Rust Belt Philosophy

As someone who plays no instruments - which, incidentally, I blame on my left-handedness - today's "song that you can play on an instrument" theme seemed like it might really be a problem. But no! Creativity wins out every time.



Not only can I play Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz" on an instrument, I would venture to say that I could accompany this song on all of the instruments in the original arrangement. Call me a virtuoso if you must - this sort of talent can only come naturally.

While I'm here telling you all about the artistic characteristics of all of the world's nations, I might as well keep going with it and say that comedians from Oceania really know their trade. For instance:



Or:



At the end of the day, though, there's just no substitute for the master.



(And! A special bonus for all of my fellow math people:

)

Or at least, in the spirit of Dave Barry, a rock and roll band. Like Billy Mallet and the Xylophonics, or something. Somebody who has any chance of ever being in a rock and roll band, I bequeath this task to you: make it happen.

Both the stupidity and the praiseworthiness are on display here - he's a very efficient guy, Stossel.

"I'm a libertarian, not a conservative. I don't think government should have any role in our sex lives.

Just as I see no reason why gays should not be free to marry, I see no reason why they shouldn't be free to be in the military."

I bet he does think that the government should have a role in our sex lives: I bet he's in favor of rape legislation and I bet he's in favor of age of consent laws, just to name two examples. But none of that has anything to do with Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and he hits that nail on the head. Hell, even Bill O'Reilly (who, I would guess, is less stupid but more malicious than Stossel) figured it out.

"O'Reilly, who recently compared gay men to Al Qaeda, is an unlikely champion of LGBT equality - but last night he attacked President Obama for perpetuating the discrimination.

'President Obama has the power to stop this 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' business. Just sign an executive order. So I don't know why it's taking so long. It's not fair. We should stop this nonsense.'"

And it only makes sense that be nice to stupid people day would also include some meanness directed at smart people - which, in this case, can only mean Obama himself, who's acting like a complete asshole about this. Whatever angels suddenly appeared on Stossel's and O'Reilly's shoulders, it would be great if they could go find Obama and smack him around a little bit.

Given the recent spate of critical comments here at Rust Belt Philosophy, I figure it might be wise to give some credit to people who normally don't deserve it. In theory this will illustrate that I'm fair-minded and more concerned with facts than with putting people on my list of enemies; in practice I suspect it will accomplish literally nothing. But it's worth a shot!

As the title indicates, we'll start with Rod Dreher and a demonstration of his intellectual failings (so as to prove that any praise from me would, in fact, have to be earned). In his reaction to Anne Rice's admittedly poorly-written pseudo-deconversion from Christianity, Dreher notes the poor quality of the writing, concludes that Rice can't really mean those things, and

"wonder[s] what really happened. Surely a woman of her age and experience cannot possibly believe that the entirety of Christianity, current and past, can be reduced to the cultural politics of the United States of America in the 21st century. Does she really know no liberal Christians? Has she never picked up a copy of Commonweal? Does she really think that if she asked a Christian on the streets of Nairobi or Tegucigalpa what they, as Christians, thought of Nancy Pelosi, they would have the slightest idea what she was talking about? And Christianity, anti-science? Good grief. Has she not noticed that Catholic Church, to which she did belong until yesterday, has affirmed evolution, and embraces science?"

Besides the fact that it's a little insulting to just straight-up accuse somebody of lying or being ignorant of their own feelings, Dreher misses the point with most of this and, in one part, goes even further off the mark. He's shocked that Rice hasn't figured out "that Catholic Church" loves science, which is a belief that he evidently bases on them having "affirmed evolution." And just think! All this while I had been operating under the impression that science extended far beyond evolution. Like, when the official catechism says empirically false things like "[s]exuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman," I would have thought that that would constitute a disagreement with science - but for Dreher, apparently it isn't.

All that having been said, however, the man is on to something when he says that "our health care system is geared at every level toward extending life, no matter how costly." He manages to cast the issue as a ridiculous false dilemma between what might be called biologism (that "extending life, no matter how costly" thing) and Christianity, granted, but he does have a point: a decision-making system on which people "fail to make preparations for what should happen in the event that" their death really is imminent is not a great decision-making system, which means in turn that whichever set of values supports that system is not a great set of values. I'm not saying that we should go quite this far...


...but I do think that we can generate a more imaginative and helpful set of beliefs about death and dying without having those beliefs conflict with the truth of the matter. So even if I disagree with Dreher about the details, I applaud him for having enough sense to abandon an ideology when it became clear that that ideology conflicted with certain facts about the world. It would be nice if he could apply this more consistently, but for now this is a good start.

A song for my funeral:

In a stunning turn of events, Sharon Begley has managed to report on an interesting, substantive piece of science without distorting it or screwing it up in any significant way at all. She does make some minor errors, both in content and tone, but overall she gets it exactly right: "U.S. undergrads are [almost] totally unrepresentative" in terms of their psychology. Why does this matter? Well, for one, it provides still more ammunition to be used against the positive program in experimental philosophy (and, if I understand the terms correctly, therefore more ammunition to be used by the negative program). But it also helps to reaffirm some of the more sensible things that people have been saying about human nature.

Wes Smith, we saw a few days ago, has doubts that the variety of human moral opinions could be generated just using a genetic basis for moral learning (that is, learning about morality) and slight initial cultural differences (that would, over time, pile up into much larger differences). His objection is pretty much worthless - "moral naturalism seems to go hand in hand with those who deny human free will" - but the point is that he prefers explanations that defer to an almost metaphysical human nature: we have a "divine spark" that spurs us to consider moral questions, he claims, and for the most part we do so rationally. That these two concepts have little in the way of precise, substantive content is no bother for Smith, as giving them content of that sort would put them into the realm of science, and apparently everyone in science denies free will and morality and who knows what else. So while he trusts a certain vision of human nature, it's more of a poetic one than one that could actually, y'know, explain anything. On the flip side, Marilynne Robinson seems to distrust all specificity when it comes to human nature (oddly enough, also apparently for consequentialist reasons); for her, it's dangerous to say anything about "what our nature is." Both of these stances, I suspect, are reactions to the simple and narrow things that some people have been saying about human nature for a long time: that we're all inherently attuned to justice or that we're all fundamentally selfish, say. While such narrow claims are indeed wrong in many cases, the smart alternative is not to run away from the question.

In the paper that Begley discusses, which you can read in full(!!!) here, the authors make the entirely sensible recommendations that psychologists and other human-nature-seekers look first and foremost at all humans as well as related non-human animals and, secondly, that they look not strictly for characteristic similarities but also for structural/developmental similarities that would explain the development of the actual range of characteristics.

"Evolution has equipped humans with ontogenetic programs, including cultural learning, that help us adapt our bodies and brains to the local physical and social environment. Over the course of human history, convergent forms of cultural evolution have effectively altered (1) our physical environments with tools, technology, and knowledge; (2) our cognitive environments with counting systems, color terms, written symbols, novel grammatical structures, categories, and heuristics; and (3) our social environments with norms, institutions, laws, and punishments. Broad patterns of psychology may be – in part – a product of our genetic program's common response to culturally constructed environments that have emerged and converged over thousands of years. This means that the odd results from small-scale societies, instead of being dismissed as unusual exceptions, ought to be considered as crucial data points that help us understand the ontogenetic processes that build our psychologies in locally adaptive and context-specific ways."

In other words, while some trait-level similarities do seem to exist,* we should stop assuming that all similarities are traits and start to look instead for similarities in the way that we arrive at those traits. Whatever specific, ground-level tendencies remain will of course be part of human nature, but the development paths themselves will have to be included as well.

This might seem to invalidate the idea of a substantive human nature or whittle it down to something too limited to matter, but I would disagree for two reasons. For one, we don't yet know that there's nothing of substance that's shared across cultures at a low level. Nor does this study focus exclusively on character traits: some of the tendencies debunked by this recent study are optical illusions, for example. I would also argue that the ways in which we all change as we age (i.e., develop) are just as crucial to an understanding of human nature as the ways in which we all remain the same. So let's say that we aren't, as per the usual line, inherently rational: how do we obtain rationality? In what circumstances do we lose it? Are there any tradeoffs between rationality in one area and another? Just looking at all of these purportedly human virtues and vices as being either there or not there is too limiting a way of looking at the situation. If we can only define human nature using the same sort of checkbox-filling system that dating sites use to describe their members, it's not gonna work.

There's just one more thing I'd like to touch on. While I think that the authors of the study wouldn't endorse this view, it is nonetheless possible to read their paper as saying that we should consider the most common responses to these psychological tests to be the default ones. They spend a lot of time identifying this or that result as "peculiar" or "unusual," and their coined moniker for the undergrad populations in question is WEIRD (western, educated, something something democratic - doesn't really matter). It can be tempting, in the face of these adjectives, to list from one mistaken conclusion to another and say instead that the non-peculiar, usual, not-weird results must be what's natural and everything else must be forced or artificial. People in non-WEIRD societies are nonetheless still in societies - this is an expansion on my earlier point that you're always in a moment - and so it makes no sense to say that the individual nature of the generic human can be discerned by investigating non-WEIRD groups. We could also try to evaluate people who grow up outside of all societies, but that's even worse - ask me about it in the comments if you're not sure why. It has taken our culture a long time to learn that "human nature" isn't the sort of thing that would exist in Plato's ideal sphere - this study is just one more step down the road of leaving that flawed notion behind and finding something more true to the way things actually are.

*They list, among others, a tendency to (want to) punish members of society who (appear to?) take in resources without contributing anything in return. This is one of the areas where Begley errs, as she seems to indicate that the study refutes all but the most meaningless of similarities (e.g. that people of all cultures like the taste of sugar).

I thought the Perry Bible Fellowship guy dropped off the face of the planet or something and it turns out he's been freelancing for Marvel? My intelligence-gathering network has failed me.

For Jews at a certain level of observance or orthodoxy, certain prayer services can't be conducted without ten men being present (or, further away from the orthodoxy, ten adults). This is called a minyan, and so one of the things you might hear growing up Jewish is that you are needed to make minyan at your synagogue or temple. However, if you heed the call and leave your place of residence in order to go pray, you may well discover that someone explicitly counts you as being not there - as in, if you're (say) the third person being counted, you will be "not-three." Why? Because Jews have all kinds of superstitions, one of which is that if you count people then the angel of death knows where they are. (As I recall there's something similar that happens with baby names, but I forget the details.) All of this is to say that it makes me a little nervous to list a song for my wedding without even having a girlfriend - but, I admit, not as nervous as the prospect of "busting rocks at San Quentin for the next 75 years," so here goes.

You may not know this, but the common bridal march is from Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin, and - spoiler alert - it plays at the beginning of the third act for a couple who, by the end of the third act, is half-departed-for-a-foreign-country and half-dead. I feel, therefore, as though I have good reason to want to replace it with something with a less fraught history. Perhaps something like "Marie Floating Over The Backyard" by eels, which is not on YouTube at all but can be found in full on the official eels website. I think it could work as a processional, given a live chorus and the right arrangement. The only issue is whether the song actually does have a less fraught history than Wagner's, cause eels can be pretty fraught at times.

I'm assuming, by the way, that "song to be played at your wedding" really means "at your wedding" and not, for instance, "at your wedding or wedding rehearsal or wedding reception or the party that night or really just any satellite event for your wedding." If I'm allowed to cheat in that way I might pick something jazzy but not super-challenging, like "Chick A Boom Boom Boom" by Mocean Worker, or some party rap, like "That Dude" by The High Decibels, or really just anything that's not the same damn music I heard at seemingly five billion bar and bat mitzvahs when I was in middle school. I swear on anything, if I have to dance to "Cotton-Eyed Joe" at my own wedding I am going to consider that grounds for divorce. Make a note of it, those of you who know me personally.

I hesitate to suggest "year" because of the BP thing, but this is pretty bad.

"'Tiger Woods needs to golf. Michael Vick needs to be playing football,' Mr. Haggard said as his new congregation joined him and Gayle in their backyard for a post-worship picnic. Little kids, shrieking with joy, splashed in the pool. Men grilled burgers. Women set out chicken salad.

'Ted Haggard,' Mr. Haggard said, 'needs to be leading a church.'"

Channeling Bob Dole as you cite Tiger Woods and Mike Vick as your role models? Not the smartest choice. But wait - there's more!

"Mr. Haggard also said that in his sorrow and shame, he accepted too much guilt after [his meth and gay sex] scandal broke.

'I over-repented,' he said."

Don't you hate it when that happens? I over-repented one time in college and had to go to physical therapy for two whole months. To this day I can feel it when it's about to rain. Now I know to go through a full warm-up before I even start to repent - jog for a few minutes, make sure to stretch everything out, hydrate, you know the deal. You can never be too safe with these things.

"Once one of the most prominent church leaders in the U.S., Mr. Haggard confessed in a tortured letter, calling himself 'a deceiver and a liar' who had long wrestled with desires he described as 'repulsive and dark.'"

And yet he decided to keep on preachin'. I guess he made his peace with the deceiving, lying, repulsive darkness, then. Would this count as under-repenting, do you think? Or just being an unreconstructed asshole?

That'd be the lecture series that recently featured Marilynne Robinson, in case the name doesn't ring a bell. Since we just went through this whole long ordeal with Robinson, I was interested in seeing whether any of the other Terry lecturers would have anything interesting to say. As it turns out, they do.

This years' speakers, the husband-and-wife duo of Joel Primack (which sounds like a supervillain name to me) and Nancy Ellen Abrams, just so happen to write about one of the precise topics in Robinson's thinking that I found to be so vexing: cosmology. Robinson, you'll recall, said that "the new cosmologies" are beautiful in their own right and don't need to be used as evidence in favor of either a theistic or atheistic worldview. I took this as evidence that Robinson not only didn't understand those cosmologies but, worse, didn't have the intellectual maturity necessary to interpret the cosmologies if she ever did come to understand them. Since Robinson never explored that claim in any substantive way, however, I was left pretty much at the conjectural level. Luckily, this is almost exactly what Primack and Abrams do in their papers, which you can read for yourself here. So far I only chose the most promising-looking title from that bunch and read through the corresponding article, so it'd be perhaps a bit hasty to make sweeping conclusions about their whole careers. Nonetheless, what I've seen so far isn't good.

Despite my initial skepticism, Primack and Abrams start off really strongly. A cosmology, they say, is the result of "the scientific study of the universe as a whole," and our modern capacity to conduct that study allows for humanity's first verifiable creation story." I like this a lot: it identifies cosmologies as strictly scientific and then reinforces that understanding by describing cosmologies as "verifiable." It's more than a little upsetting, then, when they do a total one-eighty just a few paragraphs later.

"We do not argue that either kabbalistic cosmology or current scientific theories about the origin are 'true' in some ultimate sense, but rather that by seeing each in light of the other, we begin to get some sense of what to demand of any cosmology intended to function for human society in the twenty-first century. Just as light cannot be described accurately as either a particle or a wave but only as something beyond either metaphor, the universe cannot be adequately described as either something scientifically observed or something spiritually experienced. A functional cosmology must do both."

As far as I can tell, this blatantly contradicts the earlier claim that cosmologies are scientific and verifiable. Moreover, without any kind of sociological, psychological, or anthropological data or an ethical framework on which to hang that data, it seems wildly irresponsible for them to make any claims at all about cosmologies "function[ing] for human society." Quite frankly, at this point I don't even know what that means. But okay, fine. Let's forget the obvious incompatibilities between the cosmologies-are-science view and this new cosmologies-are-spiritual-too view and see if that makes a difference.

When Robinson proclaimed her love for cosmologies, it's quite plausible to think that she had something like this in mind. Primack and Abrams claim that "this emerging cosmology gives us a new cosmic perspective, a powerful source of awe, and a potential source of meaning in our everyday lives." Philosophically speaking, the most interesting item on the list is the last one. Clearly they think that kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, connects somehow to the science of these modern cosmologies and that that connection can be used to generate meaning. This wouldn't serve as a defense of Robinson even if it were true - their project is basically to interpret science religiously out of a perceived need to do so, whereas Robinson says there is no such need - but at least it would explain why she likes cosmologies: as someone who frets about meaning, she very well might take a shine to anything that comes along advertising meaning. In order to get to that point, though, there has to actually be meaning there and that meaning has to actually be a result of the scientific facts of the matter; Primack and Abrams fail on both counts.

"Exponential growth," they say,

"is the dominant characteristic of the industrial world. Not only is the human population inflating; simultaneously, so are the technological power and the resource use of each individual. Multiply these times each other: we are now processing a substantial fraction of the earth's entire crust. In population growth, resource use, pollution, and garbage production, the human race is addicted to exponential growth. Inflation is the controlling metaphor of our time.

In our kabbalistic creation myth, Tzimtzum--the withdrawal of God--occurred in Eternal Inflation. As the notion of a God in exile gave cosmic meaning to the lives of a people in exile, understanding cosmic inflation may give a new if sobering meaning to the lives of a people dependent upon inflationary growth. Inflation is a taste of what it is like to be God. It cannot be considered a normal human pace. In a finite environment, inflation cannot continue, however cleverly we may postpone or disguise the inevitable. This is a consequence of natural laws. That does not mean growth must stop, however, as many people genuinely trying to save the planet assume. The great transition model for the future of earth may be the universe. Inflation transformed to expansion can go on for a very long time. Expansion on earth can be sustained as long as our creativity lasts. Reality is not a zero-sum game, in which a gain one place must be paid for with a loss somewhere else. Creativity is what all tiny regions do in expressing their quantum nature. The stunning lesson of Eternal Inflation theory is that the fundamental nature of reality is not conservation of energy or increase in entropy but endless creativity.

The question for our time is, how can we end inflation gently on earth? How can we slow human inflation enough that creative restoration can overtake it? When we have developed a sustainable relationship with our planet, humanity and earth will be in balance, and the transition from inflation to stable expansion will have been achieved through the restoration of the world--Tikkun Olam."

Got all that? Inflation is godly, not normal for humans, and necessarily terminates...but that doesn't mean it has to stop. Expansion, which is a word that doesn't appear to have an analog in this little story, depends on our creativity, and by "creativity" they mean both "the potential allowed for by quantum indeterminacy" and "imaginativeness." Thus, the "lesson" of this modern cosmology is that we can expand as far as we like (whatever that means) so long as we continue to be creative about it. Oh - and something about tikkun olam and how balance means the same thing as expansion, somehow. Right.

Assuming that there's even enough coherent content here for me to analyze it, the so-called meaning here is not very impressive at all. For one thing, questions about limiting the consumption of natural resources, while very important, only cover a small fraction of human interactions. If Primack and Abrams want to generate "meaning and purpose" for any nontrivial portion of our lives - which is exactly what they say they want - this could at best only count as a marginal victory. Nor does their eventual conclusion, which I think is just "dynamic equilibrium" phrased incredibly badly, even require all the hoops they've just jumped through. We've had a scientific analog for this kind of thing ever since the mid-1800s, and to be honest that analog (homeostasis) works a hell of a lot better than the quantum/big bang analogy that Primack and Abrams are trying to pull off. This schism between the science and their creation myth is the biggest obstacle for the spiritual cosmology that Primack and Abrams hope to build: in order for them to draw any meaning or lesson from the science, they have to actually have it connect to the science and not just glance occasionally at the science from across the street.

Their concept of creativity, for example, actually contains two almost diametrically opposed ideas. In physics, they define creativity as "infinite potential, hot and dense, wildly experimenting with every possibility quantum uncertainty can come up with, expanding faster and faster for all eternity, unlimited by the speed of light or by lack of space," but on the human scale the creativity for which they advocate leads to determinate ends, isn't characterized by wild experiments, and, most importantly, is designed specifically to prevent us from "expanding faster and faster" in an unlimited way. In other words, their lesson goes something like this: "the universe is creative in a way that's inflationary, so we should be creative, too, but in a totally different way that we just made up on the spot right now." How does that moral tenet have anything at all to do with the scientific concept after which it has been named? The connection, if anything, appears to be simply that Primack and Abrams needed to have a connection and so they named the two different concepts using the same word.

But the scientific problems don't stop there. Remember that this is ostensibly a kabbalistic cosmology, which you'd think would encourage them to say something about kabbalah. Their attempt to do so starts with

"the great kabbalist Isaac Luria [who] developed the scheme further, teaching that at the
initial point, Hokhmah, God began to withdraw into self-exile in order to make space for the universe. God envelopes the universe, in the Lurianic view, but when God withdrew, evil became possible inside. God sent holy light into the world, but the world was too weak to hold God's glory. Its cornerstones were vessels that shattered in the light. The role of the Jews is to repair the shattered vessels by re-collecting the sparks of God in the world. Tzimtzum is the name of God's self-exile. Tikkun Olam is the repairing of the world."

Okay, so Hokhmah equates to the big bang, that much I get. What's the scientific equivalent of God withdrawing from the universe, though? Maybe it's the collapsing of a quantum wave function or something - who knows! If Primack and Abrams do, they're not telling, so that's a dead end; we can't even try to understand the way in which evil might be related to the scientific analog of God's withdrawal. And what about this holy light thing? Is that...what, radiation of some sort? Then how could we recollect it? And if we did recollect it, how would that relate to Tikkun Olam - which, recall, Primack and Abrams envision as a stable dynamic equilibrium between humans and our surrounding environment? Basically, it looks for all the world like they just plain quit trying to include science in this at all.

In addition to all of this, there's the standard Humean objection that you can't derive a moral precept just from a description of events in the physical world. It might be tiresome to repeat this over and over again, but so long as people keep making the mistake there's not much of a better option. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the historical arc of the universe so far did in fact correspond exactly to the path that Primack and Abrams recommend for human history: nonexistence, creation, exponential growth, indefinite sustained (but non-exponential) expansion. They themselves say that this isn't how the universe works, but let's just pretend for the moment that they're wrong. Why should we care? We're short-lived biological entities and the universe is, well, the universe. How does it even make sense to take an arbitrary fact about the physics of the universe and immediately conclude that that fact should also govern our moral lives? That train of thought just makes no sense at all.

You can see, I think, why this sort of thing typically fails to win me over. In trying to craft a theory that incorporates physics, religion, and morality into a single unified image, Primack and Abrams made it harder to understand physics (perhaps to the point of encouraging serious misunderstandings), presented an incomplete and incomprehensible religious doctrine, and ended up with a moral principal that, if it's even coherent, was already uncontroversial and had long been established on reasons having nothing to do with theirs. The one tiny saving grace here is that their "creative expansion" idea is workable morally; other than that I can't point to one thing that they did successfully. But hey - they never said they were going to produce something "true," right? And really, how much could possibly hinge on our moral understanding of the universe? We'd be better off saving the true stuff for something more important, like how mean atheists are.

Remember how I was saying that banning the burqa is an inferior solution compared to enforcing preexisting laws that allow for the punishment of forced burqa-wearing? And how I said that the discussion about banning the burqa was a major distraction from the issue of unenforced laws? Well, do you? Maybe this will help to bring that into focus a little.

"The UK Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985 makes it an offence to carry out FGM or to aid, abet or procure the service of another person. The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, makes it against the law for FGM to be performed anywhere in the world on UK permanent residents of any age and carries a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment. To date, no prosecutions have been made under UK legislation.

...Naana Otoo-Oyortey [who leads a non-profit that works against FGM] is not so content with the softly-softly approach [taken by British officials]: 'We have anecdotal evidence that it is being done here. So someone is not doing their job: it's an indication that the government has been failing to protect children. The commitment is hollow.'"

If you're not quite clear on what constitutes a "softly-softly approach" in this context, the answer may well be "any kind of approach at all": a police officer is quoted in that same article as saying that he doesn't "want to alienate communities through heavy-handed tactics" like actually prosecuting people. And here I was thinking that it would be alienating for Muslim women to live in a country where they couldn't trust the legal system to protect them from bodily harm - silly me!

But seriously, what else is there to say? Something is screwed up here, we should fix it, anybody who wants to add more laws is misconstruing the fundamental problem.

The thing that gets me about Canadian art, as I believe I've said a few times already, is its plainspokenness. Well, for Irish art it's all the ways that people have to make suffering or pain into something disarming.



Martin McDonagh does this with humor, which is probably the easiest (or at least the most common) way to pivot off of a terrible thing and make something good out of it, but Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" makes suffering almost a wistful experience. Lyrically, though, it's really depressing:

In a little while from now
If I'm not feeling any less sour
I promised myself to treat myself and visit a nearby tower
And, climbing to the top, throw myself off

Oh, okay sure - I'll treat myself to suicide. Sounds great! I mean, right? "Everybody Hurts" this is not.

Still, it's that same embracing of the terribleness of the situation that makes this good sad-times music, at least for me. It doesn't make sense to pretend that I'm not depressed or down when in fact I am and it almost seems like a waste of time to listen to a song that goes (approximately) "sad sad sad things are sad, there's not much to say about this but there you have it." My response in those cases is, "Yes, things are sad, what's your point?" To make another R.E.M. reference in a post that isn't about one of their songs, try to tell me something I don't know.

The Mountain Goats come sort of close to what I'm looking for, but they're so biblical in their attitudes that things take on a supernatural or mythical tone that's too straight-faced for me to appreciate from the perspective of a regular old sad person (a flaw that I blame on their American origins) - and that's about it. Just like I haven't found a reliable alternative source of Canadian-style poetic inelegance, the only country I can look to consistently for its treatment of sadness and suffering is Ireland. Naturally.

...without a parachute, and not into water. [Edited to fix the link - sorry 'bout that!]

"Where does this uniquely human capacity [for moral reflection] come from?  That it is inherent in us as a species is clear.  But why?  David Brooks contemplates the matter in today’s NYT.  From his column, 'The Moral Naturalists:'

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

...Obviously Brooks couldn’t do justice to the moral naturalists’ thinking in a short opinion column.  But it doesn’t compute.  Not all societies embrace 'fairness' as we do in the West, for example.  The concept of justice also varies widely, which seems to me is much more than differences in taste preferences.  Indeed, some societies allow murder as appropriate in certain circumstances.  The Roman system of pater familias, for example, permitted a husband to kill his wife and children without consequence because they were his property.  Some fundamentalist Muslim cultures today allow so-called 'honor killings' as a means of suppressing women."

I'm so bored of the "inherent in us as a species" thing that I'm just going to go over it once and then move on: if he really believes that the capacity for moral philosophizing is inherent in every single member of the human species, Smith has no choice but to exclude a non-trivial segment of human-DNA-having organisms from the club. For someone who wants to save every fetus and every brain-dead body, it'd be hard for him to work that claim into his overall philosophy of life.

Like I said, though, I'm so unspeakably bored of repeating myself on that one that I can't bring myself to spend any more time on it. Instead, check out what Smith does there at the end: humans can't possibly learn morality through a combination of genetic predispositions and enculturation, he says, because that morality "varies [too] widely" to be accounted for by "differences in taste preferences." Forget that taste preferences aren't what anybody is talking about - Smith's reading comprehension skills have never quite been up to snuff. Do pay attention, though, to his alternative. "Some," he concludes with a wink, "might call [our moral lives] evidence of a divine spark." Great! A divine spark - but what kind of divinity, I wonder, might be responsible for this?

Remember, this "spark" would, on this interpretation, be primarily responsible for our felt moral impressions. In his own life, for example, Smith claims that "[h]e began to feel God calling him to preach the gospel" in his mid-20s. But then he would also have to say that these other people felt God calling them to kill their families - and, in other cases, enslave people with a different skin tone, lynch people with different sexual orientations, instigate genocides, and so on. Now, as a naturalist I'm perfectly willing to say that our ethical genetic predispositions are such that they incline us towards a picture of morality that's incomplete and incorrect enough to allow for these various errors. I can't currently prove that it works that way (perhaps just because I haven't read enough on the subject), but I do have some decent evidence to that effect and the conclusion does fit with the overall worldview. Smith, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any outs here. This "divine spark," if it exists, would be so poorly conceived or poorly instantiated so as to allow for "witch" hunts during which the hunters pour "petrol into children's eyes or ears." Just speaking for myself, that's the sort of thing that, if I were a deity, I might look at and go, "Oh fuck, that's not what I was going for, I'd better get down there and stop that." How Smith avoids coming to a similar conclusion I have no idea.


Brooks, for his part, ends his column in the exact way that you'd hope he wouldn't: by conflating the way in which we develop moral beliefs with the truth or falsehood of those beliefs themselves. Naturalist morality, he says, "is all lower case. So far, at least, it might not satisfy those who want their morality to be awesome, formidable, transcendent or great." No shit, Sherlock: in answering a question that has nothing to do with the metaphysical grounding of morality, scientists (scientists!) have failed to identify the metaphysical grounding of morality. Shocking. I don't know if Brooks would like Smith's approach better, but he ought not to. The divine hypothesis for morality, as divine hypotheses tend to do generally, has no explanatory power and collapses under the weight of what evidence we do have.

Oh, right.

"The vast majority of Muslim women wear the burqa because they are forced to. Some wear it reluctantly, on the orders of husbands, fathers, or brothers. Others may genuinely believe that they’re wearing it of their own free will, but they’re no more making a free choice than those who wear it under the threat of a beating or confinement. The compulsion is just more insidious: they’re the inheritors of a tradition of repression handed down from mother to daughter over hundreds of years.

It’s vital that the 'civil liberties' argument for allowing women to wear the burqa is confronted and defeated."

Yeah, who needs those "civil liberty" things anyway? Certainly not women, I should imagine. After all, women who do stupid self-injurious things only think they're "making a free choice" when in reality there's...I dunno, some other thing going on. It's too bad that Mike McNally doesn't go on to say more about this conception of free will, cause it certainly doesn't match up with anything that I'm familiar with and (in a sense) could therefore really shake things up in the world of philosophy. Or he could be a dolt. There is always that possibility.

"There are, of course, a couple of perfectly understandable objections to a burqa ban: that women who comply with the law will be banned by husbands and other relatives from leaving their homes, and those who feel liberated by a ban to reject the burqa could be subjected to violence. However, as long as Islamic misogyny is tolerated, Muslim women will continue to be repressed, burqa ban or not.

The choice for Western societies is to let that misogyny — and the extremism it fuels — fester, or make it clear that the repression of women is unacceptable."

Um, no. This would be far more believable if McNally were calling for an end to all of the ways in which women are repressed/oppressed, but he ain't: he's only talking about the ways that connect to Islam. It would also help his case if his dilemma didn't construe "make it clear that the repression of women is unacceptable" as meaning "literally institute fashion police." I'll say it again: those women who wear burqas (or any other clothing) under threat of violence or other coercion are already victims of crimes. All we (or the French) need to do to eliminate this particular form of re/oppression is to enforce the laws that we already have.

The issue of adding a gratuitous piece of legislation to ban certain articles of clothing, while at first blush a major waste of time, can nonetheless serve at least one useful purpose. I keep coming back to the fact of already-existing laws that are designed to protect people from coercion of this sort, but that leads to another question: why, exactly, haven't we been enforcing these laws? Not being a police officer or a journalist or really anybody who might have even the slightest insight into this, I can't say - in fact, it'd be somewhat irresponsible for me to even guess - but the reasons can't possibly be good, let alone good enough. If the situation is so dire that some places are honestly considering clothing bans, surely it must be bad enough that we can overcome whatever obstacles are currently preventing us from locking up coercers under our plain old anti-coercion laws. Besides the obviously disturbing overtones of arguments like McNally's (the only oppression of women is by Muslims or like that perpetrated by Muslims, women's choices aren't all really choices, etc.), it's also quite worrying that there has been so little attention given to whatever failures of the justice system allowed for this situation to develop in the first place. Somewhere along the line Muslim women were understood to be either undeserving of the law's protection or not in need of it, and banning clothes won't help to fix that broken decision-making process one bit.

My, how time has flown. It seems like yesterday that I had a full month's worth of music to share, and now we're down to the final third. Ah, the halcyon days of my youth.



Vampire Weekend makes me happy even if they are getting sued, and that makes them a good candidate for listening material when I'm already happy. You have to wonder, though, why that doesn't also make them good material for when I'm not happy, considering that, all told, I'd rather feel good than bad. Instead of venturing into some psychological hypothesizing that I'm not really qualified for, I'll just settle for concluding that something somewhere got fucked up. Uh, and on that note, enjoy the song!

Personal anecdote time! UMass has on its Amherst campus a basketball court on the top of a hill. At the bottom of that same hill are some dorms, so when I lived in those dorms I'd walk up the hill to go play some ball and then back down to shower and whatnot. (I've always preferred outdoor ball to indoor ball.) One time coming down the hill, I passed a group of fellow students going up, one of whom asked if he could see my ball for a second. I hesitated (almost certainly because I'm inherently suspicious of other people), but then he said, "C'mon, don't be that guy," and instantaneously I passed him the ball. Even without having heard of "that guy," it was immediately clear that I didn't want to be him. I'll come back to this concept in a bit, but I'll be using "the asshole" instead of "that guy" to avoid gender issues.

In the meantime, take a look at what N. Graham Standish has to say.

"Like evangelicals, [many of us Americans have] tangibly experienced God's presence in our lives. We know how important religious faith is to life. We share their emphasis on a traditional morality that roots us in something deeper than objective reason.

Still, like the atheists, we cherish the freedom to doubt because we struggle with doubt every day. We value rational, scientific thinking because we see how much it enhances and improves life worldwide. We are religious, spiritual and rational, logical people seeking a balance between freedom and faith."

Oh good - something deeper than objective reason. Y'know what, though? You can't just make something better by tacking "deeper than" on the front of it. If that were the case, I could just one-up Standish by referring to something deeper than his deeper thing (which, of course, he conveniently neglects to identify). I would very much like to hear him explain why objective reason is too shallow for his liking, as that's not a particularly common accusation. On the assumption that no such explanation will ever be forthcoming, though, it might be wiser just to move on.

"Basically, [atheists are] saying that in public dialogue and debate religious people should give up language that reflects their beliefs, while atheists can maintain theirs. How does that achieve equality? God-neutral language is atheistic, and demanding God-free language is an attempt to rid the culture of religion."

Yeah, in this case, fuck equality. There's a reason we don't want God to run our politics. See, for instance, Rowan Williams.

"If religion is pushed into private spaces, as increasingly it tends to be by our public discourse, we lose one of the most emotionally and imaginatively resourceful ways of seeing human behaviour; we lose something of the sense that certain acts may be good independently of whether they are sensible or successful in the world's terms. I suppose you could say that we lose the 'contemplative' dimension to ethics, the belief that some things are worth ­admiring in themselves."

Ignoring for the sake of this post the truly bizarre notion that this is the only thing that counts as "contemplative," there's only one question to ask Williams: whose well-being are you willing to sacrifice to obtain these "things [that] are worth admiring in themselves"? Let's say that we're talking about the family. Christians like to talk about "the family" as a thing worth admiring in itself and, perhaps, a thing that's "good independently of whether [it's] sensible or successful in the world's terms." How far should we go to protect "the family"? If we outlawed divorce we'd certainly make some headway in keeping families together, at least for some definition of "together." Who cares, I guess, if that means forcing people to stay together when they hate each other or when one abuses the other. We're not talking about being "sensible or successful in the world's terms," we're talking about things that are "worth admiring in themselves"!

This attitude that Rowan displays is what I am going to call asshole theism or unsporting theism. Think about public discourse like a game of capture the flag. If you're playing capture the flag with a large group of people and you see someone slowly ambling on your side of the field wearing the opponents' colors, you're well within your rights to go tag that person. They, in return, have the right to tell you that they're just trying to get from point A to point B and that they're not in the game at all - but if they are in the game and they're lying about it, that makes them the asshole. (Equally, if you refuse to take them at their word and physically drag them off to your "jail" area, that makes you the asshole.) Winning the game, I posit, is not worth being the asshole; it would be overall better, in other words, to lose sportingly than to win using underhanded tactics.

Standish and Williams, so far as I can tell, practice this brand of unsporting theism. For one thing, this entire conversation is bullshit: nobody wants "to rid the culture of religion" altogether. Know how I know? "Atheists against Halloween" returns zero results on Google. (Well, it may return one now, but you know what I mean.) We're also not out burning Bibles in the streets or picketing Iron & Wine concerts, so there should really not be any question about whether or not atheists are willing to permit religion to have a place in the culture. That this idea keeps popping back up indicates that the Standish/Williams coterie is either delusional or playing dirty.

A more central problem is that they just don't say what they mean. Standish, for example, claims to "know how important religious faith is to life," but he can't really mean that. He claims to know atheists personally - presumably they're not all empty, hollow people just waiting to be filled with God's light. While religious faith is important to his life, it is (again) either delusional or dishonest of him to generalize that importance. Likewise, when Williams frowns on "the world's terms" he really means something else: if his God exists, Rowan's religious ethics are "the world's terms." (It may be that Standish makes this same error when he denigrates "objective reason.") To give yet another example, it's this same act of sacrificing direct honesty for political point-scoring that characterizes asshole (unsporting) atheism.

"Being indifferent to the theologies of organised religions does not stop me being very concerned about their other activities. In fact, being an anti-clerical activist (which is another proud label I attach to myself) is a means of fighting for the right to be indifferent. The message to the muftis and priests and rabbis and vicars is: take your beliefs back to your places of worship and keep them there."

Terry Sanderson has "the right to be indifferent." His having written that idiotic article proves as much, given that he's still walking the streets and not locked up somewhere for the crime of (what he calls) indifference. He, like Standish and Williams, has so little concern for the rules of fair play that he looks his audience right in the eye and tells them explicitly that he isn't doing the very thing he is doing. Just as Standish rails against the empty vice of hubris and Williams overflows with lip service to "explicit reference to the roots of moral judgements" without, in either case, actually taking those concepts seriously, Sanderson has invented a concept in his "right" to be left alone that's so self-evidently stupid that one must assume that he's either secretly eight years old or completely disinterested in engaging in meaningful discourse.

It may seem that playing in the political arena calls for lowering one's standards. Sanderson wants some kind of special anti-religious rights based in who-knows-what conception of government, Williams yearns to bring in factors that aren't measured by "the world's terms," and Standish apparently prefers to form laws on the basis of "something deeper than objective reason," all in the name of something that transcends or supersedes the normal rules of political argumentation. As much as I appreciate (in theory) the instinct to evaluate any given situation from multiple levels of inspection, any attempt to do so in this way is trash. Our laws should be based in reality, whatever that reality is, and not in some abstract, traction-less notion of equality or hubris or contemplation; demoting facts and logic in order to prop up an artificial feel-good third-way solution is just never going to cut it.

Yep, so that was totally off. In some ways, though, it would've been better for Sollereder if I'd been right.

"Most of us imagine the world of Genesis 1-2, or the original creation, as a perfect world, where everything is already completed, and where Adam and Eve were meant to live out their lives in a perfect existence. Apart from multiplying and filling the earth, there is not a lot of room for growth, either physically or spiritually, for humans or for creation because everything has already 'arrived.' In a radical re-imagining of this story, Irenaeus pictures Adam and Eve in the garden as children––not perfect, but on a journey toward maturity and perfection. This is because perfection is not something you can give to an infant; it must be grown into."

While I'd never claim to be a Bible scholar, I'm fairly certain that everything had not already "arrived" in Eden. From what I can recall, there were animals and people and plants - and, y'know, day and night and water and land and all that stuff. But was there art? Probably no. Did any of the people have a scientific understanding of the universe? If so, that understanding was minimal at best. How about massages? Stand-up comedy? Milkshakes? Had they even invented basketball, that most perfect of sports? Not by a long shot. So in what sense was there not room for growth?

More importantly, I sincerely doubt that Sollereder or any other Christian can say that the afterlife will be static, either. To wit: God, as I understand it, is the only omniscient being possible according to Christian theology. So anybody who gets into the Christian heaven will be (a) immortal but (b) ignorant of some things or other. That looks for all the world like an opportunity to grow: stick a library in heaven and you'll allow for intellectual growth among its residents. We could just as easily talk about moral growth (since only God is morally perfect) or growth in ability (since only God is omnipotent), but philosophical growth will suffice. Although she's probably right in saying that most of us imagine Eden and heaven to be static in sort of boring ways, that's pretty weak evidence, especially considering that the premise appears to contradict certain basic Christian tenets.

"Now, let’s extend this argument to the wider cosmos. Just as humanity is not created in static perfection, the world around is not fully completed either. Colin Gunton, reflecting on Irenaeus, writes, 'Creation is a project... It has somewhere to go.' There is value in saying that creation has the freedom to grow, that it is an ongoing project. A world with freedom must have choice, and this is present in a world with a long evolutionary history."

This I just don't understand. Evolution counts as "free" in some coherent and special sense? Not given what we know about it. We've seen this kind of response before, and it didn't seem any less meaningless then than it does now.

Even looking past all of these issues, though, doesn't help Sollereder as much as you might think. Let's assume for the sake of argument that it's metaphysically impossible to, in her language, give perfection to an infant. I don't know why that would be impossible, but whatever. It is clearly good for us to achieve perfection, so that assumption gets her at least partway to a justification of why we screw up. But what about the so-called freedom of the universe? "Freedom and growth are valuable," she says, "and God delights in them." But so what? This, if anything, paints God as a bit of an egotist and not the moral beacon depicted in the Christian mythology. What else would you call an entity that knowingly induces (or at least permits) suffering in loved ones just to satisfy its own desires? The "freedom" and growth of the universe aren't good for us in any way, yet they entail various harms to us - seems like a pretty straightforward calculation to me. It seems, then, that Sollereder hasn't really addressed the issue: just saying "God allows gratuitous suffering because it wants to" isn't a rebuttal to the problem of evil so much as an attempt to bluff it.

Stick around in the comments section, though, and maybe she'll have some way of clarifying her stance so that it makes more sense. If not, though, we're pretty much back where we started: without an overwhelming moral reason to have things the way they are, it's not possible to explain our world using theistic premises.

Maybe Charles Chaput should be a little worried that his depiction of God is about one half-step above George Lucas's swashbuckling archaeologist.

"A simple way of understanding God’s Word is to see that the beginning, middle and end of Scripture correspond to man’s creation, fall, and redemption. Creation opens Scripture, followed by the sin of Adam and the infidelity of Israel. This drama takes up the bulk of the biblical story until we reach a climax in the birth of Jesus and the redemption he brings. Thus, creation, fall, and redemption make up the three key acts of Scripture’s story, and they embody God’s plan for each of us.

Creation

Modern Christians often seem uneasy with the Bible’s account of creation. As a result, we miss the important truths embedded there. At the heart of the Christian story of creation is the fact that God is good, and the Maker of all things. Therefore, all of his creation has an inherent goodness. At the center of the creation account stand man and woman, made in God’s own image and likeness. In Genesis, humanity crowns the created world as a final, perfected expression of God’s love. In a sense, our love for each other, which is most obviously shown in the covenant of marriage, is a reflection of God’s own identity. God himself is a communion of love in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and this is the divine joy that God created us to share in.

Fall

At least that was the plan."

See, the plan was for everything to be peachy keen, but now the plan is for everything to suck. Don't think about it too hard, he's making it up as he goes!

I guess, then, that it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that the new plan doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. We're all going to be created and then fall, even though as individuals we don't have anywhere to fall from; then we're going to grow up and get married, which is like a heterosexual two-thirds version of God's relationship to itself but also exactly like that (three-way presumably homosexual) relationship. We'd better hope that the current plan goes better than the initial one, because at this rate God's next plan will involve a refrigerator, a nuclear bomb, and Shia LaBeouf.

Bleah, totally spaced on this yesterday - sorry, all. Even if I hadn't, though, it might have taken me a good while to figure out what my favorite album is. I mean, how do you pick a favorite album? Probably one of my media applications tracks the songs that I play the most, from which information I can deduce (with, hopefully, minimal effort) which album(s) I play the most, but that doesn't necessarily indicate which one I like best. Even after having looked through my entire library the answer isn't entirely clear. Take this, then, as a guess.



Joan Osborne's Relish has a lot of really good material, and even with "One Of Us" - you remember that song, right? - it's a record that I have a hard time listening to only in part. She has a great voice, her lyrics draw people and places really clearly, and the production draws you in so immediately that you just want to keep listening. I dunno what happened to her, but she could have produced thirty records like this and I would've bought every one.

As for when I'm angry - I mean, really pissed - there's little better than "Watermark" by The Weakerthans.



I mean, those lyrics just make me angry.

I've got this store-bought way of saying I'm okay,
and you learned how to cry in total silence.
We're talented and bright.
We're lonely and uptight.
We've found some lovely ways to disappoint.

And so on. Grr.

Don't tempt me, meme! The songs that I would really really like to hear on the radio are like "Severe Punishment."



The song, of course, is brilliant to the point of magic, but it's also ridiculously profane. I can't really think of a compelling reason for radio stations (or TV channels) to be so thoroughly hamstrung by the FCC, so that would be one good option. Since that's going to happen at or about the same time that the sun fizzles out, however, I'll provide another, more realistic option...sort of.

MIA's new album, /\/\ /\Y/\, features a cover of "It Takes A Muscle." Don't know it? Here:



I fully admit that that is not a super-fantastic song. It is, near as I can tell, barely a mediocre song. In fairness, though, this band - which doesn't even have a wiki page - was around in the Netherlands in the 1980s. MIA, by contrast, is from today, and she sounds like this:



It's just that YouTube hasn't quite finished collecting her new album yet, so MIA's version of "It Takes A Muscle" isn't available anywhere I can, er, borrow it (other than her Myspace page, temporarily). But check it out: her cover is easy to listen to and has "love" in it but no swearing, so it actually could be played on the radio. Plus, since MIA is a legitimately good musician, playing her song on the radio might - just maybe - get people to spend their money on quality art instead of, oh I dunno, B.o.B.

This shit makes be absolutely despondent:

Seven hundred and fifty thousand minus one equals seven hundred and forty-nine thousand? Or is it just that Bristol Palin is actually one thousand women? For fuck's sake, people.

Remember, kids, even the best companies are only run by people.*

"Family films have well outpaced pre-release projections repeatedly since May, and the studio bosses are puzzled over why these movies 'outperform' their guesses.

'The simplest answer is that the tracking doesn't include the young kids themselves,' Disney distribution boss Chuck Viane said.

'It's just harder to get a handle on what kids are thinking,' another brilliant marketer guessed. 'Tracking surveys are based on what people express in phone and Internet surveys, and you're not going to find the young kids that way.' Pre-release tracking surveys focus on parents. 'The nag factor is what drives those kind of movies,' a studio executive tartly declared. 'The parents might be less inclined than the kids to see a picture, but then the kids pester the parents, and the rest is history.'

So why don't the studio bosses start factoring in the possibility of a 'nag factor' from young children wanting to go to the movies with parents who demand quality for their children, and make some movies accordingly? No million-dollar marketing exec has thought of that yet?"

Brent Bozell III: Beyond Thunderdome has - incredibly - a point: if you're making kids' movies, it makes no sense not to include kids in your projections of how much money those movies will make. Like, none. Bozell goes and fucks it up by concluding that Hollywood must take this information "and put their money where the American public's eyes want to go" and that there should automatically be "more respect from the movie awards shows for these animated films," but those inane comments don't detract from how right he is that the executives in question are acting like total morons.

If anybody in these studios has even thought about this problem, someone may have had the following line of thought: "It's really too bad we can't include the kids in our predictions, cause that'd make them way more accurate. But we just can't get to really young children with phone or internet surveys, so there's nothing we can do." People sometimes think that about data, that if you can't get the information from the source then you can't get it at all. I don't know why people think that, but hey, it happens. In that case, these execs may want to consult FiveThirtyEight:

"How is this site different from other compilations of polls like Real Clear Politics? There are several principal ways that the FiveThityEight methodology differs from other poll compilations:

Firstly, we assign each poll a weighting based on that pollster's historical track record, the poll's sample size, and the recentness of the poll. More reliable polls are weighted more heavily in our averages.

Secondly, we include a regression estimate based on the demographics in each state among our 'polls', which helps to account for outlier polls and to keep the polling in its proper context.

Thirdly, we use an inferential process to compute a rolling trendline that allows us to adjust results in states that have not been polled recently and make them ‘current’.

Fourthly, we simulate the election 10,000 times for each site update in order to provide a probabilistic assessment of electoral outcomes based on a historical analysis of polling data since 1952. The simulation further accounts for the fact that similar states are likely to move together, e.g. future polling movement in states like Michigan and Ohio, or North and South Carolina, is likely to be in the same direction."

FiveThirtyEight's people work with data that they know to be unreliable I can only assume that Disney and Pixar and who knows who else all have more than enough money to employ one or two statistical modelers. Nate Silver might be the most famous such person, but there ain't no way that he's the only one who knows what he's doing. Some shining intellect over in Hollywood should really just go find someone with a master's in statistics and get them to fix this, cause there's honestly no reason for studios to be so consistently wrong when even Brent freaking Bozell can see the solution.

*For now, for now! Those of you who are reading this in the future when everything is run by robots, please remember that I'm only talking about the present moment in time.

Good grief but BioLogos is a broken record. Bethany Sollereder is a new name to me, but I could swear that we've been here before.

"Theologians––academic and popular, contemporary and ancient––have almost universally affirmed the connection between sin and physical death...Scientists, on the other hand, have looked at these same natural phenomena, and have come to the conclusion that realities like pain, earthquakes, and death are in fact necessary to good and flourishing lives."

It's actually a good deal more complicated than that, both from the theological and the scientific side, but it could be worse: she says that the theologians are wrong, and I'm okay with that. This, however, makes me nervous:

"There is a lot more that we could talk about here. We could speak of predation, which encourages biodiversity and drives evolutionary innovation. We could explore how physical death is a good and necessary part of a world that has limited resources, keeping organisms from becoming cancerous (cancer cells never die on their own and are thus 'immortal'). These are important, but they roughly follow the same type of argumentation as above. In my next post, I will look at the values of a world developed through an evolutionary process, or, as it is sometimes asked, 'Why didn’t God simply create heaven in the first place?'"

I'm so bored of this conversation that I'm just going to go through the rest of it on my own and then check back later to make sure that Sollereder held up her end. Ready? Here goes.

SOLLEREDER: We've already seen how bad things are actually good things given that the world is set up how it is.

ME: Well, no. We've seen how some bad things are required for good things in a naturalistic world, which makes them instrumental and not intrinsic goods. As a result, this doesn't explain all bad things (either in the sense of "all categories of bad things" or "all instances of bad things within any given category") and also doesn't really suffice for a defense of a world that's supposed to be theistic.

S: I don't appreciate those subtleties enough to care, so I'm just going to ignore them. However, I do understand that some people think God could have just started off with heaven and thereby eliminated the need for earthquakes, pain, death, and so on.

M: Oh?

S: Yes! But you see, there are values that can only be found in a world developed through an evolutionary process.

M: I think maybe you mean "in life developed through an evolutionary process" or "in a world that contains an evolutionary process," because otherwise you're badly abusing the word "evolutionary." But okay, I'll bite: what kinds of values are those?

S: Well-ordered worlds are beautiful and speak to the greatness of the entity that created them, just like an intricate and beautiful artwork reflects the talent, intelligence, and emotional depth of the artist. Our universe is therefore not simply good but, better, it is beautiful. This explanation also helps us understand why God would include so much suffering in our universe, because we know that the best art takes tragedy or disaster and transforms it into a higher good. Thus God allows the drama of creation continues to unfold over billions of years, slowly but surely drawing ever nearer to the redemptive moment when our grand "plot" climaxes. So you see, just as God redeemed the death of Jesus by-

M: I'm sorry, I have to interrupt you at this point or else risk my head exploding. First of all, I refer your specific aesthetic theories to this post, so please let's just not talk about that part. Also, aesthetic value is not moral value. Unless you wish to posit a morally ambivalent deity who really just wants to be the best artist ever - and then actually make specific arguments illustrating the aesthetic value of plate tectonics and so on - this whole "beauty from suffering" schtick has got to go. Do you have anything else?

S: Haha! No, of course I don't have anything else - except, that is, a million-dollar megaphone purchased for me by the Templeton Foundation.

M: Ah. Right.

The only other avenue she might pursue is the "good of discovery" angle, which (roughly) says that God had to create an ordered, natural-ish universe so that we could understand it. There are problems with this argument, too, but since I don't think she'll go in that direction I won't bother dealing with them just yet.

Normally I wouldn't go out on a limb like this, but I am so bored with this BioLogos crap. This must be what the first extreme-sports bicyclists felt like: "Go up the hill, go down the hill. Go up the hill, go down the hill. Oh, fuck it - I'm going down these stairs and then I'm gonna do a flip!" Hopefully I don't land on my head, is all.

Okay, yes, wikipedia, I know that goldfish don't really have a three-second memory. Er, but wait - "[t]he black belt in martial arts is actually a recent invention from the 1880s, originally created for judo, and does not necessarily indicate expert level or mastery"??? Outrageous!

And speaking of outrageous, here's Massey CEO Don Blankenship, with my emphasis:

"'Politicians will tell you we're going to do something so that this never happens again. You won't hear me say that because I believe the physics of natural law and God trump what man tries to do. Whether you get earthquakes underground, whether you get broken floors, whether you get gas inundations, whether you get roof falls oftentimes are unavoidable.'

...The tragedy in his mine, Mr. Blankenship said, took a personal toll on him.

But he said he didn't feel guilty about it.

'I think that the word guilty is not the right word,' he said. 'I feel that I don't want to experience that again. I feel sorry for the families. I feel concern for our current workers, and I feel motivated to try to figure out what happened and try to prevent it from ever happening again.'"

Amazing.

In case you don't recall, one of Blankenship's mines exploded in a way that led federal officials to start a federal criminal investigation into his company's safety practices. Massey ran up something in the area of five hundred safety citations in the four-year period that culminated in the explosion, which you'd think would have been a sign or something. Buy apparently we're all willing to go along with Don up there and consider mining-related activities acts of God that are just "unavoidable." I wouldn't worry about it - those dead mine workers were probably homos anyway, you know how God gets around those people.

Incidentally, this makes two John Mayer references this week. Odd, no?

There's a study floating around somewhere that links happiness to the time it takes one to commute back and forth to one's job. I'm far too lazy at the moment to go find it, but Google knows where it is. Anyway, it's a great tragedy that anybody ever has to commute anywhere, with the exception of professional athletes who, let's be honest, can cry about it if they don't like it. It's a greater tragedy still that people have to commute all over the place with no decent radio stations around - myself included. Please don't take it as a reflection of my personally, then, that "Nothin' On You" is a song that I hear a lot on the radio.



"Baby, you the whole package. Plus, you pay your taxes." Sigh.

What's odd about this, actually, is that this B.o.B. person doesn't get any press, at least not where I can see it. Lady Gaga gets press, but I don't hear her on the radio. The thrice-cursed Black Eyed Peas get press, but I don't hear them on the radio. Shit, Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire and zillions of other actually good bands get press, too, but do I hear them on the radio? If you guessed "yes," that is incorrect.

This makes me wonder: am I just not listening to the right radio stations, or is there some weird disconnect between the hype and the radio popularity? Maybe the radio people are second-tier and the real action is on MTV (HA) or YouTube, for instance. Anybody know? Or are you all like me and you couldn't care less what happens in the world of pop music?

Courtesy of David Goldman:

"There is a Deuteronomic duality to the sex act, a blessing and curse. Human beings don’t couple like animals. Unlike animals, we know that we are mortal, and that bearing children is the precondition for conquering mortality. The culmination of sexual relations, the petit mort, recalls our mortality, for we produce children precisely because we know we are going to die; the sex act for its own sake is redolent of mortality without the promise of immortality. The subordination of sex to family relations within a faith community whose premise is the conquest of mortality, and the sublimation of sex into romantic love are the means by which civilization links sex to live. Take sex out of this context and it becomes a curse rather than a blessing."

Just a few questions, David, if I could...

1. "Deuteronomic"?
2. Are you maybe confusing the survival of a person with the survival of (some of) that person's genes? Cause I don't think that parents are immortal.
3. Speaking of parents: any of you who actually have kids, did you "produce children precise because [you] know [you] are going to die"?
4. Is it just me, or does this only apply to men? I may not be a sexologist or human reproduction specialist or even a biologist in any sense of the word, but I'm pretty sure that human reproduction doesn't rely on any, ah, petit morts on the part of the female.*
5. If sex has to be reproductive in order to avoid being a curse, what's all this prattle about "the sublimation of sex into romantic love"?
6. Along similar lines, isn't this all a bit sad for people who can't reproduce? How, given all of this, could such a person possibly be happy?
7. How can you tell what the premise of a community is? Who, in fact, is even to say that community is premised on anything in the first place?
8. If "the sex act for its own sake" is "a curse rather than a blessing," what does that say about the rest of life?
9. What does "redolent with mortality" even mean, and why does that sentence bring to mind Dellamorte Dellamore?

Don't feel like you have to rush in getting back to me, Dave - the less I hear about this the less likely I am to have a stroke.

*I think that I am conjugating that French wrongly, but oh well.

Continuing with Robinson's Absence of Mind lectures, last night I watched the first video. Ostensibly she was meant to talk about human nature, but as usual (for her) she ended up talking about not much of anything at all. She starts, for example, by pivoting off of Gregory of Nyssa.

"What cannot be measured or compared clearly cannot be unmoved in any ordinary sense of the word.  This is exactly the kind of language that positivism finds meaningless, though in its reaching beyond accustomed categories embedded in language it resembles nothing so much as contemporary physics."

"What cannot be measured or compared," in case you can't tell, is God, which Robinson also characterizes as the unmoved mover of the first-cause cosmological argument. We'll see later on that she chastises the positivists and new atheists and miscellaneous other villains for not knowing their classics, but it's incredibly hard to take that complaint seriously when she makes claims like this. If you'll permit me to play the role of a bored philosophy 101 teacher, the unmoved mover argument dates back at least to Aristotle, who, I am apparently required to say, did not speak English. As a result, the linguistic confusion over the use of "move" in the unmoved mover argument is not any kind of "reaching beyond accustomed categories embedded in language" but just a mistranslation. (A vastly better word would be "change," so that God becomes the unchanged changer.) When apologists use "unmoved mover" in this way, either they perpetuate the mistranslation (in which case they're not reaching beyond anything at all, just being confusing) or have no fucking clue what they mean (in which case the positivists are - gasp! - right). In other words, this is not like contemporary physics at all. Robinson would like nothing more than to have the cachet of science spill over onto religion, but this attempt to accomplish that is so pathetic as to be a joke.


If she can't raise religion up to the level of science, Robinson's next best move is to lower science to the level of religion. To that end, she complains that parascientific

"theorists speak of the old error, that notion of a ghost in the machine, the image of the felt difference between mind and body. But who and what is that other self they posit...Who is that other self needing to be persuaded that there are more than genetic reasons for rescuing a son or daughter from drowning? The archaic conundrum, how a nonphysical spirit can move a physical body, only emerges in a more pointed form in these unaccountable presences whom evolution has supposedly contrived to make us mistake for ourselves."

To make this somewhat more comprehensible, Robinson has noticed that a lot of scientists these days are saying that we frequently don't know the real reasons we acted in a certain way. This, she thinks, requires the existence of an "other self," an apparently immaterial consciousness that does all the thinking and reflecting while the body acts more or less on its own. More importantly, she thinks that this "other self" has been posited by these theorists. All of this is such a blatant misrepresentation of the views in question that it's almost appalling. While her message comes through loud and clear - "mind/body identity science is just like mind/body dualism" - her reasoning is a string of non-sequiturs that she attributes to people who would absolutely disavow it.


Having embarked on this mission to level the reputations of science and religion, Robinson realizes about a third of the way into her lecture that she might want to explain just what science and religion are. As she herself says, "it would be helpful to the general reader if [technical speakers] would provide definitions of major terms. [Otherwise,] definition may be avoided here, as elsewhere, in order to permit [read: facilitate] generalization." (Are you paying attention, anon? Remember when I asked for one of these definitions and you wouldn't give me one? Okay, then.) She begins with a few sentences that, to her credit, successfully combine the words "science" and "religion" with descriptors.

"Religion...is treated as proof of persisting primativity among human beings...and legitimizes also the assumption that humankind is itself fearful, irrational, deluded, and self-deceiving, excepting, of course, these missionaries of enlightenment...A difference...between science and parascience, is the desire in the latter case to treat scientific knowledge as complete, at least in its methods and assumptions."

Note, however, that these statements don't even end up in the same neighborhood as definitions. At best they would tell us what religion and science are not, in which case they would function in some sense as the inverse of a definition. As it turns out, though, they don't even do that: "that humankind is...deluded, and self-deceiving" is not an assumption but a scientific conclusion and, importantly, one to which scientists (even including parascientists) don't typically consider themselves exempt. Dan Ariely, to take but one example, has made a career out of explaining some of the ways in which humans delude and deceive themselves, and if you pay attention to him for more than five minutes at a time you'll see that he quite readily includes himself in this category. Likewise, nobody but nobody "treat[s] scientific knowledge as complete." It would be shocking if Robinson could produce even one citation that demonstrates this belief - but citations aren't exactly her style, so she doesn't. As for her weaselly qualifier, I would have something to say about that, too, if only I could figure out what it meant. If you know how knowledge can be complete "in its methods and assumptions," please do let me know. Until that information comes to light, however, I can only leave that phrase behind.


Coming finally to the long-promised definitions, Robinson first cites William James, for whom religion is "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Although she never explicitly endorses this (or any other) definition, she speaks of it approvingly and I will therefore consider it to be her preferred idea of religion. To explain why such an understanding of religion doesn't clash with science, she says, and I promise you that I am not making this up, that

"[s]cience is a comparatively recent phenomenon, for several centuries strongly identified with the cultures of the west, which it has profoundly influenced and by which it has been formed and channeled. Because it is recent and culturally localized, it is difficult to distinguish from its setting. Certainly modern warfare, hot and cold, have had a profound impact on the development of science in the same period that science has had its most profound impact on human life...Religion, on the contrary, is ancient and global, and since it has no clear geographic and temporal limits, persisting as cultural habit even when it seems to have been suppressed or renounced, it is very difficult to define."

She then spends some minutes diverting herself with the question of whether religion is a source of conflict, at which point it becomes clear that, though she very clearly thinks that religion and science are compatible, she will never tell us why. Rather than evaluating her argument, then, I can only provide my own argument for why her unargued-for position is wrong.

On James's understanding, religions consist of feelings, acts, experiences, and apprehensions. Some of these may at first seem to be simply phenomenological - feelings and experiences, say - but in fact all four relate back to true and false and thus, at least frequently, to science. To take a standard Christian example, many believers report feelings of being loved while in the midst of these religious behaviors. While on one level this is indeed just a feeling like hunger or the urge to laugh, you'll note that it also has propositional content: these people feel that they are loved - or, more precisely, that Jesus loves them. Without saying anything about that feeling, we can take this propositional content and evaluate it. That is, we may well ask, does Jesus in fact love these people? To make a very long story short, the answer to this question turns on many issues, a large chunk of which are scientific: that Jesus, if he ever lived, died centuries ago; that minds are the result of brains; that, therefore, long-dead people don't have any mental states in virtue of not having any brains with which to have mental states; and so on. Likewise, experiences are experiences of something that can be evaluated as true or false, apprehensions are apprehensions of something that can be evaluated as true or false, and acts rely on reasons and presumed consequences, all of which can, again, be evaluated as true or false.

Methodologically, then, science and (this understanding of) religion are obviously in conflict. Believers arrive at the true/false content of their religions without controls, without falsifiable hypotheses, without a well-defined set of experimental steps, and on and on. As it happens, science and (this understanding of) religion also conflict in their teachings - to reiterate, the former would never permit such a crazy idea as, "I am loved by an Arab who has been dead for so long that he has surely decomposed entirely." It's conceptually possible, I suppose, for a religious person to get really lucky and stumble upon only scientifically supported feelings, acts, experiences, and apprehensions, but the odds of this happening in reality are so low that we can safely describe them as zero.


In an apparent attempt to rebut this kind of argument without ever looking into it, Robinson then begins to explain why she wants to import feelings, experiences, and apprehensions into science as evidence. "No philosophy or cognitive science should be allowed to evade" the full scope of human experience, she says, because...well, she doesn't have a "because." There's a courtesan's reply where she name-checks Bach, Sophocles, and Job (as though Dennett and Dawkins have somehow never heard classical music or read the Bible) and there's the part where she praises Bertrand Russell for using "introspection...as a means of understanding the human mind," but those are just different ways of rephrasing her idea, not arguments in favor of it.

Once more, the reason for this is that Robinson's total ignorance of science leads her to form beliefs that just don't match reality. She describes introspection, for example, as "the kind of evidence that supposed science tacitly disallows," a sentiment that very nearly contains more bad words than good ones. Science (not "supposed science") does exclude introspection in most cases but not tacitly. On the other hand, science also takes introspection into account in other cases, which means that Robinson really shouldn't have any complaints. For my part, I've not seen any theory that could be said to "evade" the diversity of human experience - but then, I'm actually looking, whereas Robinson apparently prefers to just say what she feels and be done with it.

As a case in point for pretty much all of the errors that recur in Robinson's thinking, I want to conclude with her take on Descartes. Despite also being the source behind the infinitely more helpful Cartesian plane, Descartes's two most famous ideas are the cogito (or, in the original French, the "je pense") and his dualism. Robinson addresses Cartesian dualism first by comparing it to modern-day neurology, a transparent attempt to put religion and science on equal footing. As with all of her other such attempts, this comparison works only insofar as we know absolutely no details about either Descartes's reasoning or modern science. The soul, for one thing, is categorically different than a person's moral sense or visual processing capabilities, so to say that modern science is emulating Descartes is vastly misleading even before the methodologies enter the picture. And bringing the methodologies into the picture doesn't exactly help matters - from wiki:

"My view is that this gland is the principal seat of the soul, and the place in which all our thoughts are formed. The reason I believe this is that I cannot find any part of the brain, except this, which is not double...moreover it is situated in the most suitable possible place for this purpose, in the middle of all the concavities; and it is supported and surrounded by the little branches of the carotid arteries which bring the spirits into the brain."

Obviously this is not science. He does bring some empirical observations into play,* but not in a controlled way and not in a way that could dovetail with any kind of experiment. Modern scientists, in other words, are looking for a different kind of information and they're looking for it in a different way. Why Robinson thinks there's any commonality at all is a major question.

Next she questions whether Descartes actually believed in an immaterial soul - whether, in other words, Descartes was a Cartesian dualist. Again, wiki:

"The distinction between mind and body is argued in Meditation VI as follows: I have a clear and distinct idea of myself as a thinking, non-extended thing, and a clear and distinct idea of body as an extended and non-thinking thing. Whatever I can conceive clearly and distinctly, God can so create. So, Descartes argues, the mind, a thinking thing, can exist apart from its extended body. And therefore, the mind is a substance distinct from the body, a substance whose essence is thought."

Not coincidentally, I suspect, this argument centers on Descartes's inner world, his experiences, feelings, apprehensions, and so on. So this represents Robinson's inability to read and comprehend the authors she references (yes, Virginia, Descartes was a Cartesian dualist) as well as her wholly unreasonable trust in the human mind. We mind/body monists don't disagree with Descartes because we somehow evade his personal experience, we just don't think that matters of true and false can be left up to what a random person can or can't imagine. Finally, it's worth pointing out yet again that Robinson's proclamations on religion and science/parascience have failed her. Descartes did in fact delude himself using his religion, and he did so in a way that falls squarely into her idea of parascience. Him putting the word "God" in there, that is to say, doesn't help one damn bit.

At this point, I feel like I've done well more than enough to earn my anonymous commenters' trust - and, surprise, I haven't changed my mind. Marilynne Robinson doesn't respect science; I know this because, judging from the things she says, she doesn't even understand it. Her philosophical abilities are underdeveloped at best, and she consistently holds others to higher standards than those she applies to herself. I, to summarize, am done here. Science and religion do not get along, and it's our job to find a way to make science work rather than getting spooked by it and turning our backs.


*Incidentally, these observations also happen to be false: the pineal gland isn't actually "not double."