The Trouble with Science Is That It Has Never Been Tried

I'm not yet quite halfway through Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative Account of Philosophy (Princeton, 2004), but so far it's very impressive, though disturbing in many ways.  At the point I've reached, Neiman shows that Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire, Kant, and David Hume were trying, not to vindicate Science and Reason as the legitimate heirs to religion, but to show that Science and Reason could not make sense of the world any more than religion does, and that the Enlightenment critique of religion was invalid in many important respects.

Hume, for example, wrote in The Natural History of Religion (1757):

Even at this day, and in EUROPE, ask any of the vulgar, why he believes in an omnipotent creator of the world; he will never mention the beauty of final causes, of which he is wholly ignorant: He will not hold out his hand, and bid you contemplate the suppleness and variety of joints in his fingers, their bending all one way, the counterpoise which they receive from the thumb, the softness and fleshy parts of the inside of his hand, with all the other circumstances, which render that member fit for the use, to which it was destined. To these he has been long accustomed; and he beholds them with listlessness and unconcern. He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it [quoted by Neiman, 153].

The Argument from Design* has filtered down to the "vulgar" in our day: people who've never studied philosophy have invoked it to me, though usually as a reason why I should believe in an omnipotent creator, not why they believe in one.  As Neiman observes, "These sorts of claims concern psychology" (154), that is, why people find religious or other claims convincing, rather than the validity of the arguments used.  Natural religion, or natural theology as it was also called, was a somewhat confused philosophical project.  It was the work of educated people, rather than the "vulgar," intended to provide rational support for belief in God, though this generally led to a God who wasn't the god of Christianity.  But it was also meant, as Neiman shows, to produce a new religion, a rational religion, free of superstition and miracles and priests, that a modern rational person could accept.

This should sound familiar. When I was criticizing the philosopher Philip Kitcher's book Living with Darwin a few years ago, I connected him to nineteenth-century liberal Christianity, which was true enough; I forgot that he is also the heir to the philosophes a century earlier, who also thought that Reason and Science could govern the world much better than religion had.  But Hume seems not to have shared that illusion; he was, Neiman tries to show, as interested in demolishing the pretenses of Reason as he was those of Revealed Religion.

He described the innocent heathen's view of the doctrine of the Real Presence to suggest that mythological reasons do less violence to intellect.  Later he attacked most any form of conventional worship by suggesting that all ascribe to God "the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause [Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion]".  But traditional dogma was an easy target in England.  The Dialogues were bolder.  They proceeded to show that the natural religion allegedly founded on common sense is in fact less reasonable than other hypotheses.  As myths go, monotheism is not only less salutary but less scientific than alternatives.  Natural inductive procedures will lead us to polytheism [Neiman, 156].

Hume, like Voltaire before him, showed that the world does not make sense, and that Reason is of limited use in dealing with its senselessness.  (That he used Reason to demonstrate that isn't self-contradictory; that a tool is only of limited use doesn't mean it's of no use whatever.  I can't build the Great Pyramid using only a hammer, but that doesn't mean I can't use it to drive a nail.)  This is the road where modern non-theist scientists and philosophers generally prefer not to follow Hume.  They're happy to applaud his demolition of revealed religion, but they mostly have great faith in reason.  So we get revivalists like Neal DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye arguing that science can resolve moral problems like abortion, or how to govern a society.  In a free country they're as entitled to bloviate as any minister or Pope, but they have no authority in these subjects and shouldn't be taken seriously.  G. K. Chesterton famously declared, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."  But as the Christian writer Graham Shaw riposted in The Cost of Authority (SCM / Fortress, 1982) , this is "glib deceit." 

It gains its plausibility from the guilty awareness of all believers of the distance between profession and life, but if true it would be a devastating verdict on Christianity.  Few ideals have so preoccupied the imagination of men, or inspired more utter devotion.  If therefore the ideals are still untried, it may well be that they are inadequate to guide men through the complexities of life.  The same simplicity which gives them their imaginative power to haunt and obsess may also condemn them to ineffectiveness in actual life [5].

Reason and Science may not have been as widely popular as Christianity, but they have inspired many, and certainly their devotees would also claim that they have not failed but found difficult and left untried.  But that, to the extent it was true, would also be an indictment of those who claim to speak in the name of Science and Reason, but unscientifically and irrationally; even dishonestly.

Scientists will concede, a bit uncomfortably I think, that science has not been an unmitigated source of Good in the world.  True, Science has given us vaccines and rockets to the moon; it has also given us atomic bombs and eugenic sterilization.  Like Christian apologists, they will protest that it's not their fault or the fault of Science, it's because Men have misused Science to their evil ends.  (That's the Problem of Evil: Why do Men do bad things, and why does Science let them?  Because we don't have free will!) No True Scotsman comes in handy: those who did these bad things were not True Scientists or Christians.  To the extent that this is true, it undercuts the claim that Science (or Christianity) is basically Good; at best they should be judged neutral, without inherent moral content or consequences.  Since Neil DeGrasse Tyson appears to be the big celebrity scientist nowadays, I'm going to focus on his well-intentioned but blundering attempts to deal with this problem.

Tyson told NPR:

You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there's this little speck called Earth and you say, "You're going to what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?" ... Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

Here he is saying that "the cosmic perspective" would direct us better than whatever its opposite would be.  Of course, any religious believer could also claim to possess or have access to "the cosmic perspective."  The cosmic perspective on war can be found in the Bhagavad-Gita, and was summed up by whoever said "Kill them all, God will know His own."  Tyson, however, was talking about a perspective that he presumably associates with science.

But he also told a Scientific American blogger,

Lastly, you speak as though all War is bad. I tend to agree with you on a personal level. But I know as a matter of political awareness that not all wars are unjust and some wars are, in fact, worth fighting. Many scientists who serve military interests do so because they believe deeply in the value of their work to the security of our country

So maybe you will find someone with the cosmic perspective leading, or at any rate following, nations into battle.  I think as a description of reality, whether religious or scientific, that's more accurate than Tyson's fantasy about the moral effects of the cosmic perspective.  But the real problem is how we mere laypersons are supposed to tell who truly grasps the cosmic perspective and who doesn't.

This is a more serious problem.  On the one hand Tyson has denounced attempts by religious believers (whom he represents as "a few," though they probably greatly outnumber scientists in the US) to "control the behavior of everyone else." "That's no longer a free democracy," he says, though I wonder if we've ever had one by that criterion.  On the other, Tyson believes that "astrophysicists should be under no obligation to poll the public. I don't care how deeply affectionate you felt for these objects [the former planet Pluto, in this case] that we had talked about."

Still, alas, in America scientists are at the mercy of the dang sheeple.  In theory, at least.  So Tyson told Scientific American, "I can scream at lawmakers without limit, but their duty is to serve their constituents. And so it’s the electorate that I, as a scientist and educator, will always target for my messages."  I've pointed out before how doubtful it is that the lawmakers' constituents are the electorate, but at the moment I'm more interested in how Tyson feels as a scientist about public input into the science budget.  Scientists tend to view any restrictions on funding for their research as an intolerable infringement of their freedom to pursue knowledge wherever it may lead them, no matter how far, and have greatly lamented the decline in government spending on science since the end of the Cold War.  Tyson admits that he directs his persuasive efforts to the electorate, but his successes appear to have been through patronage from our elites. Contrary to liberal Democrats' view of George W. Bush and the Republican Party as anti-science, Tyson told the Daily Beast,

People can say and think what they want, but what matters is whether or not it becomes policy or legislation, and I don’t remember any legislation that restricted science. In fact, the budget for the National Science Foundation went up. What matters is money in Congress. What does Congress do? Allocate money. That’s really what they do. So the science budget of the country went up during the Bush administration, and the budget for NASA went up 3 percent—and it had actually dropped 25 percent in real spending dollars under the eight years of President Clinton. I don’t care what you say or think. I care about legislation, and policy.

Also, he appointed me! There may have been some science that he hadn’t learned yet or didn’t know fully, but he’s not creating legislation based on it. Speeches are politics, so you can’t fault a politician for saying something political.

What the voters want, then, doesn't matter much, nor does Tyson think it should.  I can understand his position, but it hardly bespeaks a devotion to either Reason or "free democracy."

Education, including science education, is also accountable to the voters, so it may not be surprising that the general population doesn't accept Science as much as Tyson and other scientists would like.  Large numbers of people, not just the few of whom Tyson speaks, don't believe in non-theistic Darwinian evolution.  That's mostly because of resistance to teaching it in schools below the university level, I know, but I can't help wondering whether part of the problem might also be that science isn't taught all that well.  Rather like history.  Remember that students' ignorance about historical facts has remained the same since the first research into the topic a century ago.  In history class students mostly are forcefed propaganda; in science class they dissect frogs and do basic experiments of the kind that physicists did before Galileo.  Under those circumstances, is it surprising that they don't understand the neo-Darwinian synthesis?  One thing I feel pretty sure of, though: you won't teach evolution or persuade people to accept it by the vitriolic abuse that constitutes so much public discourse on science education by liberal and progressive writers.  Whatever else you can say about it, that rhetoric does not model rationality.  Neither do Neil DeGrasse Tyson's less than coherent ramblings about science and society.

It might be argued that the trouble is scientists' and secularists' failure to be rational; if they were, their counsel would be faithful and true, and we could look to them to lead us infallibly into the future.  Maybe so, but they claim to be rational already, and again I wonder how I am supposed to tell whom to believe and follow.  The same dilemma is presented by religion, even if you limit it to one religion.  There is wide disagreement about what Christianity, for example, teaches about specific issues, a disagreement that goes back to the earliest days of the cult.  There are no authorities on whom we can rely without question.

We might start by teaching critical thinking from elementary school onward, but that course would meet fierce opposition from the religious and the non-religious alike.  Besides, it doesn't seem that reason and science now have the knowledge needed to make decisions, any more than religion does.  Rationalists have faith that someday all will be understood, and all manner of thing will be well; I think that's Pie in the Sky, and it doesn't help us in the meantime anyway.  For now we must recognize the limits of both science and reason.  That doesn't mean abandoning them for religion -- which religion? which minister or pope or mullah or lama?  That Darwinian evolutionary theory has serious problems doesn't mean that Genesis or some other creation myth of your choice is true.  Refusing to admit the limits of one's wisdom and knowledge is a common fault of both religion and science, despite the lip service both pay to that admission in principle.  Reason won't save us, nor will religion; we must make our own decisions and judgments, knowing that we make them from incomplete and inadequate knowledge.

This, I think, is the point of Sartre's existentialism, not the blank-slate vacuousness Mary Midgley ascribes to him.  But I'll go with something like Walter Kaufmann's version, as he developed it in Without Guilt and Justice: we must decide; no one else can do it for us; we must think hard about our choices but in the end we must act (even refusing to act is an act). If we turn out to be wrong we must take responsibility for our action and do our best to repair or ameliorate the damage.  If you have a better idea, let's discuss it.

Which brings me back to Evil in Modern Thought. Modern philosophy emerged, Neiman argues, from attempts to resolve the Problem of Evil.  Christianity can't do it; indeed, the Problem of Evil is a particular stumbling block for conventional Jewish and Christian monotheism, and the rationalist project showed this forcefully.  But that was a negative result; rationalists couldn't prove how we ought positively to deal with the painful finitude of human existence.  I'm looking forward to seeing how Neiman's account proceeds.

*Antony Flew argued, I think correctly, that it would better be called the Argument to Design rather than the Argument from Design, since  involves arguing from the regularities we see in the world to claim that they must be the result of design rather than happenstance; the move from there to a Designer is less of a leap.

Because My Heart Is Pure

The most valuable lesson to be learned from Sam Harris's recent e-mail exchange with Noam Chomsky is that two atheists, both champions of science and of Enlightenment values and rationality, can disagree vehemently on issues they both consider to be of first importance.  This might seem obvious enough, but I noticed that some of the coverage failed to grasp it.  The first notice I saw of their exchange was this article from Salon, was subtitled "How the professor knocked out the atheist." That Chomsky is also an atheist is hardly obscure; whoever wrote that headline was trying to create an illusion of more space between the combatants.

I consider this more important than who "won."  Not too surprisingly, there was little agreement about that question, with Harris's fans sure that Harris won, or at least that Chomsky lost because he was mean and rude to Harris, and Chomsky's fans sure that Chomsky won, mopping up the floor with Harris.  Or "undressed" Harris, as one notably wacky headline put it.  (The headline stayed with the post as it was cross-posted to several sites.)  Elsewhere I learned that Chomsky bitchslapped Harris, that he owned him,  and so on.  PZ Myers provided a round-by-round, punch-by-punch commentary on the exchange.  So did Susan of Texas.  Those who haven't yet seen the exchange, and are interested, could begin there. I'd prefer not to link to Harris's original blog post, just because he doesn't deserve any more traffic; you can find it easily with a simple online search if you wish.

What interests me here is Harris's recent postmortem on the encounter, in which he lamented that "Anyone who thinks I lost a debate here just doesn’t understand what I was trying to do":

Harris said he had hoped to learn what Chomsky actually believes about the ethics of intent, and he hoped his own arguments would steer leftists away from their “masochistic” tendencies.

He said Chomsky’s followers believe the U.S. was morally worse than ISIS because it had, through “selfishness and ineptitude,” created ISIS and victimized millions of people in other nations.

“This kind of masochism and misreading of both ourselves and of our enemies has become a kind of religious precept on the left,” Harris said. “I don’t think an inability to distinguish George Bush or Bill Clinton from Saddam Hussein or Hitler is philosophically or politically interesting, much less wise.

... Harris complained that he encountered “contempt and false accusation and highly moralizing language” throughout his exchange with Chomsky – and he now wishes he had addressed those points immediately and directly.

...“I wanted to talk to him to see if there was some way to build a bridge off of this island of masochism so that these sorts of people that I’ve been hearing from for years could cross over to something more reasonable, and it didn’t work out,” he said. “The conversation, as I said, was a total failure, but I thought it was an instructive one.”

I agree that the conversation was instructive, though probably not for the reasons Harris thinks.  Harris initiated the exchange by telling Chomsky that "I am far more interested in exploring these disagreements, and clarifying any misunderstandings, than in having a conventional debate."  (Harris was being disingenuous about that, since he'd announced on Twitter that he was "trying to arrange a debate with Noam Chomsky".) The ensuing conversation clarified Harris's misunderstandings very effectively, and his follow-up remarks are even more instructive.

When Harris first contacted Chomsky, he now reveals, he didn't really think he had anything to learn from him.  He was already certain that he had the True Gnosis, and if given access to what he regarded as Chomsky's cult of devotees, he could expose Chomsky's "misreadings" and free his cult from their "masochistic" view of US policy and conduct.  It's ironic that he should complain of "contempt and false accusation and highly moralizing language" from Chomsky, because that describes his own contributions so very well.  Though Chomsky explained, with amazing patience really, why he disagreed with Harris, Harris simply brushed his explanations aside and repeated his original claims -- but repetition is not argument.

The accusation of masochism, which is very nearly content-free, is especially interesting.  No one, Harris believes, could have any good reasons for judging US policy as harshly as Chomsky does, so he and his followers must be suffering from some sort of mental dysfunction.  The tactic may be connected to Harris's interest in neuroscience, which is being used nowadays to explain away all human behavior as the result of conditions within the brain, not to any external (social, political, intellectual) factors.  Those who adopt this tactic (or other reductive pseudo-explanations) never pause to consider that, if this were true, it would apply as forcefully to themselves and to neuroscience itself as to everyone else.  It would mean, for example, that Harris's stance on Islam, as well as his politics generally and his atheism in particular, is also merely the product of some kink in his synapses, not because of his superior intellect.

It also has another consequence.  Suppose that all the Muslims in the world suddenly acknowledged that Harris is right that Islam is an inherently violent cult, renounced faith in favor of atheism, and blamed Islam for everything wrong in the Middle East and in the world.  Would that be "masochism" in Harris's eyes?  I don't see how it could be anything else.  But perhaps Harris believes that Muslims are Muslims due to some neurobiological defect, so they are incapable of change, and must (however regretfully -- we're all humane and well-intentioned here!) be exterminated.  Since Harris's view of Islam is so clearly irrational, perhaps it should be diagnosed as "sadism."

Clearly Harris hoped to leapfrog over Chomsky and speak directly to his followers, bringing them the Healing Light that he uniquely has to offer.  Now, I know that, like most well-known people (Harris included), Chomsky has some fans who are devotees, who parrot his opinions without understanding them.  But I don't see any reason to believe that this is true of all of them.  Many of them have ties to various traditions of political dissent: pacifism, antiwar, international solidarity, and so on.  I formed my views on the Vietnam war, for example, based on the evidence, long before I read Chomsky's writings.  I liked them because they fit with everything else I knew.  I disagree with him on some matters, and have written about some of those at length.  I've observed that despite the accusation, popular in certain circles, that Chomsky tolerates no disagreement, he can be disagreed with if you have some idea of what you're talking about; witness the disagreements between him and Gilbert Achcar in their lengthy conversations on the Middle East, for example.  So if Chomsky's fans don't immediately accept Sam Harris's Love Gift of Wisdom, they may well have reasons other than mere "masochism."

Harris's position on morality is often described as consequentialist, including (albeit ambivalently) by himself.  Like most such classifications, consequentialism isn't all that clear-cut, but it apparently boils down to "the view that an action is right if and only if its total outcome is the best possible. This is the basic form of consequentialism; there are, however, many varieties, a few of which will be noted below. What they all have in common is that consequences alone should be taken into account when making judgements about right and wrong."  If so, then Harris is an odd kind of consquentialist, because he insists to Chomsky that intent (American intent, anyway) is vitally important, and it seems to trump every other consideration for him.  No matter how horrible the outcome of US conduct, it's still better than anything anyone else does, because the United States *

are, in many respects, just such a “well-intentioned giant.” And it is rather astonishing that intelligent people, like Chomsky and [Arundhati] Roy, fail to see this. What we need to counter their arguments is a device that enables us to distinguish the morality of men like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein from that of George Bush and Tony Blair. It is not hard to imagine the properties of such a tool. We can call it “the perfect weapon.”

"The perfect weapon" is a totally imaginary concept, a weapon that can kill only bad guys without harming any good guys in the slightest.  Harris fantasizes that US officials would gladly use the Perfect Weapon if they could, thus avoiding any collateral damage whatever, and that bad guys (Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, whoever) would reject it even if they were offered it, because they are totally Evil and like hurting innocent people.  How he knows this is not clear.  But since the Perfect Weapon doesn't exist, this is a purely speculative exercise, which is revealing given Harris's professed disdain for metaphysics and other boring, airy-fairy logic-chopping.

In the real world, we must consider how people use the imperfect weapons they have.  And oddly, Harris is rhetorically ready to concede that the United States is less than perfect.

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad. In this respect, we can more or less swallow Chomsky’s thesis whole. ... The result [of our actions] should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.
We have surely done some terrible things in the past. Undoubtedly, we are poised to do terrible things in the future. Nothing I have written in this book should be construed as a denial of these facts, or as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent. There may be much that Western powers, and the United States in particular, should pay reparations for. And our failure to acknowledge our misdeeds over the years has undermined our credibility in the international community. We can concede all of this, and even share Chomsky’s acute sense of outrage, while recognizing that his analysis of our current situation in the world is a masterpiece of moral blindness.

Taken out of context, these remarks could be taken to accuse Harris of surrender-monkey American-self hating masochism.  But his concession has no consequences.  Like any exceptionalist (Rachel Maddow is another well-known example) Harris simply refuses to admit that "our misdeeds" might lead to anger and retaliation by our victims, especially since even if the US should atone and pay reparations for our crimes, in fact we never do.  We just keep killing and killing and killing.

Rather than a consequentialist, then, Harris appears to be quite the opposite.  America is good, not because of the consequences of our actions, which are in fact often quite bad, but because we mean well.  Our intentions not only need to be weighed along with the outcome, but they trump everything else. And we know this, not because of any evidence, but simply a priori, as a matter of faith.  Chomsky and others have rebutted Harris's claims about American good intentions, but the rebuttals bounce harmlessly off Harris's armor of true belief.  Evidence?  Reason?  Harris laughs your evidence and reason to scorn, because he knows.

To acknowledge that our actions might have consequences is not to justify any and all retaliation, as exceptionalists like to claim.  What it means is that we cannot make a great show of injured innocence when the chickens come home to roost.  I don't think that the 9/11 attacks were justified, any more than Martin Luther King Jr. was calling for the Vietnamese to invade and conquer the US when he called his government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" in 1967.  If Harris had any principles, it would be he and others like him who called for the destruction of America for its manifold crimes; but he has no principles. America, that "well-intentioned giant," can do whatever we like, because we're the good guys.

One other small matter.  Harris whined about the limitations of e-mail, the medium through which he Chomsky communicated.

I’m sorry to say that I have now lost hope that we can communicate effectively in this medium. Rather than explore these issues with genuine interest and civility, you seem committed to litigating all points (both real and imagined) in the most plodding and accusatory way. And so, to my amazement, I find that the only conversation you and I are likely to ever have has grown too tedious to continue.

I've been on the receiving end of this sort of passive-aggressive nonsense myself: people who clashed with me in a public forum "reached out" via e-mail, in the apparent belief that in public discussion I'm just putting on a show and in a private exchange I'll admit that I don't really believe anything I say in public.  I wonder if such people are projecting; in some cases it seems they are.  "Tedious" does describe Harris's conduct in his correspondence with Chomsky, but of course he projects onto the Other.  What, I wonder, did Harris prefer?  Does he think he'd have done any better face-to-face?  Maybe have a brewski with the Noamster and just be two regular guys together?  The trouble wasn't that e-mail inhibits communication, it was that Harris wasn't interested in communicating: he was going to preach, and Chomsky was supposed to listen, and marvel, and be saved along with all his household.  In my experience it's usually Christians who talk like this.

Notice also how in Harris's followup he "now wishes he had addressed those points immediately and directly."  That's one of the benefits of having this sort of exchange in writing, including e-mail: you can take your time, consider your next move in relative tranquility, and even delay your response until you've had time to think it over.  But Harris isn't, on the evidence, interested in thinking.

* I'm relying on Susan of Texas's quotations from Harris here, not from Harris's original post, but the quotations are accurate; you can follow the links to his blog if you want to check them.

** Here I'm copying PZ Myers' quotation from Harris, under "Round 8."

Go, Little Meme: Marriage Gravity and Viral Ignorance

I haven't bothered to check whether these memes contain authentic quotations from the men whose photographs they use.  What interests me here is that whether or not Tyson and Whedon said these things, some of their fans were happy to believe that they did.

Okay, I did look this one up, hoping for some context.  Who's "we"?  Tyson and his fans?  I can't find a source for it, so it may well be bogus, like this one probably was.  I did find this article, which I haven't read in full yet but it doesn't contain the quotation from the meme.  But again, what interests me is that it's popular among his fans, as something they agree with, so they take for granted that he must have said it.

Ignorance is not a virus, and reason won't "cure" it.  Ignorance doesn't have to "spread," because it's an inescapable part of the human condition.  What we know will always be limited, incomplete, and subject to revision, especially what we know about things much larger or smaller than human beings.  We will always be ignorant about some things, and I believe that our ignorance will always be greater than our knowledge.  The real problem, once again, is not that people are ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so.

I recognize that Tyson didn't mean "virus" or "cure" literally.  That's the trouble.  He's preaching, not sharing information.  He's a revivalist, and he's highly selective in his use of reason.  This meme is an altar call, the very opposite of reason.  Tyson's language shows that he belongs to the ancient religious tradition which teaches that if your spiritual eyes are opened, if you are awakened and enlightened all error will immediately fall away.  It isn't true, but a lot of people believe it, because they want to believe it; and of course it's very satisfying to believe that you are one of the enlightened elite, part of the cure, and the ignorant masses, with their myths and superstitions are the problem.  If anything should be cast metaphorically as a malignant virus, it's that belief.

Joss Whedon isn't a scientist, but he's every bit as incoherent as one.  Even if equality were a "necessity," that wouldn't mean it needn't be striven for -- as his penultimate sentence admits: we need equality, but we don't have it, so I would suppose we need to strive for it, "kinda."  But it's not a necessity, since human beings have managed to live without it for millennia.

No one really knows what equality is anyway.  Amartya Sen wrote a useful book on the subject, Inequality Reexamined (Harvard, 1995), which pointed out some of the conceptual problems involved, but Noam Chomsky did a good discussion as well.

Nor is equality like gravity, which is not really a "necessity" either.  Gravity is a fact, but like equality no one really knows what it is; scientists are still trying to figure that out.  Like many basic realities, everybody knows what gravity is until they try to explain or describe it.  Equality is different; rather like justice, or the Good, it refers to what isn't rather than what is.  Its very vagueness is useful, since people can advocate it without having to think very hard about what they mean by it.  But unlike equality, gravity is something that we needn't be bound by.  Many species have found ways to get around it, and human beings tried to do the same for thousands of years.  If we treated gravity the way Whedon wants us to treat equality, we'd reject the very idea of flight, let alone space travel.  When we're trying to get off the surface of the earth, gravity is our (metaphorical) opponent.

Notice too how Whedon loses track of his pronouns and their antecedents.  The "it" in "It is life out of balance" is presumably meant to refer to misogyny, but in context it points to "equality," which is not what Whedon means at all.

It appears that Whedon was talking about sexual/gender equality, though I suppose he didn't mean to exclude other areas.  And I suppose he was extemporizing here, so it's unfair to blame him for getting lost on the way to his thought; but in that case it's unfair to put his ramblings into a meme and send them, naked and unprotected, into the lethal vacuum of the Intertoobz.

Memes like these are part of the reason I've been in a foul mood lately.  I agree about the value of reason.  I think that equality is important.  But too many of the people who are nominally on my side on these issues are depressingly irrational.  I can't blame them.  I know the limits of my own rationality, and I know how hard it is to use reason, to ascertain facts, to talk about reality, to tell the truth.  But the popularity of people like Tyson and Whedon (and even of people like Noam Chomsky, who knows this and tries to resist it) just reminds me that what many people want is a Champion they can cheer for in the great gladiatorial arena, our guy versus their guy.  And it's largely accidental which side they're on.

The Clash of Enlightenments

Today I'm reading Dan Hind's The Threat to Reason.  (I finished Betty Smith's 1943 autobiographical novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn yesterday.  I think I'll try to get hold of her other books, and the biography of the author that was published a few years ago.)  Hind is very good.  Here, for example:

The global justice movement has sought precisely to destroy the legitimacy of at least some of the transnational organizations.  It has done so through a distinctive combination of spectacular protest and reasoned argument.  It argues that its opponents have betrayed the principles of the Enlightenment for the sake of corporate and state power.  At the same time, the transnational institutions themselves have criticized the protestors' methods and have sought to depict them as simplistic, naive or vicious.  They have been keen to denounce the protestors as fear-filled enemies of progress and unenlightened xenophobes.  Each side claims to be presenting arguments based on fact, and both seek to persuade through appeals to universal principles of justice.  The World Bank / IMF inside the convention centres and the clowns and the anarchists outside are calling for the creation of a humane social order, for a global system that fulfils the promise of the Enlightenment.  Both sides might be wrong, but they are definitely not both right, and a revived Enlightenment must decide between them or reject them both.  A structure of Enlightenment that admits both because they both claim to be enlightened cannot be of central importance to our current politics.  Their struggle marks a, perhaps the, 'great divide' in contemporary politics.  Understood narrowly in terms of a clash between the rational and the irrational, the Enlightenment can say little about one of the most important political contests of our time.

I'll have more to say about these issues soon.  I hope.

Appealing to Authority

The cartoon above isn't completely off the mark, but it sets up a dubious binary.  Sure, just sitting on your couch and speculating probably won't produce meaningful criticism or dissent.  But it might: it depends on who's sitting on the couch and speculating.  The corporate media are well-known for choosing experts and critics by inexplicable criteria, and of setting up supposed antagonists who basically agree with each other in hopes of getting a mediagenic squabble out of them.

But it's the other pole of the binary that I find interesting.  The cartoonist seems to take for granted that a three-year-study funded by the National Institute of Health and conducted by a doctor will automatically deserve respect, if not fawning obeisance.  This is Science we're talking about here, people!

I don't think that three-year studies published in peer-reviewed journals automatically deserve respect. Scientists and their work, like anyone else, must earn respect.  It's even part of the mythology of Science that scientific work should be approached skeptically and critically, that scientists look at their own and other scientists' work with the aim of tearing it apart, and if it survives this trial by ordeal, it can be anointed as True Knowledge until someone comes along with new knowledge or a better theory and consigns it to the dustbin of history.  Just in principle, then, the fact that a study lasted three years should cut no ice.

It should be remembered that quite a lot of appalling garbage has passed peer review.  Scientific racism, for example, or studies purporting to prove that homosexuality can be cured.  I've mentioned before research, published in peer-reviewed journals, that involved coercing schizophrenic patients to work in the hospital garden by depriving them of food for up to five days, and if that failed, by electroconvulsive "treatment"; that "study" appears to have gone on for some time, maybe even for three years or more.  It's perfectly legitimate to criticize it while sitting on one's couch.

The study I just mentioned was conducted in Vietnam during the US invasion, but such coercive methods were routinely used in the US at the time, and afterwards.  In Mad Science, Stuart A. Kirk, Tomi Gomory and David Cohen discuss research conducted by a founder of the very influential Assertive Community Treatment approach to psychiatric treatment:

Leonard Stein, after replacing Arnold Ludwig as the director of research and education at Mendota State Hospital, coauthored a study with “provocative therapy” advocate Brandsma, entitled “The Use of Punishment as a Treatment Modality: A Case Report” (Brandsma & Stein, 1973). The study examined the value of using involuntary electric shock to reduce the “unprovoked” assaultive behavior of a “retarded, adult, organically damaged” (p. 30) twenty-four-year-old woman. This publication appeared during the time that TCL/ACT community research was already well on its way … and was apparently part of a line of research focused on force and violence as treatment, begun earlier at Mendota State. Ludwig, Marx, Hill, and Browning (1969) had previously published a single-case study on a paranoid schizophrenic patient, entitled “The Control of Violent Behavior through Faradic Shock.” The authors justified this study by its “uniqueness,” because “this procedure was administered against the express will of the patient” (p. 624, emphasis added). They used an electric cattle prod as the “aversive conditioning agent,” because it was “an excellent device for providing a potent, noxious stimulus … capable of producing a faradic shock spike of approximately 1400 volts at 0.5 milliamperes, the resulting pain lasting … as long as the current was permitted to flow” (p. 627) [100-101].

In order to "obtain a 'baseline' measure (a requirement of single-subject design research) of this patient’s assaultive behavior, she was baited and ridiculed so she would respond aggressively (101). Kirk, Gomory and Cohen quote the researchers' account:

The patient was required to sit in an armchair throughout .… During the base rate week the staff quickly developed a consistent provocative approach in order to ensure a high frequency of behavior from the patient … This consistently involved: 1) ignoring the patient in conversation; 2) refusing to give the patient candy or snacks when others were eating them; 3) denying all requests, for example, during the session if she asked if she would be able to go for a walk that afternoon, she was immediately told, “No you can’t.”; 4) refusing to accept her apologies or believe her promises of good behavior; 5) The … female sitting next to her often leading the provocation; 6) using provocative labels for her behavior, i.e., “animalistic, low grade”; 7) discussing family related frustrations, i.e., her mother’s refusal to write or visit, how her dead grandmother would be displeased with her present behavior if she were alive. It should be noticed that throughout the program the patient was kept in a seclusion room at all times except when involved in a baseline or treatment session. (Brandsma & Stein, 1973, pp. 32-33)

This is, I admit, a somewhat extreme case in terms of the methods used, and so easy to disapprove and discredit.  It should be remembered, however, that the study was not fringe science but was published in a mainstream, peer-reviewed journal.  For now my point in citing it is that it can be completely appropriate to dismiss and attack credentialed work when it's blatantly inhumane; no amount of authority can justify the kind of mistreatment these doctors write about so cheerfully.

So let's look at a case that is less obviously troubling: the development of the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a process which took six years, from 1974 to publication in 1980.  Kirk, Gomory and Cohen show that a major concern of the psychiatrists who produced DSM-III was to produce reliability in the diagnosis of mental illness, so that different clinicians could agree on the specific mental disorders troubling their patients. They didn't succeed even in doing this, but focusing on reliability enabled them to dodge the question of diagnostic validity -- that is, whether the feelings and behaviors they observed in their patients actually constituted discrete mental illnesses.  To this day, two revisions of the DSM later, that goal has not been achieved.

DSM offers behavioral diagnostic criteria as if they confirm the existence of a valid disorder, when the criteria merely describe what is claimed a priori to be an illness. Descriptive diagnosis is a tautology that distracts observers from recognizing that DSM offers no indicators that establish the validity of any psychiatric illness, although they may typically point to distresses, worries, or misbehaviors [166].

But the detailed, proliferating classifications of DSM-III were highly successful in their way: the book became a best-seller, almost univerally used by psychiatrists, other mental health professionals including social workers, drug companies, and insurance companies.  It facilitated the vastly increased use of psychoactive drugs as medications (despite their questionable effectiveness), and the coverage of such medication under insurance plans by giving nameable disorders to write on billing statements and claims.  But actual diseases -- that is, detectable disorders of the brain manifesting themselves as "mental illness" -- have not been found:

We repeat: no distinct biological determinism has been demonstrated in any mental disorder. For decades this was occasionally acknowledged, but discreetly, deep in textbooks and professional articles, rarely by experts in popular discourse. According to a survey of a probability sample of the US population, conducted by the American Psychiatric Association (2005), 75 percent of people believe that mental disorders result from “chemical imbalances.” But, already, chemical imbalances are passé, at least according to the director of the NIMH [251-2].

The speculative physiological basis for mental illness changes continually.  "Chemical imbalances" have fallen by the wayside, and neurobiology is currently a hot topic.  Brain imaging makes pretty pictures that make "wonderful marketing copy" (268):

One reason for the focus on neurobiology in the absence of definitive findings may be the extent to which descriptions of biomedical facts over the last two decades have become tied to technological advances that dazzle observers with their appealing pictures of brain function. Finding that the brains of different people seem to function differently has provided endless fascination for those who see in these differences confirmation that biology “explains” everything disordered in humans. That taxi drivers or musicians show different brain activity on certain spatial or musical tasks than other people seems merely interesting. That depressed people occasionally show different brain functioning than other people, however, “proves” that they’re diseased. This logic is erroneous, because subtle physiological difference might arise from experience or learning; it might be a consequence, not a cause, of the person’s problem diagnosed as a psychiatric disorder. And such difference does not mean “disease” unless the meaning of disease is – as we have been suggesting – distorted beyond recognition [267].

So, just because a credentialed professional publishes the results of years of research in a peer-reviewed journal, his or her work shouldn't automatically be granted authority.  The work might be valid, but it might not, and again the question arises of how a layperson can distinguish valid from invalid science.

One caveat: when I wrote about this problem a couple of years ago, one reader wrote to insist that mental illness is real, that people really do suffer, and their suffering is important.  I'm not denying that human suffering is real and important, but I am saying that "mental illness" may not be a good way of thinking about it, let alone helping those who suffer.  It is, at any rate, not the only way to think about it, or to take it seriously.  I'm going to bring this post to a close, but I'll have more to say on this subject soon.

Ours Not to Reason Why

My liberal law-professor friend passed this image along on Facebook today.  It's stuff like this (and there's a lot of it around) that produces the apathy I was complaining about yesterday.  I mean, why bother when so many of the people who are supposedly on my side are so damned, determinedly dumb?

Here's the thing: reason isn't something you wake up to.  It's something you have to work at, a skill that doesn't come all that naturally to human beings and must be developed.  As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in a passage I've quoted before:

The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; he never knows too well where he's going, he is "open," he may even appear hesitant But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth.  And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not suspect but the very form of the true -- that hinge of indefinite approximation.  It is as if their very existence were perpetually in suspension. They want to exist all at once and right away.  They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found, in which one never becomes other than what one originally was ...

Ludwig Wittgenstein said something along the same lines, chastising his former student Norman Malcolm:

... what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc. & if it does not improve your thinking about important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious ... You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about 'certainty,' 'probability,' 'perception,' etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important.

But, like, who has time to think when there are more important things to dwell on, like sports or how adorable President Obama is, or how stupid those Bible-thumpers are, or how we need a woman president, preferably Hillary?  Learning to reason, learning to try to think honestly about your life is so tiring, and often it's a downer.  So let's accentuate the positive: It's much easier just to celebrate Reason Day.  It'll make you feel good, and isn't that the important thing?

Rather an Attack on One's Convictions

I just finished reading Dangerous Convictions: What's Really Wrong with the U.S. Congress (Oxford, 2013) by Tom Allen, former Democratic Representative from Maine from 1997 to 2009.  I found it at the library, it looked like I could learn something from it, so I checked it out.

Having read the book, I'm of at least two minds about it.  It's a reasonably interesting book about Allen's experiences in the House, though I could probably have learned as much or more about the workings of Congress from any number of other books.  But Allen's main reason for writing the book is to bemoan the great partisan divide in our nation's politics, which he sees as a clash of ideological convictions. He puts most of the blame on the Republicans, of course, and with good reason.  He often mentions the question that passed through his mind and those of his Democratic colleagues when listening to their Republican colleagues speak on the floor: "Do these guys believe what they say?"

Many other people have asked that question.  Allen never quite answers it.  I'm not sure it matters all that much.  Allen raises good points about the Republicans' lack of interest in evidence (scientific or economic), their greater focus on individualism than on community, their denial of climate change, and so on.  He cites the usual savants -- Robert Bellah, George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt. (I've been stumbling over Haidt's name a lot lately.  I really would rather not read The Righteous Mind.)  Again, none of this is news to anyone who's been watching the Congressional follies of the past couple of decades, and I don't think Allen has anything new to say about it.  The best point he makes is that the Republicans have no serious and specific alternatives to the Democratic programs they reject and block; when they do get specific, as with Paul Ryan's voucher plan to replace Medicare, it turns out to be an embarrassment that costs them elections.  It's good to be reminded of that.

Allen has no serious or specific suggestions to resolve the political divide he's writing about, either, but that's okay because there's no way you can make someone listen to evidence if they absolutely refuse to.  Dangerous Convictions turned out to be a perfectly reasonable centrist Democratic book, about as intelligent as a partisan can get, and a useful overview of some major issues in American politics since the late 1990s.  Which means that Allen makes some revealing slips along the way.

For example, in recounting 9/11 and its aftermath, Allen says that "After al-Qaeda, the terrorist network in Afghanistan, was identified as the culprit, support for retaliatory action by our government was widespread" (69) and "Tony Blair and George Bush understood that al Qaeda could not have free rein in Afghanistan" (72).  This is not quite false, but when I take into account the fact that Allen never mentions the Taliban, who actually were running Afghanistan at the time, and whom we actually fought with our terrorist allies the Islamist Northern Alliance, something seems off here.  (Recently I saw a commenter at another site say that al-Qaeda blew up the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001 as an example of their "terrorism."  It was the Taliban who did that, of course, and it was an act of religious vandalism, not terrorism.)

When he gets to Bush's invasion of Iraq, Allen says:

Like most members of Congress, I had no reason at that time to question the possibility that Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons.  He had never denied that he did [!], and he had used them in the past [with full US support].  But I did not think that justified an invasion, since that would put U.S. soldiers within range of such weapons. That turned out to be the CIA's position at well.  The administration's terror-inducing speculation about a "mushroom-shaped cloud" appeared to be a fear tactic designed to cut off further discussion.  I had heard no evidence to support the claim that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons.  Moreover, I believed that the administration would have given any hard information about an Iraqi nuclear program to the UN inspection team led by Mohammed el Baradei, and he had indeed reported that there was no evidence of such a program [78].

That Bush (who, Allen laments, "heeded the neocons" on Iraq [82]) was contemplating a war of aggression, doesn't seem to impinge on Allen's thoughts.  That Allen "had no reason at that time to question the possibility that Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons," we've heard before.  (Of course there was a possibility that Saddam possessed such weapons; almost anything is possible.  But there was no real probability that he did.)  I wouldn't have thought Allen would be so willing to tell the public how easily members of Congress can be led astray.

For those of us opposed to the policy, there was a craziness to the administration's arguments and actions.  What they were doing was outside the bounds of our political experience.  They were stirring arguments they knew to be false, politicizing matters of war and peace, and above all, paying little attention to what would happen after Saddam's removal [85].

Really?  Lying, politicizing war and peace, and ignoring consequences were outside the bounds of the Democrats' political experience?  Don't you believe it.  Those are typical behavior among politicians of either party who want a war.  Look at the way the Obama administration has been lying about Iran's "nuclear program" all along; look at the way the assault on Libya was handled.  Then, if you need more evidence, look at the Democratic escalation of the US invasion of Vietnam, or Bill Clinton's intervention in Kosovo.  But as I say, this is normal and only to be expected from an intelligent Democratic partisan.

But the flaws in Allen's argument go deeper than these details.  When he discusses the "authoritarianism" he sees as the core of today's Republican mindset, he mentions a 2009 book, Authoritarianism and Polzarization in American Politics by Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, which 

sheds new light on political view that are heavily influenced by whether people are more or less authoritarian.  Those testing high in authoritarianism have a greater need for order and less tolerance for ambiguity than those scoring low on that scale...

On issues that are "structured by" authoritarianism, people's opinions are correlated significantly with how they score on a scale of more or less authoritarian.  Examples of such issues include (1) racial and ethnic differences; (2) crime, law and order, and civil liberties; (3) ERA/feminism/family structure; and 4) militarism vs. diplomacy.  On these issues authoritarians and their opposites tend to have markedly different views.  On others, like economic, health care, and environmental issues, the differences are not as wide and therefore not "structured by" authoritarianism ...

Hetherington and Weiler make a convincing case that the American electorate has recently "sorted" itself into the two major parties based on cognitive styles reflecting greater or lesser authoritarian tendencies [166-7].

There may be something to this; I haven't read Hetherington and Weiler.  It reminds me of another big study from more than half a century ago, The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno et al., full of tables and statistics and shit, which was widely criticized and I thought didn't have much currency anymore.  But I'm wary of Allen's use of the concept.  Maybe Hetherington and Weiler dealt with this, but it looks to me as though the same person can move around on the authoritarianism scale depending on the issue and whether he or she happens to wield political power at the moment.  Bill Clinton, for example, that big old softy, could sound like Dick Cheney or Dick Nixon when he was crossed:

"We're not inflicting pain on these fuckers," Clinton said, softly at first. "When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers." Then, with his face reddening, his voice rising, and his fist pounding his thigh, he leaned into Tony, as if it was his fault. "I believe in killing people who try to hurt you. And I can't believe we’re being pushed around by these two-bit pricks."

Remember Hillary Rodham Clinton's cheerful "We came, we saw, he died," about Qaddafy -- but hundreds, even thousands, of other Libyans also died in that little adventure.  And I'm sure I don't need to detail Barack Obama's willingness to kill troublesome foreigners, silence turbulent whistleblowers, and toss impertinent journalists into cages.  I'll agree that American politics is polarized, and that authoritarianism is a scourge, but remember that the reaction of some elite Democrats as the Republican Party swung right in Reagan's wake was to imitate them.  Gotta win those authoritarian votes!

Or take health care and other social programs.  Allen quotes an exchange that took place on national TV after the Supreme Court declared the Affordable Care Act constitutional:

After the Court upheld the law, Sen. Mitch McConnell was pressed three times by Chris Wallace on Fox News to explain how Republicans proposed to cover the thirty million Americans who would be covered under the ACA. McConnell’s response was, “That’s not the issue.”

WALLACE: You don’t think the thirty million people who are uninsured is an issue?

MCCONNELL: Let me tell you what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to turn the American health-care system into a western European system.

Isn't that interesting?  That was what the Obama administration said about its left critics: that we were mad because Obama wasn’t ready to turn American into the People's Republic of Canuckistan.  Glenn Greenwald has been showing since at least 2008 how Democratic loyalists began attacking dissenters who criticized Obama's policies, especially those Obama carried on from Bush. There's more common ground between the parties, when it comes to kicking the proles into line, than Tom Allen wants to believe.  Not that I blame him.

The same goes for the individualist/communitarian divide, which Allen also discusses at length: the Right is individualist in some areas, mostly economic (which Allen calls "libertarian" with a small l), and communitarian in ways related to their authoritarianism: religion, the military, jingoism.  Liberals and the left are communitarian in some ways, partly on economics and social programs, and strongly individualist on many social issues, like a woman's right to choose.  But it's often a toss-up and a matter of how you choose to look at an issue whether it's individualist or communitarian.  When a young gay kid comes out against the wishes of her family, is that individualist or seeking community?  Are "identity politics" individualist or communitarian?  Civil rights can be framed as individualist, or not.  I'm not sure this is a really productive way of looking at political controversy.  It's sort of like the born gay / lifestyle choice divide: I don't think it has much to do with people's views on whether it's okay to be gay.  Resolving it, or the individual/community binary, would probably just rearrange the furniture a bit, so to speak, without eliminating the political division.

Allen, of course, remains reasonable, conceding the faults of his own side: "We too can be wary of needed financial reforms of key government insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security" (174-5).  How narrow of them!  "Reforms" is the tricky word there.  Democrats have been trying to undermine Social Security at least since Bill Clinton wanted to privatize it but was foiled by the Republican attempt to impeach him.  Barack Obama prefers the death of a thousand tiny cuts, which he also pretends are "reforms," courtesy of his bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.  Reforms are one things, but first I need to know what Tom Allen considers "reforms."

Groping the Truth

Then my friend the ambivalent Obama supporter posted this quotation from Thomas Paine:

Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.

Reason and Ignorance are not opposites. Everybody is ignorant of far more than he or she knows.  And as someone else said, the trouble isn't that people are ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so.  Anyone who fancies him- or herself rational and free of ignorance will take a tumble in no time. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote,

The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; he never knows too well where he's going, he is "open," he may even appear hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth.  And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not suspect but the very form of the true -- that hinge of indefinite approximation.  It is as if their very existence were perpetually in suspension. They want to exist all at once and right away.  They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found, in which one never becomes other than what one originally was ...

The honest person knows that she's ignorant. That is the rationale for freedom of speech and debate: the fact that no one is free of ignorance, and so no one can decide infallibly in advance what opinion or belief should be suppressed.

What Is The Use ... ?

A day or so ago my liberal law-professor friend was crowing on Facebook because the right-wing British publication The Economist endorsed Barack Obama for reelection.  "That's not 'liberal media,'" she commented.  True, it's not.  I can't help wondering if she'd be so triumphant if Fox News endorsed Obama, or the Daily Caller, or some even more deranged right-wing media.  Would that prove that Obama was the better man, or would it cast doubt on him?  How far can you go in that direction?

All The Economist's endorsement indicates to me, I commented on her link, is that Obama is not a liberal, and I don't need them to tell me that.

My friend's reaction -- so typical of Obama loyalists the past few months (well, okay: years) -- was that it doesn't matter if Obama is a liberal or not, what matters is who is the better candidate.  "Or do you plan not to vote?" was her parting shot.

To be fair to her, I had been provocative.  But she knows perfectly well that I plan to vote.  I always vote.  I've had to tell her this numerous times as the campaign has dragged on.  I (virtually, of course) rapped her knuckles sharply on that point.  I suppose I should thank her for giving me yet another example of someone who can see only either/or alternatives, and can't conceive of more than the two; as if I needed any more.

The difference between "the better candidate" and "the less awful candidate" might be irrelevant in practice, when it comes time to vote.  But I don't think it's meaningless.  Certainly Obama cultists have refused to consider it.  My friend is another one of those Democrats who will, if cornered, concede that Obama has been a "disappointment" and feel like they're going out on a limb by doing so.  Which they might be, given the fanatical groupthink that Obama devotees have been cultivating the last four years, if they really meant it.  But it's really only a tactical move; they are not really disappointed by him at all.  They've worked very hard to repress any less than enthusiastic thought about their President, which is probably why it infuriates them so much when they encounter people who've allowed thoughtcrime to run free in their minds.

If your favored football or basketball team loses a game or even a championship, that is a disappointment.  (My friend's main subject on Facebook, aside from the election, is the fortunes of her college's football team.  I don't think that's a coincidence.  Football is politics is war.)  If George Lucas sells his production company and its prime properties to Disney, that is a disappointment.   If the President of the United States prosecutes whistleblowers to an unprecedented extent, kills American citizens without due process, demands the power of indefinite detainment, prolongs the wars he inherited and starts several more, and gives priority to the interests of the top one-tenth of one percent of the citizenry over the interests of the other ninety and nine, he's a murderous thug and a corporate enforcer.  As well as a congenital cheap pig.

Which of the two main contenders is "the better candidate" is not the issue.  It's really not of much interest to party loyalists on either side.  They begin with the conclusion of their guy's superiority and work backwards.  A person who isn't committed to this cult of personality has to approach voting differently.  Which candidate is less awful?  It doesn't follow from the fact that I consider both Romney and Obama to be loathsome -- and Romney is a comparatively unknown quantity; we have the evidence of four years of Obama's iniquity -- that I won't vote.  But how to vote?  Voting LOTE, or the Lesser of Two Evils approach, is scorned by many, but sometimes in life we have no tolerable options available, and must choose the less or least intolerable.  Whether that applies in this election is for each person to decide.  There are other candidates on the ballot in some states, who can be written in in other states.  One might decide not to vote at all, or not to vote for a presidential candidate; and despite the catcalls of "purist!" from the loyalists, non-cooperation is a time-honored option in some cases.  Again, each person must decide what to do, and such decisions are not necessarily made by pure rationality; they may just come from a gut feeling like This far but no farther.  I've made my own decision on this, but I recognize that other people might reasonably make others.  This recognition is also difficult for loyalists to think about, so they usually don't; lying is so much easier.

Such decisions can be debated, but as this campaign has shown, most people aren't interested in debate.  As I told my friend, more in anger than in sorrow, the extent to which Democrats have thrown out rationality and any concern with facts during this campaign has outstripped my own most cynical imaginings.  That's especially true with people I know personally, like my friend: two doctorates, one in mathematics and one in law, both fields in which reasoning and fact play significant roles.  Yet where the election is concerned, she falls back on pure emotion, the appeal to fear, the cult of personality -- so much so that she can't remember from one day to the next that I both intend to vote and urge everyone else to do so.  I don't know who she believes she's talking to, but it isn't me.

It occurred to me today how similar this situation is to the weeks right after the September 11 attacks.  (Eleven years ago; hard to believe.  Time flies when you're getting old.)  I was out of touch with my law-professor friend at that time, which is probably for the best.  I watched numerous liberals, people I knew personally as well as journalists, politicos, and pundits, fall into line behind George W. Bush, gnashing their teeth with lust for Saracen blood.  Some of them were forthright about throwing out rationality, since this crisis was too important to think about.  It was an unprecedented historical moment, a time of trial by fire, and you were either with the President or you were against him.  If you didn't think it was a good idea to attack Afghanistan, you obviously were on Bin Laden's side.  (This, although the best evidence then and now was that Bin Laden hoped to entice the US into a ruinous, self-destructive war, not only making more enemies all over the world but spending ourselves into collapse -- just as the USSR did in Afghanistan.  As I suggested earlier today, I consider the harm done to others more important morally than the harm we've done to ourselves; but that doesn't mean that the latter isn't significant too.)

Which reminds me of something the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote to his former student Norman Malcolm in 1939.  I've quoted some of it before, but I'm adding some more bits that seem especially relevant today:

You & I were walking along the river towards the railway bridge & we had a heated discussion in which you made a remark about "national character" that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought:what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends ... You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about 'certainty,' 'probability,' 'perception,' etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important.

I'm not sure how much philosophy would actually help in this election season.  I don't think it can even help in choosing between the candidates; reason can only be part of that decision.  Still, philosophy can encourage a becoming modesty about one's own opinions that is strikingly absent among the partisans in this election campaign.  As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in "Portrait of the Anti-Semite", a lot of which is pertinent to more general issues today:

The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; ...he is "open." He may even appear hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth. And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not even suspect, but the very form of the true -- that thing of indefinite approximation...They want to exist all at once and right away. They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found.

Rational or not, it'll all be over in a few days.  And then we'll see what happens.

The Awkward Age

I like this billboard, though I also suspect it was photoshopped, rather than a real billboard.

I also like this comment on the post the image illustrates:

My favorite quote thus far; “So we got the date wrong. It’s not like its the end of the world.”

But that's about as far as it goes. The post itself concludes:

What I am wondering is this: when the world did not end, did it cause anyone to become more rational? Or will the Doomsdayers become stronger believers (as sometimes happens in cults) – and more importantly, do moderate Christians feel their interpretation of the bible has been validated?

The word "rational" (not to mention "moderate") increasingly sets off alarms for me, as more and more atheists say and write and post ravingly irrational things in the name of rationality. I can't see any reason why the failure of the Rapture to take place last Saturday should "cause anyone to become more rational." As the blogger points out, "moderate" Christians who've been citing Matthew 24:36 as a warning about predicting a date for the Second Coming will probably see Jesus' non-appearance as a vindication of their interpretation of the Bible, not as a reason to abandon Christianity.

But then, why should they? Scientists are constantly making absurd and irrational claims about science and what it can do. A decade or so back, I read a lot of stuff by scientists who claimed that a Grand Unified Theory of Physics was right around the corner. They didn't specify the date and hour, of course -- they were as canny about that as the authors of the gospels -- but they were sure it would happen within a generation. It didn't. A little over a century ago, some physicists were making similar forecasts -- just before Einstein published his theory of relativity and knocked 19th-century physics ass over teakettle. Computer scientists have long made similar failed promises for the development of artificial intelligence. No one -- at least no scientist -- would argue that because these predictions failed, science should be scrapped.

I talked about this with an old friend who said that, confronted with harmful scientific claims about sex and race, she tries to talk about "scientists" rather than "science," since science isn't responsible for what scientists do or say. I agreed to an extent, but argued that you can't really separate the two: there is no such thing as "science", just a lot of scientists engaged in various projects. Then I pointed out that defenders of religion say the same thing she'd said about science: it's not Christianity's fault, it's Christians who you should blame.

A few years ago, Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation, "I actually believe in science. I believe we are clever enough to think our way out of the problems we make for ourselves." Pollitt has often attacked critics of science, whether Christian fundamentalists or members of the "academic left." But her statement of belief in science (which I've heard from many other people) isn't rational: it's an affirmation of faith, a credo. Whether "we" really are clever enough to think our way out of the problems we make for ourselves will have to be seen. (I have no such faith myself.) When people, especially scientists, proclaim what Science will do in the future, they are making statements of faith, not reason.

I don't "believe in science" any more than I believe in Christianity; nor do I "believe" in atheism. I don't even "believe" in Reason. I think reason is a useful tool, but like any tool it has its limits, and it's only as good as the premises one starts with. As the saying goes, "Garbage In, Garbage Out." ("Garbage In, Gospel Out," a computer-scientist friend of mine puts it ironically.) Raising Science or Reason to authority is another version of what Religion is for some people: an attempt to escape human limitations and achieve certainty by fiat.

The War on Christmas -- I Can See the Light at the End of the Tunnel

Speaking of people who Just Don't Get It, Mary Elizabeth Williams, a Christian writer for Salon.com, recently wrote an attack on atheists who attack religious faith, in particular those who put up a billboard attacking Christmas:

And as a practicing, questioning Christian, I'm in strong agreement with the belief that church and state should firmly be separated, and with the concept of civil rights for all Americans, regardless of their points of view. Because shoving your beliefs on other people is just plain rude. Do you see where I’m going with this? Whether one unshakably believes in a perfectly swaddled little baby Jesus who arrives precisely on Dec. 25 surrounded by cute donkeys and starstruck shepherds is hardly the point. It's that snotty, oh-just-face-it-you-idiots attitude, that utter certainty, that's just as belligerent coming from an atheist as it from an evangelical.

"Because shoving your beliefs on other people is just plain rude" -- am I alone in seeing the delicious, totally clueless irony in that statement? If this billboard constitutes "shoving your beliefs on other people", then all the pro-"faith" billboards and churches with roadside marquees and Gideon Bibles in motel rooms and Christmas carols on the radio and all the Christian paraphrenalia that permeates our culture is "shoving your beliefs on other people." To say nothing of all the religious advocates, ranging from the Roman Catholic Church to Jim Wallis and Michael Lerner, who are hollering for more god-talk in the public arena, as if it weren't already saturated with it. By any measure, these atheist billboards amount to less than a drop in the bucket by comparison.

And "belligerent"? The whole tone of Williams's post is belligerent, though no doubt she'd say she was provoked. Fair enough, but to allow oneself to be provoked into belligerence goes against two thousand years of Christian theory, though in fairness it conforms perfectly with two thousand years of Christian practice, starting with the frequently intemperate rhetoric of Jesus himself. I guess it's okay for Christians to be righteously belligerent, but not for nonbelievers. Christendom was built on the belief that it's not only legitimate but a moral duty to attack the beliefs of others; Williams should try investigating early Christian history.

For that matter, American Atheists are aware that they're being belligerent, and quite properly unapologetic about it.

Silverman: Here's That War on Christmas You Ordered The Times reports that "Mr. Silverman said the billboard served two purposes. The first was to get the many people who do not actually believe in God but practice religious rituals to 'come out,' in his words ... The billboard also stands up to what Mr. Silverman described as a reactionary assault on atheists driven mainly by the religious right. 'Every year, atheists get blamed for having a war on Christmas, even if we don't do anything,' he said. 'This year, we decided to give the religious right a taste of what war on Christmas looks like.'"

I'd only object that these billboards are hardly even a taste of "what war on Christmas looks like." But baby steps, baby steps.

From the same source, we get some reports of concern trolling:

I Can See This Backfiring, writes Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review. "Ironically, in his desire to out Christians who are just going through seasonal retail motions, [Silverman's] billboard may serve to remind believing Christians of the real reason for the season."

I'm sure Ms. Lopez would just hate to see anything like that happen. Oh, and What About Teh Children?

Does It Have to Be So Confrontational? wonders Fox anchor Megyn Kelly. In a mostly amiable interview with Silverman, Kelly asks, "Why impose your belief on a big billboard when the little kids drive by? It's in a place that gets a ton of visibility." Silverman replies, "We're allowed to express our views, just like all the churches are allowed to express their views on billboards."

I wouldn't expect any less from Fox News, the network that fought in court for its right to lie to you, but isn't it surprising that so many people have trouble grasping what freedom of expression (to say nothing of freedom of religion) means? Well, no, I guess not.

On the other hand, "reason" doesn't have much to do with any of this. How do you "celebrate Reason," and what's reasonable about that? For that matter, why not put up billboards debunking the myth of Santa Claus? (That might get American Atheists in trouble with the business community, a more fearsome opponent than the community of faith.) I also remember seeing one atheist blogger denouncing the erection of billboards touting belief, but that was before these atheist groups started doing the same thing, so I guess it was different, and anyway that was ancient times; we have to look to the future!

My objection to the fetishization of Reason by so many atheists and self-declared skeptics is that they are generally unaware of how much unreason and mythology they themselves subscribe to, and don't do actual reasoning very well. Take this interesting paragraph from a mostly pretty good rebuttal to a Christian from the Toronto National Post:

It’s not atheists who use ancient books to lecture and sometimes legislate people on how to live. It’s not atheists who fight over a divided Jerusalem nor who taught my French Canadian mother-in-law that the more miserable a life she lived the more she would be rewarded in death. It’s not atheists who can rally a crowd to stone a woman for being a rape victim. And while non believers likely try to pass critical thinking on to their children they don’t send them to weekly lectures about atheism and tell them they are bad if they don’t learn to parrot their parents’ beliefs.

Oh, really? Atheists are a varied lot, but some of us do use ancient books (Plato and others) to lecture and sometimes legislate people on how to live. As for fighting over a divided Jerusalem, let us not forget that the Zionists who built the modern state of Israel, in full knowledge that they were displacing the people who already lived there, were mostly fiercely secular and often Socialist Jews; blaming the Palestinian resistance to their dispossession on religion is fundamentally dishonest. Given the history of scientific racism, it's also disingenuous to blame social injustice solely on religion: scientific rationalists have been all too happy to take up the task of keeping the lowly in their place, if not for God then for Natural Selection and the good of the Race. Women and homosexuals have not always found Science to be our friend, nor Religion always to be our enemy. (Not surprising, since neither Science nor Religion has any inherent moral content.)
As for "pass[ing] critical thinking on to their children," you have to know how to do it before you can pass it on to anyone else. And most atheists are not, as far as I can tell, any better at critical thinking than most religious believers; I sometimes think they're worse, since so many assume that not believing in gods automatically makes you rational, and that's the kind of belief that makes people stupid. Waving "reason" around as a buzzword is not importantly different from waving "faith" around. Better than celebrating reason is trying to practice it well, and that's a lot harder to do.