Over at the Washington Post's always-entertaining On Faith section, they've recently been discussing the intersection of religion and sex. Many of the responses deserve attention (a word which here means "derision"), but let me just focus on two.
The one written by Janet Edwards definitely falls into the horseshoes/hand grenades category. She starts off well enough, advising people to "have sexual intimacy arise out of other kinds of personal intimacy like enjoyment of one another's company and shared interests, and give priority to love, mutual respect and safety," but it pretty quickly devolves into crazy-person territory. "[T]he central model in Scripture and Christian tradition for God's love," she says, "is 'covenant,' first between God and creation, second with Israel and finally with the church. In each instance, God's invitation to relationship stems from God's yearning for intimacy with another." This, already, is a little troubling: so we're all here so that God can engage in some spiritual analog of polyamory with all of us? And, as follows from that premise, those of us who turn God down (those for whom God is, I suppose, not our type) get to burn in hell for it? Yes, that's surely an understanding that will promote healthy sexual beilefs and behaviors.
It gets even worse when she describes how "love, respect and safety play a part: safety from destruction in the covenant of the rainbow (Genesis 8:20-9:17), respect for the harlot in the prophet Hosea (Hosea 1:2-2:20), and love, above all else, in Jesus (1 John 4:7-21)." Unless I'm missing something here, she essentially says that God is running a protection racket. I mean, you tell me what this sounds like: it doesn't matter what kind of person you are (although "harlot" ain't exactly the worst of the worst), so long as you pay up (love Jesus) God will make sure that you don't have any...unfortunate accidents. You know, like having a piano dropped on you, maybe - it's sad, but these things happen all the time. Mobster-tastic!
Meanwhile, Colleen Carroll Campbell, whose parents clearly did not read enough Spider-Man before they named their kid, has something less obviously shady but still pretty disturbing to say about the whole God and sex issue. For her, "men and women bear God's image in and through the sexual difference imprinted on their bodies." Besides her mildly disturbing usage of the word "imprinted" - what are we, collectible figurines? - Campbell's theory quickly runs into problems no matter which direction you approach it from. Are you a zoologist (or not wholly ignorant)? Then you know that animals also have "sexual difference imprinted on their bodies," which on Campbell's reasoning means that they, too, are made in God's image. Are you a doctor (or not wholly ignorant)? Then you know that people frequently have nonstandard genitalia, which apparently means that they're either subhuman (because they don't have the image of God) or superhuman (because their image of God is more special than ours). Are you a theologian (or not wholly ignorant)? Then you know that Christians believe in life after death, a scenario in which we would (lacking our bodies) no longer be made in God's image and thus be worthless. Are you a criminologist (or not wholly ignorant)? Then you know that people sometimes mutilate their own or others' genitals, in which case apparently the mutilated people become less divine. Are you an old person (or not wholly ignorant)? Then you know that our sexual functioning pretty much drops off the map at a certain point, thus making us mere has-beens in Campbell's eyes. I could go on, but by now you get the point.
Anyway, most of the entries are good for a laugh. Especially for any of you Dallas Mavs fans out there, this might be a good opportunity to lose yourself in something for an hour or so. Just so long as you try not to think about the fact that lots and lots of people take this stuff seriously, you should be just fine.
Against my better judgment, I finally broke down after reading the nth Christian endorsement of Mary Eberstadt's The Loser Letters and decided to go check it out. For those who don't spend inordinate amounts of time trawling the World Wide Series Of Tubes for bad argumentation, The Loser Letters is advertised as a CS Lewisian satire of atheism that has drawn nothing but praise from the 'net's various apologists. Spare yourself the trouble of reading it - its satire and philosophy are, to put it lightly, shitty - and let me instead go into one of its best arguments.*
As summarized by Sean Herriott, her claim centers on "the question of the evolutionary advantage of guilt (there isn’t any, as evidenced by the lack of cheetahs in carnivore support groups). Eberstadt makes a compelling argument for guilt as a proof that we are more than just an evolutionary by-product." (Get it? Cheetahs in carnivore support groups? Ha! Ha! Look, you can't say I didn't warn you.) This argument, despite being credited to Eberstadt, is in fact quite old and has been applied to any number of different human behaviors or attributes. JP Moreland, for instance, has already run this same argument with consciousness:
"It is not hard to see how an evolutionary account could be given for new and increasingly complex physical structures that constitute different organisms. However, organisms are black boxes as far as evolution is concerned. As long as an organism, when receiving certain inputs, generates the correct behavioral outputs under the demands of fighting, fleeing, reproducing and feeding, the organism will survive. What goes on inside the organism is irrelevant and only becomes significant for the processes of evolution when an output is produced. Strictly speaking, it is the output, not what caused it, that bears on the struggle for reproductive advantage. Moreover, the functions organisms carry out consciously could just as well have been done unconsciously."(For more on Moreland, see this post.)
Since consciousness doesn't confer any particular advantages, Moreland says, it couldn't possibly be the result of an evolutionary process. Forget the fact that he has no idea whether or not consciousness makes for a fitter species (the "black box" thing has ever been more a mere catchphrase than evidence), evolution just doesn't work this way.
For one thing, we can safely conclude that Moreland and Eberstadt are idiots just from the fact that many species have gone extinct: if all mutations/changes/adaptations/whatever were helpful (or even just relatively helpful) this would not happen. But that level of thinking isn't even necessary in this case, as the only reason to take the no-evolutionary-advantage argument seriously is if you already reject evolution in favor of something more personal.
Eberstadt, Moreland, and their cohorts in this matter obviously expect evolution to be elegant in some sense: whatever doesn't fit in to the picture, they think, is itself a disproof of the very concept. Elegance, however, is basically a human creation: while we can say that a certain natural state of affairs operates efficiently or tightly, those arrangements are the result of things falling into place and not, for instance, good planning or design. Indeed, the whole point behind evolution is that eliminates questions of planning and design, which means that faulting evolution for its inelegance is about as helpful as faulting the modern understanding of light because it doesn't mention the luminous aether. Basically, until religious partisans stop trying to conceive of evolution as happening the way that they themselves would have done it if it were up to them, they're just not going to get it.
But then, why should they bother? If you can receive praise (and money) for producing a philosophically blank piece of literary refuse, what possible motivation could you have for doing your homework on the actual issues in play? Until people are either too ashamed or too broke to reward hacks like Eberstadt, we'd better steel ourselves for this deluge if stupidity to continue.
*If, as you read this post, you doubt that this is actually an example of Eberstadt's best work, consider that another one of her arguments - seriously - is that atheism is "arrogant." I kid you not.
All I know is it has a math joke in it. Much like "Finite Simple Group Of Order Two," then, I fear that I may have an undue attachment to it.
Compare and contrast:
"[The word 'vegetable'] is hate speech against people similarly situated. Indeed, the V-word should be rendered just as societally unacceptable as the N-word has thankfully become. Both epithets serve the same purpose, that is, to demean, dehumanize, and exclude–so as to open the door to oppression, exploitation, and killing."
"One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms."
"When fertilization is complete a new human being is brought into existence that is genetically distinct from the mother and father and that exists as a distinct entity. Therefore, from the moment of conception what exists is a human being with potential for growth and full realization." (See also.)Wesley Smith, self-proclaimed bioethics expert and Senior Fellow at the lamentable Discovery Institute, is the author of that first quote. His point, roughly, is that humans are humans and that's it: allow Terri Schiavo to die and you're approximately as bad as someone who lynches someone because of the color of their skin. Although I still find it totally unpersuasive, I think I may have misconstrued this argument somewhat in the past.
That second quote up there is from David Hart, who hopefully you all remember from last week. At the time it didn't seem necessary to take his "human form" claim completely literally, but now I'm rethinking that. Smith, certainly, seems to operate on a hyper-literal level: for him, medical facts (like Schiavo's physiological capability to support a personality, or her lack thereof) seem to matter less than the mere fact of someone looking like (i.e., having the form of) a human. There are many objections to this position, ranging from the coldly practical (you could use the resources spent on the Schiavos of the world to do how much more good, again?) to the simply level-headed (discrimination against the insensate can't possibly be as harmful as e.g. racial discrimination), but the one in particular that I see as problematic for Smith relates to internal consistency.
Although I have not yet found a fully-fleshed-out statement of his position on abortion (I just haven't looked that hard yet), it's not outlandish to hypothesize that Smith probably agrees more or less with the human-potential-for-realization argument delineated above. Certainly that response is a common one insofar as it helps people in Smith's position avoid saying that a fetus in fetu is just as valuable (i.e., has the same moral worth) as the person who hosts it. The only problem with this is that it conflicts with his position on (shall we say) people in a persistent vegitative state: by definition, no person in an irreversible comatose state has the potential for growth or flourishing.
The missing ingredient in all of this, it seems to me, is thinking. We can look at someone like Terri Schiavo and see a person whether or not there's one there; the same goes for a fetus. But if we always jump straight from seeing to believing, the odds of working out a coherent view of reality are basically nil. Typically philosophers who are caught between a rock and a hard place talk of "biting the bullet" - of accepting a seemingly incongruous conclusion - but even that measure is unavailable in cases like these. Rather than face a single, fixed problem, the seeing-is-believing crowd end up chasing their tails - their goalpoasts, as it were, adapt to suit the limited context of the argument. While this works to some extent in a limited discussion, it quickly becomes tedious when the context widens.
So returning to Hart: I now admit, on reflection, that the typical secular morality will not in fact attribute glory to each and every human form. Given the proper medical facts, it would be insane to attribute moral worth to a human-shaped organism that lacks even the slightest glimmer of personhood; to oppress or exploit such an entity would be no worse than oppressing or exploiting a cow (and, depending on the specific case, could in fact be much less problematic). This, however, is the bullet that I will happily bite if it means establishing a single, solid moral framework instead of one that shifts depending on what its architects need it to accomplish.
Trying to make up for not posting today - been a little on the busy side - so here's a short post to close out the night, courtesy of Mike Almeida.
"...the interesting question is whether I can exist without any body at all. I have an argument that I can exist without any body at all.Let n=0: then Almeida exists with -1 cells? Sorry, I don't think so.
Suppose I have body B. Let B-1 be my body minus one cell of my current body. I can exist without B-1. Inductive step: for any body Bn that I might have, there is a world in which I exist with Bn-1. Therefore there is a world in which I exist with no body at all."
Anyway, it should be clear that his inductive step begs the question. The thing about mathematical induction, the specific method of proof that Almeida is using here, is that it doesn't strictly speaking rely on its premises being true. Empirical induction, the thing that we all do when we conclude e.g. that the sun will rise in the morning, requires true premises, but mathematical induction doesn't. So what Almeida certainly can't do is run his inductive argument and then assert that, since the argument "works," the premise must be true. That option, then, is out. Alternatively, maybe he thinks that his inductive step just is true and doesn't need to be defended. In that case, he might be a moron.
The statement "for any body Bn that I might have, there is a world in which I exist with Bn-1" could only possibly be true if it's true for the case where n=1 (the case, in other words, that "proves" dualism). Assuming the general case, that is to say, means assuming each and every specific case; when one of these specific cases is the one under investigation, such an assumption will therefore beg the question every single time. It's hidden (somewhat) by the fact that he doesn't explicitly identify the relevant case in his assumption - that's the nice thing about using the word "any" - but the fallacy exists even if you can't read it directly off your screen.
He tries to remedy this by offering some independent support for his inductive step, but his support is hardly convincing. Basically, it amounts to his repeating himself: "for any world in which I exist with any body Bn," he says, "it is possible that I lose a single cell (or single particle) and continue to exist." While that is indeed an acceptable rephrasing of his premise, playing three-card monte with words does not actually alter the argument in any way. Again, his assumption here relies (both for its truth and its usefulness) on the case where the single cell (or particle) represents all of Almeida. For mind/body monists like me, a single-celled organism whose one cell gets destroyed obviously no longer exists, and merely asserting otherwise isn't liable to change my mind.
So yeah - more posting tomorrow. In the meantime, go Spurs go!
Since arguments have specific claims and a clearly delineated path from those claims to some equally specific conclusion, it can be stressful or risky to engage in argumentation. What if one of your claims is wrong? What if your reasoning has an irreparable hole in it? Shouldn't everybody get to say their piece without fearing a reprisal from better-educated, more astute people? While I can understand these concerns and to some extent even sympathize with them, there's a pretty hard limit to how far this can be taken.
We've seen this in action before with Alex Pruss's "it's not me, it's you" post about the problem of evil and it wasn't convincing then. The odds of it working for Fred Reed, then, are not too good.
"Listening to the speakers, I concluded that AmRen [American Renaissance, a batty conference on race] suffered chiefly from an intense political incorrectness. Everything they said was either true or well within the bounds of reason. Most of it I had seen in mainstream publications. The sin of the speakers was that they spoke without abashment and equivocation. The barely restricted tidal wave from the south, they said, is profoundly changing American society without the consent of the governed. It is. The consequences have not been thought out, they said. They haven’t.See? There's no need for an argument per se, he just wants to know what we think we're doing! I mean, if you take away the political correctness and step outside the mainstream - if you can for once have the opportunity to speak proudly and openly without having to watch out for rational dissent - then you can see really clearly "that multiculturalism is not a good idea."
Probably AmRen’s fundamental idea is that multiculturalism is not a good idea, that countries are much better off when they have a homogeneous culture, or at least a dominant one. Mix cultures in one country, and you get trouble. Observation confirms the proposition. In Canada, you find hostility between English and French; in Sri Lanka, Tamils and Sinhalese; in the US, black, white, and brown; in Mexico, Mexicans and indigenes; in Malaya, Chinese and Malays; in Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites; in France, French and Africans; in Vietnam, Vietnamese and Montagnards; in India, Moslems and Hindus; in Cambodia, Cambodians and Vietnamese; in South Africa, blacks and whites; in Burundi, Hutus and Tutsis, and so on. And on. And on.
So what do we think we are doing?"
One advantage of this writing style is its tone. By casting himself as some sort of victim whose every word is slandered by the powers that be, Reed scores a rhetorical point every time he points out an obvious truth. We haven't laid out every single consequence of illegal immigration, it's true, but what does that prove, exactly? Where does that even fit in to his theory? It sounds vaguely threatening, I guess, but in terms of its relevance it's a total non sequitur, of the sort that we usually associate with major senility.
As for what little argumentation he actually presents, it's badly flawed. The United States, first and foremost, has a dominant culture (as, I suspect, do all of the other countries he lists), so the idea that countries need "a homogeneous culture, or at least a dominant one" is not actually supported (let alone confirmed) by his observations. Moreover, his evidence is partial at best. Assuming that, as stated, "black, white, and brown" people in the U.S. cause "trouble" just because they're rubbing up against one another, that still doesn't prove in general that multiculturalism itself is the problem: to be blunt about it, Asians live here, too. Along those same lines, anybody with the time and desire could easily draw up a list of peacefully coexisting cultures that's just as long as Reed's list. Observation, it bears repeating, needs to be controlled and not just you sitting in your chair with Google seeing what you can find. Especially since Reed's use of "culture" is so broad (it includes race, nationality, language, religion, and ethnicity),* it's trivial to balance out the scales.
But do the scales even need balancing? It's not clear - recall that Reed's position deals with the good of countries and not people. Without taking the time to figure out what it would mean for something to be good for a country, it's pretty clear (if good-for-countries doesn't reduce to good-for-people) that Reed has missed the point. We can, that is to say, grant him his premise "that countries are much better off" without multiculturalism even despite its lack of evidence and still not be obligated to alter our behavior in any way. Again, assuming that good-for-countries has some definition that's not just a function of good-for-people, there's no compelling reason to care about the circumstances under which a country would be better off. This would be roughly like arguing that employees have an inescapable obligation to work every moment that they're not asleep, eating, or otherwise tending to their basic bodily needs: the company would certainly be "much better off" if it received (let's say) 14 hours of work per person per day instead of 8, but the costs in this scenario obviously outweigh the benefits. Unless Reed is actually prepared to argue that the political strength of a nation should take priority over the wellbeing of people, all of this is just a giant waste of time.
It's difficult to notice all of this, however, because Reed is so careful to keep the focus on the reader. The paragraph containing his argument is preceded by one that tacitly attacks the reader's character and is followed by a rhetorical question that is for all intents and purposes unanswerable. Like Pruss's Jerry-Lundegaard-esque "I'm trying my best, here" exasperation, Reed's leverage here comes neither from evidence nor reason but a simple sense of guilt. By casting himself as humble and good-willed, he hopes that his frustration will generate (skepticism-crippling) pity in his audience in place of the derision that he has earned. Call me cold-hearted if you like, but I'm not buying it.
*It's weird, isn't it, that he has left out gender and sexual orientation. I don't have any explanation for this, necessarily, but it's just weird.
The first, I am optimistically guessing, in a series.
Today's metaphilosophy hint is this: if you have developed a new response to a very old philosophical problem (say, the problem of evil), the vast majority of the time your new response will either be brilliant or wildly idiotic. For instance:
"I doubt that the 'Problem of Evil' will ever fully make sense to us, at least this side of paradise. However, I do think that [apologist John] Polkinghorne’s free-process defence is the closest we may get. As he says:This response, it should go without saying, is gibberish. Comparing human freedom (especially the Christian, supernatural version of human freedom) to the "freedom" of the entire universe is a recipe for unmitigated disaster, and unsurprisingly that's precisely what we get here. I mean, there's really nothing else to say. This argument relies on mangling language, ignoring logic, and (as is typical for problem of evil discussions) abandoning all moral sense: assuming for the sake of argument that somehow these two senses of "freedom" really are analogous (or even that they're both coherent), there's still the incredibly obvious point that you can't harm the universe. Given the choice between allowing cosmic "freedom" (and therefore natural disasters and the resultant harm to people) and restricting cosmic "freedom" (thus harming literally nothing), Polkinghorne's God would have to choose the latter. Capital-L Love or not, any being that trades some abstracted, post-hippie notion of "cosmic freedom" for the chance to prevent real suffering is either insane or malicious; the same alternatives, one thinks, can be applied to Polkinghorne as well.
I think the only possible solution lies in a variation of the free-will defence, applied to the whole created world. One might call it ‘the free-process defence’. In his great act of creation I believe that God allows the physical world to be itself, not in Manichaean opposition to him, but in that independence which is Love’s gift of freedom to the one beloved.Just as God gives humanity the freedom to be itself and to make choices (even when those choices are not the one’s God wishes his children would make), so too God gives the whole of his creation the freedom to be itself."
…
The Cosmos is given the opportunity to be itself. (Science and Providence, page 66 [strangely, pg. 77 in the link provided])
So if you're developing a radical new answer to an old philosophical problem, please do yourself the favor of checking to see if you aren't losing your grip on reality. Taking a suggestion from the Evil Overlord List, go find an average five-year-old child and tell them your insight. Polkinghorne would almost surely have benefited from that screening process, so maybe you can avoid making his mistake.
In the midst of all of the recent shenanigans surrounding South Park, people may have missed Trey Parker's pseudo-insight on religion. He says that Christianity "makes no sense" and is "just bad writing, really," but he hastens to add that "the silliest ['religion story'] I've ever heard is, 'Yeah, there's this big, giant universe and it's expanding and it's all going to collapse on itself and we're all just here, just 'cuz. Just 'cuz.'" Before you haul off and start abusing him, let me say one thing in Parker's defense: the universe, taken as it is, does make for a pretty poor story.
This, in some sense, is the main point of Alan Moore's Watchmen, in which the resident god figure declares that no plotline ever reaches complete resolution. That universe, which if it is to be meaningful must serve as at least an allegory for ours, is one that's "expanding and it's all going to collapse on itself and we're all here, just 'cause" - and that's really hard to wrap one's head around. Without a sense of how the story ends, it's totally unclear who's heroic or villainous; you can't tell if the story is tragic or not; there are no straightforward moral lessons; there are tons of unanswered questions bracketing the story's beginning and end; and so on. Put simply, as a traditional story - something we humans can experience for a short time and then step back to view as a coherent whole - it sucks. We'd much rather have something like LOST, where (we've been assured that) a single, unifying ending exists despite the show's many switchbacks and complexities. Even though Watchmen is pretty clearly the superior work of art (and remember when I say that how huge a LOST fan I am), its story considered by itself is incredibly unpleasant and dissatisfying.
It's possible, then, that Parker had a point about the secular story of the universe: it would, in many ways, count as "bad writing" if someone were to have written it. Probably this isn't what he meant - probably he was just trying to be cutting and funny and not succeeding at either - but he does have an out if he develops a desire to take it. Even if he does take it, though, there's a big problem lurking here: at least for now, we really like stories.
For whatever reason - human brain structure or our cultural upbringings or whatever - people have an impressive tendency to narrativize things. The whole field of (pop?) history, for example, is arguably one big joke that we've been playing on ourselves: take away sociology, economics, and the various other actual sciences involved and it seems that the only thing that remains is, well, a story. On a more granular level, a common component of the midlife crisis is a sense of directionlessness - of, in other words, having fallen off the rails of one's own story. Consider also Aseem Shukla's outsize indignation that we Americans should have taken up yoga without also importing the accompanying Hindu stories:
"Christians, Jews, Muslims, Pagans, agnostics and atheists they may be, but they partake in the spiritual heritage of a faith tradition with a vigor often unmatched by even among the two-and-a half-million Hindu Americans here. The Yoga Journal found that the industry generates more than $6 billion each year and continues on an incredible trajectory of popularity. It would seem that yoga's mother tradition, Hinduism, would be shining in the brilliant glow of dedicated disciples seeking more from the very font of their passion.If you want to participate in an activity that you like and helps to keep you physically healthy, Shukla is saying, you are crass and a thief if you do so "without the spirituality" that comes from plot-progressing concepts like "karma, dharma and reincarnation." Indeed, he says that storyless yoga "is utterly rudimentary and deficient" - so you may think that you're enjoying yourself and doing something worth your while, but in reality your experience is inferior!
Yet the reality is very different. Hinduism in common parlance is identified more with holy cows than Gomukhasana, the notoriously arduous twisting posture; with millions of warring gods rather than the unity of divinity of Hindu tradition--that God may manifest and be worshiped in infinite ways; as a tradition of colorful and harrowing wandering ascetics more than the spiritual inspiration of Patanjali, the second century BCE commentator and composer of the Yoga Sutras, that form the philosophical basis of Yoga practice today.
...Hinduism, as a faith tradition, stands at this pass a victim of overt intellectual property theft, absence of trademark protections and the facile complicity of generations of Hindu yogis, gurus, swamis and others that offered up a religion's spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism."
Without commenting on whether this instinct is in general good or bad (or innate or learned), it at least seems like something we might want to account for; in terms of yesterday's post about energy consumption and immigration, this is an opportunity for skeptics to practice behaviorally informed interactions. Parker, at this point, will clearly not be of any help: even if he hasn't actually committed himself to being an ideological anarchist, he doesn't seem to have anywhere near the kind of intellect or discipline necessary to address a problem of this sort. Then again, maybe the answer is simpler than it seems.
Stories, it's worth pointing out, don't politely wait until the current one finishes before they start: the Secular Story Of The Universe, then, doesn't have to exclude other, less "badly written" ones. Moreover, so long as there is no well-written Story Of The Universe to follow, there's no reason not to focus on smaller, more local yarns. The odd thing about this is that most people are very comfortable making the same point about politics even if they shy away from doing it on a metaphysical level: many people who admit no particular concern about e.g. The Story Of The USA per se (because what matters ultimately is that people behave well and not that they specifically do so under a specific jurisdiction) will still say that atheism is dangerous or questionable because it doesn't provide a compelling Story Of The Universe. Maybe I'm missing some key psychological or philosophical insight here, but what's the big difference? Volunteering for charities, pressuring legislators into making good decisions, and even just being nice are all things whose value (and whose stories) we can explain without even a passing reference to religion or country, right? So it's not so much that Parker is wrong for calling naturalism a silly story, it's that he has (evidently) been trained to look only for stories that take place on the biggest possible scale.
At any rate, Parker gets a fremdscham++ on this one for sure. If you're going to participate in a discussion at all, it's childish to do so just in order to show off how much of a pain in the ass you can be. He's free to be a pain in the ass, of course, but it's like the movie says: if there isn't something bigger than freedom, freedom is just entertainment.
So it turns out that, every once in a while, a project undertaken in order to achieve a certain goal instead produces the opposite goal. For example, "an energy-conservation program in California that informed households about how their energy use compared with that of their neighbors" accidentally encouraged "Republicans who live[d] in conservative neighborhoods (and hence had no neighborly pressure to conserve) [to increase] their [energy] consumption by 1 percent." (Or, it seemed to do this, anyway: 1%, you'd think, is within the margin of error, and other factors may have been at play. Anyway, let's pretend for the moment that the conservation program actually did backfire; even if it didn't, you can pretty easily fill in your own example.) Whatever the reasons for this, you'd think that this is something to avoid, this backfiring phenomenon. At least, you would if you're not Ray Fisman.
"That some groups respond in unexpected ways to well-meaning nudges," Fisman says, "is a lesson that the architects of 'behaviorally informed' policy and regulation should keep in mind in drafting their messages...But this starts to sound an awful lot like fine-tuned social engineering, which gets us away from the original vision of simple nudges making a better world. And it starts to sound exactly like the type of heavy-handed governing that Republicans may be quietly rebelling against by turning up their thermostats." So what's the alternative, then? Cross our fingers and hope that people will begin to behave better all on their own? Stick with the policies and regulations that are productive and counterproductive in equally large parts of the population? In short, isn't the only alternative to behaviorally informed policy behaviorally ignorant policy?
Well, or maybe not. Maybe, instead of either doing the research needed to draft good legislation or drafting any old legislation and knocking on wood, we can just do what the lovely people of Arizona did and rule through the overwhelming use of force.
"RUSSELL PEARCE is the quintessential Arizona Republican. He wears stars-and-stripes shirts and has clips of John Wayne and Ronald Reagan on his website. He loves guns, his family, his Mormon faith, his country and the law, which he enforced for many years as deputy sheriff of Maricopa County. He jokes that being Republican, and thus not having a heart, saved his life when he got shot in the chest once. But his main passion is illegal immigrants, whom he calls 'invaders'. He loathed them even before his son Sean, also a sheriff’s deputy, got shot by one. But now it is personal.
Mr Pearce, a state senator, has sponsored an Arizona law that, if enacted, would be the toughest in the country. It is so brazen it has caused outrage. This week it passed the last hurdles in the state legislature. As The Economist went to press, it was awaiting the signature of Arizona’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer [who has since signed the bill into law].
Illegal immigration is a federal crime. Mr Pearce’s law, however, would also make it a state crime and would require the police, as opposed to federal agents, to make arrests and check the immigration status of individuals who look suspicious to them. Citizens who think their cops are not vigilant enough would be encouraged to sue their cities or counties, and no city or county may remain a 'sanctuary' where this law is not enforced."Got it? Anybody "who looks suspicious" can be stopped in public and arrested just because. And, in fairness, you have to acknowledge the expediency of this shortcut. We could probably do all kinds of research and studies to find out how to curb illegal immigration effectively - or (gasp) how to change the immigration system altogether so that illegal immigration becomes a non-issue - but it's just so much easier to throw all the brown people in jail and see which ones have the gumption to get themselves out. Besides, 4th amendment protections and scientific research are socialism. Real, freedom-loving Americans know they have nothing to fear from our brave men and women in uniform. Et cetera.
The point of making progress in understanding people, if I may be so bold as to say so, is to put that knowledge to use benefiting people. It would therefore be an embarrassment to let wafflers like Fisman handcuff our policymakers, especially given what the alternative apparently looks like.
I agree with all of this.
Children, unlike many adults I could name, are smart and can absorb the shit out of some complicated information. Really, though, that's just a specific case of a general rule: children can and will absorb the shit out of more or less any information. Accordingly, we have not only the opportunity to educate them well but, more strongly, an obligation to do so. The reason for this is that, in the absence of "science or real information of any kind," children will only be able to learn things like "the ocean smiles at the sky" - in other words, poetically delirious pablum.
Nature is pretty awesome even just as a "mediocre montage of amazing footage," it's true, but wouldn't it be more awesome if we could appreciate its surface beauty and understand it for what it is? Entertainment, as West rightly observes, need not be obtained by banishing science. In fact, if you look really hard, you might even see that the one is often accomplished by the other. Or, y'know, you could just settle for garbage. Your choice.
I call this little maneuver (as of about twenty seconds ago, when I started to need a name for it) the shield/stanchion shuffle, and Albert Mohler looks to be an expert:
"The political implications of the issue are clear — those pushing for the normalization of homosexuality want to be able to point to research that would prove the normality of homosexuality in nature. This is where Christians need to think very carefully. Some believers will be tempted just to dismiss the research as bogus or irrelevant. This would be a mistake.Here are the steps:
The world we know is a world that shows all the effects of human sin and the curse of God’s judgment on that sin. Though the glory of God shines through even its fallen state, nature now imperfectly displays the glory of God. Because of the curse, the world around us now reveals and contains innumerable elements that are 'natural,' but not normative. Illnesses and earthquakes are natural, but not normative."
- Attack a position based on some false claim or other. For example, argue against same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex couples, or even same-sex intercourse on the basis that everything other than heterosexuality is "unnatural."
- Wait for people to find out that the claim is false. In this case, Mohler cites studies of albatrosses that show (to some degree) how silly the whole gay-is-unnatural argument is. You'd think he might want to reject those studies, but if he does so he'll never get to step 3.
- Claim that the findings from step 2 constitute the entirety of your opponents' argument. Since this will normally result in a false dilemma - this one being, things are either unnatural or normative - you now have a nice, convenient straw man to stomp on for a while.
When someone launches an attack against one specific aspect of an idea or theory, like the conservative religious claim that LGBT people are sinners because they're unnatural, all that is required in response is to defend that one specific aspect (assuming, that is, that this defense doesn't break something somewhere else). One of the most effective dialectical moves, then, is to intentionally attack an idea's strong point so that its defenders will be forced to offer up such a defense. With that limited defense in hand, you can then turn around and say that the idea must be wrong because its supporters only ever offer insufficient evidence in favor of it. Best of all, step three is, taken in isolation from the rest of the process, perfectly legitimate: Mohler (a la Walter Sobchak) isn't wrong in separating the natural from the normative, he's just an asshole for pretending that that distinction is where the conversation ends. Gay rights advocates know full well about the disconnect between nature and morality and have already addressed it - but, again, the point here is not to advance the dialogue but rather, simply, to do a little dance.
As much as I disparage the history-centric aspects of practicing philosophy, I have to admit at least this much: before you enter into a conversation, you have to go back and check to make sure which arguments are designed to establish a given position as a whole (stanchions) and which are designed to protect individual pieces of it (shields). Only the former are open to the kind of free-form nitpicking in which Mohler engages; the latte require tight, focused responses. It's tempting to just go with free-form nitpicking all the time (especially because it's the easier of the two options), but that approach is childish at best and, in any case, not remotely productive.
Or, "Good evidence, bad evidence":
"Whether you agree or disagree with [columnist Peggy] Noonan’s opposition to more than two thousand years of Church history and practice, you might reasonably expect Noonan to bear the burden of persuasion to show how her proposal [i.e., promoting women into positions of power] would save the Church [esp. from future sex scandals].This argument, written by one Gayle Trotter, is just ridiculous: if you have scientific data to back up your position,* why would you feel the need to add "a brief survey of the Bible"? The stuff in the Bible didn't actually happen, and even if it did it wouldn't be a valid representation of human (and especially modern human) behavior.
In that regard, Noonan’s only apparent evidence is a nun’s comment to her that 'if a woman had been sitting beside a bishop transferring a priest with a history of abuse, she would have said, "Hey, wait a minute!"' Really?
Hey, wait a minute. A brief survey of the Bible suggests that sin is evenly distributed across the sexes. Adam and Eve both ate the forbidden fruit (and not in that order, as Paul was quick to point out). Rachel stole her father’s idols to worship them. Sarah’s jealousy subjected Hagar to vicious cruelty. And, long before Anita Hill, Potiphar’s wife put an undeserved dent in Joseph’s professional reputation and nearly destroyed his career.
...In some sense, Noonan’s argument implicitly relies on maternal stereotypes of women as more nurturing and protective of children than are men. However, a significant body of evidence demonstrates that fathers actually can play an important role in protecting children from physical and sexual abuse."
Look, I love the fact that Trotter correctly places the burden of proof on Noonan and even questions her rather skimpy secondhand thought experiment (remember, kids, hypothetical evidence begs the question!) - heck, she even did a good job calling Noonan out on the women-are-naturally-kind thing - but why on Earth would you ever liken a solid data set to a bunch of millennia-old fables? Fiction just isn't evidence, no matter how well it accords with your preferred interpretation of reality.
*Which it's not clear that she does: fathers aren't fathers, if you catch my drift, and even then the dynamics of church life are surely different than those of family life.
I've said a few times before how ugly our money is here in the US of A but I never expected this. For one thing we have no concept of how to redesign money (see e.g. the goofy new $100 bill); for another I tend to complain about relatively outlandish things. Yet what is the internet for if not the investigation of outlandish subjects?
"It seems so obvious to us that the 'only' realistic way for a swift economic recovery is through a thorough, in-depth, rebranding scheme – starting with the redesign of the iconic US Dollar – it's the 'only' pragmatic way to add some realistic stimulation into our lives! Therefore, you must take part and we really want to see what YOU would do."Neat! I can't draw for shit - you'll find this out for yourselves on Everybody Draw Mohammed Day - but they have some pretty excellent submissions from people who do have artistic talent.
My favorite, though, is the series of minimalist bills. E.g.:
As though seeking redemption for his frequent forays into absurdity, Jeff Mirus has managed to produce a very nearly praiseworthy article elaborating his position on the Vatican's still-ongoing abuse scandal. In fact, it's so very close to praiseworthy that it's tempting to round up just because he's a conservative Catholic and they've been fantastically consistent in their inability to expound on this topic without saying something monstrous. For me he doesn't quite earn it, but maybe you'll feel differently:
"A priest who murders a layman or even another priest will certainly be exposed to civil law. In many cases, a priest who embezzles parish funds will be similarly exposed, though if restitution can be made quietly this might well be avoided. In cases of sexual abuse, the Church may be understandably reluctant to expose her priests to the civil law, perhaps because of the intrinsic uncertainty concerning facts and harm in such cases, and certainly because of the fear of particularly adverse publicity. But as sexual abuse is a legitimate civil crime, typically perpetrated against lay persons, right judgment suggests that exposure of guilty priests to the civil law will ordinarily be the most effective course of action."There's a lot of squirming just in this section but you can see how he's maybe starting to come around. He does support the criminal prosecution of criminal priests, even if he can't bring himself to call it the morally right thing to do and qualifies it with "ordinarily." This kind of squirming doesn't work and never does - effectivness is only positive when it comes to good behavior and he conspicuoulsy avoids identifying which extraordinary circumstances would call for a cover-up - but at least he's squirming and not just straight-up BSing us, right? Well, sort of.
"There are good reasons to be cautious. The Church does not and should not recognize the right of the State to interfere in her own affairs. In her own sphere the Church is a sovereign power, and the ability of the independent spiritual power of the Church to inform the police power of the State is important to social health...This is so close to being a sane position. Hopefully we can all agree with Mirus that any religion's internal affairs really are its own business and don't ever call for civil interference: "failure, for example, to conduct the liturgy according to the rubrics" is just not a drastic enough offense to warrant police attention. Similar reasoning can (and should) be applied to all other clubs as well, of course, but for this conversation the relevant club is religion and more specifically Catholicism. But just because your club has a book with "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not" in it does not mean that we need to heed its "independent spiritual power" or "superior understanding of the moral law."
The Church, which has a superior understanding of the moral law, naturally desires a certain independence of civil authority. In all her dealings, then, the Church has a strong vested interest in preserving a certain legal distance between herself and the State, and one of the purposes of Canon Law is to ensure the kind of tight management of ecclesiastical affairs that will minimize recourse to the power of the State. Overall, it is a healthy instinct for a bishop to be reluctant to seek civil recourse for handling problems associated with managing his clergy."
"The rumblings from India and (especially) Africa, where the Catholic Church is seeing its greatest growth, are growing louder. The news from these places exacerbates our shock and concern: The sexual abuse of children by clergy is now coupled with widespread reports of rapes of nuns -- young women recruited from India's and Africa's poorest families.Unlike Mary Ann Sorrentino, I don't find this news to be "amazing" at all; to the contrary, I would have been more surprised if priests and mothers superior, as human beings in a position of power and with the backing of an instution like he Vatican, hadn't abused their positions. As Mirus would be quick to point out, though, the actions of low-level agents don't necessarily reflect the attitudes or practices of the higher-ups. It may not be fair, in that case, to say that "the Church" is responsible for the rape, assault, and mental trauma of these cases. Or it might be fair - but in either case it's a moot point.
...The AIDS pandemic in Africa and India is said to have made nuns 'safer' sex partners and, also for that reason, targets of priests seeking sex. (Some nuns also reported sexual abuse by mothers superior.) The women, culturally brainwashed not to challenge men or female figures of authority, felt they had no choice, and the priests took further advantage by arguing that Catholic rules for priests required them to have sex 'only with virgins.'"
"More allegations came from Sister Jesme, an ex-nun from the Indian state of Kerala, who told of sexual abuse and forced homosexual relationships in a 2009 autobiography. But when the book was released, a spokesman for the Syro-Malabar order of the Catholic Church in India dismissed it as a 'book of trivialities.'Right, because "sexual abuse and forced homosexual relationships" are totally par for the course in "communal living" - why, I remember back in my dormitory days at college we'd sexually abuse each other and force same-sex relationships all the time. It was like an intramural sports league, only instead of intramural sports it was rape. You say toe-may-toe, I say toe-mah-toe.
'It's her experiences,' he said, 'but these are things that might creep into a society of communal living.' He added that the church would not be shocked by the allegations, concluding, 'The church knows about these things.'"
The point, at any rate, is that Mirus's "church knows about these things." In the absence of a strong, (I dare say) secular police force that "informs" the Vatican, it seems very much to be the case that the Vatican itself is either incapable of or uninterested in "informing" the local police. Part of this, you'd think, is due to a mistaken impression about what constitutes the church's "own sphere"; another large chunk can certainly be attributed to the attitude (shared by Mirus) that Catholics can do no wrong if they act en masse.* Whatever the cause, it would be insane for our or any other society to cede absolute moral authority to the Catholic church. Not because they're Catholics - because they're people. Mirus walks a fine line indeed when he denigrates "the State" but then substitutes another self-interested, monolithic organization in his place. If it was his own skin on the line it'd be one thing, but when Mirus's teetering worldview loses its center and crashes down (as it often does) there's this funny tendency for the debris to hit everyone except men like him.
*Was this intended to be a pun? Who knows! Believe whatever makes you happier.
"On the subject of thought experiments, the specially-crafted scenarios that philosophers use in order to build emotional support for their cases, I once said that "any argument that relies heavily on the presumed response to a contrived situation is fallacious." My stance on that hasn't changed - in fact, what I would like to do in this post is expand my statement to include arguments that rely on observed responses.
Experimental philosophy, the field designed to obtain observed responses to thought experiments, has pretty much been under attack since its inception by doubters like myself. Rob Shaver (warning: .doc) aims to defend x-phi from those doubts by citing ways to negate the effects of what he calls framing. Generically stated, framing issues occur when a non-relevant factor (such as the wording of a situation or the order in which situations are presented) so strongly interferes with the results of a test that the test itself is essentially worthless. For example, when one group of philosophers conducted a study on a controversial thought experiment in the philosophy of knowledge, Shaver reports that "subjects were significantly more willing to grant [the hypothetical] Mr. Truetemp knowledge if the Truetemp case followed the case of [blatantly obvious] non-knowledge, and significantly less willing to grant him knowledge if it followed the case of [blatantly obvious] knowledge." Given that the Truetemp case itself was identical in every case, people's opinions of it must have changed in relation to some other - i.e., extraneous - factor.
While framing issues such as the one in the Truetemp case pose one kind of problem, Shaver believes that this problem can be resolved. Experimental conditions that mitigate framing, he says, include "greater intelligence, awareness that one’s initial response may be mistaken, and seeing both of the relevant scenarios before answering," as well as several other controls that may or may not help. For an example of how effective these can be, consider the following example:
"when subjects were given one scenario or the other, they gave much higher compensation to a victim injured in a robbery while shopping at a store he first visited on that occasion (because his regular store was closed), than to a victim injured in the same way at his regular store. 90%, however, when given both scenarios, gave equal compensation."So far, so good: you do have to wonder what those other 10% were thinking, I guess, but a 9/10 success rate is pretty solid. The one problem is that this particular question has a really obvious solution and the only reason to engage in x-phi in the first place is to investigate the non-obvious questions. However, x-phi will need to clear another hurdle even if we assume that every study can, if properly constructed, produce numbers like this.
The aforementioned in-blog link refers to a study that purports to show gender differences; another infamous experiment suggests that culture plays a significant role as well. We can also expect age, socioeconomic class, perhaps race, and the other usual suspects to play a role in guiding people's intuitions. Framing, then, is likely not just a matter of biases built into a study by a researcher - it may also be a preexisting condition. Moreover, even a completely unanimous response would not necessarily count as good evidence: how many mistaken intuitions did people hold in, let's say, the 1500s? (Or, to phrase the same objection differently, if 99% of subjects in a well-controlled x-phi study rejected the idea that murder is a serious moral wrong, would we be obliged to take their word for it?) It's one thing to use well-controlled x-phi studies to find out what people think or even which positions are most plausible on a given set of premises, but those are internal to a system and therefore not terribly useful as support for that system. Especially since these are matters with no direct empirical component - we can't see knowledge, for example, or hear goodness - the fact of a certain position being internally consistent is basically irrelevant. As Kwame Appiah points out in his Cosmopolitanism, "[t]here are countless principles that would get you" to an internally consistent, intuitively plausible place - why should we choose the first one that comes to mind?
Maybe one day we'll have a good enough grasp of these issues to rely on aggregate opinions. For all I know, we might eventually discover some convenient law that reliably connects intuitions (or even just reflected-upon intuitions) to facts, or the absence of intuitions to the absence of facts, or any kind of fact about intuitions to anything at all helpful. I doubt that we will, but hey, who knows? Until we do, though, this business about moving philosophy from the one armchair to the many has got to stop.
After inhabiting (or at least peeping in at) the world of professional philosophy for some number of years now, I have developed a theory about the political stylings of one George W. Bush. As we all know, Bush and his pals had the charming habit of declaring military or ideological victory seemingly just because they felt like it, a tendency which was certainly not unique to that administration but that found its paradigmatic expression in his giant MISSION ACCOMPLISHED sign. My theory about this, briefly said, is that it comes from the world of philosophy.
As evidence for this theory I present David Hart's recent First Things essay, as featured by Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher among others. Based in Hart's disdain for the New Atheism movement - into which he conveniently lumps all atheists, up to and including the admirable Stephen Law - the essay rambles on for a long time about how skepticism these days just ain't what it used to be. He finds the problem of evil to be "incorrigibly impressionistic," for example, and scorns JJC Smart for arguing against miracles - so cliched, these arguments, so unoriginal! Making a real effort to reach Wildean levels of snark, Hart calls all modern skepticism "vapid," "no longer adequate," "boorish[ly] arrogant" (pot/kettle much?), "childish," incurious," and a whole host of other SAT insults that don't really need to be listed at this point. His major complaint - as though he needs one - is none of these, however. The biggest problem with modern skepticism, according to Hart, is that it strays too far from Nietzsche and therefore is in desperate want of what he calls "tragic sense." Whatever this tragic sense thing is, he thinks that latter-day heretics "lack the courage" to attain it. It's not immediately clear what this even means, let alone how it's relevant, but perhaps an example will help.
A.C. Grayling's 50 Voices of Disbelief essay, Hart says, is,
"at least momentarily, interesting. Couched at one juncture among its various arguments (all of which are pretty poor), there is something resembling a cogent point. Among the defenses of Christianity an apologist might adduce, says Grayling, would be a purely aesthetic cultural argument: But for Christianity, there would be no Renaissance art—no Annunciations or Madonnas—and would we not all be much the poorer if that were so? But, in fact, no, counters Grayling; we might rather profit from a far greater number of canvasses devoted to the lovely mythical themes of classical antiquity, and only a macabre sensibility could fail to see that 'an Aphrodite emerging from the Paphian foam is an infinitely more life-enhancing image than a Deposition from the Cross.' Here Grayling almost achieves a Nietzschean moment of moral clarity."This is supposed to be cogency? The most philosophically relevant subject that Hart can identify is art? This is not a good sign. Grayling, too, earns some censure for even dignifying this obvious distraction with his attention, but the main object of interest remains Hart's nebulous reference to "moral clarity." From what I can see, this clarity has something to do with our quality of life: we'd be "poorer" without Christian art, apparently, and so Hart evidently believes that we need to somehow address this hypothetical deprivation. Moreover, he thinks that Grayling has done so by substituting mythical art: "The question of whether Grayling might be accused of a certain deficiency of tragic sense," he says,
"can be deferred here. But perhaps he would have done well, in choosing this comparison, to have reflected on the sheer strangeness, and the significance, of the historical and cultural changes that made it possible in the first place for the death of a common man at the hands of a duly appointed legal authority to become the captivating center of an entire civilization’s moral and aesthetic contemplations—and for the deaths of all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the ancient order would never have accorded them."Note once again the delicate touch with which Hart indicts Grayling while refusing to identify his specific failings. Grayling, he says, should reflect on the fable of the crucifixion - but to what end we have no idea. Hart's position is so deficient of specifics that he can't phrase his own ultimate conclusion without throwing in a debilitating "perhaps," which suggests rather strongly that even he doesn't know which point he thinks he's making. Certainly he's not saying that "the deaths of all common men and women [have been] invested...with a [certain] gravity" as a result of Jesus's death: as a matter of plain fact, that has not happened. Moreover, as another matter of plain fact, Christians operating under the tenets of their religion have been the cause of many such gravity-free deaths. If this is Hart's strongest defense, a request for reflection followed by a transparent attempt at propaganda, why does he feel entitled to make such definitive pronouncements?
"Here, displayed with an altogether elegant incomprehensibility in Grayling’s casual juxtaposition of the sea-born goddess and the crucified God (who is a crucified man), one catches a glimpse of the enigma of the Christian event, which Nietzsche understood and Grayling does not: the lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike. One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still, then, elects to turn away."Great, done - what now? Hart's point, such as it is, seems only to be that Christianity represents an historical anomaly. Well, duh: considered by various different criteria, almost any religion or cultural movement can be conceived of in that way. But okay, for the sake of argument I'll assume that Christianity is somehow unique or special even above and beyond every other comparable cultural artifact. So what? Why should we philosophers, we truth-seekers, care?
Hart seems to think that we somehow owe something to Christianity in virtue of its "mystery of historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty" - that these things in and of themselves should in some way compel us either to believe in Christianity or at least treat it with a certain reverence or awe. I say fuck that: if you want my respect you have to earn it. If his main allegiance to Christianity is his opinion of its moral structure, he faces the modern skeptical argument that religious morals, though at one time "novel," are currently obsolete and therefore that moral progress requires us to switch to another system. We can, in other words, say both that Christianity was a step up at its inception and that it is now the step that we must leave behind. If instead he pines for his beloved "tragic sense," wherein "moral clarity" enables us to "find the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms," this is either question-begging or specious: if he needs God as such, he's rigging the game; if instead he just needs a system that attributes value to "defeated" people, secular moralities are certainly capable of providing (and have already provided) such systems. And, of course, if his devotion stems from Christianity's "historical contingency," then this whole thing is a bad joke.
The real irony here is the almost lightheaded silliness with which Hart traipses through the real arguments against Christianity. I know that the problem of evil has been "solved" by Alvin Plantinga, but really, to call Law's God of Eth "impressionistic" is an indicator either of fantastic idiocy, unadulterated laziness, or simple malfeasance. "So long as one can choose one’s conquests in advance," Hart criticizes skeptics, "taking always the paths of least resistance, one can always imagine oneself a Napoleon or a Casanova." But what has Hart done in this article if not shy away from every conflict but the one he thinks he can win? Everything boils down to "tragic sense" for him; facts, logic, and the like are just not on his radar.
Dreher summarizes Hart thusly: "he respects Nietzsche's atheism a very great deal, though obviously he opposes it, because Hart sees that Nietzsche understands precisely what repudiating Christianity means." Incredibly, despite their palpable sense of victory, neither Dreher nor Hart has taken the time to actually say "what repudiating Christianity means." They'd rather hit us over the head with dollar words and dime-store analogies - see e.g. Hart's breathless (and equally meaningless) "lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity." Truth, however, is not decided by who can write the most melodramatic revisionist history, so allow me to elaborate on "what repudiating Christianity means."
It means no less (but also no more) than reconfiguring our metaphysical, moral, and even our banal interactions so as to account better for the way the world actually is. This may sound like an impossible or even a dangerous task, but do you know what? We've done it before. Hart cannot deny this, either, because his defense of Christianity is nothing other than the fact that we've done it before; he characteristically calls these reconfigurations "long revolution[s] that overturn the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike," but I prefer to use the more concise "progress." If progress is what he admires, he should be able to swallow his pride and admit that his religion has long since dropped from the cutting edge of morality into a state that one might charitably call atavistic. And in the very plausible case that he refuses to do this, we should be ready to leave him behind; his vocabulary and composition are obviously impressive (much like Bush's PR department), but no amount of textual showmanship can make up for the substance that he lacks.
So this is a one-off that wasn't initially intended for web publication and in fact may not even qualify as a comic, but I like it. This is almost certainly going to distort the graphic layout of the blog, but it's so worth it.
As much as he appears to be a level-headed and overall respectable person, Roger Ebert had better watch his back: he has made himself some very powerful enemies (powerful, in all likelihood, in direct proportion to their immaturity) by saying that video games are not and will never be art. I, too, find that assertion dubious - especially after having made the opposite declaration earlier this year - but at least I can restrain myself enough to keep the conversation civil. Probably.
"[Video game maker Kellee] Santiago concedes that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong cannot be art, however elegant their rules. I agree. But of course that depends on the definition of art. She says the most articulate definition of art she's found is the one in Wikipedia: 'Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions.' This is an intriguing definition, although as a chess player I might argue that my game fits the definition."Hooray! As a classically trained philosopher, nothing - literally nothing - makes me happier than working with necessary and sufficient conditions. It also helps that Ebert has declared an allegiance to the great game of chess. But I cannot let myself be distracted by his wily wiles - I must press on.
"But we could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For example, I tend to think of art as usually the creation of one artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it not art? One could think of it as countless individual works of art unified by a common purpose. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, yet the collaboration of a community? Yes, but it reflects the work of individual choreographers. Everybody didn't start dancing all at once."The subtlety of this reply only reaches so far: playing with definitions is fun precisely because it's an interminable process, so criticizing it on those grounds is a little on the elementary side. Also, it seems to me that there's a giant gap between reflecting the work of an individual and being solely attributable to only one person. Especially given his experience as a movie critic, this one-person-per-artwork thing comes off as really bizarre - has no movie ever been a work of art? No band has ever produced musical art, no writer with a researcher has ever produced literary art, and no photographer who works with human subjects has ever produced photographic art? Something strange is happening here: the authorship problem is one of the more popular in the philosophy of art, but this solution stinks.
"One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them."This argument would get absolutely ravaged by any even halfway-competent philosopher of art for its logical deficiencies, so I'll try to stick to more down-to-earth concerns. For example, what would Ebert think about choose-your-own-adventure books? You can win and lose those (and cheat at them!) but they're also novels. They're not typically good novels, granted, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be. Also, you can watch video games as well as play them. Many of my friends, in point of fact, enjoy life in the audience more than life at the sticks; even assuming that one cannot win an artwork (or, perhaps more to the point, that winning or losing can't make up part of an artistic experience), why can't the act of playing a video game count in some sense as performance art? This line of thought can be taken too far - performance art is a notoriously malleable endeavor - but at least it's worth thinking about.
In another incarnation of his argument, Ebert says that "the real question is, do we as their consumers become more or less complex, thoughtful, insightful, witty, empathetic, intelligent, philosophical (and so on) by experiencing them?" This, admittedly, is a return to playing with definitions - but, in its favor, it's a more fertile strategy than simply announcing that art isn't allowed to be winnable. The danger here relates to the basis of his criterion: we, the consumers, have to have some reactions or other, he says. I think this is a plausibly necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for art - and I think that many video games pass with flying colors. Ebert himself has never experienced this, that much is clear, but he's well smart enough to avoid making the mistake of generalizing his personal experience to the entire world and all of history.
To finally come right out and say it, I think the whole project of trying to set hard categorizations for things is doomed to failure. This argument is just one of many that, it seems to me, could be really easily resolved if someone were to just introduce multi-valued or fuzzy logic: a painting, for instance, is very art-like and not much like anything else we can identify, so we call it art; video games are significantly art-like but more game-like, so we get into goofy arguments about which is the more appropriate label. That's fine on a day-to-day level, but if and when we decide to get really serious about things I don't know why we shouldn't seriously adopt the position that our ordinary labeling system is just an expeditious form of shorthand that happens to truncate a lot of relevant information. My official philosopher's answer to the question, then, is that video games aren't art and they aren't not art: they are art enough.
In my dream world, I work as a logical consultant and my business card reads "[real name]: Fact-Based Philosophy." Also I live on my own private island staffed by robots, but that's sort of not the point here. The point is that the crossover between good empirical work and good theoretical work is (or seems to me to be) very small: typically people either focus on data and neglect their critical thinking or develop a deft touch with ideas only to devalue the input of actual facts. I think we can do both - sort of the grown-up version of walking and chewing gum at the same time - but every so often that optimism is really put to the test.
"I confess that I take anti-cloning arguments personally. Not only do they insult the identical twin sons I already have; they insult a son I hope I live to meet. Yes, I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son. Seriously. I want to experience the sublime bond I'm sure we'd share. I'm confident that he'd be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me. I'm not pushing others to clone themselves. I'm not asking anyone else to pay for my dream. I just want government to leave me and the cloning business alone. Is that too much to ask?"That's Bryan Caplan talking, and boy does he not get it. I thought we had finished with this clones-as-copies thing some years ago, but apparently it's still floating around. Let me see if I can straighten this out: genes are not personalities. Caplan ought to know this already, being as he is the father of identical twins. Presumably they don't have identical personalities - I mean, no two people do - so Caplan has direct, firsthand evidence of the fact that identical genomes don't result in identical people. Yet somehow he "want[s] to experience the sublime bond" between him and his clone, which will exist because he "would love to be raised by [himself]." Caplan, your clone will not be you. Step out of the late 1980s, please. If you can't manage that on your own, feel free to contact an actual scientist, as they will be more than happy to help you if it means getting you not to publish such flagrantly idiotic sentiments.
Steve Sailer feels the same way that I do - kinda.
"Generally speaking, people who would like to clone themselves tend to be arrogant and lacking in common sense. Their children will tend to also be arrogant and lacking in common sense. The interpersonal dynamics between cloner and clonee would likely be disastrous.I...what? Evidence - from fiction?? Is he even serious? It's dumb to pull a Caplan and blithely assert that biological cloning results in psychological cloning as well; it's dumber still to make that same assertion and then back it up with anecdotal evidence that's not even situated in the real world. Facts, people, start with the facts. You know, sort of like how J. DeLong doesn't:
Are families in which the sons are exactly like the fathers happier? I don't see a lot of evidence for that. In fact, I see a lot of evidence from memoirs and fiction that strong-willed fathers tend to have strong-willed sons, and the two clash relentlessly over who will be dominant."
"He [Caplan] wants to take the genes of the mother of his children out of the baby she is carrying and substitute his own genes in their place."That bang you may have just heard? That's my head exploding from sheer incredulity.
DeLong thinks that this is how cloning works? You go through the normal reproductive, ah, motions, then "take [some] genes...out of the [resultant] baby" (by which DeLong probably means "fetus") and then replace them with different genes? Really? Even if we were at the level of replacing individual chromosomes in this way - which we are WAY not - the end result wouldn't be a clone and, even if it were a clone, it wouldn't accomplish the (admittedly insipid) end that Caplan has in mind.
Why is this so hard? Wikipedia has a nice, simple explanation of how cloning works and it's well-known that portrayals of cloning as "perfect meta-xerox copies of the cloned person" are bunk. How can we be living in the year two thousand and ten without having moved our dialectic past this point? Keeping one's head in the clouds is at least somewhat defensible when it comes to the philosophy of religion or art, but there's really no excuse for this kind of negligence when it comes to hard science. All three of these twits ought to be ashamed of themselves.
To begin with - really, just to get it out of the way - how about some words of wisdom regarding "sexual purity"?
"While sex is clearly pervasive in our society, you don’t have to look very far to find plenty of reasons to avoid sexual relations outside of marriage. The biblical words for fornication or sexual immorality refer to all sexual activity outside of marriage...Presumably this clown means that there were only two known STDs back in the 60s, because otherwise he's saying something too stupid to be believed. Even then he would not only demonstrate a total ignorance of medical science (we did in fact know about more than two STDs then, thank you very much) but also an incredible philosophical thickness: our better methods of medical analysis change primarily our empirical and not ontological knowledge. This argument, in other words, would be like saying that the first visual observation of bacteria made the world a dirtier place. Microorganisms (and, I'm fairly certain, more than two STDs) have existed for the whole of human history, so it's ridiculous to pretend that either group coincidentally showed up just around the time when we started looking for it. This isn't to say that STDs definitely haven't become more prevalent over the past few decades - maybe they have - but his comparative methodology is completely wrong.
If this is not powerful enough, consider the physical consequences of sexual immorality that exist today. In the 1960s there were only two STDs: syphilis and gonorrhea. Today there are over 25, and 1 in 5 Americans between the ages of 15 and 55 has a viral STD. That number is 1 in 4 if bacterial infections are included. There are 12 million new infections every year with 60 percent of these among teenagers."
While this particular section of the text doesn't refer to women specifically, you know it's coming. It's no surprise, then, that the article ends with an exhortation to regard "women as a treasure God created for us as a companion and helpmate." Fantastic.
Oh, and the Bible is about as useful a source of sex advice as an Ikea instruction booklet.
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Speaking of uselessness, this guy's writing skills leave a whole hell of a lot to be desired.
"In a head-to-head match among [Harry] Reid, ["attractive former beauty queen" Sue] Lowden and Tea Party pretender Scott Ashjian, the men favored Lowden by 19 points over Reid and women picked Reid by a 3-point margin. Ashjian was in single digits.Before we get to that last sentiment, I want to try to suss out what exactly these polls showed. Women, apparently, swung heavily in favor of Reid when he was up against only men; men, meanwhile, were less likely (although within the margin of error?) to vote for a female Republican than a male one. Bias, then, operates in both directions on this argument - or, given that the whole thing is clearly absurd, not at all.
But change the Republican option from Lowden to former basketball star Danny Tarkanian and it is a different tale. Men still favored the Republican by 16 points and doubled their support by Ashjian to 15 points. Women, on the other hand, chose Reid by 16 points, proving they’d rather vote for a woman than a male Republican.
Men are consistent. Women are fickle and biased."
But it's all okay, see, because he knew that it was absurd when he wrote it. "It was," he later clarified, "just a bit of free hyperbole." Right - hyperbole, the thing where you make things up out of nowhere and then ignore logical symmetry for the purposes of making a point. Or was there not a point? I forget.
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Along strikingly similar lines is this argument proferred by one Hojatoleslam Sedighi:
"Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes."Again, put aside for the moment the patent ridiculousness of saying that adultery causes earthquakes. This is pretty strongly phrased so as to blame women, but the last time I checked it took two to tango - and, moreover, it's actually incredibly simple to not fuck every woman who walks by showing some skin (which, given that this guy is a right-wing Iranian, could well mean "any skin"). If we were to go completely insane and take the position that "adultery in society" is bad (as opposed, I guess, to adultery outside of society), we would still have to either parcel out blame evenly between both partners or else provide a good reason to think that only one gender bears responsibility. Sedighi did neither - but, then again, he's obviously not very bright.
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Note, as a closing remark, that none of this accounts very well at all for the existence of LGBT folks. This is one of the many problems with asserting the existence of Metaphysical Gender Truths: nature, of which we are part, is superlatively flexible and always in the process of changing. But constant change requires energy and intellectual commitment on our part, and why bother with that stuff when you can just refer to the Ultimate Nature Of The Universe and dust off your hands?
Get all of our male politicians to grow beards.
"The received wisdom in the United States is that deep spending cuts are politically impossible. But a number of economically advanced countries, including Sweden, Finland, Canada and, most recently, Ireland, have cut their government budgets when needed.Why would beards help, you ask?
Most relevant, perhaps, is Canada, which cut federal government spending by about 20 percent from 1992 to 1997...
Counterintuitively, the relatively strong Canadian trust in government may have paved the way for government spending cuts, a pattern that also appears in Scandinavia. Citizens were told by their government leadership that such cuts were necessary and, to some extent, they trusted the messenger.
IT’S less obvious that the United States can head down the same path, partly because many Americans are so cynical about policy makers."
"A recent study in the Journal of Marketing Communications found that men with beards were deemed more credible than those who were clean-shaven. The study showed participants pictures of men endorsing certain products. In some photos, the men were clean-shaven. In others, the same men had beards. Participants thought the men with beards had greater expertise and were significantly more trustworthy when they were endorsing products like cell phones and toothpaste.It's so true! I have a beard and you trust me, don't you? QED, suckas. The only problem is that this doesn't help us when it comes to making our female politicians more trust-inspiring. We could, I suppose, start handing out fake beards to all of the women and also the men who can't grow facial hair, but that's a really distasteful solution for all kinds of reasons. It'd be insensitive to Tolkeinesque dwarves, for one.
...The researchers say the implications of their findings could extend far beyond advertisements. For instance, male politicians might want to consider not shaving."
So the beard thing is one potential solution, albeit an incomplete one. We could also hire Judi Dench and Morgan Freeman to play all of our politicians, cause people seem to trust them. That might get a little repetitive, though, and eventually they'll die. The only other thing that comes to mind - and this is going to sound crazy, so you may want to sit down before you read it - is that our elected officials could, y'know, do their jobs the way they said they would when we elected them. I know that this blog isn't a marketing journal (it's a fact I have to live with each day), but it sure does seem like that might help with the whole trustworthiness thing.
Or we could go with the beards. Either way is fine.
First of all, can anybody tell me why NOMA is NOMA instead of just NOM? The acronym stands for "non-overlapping magisteria," so unless someone decided to arbitrarily include the last A it should really have been NOM. This is not nearly as bad as ATM machine or PIN number, granted, but still.
Anyway, it occurred to me while reading this post over at Ophelia Benson's Notes and Comment that I had never read the official definition of NOMA. The idea has permeated the pop consciousness, of course, and so many people (myself included) feel like they have a reasonable understanding of it, but it is sort of my responsibility to read up on it before I critique it. So okay, wiki says that, in this context, a magisterium is defined as "a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution"- a definition from which it is argued that
"the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty)."Besides the grating writing style ("what the Universe is made of and why does it work in this way"?? Pick one!), this conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. As Benson notes,
"That’s a recipe for epistemic chaos. We can’t have hermetically sealed ways of 'addressing' questions – not if we want to get things right. Ways of addressing questions have to be consistent with each other, at least."The fundamental error, I think, comes at the step when NOMA's inventor, Stephen Gould, connects discourse and resolution. Unlike in a fictional detective story or a specially-generated hypothetical, real-world questions do have to connect; in Benson's words, they "have to be consistent with each other." Setting aside the question of whether one field can ever exert complete control over a discourse, it's very hard to think of a reason why we should think that only one domain ever "holds the appropriate tools for...resolution" of questions.
Certainly Gould cannot point to experience here. Since "questions of ultimate meaning and moral value" have not actually been resolved yet, it's trivially true that they have not actually been resolved by only one domain's tools. But then the only option is to resort to abstract reasoning, and that seems like it won't fly in this case. Gould can't start by assuming that e.g. science and religion have nothing to say to each other: that's his conclusion, so that would be begging the question. He also can't say that science and religion have different tools and therefore are cordoned off from one another - that'd be a total non-sequitur and may also beg the question. In fact, I can't really come up with any way for him to make the connection that he wants to make - and for good reason: the connection just isn't tenable.
Returning again to Benson, the point of bringing one academic subject to bear on a problem isn't just to find a solution that fits with that subject's generalized goals and methods. Since so much of our knowledge (or, if you insist, theory) supports and is supported by other knowledge (theory), there are networks of dependencies that stretch across all or nearly all of what we believe about the world. No matter how convincing a religious analysis may be, that analysis is worthless if it conflicts with other, stronger ideas elsewhere in the network. Just to come up with a silly example, if some religion out there concludes that pinky fingers are morally evil that religion would then have to explain why people with pinkies are no more evil than those without, how evil could possibly be localized to a single digit, and so forth. Notably, the conflicts between science and religion are very often more pronounced than my example and they typically permit less wiggle room.
This conversation, however, need not even address the details: when considered properly, it is absurd on its face. Mathematics, I hope everyone agrees, is as inviolable a domain as possible. In other words, if you are working in some non-math field and reach some conclusion that clashes with a purely mathematical position, the latter will always win out.* We can also agree that math isn't a subset of science or religion and that neither science nor religion is a subset of math (at least, as they are practiced by humans; all scientific laws may reduce to mathematical ones, but even then we would have to discover this by means other than pure math). But then neither science nor religion is a magisterium: both deal with questions whose resolution necessarily involves a third party. In general, then, whenever this stuff about magisteria arises, I would encourage people to substitute "math" for "science" or "religion" and see what happens. Even if somebody insists on saying that religion and science aren't in direct contact (even though they are), nobody should be stubborn enough to say the same thing about either religion and math or science and math. Once you get someone to admit that overlaps do exist, however, the whole thing is over and done with: by Gould's own definition, something only qualifies as a magisterium if there are no overlaps at all. With that fiction eliminated, NOMA supporters won't be able to make their case in general and will be forced to do precisely what they hope to avoid - namely, they'll be forced to actually give reasons why specific religious/scientific issues are untouchable by the other discipline.
Or, well, they'll either be forced to do that or else to drop the facade of rationality altogether. I guess it's optimistic to think that they'd go for the former, isn't it?
*I say "purely mathematical" so as to eliminate e.g. statistical models of real-world events, which are partially math but also partially subjective interpretation of initial conditions and the like.
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