Rust Belt Philosophy

I've got good news for you, Natasha Vargas-Cooper! Er - no, wait, that was the other post. Still, though...

"MEN, SO THE CONVENTIONAL wisdom goes, tend to desire more than women are willing to give them sexually. The granting of sex is the most powerful weapon women possess in their struggle with men. Yet in each new sexual negotiation a woman has with a man, she not only spends down that capital, she begins at a disadvantage, because the potential losses are always greater for her. A failed or even successful single encounter can be life-altering. Whatever 'social construct' you might impose upon the whole matter, nature imposes much more rigorous consequences on women than on men."

I quote this paragraph not because it exemplifies Vargas-Cooper's assholeness but because it lays the groundwork for it. This, so far as it goes, is pretty much all true. Conventionally, men want more sex (both in terms of quantity and variety) than women are willing to provide; conventionally, sex grants considerable leverage to women (not sure I'd say the most leverage, though); biologically, sex is certainly a riskier thing for women than for men.* But notice that all of those statements are qualified, two by convention and one by biology (which at this point in history is, itself, subject to convention). Keep that in mind for later.

"Armed with a 'Take Back the Night' pamphlet, we were led to believe that, as long as we avoided the hordes of date rapists, sex was an egalitarian endeavor. The key to sexual harmony, so the thinking went, was social conditioning. Men who sexually took advantage of women were considered the storm troopers of patriarchy, but women could teach men to adopt a different ideology, through explicit communication of boundaries —'you can touch there' or 'please don’t do that.' Thus was the dark drama of sex replaced with a verbal contract. Once the drunken frat boys and brutes were weeded out, if we gravitated toward a kind of enlightened guy, an emotionally rewarding sex life was ours for the taking. Sex wasn’t a bestial pursuit, but something elevating.

This is an intellectual swindle that leads women to misjudge male sexuality, which they do at their own emotional and physical peril. Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Sexuality is not neutral. A warring dynamic based on power and subjugation has always existed between men and women, and the egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche. Internet porn, on the other hand, shows us an unvarnished (albeit partial) view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression."

This, I think you will note, is a rather grand claim: "[war] has always existed between men and women" because "male sexuality [is] an often dark force streaked with aggression." Vargas-Cooper even goes so far as to cast "male desire" as some kind of magical entity that, unlike every other aspect of psychology, resists conforming or adjusting to the surrounding environment. There is simply no way for a normal man to have sex with a woman in an "enlightened" way, in a way that doesn't "[take] advantage of" her. Et cetera and so on - not to be too flippant about this, but this almost seems like something David Lynch might have written if some of his craziness were transmuted into bland pretentiousness.

Given all of the grandiosity that Vargas-Cooper manages to pack into every paragraph of her writing, you'd think that her evidence would be impeccable. Or, if you know better, you would have already predicted that her evidence is, in fact, barely evidence at all.

"Never was this made plainer to me than during a one-night stand with a man I had actually known for quite a while. A polite, educated fellow with a beautiful Lower East Side apartment invited me to a perfunctory dinner right after his long-term girlfriend had left him. We quickly progressed to his bed, and things did not go well. He couldn’t stay aroused. Over the course of the tryst, I trotted out every parlor trick and sexual persona I knew. I was coquettish then submissive, vocal then silent, aggressive then downright commandeering; in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, 'Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.' This was, perhaps, the greatest moment of sexual honesty I’ve ever experienced—and without hesitation, I complied. This encounter proves an unpleasant fact that does not fit the feminist script on sexuality: pleasure and displeasure wrap around each other like two snakes."

It'd be easy to crack jokes about this story being vastly more reflective of Vargas-Cooper's own thought process than of reality, but I'm actually too pissed at her to attempt humor. What's important here is her utter preoccupation with the surface: this guy is "polite" and "educated" and maintains "a beautiful Lower East Side apartment." For all the (somewhat gratuitous) detail that she provides, we know absolutely nothing about the mental state of either participant. His long-term relationship had just ended - might that, perhaps, have been at all important? She was trafficking in "sexual persona[e]" - could that possibly have affected the encounter in any way? Why would he think that anal sex is the only thing that would make her uncomfortable? (Seriously, what?) Why, knowing what he's thinking, would she agree "without hesitation"? What, in summary, the fuck is going on here?

But if you aren't convinced by Vargas-Cooper's non-randomized, non-representative marginally empirical study of one encounter she had this one guy, she has a backup plan: defer to fiction.

"Even the crudest of online porn captures only a slice of the less-than-uplifting aspects of the sexual experience, because porn not only eschews but actively conceals this singular truth: the most brutalizing aspects of sex are not physical. This is made plain by the great, filthy, but far from pornographic Last Tango in Paris, which Pauline Kael described as the 'most powerfully erotic movie ever made.'"

See? She has to be right, because in addition to that one guy with the nice apartment there's a movie. QED.

In fact, though, it's even worse than that. Last Tango is not just not actual evidence, it bears a striking (and, one is tempted to say, not entirely coincidental) similarity to Vargas-Cooper's earlier vignette: "[i]n Bernardo Bertolucci’s story, Paul, played by an age-ravaged but still sexually menacing Marlon Brando, decides to rent a flat in an attempt to escape his grief over his wife’s recent suicide" (emphasis mine). At this point it is, in all honesty, hard not to wonder why Vargas-Cooper hasn't caught on to the pattern herself.

Although she attempts from time to time to fill in the (sizable) gaps in her argument by referring back to internet porn, neither the volume nor content of that porn is proof of the natural (or simply normal) mindset of an entire demographic. Indeed, it's precisely the reverse: in order to know what porn represents, we have to already have an interpretive schema in hand, and there's no shortage of those. That Vargas-Cooper is having trouble seeing past her own assumptions is made painfully evident when she characterizes Gail Dines...

"Porn is actually being encoded into a boy’s sexual identity so that an authentic sexuality—one that develops organically out of life experiences, one’s peer group, personality traits, family and community affiliations—is replaced by a generic porn sexuality limited in creativity and lacking any sense of love, respect or connection to another human being."

...as advocating for "a Rousseauistic pygmy race of sexually neutered males." Dines is very clearly not saying anything of the sort, but for Vargas-Cooper male sexuality is nothing if not "lacking any sense of love, respect or connection to another human being" and so any sexuality that is not morally reprehensible is by definition not a male sexuality (and, more strongly, is a sexuality that cannot be achieved by males).**

Staggeringly, even if we grant Vargas-Cooper each and every one of her borderline insane claims about male sexuality - that it centers on the mental and physical suffering of women,*** that it stands immune against conditioning or alteration, and so on - her conclusion about a war between the sexes still doesn't follow. In what is basically a revelatory insight into the unspoken premises that Vargas-Cooper brings to the table, she commits herself to the exact same false dilemma that we saw from the Canadian bishops in today's earlier post: that sex can't be both "impure of mind" and respectful of the other person. It's hard to go into any great detail about this because (tellingly) neither the bishops nor Vargas-Cooper explain what counts as purity or respect, but the long and short of it is that one person's "dark" and "aggressive" desires (which I take to be paradigmatically impure) are only disrespectful when they have no complementary desires in the other person (or people) involved. What's important about this, besides the fact that it allows for morally acceptable (and even morally exemplary) impure sex, is that it restores the moral agency of women: on Vargas-Cooper's system, an aggressive male cannot have cooperative/good/healthy/whatever (heterosexual) sex even if that aggression corresponds to the kind of sex that the woman wants; "men and women have conflicting sexual agendas," she says, and that's all there is to it. This, I think, is almost cartoonishly apocalyptic and is hard to make sense of on any system other than the one that she propounds.

That, of course, leads to the thought that none of this would be problematic at all if only her system were right. And that's true, just not helpful: "if only her system were right" represents what we in the philosophy business like to call a counterfactual. For whatever reason, even though she begins her article with a series of limiting qualifiers she ends it with grand pronouncements about The Way Things Are, and that's a real good way to end up in the weeds. There may well be something to the idea that heterosexual sex is this evil, demonic thing when men demand it more even in defiance of the desires of women, when women use it as a weapon, and when there's no reliable way of controlling the biological consequences, but those three conditions are hardly built into the very fabric of the universe. It's unfortunate that she hasn't had a happier sexual history, sure, but it's worse that she's let that history short-circuit her rational capacities.

*If you're having trouble puzzling this one out, let me help: pregnancy.
**Also, what the fuck: "pygmy race"?! Really, Natasha?
***This seems like as good a time as any to bring this up, so I will: howcome she doesn't pause to think about homosexuality? Her system seems predicated on a depressing sort of symmetry that's (allegedly) necessary in order for sex (or, maybe, sexual attraction) to happen, but that symmetry goes out the window once the participants are of the same gender.

Looks like I may have found this blog's new mascot:

New York state legislature, I've got good news for you!

"In New York, a bill is pending in the legislature’s transportation committee that would ban the use of mobile phones, iPods or other electronic devices while crossing streets — runners and other exercisers included."

Ted Haggard, I've got good news for you!

"He admits that he bought drugs from Jones 'five or six times' but maintains that he wasn't an addict.

'Sometimes I'd throw it away,' he says. 'Other times, I'd go someplace and masturbate and use it. But it was for masturbation. And that's one of the reasons why I haven't been real clear. I don't want to stand up publicly and say, 'Hey, I'm a masturbation guy!'"

Karin Calvo-Goller, I've got good news for you!

"As an earlier story in Times Higher Education reports, [professor of law Joseph] Weiler is facing charges brought by Karin Calvo-Goller, senior lecturer at the Academic Centre of Law and Business in Israel, and author of The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court. After running a review of the book by Thomas Weigend...'Dr Calvo-Goller wrote to Professor Weiler alleging that it was defamatory and asking for it to be taken down,' says the THE report, because it could 'cause harm to my professional reputation and academic promotion.' She even provided Weiler with a positive review to run in its place."

SyFy programming execs, I've got good news for you!

"TAKE two former pop princesses —Debbie Gibson and Tiffany — and cast them in a television movie involving illegally imported snakes and alligators on steroids. Stir in gobs of gooey cheese — a 'Dynasty'-style cat fight here, a trio of fisherman eaten alive there. Most important, make liberal use of computer-generated creatures and effects. Pythons blown up with dynamite! Thousands of hatching reptile eggs! Alligators the size of skyscrapers!

...A rare, colossal alignment of camp and corn? Not really. For the channel known as Syfy, 'Mega Python vs. Gatoroid' is just another Saturday night."

Canadian bishops, I've got good news for you!

 "Canadian Catholic bishops are cautioning married couples to not get too focused on sexual acts other than intercourse, calling them a potential misuse of sex that ignore God’s intentions.

A pastoral letter released this week by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops calls on married couples to lead 'chaste' lives — not meaning 'celibate' but approaching sex with 'purity of mind as well as body' and respecting the dignity of the other person."

If anyone in the history of the world has ever had enjoyable sex while maintaining "purity of mind," I would like to know who - and that brings me to today's second post.

This post may be a bit old (a whole month!), but I think you'll be happy that I'm breaking the #1 rule of the interwebs (currency, currency, currency) when you see what it says.

"So what would be enough for an Atheist to see God? Well first, they'll have to freely choose and want to find him. Walker Percy was impressed by a fraternity brother who got up early every day for Mass. T.E. Hulme went to the plains of Canada, felt his own insignificance, and knew there was a God. [Ricky] Gervais, on the other hand, stopped believing in God because his mother could not answer his brother's question of how she knew that God exists...

The loss of inquisitiveness about God worries me more than anything else. People don't seek more information that what is readily available to them. People, on a general level, are more interested in perception than truth."

Aaaaaaaand my head explodes. Yeah, people are as a rule "more interested in perception than truth" but we can absolutely trust Mr. Random English Man On Holiday who perceived a sense of smallness and decided without further inquiry that God existed. Fan-fucking-tastic.

In the rare part of her post in which she isn't busy directly undermining her own point, Julie Robinson offers an alternate argument against burden-of-proof atheism (or agnosticism):

"It took most of college, tripping and falling, laughing and reading, re-learning how to pray and really, really wanting God in my life, even when the world didn't seem so pretty, to convert my heart. I didn't ask for a sign. I didn't ask for proof. Why not? Because it's already there. God may give us the gift of faith, but it's up to us to pray and ask, seek belief, and become well-versed in his Word. If a person is going to learn to play an instrument or study a subject or get to know someone, it requires the same kind of patience, time commitment and dedication to learn truth and have a relationship with God."

(Because, y'know, skeptics don't know the first thing about religious texts...) What catches my eye here is the analogy at the very end. On a surface level it looks relatively plausible: you can't very well demand an a priori proof of your own ability to, say, shoot 40% on midrange jump shots because the proof is in the doing. Sure, somebody could come along and explain (in quite a bit of detail, actually) that it's physically possible for you to shoot 40% on midrange jumpers, but that's not really the kind of proof we're talking about. But this is, in fact, wholly misleading. The limits of one's abilities (or, inversely, the scope of one's potential) is limited by a complex web of contingent factors, not the least of which are one's own habits, tendencies, physiology, and so on. Any predictive argument about a person's capacities, then, can only be statistical in nature (at least, so long as our knowledge is imperfect). God's existence, on the other hand, is contingent on nothing and so it's perfectly legitimate to ask for an abstract proof.

Then again, it's simply false to say that musical skill, relationships, or subject-area knowledge can only be attained through "patience, time commitment, and dedication." Unlike her hypothesis about coming to know God, some people just have talent and find it utterly trivial to perform complex tasks; unlike her hypothesis about coming to know God, for those people who do have to work at it there are repeatable, empirically proven methods to develop skills; and unlike her hypothesis about coming to know God, there are some people for whom certain skills are simply out of reach no matter how hard they try. The problem for her view, in other words, is not that "really, really wanting God" is unlike learning skills; the problem is that it is unlike what she thinks it is like to learn a skill. In fact, religiosity, the way that Robinson describes it, is a skill. But a god who wants to be known - and especially a god who wants to be known and will throw a hissy fit if you ignore it - would not make that knowledge dependent on dumb luck in the same way that tone-deafness is a luck-of-the-draw sort of deal.

And, in fact, Robinson agrees. The ability know God is not luck, she says, but a "common denominator in humanity"; her "faith is completely dependent on proof" of the sort that is available to everyone. Very well: then it is not like learning calculus, making friends, or playing the guitar. It is, I think, past time that we retire this "but you haven't even tried" objection. It has no solid basis in epistemology and, worse, it begs the substantial question of whether any given non-theist has actually tried. Better we should spend the time trying new things than rehashing this worthless line of thought.

And here we go...

"As a graduate student in literature, I have been taught to read carefully, think critically, and to synthesize my interpretations with other critical perspectives on a given topic or text.

This is often more difficult than it sounds."

As much as I love it when authors begin their writing by pointing out how eminently qualified they are to take up my precious time - I'll decide that by reading your work, thank you very much - I have to thank Amy Carleton for giving me an excuse to post again about my new favorite hobby-horse, the misbegotten love affair between liberal theology and art. Carleton, you see, has something to say about the relationship between those two things and science, and by golly she has a master's degree so you'd better listen up!

"As we can see in...examples from three different fields—science, theology, and literature—during the medieval era, people were interested and engaged. They were not shrouded in darkness and anti-progression, yet for centuries the period was characterized in this way.

In our contemporary times, we should also embrace this spirit of cooperation and dialogue between the disciplines, recognizing that it is science that supplies us with data, while theology and literature—such the Bible—provide us with narrative and analytical tools to further contextualize that information in a way that laypeople can understand. As such, though science and religion are independent entities (as each has a different function), they can be interdependent—as each enriches the work of the other."

I'm not quite sure how a student of literature gets the meaning of "independent" so wrong, but that's a story for another post. The point for now is that Carleton thinks that we should support "dialogue between the disciplines [of] science, theology, and literature" so that "laypeople can understand" scientific data or, alternatively, so that each can "enrich" the other. I'm going to ignore the first of these conclusions because it's simply idiotic. We already know that laypeople can understand science just fine without recourse to novel-reading or prayer if you just teach them the damn science,* so that won't be a convincing argument even if it turns out that art and religion do help. I will, therefore, concentrate only on the latter argument.

One of her points is that science produces only "data," which is a somewhat uncharitable but not outright slanderous analysis. In order to be "enriched" or contextualized in a comprehensible way (if those two are different, which for all I know they aren't), science needs extra-scientific input - ontological theories, epistemological criteria, that sort of thing. The trouble for Carleton is that you can (at least in theory) get extra-scientific input from anything that isn't science. Her selection of theology and literature, then, is basically just her picking something out of thin air: she might equally have chosen philosophy or sports or music or cupcake-baking. That's the first real problem; the second is that, having chosen theology and literature, she's still short of her conclusion. You may have noticed that in my list of alternatives, some seem more reasonable than others. That's because what can "enrich" or contextualize science is not the same as what does. Just like it's possible to make something tasty just using two random food items but you wouldn't necessarily want to commit yourself to picking two things at random from a grocery store and then eating them together (salmon and Snickers - yum!), it's possible, but not something you should bet on, that the content of religion and written art just so happen to be just what science needs. Carleton needs more than just a glimmer of possibility before she can say that either literature or theology actually does "provide us with narrative and analytical tools" that are of any use when it comes to science.

Of course, people like Carleton love to argue that science (or science "as we know it" or some such thing) has roots in religion because the one preceded the other and they both have certain (very limited) axioms in common. That, actually, is perfectly fine: my objection from content leaves open the possibility that religion and/or literature did help. For instance, if people were ever walking around thinking that science was irrelevant to their lives and religious people came along and badgered them into believing that science was part of religion and therefore important, that would have been a help (even if it would, in part, have been based on a wild falsehood). But people are certainly not walking around thinking that today, and if we're going to have a "spirit of cooperation" or whatever today we should probably not do so just because the same thing turned out to have been really helpful this one time back in the 15th century.

Again, it's not that I hate literature (theology, maybe) or that I'm some kind of mad positivist or that I have a neurotic need to see every disciplined filed into a neat little box. I think that the arts have a special potential for human well-being and I love interdisciplinary stuff - I'm going for a degree in bio-ethics, for crying out loud. There are just limits, is all, and I'm not at all convinced that Carleton understands the concept of limits, let alone how to apply them in this case.

*You will note, incidentally, that Carleton has not made this same argument about, say, math. Math is really not that hard and yet people are remarkably bad at it, so why not "embrace [a] spirit of cooperation" with the arts and religions to make people better at math? Still other fields that she could have chosen but did not choose include: economics, psychology, social anthropology, computer science, philosophy, and history.

Yes, you read that right: I now have a new camera! My patron - that is, the person who so kindly provided me with the first camera - decided that I had "graduated" from the little Casio one and so he has provided me with a second, much nicer camera that I barely know how to use. (Fun!) So I have yet to really discover what the new one can do, but there is one major improvement that I've noticed: I can now take pictures at night and have them turn out halfway decent.

This would neeeeever have worked out with the old one and it's nice to no longer be limited in terms of what time of day it is.

To drive the point home, here are some (much clearer) nighttime shots of East Liberty Presbyterian...




...and the Cathedral of Learning.



Also in that last picture, you can see how little the city of Pittsburgh cares about making its streets safe during winter. This is Forbes Avenue, which connects several major neighborhoods to downtown, at about 11:30 at night, three or four hours after it started snowing. Granted, probably many people aren't going to go cruising near midnight in the middle of the week, but public transportation is still running and anyway it would be nice if you could get somewhere if you had to. So if you visit here in the wintertime, keep in mind that snow will make travel a little more challenging than it really ought to be.

In addition to those former subjects of my cleverly-named "What it looks like" series, I also took the new camera over to Homewood Cemetery (which, as you may recall, I said I might revisit in the winter).


Seriously, though, there's really something wrong when the cemetery roads are better-plowed than the regular roads.



I thought this was just ridiculous. If you're going to be laid to rest in something as ostentatious as a mini-pyramid, you have to take your last name into account. Putting the name "Brown" on this thing completely ruins the mood.


As for this, I'm not quite sure what's going on here - so I thought maybe you all could help. Is this headstone not finished yet? Is there some religion that permits headstones but doesn't permit them to be seen? Did somebody just really not want this headstone to get snow on it? I am utterly puzzled by this, but hopefully one of you will know.



Some people engaging in cross-country skiing, which is an activity that to my inexperienced eyes looks brutally hard.



So yeah - turns out the last time I did this I missed an entire mausoleum. Told you the place was huge. Good news, though: there's still room!


I can't tell you how much of a relief this was. The fear of mortality is a dreadful enough weight to bear, but the fear of mortality combined with anxiety over not knowing whether or not your corpse will arrive at the cemetery only to be met by a NO VACANCY sign? Truly horrible.


I still can't get over these things. It's great how we mock the ancient Egyptians for all of their burial practices and then give our dead people stained freaking glass.


So that was more or less what I expected to find at the cemetery, but it turned out that there was a surprise, too:


I'm not quite sure what these deer are still doing hanging around here in January, but I guess they must know (for some sense of the word) what they're doing.



Finally, a few shots of a new location.


One of my classes this semester is at Duquesne, which is all well and good except for one little thing.


Duquesne is a Catholic university. I did make sure that the syllabus and readings were sufficiently secular, but it's a little creepy to walk around (let alone be in class) in this kind of environment. I knew what I was getting into beforehand, obviously, and I think I can make it into a helpful learning experience, but when I stop to think about it it's definitely just creepy.


They also seem to be a bit unsure about the difference between buildings and roads. Either that or this sign should read "ROAD CLOSED DUE TO THERE'S A BUILDING IN THE MIDDLE OF IT."


As befits its organizational history, Duquesne is on the very top of one of the larger hills near Downtown (which, if you know anything about Pittsburgh, you will know means that it's quite a large hill indeed). This affords the opportunity for some nice views, complete with our trademark Seasonal Affective Gray sky.


Or, if that's not your speed, you could sit on this bench and gaze wistfully at Allegheny County Jail, which I think is one of the ugliest buildings I've ever laid eyes on. I can only hope that the bench preceded the jail, but you never know.


Finally, Duquesne is also at one end of one of the most vertiginous city staircases we've got. Even better, the only way to get to this point (that is, the point where I stood to take this picture) is to cross a pedestrian overpass that acts as a bridge over the highway that you can see to the right. So far as it can be given that you're just walking, the experience is actually kind of terrifying.

So that's it for this installment. I'd tell you what to look forward to next time but actually I'm out of ideas. Suggestions are, as always, welcome, but I'm sure something will come up one way or the other.

So hey, remember that post I wrote about how it's dangerous to spend too much time in one linguistic mode of thought? Well, turns out I was right: the original subject of that post thinks, as a result of that post, that I want her to spend all of her time in one linguistic mode of thought. (Also, that I am a racist.)

"The single narrative refers to your suggestion that communication can only take a specific shape or form. Have you even paused for a moment to think about how exclusionary this suggestion is?"

This is really impressive. To read "one's thinking is limited by one's vocabulary" and interpret it as "one ought to have as limited a vocabulary as possible" is quite a feat, but there it is. It's never fun to be misread, but to be misread this badly is more than a little disheartening. It's very much reminiscent of PilgrimSoul's appalling decision not to trust logic because logic is "not politically neutral in content." And, like PilgrimSoul et al., Martin's main "proof" of her view consists of a string of erroneous assumptions about me: where before I was allegedly automatically suspicious of anything a disabled person said (false) and not consistent in my appraisal of oppression theory (also false), now I'm "seeking a 101 conversation" (still false) and "so ignorant, that I cannot see the ways in which my race and gender, influences [sic] the way in which people interact with my work" (you guessed it - false). Worse yet, there is no way to invalidate these claims (in the minds of the people making them, that is). They're already empirically false, inconsistent with my actions, inconsistent with my stated opinions, inconsistent with the theoretical framework in which I operate, and logically irrelevant to any point I will ever make (in virtue of being ad hominems, obviously) - what more could a person need?

So please, take a break every so often from the assumptions you've become accustomed to making and go back to first principles. It doesn't have to be something that you do all the time, just once in a while. And if you ever need any encouragement - if it seems too onerous or overly cautious - just come back to this post and remind yourself that the being too parochial in your thinking is a real good way to end up spouting a bunch of utter rubbish and feeling really good about it.

If it's okay with everyone that I defer discussing the recent story about how a Vatican official said that "sexual abuse of minors" was "complex" and people should maybe not say anything about it to outsiders, I'd like to return to the abortion heard 'round the world. It's the topic of the most recent On Faith panel over at the Washington Post, a panel that features the likes of Max Carter.

"On the surface, one might argue that a hospital should not prevent patients from receiving legal procedures that are in the best interest of the patient - as determined by the patient herself. However, there is this small matter of separation of Church and State - and the commitment of our nation to allow the free exercise of religion."

As admirable as it is for Carter to cite the doctrine of separating church from state, he seems to forget that health professionals are licensed by the state. While it would indeed be problematic for the state to regulate an activity in which it has no legitimate interest and over which it has no legitimate control, medicine is not such an activity. In fact, allowing for religious exceptions in the issuance and maintenance of medical licenses is precisely what violates church/state separation, not what supports it: if a Catholic doctor gets to avoid performing medically necessary abortions but the same isn't true of a secular doctor whose "most deeply held beliefs" are just as powerful in condemning abortions, that is in essence a violation of the establishment clause. Actually, quite a few church/state questions are like this - if you look at them from one way it seems to imply government nonintervention but if you look at them from the other way it's clear that nonintervention is also bad. This is why the whole church/state thing has to be based on a preexisting notion of the state's role, which Carter has not provided.

More interestingly, though, Carter restricts his examples to Christian denominations (Catholics, Quakers, Amish). This is a bit odd, because presumably if his point is a good one it applies across all religions. Why, then, would he avoid mentioning anything other than the most popular, most socially sanctioned, most taken-for-granted religion in the country? Well, maybe this is why.

"Female genital mutilation (FGM) comprises all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.

The practice is mostly carried out by traditional circumcisers, who often play other central roles in communities, such as attending childbirths. Increasingly, however, FGM is being performed by health care providers.

FGM is recognized internationally as a violation of the human rights of girls and women."

FGM, you will note, is not a Christian practice. It is, when it is religious at all, a Muslim or tribal African practice. And even though FGM is less medically dangerous than the Catholic practice of withholding health-related abortions, you will find that it is extremely difficult to support FGM (or, relatedly, to find mainstream supporters of FGM). This clearly is not because we all hate religion so much that we're going out of our way to persecute believers - FGM is a harm whether it's religiously motivated or not - and it's equally clear that the harm of FGM is less than that of refusing to perform abortions. But if two medical practices are both potentially (but not always) religious and both are harmful, one would think that they would both be treated equally by a system that protects religious practice from government interference. At the very least, any difference between the way we treat the two would have to be justified by one being more harmful (and therefore more closely regulated) than the other. But this is exactly the reverse of what we find in comparing FGM to Catholic non-abortions: the latter is simultaneously more dangerous and less regulated. What all of this shows is that Carter cannot consistently appeal to our culture's "commitment...to allow the free exercise of religion." We have no such commitment.

Nor, indeed, should we - at least, not if we take "free exercise of religion" to include things like refusing to provide abortions or performing FGM. The problem, then, is not that we're wrongly disallowing FGM but that we're wrongly allowing Catholics (and other Christians) to take liberties that are not properly theirs. The USA is not now (if it has ever been) a country whose explicit cultural or political values are Christian or even more-than-usually supported by Christian premises - but we sure do love to give Christians the benefit of the doubt. Maybe we ought to, y'know, stop doing that.

...this is awfully sick.

Indianapolis Homeless Talent Show

www.thedailyshow.com

Having just listened to Menomena's excellent new album Mines and having read through about half of George Saunders's also excellent CivilWarLand In Bad Decline, this article looks at once startlingly familiar and tremendously depressing.

"[Dan] Savage is constructed in many corners as a progressive activist and this label is completely mendacious. I began my life facing the twin isms of race and gender, but when I became disabled, I truly understood how important it is that advocating for equality, means fighting for the rights of all people and not simply touching on the issues that effected [sic] me personally.  I believe the more oppressions that one faces, the easier it is to recognize this very basic truth.  Not only are all oppressions intersectional, they all matter. Perpetuating one to defeat another, is a defeatist strategy born of a desire to use the master's tools, because it is easier than attempting to decolonize one's mind."

Quite honestly, I don't know Renee Martin from Eve, but this is just sad. Menomena's lyricists, like Saunders, have a heavy hand with cliches, buzzwords, and platitudes because they understand that something sinister always finds its way into a string of words when that string reaches a certain level of overuse. Teachers act on this by requiring students to rephrase key ideas in their own words; those taken with Foucault will see this reflected in his thesis that one's thinking is limited by one's vocabulary; you may well have your own example. It's important to realize that this isn't some kind of partisan thing: American conservatives are limited by "support the troops" just like American liberals are limited by "freedom of choice" just like Catholics are limited by "doctrine of double-effect" just like feminists are limited by - well, take your freakin' pick, Martin's basically got the whole set.

Unless there's quite a bit of interest in this, I'm going to avoid trying to untangle that atrocious tangle of ideas I just quoted. Know that I myself am a feminist and so my antagonism in this case isn't because I'm closed-minded or ill-informed or trying to win points for my side. Racism is bad, misogyny is bad, ableism is bad, transphobia is bad, homophobia is bad, bias against the poor is bad, and bias against fat people is bad. But do you know what? They're all bad in very different ways (both in the abstract and in the real world) and those forms of prejudice (or social injustice or whatever you'd like to call it) do not comprise the whole list. There is, in fact, no whole list, and that poses a unique challenge to activists like Martin who seem to believe that you become a Good Person just by signing yourself up for the right checklist of counterculture causes.

As in today's earlier post, Martin seems to have mistaken a subsidiary ethical value (social justice, or something like it) for a foundational one. Living morally is not like Pokemon: the goal is not to generate a taxonomy and then collect 'em all. Yet when people focus too much on a single dimension of ethics, their theoretical viewpoints (if not also their lives) become warped in a way that lends itself towards the repetition of heavily theory-laden* jargon and the compulsive over-valuation (if not also over-seeking) of the (ostensible) goods referred to by said jargon. This, I think, is only to be expected: these views are designed to make critical analysis easier by collapsing certain lines of thought, but if you get carried away with that you end up collapsing way too much and essentially reducing your mental landscape to rubble. "Using the master's tools," for instance, is a short, pithy way of expressing a rather complicated sort of disapproval for a rather complicated set of behaviors - which, I hope you've realized by now, presupposes a rather complicated underlying theoretical framework. But does that come across when you read it? Nope! All that you ascertain - all that Martin believes you need to see in order to understand - is that Dan Savage is "using the master's tools" and is therefore a bad, bad man. Even if Martin herself actually understands the slew of intricate moves required to apply the "using the master's tools" criticism correctly (and I don't think that she does), it's still unhelpful in the extreme for her to use it as part of an argument that's basically just an exercise in paint-by-numbers. The only thing we can learn from this article is that being an activist means being extraordinarily sensitive to the group's standards, but without knowing what those standards are (let alone how Dan Savage has allegedly violated them) that knowledge does more harm than good.

It would be interesting, I think, to see Martin try to write this same post in plain English. Don't get me wrong, it's not because I don't think she can, necessarily. But I do think that her message would come across with a lot less punch if she left out the tiger balm** of prefabricated rhetoric.

*This seems like the right point to make this point and it's a point I need to make in this post, so here goes: yes, all jargon is theory-laden and all views have weak points. This is not, however, the same as admitting to a total inability to rank one over another or to get closer to the truth because not all jargon is equally theory-laden and not all weak points are equally weak.
**Look, a Sonny Liston reference! Everybody knows who he is, right???

Quoth Mark Vernon:

"[T]he liberal approaches to ethics [i.e., utilitarianism and deontology] are increasingly being questioned. Can they tell us what this freedom is for? Is it for more than just more consumption, more accumulation? What is the good life?

The problem is that we’ve lost touch with the bigger picture: what is it that makes life good for us humans? ... There is another ethical tradition that can help. It’s known as virtue ethics. Virtue ethics begins by asking what it is to be human, and proceeds by asking what virtues — or characteristics, habits and skills — we need in order to become all that we might be as humans."

Speaking as a utilitarian, I would like to say this to Mark Vernon: screw you, too, buddy. But speaking as a utilitarian with a brain, I would also like to say this: this whole "all that we can be" thing is awfully cheerleadery. It's easy to win converts with this kind of late-night-TV-ad puffery, but it's not good philosophy.

"The virtue ethics approach is not individualistic. It tells us that to become all we might be as humans we need others. And we need others in a number of ways. One is highlighted by Aristotle’s focus on friendship. Social animals, like ourselves, are fulfilled by being with others: we discover who we are by discovering who others are — those to whom we are connected by way of family, affection, community, and society. They shape us, and we shape them, and so we need to have a concern for them all. If we live in an unhappy family, or in an oppressive society, that is going to have a major impact upon our own lives, even compromising our full flourishing as human beings."

And here Vernon is just making things up. Utilitarianism may not take it as axiomatic that "we need others," but I defy him to explain how utilitarianism rules out or discounts things like friendship. Moreover, utilitarianism doesn't support the convenient fallacy that leads Vernon from a necessity claim ("we need others") to a series of claims about the way things actually are ("[we] are fulfilled by being with others"). Even if we grant that every person needs virtuous social interaction to be all that that person can be - which is an empirical claim and not one to be made a priori - we're still well short of proving that virtuous social interaction actually makes people all that they can be. Or, to put it differently, virtue ethics does not (and cannot) give us the full picture. We don't just need virtuous relationships in order to be fulfilled in our relationships; indeed, even virtuous relationships with virtuous people won't do the job. Maybe virtue correlates with satisfaction or fulfillment or flourishing, but ethics isn't all-or-nothing and so Vernon can't just round up. If flourishing is his foundational value he's most certainly (rationally) justified in living pragmatically with respect to it, but that's an entirely different matter than theorizing with a pragmatic mindset. There just is no way to get from "virtues often help with flourishing" to "we will unquestionably flourish if we are virtuous enough."

Interestingly enough, all of this is confirmed by Vernon's eventual citation of Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre - who, I suspect, will make a more prolonged appearance on this blog sooner or later - says, according to Vernon, that "the communities to which we belong are also the repositories for the skills that we need to live well." This is a major problem for virtue ethics as a high-level theory because (non-relativistic) ethical theories are supposed to be culturally independent. To refer to virtues as being community-specific will help us get along in those communities, sure, but it also pretty decisively rules out any possibility that virtues have anything to do with us flourishing "as humans." Flourishing as Americans, maybe (or as American liberals; or liberal American men; or however detailed this needs to be) - but not flourishing as humans. Ethics, however, has to apply to everybody regardless of the community to which they belong, if for no other reason than because many people cannot rightly be said to belong to any community at all (this, in part, is why virtues are at best statistical predictors of anything of real ethical value). When used as tools for analyzing cultural frameworks or as decision-making rules of thumb, I think virtues are just peachy. They are, however, not enough to replace utilitarianism.

Vernon's problem is that he has, somewhere along the line, mixed up his hypothesis. He wants to say that if a person flourishes then that person has a virtuous social life

That's the "going down in flames and then exploding" sound effect, in case you don't know. And, for my visually-oriented readers, this is what going down in flames and then exploding looks like:

"The first thing we must understand is that love doesn't always equal nice, clean and pretty. Love isn't about feeling good. It is about what is best for the 'other', despite the cost to 'self'. As a parent this is certainly the case. I see parents make the common mistake of being a friend to their children and end up not disciplining them, which leads to spoiled brats. They then ask how they could have turned out as they did. I remember the first time I punished my oldest child. I cried more than she did. But, I did it because I truly love her.

The second thing we should note is that love is only truly recognizable, in all of its wonder and glory, when contrasted with evil and a lack of love. If all we had was good and love, as human nature inclines us to do, we would certainly fail to see it as loving or good all the time."

As much as I would love to spend this post correcting Marcel's abhorrent punctuation, this is not a writing blog. Luckily for me, though, his philosophy is almost as cringe-worthy as his comma usage. If we take that first paragraph seriously, we end up in a pretty serious conundrum: "love [isn't] nice, clean and pretty [or] about feeling good," so expressions of love can (from the perspective of the beloved person if not also the loving person) look like almost anything at all. Marcel's daughter, for instance, almost surely did not recognize his behavior as an expression of love. (It's not clear that she had a clear, well-formed idea about what his behavior was, but that's neither here nor there.) So far as this goes, it's relatively plausible. Adults, hopefully, will have an easier time of accurately inferring others' motivations, but it's still the case that adults frequently misconstrue affection (or, more precisely, behaviors motivated by affection) as other, less positive emotions. Marcel, then, seems to be on to something - and then you get to the second paragraph.

If love has many faces, so to speak, then it makes sense to think that the experience of love is a relatively diverse one. (As opposed, say, to the experience of sitting in a nice, warm bath, which is relatively monochrome.) But now Marcel tells us that we need contrast just in order to ("truly") recognize love and so we should both expect evil and be happy that we have it. While this line of argument makes the recognition of goodness more important than goodness itself* - a patent absurdity - the more interesting thing is that he has already admitted that love contrasts with itself. To make an analogy that I hope all my readers have the requisite experience to appreciate, this is like saying that there are lots of different cheeses and the experience of eating cheese therefore can differ significantly from instance to instance but also you'll never be able to appreciate (say) the goodness of Brie from the goodness of cheddar unless you also eat some rotten vegetables from time to time. Not only does that not follow, the conclusion is ruled out by the premise! Contrast simply cannot simultaneously be the basis of knowledge and also useless for knowledge.

It's one thing to end up between a rock and a hard place when you're doing philosophy. That happens to the best of us and is in some sense just part of the practice. But when the rock and the hard place are both there because you put them there that's probably a sign that you're on the wrong track.

*Because God is, in Marcel's view, morally justified in permitting bad things merely on the grounds that those bad things will make us epistemically better off.

Maybe, if I were less young, in shape, and average-looking, I could get a happiness robot.

"[David] Levy says his book was inspired by [Sherry] Turkle's earlier work. It is dedicated to one of Turkle's research subjects, a young man named Anthony, who, in Levy's words, 'tried having girlfriends but found that he preferred relationships with computers.' Levy sent a copy of the book to Turkle, hoping she would pass it along to Anthony and believing that he would find it encouraging.

Turkle was not pleased. She expresses frustration with the notion that Anthony would be happier with a robot than with gaining the social skills necessary to connect with a human companion.

'David Levy is saying: For someone who is having trouble with the people world, I can build something. Let's give up on him. I have something where he will not need relationships, experiences, and conversations. So let's not worry for him. For a whole class of people, we don't have to worry about relationships, experiences, and conversations. We can just issue them something.'

Turkle continues: 'Who's going to say which class of people get issued something? Is it going to be the old people, the unattractive? The heavy-set people? Who's going to get the robots?'"

Speaking as an ethicist, this whole conversation is really quite interesting. To a significant extent it's a real-world rehash of Nozick's Matrix-esque experience machine thought experiment. Regular readers of this blog know more or less how I feel about the philosophical efficacy of thought experiments, but if the similarities between the experience machine and computer girlfriends are as significant as I think they are then we're no longer dealing with a thought experiment. Instead, we're dealing with a real experiment, and one that has a great deal of moral complexity.*

In order to better focus on the important portions of this story, it's best that we discard the irrelevant parts right at the start. When Turkle gets up on her soapbox and warns us about how our "inspiring and enhancing technologies [have] diminish[ed] us," we should just not be impressed. This is the Wes Smith/Leon Kass plea to romanticize a nonexistent bygone golden era and is, as a result, a worthless analysis. Very few people ever knew "how to sit quietly with [their] own thoughts" and there's no reason to believe that computers (or cell phones or whatever) are actually making it impossible to do so. (Don't believe me? Just go try it - I promise it's not all that hard.) It is also besides the point to investigate "the ethics of exposing a child [or, indeed, anyone] to a sociable robot whose technical limitations make it seem uninterested in the child [or person]." What we are looking to learn is whether positive interactions with simple robots - that is, interactions that produce positive emotions - are ethically on par with positive interactions with other humans. A full ethical account of simple happiness-oriented robots would obviously have to take account of the fact that robots, like everything else in this world, are imperfect, but it's usually a good idea to answer only one question at a time. And, to be frank, this is one hell of a question.

"During her research, Turkle visited several nursing homes where resi­dents had been given robot dolls, including Paro, a seal-shaped stuffed animal programmed to purr and move when it is held or talked to. In many cases, the seniors bonded with the dolls and privately shared their life stories with them.

'There are at least two ways of reading these case studies,' she writes. 'You can see seniors chatting with robots, telling their stories, and feel positive. Or you can see people speaking to chimeras, showering affection into thin air, and feel that something is amiss.'"

This is pretty standard duck/rabbit stuff - except that Turkle wants to run an ethical argument, not just an epistemological one. Worse yet, the epistemological aspect of this scenario pretty decisively rules out the kind of ethical reasoning that Turkle seems to prefer. Her feelings about the first description ("seniors...feeling positive") are in direct conflict with her feelings about the second one ("people speaking to chimeras"), which means that one or the other must be wrong - which, in turn, means that her feelings do not suffice as philosophical evidence. Again, regular readers of my blog know (or should know) this already: when it comes to distinguishing between true and false, feelings are nothing more than feelings. If we are going to map the moral landscape of robot/human interaction, then, we are not going to do it with our guts.

Still another tangent is Turkle's concern that some people will be issued or assigned robots in a sort of fall-back plan in case they cannot interact (successfully?) with other humans. In part this is the wrong subject to address because it begs the question: the goodness or badness of saddling somebody with a happiness robot depends in significant part on the goodness or badness of happiness robots plain and simple. Bicycles, to make a relevant analogy, are pretty okay, morally speaking - but they might start to seem sinister indeed if we went around "issuing" them to (vulnerable) populations. Another reason to avoid this particular claim is that it raises an entirely different issue: at what point is it appropriate to "issue" anything to anybody? This is basically the whole healthcare-rationing debate all over again, only generalized: we'll never get to the point where everyone can have everything they want and it wouldn't be smart for any organization (public or private) to pretend otherwise, so someone is gonna get something "issued" to them just because there's nothing better left in stock. We will, however, not learn very much at all about that question if we narrow our focus just to happiness robots, so it's better to leave that aside as well.

The matter at the heart of all of this, then, is simply whether or not "relationships, experiences, and conversations" (in Turkle's words) have a special value that is worth striving for even if one cannot have them due to one's personality (like Anthony, perhaps) or one's life circumstances (people in nursing homes, perhaps). If they do not, then all that matters is the (mental) well-being of people and it doesn't matter whether you get your jollies from another person or from a pile of rocks.

One reason to believe that "real" (i.e., interpersonal) relationships do matter is because they (can) have value for both parties, whereas of course a robot/human relationship can only have value for the person. On the face of it, then, a human/human relationship that has value x to each of its members seems to be (morally) equivalent to a robot/human relationship where the human gets value 2x. That's all well and good, and in fact I do think that this is an argument in favor of forming interpersonal relationships over relationships with robots. But part of the original problem here was that we can't always form interpersonal relationships, let alone interpersonal relationships with any real value. Ask anybody who has a pet to rate that pet relative to their friends and you'll quickly discover that people don't actually value interpersonal relationships all that much to begin with. And that's if you can make friends at all - for many people, that process is impossible or at least prohibitively difficult.** So although it would in some sense be both elegant and ideal for everybody to be great friends with everybody else, it ain't gonna happen and it'd be absolutely inane for us to pretend otherwise.

More importantly, though, this strategy sort of misses the point. We're not trying to figure out what would be best for everyone, we're just trying to figure out what would be best for (e.g.) Anthony. Maybe he has an obligation to other people to become their friends - fine, but even that wouldn't make it better for him to fulfill that obligation instead of getting together with a happiness robot. (It's also hard to figure how there could possibly be an obligation to seek out a second-best solution when the best solution is easily obtainable, but whatever.) Anyway, for her part, "Turkle would rather have the complete works of Jane Austen played continuously" to her in her dotage, and you'll note that there's no interpersonal connection happening there, so it's doubtful that this is the route she would take.

Basically, then, we're left with one avenue of approach: the notion that positive feelings of a given sort are bad for people when they exist in the absence of their proper object, where "their proper object" is basically taken to mean "another person." I think the ontology here is extraordinarily questionable - since when do feelings have proper objects? - but it's easy to dismantle this view without going into quite so much technical detail. If we assume, as Turkle seems to, that it's only good to feel like one is in a relationship when one actually is in a relationship, that rules out a whole hell of a lot more than just robots. Going back to a previous example, should you accept Turkle's view your relationship with your pet would become a drag on your life. If you find yourself emotionally relating to characters in fiction, that, too, is harmful (including, I'm afraid to say, Austen's fictional characters). In fact, you can't even emotionally relate to real people with whom you don't have a relationship: politicians, athletes, artists - even just feeling nice about seeing the same person at the grocery checkout line is invalid. Worse yet is that you very likely wouldn't even have good relationships with the people you do know. Remember, knowing someone (including yourself) is much more like the parable of the old men and the elephant than it is like knowing, say, the arithmetic order of operations: even for the people you know best, your mental processes are responsible for constructing a pretty significant chunk of who (in your mind) they are every time you interact with them. Or, to put it in plainer language, there is never a clean dividing line between "real" "relationships, experiences, and conversations" and "fake" ones. Turkle can always just fall back on the (very much real) difference between having another complex living thing involved as opposed to not having one, but then she runs straight into the is/ought gap: why should we care about the arrangement of molecules in the things that make us feel happy? We are, after all, not interacting with the molecules or their arrangement, at least not so far as our emotions are concerned, and this is (to repeat myself) just as true when it comes to other people as it is for pet rocks or Furbies or housecats or Fitzwilliam Darcy.

There are, of course, limits on how far we should take our reliance on machines - I agree, for example, that it's not cool to check your email on your phone in the middle of having dinner with a friend. But there's a world of difference between lacking simple manners and allowing oneself to be distracted from what would otherwise be a miserably lonely existence. Yeah, it'd be great if we could all hold hands and love one another and I could buy the world a Coke or whatever. And yeah, it'd be great if we could finally just make a computer with feelings so that this whole silly technophobic attitude would just go away already. But in the meantime, people are suffering more than they have to and I refuse to say that my attitudes towards robots are so important that anyone who disagrees is putting themselves in grave moral danger.

*Levy, for his part, agrees: "Who is going to get the robots is an ethical question, and I am no ethicist."
**And this isn't just a shot at shut-ins or old people. It can be hard to make new contacts if you're a transplant (especially an immigrant), if you have certain chronic conditions, if you're tied for some reason to an area with a very small population of people you dislike, and so on and so forth.

Ladies and gentlemen and others, William James O'Reilly, Junior:



'nuff said.

Somebody give Mary Grabar a cookie.

"As I discovered by spending two days in workshops at a conflict resolution education conference, discourse that deviates from the peace and one-world government orthodoxy is silenced. It is silenced, not by words or logic, but by social ostracism...Conservatives have fallen into the same trap set for college freshmen: agree or face accusations of 'incivility.' And the definition of 'incivility' broadens. Now even to claim that Obama or any of his allies are 'socialists' is taken as a personal attack."

The proper response to this feckless whingeing is simply, I think, the old aphorism that turnabout is fair play. (That, incidentally, is probably my favorite old aphorism. Maybe that deserves a post in the near future?) If you want to participate in a grown-up discussion while acting like a child, the other participant(s) have no obligation whatsoever to let you in or, having let you in, to let you stay. You want to call Obama a socialist (which, incidentally, is taken as a personal attack because it's intended as a personal attack)? Good for you - but don't think you can do it in a legitimate news outlet, on the floor of the Senate or House, in an academic journal, or in my living room.

Grabar makes it sound like Democrats have just now invented this technique and are applying it for the first time in human history, but she should know better: our elected officials aren't anywhere near that smart. It's not even the case that social ostracism is a strictly liberal trick. You fuck with the Catholics too much and they'll excommunicate you; a queer conservative group attending CPAC barely made it in and led to boycotts; and then, of course, there's the whole decades-long conservative effort to portray anybody to the left of Glenn Beck as a traitor. Turnabout, I say again, is fair play - but even if it wasn't, Grabar is missing the bigger point here. Everybody uses social ostracism, yes, but social ostracism is, as most everything is, dependent on the details for its moral character.

Let's take a really extreme case to make this abundantly clear. If some lunatic were to run for Congress on the platform that brown-haired people are genetically inferior and should be exterminated, it would not be appropriate to give that person a platform to air those views, let alone to elect them and then bring them into a conversation about how to craft laws. While that kind of view can of course be debated and disproven using "words and logic," silencing it is another story altogether. When we as a society (or even as individuals) present ourselves as being open for adult debate on one or another topic, we implicitly agree not to silence the opposition - after all, how can you have an adult debate where only one side talks? Worse yet, when we discover, to our idiotic surprise, that openly debating the crazy person has not managed to make the crazy person shut up and go away, our instinct is often to debate the crazy person on an even bigger stage. Think about how little sense that actually makes: "Well, gee, it didn't work to invite anti-brown-hair person on my local-access broadcast show with twelve total viewers, maybe we ought to get [him or her] to publish an op/ed in the ten-thousand-subscription local paper instead - surely exposing [his or her] view to more people will work better to silence [him or her]!" There's nothing wrong with stigmatization in and of itself, especially given that the alternative is often self-defeating. You just have to make sure that you stigmatize the right thing, is all. So if Grabar is all sad cause we're starting to stigmatize outlandishly hateful speech from politicians, let her defend it. Otherwise, she'd better be careful that she doesn't wind up with the business end of social ostracism pointed at her, too.

Sing it, Loren Wilkinson!

"Change comes slowly in deeply held beliefs, and Denis Alexander is to be commended for his attempt, however flawed we might find it, to persuade a group of Christians that Christianity and science can indeed be integrated, that they help us describe and live in one world, not two."

Yes! It would be really, really great if we could all live in one world, at least so long as that's the world of truths. Unfortunately, some of us are making that one-world thing very difficult by pushing fictions on others. You know, people like Loren Wilkinson.

"[S]cience at its core, is a religious activity, in the deepest and most literal sense of 're-ligious'—that which links. Religion and science both come from the uniquely human passion to see the diverse pieces of our experience as one supple and coherent body of knowledge: thus its connection with a word like 'ligament', the tissue which holds the skeleton together. There is no science without scientists, and scientists are always and only humans, probing and coming to know an inexhaustibly mysterious cosmos by means of their own passions, beliefs, hunches and theories."

Oh boy, a fallacious argument from etymology. How thrilling and novel. Next...

"[T]he modern tradition of empirical science has deep roots in the Jewish and Christian tradition."

Hm - this is also "deep." I don't know how deep a genetic fallacy can be, really, but apparently Wilkinson is seeking new depths.

"Third, The [sic] warfare language implies that there were two kinds of knowledge: 'religious knowledge', established only by emotion and authority, and scientific knowledge, established by experience, experiment and testing. If true this would be a disastrous situation, culturally and personally, since it would doom 'religious' people to living in a pseudo-reality constructed from dogma and wishful thinking, and 'scientific' people living in a meaningless world of emotion-free 'facts' each of which they must establish for themselves."

Now see, there's your problem: many people who use "The warfare language," like Jerry Coyne (Wilkinson's example), don't actually think that there is religious knowledge. I'm not sure how that point managed to slip by - the whole atheists don't believe in the truth of theism thing should be obvious, right? - but that throws a big ol' wrench into Wilkinson's thought process. If the best he can do is to assume that some religious beliefs count as knowledge (i.e., are true) and then use that assumption to bludgeon people like Coyne, we shouldn't be very impressed - that's just begging the question.

It's also worth correcting Wilkinson's incredibly poor understanding of a skeptic's epistemology. Nobody - and I mean nobody - believes that there are only two kinds of knowledge; nobody believes that the only two kinds of knowledge are religious and scientific; and nobody believes that the only two kinds of knowledge, which are religious and scientific, can only be established by emotion and authority on the one hand or experience, experiment, and testing on the other. Moreover, there is no existing hypothesis that implies or even suggests such a dichotomy. Wilkinson is, in short, wrong at every step of the process. Oddly enough, though, he ends up at more or less the right place in the end: religious people do live in pseudo-realities (note that, yet again, he can't avoid oversimplifying the plurality of religions into a single worldview) constructed from dogma and wishful thinking.

My favorite part, though, is not the part where he seemingly picks a fallacy at random and then builds an argument around it. My favorite part is this (with my emphasis):

"On the one hand such an understanding [i.e., a mythological interpretation of Genesis] removes any possibility of tension between 'science' and the Biblical text. It is not about science; or, to be more precise, those ancient writers used the science available to them to talk about things which they considered to be much more important: Is there a purpose to the cosmos? What is my purpose in it? How do I relate to the cosmos, its creator, my fellow human beings? The answers to these questions do provide an important 'data set'; but for answers to questions like the age and physical origins of the earth, or of humanity, we use the data set from the best science available to us. It would be, as Alexander insists from the beginning, a mistake to regard the two sets of data as having nothing to do with each other. Thus the need for 'models' to explore how they might be related."

Um, okay - so Biblical and scientific data can't possibly contradict one another because the Bible only talks about things that are totally removed from science, but also you need a model to make them mutually coherent because actually the Bible does say some things that are relevant to science. Neat!

I hate to keep beating up on BioLogos's guest bloggers like this (because their regular bloggers aren't any better), but this is exactly the kind of schlock you get when you go look for someone with training in philosophy, literature, and theology. Training in literature is great, don't get me wrong: if more people were trained in literature then Seth Rogen wouldn't have a career and life would be much better. And training in philosophy is usually okay even if it tends to produce a dead-white-guy fetish. But we're not asking for a literary analysis of evolution or even a philosophical one - we're just trying to make sure that people confine their scientific opinions to positions endorsed by, y'know, scientists. Just because a guy with eighty-five humanities PhDs comes along and says it's perfectly okay to believe that evolution is guided by an all-powerful, morally perfect dead guy with multiple personalities does not make it okay. I promise that we'll stop using conflict language to describe the interaction of religion and science when religious people stop producing conflicts between their beliefs and scientific fact, but until then it's just not gonna happen.

Continuing on my one-man photo tour of Pittsburgh, today we come to two famous landmarks that are famous in completely different ways. First up, the U.S. National Aviary, which (I presume) is well-known outside of the city but which Pittsburghers will consistently be surprised to learn is in their city.

As it just so happens, I know absolutely nothing of interest about birds. Take this one as an example:


What kind of bird is it? I have no idea! Perhaps, judging by the facial markings, it is somehow related to raccoons? And why is it worthy of inclusion in the aviary? After all, they don't put pigeons in there, so presumably there's something special or noteworthy about this one. Alas, however, I don't know that either. Oh well!


They sure are colorful, though, birds.


Also, small.



I'm pretty sure that's a pelican. Right? Pelicans have the big, long beaks and the white feathers? Someone please tell me I'm not wrong about that.


I was a little pissed about this cage being here, because although I could stick my camera's lens through the bars I could not do so in such a way as to reliably get the bird in the shot. Presumably there's some Photoshoppy thing one could do to remedy this, but I'm too lazy and also cheap and also pretending to have principles to do that.


I'm pretty sure those are fake trees, but I wasn't about to go testing that theory.


I think this is my favorite bird: look at that awesome tail! Someone with knowledge of physics, please tell me if I'm right about this: as awesome as that tail is, it has to interfere with that bird's aerodynamics. But still - awesome!



This parrot wanted to show me its good side, I guess. Maybe it thought it was going to appear on a coin?


I sort of wanted to yell at this bird, "WAKE UP, YOU LAZY GODDAMN BIRD! IT'S TWO IN THE AFTERNOON AND ALL THE LIGHTS ARE ON!" But I didn't think that the other patrons would appreciate it and also, to be perfectly honest, if I could get away with it I'd be asleep at two in the afternoon, too.


Zombie parrot! ("Polly want braaaaaaaains...")



I'm not exactly sure why they named this penguin Elvis. He doesn't look all that fat to me, he isn't wearing a white rhinestone-covered jumpsuit, and I doubt that it has put any bullets into any TVs recently. I guess it could be a name shortage: one of the newer penguins was named, and I swear to you that I am not making this up, New Penguin.



Also, for some reason they have a sloth:


Now, like I said, I'm no bird expert. But I'm pretty damn sure that sloths are not birds. So this one is a bit confusing.


This one I could see as Elvis: check out the curly feathers on top. But no - they probably named this one "Warren G. Harding" or something equally absurd. Truly, the birdkeepers move in mysterious ways.


Happily, I'm confident that the owls at the aviary are what they seem.



This little bastard, the one with the white mustache-looking thing on its face, is the only bird whose species I learned - it's an Inca tern. The reason I learned its species is because I noticed that it had that mustache-looking thing and I thought, "Hey, that's pretty slick, I should definitely take a picture of that." And then the fucker spent the whole time flying around or else hiding behind this stupid fence. So I took a picture of it anyway, but more importantly I learned that Inca terns are assholes.


So much for the aviary. Next up is the Strip, which everyone in Pittsburgh knows but that is probably completely unknown outside of the city.


So scenic!


The Strip is sorta-kinda Pittsburgh's version of an outdoor market. Unlike the one we explored in Jerusalem, this one had mostly everything covered up, which is much less exotic but, one has to think, much safer. For example, unlike in Jerusalem, I did not see any birds landing on the food and eating it when I was in the Strip.


Also unlike Jerusalem, one out of every two stores here is Steelers-based.




This tent-store was selling individual mittens, which made me very confused. I have since tried not to think too hard about it.


It's always classy to make food in public using a store-bought spice blend: I've got one of those green cylinders in my spice cabinet at this very moment. So good job, very-slightly-incredulous-looking guy, you are an honor to your profession.

And finally, to wrap things up, another one of Pittsburgh's public staircases, first seen in this post.


I've got an especially impressive one of these coming up next time, so look forward to that.