Rust Belt Philosophy

cl - whom you might remember as the guy who doesn't know shit about Hume and can't be bothered to stick around and actually talk about it - would

"like to share an experience I had this evening.

A mother was tending to her crying baby, presumably related to the pain of teething. While trying to comfort the baby, the mother said,

Aw, I wish I could take the pain of teething for you…

I feel confident in asserting that the majority of individuals would both approve of the mother’s loving intentions, and encourage her to take the pain if she had the means. So why is it that such a disproportionate subset of people object when Christians preach a God both willing and able to take the pain of sin for us?"

Well, gee, might it be because substitution in punishment seems like a contradiction in terms and this woman had no intention of relieving her child of earned suffering? As one of cl's commenters said, this thing with the mother and the baby is not exactly "a full-on, complete analogy"; it is, in fact, missing exactly the part of the analogy that the analogy is supposed to address, the part where there is (as in the title of cl's post) "penal atonement." Er, no wait - did I say that was one of cl's commenters? Sorry. I meant to say that it was cl himself.

This has to be some kind of joke. "I know you have a problem with aspect X of my worldview, so here's an analogy that is utterly incapable of addressing aspect X and is in fact designed so as not to be relevant to aspect X even in the slightest. There - doesn't that make things better?" I've seen some impressive attempts to pass off fraudulent trickery as legitimate reason, but this one is really quite impressive.

Now I can understand why the Prosblogion, a blog dedicated to the philosophy of religion and written by a band of unabashed believers, might ask:

"Why Are More Petitionary-Prayers Helpful?"

I'm appalled by the blatant misuse of a hyphen, of course, but the question itself I understand. And BioLogos, well...

"Humans were barred from the Garden, but what exactly happened to it? Why does no one know where it is? Did God destroy it? Was it wiped out in the flood? Did it just disappear?"

...that's only to be expected, really. Similarly, the National Review practically has a patent on bull-headed stupidity...

"What humane purpose is served by this media obsession with condoms? What happens to the press’s vaunted willingness to challenge conventional wisdom when the issue at hand is anything touching on sexual license?"*

...but the USA Today? Really?

"Do you think American Exceptionalism is threatened by actions taken or not taken by politicians, that God will lift his favor if the USA doesn't do this, that or the other?"

I thought they were at least ostensibly a real newspaper - y'know, the kind that doesn't just assume that American Exceptionalism is a real thing or that it's equivalent to God's favor. I mean, okay, it isn't a good sign that they have to color-code their sections so that their readers can figure out which one is which, but this is going a bit far.

*Aside to George Weigel: "the press's vaunted willingness to challenge conventional wisdom"? Since...when?

Exhibit A:



Exhibit B:

"I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO..."

Exhibit C:

AFC North Team	W	L	T
Baltimore Ravens	8	3	0
Pittsburgh Steelers	8	3	0

You know you're off to a bad start when, in the very first sentence of your blog post, you announce that you self-identify as "a die-hard fan of the Saint Louis Cardinals, and something of a baseball historian." Honestly, being a fan of any given baseball team is like really enjoying watching paint dry - but only one color, dammit. Anyway, Anthony Esolen only goes downhill from there - if you can believe it - when he turns his attention to what he calls "the immorality or amorality of the sexual revolution."

"...we should ask, 'What kind of society has the sexual revolution produced?'  For surely we have no right to solipsism.  The Constitution is not a suicide pact.  It does not compel us to submit to living in a sewer.  We do have the right to ask, of every single one of our sexual customs, 'To what does this conduce?'

     It's strange, but when I engage in some on-line confrontation about the morality of this or that sexual proclivity, and I challenge the interlocutor to defend the sexual revolution based upon the goodness or the nobility of the society it has led to, that challenge is never taken up."

Esolen goes on to list a number of sob stories allegedly linked to the sexual revolution, but the plural of "anecdote" isn't "evidence" et cetera and so forth and I will therefore not address that particular line of thought. What's far more worth our time here is the curious fact that Esolen chose not to pluralize "society," seemingly implying that the sexual revolution has only produced one kind of society. That this is untrue should be blindingly obvious: even if we can say that the U.S. is socially homogeneous, that supposed homogeneity for damn sure doesn't match up with the society at play in any other developed nation. There is, then, exceedingly good reason to believe that there is no direct and ineluctable connection between (what we in the U.S. take to be) sexual liberalism and social decline.

What's even interesting yet is that Esolen, if you read him literally instead of taking his implied meaning, is actually right on the money. We don't have to live with various social problems. We should investigate each and every one of our sexual customs. There are absolutely social practices that we should reject, starting with the custom of looking to thousand-year-old books of fables for moral guidance. I rather suspect that Esolen won't like that idea very much, but on the other hand Esolen is a guy who takes directions from an ex-Nazi just because he (the ex-Nazi) wears a silly hat. Just sayin'.

If only the American public were smart enough for Bill Amend to draw this sort of cartoon all the time.

Everyone else, do your best to enjoy "Alice's Restaurant" even though it's not really your holiday:

Everybody ready for a ride on the lollercoaster?

"You might assume that measures that prevent terrorist [sic] from boarding aircraft with weapons would garner almost universal support. You might even assume that the people who were most vocal in criticizing the government for failing to do enough to protect us would praise the increase in security—even though it took nine years to implement.

I confess that I was foolish enough to make just those assumptions. I never suspected that when the Transportation Security Administration announced it was implementing full-body scanners that a significant number of pundits and politicians would hyperventilate and resort to overheated hyperbole to denounce the changes."

You might be surprised to read this; I was. See, I'd been under the impression that "[l]iquid explosives and other organic contraband contrast poorly and are difficult to spot. And full-body scanners are completely useless for detecting contraband embedded inside the body." And then, of course, there's the problem of having fallible humans run the fallible machines. But don't you worry your pretty little head about that! "Few of the critics of the new procedures can adequately argue that they do not make us at least marginally safer," says Joe Carter. Notice, first of all, how this does not constitute a proof. The argument being made is precisely that the TSA doesn't make us marginally safer, so he can't just claim otherwise and then move on to a different topic. Also, note that he said few and not none. Presumably this means that at least one person out there has "adequately argue[d] that [the new procedures] do not make us at least marginally safer." If so, that means there's an adequate argument out there against Carter's position that he himself recognizes. Why, then, has he not abandoned his position?

Far be it from me to say for sure, but perhaps it has something to do with his utter inability to restrict himself to reason:

"Naturally, the loudest complaints against the changes appear to be coming from the usual privacy fetishists: the privileged elite who believes their most inviolable right is the right not to be personally inconvenienced.

I suspect there is an inverse correlation between those who have made contributions to the securing of our nation’s freedoms and those who scream the loudest about having their liberty violated. Our men and woman in uniform forgo constitutionally guaranteed rights in order to protect our national security—and they willing do so for years or decades without complaint."

See? If only we could adopt the point of view that the TSA is like our commanding officer and that we citizens have to live in more or less a state of martial law whenever we fly, we would stop being such whiny, America-hating, troop-undermining milquetoast pansies and then it wouldn't be a problem. You don't want to be a whiny America-hating, troop-undermining milquetoast pansy, do you? DO YOU?! Okay then.

If this is the best we can do, history might as well write us off now. The TSA is a one-size-fits-none, nothing-for-the-whole-family kind of operation: it's a massive waste of government funds that could otherwise be used on economic growth, it helps to sustain the unwarranted culture of fear in which we live, it provides a platform for small-minded jerks to abuse random people, it serves as yet another home for institutional corruption and graft, and it appears not to be something we the people can hold to any kind of account. That it is being defended despite all of this is truly ridiculous.

As I am confident that everybody knows, the NBA has started its regular season. As usual, neither the NFL nor the NHL decided to be polite and just pack it in until June, but there is some good news.

Good News Item #1
My Spurs have started the season 11-1 and, at the time of this writing, have the best record in the league. Go, Spurs, go!

Good News Item #2
Blake Griffin is some kind of superhuman cyborg monster person. Also, he doesn't seem to care - look at how resistant he is to getting excited.





I think we can all be thankful that Griffin was drafted by any team other than Portland. It's one thing to put Greg Oden on the Team o' Death, but it would have been a real (sports) tragedy if Griffin's career had been destroyed by the Trailblazers' piss-poor physical training staff.

Good News Item #3
Semih Erden, rookie center for the Boston Celtics, is apparently a fan of the Steelers' Hines Ward.

And this, boys and girls and others, is why people should learn about articles.

"I watched a bit of Eugenie Scott’s talk at the Secular Humanism party again, via a post on it by Jerry. I watched the bit where she talked about The Feeling of bonding with her infant daughter, and the fact that 'it is the meaning of the experience that is important [not the physiology].' Science can’t – you know the rest."

Ophelia Benson is right to single out this comment for further investigation. The complaint here is not that Scott is wrong to call her feelings (i.e., "the meaning of the experience") important but that she limits importance to her feelings. As Benson points out, what happens

"if you change the variables? Scott’s story is a peripeteia, a reversal of fortune. Just before the birth she was full of dread; then perinatal hormones kicked in, and she bonded. Imagine a different peripeteia. There’s the one in Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men, for instance. At first the men didn’t want to walk their assigned Jews into the forest and shoot them to death; then the demands of group loyalty kicked in, and they gritted their teeth and did their job, and it got easier and easier. Does it sound quite the same to say that 'what is important is how I feel about that job, which is distinct from any additional scientific understanding of the process'?"

That meaning is an important element of the story, in other words, does not suffice to show that it is the important element of the story. Although there are indeed many contexts in which we permit (and even encourage) individuals to behave or believe just on the basis of the meaning that they attribute to this or that, it would be a horrific mistake to extend that permission to all contexts. Nor, of course, is such an extension necessary: Scott and others appear to be worried about a scientism that insists on eliminating meaning altogether, but again we find that this is just a problem with properly locating the quantifiers. While there is (or, let us say, may be) no specific meaning in an event (like childbirth) itself, that isn't to say that there is no meaning at all.

So we find that in Scott's case, as in a surprising number of cases, her error in choosing a direction in which to go is founded on a simple and rather foolish misunderstanding of what it is she (thinks she) is running from. I myself am not aware of any atheists who say that a person's perception of meaning is, as a rule, unimportant. We have different ideas about how important it is, true, and we may even say that a person's perception of meaning is dangerous or wrong - but why would we bother to say those things if the meaning was unimportant, irrelevant, or otherwise impotent? I have no idea about Scott's scientific qualifications, but if this is the quality of her philosophical thought then I have to say that I am not impressed.

Today on Rust Belt Philosophy, the continuing adventures of the author in grad school.

"If you declare a human being to be intrinsically unequal–which is what denying full moral status to young children does–it can’t help but promote discrimination, and must eventually affect public policy and law once anti equality attitudes become widely accepted."

Wes Smith, professional bioethicist, is my go-to guy for demonstrating why the field is in need of some philosophical tightening-up. Here he expresses his anxiety about Peter Singer's (simplified) view that humans "get perhaps to full moral status, really, only after two years." The consequences of adopting this view, says Smith, are on par with (and maybe actually are) slavery and infanticide. Here's my problem with this: we already deny full moral status to young children, especially when we define "young children" to mean children just a few months old.

For Smith, this issue reduces to our ability "to protect the lives of the weak and vulnerable specifically, and more broadly, guarantee universal human rights." (He doesn't actually mean this, of course: not once does he express his concerns about the economically weak and vulnerable or the rights of the poor. But it's what he says, anyway.) This conception of rights, however, is more than a little weird. This thing that he and Singer are calling "moral status" seems to correlate roughly to certain expected behaviors so that, for instance, if we call "full moral status" H (for Human), then presumably reaching H gives an entity certain protections that everything beneath H lacks. I myself have no idea how it makes sense to build a morality like this - although, yes, I can see how it makes sense for politics - but the bigger problem is that no matter how Smith approaches the issue he can't make it work out in his favor.

Human exceptionalism - Smith's view of choice - makes the utterly banal move of drawing a sharp line between humans and everything other than humans (as maybe you could have guessed). This line, he thinks, is the reason why we can eat chickens but not humans and wear cow skins but not human skins and tear the wings off of flies but not the arms off of humans. (Okay, so I dunno about that last one for sure, but I'd bet that he'd be okay with tearing the wings off of flies.) And, indeed, human exceptionalism seems kinda reasonable if you intentionally limit your thinking to this sort of example. Extend it much farther than the eating/killing axis, however, and you start to run into real problems.

For example: we typically think that, as people, we have a right not to be insulted for no good reason. Maybe it's not a super-strong right, but if we're going to talk about moral rights at all (which, again, I am sort of leery of doing) I think most of us expect to be able to walk down the street without having people call us names. Except that doesn't really apply to babies, does it? Just like with pets, you can call your kid whatever you want so long as you say it in a warm tone of voice. Or take property rights: if we think that babies have them at all, I think most of us would say that they're drastically weakened in the case of infants. There are more of these and you're free to pick your favorite, but by now the general point should be established. Contrary to the impression given by Smith's writing, we aren't in danger of falling down a slippery slope to a place where young children are considered not to have "full moral status" (whatever that is). We are, rather, already there.

As a closing point, it's also worth mentioning that there are two ways to react to Singer's suggestion that there is no radical moral break between humans and other animals. Either we can say that (at least some) humans should drop to where animals are now or we can say that (at least some) animals should rise to where humans are now. Smith, of course, chooses the former and then pretends as though the latter was never an option at all, but that tells us more about his lack of moral imagination than it does about the matter itself. Especially given how poorly he reasons about everything else, there's no reason to take him particularly seriously on that point, either.

Soon there won't be any Catholics at all - or, at least, none that are willing to take the word of a random old white guy as gospel.

"Pope Benedict XVI says that condom use is acceptable 'in certain cases,' notably to reduce the risk of HIV infection, in a book due out Tuesday, apparently softening his once hardline stance...To illustrate his apparent shift in position, Benedict offered the example of a male prostitute using a condom."

Oh. So that thing you've been saying for decades would absolutely, positively send us to hell turns out to be okay sometimes? Well, then. Thanks for the update. You piece of slime.

"So... condoms are okay when they're being used to protect men who see male prostitutes. They're not okay when they're being used to protect a woman—a woman who might already have more kids than she can possibly feed—from an unwanted pregnancy or a sexually transmitted infection. That's when condoms are not okay."

Dan Savage is right: el poperino appears to be channeling The Big Lebowski here. "Do you see what happens, Larry? DO YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, LARRY! THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS!"* And, as I think we all remember, the only instance of heterosexual intercourse in that movie was totally legit - QED!

But you know things are really bad for the Catholics when Andrew Sullivan, general all-around Catholic cheerleader, gets upset.

"Of course, in a magnificently perverse way, this teaching privileges homosexuals. It's okay for a gay prostitute to wear a condom because he was never going to procreate anyway. But for a poor straight couple in Africa, where the husband is HIV-positive and the wife HIV-negative, nothing must come in the way of being open to procreation ... even if that means the infection of someone you love with a terminal disease.

It's then you realize that the Vatican's problem is not just homophobia. It's heterophobia as well."

Well, no, not exactly: the Vatican's problem is that it is basing a comprehensive moral doctrine on a series of myths and fables. It's problematic that the Vatican mishandles heterosexuality almost as badly as it mishandles other sexual orientations and proclivities, but the problem - that reason and evidence have taken a back seat to tradition and the gut (if indeed reason and evidence are even in the car) - is much more fundamental. But hey, the journey of a million miles starts with a single step, right? If that step just so happens to be a step backwards out of shock, so be it.

*I am assuming here that Larry is the name of a person who objects to Ratzinger's reasoning and that the transmission of HIV is "what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass." Work with me on this one.

I have been working for the last 17 hours that I've been awake (i.e., excluding however long I managed to sleep for last night), so maybe I'm a little crankier than usual. Or, maybe this is precisely as fucking stupid as I think it is.

"In its declaration of sexual rights, the International Planned Parenthood Federation takes sexual inversion to full term, claiming in its seventh principle that states are obliged to 'respect, protect and fulfill the sexual rights of all.'"

Snell, of course, is virulently sex-negative and is only capable of conceiving of rights that are consistent with his religious tradition (contraception, for instance, earns his immediate disapproval). Still, that sounds awfully dangerous, that thing about governments fulfilling the sexual rights of people. Happily, the operating definition of "fulfill" in this case is "adopt 'legislative, administrative, budgetary, judicial, promotional and other measures towards the full realization of the right.'" As a result, this complaint...

"The list of enumerated rights to be respected, protected, and fulfilled is quite extensive, including the right to pleasure, right to abortion without restriction, right to contraception, the right for everyone to marry or not as they choose, the right to explore dreams and fantasies without guilt or shame, and the right to information on non-conforming lifestyles. They assert all of this despite the rather obvious (and potentially absurd) difficulties of how the state is to fulfill the right to pleasure and fantasy."

...starts to look pretty underhanded. The implication here, it seems, is that the IPPF is asking the U.S. government to send everyone a trained fetish worker so that we can all have our pleasures and fantasies fulfilled. That that implication looks utterly ridiculous next to what the IPPF actually said is of no concern to Snell, who apparently has no pride or sense of fair play whatsoever. Guaranteeing the right to explore one's fantasies or to seek pleasure is not remotely the same as ensuring that every person actually experiences sexual pleasure or sees their fantasies enacted. How Snell got to be a professor of philosophy without being able to understand basic distinctions such as these is beyond me.

If as seems to be the case misrepresentation is Snell's main talent, at least we can credit him with persistence. After he finishes slandering the IPPF, Snell turns his wrath on the philosophical project behind what he calls contemporary liberalism. This project, he says, rejects "any limitations on freedom" whatsoever and so relies upon "a refusal of human commonality." He spins these premises out into a number of apocalyptic-sounding consequences, but the plain fact of the matter is that the premises themselves are nowhere near what any "contemporary liberal" (let alone the IPPF) actually thinks. A total and absolute ban on the limiting of freedoms would result in liberal groups that argue for the decriminalization of murder and rape, not just the decriminalization of yiffing.* If Snell can actually find a pro-murder (or, more accurately, anti-murder-legislation) group out there, he would be well within his rights to attack that group. The IPPF, however, is not such a group, and it is outrageous that Snell can get away with pretending that it is.

The bottom line, for Snell and the rest of his camp, is this: they, too, are sexual beings. Thanks to the contingencies of history and the obliviousness inculcated by certain modern political organizations, they have come to believe that their sexuality is the default and so deserves special consideration by governments and private entities alike. This position is not supported by any known theoretical system that has even the slightest shred of evidential backing and it entails moral positions that are, frankly, abominable. Snell, therefore, does not engage in this mendacious behavior simply because he is a dolt and a fraud; he engages in it because he is a dolt and a fraud whose ideological commitments leave him no other choice.

*Look it up.

A friend of mine recently received for his birthday the gift of a video game console and assorted accessories therefor, including of course actual video games. I present now the apparent plot and setting of one of those games (set, for clarity, in a different font):

Without knowing your (i.e., your character's) background or motivations, you find yourself traveling via airplane to an extremely remote cluster of tropical islands. These islands are, in fact, so remote and so small that the main one on which you land does not have an airport or any place for your plane to land - your direct method of arrival, therefore, is a parachute. How you will leave these islands, if you leave them at all, is at least somewhat unclear.


Having arrived, you notice that the islands appear to be devoted strictly to frivolity: the only industry to speak of is tourism (you appear to be a tourist yourself). More specifically, the travelers or guests seem to spend their time engaging solely in athletic activities, thus marking the tourism as a rather limited and somewhat odd sort: do these people have no opportunity to engage in these activities at home? And how much money would one have to have in order to spend it traveling to a far-flung island just to play, for instance, table tennis? (If only you could remember your own history! Perhaps then you could answer some of these questions.) Stranger still, despite the active nature of the pastimes in which you and your fellow tourists engage, there are no medical facilities to speak of - and, odder still, the need for such facilities never arises. Whether the tropical environment has dulled the competitive instinct or whether you and your fellows are just extraordinarily lucky, you witness no injuries of any severity at all and are never so injured yourself.


Eventually, having exhausted the activities made available to you, your attention turns to the locals. While genial and accommodating as a rule - as only befits a community whose existence depends on wealthy tourists - you cannot help but notice that they adhere uncommonly strictly to rules, especially rules of propriety and appearance. In this age of customization and catering to individual tastes, it seems incongruous that one local social gathering place should proscribe flip-flops or that the main hotel should be so firm on refusing to offer any kind of altered price for any reason. Some of the meticulousness can apparently be explained in relation to the sporting mission of the islands - for instance, the obsessive attention paid to the length of the grass on the golf courses - but a good deal more seems to exist either just for its own sake or else as a consequence of some deeper loyalty. You can only guess as to what kind of loyalty would produce such steadfastness, but on the other hand there seems to be little room among the locals for pointless behavior or wasted energy - the downtown area is arranged immaculately, the only "suburb" is half a mile away, all the electricity is provided by clean sources and all the cars are electric, and every part of every island is utilized toward the unified end of serving the tourist visitors.


In sharp contrast to the openness that you find in your inquiries into life on the islands, there are several topics about which you can learn nothing of substance. Aside from the obvious impracticalities that would seemingly need to be addressed - how do the islands manage food, e.g. - you hear nothing of how the tourist attractions came to be. Nobody knows (or will say) who funded their construction, when the venture began, why the locals' ancestors decided to move there or indeed if their ancestors made that decision, or how the locals have come to understand their rather unique situation. And then, of course, there are the islands themselves.


The main island, for a start, is an active volcano. It hasn't erupted for centuries - of course - but it is nonetheless an active volcano. Nobody seems to make much of this, and, in fairness, they may well have the seismographic information necessary to reach a justified state of unconcern. But then there are the ancient ruins, built to honor who-knows-what deities; the giant monuments built, somehow, on plateaus and in the middle of otherwise undisturbed forests; the island's inexplicable geographical features; the reports of eerie whispers; and the rumors that monsters (of all things) populate the islands. There are the tunnels and cave systems that cannot be natural but that the locals did not build. There is the castle, built by unknown parties for incomprehensible purposes (why build a fortified structure on a depopulated island?). There are the prophesies, familiar to all but taken seriously by none, that one day the island will be restored to its prior state. And while you cannot bring yourself to view these as anything other than quirks or effects of a mild population-wide cabin fever, you also cannot help but notice the locals who spend endless hours on the water "whale-watching," the planes that constantly circuit the island, and the absolute secrecy that the locals maintain with regard to their private lives. Moreover, you cannot help the locals noticing you noticing these things.


And then, when you appear to have hit the limit of what you can (or have been allowed to) learn, the locals surprise you with a gift: a house, built just for you, on a private island. While you cannot for your life explain why they would reward you, a tourist, with a house, or why they would reward anyone for what, you must admit, has basically amounted to endless snooping, you cannot deny that the house is, at the very least, a new opportunity to familiarize yourself with the locals' culture - their architecture, what they value in living quarters, and so on. And so you accept their gift, and then...


Now you tell me: what does this sound like? Because when I saw these factoids being revealed, I was more than a little surprised. Individually maybe they're alluringly mysterious or charming, but when you put them all together it seems an awful lot like something H.P. Lovecraft would've come up with if he ever spent any time in, say, Hawaii. The reason this surprised me was that the game is not some new survival horror thing or an atmospheric puzzle game or anything like that. It is, instead, Wii freaking Sports Resort. Am I the only one who finds this strange? Is anybody with me on this one? Because I had not expected this at all.

Of all the incredibly silly arguments that abound on the internets and in the minds of people across the world, this one very well might be the silliest.

"Recently, a piece of news regarding talent selection for Chinese football has generated hot debate on the internet: Chinese football star cradle Tianjin Locomotive football club looks at the development of the genitals when selecting new sprouts. The original text said that apart from a series of physical fitness and basic skill tests, the club will also vary with the individual, adopting some seemingly unscientific 'original methods' to select players. What has taken everyone’s breath away most recently is their using the male’s genitals to determine his male hormone levels, to see if he is able to withstand the rigors and intense competition of football athleticism, [because] according to one of the club’s seasoned officials, little boys whose genitals are short but thick and whose scrotums are taught [sic] are good new sprouts or football."

I mean, what the fuck. Really, China? Really? What are you, taking lessons from the Catholic church? Now this study about male genitalia, on the other hand, is impeccable.

"Conducted over a period of four years, the research involved 600 men aged 23 to 54 who exclusively identify as heterosexual and enjoy penetrative vaginal sex with women. They were divided into two groups: one received oral sex on a daily basis from a team of experienced homosexual men, while the other did not. At the end of the study, all 600 were screened for prostate and testicular cancer. Eight tested positive for prostate cancer; six for testicular. All fourteen were from the group that did not get serviced orally by gay men.

Biologists who have examined the findings believe it may have something to do with 'innate body resonance' (IBR), which refers to the human body's natural, ingrained inclination to react positively to external stimuli coming from another person of the same sex."

See? Innate body resonance - it makes perfect sense! Just because wiki doesn't know what that is and it sounds like more or less like magic doesn't mean that it's not a real thing. Penis-forecasting, by contrast, is obviously ridiculous.

In a related story, I am now accepting applications for my personal Cancer Prevention Squad. I won't divulge the pay here, but I can say that the benefits are...unique.

Over at BioLogos, Mark Sprinkle provides a wonderful demonstration of how not to construct a workable epistemology. As stated in his words, Sprinkle wants to know, "does the cultural power of science really flow from mere description of material properties, or even the predictive powers of biological and cosmological theories? And beneath that question lies this: Does the process of discovery in science really proceed by disinterested observation and simple deduction, apart from any subjective forms of thought?" Before starting our analysis of his article, it might be wise to ask a question of our own: what does Sprinkle hope to prove by answering his two questions? The explanatory power of science, happily, depends neither on the cultural perception of science nor on the mere presence or absence of "subjective forms of thought." But this is BioLogos, after all - expecting a super-high level of confidence would betray a certain lack of learning. Putting this initial difficulty to one side, then, let's move on.

"...chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi argued that such imaginative structures [minds as computers, etc.] are not just imported from outside science (a bastardization of some pure mathematical rationality necessary to simplify complex theory for public consumption), but that personal engagement and creative subjectivity is actually integral and indispensable to scientific inquiry at the most basic level, and even more so in those instances where great leaps of understanding are achieved."

As a result, Sprinkle alleges, "the common idea that science is defined above all else by its commitment to a detached rational analysis of the material 'evidence' is not actually true." If this conclusion seems unwarranted, that's only because it is. And, bizarrely enough, Sprinkle himself identifies the reason why.

"Indeed, though he [Polanyi] set out to better understand how scientific progress and discovery happens, he eventually broadened his investigation to include the highly subjective, even non- or pre-rational qualities that underpin all sorts of complex forms of human understanding, faith not least among them. Polanyi’s insight was to give full weight to the importance of insight, itself—literally, what we perceive from within—even (perhaps especially) when such flashes are not readily available to our rational, verbal minds."

Again, all sorts of complex forms of human understanding benefit from insight. In other words, insight is the baseline; it can, for philosophical purposes, go without saying.* What will distinguish science from all other "complex forms of human understanding," then, cannot possibly be that it benefits from insight. Science, that is to say, is not defined by its reliance on insight - definitions, after all, only make sense if they can distinguish one sort of thing from another. So okay, which characteristics distinguish science? Oh, I dunno - maybe the commitment to detached rational analysis of the material evidence? Just maybe?

As obvious as that may seem, Sprinkle would rather not cop to it because - can you guess??? - he has an agenda to pursue.

"[If] personal participation and imagination are essentially involved in science as well as in the humanities, meanings created in the sciences stand in no more favored relation to reality than do meanings created in the arts, in moral judgments, and in religion. At least they stand in no more favored relation to reality on a basis of the supposed presence or absence of personal participation and imagination on the one rather than the other."

That's Polanyi in that quote, but Sprinkle endorses it and it serves as the basic thrust of his whole article: religion is just the same as science because of insight. Whether Sprinkle has taken Polanyi somehow out of context or nor, this line of reasoning betrays a total lack of logical thought. Obviously it's impossible to choose one system over the other based on a shared attribute. It proves absolutely nothing, then, to say that science and religion "stand in no more favored relation to reality on the basis of...imagination." To put this into terms it might be easier to understand, Sprinkle might as well argue that, since Amare Stoudemire and Matt Bonner are both 6'10", there are no grounds on which to say that one or the other is the better basketball player.

Having done his best to confuse the issue beyond all sense, Sprinkle tries to put a bow on his case by adding that "what is most true often resists our every attempt to quantify, codify and resolve." Assuming this is true - which would have to be an assumption, as he provides no evidence for it - we're still left with the uncomfortable fact that what is least true also often resists our every attempt to quantify, codify, and resolve it; see, for instance, the reams and reams of paper that have been devoted to the self-evidently terrible hypothesis of the Christian trinity. That an idea resists clarification, then, is hardly evidence of its truth.

The paper goes on for quite a bit more, but to be honest I stopped reading because I just could not make myself care. If Sprinkle cannot bring himself to the point of understanding that contrasts only work when you're contrasting different things - that contrasting one thing with itself is a doomed project - I have a hard time figuring out why anybody should take his thinking seriously. Regardless of the popular conception of science (or the BioLogos conception of science), neither science nor any other field earns its keep just in virtue of insight. Maybe Sprinkle just doesn't understand the connection between evidence and the proper formation of beliefs - but then, maybe he ought not pretend to have anything intelligent to say about how we ought to form our beliefs.

*It may be important to bring this up for rhetorical purposes - Sprinkle certainly thinks so - but rhetoric is not philosophy.

The philosophical move you've approved is moot until it's proved! By George, I think he's got it!

"[Academics have] create[d], ex nihilo, the silly rule that the only legitimate relation to the divine is a functional atheism. 'You can believe your fairy stores about Jehovah and Jesus,' they smirk, 'but they are inadmissible in academic explanations.'

...we Christians react defensively. We tend to act as if we are the ones who are required by default to defend our position because . . . well, because those are the rules of the game."

Joe Carter, it seems, has discovered the burden of proof and, in typical First Things fashion, has handled that discovery with all the grace and intelligence of a teenage homophobe discovering that he himself is gay. The only reason that the academy works as well as it does is that each field has its own standards of evidence and argumentation. We brushed up against this fact earlier in the week with respect to the scientific disciplines, but the point is a general one: if you want to have any kind of success in the field of Xology, you'd darn well better learn how to write and think like an Xologist.

Shockingly enough, people normally accept this happily - we don't, for instance, see lots of mathematicians laying siege to English departments because they weren't allowed to publish their group theory analyses of Moby Dick. Carter, however, really feels very strongly that his Christianity - which, incidentally, is not even an academic field or technique in its own right but merely a pastime of sorts - ought to stand on the same ground as the double-blind study, the logical deduction, and the feminist critique. The suggestion itself may be absurd enough to reject out of hand, but what's even more laughable is that he thinks we should accept his suggestion for literally no reason (i.e., without defense). Presumably we should instead be convinced just in virtue of the way that he characterizes his opponents - smirking functional atheists - but if Christianity doesn't count as academic it's really very hard to see how name-calling could.

So yes, Joe, you are required by default to defend your position. And yes, Joe, you are required to do so because those are the rules of the game. If you don't like it, you're free to refrain from playing.

As a teetotaler and a person who really does not want to spend any time in jail, I must admit to a certain (small) frustration at not being able to legally spend any time in an altered state of mind. It's not an issue that'll ever come up here in Pennsylvania (unlike when I was in California for all of four days recently I had two chances to get high), but at least we can talk about it like reasonable people - say, by comparing the current and ongoing anti-marijuana laws to the alcohol prohibition efforts of the early 20th century.

"The harms [of the prohibition movement] are fairly well known. Prohibition led to bootlegging, death or blindness from consuming adulterated alcohol, loss of tax revenue, loss of business activity, and crime as the mob expanded from gambling and theft to liquor. It also was the first period in American history when the law was so widely broken that disrespect for the authority of the law became its own social evil."

So says Andrew Tallman, who adds that prohibition also had benefits.

"The reality is that average consumption of alcohol in the years prior to most legal restrictions (1906-1910) was 2.60 gallons per year. In 1934, when it was again possible to accurately measure, the number had dropped below one gallon, and it didn’t return to the pre-Prohibition level until 1973! During Prohibition, admissions to psychiatric facilities for alcohol-related issues dropped 60 percent, arrests for drunkenness decreased 50 percent, cirrhosis deaths for men dropped over 70 percent, and welfare agencies reported tremendous drops in alcohol-related family problems."

There's a whole hell of a lot of nitpicking one could do with this argument - like, I dunno, bringing up the two World Wars in between 1906 and 1973? Just for a start? - it turns out there's no need.

"I’m not saying Prohibition was a complete success, or even that on balance it was a success. I’m just saying that it had the most direct success at its intended goal: reducing alcohol abuse."

Oh, well gee, Andrew, in that case I guess that really makes me think about it in a whole new light. Prohibition had some benefits, but they aren't really sufficient to overturn the conventional wisdom - what a revelation! I've heard of epistemological modesty, but this is a bit much. Normally I'd have some kind of response, but Tallman appears to have responded to himself already, so instead please enjoy this music video from the British rap outfit The Streets:

Actually, at this point any kind of police will do.

"In his book, titled 'Decision Points,' Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about still-pending terrorist plots against the United States. Bush writes that his reply was 'Damn right' and states that he would make the same decision again to save lives, according to a someone close to Bush who has read the book."

That anybody should have voted for this man once, let alone twice, shows the extent to which rational thought can be and has in this country been corrupted by politics. It is inconceivable that a person with such a paltry understanding of morality could be qualified to serve as a president of anything. Even on the superlatively generous assumption that waterboarding either isn't torture or else is somehow justified by its consequences, this kind of clear-mindedness about the moral calculus can only result from massive and fundamental delusions about good and bad, delusions of the sort that should automatically disqualify a person from presiding over a country or commanding a military.

No matter how offensive the candidate, however, voting is not a war crime - torture and the authorization of torture are. It will be a great tragedy if George W. Bush does not suffer the consequences of his inhumane attitude towards and treatment of human persons.

Do any economists or sociologists read this blog? I mean, professional ones, not just amateurs. Not that there's anything wrong with amateur economics or sociology per se, I'm just curious to know whether practicing members of those fields consider them to be sciences. Karl Giberson does and so does Samir Okasha (see also), but that strikes me as a little on the implausible side. Anyway, Giberson uses this alleged grouping to say that

"[r]eligious reflection is more like economics than it is like chemistry. There is evidence for the claims of the economist and for the chemist and there is evidence for religious truth claims. This is a simple fact. The New Testament contains several documents written about Jesus by smart people in the first century. These documents are evidence."

Sadly for Giberson, this blanket statement is not justified. "Religious reflection" notably tends to exceed the bounds of what most of us would comfortably label "religious," which means that the results of that reflection need to be taken on their own terms. When religions make chemical claims, for instance, they are in fact much more like chemistry. When they make botanical claims (say, that the mustard seed is the smallest seed) or cosmological ones (about the beginning and development of the universe) or biological ones (regarding the order and speed of speciation) or historical ones (stating which kings reigned when) or medical ones (touting the efficacy of prayer) or astronomical ones (describing how stars behave) or meteorological ones (reporting on calamitous weather events), they are less like economics than botany, cosmology, biology, history, medicine, astronomy, or meteorology. You will note, incidentally, that ancient documents only properly count as evidence for one of those fields.

In one last-ditch effort to rescue religion from its own nature, Giberson amends his list of evidence to include the "transformative consequences" that "often" occur from "believers mak[ing] their leap[s] of faith." That this fails as scientific evidence should be so obvious that I don't have to say much about it, so instead I'll conclude by noting that this whole project has been an attempt on Giberson's part to make religion seem more sciency. Why, one cannot help but wonder, does he think this is a good idea? As a believer in religious tenets, Giberson ought to be arguing things the other way around, you'd think: why bother holding to your beliefs-established-in-way-x if you think that beliefs-established-in-way-y are in fact epistemologically superior? The only answer I can come up with is that Giberson hopes his readers don't think about this too hard and just end up feeling that, yes, religion can indeed be reliable in a sciency kind of way (or, of course, that Giberson himself hasn't thought about it too hard and has thus ended up in that situation). In light of this topic having come up here, I invite you all (if you haven't already been doing so) to keep up with the still-ongoing comment thread over at Unequally Yoked that I hyped a week or so ago, because I feel like these issues are about to arise there as well.

Having decided to write one of my term papers on the notion of dignity in bioethics - more on that coming, maybe - I bookmarked this article of David Mills's as being a plausible source of material to help me focus my thoughts. (As I have intimated earlier, First Things is not exactly academic-quality material, but you can get away with a few softer sources in a long enough paper.) As it turns out, Mills didn't even rise to that level, but his writing does serve some use.

"'Death with dignity' offers not only an escape from pain and humiliation, but a rational and apparently noble way to leave this life. All it requires is that you declare yourself God. Make yourself the lord of life and death, and you can do what you want. All you have to do, as a last, definitive act, is to do what you’ve been doing all your life, every time you sin: declare yourself, on the matter at hand, the final authority, the last judge, the one vote that counts.

But you are not God, and, the Christian believes, the decision of when to leave this life is not one he has delegated to you. To put it bluntly, he expects you to suffer if you are given suffering and to put up with indignities if you are given indignities."

Let's pretend for the moment that there's a solid way of determining just what God "has delegated to you." Very probably this process will look an awful lot like the process of determining just what the Bible means, but every so often it can be fun to give people the benefit of the doubt when they don't really deserve it. Like this case, for instance, in which the benefit of the doubt turns out not to be particularly beneficial at all.

Putting aside the issue of whether Mills actually has any grounds for saying that God is responsible for this or that illness (or this or that symptom), try to understand what he's asking. It is, contrary to his claims, not just that we must refrain from killing ourselves or seeking (reliable medical) ways of speeding our own deaths. His claim is much stronger: that we must experience in full each and every negative state of affairs that comes with (at least some kinds of) illness. Maybe this is me being a godless sinner, but fuck that.

You all should feel free to correct me if I err in saying this, but this is the whole point of having medicine in the first place, to circumvent to the greatest extent possible having to experience in full each and every negative state of affairs that comes with illness. When I have a headache, I don't "suffer" it, I go get some acetaminophen; when I strained the deltoid ligament in my ankle, I didn't just "put up with" it, I went to go get physical therapy. If God wants me to go through life a decrepit wreck, a living record of every little injury or disease I've ever sustained, I guess God will just have to be disappointed. That goes double for if God wants me to live my entire life one way and die another: unless upon entering my last days I just so happen to find myself teleported to an entirely new universe with a radically different moral structure, I think I'm gonna go ahead and continue to operate under the same moral principles that I'm using now. Maybe that'll entail seeking out death per se, maybe it'll just mean taking painkillers to the extent that (in the current euphemism) they "hasten death," or maybe I'll luck out and I'll be able to make do with massages and hot chocolate. Either way, I see no reason to treat my last illness any differently just because it's the last one.

I tried, though. Next time I'll have to line them up in advance or something, I dunno. Anyway, here's an interesting remark of George Berkeley's that I found while browsing randomly through philosophical websites:

"But say you, though the ideas themselves do not exist without the mind, yet there may be things like them whereof they are copies or resemblances, which things exist without the mind in an unthinking substance. I answer, an idea can be like nothing but an idea; a colour or figure can be nothing like but another colour or figure. If we look but ever so little into our thoughts, we shall find it impossible for us to conceive a likeness except only between our ideas. Again, I ask whether those supposed originals or external things, of which our ideas are the pictures or representations, be themselves perceivable or no? If they are, then they are ideas, and we have gained our point; but if you say they are not, I appeal to any one whether it be sense to assert [that] a colour is like something which is invisible; hard or soft, like something which is intangible; and so of the rest."

I did this whole thing back in undergrad, so this isn't the first time I'm running into this argument but it's been too long for me to remember exactly which book it's coming from. (I guess this one, but who knows.) At any rate, Berkeley's whole thing was skepticism saved at the last minute by God - y'know, sort of the basic mode of western philosophy for a couple hundred years. The interesting thing here is not that Berkeley was so far off but that he wasn't very far off at all. Rather, he just lacked the right context into which to place his thoughts.

The argument above, roughly speaking, is that we cannot reason from ideas (thoughts, notions, perceptions - whatever you want to call bits or segments of experience) to objects (i.e., reality) because ideas don't and can't resemble objects. The former are invisible, intangible, have no scent, and so on, whereas the latter ostensibly exist with the opposite properties. This is all well and good insofar as it goes, but we humans don't deal just in ideas: we deal in nested systems of ideas.

As we saw a little while ago with Michael Egnor's trick questions for atheists, ideas are like "external objects in the sense that they create a simulation or representation of those objects, such that perturbations of the simulation accurately track the behavior of the external object." Our ideas, in other words, aren't somehow encapsulated or sealed off from one another in such a way that it makes sense to ask whether each of them is like an external thing. A better question would be whether our ideas of objects, when situated inside our ideas about physics and ontology and so on, are like external things. One nice feature about this counter-suggestion is that it actually fits the way our brains work; another is that it solves Berkeley's dilemma rather cleanly, because in fact our idea of an apple, for instance, will actually resemble real apples if only we don't take the extraordinarily odd step of trying to conceive of The Apple all on its own and instead allow it to exist within a fuller imagined world. Something even nicer, however, may go overlooked: that the laws of physics and the truths about ontology and so on are actually like ideas in the ways that Berkeley lists. Boyle's law, for example, can't be seen, touched, tasted, smelled, and so on - and, in fact, neither can our idea of it. Similarly, our ideas about gravity, object permanence, inertia, and the like - that is, the right constraints in which to investigate our more quotidian ideas - are all just as featureless as the actual things. This solution, then, works not just at the level of Berkeley's initial argument but also resists regressive attempts to re-ask the original question, which is a standard philosophical pitfall.

Berkeley, of course, knew nothing of computers and certainly nothing of virtual realities and so can't really be blamed for failing to consider this flaw in his argument. And, in fact, for most of us this will still leave open some (non-brains-in-jars) avenues for skepticism - like the uncomfortable realization that our idea of an apple, if conditioned on our idea of gravity, will only be as accurate as our idea of gravity, which in turn will probably not be very accurate at all. That kind of skepticism, however, is a far cry from what Berkeley thought he established, so I'm willing to count it as a win.

Because I think my Duplotype is the same as that (I'm guessing) Asian woman who's shopping for groceries that are bigger than she is.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

"It all began at the annual Fall Convocation of faculty and staff at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU). When President Doug Whitlock announced that he would be instituting a domestic partner benefit in January 2011, most of my colleagues applauded. I, however, believed it was a step that ultimately would provide justification for the state supreme court to overturn traditional marriage in Kentucky...If traditional heterosexual marriage was really threatened by the domestic partnership policy, someone had to do something. As a junior professor I’d kept a low profile, but I had tenure now. Was I the one who should challenge the policy?"

Before this post really gets going, let me just point out that this confirms Dan Savage's oft-repeated argument against compromise. The right wing in this country despises compromise; seeking compromise, then, is tantamount to seeking failure.

Having said that, observe that Todd Hartch, the deluded bigot who authored this piece, felt no particular fear about starting a campaign against the rights of his fellow citizens. This is in direct contrast to the story I cited earlier, in which

"some young, smart Christians—believers who went to the best evangelical colleges and are thoroughly versed in the Great Works of the faith and Western civilization—who fully understand what is at stake...are willing to give it all up because they fear being called bigots by their peers."

That, quite frankly, is what we want and what we ought to want. It's good for asshole bigots to "tremble at the thought that someone might call them a homophobe." It's not good for asshole bigots, of which Hartch is one, to feel "mostly relief" at getting their "views...out into the open." And do you know why? This is why:

"The discussion of marriage and sexuality has continued in almost every issue of the campus paper but it also now occurs in campus coffee shops and professors’ offices. I’ve met professors and students who agree with me and I’ve met those who don’t. I’m in the middle of negotiating with the Philosophy Department and proponents of gay marriage about holding a series of public debates on gay marriage and related issues."

When's the last time you saw a series of public debates on slavery "and related issues"? How about women's suffrage? Child labor laws? Ever seen someone stand up in public and say that rape really isn't so bad or that we ought to reconsider solving the Jewish problem? You'd better believe that these aren't non-issues because nobody wants to make them issues. No - the reason that those issues aren't discussed "in campus coffee shops and professors' offices" is that some ideas are so outrageous and would generate such an unremitting backlash that only absolute lunatics - like the Westboro Baptists, just to give you a sense of what I'm talking about - are even willing to voice them. It's past time that marriage equality became one of those ideas that you just can't bring yourself to criticize, even if you are the kind of bigoted asshole who's lucky enough to have tenure.

Part of committing to that vision of reality - and a part that's confirmed by Hartch's writing - is understanding the importance of not treating marriage equality like it's actually up for debate. Hartch himself is convinced that "[m]any students have never heard a rational conservative argument about any moral issue" and that if his side can only bring itself to "speak up" and "make a public case" for itself it can "forge relationships of trust and respect" with the other side and even win some converts. Again, this is not a way to work towards compromises: with Hartch, the definition of a compromise is something that "undermines marriage." Given the staggering depth of his delusions - students, especially those in Kentucky, haven't heard the case against marriage equality? Be serious, you fucking clown - it would be an utter waste of time to treat Hartch like an adult with whom you have a reasonable disagreement, who you could "trust and respect" if only you could sit down and really talk to him. Because while he is in fact an adult, the disagreement has long ceased to be reasonable.

And that, in the end, is the point. It's not that he's wrong that students haven't heard the rational conservative arguments - it's that there are no rational conservative arguments. Even given that, however, we're so accustomed to using debate as a means of resolving disputes (and this custom is such a highly revered one in our liberal democratic culture) that we may flounder once it's taken away. So in the spirit of making progress, allow me to make a few modest suggestions about how to proceed without making the fatal mistake of leading the fuckwits to think that they have an okay point.

• Mockery - vicious, unapologetic mockery. There's a semi-famous story about how the KKK started to crumble just because some of its information showed up on the Superman radio show, the moral of which is that it can be very effective to recontextualize someone's somberly-held beliefs as jokes or notions worthy only of clunky fiction. The image of the anti-equality bigot should not be Hartch's "surprisingly thoughtful and urbane" conservative but rather the cheesy-looking cookie-cutter Christian rock imbecile from today's earlier post.
• Social pressures. Are you friends or friendly acquaintances with anybody who doesn't believe in equal rights? (If you're religious, do you attend services run by an organization that doesn't believe in equal rights?) Maybe you should consider cutting ties with those people if they persist in their attitude (or find a new religious organization). Maybe, in fact, you should go so far as to encourage your mutual friends to do likewise. You wouldn't hang out with racists, right?
• Write your congressperson and your senator. Then call your congressperson and your senator. Then take a road trip on a long weekend to visit your congressperson and your senator in person. Believe it or not, at least a few of them actually do pay attention to that sort of thing.
• Support the queer people you know. Rather than trying to do everything possible to destroy or discredit the wrong point of view, it may be more effective (and will certainly be more effective after a certain point) to build up or normalize the right point of view. The means of support will have to differ depending on the individual, of course, but with a basic modicum of social intelligence you should be able to figure out that bit on your own.

Be careful how you title your YouTube videos, folks - you may end up saying something you didn't intend.



Again, for those unwilling or unable to watch the video, about the best argument offered up by the "amazing" Christians within - again, not my word - is that same-sex marriage is "weird." Yes, they run through the standard list of hallucinated "facts" about how sexual orientation is a choice and how discrimination is some sort of precondition for society, but c'mon, are we supposed to take those seriously anymore?

"You think being gay is a choice? Then choose it: Suck my dick. Show me how it's done. You choose it—suck my dick—and I'll videotape it, and then we'll put the proof that being gay is a choice on the internet for the whole world to see. Deal?"

"True to the pro-inequality position, the guy with the street affectations and the other speakers in the video don't bother listing the effects, let alone specifying why we should care about the effects, let alone detailing an argument (philosophical, political, sociological, or other) that links the suggested cause with the unnamed effects.



I gather they're bad effects, but are they unjust effects? Oppressive effects? Painful effects? Will our hair fall out, our skin get blotchy? Will our cats fill their litter boxes more frequently? Will Christmas move to an every-other-year schedule? Will more college football programs adopt a garish shade of turf, as they have done in Boise?"

As Dan Savage and Dale Smith illustrate, it becomes increasingly difficult to respond to these beliefs with anything other than dismissive derision, especially when they're coming from people who appear never to have had an original thought (or, in the case of that one guy with the bleached hair, a thought) in their lives. The point is not, as Breathy Tremulous Voice For Jesus Girl would have us believe, that God wants this or that. The point is that dim-bulb backwater Bible-thumpers find same-sex relationships weird and if any kind of weirdness is going to be imposed on anybody it'd damn well better be their kind of weirdness, where a millennia-old book about a heretic Jewish zombie serves as the sun around which all scientific, moral, and political fact revolve. The fact that they don't consider this to be a sick kind of joke doesn't make it any less of one.

Last week, quantification; this week, qualification - next week, who knows!

"There are those who would like to get [elementary school teachers] Nasira and Rochel to abandon their 'backward' ways. In the view of the school principal, for example, the religiosity and consequent modesty of Nasira and Rochel are outdated and irrational. At a workshop to instruct teachers about tolerance, the principal simply assumes and then goes on to tell the whole group that she thinks Nasira wears a headscarf because her father forces her to do so. Nasira, however, refuses to let this snide remark pass and shares with the group an eloquent explanation of her personal choice to follow her religious faith and how this informs her understanding of feminine modesty."

Jennifer Bryson is trying to say something here about modesty and dignity, but it sure is hard to say just what that thing is. First we learn that modesty is a consequence of religiosity, but then it turns out that modesty (or maybe just this particular instance thereof) is also feminine. Is it feminine because modesty works differently for women or just because the modest people in this case happen to be women? And how does religion figure into this? Bryson will not say.

"This story—devout Muslim and Orthodox Jewish women discovering common ground in valuing feminine dignity and family—is not just some fictional tale of unrealistic wishful-thinking."

Modesty, at least, is a mostly empirical claim. While it does have normative overtones, that is to say, we can at least roughly specify some observable pattern or theme to modest behaviors and attitudes. (Headscarves are sort of in the ballpark, thongs are not - that sort of thing.) Dignity, however, seems to be the inverse, lots of normativity with only a sliver of intersubjective agreement on how to identify it in the world. This makes the adjective "feminine" even more beguiling. Is dignity a virtue only for women? Does dignity mean something different for women than for men? Is dignity for women somehow related to the other "feminine" concept in this article, modesty? (Is the one consequent of the other?) Or - taking more of the sentence into account - is dignity a feminine thing in this case because, as before, females happen to be the people "valuing" it? And again, how does devoutness matter?

"Shared values provide a bridge for Nasira and Rochel. They are women with humble self-dignity in a world not disposed to support integrity or family."

Here Bryson refers to "self-dignity," perhaps indicating a relativism about dignity: when one values oneself (perhaps in a certain way), one is ipso facto dignified. This, however, strikes against interpreting "feminine" or "modest" as having any kind of real relevance here. In other words, if a person's dignity is self-generated and is simply qualified according to what gender that person is, it would be a case of masculine dignity for a man to wear a headscarf out of modesty; similarly, if dignity (the mostly normative thing) is self-generated but modesty (the mostly empirical thing) is not, there might be cases of people justifiably choosing dignity over modesty. It's very hard - almost impossible, really - to imagine that Bryson would accede to either line of reasoning, though. For example, there seems to be something special about "women discovering common ground in valuing feminine dignity" or women having an "understanding of feminine modesty" - discovering and understanding, as opposed to more creative, self-powered acts such as making or building.

Whatever Bryson means, it would for sure be nice if people stopped assuming that women cannot freely choose traditional religious behaviors - that much she gets right. But it would be very easy to accept that point in a way that allows her confusing treatment of concepts like modesty, dignity, integrity, and family to pass unnoticed. Until she commits to a solid, clearly explained theory of femininity, we'd be better served to come up with our own reasons to accept her overarching point than to rely on her overly foggy and highly suggestive reasoning.