objective foundation for morality is an ancient pursuit, and one of the things we notice by studying the history of it is how often it provides a cover for one's own ideology. There is actually very little empirical science underlying Harris' presentation of the virulence of faith, and yet this appears to be one of his most deeply held views. In his debates on this question he has demonstrated very little openness to alternative explanations of the etiology of jihadism, even when put forth by those, like anthropologist Scott Atran, whose primary research is on terrorists and suicide bombers. Atran has catalogued numerous cases where Harris' views lean away from scientific data and toward folk wisdom (which is to say, stereotype) about jihadism, to the point of toppling over completely. And Harris is often quite open about the self-evidence of his convictions. After stating his belief, in an Edge "Reality Club" segment, that the response to the Jyllands-Posten cartoons was not contingent on anything but a Koranic injunction against depicting Muhammad¹--neither racism, economic disparity, nor blowback--he writes:

If the Koran contained a verse which read, "By all means, depict the Prophet in caricature to the best of your abilities, for this pleaseth Allah", there wouldn't have been a cartoon controversy. Can I prove this counterfactual? Not quite. Do I really need to?

When it's obvious, when we all know what "those people" are like, data and context be damned, then we are adopting the "moral peaks and valleys" of the mob. If that's Harris's idea of "well-being," then perhaps he is right after all to say that certain people might not know what that word means.

¹Actually no such injunction appears in the Koran. The Hadith (sacred to Sunnis, much less so to Shiites) discourages the painting of all pictures of people or animals generally, but says nothing of depictions Muhammad particularly. The response of the Imams who toured Denmark was that the cartoons were offensive to Muslims, not that they broke a sacred injunction against depicting the prophet. So much for facts.

2010-03-29T22:34:00.000-05:00

Did Science tell Sam Harris to call Sean Carroll an idiot?

Summum bonum medicinae sanitas

2010-03-28T17:42:00.001-05:00

[3/30/10--Welcome Cosmic Variance readers. I'll remain silent on the question of whether I know what I'm talking about any better than Sean, except to nod reverently to Brandon @ Siris, to whom I owe my improved understanding of Hume and the is/ought fallacy.]

The end of physic is our body's health.
Why, Faustus, hast thou not attain'd that end?
Are not thy bills hung up as monuments,
Whereby whole cities have escap'd the plague,
And thousand desperate maladies been cur'd?
Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man.
Couldst thou make men to live eternally,
Or, being dead, raise them to life again,
Then this profession were to be esteem'd.
Physic, farewell! Where is Justinian?

--Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus

Sean Carroll has come out hard against Sam Harris's recent, mulish TED talk arguing that science can (and should?) tell us what to value. Carroll's response draws on the clear and simple principle that arguing that values are "objectively true" is like trying to square the circle. You can only succeed by annihilating your subject.

In the real world, when we disagree with someone else’s moral judgments, we try to persuade them to see things our way; if that fails, we may (as a society) resort to more dramatic measures like throwing them in jail. But our ability to persuade others that they are being immoral is completely unaffected — and indeed, may even be hindered — by pretending that our version of morality is objectively true. In the end, we will always be appealing to their own moral senses, which may or may not coincide with ours.

Along the way, Carroll invokes Hume, to whom, it is commonly supposed, we owe the notion that "you can't derive an ought from an is." That's only partly true. Hume was getting at something more specific than a distinction between facts and values. He was trying to identify an error in rationalist thinking, in order to discredit that way of thinking, and the fact-value gap was his reductio. In the end, Hume didn't take much interest in deriving oughts from anything, and makes a poor champion for moral reasoning.

What most casual talk of "oughts" leaves out is a conditional premise. We ought to do X, if Y. We ought to eat better, if we want to live longer. We ought not to murder, if we believe that humans are ends in themselves -- or that we want to avoid a blood feud -- or that what goes around comes around -- or that God will be displeased with us for reasons he hasn't specified. Or some combination of these premises, which generally speaking flow from the way we imagine the nature of the world, which is to say, from our metaphysics.

The main danger of defining values as a sub-category of "empirical fact," as Harris does, is that it buries our metaphysical depictions in cement, where we can no longer call them up for reconsideration. It is an ideological move to say that one's values are universal, but it is nearly always a lie.

Harris asks:

Why is it that we don't have ethical obligations toward rocks? Why don't we feel compassion for rocks? It's because we don't think rocks can suffer. And if we're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it's because we think they're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering.

[...]

There is no version of human morality and human values that I've come across that is not at some point reducible to a concern about conscious experience and its possible changes.

Overt concern with the fate of conscious (and pain-sensitive) agents is the sort of "universal moral truth" that seems obvious to those who have not surveyed the facts, which don't permit any such universality. The connection between "biological complexity" and sentience is a relatively new moral development. To an animist, mountains, trees, and bodies of water are all conscious. To a follower of Vedanta, everything in the world is a performance by the Godhead. Buddhist and Jain monks take care not to trod on the smallest beetle if they can help it. To define sentience in our modern way, as a function of neural complexity, and then argue that such sentience has always been everyone's concern, is incoherent.

Discussions of meta-ethics must take into consideration that like all societies, we have our own metaphysical presuppositions that our ethical questions flow from. Today we are almost all humanists of a type, and this includes the Abrahamic religions. Secularists and monotheists alike take for granted that nature--matter--is passive and inert, and must be shaped by an intentional or "informational" force, whether God, man, or laws of physics and natural selection. This is not a matter of science, it is a matter of the metaphysical view that permits science (though there may be others).

Another important metaphysical precept that goes unexamined in Harris'analysis is Hobbesean social atomism, which underlies most moral thinking in the enlightenment tradition. But ecologists have been questioning for at least a century whether it makes any sense to value apes and dolphins, but not ants and plankton, when they each inhabit (with all of creation) the same web of causation. Perhaps it is not so crazy to have an ethical obligation towards rocks (in the form of coral reefs, for example), and perhaps this is area in which our primitive forebears have bested us in moral reasoning, by recogizing there is no extraneous, separable part of nature which we are not obligated to.

Harris does have some thoughtful things to say in this lecture. He makes a strong case for moral reasoning (though I would say it conflicts with his main thesis that morality is empirical.) And he makes the important point that we do have the right to judge other people's moral practices, such as shame killings. But ultimately his animus for religion drives him to illogical conclusions, such as the notion that what the Taliban lacks is sufficient science about "human flourishing" to make good moral choices¹. By this standard, how much less moral must the ancient Greeks have been, who knew so much less science than the medieval Arabs. And how much more immoral the nomadic tribes that preceded them thoughout Africa and Asia minor. How immoral that first human couple must have been, in their African Eden!

What this hyper-utilitarianism (which marries Mill with the logical positivists) primarily accomplishes is this. It obviates the need to look reflectively at evil. When evil can be equated with a simple paucity of learning, like deficiency of a vitamin, there is no need to look within our own hearts for its seeds. All the world's darkness can be projected outwards onto people we couldn't have less in common with. We don't want to subjegate women; we don't want to tyrannize innocents; we don't want to convert the whole globe to our ethos, and exterminate those who resist (wait, scratch that last one.) Unfortunately it is far more likely that the opposite is true. Not even all the science of John Faustus can make us good, if we won't season it with introspection.

¹It is noteworthy that Harris sets up the Dalai Lama as a paragon of virtue, based on his emphasis on compassion. But Tibetan Buddhism is just as old as Sunni Islam, which Harris places on the other pole, and while it may not be as reactionary in its anti-modernism as the Taliban, it does not embrace the metaphysical naturalism that Harris conflates with science.

Belief in "Belief in Belief"

2010-03-21T19:13:00.003-05:00

In Elizabethan England, the word "atheist" was used to indicate any deviation from religious orthodoxy, more a charge of noncomformity than actual metaphysical rejection of God. Most people of this time just did not want to know the details of someone's apostasy, whether it be Deist, Gnostic-Hermetic, or some other freaky-deaky thing. It was the deviancy that mattered, not the content of that deviancy. Reject just one of the terms of orthodox Anglicanism (or Catholicism; it was the Jesuits who first called Ralegh an atheist) and you might as well reject the whole package, a time-honored mode of alarmism we see today when Republicans brand any attempt to regulate markets as "Communist."

Something of spirit pervades the writings of the neo-atheists, whose attempts to enforce a Christian doctrinal purity I have been loosely chronicling here over the last few months. Both Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have had strong things to say about who may really call themselves a true Christian, and now Daniel Dennett, as part of his effort to demonstrate the evils of "belief in belief," has chimed in with the results of a pilot study profiling five "non-believing" clerics currently preaching in Protestant churches.

In his report on this study, posted from his pulpit at the Washington Post's "On Faith" panel, Dennett allows from the outset that such a project is hampered by the difficulty of what, exactly, a "believer" is supposed to believe. He describes a continuum, one far pole of which would feature a god few people have believed in (In the Judeo-Christian tradition, at least) since the days of Jacob: a fully anthropomorphic God "existing in time and space with eyes and hands..." On the other pole, pure atheism, lacking even an abstract "Ground of Being." Moving along this continuum, from left to right, where can we properly say we have left "belief in god" behind? Two of Dennett's study subjects, both evangelical, are able to draw such lines in the sand (helped no doubt by the implicit hermeneutic of their own fundamentalism), and self-identify (privately, confidentially) as atheists. They each consider themselves hypocrites, and are looking for a way to leave the church. Assuming they are able to do so, these two would not seem very tightly bound by the "trap" Dennett goes on to describe. Their story would seem to be the more straightforward one of people who change their mind about the world, and make changes accordingly.

The bulk of the moral quandary, then, is assumed by the other three subjects (each Mainline Protestant), who consider themselves believers by their own lights, but are concerned that these lights illuminate a much more symbolic realm that that embraced by many of their parishioners. They would like to "come out" and explicate their more subtle understanding of God and scripture, but fear they cannot for the effect it would have on their ability to preach. Some are concerned they would lose their jobs outright, others that focusing on what is signified by doctrinal terms would just get in the way. Dennett quotes one pastor named "Wes":

Well, because on the pulpit, on a Sunday morning, you get people in all different stages. And if I laid that out there, then again, people would not hear the point of the sermon.

Dennett means for all of this to support his idea that there is a conspiracy of lies enshrined by our culture's tacit respect for faith that he calls "belief in belief." Because we are not allowed to examine certain cultural values marked off as "sacred," we end up absurdly perpetuating them with institutions which long ago abandoned any claim to real conviction.

It's a compellingly chilling story, one that might lend itself to dystopic science fiction. But is it true? Does Dennett's preliminary data support it? And to the extent it is true, is it uniquely true of religious values, or is this a dilemma that involves anything a society might value, including freedom, justice, progress, self-sacrifice, or even rationality itself?

In his On Faith column, Dennett writes that his working hypothesis, which emerged out of writing Breaking The Spell, was how often ordained clergy "didn't believe a word of the doctrines of the faith to which they were devoting their lives¹." Even of his own small and self-selected sample of "non-believers" this is too strong a statement. At least three-fifths of his subjects believe in Christian doctrine in a meaningful, allegorical way. They don't think they are telling lies in their pulpits; they think they are offering vehicles for truth expressed non-literally (which would seem to be legitimate according to the continuum earlier proscribed). Of the two atheists he describes, one has taken the role of "worship leader," avoiding sermons. The other admits to play-acting, and that he doesn't believe "in what I'm singing in some of these songs." But while Dennett has shown what anyone might have guessed (especially anyone who has read Victorian literature), that some percentage of clerics have lost their faith, or part of it, he falls short of convincingly arguing that this rises to the proportion he originally speculated on.

To the extent that closet atheist clerics do exist, though, as they clearly do, can we attribute the etiology of this phenomenon, as Dennett would, to the success of religion in keeping a firewall against rational inquiry? I think we have to ask if there are any parallels pointing to a more broad phenomenon.

Let's imagine a secondary school teacher in mid to late career, once full of zeal for opening the doors of possibility for classroom after classroom of eager students, now jaded into thinking that it's of no consequence whether or not children grow up learning history, math, economics, geography, and biology. The world keeps getting worse; today's children invariably end up as tomorrow's suck-ups and sell-outs. Our cultural experiment in betterment through public education has been a failure. But perhaps it's not all bad, in that it keeps the kids off the streets and out of the sweatshop. Best to go along with the charade. And besides, after 20 or 30 years, what else is a trained teacher, with no savings and only a meagre pension, to do?

Now imagine another pedagogue, this time a college professor of literature. Throughout grad school this professor sustained herself by fantasizing about future seminars and workshops where she would introduce students to the practice of literary analysis, and, indirectly to moral philosophy and the examination of their own souls. Instead she has found, even after securing tenure at one of the nation's most renowned colleges of arts and science, that the vast majority of her students want to be lectured to. They want her to tell them what the important themes of the great books are, and are inordinately concerned with what's "on the test." Attempts to exercise greater control over curriculum and grading policy have only led to increased friction not just with her students, but also with her fellow faculty members, and with administrators, forcing her to modulate her teaching style. She still tries to engage her seminars in discussion, but resiles to lecture format much more than she would ideally prefer, resigning herself to the thin hope that special students will seek out more engagement during office hours.

Are these two instructors also not held in a type of "trap"? We could construct similar analogies featuring scientists, politicians, industrialists, soldiers, environmentalists, filmmakers, poets, building inspectors--indeed it is hard to imagine a vocation that is not prone to disillusionment, in which one could not one day stop believing, for better or worse, in its foundational values. Religion would not seem to suggest any sort of special case on this account. In a separate On Faith column, Richard Dawkins begs to differ, calling the religious case a "singular predicament," and revealing the ideological impediment that keeps him from treating this matter thoughtfully:

Does a doctor lose faith in medicine and have to resign his practice? Does a farmer lose faith in agriculture and have to give up, not just his farm but his wife and the goodwill of his entire community? In all areas except religion, we believe what we believe as a result of evidence. If new evidence comes in, we may change our beliefs.

Farmers losing faith in farming as anything but an instrument of destitution, and yet having to carry on, is such a commonplace in literature and folklore, that I can't imagine how Dawkins can bring it up with a straight face. For modern, factual examples we can look to Michael Pollan, for example, who in The Botany of Desire chronicles one potato farmer who will not eat the produce from his own field for its saturation with pesticides. Another potato grower he profiles uses organic methods, and as a result cannot farm the potato (the Russell Burbank) that the biggest customers--makers of fast food french fries--want to buy. As for doctors, the dwindling number of medical students willing to become general practitioners tells a story we could flesh out in a series of posts each as longwinded as this one.

As someone who cannot imagine losing faith in his principles, Dawkins is perhaps one of the lucky ones. But such certitude serves as an impediment against his having clear insight into this aspect of human nature, in which conviction can fail, and it is not easily known whether this failure is an indication that it's time to move on, or to re-up. Is our marriage doomed, or are we just not trying hard enough? Has our child-rearing philosophy gone awry, or do we need to double down? Is our chosen career wrong for us, or are we always too quick to give up when the going gets rough? Is our argumentative style in business meetings an efficient way of getting results or just a needless source of hostility? Of course empirical facts must play a part in answering these kinds of questions. But facts alone cannot make our important moral decisions for us. The defining feature of human agency is the leap of faith. (Always, notably, subject to later revision. If even the conservative Christians of Dennett's study find themselves capable of rejecting their once-sacred beliefs, perhaps the iron-grip of the faith-meme has been over-sold). Looking taxonomically all known traps, surely there is a greater risk that when we make faith in every circumstance an emblem of evil, we make war with ourselves.

[Note: Since originally posting this last night, I've added a few sentences to the introduction, to compensate for my tendency to "bury the lede"]

¹(That this was more than just a hypothesis, but more like an article of faith, is suggested by a comment from December, 2008, on a Guardian post by Andrew Brown stating affirmatively that "The seminaries and churches are full of atheist clergy who live their own version of this paternalism" [where religion is defended as being good for people, even if false].)

Lying in the beds we make

2010-03-09T17:14:00.004-06:00

[Updated 3.10.10 -- John Wilkins has a new post on this subject, which comes to similar conclusions much more economically than I do here, and has generated a lively and thoughtful conversation in comments. John and I differ on whether religion is (or can be) a "way of knowing" or not, but he rightly observes that the answer to that question need not bear on issues of "compatibility" (a word for which we still lack a meaningful definition, IMO.)]

The advocates of "anti-accomodationism," or sometimes "Churchillian atheism"--people like science-bloggers Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, Larry Moran--and (though they write about it less often) biologist Richard Dawkins and philosopher A.C. Grayling--begin from an understandable frustration with the corruption of scientific understanding by religious dogma, most pronounced in the resistance among many Christians and Muslims to Darwinian evolution. From this frustration, with the help of a boiled-down version of the "conflict thesis" (which says, essentially, that religion has always been an impediment to clear and accurate thought) these writers have developed a platform called Incompatiblism (not to be confused with the philosophical doctrine regarding free will and determinism), which puts forth that because religion and science make competing claims about nature, they are "incompatible," in the same way that geocentrism and heliocentrism are, for making competing claims about cosmology.

I've touched on incompatiblism before, though not exhaustively, in my post "On Walking and Chewing Gum" from last April. In short, what Coyne et al really mean is that theistic scientists can't fully commit to philosophical naturalism; however: it is methodological, not philosophical, naturalism that permits science to take place. A person can burn the fatted thighbone of an ox in the morning, and head off to the lab to conduct research in the afternoon, and there is nothing about the former that automatically corrupts the latter (it may, but so may any number of non-supernatural prejudices). Most great scientists in history have been metaphysically incorrect (by the lights of philosophical naturalism), and no one calls their efforts into question on this account alone.

On this subject John Wilkins Josh Rosenau, and John Pieret have many enlightening things to say, as do many of their commenters. What I am moved to remark on today is the strangely anti-scientific position such a doctrine leads to.

We're all aware that the practice of science, while it perhaps has some blurry edges, generally relies not just on empirical observation, but also on the testing of hypotheses, and also to the related practices of replicating the results of such tests, and publishing such results for the scrutiny of other scientists. Eliding any number of these steps is a sure way to have your findings (or "findings") mocked. And it is on these shoals that most "pseudo-sciences" founder. There is plenty of what a lawyer would call circumstantial evidence for things like ESP and homeopathy. What there is not, in support of these phenomena, is hypothesis testing, controlled experiment, and peer review.

This is common knowledge, and we can read about it every day on blogs like Myers', Coyne's, and Moran's (in fact one of the things I've praised each of these bloggers for in the past been their willingness to call out a discipline like evolutionary psychology for being largely speculative.)

But now look what happens in the context of incompatiblism. Those of us called "accomodationists" make the observation I summarized above, that science need not be unduly harmed by the scientist holding prejudicial beliefs, as long as the scientist adheres to scientific method. The incompatiblists immediately concede the point as trivial, and regroup around the question of whether there is any reason to hold non-scientific (by which they mean religious) beliefs at all. But since the "incompatiblist" argument hinges on the influence of the other beliefs on science, we have to wonder what our new working definition of "compatible" is. Must we embrace everything we are compatible with? (If I am a Mac, and my sweetie is a PC, and we share a wi-fi network compatible with both, does this constitute a defense of Microsoft on my part?)

Larry Moran puts it this way, responding to John Wilkins' point that compatibility really just means functional coexistence:

John repeats [the] tired old argument that just because there are people who claim to be good scientists AND are religious, then it follows logically that science and religion are compatible. ... If it were true, then science has to be compatible with every single belief that's ever been held by anyone who claims to be a scientist. In other words, science is compatible with Young Earth Creationism since we know for a fact that there are many scientists who are Young Earth Creationists.

Please, John, for the sake of all of us, drop this argument. It's not going to convince any of us accommodationists and it makes your side look ridiculous since it puts you in the position of defending Young Earth Creationism and other kooky ideas that must be compatible with science if your argument is valid. You know darn well that there are many people who hold on to contradictory ideas. The fact that those people exist is NOT evidence that the ideas are compatible. (my emphasis)

Here Larry has expanded the definition of "compatible" to include things we would defend or embrace. This is a very different point than the one the accomodationists are making, which is more like "no harm, no foul," where "no harm" means "as long as the science is good."

This might be a good place to briefly digress to the question of what it means for "science" to be compatible with anything. Science as the body of known facts? Science as plausible theory? Science as method? As the blogger Heddle noted in comments at Evolving Thoughts, depending on how we define our terms, science isn't even compatible with itself. There are numerous theories held by reputable scientists that are mutually exclusive, which is to say that there is a lot of wiggle room granted by scientists on the overlap of their own magesteria. This gives us even greater reason to suspect that this issue here is one of tribal authority, though that point will have wait for another day to be fleshed out.

There is a logical end to Larry's argument, and John Pieret is right to call it a scientistic one. Once we have dismissed religion as a source of legitimate beliefs based on its inability to scientifically verify those beliefs, we have to likewise bear the egress of other non-verifiable means of human expression and understanding: Art, politics, fashion, jurisprudence, history, and many others.

Nobody wants this, and so these endeavors must be smuggled back as actually scientific. Taking up this burden is PZ Myers. To John Pieret's question (originally posed to Moran) whether he has "decided he loves his wife because he has performed scientific tests on himself?" Myers answers:

John, yes, we carried out a long period of empirical investigation. It's called "dating". Both my wife and I studied the problem carefully, and if I'd been a jerk or she'd tormented me cruelly, we'd probably have reached the rational decision that we shouldn't marry.
I really don't understand how people can fail to recognize that we do carry out critical examinations of others and ourself. Love doesn't just pop into existence in the absence of knowledge or experience.

And as I predicted, you do have a naive view of what "scientific" means. It does not mean hormones and [EEGs.] You don't have to put on a lab coat to do it. It's simple, rational, evidence-based thinking. (my emphasis)

And later, in follow up comments,

Are you suggesting that I was just imagining things when we had long conversations? That first kiss was just a fantasy?

Seriously, man. Human beings actually interact physically and intellectually with other human beings -- we have evidence. People are always measuring each other up on the dating scene. Watch an eHarmony ad sometime. (my emphasis)

No doubt the probability of denial was bound to increase in proportion to how personal the counterfactual is (your wife.) But it is remarkable how much a scrupulous scientist has left out of his definition. White lab coats aside, without hypothesis testing and publication and replication of results, Myer's courtship is about as scientific in its method as UFOlogy. Probably less, given the number of publications devoted to the latter. Which is not to say, of course, that PZ's love is not real, or that his knowledge of it is flawed.

One commenter at Pharyngula, writing in PZs defense, wrote that "People who don't critically think about a relationship aren't usually in a lasting one." And this is true. But critical thinking is a much broader category than science. (And as much as most anti-theists hate to admit it, most theology counts as critical thinking).

Another commenter wrote to erect a firewall between case the case of PZ (or anyone with a beloved) and a theist:

Love is an emotional response to real-world input. Theism is a response to absolutely nothing except your own delusions, or those of others.

This seems to me the kind of distinction without a difference that most anti-theism trades on. Paranoia is also a response to a real world input, as is racism, and child abuse. Conversely, is there any reason to believe that the desire for the transcendence of human limitation often found in religion is less legitimate than the desire for love? Most anthropologists studying the phenomenon would not say so.

This pretzel logic is the only place incompatiblism can lead, and it is absurd. The incompatiblists have painted themselves into a corner, for reasons that bear a superficial resemblance to hubris (though they are perhaps something closer to insecurity and lack of confidence.) Rather than place a stronger light on our definitions of knowledge, belief, certainty, evidence, and the like, which is always welcome, they have chosen to try to eradicate the forms they don't like on the grounds of a supposed threat. Such a strategy can only ever have short term success, as we can see by analogy to the war on terror, where the policy has been monotonically focused on the existential threat of terror groups, rather than on the virtue of what would bear defending. Absent such a defense on the merits, we become, through intolerance, what we oppose. In the case of Western democracies, we become tyrannical and exclusive. in the case of scientism, we become religion at its worst: tribal, fearful, and blinded against nuance.

On Who Started It.

2010-03-06T13:46:00.000-06:00

I haven't attended to the whole "accomodationist" business in a while, but the aspidistra is still flying.

Josh Rosenau, [via John Wilkins,] makes a point I have long argued here, that a great deal of neo-atheist rhetoric appears absorbed not with putting forth a rectified ideology, but with score-settling.

Rosenau cites the example of PZ Myers, one of the neo-athiests' most gifted shibbolecists, who defends a gratituous shot at noted "faitheist" Chris Mooney by writing

Did you read Mooney's last book, Josh? It's a bit late to tell ME that I'm taking cheap shots.

This is an unusual response from someone hoping to be thought of as representing the evolved, wise and mature point of view. But let's allow that it is an understandable one. We've all felt that it would be a lot easier to remain reasonable if only we were not besieged by hostility. Last summer I quoted Russell Blackford making just such an explicit argument:

It would be nice to live in a world where no one is ever called names, no one is ever sarcastic or nasty, nobody ever gets exasperated, all argument is totally civil and reasoned, all points are engaged rather than evaded, etc. But we don't live in that world, and I'm sick of the idea that it's okay for our opponents, such as these faithiests(not to mention the religious themselves) to be very nasty indeed, while a double standard applies requiring us so-called "New Atheists" to bend over backwards to be nice and not make the slightest fun of anyone else.

We all want to be taken seriously, granted respect, and given the benefit of the doubt. But whatever our disappointments on this score, the idea that Russell is "sick of" here is the main principle underlying the impulse to civilization itself. All adult, grownup behavior is subject to a double standard. That is the definition of adulthood in the post-Vendetta phase of human civilization.It is one of the main tasks of child-rearing--and one of the reasons why it takes so long in humans--to build a faculty for sublimating the urge to retaliate long enough to see one's other discursive options. Such a faculty is a baseline expectation for ordinary adults in our culture, not to mention philosophers and intellectual standard-bearers.

Being a grown-up means not relying on others to set the tone. It means being able to see, even in the heat of anger, that though your opponents may resemble, at the moment, a band of rock-throwing ogres, that they are actually human, like you--and that they may well feel, just as keenly as you, that someone else "started it."

Neo-atheists are fond of analogizing themselves to the civil rights movements of the late 20th century, and in the sense that many of them are struggling for the legitmacy and visibility of a non-theist view, they are right to do so. But no civil rights movement has made even a millimeter's progress by appealing to the spirit of retaliation. Dr. King didn't complain that the nastyness of his opponents made it too difficult to do his job, and neither did the leaders of the more successful arms of the women's rights and gay rights movements. They focused on the nobility of their vision, and let the ugliness of others make whatever impression it would. That is how progress happens.

Meanwhile, in the eternal contest over who is the oppressor and who the victim, what gets lost is the actual substance that supposedly underlies these great gifts--the case that would be made if it were to be decided on its merits, rather than on the triage of schoolyard transgressions. Wilkins gets into the question of just how scientific the supposed "incompatibility" of science and religion actually is, a subject I wrote several posts on¹ last Summer, beginning with one titled "Is Neo-Atheism a Pseudo-Science?" That was in June, and since then I have seen nothing that would add any intellectual credibility to the "incompatibalist" position, which may in part explain why the low road in this debate is so often taken.

¹As did John Pieret at Thoughts in a Haystack.

Smarter than the average (polar) bear

2010-02-24T15:24:00.000-06:00

Jerry Fodor's new book, with Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong, is getting hammered in the blogopshere and the traditional press. I have not yet read it, but from what I have seen in the papers and articles by Fodor that preceded its publication, most reviewers are either not grasping F & PP's full argument, or using defects in their argument to stand for the whole, while ignoring some very important, though perhaps less dramatic, critiques.

I've been reluctant to post on this, not yet having read the book, and having some other pressing projects that would keep me from devoting sufficient energy to weighing and presenting my thoughts. But as a prologue to a time when I can write more reflectively, I want to quote a commenter (@10) from the Boston Review's review of WDGW, by Ned Block and Phillip Kitcher. The commenter's name is Michael Johnson, and he doesn't follow Fodor all the way down the rabbit hole, but he presents the most succinct version of Fodor's point about natural selection's shortcomings as a scientific law that I've yet seen. Johnson writes:

When there's no covering law, there's no [demonstrable] causation. Fodor's example is that of history. Suppose Frenchman tend to lose battles and all and only Frenchman are short. Is it because they're short or because they're French that they lose? Or because of some other property correlated with Frenchness and shortness? Well, none of the above. There's no fact of the matter because there are no laws of the form: French -> lose or short -> lose. There just aren't any laws of history, not even ceteris paribus laws.

This is also Fodor's view regarding natural history (evolution). White polar bears proliferate. Is it because they're white or because they're snow-colored? No fact of the matter *because* there's no law of the form snow-colored -> proliferate, and no law of the form white -> proliferate. There aren't even ceteris paribus laws of this form.

Though we may have some good guesses (like we may have about certain battles lost by certain short Frenchmen), we don't have a scientific theory that tell us why leopards have spots, polar bears are white*, giraffes long-necked. We have only a theory that these traits must have been advantageous, or at least not significantly detrimental. This gets us out of the God-shaped hole left by the failure of creationism, but it does not warrant as scientific most of the speculation about the "design" of living organisms. These are questions for biological history, not biological science, and as such must remain duly open-ended.

There's more to Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini's argument than that, of course, but I wanted to recapitulate this part because it is so modest in its scope in proportion to the amount of vexation F & PP have engendered. It is now every respectable biologists job to say how stupid Jerry Fodor is. Maybe he is (though I venture that few reviewers so far, even the professional philosophers, have engaged Fodor's point about disengaging extensional from intensional sets, which is pretty tough sledding.) But the unity of such responses bear a passing resemblance to a thin blue line, aligned to turf, not truth.

More to come on this.

* For those who find the answer too obvious to bother with, consider the finding cited by commenter Peter Ashby that polar bear hair fiberss are hollow, generating extra warmth, and that this hollowness confers a whiteness (actually transparency) to the bear. It is plausible then, though not demonstrable, that polar bears are white for reasons wholly unrelated to camouflage.

Your 2010 Candy Zeitgeist

2010-02-15T16:09:00.000-06:00

On Not Burning That Witch

2010-02-12T13:01:00.005-06:00

"If a man loves God, he can become holy in 20 years. If he hates God, he can do the same work in only two." (--Trad.)

As a matter of purest speculation, I informally propose that at least part of the impetus for the neo-atheist movement derives from a root fear of effacement that precedes any analysis of the threat of religious ideas to secular, modernist society.

My case study for this hypothesis will be the noise presently being raised in the UK against Cherie Booth¹, a judge at the Inner London Crown Court, for suspending the sentence of an Islamic man convicted for assaulting another man in a bank queue. There are several news reports on the incident and subsequent court proceedings, but they all seem to reduce to the following basic facts, beyond which only the parties involved can comment:

1). The attacker, a 25 year-old named Shamso Miah, struck another man in the face, after arguing with him about who was first in line at the bank. The other man followed him out into the street and asked why he had been hit, at which point Miah hit him again, fracturing his jaw.

2). Miah claimed self-defense upon his arrest, but surveillance video footage showed that Miah had been the aggressor, and at his trial he pleaded guilty to the assault.

3). In the course of sentencing him, Booth told Miah (a first-time offender) that “I am going to suspend this sentence for the period of two years based on the fact you are a religious person and have not been in trouble before. You caused a mild fracture to the jaw of a member of the public standing in a queue at Lloyds Bank. You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour.”

This is the extent of what has been reported. Certainly there is more on the court transcripts, and perhaps in reporters' notebooks, but what has so far been made public is so meager as to make the historical record of Jesus Christ look like Samuel Pepys' diary.

This paucity of fact has failed to prevent an outcry among ardent secularists on the grounds that Booth's leniency in this case amounts to a form of discrimination against the non-religious. Terry Sanderson, president of the British National Secular Society, has filed a complaint against Booth attesting that

This is a very worrying case of discrimination that appears to show that religious people get different treatment in Cherie Blair’s court.

The tendency of human beings toward bias and prejudice being what it is, Sanderson's claim is not entirely implausible. But it lacks evidence of any differential in Booth's leniency towards religious and secular defendants. Rather than seeking such evidence, it rests on a zero-sum fallacy which I am calling, provisionally, central to the neo-atheist Weltanschauung: that any favorable statement or deed toward a religious person implies a corresponding prejudice against atheists, and is thereby an act of hostility towards them.

This fallacy is easier to see if we neutralize the subject matter to something less incendiary. As commenter OneManIsAnIsland at Andrew Brown's Cif Belief site wrote, "if [Booth] said 'you are a boy scout, and you know right from wrong' no one would be arguing that this discriminated against non-scouts." Commenter sarka riffs on this:

Good family man? How dare you, you mean you'd give him a heavier sentence if he was gay? or single?

We don't know what Booth meant by calling Miah a "religious man" in this context, but unless we have some a priori reason to believe that she doesn't observe basic jurisprudential standards, she very likely meant something like, "your co-parishioners have testified that you are a regular attender at prayers, and have strong ties to the local Muslim community." It is standard practice in sentencing for judges to consider evidence of good character of various sources, and this evidence may--but need not--be religious in nature. Since a great number of people's actual social cohesion is expressed religiously we shouldn't be too surprised to see this reflected in the calculus of sentencing leniency. It's also possible that Booth considers adherence to a religious faith in itself to be proof of good character, and this seems to be the interpretation of Sanderson, and of the neo-atheist evangelist Jerry Coyne², who praises a response to the sentencing by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, noting that this is the kind of philosophy a person can get behind:

Let’s have more of the dissection of tortuous logic, and exposing of hidden and invidious assumptions, that is the real good that philosophy can do.

OK, then, let's. One thing--perhaps the main thing--we look to philosophers for is to probe behind the surfaces of things, these "hidden and invidious assumptions." Anyone with rhetorical gifts can stimulate people's existing prejudices. Philosophers have the higher task of reflecting on the truth in a way that helps people re-conceive it. Which is why it is so disappointing to see a man with Grayling's gifts and training join Coyne and Sanderson in treating Booth as a mother passing a out a very limited amount of candy to a factionally divided brood with competing claims on it:

As a barrister Mrs. Blair should be able to see the inadmissible corollary of passing lenient sentences on believers because they are believers; namely, that non-believers should receive less lenient sentences.

Grayling is an Oxford man with a solid grounding in good old fashioned logic. On many another topic he'd be the first to object that no evidence has shown that Booth has passed lenient sentences on believers "because they are believers," and that no such corollary would follow if she had. (There might logically be any number of subcategories of atheism that merited equal leniency). Booth's entire public statement (as reported) is contained in two rather terse statements about Miah being "religious," both of which need a great deal of context before we can say they are the "logical obverse" of "I am going to apply the full penalty of the law based on the fact that you are not a religious person," as Grayling puts it in his exercise of "the real good that philosophy can do."

This is the third time in as many weeks that I have here observed a major figure in the neo-atheist movement transforming, virtually de novo, positive remarks in support of some religious idea or sentiment into remarks hostile toward secularism, where no hostility can be shown overtly or obliquely. Such anti-secularist monsters and demons exist, most surely, and we know many of their names, but they are not found among the known deeds of the people they are being projected onto here. This is the etiology of the witch hunt, presenting itself in the psyches of demonstrably intelligent and educated writers. How are we to account for such bald irrationality and quickness to presumption when we cannot resort to the usual explanations?

The conventions of polite rational discourse don't permit me to speculate on motives, since these are never objectively visible for our inspection. And it would be ironic of me to defend Cherie Booth on the grounds that we have no facts to make a judgment against her, only to follow up by making just such a judgment against her detractors. And yet: we can't deny a decided proclivity for shadow-chasing in the rhetoric of many neo-atheists. If a person consistently drew dire conclusions from fleeting, innocuous physical symptoms--if every headache was a brain tumor, every muscular weakness was ALS--we would be justified in calling that person--without judgment--a neurotic, and suggest that they were possibly acting out some ancient transgression.

It doesn't seem too impertinent, six years into the neo-atheist movement, to draw this parallel. Not everything the neo-atheists preach is a demerit against them. Speaking up for the legitimacy of the secular minority is a good thing, and working to advocate safe visible ideological alternatives to theism in provincial communities is a noble effort. But such messages rarely travel, in the writings of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Coyne, Grayling, Johann Hari, Ophelia Benson, Russell Blackford, and a few select others, unaccompanied by a sentiment that all religious expression cloaks an existential threat. We can call this tribalism, McCarthyism, Manichaeism, or a bunch of other nasty things, but this runs the risk of throwing yet another shibboleth onto a growing pile, so that neo-atheists become bogeymen of their own, and opposing them becomes a duty of its own, apart from their actual words and deeds in the world.

It will be cold comfort to stop short at simply calling them neurotic, for now, but perhaps doing so will humanize them enough in my own eyes and those of my readers that we can reject the war footing that ideological disagreements so often devolve into, in favor of improved dialogue about human nature and our shared predicament on this planet. There is nothing, after all, more human than fear.

¹Also known as Cherie Blair, wife of Tony. As Booth is her professional name, I consider its usage here to be a rudimentary feminist gesture.

²Anyone inclined to doubt that Coyne's stance is more ideological than "free-thinking" should consider his follow-up post, in which he calls Andrew Brown a "moron," and "blockhead" and references his "hatred of atheism" before declaring him blogospheric persona non grata. Since Brown has never been coy about his atheism, we might compare this to the common move among Zionists of calling any Jew who disagrees with them "self-hating." To be a real Jew, in this scheme, is not merely to follow the Torah, but also to politically support Eretz Yisrael against the claims of its non-Jewish inhabitants. To be a real atheist, by comparison, is not merely to disbelieve in god(s), but to treat any kindness toward religion, even if non-preferential, as an abomination, a litmus test Brown fails miserably.

Some cosmetic changes

2010-02-08T17:52:00.000-06:00

Mostly so I could switch to commenting by Echo.

Man of whole cloth

2010-02-04T14:16:00.009-06:00

To the ranks of budding theologians we may now add the name Christopher Hitchens. Asked last week in an interview [via Religion Dispatches] by Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewall about the difference between fundamentalist and liberal Christianity, he responds:

I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian. (my emphasis)

Why should that be? One argument that is often made on this score is that the vast majority of Christians take the gospels literally, and anything deviating from this consensus is a heresy on the principle of majority rule. We can argue about just how "vast" this majority is (statistics are hard to come by on this topic), but even granted that such a normative majority exists on balance, is it really valid to derive a Christian essentialism from this fact?

The "vast majority" of Americans in the early 19th century believed in the holding of slaves, but we would not on this token call abolitionism "un-American." An even vaster number of Southerners did likewise. We can imagine that the few who dissented must have seemed like traitors to the rest. Not like real Southerners in "any meaningful sense." What a tragedy it would have been if they were right, and Southern identity could not change to accommodate them; if to be an abolitionist, to a Southerner, were an irredeemable iniquity, and to be a Southerner, to a Yankee, were likewise forever in the wrong.

Now, to be a Southerner would seem to be a simple, factual thing. Either you are from below the Mason-Dixon line or you are not. But such simple delineations are not the usual convention for determining identity. As a naturalized, British-born American, Hitchens must be keenly aware of the role of pedigree. We treat with mistrust the recently arrived, especially if they speak or look different from the rest of us, or bring with them funny ideas. (It is still a highly contentious question on the continent of Africa, whether the white Afrikaners in the South, or Arabs in the north, are "true Africans.")

Hitchens admits he likes Sewall's mythopoetical Christianity much better than than the literalist variety. ("If all Christians were like you I wouldn’t have to write the book.") So what is his interest in saying that such beliefs are not "meaningful"? It is, I believe, an interest in preserving a concept of "religion" as strictly baneful, a thing that "poisons everything." This will require him to play a pretty deft Monte Carlo game with his terminology, as we shall see.

After the exchange I have just cited, Hitchens asks Sewall to clarify her understanding of the resurrection. She replies that it symbolizes a new relation to the world and to other people, in this life. Hitchens responds,

[M]aybe you are simply living on the inheritance of a monstrous fraud that was preached to millions of people as the literal truth.

"Monstrous fraud" is certainly too strong. No religion is, top to bottom, a case of Machiavellian exploitation. We must attribute some measure of good faith in the development of the central myths of Christianity, among the writers of the Gospels, at least, if not also among the early "Church Fathers." And these persons, too, had their inheritances: Judaism, neo-Platonism, Mithraism, and more.

Who is free to completely reject their intellectual inheritance, after all? Not modern physicists, who still talk of "atoms," though these bear little resemblance to the concept as it was once put forward by Lucretius (who Hitchens cites, though his transcriber, a Star Trek fan perhaps, writes the name as "Locutius.") Not humanists, many of whose earliest prophets, like Erasmus and More, were clergymen. Not rationalists, who are still trying to walk back the damage of Descartes' extreme skepticism and mind-body dualism.

In one part of his conversation with Sewall, Hitchens holds up Socrates as a better example or moral rectitude than any religious figure:

If you want a good mythical story it would be the life of Socrates. Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammad to the life of Socrates is—I have to say it to you—intellectually defective.

It's a curious thing that preference for one story over another should provide evidence for a defect of intelligence, per se--where does Harry Potter fit in? Hitchens goes on to praise Socrates' "teachings, his method of thinking, and his extreme intellectual and moral courage" and places him in a philosophical "tradition" running from Epicurus and Lucretius (both of whom post-date Socrates, and were not positively influenced by him or by Plato), through Voltaire and Spinoza. These thinkers, admittedly, did all share in common a valorization of independent thought and a disdain for what they each called superstition, but no clear or simple line of influence connects them, and their ontologies could not be more dissimilar.

Even in the single person of Socrates there is no single "story," and no single tradition. He is the hero of Plato's Apology, where he willingly dies for the ideal of speaking truth to power (more or less), and in other early Platonic Dialogues where he is usually found brilliantly hoisting the corrupt Sophists with their own petards. But he is also the anti-democratic polemicist of the Republic, preaching respect for the gods, and mistrust of poets. Can we really build to suit the Socrates of our present inclination by cherry picking from Plato, while deriding "liberal" Christians for doing the same?

None of this would be a problem in itself, if Hitchens were not so insistent that dissenting views were heretical and a danger to free people everywhere. Of his patchwork quilt of free-thinkers he tells Seward

It a better tradition for people who think for themselves and who don’t pray in aid of any supernatural authority. That’s what you should be spending your life is in spreading and deepening that tradition. (my emphasis)

Despite the muddles and contradictions, we can reconstruct, in Hitchens' conversation with Sewall, a gospel whose heart is the tautology that everything religious is evil because everything evil is religious. Even in the places where the religious person is inclined to do good, it is a corrupt, degraded good, that cannot compare to the true good works of the humanist. On Bishop Romero:

I know many, many, many people in El Salvador who have no religious faith of any kind who stuck up for human rights much longer, more consistently, and more bravely than he did.

Is this really the place for a pissing match? My martyr is better than your martyr? One almost expects him to invoke, next, secularists in Vietnam who self-immolated themselves during the war with a brighter flame, so as to be more reproachful. On Martin Luther King:

He would’ve been much better off not invoking the nonsense story of Exodus, a story of massacre and enslavement. He left us with a legacy where any clown or fraud or crook—Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, our new president’s favorite priest in Chicago—who has the word reverend in front of his name can get an audience.

Is the point that if MLK had not been a reverend, he would not have inspired venal, second-rate copycats? That seems unlikely. Is it that a true story about massacre and enslavement would have served better? That too seems unlikely. Hitchens cannot mean that using stories from Exodus, which were well known to those he wanted to reach, and which helped inspire civil rights pioneers to endure hardship for the cause, was a bad pragmatic move. So what then? This appears to be a simple case of Hitchens' animus for all things religious getting the better of his rhetoric.

**

What makes it all the more bizarre is that at the end Hitchens has come out as a kind of mystic, citing humanity's need for the "numinous" and "transcendent." In an unguarded moment, encouraging Sewall to leave "faith" behind her, Hitchens tells her:

I don’t want you to go away with the impression that I’m just a vulgar materialist... We have a need for, what I would call, “the transcendent” or “the numinous” or even “the ecstatic” that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn’t trust anyone who didn’t respond to things of that sort.

[...]

I think everybody has had the experience at some point when they feel that there’s more to life than just matter. But I think it’s very important to keep that under control and not to hand it over to be exploited by priests and shamans and rabbis and other riffraff. (my emphasis)

Perhaps Sewall was too courteous to ask what would happen to us if we didn't "keep it under control." She did, however, follow up on his use of the word "soul," which has the effect of turning this profoundly articulate and erudite man into Karen Armstrong:

[Soul] is what you might call “the x-factor”—I don’t have a satisfactory term for it—it’s what I mean by the element of us that isn’t entirely materialistic: the numinous, the transcendent, the innocence of children (even though we know from Freud that childhood isn’t as innocent as all that), the existence of love (which is, likewise, unquantifiable but that anyone would be a fool who said it wasn’t a powerful force), and so forth.

On the importance of the "transcendent," which Armstrong calls Apophatic theology, to contrast it with the more literalist and prescriptive variety, she and Hitchens seem to be in perfect accord. On their advocacy of a spiritual life without superstition or capitulation to rank authority they seem to be in perfect accord. Yet Karen Armstrong is one of the greatest devils of the neoatheist movement--a "publisher of meaningless twaddle" (PZ Myers), and a "woolly-headed apologist" (Jerry Coyne), while Hitchens is a member of the "Four Horsemen."

All that seems to separate them is Hitchens' tautological equation of "religion" with evil, which leads me to suspect, as I've mentioned in the past, that the primary function of the neoatheist movement is to project outward the unacceptable inner shadow cravings for authority, security and union. Christopher Hitchens has let slip, here, some clues of his long-repressed longing for religious ecstasy. If his fellow horseman can do the same, perhaps we can begin to move toward real dialogue, instead of our present thinly-disguised war to the death.

Richard Dawkins, originalist

2010-01-28T15:24:00.006-06:00

It's going to be a little hard to take Richard Dawkins' position on theology as a "non-subject" at face value if he continues to engage in it as ardently as he does this week at the Washington Post, in an essay that derogates "moderate" Christians as heretics. "True" Christians, like Pat Robertson, writes Dawkins, understand that blaming the victim for his or her misfortune is the central teaching of Christianity:

Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for 'sin' - or suffering as 'atonement' for it? You may weep for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but at least, in his hick, sub-Palinesque ignorance, he holds up an honest mirror to the ugliness of Christian theology. You are nothing but a whited sepulchre.

Putting aside for a moment the question of whether this accusation is accurate, it appears to constitute a recanting of Dawkins' earlier insistence that the only thing we need to know about theology is that, like "fairyology" it enquires into the nature of non-existent things. This was the heart of the infamous "Courtier's Reply" argument, which responded to critics of The God Delusion like Terry Eagleton and Allen Orr (who had observed that Dawkins' understanding of religion tended toward the the overly simplistic) by insisting that detailed elaborations of a non-existent thing don't contribute anything to our understanding that the thing does not exist.

But the "Courtier's Reply" gambit can only apply to the dispute over the so-called facts of religion. It has far less purchase on the ethics, as Dawkins seems to be recognizing. It's one thing to say we don't need to know how many angels can dance on a pin before we dispense with the question of there being any angels in the first place. But if we take this position we recuse ourselves (or should) from the kind of broad moral generalizations that stand in judgment of religious moral reasoning, since theology is the tableau of such reasoning, just as jurisprudence is for secular moral reasoning. If we are to draw a moral lesson from the book of Job, for example, we need to make an effort to determine what the book of Job means.

If Dawkins has in fact reconsidered his lack of curiosity in theology he does not yet display the fruits of his learning. In searching for counterexamples to the notion that Christians might plausibly and coherently believe that natural disasters are not acts of divine retribution, he cites not theology, but scripture (Noah, Sodom and Gomorrah), which begs the very question Dawkins had claimed is not germane to the topic: what does scripture mean? What do Christians think is the meaning of the story of the flood, or of Lot and his wife? Has the answer changed much through time? Does it differ from Jewish interpretations of the same text? Since Dawkins has not read any theology, he must start at the beginning, much in the way someone unschooled in astronomy would recapitulate all the old folk knowledge about the cosmos: that the the stars and planets move across a dome over a stationary and flat earth, for example.

To say that Pat Robertson is "true" to the bible obviates any need for context and interpretation in establishing that meaning. It is like asserting that Leo Strauss was "true" to Machiavelli or Plato, or that Ayn Rand was "true" to Nietzsche, or that anyone in particular was "true" to Wittgenstein. Or, indeed, that the ancient Babylonians were "true" to their astronomical observations. Each thought they were putting forth something "essential," and in each case we have good reason to doubt it, or at least ask for compelling argument.

Dawkins' expression of Christian essentialism is this:

Dear modern, enlightened, theologically sophisticated Christian, your entire religion is founded on an obsession with 'sin', with punishment and with atonement. Where do you find the effrontery to condemn Pat Robertson, you who have signed up to the obnoxious doctrine that the central purpose of Jesus' incarnation was to have himself tortured as a scapegoat for the 'sins' of all mankind, past, present and future, beginning with the 'sin' of Adam, who (as any modern theologian well knows) never even existed?

This is surely an interpretation of Christianity that needs unpacking. "Obsession" is a loaded word; we would not fairly say that Darwin was "obsessed" with natural selection, for example. It's true that the concept of "sin" is central to most expressions of Christianity, but it's not always clear what is meant by it. It signifies a wide range of qualities, indicating shame and worthlessness among protestant fundamentalists, but in other interpretations something more like basic human imperfection. (In liberal or "emergent" theology the concept of sin plays a vanishingly small part). In any case there is nothing inherent in Christianity or Judaism that directly correlates earthly suffering and sin. Divine retribution of the kind that Pat Robertson enjoys portraying has very little grounding in theological doctrine. Even John Calvin did not imply that people get what they deserve in earthly life.

Placing vengeance ("payback") at the heart of a universal Christianity, and then scolding theologians for not re-organizing their principles accordingly, is the kind of misapprehension one is bound to make when one declares at the outset one's ~~disinterest~~ lack of interest in actually educating themselves on a subject, while reserving the right to hold (and preach) strong and broad-reaching opinions about it. This is by no means an essential attitude among atheists, many of whom have taken pains to see religion in all four dimensions. But it may well be a defining feature among blowhards, a sect of which it is never too late to repent.

[See also Santi @ Prometheus Unbound]

Horse's Mouths

2010-01-21T16:43:00.003-06:00

I was actually, on reflection, a little knee-jerky in my last post on the debate between co-bloggers Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef at Rationally Speaking. Philosoblogging engenders a lot of short-hand, and this (coupled with the immediate gratification of instant publishing) sometimes makes it too easy to look for the emblems of one's own ideology and throw down in solidarity rather than make a more patient effort to understand just what is being put forth, and what one's reaction is.

Having said that, I think that Massimo's response suffers from some oversimplification of its own.

The subtlety I too quickly passed over lies in the difference between saying, on the one hand, that you can't derive a value from a fact (an ought from an is), all things being equal, and on the other saying that there is no place whatsoever where fact and value come to meet. Massimo believes that Julia is taking the latter position, and thereby believes that all ethics are arbitrary matters of taste. I think her argument expresses a more nuanced position than this, though of course I welcome correction in her own words.

In her opening post, Julia wrote of Massimo's belief "that it is possible to use scientific facts to justify selecting one particular set of initial axioms over another." The way this is worded, I presumed her to mean scientific facts alone, without any assistance from reason or sentiment. It is easy enough to say that our idea of goodness is rooted in a mammalian propensity for nurture and altruism. But if we generalize this move, what is to prevent us from saying that our natural propensity for violence, greed, lust, security, and pleasure, also render these things good? I think most of us would allow that our natural traits are often good in context, and in balance with other traits, but it would not be legitimate to use a foundation in biology as a case for the intrinsic morality of an impulse.

I don't think Massimo would disagree with this, but he nonetheless paints a wide gulf between his position and Julia's, which he describes as "moral relativism." If Julia clarifies her comments she may well yet earn this description, but I'm keeping an open mind. I think it's just as possible that Massimo is reacting to her invocation of "the Naturalistic fallacy," in light of what that term has meant in 20th century philosophy.

Julia credits Hume with the notion, but the term traces to G.E. Moore, who wrote almost 200 years later, and who took the premise to much greater extremes. Moore began from the valid critique I described above, where empirical facts themselves are not sufficient for the determination of value. He was writing largely in response to J. S. Mill and the utilitarians, who took it for granted that whatever people wanted (summarized under the catch-all phrase "pleasure") should be maximized. But, rather than stopping there, Moore made something like a religion out of this critique, in a text he titled Principia Ethica. Here he made the much more reductive case that any moral reasoning that appealed to any principles at all was specious, and that serious philosophers should avoid matters of morality altogether. Moore later repudiated this work (which he wrote when he was in his 20s), but it had a huge impact, which we still feel today whenever someone calls moral reasoning into question on intellectual (as opposed to religious) grounds.

Julia's post is brief, but I don't see in it a repudiation of moral reasoning altogether. She opens by agreeing with Massimo that "moral reasoning is possible, given a set of initial axioms," which would have been anathema to Moore, who felt that all such axioms were deprecated by his theory. But admittedly we, as readers, are joining an old conversation between friend-combatants in media res, and Massimo may have good reason, based on prior conversations, to believe that Julia hold the extreme meta-ethical view he ascribes to her. In which case I will have to join him in his criticism.

Even then, however, Massimo will have overstepped in his defense. Returning back to the question of just what influence empirical fact can have on value, Massimo writes:

I define ethics as that branch of philosophy that deals with the maximization of human welfare and flourishing. I’m sure this will disappoint Julia and others, but I simply don’t understand what else they might possibly wish to include in a talk about ethics.

It is important to note that this position is offered by fiat only, and suggests a return to the kind of utilitarian logic that Moore was right to challenge. The notion that we can only do right or wrong by other people, and that the rest of the Cosmos is either instrumental to our fellow humans or not, is an ideological position that needs defending. I see no reason why a Taoist, Confucian, or Aristotelian ethics based upon principles of balance, harmony, and cosmic order should be eliminated from consideration right off the bat. It has been normative since the late Renaissance to presume a Hobbesean social atomist metaphysics; but however sensible Social Contract theory may continue to appear to us, we should nonetheless resist considering it a scientific fact about the world. It is just this kind of "common sense" moral theorizing that closes off real moral inquiry.

Massimo continues:

I define as moral an action that increases human welfare and/or flourishing ... and then [I] ask biologists and cognitive scientists to provide me with some empirical points of reference so that my concept of human flourishing is based as much as possible on the so highly valued empirical data.

This statement doesn't entirely cross the line into moral capitulation, but it at least flirts with it. The deep vein of enlightenment rationalism that runs through much of analytic philosophy often creates a deceptive sense of science as a practice existing outside moral biases. But scientists are every bit as human as philosophers, and their studies exist inside a normative structure. The completely dispassionate fact is a chimera. Even if we allow that empirical fact exerts an influence on moral value, we have to likewise concede that moral value exerts an influence on what counts as facts, since the revelation of those facts is practiced by moral agents. Iris Murdoch put it as strongly as it needed to be put, writing just after C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures"

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, and the place of science in life must be discussed in words. (my emphasis.)

The dialogue between value and fact must run both ways if we are not to allow our often unconscious metaphysical concepts deter us from ongoing examination of our own lives and the collective condition of humanity. It is for this reason, and not out of any desire to shrink from the truth, that we should stay vigilant against too much naturalism in our ethical reasoning.

Oughtism

2010-01-16T14:35:00.003-06:00

Like stumbling a Banggai crow, a Worcester's Buttonquail, or some other thought-to-be-extinct endangered creature, I am delighted and surprised to see moral philosophy being done on the internet, and not just anywhere, but in deep rationalist territory.

Massimo Pigliucci, the biologist-turned-philosopher who writes at Rationally Speaking, has added a blogger to his site--the writer Julia Galef--and much to his credit she is someone with whom he appears to disagree on a whole host of important questions.

Galef's introductory post is on the old question of whether you can derive an "ought" from an "is." Since the demise of theism this has become an increasingly uncomfortable question, since it forces us to ask where morality "comes from," if not from divine revelation. Some 20th century philosophers, like Iris Murdoch, have argued that this question requires a revisitation of Metaphysics, using Plato as a starting place. But the more dominant trend, especially in so-called analytic philosophy, has been to look to the sciences to tell us what we ought to value. Galef approaches the problem by recapitulating her argument with Pigliucci:

Massimo starts with biological and neuroscientific facts such as "Human welfare requires things like health, freedom, etc." and "Humans are wired to care about each other's welfare," and from these he derives the conclusion, "Therefore, it is moral to act in a way that increases those things which are necessary for human welfare." In my opinion, this is an example of what is sometimes called the naturalistic fallacy: telling me scientific facts doesn't tell me how to act on those facts, and the alleged point of moral principles is to tell me how to act. Science can tell me that if I want to make other people happier, then treating them in certain ways -- giving them health, freedom, and so on -- will accomplish that goal. But science can't tell me whether making other people happier should be my goal.

Alternately, you could use evolutionary biology and neuroscience to argue that being kind to others is the best way to maximize one's own happiness, thanks to the way our brains have become wired over the course of our evolution as social animals. I agree that there's some truth to this claim, but I deny that we can derive any moral principles from it -- it implies only an appeal to self-interest that happens, through lucky circumstances, to have positive consequences for others.

But Galef chickens out at the last minute. Recognizing that "Hume's Guillotine" severing ought from is leaves us, if not headless, at least in blind search for first principles, she decides to make a last-minute distinction between "philosophical" morality and "real-world" morality, which gives the game away to the fatalists:

Fortunately, even though I think the blade of Hume's guillotine is inescapably sharp in the philosophical world, I don't think it has the power to sever much in the real world. Because, thanks to some combination of evolutionary biology and social conditioning, I do enjoy being kind, and I do want to reduce other people's suffering -- and I would want to do those things even without a rational justification for why that's "moral." And I believe most people would feel the same way.

But clearly "most people" only feel this way some of the time, bumbling around in the broad grey area between sainthood and depravity. We can generalize that most people are pretty good most of the time, but this doesn't help much when we want to know how to resolve conflicts between competing interests, which is what moral reasoning is for. To the extent we have a "lust to be good" as Richard Dawkins likes to say, there is no problem. But we have other "lusts" as well, often in direct conflict with one another. The multiplicity of desire is the "is," and the fact that we can only act on a limited number is the "ought." Biology and "social conditioning" are not sufficient to resolve the difference.

Fighting Words

2010-01-14T15:21:00.004-06:00

As recently as 1949 it was illegal in some US jurisdictions to insult a fellow citizen. In Chaplinksy v. New Hamphire, the Court unanimously upheld that the town of Rochester, New Hampshire could arrest a sidewalk preacher under a statute prohibiting the utterance of "any offensive, derisive or annoying word to anyone who is lawfully in any street or public place...or to call him by an offensive or derisive name." This was a landmark test of what is sometimes known as the "fighting words doctrine," which limits speech that may "reasonably incite the average person to retaliate."

Subsequent test cases in 1969, 1972, 1992, and 1999, have narrowed the doctrine nearly out of existence. (It is worth noting that in most cases the statutes were meant, in theory or practice, to restrict opprobrium directed at police officers). The fighting words doctrine is rarely applied today, even more rarely upheld, and the tenor of speech most of us encounter in our daily lives just 61 years after Chaplinsky is testimony to a rapidly changing standard of what "opprobrium" is, and how much of it, if any, constitutes "incitement."

Nevertheless, the doctrine does point to an important distinction between the form and content of speech, one also indicated by numerous laws, still on the books, against "disturbing the peace." What are we to do with those? The concept seems quaint and Mayberryish today, but is it totally deprecated? It is certainly not an abridgement of protected speech that my neighbor cannot play loud music outside my window late at night, for example, whetever its merits.

When the disruption is measured in opprobrium rather than decibels, US case law sets the bar very high. In 2003 the high court ruled that public cross burning is only a crime if it can be shown that its intent was to intimidate. (Imagine, by contrast, if I could not get my neighbor to turn down his music unless I could prove he was playing it with ill-intent.)

The fighting words doctrine is based on the presumption that there is something inherently disruptive about being provoked; that being insulted or challenged to a fight breaches a personal "peace" or integrity in the same way that loud noise or bright lights do, as a kind of assault. Such notions trace back to our "honor culture" roots dating from time immemorial. This does not square well with our modern sense of ourselves as creatures of reason, raised on the maxim that "words many never hurt me," who have finally supplanted the code of honor with the code of law. But it was a mere 10 generations ago that Alexander Hamilton, "founding father" of the world's first modern democracy, was killed by Vice President Aaron Burr over the defense of his honor. Just 42 years ago, in the year of my birth, two French members of Parliament "settled" an insult with their rapiers (neither was seriously hurt.) The "winner" was a socialist.

Can we, who in living memory banned Lolita and Lady Chatterly's Lover, criminalized personal insults in the public square, and even settled scores at the point of a sword really afford to be cavalier about who can, and who cannot "take a joke"? More than once I have seen the remark (most often in blog comments) that the recent attack on Kurt Westergaard's life proves he was onto something when he implied Muslims were violent in his cartoon. This (if it were true) would present serious problems for the free speech defense, which relies on a common agreement that words are not harmful, that honor is subservient to free expression--an agreement we were not expected to have made in the West just 60 short years ago.

Indeed, race-baiting is an age-old justification for bigotry. The undisputed masters of it were the Nazis, but we shouldn't use the extremity of the example to pretend that any of us are not capable of it (which is, after all, just a more subtle version of race baiting, as Will Self recently observed).

If I am perceived as going back on my earlier words that Kurt Westergaard was not to blame for the attack on his life, let me re-affirm that he is not. No mechanism of incitement that I am aware of takes 3 years to percolate, for one thing. And even if the attacker's response had been instantaneous, he is just as responsible for understanding that a code of honor (if it was this that motivated him, and not, as seems more likely, an organized attempt at sowing terror and intimidation) does not obtain in Denmark. We live in more sophisticated times than that.

Rather I am trying to draw out the possibility, which I find very plausible, that free speech and rule of law are a rationalization in this case for a type of combat that is being carried out in a much more atavistic idiom, with the intent not (primarily) to criticize, but to retaliate and shame. Such an interpretation would not weaken the protections of speech and safety Westergaard enjoys as a Danish citzen, but it might provide a more honest look at the dynamics of the tensions between the Islamic world and secular modernity.

I'll close with a quote from Talel Asad from a paper I have earlier cited:

The problem of blasphemy... is a European obsession. For a secular society that doesn’t acknowledge the existence of such a thing as blasphemy it is quite remarkable how much public discourse there is about it – and about those who complain of it or claim to be affronted by it. Quite remarkable, too, is the obsessive need to repeat again and again the words and images that secularists think will be regarded as blasphemy. Who, one might wonder, are these defenders of worldly criticism trying to convince? It is too simple, I think, to claim – as some Danish commentators have done – that the publication of the cartoons merely sought to overcome the crippling fear that Europeans had of criticizing Muslims. But there is certainly something complicated going on beyond the courageous demonstration of political freedom, something that has to do with the attempt at re-assuring the limitless self.

[...]

Liberal Europeans have repeatedly said that modernity – their modernity – consists precisely in the continuous re-creation of individual experience and political-economic futures through the exercise of auto-critique, yet in the case of their relationship to European Muslims a limit seems to have been reached, a limit that is insupportable. Their conception of criticism is motivated by the dark face of religion, ours by secular debate, democratic openness, and joyous satire; their anger undermines freedom, ours informs its defense; they seek to impose limits (in the idea of blasphemy), we overcome them (by secular critique).

On Umbrage, Part 3: Blasphemy

2010-01-12T16:50:00.007-06:00

This is the concluding post in a 3-part series. Read Part 1, and Part 2.

“What is Blasphemy Today?” is the question of the week at Andrew Brown's CiF Belief site at the GuardianUK. In the gloss is a question that has lay beneath the surface in my last two posts (and that came up for air in comments). Brown writes:

Civilization seems to depend on a balance between unwillingness to take offense and reluctance gratuitously to give it. But where do we draw the line?

Unfortunately I think that a word like blasphemy, with all its archaic, pre-modern connotations, acts as a signal that the issue is one we don't really have to take seriously: Modernism has outgrown blasphemy; the rest of the world will catch up if they want to participate in Western civilization. The problem is that blasphemy is actually a very inadequate word to describe the issue, because it seems to imply a special privilege for religious adherents. Why, ask secularists, should the religious have a special protection of speech unavailable to the rest of us? Modernity is about the leveling of the playing field, and giving up outre notions of blasphemy we argue, is the price of admission.

But it is important to recognize that in the wake of the Danish Muhammad cartoons the word blasphemy was not introduced into discussion by those Muslims said to take offense, but by the Western press. According to an analysis by anthropologist Talel Asad¹, the Islamic words most commonly translated as blasphemy (tajd_f, meaning to scoff at God's bounty, kufr, meaning unbelief, ridda, meaning apotasy, and ilh_d, meaning heresy) do not in fact apply to non-believers, and were not used by Arabic speakers in response to the Danish cartoons. Those that were used conveyed the type of secular offense we might feel when we or someone we love is slandered or sullied. Is_'ah, for example, which means "insult," is the word that was used by the World Union of Muslim Scholars in their complaint.

Our English word blasphemy has the Greek root blasphemeo, "to injure a reputation." We also get our word “blame” from this root. It is essentially a synonym with “slander,” a word with Latin roots. The reason one has ecclesiastical connotations and the other does not, has mostly to do with historical vicissitudes, similar to the ones that gave us the Saxon words “pig” and “cow” for livestock, and the French words “bacon” and “beef” for the same animals on our plates.

If we rephrase the question, then, “What is Slander, or Defamation Today?” we get a much more straightforward answer. Certain kinds of defamation, such as libel, are actionable by law in secular modern society. Others have less formal recourse, like the demand for an apology after an ad hominem attack. They are hardly foreign, outmoded concepts. We negotiate them daily. And, crucially, free speech is not an adequate defense for their violation.

Here we come up against the problem cited above. How can we simultaneously employ critique in the service of our values, like justice, freedom, and truth, while simultaneously denying it access to our highest (most sacred) places of value? How can we “rationalize” our highest values without exposing them to criticism--even mockery, if necessary? And yet, how can we perpetuate their value without protecting them from such assaults?

Intellectually, the problem seems silly. The truth always survives scrutiny, no worse for wear. If a thing of value cannot survive criticism, it never was meant to be exalted. But not all criticism is created equal. Generally speaking, it cannot be too personal. I can perhaps critique broad ideas of female sexuality in a painting or photograph. But if I want to make the “statement” that I think your sister is a slut by painting a lewd billboard of her across from your house, I have crossed from critique into defamation, by moving from the abstract to the particular.

To atheists and other secularists, "god" is an idea, a concept. To the religious, He, She, or It, is a relation of value. In the former context no real defamation is possible, just as one cannot defame in any visceral way the idea of democracy or equal rights (though one can infringe the rights of certain groups or individuals.) In the latter, can we imagine that critique may feel personal in the same way that it does in the case of the slander of our sister, or other loved one? We have to consider that some critiques run the risk of feeling like infringements, of in fact being infringements. However much we may disagree with the concept of copyright protection, for example, freedom of expression does not permit us to critique it by breaching it. If we want to criticize the taboo against child pornography, we are not permitted to do so by depicting it. We must adopt other modes of argument to make our point.

By calling the infringement “blasphemy,” however, we detach the realm of the religious from the kind of secular protections we take for granted. Blasphemy has no standing in secular modernity; its infringement thereby has no meaning. Ironically, the case against blasphemy often tries to cast it as a “special right,” since religious relations of value are not shared universally across cultures. We can fruitfully compare this to the attempts by religious conservatives to cast gay rights (the right to marry, the right not to be discriminated against in work or housing) as likewise“special,” because not normative.

Here for example, is Ophelia Benson, with a solicited response to the question raised this week at CiF Belief. Blasphemy, writes Benson, is a “privilege,” and an unjustified one at that.

Notions of blasphemy operate to keep religions shielded from questioning and criticism, and that's a frankly terrible arrangement. Religions are human institutions that make enormous, searching, pervasive demands on their members, backed up by the putative authority of a god or gods. This is the very last sort of institution that should be immune to criticism. (my emphasis)

Apart from the reference to the authority of gods, this could be a discussion of any number of human institutions: banks, congresses, universities, armed services, the UN. While granting that divine authority often serves to stifle dissent, we still need to ask if the kind of “shielding” this promotes is really so unique. Thomas Jefferson itemized in the Declaration of Independence a number of self-evident truths that are just as hard to refute though they don't resort to specifically divine provenance. On what grounds do you refute the "self-evident"? And the institution of criticism itself is famously immune to criticism itself, being about as subject to evaluation by such means as Epimenides (the Cretan)'s statement that “all Cretans are Liars.” Criticizing criticism is like, in Julian Jaynes' image, shining a flashlight in a dark room in search of an unilluminated spot.

It would be more accurate to say that religions have no more or less right to be criticized than other human institutions. But as we saw with Russell Blackford's remarks, there runs a sentiment that religious speech is objectively less valuable than other forms. The term Blackford used was “the right to be suspicious of religion,” which in a free society shouldn't rank any higher (or lower) than the right to be suspicious of one's corn flakes. But with secular modernity comes a self-affirming bias just as powerful as the ecclesiastical biases it usurped. Benson's version of the phrase, which she uttered to me in a pleasingly civil exchange in comments, was that the experience of taking offense “is trumped by the need to criticize religion.” (my emphasis)

What seems to have creeped in here is the implication that free speech protections are justified not by the speech act itself, but by the consequences of that speech. Criticism of religion, then, has a double warrant, firstly on grounds of freedom of expression, and secondly on grounds of its probative value. But this is troubling. If we begin to add the criterion that certain types of speech are good for us, we embark on a whole new program of censorship. Suddenly the more noble speech (from a certain point of view) like criticism of religion has more of a privilege to expression, ceteris paribus, than ignoble speech, like the Nazis marching in Skokie, or whatever most recent terrible thing some bishop or ayatollah has said. In this scheme, the spirit of freedom of expression has been abandoned. (Andrew Brown chronicles just such a double standard in action, here.)

It may be every bit as true as we hear it from Ophelia Benson and Russell Blackford that religion is backward and oppressive and antagonistic to the ethos of secular modern society. It may have no other redeeming values. But modernity cannot simultaneously take the position that free expression is a universal right, and at the same time promote a hierarchy of value for that expression. This means that when it comes time to evaluate the competing claims of freedom of speech and the right to property (as with copyright), or propriety (as with libel), or privacy, or the right to a fair trial, or select others, that standards as similar as possible to one another be applied. We don't peremptorily dismiss concerns that might be closely analogous to our own by deprecating them as archaic, and then congratulate ourselves for defending liberal doctrines of fairness and equality. That would be downright medieval.

¹These observations, and others inspiring my comments here, are taken from his 2006 paper, "Reflections on Blasphemy and Secular Criticism" which was published in the 2008 anthology Religion: Beyond a Concept (Hent de Vries, ed.)

On Umbrage, Part 2

2010-01-09T17:12:00.004-06:00

If we imagine for a moment that an international newspaper had published cartoons in 2005 depicting Obama--or Mandela--with a bone in his nose, Hillary Clinton--or Angela Merkel--as a warted witch, or Abe Foxman as Shylock, most of us would have little trouble accepting the warrant for an apology by the editor without feeling that we were compromising our commitment to free expression.

This is not an especially original point, but it serves a solid place to stand when asking why we should specifically privilege, as Russell Blackford suggests, a right to "suspicion of religion:"

People in Western democracies (or, arguably, anywhere else) should have every right to be suspicious of religion, or of a particular religion, and the right to express their suspicion in whatever form they find most natural - including by way of satire or mockery. They should then have the right to stick to their guns and refuse to apologise, even if somebody takes offence.

[...]

[Holm] would do better to stand up for the right of Danes such as Westergaard to be suspicious of religion - and to express it openly if it's what they feel.

If Danes, or any of us, have a "right to be suspicious" of religion, it is only as a particular instance of the right to believe (or feel) whatever we like. It is not any more intrinsically noble than the right to be suspicious of foreigners, or infidels; of Communists, or gays, or anyone different from oneself. This is the bargain of pluralistic modernity: such rights are universal, and substitutable. What we allow to one we must allow to all, however heinous to our sensibilities.

Closely associated with the right to belief is the right to expression, though the transition between them is marked by certain restrictions, depending on the jurisdiction. In most cases, copyright infringement, child pornography and incitement to violence are not allowed in expression, though they cannot be dislodged from private belief.

But there is, in the democratic modernist tradition, no specific appeal to "suspicion" that allows us to defend some offensive remarks and condemn others. If suspicion is our warrant, then it applies as equally to the paranoid schizophrenic as to the anti-religious secularist. The attitude that holding Muhammad in piety as a prophet directly leads to acts of terrorism is not distinguishable from the attitude that that black skin correlates to barbarity or low IQ, homosexuality to promiscuity, or gypsy "blood" to thievery.

So it is too with the "right to offend" which often comes up alongside this topic. We all have it, and it cannot be taken away. But neither can it be selectively applied to our pet biases. We have no greater right to offend than the worst among us. I've fought in my share of flame wars, and don't have enough hairs on my head to count the number of times one disputant has asked another to "take back" some ad hominem remark. Often enough the request comes from the same people who now deny those offended by the Muhammad cartoons any such claim.

The truth is that none of us, aside from possibly a few random sociopaths, really believes that civility must always take a back seat to the right to expression. We all want to be treated with respect, and while we tolerate breaches in the observance just to get through the day in a society of imperfect persons, we also all have a breaking point, where we must finally insist on a shred of dignity. You may be suspicious of my breaking point, and I yours. Perhaps you're faking, to get ahead in the argument, or perhaps I am just impossibly over-sensitive. But what a lie it would be to pretend that beneath such deceits lurks no actual meaningful capacity for offense or humiliation.

Of course we have the right to "stick to our guns" and refuse to apologize when we have offended someone. Some amount of offense is unquestionably a good thing, especially if it leads to greater reflection and understanding, as with satire. But here we can take some inspiration from the apology's etymological forebear, the apologia, which sidesteps blame for the umbrage taken, in order to try to improve understanding of the intention. Here's New Yorker editor David Remnick in a Huffington Post interview just after the "fist bump" cover in 2008:

Normally I'd want the work to speak for itself — normally I'd not want to explain jokes, or short stories, or a piece of non-fiction that we publish — people always read things the way they're going to read them. In this case, since I see that it's stirred the pot somewhat, and some people have misinterpreted it very quickly, I'm talking to you. The image tries to be as clear a possible the title tries to make sure of that.

[...]

I respect people's reactions — I'm just trying to as calmly and as clearly as possible talk about what this image means and what it was intended to mean and what I think most people will see — when they think it through — that it means. The fact is, it's not a satire about Obama - it's a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama.

New Statesman editor Peter Wilby, in responding to a highly criticized 2002 cover, rightly saw the perception of antisemitism as an obstacle to the editorial remarks his magazine had intended:

We (or, more precisely, I) got it wrong. The cover was not intended to be anti-Semitic; the New Statesman is vigorously opposed to racism in all its forms. But it used images and words in such a way as to create unwittingly the impression that the New Statesman was following an anti-Semitic tradition that sees the Jews as a conspiracy piercing the heart of the nation. I doubt very much that one single person was provoked into hatred of Jews by our cover. But I accept that a few anti-Semites (as some comments on our website, quickly removed, suggested) took aid and comfort when it appeared that their prejudices were shared by a magazine of authority and standing. Moreover, the cover upset very many Jews, who are right to feel that, in the fight against anti-Semitism in particular and racism in general, this magazine ought to be on their side.
(My emphasis)

In October 2009, Kurt Westergaard, too, tried to effect a sort of apologia, but note the difference in tone:

My cartoon was construed as an attempt to hurt the feelings of every Muslim in the world. That was never my intention. My picture was an attempt to expose those fanatics who have justified a great number of bombings, murders and other atrocities with reference to the sayings of their prophet. If many Muslims thought that their religion did not condone such acts, they might have stood up and declared that the men of violence had misrepresented the true meaning of Islam. Very few of them did so. (my emphasis)

This bears a passing resemblance to the defense, in having perpetuated a stereotype, that one was only trying to make a point about some Jews, or some blacks, though the stereotype itself makes no such distinction. Westergaard cannot stop himself, in the bolded passage from calling out those he has offended for not differentiating themselves enough from terrorists. Who's "blaming the victim" now? In fact his langauge ("if... /they might...") seems to betray a suspicion that despite their protest, "many Muslims" do condone terrorist acts in the name of Islam, despite his earlier insistence that he was editorializing only about "fanatics."

It is probable that Westergaard is just confused, and has not fully worked out his thoughts and feelings about Muslims. My intention here is not to take him to task for that, but to ask if civility and free speech are really at such odds that we must pit them against each other in a zero-sum contest. Is it not possible to condemn specific expressions, and even ask for their retraction, without being accused of censorship? Are there not certain things that should not have been said, regardless of our right to say them? If we cannot discuss these things in hindsight, then it will be all that much more difficult to discuss them in foresight, leaving us in the position of having to compulsively say everything that we are able, without evaluating our own motives, and any possible consequences.

On Umbrage

2010-01-07T13:31:00.003-06:00

I agree with Russell Blackford that journalist Nancy Graham Holm is wrong to put the blame on Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard for the attempt on his life last week. The attempted murderer had recourse to every bit as much free will as Westergaard did when drawing the cartoon, however much that may be. The law protects Westergaard's free speech, and rightly so, and there is no provision to justify his attacker's assault, which was coolly premeditated.

However, I think that the explicit analogy Russell (and his commenters) make to other "innocent" victims of assault paints a distorted picture of the dynamics of the Jyllands-Posten affair.

It is a fact of the world that we in Western democracies share it with hundreds of millions in honor societies who are in direct dialogue and communication with us through globalized media, though the conversation tends to be fairly one-sided. This is perhaps to be deplored, especially the last part. But are we doing all we can to communicate why it is to be deplored? The appeals to free speech that pertain to this conflict generally presume it is self-evident, as it is many of us. It is less so to those who did not grow up praising its virtues.

In Islam and Democracy, Fatima Mernessi writes of a deep distrust of Western Democracy in Arab societies, conjuring as it does memories of the Kharijite "seceders" of the early Caliphate. The Kharijites bore many superficial resemblances to the revolutionaries of Jacobin France and Colonial America, advocating, often through violent means, the right of the people to oppose unjust or corrupt rule. Unlike the revolutionaries of America and France (and so many others that followed), the Kharijites were on the wrong side of history. As a result, the word "Kharijite" has the same connotations through most of the Arab-speaking world that anarchist or vigilante does in Western lands. (If we want to relate to these sentiments we can easily recall our own trials with secessionist movements and so-called "states rights." Establishing what "the people" want in a democratic society has never been easy to define, or apply.)

Western Democracy is, of course, not a very accurate analogy to Kharijism, which had very little to do with Droits des Hommes and human rights, generally. But the association persists, perhaps helped along by the fact that, historically, Western Democracies have been reluctant to promote those same values outside their borders as within. Declarations of "universal human rights" are bound to sound more hollow in the ears of those who remember that it was a Western "Democracy" that carved up the Ottoman Empire into client states, another that installed the Shah of Iran. Paraphrasing their uneasy neighbors, it might be an understandable question to ask about democracy, what's in it for the Arabs?

There's a good answer to that question. But has it been given? This is a separate issue from whether Westergaard had a right to publish his cartoon, as of course he did. Westergaard was not the cause, in some deterministic way, of the attempt on his life. But neither does he exist entirely removed from the web of causation that led to it. Singling out only free speech concerns, as Blackford does in his piece (and as Hitchens does, here) evades a consideration of the great and ongoing conflict of which the Jylland-Postens affair was a symptom. This conflict has less to do with religion, generally, or with specific religions, than it does with competing definitions of what is, and should be, held sacred.

This is a complex context which Westergaard does not engage by going on speaking tours about the Muhammad cartoon affair with the rather self-congratulatory message that "Muslims need to develop a sense of humor." Perhaps they do. But is there no part of us that can sympathize with the tendency to take umbrage? (I speak here of only a civil, lawful umbrage). Blackford spends a few sentences expressing empathy for Westgaard's 5-year old granddaughter who was present at the time of the attack. In doing so he appeals to our universal sense that there is something sacred about innocence and childhood that needs to be protected. It is not difficult to imagine, if we wish, a cartoon which would depict a violation of those values. It is harder to imagine any newspaper running them. It is harder still to imagine that any of Westergaard's defenders would appreciate being told they have no right to be offended by such depictions.

It detracts nothing from the virtue of free speech to point out that in every society it must be contextualized; it must have limits. These limits are not easy to proscribe, and I don't argue here that any should have been applied to censor the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. I merely wish to point out that to some readers in and outside Denmark, some of these cartoons constituted the same proportion of offense as the worst things we can imagine being printed or broadcast, and which are in fact commonly regulated in Democracies, if not altogether banned, for the common good. Blasphemy is not a subspecies of obscenity in our dominant culture, but to many others it remains one, and we don't improve our understanding of the problems we face in trying to expand and enlarge the protection of human rights by pretending this is not so.

Nancy Graham Holm makes this point clumsily in her Guardian article, along the way appearing to unjustly blame Westergaard for the attempt on his life, and needlessly characterizing Danes as generally bigoted toward religious Muslims. But her argument is not totally without merit. It is true that "intentional humiliation is an aggressive act," and whether or not it is defensible by law is not our only concern when considering how to promote greater harmony and human rights not just in our own privileged enclaves, but worldwide.

Let Us Now Scold Famous Men

2010-01-03T13:56:00.005-06:00

[updated 1/4/10: see footnote]

Katie Roiphe compares the libidos of the present generation of male American writers to that of Roth, Updike and Mailer and finds them wanting.

Back in 1994 when Roiphe published her polemic on date rape, The Morning After, Katha Pollitt dismissed it in The New Yorker as mere argument from anecdote: some women Roiphe knew had questionable grounds for using the word "rape," therefore (Pollitt's account of TMA continues) the date-rape crisis was overblown, QED. This criticism was not entirely fair. Beneath Roiphe's bravado lay a more complex and nuanced rebuke of the sexual climate of the time. But Pollitt was right to take Roiphe to task for over-relying on her own social Umwelt, and for not being more meticulous with her data on so charged and influential a subject.

15 years later, Roiphe has not cast aside the impulse. She opens her article with the claim that "It has become popular to denounce [male post-war American writers], and more particularly to deride the sex scenes in their novels." In support of this grand thesis, she leads with this somewhat limp substantiation:

After reading a sex scene in Philip Roth’s latest novel, “The Humbling,” someone I know threw the book into the trash on a subway platform.

This account is allowed to stand, alone*, as proof of concept, until the concluding paragraphs of Roiphe's essay, when she finally gets around to mentioning that some of the younger authors she has been discussing also have some desultory things to say about Updike and company. (The most famous example is David Foster Wallace's 1997 essay on Updike in the New York Observer, from which we are almost tempted to draw the conclusion that Wallace has trouble distinguishing the essayist-omniscient voice from that of the unreliable narrator.)

But for all its haphazard documentation, Roiphe's point is a good one. There is a sexually neuter quality to the male American novel today, or at least to the ones that are read and talked about, and constitute the canon of literary homestands like McSweeney's, The Believer or n+1. Death and loss may still lurk (however mutedly) as the wellsprings of conflict and struggle, but they have been uncoupled (*ahem*) from the erotic.

Roiphe seems inclined to blame the "puritanical" writers she has in mind--David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Safron Foer, among others--for chickening out, for preferring the "noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world." But these men (who she calls boys) did not foist themselves upon us, Svengali-style (just as Updike, Roth, and Mailer did not). They had agents, publishers, and--most importantly--readers.

There are other novelists--Nicholson Baker, for example, or William Vollman (each born within a few years of Franzen and DFW)--who have not shied from writing protagonists full of sexual zeal. Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerny likewise have not. But though all have been praised at earlier points in their career, their books have for one reason or another fallen out of fashion. The reasons are surely not simple, but apart from a generation of writers with erotic ambivalence, we are also faced with a generation of readers with the same aspect, which seems to me the far more interesting phenomenon.

* In the print version of Roiphe's essay there is a note (available online here) clarifying that she is responding not just to comments by her friends but also to recent reviews of Roth's latest novel.

Not silent enough

2009-12-24T12:24:00.002-06:00

Real elitists go to Tin Pan Alley.

You only had to be of moderate perceptive gifts as a listener of Prairie Home Companion to see this coming [via Ed Brayton]. Garrison Keillor vomits all over the creche, sputtering about "elites" monkeying with the sacred Christmas songs, in collusion with Jews* and Unitarians, and it's all Ralph Waldo Emerson's fault. By comparison, here is Keillor's meditation on humility and commonness:

Christmas is a Christian holiday -- if you're not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don't mess with the Messiah.

Happy Holidays!

Playing Grinch to Keillor's Scrooge are the noble minds at the Freedom from Religion Foundation, who placed this sign among the nativities, menorahs and trees (there is even a Festivus pole) at the Illinois state capitol building:

At the time of the winter solstice, let reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is just myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

Space apparently did not permit the full intended statement, which concluded

If I could work my will... every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding.

We all of course have a sacred right in the US to mock other people's beliefs, and also tell them their kids are ugly. Let a thousand flowers bloom. But if atheists want to be taken seriously as a force for Good and as a potential successor to "myth and superstition," perhaps they can consider the subtext, in conjunction with the all-important veracity, of their statements. As secularized as Christmas has become, much to the irritation of both Garrison Keillor's and Bill O'Reilly's bowels, as universal as have become its appeals to peace and fellowship, there is really no better candidate for a time of fucking truce in the metaphysical wars.

In the worst of all worlds, the trenches of Europe in 1915, French, German and British soldiers took it on themselves to enact a de facto armistace despite the refusal of their commanders to halt the fighting. According to one account, "they visited each other through disused trench tunnels, and exchanged wine, cognac and cigarettes for Westphalian black bread, biscuits and ham." If you have to bite your cheek for a few days--Garrison, Bill, PZ--to make nice for a few days with the other benighted fools who regrettably share your DNA, yo can at least take solace in the knowledge that it's only temporary, and the shelling will resume before you know it. You can always take inspiration from Captain Blackadder, who, reminiscing four years after the 1914 Christmas truce ("after which millions of peopls have died"), is still collicky about the football match they played:

Remember it? How could I forget it? I was never offside! I could not believe that decision.

* In fairness, his mock-Rosh Hashannah couplet puts Adam Sandler to shame: "Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we'll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah"

Snakes do it

2009-12-20T11:08:00.003-06:00

Earlier I cited the example of Conrad Waddington's experiments with fruit flies in the 30s and 40s to illustrate the under-appreciated biological principle of "genetic assimilation." But more recent work [via Not Exactly Rocket Science] by two researchers from the University of Sydney, Fabien Aubret and Richard Shine, has demonstrated the same effect, indicating that Waddington's work may finally be getting its due.

Over the course of a number of ongoing studies, Aubret and Shine have taken as their subject the tiger snake (Notechis scutatus), a venomous snake found in Southern Australia. About 9,000 years ago, one island population of tiger snakes were cut off from mainland by rising sea levels. More recently (30 to 90 years ago), a newer population of tiger snakes has found their way to other nearby islands. By comparing these populations and introducing them experimentally to a variety of foods sources, Aubret and Shine have shown interesting differences in how each responds developmentally to new environmental conditions.

On the islands, the tiger snakes' available prey tend to be larger than on the mainland, necessitating larger heads*, and, indeed, as we might expect, the snakes in the island populations tend to have larger heads than those on the mainland. Classical neo-Darwinian theory would explain this character difference by suggesting that snakes with genes for bigger head size were differentially selected in island habitats over those with genes for smaller head size. Instead, Aubret and Shine found that the more recently introduced populations were able to "adapt" their head size accordingly during their own neo-natal development, owing to an inherent plasticity in their genome regarding head size.

Snakes in the older populations, however, tended to be born with larger heads, and showed much less variability when exposed to food sources of varying sizes-they is, they could not be induced to develop smaller heads neo-natally. The plasticity of the trait of "head size" appears to have vanished in this population, presumably because the genetic variability underlying it has been lost.

Plasticity is nothing new. We are well aware of its role underlying common human traits like the capacity to grow callouses when the skin is exposed to friction, or to tan when exposed to sunlight. Neither is the loss of plasticity anything rare or exotic. We are all born with the bottoms of our feet pre-calloused, for example, which is probably another case of genetic assimilation that happened long, long ago. (Similar in utero callosities are found on the knees of ostriches, for example, who have a tendency to kneel a lot on hot sand.)

While plasticity in itself does not contradict standard selfish-gene selectionism, it indicates serious difficulties with some of its underlying metaphors. Richard Dawkins has often remarked that we should view the genome as the recipe for a cake. This suggestion often arises in the context of whether or not Dawkins is a "genetic determinist." Older metaphors, like "program" or "blueprint" imply, in Dawkins' words, "point-for-point specification of some end product," with such precise one-to-one mapping that this product can be reverse engineered. Not so with the recipe**: "You can't isolate a blob [of cake] and seek one word of the recipe that 'determines' that blob. All the words of the recipe, taken together with all the ingredients, combine to form the whole."

Such a metaphor admittedly allows for non-genetic influences from the environment. A "successful" cake relies upon an accurate recipe, a competent baker, and the right conditions in the kitchen (temperature, humidity, a reliable oven without "hot spots"). But then, too, so does the successful house rely upon not just blueprints but competent contractors, the right tools, good subsoil...

Whatever their differences, what both blueprint and recipe share is a lack of variability. A house is meant to come out a certain way, and so is a cake. We can tell when they've been made wrong. There is only the plan/blueprint/recipe, and intererence with that plan. What differentiates the genome from a recipe or blueprint is that there is more than one possible plan, more than one right answer to the question, say, "how big should the snake's head be?" Genomes consist of potentialities, not instructions. John Dupre has proposed the metaphor of the genome as a reference library (though he concedes that this metaphor promotes the false impression that the genome is entirely passive, rather than one component, among many, of a system without centralization.) Whatever metaphor we adopt, however, will hopefully be free of the essentialism that has long dominated gene-talk. An organism is not the "product" of its genes, it is an expression of its genes in dialogue with a particular environment.

* This means there are really two adaptations under consideration: the behavioral one of selecting novel prey, and the physiological one of having a larger head to eat it with. The question of how an organism could fortuitously develop complementary behavioral and physical changes was one that also occupied Waddington's thought. For example, camouflage is of no use if the organism won't hide in the right places, and vice versa.

** Actually a good pastry chef can reverse engineer a cake, by analyzing not the physical construction of the crumb, but its qualities--lightness, richness, cell structure, etc.