September 2010

Who Are You Going to Believe, Me or Your Lying Eyes?

By in philosophy, science

Anthony Gottlieb:

No group of believers has more reason to be sure of its own good sense than today’s professional scientists. There is, or should be, no mystery about why it is always more rational to believe in science than in anything else, because this is true merely by definition. What makes a method of enquiry count as scientific is not that it employs microscopes, rats, computers or people in stained white coats, but that it seeks to test itself at every turn. If a method is as rigorous and cautious as it can be, it counts as good science; if it isn’t, it doesn’t. Yet this fact sets a puzzle. If science is careful scepticism writ large, shouldn’t a scientific cast of mind require one to be sceptical of science itself?
There is no full-blown logical paradox here. If a claim is ambitious, people should indeed tread warily around it, even if it comes from scientists; it does not follow that they should be sceptical of the scientific method itself. But there is an awkward public-relations challenge for any champion of hard-nosed science. When scientists confront the deniers of evolution, or the devotees of homeopathic medicine, or people who believe that childhood vaccinations cause autism—all of whom are as demonstrably mistaken as anyone can be—they understandably fight shy of revealing just how riddled with error and misleading information the everyday business of science actually is. When you paint yourself as a defender of the truth, it helps to keep quiet about how often you are wrong.
…At the end of her book “Science: A Four Thousand Year History” (2009), Patricia Fara of Cambridge University wrote that “there can be no cast-iron guarantee that the cutting-edge science of today will not represent the discredited alchemy of tomorrow”. This is surely an understatement. If the past is any guide—and what else could be?—plenty of today’s science will be discredited in future. There is no reason to think that today’s practitioners are uniquely immune to the misconceptions, hasty generalisations, fads and hubris that marked most of their predecessors.
…Happily, there is another way out of the impasse between fallible science and even-more-fallible non-science. The contest is not a zero-sum game: the shortcomings of science do not make it rational to believe cranks instead. It’s a fair bet that many of today’s scientific beliefs are wrong, but only your grandchildren will know which ones, and in the meantime, science is the only game in town.
Well, yeah. Seems like an unnecessarily roundabout way of arriving at that conclusion, but okay. I’m not sure how many people there are who hold some belief in the infallibility of today’s science; I certainly don’t know any myself, and I suspect a lot of them have straw sticking out from their raggedy shirtsleeves and pantlegs in any event. Too often, though, when you hear someone placing emphasis on the imperfect nature of science, it’s being used as a way of trying to keep a foot in the door so that their preferred illogical, irrational belief can sneak back in.
You’re at some large gathering. Noisy, crowded, lots of things to pull at your attention. You hear what sounds like a familiar voice in the general din, turn and see someone through the haze and crowd, standing with her back to you, and recognize her as your friend. You decide to mischievously surprise her with a sly pinch on her ass. One close look and one stinging slap to the cheek later, you realize your mistake. If you’re René Descartes, the lesson you take away from this, and one that is for some reason treated with the utmost respect and gravity by important thinkers for centuries to come, is that your senses can be misleading and therefore can’t be trusted to give you absolute certainty. But how do we know that the senses can mislead us? By further application of the very same senses. You realized that wasn’t your friend after getting close enough to see her shocked face and hear her voice more clearly as she yelped in outrage, using the same eyes and ears that initially gave you the wrong impression. There’s no other method for obtaining that information.
In the same way, we discover our mistakes in science by continuing to apply the same standards of evidence and rationality. There is no divine revelation, no thunderclap of sudden awareness from out of nowhere that clues us in. It’s true that there is no absolute certainty (or at least no way for us to know of it, if you want to throw a bone to Kant here), but science has the reputation it does because it’s repeatedly proven itself to be the best way we know to get reliable, practical understanding of the reality we inhabit. Whatever shortcomings or failures it has to own up to do not mean the door is open to any incoherent fantasy or wishful thinking being just as epistemologically valid.

Wu Wei

By in waiting for the barbarians

Strangely, Bush’s most impressive real achievement in that period was in tamping down the domestic backlash against Muslims.

I’m surprised she, of all people, keeps repeating this. The only thing he “did” to keep it tamped down was to be a white Republican president. The wingnuts I know brush off his public statements about Islam being a religion of peace, etc. as something he had to say to appease liberals, not something he really meant. (No, I don’t know why they think he had to appease them on this particular issue when he was perfectly content to rub their noses in their own cowardice and uselessness otherwise, but that’s what they tell me.) They kept a lid on it themselves because they trusted the white, Republican, Christian cowboy to keep them safe. Once he was gone, the reactionary id came sproinging out like a paranoid, racist jack-in-the-box.

We Also Know There Are Known Unknowns

By in books, calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, writing

Chris Graham:

The problem for the librarian, no less than for the career consultant, the occupational health and safety supervisor, and the beleaguered investment banker, is that the notion of a “work-life balance” is a terrible false dichotomy, the Marxist equivalent of giving all your chips away before the deck is even shuffled and then borrowing from the dealer to buy a round for the table. It is manifestly impossible to divide one’s life into neat or even approximately spherical compartments (how many New York Times crossword puzzles have been completed with a “Eureka!” exclaimed while on the family dog’s midnight promenade), and the decision to deny the obvious is generally employed by those who actually know better, which is why they are forever unsatisfied with the level of the scales. While it is plainly true that one can read a book more or less closely (substitute a beach blanket and a daiquiri for a pencil and a desk), it is equally true that something of everything we read is retained, to be recalled, by chance more often than design, on some or another future occasion, a dinner conversation, a tutorial essay, or a game of Trivial Pursuit. As every student who has written an examination knows all too well, it is impossible to predict when the most felicitous recollections – legend has it, the essential ingredients in the making of a “Congratulatory First” – will occur, but the chances are most assuredly increased in direct proportion to the number of books we read.
Even, just for pleasure.
As Heywood once said about spelling ability, I would say about intellectual ability — there’s no substitute for always having your nose in a book. The more you read, even if “only” for pleasure, the more you’re exposed to different ways of thinking and expression, to references that lead to further illumination after striking your curiosity. I’m continually surprised at how many forgotten words, phrases, passages, books, and blog posts spring to my attention from somewhere deep in my subconscious at just the slightest oblique trigger. The more you read, the more stuff you have in your mental basement waiting to be hauled out and dusted off.
But the phrase “reading for pleasure” itself has a little bit of a sneer to it, an implicit conviction that stuff we really like isn’t good for us, and vice versa. The “blood, sweat and tears” school of intellectual achievement. The angry, suspicious ghost of John Calvin, hostile to anything pleasurable, warning of idle hands – or minds, as the case may be – doing the devil’s work. But as Graham says, we often don’t know what’s going to make the deepest impression on us, what’s going to become an important hub in a wheel of thoughts. I’ve read scholarly books that I honestly can’t say enhanced my understanding of a subject at all, whereas there have been comics documentary, graphic nonfiction books that have given me those “Eureka!” moments he mentioned. And I will always name Calvin & Hobbes as one of my biggest intellectual influences.
Even then, I don’t mean to sound like I’m saying that it’s tolerable to read less weighty material as long as you manage to achieve some practical result from doing so. Sometimes, you need to just read for fun. For the entertainment of a good story and language. For the pure, exuberant fuck of it. I mix my serious reading with Forgotten Realms fantasy novels or Simpsons comics all the time.
And really, I’ve found that nothing makes reading feel like work more than a terrible writer, regardless of the topic. If you’re really interested in a subject, and you find a writer who can make it come to life with engaging prose, well, then! You’ve got it made. I remember reading one of Isaiah Berlin’s books in a veterinarian’s office once, and she asked me if I was reading it for school or something. When I said no, she gave me the most incredulous look and asked why I would bother. I guess it would have been insulting if it hadn’t been so funny, the way she almost acted affronted by it. Why would anyone think or read if they weren’t being forced to?! Oh, well, her loss.

Mama Weer All Crazee Now

By in augean stables, media/propaganda, religion, samesecks

One of these kids is doing his own thing
C’mon, can you tell me which one?
Can you guess which kid is doing his own thing?
Before my song is done?
And now my song is done.
– Sesame Street
On the Daily Show the other night, Jon Stewart and John Oliver discussed Terry Jones, the would-be Koran-burning pastor, by comparing him to other “lunatic” Christian preachers.
– Fred Phelps, famous for his “God Hates Fags” obsession and for taking his congregation of Midwestern bibletards around the country to picket people’s funerals for attention.
– Pat Robertson, famous for…oh, hell, just go read one of the many “Greatest Hits” compilations floating around out there.
– Jeremiah Wright, famous for being Barack Obama’s former pastor, and for suggesting that the HIV virus might have been deliberately created as a government conspiracy against black people, which isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds given other black experiences with government doctors. He also claimed that white people generally have no sense of rhythm, the crazy bastard. But what really pissed people off about him, and what prompted Obama’s public renunciation of him, is when he suggested that the September 11th attacks were motivated by American foreign policy. Oh, no he dih’unt! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
Stewart is probably the best pundit we have, and as I said before, I don’t expect him to be a radical firebrand, but sometimes this faux-evenhandedness really grates on my nerves.
…adding, what Glenn said.

Chain Chain Chain

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, technology, writing

Scott Rosenberg:

Links have become an essential part of how I write, and also part of how I read. Given a choice between reading something on paper and reading it online, I much prefer reading online: I can follow up on an article’s links to explore source material, gain a deeper understanding of a complex point, or just look up some term of art with which I’m unfamiliar.
There is, I think, nothing unusual about this today. So I was flummoxed earlier this year when Nicholas Carr started a campaign against the humble link, and found at least partial support from some other estimable writers (among them Laura Miller, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jason Fry and Ryan Chittum). Carr’s “delinkification” critique is part of a larger argument contained in his book “The Shallows.” I read the book this summer and plan to write about it more. But for now let’s zero in on Carr’s case against links, on pages 126-129 of his book as well as in his “delinkification” post.
The nub of Carr’s argument is that every link in a text imposes “a little cognitive load” that makes reading less efficient. Each link forces us to ask, “Should I click?” As a result, Carr wrote in the “delinkification” post, “People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form.”
This appearance of the word “hypertext” is a tipoff to one of the big problems with Carr’s argument: it mixes up two quite different visions of linking.
…For Carr and his sympathizers, links impede understanding; I believe that they deepen it. Back in 1997 Steven Johnson (in his book “Interface Culture”) made the case for links as a tool for synthesis — “a way of drawing connections between things,” a device that creates “threads of association,” a means to bring coherence to our overflowing cornucopia of information. The Web’s links don’t make it a vast wasteland or a murky shallows; they organize and enrich it.
…Links, you see, do so much more than just whisk us from one Web page to another. They are not just textual tunnel-hops or narrative chutes-and-ladders. Links, properly used, don’t just pile one “And now this!” upon another. They tell us, “This relates to this, which relates to that.”
Thank you. I remember reading about Carr’s campaign a while ago and being mystified. I’ve always loved the ability to link, for aesthetics as much as the extra informational content. Prose is able to flow much more smoothly when you don’t have to break it up in order to add a long-winded, explanatory parenthetical aside, and I find footnotes in a book to be far more distracting than links on a webpage.

At Least It’s an Ethos

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, philosophy, waiting for the barbarians

Julian Young:

What, according to the fourth Meditation, is wrong with modernity? It is, Nietzsche observes, vulgar (gemein) and money-grubbing, its denizens exhausted by overwork so that the typical demeanor of the passer-by in the city street is one of being ‘harried’. This is partly because, whereas formerly we looked at life from the eternal point of view, we now live in a newspaper (media) culture which barrages us with the events and agitations of the moment. Modern culture is permeated by boredom, ‘industrious boredom’ — because presumably (a) work is what we do nearly all of the time, and (b) modern work practices are intrinsically unsatisfying. That we are bored work-slaves generates a specific kind of art, in particular theater. It is forced to become a ‘lascivious antidote’ to the worker’s exhaustion and boredom. What the audience wants – and gets – is ‘bedazzlement, not art’.
…This is what modern German sociologists call the Erlebnisgesellschaft: the society of the frenzied quest for ‘experiences’, for cheap thrills. Without a communal ethos to give aspiration and meaning to one’s life, the only way of keeping boredom at bay is in the frenzied search for cheap thrills.
What, however, is actually wrong with ‘post-modernism, with being dominated by the ‘critical-historical’ spirit? Why should such a spirit be culture-destroying? What is wrong, Nietzsche says, is that by presenting us with a smörgåsbord of lifestyle options but with no evaluative ranking of them, it produces a mood of irony, cynicism and bewilderment which turns us into spectators rather than actors. Our culture becomes ‘senile’ since the critical-historical spirit destroys life’s ‘plastic powers’ — its ability to employ its past so as to nourish its future.
It’s kind of funny to see how the first paragraph describes one of the four essays of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. Not very untimely anymore, is it? Who hasn’t complained like that at some point? Hell, some people have made a literary name for themselves doing it.
And yet, although I don’t substantially disagree with any of the observations, I’ve never been sympathetic to what I see as the excessively romantic, backwards-looking mentality that almost inevitably accompanies them, especially when it becomes tangled up in some form of nationalism. Young’s book attempts to situate Nietzsche’s thoughts on religion within the context of nineteenth-century German völkisch thought. Of course, we all know what the negative aspect of that tradition eventually wrought upon the world. And how else can you see Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s current “restoring honor” project but as the last-ditch attempt of the American völk – i.e. white, socially conservative, middle-to-lower-class Protestants – to stave off their inevitable demographic decline (their cultural decline having been ongoing for a long time now)? Clearly, the answer is not to band together with people who look, talk and dress like me in hope of finding some sort of strength through homogeneity.
Are we just too knowledgeable and sophisticated now to go for these sorts of communal identifications or grandiose ideas? Have we reached a point where “existential meaning” for us simply amounts to living as comfortably as we can while giving as little offense as possible, tiptoeing through life in order to arrive safely at death, having been pleasantly amused, distracted and sated along the way? We can’t think our way back to naïveté or innocence, just like how it’s futile in my late thirties to daydream about recapturing some of the optimism and energy of my late teens. Those days are gone, and we have to move forward with what we know.
Have we ever even had an American culture, for that matter? Aside from the aforementioned white middle-class American Dream, which would have still probably been too shallow, pedestrian and money-grubbing for someone like Nietzsche, has there ever really been a binding myth that could be said to constitute the American identity? I guess what I’m asking is, is there really anything to regenerate in the first place? Or, speaking of Berman, did he have it right in his The Twilight of American Culture, and those of us with different values and visions are just going to have to retreat into semi-solitude, in the society but not of it?

Waste Not, Want Not

By in jests japes jokes jollies, religion, sex-you-all

I really don’t see what all the fuss is about here:

Long before she became the latest fascination of the political press and the cause-of-the-moment of the Tea Party movement, Christine O’Donnell (R-D.E.) was appearing on news outlets large and small extolling the sins of not just sex but masturbation.
The Delaware Republican, who is challenging Rep. Mike Castle in the state’s Senate primary and has earned the financial backing of a portion of the Tea Party movement, made an appearance in the MTV series “Sex In The 90s.” Entitled “The Safest Sex Of All,” the episode was ostensibly geared towards understanding the importance of abstinence. But O’Donnell’s guidance went a bit further. Masturbation, she argued, is not a moral substitute for sex. “The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can’t masturbate without lust.”
“The reason that you don’t tell [people] that masturbation is the answer to AIDS and all these other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is because again it is not addressing the issue,” she extrapolated. “You’re just gonna create somebody who is, I was gonna say, toying with his sexuality. Pardon the pun.”
I certainly don’t want to be one of those shallow atheists who have no idea what “serious” religious thinkers have said on all sorts of weighty issues, so I checked with one of the most widely-known and respected authorities of all time, Thomas Aquinas, and after seeing what he had to say, well, I’m afraid that even Ms. O’Donnell might be looking a little too bleeding-heart-liberal for my taste with meek disapproval like that:

St. Thomas Aquinas went so far as to consider masturbation as more evil than forcible rape. His reasoning was that even though forcible rape might cause injury to another person, it could still result in procreation and therefore could not be peccatum contra naturam (a crime against nature), whereas masturbation was definitely against nature since it could never result in procreation. Aquinas no doubt had this text in mind when he wrote in the 13th century that “right reason declares the appointed end of sexual acts in procreation.”

It’s not just teabaggers who have allowed liberal propaganda to cloud their moral vision here, though. Look how many versions of Matthew 19:12 use obfuscatory language to mislead their readers about what Jesus was asking of his followers! Thank goodness Origen, at least, has provided us with a heroic example for all good Christian men to aspire to.

Selfless, Selfmore

By in philosophy

Kurt Keefner:

Noë wants to break down mind-body/brain-body dualism, which is commendable. But in so doing, he verges on breaking down subject-object dualism: he wants to project mind out into the environment so our bodily-external tools become a part of us. I am reminded of when Sweeney Todd picks up his razor for the first time in years and cries “My arm is complete again!”
Still, I wouldn’t want to dismiss Noë’s extension of the mind completely. Perhaps without using the pernicious concept of mind, we could speak of different senses or extensions of the self. The core sense of self would be the living organism; in its environment, but distinct from it. The next sense of self would incorporate non-living parts of the self, such as the hair and nails. Here the cat’s whiskers serve as a biological analogy to the blind man’s cane. The third level of self would include our clothing and jewelery, which form part of our ‘person’. Fourth might be the tools we use naturally, such as a fork or a pencil and paper. One could take this further and include the things one identifies with, such as family and country – although such identifications are often problematic. Although there would be a solid notion of the person (conscious and bodily) as the primary sense of the self, we could be flexible about the boundaries for different uses of the word. I think this way of speaking would be more intuitive than super-sizing the mind. A framework along these lines would be flexible enough to handle tough cases: the amputee’s prosthetic limb is intimately part of his self insofar as it is strapped securely to him and responds to electrical stimulation from within him, unlike any other tool currently in use. At the same time, if the artificial limb were to be crushed, the amputee would not himself be hurt.
The definition of self along these lines would be a fascinating thing to explore. I would not want to dismiss the idea that some sense of the self can be larger than the bare organism, especially given the way technology will surely extend the self in decades to come. But I believe it is essential to preserve the idea of the natural person, especially in the face of a Cartesian materialism which would divide and destroy it.
I wonder if he’s aware how much exploration of this idea has already been done by Buddhist thinkers?

Show Your Work

By in atheism, augean stables, religion, science

Most of us have seen the movie Weekend at Bernie’s, right? Two guys going through all sorts of wacky hijinks in order to convince people that their dead boss is still alive, while going to hilariously desperate lengths to deflect any close scrutiny that might reveal the truth?

For some reason, I was reminded of that movie while reading this screed from Anthony McCarthy about religion and science.
Why is anyone paying attention to what Stephen Hawkings or most other scientists say about religion except on the basis of their presumed authority? And it’s the flimsiest kind of authority on the topic, based in a reputation gained in an entirely different field of study. As far as I have been able to see, Stephen Hawking has never published a scholarly paper on the subject in a reviewed journal so it’s not even passed that level of testing. Perhaps if he had tried his ideas in that academic realm he might have avoided limiting himself to one, very crude assumption about religious thinking, believing that all of it is as unaware of the vicissitudes of the study of religious questions as he obviously is.
Anyone who has read even a little of the rigorous, formal literature around various religions, would know that the contemporary critics of religion almost never have the slightest knowledge of what serious people have said on the topic.
Nameless contemporary critics “almost never” know what nameless “serious people” have said about it, eh? Well, that was most certainly, uh, precisely vague! As has been said many times before, it’s amusing to see how they don’t even bother trying to disguise this ridiculous double standard. The most unsophisticated, uneducated professions of faith are always accepted as valid and genuine; the most simpleminded believer is accepted to have had some meaningful experience of the truth of God’s existence. No one would think of scoffing at the faithful for daring to speak of their beliefs without having spent years in seminary first. Yet skeptics are constantly told that they must display intimate familiarity with the most irrelevant nuances of theological reasoning, from Augustine to Niebuhr, in front of a panel of judges who can hardly be said to be impartial, before their objections will be treated as “serious”. And you should be ashamed of yourself for suspecting that this is all just an elaborate exercise in keeping the goalposts in constant motion!
But lest you think I’m unsympathetic here, let me hasten to assure you that I know all too well what it is to suffer from this sort of doctrinaire purism. My sophomore-year geometry teacher, mathematical fascist that she was, repeatedly refused to consider the ornate brilliance of my thirty-step proofs, dogmatically insisting that I had failed to establish my given! So I fully appreciate how tiring it must be to have to listen to these philistines nattering on about how you need to provide some evidence that we should even take the idea of an invisible deity seriously to begin with before we can move to discussing all his/her/its glorious attributes.
Okay, seriously though, fine. It’s simple, really — put up or shut up. Devise whatever standardized religious literacy test you want. Name whoever you want as a “serious” source for us to familiarize ourselves with. I guarantee you there won’t be any problem finding an atheist who can ace it. Hell, we can start with an agnostic like Bart Ehrman right off the bat. Anything else you want to complain about?
Not a single law of science is anything other than the product of human thought. Not a single one of them has been developed except within a realm which excludes everything but what we can discover of the physical universe. I believe that exclusion is based in our experience and the extension of our logic, which, itself, is a means to address our experience of the physical universe.
…A passage in the Book of Isaiah that often comes to mind when thinking about this topic, is when God is said to have said, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,”. Whatever else people have held about God, no matter how much of our limited minds and thoughts and even our crimes and injustices we have attributed to God, even the most anthropomorphic religion holds that God is not a human being. To think that God would be required to follow our laws of science or, indeed, any possible actual mechanisms of a universe created by God, is rather touchingly naive in a way that even the “ignorant goat herders” who are believed by the incredulous to have written the Bible were able to surpass.
Ah, yes, that’s the good stuff. Science and our conceptual ability are limited to being able to understand the “physical” universe, which we experience through our senses. God is beyond all that. God is like Emily Dickinson times infinity, hiding in a closed room he/she/it never leaves, slipping cryptic notes out every so often, written in a private language that can only be understood via mystical communion by those already inclined to believe in him/her/it. So how, then, asks the skeptic, are you, a fellow human with a similarly limited brain, capable of perceiving this mysterious “beyond”? What is this God you speak of, if he/she/it is too enormous to be caught in the puny little conceptual nets we humans are limited to using? And even if you claim we can’t look directly upon God in all his/her/its mind-shattering majesty, what discernible effects does this God have in the universe we live in, and what do they have to do with our cultural standards of morality? If even that’s too much to ask to see, well, could you at least tell me how an incomprehensible, imperceptible God is distinguishable at all from a nonexistent one? Can’t you point to some sort of common, shared experience we can use as a foundation for further discussion?
“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe…”
Moving along.

It seems to be an emotional need of the new atheists to believe they have disposed of the question of purpose but most people seem to be unimpressed with that artificial substitute for reason. And that’s only one of the questions that we, mere mortals, have about the universe which we find ourselves in. I am more convinced as I see us destroying ourselves, to a large degree with the products of science and technology, that unless we include questions of purpose, justice, rights, morality and other entirely non-scientific features of human thought and culture, that science is inadequate in itself to ensure our continued existence.

I’m not sure who these nameless people are that think science alone is going to solve all of our problems independent of ethical or practical considerations, but assuming there are some out there somewhere, I’ll agree, he sure put them in their place. But once again — whatever solutions we come up with are going to have to come by way of communication over a shared experience. I’m not interested in what your particular favorite holy book says. I’m not going to take your word on the validity of the supposedly mystical insights you’ve had if you can’t even begin to express them in some form others can understand and relate to. And I don’t care how many religious authority figures in history have advocated the Golden Rule as a general ethical principle if I can reason my way there by myself.

Athena Shrugged

By in augean stables, foolosophy, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, psychology

What does it take to be a Megan McArdle? I’m really, truly fascinated by this phenomenon. What kind of psychological contortions must you put yourself through in order to suffer this kind of humiliation on a regular basis without losing faith in your intellectual abilities?

Bear in mind, those are just examples from the last couple of weeks. She’s been getting pantsed like this for years. There’s a whole subgenre of the blogosphere devoted to razzing her. How can you possibly be exposed to that many people on a daily basis telling you in loving, annotated detail how completely full of shit you are without ever taking any of it to heart?

Beating My Meat (Habit)

By in animals, herbivory

Hal Herzog:

The fact is, very few people are vegetarians; even most vegetarians eat meat. There have been several studies, including a very large one by the Department of Agriculture, where they asked people one day: Describe your diet. And 5 percent said they were vegetarians. Well, then they called the same people back a couple of days later and asked them about what they ate in the last 24 hours. And over 60 percent of these vegetarians had eaten meat. And so, the fact is, the campaign for moralized meat has been a failure. We actually kill three times as many animals for their flesh as we did when Peter Singer wrote “Animal Liberation” [in 1975]…I think the fact is that we’re natural meat-eaters. And a lot of my vegetarian friends don’t like that. But it’s our biology and our evolutionary heritage. It’s tough to fight that. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fight it. But most people lose that balance. And two-thirds of vegetarians eventually resume eating meat.

I don’t mean to be an etymological extremist here, but it occurs to me that if you eat meat, you are, by definition, not a vegetarian. It’s fine if you don’t eat red meat, or you just aim to reduce your overall meat consumption, but that just makes you a selective eater, not a vegetarian. And, no, by the way, fuck all this pesco/lacto/ovo-vegetarian bullshit. Again, if you’re a selective eater, just say so. Stop hyphenating about it. It doesn’t clarify anything.
I’ve been vegetarian for about sixteen years, and I’ve never been tempted to give it up, nor has it ever felt limiting to me (although I’ve long wanted to start taking actual cooking classes to learn how to broaden my admittedly limited repertoire). I think that may be due to the fact that I never really had any hope for the persuasiveness of the moral case (though I firmly accept it myself), so I didn’t fall prey to the disappointment so many new coverts feel when they realize that not everyone is going to be convinced by a pep talk and some pamphlets. People can rationalize damn near anything. If anything, it’s more likely to make an impression on people when they consider the environmental cost of First-Worlders using up such massive quantities of grain to raise livestock for our meat-at-every-meal habit, a luxury that the vast majority of the world can’t even begin to afford. Even that, I imagine, is likely to be a casualty of our inevitable decline in living standards over the next few decades. Just as we can’t continue to burn through natural resources at such a breakneck pace, neither will we be able to keep eating like kings.

The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (Hopefully)

By in atheism, george carlin, religion

Have you ever noticed that when you’re driving, anyone going slower than you is an idiot? And anyone going faster than you is a maniac? Why, I tell ya, folks, it’s a wonder we ever get anywhere at all these days, what with all the idiots and maniacs out there. Because no one ever drives at my speed.

– George Carlin

Religious people have no real interest in Dawkins, whom they find extreme, clinical, mechanical, and monolithic.

I’ve noticed this a lot lately, this apparent unspoken agreement to make Richard Dawkins the official representative of Atheist Fundamentalism®. From Boteach and other religious believers to Matt Taibbi to random blog commenters, I keep hearing about how Dawkins is humorless, ignorant, strident and intolerant. But I read The God Delusion, something I suspect many of his critics did not, and I didn’t see evidence of anything like that. The only real attempt I can recall from recent memory to actually engage in measured criticism of something he’s said, as opposed to just repeating the same declarative insults, was this recent column from Gary Gutting, and even that, well…
I’d really love it if we could arrive at a common understanding that this sort of thing is not an argument. It’s a psychological balancing mechanism, a way to position yourself as the voice of sensible, moderate reason, by drawing false equivalences between the fanatics on both sides of you (who are frequently invented if they don’t already exist).

Our Father Who Ain’t in Heaven

By in atheism, calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, philosophy, religion, science

Calvin: Why do you suppose we’re here?

Hobbes: Because we walked here.
Calvin: No, no. I mean here on Earth.
Hobbes: Because Earth can support life.
Calvin: No, I mean why are we anywhere? Why do we exist?
Hobbes: Because we were born.
Calvin: Forget it.
Hobbes: I will, thank you.
Rev. Robert Barron says that Stephen Hawking should shut up about philosophy and theology since all he knows is physics…and then proceeds to talk as if he understands physics based on the excerpt from Hawking’s new book that everyone is talking about, where he says that science makes God irrelevant when it comes to the “how” of the universe’s existence.

The classical philosophical tradition gives us an adage that is still hard to improve upon: ex nihilo nihil fit (from nothing comes nothing). Any teacher worth his salt would take a student to task if, in trying to explain why and how a given phenomenon occurred, the student were to say, “well, it just spontaneously happened.” Yet we are expected to be satisfied with precisely that explanation when it comes to the most pressing and fascinating question of all: why is there something rather than nothing?

‘Tis a mystery. One that isn’t solved or explained by postulating a God about whom nothing tangible can be said or understood. Why do you act as if you’re owed an explanation for metaphysical puzzles anyway?
You and I are contingent in the measure that we had parents, that we eat and drink, and that we breathe. In a word, we don’t explain ourselves. Now if we want to understand why we exist, we cannot go on endlessly appealing to other contingent things. We must come finally to some reality which exists through the power of its own essence, some power whose very nature it is to be.
But that whose very nature it is to be cannot, in any sense, be limited or imperfect in being, and this is precisely why Catholic philosophy has identified this non-contingent ground of contingency, this ultimate explanation of the being of the universe, as “God.”
Three things:
1) Many Buddhists would be happy to explain to you how we can “go on endlessly appealing to other contingent things” to understand our existence. You’ll notice I didn’t say they will explain why we exist, which leads us to the next point.
2) The very question “Why do we exist?” is inherently invalid, resting as it does upon the unquestioned assumption that our existence itself is teleological by nature, something that is unclear and unproven, to put it mildly. “Purpose” is a human concept, a tool we use, not a built-in feature of life itself.
3) Anselm? Really?

Neologisms for Dummies

By in books, bread and circuses, jests japes jokes jollies, language, socmed, tribalism

The fuck..?

Two weeks ago, best-selling author Jodi Picoult sent a Tweet in a fit of pique. Upon reading Michiko Kakutani’s glowing review of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom in the New York Times, the lady novelist took to her keyboard and typed out the following:
NYT raved about Franzen’s new book. Is anyone shocked? Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren’t white male literary darlings.
Then fellow best-seller Jennifer Weiner revved up her Twitter account, too, and posted about the breathless critical love of Franzen, whose book was still not out yet. She invented the Twitter hashtag #franzenfreude, which she describes thusly: “Schadenfreude is taking pleasure in the pain in others. Franzenfreude is taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen.”
Weiner tweeted prolifically after starting the franzenfreude meme. “In summation: NYT sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance. And now, to go weep into my royalty statement,” she wrote on Aug. 19.
It’s like watching Curly Howard with a paint can on his head and buckets on both feet, using an umbrella to duel with a potted fern. Has no one else noticed what Michael Schaub already pointed out?

Weiner probably does have a rough life, what with her bestsellers and the popular film adaptation of one of her novels a few years back. And I’m sure she’s talented, but for fuck’s sake, if you’re trying to convince people to read your books, maybe coming up with the word “Franzenfreude” (which is literally “Franzen joy,” and thus the fucking opposite of what she’s trying to say) isn’t your best sales pitch.

See, this is why I keep saying we should just use the English word “epicaricacy”, which means the exact same thing. It might not have lent itself very well to a play on Franzen’s name, but still, she could have been spared so much embarrassment.
And is it just me, or is a story containing a sentence like “So-and-so tweeted prolifically…” just absolutely guaranteed to end in tears of laughter? Is it even possible for Twitter to feature in a story without something atrociously stupid being said?

Raggedy Antichrist

By in jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis, religion, the madness of crowds, waiting for the barbarians

14 percent say that Obama “may be the Antichrist.”
Curious about that final 14 percent, I performed a simple Google search for “Obama” and “Antichrist” which yielded almost a million hits. These numbers are alarming, not only for the president but for what it says about Americans and what passes for fact.
…Obama has bigger problems to deal with than to be sidetracked by the ridiculous. But what does it mean when a portion of the country views the president of the United States in this way? What is that really about?
Hey, a Google search for “Ronald Wilson Reagan Antichrist 666” got me 8,980,000 hits. Even a simple “Pope Antichrist” gets a not-too-shabby 667,000. And as I just said, 18% or so of Americans think the sun revolves around the Earth. Quite simply, about one out of every five or six people here is functionally retarded and should be required to don a safety helmet, protective goggles, bubble wrap and water wings when leaving the house. How much analysis does this call for? What else is there to say about it?
Just this: I am supremely disappointed in the lack of imagination in this country when it comes to the diabolical, the malevolent, the fiendish, the infernal. I mean, really: even if we limit ourselves to these three sorry candidates, a senile old jellybean-munching actor and a milquetoast, technocratic centrist outpoll the ex-Hitlerjugend head of a secretive, worldwide criminal cartel of kiddy-diddlers? Surely we can do better, even the 13% or so who admit to having stuck their tongues into light sockets to see what electricity tastes like.
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