Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech: we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We understand that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” isn’t really about a cockroach. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We grasp that the right piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values, and that setting fire to such a flag is a highly charged act. We can learn that a certain combination of sounds put together by Tchaikovsky represents Napoleon getting his butt kicked just outside Moscow. And that the name “Napoleon,” in this case, represents thousands and thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Metaphors and the brain
This Is Your Brain on Metaphors:
Sunday, November 14, 2010
The Stupid! It Burns! (Satanic edition)
A little burning stupidity from "down under." (No, not Australia, Hell itself!)Man up, (so-called) atheists
Atheists disappoint me. [Awwwwww, I'm sowwy.] ...
[I]s the Stiefel Freethought Foundation, which is just a bunch of atheists, really about free thought? Are they free to think about ME? [Yes. They think you're an idiot*.] ...
I also hate religion! And let’s fight their religious bigotry with our own religious big. . . uh, big. . . big signs! That’s it, big signs! [As opposed to what, a blog post that will be read by ones of people?]
First of all, no one believes you. You know why not? Because GOD EXISTS you nitwits!
Hello! Have you not ever looked around you at the world? Ever since its creation (and I was there!), God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. Come on, my (so-called) atheist friends, you are without excuse here! Going around saying God does not exist is like going around saying creation doesn’t exist. Do you also look at fine art and conclude no painter existed? Do you look at a novel and say no author existed? Of course not. [Ray Comfort with horns! Is the pineapple proof of Satanic power?] ...
But do people go around writing books about teapots not existing? The Teapot Delusion? The Teapot is not Great? Is there a “free thinker” group whose mission it is to ensure separation of teapots and state? [We would if the teapot believers were flying planes into buildings.] ...
I know you new atheists. And I know that you are not really atheists. You are theists just like me. But just like me, you hate God. [Don'tcha just love it when people tell you what you think?]
*Not really; I have no idea what they think. Probably nothing. But if they did think about this guy, I'm pretty confident what they would think.
The whole post could be sarcastic. <shrugs> If so, I'm well and truly duped.
Do atheist activists poison everything?
A article at StateReligionVIC provocatively asks, "Do atheist activists poison everything?" The article more precisely asks, "Does being antagonistic toward religion compromise human rights?" The answer to this question depends critically on how we interpret the human right of freedom of religion. On an abstract interpretation, antagonism toward religion does not compromise human rights.
Normally, to condemn something, as atheist activists do in fact condemn religion, is implicitly to demand that it should be illegal. If I say that people should not kill each other, or steal each others' stuff, or that banks should not take excessive risks with their depositors' money, then I'm saying we should take coercive measures, either proactively to prevent the activity or retroactively to punish it. It usually doesn't make any sense to say, "This or that is bad, but if you want to do it, go ahead." At first glance the author is raising a valid objection.
There are, however, exceptions to this interpretation. The most important exception follows from the understanding that the government — the collection of institutions that have a near-monopoly on the use of coercive force — is not just a completely neutral third party. People in government (and those who control the government, be it the ruling class or the majority) have their own personal and institutional interests, some of which they can fulfill only to the detriment of the interests of people in general. In such cases we might condemn some activity but also not want the government to enforce that condemnation, not because the activity itself shouldn't be — in a perfect world — coercively prohibited, but because we cannot determine how the government could do so without also having the power to implement its own interests to the detriment of our own.
The position of anti-religious atheists such as myself, who are also secularists, is that the fundamental human right of freedom of religion, i.e. legal secularism, is just such a "negative" right. The purpose of this right is not to establish and protect a good, but rather to prevent a greater evil. We support legal secularism not because we believe religion is a good that must be protected, but rather because we cannot think of a way for the government to stop people from being religious without also giving them the right to be arbitrarily tyrannical. Support for legal secularism has everything to do with the inherent limitations of government and nothing to do with the positive value of religion.
For this reason, you will often see an apparently "schizophrenic" attitude toward religion, especially minority religions such as Islam in the United States. On the one hand, we see nothing at all good about the religion. Even where the religion or religious leaders espouse some good belief, some moral standard we approve of, it's just as bad or worse to espouse a good belief for bad reasons; indeed what makes a reason bad is not that it leads only to bad beliefs, but because it can justify any belief, good or bad. On the other hand, attempts by the government to coercively prohibit or marginalize religious belief are worse than the religion. If the government can prohibit a religious belief, it gains powers that can be used to suppress dissent and democratic debate. So we will often condemn Islam in one breath and in the next vigorously support the "ground-zero mosque." Even if the Park51 Muslim community center were a public relations mistake, it is a mistake that is its owners to make, not ours to prevent.
We can find an eloquent expression of this meta-principle in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, regarding freedom of speech. Mill does not argue that freedom of speech exists because every opinion is itself good. He argues, rather, that we must have to subject all ideas to criticism. It is only by public criticism and analysis that we can separate good ideas from bad.
The case for freedom of religion is different than the case for freedom of speech. What is similar, however, is the idea that a universal right can operate on a meta-level. Just as Mill makes clear that we need freedom of speech not because every opinion is good at the literal, "concrete" level and should be encouraged and promoted, but rather because we must protect the abstract meta-level of open discourse. In much the same sense, anti-religious atheists support secularism not because any religion is good at the literal level, but because the suppression of religion is bad at the abstract meta-level. I can criticize and condemn at the literal level some racist, Nazi screed, call it not only mistaken or false but also despicable and contemptible, yet not compromise in the least the abstract principle of free speech. Indeed the principle of free speech exists so I can condemn speech I consider abhorrent. In just the same sense, I can condemn at the literal level any religion, even the idea of religion without compromising in the least the abstract principle of freedom of religion.
We can therefore conclude that criticism of or antagonism towards religion at the concrete level does not compromise the abstract principle of freedom of religion. The only available counter-argument is that the freedom of religion is not an abstract principle; it operates, rather, at the literal level. For example, the right to personal property operates at the literal level, the ownership of personal property is itself good, and must be protected for its own sake. One could argue, therefore, that anti-religious atheists really are compromising an important human right, because being religious is itself good. But that's a different argument. Construed as an abstract principle, freedom of religion exists as much to facilitate criticism and outright antagonism as well as the practice and belief of religion.
Abstract principles often create apparent contradictions. For example, freedom of speech affords the opportunity to criticize freedom of speech itself, to call for government or social censorship. On the one hand, because freedom of speech is nearly absolute such speech is definitely protected. On the other hand, such speech seems to violate the "spirit" of the principle. It is — if not logically contradictory — at least hypocritical to demand universal free-speech protection to call for the compromise of freedom of speech. We have an intuition that implicitly or explicitly attacking the abstract principle itself is illegitimate in a sense different from the negative qualities of bad ideas in general. It is one thing to claim, "Your idea is wrong, mistaken, odious, or abhorrent;" it seems quite another thing to demand, "Because this idea is wrong, you should not speak it." The first is only an exercise of free speech; the second an attack on not just the speech but the principle of free speech itself. Both statements are technically protected; but we can criticize the second in a way we cannot criticize the first. In the first case if we believe the criticism is correct, we have nothing to say about it. In the second case, we might agree with the underlying criticism (we might agree that the idea really is wrong) yet still criticize the speech: we should not demand that anyone remain silent. Right or wrong, put your idea out there so the world can criticize it.
The StateReligionVIC post might be similarly illegitimate. If we see freedom of religion in the abstract sense, it is illegitimate to demand anti-religious forego our own abstract freedom of "religion", i.e. the freedom to argue that religions are harmful. Again it is important to distinguish criticism of our position from the claim that merely stating our position by itself compromises a human right. Just criticizing our position — just saying that we were somehow mistaken in our estimation of religion, or that the author disagrees with our position — would be entirely legitimate. But the StateReligionVIC article seems to say that just the activity of being "antagonistic" to religion by itself compromises an important human right. To make this criticism stick, the article would have to argue the direct claim that freedom of religion exists because religion itself is good.
But the article itself does not even make that claim, much less argue it. The article argues for the value of religious tolerance, not the value of religion: the article states that atheist and anti-religious blogger P. Z. Myers "seems very oblivious to central role that religious tolerance plays in a pluralist society," arguing for the value of religious tolerance, not religion itself. The article also observes that it's difficult to determine precisely what constitutes "religion."
The article makes other arguments, but none of them state, imply or argue the critical minor premise that religion itself is good. For example, the article views advocacy for a society free from religion "as a personal opinion, that can not and should not be advocated as public policy or law." The article does not, however, actually cite any instances where this personal opinion actually is advocated as a public policy or law. It chides some commenters for an unsupported opinion, that "calling the people at ACCESS Ministry 'awful people' was not as useful as saying something specific about what they were doing wrong and why it was wrong." Even if absolutely correct, this criticism fails to go to the initial claim. The author objects to his or her treatment by atheist and anti-religious blogger P. Z. Myers and commenters on his site. But again, even if it were correct, this criticism fails to address the claim. Nothing in the article argues for a literal interpretation of "freedom of religion" over an abstract interpretation.
Not only does the article fail to argue for a literal interpretation, it explicitly calls for anti-religious atheists to censor themselves.
Anti-religious atheists engage in analysis and criticism. We do not, on the whole, advocate anti-religion as a matter of public policy or law, or advocate coercive measures. With the exception of Sam Harris, who states, "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them,"* a position that has received considerable criticism**, anti-religious atheists confine ourselves to substantive criticism and condemnation of religion itself, its content; we refrain on principle from advocating coercive measures to eliminate religion. We are in exactly the same position regarding freedom of religion as anyone who condemns The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kampf as not merely false but also odious and abhorrent. It would be one thing if accommodationists such as the author of the StateReligionVIC article were to criticize or condemn our position or arguments for being false, mistaken or inherently odious; to argue in effect that freedom of religion literally and directly protects religion as itself good. But it is hypocritical to demand that we refrain from criticizing religion because criticism is itself "intolerant", because it violates the abstract principle that religion not be subject to coercion. The first would, I would argue, be simply mistaken; the second demand is itself odious and abhorrent, a violation of the very principle it seeks to uphold.
Normally, to condemn something, as atheist activists do in fact condemn religion, is implicitly to demand that it should be illegal. If I say that people should not kill each other, or steal each others' stuff, or that banks should not take excessive risks with their depositors' money, then I'm saying we should take coercive measures, either proactively to prevent the activity or retroactively to punish it. It usually doesn't make any sense to say, "This or that is bad, but if you want to do it, go ahead." At first glance the author is raising a valid objection.
There are, however, exceptions to this interpretation. The most important exception follows from the understanding that the government — the collection of institutions that have a near-monopoly on the use of coercive force — is not just a completely neutral third party. People in government (and those who control the government, be it the ruling class or the majority) have their own personal and institutional interests, some of which they can fulfill only to the detriment of the interests of people in general. In such cases we might condemn some activity but also not want the government to enforce that condemnation, not because the activity itself shouldn't be — in a perfect world — coercively prohibited, but because we cannot determine how the government could do so without also having the power to implement its own interests to the detriment of our own.
The position of anti-religious atheists such as myself, who are also secularists, is that the fundamental human right of freedom of religion, i.e. legal secularism, is just such a "negative" right. The purpose of this right is not to establish and protect a good, but rather to prevent a greater evil. We support legal secularism not because we believe religion is a good that must be protected, but rather because we cannot think of a way for the government to stop people from being religious without also giving them the right to be arbitrarily tyrannical. Support for legal secularism has everything to do with the inherent limitations of government and nothing to do with the positive value of religion.
For this reason, you will often see an apparently "schizophrenic" attitude toward religion, especially minority religions such as Islam in the United States. On the one hand, we see nothing at all good about the religion. Even where the religion or religious leaders espouse some good belief, some moral standard we approve of, it's just as bad or worse to espouse a good belief for bad reasons; indeed what makes a reason bad is not that it leads only to bad beliefs, but because it can justify any belief, good or bad. On the other hand, attempts by the government to coercively prohibit or marginalize religious belief are worse than the religion. If the government can prohibit a religious belief, it gains powers that can be used to suppress dissent and democratic debate. So we will often condemn Islam in one breath and in the next vigorously support the "ground-zero mosque." Even if the Park51 Muslim community center were a public relations mistake, it is a mistake that is its owners to make, not ours to prevent.
We can find an eloquent expression of this meta-principle in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, regarding freedom of speech. Mill does not argue that freedom of speech exists because every opinion is itself good. He argues, rather, that we must have to subject all ideas to criticism. It is only by public criticism and analysis that we can separate good ideas from bad.
But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.We can also add, according to Hegel and Marx, the idea that the collision of thesis and antithesis can produce a new synthesis; whenever we suppress the antithesis to the thesis of common belief, we lose the opportunity to generate a synthesis, new knowledge and new belief.
The case for freedom of religion is different than the case for freedom of speech. What is similar, however, is the idea that a universal right can operate on a meta-level. Just as Mill makes clear that we need freedom of speech not because every opinion is good at the literal, "concrete" level and should be encouraged and promoted, but rather because we must protect the abstract meta-level of open discourse. In much the same sense, anti-religious atheists support secularism not because any religion is good at the literal level, but because the suppression of religion is bad at the abstract meta-level. I can criticize and condemn at the literal level some racist, Nazi screed, call it not only mistaken or false but also despicable and contemptible, yet not compromise in the least the abstract principle of free speech. Indeed the principle of free speech exists so I can condemn speech I consider abhorrent. In just the same sense, I can condemn at the literal level any religion, even the idea of religion without compromising in the least the abstract principle of freedom of religion.
We can therefore conclude that criticism of or antagonism towards religion at the concrete level does not compromise the abstract principle of freedom of religion. The only available counter-argument is that the freedom of religion is not an abstract principle; it operates, rather, at the literal level. For example, the right to personal property operates at the literal level, the ownership of personal property is itself good, and must be protected for its own sake. One could argue, therefore, that anti-religious atheists really are compromising an important human right, because being religious is itself good. But that's a different argument. Construed as an abstract principle, freedom of religion exists as much to facilitate criticism and outright antagonism as well as the practice and belief of religion.
Abstract principles often create apparent contradictions. For example, freedom of speech affords the opportunity to criticize freedom of speech itself, to call for government or social censorship. On the one hand, because freedom of speech is nearly absolute such speech is definitely protected. On the other hand, such speech seems to violate the "spirit" of the principle. It is — if not logically contradictory — at least hypocritical to demand universal free-speech protection to call for the compromise of freedom of speech. We have an intuition that implicitly or explicitly attacking the abstract principle itself is illegitimate in a sense different from the negative qualities of bad ideas in general. It is one thing to claim, "Your idea is wrong, mistaken, odious, or abhorrent;" it seems quite another thing to demand, "Because this idea is wrong, you should not speak it." The first is only an exercise of free speech; the second an attack on not just the speech but the principle of free speech itself. Both statements are technically protected; but we can criticize the second in a way we cannot criticize the first. In the first case if we believe the criticism is correct, we have nothing to say about it. In the second case, we might agree with the underlying criticism (we might agree that the idea really is wrong) yet still criticize the speech: we should not demand that anyone remain silent. Right or wrong, put your idea out there so the world can criticize it.
The StateReligionVIC post might be similarly illegitimate. If we see freedom of religion in the abstract sense, it is illegitimate to demand anti-religious forego our own abstract freedom of "religion", i.e. the freedom to argue that religions are harmful. Again it is important to distinguish criticism of our position from the claim that merely stating our position by itself compromises a human right. Just criticizing our position — just saying that we were somehow mistaken in our estimation of religion, or that the author disagrees with our position — would be entirely legitimate. But the StateReligionVIC article seems to say that just the activity of being "antagonistic" to religion by itself compromises an important human right. To make this criticism stick, the article would have to argue the direct claim that freedom of religion exists because religion itself is good.
But the article itself does not even make that claim, much less argue it. The article argues for the value of religious tolerance, not the value of religion: the article states that atheist and anti-religious blogger P. Z. Myers "seems very oblivious to central role that religious tolerance plays in a pluralist society," arguing for the value of religious tolerance, not religion itself. The article also observes that it's difficult to determine precisely what constitutes "religion."
[W]ithin the realm of human rights, it is extremely difficult to determine [what] the proper scope of the freedoms of conscience, of belief, and of religion are and to identify those freedoms in a general and versatile manner for all citizens.I agree! Thus the principle must be seen in the abstract: we protect freedom of religion regardless of religions' merits, because governments cannot even identify, much less consistently evaluate, religious belief. But these problems are benign regarding private criticism, without the coercive power of "public policy or law." If private criticism misidentifies some behavior, it is simply mistaken, not directly harmful in the same sense that mis-identification or vagueness is directly harmful in public policy and law.
The article makes other arguments, but none of them state, imply or argue the critical minor premise that religion itself is good. For example, the article views advocacy for a society free from religion "as a personal opinion, that can not and should not be advocated as public policy or law." The article does not, however, actually cite any instances where this personal opinion actually is advocated as a public policy or law. It chides some commenters for an unsupported opinion, that "calling the people at ACCESS Ministry 'awful people' was not as useful as saying something specific about what they were doing wrong and why it was wrong." Even if absolutely correct, this criticism fails to go to the initial claim. The author objects to his or her treatment by atheist and anti-religious blogger P. Z. Myers and commenters on his site. But again, even if it were correct, this criticism fails to address the claim. Nothing in the article argues for a literal interpretation of "freedom of religion" over an abstract interpretation.
Not only does the article fail to argue for a literal interpretation, it explicitly calls for anti-religious atheists to censor themselves.
In the course of my comments on the school religion issues, I pointed out that I thought PZ Myers would be useful to point out how ICCOREIS statements about evolution exposed their anti science bias, and that the St. James crew didn't want to confront them on this ... so this was an example of how PZ could be "useful" ...The demand that someone else should say something is just as censorious, compromises freedom just as deeply, as the demand that we should not say something. It is the author himself who is at least demanding we compromising our own human rights, the fundamental right to engage in the discussion of religion according to our own agenda, not any Christian's, Muslim's, or Buddhist's or any accommodationist's agenda.
On the issue of religion in schools I find myself continually begging people who are against the current situation, to use language that makes more sense to people who are not anti religious...
Anti-religious atheists engage in analysis and criticism. We do not, on the whole, advocate anti-religion as a matter of public policy or law, or advocate coercive measures. With the exception of Sam Harris, who states, "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them,"* a position that has received considerable criticism**, anti-religious atheists confine ourselves to substantive criticism and condemnation of religion itself, its content; we refrain on principle from advocating coercive measures to eliminate religion. We are in exactly the same position regarding freedom of religion as anyone who condemns The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kampf as not merely false but also odious and abhorrent. It would be one thing if accommodationists such as the author of the StateReligionVIC article were to criticize or condemn our position or arguments for being false, mistaken or inherently odious; to argue in effect that freedom of religion literally and directly protects religion as itself good. But it is hypocritical to demand that we refrain from criticizing religion because criticism is itself "intolerant", because it violates the abstract principle that religion not be subject to coercion. The first would, I would argue, be simply mistaken; the second demand is itself odious and abhorrent, a violation of the very principle it seeks to uphold.
*The End of Faith, pp. 52-53
**See e.g. Tom Flynn, 2005. "Glimpses of Nirvana." Free Inquiry, volume 25 number 2
Saturday, November 13, 2010
The Stupid! It Burns! (moral edition)
The stupidity is flowing thick and fast this weekend! Stop It, You're Giving Us a Bad Name:
The normal shorthand way that Americans proclaim that they adhere to a standardized moral code regarding their treatment of other people is to acknowlege membership in a religion. If you don't have such a membership, sensible people will rightly wonder whether you have ANY moral code. Until you convice them that you do, folks have a right to be a little leery of dealing with you.
In my America, the normal shorthand way we proclaim we adhere to a standardized moral code is to call ourselves law-abiding taxpayers.
The author is himself an atheist, proudly in the closet. (He calls anyone out of the closet an "asshole".) It really is true: sometimes an atheist is someone with just one fewer stupid idea than a theist.
The Stupid! It Burns! (willfully stupid edition)
How not to do atheism: The lesser kind of atheist writers have been trying for some centuries to compile lists of “bible difficulties”. They would like us to believe that, if they can find or invent anything which looks like a contradiction, by whatever combination of ingenuity or wilful stupidity, in a library of books written over a period of several centuries and copied by hand — especially a numerical difference, and we all know how reliable is the copying of numerals in ancient texts –, then that proves … well, what? They get quite hazy about what it proves, specifically, other than that “the bible is not true”.
The Stupid! It Burns! (shoot yourself in the foot edition)
Wow. I'm reading an otherwise well-written and reasonably intelligent essay until I hit this gem of stupidity in the footnotes, which completely undermines the entire article. A Theology of Disbelief: Women, Religion, and Atheism
Feel free to argue with me until you’re blue in the face, but New Atheism is as much a religious movement as fundamentalist Christianity. Even without a specific unifying doctrine of beliefs and a codified church law and no tax exempt status, new atheism is what scholars call a “quasi-religion” like Marxism.I'd argue with the author (actually, that's not really necessary, since she herself supplies without rebuttal a fairly persuasive argument against her own position, but she explicitly says she's impervious to reason, that she will hold her belief no matter what.
Sorry, Meg: you shot yourself in the foot and displayed your fundamental lack of intellectual integrity.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Unpacking the question
Rule #1: NEVER blithely answer a question. Before you answer any question, ALWAYS determine what the question actually means. This rule is especially true in philosophy* and politics, but as Miller shows us, it's important in science as well. It is more important to ask good questions than to come up with answers; indeed I claim that you cannot get a good answer to a bad question; I claim also that when you've asked a good question, the answer — or at least how to find the answer — will be clear.
We had a discussion the other day in Political Science class that illustrates this principle perfectly. The instructor essentially asked: who is greedier, the person who has a lot, or the person who doesn't have a lot, but undeservedly wants more? The discussion quickly moved to the question: what determines a person's social and material outcome, the choices he makes or the environment he grew up in? Both questions, however, are vague, and depend enormously on different kinds of underlying premises; they depend as well on the kind of social and political questions that the answer would itself underlie as a premise.
The discussion of the second question more-or-less took on a "nature/nurture" character. What determines a person's choices: his "innate" decision-making cognitive apparatus or the environmental influences on that apparatus? As Miller notes, however, the ordinary discourse about this question is scientifically incoherent; it's not the sort of question that can be answered scientifically, even in theory. When you have multiple-factor causation, and especially when the different factors don't just influence the outcome but influence each other, assigning degrees of causality to the different factors is not logically possible. Outcomes are, rather, the result of emergent properties of the multiple-factor system, and a superficial reduction loses the interaction between the factors. There are a lot of interesting scientific questions we can ask of multiple-factor causation; Miller offers the example, "How much of the variation in a given human trait is due to genetic variation between individuals of a population?" We could translate this question into the context: How much of the variation in social outcome is due to variation in the individuals' choices? But this, of course, is not the sort of question that we can reasonably expect an answer from a bunch of freshmen in an Intro to Poli Sci class.
We want to use the answers to questions about the underlying causality of social outcome to answer questions about social and political policy: how can we most effectively change social outcomes? What properties of social outcomes do we want to change? If we do change one property of social outcomes, what other properties can we predict will also change, and how do we feel about those changes? How can we detect and respond to indirect changes that we can't predict? And even: should we change social outcomes at all? The last question brings us around to the first question posed in class, which can be recast as: is it morally right to for an individual to receive a social outcome he does not deserve?
We're a little closer, I think, to seeing the important underlying questions we really want to answer. I'll try to ask them explicitly in another post, and maybe try to even answer some of them.
*It's arguable that philosophy consists almost exclusively of determining what questions mean and is almost entirely unconcerned with actually answering them.
We had a discussion the other day in Political Science class that illustrates this principle perfectly. The instructor essentially asked: who is greedier, the person who has a lot, or the person who doesn't have a lot, but undeservedly wants more? The discussion quickly moved to the question: what determines a person's social and material outcome, the choices he makes or the environment he grew up in? Both questions, however, are vague, and depend enormously on different kinds of underlying premises; they depend as well on the kind of social and political questions that the answer would itself underlie as a premise.
The discussion of the second question more-or-less took on a "nature/nurture" character. What determines a person's choices: his "innate" decision-making cognitive apparatus or the environmental influences on that apparatus? As Miller notes, however, the ordinary discourse about this question is scientifically incoherent; it's not the sort of question that can be answered scientifically, even in theory. When you have multiple-factor causation, and especially when the different factors don't just influence the outcome but influence each other, assigning degrees of causality to the different factors is not logically possible. Outcomes are, rather, the result of emergent properties of the multiple-factor system, and a superficial reduction loses the interaction between the factors. There are a lot of interesting scientific questions we can ask of multiple-factor causation; Miller offers the example, "How much of the variation in a given human trait is due to genetic variation between individuals of a population?" We could translate this question into the context: How much of the variation in social outcome is due to variation in the individuals' choices? But this, of course, is not the sort of question that we can reasonably expect an answer from a bunch of freshmen in an Intro to Poli Sci class.
We want to use the answers to questions about the underlying causality of social outcome to answer questions about social and political policy: how can we most effectively change social outcomes? What properties of social outcomes do we want to change? If we do change one property of social outcomes, what other properties can we predict will also change, and how do we feel about those changes? How can we detect and respond to indirect changes that we can't predict? And even: should we change social outcomes at all? The last question brings us around to the first question posed in class, which can be recast as: is it morally right to for an individual to receive a social outcome he does not deserve?
We're a little closer, I think, to seeing the important underlying questions we really want to answer. I'll try to ask them explicitly in another post, and maybe try to even answer some of them.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
The Stupid! It Burns! (absolute transcendent edition)
Why You and I Can’t Understand Atheists In fact denialism is pathological in the rationale of Atheism. It is really the only defense against first principles based, transcendent logic. Such absolutist logic can only be denied, not disproved, and this is just what Nietzsche did in his support of Athesim. But most Atheists don't delve that deeply into the philosophy of their own beliefs, because there is no need to examine a personal truth construct for validity if one actually believes it.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
And all of the children are above average
In The Election That Wasn't, Thomas Friedman approves of Lawrence Katz' assertion that "Everyone today... needs to think of himself as an 'artisan.'" Not a terrible idea in itself, but Friedman concludes that "...just doing your job in an average way... will lead to below-average wages. Sadly, average is over. We’re in the age of 'extra,' and everyone has to figure out what extra they can add to their work to justify being paid more than a computer, a Chinese worker or a day laborer." This conclusion a pervasive — and pernicious — capitalist moral standard, a moral standard that any future communist society would have more difficulty overcoming than it would actually defeating the capitalist class.
When skill and ability is normally distributed, half of all people are below average. Always. By definition. It is one thing to say we must become "artisans," that we all become become more skilled in absolute terms, but it is quite another thing to say that only those with above average skills can expect anything more than below average wages. And in a capitalist economy, "below average" is newspeak for subsistence wages, only enough to support the bare minimum of survival, never mind "luxuries" such as decent dental care or the education necessary to participate in a democracy.
We read this article in my Economics class yesterday. My instructor maintains that Friedman is speaking metaphorically in his conclusion, but I think he's speaking literally. There really is a disproportionate weighting relative to the distribution of ability and skill towards the high end of the scale: the average wage is substantially higher than the median wage. We see this way of thinking all over the place, from the tendency of upper-middle class people comparing themselves to the ultra-rich and feeling poor, to Joel Spolsky's business model of hiring only the best of the best.
This way of thinking — the idea that those who are only average "deserve" below average wages — matches reality to a certain extent. Productivity is not directly proportional to skill, it's proportional to some power of the skill. A worker who is twice as skilled as another will produce not just twice as much but four times as much as the other. This relationship underlies the 80-20 rule of thumb: 20% of the workers produce 80% of the output. So the idea that the most skilled workers in any field are disproportionally rewarded is in a certain sense "fair".
Without commenting on the "macro-ethics" of capitalism, under economic conditions where there's value in going balls to the wall to increase our economic productivity, to increase productivity an order of magnitude faster than the population is increasing, this particular "micro-ethical" sense of fairness is almost guaranteed to be selected for*. Any economic ecology that identifies the most skilled people and encourages them to work as hard as possible will have an enormous selective advantage versus those that do not do so.
But economic conditions have changed. We no longer need to improve our productivity as fast as possible. We no longer want want to improve our productivity as fast as possible. And we physically cannot improve our productivity — especially our productivity of physical things — as fast as possible.
We have enough "stuff" — enough food, enough clothing, enough housing, enough electricity, enough medical and dental care, even enough televisions, DVD players and computers — for everyone in the world. Or, more precisely, we have the capacity to produce and physically distribute enough stuff for everyone. We have the capacity right now for everyone on the planet to live in a degree of physical comfort. I'm not saying that we shouldn't ever produce more stuff, or better stuff, but we are no longer facing the pressure of desperate poverty to improve our productivity as much as possible.
I don't want more stuff; indeed I want a lot less stuff than I used to want. I don't think I'm alone in this opinion. Everywhere I look, even those who want more stuff seem to be growing more desperately absurd and contrived. I've reduced my spending (and income) almost an order of magnitude, from the low six figures to the low five figures. I don't want a 3,000 square foot house in the suburbs. I don't want a new car every two years to drive more than an hour a day in increasingly congested traffic to get to work. I don't want the latest smart phone, iPad, or electric back-scratcher. I don't want more processed food, processed entertainment or processed opinions. I don't want more stuff; I'm tired of stuff; I'm tired of chasing after stuff. My life is better now with less stuff than it was two years ago when I had tons of stuff.
I don't want more stuff. I want better medical care and especially better dental care, but most of all I want to learn and I want to participate. The greatest technological development of the 21st century, the development that has given me the most reward and satisfaction, is Wikipedia, that has put all the knowledge of the (English-speaking) world at my fingertips. For free*. I don't want a dozen $500,000/year Harvard professors to tell me what job I should do and how much I should get paid, I want to learn about economics myself. I don't want to pay $20 to see professional actors in a $200,000,000 movie, I want a community theater where I can act. I don't want to watch two dozen steroid-crazed gorillas mauling each other on TV, I want to actually play soccer with a bunch of other out-of-shape middle aged folks. I don't want to watch, I want to do.
We physically cannot produce more stuff We are running into physical limitations on the production of stuff: pollution, global warming, garbage, the energy required to move stuff around. If we keep producing stuff, and especially if we keep producing more and more stuff, we're going to drown in our own shit. Not in a thousand years, either, but tomorrow.
There's a kind of perversity in the present-day capitalist system. I believe that human beings are fundamentally morally good. I think that underlying capitalism — explaining and even to a certain extent excusing its immorality and exploitation — has been a feeling that it's fundamentally good to do everything in our power to respond to the desperate poverty and unimaginable suffering of the hundreds of thousands of years of humanity's mere economic subsistence. There is a belief — righteous, I think — that the three-century-long project to improve our material well-being has been worth all the sacrifices and excesses of the capitalist system. Worth it or not, here we are, with such a monumental productive capacity that we can today produce more in a year than the the the entire pre-capitalist world produced for all of recorded history. But because this response to desperate poverty is so ingrained, when we are on the verge of actually eliminating poverty, we are reluctant to do so, for fear of eliminating our primary motivation.
We do not rationally construct our ethical beliefs; our ethical beliefs evolve. The idea of concentrating reward for the most productive people evolved because it worked to increase our productive capacity as fast as possible. But we don't really think about why an ethical belief evolved; we tend to think about our ethical beliefs as intrinsically valid, not instrumentally valid. Under specific environmental circumstances we evolved an ethical predisposition to increase our productivity as fast as possible in order to alleviate poverty. But because the ethical belief evolved — because we did not consciously construct it — we have come to believe that increasing productivity, especially for the production of physical goods, is intrinsically good. And therefore we see any retreat from that impulse to increase productivity, or any belief that would even permit a retreat, as intrinsically bad, lazy, useless, wasteful, without regard to the underlying why.
The last three recessions have hinted at the increasing disconnect between our foundational "capitalist" ethical beliefs and the actual material conditions of global society. We recovered from earlier recessions by eliminating production of stuff we didn't want and then using the available labor to increase the production of more and better stuff, stuff we actually needed and wanted. But except for the construction of the internet and cell-phone infrastructure (which are only a small fraction of GDP) the last three recoveries have not been driven by reallocation of production, but by finding new and creative ways to create financial bubbles. We recovered from the 1991 recession by creating a stock-market bubble; we recovered from the 2001 recession by creating a housing bubble; and — lacking a suitable vehicle to create a financial bubble — we have not yet truly recovered from the 2008 recession. In each of the last three recessions, the fall in unemployment has lagged further behind recovery in GDP growth, indicating that the recovery is not being driven by effective reallocation of employment. Indeed, we have seen an increasing fraction of GDP transferred to financial services, services arguably without any actual social utility. We aren't even trying to efficiently allocate our labor anymore; we seem instead to be flailing around to more effectively allocate demand... and failing to do so.
The observation that the exceptional receive a disproportionate reward is obvious, and has been around since the beginning of recorded history. It is only recently that we have been able to push the unexceptional out of sight, in ghettos and mostly in other countries, that we have been able to pretend that "everyone" (at least everyone we can see) deserves a basic level of comfort and dignity that has for most of recorded history truly been available only to a privileged few. With globalization, the pointy end of this inequality has returned to our own shores.
And fundamentally, I object to Friedman's conclusion not because it's wrong, but because it's too limited. Friedman is "right" within his own tiny little box of the capitalist ethos, but the box itself has become too small, too ill-fitting to today's world. It is the ethos of the 19th century, when the vast majority of the population was called upon to sacrifice their lives and labor for the benefit of their great-grandchildren. Perhaps this sacrifice was unjust, perhaps we could have achieved the same result without so much misery, exploitation and suffering, but they did in fact make that sacrifice. We ourselves, however, are those great-grandchildren they made that sacrifice for. It is time now to enjoy that sacrifice, to let everyone live in the comfort and dignity we can because of that sacrifice now enjoy, and to work on making the world better instead of more productive.
When skill and ability is normally distributed, half of all people are below average. Always. By definition. It is one thing to say we must become "artisans," that we all become become more skilled in absolute terms, but it is quite another thing to say that only those with above average skills can expect anything more than below average wages. And in a capitalist economy, "below average" is newspeak for subsistence wages, only enough to support the bare minimum of survival, never mind "luxuries" such as decent dental care or the education necessary to participate in a democracy.
We read this article in my Economics class yesterday. My instructor maintains that Friedman is speaking metaphorically in his conclusion, but I think he's speaking literally. There really is a disproportionate weighting relative to the distribution of ability and skill towards the high end of the scale: the average wage is substantially higher than the median wage. We see this way of thinking all over the place, from the tendency of upper-middle class people comparing themselves to the ultra-rich and feeling poor, to Joel Spolsky's business model of hiring only the best of the best.
This way of thinking — the idea that those who are only average "deserve" below average wages — matches reality to a certain extent. Productivity is not directly proportional to skill, it's proportional to some power of the skill. A worker who is twice as skilled as another will produce not just twice as much but four times as much as the other. This relationship underlies the 80-20 rule of thumb: 20% of the workers produce 80% of the output. So the idea that the most skilled workers in any field are disproportionally rewarded is in a certain sense "fair".
Without commenting on the "macro-ethics" of capitalism, under economic conditions where there's value in going balls to the wall to increase our economic productivity, to increase productivity an order of magnitude faster than the population is increasing, this particular "micro-ethical" sense of fairness is almost guaranteed to be selected for*. Any economic ecology that identifies the most skilled people and encourages them to work as hard as possible will have an enormous selective advantage versus those that do not do so.
*More precisely, any other behavior will be selected against.
But economic conditions have changed. We no longer need to improve our productivity as fast as possible. We no longer want want to improve our productivity as fast as possible. And we physically cannot improve our productivity — especially our productivity of physical things — as fast as possible.
We have enough "stuff" — enough food, enough clothing, enough housing, enough electricity, enough medical and dental care, even enough televisions, DVD players and computers — for everyone in the world. Or, more precisely, we have the capacity to produce and physically distribute enough stuff for everyone. We have the capacity right now for everyone on the planet to live in a degree of physical comfort. I'm not saying that we shouldn't ever produce more stuff, or better stuff, but we are no longer facing the pressure of desperate poverty to improve our productivity as much as possible.
I don't want more stuff; indeed I want a lot less stuff than I used to want. I don't think I'm alone in this opinion. Everywhere I look, even those who want more stuff seem to be growing more desperately absurd and contrived. I've reduced my spending (and income) almost an order of magnitude, from the low six figures to the low five figures. I don't want a 3,000 square foot house in the suburbs. I don't want a new car every two years to drive more than an hour a day in increasingly congested traffic to get to work. I don't want the latest smart phone, iPad, or electric back-scratcher. I don't want more processed food, processed entertainment or processed opinions. I don't want more stuff; I'm tired of stuff; I'm tired of chasing after stuff. My life is better now with less stuff than it was two years ago when I had tons of stuff.
I don't want more stuff. I want better medical care and especially better dental care, but most of all I want to learn and I want to participate. The greatest technological development of the 21st century, the development that has given me the most reward and satisfaction, is Wikipedia, that has put all the knowledge of the (English-speaking) world at my fingertips. For free*. I don't want a dozen $500,000/year Harvard professors to tell me what job I should do and how much I should get paid, I want to learn about economics myself. I don't want to pay $20 to see professional actors in a $200,000,000 movie, I want a community theater where I can act. I don't want to watch two dozen steroid-crazed gorillas mauling each other on TV, I want to actually play soccer with a bunch of other out-of-shape middle aged folks. I don't want to watch, I want to do.
*Or more precisely for the trivial cost of a half-day's minimum wage work per month for my internet connection
We physically cannot produce more stuff We are running into physical limitations on the production of stuff: pollution, global warming, garbage, the energy required to move stuff around. If we keep producing stuff, and especially if we keep producing more and more stuff, we're going to drown in our own shit. Not in a thousand years, either, but tomorrow.
There's a kind of perversity in the present-day capitalist system. I believe that human beings are fundamentally morally good. I think that underlying capitalism — explaining and even to a certain extent excusing its immorality and exploitation — has been a feeling that it's fundamentally good to do everything in our power to respond to the desperate poverty and unimaginable suffering of the hundreds of thousands of years of humanity's mere economic subsistence. There is a belief — righteous, I think — that the three-century-long project to improve our material well-being has been worth all the sacrifices and excesses of the capitalist system. Worth it or not, here we are, with such a monumental productive capacity that we can today produce more in a year than the the the entire pre-capitalist world produced for all of recorded history. But because this response to desperate poverty is so ingrained, when we are on the verge of actually eliminating poverty, we are reluctant to do so, for fear of eliminating our primary motivation.
We do not rationally construct our ethical beliefs; our ethical beliefs evolve. The idea of concentrating reward for the most productive people evolved because it worked to increase our productive capacity as fast as possible. But we don't really think about why an ethical belief evolved; we tend to think about our ethical beliefs as intrinsically valid, not instrumentally valid. Under specific environmental circumstances we evolved an ethical predisposition to increase our productivity as fast as possible in order to alleviate poverty. But because the ethical belief evolved — because we did not consciously construct it — we have come to believe that increasing productivity, especially for the production of physical goods, is intrinsically good. And therefore we see any retreat from that impulse to increase productivity, or any belief that would even permit a retreat, as intrinsically bad, lazy, useless, wasteful, without regard to the underlying why.
The last three recessions have hinted at the increasing disconnect between our foundational "capitalist" ethical beliefs and the actual material conditions of global society. We recovered from earlier recessions by eliminating production of stuff we didn't want and then using the available labor to increase the production of more and better stuff, stuff we actually needed and wanted. But except for the construction of the internet and cell-phone infrastructure (which are only a small fraction of GDP) the last three recoveries have not been driven by reallocation of production, but by finding new and creative ways to create financial bubbles. We recovered from the 1991 recession by creating a stock-market bubble; we recovered from the 2001 recession by creating a housing bubble; and — lacking a suitable vehicle to create a financial bubble — we have not yet truly recovered from the 2008 recession. In each of the last three recessions, the fall in unemployment has lagged further behind recovery in GDP growth, indicating that the recovery is not being driven by effective reallocation of employment. Indeed, we have seen an increasing fraction of GDP transferred to financial services, services arguably without any actual social utility. We aren't even trying to efficiently allocate our labor anymore; we seem instead to be flailing around to more effectively allocate demand... and failing to do so.
The observation that the exceptional receive a disproportionate reward is obvious, and has been around since the beginning of recorded history. It is only recently that we have been able to push the unexceptional out of sight, in ghettos and mostly in other countries, that we have been able to pretend that "everyone" (at least everyone we can see) deserves a basic level of comfort and dignity that has for most of recorded history truly been available only to a privileged few. With globalization, the pointy end of this inequality has returned to our own shores.
And fundamentally, I object to Friedman's conclusion not because it's wrong, but because it's too limited. Friedman is "right" within his own tiny little box of the capitalist ethos, but the box itself has become too small, too ill-fitting to today's world. It is the ethos of the 19th century, when the vast majority of the population was called upon to sacrifice their lives and labor for the benefit of their great-grandchildren. Perhaps this sacrifice was unjust, perhaps we could have achieved the same result without so much misery, exploitation and suffering, but they did in fact make that sacrifice. We ourselves, however, are those great-grandchildren they made that sacrifice for. It is time now to enjoy that sacrifice, to let everyone live in the comfort and dignity we can because of that sacrifice now enjoy, and to work on making the world better instead of more productive.
Monday, November 08, 2010
Atheist myths debunked!
Ben Pobjie debunks several atheist myths. For example:
3. ATHEISM IS A RELIGION: Not at all - atheism is not the sort of structured belief system usually designated as "a religion" - it is in fact a very narrow set of beliefs more properly dubbed a "death cult". It really ticks us off when we get lumped in with the religious, when our soulless blend of nihilism and masochism is really very distinct.
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