02.16.09
Posted in Philosophy &c, Book Reviews - Non-Fiction at 6:20 pm by steve
Jim Holt became popular with his “Stop Me if You’ve Heard This: a History of Philosophy in Jokes.” It is, we understand, a clever way of wrapping philosophical ideas in jokes so that people who don’t wish to study philosophy at a university might become acquainted with the ideas of philosophers. The humor draws us to the ideas. It’s an ingeniously fun way to bring people to philosophical ideas. It’s a brilliant idea and a noble undertaking.
Holt, this week, reviewed the ideas in Cricthley’s Book of Dead Philosophers in the NYT book section. This time things are backwards. He sets out to make philosophers look ridiculous but succeeds in becoming the butt of his own joke. He spends most of his review space ostensibly refuting Epicurus’ arguments on why it is not logical to fear death. Epicurus’ argument goes like this:
1) Death is annhililation, so there is nothing to worry about.
2) Whether I die young or old, it doesn’t matter, either way I am dead.
3) Your existence in death is essentially like your existence before being born. There is no more reason to fear one more than the other.
It seems impossible to interpret the sense of “death” in this argument as anything other than the experience simply being dead: that is the best interpretation of the first clause. There is no sense in which the argument addresses what happens before that - how one comes to be dead, the processes, the experiences, or the implications of death on the living. The argument is simply about how one experiences the state of being dead in the first person.
We intend to argue:
1) There is nothing logically wrong with Epicurus’ argument.
2) Whether it is logical to fear death depends upon whether death actually is annihilation.
3) Either way, it is not unreasonable to fear death.
We may end up arguing for a conclusion not incompatible with Holt’s; but we worry greatly about the path he takes, because it persistently confuses the experiences of being alive with those of being dead.
Holt trots out some refutations by Nagel “Just because you don’t experience something as nasty … doesn’t mean it’s not bad for you. Suppose a person has a brain injury that reduces him to the mental condition of a contented baby.” Nagel argues that this is bad in the same way death is bad. Therefore death is bad and to be feared. But this argument fails to see the experience from the point of view of the person experiencing it. If one is actually having the experience Nagel describes, fear plays no role; for in that state one is neither anxious nor fearful nor in pain. It fact, billions of people regularly seek to exist in this state by taking alcohol or other mind-altering drugs. Some arrive and never leave. We may judge that to be bad; or we may not. But the badness associated with it has nothing to do with the way the person in question experiences it.
We might reasonably fear being in that state; but the reason we would fear it is not because of what one might actually experience when in the state. Rather, fear arises from a realization that we would have failed to meet an expectation of how we “ought” to be - namely rational, functional human beings capable of exerting control over our environment. We fear the loss of control. Having control over our environment may be a reasonable expectation of being alive, but it is clearly not a reasonable expectation of being dead. That’s one big difference between Nagel’s two cases.
Holt, in reasoning about the second argument, once again misunderstands the point of view. He asserts, “The second argument is just as poor. It implies that John Keats’s demise at 25 was no more unfortunate at 25 than Tolstoy’s at 82.”
Is Holt arguing that Keats’s experience after death was somehow worse than Tolstoy’s? I wonder how he would demonstrate that? That is what one would have to prove to demolish argument 2). But he does not attempt it. Instead, Holt points out “The amount of time you’re dead matters only if there is something undesirable about being dead.” This, of course, is the nub of Nagel’s argument. And it is why Nagel’s argument comes perilously close to violating the first premise set by Epicurus. Any contradiction here is Nagel’s, not Epicurus.’
Once again, Holt trots out Nagel to refute the third argument “… there is an asymmetry between the two abysses that flank your life. The time after you die is time of which your death deprives you. You might have lived longer…” Or you might have been born earlier.(1) Once again, Nagel’s argument succeeds only when one starts with the assumption that the experience of being dead is to be feared. But that’s not a logically tenable assumption upon which to base the argument; for that is what we are arguing to begin with.
One may reasonably wonder what Epicurus really thought. Was Epicurus seriously proposing that it was unreasonable to fear death? Or was he arguing that there is no logical imperative to fear death? Perhaps he was doing the latter simply to make a point. There is a great difference between the two. Logic is but the grinding machinery, not the food in thought process. If Epicurus was arguing that there was no logical imperative to fear death, his argument relies on the stated assumption that all sensation and feeling cease with death. Experience ends there.
If this assumption is correct, there is no logical imperative to fear one’s own death. It is an argument that has considerable force. And it can help one live a life with less fear of death. That’s can be both a liberating and an ennobling end; and it is an end to which most religions are disposed.
If, on the other hand one believes that one experiences pain after death, then there is reason to fear. The whole of the logical force of Epicurus’ argument rests on the idea that first person experience of all sorts ends with one’s own death.
Nagel and Holt argue as if Epicurus believed that it is unreasonable to fear death; and that, therefore, no reasonable person actually fears death. Their reasoning does not adhere to the bounds set by Epicurus. It is not unreasonable to argue that, despite Epicurus’ logical construction one might reasonably fear the process of dying; for it can be fraught with pain. One might even fear the state of death itself, despite logical arguments to the contrary. The difference is that good reasoning can take into account emotive inputs. In fact, good reasoning must do so.
Hume observed that all properly motivated actions arise from proper feeling; and reason properly serves empathetic emotions. He argued that if one asked “why?” to any explanation of moral propositions often enough and long enough, one always ended up with a statement about happiness or unhappiness. Death makes us unhappy. Pain makes us unhappy. Injustice makes us unhappy. Not just in the first person, but in the second and third person.
Epicurus was interested in happiness, too. If one believes all experience ends at death, it is illogical to argue that one is unhappy when one is dead. This does not make us stop fearing death; it only helps us understand it is not logically consistent to do so. We fear death not because of the logical imperative to do so but because this is physiologically the way we are wired. Fear is functional; but it is not always logical.
Today we are rediscovering that the worst criminals are, in fact, psychopaths. They are not stupid people; in fact, many appear to be remarkably intelligent and logical. They are, however, people for whom proper empathetic emotions are suppressed or absent. They experience perverse pleasure in observing the pain and suffering of others. By contrast, people who are socially oriented and well - adjusted are informed by empathetic feeling. This gives force to the idea that in the real world, moral action is informed by proper empathetic orientation, not by the force of pure logic.
Holt clearly understands the distinction between logical and reasonable, between pure reason and reasoning in the service of empathetic emotions: he exploits it in a rhetorical flourish at the end of the essay referring to the rather fearful “Falangist cry ‘Vive la Muerte’ - long live death.” This is an appeal to our emotions, not to logic.
We have reason to fear that cry since it is a reference not to one’s existence after one has ceased to exist, but to the whole painful process of dying. It is also a reference to our own experience of the tragedy of loss associated with the death of another. But the fear aroused by that cry has almost nothing to do with Epicurus’ argument.
Holt’s argument employs a time-honored philosopher’s trick of using the same word to signify materially different things. In the Epicurean argument, the linguistic token “death” stands for first person experiences after one is dead. Nothing else. There is, however, no point in Holt’s discussion in which Holt is referring to the same thing. Mostly, Holt is talking about experiences of the living in the face of death. (2)
In some cases he uses the same token to refer to death in some abstract, hypothetical case. Or to death as we now imagine it, anticipate it, and fear it. The abstraction includes both the process of dying and the possibility that the death occurs to someone else. For example, if we were to assume that Keats died leaving a wife, young children, and a parent or two to survive him, then there is a great measure of pathetic feeling surrounding his death. If we were to assume that Tolstoy died after all his known relatives and even his own housekeeper were dead, then there is nobody to mourn his passing. This makes Keats’ death more tragic to all living observers. Similarly, we can assume that civilization lost more in Keats’ death than in Tolstoy’s because the latter, presumably, had fewer good pieces of literature left in him.
The tragedy of Keats’ death is realized not by Keats himsel so much as it is by everyone else. Holt pretends otherwise.
Where the Falangists show up, however, “death” refers not only to death in the third person, but also to the process of experiencing the pains associated with dying in the first person. It refers to death of others brought on by violent means, especially by some institution that has no legal or moral authority to do so. It refers to the fearful pains associated with dying a violent death in the first person. It is certainly reasonable to fear, for instance, the process of being hacked to death by partisans. But this process is not at all what Epicurus was referring to.
Holt is confusing the things we experience after ceasing to exist with those we experience during process of transitioning to that state. He is confusing things we experience after the death of others with those we might experience after our own death. One might as well confuse what one remembers of one’s own experience of birth (what is null) with
i) The birth of others
ii) All the things that preceded our own birth.
Doing so logically nullifies the existence of others. And it denies history.
Epicurus’ argument is a logically sound one. To reject it, one must reject the first premise. If one can fully accept the first premise, then one must logically end where Hume did, asserting no logical reason to fear being dead. That, however, very much different from fearing the Falangist cry - it’s as different as being alive and being dead.
NOTES
(1) If one accepts the premise that when one is dead, all experience ceases, then there can be no difference between the experience that precedes life from the experience that follows it. To try to argue that there is would be as silly as mounting a deep inquiry into what happened before the start of the Big Bang - i.e. the start of time. When there is no matter there is no time; where there is no time, there is no “before.”
(2) It may seem like a trivial distinction - the distinction between dying and being dead; but it is no more trivial than the distinction between the process of having your house painted and living in a freshly painted house, or the distinction between the process of getting a root canal and living thereafter with a tooth that doesn’t hurt. A failure to make these vital distinctions can lead to serious errors of judgment. I hate getting root canals and I hate having my house painted, but I enjoy living with the outcomes.
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06.17.08
Posted in Philosophy &c, In the Kitchen, Rant and Rave at 6:51 pm by steve
An Extended Complaint About Kitchen Aide’s Customer Service
Lean thinking was the business rage of the late eighties. Ideas in lean thinking include reducing redundancy, reducing inventory, and reducing the amount of capital one uses to achieve an end. There is much good to be found in lean thinking; but as is true of every good idea it is essential to bring the idea into practice, to use it to inform decisions, but to stay clear of letting it control your business or your life. Lean thinking is one business tool. No matter what its proponents claim it is not the whole of a business.
Let us construct a hypothetical example of a customer service center for a kitchen counter-top appliance manufacturer. Assume it stocks and ships several hundred SKUs. All of them are replacement parts for things like mixers, blenders, toasters, and so on.
Now, let us assume that the management of this enterprise has the lean thinking religion. That is, they organize all of their business approaches around the lean thinking idea, assuming that what else there is to running the business well will take care of itself. Perhaps they lose sight of the idea that the business purpose of the enterprise is to keep parts flowing to customers. Instead, they see only the operational mandate to minimize costs by keeping a razor-thin inventory. Or rather, to arrange a flow of goods from suppliers to customers in a way that reduces the inventory at the service center to zero.
In fact, the optimal solution in terms of minimizing cost of managing the center is to arrange it so that an order for a part and the part itself arrive at the center on the same day. This would allow one to keep zero inventory. And it would provide prompt service for each customer. It’s the best of all possible worlds.
If the scale of the business is large and the number of SKUs is small, it is likely that the average amount of volume for each SKU is relatively large compared to the random noise in order volume. And one can schedule regular deliveries for most SKU’s - maybe weekly or even daily. If one has been in the business for decades, one can develop high-quality time-series forcasting models for parts orders. One can actually hope to approach the ideal situation in which a part and order arrive on the same day.
If the parts are not of some highly time-sensitive nature, then two or three week delivery times may be assumed to be acceptable. In this case, all one needs to do is to arrange weekly or biweekly deliveries of virtually every SKU that might ship. Inventory then becomes nothing but evidence that one has overestimated the order volume of an SKU. A well-managed SKU, then, is never in stock.
In this model, the optimal solution from a cost standpoint is not to carry stock but to carry a standing backorder quantity on all parts. The game is no longer to minimize inventory, but to manage the backorder list in a way that loses the fewest customers. If one gets incredibly good at the game, one needs not stock any parts. And the customer remains oblivious to the fact.
The model above has a glossy kind of appeal that would give lean-thinking fundies wet dreams. And if all one can see in a business is the goal of minimizing costs, there is no other possible model. But is minimizing cost the only game? A business with no costs is no business at all. A business with no customers has the lowest operational costs of all.
Cost minimization is unconditionally good to the extent that it improves efficiency - delivering the same net results with fewer resources. But cost minimization is unconditionally bad when it kills your business. All the stuff that actually matters lies somewhere in between.
You have to actually connect the operational details with the business goals. One of those goals has to be delivering stuff to the customer. Lean strategies that fail to deliver have ceased cutting fat and started amputating limbs. This is where the model begins to fail.
The model above starts with a hidden assumption. It assumes that parts are ordered one at a time. It is not an unreasonable assumption if one is shipping blender parts to housewives. It might work most of the time in this or some other contexts. If one has business practices that always treat the order of any part in a manner that is consistent with this assumption, one has a viable operation. But what happens if someone orders more than one SKU?
I ran into a very interesting example of this in a recent exchange with Kitchen Aide’s customer service department. Last November my wife placed an order for some parts with them, several different SKUs. In April, when they had still not shipped, she cancelled the order. In May I tried again. I started online filling out a customer request. Nearly two weeks later, after getting no response, I called the company. The first call was shuffled through the auto-answering maze. I waited five minutes. Then there were some rings at the other end. Then dial tone.
On the second or third try, after ten or twenty minutes of waiting I got a real person. Long queues is a sign of lean thinking. It screams “The customer’s waiting time costs us nothing.” Not true, but that’s another argument.
I placed an order for the parts. I was told that everything was in stock except for one part, and it was due the next day. Roughly three weeks passed and I did not receive the order. So I called customer service and spoke to Janet.
This time I was told that “all the parts were on backorder.”
“How could this happen?” I asked. “All the parts, save one, were in stock when I placed the order. And that part was due the next day.”
“The order is configured to ship when all the parts are available,” answered Janet. “Some are coming in this week and some are coming in next week.” In other words, parts that should have been shipped to me were shipped to other customers because of the way my order was configured.
I suddenly understood the game. And I explained it to Janet in a forceful and unpleasant way. “While my order waits for food processor blades, all the blender jars are shipped to other customers until there are none left. When the food processor blades arrive, the blender jars are out of stock. But while we wait for jars, the blades go out of stock again. And we are back to where we started. This process repeats itself forever. Or until one cancels the order.”
Janet assured me that what I was explaining was impossible. And that the parts would be in stock maybe this week. Or maybe by the end of this month. Really, I had no cause for concern.
But I have had graduate courses in statistics and in inventory control. I have a good imagination. I have also worked in industry and I have lived among fundamentalists of all sorts: I know how insane things can get. I understand something about what might have happened and why. I was capable of setting up a model of their operation in my own mind and proving to my own satisfaction that unless the system were fooled into treating my order that had four separate SKUs as four separate orders, I would absolutely never receive any part of my order. I was upset that the whole of the customer service organization was completely oblivious to this glaring problem and that it meant that people with smaller orders who ordered after I did always got their stuff first.
The special quality of the idealized operation we described above is that it assures that most parts are on backorder most of the time. It is not an accident. It is not even viewed as an undesireable side effect of minimizing inventory. It is the operational goal of the inventory management system. Now, if regular deliveries always brought in more parts of every SKU than there were backorder quantities, one could still recover.
But if one were designing the system to be brutally efficient on a day-to-day operating sense, then one would take deliveries five days a week. And it would almost always be the case that some SKUs would arrive only on certain days of the week.
On a given week blender jars would arrive on Monday. And they would all ship out Monday. Food processor blades would arrive Tuesday. And they would all ship out Tuesday. And so on. Such an arrangement would distribute labor over the week and achieve certain returns of scale in the process of moving parts from incoming queue into outgoing queue.
So, if a person placed an order that included a blender jar and a food processor blade; and if that person specified not to ship until all the parts were in stock, it was a mathematical certainty that they would never receive their order because it could never ship. The parts would never be in the warehouse at the same time. It was not an accident of the design, it was a goal of the design.
It is at this point that an enlightened business manager might begin to understand how lean-thinking fundamentalism is strangling his business. The lean-thinking model eliminates all sales to customers who order more than one part at a time. It assures that their broken appliances remain broken forever. It drives them to buy from competitors with inferior products who have business processes that allow them to actually ship product against complicated orders.
Now, I am absolutely certain that if some person from Kitchen Aide were to read this essay they would categorically deny every part of it. That’s fine; but as I write this I am still waiting for those parts my wife ordered in November. I am still waiting for those same parts I ordered in mid-May. The explanation may be subtly different; but the results are the same.
In the mean time we bought an Oster blender that turns ice cubes into snowdrifts in a way that my Kitchen-Aide blender never could approach. But it makes such a godawful racket that I fear it will cause hearing loss. And while it boasts “all metal drive” it also has a base that has the look and feel of really cheap plastic. I look at it, and I feel sad because all I can see is the day i throw it out, another tangible symbol of the gap between the hopes we have for products and what they deliver.
We live in a marvelous age where all sorts of stuff is incredibly cheap. We have learned to manufacture efficiently. We have learned to distribute efficiently. But there are still gaping holes in our ability to manage effectively. I just want a blender that can be made to work, even after parts break; and one that does not make me deaf. I’m sure that there exists a solution to this problem; but the first two tries were failures.
When you have to throw away the first two instances of any good before settling on one that works, you begin to wonder whether the current world is not built upon false economies. You begin to wonder whether lean thinking has not just cut the fat but also amputated important organs; the principle organ of thought, for instance.
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05.03.08
Posted in Philosophy &c, Science & Religion at 6:28 pm by steve
In the day it was written the King James Bible stood as a symbol of the Reformation, a realization of Renaissance and Enlightenment principles. Today it stands as a symbol of the past, a day where witches were burned at the stake and religious practice was prescribe by the state. Are we turning today in that direction? It’s a much bigger question than we have time to answer; but we hope that this little piece succeeds in framing the question.
What is Medieval?
Renaissance artists gave the middle ages a bad reputation. Mostly, the middle ages deserved it. It was a superstiious age. An age governed by a greedy and corrupt church and peopled by men who were almost all illiterate and provincial. The medieval ideas of self-sufficiency, superstition, continuity, cyclicality, religious bias, and stasis that governed medieval thought were overthrown by the opening up of the New World and the establishment of reliable trading routes to the far east. The enlightenment was a response to new possibilities, new frontiers, new ideas, new ways of doing things.
Since the end of the Apollo program, however, the world in general and Americans in particular have been turning inward and looking backward. The impulses that ruled medieval life are gaining momentum. Not all of these are necessarily bad. Self-sufficiency is a useful goal for any society when it comes to issues of food and energy, for example. When these are in ample supply, most other things might possibly follow. When not, the others don’t matter very much. But most of the medieval principles run in opposition to a happy, prosperous, egalitarian existence rich in art and culture.
The great objections to the medieval lie in its mental attitudes. Medieval thought is bound by superstition. It denies or ignores science. It preys on ignorance. It closes peoples’ minds. It exploits and magnifies minor power differences creating a highly stratified society. It magnifies and exploits cultural differences, creating Balkanized areas. All of these things combine to make it hostile to arts and sciences.
The same hostility is one that blossomed during the Reagan revolution in America. That same revolution brought an appeal to “deregulation” and “free trade” that is in opposition to medieval principles. But it created a “trickle down economics” and a class divide of hyper-rich set in opposition to lower classes. And it began reserving for that class special priviledges that would allow it to propagate its power advantages over the middle and lower classes. If this class divide proves durable it will be the start of a kind of feudal power system that resembles those that preceded the French revolution. And this divide will pose more difficulties to the lives of Americans than the modest gains of free trade ever could. The Reagan revolution promises to return Americans to a life of servitude of the sort their acestors left Europe to escape.
Changes in culture such as the enlightenment, the French revolution, and the rise of democracy do not happen all at once. They happen by accretion. More than four hundred years elapsed between Marco Polo’s trip to China and the writings of enlightenment authors such as Rousseau, Montesquiieu, Voltaire, Hume, and Jefferson. Similarly the retrograde motion from a happy, liberal democracy to a world of feudal lords and serfs cannot happen in a generation. One would expect that the trend would take some time to develop.
Looking back we will see the elimination of the study of civics from the high school cirriculum to be one such event. We will see Reaganomics and the culture of greed to be another. We might compare the thinking of Rawls and Nozyck and decide that at the point in time when society chose the assertion of rights in the first person over an attempt to deal with property in a way that recognized a kind of joint stake humans share by virtue of being social creatures, we turned our backs on liberal ideas and doomed democracy to failure. Judge Stevens suggested we were doing just this in his dissent in the landmark decision of Nordlinger v. Hahn. And Kevin Phillips comes at the worry from another angle in American Dynasty.
It’s hard to know where this arc of descent will take u;s but when we get there we might look back and see many markers of the descent. One is a kind of nostalgia for the past, an impulse to connect with it in a way that turns its back on things easily judged to be better. One example is an impulse all humans have to be attracted to things they held most dearly in their youth. It’s a natural impulse. It’s one that accounts for such things as the durability of pair-bonding and the fact that music we listened to in our youth casts a spell on us from which we cannot easily escape. No matter what I might think of these songs today, “Colour My World” and “Stairway to Heaven” will always have an effect on me.
But sometimes our yearning for the past seems to be unrelated to actual experience. We imagine simpler times to be stripped of the stresses of modern times. But they were not. The stresses were simply different. Today they are more abstract; then they were more related to the physical environment, perhaps. It may be that we are better equipped to deal with the stresses of simpler times than the ones of today. And if that is true, then we have arguably created a way of living that is out of balance with our nature. But it’s not clear that medieval times offered the kinds of primitive satisfactions that our romantic imaginations attach to them. Social structures were rigid and material shortages prevailed. In a sense, it was the worst of all possible conditions.
Attention, Shoppers
It seems odd at first, but this argument was provoked by reflection on the following, a passage quoted from the writer’s almanac and sent to me by a friend:
It was on this day in 1611 that the first edition of the King James Bible was published in England.
It was a chaotic time in England, and King James I thought that a new translation of the Bible might help hold the country together. There had been several English translations of the Bible already, and each English version of the Bible had different proponents. King James wanted a Bible that would become the definitive version, a Bible that all English people could read together.
King James appointed a committee of 54 linguists for the project. For the first few years, the scholars worked privately on the translation, and starting in 1607, the collaborative work was assembled. It went to press in 1610, and the first finished King James Bibles appeared in 1611.
Many of the turns of phrase in the King James Bible came from previous translations, but it was the King James Version that set them all in stone. Several of its phrases have become enduring English expressions, such as “the land of the living,” “sour grapes,” “like a lamb to slaughter,” “the salt of the earth,” “the apple of his eye,” “to give up the ghost, and “the valley of the shadow of death.”
And I wondered out loud what the current fascination with the KJV comes from:
I am really intrigued by the recent fascination with the story of the KJV. This is the second blip I’ve seen about it recently. One was in a major news publication. I have never seen one before, in all my life. I wonder where the interest comes from?
The KJV is a kind of iconic expression of the durability of the Reformation. There had been for centuries before an effort to commit the scriptures to the vulgate. The people who were behind this were essentially the same ones who backed Protestantism, if I am not mistaken. James, as a Catholic king ruling a land that not long before had been overrun by Cromwell and his Protestant roundheads, probably viewed the project in part as an investment in the continuity of his neck.
The KJV is quite an achievement, though. It is sometimes brilliant in the turn of phrase, but it is rarely too difficult to understand. College sophomores today may have some difficulty following substantial bits of Shakespeare read aloud; but they will rarely have so much difficulty following the KJV.
The KJV is dated, however. A significant portion of the words it uses simply have different meanings today. In contemporary usage “suffer,” \, almost never takes the sense of “allow” or “permit” as in “suffer the children.” And “day” which was then used to denote any period of time, short or long, twenty four hours or twenty four million years, today generally refers to just twenty four hours. My guess is that one could identify a thousand words, perhaps ten times that many whose usage is so materially different today that reading the KJV would give the wrong impression of the author’s original sense. (or of the sense in conveyed in the documents used by the KJV translators )
Whatever one might choose to believe about religion, one must view the KJV is a cultural icon. It was a material expression of the notion of empowering the common man, an idea that seems deeply ingrained in Germanic culture. One might even argue that it did more to standardize English usage than any single document in history. It was one book that could be found in almost any household that had readers. And it was one document from which all the faithful read for almost four centuries. It’s hard to find a document in the English language with broader and longer exposure.
The Magical Mystery Tour
Again, why should we suddenly care about the KJV translation? Since WWII there have been two or three new renderings of biblical writings into modern English. Some worked very hard to preserve the sense but sacrificed beauty; others worked very hard to preserve the artistic and mystical qualities of the writings while yielding a bit of ground on the sense. By comparison to any of these, however, the KJV fails quite compellingly to deliver sense and clarity without the reader doing more work than most readers of the KJV typically do. So why this interest in the KJV? It cannot have to do with the question of how to understand scripture better.
My own guess is that one of the attractions of religion is its mystical attraction. And part of that mystical attraction lies in the very difficulty one encounters in decoding “sacred” messages. It is a vestigal impulse borne of the infantile need to make the leap into a lingual world. We are drawn to the puzzles that occupied our minds before we mastered language. A Bible that has its own “language” that is different from our own yet somehow comprehensible satisfies this need better than a Bible that is clear and plain. A bible with a hard to decipher message moves us into a time when “the world lay at our feet.” We could get what we wanted, if only we knew how to ask for it. Or so we thought. Religious practice sometimes restores us to this happy state.
What we see happening is a re-engagement with the mystical. Since humans get much satisfaction from mystical entanglements, this, by itself, is not a big problem. Humans rightly ought to engage with the mystical in order to live meaningful lives. Science cannot provide this.
But reengagement with the mystical sometimes means denying science, and if this behavior is taken as part of a pattern of denying all other enlightenment principles, one might begin to wonder how close we may be coming to a new age of stasis and the kinds of inward-looking impulses that accompany it. Power concentrates in high places. In high places, science, for its failure to enthrall, has been overthrown. There too, ethical reasoning for its inabiltiy to deliver excess profit has been overthrown. All that is left is power and mystical impulses.
We await the rack. Or worse.
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12.03.07
Posted in Philosophy &c, Social, Rant and Rave at 2:59 pm by steve
“Kill her, Kill her.” That’s what the fundamentalist crowds of Khartoum were chanting during the trial of a western school teacher who had allowed her students to name a teddy bear “Mohammed.” The judges handed down a somewhat more moderate sentence, 15 days in prison. The schoolteacher, Gillian Gibbons, a young British woman, had offended Islam by allowing a stuffed animal to bear the name of its greatest prophet. And this, the fundamentalist crowds of Khartoum found heretical.
The scene hearkens to a Monty Python sketch in which a young woman is on trial for being a witch. At one point it is proposed that the young woman be thrown into the moat; if she floats she is a witch, and must be stoned. A bit later one of the townspeople complains “She turned me into a newt.” The judge scowls in disbelief. The townsperson mumbles “I got better.” What this woman’s actual offense might have been I cannot recall. Whatever it was it had no basis in law. And more tolerant sensibilites won over less tolerant ones. But only just.
The teddy bear named Mohammed scene is described in a piece by Mark Steyn. The subtitle of Steyn’s piece suggests that the difference between Sudan and the United States is “the ability to give and take offense.” But whether this is true or not depends a bit on what it means. Certainly in a society characterized by fundamentalist values such as the one of the uneducated Sudanese, tolerance of other points of view is not considered a virtue. And certainly in the Anglophone tradition since at least the early seventeenth century tolerance of other regligious points of view and other social methods is considered a virtue. So if Steyn is referring to the idea of tolerance as a virtue when he uses the term “ability to give and take offense” I would have to agree with him.
But it seems that this is not what Steyn is talking about. He complains about people who wish to remove “God” from the pledge of allegiance to the flag. And this is not an inherently tolerant point of view. Nor is tolerance a virtue widely preached among the NR faithful.
Now I happen to have a very different point of view about the pledge of allegiance. I happen to believe that a nation must earn what allegiance it gets. And that pledges of allegiance, if they are thought to be necessary, are a sign of bad faith on the part of a government toward its people. For a pledge forces honorable people to behave constructively toward a government even once that government works to undermine the general welfare of a people. Now I admit that at any given point in time a well run legitimate government will be doing a number of things with which good and honorable people disagree. And this should not be cause for undermining a government. But when a government is actively engaged in destroying the lives and livelihoods of most of its citizens or when it is completely unprepared to protect them from highly destructive external forces, it may sometimes be viewed as illegitimate. The pledge, if it means anything, removes this possibility.
The pledge, then, because it implicitly denies this contractual point of view, is antithetical to the idea not just of democracy but of all forms of government that assume a contractual bond between government and governed. In other words, the pledge of allegiance actively undermines the idea that government is properly judged in terms of how well it governs - or at least on how well it intends to govern. It undermines the idea that allegiance is an earned property of good government. This is the fastest shortcut to bad government.
The pledge calls all honorable people to respond to country as the religious do to their God. The great difference being, however, that many religions today encourage their followers to study the founding texts of the religion and to judge their own beliefs in light of those writings; while the proponents of the pledge of allegiance also argued against the study of civics in schools, effectively making the writings of the founding fathers and the ideals upon which this nation are founded less available and less widely circulated. Belief in the nation becomes more an act of blind faith than it does an act of reason. It becomes a kind of fundamentalist act.
I am, therefore, a little ambivalent over the whether the term “God” appears in the pledge of allegiance. I believe that, to the extent its existence encourages people to maintain a kind of moral framework that lives outside that encouraged by their government, it ought to stay so long as the pledge is said. So long as people imagine that there is a moral framework that informs law there is some tiny hope that some parts of the body of law will agree with good ethical principles. I yearn for the day when it is a moot point.
I disagree with the practice of public prayer in schools. If people wish to sequester themselves in rooms after school hours and practice Yoga, or Wicca, or Buddhism, or Catholicism, or Islam, or Methodicism or any sort of legitimate religious practice, I have no problem with that. I categorically reject public prayer in schools because it conflates religion with nationalism. While I am inclined to reject both; I wish to do so for different reasons.
I reject prayer in schools not because I am offended by prayer in schools. It is not because it causes offense to others. No. It’s because it turns us into the very people who wish to burn witches and kill clueless teachers who allow stuffed animals to be named after sacred personages. Homogenizing God and Country is the most effective way of producing a huge class of fundamentalists of the sort who burn witches and chant “kill her, kill her” in the streets of Khartoum. Nor is it an accident that Darfur is on the western fringe of such a fundamentalist nation. This is the natural consequence of fundamentalism run rampant.
Mr Steyn’s paper routinely panders to the fundamentalist right in America. It does so in this article by calling for prayer in schools, by calling for a pledge of allegiance containing God, And as it does so it strengthens the fundamentalist fringe by giving its ideas more currency.
The great irony of Steyn’s piece is that Gillian Gibbons is saved from the fundamentalist mob by a judge who, in the eyes of that mob would undoubtedly seem like a great liberal activist. He would be viewed contemptuously by them for undermining the precious fundamentalist values of the Moslem masses of Khartoum. Yet here in the US. the National Review publishes its own “Judicial Watch” in which it takes to task judges who, when viewed from the point of view of good old fundamentalists are doing things that are offensive.
If acts that are liberalizing - acts that tend to get us to view the world from other points of view - they will axiomatically be seen as being offensive by fundamentalists. On the other hand, not all offensive acts are necessarily liberalizing. I might call Mr. Steyn a kike and cause offense. Because it is a pejorative term and causes offense, Mr. Steyn might argue that doing exactly this furthers the cause of western civilization. I would agree with thim that it is offensive. But I would never be able to understand how, outside simply being offensive, it serves any liberalizing purpose.
In fact, such a comment could reasonably elicit a defensive reaction from Mr. Steyn and at the end of the conversation it is most likely that we would find our fundamentalist prejudices more firmly entrenched. And this conflict would tend to make both of us more firmly entrenched in our own fundamentalist biases.
So Steyn is mostly wrong. And to the extent that he is right, he is right by accident; liberalizing forces offend fundamentalists simply because fundamentalists have so much of their selves invested in their closed-minded views of the world. The differences between the fundamentalists of the west and those of Khartoum is a matter of degree, not of kind. Steyn and the paper he writes for, I fear, are not drawing us in a liberalizing direction. They are not working to preserve the benefits of the differences that exist between the west and the Moslem mideast. They are, if anything, working to establish an oppositional fundamentalism, one no less based on arbitrariness and blind faith. One that is gratuitously offensive, evidently.
If they succeed, the following question will again make sense in a judicial debate: “Does Gillian Gibbons float?”
Permalink
09.23.07
Posted in Philosophy &c, Social at 5:49 am by steve
Shock and amazement has accompanied the release of several hundred photographs taken by an officer at Auschwitz depicting functionaries at the prison in their daily lives. They are depicted drinking beer, eating blueberries, joking, cavorting, laughing, smiling. This is not the face of evil. Nor does it seem to be the face of evil people. These people could be out neighbors, our friends, our co-workers, our relatives, our children. “They offer an interesting perspective on the psychology of those perpetrating genocide,” notes director of the Holocaust Museum, Sara Bloomfield.
Indeed, the acts they committed were monstrous. So we expect that the people who committed them must be monsters. But that’s not the way it works. Stanley Milgram showed that when people were placed in a particular context they would inflict pain or even put other people at risk of serious injury or death. The requirement was that they be working as part of an institution that they believed had legitimacy; that they believed that their behavior was necessary to the goals of that institution; and that responsibility for any harm could reasonably be shifted to the institution.
It turns out that most of the people in Milgram’s study entrusted much or all moral judgment to the institution. They are compliant with institutional ideas and ideals. They behaved as they are expected to behave. And when they did so, they do not exercise independent moral judgment.
The idea that people are social beings who act in institutional roles rather than individual ones has been employed in Africa in two recent settings. One was the “truth commissions” set up in South Africa with the end of colonial European rule. The implicit assumption was that people who perpetrated violence against blacks did so not out of personal animus, but because this was their institutional role. Such a point of view would absolve a person within the apartheid police apparatus of violent or inhumane acts they would have taken to enforce government policies of apartheid. Rather, the reason for their behavior was because they were performing institutional duties to that government.
The great advantage of doing this is that it breaks the cycle of violence. Change the way officially sanctioned way of looking at race relationships so that racial differences are no longer a reason for power differences; and make it impossible to think that behaving in the old ways is acceptable within the society, and behavior changes without creating huge reactionary backlash.
Similarly, trials of Hutus in Rwanda have had a similar element. The Hutus, when they hacked their Tutsi neighbors to death with machetes were responding to calls by public authorities at the time to do just this. Therefore, one might argue, they behaved in a way that was supportive of the institution in power. While it is true that some Hutus have been punished, and many more still live as refugees in other nations, some participants have been reconciled with their tribal communities.
If we think about the Milgram experiments; and if we acknowledge that people who live in societies do have some practical limits placed on their abilities to think independently and to act on independent thought, then we realize that the people in those old Nazi photos are not just monsters. They are ordinary people who are sometimes called by their duties to society to act as monsters. And they were behaving rationally, considering the society they inhabited.
The reason we are shocked that those photos do not depict monsters is that we have been conditioned to believe one of the most dangerously evil ideas there is: that people who do certain bad things are so inhuman as to be recognizably deformed. Rarely is this true. And if it ever is true, it is typically true of people who have spent most of their lives pursuing evil ends. But much evil is not apparent to the eye. Most of what we see as evil has compelling logic. In fact, the logic of “evil” is frequently a great deal more compelling than the logic of “good.” More than a third of German society fervently believed in all that Hitler stood for. They thought he would transform Germany into a powerful nation, restoring Germany to a place of prominence on the international stage.
The logic that underlay the lives of the people in these photos was almost indistinguishable from the logic that underlies our own lives as they are defined by ordinary daily events and by the political events that go on around us. As people, they had hopes, dreams, and ambitions. They absorbed the ideas they heard most often in the press. They interacted with people they knew, with institutions. Many are in their twenties or thirties; they grew up entirely in the world of the Third Reich. They believed what they were told. They did what they could to do to be successful.
But they lived in a blighted time. Just as our own political leaders use language to dehumanize whole swathes of the human race in order to create the mental space that would allow us to do violence to them, so too did their political leaders use language to dehumanize whole swathes of the human race in order to create the mental space for violence. Nobody believes and lives the great body of mythology that their culture creates more than the ambitious twenty-something person who is rewarded for their compliance. It is not uncommon that the brightest are rewarded most, making it all the more difficult for the group as a whole to exercise independent moral thought.
But in Germany it was worse. Germany had thought police. And they made unutterable all thoughts that so much as questioned party dogma. The simple fact that these prison functionaries lived and worked in such a society and under such institutions made them no less human. In fact, one can argue that their commitment to the social institutions that reared them is behavior that in any society would be lauded as compliant and, therefore, exemplary. These were the future leaders of German society in training for their leadership roles.
We have created much the same conditions in Baghdad. Only now, instead of SS stormtroopers or prison camp guards, we have “independent contractors.” They shoot and kill fleeing Iraqi men, women, and children by the dozens with essentially no provocation and with impunity. They are outside the reach of Iraqi law. And there is no US institution set up to systematically police their behavior and punish malfeasance. They are paid $600 a day to behave this way. That is the institutional reward for this behavior. If we believe that the shooting of innocent civilians in a foreign land is morally wrong, it is incumbent upon us to change laws and institutional beliefs and practices stateside so that such behavior is not preferentially rewarded.
One could argue that there is an institutional difference between a government that sets out to exterminate a group of people and one that exterminates them as a consequence of bad policy and flawed execution. But the result looks approximately the same to the victims. In both cases there are dead bodies of civilians numbering in the hundreds of thousands or the millions. And in both cases institutional malfeasance is at the root of the problem.
When we think of the family photos of the Blackwater contractors who shot 28 men, women, and children in the back as they were trying to flee, do we expect to see faces contorted with evil? Probably not. Nor is it likely that most of the people doing the shooting hoped to be in that situation in Iraq. If any did, they probably should be doing work that does not put them in reach of or in line-of-sight with any guns or munitions. As evil as their acts are and as sad as the consequences are for all touched by the violence, we need to understand that the people who pulled the trigger, were not monsters, even if their acts were monstrous.
Ideas matter. And the currency of ideas circulated by the neocons and their affiliated supporters have led us to the brink. An important reason for the existence of Worry Wart and for Devil’s Dictionary Defiled is to argue that institutions matter; and that the ideas they stand for and promote matter. If we start out with the same ideas and practices as the Nazis, and we build our institutions to exploit ethnocentrism, promote fundamentalism, integrate church and state, and dominate the world; then we will doom ourselves to behaving in pretty much the same way. And to meet the same end. When we are off-duty, we may still have fun drinking beer or eating blueberries or “scamming for babes;” but what we do when we are fulfilling our society’s expectations for us may prove to be crimes against humanity. In the end, if we are people of conscience, we will have bad dreams. And our grandchildren, convinced we were monsters, will deny being related to us.
Permalink
09.21.07
Posted in Uncategorized, Philosophy &c at 8:25 pm by steve
Mandela is dead. Saddam Hussein killed the Mandelas.
Who said this?
- The village idiot.
- An isolated American with neither interest in nor minimal functional knowledge of foreign affairs
- The nominal president of the United States.
- Just an ordinary fella who likes beer and who can’t be bothered to get the facts right.
- All of the above
- Nobody of importance. The actual quote should read “Well, Mandela is dead, because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.”
The quotation is from a paragraph in which Dubya implicitly blames Saddam for pretty much every tragedy that has happened in Africa in the last twenty years and for some that haven’t. The quotation goes on to say that Saddam “split up families,” a reference that might be more accurate in describing the Hutu uprising in Rwanda than in describing Saddam’s behavior. Mandela, similarly, is a citizen of South Africa and is very much alive. While he lives, his spirit of reconciliation and cooperation is the underlying fabric mesh that holds together the potentially explosive political world of South African politics.
There is, however, a very symbolic sense in which Mandela is dead.
Mandela is a symbol of liberalism. It was Mandela who advocated a “truth commission” for South Africa that would uncover the abuses of apartheid and forgive them. The reasoning was that the behavior was a logical part of thinking about the world in the wrong way. And if one exposed the consequences of this bad thinking, it would be impossible to choose to behave the same way. And it worked. There is something profoundly liberal and liberating in such a point of view. One simply cannot stop evil by killing bad people. One must stop evil by changing behaviors: theirs and ours. Mandela understood this as nobody in power in the US seems to do.It is the most liberal of ideas. And the most Christian, too.
What is required for Mandela’s solution to work is for people to see humanity in those with different political points of view, different cultures, different experiences, and different economic interests, and to acknowledge that humanity. This is not the style of the Bush-neocon politics of hatred and fear. Indeed, in America the spirit of Mandela is departed. Mandela is as good as dead. His ideas are forgotten by at least half of America. But Saddam had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was the people who went after Saddam who killed the spirit of Mandela.
Bush has confused his own behavior and that of the neocons with the behavior of Saddam. He won’t be the first. Or the last.
Permalink
09.14.07
Posted in Philosophy &c at 2:43 am by steve
Or, How to Blow up the World
In a recent piece at the Weekly Standard, Mathias Kunzel argues that the attack on the WTC has its roots in Nazi hatred of Jews. This image is introduced in the first paragraph:
“In the latter stages of the war, I never saw Hitler so beside himself as when, as if in a delirium, he was picturing to himself and to us the downfall of New York in towers of flame,” wrote Albert Speer in his diary. “He described the skyscrapers turning into huge burning torches and falling hither and thither, and the reflection of the disintegrating city in the dark sky.”
Then he goes on to make an argument that goes approximately like this:
1) Hitler hated Jews.
2) Hitler intended to fly planes into NYC buildings to destroy Jews.
3) All people who intend to fly planes into NYC buildings hate Jews. Therefore,
4) Hamas and al Qaeda are organizations that hate Jews. Therefore,
5) We need to bomb Iran.
We are willing to grant Kunzel the first proposition on inspection. We must take Speer’s word for it that the second proposition is true. Getting from the second to the third proposition is tricky. And this is what most of Kunzel’s argument is about. The fourth proposition Kunzel gets to by means of the third. But we see problems with the method. Of course there are other methods. If these organizations gain power by exploiting a predisposition to hatred as a means to another end, they have the effect of increasing hatred of Jews even if it is not their main purpose. But how we make sense of these relationships matters.
A significant problem lies in the whole question of who or what is a Jew-hater? And is it reasonable to argue that Jew-haters need to be eliminated? Or what? And that leads us to the final proposition: anyone who believes that any group that poses a risk to one’s own happiness ought to be obliterated before that risk is realized will find that the fifth follows from the fourth.
To start, Kunzel argues that all of today’s “terrorist organizations” descend from the Moslem Brotherhood, a group that was established in 1928. He asserts that their goals and means are essentially the same. That they hate Jews and resort to thuggery to express this hatred. There is certainly some truth in the idea that groups that are oppositional to Jews have something in common. But there are different kinds of of opposition. Not all opposition is created equal. And we need to be able to make meaningful distinctions between them.
Kunzel takes pains to show that the Moslem Brotherhood was generously funded by Nazi Germany. And he uses this idea to help convince us that the Moslem Brotherhood hated Jews in the same ways and for the same reasons as did the Nazis. But what is more likely is that Germany had identified the Moslem Brotherhood as being the most influencial organization in the Levant. Germany had aspirations of power; and it calculated that it could best exercise power and influence in the region. Kunzel notes that Gamal Abdul Nassar was an influential member of the group. He went on to become Egypt’s ruler. And was so for several decades.
Germany, at that point in history, was competing with Britain for influence in the region. And it needed an inside-track to counter Britain’s post WWI regional dominance. So Germany’s pre-war association with the Moslem Brotherhood need not have been ideological. There was no reason to believe that the Moslem Brotherhood’s goals or methods vis-a-vis Jews had anything to do with Germany’s. All that was required was that they not be mutually incompatible. It is reasonable to see German support of the Moslem Brotherhood as nothing more than an exercise in realpolitik to gain influence in a strategic oil area.
Kunzel cites a riot carried out by the Brotherhood in Cairo that resulted in the death of seven Jews and the injury of many more. This piece of information does establish that the Moslem Brotherhood had antipathy toward the Jews. And it establishes that it occasionally resorted to thuggery to express that antipathy.
But the action in Cairo strikes one as being categorically different from the actions taken in wartime Germany. The former is a kind of mob action. And mobs get out of control. The latter is government action. And governments are presumed to be in control. To harrass and annoy is fundamentally different from planning to eliminate and carrying out that plan.
Kunzel fails to convince us that the Moslem Brotherhood’s association with Germany had anything to do with positions on Jews. And he makes no argument whatsoever that links that association with Hamas or al Qaeda. He fails, therefore, to establish that these organizations harbor any institutional hatred of Jews. They may exploit hatred of the Jews. Or they may have institutional disagreements with Jews about the legal status of the state of Israel; but each of these is distinct. In light of this, his argument fails.
The main problem, however, with the argument is not the simple logic, it is the assumptions about terms and relationships. Kunzel’s argument begs for a definition of terms. What, precisely, does he mean by hatred of Jews? To what extent is it because Jews are Jewish per se? To what extent is it an artifact of other natural factors? To what extent is he referring, rather, to hatred of specific acts, or to specific attitudes, practices, or beliefs widely held by Jews? These are all different things.
We have already talked about the distinction between institutional and casual. Another thing to examine is the nature of antipathy and its sources. One can assert sources of antipathies. One is an antipathy based on bad experience. People dislike those who have treated them unfairly. The other based instead on lack of experience. It is a part of human tribal behavior to “reject outsiders.” Every culture does it. Each does it in different ways. And sometimes these antipathies work together.
In Rwanda, the ruling Tutsis are a minority and are considered by the Hutus to be outsiders. While the Hutus follow tribal religious practices, the Tutsis are Moslems who moved in from the north. They tend to be more highly educated and they thrive in towns better than their Hutu counterparts. They tend to have different physical features that allow them to be identified.
According to Jared Diamond, overpopulation and ecological stress created a ticking time bomb in Rwanda in the 1990’s and that time bomb went off when the Hutu expressed their antipathy to these uppity outsiders by hacking hundreds of thousands of Tutsis to death with machetes. There are many reasons for the genocide. Some were cultural and some were environmental. But by all accounts it was the “outsiders” - primarily Tutsis - who bore the brunt of most of the violence.
Tutsis had lived in Rwanda for many generations. So the real “outsider” issue was a simple tribal issue. There existed two competing cultures in Rwanda. The economically and politically dominant culture was a minority. And the majority of Rwandans were pushed past the limit by their physical environment. It is not difficult for an objective observer to explain the situation without resorting to ideas of hatred. And, perhaps, it is possible in the Hutu culture to behave precisely as they did without resorting to ideas of hate. But certainly in informal parlance we would call their acts hateful.
The “outsider” issue is a recurring problem. It is at the heart of political instability in South America, for instance. Popular governments tend to align with the indigenous poor majorities; authoritarian governments align with the rich and educated European descendents. There can be a strong sense of antipathy between the groups. And even after five centuries, those of European descent are viewed as outsiders.
In light of the “outsider” problem, it is not entirely unexpected that Jews should experience some amount of societal animus when they live in distinct enclaves and cultivate distinct cultures. They are not hated because they are Jewish. Rather, to the extent they appear to be separate and distinct from the local culture they are a natural target of animus. The Tutsis were disliked because they were different. They were also disliked because they were more successful in a modern, urban society than the more tribal Hutus were. And this differential success may serve as part of an explanation for why Jews were hated in Weimar Germany, and why Europeans and Americans are hated in pockets of the Mideast.
Kunzel touches on differntial success as an argument. He argues that radical fundamentalism Islam tends to be a causative factor in low economic achievement rather than vice versa. There certainly is a case to be made for this. A recent article in the Economist about Muslims in India suggests that they are always at the bottom of the economic heap. To the extent that it eschews all elements of western styel education, Islamic fundamentalism certainly does lead to behaviors and attitudes that hinder economic development.
But there is a way in which humans believe their own case is normal and therefore normative. So poverty can perpetuate impoverished ideas. And Islam has thrived most in states that have suffered a static or declining standard of living for much of the last two millennia. So one might expect some aspects of Islam to be well adapted to dealing with such non-frontier cultures. And some of those adaptations may put it in conflict with frontier cultures like that of post Enlightenment Europe and the West.
In other words, some of the reasons for the antipathy of Moslems toward the Jews is necessarily the same as some of the reasons for antipathy of Moslems against the West. And some of the reasons for antipathy against Jews stems from their status as a minority with a different culture. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay - in arguing for a single Republic - note that neighboring states are natural enemies. They compete for the same resources. So the simple existence of Israel as a state, regardless of its composition, predisposes it to some competetive tensions with its neighbors.
All of these sources of antipathy are natural and they can be transcended by thinking of cultures in broader ways. Mostly, we have to be willing to give up thinking that our own culture is always good, right, just, holy. And we have to understand both the weaknesses and the strengths of our cultural belief system. Most importantly, we need to think about how cultural ideas and practices produce societal results.
In the absence of a long history of mutual abuses, most tribal antipathies are easily overcome. In places like the Balkans, however, antipathies five or ten centuries old flare up with regularity. Each act of violence is justified by a mythology of violence and abuse handed down for many centuries. And each culture has its own mythology that allows the dehumanization of the other. In the Balkans, it is destructive acts and the framing stories told to children about those acts that perpetuates the violence. The story of Israel and Palestine seems to be shaping up the same way.
At least some of the reasons for Moslems hating Zionists is the way in which the state of Israel was formed. There are merits profound and numerous for Jews to have a homeland. And Israel happens to claim to be exactly this. Unfortunately, the process of its formation caused another problem. And that problem has been the source of friction in the Mideast ever since.
It is unreasonable to expect that if the Palestinians were ultimately treated justly, then all frictions between the Jews and Moslems would disappear; but injustice is a powerful nucleation force for precipitating the haze of normal cultural antipathy into destructive action. The thing that precipitates destructive acts by Hamas and al Qaeda is not hatred of Jews at all. It is hatred of certain actions and the attitudes that make those destructive acts possible. To the extent that Hamas and al Qaeda express hatred, it is for unfair Zionist actions, not for Jews themselves.
Kunzel makes a common mistake. He deliberately confuses hatred of Jews with hatred of some form of Zionism. One is a hatred for a people with an ethnic identity; the other is hatred of an ideal that expressed itself in a way that was unfair to certain Palestinians. How we view this distinction really matters.
It is reasonable to argue that Hitler, in Weimar Germany, transformed a vague fear of the outsider and an age-old European prejudice against Jews into a hatered of a people. Many societies imagine they are superior to other societies. And Germans who responded positively to Hitler certainly believed this of themselves. Max Weber’s “Protestant Working Ethic” had, only a few decades earlier, been published and it proved to the industrious German that he was far more holy than anyone else.
The Germans also saw themselves as victims; the Treaty of Versailles was artificially punative and it led to serious economic problems. A millenium-old tradition in Europe was that the banking system was run by Jewish people because until roughly the time of the Enlightenment it was illegal for Christians to lend money with interest. Using this fact, Hitler shifted blame for Germany’s economic problems to Jews because it was convenient to his political purposes. He exploited prejudice to parlay hatred of actions into hatred of persons. And he institutionalized this hatred within the government. The outcome was terrible, terrifying, hateful.
Today, from other sources, we hear how superior Ashkenazy Jews are to everyone else. They are smarter. They have higher IQ’s. They achieve more. They have better musical sense. They play chess better. And they are the only people with any sense of humor. And we hear how everyone else hates them; how they have been victimized by this or that group. While there may be solid reasons to believe that all of the statements about them are factually true, there is a psychological pathology about any ethnic group who believes themselves superior simultaneously identifies themselves as victims. Dr. Salman Akhtar identifies these as being two of the four qualities of fundamentalism - the form of belief that is at the heart of any destructive act for the purpose of an ethnic group. Fundamentalist belief uses both factors to dehumanize all people who threaten its hegemony. If one wishes to find an idea to blame for the events of 9/11, no matter what theory of the crime one chooses, one will find fundamentalist belief to be the motivating factor.
The great problem with Kunzel’s work is that the simple act of creating individuals or groups of people that “hate Jews” is an act of fundamentalist aggression. It sets up the possibility of engaging in unprovoked acts of violence against those individuals or groups. Even if the facts that inform this behavior are valid, the response to those facts is destructive. The act of creating and propagating the mental frame of a distinctive ethnic group that is simultaneously distinctly meritorious and victimized sets up the logic for acts of pre-emptive aggression that lead to an endless cycle of violence. This is where choice comes in.
It is theoretically possible to hate ideas and acts of people without necessarily hating people themselves. While is possible to argue that hatred is hatred, its effects are the same and it doesn’t matter how it arrises, this point of view is dangerously fatalistic. It dooms us to an eternal cycle of ethnic hatred. If hatred is informed by action and if action is informed by belief, then what we believe is the ultimate cause of hatred. This suggests that if we can choose to believe and act otherwise, we can have some hope of breaking a perpetual cycle of hatred.
If a person is hated simply because he is a member of a distinct ethnic group, that hatred - though natural - is categorically wrong. In a world with distinct ethnic groups it predisposes violence. Yet, it is extremely rare for a person to perform a destructive act where they perceive no harm to their person or to their group.
If, on the other hand, a person is hated for holding some distinct and threatening belief that informs a destructive action, then it is the belief itself that motivates hatred. Moreover, if a person acts on that threatening belief, the act itself is hateful. It is not just reasonable to hate the act, it is necessary. But if we assume that the act was not simply an arbitrary or gratuitous act of violence, we may see the person behind it. *
And if we assume that change of behavior is possible, then it is rational to hate bad actions and the bad beliefs without causing us to hate “bad people.” This gives us a choice. And it gives the potential object of our hatred a choice. It makes communication and reconciliation possible. It humanizes us because we recognize the humanity of our adversary. To do the opposite removes choice from the equation. It dehumanizes us. It makes conflict inevitable.
The problem with believing that people hate unconditionally is that it makes the reconciliation between parties with a long antagonistic history impossible. If bad character is what causes bad action, there is no hope of getting a good outcome except to exterminate the foe. But to do this one must dehumanize the foe by depicting them as hateful.
So what is the rhetorical purpose of comparing 9/11 to a Hitlerian fantasy? It is to establish a mental equivalence between Hitler and certain contemporary organizations of Moslems: Hamas and al-Qaeda.** It is to dehumanize people in these groups just as Hitler dehumanized the Jews and just as Hitler has been dehumanized by them. This sets us on the course to escalating conflict. If the cycle of hatred is not broken, it must lead to similar ends.
Sadly, this seems to be precisely what Kunzel is counselling. The last third of his piece is about Iran’s nuclear program and how the West fails to comprehend Iran’s nuclear ambitions. We hear Kunzel trying to argue that Iran under the Revolutionary Guard is just like Germany under the Gestapo. It hates Jews. It wants to destroy them all in a great nuclear blast. The only logical choice is to stop them before they strike. Where have we heard this before?
Perhaps it is time to think of things differently. If, instead of simply arguing that Moslem hatred is irrational and endemic, we imagine that Moslem hatred is informed by policy, by action, then what we do actually matters. Any person who has been in a relationship with another person might understand that sometimes this actually is true. Sometimes we have choices about the way we behave. Somtimes we can choose to get along. Working things out requires the establishment of trust and open lines of communication.
If we fail to do this, our children will wake up in a world where “going Hutu” is the deault means of conducting relationships between tribal cultures. And no matter what we do, both sides will be armed with something more dangerous than machetes. We will all wish we lived in Baghdad in 2007. It’s time to stop the hate-talk, time to take responsibility for our hurtful actions, time to view people from other cultures as humans.
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* One of the great tragedies of our time is that Hitler has been so thoroughly demonized that we fail to recognize how his ideas made sense to those who supported him. And we fail to recognize how he manipulated his supporters. If, instead, one worked to understand the choices he made, the methods he used, and the reasons behind those methods, we might find that instead of rejecting those, some of us today are making the same mistake over again; but in a different context. Understand Dr. Akhtar’s definition of fundamentalism broadly and clearly, and one will see that Hitler used fundamentalism in Germany to manipulate the masses. He used the ideas of ethnic superiority and of victimhood to create a hated “other.” And he burned the Reichstag and blamed it the hated “other.” Just as childhood victims of violence tend to visit the same misuse on their own children, history appears to be repeating itself. Our focus needs to be less “who” is hurting us and more on “what ideas” are hurting us.
** It is popular to argue that Hamas hates Jews. But it is more than just a society of Jew haters. It is a functional social organization that delivers social services. And it is by virtue of its functionality that the organization won the Palestinian election that was pushed by the Israelis and the Americans. It is reasonable to argue that its official position about the state of Israel is anti-Zionist; but to argue that Hamas hates Jews does not follow automatically.
As for al-Qaeda, its main goal is to change the nature of Saudi Arabian government and society: to promote Wahibbism. Its means appear to be trading narcotics, arms, and gems. It is probable that al-Qaeda exploits hatred of Jews for recruiting purposes. But how is this exploitation any different from the exploitation of hatred of the Moslem “other” that is present in the popular term “Islamofascists” and in the perpetual “war on terror?” To his credit, Kunzel eschews the incendiary term. But his argument stops just short of it.
In the first case, the organization has legitimate social value. In the second, one is simply dealing with another organized crime society that once had a particular political point of view. In both cases, the most productive means is to interfere with and prosecute criminal behavior. And, if one is determined to undercut the organization, one must take away its raison d’etre. Without a good reason to hate, al Qaeda will suffer serious recruiting problems. And Hamas will either disappear or it will become a normal political party.
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08.05.07
Posted in Philosophy &c, Social at 2:02 pm by steve
Just days after “bridge to nowhere” Senator Stevens’ home was raided by the FBI looking for evidence in a bribery case, the I 35 bridge in Minneapolis fell into the Mississippi at rush hour. Ironically, work crews were working on repairs. But the repairs were to the surface of the bridge, not to its structure. The repairs were to the part we, the public, might see. They were not to the part we, the public, depend upon to keep the bridge from falling into the river. The surface is to be clean and freshly painted. And that is supposed to be enough to keep us all happy.
On the surface things are shiny and happy and these events have nothing to do with each other. It is a coincidence that these two events fall in such close temporal proximity to each other. But the two bridges are connected by a common cause. That cause is a misunderstanding about the idea of common good, how government rightly plays a role in promoting common goods, and how this notion of public good has been systematically and purposefully destroyed by a group of people with interests in doing just that.
Republicans since Reagan’s day have been arguing that governments do not deliver public goods. Follow that argument very far and one gets bridges falling into the water. Republicans since Reagan’s day have also been arguing that governmental funds should go to private firms. And if one does this while following the previous notion, the logical result is billion dollar bridges to nowhere and trillion dollar wars fought by private contractors for special oil concessions. And one gets bridges falling into the water, exploding steam pipes, and failed levees.
These arguments:
1) Deny the proper place of government in public life
2) View government not as a source of public goods but of private ones
These are two big, related themes that have been promoted and exploited by the right since the days of the Reagan administration. Democrats have been less inclined to see the world this way; therefore, the only time we could observe the principles in action essentially unchecked was during the first six years of the Bush administration when Legislature and Executive branches both were filled with people who strongly believed these two ideas. Only then could they be properly expressed. The damaging effects, however, will be with us for a decade or more.
Before the Reagan era there was an agreement in both political parties that government had a legitimate role in public life. Partisans and non-partisans alike agreed that there exists a body of goods and services that competent governance is in the best position to deliver. Such services include public schools, public roads, dams that provide flood control, irrigation, and electricity, and certain public utilities such as sewerage and garbage disposal. There are a number of ways of deciding which things belong to these categories.
One rule is this:
a) To the extent that the benefits of a good or service accrue directly to a person who receives it, the provision of that good or service is usually best provided privately;
b) To the extent that benefits of a good or service primarily accrue to a greater society, the provision of the good or service is usually best provided publicly.
In the case of schools, for example, society as a whole benefits from the fact that most people can read, write, do arithmetic, think critically, and have a sense of geography and history. In fact, the founders of the American Republic believed that the Republic could only survive if people could read broadly and think critically. And that is why we have education. It’s not conceived as a vocational tool; it is conceived as a means of protecting broad political participation. This means that I personally have a great deal of interest in how your child is educated. Similarly, you have a great deal of interest in how my child is educated. Because if enough children are educated badly, you and I both will lose our ability to participate in government through the electoral process. And as we will argue later, this means that we stand to lose public goods to powerful interests in ways that would not occur under enlightened democratic rule.
Failures in education result in problems in society. Failures in other areas have analogous effects. In the case of garbage disposal and sewerage, one person’s waste poisons and endangers many. The accumulating garbage of just a few people in a town can bring in a plague of rats. For this reason, garbage collection in cities is frequently a municipal function.
In towns and cities without proper, functioning sewerage systems waste products accumulate in streets and in public spaces causing a perpetual stench and causing periodic plagues of cholera and other fatal infectious diseases. Thus, each person in a city has an interest in the proper disposal of all waste. All benefit from the collection and proper disposal of each person’s waste.
Similarly, roads and bridges encourage commerce. And commerce is a public good. Going to work, for instance, is an act of commerce. So is the transport of every material good that we use; groceries, building materials, consumer electronics, cars, and so on.
Public good was defined by PaulSamuelson as having two properties: it is Non-Rival and Non-Excludable. Non-Rival means that one person’s consumption of a good has no effect on that of another. Breathing air is an example. Or drinking water from the Amazon River or ice-melt from the Antarctic ice cap at the source. Or being one of two or three people who buys tickets to watch a movie in an otherwise empty theater. Non-Excludable means that if the good or benefit accrues to one person it accrues to many. Television broadcasts are an example. But not cable television.
So in this model an Interstate Highway, lightly loaded, represents a public good. Similarly, a sewerage system that never backs up due to “overuse” is a public good. Or an electrical transmission system that never breaks down, leaving people stuck for hours in elevators, is a public good. We will suggest that it is possible to entrust public goods to be managed by private entities, but this only works so long as there is a clearly established criterion for expected service level and only if that is adequately enforced.
Most real goods that are produced with some inputs of labor and capital exist on a spectrum from public to private. And different people will have different senses about what a public good is. This does not, however, mean that we can just simply ignore the question and let someone else decide for us. For if the people like Ted Stevens and the advocates of the Iraq war are left with the decision, then bridges will be built where they are not needed; and bridges already built and heavily used will fall into the water at rush hour.
The problem of powerful people using the structures of government to appropriate to themselves public goods is one as old as government. Ironically, the colonization of North America was based on the presumption that the British King could grant territorial charters covering areas in a new land that none of his subjects had ever visited. But it was the King’s claim to these same lands, and his assumption of more power over them than he could actually exercise that led to the Revolution and its success.
America’s founding fathers recognized a number of strengths of in British law and governance, but they also saw a need to build a governing institution with a broader base, one that was more responsive to more people. The real reason was, to a significant degree to assure that public goods accrue primarily to the public.
Transparency was one critical assumption. If all acts by all public agents and agencies are open to public scrutiny and if the press manages to do its job scrutinizing public acts, then in theory, when public agents and agencies act to transfer public goods to powerful private hands, the public can react and get them back. But this process assumes two things.
1) It assumes perfect knowledge of the public.
2) It assumes that the public understands and cares about the problem.
If private agencies can convince the public to view these transfers as being innocuous or as being in their own best interests, then they go forward. In the United States, the biggest single case of this practice is the “national defense.”
Economist Jeffrey Rogers Hummel argues that the idea that national defense is a “public good” is a misinterpretation. He argues that, in fact, national defense is a national good. He argues further that the confusion between the two costs a great deal and threatens even more.
The cost of “national defense” stood at $400 billion per year before the invasion of Iraq. But Iraq’s “off the books” expenses have represented an incremental $60 billion per year exclusive of the cost of wear and tear on weapons and people. Bys most estimates, the war in Iraq will cost US taxpayers between one and two trillion dollars.
One can argue, perhaps, about whether the war in Iraq might be in the national interest. But using Hummel’s argument ( in 1990) it is impossible to argue that the war creates any public good. If, for instance, having fewer terrorists in the mideast is a public good, the war in Iraq does not do this. It makes more. The war has effectively made less oil available from the mideast, driving up oil prices. That is decidedly not in the public interest; though it may be in the interest of the people who decided to invade Iraq: Bush and Cheney have extensive oil and oil service company personal and familial interests.
National interest, in Hummel’s model is the interest of certain groups within government and of private groups with which they have a close alliance. And through this alliance they subvert the public good. It seems like an odd argument, but sometimes the national interest is antithetical to public interests. This is true to the extent that powerful groups in a nation subvert public good for their own advantage.
In short, the democratic State makes it much easier to enact policies that funnel great benefits to small groups than to enact policies that shower small benefits on large groups… When a group successfully provides itself a public good through the market, the resources it expends pay for that good. In contrast, when a group successfully provides itself a good through the State, the resources it expends only pay the overhead cost of influencing State policy.
That we live in a nation in which the democratic check that rightly ought to prevent groups from subverting the public interest becomes even more clear when we consider Timothy Weiner’s new book about the CIA, Legacy of Ashes. Weiner argues that the CIA, since its inception, has been seriously flawed. It has rarely been successful in recruiting meaningful intelligence contacts. This has sometimes meant that the quality of its intelligence has been seriously flawed. But even when it has been correct, its substantial lack of redundancy has meant that it has either suffered from lack of credibility or been subject to reinterpretation by shrewd operators with special interests.
More troubling, it has frequently been engaged in illegal covert acts to subvert foreign governments. The 1953 overthrow of Iran’s parliamentary government is one example. The Guatemalan revolution a few years later a second. And the failed Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba is a third.
The agency has persistently and successfully dodged oversight. And while it may have sometimes served national interests - defined as Hummel did in terms of benefits to a powerful minority - it rarely seved the public good. It is easy to find how its secret programs stood to benefit private interests. Oil concessions figured prominantly the purpose of the 1953 work in Iran, for instance. And Dubya’s uncle Walker lost his sugar plantation to Fidel. In other words, the interest of the CIA has rarely even been so broad as national. And it has never served the public interest. It cannot, in fact, do so so long as its products are secret. This point is made again in yet another book review.
Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss this week, reviews two more titles in the NYT Review of books that include nods in the general direction of the CIA. he tells a story about Eisenhower that brings all of this together.
A lifelong Army man, Eisenhower had watched Marshall and MacArthur during their differences with Roosevelt and Truman. When he entered the White House in 1953, he was probably better schooled to know both the importance and the limits of military advice than any other president of this century. ..
Eisenhower’s generals - especially in the Air Force - were clamoring for a huge increase in the defense budget. The Soviet Leader, Nikita Khruschev, was declaring that his country was cranking out planes and nuclear missiles “like sausages.” and would soon overtake the US.
Knowing from secret intelligencw that Khruschev’s claims were a fraud, Eisenhower held down military spending. .. Ike was the leader in 1954 who scoffed at warnings that the free world was in peril unless we immediately went to fight in Vietnam.
In short, a bridge falls into the Mississippi in Minnesota for the same reason America fought in Vietnam and in Iraq. It fell because the public interest has been subverted by a very powerful special interest - one that succeeds in taking from the American taxpayers almost half a trillion dollars a year in tax revenue. It is an interest that builds arms and finds reason to use them. For how can one justify spending half a billion dollars a year on defense if the arms in question see no use?
The same mental framework that makes this huge waste of resources thinkable provides legislators with special considerations in return for special favors. That bridge to nowhere: it actually would have connected a developed area with an undeveloped one in which associates of Stevens owned huge tracts of land that they hoped to develop. The bridge, then, would have made their land worth very much more. The bridge had a purpose. It was to use public funds to make private interests rich. And that is the purpose of the whole agenda denying the “public good.”
Stevens’ bridge to nowhere, then, is an ideal metaphor for the consequences of the Reagan legacy of denying public good and of shifting functions from the public sector to the private sector. It has nothing to do with “efficiency.” It has everything to do with private entities using State resources to enrich themselves. It is the very antithesis of public good. And if we follow this bridge to nowhere that is where we as a nation will end up. Nowhere. That is, provided the bridge does not fail first.
Permalink
07.08.07
Posted in Philosophy &c at 2:12 am by steve
Worry. It’s what we do. A trusty friend tells me that many readers arrive at this site looking to find out whether it is true that 90 percent of worry is wasted. So we will attempt to answer that question. As a person who spends much time worrying about things, and much of the remainder worrying about not worrying about things, I can assure you that probably 99.99 percent of my worry is wasted. Or not. Depending on how you look at it.
The thing with worry is that it is always about the hypothetical. It is always about hypothetical risks to things we value. It is quite easy on a case-by-case basis to show that when lack of care, lack of forethought, or lack of worry has led to a poor outcome, one has not worried enough. But only if nothing ever ever ever ever goes remotely wrong can one show that one worries too much. Some people experience the world that way; everything’s nice and nothing hurts. That’s good for their mental health. But maybe not always indicative for the way things actually are. And failure to deal properly with disaster is generally seen as a sign of madness.
It turns out that if one were to take a drug that made one completely impervious to worry, a drug that enforced a state of peaceful, happy oblivion, one would be happy all the time. But that state of consciousness would occur even as disaster struck. And one would react inappropriately. A moderate amount of worry about the right sorts of things focusses our attention on potential problems. It helps us anticipate what might go wrong.
For example, suppose that each morning one gets up, showers, dresses in very expensive clothes, then eats “dippy” eggs, juicy sausages, and home fries with ketchup. Without some modicum of care, without some minimal amount of worry, one would end up going to work with egg on one’s face or sausage juice on one’s lapel. Worry can be what puts the napkin at the right place for protection. Worry can be the thing that makes one lean far enough forward that ketchup lands on the plate, not on the $50 pale blue silk tie.
So long as worry is orienting toward the avoidance of problems, and so long as such worry motivates constructive behavior, it is not wasted.
I worry about really big things. The things I worry about are things that have big consequences. And if we fail to discuss them as a society, we will find that we will either end up with ineffective solutions or we well end up with solutions imposed in ways most of us disagree with. And we will be more permanently and profoundly unhappy with the state of affairs than if we had ruined an expensive new tie.
So here are some of my worries: Antibacterial-resistant bacteria, the unfixable nature of healthcare in the US given a culture of centralized deceipt and corruption; long term effects of global warming including all the Antarctic ice sliding into the sea; the way failure to teach civics and ethical responsibility in schools has degraded public discourse; the failure to teach mathematics and critical reasoning in public schools; the imminent collapse of democracy in the US; the rising tide of nationalism in Europe; the death of liberalism in virtually every nation in the world except for a few Latin American nations; the imminent peak oil crisis; the falling fertility of farm soil; peak oil; the resistance of pests to pesticides; the accumulation of industrial and medical chemicals in waterways that cause fish to be diseased, weak, dead, or infertile; the corrupting influence of various captialist commercial institutions on government; the exploitation and nurturing of fundamentalism by neocons for political advantage; the inequities of old patriarchical systems and our inability to frame new systems that people naturally choose in preference to the old; and so on.
Any one of these either threatens to completely transform the world we live in or it is a current problem whose solution might actually make this a more pleasant place. This is a lot for one person to worry about, but it’s just a tiny portion of the really big problems. Meanwhile; the M$M focusses on how presidential candidates smell and how much they spend on hair. And the insane cheerleaders of the neocon right urge us “Don’t worry. Be happy.”
Fortunately, I get some help. Progressives around the liberal blogosphere worry about some of these things. And more. Still, I suppose I worry the most. That’s not something I worry about, though.
Now, it would be a great mistake to imagine that all of the things I worry about might actually happen. In fact, it is possible that nothing that I worry about ever really will be a problem. Maybe if schools lower their standards enough so that every student who shows up most of the time feels proud and happy about their own educational achievment we will produce a prouder and happier society.
But it may be that we will also produce a society of economic slaves - people whose only hope for upward mobility is to serve tables at the more expensive food establishements owned by the Chinese or Japanese or Norwegians or Qataris. This is not to denigrate food service workers. It is a noble calling; it is difficult work. But in my experience, the people who have been most accomplished, found in the most expensive restaurants have too frequently been showmen and hucksters as well as being servers. And that bodes ill for society in general. Craftsmen, though more easily deceived by politicians than salesmen and hucksters, at least vote with good motives sometimes.
That’s just one worry. And it’s just a tiny piece of it. All of these are things we’ll be worrying and fretting over in the near future. So that’s one less thing you have to worry about.
Now, if you are here because you worry that you worry too much I would say this: that’s one thing you should stop worrying about. If this advice doesn’t cause you to worry any less, it will at least helpt you to worry about more important things. Oh, and if this site makes you worry just a little more; I imagine that’s good. If it makes you really worried; tell someone else. Maybe if enough people are listening we can make some of these worries just a little less likely. And then we can spend more time worrying over what we spill on our clothing.
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06.24.07
Posted in Science & Religion at 6:43 am by steve
Science. Religion. What’s the difference? Why does it matter?
Both questions are of vital importance in framing public policy debate; and that is why we take them on here. We intend to argue the second issue in a different essay; but we provide a quick sketch. In a practical sense, the difference between two things matters if one gets best results treating them differently. For instance; a rattlesnake and an apple. Both are live objects. And both are edible. But if one approaches and treats a rattlesnake precisely as one would an apple the outcome would not necessarily be the same. In one case one could expect to have a tasty snack in the other case one might expect to be dead.
That the confusion between science and religion can have similar ramafications is not always quite so intuitively obvious, but there are actually cases in which they either must or could. And on a large scale. There are actually a number of hazards that public policy will treat differently depending upon whether public policy decision criteria are based on scientific understanding or to some other modality*
One of the many hopes for this site is that it might illuminate how public policy is debated: how it is framed, how it is discussed. And so we take on the question of the difference between science and religion.
Because this is such a broad topic our dicussion must necessarily take on a sketch-like quality. We will not be developing points in painstaking, connected manner, but rather we will be making them in a way that is a little more desultory. Readers who are used to good academic writing might find this disorienting, but it is a necessity of the breadth of the topic. In a sense this is a kind of an exploratory essay or a kind of annotated outline to simply begin to collect and organize the topics that would reasonabaly need to be discussed.
Some readers may be disappointed that we neither support or deny any religious point of view. There are two reasons for this. One is that in the spirit of the essay it is not only unnecessary; rather such an assertion would run counter to the purpose. the purpose is to help people with different beliefs talk and listen more openly about these issues in public policy forums. Another reason is that as a scientific proposition, the exsistence of God is simply not meaningful. Neither philosophy nor science has anything conclusive to say about the subject. Aquinas proofs of God pretty clearly define God as being immaterial. And science has found altnernative explanations for pretty much everything attributed to God. But neither of these is proof one way or the other.
Finally, it is not the existence of God that atheists rightly find repugnant, but the conceptions of him. Since the conceptions are protected as holy by a body of theological thought, they attack at the vulnerable position. We intend to argue elsewhere that this cheats everyone. It cheats the people both inside and outside the religion who are negatively affected by dysfunctional conceptions of God. The most helpful approach is to attack the bad conceptions and trust that good people will respond. Kind of like what Martin Luther did.
Common Roots
Before we get to the differences it is useful to understand in what senses religion and science are similar. Good science is driven by wonderment. It is driven by asking questions. It is driven by a sense of puzzlement. It is propelled by mystery. Fail to be inquisitive and you cannot actually do science. Fail to be adequately playful and you will become a scientific drudge. All of the great scientific sea changes have been driven by asking the right questions, new questions, questions previously unasked. It is not information alone that drives science but the human craving for puzzlement, the desire for more powerful, more precise, more general explanations of how the natural universe works.
Similarly, it is mysticism and attraction to puzzlement that explains some part of the religious experience. There is a strangeness to the mythology and to the theology that sometimes people find attractive precisely because it doesn’t make sense. It is a kind of mixture of common daily images with uncommon and strange ones, annd a struggle to find some different way of framing their existing reality that attracts some people to religious practice. We talk about this idea a little more in our essay on Mysticism and Language
Religious icons: spirits and gods have been used by people in cultures all over the world to explain observed natural phenomenon. Even today in modern, scientific America “Acts of God” refer to phenomena with natural origins such as hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, mudlsides, and perhaps wildfires. This idea of superstitious notions and practices is described in great detail by Sir James George Frazer in the Golden Bough. It is a kind of anthropological tour-de-force, an overview of rites, superstitions, and taboos that live in cultures that antedate organized religious practice. The work suggests that many of these had sound empirical bases that can be more precisely treated with science. And it suggests that many were of more mystical nature and were absorbed into religious practice simply because they existed and people found some symbolic meaning in them.
So in two ways relgion and science arise from the same historical roots. One is an appreciation of the mystical. Another is as a means of explication. Common history and common psychological origin work together to confuse people.
The Difference Criteria
There are a number of ways in which science and religion are categorically different. They have different purposes. They deal with different subjects. Their modes of authority are different. Their claims are different. Their methods are different. Their practitioners are different. And their universes of discourse are different. One could, presumably, enumerate other areas of difference. We choose to talk about three: subject, authority, and purpose.
Subject
The subject is thing of interest, the thing being studied, the thing being observed, the thing being talked about, the thing to which we refer. In science that subject is matter and energy. Or it is matter and what reliably and predictably interacts with it. Since there is a mathematical equivalence between matter and energy, and since all forms of energy either are manifestations of particular states of matter or they are capable of interacting with matter or they have material origins, when we use the word matter here, we will generally mean it inclusively to include energy.
Matter, as we encounter it is made of atoms. The atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. And all of the physical properties of matter derive from ways in which these combine into larger molecules and from how all of these particles interact together. Matter is real. It is durable. It is exhaustively studied. It is well understood.
Physics is interested in learning fundamental rules about matter on the smallest and largest of scales. And in understanding the interactions of matter and energy in great detail. Chemistry is interested in how matter organizes in chemical compounds and how it can be transformed in chemical reactions from one compound to another. Biology is interested in describing flora and fauna whose existence is both made possible by and bounded by physical and chemical constraints. In all of these cases the subject of study is matter.
Matter matters, as a matter of fact. Assuming we accept the philosophical idea that it actually exists, is durable, and behaves in fixed ways, then science is capable of helping us understand all physical phenomena. It helps us make sense of the real world. This is the world from which we derive our air, our food, our shelter. And while we have exercised great control over our environment, we are still subject to fundamental physical constraints. When we forget these or when we deny them we make bad public policy. That is where we started this discussion.
In religion the subject is immaterial. That is, it is not made of matter. Some might argue that the subject of religion is God; but God is not the subject of all religions. And even in monotheistic religions it is more useful to imagine that the subject is one’s relationship with that God. It is that relationship that characterizes religious practice. That relationship is primarily experiential. And it is the experiential aspect that is common to all religions. Religious practice cultivates a certain kind of experience.
The kind of experience is a mystical one. It is difficult for me to describe these mystical elements in any great detail since I have reason to believe that some of kinds experienced by others are not among my own body of experience; but I am told that there exist special states of consciousness that have special qualities. And that these qualities are described in terms of religious experience. The chemical psilocybin, for instance, reproduces these same senses and does so more effectively than natural methods normally do. That this is true suggests that the experiences are very real. Sadly, it is not of great help in determining the source of the experiences under other conditions.
There are, of course, other forms of mystical experience. It is widely held that Newton was “the last great mystic.” This seems like a remarkable thing to say about a man who is considered a giant among a host of giants of the scientific field. But if one looks at his body of work there is a kind of relentless search for explanations. He was compulsive about solving puzzles, and took on many difficult projects. Fortunately motion was one of those. And that led to gravitation and calculus.
I happen to believe that this search for explanations and the sense of puzzlement that accompanies it is a fundamental quality of mystical experience. This, I believe, has some connection with the experience described above: Either it is the same in type but different in magnitude, or it depends upon at least one common mechanism or causal phenomenon. As I explained in my essay on Language and Mysticism, I believe that it is this quality that motivates the acquisition of language in pre-lingual children. I think it makes just about every child ask questions like “Why is the sky blue?” And I hypothesize that were it totally absent, our interest in learning anything at all would be similarly absent. We might learn facts, but our knowledge would be rote knowledge. We would not develop methods of abstraction and synthesis.
I think, too, that a sense of mysticism is a sense of openness to change, to new ideas, to active adaptation to the world. This idea is reinforced by fact that “consciousness altering” techniques are frequently used to help people change behaviors. Hypnotism has been used with some success in smoking cessation, I am told by a reputable hypnotist. And I have read articles about the use of psilocybin in the treatment of opiate addictions. All of these things point to a connection between mystical sensibilities and learning - its motivating forces and its “sticking power.”
Religious practice in many religions involves some invocation of a spirit world: Gods, angels, spirits of the dead, and so on. Whether these entities actually exist as a scientific proposition is irrelevant. The fact is that the practices that invoke them change a person’s state of consciousness in some subtle and usually meritorious way. In any case, the person practicing the religion finds it so. So there is a kind of “endogenous” reality to the experience. The acts of reverence, of worship, of supplication, or whatever, actually change a person’s state of being. This relates directly to the discussion about the mystical. Christ, perhaps, summarizes this part of the religious experience thus: “Love the lord God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all you might..”
The second subject of religion is relationships between people. All the major religions define proper social relationships between people. They define interactions in a way that demonstrates fundamental caring and good judgment in balancing interests between conflicting parties. This body of religious knowledge is sometimes known as morality. Christ summarizes morality in two ways that, I believe, are identical “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “Treat others as you would be treated.” This is the “Golden Rule” and I think it is a necessary part of religious practice. Some version is found in more than twenty religions including all the major monotheistic ones, Buddhism and Hinduism.
So the subject of religion a particlular kind of experience. Experience is a little difficult to define. But it has to do with our internal attitudes, emotions, reactions, and predisposition to action in the physical and social world. It embodies satisfactions, and dissatisfactions, elation, and sadness, joy and sorrow. At the center of religion is a body of “right feeling”
A famous Jewish comedian said “Right and wrong: yes, I believe in right and wrong. What’s the difference? When I do wrong I feel terrible.” There is a way in which religion derives from, codifies, and accentuates that sensibility. Studious and careful religious practice can frequently illuminate the path and help people avoid doing things that make us feel terrible.
Cognitive scientists will explain to us the actual physiological processes that are taking place, perhaps invoking “mirror neurons” or “dopamine release.” And evolutionary biologists who are acquainted with Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation will demonstrate why these physiological responses predispose cooperative individual and therefore societies composed primarily of cooperative individuals to be more successful than less cooperative ones. In other words, moral thinking is informed by and is a reflection of a physiological adaptation that allows humans to form low-friction societies.
Moses, or or whoever it actually was who wrote the first half dozen or so of the books of the Old Testament, understood this idea better than almost anyone alive today. If one reads Hammurabi’s code and Moses’ body of law the number of parallels is incredible. They deal with the same general ideas - which is completely unsurprising. They make essentially the same distinctions - which could be explained by similarities in culture and social structure. They both have extremely strong appeals to authority. They strike similar postures on similar things, But their tone, style, and presentation are almost identical. It is impossible to imagine that Moses did not have a written copy of the code before him as he wrote the body of law. Moses also understood that Hammurabi’s code was temporally challenged. Because it derived authority from a person, its own authority expired with the person. Moses had to base his law on a more durable authority. He invoked God. And he either invented a mythology to support that idea or he co-opted one. That is the purpose of earlier parts of Genesis.
Authority
This brings us to the second category of distinctions between religion and science, authority. One of the sources of authority in religious practice must be an innate sense of rightness. We have already discussed a little about what this is and how it can be explained in terms of evolutionary fitness. Any person who has used the word “conscience” has referred to this sensibility of “rightness” in a social context.
In religious parlance, a sense of rightness might be something that moves us toward God or it might be an actual experience of God’s grace. We can judge these propositions in many terms. As an empiricist, I would argue that so long as these explanations aid us in behaving cooperatively and fairly inside society, so long as they increase our personal levels of satisfaction without materially diminishing those of others who might believe differently, they are favorable ways of looking at the world. And I would hope that a religious person, using the moral ideas that normally pervade religious thought, would afford me a complementary point of view.
We might not think of ourselves as sources of authority. But we are creatures imbued with some capacity of knowledge and judgment. Each of us must necessarily have some innate authority. Fundamentally, we have the authority to judge how ideas in society affect our own lives. And we have some obligation to voice our concerns when those ideas are hurtful; for hurtful ideas generally degrade the lives of all touched by them. Aristotle develops the idea of moral character. And we talked about conscience above. In all of these senses moral authority is derived internally. And it arises from a complex interaction of our capacity for empathy and our ability to make situational judgments.
Authority, more traditionally, is assumed to flow from older to younger. Or from higher rank to lower. Here, again, we can find an evolutionary reason. And it is as old as mammals. Offspring learn behavior from parents. Successful behaviors tend to spawn success. So copying behaviors found in older members of society is a proven means of evolutionary success. This is the evolutionary basis of the idea of exogenous authority. It is the basis of equating authority with age. It is certainly not foolproof; but it can be quite a useful counterbalance to youthful intemperance and impetuousness.
Gods are conceived by abstraction of human authorities. To a young person, an old person is almost inconceiveable. It’s not much of a leap from there to an imaginary being. At first they might take on physical forms in our imaginations. All the Greek gods had physical descriptions, if I am not mistaken. But as we create their images in our minds, and as we gain more experience with our gods through a combination of shared experience and mythology, they become defined less by physical qualities and ever more by behavioral attributes described in terms of human analogy. Gods, since they have lived an especially long time, and since they have superhuman powers must also have extraordinary powers of authority for the same reasons that old people have authority. In fact, as we have just explained in the case of Moses that is one powerful reason one might invent a God.
Once again, even if a God did not exist, the conception of a God and the attribution to her of ideas, arguments, reasoning, and mythology tends to accrete authority to that God. Religions have authority that individuals do not have, precisely because they are institutions and their body of practice, experience, and mythology is deeper than that of any one, or ten, or one hundred individuals. This body of stuff has proven helpful in keeping societies peaceful and well organized. And it has proven helpful in allowing humans to find meaning within those societies. Thus the authority granted to Gods can be warranted, even if it is based upon a myth.
Holiness in this construction is a special attitude we hold toward ideas, objects, or practices. It is an attitude with a mystical component, veneration. And the object of the attitude generally is deserving of some veneration for its institutional significance. An attitude of holiness helps hold together institutions. I suppose reverence might be an alternative term. For example, in the US, there exist a group of people who revere the US constitution. Not the document, but the ideas it embodies. And that reverence elevates the document to a position almost of holiness. It means that its ideas and ideals are energetically defended, and its precepts are kept at the center of legal practice in the US. Were we to live in an age where the reproduction of documents was extremely painstaking and expensive, then the copies of the document would be held just as dear, as the Koran to moslems.
The authority of science, by comparison is consensus. And that consensus is arrived at by experimentation. Well designed exeperiments with clear results create consensus about hypotheses whose truth was previously unknown. It is a well defined process.
It is not quite so simple as that, however, because experiments are not used to prove just the observation of the experiment itself; they are designed to test theories. This raises all sorts of correspondence problems. If we start with a poor enough understanding of the relevant categorical relationships we can design experiments that tell us nothing. Or that mislead us.
A perfect example of this is a an old joke about a scientist and a frog. He places the frog on the floor and instructs the frog to jump. The frog jumps 16 inches. He writes in his lab journal “Frog with four legs jumps 16 inches.” He cuts off one of the legs. He tells the frog “Frog jump.” The frog jumps 12 inches. He writes in his lab journal “Frog with three legs jumps 12 inches.” He does the same experiment with two legs, and measure 8 inches. And again with one leg and measures 4 inches. Finally, he cuts off the fourth leg, places the legless frog on the floor and demands “Frog jump.” But the frog doesn’t jump. He raises his voice. Frog just sit there motionless. Then he yells at the top of his lungs. “Frog jump.” And he gets no reaction at all. He writes in his lab book “Frog with no legs is deaf.”
Sometimes this is the way we approach science. And when we do we get back nonsense. One of the problems in science, then, is that scientists do not always ask the right questions. That creates all kinds of problems. When a field has asked the wrong questions for long enough it becomes marginalized.
One of the terrific problems in science, however, is that the level of abstraction in a number of sciences is such that only a fraction of a percent of the population can understand what’s going on. And sometimes only a fraction of the practitioners really have sensible things to say about the field. When this happens, sometimes the field gets ossified and the people who practice stop being real scientists but become more like protectors of a kind of faith about a body of knowledge. The word orthodoxy comes to mind. In this case authority is credentials. When fields become characterized by this practice, the field is dead. It may serve as a repository of knowledge, like a musty library, but science is not being done there. Authority in such cases derives from work described in old, classic papers. And the “scientists” come to resemble medieval scholastics defending an ancient orthodoxy.
Purpose
It is impossible to make sense of the distinction between religion and science without discussing purpose. The purpose of science is explication. Specifically, it is explication of fact. Explication of events. Explication of all things that involve matter. I define explication here to mean systematically searching for, finding, testing, and propagating robust models that explain and predict behavior of matter and of collections of matter. My essays On Knowledge deal a little more with the issue of knowing. Explication is fundamentally about knowing, about how we come to know.
The purpose of religion is a matter open to debate. But I see that it has two fundamental purposes. One is one’s own satisfaction, happiness, fulfillment, motivation, and so on. If one believes in an afterlife, it is concerned with the same issues in that case. Some Christians talk of salvation; that is a term of their particular practice that corresponds to what I am saying. The other purpose is the promotion of smooth-running society. I believe that religions are successful because there is a general tendency for them to actually succeed in promoting both of these public goods. Were they to fail profoundly in either area they would fail profoundly in real life. Failure in the first area would cause people to stop practicing. Failure in the second would cause societal collapse.
I have no questions about the legitimacy of either of these purposes. But I do object to exclusive claims that religions have to them. I am doubtful of the idea that people might not find personal fulfillment in the absence of either a particular religious practice or religious practice in general. I do believe that the ubiquity of religious practice suggests that it is easier to find such fulfillment within the context of a a supportive religious community; but I think the operative terms here are supportive and community more than they are religious.
I will certainly grant that religious practice and religious authority create a shortcut to ethical reasoning. I might even be convinced that religious authority is necessary if one is to create a society that reflexively practices sound ethical reasoning. But, I am afraid, I shall never come close to imagining that religious institutions have some perfect authority over moral thought.
The Catholic Church proves that one either clings to dogmatic ideas that grow anachronistic and begin to look downright evil, or one updates moral ideas and ideals to reflect the extremely slowly evolving ideas of fair and sound ethical practice. And when one does make a change it produces the appearance that the previous practice was in some way wrong.
But in reality, it’s not like that. It is not necessarily true that there is some real, durable, everlasting right point of view to every ethical or theological question ever posed. At any point in time there are good arguments for maintaining the status quo point of view and there are arguments for change. When a change occurs it is not because there is something inherently right or wrong about a disputed position. Salman Akhtar suggests in his discussion of fundamentalism, only murder is categorically wrong. Of every other action, rational and caring people in different cultures might disagree. Cultural contexts can change the points of view. They are profoundly influenced by issues of geography, definitions of property rights, mating rituals, and a host of other issues.
For example, in almost every culture in which marriage is an institution, marital fidelity is considered a kind of a norm. In some cultures this norm is taken very seriously; and in others it is seen, perhaps, more as a suggestion. But long ago some of the Inuit had a different custom; male visitors would sleep with a host’s wife. This may be seen as an extreme measure of hospitality. But in a culture in which population was extremely sparse and tiny families were very isolated, it turned out to be a way of reducing the hazards of inbreeding. In an evolutionary sense it could benefit everyone involved. It was a cultural practice that had utility. To argue that it was morally wrong is actually to inflict harm on the culture.
If we view religious practice and religious tradition in a cultural context as being an accretion of useful thought and action, we can imagine such tradition to be a kind of nucleation site for agreement, a point of cohesion. Religious practice, after all, gained much of its political power from its ability to cause neighboring cultures, tribes, and states to find points of commonality.
Religion has social utility. But if we cling too tightly to its provisions while remaining blind to its power to unite us, we might actually risk trading away any personal and societal transformative power it might offer.**
Claims
I think it is very important to understand what religion properly ought to claim. What it reasonably might claim, and what it properly ought not to claim.
Claims of Religion
First: Religion is not a system of explication. Explication plays almost no role in its purpose. Explication plays almost no role in its authority. And explication has nothing to do with the subject involved. The confusion arises because of one of the first errors of man was to explain things in terms of gods. Gods were invented as explanations. And this really tells us a lot more about ourselves and our psychological makeup than it does about the gods themselves or the things that the gods were invoked to explain. Science is about explication. Religion is not. This really matters.
Take the issue of ID. ID posits that it is not natural selection that drives evolution but divine selection. Let us suppose that were true. Now let us consider the issue of antibiotic resistant bacteria. (ARB) We know that cases of deaths from antibiotic resistant bacteria have been rising over the last decades. They are responsible for a significant and growing portion of the hospital deaths due to infection. And this is among the more common causes of death in the nation.
Now, if we imagined that natural selection were responsible for the problem we would take certain steps to slow the speed at which antibiotic resistant strains would survive. This might include changing antibiotics chosen, changing dosing regimens and so on. But if we attribute selection to God, then God is the cause and all of these changes in regimens will make no difference whatsoever. In actual fact, though, changing regimens does change outcomes. So either God doesn’t intervene in the selection of bacteria. Or he only does it when we aren’t looking.
If we develop health policy about ARB assuming ID, we will not be looking. And a lot more people will die. Explaining all of this with ID either defies science and observation and risks killing a lot of people or it requires a really knotty theology that describes when God intervenes in selection and when he doesn’t.
ARB outbreaks have enormously huge potential for widespread fatalities. Before the advent of antibiotics outbreaks of cholera, plague, or tuberculosis could decimate cities. So if we respond incorrectly to ARB by assuming ID, millions could die who might otherwise not die in such an outbreak. And, it seems to me, that proponents of ID could reasonably be held legally liable for creating a body of thought they knew was false. Even if they were not, they would be thought of as supporting health policies that led to millions of unnecesary deaths. It matters what we believe about God. It matters whether religion is invoked to explain things that it is unprepared to explain.
Second: Religion, so long as it remains exclusively a body of ideas that illuminate life in the first person, is generally helpful and rarely harmful. To the extent that a person’s religious experience is primarily with his God, and to the extent that the secondary experience is good social adaptation: treatment of others with kindness and respect, it is good. Any person whose religion produces precisely these effects must be respected not just for their inherent value as a person, but also for their dedication to a kind of shared human existence.
But where religion is always wrong is in its third person claims. Religion certainly has first person claims. That is a definition of its nature. Religion might possibly have second person claims. That is, there may be contexts in which a religious person is warranted in discussing his beliefs and their merits with a second person. Religion has absolutely no third person claims. It cannot make “them” do anything. When it does it always errs. When it does it is always evil.
Claims of Science
First: Science claims explication. This it owns in toto. Explication is extremely powerful. And yet, when it comes to the complexities that govern interactions between all sorts of physical entities - whether they be atoms, molecules, cells, organs, bodies, institutions, or societies, science has only illuminated a tiny fraction of what we need to know.
This suggests that we must have bridging strategies - ways of dealing with things that are unknown. The first part of any such strategy is to understand what is known and what isn’t. The second is to understand the consequences of making various choices, particularly the consequences of being wrong. The purpose of public policy discussion is to do this very thing. Sadly, that sort of thing disappeared from public discourse in the mid 1970’s and has only begun to be part of political reality in the last several years thanks to the Web. But hardly anyone has any practice at it and only a tiny bit of what we are doing in the area is very good. Still, there is hope.
Second: Science’s claims beyond explication are tenuous. Science might be able to describe what constitutes meaningful existence but it cannot bring meaning. Science might be able to create antibiotics, but it cannot bring them into people’s lives when they need them. Science might enable us to travel to the moon, but it is not science that actually gets us there. We must depend completely upon science for things it can tellus. And we must learn to use scientific ideas and techniques to help us gain some loose and tenuous grasp on what we do not. Then we must used bridging techniques. Finally, we must try things. We must fail. We must acknowledge failure. We must learn from it. And we must try again.
Universe of Discourse
The universe of discourse of science is fact. If there is a fact, it is connected to matter. It either is descriptive of some embodiment of matter or it is descriptive of an event, a change in state or an interaction between bodies of matter.
The universe of discourse of religion is inner life. It is about how a person experiences his or her existence in ( or out of) time.
When external facts have bearing on this experience there can be an interaction between science and religion. When they do not, there is none. The fact that morality is relegated to religious study is because it is a body of thought that describes how we are affected by our behavior.
For example, moral thought is a kind of explication of how we experience our existence. Moral thought has traditionally been associated with religion, but it need not be so. Kant’s categorical imperative which might reasonably be viewed as a kind of philosophical method one might use to derive moral truth systematically. It really is a kind of mathematical formalization of the Golden Rule.
Gauthier in his Morals by Agreement takes another approach of defining the Golden Rule in terms of rational choice and market theory. The fact that the Golden Rule idea is part of almost every form of religious thought and practice suggests that in some measurable way - in a way that relates directly to how humans experience the world - it is more important than the God of monotheistic religions. Or else it defines the experience of God in terms of a moral code.
Our moral codes are product of six thousand years of thought, debate, and practice enshrined in religious practice. It is likely that this process got some things right. It is right that we should approach the tradition with some reverence. But it is not helpful to imagine that some hypothetical holiness puts all specific tenets of religious thought beyond further evaluation or critique, for there are cultural differences between our own time and Biblical times. Nor is it helpful to assume that any single religious moral code is axiomatically right or holy.
What we need to do is live our own lives with reverence to any religious and moral ideas that give our lives meaning and help us live rich and cooperative social lives. We need to respect the religious and moral ideas that other people find to enrich their own lives. We intend to argue that ethical training be part of schooling; and that it not be religious. I have been told that “civics” is the technical term for what I mean by that, though I am not old enough to know it from experience. When people live well together voluntarily, the law needs little scope or force. And that is an ideal society to inhabit.
Conclusion
I am afraid this is but the most cursory sketch of my conception of the difference between science and religion. There are many vast bodies of explanation missing. Still, I hope that for all its shortcomings, this provides some basis for a discussion on the difference between science and religion and why it matters.
I hope, too, that by searching for some common ground and developing a body of things upon which we can agree it allows us to begin bridging the gap between fundamentalist reactionaries to mid-twentieth century liberalism - “moral majority and their ilk” - and the anti-fundamentalist atheistic reactionaries of today - Hitchens, et al. We cannot afford an amoral society Nor can we afford a scientifically ignorant one. The first sort will be the end of democracy and of liberty; the second sort could lead to the collapse of civilization.
TABLE 1
|
Religion |
Science |
| Purpose |
mystical and moral development |
explication |
| Subject |
relationships and mystical experiences |
matter and energy |
| Authority |
innate sense of rightness, tradition |
consesus, observation of fact |
I used this table to write the work, but I fear that there is still some lack of correspondence between the two. As I meant to say, this is a work in progress.
—
*Frequently at this sight we use the words religious and orthodox to refer to ideas that are held primarily by faith and promulgated primarily by force of authority. For the purposes of this particular article we will be referring to religions in a slightly more traditional way. We think of Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and a handful of other institutions with defined rituals, beliefs, forms, communities. By modality we mean religious faith or faith in any unwarranted method of arriving at a policy decision. We have in mind a kind of blind faith in laissez affaire capitalism as a means to achieve every humann good as an exemple of one such modality.
** Our argument is that religion can illuminate a society’s necessary debate about ethics, but it cannot usurp it. Similarly, we are not arguing for situational ethics, we are arguing for a dialogue that struggles to gain a general agreement on a wide range of ethical issues, not by teaching people what to think about ethical issues, but by teaching them how to think about them.
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