October 2011

Why Ask Why?

By in calvin and hobbes, religion, science


Julian Baggini:

Many “why” questions are really “how” questions in disguise. For instance, if you ask: “Why does water boil at 100C?” what you are really asking is: “What are the processes that explain it has this boiling point?” – which is a question of how.
Critically, however, scientific “why” questions do not imply any agency – deliberate action – and hence no intention. We can ask why the dinosaurs died out, why smoking causes cancer and so on without implying any intentions. In the theistic context, however, “why” is usually what I call “agency-why”: it’s an explanation involving causation with intention.
So not only do the hows and whys get mixed up, religion can end up smuggling in a non-scientific agency-why where it doesn’t belong.
This means that if someone asks why things are as they are, what their meaning and purpose is, and puts God in the answer, they are almost inevitably going to make an at least implicit claim about the how: God has set things up in some way, or intervened in some way, to make sure that purpose is achieved or meaning realised. The neat division between scientific “how” and religious “why” questions therefore turns out to be unsustainable.
…But for the moment, we can say that any religious belief that involves an activist, really-existing God and claims that religion has something to say about why things happen, must also be encroaching on questions of how they happen, too. And if that’s true, the easy peace which many claim should exist between science and religion just isn’t possible.
It’s not unidirectional, though. Perhaps politeness forbids him from suggesting that science and rationality can, in the course of delineating the hows, do away with the whys by process of elimination, leaving them nowhere to rest but in incoherence. The more we learn about how things work, the more we come to see the futility of trying to make the universe fit the Procrustean bed of purpose and meaning on a human scale. I speak to you from personal experience here, my friends: when you allow your desperate need for objective meaning rooted in abstract universal truth to atrophy, wither and fall away, life is still worth living.

Nowhere You Are

By in the feeling of absurdity

“Fuck!” he exclaimed from the backseat. “I can’t get a signal because we’re out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“What are the odds,” I said to her beside me, “that people always find themselves smack dab in the middle of nowhere? How come it’s never, ‘I’m on the outskirts of nowhere’? ‘I’m passing through the suburbs of nowhere’? ‘I’m about one-quarter of the way to Nowhere Central, where the horizon and the landmarks are just starting to lose their distinctiveness’?”

“Or ‘on the edge of nowhere’?” she replied.

“Well, if you were on the edge of nowhere, you’d actually be somewhere,” he chimed in.

“Good point,” she responded.

“Maybe ‘nowhere’ isn’t actually a place,” I speculated. “Maybe it’s more like an amorphous fog that follows you around, so that when it settles, you’re perfectly in the middle of it.”

“Or maybe, as much as an affront to common sense as it seems,” I continued, “we really are in the middle of nowhere, right here in rural Virginia. This is it, the fabled epicenter.”

“The literal epicenter. Equidistant.” she said, nodding along.

“Yes, literally. It extends way out into the Atlantic ocean on one side, and out into… I dunno, the Midwest on the other. But we happen to be perfectly centered at this moment, right here.”

We paused a moment to reflect on the momentous significance of all this, on our humbling privilege.

“We are such nerds.”

“Yeah, I know.”

#Unintendedconsequences

By in extraordinary popular delusions, socmed, unintended consequences

Hey, remember back in mist-shrouded ancient history when a bunch of Egyptians got on Facebook and Twitter and totally had a bitchin’ revolution that brought down an evil dictator? And how narcissistic, shit-for-brains American bloggers used that as fuel for their masturbatory obsession with social media? Good times, good times:

Around 7:30 PM, I received text and Twitter messages that an announcer for State TV had on air called for Egyptians to go down and “defend the soldiers who protected the Egyptian revolution” against “armed Copts” who had opened fire and were killing soldiers. Looking around me, I could see that many of those gathered in the tight area around the TV building seemed to have responded to the call. Rough-looking men were arriving in groups; people said they were neighborhood thugs. They held bludgeons, wooden planks, knives, and even swords, and walked boldly into the chaos of burning cars, flying bullets, and glass. “We’ll kill any Christian we get our hands on,” one of them shouted. Someone tweeted that he was in the middle of what looked like a militia, “men with clubs and antique pistols.” Nearby, a young girl was harassed, and a mob assaulted a young Coptic couple, beating them and ripping their clothes. One of the perpetrators emerged from the gang with blood on his hands. “Christian blood!” he boasted. (The couple survived—rushed away by ambulance to be treated for wounds and possible fractures.)

…What exactly happened at Maspero on October 9, when, amid a great deal of confusion, a peaceful protest turned into something of a massacre, has become a question of enormous implications for Egypt’s military and government, as well as for its increasingly divided population. Although many are critical even of the idea of “Coptic protests,” saying their premise is sectarian and that the Copts should instead be out defending a “united Egypt” in Tahrir, the events at Maspero have pitted those who believe State TV and support the army, against those who don’t. In the former camp are a working class majority who are convinced the Copts are to blame. Although all political factions, including the Islamists, have condemned the violence, and the Islamist political bloc has been swift to publicly claim it embraces Copts and Muslims alike, insisting it will work for a democratic Egypt, at a grassroots level there are also growing indications that Muslim conservatism is spreading nation-wide. In the aftermath of the violence, I was reminded by friends that many young Egyptians are taught that “Christians are going to hell.”

…Whatever is ultimately revealed about what happened at Maspero, many in the Coptic Christian community, which accounts for some 10 percent of Egypt’s 82 million population, regard their position in Egyptian society as increasingly tenuous. The original cause for the Maspero protest, the burning of the El-Marinab Church in Aswan on September 30, was the fifth such assault on a church since the fall of Mubarak, and the sixth in twelve months. Hours before the Aswan church was set on fire, a preacher at a nearby mosque used his midday sermon to incite further anger against the town’s Copts. And in Alexandria the week before the Maspero violence, I heard a Salafi preacher blame the ills of the world on Christians, Zionists, and women.

Jeez. Somebody should just press a “Dislike” button or something. And, uh, has anyone decided what color scheme we’re supposed to use on our blog in response to this?

Uniquely Contrarian™

By in getting and spending, history, identity, philosophy

Jonah Lehrer:

I’m waiting in line for a cappuccino. It’s gonna be a good one: short, intense, the foamed milk emulsified with the syrupy shot. I glance up from my phone and look around at the cafe. It is, for lack of a better adjective, a hipster joint. There are the artfully branded items for sale (T-shirts, espresso cups, etc.) and a long list of single varietal beans. Hot water is being poured out of sleek Japanese kettles; the baristas are wearing fedoras. And then I look at the other people in line. I notice their costumes: the slim dark jeans, flannel shirts, scuffed boots, designy glasses, mussed hair. Everyone is staring down at the gadget in their hands. They all look like me. I look like them. This is the definition of self-loathing.

I mean no disrespect. I’m a sucker for single-varietals. I own one of the Japanese kettles. Right now, I’m wearing that branded T-shirt from my coffee place. What interests me, however, is the irony of the situation. Here we all are, seeking uniqueness, looking for those things that neatly express the idiosyncrasy of our peculiar personalities. And yet, our uniqueness (at least as consumers) is mostly a sham. Somehow, we all end up in the same place, chasing the same trends while drinking the same drink while staring at the same app on the same phone.

Isaiah Berlin identified the period following the death of Aristotle as an important one in the development of Western concepts of individuality, when the philosophical schools “ceased to conceive of individuals as intelligible only in the context of social life…and suddenly spoke of men purely in terms of inner experience and individual salvation.” He specifically credited the ancient sophist Antiphon and Diogenes with reacting against the social life of the polis with the idea of independence meaning freedom leading to happiness. The individual rather than the group became the natural unit, ethics were the ethics of the individual, and privacy became a new value.

Peter Watson said that “In all cases, then, we have, centering on the sixth century BC, but extending 150 years either side, a turning away from a pantheon of many traditional ‘little’ gods, and a great turning inward, the emphasis put on man himself, his own psychology, his moral sense or conscience, his intuition and his individuality.” Colin Morris called the “discovery of the individual” one of the most important cultural developments between the years 1050 and 1200, one which seemed to correlate with a fundamental change in Christianity. And John Benton claimed that an increase in self-esteem during this period, along with a larger verbal and visual vocabulary for concepts of selfhood, led to the age of discovery and the Renaissance.

So our conceptions of individuality itself have been a long work in progress, to understate it mildly. But I would imagine that the sort of individuality that Lehrer is talking about, one that primarily identifies the self with expression through consumer products, is much more recent. Authors like Thomas Frank and Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter have argued that the urge to differentiate oneself through owning the newest and the rarest commodities is actually the driving force behind rapacious consumerism, rather than the usual conception of consumers being a mindless herd of people all wanting to be just like everyone else. The emphasis on external signifiers, of which there can only be so many variations, after all, as opposed to internal experience, is what causes this silly kind of hipster angst.

Jnana

By in foolosophy, meditation

Melani McAlister:

See, I don’t want to be part of a yoga world of happy talk about unending potential and perfect happiness. I don’t have much time for the kind of self-impressed platitudes that give yoga a bad name. Like so many of the secular, health-oriented, somewhat prideful members of my clan, I do yoga to quiet my brain, not to fill it with nonsense. And yet nonsense abounds. Last month, I dropped in on a class at another studio. As class began, the teacher offered her thoughts about the goodness of the world and its benevolence toward us. “If you just reach out with your intention,” she said sagely, “the universe will rise to meet you half-way.” I almost walked out. The earthquake in Japan had happened the day before.

…The point is that the practice of attentiveness—the fundamental practice that yoga cultivates—should lead us to contemplate the full reality of our life, which includes its inevitable end. As the yogi Richard Freeman puts it, “Yoga is a rehearsal for death.” That is the universe rising up to meet you.

For me, this discussion was a rare moment when I had some inclination of what “yoga spirituality” might mean, particularly for someone who doesn’t actually believe in spirituality. In this version, there is no promise of health or happiness. There is only our embrace of reality, in both its quiet joys and its suffering. We recognize ourselves as part of the universe, and we accept that universe’s fundamental indifference to us. Then we see what flows from that. I suspect that this embrace of death, and life, doesn’t arise from an act of will or from reading the right books. Maybe, though, it comes from the act of the placing one’s feet in exactly the right alignment, and paying attention.

I started doing yoga when I was twelve years old. I took a copy of a 28-day program by Richard Hittleman that my mom had on the shelf, and every day for the next month, I would get up at 5:30 and go through the routine, dutifully lying still after each pose and “being aware of the changes going on in my body.” Mainly, I just spent that time wondering what exactly I was supposed to be noticing, worried that the Karma Police were going to nab me for not doing it right.

I’ve kept at it off and on lo these many years since, mixing traditional yoga poses with regular calisthenics and strength exercises. I’ve never been to a class for it, mainly for the reasons McAlister mentions; I just like the attentive act of feeling my muscles stretch and following my breath. No thought of enlightenment or physical gain, just the enjoyment of holding still and being quiet. In fact, I’m going to get up and go through some exercises right now.

An Idle and Lazy Guy

By in foolosophy, getting and spending, santutthi, work

Susan Smalley:

Perhaps the true sign of success is the ability to free oneself from work to engage in the active process of what Aristotle called idleness, the effortfully investigation of life to ‘know oneself.’ What if we were to cease ‘work’ when it no longer was for necessity; perhaps it would increase the ability of others to secure work toward a similar vein and allow for an increasing collective to investigate those age-old questions of ‘who am I’ and ‘what is the meaning of life’.

Perhaps the post-50 sign of true success is living the Idle life.

Age-old questions? Uh, excuse me, excuse me, but we were just informed in no uncertain terms by a melodramatic Philosophy 101 student that no one is asking those questions.

But seriously, though — post-50? Sheeit, I’m already living it pre-40, baby. I just — literally, just — paid off the little bit of credit card debt I had. The only financial obligation left is a mortgage, and I could easily foresee a day when even that becomes too onerous of a burden for my liking. And I’m going to be spending the majority of the next few days haunting library sales. As part of my job.

I do have a spare storage shed if anyone else wants to come join the slacker collective. Just chip in some for groceries, is all.

Lucubrations, no. 8

By in drugs, lucubrations, omnigatherum

In case you were looking for some good writing on the darker side of the blogosphere:

It’s now almost 10 years that I have been living life on the needle. During that time I’ve shot up in parks, cars, toilets and on buses. In addition to my arms, legs, stomach and chest, I’ve also injected in my fingers, toes, palms and forehead. I’ve hit nerves, arteries, joints and bone, and have suffered every imaginable lump, bump and swelling. I’ve poisoned myself 4 times with ‘dirty heroin’, had abscesses the size of golf balls and I’ve Od’d twice. On my entire body I have only one visible vein left. In my determination to self-medicate I’ve lost family, friends, lovers, two Cockatoos and a dog. My bank is in the red and so after 34 years I have less than nothing.
As I write this it is 24 hours since my last injection and that seems a long time. Previous to that it was 72 hours and previous to that 7 days. The longest I’ve ever been heroin or needle free is 5 months. But I do have some qualities and I use them to convince the few people left around me that I’m changing… that I’ve finally seen the light. And as I sit there with my perforated escape plan laid out, I busk and dance my way around all the awkward questions. At one point I even promise to stop smoking and cut down on the chocolate. It’s then I realize I’ve gone too far, that I’ve said too much. The place kind of deflates with disappointment and without even looking up I know what they’re all thinking, “He’s not getting better… he’s getting worse!” And I can’t blame them for that… I’m thinking exactly the same myself.

Every Silver Lining’s Got a Touch of Gray

By in extraordinary popular delusions, history, moralizing

John Gray on the progressive faith of Steven Pinker:

Some of the impulses we inherit from our evolutionary past may incline us to conflict, but others— “the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln called them—incline us to peaceful cooperation. In order to show that conflicts between the two will in future increasingly be settled in favour of peace, Pinker needs to be able to identify some very powerful trends. He does his best, but the changes to which he points—the spread of democracy and the increase of wealth, for example—are more problematic than he realises. The formation of democratic nation-states was one of the principal drivers of violence of the last century, involving ethnic cleansing in inter-war Europe, post-colonial states and the post-communist Balkans. Steadily-growing prosperity may act as a kind of tranquilliser, but there is no reason to think the increase of wealth can go on indefinitely—and when it falters violence will surely return. In quite different ways, attacks on minorities and immigrants by neo-fascists in Europe, the popular demonstrations against austerity in Greece and the English riots of the past summer show the disruptive and dangerous impact of sudden economic slowdown on social peace. All the trends that supposedly lie behind the Long Peace are contingent and reversible.

…Pinker’s attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith. We don’t need science to tell us that humans are violent animals. History and contemporary experience provide more than sufficient evidence. For liberal humanists, the role of science is, in effect, to explain away this evidence. They look to science to show that, over the long run, violence will decline—hence the panoply of statistics and graphs and the resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts. The result is no more credible than the efforts of Marxists to show the scientific necessity of socialism, or free-market economists to demonstrate the permanence of what was until quite recently hailed as the Long Boom. The Long Peace is another such delusion, and just as ephemeral.

And on Christopher Hitchens’ own version of it:

Six months before he was murdered in his study in Mexico City, Leon Trotsky wrote: “I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.”

There is something tragicomic in this confession of faith. Dialectical materialism, though it claimed to be based in science, was never more than superstitious gibberish. When he invoked the supposed science to bolster his failing political hopes, Trotsky was engaging in a type of magical thinking, using words as charms to ward off the terrors of history. At the same time – and this is the irresistibly comical element of Trotsky’s career – he never ceased to regard himself as anything other than an uncompromising rationalist.

…Hitchens’s account of the origins of neoconservatism has obvious parallels with his own political trajectory. He has always made it clear that, for him, the decision to invade Iraq was justified as the beginning of a revolutionary war. It is this continuing ideological mindset that accounts for many of the misjudgements he has made over the past decade. For Hitchens, that the Iraq war proved to be a disaster does not show the enterprise to have been a mistake – any more than the disastrous history of the former Soviet Union shows that the Bolshevik revolution (for which Hitchens continues to nurse a decidedly soft spot) was a mistake. In both cases, the human costs count for very little in the final analysis. What matters is the world-transforming revolutionary impulse that animated both experiments.

…There are some who represent Hitchens as a contrarian or provocateur, without convictions. They are wrong. What sort of provocateur would write that “Bin Ladenism” is more dangerous than German Wilhelmine imperialism, the Nazi-Fascist axis and international communism? Such a patently absurd claim could only be made by one who deeply believes it to be true.

Leave aside the grotesque disproportion in lumping the Kaiser’s Germany in with mid-20th-century totalitarianism. What is wholly fantastical is putting Osama Bin Laden’s gang in the same category as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – two extremely powerful states with vast industrial and military resources, the first coming close to conquering all of Europe, the second annexing Europe’s eastern half and the Baltic states while imposing itself throughout central Asia. In passing over these undeniable facts, Hitchens is not playing the role of intellectual gadfly. He is showing himself to be a believer who – like Trotsky – blanks out reality when it fails to accord with his faith.

That Hitchens has the mind of a believer has not been sufficiently appreciated.

Delilah’s Razor

By in gender, identity, macho macho men

Kate Bolick:

Statistics are indeed showing that more men are struggling now than in the past, which is a result of vast economic forces, as well as social ones (Christina Hoff Sommers wrote very presciently about “The War Against Boys” in 2000). And this is serious, and needs to be paid attention to.

…A darker aspect is that this new power balance/imbalance means men are having to grapple with feelings of inferiority that they’re not quite accustomed to, and this can be hard on couples, particularly in a world that almost presumes women will have inferiority complexes.

My ex-girlfriend took an auto mechanics course in high school and knew a fair amount about troubleshooting and making minor repairs. My current girlfriend is far more knowledgeable about all sorts of traditionally masculine skills than I am; I hardly ever used anything more than the most basic tools until my brief stint as a satellite technician. She showed me how to patch a minor leak in the roof, and she made and executed all the plans for building shelves in the garage while I just followed her instructions. I’ve never felt the slightest bit threatened by having to defer to female superiority in matters like that. In fact, it’s downright amusing to go into a Home Depot and watch her do all the talking to the employee who comes over to help while I just stand there smiling. If I were going to learn a new skill, culinary classes would be at the top of my list.

To a certain degree, I do like purposely tweaking people’s conceptions of how a heterosexual male is supposed to think and act, but I’ve just never identified with the sort of rooster pride that concerns itself with being accepted as one of the boys. It’s never occurred to me to see it as anything less than a plus if my partner has skills that complement mine, and I feel sorry for any poor bastard who can’t appreciate his wife making more money than him.

Apptitude

By in santutthi, work

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

– Aristotle
I understand why people find this inspiring or profound. But this is absolutely terrible advice from a practical standpoint.
Most of us are never going to get paid to do what we love. Work is something we do to support ourselves. Ideally, we don’t hate it. That’s the best most of us will ever do with our employment – we can consider ourselves fortunate if we don’t actively loathe it. But love it? Steve Jobs got paid to do what he apparently loved, and good on him. He is not like most of us, though. He had a lot of talent and he happened to love something that was beyond lucrative.
Hear, hear. As Max Weber famously noted, the old Calvinist notion of a “calling” has long been intertwined with our ideas about work. Personally, I lament all the wasted time and unnecessary anxiety I felt as an adolescent, struggling to figure out why I couldn’t think of a career choice that appeared to me in a flash of divine illumination. Many of my peers seemed to have their lives all planned out by the end of high school; what was wrong with me? Was I going to be a – gasp! – failure?
But now, one of the things that ruffles my feathers about all these platitudes and exhortations is the unspoken and likely unconscious elitism behind them. I would add to what Ed said that many of the jobs that are absolutely necessary for society to run at all are inherently boring, tiring, and nowhere near being nourishing and life-affirming. There’s an implicit understanding in speeches like the address Jobs delivered at Stanford that we are the special ones; we have the education and privilege to customize our lives to our exacting preferences. Trash collecting? Maintenance work? Don’t those people have an app to take care of that sort of thing?

To Say the Names of Things

By in language, spiritual-not-religious

Gina Welch:

When people tell me they are spiritual, first I think of healing crystals and astral charts, a lock of white hair tied to the end of a stick, drum circles and dreamcatchers, the cosmic juice between us all, man, synchronicity as a sign of some kind of, like, churning force!

Shaking off the stardust, I turn to thinking that the Spiritual Person probably has cobbled together a set of private beliefs they don’t really feel like explaining. After one of my best friends almost died in a car accident, he custom designed a personal program based on the Beatitudes, Buddhism, and Emerson. It verges on genius, and it is a spirituality. Religion is a form you sign; spirituality is ideas. But if we each get to decide what spirituality means, what the freak is spirituality?

See how terrible I am at this? Spirituality is one of those annoyingly flexible words like freedom, a blankness that invites our self-centered definition to scribble itself all over the big dry erase board of its name.

In Andre Comte-Sponville’s excellent morsel of meditation, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, he writes that “we are finite beings that open onto infinity.” That’s better. Let me request that you suppress the word spirituality for two seconds, and instead invite you to open onto the ethereal atmosphere between us, weather, vibes, the forever stuff, our flickering understanding of what connects us, and what connects us all to eternity.

Shanna was once talking to me about the field of linguistics; specifically between denotation, the dictionary definition of a word, and connotation, the implications and social uses of a word. For me, my objection to the word “spiritual” is that it fails on both levels.

Ho, there! Now, it should — hopefully — go without saying that I am all in favor of the turn away from institutional forms of religion toward a inward form of seeking. I hereby proclaim it to be a Good Thing that more people have the education and leisure to gain awareness of other beliefs and ideas from around the world and incorporate them into their lives after at least some rational analysis, independent of the stifling weight of family and community tradition.

But on a denotative level, the word “spirit”, in this context, is almost always understood to be contrasted with matter. I don’t believe words have magical power, of course, but they do form the conceptual framework we organize our thoughts within, and as such, I think it’s important to think carefully about the terms we use and what they imply. If you want to rebel against “organized religion” and all of its unfortunate legacy, it seems to me that rejecting the old Platonic dualism would be a good place to start.

And on a connotative level, the word “spiritual” doesn’t signify anything in particular. It’s vague to the point of utter meaninglessness, as Welch says, and yet, it still commands a certain reflexive respect simply by virtue of not being organized religion, which no cool kid would want to admit belonging to. It somehow manages to still have indie credibility despite having topped the charts and become a household name. But I still say that when you actually press SNR people on what it is they really believe, you invariably find that they are using the same old templates as the stultifying religion they supposedly left behind. They confuse their evasive, lazy lack of clarity for a sign that they’ve transcended all classification.

There’s nothing esoteric or otherworldly about the experience or mentality. You don’t need to invoke eternity, ethereality, forever, transcendence, or other loaded terms. All that’s needed is to live attentively. Language, as beautiful and useful as it is, tends to have a deadening effect on our ability to do that. We mistake the word for the experience, the menu for the meal, and focus on the finger instead of the moon.

He’s Mean, He’s Mean, You Know What I Mean

By in atheism, ohferfucksake, religion, science

Speaking of Alan Lightman:

Dennett says that I am concerned that Dawkins is “too darned clear, too brutally frank when he articulates his case” against religion. It is not Dawkin’s clarity that concerns me. It is his condescension towards believers and his labeling of this large group of people as non-thinkers.

…Dennett reminds me that Richard Dawkins is deeply appreciative of the art, music, and poetry that religion has engendered, but it is just that Dawkins believes that religion, on balance, has accomplished more harm than good.

I would find it difficult to attempt such a tally. Whatever the results of such a balance, does that mean we, like Dawkins, should throw out religion wholesale, take a condescending attitude toward people of religious beliefs, label people of religious beliefs as non-thinkers imperious to scientific evidence? No. It means that we should continue to oppose those practices of religion that do damage, we should continue to oppose irrational thinking on issues that require rational thinking and evidence. But, at the same time, I would argue that we should allow our existence to encompass some things that we cannot explain by rational argument and proof.

If you read Dennett’s earlier essay, you’ll notice that in the second sentence, he says:

…Alan Lightman joins a long line of atheist apologists who feel compelled to respond negatively to Richard Dawkins’ campaign but find it hard to put forward a crisp, fact-based objection.

So Lightman responds by once again complaining that Dawkins is condescending and rude without ever providing a specific example, such as, say, a quotation where Dawkins attacks believers themselves, as opposed to faith or belief in the abstract, in such personal, denigrating terms. Brilliant.

I like that last sentence too. “We should allow our existence to encompass some things that we cannot explain by rational argument and proof.” Again, who fails to do this, aside from people with burlap bags for heads and straw sticking out from their collars and shirtsleeves? Who demands rationality and proof in art, poetry and music? Ironically enough, it’s people like Lightman who seem inclined toward a strict dichotomy rather than a continuum when it comes to questions of faith; as he says earlier, he thinks that if the existence of an intelligent creator or an objective meaning of life can’t be disproved by science, they are just as valid as any other belief and are required to be taken seriously. But lumping faith in a personal God in with faith in what we understand of scientific laws is disingenuous in the extreme; there are massive degrees of difference between them when it comes to evidence and likelihood.

Lucubrations, no. 7

By in atheism, extraordinary popular delusions, identity, lucubrations, religion, science

Sittin’ here in the wee hours, just contemplating the usual middle-of-the-night issues: the nature of self, the nonexistence of God, other lighthearted fare. Daniel Dennett keeps popping up in my readings tonight:

Yes, many unanswered questions persist. But these are early days, and neuroscience remains immature, says Churchland, a professor emerita of philosophy at University of California at San Diego and author of the subfield-spawning 1986 book Neurophilosophy. In the 19th century, she points out, people thought we’d never understand light. “Well, by gosh,” she says, “by the time the 20th century rolls around, it turns out that light is electromagnetic radiation. … So the fact that at a certain point in time something seems like a smooth-walled mystery that we can’t get a grip on, doesn’t tell us anything about whether some real smart graduate student is going to sort it out in the next 10 years or not.”

Dennett claims he’s got much of it sorted out already. He wrote a landmark book on the topic in 1991, Consciousness Explained. (The title “should have landed him in court, charged with breach of the Trade Descriptions Act,” writes Tallis.) Dennett uses the vocabulary of computer science to explain how consciousness emerges from the huge volume of things happening in the brain all at once. We’re not aware of everything, he tells me, only a “limited window.” He describes that stream of consciousness as “the activities of a virtual machine which is running on the parallel hardware of the brain.”

“You—the fruits of all your experience, not just your genetic background, but everything you’ve learned and done and all your memories—what ties those all together? What makes a self?” Dennett asks. “The answer is, and has to be, the self is like a software program that organizes the activities of the brain.”

And here he responds to Alan Lightman’s faith-based twaddle from last week:

Is there any rational grounding for a belief in a miracle-making interventionist God? (No.) Do we need God to account for the brilliant design of living things? (No.) Do we need God to somehow underwrite or ground our confidence that our ethical convictions are not just parochial prejudices? (No.) There is nothing gloriously, ineffably, tantalizingly imponderable about these questions, carefully crafted and vetted by philosophers and scientists over the centuries.

Lightman fails to consider the possibility, moreover, that the reason many theological questions continue to evade the bright light of rational inquiry is that they have been ingeniously crafted by theologians to do just that. As the traditional concepts of God, heaven and hell crumble in the collision with science, the theologians invent new, more “sophisticated” concepts to take their place. They are improvements only in the sense that they are more immune to falsification by any imaginable discovery.

…Like many atheists, Dawkins — as Lightman surely knows — is deeply appreciative of all the glorious art and music and poetry that religion has engendered. But still he trots out the canonical list of glories to float the implication that we atheists are a philistine lot. Shame on him. That is what I call faith-fibbing. Not so much a bald-faced lie as a carefully indirect misrepresentation. He can’t actually claim that Dawkins doesn’t weigh the many contributions of religion to the arts against the damage it has wrought. Dawkins does just that, and arrives at a judgment with which Lightman apparently disagrees: All things considered, religion’s blessings are outweighed by the harm they do. The problem is that Lightman doesn’t tackle that difficult issue; he prefers to sing the praises of faith without holding it to account.

Endless, Nameless

By in books, foolosophy, the big sleep

James Kirchick:

There were moments reading this book when I was forced to shut it closed, an experience utterly alien to me. Like any reasonably historically-aware individual, I considered myself familiar with the carnage that overtook Europe in the earlier half of the 20th century: the gas chambers and the gulags, the mass shootings and show trials, the wanton disregard for human life and the heinous ideas which compelled people to, actively or passively, play a part in the deaths of tens of millions of fellow human beings. Reading about this period, there comes a point when the sheer scale and horror of the events which took place — the instant incineration of tens of thousands of civilians, for instance — desensitizes one from appreciating the sheer terror and physical pain that individuals endured.

Even with the knowledge of these attrocities, there is still little than can prepare a reader for the grisly accounts of the Ukrainian Famine that Timothy Snyder details in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Of course, I knew something about the widespread starvation that afflicted Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. This mass culling was directly caused by Josef Stalin’s collectivization policies, which were comprised of seizing private farms and exporting whatever food was grown to the rest of the Soviet Union and beyond. Those who have studied the event in-depth will not find anything new in Snyder’s account. But most readers, I imagine, will reevaluate their conception of the depths of human depravity when they read, in particular, about the widespread cannibalism that became rampant in what Robert Conquest has referred to as “one vast Belsen.” These are tales that one imagined lay only in the realm of zombie films: parents cooking and eating their own children, children in a nursery eating each other, a starving toddler literally eating himself.

With its ferocious attention to detailing the crimes of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes, Bloodlands has inevitably become a new entrant into the long-running debate about the comparative evil of Nazism and Stalinism, though Snyder, a scrupulous historian who shies away from polemic (an exemplar of this increasingly rare breed), does not consider himself a partisan in this particular battle. Contrary to some of his critics, Snyder has not minimized the horror or unique evil of the Holocaust by writing a book that studies it alongside the array of atrocities carried out by Stalin in the years leading up to, during, and after the Second World War. Rather, Snyder’s aim is to place the Holocaust within the context of this era of mass killing. He does so by focusing on the region he terms the “bloodlands,” the territories that fell under both German and Soviet occupation between 1933 and 1945 and were the main theaters of those regimes’ policies of non-combat-related mass murder. The era of the bloodlands commences with the Ukrainian famine, is followed by Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937–1938, continues with the combined German and Soviet mass murder of Poles during the short-lived period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the German starvation of Soviet citizens across present-day Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, and ends with the German “reprisal” killings of Belarusians and Poles. All told, some fourteen million people are estimated to have died as a result of these atrocities; to put this number into context, it is two million more than the total number of German and Soviet soldiers killed in battle and over thirteen million more than American losses in all of its foreign wars combined.

I’ve had Bloodlands on the bedside table for a while, and started reading it in earnest last week. My reaction has been much the same; there are times you just lay the book aside and stare off into space, trying to absorb the immensity of what you’ve just been told. But Snyder does a commendable job of providing enough humanizing details to ground the reader’s attention amid all the hellish, impersonal statistics. Just to pick one passage at random that I read last night:

They waited, not knowing what would come next, probably not suspecting until the very last moment. An NKVD officer asked one of the waiting prisoners, alone then with his captors, how old he was. The boy was smiling. “Eighteen.” What did you do? Still smiling. “Telephone operator.” How long had you worked? The boy counted on his hands. “Six months.” Then he, like all of the 6,314 prisoners who passed through this room, was handcuffed and led to a soundproofed cell. Two men held him by his arms as a third shot him from behind in the base of the skull.

Some of my friends have thought me slightly bizarre for reading things like this willingly and have not hesitated to say so. But integrity, I think, compels us to remember that these people were just as sure of their own importance as we are of ours. I hear so many people prattle on about how the most jejune coincidences in their life are proof positive that the universe itself is favorably disposed toward them, and it offends and irritates me, that blinkered lack of rudimentary awareness and the accompanying conviction that any challenge to it is perversely morbid. That eighteen year-old boy was no less important in the big scheme of things than any of us, living our comfortable lives, sure that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world and everything happens for a reason. He was just as motivated by all the joys and fears that anyone else is, and his life ended pointlessly and anonymously in a prison cell, before being deposited in a mass grave. He and millions of others. At just this one particular, recent, point in history.

Memento mori. Don’t be complacent.

Evil All the Way Down

By in language, ohferfucksake, philosophy, science

On two previous occasions, I have found Ron Rosenbaum to be a fatuous twit when it comes to all things metaphysical. The passing of time has not improved matters any:

“My main goal,” says Baron-Cohen, “is replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ’empathy.’ ” What he means is that instead of calling someone evil we should say they have no empathy.

Baron-Cohen goes to great lengths to posit an “empathy circuit” in the brain whose varying “degrees” of strength constitute a spectrum, ranging from total, 100 percent empathy to “zero degrees of empathy.”

This empathy circuit, he tells us, consists of 13 specific regions of the brain involved in the generation of nonevil choices, among them “the medial prefrontal cortex,” “the inferior frontal gyrus,” and “the posterior superior temporal sulcus.”

Ideally all of these act together empathetically to defeat “single minded focus,” which appears to be Baron-Cohen’s explanation for what was previously called evil. Single-mindedness is the inability to “recognize and respond” to the feelings of others. A healthy empathy circuit allows us to feel others’ pain and transcend single-minded focus on our own. This theory does, however, seem to carry a presumption that when one “recognizes and responds,” one will do so in warm and fuzzy ways. But what about those who “recognize and respond” to others’ feelings with great discernment—and then torture them? It happens.

One troubling aspect of Baron-Cohen’s grand substitution of a lack of empathy for evil is the mechanistic way he describes it.

He characterizes those who lack empathy as having “a chip in their neural computer missing.” He tells us “empathy is more like a dimmer switch than an all-or-none switch.” The big problem here is that by reducing evil to a mechanical malfunction in the empathy circuit, Baron-Cohen also reduces, or even abolishes, good. No one in this deterministic conceptual system chooses to be good, courageous, or heroic. They just have a well-developed empathy circuit that compels them act empathetically—there’s no choice or honor in the matter.

…Many neuroscientists, confronted by the “hard problem of consciousness,” evade it by citing a quarter-century-old experiment by one Benjamin Libet, which purported to reveal that apparently conscious decisions are actually made unconsciously—preconsciously—some 500 milliseconds (half a second) before the illusion of a conscious decision is made conscious. (A recent paper puts it at a full second.) But Libet’s study fails to explain how the initial unconscious decision is made by the electrified piece of meat—he just kicks the can into the preconscious, you might say—or why we have the illusion of consciousness at all.

You get the idea. It’s like the God of the gaps theory, except the setting is the brain itself rather than the fossil record. No matter what studies show, Rosenbaum is going to insist that there is an unaccounted-for area at the beginning of the thought process that can only be satisfactorily “explained” by positing some sort of noumenal vacuum beyond space and time whence all human decisions spring, uncaused. And once again, this is only an issue at all because we insist on perpetuating a distinction between “me” and “my brain”.

When All You Have Is a Bible, Everything Looks Like a Crucifixion Nail

By in extraordinary popular delusions, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, religion, waiting for the barbarians

Jim Wallis sees dead people:

There is a lot of speculation as to who the “Occupiers” are and what they might accomplish. There is much I still don’t know about the movement, but undeniably it has caught the imagination of a generation — and that matters.
Here are a few things I do know about the Occupy Wall Street protesters:
When they stand with the poor, they stand with Jesus.
When they stand with the hungry, they stand with Jesus.
When they stand for those without a job or a home, they stand with Jesus.
When they are peaceful, non-violent, and love their neighbors (even the ones they don’t agree with and who don’t agree with them), they are walking as Jesus walked.
When they talk about holding banks and corporations accountable, they sound like Jesus and the biblical prophets before him who all spoke about holding the wealthy and powerful accountable.

Oh, please. Jesus wouldn’t be protesting on Wall Street; he’d be grabbing people by the lapels and yammering about Mayan prophecies! 2012! End of the world! Aieee!

Also, I couldn’t help but be reminded of this.

1 2 3