A Skeptic's Creed

Vaccination: A Numbers Game

2011-01-07T12:55:00.002-05:00

Yesterday evening, NPR ran a story on the recent judgment that the original study linking vaccination with autism was fraudulent. The charge is that the researcher in that initial study, Andrew Wakefield, falsified data to support the conclusion he wanted.

I posted the story to my wall on Facebook, and received several strident comments from an acquaintance who is convinced that vaccination is in fact harmful and that the new conclusions about the Wakefield study are themselves suspect.

Regardless of the merits of charge and counter-charge regarding the Wakefield, my exchange with this particular interlocutor soon turned to the question of whether the idea of "herd immunity" has any validity. My interlocutor asserted simply that there is "no evidence" to support the idea of herd immunity.

I attempted to reply from a number of angles, including pointing out that the claim of "no evidence" sounds suspiciously like similar claims made by creationists about Darwinian evolution and by free-market ideologues about climate change.

Acknowledging that I am a little out of my depth, since I have only casual acquaintance with the concrete details of epidemiology, I suggested that "herd immunity" might serve as a theoretical concept, like "natural selection", for which direct evidence of the kind that simply confirms or falsifies it may not be available. Rather it is an organizing concept, one that has validity to the extent that it helps a community of inquirers makes sense of a wide range of observations, in both everyday and experimental contexts.

My interlocutor replied by citing a study:

A review of all (then published) studies of all human populations where over 95% of the population had received the vaccine showed that more people who got infected with the disease had received the vaccine than not.

Unpack the logic of this claim: A number of vaccinated people who get infected is larger than the number of non-vaccinated people who get infected! Therefore, vaccination is ineffective!

Well, not so fast.

On the face of it, the most you could conclude from the study is that vaccination is not 100% effective. But then, I don't think anyone would claim that it is 100% effective. Instead, the claim is that vaccination reduces risk, both to the individual and to the population at large.

In fact, I suspect the study cited may actually support the effectiveness of vaccination, once the numbers are worked out and given a more plausible interpretation.

I don't have access to the study in question - my interlocutor did not provide documentation - so I don't know the actual numbers. So, I plugged in some hypothetical numbers, which is sufficient to prove a logical point about my interlocutor's intended argument.

It was stipulated that "over" 95% of the populations in question had been vaccinated. For illustration, let's just say it's 95% on the dot.

Assume a population of 1000 of which 950 have been vaccinated against measles.

If 5% of those vaccinated get infected with measles, that comes to roughly 48 cases of measles among the vaccinated.

If 50% of those not vaccinated get infected with measles, that comes to 25 cases of measles among the non-vaccinated.

48 is a larger number than 25, nearly by a factor of 2! So, non-vaccination wins!

Except . . .

. . . 95% of those who received the vaccine avoided infection, while only 50% of those who did not receive the vaccine avoided infection.

. . . . rates of infection among the non-vaccinated are likely to be lower than they would otherwise be, since they are less likely to be exposed to the disease. Consider that 926 of their fellow citizens have not been infected (902 of the non-infected having been vaccinated) and so cannot pass it on to them.

(As it happens, the study, as cited by my interlocutor, seems to have little bearing on the validity or non-validity of the idea of herd immunity. At least, the idea of herd immunity seems perfectly consistent with these results.)

The numbers are made up, but the logic is inescapable: The mere fact that the majority of those infected with a disease in the circumstances described were vaccinated against it does not imply that vaccination is ineffective, only that it is not 100% effective . . . which we already knew.

Frankly, given the choice between a 5% chance of infection and a 50% chance of infection, I would take the 5%.

More than this, since there does seem to be some validity to the idea that vaccination reduces infection rates for the population as a whole, reducing the risks of epidemics or even pandemics, then it may well be a moral and civic obligation to get myself and my children vaccinated.

But then, I'm trying to be rational about risk. The fact is, people are likely to continue to see risks in all the wrong places, exaggerating risks posed by the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry while minimizing risks posed by the diseases themselves . . . a luxury we have only because of the widespread use of vaccines.

But then, as the NPR story has it:

‎". . .more revelations about Wakefield aren't likely to make the fear of vaccines go away. But David Ropeik, is [sic] an instructor at Harvard, says something else eventually will. 'As more and more people get measles and kids die, which is happening around the world. Eventually the threat of the disease will come back and surmount our fear of the vaccine.'"

Reprint: Manifesto

2010-09-17T07:56:00.000-04:00

I don't usually republish blog posts, but there's one I wrote last October that seems worth repeating.

* * * *

Last week, while I was mulling over the principles of the 912 Project, I fell into a long and rambling conversation with the two other members of one of the bands in which I play fiddle. The three of us have somewhat different backgrounds and come down in different places on the political spectrum. Still, through our conversation, I started to glimpse the possibility of a new political movement.

I later dubbed it "The League of Noisy Moderates."

Lots of people are out there making lots of noise, motivated either by rigid ideology, nameless fear, or some other force that deprives their speech of nuance as it raises the volume.

Meanwhile, thoughtful people, those who might be willing and able to do the actual hard work of democracy, sit back quietly and shake their heads.

Enough of this. The time has come for those of us who are in the broad political middle - from thoughtful conservatives to thoughtful progressives, and everyone in between - to take to the streets in angry protest, demanding . . .

an end to angry street protests?

Oh, never mind.

Skeptical Flim-Flam (updated)

2010-05-25T16:29:00.012-04:00

I have an uneasy relationship with what is described as "the modern skeptic movement," as I've discussed from time to time on this blog. The greatest source of my uneasiness lies in the fact that it casts itself as a movement, with its (self-)identified leaders and a kind of guiding ideology. I've bristled at suggestions that skeptics ought to get in line and march in step.

Once in a while, a self-described skeptic will get so carried away in attacking ideological enemies that she or he will abandon the kind of careful inquiry and critical thinking that I take to be the very core of skepticism.

Case in point, a recent post to Skepticblog by Mark Edward, whose bio on the site starts thus:

Mark Edward is a professional mentalist specializing in magic of the mind. His amazing mind reading techniques make a statement about our limited powers of observation and our refusal to believe manipulation can easily happen to the best of us.

He's certainly a savvy guy, well placed to see through the pretensions of self-proclaimed psychics, mediums (media?), remote viewers, and other purveyors of hooey.

But this just makes it all the more dismaying that he would post under the title:

ABC Has a Medium on Staff

(The URL for the post reveals the original title, wisely retracted: "Network Exploiting The Dead for Cash".)

The claim is based up on a single website, to which I'll return in a moment. The post itself is an account of Edward's own "investigation" of this case, though it's an investigation so sloppy and so confrontational as to make even Michael Moore feel queasy.

Now, the source of his outrage is clear enough: he sees self-proclaimed mediums (media?) exploiting people's grief and loss, promising them answers about the fate of their loved ones that are beyond the reach of ordinary perception . . . for a price. I agree, this is pretty reprehensible.

I also agree that any decision on the part of a television news desk to devote serious air time to this kind of nonsense casts doubt on the credibility of that news desk. For a news organization to have a medium on staff would be even worse, if only because it would mean scarce resources were being diverted from news that might actually be important or useful to people.

The claim in the title of the post, and the strong implication throughout the post, is that the culprit in this case is none other than ABC, whose news division is generally well respected among the national networks, and that ABC is guilty of actually hiring a medium and paying for her services.

The thing is, even a cursory investigation reveals that the central claim is groundless. Edward himself provides a link to the offending webpage, which lists Kelli Faulkner (the offending medium) among "experts" who might appear as "guests" from time to time on the noon news . . . in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

A couple of clicks leads me to the website of the news organization in question, Indiana's NewsCenter, which seems to be associated with the ABC, NBC, CW, and My Network TV affiliates in the Fort Wayne market.

A further click leads to the parent company of Indiana's NewsCenter, Granite Broadcasting Corp., which describes itself as "a market leading owner of local media properties."

This is the base on which Edward grounds his claims against ABC. He seems to have convinced at least some of his readers, those unable to see through the fragile tissue of innuendo and guilt by association by which he attempts to cover over the gaping holes in his understanding of the case and his reasoning about it.

Even granting, as I do, that it's bad to have news organizations give air time to hooey, a genuinely skeptical investigation of this instance should be careful enough at least to acknowledge the most basic and readily accessed facts of the matter.

Okay, maybe Edward was just having a bad day, getting a little sloppy. It happens to all of us.

When I commented on the post, however, pointing out the mismatch between the claim about ABC and the evidence on offer, Edward and a few other commenters turned on me, offering snide dismissal and even a few nasty jabs at my character. One commenter suggested I should consider taking up a PR position with BP, and Edward himself suggested that I must be an employee of ABC, seeking to defend the network's reputation at all costs.

The thing is, I was really just asking for clarification of the relationship between the medium and the national network, clarification I eventually had to go out and find for myself, since none was forthcoming from Edward.

I asked him:

Are you exaggerating the scope of the issue to pump up skeptical hysteria?

He replied that he was indeed trying to stir up some hysteria. In the next paragraph of his reply he actually used the word, 'duh', as a rejoinder.

I replied:

Isn’t it odd to try to use hysteria in the service of skepticism? Think of what this means: manipulating people’s understanding of a situation in order to elicit an irrationally zealous response. This seems to be in tension with the aim of promoting clear, critical thinking.

Another commenter offered the following reflection on my quibble about the relationship of responsibility between network affiliate and the network itself - working as I was, at the time, on the assumption that the news organization in question was simply and unproblematically a network affiliate:

Personally I think the title is just fine. ABC Indiana is still ABC in the eyes of most of its viewers.

To which I replied:

I would also point out that your final claim suggests an argument ad populam: “ABC Indiana is still ABC in the eyes of most of its viewers.”

Funny, how you’ll pass over legitimate and complex legal and moral questions about responsibility (and accountability) in hiring a medium by appealing to the perceptions of the public . . . when you might be the first to ridicule and condemn that same public if some of them were to perceive UFOs in the night sky or pictures of Jesus in slices of deli meat.

That same commenter also attempted to dismiss my objections as being a matter of personal preference on my part, asking:

So, your real problem is just with the title of the blog? If Mark had used affiliate in the title you would be okay with that? (not that its all about what you want)

See, if it's just me being peevish, demanding to get what I want, they don't have to take my questions all that seriously. To which I replied:

No . . . it isn’t all about what I want. It’s about what readers of a blog by and for skeptics can reasonably expect: careful and thorough inquiry combined with clear and critical thinking.

But maybe this is too much to expect from a blog that sometimes seems to be more the organ of an ideological movement than an open forum for critical inquiry.

UPDATE - 12:45am, May 27, 2010

Despite myself, I continued the exchange in the comment thread of Mark Edward's post on Skeptic Blog. In the end, I was able to state my concerns precisely enough that Edward saw the point . . . though he was still a bit testy about it: "Okay, fine."

He returned to his main point, which is that the situation still involves a supposed "spirit medium" getting TV air time, with the implication that something should be done about it. I had already acknowledged and conceded that point.

At that, I'll let the matter rest.

Comfort's Wager

2009-11-25T08:07:00.013-05:00

The biggest howler in Ray Comfort's "Special Introduction" to the Mutilated Edition of On the Origin of Species comes not in the parts about Darwin, but in the Bible-tract preachment that makes up the last third of the piece. He offers the following instructive dilemma:

Imagine I offered you the choice of four gifts:
The original Mona Lisa
The keys to a brand new Lamborghini
A million dollars in cash
A parachute
You can pick only one. Which would you choose? Before you decide, here's some information that will help you make the wisest choice: You have to jump 10,000 feet out of an airplane. (pp. 40-41)

The answer is supposed to be obvious, of course, though this is set up like one of those lateral-thinking exercises in which you take the keys to the Lamborghini and offer them as a bribe to some poor sucker who has one parachute and not a lick of sense . . .

Anyway, let's play along. Writes Comfort: "The knowledge that you will have to jump should produce a healthy fear in you - and that kind of fear is good because it can save your life. Remember that." (p.41)

Okay, give me a minute. Fear: Good. Got it. Take the parachute.

Comfort continues:

Now think of the four major religions:
Hinduism
Buddhism
Islam
Christianity
Which one should you choose? Before you decide, here's some information that will help you determine which one is the wisest choice: All of humanity stands on the edge of eternity. We are all going to die. We will all have to pass through the door of death . . . For most of humanity, death is a huge and terrifying plummet into the unknown. So, what should we do? (p.41)

Notice that he's no longer talking about "information." If I'm in an airplane of which the engines have flamed out, the plummet of the airplane is a fairly straightforward matter of fact. It's a plummet to the ground, not a plummet into the unknown.

The death of my body could be treated the same way: sometime, the engines will flame out . . . That much is a brute fact.

But Comfort smuggles in some metaphors that serve a metaphysical function. "The door of death" - like that archway in the Department of Mysteries in the fifth Harry Potter book - suggesting that there's something on the other side. (They're whispering and muttering over there, according to Harry.) It's a plummet into the unknown . . . but only for "most of humanity". The elect few, Comfort is here to tell us, know what's on the other side, and, conveniently, it's just what the Bible tells us it is.

So, you walk through this door, and find yourself before the throne of God, where you will be judged according to the Ten Commandments. The whole thing has the whiff of hellfire about it.

Now, remember: fear is good. Writes Comfort, "let fear work for you." (p.42)

But bring this back to the choice. Which religion will actually function like a parachute to stop your plummet into hell?

Let me rephrase that. Which religion will save you from the most primitive, simple-minded horror story Christians have used to manipulate children and their intellectual equals into being good Christians? (Fear is good! Let fear work for you!)

Let me rephrase that. Assuming this fearmongering version of Christianity is true, which religion should you choose?

Uh . . . I don't know. Hinduism?

Let's review. In the first version of the choice, you are offered four items, only one of which is really useful for resisting the consequences of gravity when the airplane's engines flame out. Assuming the laws of physics remain valid, you should pick the parachute.

In the second version of the choice, you are offered four religions, only one of which is really useful for resisting the consequences of Christianity being true. Assuming Christianity is true, you should pick Christianity.

For those keeping score in the ongoing game of Name That Fallacy, that's one count of petitio principi, begging the question, for assuming the truth of that which is to be proved. Also add (at least) one count of false dilemma, for the assumption that there are only four options in the religion-picking game and, for that matter, the assumption that there is only one (childish fearmongering) version of Christianity in the offing.

I suspect that, for his arrogance, Ray Comfort is going to be reincarnated as a newt.

The Affliction of Comfort

2009-11-24T23:09:00.002-05:00

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. To mark the event, Ray Comfort (a.k.a. The Banana Man) of Living Waters Ministries distributed free copies of the book . . . last week sometime.

The edition of the book in question contains a strategically abridged version of Darwin's text with a 52-page introduction by Ray Comfort himself, drawing a direct connection between Darwin and Hitler and warning readers (*yawn*) of eternal hellfire, and so on.

Comfort has been a bit cagey about the whole thing, and the complete text of the introduction was recently removed from his website. Before the big day, last week, Comfort stopped answering questions. This from an article posted on the website of Living Waters Ministry:

From now on I will refuse to answer questions about the book or its contents," Comfort said, "because there is such a deep-rooted anger in the atheist world about this publication.

"They desperately want to stop us," he said, "and I don't want to give away any further details regarding the campaign."

Angry? Is he kidding? I'm delighted! I managed to find a PDF of the introduction through another website. I plan to spend a diverting hour or two playing Name That Fallacy.

It'll be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Politics Takes the Plunge

2009-10-17T15:54:00.005-04:00

From time to time, I've made posts to this blog in which I've criticized political activists, from environmentalists to tea partiers, for engaging in ridiculous theatrics to draw attention to one cause or another. Such useless and distracting political gestures typically serve only to obscure real, important questions of value and obligation that lie at the heart of most policy debates.

For all that, political theatrics can sometimes strike a chord. For some reason, I found this one particularly touching:

The photo is from Agence France-Presse - Getty Images. It accompanies an AP story filed at 10:27am ET today, which appears on the website of the New York Times.

This is a meeting of some members of the Cabinet of the Maldives, the small island nation in the Indian ocean the very existence of which is threatened by a rise in sea level. They met at the bottom of a lagoon, about 20 feet below the surface.

With a backdrop of coral, the meeting was a bid to draw attention to fears that rising sea levels caused by the melting of polar ice caps could swamp this Indian Ocean archipelago within a century. Its islands average 7 feet (2.1 meters) above sea level.

''What we are trying to make people realize is that the Maldives is a frontline state. This is not merely an issue for the Maldives but for the world,'' Nasheed said.

As bubbles floated up from their face masks, the president, vice president, Cabinet secretary and 11 ministers signed a document calling on all countries to cut their carbon dioxide emissions.

So, I wonder, what is it about this little bit of drama I find so impressive, while the histrionics of the American left and right only draw my scorn? I'm not sure. I'll have to think about it.

Perhaps it's just the calm deliberateness with which they carried out their stunt, the direct focus on the One Big Thing that is at stake for the Maldives. Maybe it's the sly, almost Python-esque absurdity of the thing.

The story quotes President Mohammed Nasheed.

''We have to get the message across by being more imaginative, more creative and so this is what we are doing,'' he said in an interview on a boat en route to the dive site.

It 's probably not quite that simple. Maybe it's because the Maldives really do have a lot to worry about, and I'm sympathetic to their plight. Meanwhile, the antics of American activists, on one side or another, seem all the more ridiculous when so little seems to be at stake for them personally. It's hard to feel sorry even for 13,000 bloggers, for example, or all the people who have made the Ultimate Sacrifice of turning out their lights for one hour once a year.

Blog, Blog, Blah, Blah

2009-10-15T09:24:00.005-04:00

Today has been dubbed "Blog Action Day" by a group of people who have come together to dub today "Blog Action Day." Here's what the dubbers of "Blog Action Day" say about their event on their website:

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be one of the largest-ever social change events on the web.

Why have they done this dubbing?

First and last, the purpose of Blog Action Day is to create a discussion. We ask bloggers to take a single day out of their schedule and focus it on an important issue.

By doing so on the same day, the blogging community effectively changes the conversation on the web and focuses audiences around the globe on that issue.

Out of this discussion naturally flow ideas, advice, plans, and action.

The idea that bloggers might "unite" to create "a discussion" already strains credulity. I mean, these are bloggers we're talking about. At last count, nearly 9000 bloggers have registered for the event. That's 9000 people all talking at once, not even sure that anyone out there is listening, and perhaps not even really caring. (Okay, make that 9001.)

The result is more cacaphony than discussion. The metaphorical notion that something might "naturally flow" from such an event is especially unfortunate . . . but let's not go there.

Setting that aside, what is supposed to "flow" from 9000 bloggers all holding forth at once? The "ideas" and "advice" are bound to be at cross-purposes, pointing in 9000 different directions. This is unlikely to result in anything as concrete and coherent as "a plan", which puts any meaningful "action" well beyond reach.

This is monologue, not dialogue. It serves a purpose of its own, perhaps, but it doesn't get to the heart of what democratic deliberation requires.

Blogs and other social media are about "me." Democratic deliberation is about "us."

Imagine you are a political leader - or even just a genuinely thoughtful citizen looking to engage in real, substantive discussion of important issues. You attend a town hall meeting but, when you arrive, you discover that the ground rules have already been set: everyone who has anything at all to say on anything even vaguely related to the topic at hand will be given one full hour to declaim. The meeting is only one hour long, however, so everyone will have to declaim at the same time.

If it were me, I would turn around and leave.

Manifesto

2009-10-06T00:32:00.006-04:00

The Gold Standard

2009-10-04T01:23:00.010-04:00

As I have been reconfiguring this blog, I have also begun to explore more widely what I've started to call The Skeptics' Corner of the blogosphere. Some things I read this evening have converged with a few other threads that have been running through my thinking of late concerning the character of skepticism, all pointing to questions that require some sort of answer.

Here I am, ranging through human experience, subjecting beliefs and assumptions to the acid of doubt. But what standard should I apply when I scrutinize beliefs and assumptions? On what basis should I say this belief is faulty, but that belief is all right?

And then: To what end am I doing all this?

In the broader, mainstream skeptical community, the answer to the first two questions is clear and, apparently, straightforward: scientific research is the gold standard. We must bring our beliefs and assumptions about the natural world - including our own, all-natural hearts and minds - to the test of rigorous, "objective" scientific testing. Only that way can we sort out fact from fantasy.

Consider this, from the "Skeptic's Manifesto," an extended excerpt from Michael Shermer's book, Why People Believe Weird Things, posted on the website of The Skeptics Society

Modern skepticism is embodied in the scientific method, that involves gathering data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena. A claim becomes factual when it is confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement. But all facts in science are provisional and subject to challenge, and therefore skepticism is a method leading to provisional conclusions.

This is okay, as far as it goes, but it strikes me as still too narrow, too prone to slip into a kind of dogmatic, naturalistic orthodoxy on the model of positivism: there's science, and there's hooey . . . and there's no middle ground. This seems to rule out in advance any possibility of a critical engagement with the questions of ethics, political theory, epistemology (including philosophy of science), and other domains of human experience that is not based on the blithe assumption of their reducibility to or "consilience" with physics . . . and with naturalistic metaphysics.

I would suggest instead - taking a cue from both European phenomenology and American pragmatism - that the natural sciences are themselves a (very significant) part of a broader human enterprise: critical intersubjective inquiry.

This is my gold standard: critical inquiry in all domains of human experience, where claims are supported by reasoned argument, where claims and arguments together are offered up to the scrutiny of others. This is science in an older, broader sense, akin to the German term Wissenschaft, which encompasses both nature and culture.

I'll have to develop this further, but I would insist that the question of the relationship between the natural sciences and the "human sciences" is itself open to inquiry. I freely acknowledge the importance and the power of the natural sciences, and the authority of the community of scientific inquiry in addressing questions of how nature works. I relish the work of mainstream skeptics in debunking myth and distortion in that domain.

However, I am unwilling to assume consilience, unwilling to assume that ethics, for example, or political theory must ultimately bow to physics, or even to evolutionary biology. This is not to say the two modes of inquiry - roughly, the "two cultures" identified by C.P. Snow - are entirely independent of one another. It is to say that the relationship between them is problematic, and we should keep our options open. If anything, the two modes of inquiry intertwine in all sorts of curious ways, each by turns supporting and undermining the claims of the other.

Then there's the question of the purpose of all this. Why engage in this kind of inquiry at all, where every assumption is thrown open to scrutiny?

In a recent post to Skepticblog, Brian Dunning (a.k.a. the Skeptoid), took to task a blogger who had criticized him on some point or other. Dunning withheld the details, it would seem, to keep all this from getting personal. However, he seemed to think the criticism was misguided and overblown and, worse, that it would do real harm to "the skeptical movement." He writes:

I liken the drivers of the critical thinking movement to paddlers in a giant canoe. Some are more influential and paddle hard, others less so. But we’re all paddling. Every little bit helps. We’re paddling because what we’re doing is important and we believe in it. I welcome everyone who comes aboard to help, no matter the size of their paddle.

So it’s frustrating for me when I see people who represent themselves as paddlers, but really all they’re doing is disparaging those who actually do paddle. Oh, occasionally they may stick their paddle into the water and steer or give a little push or two, but every time they stop to lambaste the contributors, they’re dead weight; and when they shout to other boats what horrible paddlers their shipmates are, they are actively counterproductive.

He goes on to recount another instance in which he was critical of something that happened at a meeting of skeptics, but pursued his criticism quietly, by direct communication with the people involved. He discovered that his misgivings were based on a factual error regarding the circumstances of the alleged occurrence, and the problem was resolved. Writes Dunning: "We’re still paddling in step."

Leaving aside the disturbing imagery of "climb[ing] on board," closing ranks, and [walking] in [lock-]step, what I picked up on is the idea that everyone should be paddling in the same direction, toward some goal.

Okay. What's the goal?

As it turns out, the goal of the "skeptical movement" is fairly narrow: to debunk pseudoscience, mysticism, and other kinds of junk knowledge, and to spread critical thinking and foster better understanding of scientific inquiry and its results.

Again, that's all great, as far as it goes. But then, to what end are we doing these things?

Two possibilities spring to mind. One comes from Aristotle, for whom all the arts and sciences, and every form of inquiry, aimed for the same thing: a good human life in a vibrant and stable political society. The other possibility is a more current idea, Aristotle's vision writ large: the project of human civilization.

But then, why assume that as the goal? Why assume agreement on what constitutes "human civilization," or even "a good life"?

We'll have to look into that.

Death and Taxes

2009-10-01T11:58:00.018-04:00

From time to time, I discuss the problem of evil - or, The Problem of Evil - with my students.

This week, it was in the context of a special topics course on the Darwinian Revolution and its philosophical implications. Trying to bring them to some insight into pre-Darwinian ways of thinking, I had them read a few selections from Leibniz on the principle of plenitude - sorry, the Principle of Plenitude - and the Principle of Sufficient Reason, followed by the First Epistle of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man.

Two lines from Pope provide a deft summary of Leibniz, and help to solidify the idea of the Great Chain of Being.

. . . all must full or not coherent be,
And all that rises rise in due degree.

A brief explanation will be enough for this context. The idea in the Leibniz selections is that everything that is possible is striving toward existence, but not all possibles can come to existence in the same universe at the same time. Existence is a kind of perfection, so that world that has the most different kinds of existing things in it is the best or most perfect. When God set down the laws of the universe and set them in motion, he chose those laws that would allow the greatest possible number of possibles to come into existence. That's the idea of Plenitude.

That there is a continuous gradation of degrees of perfection in Being, "from Infinity to thee, from thee to Nothing", as Pope puts it, is the idea of the Great Chain of Being . . . about which more another time.

So, why does any particular thing exist, as opposed to something else? It is not necessary that it be so, in the technical sense that the non-existence of any particular thing (except God, to Leibniz' way of thinking) does not violate the principle of non-contradiction - er, the Principle . . . oh, never mind. Instead, things exist, and things happen, because there is Sufficient Reason for them to do so. In short, the kind of universe in which this particular thing exists or that particular event happens is more full, more perfect than the kind of universe in which it does not.

All of this is terribly, terribly medieval, full of the tropes and ideas of Scholastic philosophy: substances and degrees of perfection and existence as a predicate and so on. Still, the most basic idea has some staying power, and I see signs of it here and there in everyday talk about everyday things. The most basic idea is this: everything happens for a reason and, as Pope puts it, "whatever is, is right."

Enter the Problem of Natural Evil.

If the universe was crafted by an all-knowing, all-powerful, and benevolent God, if all is truly for the best in the best of all possible worlds, why do bad things keep happening to us?

Pope's response is, in effect, "Well, who the heck are we, that we should question the divine plan?"

Then, on November 1, 1755, a powerful earthquake struck Lisbon, Portugal. Based on descriptions of the damage, seismologists have retroactively estimated its strength to measure as high as 9.0 on the Richter scale. The earthquake itself combined with fires and a tsunami to kill as many as 100,000 people in the Lisbon area alone, though it's hard to be sure of the precise number.

The catastrophe had serious intellectual consequences, bringing the problem of natural evil under sharp scrutiny. Voltaire reeled off an angry rebuttal to Pope's essay, which, among other things, spurred Rousseau to write a spirited letter in defense of divine Providence, which may have been one of the goads that prompted Voltaire to write Candide.

Part of the point of bringing this up in class was to contrast this older view with a more current view, shaped in part by Darwinian thinking, and by the natural sciences more generally: we live in the world we live in, and stuff just keeps on happening.

That's not the point I wanted to make here, however. Instead, I wanted to report an astonishing alignment of events.

The first time I spent an entire class session discussing Leibniz, Pope, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the problem of natural evil was September 10, 2001. On September 12, of course, my prior plans for class were shoved aside, and we discussed instead the problem of moral evil . . . along with a number of other things that were on our minds that day.

This past Tuesday, around the time I was teaching my class, an earthquake in the Pacific spawned a tsunami that, as of this writing, killed at least 89 people in Samoa and American Samoa. Barely 24 hours later, a major earthquake struck Indonesia, killing hundreds.

If I had the turn of mind for it, I could conclude from this that I have developed some freakish power to foresee terrible events while I am writing my course syllabi, even months in advance.

I might also conclude that I should stop planning to talk to students about the problem of evil. Or, if I do, perhaps I should alert the authorities ahead of time. But then, what if I change my plans while the semester is underway, and shift the discussion to the following week? It gets awfully complicated.

It's absurd, of course. Bad things happen all the time, lots of them, even if they aren't big or bad enough to make the news. More to the point, lots of bad things have happened on or just after days when I was not talking with classes about the problem of evil. The 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai took place over the Thanksgiving break, just before which one group of students was giving in-class presentations and another was discussing the question of whether monkeywrenching is ever justified as a form of political protest. Hmmm . . .

Anyway, the 2005 tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people took place during the winter break, so you certainly can't pin that one on me.

And, on the other side, I've spent a number of class sessions on Leibniz, Pope, and that lot, over the years, and I recall nothing really bad happening except in the two instances I mention, at least nothing that made the news. I made special note of this fact, with some relief, the first time I discussed the problem of evil after September 2001. (I got away with it!)

Why do I bring all this up? Well, the other day I was talking with my friend, the astrologer. He told me, in all earnestness, that he is preparing a scholarly presentation to his fellow astrologers concerning an astonishing alignment of events. I'm not sure precisely what he meant, but it would seem that Pluto is entering into the zero-degree of Capricorn . . . or something. This is an astrological event that occurs once every 250 years or so.

The last time it happened, he told me, was right around the year the Stamp Act was passed, which was a contributing cause of the American Revolution. The time before that was right around the year "Cardinal Wolsey" became, my friend said, "Regent" (in fact, a quick check of Wikipedia assures me, Henry VIII - every inch a king, no Regents need apply - appointed Thomas Wolsey to the post of Almoner in 1509, then made him High Chancellor in 1515; Wolsey didn't become Cardinal until 1514.) Anyway, my friend did accurately report that Wolsey made serious and far-reaching changes to taxation in England.

And now, as Pluto does its thing once more, we have President Obama in office, who is, as my friend put it, "shaking up the bureaucracy."

So, there you have it. Pluto doing whatever it's doing to Capricorn allows us to predict some kind of change in something related to taxation that will somehow have some sort of major political ramifications. So, brace yourselves!

Except that lots of consequential changes in taxation occurred when Pluto wasn't doing whatever it's doing to Capricorn, like the first introduction of a federal income tax in the United States in 1861. On the other side, Wolsey became Almoner some eight years after the date of the Pluto-Capricorn thing, and High Chancellor some five years after that. Is there a statute of limitations on this sort of thing?

It's a constant refrain where I work - lots of social scientists around - that correlation does not prove causality. Well, here's a corollary: coincidence doesn't prove correlation. In the case of Cardinal Wolsey, you have to kind of squint at the sequence of events just to see a coincidence. The mists of time help: what's eight years, give or take, in recounting events that occurred half a millennium ago?

We can always find the extraordinary if we are looking for it - and we humans do tend to look for it - so long as we are willing studiously to ignore the ordinary.

Weak Tea, part five, addendum

2009-09-30T08:40:00.010-04:00

Thomas L. Friedman's column today in the Times is worth a read. It relates to an idea I was trying to develop in yesterday's post: the people as a unity, not just an aggregation.

Toward the end, he lists a number of factors that have changed American politics, allowing noisy and unthinking fringe groups on all sides to overwhelm the ingenious checks and balances of the system set down in the Constitution and make it difficult, if not impossible, to do anything at all for the common good:

Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.

I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.

So, who's up for some serious discussion?

Weak Tea, part five

2009-09-29T12:37:00.031-04:00

Here, at last, is the ninth principle of Glenn Beck's "912 Project":

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.
Who works for whom? “I consider the people who constitute a society or a nation as the source of all authority in that nation.” Thomas Jefferson

Yet again, the principle as stated obscures and distorts some genuinely interesting and important questions. And, again, it openly contradicts the fifth principle, that no one is above the rule of law. How is the rule of law carried out, except that executive power is entrusted to a government, and each of us thinks of ourselves, in this respect at least, as answerable to the government? There seems to be a muddle here, which can only be sorted out by going back to the basics of democratic theory.

I would note in passing that the quotation from Jefferson is a bit ambiguous. What does he mean by “the people”?

On the one hand, he could mean the sum of individual persons. This is what the grammatical form here suggests: “the people who constitute” – with “people” being used in the plural.

On the other hand, following the conventions of democratic theory at the time, he could mean the whole that is in a sense greater than the sum of the parts: the people, used in the singular, as a kind of collective entity. It’s us, not just you and me and him and her and everyone else. The idea, for Locke as for Rousseau, is that there has to be a people first, before its members can organize themselves into a political society. Jefferson might better have written: “the people that constitutes . . .”

Looking at the principle itself, what seems to be happening here is akin to the fallacy of division, attributing a property of a whole to the parts that make up the whole. For example: the universe is vast, and the universe is made of atoms, so atoms must be vast.

Now, in modern democratic theory, all legitimate political power comes from the people, and those entrusted with political power "work for" and are answerable to the people.

So far, so good.

But “the people” here is understood in the singular, collective sense already noted. Put simply, the government works for and is answerable to us. It does not follow that the government works for and is answerable to me, not even to you and me and him and her . . .

So, what is my part in all this, as an individual? In Rousseau’s terms, I am both citizen and subject. As citizen, I participate in the sovereignty of the people, contributing my own voice to the deliberative process whereby we make decisions about what is in the public interest. As subject, I am bound to obey the results of that deliberative process, as carried out by the government. Government is a body of hired functionaries, to whom we entrust the responsibility of acting in the public interest.

(The complication for us, over what Rousseau has in mind, is that we have also delegated most of our legislative power - the power to deliberate and make decisions about laws that serve the public interest - to Congress and to the various state legislatures.)

Even if it could be said, then, that the government answers to me insofar as I am a citizen, it does so only to the extent that I am part of the assembly of citizens deliberating about the common good.

It does not follow that it answers to me as an individual. I cannot, as an individual, go telling the President what to do and expect him to obey me, any more than I can walk up to an infantryman in the U.S. Army and start issuing orders. Even if 60,000 of us get together and scream at the President, he’s not bound to obey us; we are, after all, only .02% of the people. 66,862,039 voted to entrust him with the Presidency in the first place, following the proper Constitutional procedure for doing so. But even they, as individuals, cannot tell the President what to do and expect him to obey.

Are we bound to obey the government? Well, yes, insofar as we are also subjects, insofar as we have committed ourselves to the rule of law. Otherwise, the whole social contract breaks down.

Here, as I see it, is the real question, the one obscured by the rhetoric of “stomping on” the federal government: How can we, the people, best ensure that the government is living up to the trust we have placed in it, that it will act in the public interest?

Some of that insurance comes from the Constitution itself. We elect representatives and members of the executive branch from time to time, which is supposed to bind them to us. It's in the nature of the democratic process that not everyone will be happy with the outcome of any given election . . . but there's always next time.

Once in office, those entrusted with political power are supposed to be hedged about by checks and balances, each branch answerable to both of the others, and all of them differently answerable to the people.

But then, there is the corrupting influence of special interests, with money and power behind them, each claiming to speak for the public. Then, there are the mass media, which can distort understanding, stoke emotion, and trivialize public debate. There are historical circumstances that call now for a stronger executive (9/11, for example?), now for a stronger judiciary (undoing segregation?). And there is the corrupting influence of power itself, the struggle among the branches that goes this way and that.

What can we do? I can’t really begin to answer that question in this one post, but I have my own approach to the matter. We citizens, each of us as individuals, must start to live up to our own responsibilities as citizens: to inform ourselves, to think clearly and critically, to engage in the kind of deliberation that generates more light than heat. (Note: I do not say the deliberation should be without heat.) We must be more willing to do for ourselves the hard work of democracy, finding a way to go on living together despite our disparate perspectives and projects.

And what do I mean by the public interest? I mean what is good for the body politic as a whole, the conditions under which a political society can thrive. There is a wide range of possibilities here, and lots of room for really interesting disagreement.

For myself, as I’ve already written, I’m convinced that we, the people, really are better off if, most of the time, all else being equal, we as individuals are left alone to pursue projects that fall within the private sphere. On that general principle, I have no disagreement with the tea partiers.

However, I also hold that we are better off, even better able to pursue our own private projects, if we undertake a variety of public actions and make a variety of judicious public investments for the common good.

You and I may disagree on where to draw the line between what is properly private and what is properly public, and rightly so. But then, let’s focus on the substance of the disagreement itself and commit ourselves to real, substantial deliberation on this most difficult question, rather than throwing tantrums, calling names, and threatening to pull down the entire government if we as individuals don't get our way.

Weak Tea: A Side Show

2009-09-28T10:43:00.021-04:00

My brother sent me a link to the following video, with a note that it "speaks for itself."

This is outrageous! I mean, what a terrible, terrible song!

If I were Mr. Obama, I'd be mortified.

But that, of course, was not my brother's intention in sending me the link, nor is it how tea partiers and other critics of the administration have responded to the video. To them, it means that Obama really is a crypto-socialist-fascist dictator-in-the-making, and that the indoctrination of schoolchildren has begun.

I responded to my brother:

Well, since our email exchange, I've been engaged in actual critical thought, not just sending links to videos of people doing stupid things that reflect only on themselves. Now, had there been actual government agents in the room supervising the reeducation of children, or evidence of an Executive Order demanding that every school hold a pageant offering uncritical praise to the President, then you might have something.

He wrote back:

Again you missed the point! Sing praise to whomever you want (1st Amendment), don't use tax money in public school. If they were singing praise of Reagan or Bush what would be on your blog? I can tell you I would be opposed to it.

I responded to my brother, agreeing with him . . . up to a point. It was a stupid and inappropriate thing for a teacher to do, about as stupid as having kids sing Christian hymns at school assemblies.

But, again, it is not a sign of rising socialist-fascist totalitarianism, as many who share my brother's outlook seem to think. Just look at the comments posted on YouTube in response to the video, if you have the stomach for such things.

I went on, in my reply to my brother, to play the logic card. People who see this sort of thing as the sign of rising socialist-fascism seem to be reasoning as follows:

1. Mao Zedong was a totalitarian communist leader, and he had a cult of personality.
2. Hitler was a totalitarian fascist leader, and he had a cult of personality.
So, 3. Totalitarian leaders sometimes have a cult of personality.
4. A lot of people think Obama is a really great guy and they're very happy he's president.
So, 5. Obama has a cult of personality.
Therefore, 6. Obama is a totalitarian leader.

Claims 1 and 2 are matters of historical fact. It's somewhat disturbing that, in Russia, there now seem to be some efforts aimed at reviving the Stalin cult.

Claim 5 is supposed to follow from claim 4, but it does so by no valid logical inference I can discern. People may be excused, I think, for being really excited to have an intelligent and articulate man in the Oval Office. People may be excused for being really excited that one of the great hurdles in the long struggle for civil rights has been surmounted. It does not follow that Mr. Obama can do no wrong. It does not even follow that most Americans think Mr. Obama can do no wrong.

Claim 6 is supposed to follow from claims 3 and 5, but the inference is an instance either of the fallacy of the undistributed middle or the fallacy of affirming the consequent, depending how you formalize the argument.

Consider the above argument stripped down to its essence, granting, only for the sake of argument, that Obama's popularity really amounts to a cult of personality:

All socialist-fascist totalitarian dictators are leaders with a cult of personality.
Obama is a leader with a cult of personality.
Therefore, Obama is a socialist-fascist totalitarian dictator.

This has precisely the same form as the following argument, in which will be proven that Mr. Obama is, in fact, a whale:

All whales are mammals.
Obama is a mammal.
Therefore, Obama is a whale.

Behold, the mighty work you can do with the fallacy of the undistributed middle.

Much the same can be done with the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Consider:

If Obama is a socialist-fascist totalitarian dictator, then Obama has a cult of personality.
Obama has a cult of personality.
Therefore, Obama is a socialist-fascist totalitarian dictator.

And again, using the same form:

If Obama is a whale, then Obama breathes air.
Obama breathes air.
Therefore, Obama is a whale.

I hasten to point out that there is one, very significant difference between whales and socialist-fascist totalitarian dictators, to wit: whales actually exist. A socialist-fascist totalitarian dictator is all but a logical impossibility. Socialism and fascism are deeply incompatible ideologies, even if their historical instantiations have had some features in common.

As it happens, conflating or equating the two on the basis of those common features is yet another instance of the undistributed middle . . .

Competing Images of Democracy

2009-09-28T00:12:00.017-04:00

A comparison.

First, some images of recent "town hall" outbursts (photos from Charles Dharapak/AP Photo and Commercial Appeal/Landov):

. . . and one image of protests around the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh (photo from AP):

Now, some images of yesterday's World Wide Views project meeting in Atlanta:

Following the common method of the project, we brought together group of ordinary citizens from around the Atlanta area, and asked them to spend the entire day discussing in depth and then voting on complex and detailed questions about climate change and climate policy.

The group included hard-core climate skeptics and others who asked serious and pointed questions about the motives and methods of the meeting itself, as well as many who had no firm prior commitments on the issue, other than some general knowledge and some degree of concern. All were welcomed, and all made themselves heard through the process.

Honest and civil discussion prevailed, as well as willingness to do the hard work of practical policy making: at the end of the day, each of the small groups in the room crafted a single recommendation for policy makers at the upcoming COP15 in Copenhagen, forging some sort of consensus out of their disparate views. The lower two images show participants circulating around the room, considering the other groups' recommendations before casting votes for the three they favor.

(The complete results from the Atlanta meeting can be found here; they show interesting patterns of convergence and divergence, especially when compared to results from other nations or groups of nations. Try comparing the Atlanta meeting with that in Mali, for example, or Annex-1 "developed" countries with low-income developing countries.)

Now, compare the two sets of images, the "town hall" and G20 protets versus the citizen consultation. Both may reveal aspects of what democracy is. But which should we hold up as the model of what democracy can be, and what it should be?

A few more images of WWViews events . . .

From Boston:

From Copenhagen:

And from New Delhi:

Pictures do not speak for themselves. I understand that.

I'm just sayin' . . .

Weak Tea, part four

2009-09-27T18:22:00.031-04:00

Just one principle from the 912 Project, this time. I'll finish up in a day or two.

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.
On your right to disagree “In a free and republican government, you cannot restrain the voice of the multitude; every man will speak as he thinks, or more properly without thinking.” George Washington

Again, it’s hard to disagree with this, at least on its face.

And again, where were these people during the Bush administration, when we were told that dissent was all but tantamount to treason, weakening our resolve and giving "aid and comfort" to our enemies? That was the line from Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Cheney, and the rest from 9/11 on down.

There was an obvious threat behind this kind of rhetoric from the Bush administration: treason is the one crime explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, and it is punishable by death.

And what did protesters against Bush-Cheney policies want? They wanted to maintain basic civil liberties, outlined by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, realized through the long tradition of American jurisprudence, against the perceived encroachment of the federal government.

Did they have good reason for their dissent? Perhaps. Did they engage in overheated rhetoric? Some of them certainly did, yes.

Just so, the tea partiers see themselves as standing up for basic liberties, outlined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, sometimes realized, sometimes eroded by the long tradition of American jurisprudence, against the perceived encroachment of the federal government.

Do they have good reason for their dissent? Perhaps. Do they engage in overheated rhetoric? Some of them certainly do, yes.

But are the cases really parallel?

Here’s the crucial question for the tea partiers: Who, exactly, is calling you unpatriotic, or disloyal, or treasonous? Not anyone I’ve heard, and certainly not anyone in the administration.

No, people are just saying the claims you make seem ignorant and misguided, drawn more from overwrought emotion than from clear understanding and careful deliberation.

That, at least, is what I am saying, and not, I think, without some justice. I mean, are the 9 Principles really the best you can do? Is this what passes for thinking in the tea party "movement"?

Of course you have the right to say stupid things. But I have the right to sort through your claims for myself, and come to my own considered judgment. I even reserve the right to make jokes at your expense, as you would be happy to do at mine.

That, at least, is what I would tell the tea partiers, if any of them were to ask, and assuming they could hear me over all the screaming.

A few more comments on this principle.

First, casting their position, and their position only, as Patriotism is really just putting more poison in the well. We’re the real Patriots, they seem to be saying. If you disagree with us, that means you think we're un-American, which just goes to show how un-American you are (or un-Real-American? Unreal American?) After all, criticizing the 9 principles means you have doubts about the first principle, which implies you believe America is bad. QED.

So it goes.

Second, the phrase “share my personal opinion” always makes me slightly queasy. The idea of sharing opinions smacks of kum-ba-ya, can’t-we-all-get-along pablum. It implies that, if you share your opinion with me, I ought to accept it gratefully, as a gift. Perhaps I can then share my opinion with you.

Happy, happy!

And if you say bad things about what people have shared with you, then you're just a no-good mean meanie.

(But then, if you play along and share an opinion that does not fit with theirs, they howl like demons and lunge for your throat.)

As for framing this in terms of personal opinion, that reminds me of a gambit sometimes employed by students in my philosophy classes, especially if they receive a low grade on a paper: philosophy is all about personal opinion, they say or imply, and you have no right to criticize my opinion, which is, after all, mine and not yours.

Well, I try patiently to explain, philosophy is about thoroughgoing critical examination of beliefs and the assumptions behind them, no matter whose beliefs or assumptions they happen to be. This is hard work, and there's no substitute for it. Hiding behind some supposedly unassailable “personal opinion” is just cover for intellectual laziness.

Third, it’s odd to use that particular quotation from Washington in this context. He seems to mean that everyone has the right to speak, even if the mass of ordinary people (on whom Washington seems to look with a kind of fatherly contempt) insists on speaking without thinking.

It is used in the context of these principles, it seems, to uphold instead the right to not think, even if the courageous heroes who attend tea parties dare to speak very loudly while not thinking.

I suppose there is such a right, if only for lack of any practicable way to violate such a right: I know of no way to force someone to think. It seems to me, though, that the right, the privilege, and indeed the responsibility of careful, critical thinking is much more worth defending.

But then, to quote my brother:

I am one of the pissed off Americans and I don't need to make an intelligent argument. I just hold up the Constitution and ask where is the healthcare, social security, Medicare, education department, HUD, NEA, Highways (send $1 get $.80 back) states should handle their own roads (Pay $1 get $1). The list continues on and on. We shouldn't have to defend what should never have been allowed.

I have to say I really don't understand that last sentence. Must be something pretty deep.

Fourth, does it strike anyone else as odd that conservatives have suddenly become so eager to cast themselves as Victims? I thought that was a liberal thing . . .

Copenhagen: A Memento

2009-09-27T13:25:00.012-04:00

Here's something I discovered on my trip to Copenhagen last March.

First, my version of the standard postcard view of a famous (though not so very significant) landmark:

Now, with a slight change of angle, we can see what she's really looking at:

I have nothing to add, except that, yes, those are wind turbines in the far distance, with a coal-fired power plant in the near distance.

World Wide Views on Global Warming

2009-09-25T19:45:00.007-04:00

Tomorrow I serve as Head Facilitator of the Atlanta Meeting of the World Wide Views project. This was the reason for my trip to Copenhagen in March (see this, and this).

Now that it comes down to it, I'm actually really excited to be participating in the project. The first meetings have already begun, way over by the International Date Line, and the last meeting, in southern California, will wrap up about 22 hours from now.

And the results are already starting to come in, though only on the first, rather bland questions. It's the later questions on which it will be most interesting to see the results, most especially the recommendations from the assembled citizens that will be gathered at the end.

You can follow the results at wwviews.org.

I'll have more to say about this afterward, though probably not immediately. I need to be careful not to step on the toes of those carrying out research on the effects and the effectiveness of citizen consultation carried out by this method at this scale.

Weak Tea, part three

2009-09-23T16:19:00.028-04:00

I seem to be on a roll. Here we go, deeper into the principles of the 912 Project . . .

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.
Life, Liberty, & The Pursuit of Happiness “Everyone has a natural right to choose that vocation in life which he thinks most likely to give him comfortable subsistence.” Thomas Jefferson

Most of the first part of principle is itself a direct quotation from the Declaration of Independence. To question that would be tantamount to blasphemy.

The second half of the principle also seems fairly uncontroversial . . . in part because strict equality of outcome is all but incoherent as a goal for any economic and political system that involves human beings. Does anyone seriously propose this any more?

Here it is a false dichotomy that obscures the really interesting questions – and there are a number of them – still to be asked about equality and the pursuit of happiness, questions about which there may still be reasonable disagreement.

Now, it may well be that the Republic as a whole really is better off if everyone adheres strictly to the libertarian vision: everyone pursues his or her own happiness, and lives (or not) with the outcome they get.

Or, maybe not. Consider just one question that might fall in between libertarianism and strict equality of outcome.

Might the Republic as a whole be better off – more just, more secure, more free – if we establish a minimum level below which no citizen should be allowed to sink? In short, should there be public provision of some kind of safety net?

As it happens, I’m reading Aristotle’s Politics with one of my classes right now. I just came across a passage in which he is discussing what he calls “polity” or constitutional rule, a particular kind of constitution that is the mean between democracy (rule by the poor, tending to mob rule, stickin' it to the rich) and oligarchy (rule by the rich for their own benefit, stickin' it to the poor). Aristotle considers polity to be the best political system that is readily attainable under ordinary circumstances, avoiding the corruption of the other two forms. As it happens, though, this balanced kind of constitution is possible only when there is a large middle class, neither too rich nor too poor.

Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property; for where some possess much, and the others nothing, there may arise an extreme democracy, or a pure oligarchy; or a tyranny may grow out of either extreme. Politics 1295b38ff

How many of the policies decried by neo-conservatives, from the New Deal on down, were aimed at the establishment of a broad middle class, secure in their homes and in their investments? How many were aimed at preventing – albeit with mixed success – the fall of too many citizens into a permanent underclass, or aimed at lifting - with still more mixed success - people out of poverty?

America That Was, that dream to which tea partiers long to return, seems at times to be the agrarian republic favored by Jefferson. He feared the coming of industrialization from Europe because it would create a class of poor workers. Jefferson had read Aristotle; he could see what would follow from that. Well, the factories came, drawing displaced people into the cities from the American countryside and from Europe, and away we went.

So, how to prevent the working class from becoming a revolutionary class, heralding the dictatorship of the proletariat? Provide them with a safety net, yes, but also draw them into the middle class. Make it easier and safer to get a mortgage. Get them into homes of their own. Offer them security for their retirement. Encourage them to buy cars, then build roads for them to drive on . . . so they can drive to Washington, D.C., stand in a public park, and decry the interference of the federal government in their pursuit of happiness.

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.
Charity “It is not everyone who asketh that deserveth charity; all however, are worth of the inquiry or the deserving may suffer.” George Washington

Here, yet again, is a principle that distorts an interesting and important set of questions.

Charity is almost by definition voluntary. It's also particular and personal. Prompted by my sympathy for your plight, I offer you assistance and ask nothing in return. If you demand that I give money to individuals (Bums! Slackers! Welfare Queens!) I don’t admire and for whom I have no sympathy, you are violating not only my rights, but the very idea of charity itself. More evidence that you are an evil fascist!

More poison in the well.

The thing is, charity isn’t really the issue here. We're not talking about something personal and particular, but something public, something we (or our representatives) may choose, even though you or I do not.

Here, as I see it, is the salient question: What kinds of public action may legitimately be taken to secure public goods?

(What follows overlaps with my discussion of the sixth principle, but since Beck and his writers seem to be dwelling on this point, distorting the same question from two different directions, some of this bears repeating.)

There are many good things we as individuals and as families can secure for ourselves through private initiative in the open market. But there may also be some good things we as a nation pursue together, some of which may even be necessary for the full flowering of liberty, that can be secured only through public action and public investment.

Some would argue for a fairly spare set of public goods, once we’ve established national defense and protection against force and fraud, including perhaps some public spaces and public fora, basic transportation infrastructure, and so on.

Others envision a much broader set of public goods, including educational and cultural institutions, public funding for various kinds of research, regulation of markets to smooth out the inevitable boom and bust cycle of a capitalist economy, and safety-net provisions that help people over the rough spots, so they can continue to participate in economic and civic life.

At it's best, the argument might go, the American government can act and invest in such a way as to open up new kinds of opportunities for people to pursue their own, privately chosen goals.

So, the way to think of the provision of public goods is not as the coerced transfer of wealth from one particular person to another person who does not deserve it. Rather, it’s our collective investment in the long-term liberty, security, and prosperity of our Republic.

As noted in my response to the sixth principle, someone could reasonably argue for safety-net provisions on the grounds that the republic as a whole is worse off – less secure, less prosperous, ultimately less free – if too many people are malnourished, uninsured, etc. Of course, the republic as a whole may be worse off if too many people are abjectly dependent on government subsidies, but that seems to indicate there is a balance to be struck. The point is at least debatable.

It’s also possible to argue for safety-net provisions on the grounds of simple reciprocity, following good old-fashioned social contract theory. “I agree to pay taxes that will be used for public action to provide a basic safety-net for others because I would want others to do the same for me if I should find myself, in spite of my honest best efforts, falling on hard times.”

As I write this, the Atlanta area is recovering from serious flooding, after 20-25 inches of rain fell in three days. I heard on the radio this morning of a woman leaving a Red Cross shelter in tears because she had lost everything in the flood, and the Red Cross could not provide her with a rent voucher to help her through until she could recover. The Red Cross depends on the state government to provide funds for such emergency assistance, but Governor Perdue insists the coffers are empty.

Is that just her tough luck? Should she depend instead on charity, which may be utterly inadequate to the scale of the disaster, uncertain in its delivery because it is dependent on the momentary goodwill and private means of individuals, and provided only with strings attached (say Hallelujah!)?

Would I be content if I were in her situation? Would you be content? Do we really will to live in a Republic that makes no provision for emergency relief? The point is at least debatable.

Where the tea partiers do have a good point is that the current way of making decisions about public investment in the common good doesn’t seem very public. Congress seems detached, in a reality of its own, and tempers are running high.

Fair enough.

But what’s the solution? To stomp on the federal government as such? To “starve the beast”? Or is it to reform our institutions, to make them more directly responsive to public deliberation, less under the influence of private and powerful special interests?

I would opt for the latter, but this would require citizens to be a lot more informed, a lot more engaged, and a lot less inclined to call names and bellow their incoherent rage.

Weak Tea, part two

2009-09-23T12:12:00.021-04:00

Moving along . . .

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.
Marriage/Family “It is in the love of one’s family only that heartfelt happiness is known. By a law of our nature, we cannot be happy without the endearing connections of a family.” Thomas Jefferson

Now the principles of the 912 Project start to get a little more serious, and my responses will, too.

This one is very curious. On the one hand, there is an issue of real substance here regarding the proper relationship between public and private, and regarding the kinds of decisions appropriately left to each realm.

But the way the principle is stated begins to reveal a pattern that bedevils this and most of the principles that follow: a substantive issue about which there may be reasonable disagreement is entirely obscured by a provocative exaggeration, one that both misses the point and poisons the well.
You disagree with this principle? Well, then, you must want the federal government to micromanage your private life, make decisions for you, your children, and your household. You are therefore an evil fascist!

Nonsense.

But then, the principle as stated is itself nonsense. Those who would make such an assertion cannot possibly mean what they say, but perhaps only because they don’t know what they mean.

What’s right about this is that households – families in some broad sense – are important units in any political order. Aristotle, to go back to the beginnings of European political theory, saw households as the building blocks of the polis. Now, we may quibble about what constitutes a household, who can be a spouse, how labor and authority ought to be divided, and so on. Still, it is clear enough that many of the decisions of ordinary life are best and most appropriately made at home.

But does this mean that mom and pop have “ultimate authority”? Authority over what? Does ultimate authority mean mom and pop can do anything they choose, without answering to anyone?

Taken at face value, this goes beyond atavism. It isn’t a return to America That Was, but a return to The Time Before – before constitutions, before civil society, before villages – when fathers might well exercise despotical rule over their wives, children, and household slaves, treating them all alike as chattel. (In his Politics, Aristotle attributes this way of living to barbaroi.)

Oh, but we wouldn’t do that, the tea partiers might protest! We’re Christian parents. Small comfort there.

Worse still, taken at face value, this principle seems to stand in direct contradiction to the next principle, which seems to establish “the law” as, in some respects at least, “the ultimate authority.”

Are mom and pop above the law, or aren’t they? If the law establishes broad areas for private decisions, much leeway for families to make their own way, well and good. But the law must also put some restrictions on what parents can do within their households, decisions they cannot be allowed to make, and the law must come first in such instances.

Parents may not, I think most Americans will agree, use opiates to pacify their children, or make their children work in the mines or factories to help support the family, or marry them off at the age of 12, or prevent them getting at least a minimal education. On other questions, it may be harder to decide whether parents have prerogative – withholding needed medical treatment for religious reasons, for example – but the question is at least debatable.

Also notice that the quotation from Jefferson has almost no bearing on the principle. Family life is great, Tom, yeah. And you should know.

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.
Justice “I deem one of the essential principles of our government… equal and exact justice to all men of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political.” Thomas Jefferson

Here’s a nice idea. It's hard to dispute this principle, at least when it's stated in such general terms.

But then, where were these people during the Bush Administration when, for example, the Vice President tried to establish his office as beyond the reach of the Constitution itself?

It's always a good thing to ask whether a President or other public official is acting within the bounds of the law. For myself, I've seen no evidence of any actual abuse of power on the part of the Obama administration - which is not to say there will be no such abuses or that there have not been abuses the evidence for which has yet to come to light.

But a distinction is in order between calling out abuses of power and calling out policy decisions you think are misguided, foolish, or otherwise bad. Don't like the proposed health-care reforms? Think it was a bad idea for the government to take emergency measures to bail out the auto industry? Then say, precisely, why those were bad ideas, and what you would have had the President do instead.

I'll return to this point later, but the President is not bound to do what you, as an individual, want him to do. That he made a decision you disagree with does not in itself constitute an abuse of power. To say it does so it is to level an accusation that requires extraordinary proof.

If you push it still further, labeling the President a "Fascist," or tagging him with the ironic title of "Emperor" or "Messiah," then others might be excused for thinking you a moron who has scant understanding of the meaning of the Constitution and no regard at all for the plain meanings of words.

Weak Tea, part one, addenda

2009-09-23T09:13:00.015-04:00

Two further thoughts on the first three principles of the 912 Project:

First, it now occurs to me that there is good reason why there is no quotation from the Founding Fathers to accompany the first principle: Beck or his ghost-writers couldn’t find one.

The Founders didn’t really go in for mindless jingoism, you see. That would come later.

Second, it has also occurred to me that there may be a still more insidious meaning behind the third principle. It is worded very carefully so that it does not actually commit adherents to being fully Honest today, so long as they are more Honest than they were yesterday and they make an earnest promise to be still more Honest tomorrow.

So, some of these folks may be a lying gasbags today but, hey! You shoulda heard ‘em yesterday!

In fact, the principle can be seen as positively forbidding adherents to be fully Honest today. If they were, how could they be still more Honest tomorrow?

Weak Tea, part one

2009-09-22T22:10:00.032-04:00

My recent - now, mercifully, terminated - email exchange with my brother did serve the function of piquing my curiosity about the September 12 rally in Washington and the intentions of its organizers. Most especially, I'm interested in Glenn Beck's so-called "912 Project."

Built on 9 Principles and 12 Values, it seems intended to provide a common platform for the protesters, talking points, a rallying cry, a unifying vision . . . whatever.

Oh, please. 9 Principles and 12 Values? It sounds like a hastily written self-help book. What's next, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Wingnuts? (With profound apologies to Steven R. Covey.)

Still, I will suppress my rising gorge long enough to take a look at these principles, one by one, over the next couple of posts. As presented on the website of the 912 Project, each principle is followed by a quotation, cherry-picked from the writings and speeches of the Founding Fathers.

Let's take a look.

1. America Is Good.

Well, who could argue with that? I mean, here's a claim with almost no determinate content. It can mean anything!

Hooray for America!

I can dig it. Just saying the word, "America," gives me a strong positive affect!

This is the one principle that stands on its own. Apparently, it requires no explanation or defense, not even that provided by a cherry-picked quotation.

But which aspects of America? The whole thing? The people? The Constitution? The federal government? (Oops, I guess not that one.) What Sarah Palin so endearingly, winkingly called "The Rill [i.e., Real] America"? Us, as opposed to Them? A particular, sepia-tinted image of the Time Before Everything Went Wrong?

And "good" in what sense, by what standard? That's what we philosophers might call a vexed question. But I digress . . .

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.
God “The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.” from George Washington’s first Inaugural address.

Okay, they lost me there. I guess there's a religious test for being a tea partier. I wonder, is there also a religious test for being a Real American? I guess we can begin to piece together some of that sepia-tinted image of America That Was. I'm not there.

Anyway, as for the cherry-picked quotation, that's just typical deist talk, really. Any of the founders could have used such language in referring to the general idea of rules for conduct derived from nature by reason. Even all-but-atheists like Jefferson used such language.

The idea that obvious standards of right and wrong can be read directly from the book of nature has fallen on hard times of late, though, and for good reason. In many, many ways our understanding of the universe and our place in it has changed since the eighteenth century, expanded, turned upside-down, come unhinged, or whatever metaphor you like. I guess America That Was can only be found in the Universe That Was.

My question about the Universe That Was, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, is this: How did we ever manage to live in anything so small? I much prefer what John Dewey called "a universe with the lid off."

In such a universe, ethical inquiry has become more subtle, more complex, and more difficult. Or maybe it's always been so difficult, and people have just been denying it? It's just one vexed question after another. But I digress . . .

Since the tea partiers are so terribly fond of quoting Jefferson, how about this one?

Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined, and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites. (Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia)

Or this one?

Where the preamble [of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom] declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting the words “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read, “A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination. (Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography).

Let's hear it for infidels! (I'm a Reformed Infidel, myself.)

Is Jefferson alone not enough of an authority for the tea-bag atavists? Here's one written into a treaty signed by John Adams:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion ... (Treaty of Tripoli)

Then, of course, there's that pesky little clause in the First Amendment.

Haven't had enough? See here for more!

Moving on . . .

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.
Honesty “I hope that I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider to be the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.” George Washington

Okay, I can go along with this. No problem.

But, then, what the heck is this kind of pablum doing in what is supposed to be the agenda of a political movement with radical, perhaps even revolutionary intent?

Is this just filler? Did Beck throw this in so he could round out his nine principles, since the rally was planned for September?

Or maybe there's something more insidious here. Maybe it's meant to imply that only Real Americans are Honest. Maybe it's meant to imply a monopoly on Virtue as such.

Maybe Beck hopes that, if the tea partiers can convince us of their dedication to Honesty, we won't notice that the rally on September 12 was awash in distortions and lies.

That there would be what we philosophers call a performative self-contradiction, lying about being honest. But I digress . . .

Tea Party!

2009-09-21T17:33:00.011-04:00

I've fallen into a heated email exchange with my brother. It began when he sent me a link to a YouTube video in which scenes of the September 12 "Tea Party" rally in DC are strung together with the apparently revolutionary (but secretly reactionary?) song by The Who, "We Won't Get Fooled Again". The images, one after the other, display the shoddy propaganda and misguided hysteria of the crowd.

My brother avowed that he was moved by the actions of "those patriots" at the rally.

Well, I couldn't take this sitting down, so I wrote:

I don't know about patriotism. Somehow, anger and fear fed by ignorance and expressed through name-calling and really lame propaganda doesn't strike me as the best way to show one's love of country. All this shows, really, is that conservative activists can make themselves just as ridiculous as liberal activists when they engage in pointless street-theater.

Engaging in actual informed, reasoned debate about the substance of policy issues . . . now that would be an expression of patriotism in a democratic republic.

But, since you seem interested in exchanging mean-spirited jabs by way of YouTube, I offer this, directed at the problems that arise from ignorance in a democratic republic.

Okay, the Bill Maher video clip was over the top. I shouldn't have been so provocative. He wrote back with a long, angry diatribe against elitism, in favor of liberty, tried to smear me with every label he could, to associate me with King George, who would have thought colonists like Jefferson ignorant, and with those pimp- and prostitute-loving yahoos at ACORN, and on and on.

A sample:

The 9/12 gathering on the Mall in DC had over 1 million people, (I know the news only said 60k, but then there must have been only 60k at the inauguration of the Messiah because the crowd was exactly the same size. Time lapse photography from both events.) I digress, Zero arrests (0) yes and the park service commented on how people actually picked up after themselves. I will take ignorant dumbasses like these any day of the week. The problem the left has is that their people are only passionate when they get paid for it, with the exception of a few like moveon.org, PETA, Michael Moore (oh, they do get paid for it). The people you are seeing, by the way many Libertarians (although ignorant and unimportant to you) are passionate for freedom. No government banks, healthcare, businesses, education (yes, no government education). If we as American's don't know what the Bill of Rights is all about or the Constitution or Government, or that the planets revolve around the sun (really?) what are they teaching in government regulated schools? Time to stomp the government back down to size, We the People!!

So, I wrote back again. Here is my reply, in full, with a few minor corrections:

I simply point out that, in that little video you so admired, there was not one cogent argument, not one careful assessment of the very serious policy proposals now on the table in light of the best available facts regarding health care, apparent disdain for the plain meanings of words (like "tyranny", "socialist" and "fascist"), and overall an apparent failure to understand what freedom is and how a constitutional republic works. And what of those few, fringe crackpots among the "teabaggers" who seem willing to make veiled threats against the life of the duly elected president of the United States by openly carrying firearms to events where he was speaking? Do you include them among "patriots"?

There are no doubt many people who have legitimate concerns about health care proposals and to the various actions taken in response to the financial crisis, even based on a fact-based assessment of the actions and motives of the Bush and Obama administrations. There is certainly room for debate regarding the scope and limits of legitimate use of government authority in various domains. The problem is, the argument cannot even get started when the most prominent voices are, for all intents and purposes, howling their incoherent (and almost certainly misdirected) rage - exemplified by the guy who stood up at a "town hall" meeting and demand that his elected representative "keep government hands off my Medicare!"

If people don't know how government works, if they don't know from which government programs and policies they benefit, if they think of themselves as living in some sort of fairy-tale libertarian vacuum, how can they even begin to engage in reasoned debate about the appropriate scope and limits of government? How many of those at the rally are on Medicare? How many arrived at the rally by driving on a highway system designed and financed by the federal government? How many of them have never had e. coli or salmonella because of the work done by the FDA and the USDA, even in the decrepit state in which they now subsist? How many of them have homes because of federal (FHA and VA) guarantees on home mortgages and because of that sacred cow of American politics, the home-mortgage interest deduction? How many of them remain cancer-free because of federal regulations aimed at clean air and clean water? How many of them did not lose their savings because of the FDIC? How many of them think their local school system must absolutely and without question live up to the mandates set down in the (federal) No Child Left Behind Act? Clearly, calls for some kind of absolute freedom against any "interference" from the Federal Government are at least an exaggeration. It strikes me that those at the tea party can't possibly mean what they say, but perhaps only because they don't know what they mean.

As for playing the King George card, I would hasten to point out that my concern - and, in fairness, Bill Maher's concern - is not to subject ignorant citizens to the rule of benevolent philosopher-kings. (I just finished reading Plato with my students, so I know the arguments in favor of such a position.) No, my concern is to do my best to make sure citizens of a free republic can live up to their responsibilities by becoming better educated, more informed, more capable of critical thought, better prepared to engage in real, serious, fair-minded public deliberation. That, I think, would have been Jefferson's take on it, since you invoke him.

You cite the fact that there were no arrests at the rally. That's great! If we were sliding into fascism, the 60-1000 thousand people who were there would have been lucky to have gotten out alive. Remember Tienanmen? Or Chicago in 1968?

Regarding the size of the crowd, I see that as typical number-skewing. Any count given by the organizers of an event is suspect, since they have a political stake in number-inflation . . . though I've read that Freedom Works has recently revised it's number down to 600,000, since that's a marginally more plausible inflation than their initial estimate of 1.2 million. Still, I would want a count from some independent, nonpartisan source.

Okay, so it's not the best, most thoughtful argument I've ever written. But unalloyed bullshit really annoys me. It makes me positively hasty.

Regarding the size of the crowd, I find it's always a good idea to check with poltifact.org, a non-partisan fact-checking service of the St. Petersburg Times. Their ruling on the claims of conservative bloggers based on a much-posted (still, not time-lapse) photograph of the event? Pants on fire! The photograph is of a different event, one that took place at least a decade ago.

It's more "time warp" than "time-lapse."

The Sentiments Trap

2009-06-07T09:50:00.012-04:00

Teaching environmental ethics this summer, I've found a new wrinkle in an old argument.

In a number of early articles in defense of Aldo Leopold's land ethic, the philosopher J. Baird Callicott appeals to a theory of moral sentiments to connect facts and values: from descriptions of ecological relationships he hopes to derive prescriptions as to how we should make decisions about environmental change, with moral sentiments as the middle term.

I've long had doubts about this move, and I've taken up the matter in a number of papers I've had published. The most basic problem is that, while the moral sentiments view introduced by Hume and cultivated by Darwin offers important insight into human moral experience, on its own it seems to undermine the very possibility of ethical deliberation.

Here's Callicott, from In Defense of the Land Ethic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 127:

Leopold urges upon us the conclusion, [that] we ought to ‘preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.’ Why ought we? Because (1) we all generally have a positive attitude toward the community or society to which we belong; and (2) science has now discovered that the natural environment is a community or society to which we belong, no less than to the human global village.

Callicott set up the pattern for this sort of practical syllogism with an argument about smoking:

1) We all have a strong inclination to preserve our own health.
2) Smoking is harmful to human health.
Therefore, 3) you ought not to smoke.

Start with two facts - one about the world, one about human psychology - and end with a moral injunction. Is yields ought. It's very tidy.

Well, not so tidy, really. I've pointed out elsewhere that Callicott smuggles an ought into the ises. Suppose, for example, a teenager denies the validity of the practical syllogism regarding smoking on the grounds that he or she does not value life all that highly just now. Callicott responds by revising the first claim, to the effect that "psychologically normal" people in fact share such an inclination and that, if someone does not share it, then psychological counseling may be prescribed. In other words, people ought to share this particular inclination, and we have a duty to make sure they do.

With this argument, Callicott trapped himself. How is this new, smuggled-in ought to be justified? By appeal to further moral sentiments that all normal people ought to share? or by appeal to something that is not a moral sentiment? That's his choice: he must either allow himself to fall into an infinite regress, or he must contradict the theory of moral sentiments on which he has pinned his hopes for the land ethic.

As I say, I've dealt with this all this in the past. The only reason I revisit it is that I've put a new twist on the argument. It occurred to me that a similar practical syllogism could be derived from any widely-shared sentiment or inclination bequeathed to us by natural selection. So . . .

1. All psychologically normal males have a strong inclination to seek orgasm at any opportunity.
2. [Pick one: a) a random hook-up, b) hiring a prostitute, c) clandestine homosexual activity in public restrooms, d) date rape] is an opportunity to attain orgasm.
Therefore, 3. You ought to [pick one . . .].

Depending on your own inclinations, I would assume you would see following through on some or all of the options listed in 2 as irresponsible and/or reprehensible and/or icky. Still, claim 1 is fairly obviously true, and claim 2 is fairly obviously true, as stated. If Callicott's practical syllogism on behalf of the land ethic is cogent, then so is this practical syllogism on behalf of [pick one: promiscuity, deviance, criminal wrongdoing.]

Now, you may be thinking, this is hardly fair. Even allowing that psychologically normal males have a strong inclination to seek orgasm, the whole point of morality is to keep such "low" or "base" inclinations in check, subordinating them to our "higher" and more refined inclinations. Darwin sets this up well in The Descent of Man, where he presents morality as what inevitably happens to a social animal that happens to develop intellect: we can remember, we scold each other, we can feel remorse, and so we can master ourselves and resolve to do better in the future.

But this precisely is the Achilles' heel of moral sentiments theory: it's hard to know what it could mean to exercise self-control when, on a purely empiricist account, the self is really just a bundle of sensations and sentiments. On this account, moral deliberation occurs when two sentiments clash, and the decision is made when the stronger sentiment prevails. The "self" has nothing to do with it. Reason, which according to Hume is only "the slave of the passions," cannot intervene on its own account.

In any case, the theory of moral sentiments seems to leave all psychologically normal males with a prima facie duty to pursue orgasm at all costs. Of course, this would have to be balanced against our prima facie duty to our own long-term well-being, our duty to care about the well-being of others, our duty to the broader community. But, if Hume, Darwin, and Callicott are to be believed on this point, the balance will have to find itself while "we" stand back and watch.

May the stronger sentiment win.

From Copenhagen, Day 3

2009-03-25T13:28:00.008-04:00

I didn't post last night, because I was too tired. I'm still too tired.

(There is, I have learned, a way of meeting and working peculiar to the Danish. It is characterized by long days and full schedules executed with ruthless efficiency, with breaks that are few and brief.)

I think better of the World Wide Views process than I did when last I posted, though there are still things of which I will be watchful.

After participants in the September 26 meeting have discussed and voted on a series of closed-ended questions, there will be a session in which each group of 6-8 participants will formulate a recommendation for the negotiators at COP-15. There are no prior restrictions on what their recommendation might be.

Then, each participant reads the recommendations and votes for three of them. Votes are tallied, then each recommendation is entered into a computer system in rank order. The computer system will automatically post the results to the World Wide Views website.

It's really a fairly clever execution of a fairly standard approach to citizen participation. I have hopes it will yield some interesting results.

The organizer of the whole event, the director of the Danish Board of Technology, made it very, very clear that we are not in any way to manipulate the participants . . . because doing so will undermine the whole project. He was quite stern about this. It does leave the question, though, of whether we should merely avoid the appearance of manipulation . . .

Yesterday, when we did a role-playing exercise in which we went through an abbreviated version of the World Wide Views process, I found myself in the role of group facilitator.

In principle, this means I had to be neutral, simply keep the discussion going. In practice, however, I found that whenever I intervened in the discussion, I shaped it - sometimes more, sometimes less. There seemed no simple way to determine where the line is between facilitation and manipulation.

If I end up being head facilitator of the Atlanta meeting, I'll have to be very careful of this, especially training and monitoring the group facilitators.

I'm done with the seminar now. Tomorrow, it's the long flight home . . . during which I will be responsible for around 1500lbs of carbon dioxide.

(One of these days, I plan to write a paper for presentation at an environmental ethics conference entitled "We've Got to Stop Meeting Like This.")

From Copenhagen, Day 1

2009-03-23T18:22:00.010-04:00

So I've fallen into a very interesting project related to the UN COP15 climate negotiations to take place in Copenhagen in December 2009.

The Danish Board of Technology, which advises the Danish Parliament on matters of technology assessment, has developed a methodology for providing public input on difficult matters of policy. To make a long story short, they have decided to go global with the project.

On September 26, if all goes as planned, meetings will take place at 55 sites in 46 countries around the world. At each meeting, 100 citizens will learn about climate change, then discuss and vote on answers to various questions. The results will be posted to the web as they are gathered. The task then will be to bring the results to the attention of delegates at COP15. The whole thing is called the World Wide Views project (wwviews.org).

I'm here in Copenhagen for the launch seminar, where project managers are trained for the 55 local meetings. I don't think I'm the project manager, but I am at least involved in setting up a meeting for Atlanta. Today was the (very full) first day of the seminar; we received an overview of COP15 and the method of WWViews; we talked about recruiting citizens for participation, and we've started to grapple with diffiuclt questions both practical and theoretical. We also went to a reception at the Danish Parliament. We have eaten really fine food.

In many ways this is an extraordinary event. As far as any of us here know, this is the first time anyone has attempted public participation at this scale. 44 countries spread across all 6 habitable continents are represented here, and the meetings we organize may include nearly 6000 people around the world.

I'm not writing to praise the project, though I think it's a fine idea in principle, and I'm happy to be involved. Instead, I wanted to draw out some of my worries about the project, if only to make them explicit so they can be dealt with.

The first is an odd duality. On the one hand, the hope is to allow citizens to express themselves, to become informed enough to make their own recommendations to the COP15 delegates. Along these lines, there is real concern that we not manipulate the process or the citizens as they deliberate.

On the other hand, the hope is to use the citizens to pressure the delegates into doing what we (whoever "we" are) think they should do, take the risks we (again) think they should take. Along these lines, there is real concern that we not appear to manipulate the process or the citizens as they deliberate.

I think we should stick firmly to the former. There are others who want to swing toward the latter, because of their own policy commitments.

Much will depend on how the whole thing is framed for participants, how the questions are formulated and presented. I have the impression that the citizens involved will have very little leeway in changing the formulation of the questions. (The results have to be comparable across meetings, after all.)

I'll watch carefully as the questions are revised and finalized.

The second thing I noted follows from the idea that "we" need to pressure delegates to COP15 to take swift action in the "correct" direction. In a presentation at the beginning of today's session, a Danish official offered the following imperative:

The science is clear: we must act now.

Set aside for the moment the vagueness of these two claims. Even assuming both claims are just obviously true, the relationship between them is far from clear. The imperative to "act now" is supposed to follow simply from the clarity of scientific consensus, but it does not. There are steps in between.

(For those keeping score at home, I glean this insight from Hume's critique of attempts to derive ought from is, and from Kant's idea of the hypothetical imperative.)

First, formalize the claim:

Given X, we ought to do Z.

Where X = "the scientific consensus on climate change" and Z = "act [in some specific way] now!"

There's a missing step, though.

Given X, if we want Y, then we ought to do Z.

Where Y = some basic value or goal.

Stating the claim in this form makes it possible to ask very pointed questions about each component and their interactions. A sample:

Is X really true? Does everyone agree? If there is disagreement, on what is it based? (Note that some people disagree with X because they don't like Z, and they accuse those who do advocate for Z of twisting X to get what they want.) How did people come to believe X? How much uncertainty is there?

What is Y? (Survival? Sustainability? The status quo ante? Ante what? Universal harmony? A red ferrari in every garage?) Why should we want Y? If there is disagreement on Y, on what is it based? Can we reasonably expect to agree on Z even if we don't all agree on Y?

What is Z? Is Z enough to secure Y, given X? Who's "we"?

Then consider: If Z is not adequate to secure Y, given X, should we reconsider Z, reconsider Y, or both? If we're not sure about X, is it safe to hold Y constant and wait to tinker with Z only when it's necessary? Are there other reasons to radically reconsider Y? If we refuse to reconsider Y, can any Z be sufficient, given X? (A column in last week's Newsweek suggests not, as does the whole of Kunstler's The Long Emergency.)

But then, approaching COP15, Z is almost already set down in writing, and nobody knows Y.

(Oooo, sorry about that.)

More after day 2.

Theory and Practice, Man, Practice!

2009-01-27T12:28:00.010-05:00

I'm continuing to develop a thread introduced here some time ago regarding the possibility of a theoretically informed moral imagination. I've written in earlier entries about Newtonian imagination, Darwinian imagination, and even hinted at thermodynamic imagination. I could add ecological imagination, climatological imagination, sociotechnical imagination, and any number of others.

The question is: How and to what extent can scientific theory shape ordinary lived experience? It's an interesting question for phenomenology, and I'm working on a paper along those lines, now. My interest is not just theoretical, however, but practical. What I want to know is how and to what extent scientific theory can influence what we attend to, what we value, what we expect, what we hope for, what we foresee, and ultimately what we do.

As it happens, I've stumbled upon a parallel track in my life outside academia: music. I've decided that, in order to become a better and more versatile fiddler, I should learn some music theory and put that theory into practice. I know a little theory, but my early experience with music involved reading melodies written on a page and playing them on an instrument conveniently tuned in C; I didn't really need to understand harmony, transposition, or any of that sort of thing, and I was never called on to improvise. So I'm setting out to learn just enough theory, as the fiddler Laura Light put it when I told her of my plans, "to be dangerous."

An odd thing is happening: Even as I begin to dabble in music theory, before launching into a more formal study, it has started to change the way I play and hear music. I know what a V7 chord is and what it does; I can start to pick it out when it happens. I've just now figured out that in a tune in Bm I can play an A# in measures built on the V7 chord (F#7) when improvising or harmonizing - which is not something that would ever have occurred to me before.

(For you harmony players out there, be patient. I'm just now entering the "Duh!" Conservatory of Music.)

Of course, I made the connection by practicing scales and arpeggios, running through a number of exercises in D and Bm, and then playing some tunes I know in Bm (Reel Eugene, Two Rivers). Theory helped me figure out what to practice and what to listen for.

I think the same may apply to scientific theory. Even a layman's knowledge of thermodynamics or evolutionary biology can bring about a shift in attention and expectation . . . with a little practice.

As an aside, I've also devised a mnemonic for the Renaissance modes, in order:

"I Don't Play Lydian Mode A Lot"

(Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian)

I'm unduly proud of this.

The Last Status Update

2008-12-25T23:12:00.004-05:00

I've deactivated my Facebook account, and intend never to reactivate it. If reasons must be given to the (candid or otherwise) world, I offer only this, from Thoreau:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

How Astrology Works

2008-12-09T14:30:00.012-05:00

I was having a conversation with an astrologer of my acquaintance when I began to formulate a hypothesis about how astrology works. That is to say, I began to sense how astrologers and their clients could come to believe firmly that the relative positions of stars and planets on particular dates can serve a predictive and explanatory function, shedding real light on character and motivation, in spite of the fact that the whole idea is (demonstrably) errant nonsense in the universe of Galileo and Hubble.

The particular astrologer in question asserted with confidence that he could know all he needed to know about any given individual based entirely on "their chart", without ever having met the individual in question. More than this, he asserted that he could always convince a skeptical client of the revealed truth about their character and motivation, overcoming their initial denial and leading them to recognize themselves in "their chart."

I put this together with things I've read and heard about astrology from various sources, including demonstrations by James Randi, along with ideas from cognitive science I have encountered by way of the literature on moral imagination. The hypothesis began to take on a more determinate shape. I don't claim this is an original hypothesis, but it has allowed me to find some clarity.

Here it is.

Human life and human experience are complex and ambiguous; our motivations are almost always mixed. As Whitman would have it, we contain multitudes. We can make sense of ourselves and the world around us only by actively framing our experience through conceptual schemata or mental models, highlighting some facets of our experience while ignoring or suppressing others.

In putting together a person's chart, an astrologer provides a very particular frame for that person's experience. Through some combination of strategic vagueness, keen observation, and persuasive power, a skilled astrologer can convince just about any prospective client that the chart really fits them, really reveals the truth about who they are.

Being human, prospective clients are often hungry for coherence; at least some of the time, most of us just don't know what to make of ourselves.

The thing is, our experience is complex enough and ambiguous enough, our motivation are mixed enough, that nearly any chart could be seen to fit nearly any person. This is a testable hypothesis, as sometimes demonstrated by Randi and others: people can "see themselves" in just about any chart. (An excellent double-blind study was published in the journal Nature in 1985; the research is also described here.)

Now, to be fair, it could be that astrology is just a harmless diversion. In the right hands, it might possibly serve as a useful tool for self-discovery or even therapy.

I have my doubts.

I suspect astrology is more pernicious, in part because it assumes the mantle of mystical insight and the presumed authority of an ancient practice. If I were on this basis to give credence to the pronouncements of an astrologer, I would be giving the astrologer real and significant power over me: the power to tell me who I am, to tell me what I really need and really want. It would short-circuit my autonomy and lock me in the prison of lowered expectations: I can always excuse any failing by appeal to the chart. (What do you expect? I'm a Libra!) In short, I would be trading some essential part of my human freedom for a false sense of certainty about my place in the universe.

I have no interest in what my own chart would show. If I am to be framed, I will frame myself.

A Case for Personal Virtue: 3. Which Virtues?

2008-11-20T07:38:00.007-05:00

Virtues are good or desirable traits or habits of character, cultivated tendencies to act one way or another in response to particular circumstances. The standard by which a character trait may be judged a virtue or a vice is human thriving in the context of the broader moral and political community.

Obviously, there is considerable room for disagreement about such judgments. Even so, I would like now to propose a partial list of virtues that seem to me conducive to the development of a sound energy policy and a sustainable civilization.

Temperance. This is a one of the primary moral virtues, that is, virtues that concern how we respond to emotions. In this case the emotion is general desire. Where energy is concerned, temperance consists in regulating desire, fitting our desires more carefully to the means available.

Courage. This is another moral virtue, this time concerned with how we respond to fear. Oil depletion is a fearful prospect, as is the prospect of profoundly changing the ways we live in the world. Courage does not require that we be fearless or that we ignore fear, but that we do not let our fear lead us to evade or deny our limits or our responsibilities.

Deliberateness. Until very recently, with the possible exception of the 1970s, it has been easy for consumers in the industrialized world to be casually thoughtless in their use of energy. Decisions about what to do and how to live could be based on convenience, pleasure, or some other standard, not on the availability of energy or the consequences of using energy from this or that source. It seems reasonable that people should cultivate the intellectual virtue of deliberateness, more carefully weighing the energy costs of the various options they have available to them.

Creativity. It would help further to have a wider array of options to choose from when deliberating about ends and means. If we are blindly committed to a particular way of living – a non-negotiable “American Dream” – then the choices posed by oil depletion are stark. But if more basic values of health, civility, opportunity, mobility, and so on, can be detached from particular forms of life, we can more easily find new ways of getting at what we need and what we want. In short, there is more than one way to lead satisfying, civilized human lives, and some of them are bound to be more sustainable than others. This suggests the need for a degree of intellectual flexibility or creativity.

Systems Imagination. This is a more specific intellectual virtue that is especially important where energy is concerned. Consider an ordinary person standing at the gas pump, agape at the rising costs of a fill-up. One question comes easily to the lips: Who is to blame for this? Media accounts and letters to the editor are full of finger-pointing: this or that political party is to blame, or greedy executives, or speculators, or thoughtless consumers. Energy policy would be better served by thinking instead in terms of complex, heterogeneous systems of interaction in which all of these actors may play some role, but which have emergent properties larger than any of them. Ordinary people and policy makers alike may be more apt to make reasonable decisions, to face the reality of our situation with courage and creativity, if we do so based on a feel for the system.

A Case for Personal Virtue: 2. Why Virtue?

2008-11-19T07:03:00.009-05:00

I here offer three broad lines of argument for the necessity of personal virtue.

First, to dismiss any role for personal virtue is to take a one-sided view of technological systems, placing all causal efficacy on the side of technical hardware and institutional software while reducing ordinary people to passive recipients of whatever the system happens to allow them. This suggests a grim technological determinism, or at least an unquestioned hegemony for powerful players in business and government. Instead, I would opt for the view that technological systems are heterogeneous, with the choices and actions of ordinary people playing a part in giving the system its shape. To use the language of technology studies, technological forms are both cause and effect of social forms. [2]

This is not to say the relationship between technology and society is symmetrical. As Thomas Hughes has argued, it becomes more and more difficult for people to change technological systems once they have matured. An important turning point in the development of what Hughes calls “technological momentum” occurs when a system comes to be intertwined with the values and habits of ordinary people. [3]

It seems to follow that the character and choices of ordinary people play an important role in shaping and maintaining complex technological systems, from which it follows that the character and choices of individuals may have an important role to play in changing those systems. At the very least, policy makers would have a much more difficult time changing systems of energy production, distribution, and consumption without the good will and active support of ordinary people.

This brings me directly to the second line of argument, which draws out some of the pragmatic consequences of the heterogeneity of technological systems. In short, an energy policy framework that does not engage ordinary people and seek to bring out the best in them is likely to be hollow, inflexible, and therefore unstable in the face of an uncertain future.

This is partly a matter of commitment. If ordinary people are not personally committed as willing participants in the project of reshaping or replacing the vast system of energy production and distribution, then they will only go so far in their own efforts to contribute to the project’s success. To alter Hughes’ metaphor, ordinary people would in this case be part of the inertia of the system that, at best, will delay the emergence of a new system and, at worst, will hold the system in its current configuration.

There is a historical parallel in early efforts toward soil conservation. As Aldo Leopold saw it, centralized efforts to rein in soil erosion (i.e. “government conservation”) would always fall short of what was really needed. Concerning such efforts in Wisconsin, Leopold writes: “we asked the farmer to do what he conveniently could to save his soil, and he has done just that, and only that.” As a consequence, the soil conservation districts set up by the Wisconsin legislature in 1937, is “a beautiful piece of social machinery” that is nonetheless “coughing along on two cylinders because we have been too timid, and to anxious for quick success, to tell the farmer the true magnitude of his obligations.” [4] What Leopold would ask of farmers is that they develop a particular moral virtue that might be called community mindedness, with the extension of the community to include ecological systems.

The practical need for virtue is also a matter of flexibility. When ordinary people are paying attention to the broader context, continually rethinking their choices and redirecting their efforts, the entire system can be more finely tuned. When energy supplies fluctuate or environmental conditions change, adaptation can then begin at the ground level and work its way up.

In September 2008, in the wake of Hurricane Ike, gas shortages in the Atlanta area went on for weeks. The causes were complex: refineries on the Gulf coast of Texas had shut down as a precaution as the storm approached, power outages after the storm delayed efforts to restart them, the distribution system did not have much excess capacity to make up for missed deliveries, and gas stations in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area were just switching from the summer formula to the winter formula in keeping with federal regulations. However, what might otherwise have been a short-term dip in supply became something of a crisis as consumers panicked and began hoarding gasoline, reportedly topping of their tanks whenever they happened to pass a station that still had gasoline. As a consequence, more stations ran out of gas and recovery from the fluctuation was delayed still further. Some efforts to address the problem from outside may have helped, including a one-time relaxation of federal regulations, but certainly a greater degree of virtue on the part of the drivers of Atlanta could have prevented it from getting as bad as it did: the intellectual virtues required to understand the broader context, and the moral and civic virtues required to resist their own panic in order to ease the problem for the whole community.

The third line of argument draws out the normative consequences of the heterogeneity of technological systems. As Aristotle would remind us, personal virtues are never merely personal, they are also political: virtues are good to the extent they contribute to the health and vibrancy of the polis. In our own context, the personal virtues involved in conservation either contribute to or complement the virtues of citizenship in a democratic society. The normative bottom line is this: without the active and thoughtful engagement of ordinary individuals as citizens, the public sphere is moribund and public policy regarding energy – or anything else – is illegitimate.

Oddly enough, a parallel to this point can be found in Garret Hardin’s argument regarding population growth. Hardin maintains that appeals to conscience, which he terms “propaganda”, are not a sufficient response to the crisis of population growth. To paraphrase, personal virtue is self-eliminating. Instead, the only way to make people responsible in matters of reproduction is by way of “definite social arrangements.” On its face this seems to call for a top-down solution engineered and administered by experts, but Hardin adds in a democratic twist: the social arrangements are a function of “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.”[5] So, even if he is correct that private virtue is all but pointless, Hardin at least assumes that people as citizens do – or ought to – possess enough civic virtue to agree to mutual imposition of constraints.

Of course, civic virtue can play a role in policy formation only in a robust democratic system with an open and active public sphere. It assumes a degree of equality in fact and not just in principle: not only should all votes be counted, but all voices should be heard in effective public deliberation about public goods. As democracy is actually practiced in the industrialized world, particularly in the United States, it may well be that political life is in fact lopsided, with much of the weight on the side of corporations and government agencies. It may well be that ordinary citizens in fact have little or no voice in the policy process. It need not be this way and, I would insist, it ought not to be this way. That it will be difficult to push toward a more fully democratic energy policy is no reason not to make the attempt, and a good first step is to foster personal and civic virtue.

[Up next . . . Which Virtues?]

Notes

2. Pinch, T.J. and W.E. Bijker, "The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit One Another," in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes, and T.J. Pinch, Editors. 1987, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 17-50.

3.Hughes, T.P., "Technological Momentum," in Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, M.R. Smith and L. Marx, Editors. 1994, MIT Press: Cambridge. p. 101-113.

4.Leopold, A., A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. 1949, New York: Oxford University Press.

5. Hardin, G., "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science, 1968. 162(3859): p. 1243-1248.

A Case for Personal Virtue: 1. Outside-In Or Inside-Out?

2008-11-18T11:54:00.009-05:00

[Here is the second installment of the paper. If you're just starting, refer to the previous post for the introduction.]

To get at the nugget of truth in the Vice President’s statement, it is worth attending to the situation of ordinary people whose part in the system of energy production and distribution is primarily that of consumers. I have in mind those of us who are not policy makers, scientists, engineers, corporate executives, nor holders of any position of apparent influence over the future of the infrastructure. These are ordinary citizens and consumers, watching and worrying about the price of gasoline or of natural gas, making decisions about how to get by with less.

What is energy policy to them?

Ordinary consumers make their decisions under various kinds of constraint, the terms of which are set by the systems in which they participate: a more-or-less regulated market economy, post-industrial production and distribution, the decentralized metropolis, transportation dominated by the automobile, and so on. Within those systems, they have a narrow range of options available to them, and their choices among those options work within a narrow field of influence. It might well seem as though behavior is largely determined by external systems, leaving little scope for changes in attitude or the acquisition of personal virtue and little hope that such changes might in turn help to determine the future shape of those external systems.

Accordingly, much of the discussion about energy policy focuses on scientists, engineers, corporations, and policy makers working to change the system from above, removing or reconfiguring constraints in order to direct consumer choice and behavior along new pathways. The mandate is to leave people as they are but make sure that, as they blindly follow their consumer impulses, they have different toys to choose from and the toys they have to play with use less energy, or use energy from different sources. I think of this as the outside-in approach: change the system as a whole, and the behavior of ordinary people will follow.

The main alternative would be to work from the inside out, seeking to change the way people think, perceive, value, or feel in order to change individual behavior, which will bring about changes in patterns of consumption, which will in turn bring about changes in the infrastructure of energy production and consumption. This is the preferred approach of many activists and advocates who aim for some kind of “consciousness-raising.” It is also the preferred approach of thinkers in my own field, environmental ethics.

From the system-oriented perspective of a policy maker close to the centers of power, the inside-out approach could well seem hopelessly, laughably naïve. However high individuals raise their consciousness, one could argue, nothing of any use will be done unless policy makers close to the centers of power act to either change or shore up the system from the outside. From this perspective, perhaps, a personal commitment to conservation may be dismissed as an empty gesture.

There is some danger here of falling into a false dichotomy. I would suggest that the outside-in approach and the inside-out approach are not only compatible but are necessary to one another. This, then, is my recommendation: do both. Look for ways of integrating personal virtue into a comprehensive approach to energy policy.

A Case for Personal Virtue: Introduction

2008-11-18T11:42:00.005-05:00

[This is the first installment of the paper I submitted to the IEEE Energy2030 Conference; I presented a poster based on the paper yesterday at the conference.]

In April 2001, Vice President Cheney remarked that “conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” His remark was widely read as a snide dismissal of environmentalists and other advocates of any alternative to a policy aimed primarily at increasing the supply of fossil fuels, especially petroleum.

I would like to start by acknowledging that the Vice President was correct on one count: personal virtue is not a sufficient basis for a comprehensive energy policy. That said, there is plenty of room to disagree with him on other points.
I might argue, for example, that conservation is not merely a matter of personal virtue or that conservation is not synonymous with austerity and self-denial. I might also argue that personal virtue is never merely personal, but feeds into civic virtues that are the proper foundation of public life as such.

My thesis, in fact, builds from this last point. Even granting that personal virtue is not a sufficient condition, it is worth considering the possibility that personal virtue is a necessary condition for sound energy policy and for a sustainable civilization – or perhaps I should say it is a necessary condition for an energy policy worth having and a civilization worth sustaining. At the very least, personal virtue is something we ought to aspire to, something we ought to foster in ourselves and in others.

1. Kahn, J., "Cheney Promotes Increasing Supply as Energy Policy", New York Times, May 1, 2001.

Assumptions

2008-11-17T22:30:00.011-05:00

Today I attended the first day of the IEEE Energy2030 Conference in Atlanta, a gathering primarily of engineers with a few industry executives and government officials . . . and one philosopher. The general topic was the creation of a sustainable energy infrastructure, somehow, between now and 2030.

In the course of the day I detected a number of basic assumptions at work in the background, mainly unquestioned but, I think, eminently questionable.

1) Growth in per-capita GDP is good in itself.

2) Growth in per-capita GDP is the only relevant index of human progress.

3) This is so regardless of distribution (except perhaps that developing countries should be allowed to catch up with developed countries.)

4) "Quality of life" = "standard of living" = per capita GDP

5) "Quality of life" is not negotiable; it is not to be compromised or seriously questioned in any way for any reason.

6) Sustainability = producing enough energy to support growth in per-capita GDP indefinitely.

6) Consumers are motivated entirely by desire; desire grows without limit.

7) No real initiative toward sustainability can or should be expected from consumers.

8) Policy "engages" with consumers by manipulating their behavior ("incenting" them) to adopt more efficient means to fulfilling their desires.

9) “Incent” is a verb.

10)For the most part, policy and engineering need not engage consumers at all (working quietly in the background while consumers do whatever they want).

11) Personal freedom = doing whatever you want without limitations.

12) Properly structured markets are MAGIC.

13) All problems have solutions.

14) Most solutions are to be found in technical innovation.

15) Solutions in any case are to be worked out by experts - engineers, industry executives, and government officials - and introduced into the system from above.

These assumptions are not entirely surprising, given the audience; the poster I presented in the late afternoon session was already a response to some of these very assumptions. What was surprising was that the assumptions did not always remain in the background: they were sometimes asserted with fervor, and contrary assumptions were sometimes vehemently denounced. A favorite image: anyone who calls for any sort of restraint on the part of consumers wants them to suffer the ultimate indignities . . . warm beer and cold showers.

Over the next few days, I'll post installments of the paper I submitted to the conference. It begins with a quotation from VP Cheney . . .

Temporary Sustainability

2008-07-15T16:06:00.009-04:00

I've had the strangest convergence of reading material today. I've suspended the atheism project for a while - I've read a lot, and am mulling things over - and turned my attention to the courses I'll be teaching in the fall. I'm re-reading Rousseau's The Social Contract at the same time I'm reading James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency.

At the end of the first chapter, in what may be some of his best prose yet, Kunstler offers an observation both moving and striking:

If it happens that the human race doesn't make it [through the Long Emergency], then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of a depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned, and in the end the mystery is all there is.

Marvelous. It puts all of the (much needed but often misguided) talk about sustainability into perspective: Just what is it we're trying to sustain, and how long do we think we'll get away with it?

So, then I turned to Rousseau, and found a very similar thought on a topic only slightly narrower: the inevitable decline of civil society. This is from the chapter on "The Death of the Body Politic" (Book III, chapter 11, for those to whom it matters):

Such is the natural and inevitable tendency of the best constituted Governments. If Sparta and Rome perished, what State can hope to last forever? If we want to form a lasting establishment, let us therefore not dream of making it eternal. To succeed one must not attempt the impossible, nor flatter oneself that the work of men can be endowed with a solidity human things do not allow for.

Even the most sustainable civilization will pass away sooner or later . . . possibly sooner.

An Open Letter to Senator Barack Obama

2008-07-03T09:39:00.005-04:00

Dear Senator Obama,

I have to this point been an enthusiastic supporter of your candidacy for the presidency of the United States. I must, however, register a grave objection to your stance on faith-based initiatives, as articulated in your July 1 speech in Zanesville, Ohio. Not only is this a misguided policy, but I found your comments unduly dismissive of those who might object to it.

Separation of church and state is, as you yourself note, a bedrock principle of our republic. Any use of taxpayer money to fund any activity of an explicitly religious organization runs directly counter to that principle; it may fall short of “establishment,” but it creates an entanglement between church and state that can lead to no good end.

Cogent arguments against such an entanglement come from all sides. Consider the perspective of avowed secularists, who would not have one penny of the taxes they pay go anywhere near organizations whose beliefs and policy aims are directly counter to their own. Consider the perspective of those devout in their religious faith who would not have a single federal string attached to the funds they use to accomplish their aims.

You reply to these objections by introducing “a few basic principles” to govern the “partnership” between church and state, but these do not withstand close scrutiny.

You state: “if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them – or against the people you hire – on the basis of their religion.” You continue: “federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs.”

The notion that a religious organization will be able carefully to compartmentalize their funds – religious money here, secular money way over there – simply defies credulity. Any federal money going to “secular” activities would serve only to free up a larger share of private contributions for “religious” activities, including proselytizing.

Any effort on the part of the federal government to ensure public money is being used only for “secular” purposes would require onerous and costly oversight, vast new bureaucracies to scrutinize the books of religious “partners” in order to police the church-state line. Not only does this raise the specter of direct federal interference in religious activities, but the time, effort, and money that would have to go in to such oversight would better be used bolstering existing, public programs.

Your main response to those who would object to your stance on faith-based initiatives is an obvious straw-man argument. You say: “I know there are some who bristle at the notion that faith has a place in the public square.”

First, using the term “bristle” implies that any objection can only be a kind of reflexive response: knee-jerk secularism. This is meant to imply further that any such objection is inherently unreasonable. Such an argument hardly merits a reply.

Second, you have misrepresented the objection itself. People of various faiths have their place in the public square: insofar as they are citizens, they cannot be expected to remain silent about their beliefs, values, and aims. As you yourself have pointed out, however, if they want to influence public policy they must make their case in public, “universal,” and therefore secular terms.

No, the objection is that, whatever place people of faith may have in the public square, religious organizations should not receive any public funds. They can participate in the public square freely, openly, and on their own dime.

The upshot of all this is a precipitous drop in my enthusiasm for your candidacy.

I am not generally a single-issue voter, but I find that some issues count much more than others, and a small handful are make-or-break. I would not vote for someone who did not accept the mounting consensus on climate change, for example, or who did not accept Darwinian evolution as the core of modern biology. It turns out I have very grave doubts about any candidate who does not pledge to rebuild and maintain Mr. Jefferson’s wall of separation between church and state.

I suppose you still have my vote, for what it’s worth, but where it would have been given enthusiastically it will now be given reluctantly, on the grounds that your opponent is even worse.

Respectfully,

Robert Kirkman

Collateral Damage

2008-05-20T09:22:00.007-04:00

I've been reading Hitchens' marvelous little screed, god is not Great, and brought it with me this morning on the train.

I did this with some misgiving, knowing that other people on the train might be put off, offended, or otherwise disturbed just being in the presence of a book with such a title. I've heard a reliable second-hand account of an otherwise reasonable person who was uncomfortable even having Hitchens' book in the house, as though its mere presence posed some sort of threat.

I read the book in transit anyway, of course, but it got me thinking about why it is people might react this way. Part of it, I thought uncharitably, is simple fear: someone reading such a book is committing a terrible offense against God, and may be struck down at any moment.

Why should this inspire fear in others who just happen to be nearby? Well, given the long history of misfortunes and disasters attributed to God's punishment, the message is clear enough: God is jealous, God is vengeful, and God has very bad aim . . .

Sticks and Stones

2008-05-10T16:51:00.015-04:00

There's been some talk among atheists about what to call themselves, especially given the power of language to frame attitudes and debates. "A-theist" is negative, and maintains a focus on theism.

One effort at a redefinition is being pushed by people who call themselves "brights". Here is how they describe themseves on their website:

The noun form of the term bright refers to a person whose worldview is naturalistic--free of supernatural and mystical elements. A Bright's ethics and actions are based on a naturalistic worldview.

A number of prominent atheists have signed on, if only out of solidarity. In Breaking the Spell, Dennett refers to himself as a bright.

The hope is to start the spread of an infectious meme that will change how people think about those who reject theism, in much the same way homosexuals have redefined themselves in part by appropriating the terms "gay" and even "queer" to describe themselves.

I don't think it's going to work, if only because a number of clear-headed skeptics I've talked to would be embarrassed to be called or thought of as "brights". Part of the problem is that the whole effort seems too artificial, too much a contrivance of strategic marketing. Perhaps a bigger part of the problem is that the term is too smugly self-congratulatory.

I won't mince words. It makes me gag.

Hanging out in the forum of the official Richard Dawkins website, I've hit on a couple of possibilities for repackaging the brand.

First, a number of fledgling atheists complain that their friends and family accuse them of being insufferable know-it-alls. They keep hearing variations on the theme: "Where do you get off questioning God?"

Following the model of queer activists, who adopt a derogatory epithet as both a badge of honor and a tool for subversion, I propose that atheists, skeptics and other free thinkers call themselves "smart-asses".

Second, the smart-asses should adopt April 1 as their official holiday. This is inspired by a widely-circulated email containing an apocryphal story about a moralizing theist judge who throws out a case brought by an atheist concerning religious holidays. The punch line: the judge argues that April Fool's Day is an atheist holiday because, according to Psalms 14.1, "The fool says in his heart, there is no God".

Well, why not? Perhaps smart-asses could spend April 1 playing pranks on fundamentalists to expose their gullibility . . .

Magisteria

2008-05-09T09:27:00.015-04:00

I've now started reading Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, and already the book has allowed me to make explicit a useful distinction toward which I have been fumbling.

I think part of my concern about possible dogmatism at the heart of atheism comes down a sense that the natural sciences, whatever their evident power, are necessarily limited in scope. The empirical, quantitative methods of the sciences simply cannot tell us or explain everything that is interesting about the world. To the extent prominent atheists like Dawkins assume the question of God's existence or non-existence can definitively be settled by the natural sciences alone, they seem to have fallen into the dogmatic ideology of scientism.

I have been particularly wary of those who argue that every field of human inquiry is ultimately reducible to or "consilient" with physics. E.O. Wilson in particular seems to propose a solution (I almost wrote "final solution") to the "two cultures" problem that amounts to a wholesale colonization of the social sciences and humanities (one "culture", in C.P. Snow's account) by the physical sciences (the other "culture").

In reaction against efforts like Wilson's, I have been drawn to Stephen Jay Gould's notion that science and religion (into which he lumps ethics and other philosophical concerns) constitute separate, "non-overlapping magisteria." The simplified version goes like this: science asks "what?" and "how?" questions about the world, religion (alongside philosophy) asks "why?" (and perhaps "what now?") questions; as long as the two do not intrude on one another's territory, everything will be fine.

I've been aware that this distinction is troublesome from a number of perspectives. Adherents of religion are unlikely to be willing to cede the field in all matters of "what?" and "how?", and scientific discoveries can have a profound impact on our framing of "why?" questions.

What I have discovered from reading Dennett, though, is that I have been conflating two separate questions. On the one hand is the question of whether the natural sciences constitute the only legitimate form of critical inquiry. On the other hand is the question of whether theistic religion is still tenable in the face of critical inquiry.

My main concern has been with the first question: I have been eager to leave open some intellectual space in which the humanities and social sciences are recognized as legitimate forms of critical inquiry that do not derive their legitimacy from the natural sciences. Dennett uses the old German terms Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften for these two broad types of inquiry.

I have not been so much concerned with the second question. It seems simply obvious to me that theistic religious belief is untenable unless truly extraordinary accommodation is made for it, even up to Luther's admonition that we "tear the eyes out of our reason." I will not follow Luther's advice, of course, and my current reading in the literature of the new atheism is spurring me to make even less accommodation to theistic claims in public discourse. My point here, though, is that the two questions really are independent of one another. I'll focus on the first question for a while longer and return to the question of theistic belief later.

I've elsewhere sketched out what I think is a fruitful way of grasping the relationship between the natural sciences and the "human sciences" (if I may be permitted to use "sciences" as a general term for critical intersubjective inquiry), drawing from Kant's "two standpoints": the "spectator perspective" that considers the domain of human experience "from the outside" (e.g., the natural sciences) and the "agent perspective" that considers human consciousness "from the inside" (e.g., phenomenology, ethics). These are two legitimate perspectives on the world of common experience, each of which is authoritative in its own domain, and neither of which can be wholly absorbed into the other.

Here's an illustration (from my "Darwinian Humanism" paper):

A room full of people is a physical space occupied by natural objects that are demonstrably subject to natural laws, and it is also at the same time a moral space in which free moral agents can negotiate the terms of their relations to one another and engage in inquiry and deliberation about what is good and what is right. It is possible to hold these perspectives at the same time because neither on its own can capture the whole truth of what a room full of people really is.

I would clarify that I no longer think of these perspectives as "non-overlapping" - nor even as "magisteria". If anything, the natural sciences and the human sciences are just two sets of tools for inquiry into the world of common experience.

As for the actual practice of inquiry, there is a great deal to be gained from interdisciplinary work across the cultural divide. When we are grappling with complex human problems, we should use the full array of available tools.

My own field of research is environmental ethics and policy, with a particular emphasis on metropolitan growth in the United States. I'm currently collaborating with an economist in a study of the limits of ethics in relation to a particular policy decision. We're looking at those limits both "from the inside" as a matter of lived experience and "from the outside" as a function of various kinds of systems (markets, sociotechnical ensembles, etc.). It is a remarkably fruitful interaction.

I would also add that I have been influenced by Dennett's image (in Freedom Evolves and elsewhere) of Darwinian evolution as a "universal acid", which cannot be contained as it spreads through human inquiry and human experience, transforming everything. My point in the "Darwinian Humanism" paper is precisely that the humanities are transformed as well - though I would insist that this transformation is not a simple dissolution. The sciences may legitimately try to explain consciousness, freedom, and so on, but they do not thereby explain them away. Even scientists still inhabit a meaning-rich world of intersubjective experience in which they freely decide what to do, however they may squint at that world in doing their research.

In the paper, I offer a brief sketch of a phenomenological ("from the inside") approach to understanding scientific inquiry: we start with and remain within the actor perspective, pushing and pulling on the surrounding world, and gradually begin to model the "hinges" and "pivots" (Merleau-Ponty's term) back there in the depths of the world in which we live and act; the natural sciences are one particular way of systematizing that pushing and pulling, using ever more sophisticated tools. With the Darwinian revolution,

we have progressed so far in this systematization that we can begin to model the hidden armature of the actor perspective itself as a product of the evolutionary history of these bodies that we are. We have, in a sense, managed to turn ourselves inside-out. Now that we are here, investigating the natural origins of what we are, we have begun to worry about the creeping advance of mechanistic explanation that seems poised to explain away our freedom and our dignity. And yet, we remain rooted in freedom, and the systematization of knowledge remains one of our projects as incarnate subjects, another expression of our agency.

If there can be any such thing as Darwinian humanism, then, it is not so much a coherent worldview as it is an acknowledgment of an unavoidable ambiguity at the heart of human moral experience: we are somehow able to experience ourselves as fully free and fully natural at the same time.

Now, getting back to atheism, it seems to me that, in the wake of the Darwinian revolution, "the God hypothesis" in its various forms becomes increasingly untenable from the inside as well as from the outside. Just ask Nietzsche.

Of course, it may be that the God hypothesis was always untenable in the face of robust critical inquiry, as its advocates are unable to offer evidence and argument that would be compelling to anyone who does not already believe. The Darwinian revolution simply brings that inherent flaw in theism to its crisis.

Is Atheism Just Another Dogma?

2008-05-06T14:46:00.008-04:00

I've just finished Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I very much enjoyed the author's oft-noted wit and passion for his subject, but the book still leaves me with one of the nagging questions I had going into this project.

As a skeptic, I am suspicious of dogmatism in all its forms, particularly concerning matters that transcend the world of common experience. As a corollary, I am suspicious of polarization and false dichotomies in public discussion.

The nagging question is this: To what extent is the "new atheism" of Dawkins, Harris, et al., a form of dogmatism? One way to get the measure of this would be to ask: To what extent does the "new atheism" either presuppose or promulgate polarization?

Regarding the main question, the new atheists whose work I've read so far seem prone to very definite and by no means uncontroversial views about the basic nature of reality and about the basis and scope of human knowledge. Dawkins is a scientist and, even though he at one point avows otherwise (p.185), can be read as advocating scientism.

For one thing, Dawkins is an empiricist in practice if not in principle, which entails fairly narrow criteria of what counts as "evidence", and further entails that anything not open to proof or disproof by that narrow range of evidence is not worth considering. The idea that "the God Hypothesis" is necessarily a scientific hypothesis seems a gross oversimplification - but precisely the sort of claim to be expected from a dogmatic empiricist.

For another, Dawkins explicitly embraces philosophical naturalism, particularly the view that reality is basically material. His particular understanding of material reality informs the central claim of his argument against the existence of God: that God would have to be more complex (and hence more improbable) than the world He allegedly created. This is convincing for people who have already bought into philosophical naturalism, perhaps, but not so much for others.

Regarding the subsidiary question of polarization, Dawkins does have an unfortunate tendency to polarize the debate and to "poison the well" for anyone who wants to take a moderate position, though he does not go nearly so far in his well-poisoning as does Sam Harris in Letter to a Christian Nation. Still, the two would give the Bush administration a run for its money in their with-us-or-against-us rhetoric.

Two worlds stand opposed to one another, a world of light and a world of darkness . . . ahem. Where was I? Oh, yes . . .

According to Dawkins and Harris, there are only two sides to the debate. On the one side are rational people who reject superstition and embrace Science. On the other side are those whose minds have been hijacked by the toxic memes of religion - the fundamentalist evangelical Christian gloating over natural disasters, the Catholic priest abusing the minds if not the bodies of children, the Muslim suicide bomber, and the rest of that sorry lot.

What's in between? Nothing viable, they argue. Nothing worthwhile. Besides, moderate and liberal theists, agnostics, skeptics, and a whole of a culture that affords undue deference to religious belief only play into the hands of the fanatics. As Dawkins (p.346) puts it: "The teachings of 'moderate' religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism."

There is another, more restricted polarization in both of these books, perhaps stemming from their authors' unsophisticated understanding of moral philosophy, and almost certainly fostered by their adherence to empiricism and naturalism. In treating the question of whether morality can exist without God, both of them fall into a false dichotomy: morality is either absolutist (a matter of duty, following rules) or it is consequentialist (growing out of an empiricist tradition in ethics, since suffering is something we can see and feel). There are no other options, and since theism tends to favor absolutism, it is just obvious that rational people will favor consequentialism (see Harris, p.23-24; Dawkins, pp.335). There are other options.

And yet, it's still not clear to me that a robust, positive atheism requires a prior commitment to empiricism or philosophical naturalism, or that it necessarily entails political polarization. In the interstices of Dawkins' book - though not in Harris' little screed - there is the possibility of a broader and more generous sort of atheism, the primary commitment of which is to pursue open, critical inquiry in whatever form it takes and wherever it leads . . . with a growing conviction that it leads away from any sort of theism.

The basic insight, to which Dawkins himself alludes on occasion (though I can't find the passages just now), is that science is just one, particularly powerful form of intersubjective critical inquiry, its evidence just one kind of evidence, among several. The point is that the inquiry has to be intersubjective and also critical.

I could cast this kind of inquiry in phenomenological terms (playing on "intersubjective"), or in terms set out by the American pragmatists (Peirce, Dewey), or in terms of the theory of deliberative democracy (Rawls, Habermas). In the end, not much may hinge on the distinction.

The point is that any claim I make, any policy I propose, would have to be backed up by argument and evidence that is accessible to and understandable by a wide range of interlocutors, many of whom will likely not share my particular beliefs and values nor even my basic presuppositions. In order to convince anyone, the evidence and argument I offer must be "public," that is, rooted somehow in the world of common experience. I happen to think that the common world is richer and deeper than the empiricists' sensorium.

As a skeptic, I am committed to holding only to those beliefs that can survive robust criticism in the public forum. I am further committed to holding those beliefs only provisionally, open always to the possibility that further public evidence and argument may lead me to revise them or even replace them.

Here is where atheism makes sense, at least if it is understood as the negative of a particular understanding of theism. Dawkins' target is not the broadly spiritual sense of awe and deep meaning experienced by, say, Einstein, but the particular beliefs of theists in the three Abrahamic traditions. He states "the God Hypothesis" as follows, on p.52:

there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.

If that's really what theism is, then it seems the approach to critical inquiry I have outlined is destined push me toward atheism, if not all the way there, for some of the basic reasons Dawkins' cites.

For one thing, claims in a particular religious text are only convincing to those who already accept the literal and compelling truth of a religious text, something that is notably difficult to establish on the basis of public reasons. It is only by the undue deference granted to religious belief that people get away with it at all. Even then, there are all the usual problems of authorship, transmittal, translation, cherry-picking, and so on.

For another, there are other well-established threads in public debate that undermine the God hypothesis or show the particular forms it takes to be utterly contingent and idiosyncratic. Evolutionary biology is one of these threads, the one on which Dawkins hangs much of his argument, along with threads from historians, anthropologists, neurologists, psychologists, and so on and on. There are also lines of inquiry in philosophy that have bearing on the question: I think particularly of Kant, for whom God was at most a regulative idea of judgment, and of the existentialist tradition from Nietzsche on down.

There are a lot of questions I have yet to address: What about "moderate" theism, or broader kinds of spirituality? Is theism okay in private as long as it is not pushed in public? Would this make moderate religion more understandable and more justifiable? (Certainly, even Dawkins acknowledges that atheists and moderate theists can find some common ground and make common cause in practical matters.) In that case, does my take on critical inquiry really push toward atheism in principle or just secularism in practice?

The Atheism Project

2008-05-05T19:25:00.004-04:00

Though I have not been a Christian since before I graduated from high school, and have consciously thought of myself as a skeptic for at least the past decade, I have never really grappled directly with the question of whether my skepticism amounts to atheism.

I have usually been content casually to think to myself - and occasionally to write in this blog - that atheism strikes me as altogether too dogmatic, and its public proponents too zealous, shrill, and occasionally repellant for it to really be taken all that seriously.

But then, recent work I've done on the consequences of the Darwinian revolution for human self-understanding and moral experience has led me to think that I cannot remain as nicely neutral on, say, the relation between science and religion, as I might have hoped.

Let me put it this way: skepticism calls for suspension of judgment on matters that cannot currently be decided, particularly those that transcend the world of our common experience. Sextus writes of "equipollence", a condition in which arguments for one side and the other of a particular belief are evenly matched in their merits and their flaws, with no way of deciding between them. Then, the skeptic suspends judgment and is at peace, focusing instead on practical affairs in the world of common experience.

Accordingly, I've thought to myself that what I object to in organized religion is dogmatism, not theism per se. I myself am not a theist, but as long as theists do not insist on pushing their views unduly in the public forum, I have hoped, we can all get along just fine.

But can I be so sure of that? Could atheists be correct that there is something so terribly implausible and wrong-headed about theism that equipollence is broken and the suspension of judgment itself suspended? Is it possible that, even while continuing to suspend judgment about what's really going on in the world, back there, behind the curtain, I can at least say: "Whatever it is, it's not the intelligent creator-God of the theists"?

I think it is at least possible, in which case my skepticism does amount in principle to atheism - though in truth it has long amounted to atheism in practice.

So, I'm going to devote some of my time and energy this summer - starting now, as my spring semester has just ended - sampling the recent spate of "new atheist" books. Right now I'm working through what may turn out to be the best of them, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I'll take in Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, and others, take a tour through Jacoby's scholarship on the subject, and consider some of the less hysterical replies, including Hedges' recent book, I Don't Believe in Atheists.

Since much of the reading I do outside of my research takes place while riding public transit, I'll be interested to see what happens if anyone notices me reading The God Delusion or God is Not Great on the bus . . .

Wish me luck.

Life Without Newton

2008-05-01T22:04:00.011-04:00

It's bad enough that most Americans don't believe in Darwinian evolution. Far worse is that many of us - at least in daily practice - seem not to believe in Newtonian mechanics. This thought occurred to me today as I watched yet another car pull out directly in front of yet another fast-moving bus.

The driver of the car seemed in that moment not really to believe the First Law of Motion, to wit:

Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

The more massive the object and the higher its velocity, the larger the force needed to slow it, stop it, or deflect it. In short, the bus is very unlikely to be able to stop in time.

More than this, when a very large, fast-moving object strikes a smaller, slow-moving object, which is the most likely to be - um - deflected from its current state of motion? It doesn't matter that the car in question was an SUV, except that its size relative to other cars may have lulled the driver into a false sense of invulnerability.

I gathered further evidence a short time later, on campus, walking up the hill on the way to my office. A student who was in my lecture class this semester, no doubt finished with his final exams, was flying down the street on his bicycle. At least, he seemed to think he was flying: he looked exultant. He was not wearing a helmet. I happen to know he is a very intelligent engineering student, no doubt about to graduate with some sort of honors from an engineering university of some prestige . . . but he seemed at that moment not to believe in the First Law of Motion. If some external force were to act on his bicycle . . .

I brought this up a few minutes later with one of my graduate student teaching assistants, who pointed out that people here in the South do not have sufficient respect for trains, whereas people from the Midwest know that long freight trains take a very, very long time to stop.

In this case, disbelief in the First Law is echoed and reinforced in children's books. My daughters have a picture book on their shelves in which a pickup truck, stuck on the railroad tracks, is saved by the frantic light-writing of a firefly. The driver of the train, apparently a few hundred yards down the track, sees the writing, sees the truck and stops the train in time.

I've heard that by the time the driver of a mile-long freight train traveling at 60 miles per hour can actually see an obstacle on the track, it's already too late to stop.

Don't even get me started on people who don't wear seat belts. The car stops, they remain in motion until . . .

I'm sure there's a subtle point to be made here about risk perception, self-deception, and so on, but I'm not going to go looking for it just now. I'll just end this by wondering aloud: What is it that allows some people to internalize Newtonian mechanics, to live as though mass and velocity have real, practical implications for moment-by-moment decisions, without special exemptions for SUVs? What would science education (or education in general) have to be like so that most people lived this way?

I'll add, as a post-script, a further question: What is it that allows some people to internalize Darwinian evolution, to actually live, moment by moment, in the world Darwin opened to us?

Of Whales and Bitterness

2008-04-13T12:09:00.012-04:00

This morning's online New York Times includes an article on Senator Obama's efforts to explain comments he made a few days ago about voters in small towns in Pennsylvania. As the Times has it:

“And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not,” Mr. Obama went on. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Senator Obama has since admitted that he did not express himself very well, and he has clarified along these :

“So I said, well, you know when you’re bitter, you turn to what you can count on,” he added. “So people, they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community.”

My interest here is not in what Obama said or what he meant or the velocity at which he is spinning. My interest is in a reply to this from Senator Clinton. Here's how the New York Times presents it:

“I grew up in a church-going family, a family that believed in the importance of living out and expressing our faith,” she said at a rally in Indianapolis. “The people of faith I know don’t ‘cling to’ religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich.”

Aside from the rhetorical play on the phrase "cling to", there is an obvious lapse of logic here. Senator Obama said that some people who are bitter cling to religious belief. Senator Clinton implies - with her usual forced mix of outrage, derision and condescension - that Senator Obama believes all religious people (that is, people who cling pathetically to religious belief) do so because they are bitter.

Consider an analogy. Senator Obama asserts that all whales are mammals. Senator Clinton wants to give the impression Senator Obama thinks all mammals are whales, so she rushes to the microphone to declare, with barely concealed contempt, that she has known many mammals (Socks the cat, for example) who are very happy not to be whales.

Saving the Earth, One Hour at a Time

2008-03-27T06:52:00.007-04:00

This Saturday marks observance of the second annual "Earth Hour", an event foisted upon us by the World Wildlife Fund. The idea is that businesses and residences will turn off all "nonessential" lighting from 8pm until 9pm "to symbolize that each one of us, working together, can make a positive impact on climate change - no matter who we are or where we live." (www.worldwildlife.org/earthhour)

Now, I'm all for a serious and coordinated response to climate change, though I'm coming around to favor an emphasis on adaptation rather than mitigation. After all, even if we stopped emitting carbon altogether by late this afternoon, human-induced climate change could continue for decades. We should try to mitigate as much as we can, but I have no illusions that the path to a more sustainable form of civilization will be easy or straight.

It is partly for this last reason that I have grave doubts about usefulness of symbolic gestures from people who want to be thought green . . . and there are more of those every day. Major institutions have jumped on the bandwagon, including my own employer . . . an institution filled with people who ought to know better.

In short, Earth Hour may turn out to be coordinated, but it is hardly to be taken seriously.

When the lights are out, everyone can feel unified in their green righteousness. Everyone can feel superior to those who leave their lights burning bright.

Then, at nine o'clock, their duty behind them for another year, the lights can blaze forth once more.

It sure beats actually changing anything.

Behind the Curtain

2008-03-22T12:13:00.009-04:00

An important turning-point in my intellectual life occurred while I was washing dishes and listening to music - a combination, I might add, that is a reliable generator of good ideas. In this instance, I was standing at the sink in the kitchen of our apartment in New Hampshire, listening to Laurie Anderson's Big Science CD. It was, if memory serves, 1997.

I had been wrapping up work on one draft of my first book, casting around for a new direction for my research. I was a-jumble with vague hints and half-formed indications, nothing much to go on.

Then, in the track called "Born, Never Asked," a single question set up some kind of resonance, and I knew what I should do next.

In that track - not a song, really - Anderson describes a room full of people, "all kinds." The only things they have in common are that that happen to have arrived at "more or less the same time" and that they are all asking themselves, "What is behind that curtain?"

(The allegory is obvious enough: the world, those of us who happen to be here, who were born without ever having been asked, etc.)

She follows this with: "You were born, and so you're free."

Thus was I launched into my investigation of human freedom as a new approach to the questions of environmental ethics, following on from my skepticism regarding claims to know what nature is and what nature wants (back there, behind the curtain).

So this semester I'm teaching modern philosophy and, as part of my ongoing investigation of human freedom, reading Hegel. I keep coming back to the metaphor of the curtain.

For early modern philosophers, particularly the rationalists, there was no curtain. There was only the gossamer veil of consciousness, like a projection screen on which all that is important is made plainly evident. For Descartes, it was God who guaranteed that anything he perceived clearly and distinctly must be true, God who assured him there isn't anything untoward going on back there.

Poor old Locke, the most naive of empiricists, seemed blithely unaware that there could be anything back there that wasn't evident up here, though he had the decency to note when he was fudging: substance is that something "I know not what" in which qualities inhere.

Then comes Hume, with his mitigated skepticism: we can be familiar only with what is in consciousness while the "secret springs and principles" of nature remain hidden from us. Worse, that familiarity really is only familiarity: we connect ideas and events and moral judgments together only by a kind of warm glow of fulfilled expectation rather than by any sort of logical necessity.

Then comes Kant, with his distinction between phenomena and noumena. Unlike Hume, Kant finds necessity in our experience of phenomena, but only because the mind puts it there in constructing experience. For that very reason, we can claim no knowledge of noumena - things as they really, really, truly are.

However, Kant leaves open the possibility that we can think our own freedom as part of the noumenal realm, and the possibility that we can hope the world really, really, truly is put together to help us to be good and to reward us when we succeed. Back there, behind the curtain, God is smiling up on the good and frowning upon the bad. Still, we can't really claim to know any of this.

Kant's successors weren't satisfied with this. They looked for ways to unify phenomena and noumena, nature and freedom, and to claim knowledge of their unity. Schelling asserted the unity. Hegel belabored it.

Hegel's one trick, that he uses again, and again, and again, and again in tiresome repetition, is to have consciousness rip aside the curtain to discover . . . itself, looking back. That's kind of exciting at first, but it gets really old, really fast. He keeps doing this trick until, he thinks, there are no more curtains to rip aside: self-consciousness that is conscious of its own self-consciousness can rest content in its own consciousness of itself . . . or something like that.

But Nietzsche is waiting in the wings, with his warning that we'd be better off if we didn't rip aside that last curtain, because we really wouldn't like - and in fact could not live in the face of - what we'd find behind it.

For myself, I'm much more interested in the room itself, all of the people who happen to be here now, and all of those who are on their way.

It's getting awfully warm in here . . .

The Return

2008-03-22T08:58:00.009-04:00

Well, I'm back.

In a fit of pique against the dominance of technology in my life, I obliterated the earlier version of this blog . . . though not before saving all of the entries for my own reference.

But then there would be a story in the news about some rank hypocrisy, an editorial about climate change ridden by particularly sloppy thinking, yet another damned screed by a belligerent, dogmatic atheist (or anti-atheist), and I'd think: I'd sure like to be able to write about that in my blog . . .

So, I'm back. I don't know that I'll be contributing to this thing very often, and I can't promise I won't recycle old entries from this blog's predecessor, but I will post occasionally.

In the mean time, I've been solidifying my sense of what it means to be a skeptic: I am doubtful of - and wary of - dogmatism in all its forms, in every area of public life. I generally favor thinking that is nuanced and modest, with due respect for ambiguity and uncertainty, perhaps especially when it concerns the most basic questions of what it is to be a human being in the world.

I will also post poll questions, from time to time, over here. --->

On the Passing of Jerry Falwell

2007-05-15T12:00:00.003-04:00

The New York Times online wasted no time in posting an article on the death today of Jerry Falwell, and they opened a blog for reader comments on Falwell's legacy. Most of the comments - as of this moment, more than 70 of them - are on the order of "good riddance to bad rubbish," "may he rot in hell," and "let's throw a party and dance on his grave."

For the record, here is my comment, with one slight emendation:

I will not mourn the passing of Jerry Falwell, but I would note that most of the comments here are as mean-spirited and bigoted as many of his public comments. If we stop to think about it, Falwell represented the danger of any narrow and dogmatic ideology, left or right, secular or religious. Let someone who is without prejudice cast the first stone . . . and the stones will stay safely on the ground.

In short, Jerry Falwell was to all appearances a nasty, bigoted, and twisted individual, but we all have in us the potential to be his equal in that regard.

Three Thoughts on Virginia Tech

2007-04-18T12:00:00.002-04:00

1. I hesitate to write anything about the massacre two days ago at Virginia Tech. Too many words have been produced already, by endless blogs and editorials, by the blather of the 24-hour cable news cycle. Words always fall short of such horrors, and it seems the more words we produce about it, the farther they are from hitting the mark. Whereof we cannot speak, to quote Wittgenstein out of context, thereof we must remain silent.

Still, I can hardly resist . . .

2. Last night I saw a couple of commercials on television for movies involving heavily armed men causing mayhem. One image, of a man with large automatic weapons hanging crossed on his back with a pistol in each hand, was clearly meant to be the iconic cool image of the film.

I remembered hearing in a news account from Virginia Tech that the shooter was emotionless and silent, carrying out his killings with a grim efficiency and a straight face.

Putting these together, I remembered an iconic image from some years ago: two people, a man and a woman, enter the lobby of an office building. They are wearing long, black trench coats and designer sunglasses; their hair is slicked back. They throw open their coats to reveal a virtual armamentarium, and they proceed to carry out a series of killings with grim efficiency, straight faces, and really cool aerial martial-arts acrobatics in slow motion.

These were the good guys.

I am not claiming direct causality here, only pointing out the parallel.

3. Regarding criticism of the administration at Virginia Tech, I have to say that I can understand the difficulty of their situation. They seem to have been trying to avoid one type of error (a "false positive" in effect, alerting people to a risk that is not there) and fell into another (a "false negative", not alerting people to a risk that was there.) Should they not have been more cautious?

I'm sure there are a lot of things that go into such decisions, but consider: had they sounded the alarm and locked down the campus, the massacre might never have happened. In fact, that would the point of sounding the alarm. But then, what would all the fuss have been about? They might have been criticized for crying wolf.

The Secret

2007-03-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

If I think about it really hard, can I make it so that people are no longer suckers for idiotic self-help books?

How to Impress a Philosophy Professor

2007-02-21T12:00:00.001-05:00

Thinking about former students whom I've suspected of being Objectivists has made me think more generally about what I hope for from my students.

It's sometimes funny, sometimes troubling, to catch a glimpse of what they think I'm looking for.

Often, students assume that because I have a PhD in Philosophy I must really be impressed by long words. I can't even count the number of times I've received a paper written in an inflated and self-important tone with lots of long words that are, somehow, not quite right. I can tell that the students who hand in papers like that spent a lot of time with a thesaurus, which almost always leads them astray: the denotations may be more or less right, but it's the connotations that get them.

I try to tell those students, sometimes with some success, that what really impresses me is clear thinking expressed in plain language.

There are also students who take this a step further: The only thing that will impress a philosopher, they seem to think, is something written by another philosopher. So, they cut and paste a paper from other sources. Pastiche does not impress me; it just wastes my time in gathering the evidence to file an academic misconduct report. It makes me very grumpy.

What does impress me is students trusting themselves enough to try to put together an argument on their own, even if it doesn't go very well at first.

Other students get annoyed with me because I have the audacity to be critical of the argument they offer in support of their view on a particular topic. This is just a philosophy class, they tell me, and my point of view is as good as anyone else's. They assume that if I give them anything less than an A, I am showing disrespect for their point of view, which amounts to disrespect for them as people. Shouldn't I be more accepting than that?

This came out several years ago, in the anonymous evaluation of a course I taught. I tried from the beginning to make it clear that I grade papers on the quality of the argumentation, using clear standards that are set out in the syllabus; I do not grade papers based on whether I agree or disagree with the conclusion. I worked tirelessly to help them see that not all opinions are equal, and that the goal should be to have informed opinions that can be supported by reasons. Still, at the end of the course, a student wrote: "I thought the grading was kind of harsh, since this is only a philosophy course, which is really just opinion." What could I do?

Some time ago, I even had a student send me a series of abusive emails about what an incompetent jerk I was to give him a B on his final paper, which led to his receiving a B in the course. He was deeply committed to his thesis, it seems, and thought I was punishing him because I did not agree with his thesis. Again, what could I do? I could only try to explain, again and again, that the grade I assigned had nothing to do with my agreement or disagreement with the thesis, but with the fact that the argument needed much more careful development and he needed to be more scrupulously fair to other points of view.

Again, I try to tell students that what impresses me is clear thinking and basic fair-mindedness. To tell the truth, some of the best papers I've ever received from students were ones I disagreed with strongly. It may be that those students knew or suspected that I would disagree, and so they tried that much harder to put together a cogent argument.

On the other hand, some of the worst papers I've ever received came from students who assumed that I would agree with them. Kissing up does not impress me.

Then there are students with an axe to grind, who think that my role is to sit back and be impressed as they trot out well-rehearsed arguments in defense of their own particular dogma. The suspected Objectivist I wrote about in my last post was like this.

Apologetics do not impress me. What I hope for from my students is that they will begin to entertain some reasonable doubts about their own beliefs and assumptions, and perhaps develop a more nuanced and more complete view of the world. I hope that their moral imagination is richer than it was before we started. More than this, I hope that they get into the habit of doubt, which is to say the habit of open and honest intellectual inquiry.

Come to think of it, there's something wrong with the way I've cast this. In the end, it really doesn't matter whether my students impress me. What matters is that they leave my class with a broader and richer understanding of human life in the world and the choices human beings have to make, and with some of the basic skills they will need to continue the inquiry.

Confession of a Former Objectivist, part four

2007-02-19T12:00:00.001-05:00

I think that I am more or less done writing about my misspent youth, for now. I may have more to add at some point in the future.

I did want to add that I occasionally come across a student whom I suspect of being an Objectivist, or at least an Objectivist sympathizer. The signs are not hard to spot.

I once had a student who was terribly frustrated with the professional ethics course I was teaching because I kept expecting him to actually practice some basic skills for understanding ethical problems and generating options for action. He regarded such exercises as a waste of time, since they only kept him from being able to show off his own intelligence and his own profound wisdom about all matters of proper human conduct.

There is no point to being creative, he said. There is a right answer and a wrong answer, and if you'd just give me a chance, I'll tell you what the right answer is.

He also insisted that there is no such thing as a genuine dilemma that calls for trading off one value for another; there is always a right way to go, no matter what.

He said he wanted to be challenged, but I could tell that he did not want to be challenged in any way that really mattered, that is, shaken to the core of his beliefs and forced to reassess everything from the ground up. No, he wanted to be confronted with ideas he disagreed with so he could dismiss them out of hand, undermine them by any means necessary.

Do not ask me to take other points of view seriously, he insisted. If you do so, he implied strongly, you are part of an academic conspiracy to undermine my confidence in myself.

His favorite way of undermining other points of view - and this was one reason I suspected he might be an Objectivist - was to reduce all values, obligations, and motives involved to some mix of psychological and ethical egoism. Engineers do not have obligations to public health and safety, he argued, they only have obligations to themselves; self-interest dictates that they would be stupid to let what they do hurt other people, because if they do, they'll lose their opportunity to do meaningful and satisfying work, to create things. (I read: to Produce.)

Another reason I suspected him of Objectivism was that he "solved" one case - involving a decision whether to cut down part of an old-growth forest in order to make a stretch of highway more safe - by a very provocative reframing: this should not be an issue at all, he declared, because roads should not be built by the government. All roads should be built and maintained by private companies, like they were at the beginning of the Republic. If roads were in private hands (and, I suppose, trees as well) this would issue would never have arisen.

(I did not point out that, before the advent of the Federal Highway system, it took an armored military column - including Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower - 62 days to travel from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. That's another story.)

I guess I have to say that I'm sympathetic to students like this. After all, I was very much like they are in my first two years of college. On the other hand, I find such students very, very frustrating. There is no way to teach them, no way to bring them to Socrates' insight that wisdom begins with the acknowledgment of our own ignorance.

They will have to discover this on their own, as I eventually did, or they will never actually learn anything.

Confession of a Former Objectivist, part three

2007-02-16T12:00:00.001-05:00

On second thought, it may be that the paper I wrote about Objectivism during my last semester in college is best left in obscurity.

Part of the problem is that I just can't help reading the paper as the work of a student. I keep wanting to grade it, to comment on it, to correct it, to steer it in a better direction by sheer force of will. I am haunted by what the paper might have become in more capable hands than those of my twenty-one-year-old self.

(I experience this sort of thing a lot when reading students' work. They have no idea what an agony it can be, always wanting their work to be the best it can be, but always seeing how it could have been better.)

Besides that, the paper was very much the product of the course for which it was written, which was very much the product of the particular obsessions of the professor who taught it. Much of it doesn't make sense outside of that context.

I will say something about the general idea of the paper, though, with which I am still in basic agreement. I distinguished two agendas in Ayn Rand's work, and argued that one served to undermine the other.

The first agenda is her early effort to articulate her "sense of life" - a bright and clear vision of what human life in the world can be when we are paying attention and thinking clearly. I cast this as part of the broader historical project of humanism.

The second agenda is her later effort to establish the philosophical underpinnings of this "sense of life", through a naive realist ontology and epistemology, rational egoism, and a defense of laissez-faire industrial capitalism. I argued, on the basis of some of the works I read for the course, that this second agenda actually puts Rand at odds with humanism in general and with her own "sense of life" in particular. I have a bit of trouble recreating the connections I made then, but the gist of it is that her contrived foundation offers little hope of actually making sense of human experience or providing a "bright" and "clear" vision of human possibility.

In reading the paper, I was reminded of one of the more amusing aspects of Rand's thought. Somewhere along the way, Rand developed a deep and passionate loathing for the work of Immanuel Kant. Not only did Kant argue that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves, but the mere fact that Kant believes we may have positive duties toward other people puts him strictly beyond the pale of what is acceptable in an Objectivist system.

Rand, I wrote in the paper, inhabited a moral universe in which a strict, all-or-nothing dualism held sway: either one is a rational, clear-eyed, clear-headed, egoistic Producer, or one is an irrational, dull-eyed, slack-jawed, mushy-headed Looter who uses altruism and collectivism as excuses to drift along at the Producer's expense. It is the job of the Mystic to fill the Looters' heads with mush, to get them to think they are entitled to appropriate what the Producers produce.

In Rand's universe, Kant qualifies as a Mystic simply because he would not have bought into her naive realism or rational egoism. Because of her ideological fervor, she seems to miss the facts that Kant was about as clear-headed as anyone could be in the eighteenth century, that he offered decisive arguments against the kind of naive Lockean empiricism favored by Rand, that he also offered decisive arguments against the Rationalism of Descartes and Leibniz, and that he mounted as robust a defense as has ever been offered of human dignity and autonomy. Kant was, in this last respect at least, an arch-humanist.

These days, I'm quite fond of Kant's critical philosophy and its offspring, particularly it's great-grandchild, existential phenomenology. I still think of myself as a humanist, in some sense of the word, though I guess I would have to call myself a skeptical humanist.

I am also quite alert to false dichotomies in ethical and political discourse (see this, for example). It's another skeptical habit I picked up, thanks to (and in spite of) Ayn Rand.

Confession of a Former Objectivist, part two

2007-02-14T12:00:00.001-05:00

In the wake of my experience with Objectivism, I came to mistrust all claims to certainty. This was reinforced by my continuing study of philosophy, through which I gained a growing understanding of the richness and ambiguity of human experience and the elusiveness of knowledge.

Through many years of disorientation and bafflement, I gradually came to be comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. By recasting myself as an environmental philosopher, using the intellectual resources of the philosophical tradition to grapple with complex issues of knowledge and value in environmental ethics and policy, I was slowly able to open up a practical domain in which I could make some (tentative) assertions and hold some (tentative) convictions.

I should give a sense of what I mean by "gradually": I was already a year or so into my graduate studies before I solidified my self-identification as an environmental philosopher, and it was several years of teaching and writing after I received my doctorate before I really began to gain some confidence asserting much of anything.

It is telling that, early on, my assertions were mostly negative. I developed a critique of environmental ethics as it had been practiced (and as it is still widely practiced), and was only able to gesture at what the alternative might be: a way of (somehow!) approaching environmental issues without claiming foundational knowledge of what Nature is and what Nature wants, or some other metaphysical or ontological variation on that theme.

What's really telling, though, is the pattern I began to identify in many of the arguments offered by environmental ethicists. These are the foundational principles we should adopt, they argued (sometimes openly), because these are the only foundational principles that fully support and justify the values we hold and the political agenda we pursue as environmentalists.

This kind of argument also takes a negative form, seen in attack after attack on anthropocentric (human-centered) ethics: We must reject human centered ethics, they argue again and again, because it supports and justifies attitudes and policies that seem to run counter to the values we hold and the political agenda we pursue as environmentalists. Anthropocentrism has become a kind of ideological litmus test among environmental ethicists.

As I argued in my dissertation and later in my book, this kind of argument is precisely backward, and more than a little deceptive. While environmental ethicists often pretend to be grounding non-anthropocentric ethical principles in some (scientific, ontological, metaphysical, perceptual, or spiritual) certainty about the world, what they are doing is rigging their science, ontology, metaphysics, perception, or spirituality to fit a practical vision and a political agenda the validity of which is always assumed from the beginning.

Where had I seen this pattern before?

Ayn Rand lived through the Russian revolution, and came to despise everything the Bolsheviks stood for. The United States stood out in stark contrast to all of that. She came to valorize the United States, and she embraced idealized versions of Capitalism and Rugged Individualism as her guiding lights. Her early novels, We The Living, Anthem, and even to some extent The Fountainhead are expressions of what can only be described as her passion for (a kind of) freedom and independence, a celebration of (a version of) human dignity.

(This was heady stuff to a confused seventeen-year-old, and at its best Rand's work can even be kind of bracing for grown-ups, too.)

By the end of The Fountainhead, however, through the whole of Atlas Shrugged, and on into her volumes of turgid non-fiction, Rand had begun to style herself as a philosopher. Her goal was to find the foundation, the ultimate justification for the vision of life to which she had given voice.

The problem is that - can you guess? - she reasoned backward, rigging together a loose system of naive realism and rational egoism that seemed to lead to the conclusion she wanted, but which could be held together only in the mind of someone driven by an ideological agenda or a blind passion - or both. Look too closely, ask too many reasonable questions about knowledge, or perception, or value, or economics, or politics, or for that matter the actual course of real human relationships, and the whole rickety edifice comes tumbling down.

When I turned my attention to environmental philosophy, I guess I was primed to spot backward reasoning and all manner of foundation-rigging wherever it happened to be. I got into the habit of pointing out that sort of tomfoolery when I spotted it, and I've never lost the habit. Much of what I've written in the subsequent 15 years or so is a testament to that.

I wrote a paper about Rand for an advanced ethics course I took during my last semester in college. At the time, I thought of the paper as a final farewell: with this paper, I thought at the time, I will finally put Objectivism behind me. I've never tried to publish that paper, but maybe now I'll dig it out and post extended excerpts as part three (and maybe parts four and five) of this series. Stay tuned.

Confession of a Former Objectivist, part one

2007-02-13T12:00:00.001-05:00

I owe a debt that I do not often acknowledge openly. At least some of what I have become as a philosopher, as a citizen, and, for that matter, as a human being can be traced back to a two-year period during which I was devoted to the writings and the thought of Ayn Rand.

That's right, I was an Objectivist.

In fact, reading Ayn Rand's books - nearly all of them, if you can believe it - was the reason I first decided to study philosophy. It was not, however, the reason I continued to study philosophy.

Let me start at the beginning.

I was raised as a Christian in the Lutheran Church. By the time I was finishing middle school, my brothers had both linked up with a kind of charismatic-evangelical undercurrent that ran through the various protestant churches in the Toledo area. They went to bible studies, prayer meetings, and concerts by Christian pop and rock musicians. They spoke in tongues.

I followed the same path, trying to become as fervent in my belief as they seemed to be, though always with some reserve, some critical distance. I did manage to speak in tongues myself, though I doubted at the time that any human being (or any other being, for that matter) would have understood.

(Glossolalia is a curious experience - and also not something I often acknowledge publicly.)

Within a few years, though, I was in the midst of a full-blown crisis of faith, all mixed up in the confused blur of adolescence. Old certainties were breaking up, leaving only questions behind.

I still went to church because that is what my parents expected of me. I even taught Sunday School, though my motives were mixed. Partly, I was just trying to avoid going to Sunday School myself. I had a hard enough time with my peers at high school during the week without seeing so many of them again on Sunday.

Then, during my senior year in high school, I learned of an essay contest sponsored by the Ayn Rand Institute, focusing on her novel The Fountainhead. I had never heard of Rand, and I had certainly never heard of the Institute, but I decided to read the book and see what I could make of it.

I was captivated. Here was a book that offered certainty about the world and affirmation of my own worth. As a bonus, it even offered validation of my doubts about Christianity.

I submitted an essay to the contest, which yielded nothing, but then spent the summer after graduation reading every book by Rand I could get my hands on. I decided that when I got to college, I would study philosophy. More than that, I would be self-sufficient, self-assured, independent, whole.

(As it happened, I mostly just became an insufferable pain in the ass for a couple of years. I blush to think of the people I alienated, the actual and possible friendships I sacrificed on the altar of Rational Egoism. That part of the story is complicated, though, and beside the point here.)

I would go on, in my first year and a half in college, to organize an Objectivist club on campus. By the mid-point of my sophomore year, though, doubt had set in once again. By that summer, I no longer thought of myself as on Objectivist. I abandoned the Objectivist club, and started reading and thinking more broadly.

What had happened, I soon came to see, was that I had taken Ayn Rand at her word. She occasionaly warned her readers not simply to believe what she wrote but to think it through for themselves. Of course, she was assuming that anyone who was really thinking, really being rational, would come to the same conclusions she had come to.

She was wrong. I thought for myself, and discovered not only that her conclusions were ill founded but that trying to live as an Objectivist was a sure-fire way to become a fully miserable human being.

After a while, though, I also came to the realization that Objectivism had served a very important purpose: it was the dogma of my youth, which served as a bridge between the dogma of my childhood and something else. The experience of embracing and then rejecting Objectivism taught me something about belief and doubt, and got me into the habit of overturning my own way of thinking from time to time.

In other words, the trajectory of my experience with Objectivism helped to make me into a skeptic. More about that in part two.

Happy Darwin Day!

2007-02-12T12:01:00.006-05:00

Today is the anniversary of the birth in 1809 of Charles Darwin, and also the anniversary of the publication in 1859 of On The Origin of Species. Someone, somewhere decided to dub this "Darwin Day" and to encourage celebrations, discussions, public presentations, etc., etc.

Of course the really big party will be two years from today, on the bi- and sesquicentennial.

In observance of the day, I offer the following news story from Agence France-Presse, the link for which was first sent to me by a colleague some days ago. The original story is dated February 2, 2007.

PARIS (AFP) - Tens of thousands of French schools and universities have received copies of a Turkish book refuting Darwin's theory of evolution and describing it as "the true source of terrorism."

The education ministry said Friday that it had warned school and university directors that the textbook is not in line with the recognized curriculum and that they should disregard it.

Entitled "The Atlas of Creation," the 770-page book by Turkish author Harun Yahya quotes several passages from the Koran and asserts that "human beings did not evolve (from another species) but were indeed created." . . .

The book features a photograph of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center with the caption: "Those who perpetuate terror in the world are in fact Darwinists. Darwinism is the only philosophy that values and incites conflict.

"The theories of Charles Darwin are "the true source of terrorism," it said.

Where to begin? To address all of the problems with the claims in the textbook would take more time than I am willing to spend today. I offer here one line of thinking, in brief.

The argument that "Darwinism" is a "philosophy" that "values and incites conflict" is problematic on a number of fronts. Perhaps most notable is the assumption that all human actions can be traced back to intellectual roots, so that only a "philosophy" of conflict can lead to actual conflict. It would seem to follow, then, that the actions of someone who claims to act on a "philosophy" of compassion or justice must necessarily be compassionate and just. Since Islam embodies ideals of compassion and justice (so the textbook's author claims elsewhere), then anything any Muslim does must necessarily be compassionate and just.

It would also seem to follow that there could have been no conflict - or perhaps no "true" conflict - in the world prior to February 12, 1859.

This is, to say the very least, implausible. Why, just this morning I heard a story on NPR about the original split between Sunnis and Shiites in the decades after the death of the Prophet, and the wholesale slaughter that ensued over which version of compassion and justice should rule the day.

Don't get me wrong here: I do not mean to pick on Islam. There are all manner of horrors in the history of other religions and ideologies, many of which embraced principles of compassion and justice.

As it happens, there is ample room in Darwinian theory (which is a scientific theory, not a "philosophy") for compassion and justice among human beings. Yes, there is a struggle for survival among living things on earth, and the struggle is sometimes (but not nearly always) violent. But, Darwin argued in The Descent of Man, social animals can gain an advantage in this struggle when they cooperate with one another. Darwin traces the origin of "the moral sense" to a kind of social instinct: those who are able to experience compassion for others are more likely to cooperate with others, and so they are more likely to thrive and reproduce than those who are unable to experience compassion for others.

As I have argued elsewhere (in an article to be published this month, in fact), there are some problems with this kind of empirical approach to ethics, but at least Darwin's account allows us to distinguish between conflict or struggle in the wider world of nature and cooperation and solidarity within the human community.

Darwin's account also points toward the importance of at least one variety of moral imagination: the ability to see the world through the eyes of others.

I would even go so far as to suggest that it points toward a different source of terrorism, not in any particular philosophy, or religion, or ideology, but in a simple lack of compassion. Those who brought down the World Trade Center were not rampaging Darwinists, but men who had, for whatever reason, suffered a catastrophic failure of moral imagination.

Pretend!

2007-02-11T12:01:00.001-05:00

A passing observation, a propos of nothing much:

Watching my two daughters playing together, I'm struck by the way they use the verb 'to pretend' in the imperative. It's not something you hear very often among adults.

"Pretend you're a kitten who's lost in the woods," one will command the other. "Okay, now. Pretend I'm a princess who has been invited to a ball! . . . "

Perhaps even more striking is the way in which the other child always takes this in stride, switching from lost kitten to robot to wizard to pastry chef without question or protest, and without missing a beat.

What We Don't Know about Sprawl

2007-02-09T12:01:00.003-05:00

I have been reading a lot in the rhetoric of the debate over "urban sprawl" and "smart growth", with a particular angle. I am interested in the question of whether and to what extent people can be said to choose sprawl.

If the rhetoric (pro and con) is any guide, then the question comes down to this: Is sprawl the true and highest expression of human freedom, as individuals pursue their own preferences in a free market, or are people coerced into building and living in the sprawlscape by political and economic forces beyond their control?

As far as I can tell, this way of framing the debate is all but worthless. That's not what I wanted to write about, though.

Instead, I hereby present a few more examples of the kind of shoddy scholarship and shoddy thinking that rises to the surface in debates like this, like . . . never mind. The appropriate simile would ruin your dinner. I'm focusing on one side of the coin here, though I know there's plenty of shoddy work to go around.

I just finished reading (slogging through) Randal O'Toole's The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths, a sprawling and highly disorganized screed against "smart growth", apparently motivated by a personal grievance against Portland's Metro. The work is also informed by O'Toole's own libertarian leanings. I could devote an entire blog just to picking the book apart, but I won't.

One interesting question about choosing sprawl concerns the role of the federal government in creating sprawl in the first place: How much of a role, if any, did the federal policies (taxation, transportation, water and sewer infrastructure, mortgage lending, etc.) play in shaping the current landscape of the United States? How much of a role do they play now?

The stakes for O'Toole and others with a predilection for free-market ideology are high: If government policies and subsidies shaped sprawl, then sprawl is not the pure expression of freedom they want it to be. Worse, if government policies and subsidies shape sprawl, then different government policies and subsidies might be effective ways of changing development patterns in a direction that people might really like better.

O'Toole claims it is a "myth" that "low-density suburbs have grown because of government subsidies and other policies favoring suburbs over higher-density cities." A major piece of evidence he cites is an April 1999 report from the General Accounting Office, entitled Community Development: Extent of Federal Influence on "Urban Sprawl" is Unclear.

(By the way, when people claim to be demolishing "myths" and revealing "reality", they are usually weaving myths of their own. Lomborg did the same in The Skeptical Environmentalist.)

O'Toole summarizes the report by saying that the GAO "could not find any clear evidence that federal policies were promoting sprawl." (p.234). This is not an inaccurate statement of what the report was about, but it is not a complete statement either. O'Toole does not quite say it, but he clearly wants to take this as demonstrating that federal policies simply do not promote sprawl.

In another work from the same quarter, Ronald Utt doesn't hold back at all. I am looking here at Utt's chapter "The Federal Role in Smart Growth" in a book published by the Heritage Foundation and PERC, A Guide to Smart Growth: Shattering Myths [ahem!], Providing Solutions. Citing the same GAO report, Utt boldly asserts that "the GAO could not find any definitive impact and concluded that the extent of federal influence on "urban sprawl" is not well documented or quantified." (p.95) Later, in passing, he asserts that "an analysis of federal transportation, housing, and infrastructure policies suggests that they have done little or nothing to foster suburbanization . . . " (p.101)

This is a misrepresentation of what the GAO report actually said, and it amounts to a classic argument from ignorance.

Here's a more complete passage from the GAO report, including a fragment that was cherry-picked by O'Toole and Utt alike:

The extent of the federal influence on "urban sprawl" is not well documented or quantified. The lack of agreement on a definition of "urban sprawl," coupled with the many interrelated factors that contribute to this condition, makes it extremely difficult to isolate and measure the influence of specific factors - including those relating to federal programs and policies. The shortage of quantitative evidence does not mean that federal programs and policies do not have an impact on "urban sprawl"; it simply means that the level of federal influence is difficult to determine. (p.19-20)

So, what the GAO actually concluded is that there is not enough quantitative evidence to determine the extent of the federal contribution to sprawl, though elsewhere the report notes that "anecdotal evidence exists" that supports the contention of many experts that there is such a contribution (p.2). O'Toole acknowledges this "anecdotal evidence"; Utt does not.

What O'Toole wants to imply, and what Utt blithely assumes and boldly asserts, is that the lack of evidence for x constitutes firm disproof of x. In other words, a straightforward argument from ignorance. The problem is that ignorance works both ways: I could just as easily (and with just as much warrant) argue that there is no clear evidence that the federal government is not contributing significantly to sprawl, so the federal government must be contributing significantly to sprawl.

I came across another example of shoddy work in a chapter in the Heritage Foundation/PERC book entitled "Lessons from the Atlanta Experiment". The author, Angela M. Antonelli, is presented as having managed "The Heritage Foundation's research on budget, tax, regulatory, labor, and environmental policy".

It would seem that either she doesn't know much about transportation and transportation policy, or she has never actually been to Atlanta. She refers repeatedly to "the fascination with light rail" among planners and others in Atlanta, and she refers to the core of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) as a "light rail" system (p.139).

Anyone who claims to know anything about transportation should know that MARTA operates a heavy rail system, which makes a big difference in terms of capital costs, operating costs, capacity, and speed.

Now, this does not mean that other points in that particular chapter are invalid. Or, rather, if other points in the chapter are invalid, they are invalid on their own grounds. It is a particularly shocking bit of sloppiness, though.

The Obscure and the Profound

2007-02-08T12:01:00.002-05:00

An old idea came back to me last night, shaken loose while I was watching Lost on TV.

I’ve sometimes noticed that people mistake the obscure for the profound: it must be deep, they seem to say, because I can’t really understand it.

No, sorry. Sometimes things are obscure simply because they are obscure, even if they are as shallow as a mud puddle or as thin as a paper bag.

In the case of Lost, of course, the obscurity is deliberate, and its creators are counting on the conflation of obscurity and profundity to keep stringing viewers along and raking in the ad revenue.

I keep watching, even though it has come to feel like a chore, in part just to see what kind of hooey they try to foist on us next.

(For another example of the obscure-profound conflation, consider any song by the Indigo Girls.)

Newton's Third Law of Politics

2006-10-18T12:01:00.003-04:00

I am currently reading Sprawl: A Compact History by Robert Bruegmann, and with each page I grow more annoyed. The very premise of the book is a logical fallacy for which there may not yet be a name. I would like to suggest one, but I can't decide between "The Fox News Fallacy" and "The Air America Fallacy."

In effect, if not by intention, the fallacy grows out of a metaphorical application of Newton's third law of motion to political discourse. In physics, the law is:

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

In political discourse, the law becomes:

For every distortion there is an equal and opposite distortion.

The Fox News/Air America Fallacy takes this form:

I can restore fairness and balance to political discourse by pushing distortions that are equal and opposite to those that happen to have the upper hand right now.

Bruegmann explicitly embraces this fallacy. Consider the following passage from the Introduction to Sprawl:

Nor do I claim that this book represents an attempt be [sic] even-handed in treatment. Because the vast majority of what has been written about sprawl dwells at great length on the problems of sprawl and the benefits of stopping it, I am stressing instead the other side of the coin, that is to say the benefits of sprawl and the problems caused by reform efforts. (pp. 12-13)

This may not be such a bad thing in itself, and in fact I am generally sympathetic with Bruegmann's project of digging out the many unexamined assumptions built in to many anti-sprawl arguments. My sympathy ends there, though, because in his zeal to show "the other side", Bruegmann plays fast and loose with the term "sprawl", carefully selects his facts and his sources, deliberately misunderstands or misconstrues the point of many anti-sprawl arguments, and generally practices the kind of partisan myopia and selective memory that signals the death of intelligent inquiry.

In his discussion of contemporary arguments about the automobile, for example, Bruegmann notes that:

Another common complaint about sprawl is that it depends on massive government subsidies that favor suburbanites and car owners. Of course, it is true that there has been more public funding for roads than for public transit in the United States. This is neither surprising nor inequitable, given the fact that private automobiles are used for the overwhelming majority of all travel in the United States. (p.146)

This response entirely misses a central point of the anti-sprawl argument, as well as the point of more even-handed studies of the history of suburbanization: it is at least conceivable that Americans have come to use the automobile for most travel because it has been so heavily subsidized. It was, at the very least, not an entirely unconstrained choice.

In staking out his contrary position, Bruegmann seems to be buying into the kind of bland endorsement of the status quo pushed by the free-market ideologues he cites so uncritically.

And this, in the end, is the most serious problem with the approach Bruegmann has taken. So eager is he to root out the faulty assumptions behind anti-sprawl rhetoric that he never bothers to examine his own faulty assumptions.

(In a sense, what he's doing here is a variant on strategic skepticism of the sort practiced by Bjorn Lomborg and others.)

Another Tragedy, Another Miracle

2006-10-12T12:01:00.002-04:00

Yesterday a small plane, apparently piloted by New York Yankee's pitcher Cory Lidle, crashed into the 30th floor of an apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and fell, burning, to the pavement.

In the course of recounting the story this morning on NPR, a reporter hit both of my pet peeves about the use of language. While people first feared that the crash was a terrorist attack, the reporter intoned, it quickly turned into a story of "personal tragedy." Meanwhile, the two people who were in the apartment that was struck "miraculously" escaped unharmed.

Now, I don't want to downplay the fact that this was a horrible accident and that many people will be stricken with grief because of it. Still, there is not yet any reason to suppose that the circumstances surrounding the accident amount to a tragedy in the fullest meaning of the term - the remorseless working-out of a self-inflicted doom, and so on.

What really gets me in this case, though, is the utter trivialization of the term "miraculous". Yes, no doubt, the two in the apartment were very fortunate not to have been standing next to the windows just then. But in all likelihood they were able to walk out of the apartment and find their way safely down the stairs or to the elevators. At worst, they may have been carried out on strecthers by very brave, very competent emergency personnel who in no way violated any laws of nature in the process. In short, there is nothing particularly miraculous, or even particularly extraordinary, about their escape.

Had they spontaneously teleported out of the midst of the fireball and immediately appeared, unscathed, in the middle of the nearest Starbucks, that would have been a miraculous escape.

I suppose I'm overreacting, again. I can only say that I was primed for it by the fact that my local paper ran an article the other day about the degradation of another term: 'icon'. Once it referred to particularly powerful pieces of religious art, but now it includes pop-culture "personalities" including, according to some, Paris Hilton.

More evidence, I brooded, that we are facing the end of language as we know it. That would be double-plus-ungood. Quack quack.

I'll just keep on grindin' that axe.

Noodles

2006-09-28T12:01:00.001-04:00

I came across a nice bit of satire, aimed at the argument for Intelligent. Its form is basically that of a reductio ad absurdum.

Advocates for Intelligent Design maintain that their account of the origins of life on Earth should be taught in the science classroom, in part because it is supposed to fill in "holes" in the theory of evolution, in part because ID is itself supposed to be a scientific theory backed by evidence . . . of some sort.

Well, if they are correct, then the science classroom should be open to any account of the origins of life on Earth that has as much or more actual scientific validity as ID, including the theory that life on Earth began when the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) strecthed out His Noodly Appendage . . .

So argued the author of an open letter to the state school board in Kansas.

I don't really have anything much to say about this, except that I do indeed think this is a very fine bit of satire. I would add, however, that I am still holding out for the Great Green Arkleseizure.

By the way, followers of the FSM are known as Pastafarians, and are supposed to dress like pirates. Followers of the FSM have cobbled together a graph that "proves" that global climate change is a direct result of a decline in the number of people who dress like pirates, a decline that has apparently made the FSM angry.

Goodbye, Err America

2006-06-08T12:01:00.001-04:00

I found out yesterday that Air America Radio will be losing its Atlanta outlet soon. Someone recently bought the station - 1690AM - and will be converting it to some sort of music format, keeping only the Al Franken show for the afternoon drive time.

I'm only a little bit conflicted about this. As I've written before (here), listening to Air America Radio is at best a mild guilty pleasure. Most of the time, it's just annoying.

The other day, I paid a visit to a much-talked-about new-urbanist development in Atlanta, called Atlantic Station; it's on the site of an old Atlantic Steel plant in midtown, just north of Georgia Tech. I got on the shuttle bus for a ride back to the train station, and found that the driver was listening to the Randi Rhodes show - and making everyone else on the bus listen to it as well.

I found that I was embarassed - for the driver, for Randi Rhodes, for myself, and for anyone who claims to be liberal or progressive. It's not that she's wrong, exactly; it's just that she's obnoxious and - to put it mildly - lacking in good critical thinking skills. I could only comfort myself that at least it wasn't Jerry Springer or, heaven forbid, Mike Malloy who was ranting away, at high volume, all the way to Arts Center station.

Liberals and progressives should not think of the (probably temporary) end of Air America Radio in Atlanta as a defeat for our side, but as the removal of one obstacle to reasoned and constructive public discourse in this country.

Of course, the job is much less than half done. The political pornographers of the left have suffered a setback, but the political pornographers of the right are still deeply entrenched in the American media. It's hard to imagine Rush Limbaugh or Fox News losing their outlets in any American city, least of all Atlanta.

But at least we'll be spared the spectacle of left-wing hacks trying to battle right-wing hacks on the same terms, using the same methods.

66(Oh?)6

2006-06-06T06:06:00.000-04:00

Is he here yet? Is he here yet?

No?

Didn't think so.

Oh, well. Better luck in 2106 . . . or maybe in 2999.

A Convenient Fabrication?

2006-06-04T12:01:00.001-04:00

I heard about this yesterday on the NPR show "Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!", and looked it up online today. Here is the full story, as it appears on the Washington Post website, with the source given as Philly.com:

Greenpeace Just Kidding About Armageddon
Friday, June 2, 2006; Page A17
The environmental activist group Greenpeace wanted to be prepared to counter President Bush's visit last week to Pennsylvania to promote his nuclear energy policy.

"This volatile and dangerous source of energy" is no answer to the country's energy needs, shouted a Greenpeace fact sheet, decrying the "threat" posed by the reactors Bush visited in Limerick.

But after that assertion, the Greenpeace authors were apparently stumped while searching for the ideal menacing metaphor.

"In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]," the sheet said.

The Greenpeace spokesman who issued the memo, Steve Smith, told the Web site that a colleague was making a joke in a draft that was then mistakenly released.

The final version did not mention Armageddon; instead it warned of plane crashes and reactor meltdowns.

This is unfortunate on a number of levels. I can see how the Greenpeace activist might have been joking around in private, poking fun at him- or herself and at the rhetorical tendencies of Greenpeace activists. It is a pity that the joke went public, inviting the scorn of those who are already too willing to dismiss all environmental activism as alarmist.

At the same time, it's unfortunate for the same reason it's funny - because it gets at an uncomfortable truth. Those who oppose an entrenched status quo, who are frustrated at their own marginalization, may be tempted to ramp up their rhetoric, to threaten and cajole, to exaggerate the dangers, hoping that fear will motivate people to join the cause. The resulting factoids may not be mere convenient fabrications, but they are certainly not the unvarnished truth.

When that tactic doesn't work, as I've written before, activists may even be tempted to hope for the apocalypse - an instructive apocalypse that'll teach those bastards a lesson.

Now, in all fairness, there is lots of distortion at the other extreme, as well. Think of the rhetoric of some anti-environmentalists: Environmental protection will destroy the economy, they shout. Since Earth Day, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST ECONOMIC MUMBO-JUMBO HERE].

Also, in all fairness, it is important to note that there is a lot to be concerned about, perhaps even alarmed about, without politically-motivated risk inflation. I have not yet seen Al Gore's movie, but I look forward to seeing how alarming - and how motivating - a scholarly, even pedantic presentation of the current state of scientific knowledge (uncertainties and all) can be.

By all accounts, it's electrifying.

Civic Energies

2006-05-22T12:01:00.001-04:00

Within a few hours of my last posting I started to wonder what the heck I was thinking of. I was half tempted to delete the entry altogether.

Now that Chris has commented on it though, I suppose I ought to think it through a bit. What do I mean by "civic energies"?
Before I get to that, let me clarify that I think of that passage from Rousseau when I hit a low point in my feeling about the future of this country. Rousseau was basically a pessimist about civil society. Even at his best, in The Social Contract, he couldn't shake off his earlier belief that we were all better off in the state of nature where, because we never wanted more than we could get for ourselves, and because we never had an abstract thought in our heads, we could live happily under Nature's tender care.

In The Social Contract, Rousseau famously observes that people are born free, but everywhere we are in chains. Oh well, he says, we may as well figure out how at least to make these chains legitimate. The social order he constructs is, in his view, pretty good: it is at least second to the state of nature in offering a chance at human happiness. This order is, however, very fragile and prone to corruption.

His dictum that "liberty can be gained but never regained" is a reflection of this basic pessimism. When I'm in a dark mood, listening to news about one more step toward secrecy, one more step away from accountability on the part of the current administration, Rousseau comes to mind all unbidden.

The reason civil society is fragile, according to Rousseau, has to do with his morally thick understanding of liberty and democracy. While Hobbes was satisfied with a mechanical understanding of liberty (i.e., movement without hindrance) and Locke was satisfied with a liberal understanding of liberty (i.e., leave me alone to do more or less what I want), Rousseau thought of liberty as autonomy. To be free, for Rousseau, is to be subject to a law one makes for oneself.

It follows that, to be free in civil society, the laws to which we are subject have to be laws that we have collectively made for ourselves. In Rousseau's terms, they have to embody "the general will", which is something like a societal consensus on what is really good for each of us and for the republic as a whole, when all of our individual desires for ourselves are filtered out. This is what democratic processes are supposed to do, he thinks: filter out individual desires so that the body politic can speak with a single voice.

This is a very demanding form of democracy: in order to be coherent, a civil society must be united by a single vision of the common good. Rousseau thought it could only work in a small republic, like the Geneva of his dreams. (The real Geneva fell somewhat short of his vision.)

On Rousseau's account, civil society is corrupted when partial wills begin to assert themselves, seeking to attain arbitrary power over others for their own ends, the very antithesis of liberty. These may be individual wills or the corporate wills of various groups - including, I suppose, political parties.

(This suggests one of the measures I was looking for yesterday: our liberty is inversely proportional to the amount of money that changes hands through bribes or influence peddling.)

I suppose, then, that what Rousseau meant by "civic energies" was the energy of citizens to be engaged in the work of the republic - the work on "the public thing" - including the direct act of legislation regarding the common good.

Now, I do need to distance myself from Rousseau somewhat. I doubt that any civil society can attain - or should try to attain - the kind of moral consensus he envisions. It's the skeptic in me.

What I take from Rousseau is the idea that, in order to remain free in the most robust sense of the term, citizens of a republic should engage as directly as possible in reasoned deliberation - though I would say that the deliberation should be about how we can live together even if we have different visions of a good life. This takes effort; it requires "civic energy".

To the extent that we are too busy, or too distracted, or too tired, or too despondent, or too bamboozled, or too frightened, or too dogmatic, or too cynical, or too weak, or too ignorant, or too polarized, or too corrupt, or too self-righteous, or too surveilled, or too co-opted to do this work, to that extent we are not free.

Then the question is: Once we give up some of this essential freedom, can we get it back? Can we the people, who do not speak with a single voice, revive ourselves and carry on with this daft experiment of working things out among ourselves?

I don't know.

Worn Out?

2006-05-20T12:01:00.001-04:00

These days, a passage from Rousseau's Social Contract keeps coming to mind.

Although a people can make itself free while it is still uncivilized, it cannot do so when its civil energies are worn out. Disturbances may then destroy a civil society without a revolution being able to restore it, so that as soon as the chains are broken, the state falls apart and exists no longer; then what is needed is a master, not a liberator. Free peoples, remember this maxim: liberty can be gained, but never regained.

I wonder if he's right about this, if the history of free peoples only goes in one direction. It could be argued that the United States has gone through periods of more restricted freedom (the 1950s, say), always rebounding into a period of greater freedom (the 1960s, for good and for ill). This could be an illusion, the comforting myth of a once-free people in decline. Or it could be have been a genuine regaining of liberty, a measure of how much "civic energy" has been left at those times.

If Rousseau is right, I wonder whether the "civic energies" of the United States are just about played out, with more and more people retreating into media-supported fantasy worlds and political life becoming more and more cynical and corrupt. I'm not sure where I could stand so as to measure this, or what standard I should use.

From where I stand now, though, the Orwellian maneuverings of an imperial administration do not give me much hope. "A master, not a liberator", indeed.

Missionary Trouble

2006-04-24T12:01:00.002-04:00

The other day I was in my home office when the doorbell rang. I looked out of the window and saw two older women in their Sunday best (it was a Saturday) coming up the driveway. I recognized them as half of a team of missionaries who come through the neighborhood every month or so; the other half of the team, being fleeter of foot, were already on the doorstep.

I ignored them. I returned to my computer, sat there working quietly, and ignored them.

Just last week, my valiant spouse wasted nearly an hour of her time in conversation with missionaries on our doorstep - whether it was the same group, I don't know. I was unwilling to follow her example.

It's not that I'm afraid to talk to missionaries. It's that I can no longer be bothered with them.

I used to relish wasting their time, leading them in circles. When I was a graduate student living in Stony Brook, I rented a house with other graduate students. One weekday afternoon I was lying on the couch reading The Origin of Species when the doorbell rang. I went to the door, taking my book with me, and was confronted by a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses, there to tell me all about the evils of Darwinism.

You can't make this stuff up.

I spent a pleasant hour telling them all about Darwin and quoting freely from the Bible, which was still fairly fresh in my mind. That drove them crazy: what could they do with someone who knew the Bible nearly as well as they did, and who knew Darwin better than they would ever bother to?

In the end, they retreated in dismay - though they returned a few days later with a hardcover (!) religious tract about the origins of life, a tract so choc-a-block with fallacies and misinformation that I have in the past held it up as an example for my students, to show them how not to argue.

Example: the caption of a picture of street signs against the backdrop of a starry sky puts forward the argument that traffic laws require a lawmaker so natural laws require a lawmaker as well - an obvious play on the ambiguity in the world "law". A law of nature is a description of an observed regularity in nature, while a traffic law is a prescription of how people ought to behave when they are driving.

Example: the caption of a picture showing two humans, one of whom is holding a chimpanzee, declares that humans have "all the earmarks" of having been created separately from other primates. The irony here is hidden: one of the early pieces of evidence for common decent is precisely our "earmarks," since human ears are very similar in their formation to those of chimpanzees. It may have been Huxley who included in one of his books an actual picture comparing ears of different species of primate.

(Another feature of the tract has proved useful when I teach about the cultural roots of suburbanization. Jesus described heaven as a mansion, and the author of Revelation described it as a city. In this particular tract, heaven is represented as an exclusive country club, complete with wide, neatly trimmed lawns and a Tudor-style clubhouse. The membership of the club is telling: lots of happy white families, a happy Asian family, and a single black mother with her young son. There are, apparently, no black men in heaven.)

Anyway, when I saw who was at the door the other day, I wasn't even tempted to open it. I did not want to waste their time, or mine.

Nanotechnology

2006-04-07T12:01:00.002-04:00

I found myself in a peculiar situation the other day. I had been asked to lead a brief discussion on "The Social and Ethical Implications of Nanotechnology" at an event dubbed "Nanotech Day" - a meeting between researchers in a nanotech center at Georgia Tech and researchers from the CDC. The meeting turned out to be something like a four-hour, interactive infomercial.
This particular research group at Tech has a state-of-the-art clean room for nanoscale research and engineering and, as a node of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN), they have a responsibility to support others' research into nanotechnology. As a consequence, they are always on the hunt for "users" (their term) of the clean room, and on this particular day they were wooing CDC with the marvelous potential of nanotech to serve the goals of public health.

I found out that the discussion I was to lead was one of several break-out meetings in which participants were to brainstorm ways in which the clean room could be of use to the CDC. It was difficult - to put it mildly - to see how a genuine and frank discussion of ethics could fit into such a framework.

I probably violated the unstated social contract of the meeting, and I probably stepped on the toes of some influential people, but I forged ahead. In the three minutes I had to present the results of the group discussion - a discussion that was notably lacking in CDC personnel - I went ahead and talked about the meaning of nanotechnology, its promise and its perils, the meaning of progress, and the necessity of making responsible choices - including the choice to forego nanotechnology in many instances.

I noted that, even though we can do really cool things with nanotechnology, we might be able to alleviate more human suffering by low-tech means. For example, if it came to a choice between a high-tech nanoengineered system for aerosolizing vaccines and the distribution of mosquito netting throughout sub-Saharan Africa, we might be better off doing the latter.

(I also made something of a sales pitch of my own, talking about the various resources at Tech for grappling with the social and ethical aspects of technology.)

In preparing for the meeting, I spent some time reading and thinking about nanotechnology, and about technology more generally. It struck me again - and I don't pretend this is my own original insight - that people tend to hold two contradictory views of technology at the same time, both of which tend to make them complacent in their response to innovation. This strange alliance of assumptions may be especially prevalent among scientists and engineers who are directly involved in technological innovation - even though they ought to know better.

The first is the instrumental view of technology, according to which technology is a neutral and transparent medium through which human will can act in the world. This implies that technology itself has no ethical content: it may be used for good or ill, but it cannot itself be good or bad, and it cannot shape or reshape human will, human desires, human institutions. The instrumental view also implies that more powerful and sophisticated technology is desirable because it empowers the human will to act more precisely and more effectively in the world.

The second is the view of technology as autonomous. Technology develops as it will, each innovation following inevitably from the innovation before. This implies that technological progress is linear and inevitable, and woe to any knuckle-dragging Luddites who try to stand in its way. To paraphrase something an engineer at Tech once told me: sure, people will suffer and die as a consequence of technological innovation, but that's the price of progress; progress happens, and there's nothing you can do about it.

It's a real trick to hold both of these views simultaneously - how can technology be both autonomous and instrumental? - but it seems to me that many people do it all the time. Perhaps the first view is a way of coping with the consequences of the second view: we are becoming more powerful, whether we want to be more powerful or not, but at least we can choose how to use that power. To hold the latter view without the former is just too depressing - regarding which see the work of Jacques Ellul and other technological determinists.

In my discussion and presentation the other day, I deliberately reframed the issue. Instead of the social and ethical implications of nanotechnology, I insisted on studying the social and ethical aspects of nanotechnology. Again, this is not an original insight on my part, but talking of the implications of nanotechnology assumes that nanotechnology is already there, its meaning already fixed. The decisions we make today, I told them, will help to shape what nanotechnology becomes - which will in turn influence how nanotechnology shapes what we become.

I may as well have been speaking Martian.

Avoiding Tragedy . . . or Not?

2006-03-19T12:01:00.002-05:00

I wrote in my last post that skepticism may be rooted in a desire to avoid tragedy, to the extent that tragedy is the product of stubbornly insisting on the universality and rightness (and righteousness) of what turns out always to be a partial and flawed view of the world.

There is a problem with the desire to avoid tragedy, of course: the easiest way to do it is to just not give a damn about anything. Historically, perhaps stereotypically, skepticism has always seemed to slide into quietism, complete passivity and indifference in the face of whatever happens. How do you know it matters, anyway?

Hume pointed this out, and also noted the tragic flaw in the avoidance of tragedy: quietism can only result in extinction. Failing to choose and act at the right moment can also have tragic consequences. We have to act, in spite of our doubts, in spite of our fear that we may be acting on a partial and flawed view of the world.

Nietzsche would say that we need our illusions (read: our mental models that make meaning for us, however partial and even deceptive they may be) in order to live. To strip away all of our illusions is the cognitive equivalent of stripping the atmosphere from the Earth: both make life impossible. (I can't remember where Nietzsche appeals to this image - perhaps in The Gay Science?)

So, how to be a skeptic and live?

Perhaps it's a matter of having a finely-tuned sense of irony, feeding into an intellectual modesty that feeds in turn into practical caution . . . but not too much caution.

At work, I am surrounded by Pragmatists, in the sense that many of my colleagues do work informed by Peirce, Dewey, James and the rest of that lot. Some of their ideas have started to inform my own work, though I'm still a hold-out for Continental approaches to the same problems. The main idea I take from Pragmatism is the usefulness of an experimental method: by all means, choose and act boldly, but recognize that you are acting on a hypothesis that may be subject to revision.

Being a skeptic, like being a pragmatist, requires intellectual agility and a sort of practical wisdom that Aristotle might recognize right away: do not overcommit to a particular way of viewing the world, but do not undercommit to it either.

Being a skeptic also means recognizing fully that, however hard we try, we cannot really avoid tragedy, even if we can improve our odds a little.

Tragedy Revisited

2006-03-18T12:01:00.005-05:00

My recent research into the notions of moral imagination and moral luck has led me to revise (slightly) my previous view of the use and misuse of the term "tragedy."

The first part of Martha Nussbaum's The Fragility of Goodness is a study of Greek tragedy, particularly Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Sophocles' Antigone. As I read her interpretation, it occurred to me that I would need to actually read the plays themselves. I had read Antigone before, but I don't think I had ever read anything at all by Aeschylus.

So, I dug in: I read the whole Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus as well as a handful of his other plays, Sophocles' Theban plays, and even a few plays by Euripides. I had to read the Oresteia twice so that I could catch the irony the second time around: almost everything said in the first half of Agamemnon has a double meaning, which only comes clear if you know how the whole thing ends.

The thing about tragedy - and this from Hegel as well as Nussbaum - is that the characters always have only a partial view of their situation. They get themselves into trouble when they act with too much pride, too much confidence that their view is the only correct view. This is most acute in the conflict between Antigone and Creon.

The audience and (sometimes) the gods see more clearly: they can see the partialness of the views on both sides, and can see the tragic collision that is afoot. Judging Orestes' case in Eumenides, Athena declares that she can see justice on both sides (Orestes on the one hand, the Furies on the other), so she institutes due process of law to sort it out.

This take on tragedy meshes nicely with what I've been reading about moral imagination and the cognitive bases of ethics. We always understand the world through a set of conceptual schemes or mental models; this is how we select from the overwhelming detail of the world around us, this is how we make meaning. But mental models are always partial - by necessity, because they must be selective.

We get into trouble when we think that one mental model - the one we happen to have right now - is complete and authoritative. When we do this, we are riding for a fall. One of the functions of tragedy as a dramatic form is to show the audience just how much trouble we can get into, and how big the fall can be.

This has led me to the possibility of recasting skepticism in new terms, since I've worried about being too reliant on Hume, with all his dogmatic empiricism. Skepticism may be nothing more than a matter of recognizing the partialness of all mental models, and resolving always to be open to other ways of looking at things. In other words, skepticism is a persistent effort to avoid the kind of pride that leads to tragedy.

(I should look into whether the avoidance of tragedy might have been behind the thinking of the Pyrrhonians, whose goal was tranquility, an end to unnecessary strife.)

So, getting back to my earlier post on tragedy, it occurs to me that I may have been too hard on people. When something awful happens - perhaps even the death of Fluffy - it can break through the complacent assurance with which we tend to view the world. It throws our own mortality in our faces, shows us the fragility of everything we take to be rock-solid.

Now, I do think that the term is used too casually in the media; mostly, people should say of things that are really just very sad that they are really just very sad. I also doubt that anyone would write a play about the death of Fluffy.

But then, consider these passages from Robert Fagles' translation of Agamemnon:

Cassandra to the Chorus:

Oh men, your destiny.
When all is well a shadow can overturn it.
when trouble comes a stroke of the wet sponge,
and the picture's blotted out. And that,
I think that breaks the heart.

or, earlier on, the Herald to the Leader of the Chorus:

Think back in years and what have you?
A few runs of luck, a lot that's bad.
Who but a god can go through life unmarked?

or, still earlier, the Chorus:

Zeus has led us on to know,
the Helmsman lays it down as law
that we must suffer, suffer unto truth.
We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart
the pain of pain remembered comes again,
and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.
From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench
there comes a violent love.

Robert F. Kennedy misquoted Edith Hamilton's prose translation of this passage in an impromptu speech upon hearing of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Here is Hamilton's (1930) version:

And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

So maybe there can be a chance to attain some measure of wisdom in any experience of grief and pain, from the ridiculous (the death of Fluffy) to the sublime (the death of Dr. King). To this extent, at least, any really sad thing can have at least a tenuous relation to tragedy.

Err America

2006-02-18T20:37:00.003-05:00

I have a secret vice, which is that I occasionally listen to Air America Radio. The experience is sometimes cathartic and often (and often unintentionally) comical, especially in times of great stress. I listened quite a lot during the run-up to the 2004 election, and once or twice a week since then.

Listening intermittently over the past week has helped me to crystallize some of my thoughts about what, exactly, is wrong with Air America. Ever since Vice President Cheney pulled the trigger last weekend, they - and I mean everyone on every show, from Jerry Springer to Janeane Garofalo to Randi Rhodes - have been in ecstasy. They've been howling about secrecy, riffing on the metaphorical connection between hunting accidents and foreign policy, spinning out salacious gossip about alleged affairs and binges of drinking and hunting, and indulging in that most popular of rhetorical tropes: the conspiracy theory.

Most of this is bullshit, in the precise, technical sense of the term (following Harry Frankfurt): utterances made with no regard for truth and at best a tenuous connection with reality.

Now, I'd be the first to admit that I am always worried and frequently outraged by the secrecy of this administration, and that I've made jokes at the Vice President's expense. I once referred to his 2004 debate with John Edwards as "Darth Cheney v. The Boy Wonder."

Still, a bit of intellectual modesty is in order here, and a willingness to give the Vice President the benefit of the doubt in this instance. I mean, what would I have done if I were in his position? Would I not have been deeply mortified and shocked by the sudden realization that I came very close to causing the death of a friend? Would I not have wanted to hide out for a day or two? Vice President Cheney deserves at least some credit for coming clean about the incident, even if it did take him several days, and whatever his other faults may be.

But the hosts on Air America are too single-track for those kinds of subtleties. There's blood in the water, and they're circling, thrashing around recklessly as they go in for what they vainly hope will be "the kill." In the process, they only make themselves ridiculous.

Getting to the core of it, consider the conspiracy theories being spun out. Maybe something was going on between Cheney and Whittington, something unseemly; maybe Cheney actually meant to kill him, but missed. As with JFK conspiracy theorists, there has been speculation about ballistics and distances, angles of entry, and so on.

There is a twisted sort of selective skepticism at work here. The other night, Janeane Garofalo actually said that the reason she feels justified in spinning out conspiracy theories is that "They" have not given us any reason not to.

Huh?

A few months ago I was up late, working on decorations for my daughter's birthday party and listening to Mike Malloy's show. He devoted the entire thing to conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Malloy listened intently as wacko caller after wacko caller picked out little anomalies - real or imagined - in news accounts and existing evidence, mixed them together with a whole lot of paranoia and ideological opposition to the current administration, and came up with a story of "the inside job" - that is, the contention that the Bush Administration orchestrated the collapse of the World Trade Center in order to justify the invasion of Iraq, the creation of a police state at home, and lots of no-bid contracts for Halliburton.

"Uh-huh", said Malloy, his few critical faculties failing in the face of politically-motivated credulity. "How interesting." He tried to cast himself as reasonable and modest in letting the wackos give vent to their theories, giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Thing is, Malloy, Garofalo, Springer, and their ilk would be the first to cry foul when others use the same kind of logic for any other purpose than to bash the Bush Administration, say, when Intelligent Design theorists pick out little anomalies - real or imagined - in evolutionary theory, and some more extreme advocates for creationism mix these anomalies together with paranoia and ideological opposition to all things secular, and come up with the story of the humanist conspiracy to destroy religion. The same again holds for those who pick out little anomalies - real or imagined - in climate science, supporting the story of the liberal environmentalist conspiracy to destroy capitalism.

Malloy's credulity and Garofalo's self-justification suggest a misplacement of the burden of proof. If conspiracy theorists want to make allegations that 9/11 was an inside job or that Cheney had some reason to shoot Whittington, it is up to them to offer more than just hints and innuendos. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

More on Civic Skepticism

2006-01-28T12:01:00.004-05:00

The lead editorial in tomorrow's New York Times is a systematic demolition of the Bush administration's alleged defense of domestic spying without a warrant. One point in particular echoes the point on civic skepticism I was making a few weeks ago.

Just trust us. Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance between national security and Americans' rights, between the law and presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is doing it right. But even if the United States had a government based on the good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not have earned that kind of trust. The domestic spying program is part of a well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn't like the rules, he just changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance.

I have nothing to add.

Atheistic Zealotry

2006-01-28T12:01:00.003-05:00

My local paper ran an AP story this morning about a peculiar legal action in Italy:

An Italian judge heard arguments Friday on whether a small-town parish priest should stand trial for asserting that Jesus Christ existed.

The priest's atheist accuser, Luigi Cascioli, says the Roman Catholic Church has been deceiving people for 2,000 years with a "fable" that Christ existed, and that the Rev. Enrico Righi violated two Italian laws by reasserting the claim. . .

Cascioli filed a criminal complaint in 2002 after Righi wrote in a parish bulletin that Jesus did indeed exist, and that he was born of a couple named Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem and lived in Nazareth.

Cascioli claims that Righi's assertion constituted two crimes under Italian law: so-called "abuse of popular belief," in which someone fraudulently deceives people; and "impersonation," in which someone gains by attributing a false name to a person.

According to the AP story, the accuser says his goal is to go through the procedure so he can reach the European Court of Human Rights, where he can accuse the Catholic Church of "religious racism."

Not only does this sort of thing give atheism a bad name, but it drives home for me the distinction between atheism and skepticism.

The most public atheists go about promulgating their beliefs with what can only be called religious zeal: this is the only true way to believe, they seem to say; all other ways of believing are either delusional or fraudulent.

This is dogmatism, pure and simple; as such, it is the very antithesis of skepticism as I understand it. An ounce of intellectual modesty would go a long way here, at least far enough to keep an atheist from embarassing himself by going after a priest for (gasp!) writing about Jesus of Nazareth in a church bulletin.

(See my earlier postings on "Universism" for a parallel case of anti-religious dogmatism.)

Civic Skepticism

2006-01-13T12:01:00.000-05:00

I'd like to, but I'll refrain from belaboring the argument against the current expansion of executive power in the government of the United States. Suffice it to say that we have a President who believes he is free to interpret laws even as he signs them, and free to break them when it suits his convenience as Commander in Chief. The President has a long and very public history of not paying attention to evidence or arguments that might count against his own beliefs about the world. He has also nominated to the Supreme Court a judge who has advocated for something called "the unitary executive."

All of this is a matter of public record.

Watching the trend toward greater executive power as it has unfolded over the last four or five years, all the while teaching and thinking about the bases of a legitimate political order, I've been struck by the degree to which the Constitution of the United States - and perhaps liberal democracy itself - is grounded in a kind of civic skepticism.

Consider the largely tacit argument for allowing the President to have more power: George W. Bush is a decent man, the argument runs, a fine and upstanding Christian conservative; we should trust him. In short, we should give him the benefit of the doubt. The President's opponents, on the other hand, are supposed to bear all the burdens of doubt: doubts about their intelligence, their claims to knowledge, their moral standards, their integrity, their support for the troops, their patriotism.

As an example, consider the ease with which the Adminstration appeals to strategic skepticism when it suits their purposes - shifting the burden of doubt onto others in the case of climate change, for example - all the while labeling as an enemy of liberty anyone who disagrees with the President on any other matter of policy.

It doesn't matter how trustworthy the President says he is. It doesn't even matter how trustworthy he seems to be. We have the right and the responsibility as citizens to doubt him on this point, and to keep him from overstepping the constitutional bounds of his office.

The whole point of our system of government is that we should not have to trust one individual, whether it's George III or George W. Bush. The United States is supposed to be a nation of laws, not of people, precisely in order to avoid the imposition of arbitrary power of any individual or group over any other individual or group.

I would certainly not be the first to say that dissent is the first right of a citizen in a democracy. I would add that a moderate sort of civic skepticism may be our first duty.

Intelligent Design and Philosophy, cont'd

2006-01-12T14:01:00.003-05:00

On reflection, I think there's an easier way to characterize the problem with the supposed "philosophy" course in California that is set up to assault the "philosophy" of Darwin.

The point of "teaching" ID in a philosophy class would not be to get students to either accept or reject ID as such, but to help them gain some critical perspective on the broader debate over the place of ID in public schools. This would involve looking carefully and thoughtfully at the existing debate over science and religion, its history (going back to ancient times, if necessary), and the assumptions that underpin the arguments of various advocates on various sides.

This is "teaching the controversy" in a different sense than the phrase is used by ID advocates. There is no scientific controversy regarding ID; instead, there is a cultural controversy over the scope and meaning of the sciences in relation to religious faith and ethical ideals.

This brings me back to something I didn't really focus on the first time around. The teacher of the course is going after the "philosophy" of Darwin. This is slippery, to say the least. In part, this is just a way of observing the letter of the law: by casting Darwinian evolution as a "philosophy" rather than as a scientific theory, the school can claim that it is not teaching ID as science. However, it is fairly clear that the intent of this particular course is to undermine the credibility of Darwinian evolution as a scientific theory, the established naturalistic explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.

But there is an important distinction to be made here. Insofar as it is a scientific theory, evolution is about as well established as it can be. It is at least the peer of relativity and atomic theory in that regard.

However, insofar as the interpretation and teaching of the theory is allied with strict positivism or a more general "scientism" - the ideology that holds that scientific explanations are the only valid form of knowledge - or greedy reductionism, then it may amount to an equally unconstitutional teaching of contempt for religious faith in the public school classroom.

It may turn out to be a shoddy compromise, but what this points toward is a division of labor. Science teachers should teach the best that the sciences have to offer, including a full introduction to evolutionary theory as the core of modern biology. However, they should leave broader considerations about the meaning of evolutionary theory for human life to other contexts - a broad-ranging philosophy course based on open and critical discourse, for example.

In both cases, I suppose something like the Christmas Tree test could be applied (see my post for 12/7/2005). The question with public holiday decorations should be: What is the message being sent? If a display amounts to public endorsement of a specific point of religious doctrine, then it is unconstitutional and should be removed or altered.

So, the same applies in public school classrooms: what is the message being sent? In the California case, the message seems to be that students should doubt Darwin in order to spare a particular doctrine - special creation of living things - from a bath in what Dennett calls the "universal acid" of Darwinian evolution.

Applying the same standard to the science classroom, there are two possibilities. The appropriate message is that Darwinian evolution is a powerful scientific theory that unifies biology. An inappropriate message would be that anyone who maintains any sort of religious faith is (metaphorically, at least) a Neanderthal worthy only of contempt.

Intelligent Design and Philosophy

2006-01-12T12:01:00.002-05:00

Advocates for "intelligent design" have found a new tactic: since they cannot seem to pass legal muster in their efforts to get ID into science classes, at least one teacher has taken the suggestion of the ACLU and others that ID might be taught as part of a philosophy course.

The problem is that the teacher in question doesn't seem to have the slightest idea what philosophy is, or what it means to teach philosophy.

The New York Times reports today that a special education teacher in a small school district in southern California is offering a four-week course described as follows: "This class will take a close look at evolution as a theory and will discuss the scientific, biological and biblical aspects that suggest why Darwin's philosophy is not rock solid."

(The course was approved by the school board in an "emergency meeting" held on New Year's Day. Nothing fishy there.)

It seems that much of the course will involve watching 24 videos, 23 of which were, according to a lawsuit filed by 11 parents, "produced or distributed by religious organizations and assume a pro-creationist, anti-evolution stance."

I can only assume that the teacher (and school board) understand philosophy in the casual sense, as one's own, personal, idiosyncratic opinion about the world in general. To teach philosophy, in this sense, must mean to foist one's opinion upon one's students by any means necessary.

In the California case, the result seems to be a straightforward attempt at religious indoctrination in the public schools, since the evidence points to the teacher in question being an advocate of young-Earth creationism. The course seems at the same time to be a wholesale attack on a scientific theory from what purport to be scientific bases, but in a course that is not called "science."

I think that those who are bringing the lawsuit aimed at stopping this course need to be very careful, and need to have a clearer understanding about what philosophy is as a discipline and as a form of inquiry. Philosophy in this sense is not a fixed set of opinions but a way of asking questions about the world, about ourselves and our assumptions.

I discussed ID with my own students last semester. I did so as part of a larger discussion of Darwin's work and its meaning, which was in turn part of a still larger unit on human freedom and materialist explanation. The point of introducing ID was simply to get students thinking and talking about the relationships among science, religion, ethics, and politics.

I was critical of ID theory, working with students to draw out its assumptions and call them to account. At the same time, I was critical of what Dennett calls "greedy reductionism", which would reduce every aspect of our existence and our lived experience to the terms of physics and chemistry. I introduced Kant's two standpoints as one way of addressing the tension between science and ethics, science and faith: we can look at the world as a field of matter that follows deterministic natural laws, and we can at the same time look at the same world as the domain of meaning and of moral community. Then, I left the students to think it over for themselves.

I had an end in view, but it was not indoctrination. Rather, I aimed to get students to take these matters up as a (perhaps intractable) problem. Giving the sciences their due - including evolutionary biology - how far does their writ run? How do we reconcile the undeniable power of materialistic explanations of natural phenomena (including our own bodies and brains) with our own lived experience of freedom and dignity, our sense of our own uniqueness as a species and as individuals?

These are question with which I still struggle, and the kinds of questions that should be at the heart of any philosophy course worthy of the name.

Blasphemy for Fun and Profit

2006-01-05T12:01:00.002-05:00

I discovered a few years ago that I have the same name as a writer of comic books, including Invincible and the inimitable Battle Pope (about which more in a moment).

This coincidence of names can sometimes be amusing. For a long time, Amazon.com recommended that anyone who would consider buying my book (a work of academic environmental philosophy) should also consider works by Neil Gaiman and other writers of fantasy novels and comics.

Last year a student asked me - with considerable hesitation - whether I've ever written anything outside academic philosophy, particularly in the realm of comics; he seemed more relieved than disappointed when I told him that I have not.

My family and I just spent a few days with friends in New Jersey, one of whom works at a comics shop. On New Year's Eve, she took me in to introduce me to her boss - with more of a flourish than was strictly necessary - and his jaw dropped when she told him my name. I immediately corrected any misimpression he might have had, lifting a line from Douglas Adams: I'm just a Robert Kirkman; we come in six packs. I joked, as I left, that he should still tell his customers that Robert Kirkman had dropped by, and I even offered to sign something for him.

My friend bought me the first trade volume of Invincible as a Christmas present, and bought herself the re-issue of Battle Pope. The former is much more engaging and enjoyable than any comic about a teenage superhero has any right to be. I have seriously mixed feelings about the latter.

The basic premise of Battle Pope, as far as I understand it based on one reading of the first issue, is that the world has become so corrupt that God has simply forsaken it; the Gates of Hell have burst open and, even though a treaty eventually closes said Gates, various infernal creatures now infest (and sometimes rule) Earth. At the time all of this happens, the man serving as Pope is power-hungry, lecherous, and self-indulgent but also, incredibly, trained in martial arts and other skills that will eventually come in handy. After being brutally murdered by one of the aforementioned infernal creatures, the Pope is resurrected by God and chosen for a mission to rescue St. Michael from Lucifer. The Pope is transformed from a rather dumpy middle-aged man to a buff and spandex-clad superhero, though he does get to keep the mitre. He is assigned a trusty side-kick: none other than Jesus H. Christ, portrayed as an ineffectual hippie wearing a crown of thorns and a tee-shirt with the motto "What would I do?"

God, it turns out, has nothing but contempt for his only begotten son.

In a gesture typical of the twisted humor of the whole enterprise, the re-issue of Battle Pope no. 1 is dedicated to the memory of Pope John Paul II.

In short, the comic is self-consciously, gleefully blasphemous, an insult to everything Christians (perhaps especially Catholics) hold sacred. This is what gives me mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I don't really go in for blasphemy of this sort: the fact that I don't share their faith does not mean that I think its all right to insult Christians or make a mockery of their core beliefs.

On the other hand, Battle Pope is a hoot.

I Am Not a Caveman

2005-12-12T12:01:00.002-05:00

My older brother is always good for a laugh. He has this idea that there are two kinds of people in the world: upstanding Christian conservatives like himself, and liberal crackpots. Since I am not in the former category it follows, in his mind at least, that I must necessarily be in the latter category.

He never hesitates to tell me what I think.

Last summer, at a family reunion of sorts at a park in my home town, my brother informed me that, if it were up to me, "we would all be living in caves."

This struck me as an extraordinary claim, but his reasoning was transparent enough. The argument goes like this:

1. I am not an upstanding Christian conservative.
2. If I am not an upstanding Christian conservative, then I am a liberal crackpot.
3. If I am a liberal crackpot, then I am a rabid, tree-hugging environmentalist.
4. If I am a rabid, tree-hugging environmentalist, then I am opposed to Civilization as such.
5. If I am opposed to Civilization as such, then I would like humans to return to a time before Civilization (e.g., "Back to the Caves!").
Therefore, 6. if it were up to me, we would all be living in caves. QED.

Claim 1 is true enough: I am an upstanding (I hope), moderate secular progressive. Claim 2 is an obvious false dichotomy.

The grounds for claims 3-6 lie in what George Lakoff calls a "pathological stereotype." There is a pathological form of environmentalism that afflicts a few individuals and organizations at the fringe. These are the real crackpots who take literally the Earth First! motto, "Back to the Pleistocene!" (There may be many others who embrace the motto strategically, or ironically, or heuristically.)

Following the lead of political pornographers like Rush Limbaugh (on the right) and Mike Malloy (on the left), my brother has fallen into the trap of painting all environmentalists, and therefore all liberals, with the same brush. Thus a pathological form of environmentalism becomes a stereotype for all environmentalists and, by extension, for all liberals.

Logically, this makes no sense whatsoever: Some individuals who identify themselves as environmentalists want everyone to go back to living in caves (metaphorically, if not literally). Therefore, all individuals who identify themselves as environmentalists want everyone to go back to living in caves.

Any decent critical thinker from Aristotle on down can easily spot the fallacy of inferring a universal claim from a particular claim. But this is politics, not logic, so the rules don't seem to apply.

As it happens, I am an environmentalist, but I think that much of the point of environmentalism is to find ways to make civilization more sustainable, so that our grandchildren and their grandchildren can enjoy a range of opportunities at least comparable to what we have enjoyed. This may involve significant changes in how we think and how we live, in both our culture and the infrastructure that supports it. However significant those changes may be, however, going "back to the caves" would simply defeat the whole purpose, restricting our opportunities and our aspirations to mere subsistence.

Anyway, what brings all of this on is that the heat has been out in my house since yesterday morning, and the weather has been cold by Atlanta standards. The temperature in the house when I got up this morning was 54 degrees Fahrenheit.

There's nothing like a furnace breakdown or a power outage to make a person appreciate the fruits of civilization. At least we have some back-up systems: hot water, electric radiators, and extra layers of clothing are getting us through until the Vanguard of the Civilization Defense Force (a.k.a. the furnace guy) gets here in a few hours.

Still, it is sobering to think of what might happen in the future, as supplies of cheap natural gas and oil are harder to come by. The home heating crisis predicted in the wake of Katrina and Rita seems to be abating somewhat, but it seems only a matter of time until some major disruption in energy supplies leads to death-by-freezing for more Americans than we'd care to think about, and also to massive deforestation and particulate air pollution as more and more people turn back to wood as a source of heat. This, in very concrete terms, is what is at stake in developing sustainable energy policies.

I am not a caveman, and have no desire to become one. The simple, inescapable fact is that I will live or die with this civilization. It is not just that I entertain no survivalist delusions. It is that I would not want to outlive the conditions that make a civilized life possible.

(Thanks to Gordon Kingsley for the term "political pornographer.")

A Fir Tree By Any Other Name

2005-12-08T12:01:00.003-05:00

Today was the last day of class for the semester, and I unwound a bit by having my students discuss a simple question: "When we get up to leave today, should I wish you a Merry Christmas?"

The discussion in each case was livelier than many we've had this semester, and covered a lot of the ground I've covered in this blog in the last few days. My students helped me to clarify my thinking.

I'm no longer sure how worthwhile it is to get hung up over the word, "Christmas". It's almost as though we now have two words rolled into one. One of my students made a verbal distinction between the two: we can speak of Crissmiss (with a short 'i' in each syllable) and Christ-mass (with a long 'i' in the first syllable).

Crissmiss seems to have become the dominant term for the whole Yuletide season, including pagan and suitably neutralized Christian symbols and music along with Santa Claus and rampant consumerism. We have a Crissmiss tree in our living room, and our city has lighted Crissmiss wreaths on every lamppost downtown. Many secular Jews celebrate Crissmiss, as do many non-Christians in Japan.

Christ-mass is the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus. It is integral to the liturgical calendar of the Christian church, a matter of specific doctrine drawn from the Bible.

So, is it all right to call a decorated tree in a public place a "Christmas Tree"? Probably, as long as it is fairly clear from context that it is a Crissmiss Tree and not a Christ-mass tree - that is, not a public endorsement of a specific religious doctrine. On these grounds, it might also be fine, again depending on the nuances of context, to wish people a "Merry Christmas."

More broadly, atheists who sue to remove all signs of the holiday seem to be missing the point, mistaking Crissmiss for Christ-mass. They may be right to oppose public manger scenes, but it seems they're just getting bent out of shape if they want to ban Crissmiss trees as well. But then atheists, being dogmatists, are generally more likely than skeptics to get bent out of shape in any case.

Of course, there are still puzzles in this. The public display of a manger scene seems to be a public endorsement of a particular creed, which violates the establishment clause. Public display of a Christmas (er, Crissmiss) tree probably does not, in and of itself, given the diverse history of the tradition and it's many possible meanings. But, as one of my students asked, what if the public Crissmiss tree has an angel on top? What about a star?

In any case, I've decided that, next year, I'm going to decorate my yard with a giant, illuminated chart of retail sales figures.

P.S. When I ran the spell-checker on this entry, it didn't recognize the word "Crissmiss." It recommended instead "crassness."

Plan Ahead and Keep Moving

2005-12-08T00:00:00.002-05:00

It's an unusually cold morning in Atlanta, and there's a good chance of rain this afternoon.

Yesterday, looking ahead to today with a certain dread, I once more consoled myself with the thought that this is the kind of weather that makes us know we're alive.

On my way up the hill to my office this morning, mulling over the idea, it occurred to me why it is so: it's easy to die in this kind of weather. When I lived up north, I experienced winter days that could easily kill a person in a matter of minutes. All you would have to do is go outside without heavy clothing (coat, scarf, hat, gloves) and stand still for a while.

But then, this is generally true. To stay alive, we always have to plan ahead and keep moving. Winter just makes that necessity more pressing, closer to our immediate awareness.

Yuletide in Public and in Private

2005-12-07T12:01:00.002-05:00

While I celebrate Yule and accept that others celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, and the Feast of Acquisition, I think it is important to draw a line between the public realm and the private realm regarding the various observances of the season.

In private spaces, including stores and malls as well as homes and places of worship, expressions of the religious traditions of the holidays are perfectly fine. They may be present or absent to a degree chosen by the owners of those places. As far as I'm concerned, this includes front yards.

The public realm is different. Any place owned or operated by government at any level should studiously avoid overt expressions of religious faith, in deference to the diversity of the people who are served by that government and subject to its jurisdiction.

The difference is this. If I put a manger scene on my lawn, I am saying in effect, "“I am -– or we (this family) are -– celebrating the birth of Jesus",” which I would no doubt do, and rightfully so, if I were a Christian. If a congregation puts a manger scene on display in front of a church, they are saying in effect: "“we (the congregation) are celebrating the birth of Jesus." Again, no problem there.

But if a government displays a manger scene in front of a courthouse or in a public square, they are saying in effect: "we (the people of this jurisdiction) are celebrating the birth of Jesus”." That'’s a problem, because "“we the people"” are saying no such thing, at least not with a single voice. Putting a menorah next to the manger doesn't help, since "“we the people"” have and actively choose other options than celebrating the birth of Jesus or celebrating the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem.

The same applies in the schools. If two students who are both Christian greet each other with "Merry Christmas”", that'’s fine. But if a teacher or administrator wishes everyone a Merry Christmas, or leads everyone in a Christian hymn or a Christian prayer, that crosses the line.

I remember singing Christian songs in public school when I was a kid. I think everyone just assumed that, since the school was in a lily-white Protestant suburb, no-one would object. I didn'’t, at the time. But this now strikes me as an arrogant and unfounded assumption, given the diversity of the American republic.

This is not to say that the line between public and private isn'’t sometimes blurry. For instance, should there be public displays of evergreen boughs and wreaths, trees festooned with lights, and other pagan trappings of the season? Or have those trappings been sufficiently abstracted from their origins that they can serve as generic decorations for whatever holiday we (the varied and diverse) people choose to celebrate?

When should the Post Office and other government offices be closed? Can a government employee be required to work on Chanukah or the solstice, and required to take Christmas off? Or if a government employee takes one of the other days off, should they be required to work on Christmas Day? Can the observance of December 25 as a national holiday be distinguished from the observance of Christmas as a Christian celebration?

Can there be performances of religious holiday music in public places? Can a public high school orchestra and choir perform excerpts from Handel's Messiah (which my high school music program did every year)? It is part of the standard repertoire of orchestral and choral music that is accessible to high school-age musicians, but it is also without question a Christian work, with the text taken directly from the Bible.

Tough questions. I guess the acid test should be the message that comes across: Does this or does this not attempt to speak for everyone about the meaning of the season? Does this or does it not acknowledge the full range of meanings that have become invested in Yuletide?

Happy Chanuchristnicholanzaa Yulestice!

2005-12-06T19:05:00.001-05:00

I have a guilty secret that I always have to grapple with at this time of year. I am no longer a Christian, but I love Christmas.

This may be just an artifact of my upbringing. With my family, Christmas has always been a big deal, with unrestrained decoration and big family gatherings with lots of good food. There were church services for Advent, pageants, the works.

I don't go to church any more. I don't celebrate Advent or the birth of Jesus. Even so, the lights, the music, the food, even the shopping (especially now that I have children), all of it is still strangely moving to me.

It's the music that gets me the most. It doesn't matter whether its a Christian hymn or a pagan revel, at this time of year I want to hear it. We have collections of Christmas music spanning centuries, from medieval polyphony to jazz renditions of "Jingle Bells." Some of the Christian music is simply stunning, especially Britton's Ceremony of Carols and Poulenc's Christmas motets. I always look forward to the beginning of December, when we give ourselves permission to play the music until we can't stand to hear it any more.

But isn't there something ridiculous about a skeptic celebrating Christmas?

Perhaps. But then, I think there's something about this season, at least in the temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere, that calls out for some kind of celebration. If nothing else, we are compelled to show our defiance of the weather.

If this is true, then it should be no surprise that the season is packed with overlapping layers of significance, some of them contrived (Santa! Rudolph!), some of them crass (Doorbuster Specials!), but some of them deeper and more serious (Solstice! Jesus! Family! Impossibly Decadent Food! Revelry!).

So, for better or for worse, whether it's simple rationalization or not, I've started to make my peace with the season. I seldom wish people a "Merry Christmas!" unless I know that they themselves are Christian. I don't particularly dig the bland "Happy Holidays!" I'm starting to gravitate toward "Good Yule!" as a suitably neutralized greeting with pagan roots: "Yule" is apparently the name for a big feast near the time of the solstice.

In celebrating Yuletide, I'm happy to borrow bits from here and there, including Santa Claus (for my young children, about which more another time) and the tradition of giving gifts, the usual mix of Christian and pagan symbols and music (perhaps with more emphasis on the pagan symbols, like the tree and the meaning-drenched mistletoe), and even a dash of contemporary commercial Christmas kitsch. I'll make sure my children know that Christians are celebrating the birth of Jesus, just so they know what people are talking about, but I'll also make sure they know that the season is far richer and more complex than that.

So, why celebrate at all? Because it's dark and cold out there, and we need to generate some light and warmth to keep ourselves together, to remind ourselves to live.

P.S. A guide for the perplexed: the greeting in the title of this entry is a mash-up of Chanukah, Christmas, St. Nicholas Day (today, unless I'm mistaken), Kwanzaa, Yuletide, and Solstice.

P.P.S. I left one out: the most overblown consumerist version of the holiday should be dubbed "The Feast of Acquisition". This is a pernicious, mutant form of the more benign tradition of gift-giving. It's what happens when the joy of the Yuletide season is reported in retail sales figures and consumer confidence indices, with fistfights over cheap computers and badly-made but fleetingly compulsory gewgaws from China.

Pat Robertson v. Intelligent Design

2005-11-15T12:01:00.001-05:00

In response to last week's election in Dover, Pennsylvania, where voters turned out of office all eight conservative school board members who supported the introduction of intelligent design into the science classroom, Pat Robertson has been quoted as saying:

I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city.

And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there.

There are so many things wrong with this statement that it's hard to know where to begin - the smug self-righteousness, the peevish and petty vengefulness, the idea that natural disasters are a punishment, and on, and on.

But I've noticed something about this claim that has not drawn a lot of attention: Pat Robertson has actually undermined the legal and political argument for intelligent design.

ID can only pass constitutional muster if its advocates can show that it is not a religious doctrine but a scientific theory. That's the whole point: do an end-run around the establishment clause by taking all of the God-language and Creation-language out of creationism, packaging the whole thing as a respectable scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution, publishing slick textbooks, and finding a school board here or a school board there that might be willing to introduce it in the classroom.

Robertson has ripped the mask off of that. It's really all about God after all - and not just any old God, but the wrathful and righteous God peculiar to American fundamentalists.

Again? So Soon?

2005-09-22T12:01:00.001-04:00

Here I am again, in the box at press level, watching Hurricane Rita cross the Gulf of Mexico. It's now a Category 4 storm, though it peaked as a Category 5 early this morning, with top winds of an astonishing 170 miles per hour.

So, the struggle resumes between fascination and dread - only now I'm watching myself as I watch the storm, trying to catch every swing of the pendulum. I'm also trying, in the interest of decency, to let dread win out.

I know people in the path of the storm this time, which makes it a little easier to keep fascination at bay. My cousin who lives in Houston with her husband and two young children have taken refuge in a motel near Dallas. I'm not sure what my wife's uncle is doing, though he has family elsewhere in Texas. This somehow makes the coming destruction more real - though why it does so is itself a matter for investigation.

Still, to have two record-breaking, Category 5 storms within a month of each other is impressive. (Wow! That's cool!) [No, it's not.] The visible-light sattelite images of Rita are almost beautiful in their symmetry and shimmering white texture. (Oooo!) [It doesn't look quite so gorgeous from underneath.] The storm is very likely to reflood New Orleans, raising further doubts about its long-term viability as a city. (That'll teach 'em!) [Teach whom? Teach them what?]

A critical point came this morning, when I learned that the storm had weakened somewhat. At first, unguarded, I felt a slight disappointment. It somehow made the thing seem less impressive, less glamorous, less history-making. But when I think of the people in the path of the storm, when I appeal to my sense of solidarity with my fellow humans, a Category 3 will be beat a Category 5 any day. [Impressiveness be damned!] (Aww . . .)

And so it goes.

Suspense

2005-09-12T12:01:00.002-04:00

The other night I had a dream in which I made an important connection about apocalyptic thinking. I dreamed I was talking to people about all this when it occurred to me that the whole thing may be wrapped up in the lived experience of time.

I’m not sure what brought this on, unless it was watching the Georgia Tech-North Carolina game on Saturday afternoon. (I was in the College of Engineering box, on the Press Level at the stadium. It’s a long story.) When Tech pulled ahead 14-0, we all relaxed; this was going to be easy. But the first half ended in a tie. Tech won, but it was a slightly messy victory, much scarier than it needed to be.

Watching the game, we were all tossed back and forth between hope and fear, and the whole thing turned on one or two critical plays, like that Tech interception in the end zone that prevented Carolina from scoring in the last few minutes of play. Since we could not know how the game would end, since the whole thing hinged on the strangest of mischances, we were left in the most turbulent kind of suspense.

As Vonnegut might say (taking a cue from Galápagos), our big brains are capable of having any number of conflicting opinions at the same time. Under stress, trying to cope, I might be smug in the assurance that Tech somehow deserves to win (and that the refs cheated them out of at least 50 yards), fearful that the team might be playing under some jinx that makes humiliating defeat inevitable, taking refuge in my old disdain for all sports by thinking that it doesn’t really matter anyway, and so on, and so on, all at the same time – or at least in very quick succession, with lots of repetition.

Watching (vicariously, by satellite) the progress of Hurricane Katrina across the Gulf of Mexico, watching the flooding and the chaos in New Orleans, was a lot like this. We knew what could happen, perhaps even what was likely to happen, but we were still in suspense. The whole thing turned on strange mischances: Would the levees hold, in spite if years of neglect? Would help arrive in time?

In that moment, without the benefit of hindsight, there is time for dozens of contrary opinions and emotions, from the noble to the perverse – at least for someone watching from the safe remove of a box on the Press Level.

Denial

2005-09-09T12:01:00.002-04:00

Further reflections on Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans have helped me to draw together some of the threads that have run through this blog.

At least part of what it means to be a skeptic in public life is to steer a course between credulity and incredulity, and between the perverse relish for the apocalypse and simple denial. This is a difficult course to steer: the extremes exert a powerful influence on the human psyche (or, at least, on my psyche; I shouldn’t over generalize).

So, (for me, at least) to be a skeptic in public life is to maintain a tension among these influences, and to somehow find a way to live within and through this tension.

This is very hard to do.

I sometimes wonder if, for most people, denial exerts the strongest pull. Consider a column by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, which appeared in the Atlanta paper this morning.

Krauthammer begins by recalling “less enlightened times” when every natural disaster was blamed on some human agency, leading to the burning of witches, the massacre of Jews, and so on. He then laments that “our progressive thinkers have not progressed an inch. No fall of a sparrow on this planet is not attributed to sin and human perfidy” . . . including global climate change and tax cuts.

His response: “This kind of stupidity merits no attention whatsoever, but I’ll give it a paragraph. There is no relationship between global warming and the frequency and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes. Period.”

What an astonishing claim! On what authority and with the support of what evidence does he make this declaration?

No respectable or self-respecting scientist would speak or write in such absolute terms. Scientific projections of the effects of climate change are couched in terms such as “likely” or “very likely”, which may be defined precisely as ranges of probability.

On the face of it, this is an obvious straw man: The doomsayers are a bunch of regressive liberal whackos who want this disaster to somehow be our own fault, if only to teach us a lesson. They can’t be right. Therefore, this disaster is not our own fault.

Of course, there is something to this argument, insofar as environmentalists must struggle with our own hopes for an instructive apocalypse. But between hope for the apocalypse and the simple, categorical denial issued by Krauthammer, there are myriad possibilities.

My own take on the matter goes like this: Human beings burn fossil fuels in order to do all sorts of good and useful things (as well as bad and useless things). This has consequences of which we are only beginning to become aware. It is all but certain that our use of fossil fuels has led to a change in the composition of the planet’s atmosphere, and very likely that this is leading to an increase in average global temperature. In any case, average global temperature is rising. One very likely consequence of this is a warming of the oceans, and warm water fuels tropical storms. While no one storm can be blamed on global warming, an increase in the frequency and intensity of tropical storms is consistent with projections of the effects of that warming. This leaves us with a number of important policy choices, including the extent to which we will continue to use fossil fuels, and whether we will make public investments to find alternative sources of energy or, at least, investments to prepare for likely consequences of global warming.

There. No doom, no gloom. But no denial, either.

(Later in the same column, Krauthammer refers obliquely to the extent to which the American public has stood in the way of “any responsible energy policy” over the past 30 years. I wonder what a “responsible” policy would look like that denied the very likely consequences of global warming.)

Hoping for the Apocalypse

2005-08-31T12:01:00.003-04:00

Watching the unfolding story of Hurricane Katrina yesterday left me struggling, once again, with my own fascination with the apocalypse.

I've written, in other contexts, that this fascination pervades Western culture, and that it may have deeper roots in the human psyche. Witnessing or being a part of cataclysmic events, I've noted, seems to elicit a pair of responses, both of which are basically perverse: "Cool!" and "That'll teach 'em."

An event on the scale of last year's tsunami or yesterday's hurricane are sublime in their horror. It almost seems a privilege to live on a planet where such momentous things can happen. That's why we huddle around our TV sets, straining out bits of news - did the levees break, or not? - hoping to see something really awesome and unprecedented, to be a part of history in the making.

At the same time, such events can serve to humble those whose arrogance has (in "our" view) led them astray. So, those who think they can control rivers, and those who deny that global warming is happening, might finally have to admit that they were wrong. This is an especially insidious trap for environmentalists, frustrated by the recalcitrance of those in power.

In past years, I had heard scenarios whereby a major hurricane could render New Orleans uninhabitable for the indefinite future: flood waters fill the bowl beyond the capacity for pumps to remove it; the water is contaminated with sewage, dead bodies, and toxic wastes. What could be more momentous, more history-making, more humbling than the forced, wholesale abandonment of a major city, the final failure of all that the Corps of Engineers had tried to do to the lower Mississippi River, the revenge of an overheated Gulf?

I struggled with this all day yesterday, suppressing the impulse to hope that the worst would happen, and the perverse disappointment I felt that the levees seemed to be holding. I told myself, again and again, that these are my fellow humans who are in the path of the storm, who are losing their homes, their loved ones, their dignity, their lives. I should be casting my lot with them, pulling for them, hoping for the best.

I succeeded, in some measure, especially as the real news, the particular stories of people in New Orleans and, especially, along the coast of Mississippi, started to filter through the noise. Today, the fascination is gone; as the devastation sees the light of day, as the waters rise in New Orleans, there is only a kind of sick horror at the destruction left by the storm and some small hope that something can be salvaged from the wreckage. There's also the desire to do something, anything to help.

I guess the fascination with the apocalypse is only really tenable when it's abstract - or perhaps when it's distant in time and space. If it had happened here, or if I were a resident of New Orleans, I could not even have imagined hoping for the worst. Even at this safe remove, I realize, I have no business doing so.

(Though I do remember, when I was a child living in Ohio during the renowned Blizzard of '78, hoping that the power would go out so we could all sleep by the fireplace in the family room. Cool!)

(I later denied this when I wrote a report on the blizzard for school.)

I've thought for some time that I need to look more carefully into this matter of the apocalypse. Maybe this would be a good time.