The New Atheism Pitchforks

Occasionally there is heard from certain New Atheist quarters a good deal of vitriol against all forms of religion. It is one I fully understand - ever since I first heard Sam Harris on book TV a number of years back, boldly calling for an unflinching response to the sheer absurdity of religion and asking why we are always asked to approach it with kid gloves.

And soon after we began hearing about the New Atheists and their supposedly radical agenda. Although whatever that agenda was was a matter of debate. To some, it simply meant "coming out" and actually openly declaring themselves atheist, or dropping the agnostic moniker that has served as a sort of spiritual cover - a sort of peace offering to bridge the gap between the absurd and the agnosticist "possibility of the absurd".

And others began to go further. Instead of simply adopting a principled, yet passive posture, they went on the attack. They sought to actively promote their Atheism to the blindly religious masses. The famous books were written making the case that, while quite difficult to offer proof that God does not exist, there is actually ample evidence that he is an entirely human construct, and what's more a contradictory and illogical drawn one at that. Articles were written engaging the New Atheists in dialogue. Movies were made. Billboards erected.

I cheered them on. I still do. I admit I had always felt a need to hide my atheism. The history of oppression and social ostracism is real and powerful. But as science has steadily built up a vast body of data and theory on what people are and why we do what we do, people are more and more becoming skeptical of religion and its increasing anachronism.

But there was also a sort of self-righteousness that irritated me. It seemed like the old human game was being played where people feel like they need to take sides and form teams. This has long been a part of any social struggle - regardless of its legitimacy. There's an aspect of strategy and tactics to it: strength in numbers, hold the line, surround the enemy, put them on their heels, distract them.

This can all be very effective. But it draws its strength from a deeper human emotion and can end up bypassing reason. Part of its strength lies in just this fact. When reason and reflection come into the equation they can dampen that raw emotional energy and cause people to question whether they ought to keep up the fight. This is what demagogues have always exploited. Pitchforks don't pump as vociferously through calm rationalism as they do through certainty and allegiance to the cause. And of course we all know what happens when arguments lose reason.

A powerful idea emerged from the New Atheism that, while maybe not originating through emotion, has certainly been weakened by it - effective as it has been as a sort of dark magnet for the cause. This is the idea that religion is not just a negative force, but dangerous. So dangerous in fact that it presents an urgent threat to modern civilization. I think this was triumphantly illustrated by Bill Maher's Religulous, when near the closing credits images flashed across the screen of religious zealotry and violence while a rousing score blasted (was it Wagner?), tied together in a modern propagandist display of fearmongering. This was the bypassing of reason at its most forceful.

I personally don't buy it. Sure, I think religion, combined with desperation and ignorance that leads to fundamentalism, can do horrific things. I also thing it is, on its face, stupid. It encourages magical thinking, when thinking should be anything but. It codifies oppression and degradation. It sews division and dischord.

But it is also incredibly human. That is, evidenced by its near universal adoption throughout human history, it seems to come directly out of the way our brain is wired for consciousness and processing of external stimulus. One must begin then to tease out what religion is. In one sense it is a very rational set of rules and beliefs that have their own internal logical structure. But in another it is a purely sensory and irrational experience that allows one to quiet the mind and exist in a state removed from the confines of ordered consciousness.

Religion is both of these things. One exists to serve the other. What are different religions but different ways of organizing how one might tap into that "spiritual" state of unconsciousness. These are all accomplished in degrees. At one end you might have a simple and short re-framing of a conscious experience by appealing to a magical thought, i.e. "That bastard just stole my parking spot. Sweet Jesus have mercy on his soul."

Now, this example could highlight two very different responses to the same event, with two very different conscious outcomes. The driver, obviously angered by being wronged, appeals to her religion to salve the wound. Instead of allowing the complex to linger, continuing to affecting her conscious state, she does a sort of jedi-mind trick on herself, in the form of obedience to religious teaching, and she moves on.

But two people could perform the same ritual with two very different outcomes, based largely on interpretation owing to emotional and cultural development. Person A might curse and make the same "prayer", and self-comfort with the notion that "we are all God's children" and that "they know not what they do". Situation explained, cognitive dissonance resolved. Persona B might also self-comfort, but instead with the notion "they will burn in hell because they are sinners". Situation explained, cognitive dissonance resolved.

Both appealed to the same religion, but different versions of the dogma. One could be said to have left with kindness, while the other with anger and hostility. While a simple parking-lot annoyance is quite trivial, at the other end of the spectrum we have serious matters such as war and conflict. Yet one could also make the case that for every warmongering Osama Bin laden, or George Bush, there are those who identify with the religious traditions highlighting pacifism and diplomacy. For every Palestinian suicide bomber or Jewish settler, there are aid groups in Africa or soup kitchens downtown.

Ayan Hirsi Ali, no doubt owing to her personally horrific religious experience, finds many examples of ways in which the Koran explicitly lays out suggestions that only require a simple interpretation to lead believers to commit heinous acts. This may indeed be true. But while religious texts may be dangerous, and magical thinking may lead to conflict, it also has the power for much good. In many cases, religion may be the one thing that is keeping more harm from coming.

Now, the bad may certainly outweigh the good, and thus as a philosophical position is principled. But the reality is that we just aren't anywhere close to the eradication of religion. We live in a world in which religion is tied up in ethnicity, and cultural tradition is tied up in a complex web of reason and spirituality that does good and harm simultaneously.

This is why I find the argument that some in the New Atheist movement make, that religion is urgently dangerous and needs to be cast completely out of society, both false and impractical. It is certainly sometimes dangerous, but also often very helpful, and in any event deeply tied into cultural and ethnic patterns of thought that aren't easily separable. For this reason it just isn't practical to rid society of religion, even if the threat it posed warranted such hostility.

Religion has been compared to other social ills, such as racism, or unjust political movements. But this is reductionist nonsense. Sure, there are specific tenets of specific religious dogma that one can certainly call unjust
and wrong, and intolerable (homophobia being a prime example). But to cast a net over the entirety of religious thought is reaching a bit.

People will always be ignorant and small-minded, with or without religion. They will really on logical fallacies in their thought, they will ignore complexity for easy answers. Religion can certainly contribute to this behavior. But it can also offer people a way to transcend it, or at least the complexities of consciousness that would encourage it.

And so in this way I think it should be given respect. At the very least as a part of one's cultural behavior that they should not be made to feel ashamed of having accepted. By doing so we are not tolerating any specific ideas or practices that are unjust or directly cause harm. We are tolerating the right of each individual to find their own way in peace.

CCFW and the Nanny State

Richard Carrier has a review on his blog of Tom Clarke's primer on Naturalism, Encountering Naturalism. He's largely in agreement, but doesn't see how Contra-Causal Free Will has much to do with anything. That's a sentiment that makes very little sense to me.

Carrier: "Once you allow the argument "because we don't have freewill, therefore the majority can make decisions for us," you create a monster that will destroy far more than it will ever protect."

I think this disagreement is exactly why we need to sort out whether CCFW exists: we need to determine what will is and how people get it.

As far as I can tell, CCFW is some magical mechanism of consciousness that allows people to A) have prior knowledge of things they before did not, and thus B) then make decisions that over-ride impulses they are not sufficiently aware of while simultaneously predicting the outcomes of those decisions.

It seems entirely relevant to any debate relating to human behavior that we first decide whether CCFW exists.

I'll give you an example from my kindergarten classroom. I assume that my students have no CCFW (as I think most people would). This means then that every action they take is a direct result of their particular cognitive and emotional state at that time.

Were they to have CCFW, their actions could be the result of them having special knowledge of things they did not, and thus the ability to over-ride impulses they are not aware of, as well as accurately predicting the likely result of their action.

So when the child acts like a "typical 5 year old" (i.e. emotion & cognitive state recognized), I adjust my response accordingly. Sure, they knew it was wrong to smack their playmate with a book - but they had not developed enough of a neural framework to process & contain their emotional impulse.

Thus I - acting in the role of a "nanny state" - make all sorts of arrangements to nudge my students in the right direction. I don't leave candy out on the tables. I don't lecture them for an hour straight. I require them to walk in the hall instead of run.

Of course, human adults in general have more developed cognitive and emotional systems. The need for regulation is less severe. Yet we generally agree there ought to be some. Hence traffic laws, drug laws, etc. These are instances in which no negative consequence has yet resulted, but the possibility of one occurring is deemed to warrant deterrence.

The degree to which one believes the public can self-regulate is in direct proportion to the degree one believes in state-regulation. Unless of course one believes in CCFW. Because, it would logically follow, that everyone is necessarily capable of self-regulation. Although I'm not sure if kindergartners are included - I think there may be a cutoff age, but I'm not sure.

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg regarding social justice. What I think is just as important is to what extent people have a right to take credit, and thus be rewarded for what they have achieved. But that's a whole 'nother discussion.

Conservatism Vs. Racism

Of course the thinking is that if one is an economic conservative, one isn't necessarily a racist. I mean, duh, right? What a convenient ad hominem attack to substitute for serious policy disagreement.

But I'm not so sure.

My thinking is that modern "liberalism" and "conservatism" are really more about views on human nature than anything else. This is why you tend to get such circular positions on so many issues; the details seem to be secondary to the political philosophy. We are not really discussing policy - we are discussing conflicting assumptions.

We all know that while most conservatives are not admittedly racist - or at least not in theory, all conscious racists are pretty much conservative. Why is this? Just some cultural coincidence?

I think not. It occurred to me that the conservative view of human nature - that we are all free agents, acting of our own free will, and personally responsible for our relative successes or failures in life, if true requires a racist explanation. For it is a statistical fact that minorities are quite disproportionately responsible for crime, drug abuse, poverty and general lack of success. To the racist, this is obviously because there is something inherently wrong with their race, or at the very least their ethnicity.

The conservative however, unable to simply blame race, instead defers to the magical substance he calls "free will". Somehow, though free as any other man to not engage in destructive behavior, the minority continues, year after year to make that choice. If this is not profoundly convincing evidence of racial inferiority, I'm not sure what more evidence one would need. Yet consciously admitting to oneself that one is indeed racist is a cognition in dissonance with modern social morality.

So the conservative, propelled as he is into racial hatred by the geometry of his political calculations, crawls deeper and deeper into it's philosophical hubris. Themes such as "freedom" and "markets", impenetrable in their vast shallowness, provide sophisticated cover for what has become an idolatrous cult of majoritarian self-improvement. Like Narcissus, he gazes out over his fellow man, yet only ever sees his own sheltered self. Compassion has been transformed into Onanism: instead of accurately reproducing renditions of the trajectories of others, he draws lines that resemble little more than poorly sketched version of himself, or others like him.

Reading Ayn Rand

I came across this page at the Ayn Rand Institute. It's a definition of "selfishness" according to Objectivism.

Selfishness

The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man—which means: the values required for human survival—not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the “aspirations,” the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment.
The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.

Trying desperately to make my way through the logic of this fantastic bit of writing, I realized the key to the whole thing lies at the end.

The Objectivist glorification of selfishness has, I think, been what has caused most adults to dismiss it as idiotic at best, downright evil at worst. How, after all, can one seriously defend the seeming root - greed - of so much human suffering throughout history?

Rand does very little arguing here; she is mainly making bold statements about moral truths, as if they should be self-evident. She blithely declares that human good "cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone." Really? That's bizarrely wrong.

What planet was this woman on?

But then I was struck by the three words at the end of this sentence: "...there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them". Of course there is conflict of interest among men - especially when it comes to capitalism. This is where the word "cutthroat" comes from! Being moral isn't impossible in business - you just can't make as much money that way. In an exchange between two equal parties, there is always the possibility that one will use deceit to take advantage of the other.

What is more, capitalist transactions frequently involve unequal parties - that is, one party clearly holds the upper hand, whether through purchasing power, market control, etc. Because the dominant party will usually benefit more from the transaction, unequal relationships can be quite lucrative. The history of labor is rife with just this sort of exploitation, from slavery to sharecropping to child labor to sweatshops. Thus being immoral is not only possible, it is rewarded. And immorality could be said to be the very definition of conflict of interest.

Yet Rand offers an exquisite caveat, a cunning condition to rectify her flimsy case: man ought not accept sacrifice from others.

So there you have it. Capitalism and greed are wonderful, as long as both parties do not take advantage of one another. The only problem is that this redefines what "selfishness" means. One is unselfish to the degree that one takes into consideration the sacrifice of others. A selfish boss pays his workers as little as possible - asking the most sacrifice of them. An unselfish boss, recognizing their sacrifice, pays them fairly.

Rand's rhetorical strategy is utterly dishonest. She makes the revolutionary claim that selfishness be upheld as a highly moral value, but then redefines it so as to strip from it most of its original meaning.

According to Rand man should act entirely in his own self-interest (which happens also to be the interest of society - "the values required for human survival"), all the while keeping in mind not to exploit others. But is it not in man's interest (and society's) that others also act to their fullest potential? Does he not want his workers to be the smartest, most creative, happiest and productive workers? Surely this at times must require from him some level of sacrifice. Would not paying his workers more, or allowing them bargaining rights be considered a sacrifice?

All of this seems ultimately to be Utopian: it envisions a future of perfect order, but one that is dependent upon its own perfection. This circularity denies the current reality that in a capitalist system, when inequality exists, exploitation will occur, if not by individual moral failing then by systemic incoherence. The modern democratic response has been pragmatic: government regulation and intervention into the market. Just as streets and borders are policed, so is the market - via wage laws, environmental, safety, quality, etc. regulations.

An outgrowth of this practical recognition of the inherent failings of a pure market has also been to provide on the one hand a safety net for those unable to benefit from the market (medicare, social security) and on the other an educational and civic framework upon which to build-in equitable distribution of social capital (schools, libraries, parks, etc.).

Yet to Rand all of this would be considered sacrifice - especially so if unevenly burdened upon the wealthy (those considered to have an excess in capital advantage). But as these advantaged individuals are, historically and in our present system, in a position to reap the rewards of others' sacrifice, either through deceit or simple systemic asymmetry, what is keeping them from doing so?

The answer would seem to me to be an incalculable level of unselfishness, that is - for each transaction one would be required to assess the other party's particular level of sacrifice. And given that a true assessment of sacrifice would need to take account not only of that individual's monetary resources, but also their level cognitive and emotional resources - such things that inform one's transactional capacity.

The beauty of government intervention is that it does much of this for us! As long as a decent safety net is provided, and an institutional framework that eliminates structural disadvantage is established, one can assume with much greater confidence that any transactions entered into will be built upon a foundation of equal sacrifice on both sides. The marketplace will take place within a system of genuine equity, and the likelihood of either conscious or implied exploitation will be minimal.

Health Care Is Not A Right

I've thought about this occasionally, but only recently have I come upon what I believe is a truer expression of a liberal philosophy of health care.

The political argument is obvious: by calling health care a "right", you automatically justify guaranteeing coverage to everyone. By evoking a natural principle, you are fundamentally answering opponents by claiming that health care is a moral, not economic issue.

But this is not generally how we think of rights. We usually think of them as simple freedoms that require little in the way of effort on the part of others. Freedom of speech, movement, worship, or privacy all require little other than being left alone. Of course, the definition of a social contract includes the quality of living with others. Thus it implies a level of engagement with one's fellow man.

It is within this expansion into the social realm that the liberal inserts an added clause: duties. Duties are all the things we must do for one another to maintain our individual freedoms, or "rights". They are of course more difficult to define, much less to achieve. But they are as elemental to the provision of man's rights as the established state itself.

Throughout our nation's history we have defined them differently, as have other modern democracies: We reserve the right to draft men into military service to protect from foreign threats. We reserve the right to declare martial law. We reserve the right to tax income and commerce. We reserve the right to guarantee things like education or legal defense. Though at times they may be defined differently, they are the same in that they represent an expression of duty towards the common good. Each requires a level of sacrifice - often different depending on the individual - to the idea of the "common good".

Universal access to health care is now being called for by liberals. It is being argued that, by virtue of being a citizen (for many like myself, simply a human being) one should be guaranteed a minimum standard of free health care. Or to put it another way, it is the DUTY of every citizen of this country to contribute in some way to ensuring universal health care coverage to every man, woman & child.

Health care is a duty.

Understanding the Town Hollerers

I'm going to start off with a few assumptions: A) Most of these people are not idiots, B) Most of them are well-meaning and compassionate, C) Most are probably even politically moderate & D) My ideas are better than theirs.

OK - come on, who doesn't agree with that last one.

So, the question then becomes - why do they feel the way they so passionately do? On the basis of much of what I have heard, my hunch is that most of this isn't even specifically about health care. It is an amalgam of very high levels of federal spending, much of which has gone either to bank or auto bailouts, or nebulous future government projects. I think they have had no real problem with education, or war, or medicare, or moderate social spending in the past.

But they look at the dire straights the economy is in, and then see the government borrowing large amounts of money at a time when common sense tells you you need to cut back. They see Democrat health care "reform" as an added, luxury expense that at best we can't afford, and at worst will actually make their health care worse.

If they are neither dumb, mean, or even radical, then where are they coming from? Why can't they connect the dots they way that I do and end up agreeing with me? It all seems so obvious!

Well, except that I don't quite think it is. I think my ideas, while logical and sound, are actually quite radical. Well, let me rephrase that. I think they have potentially radical implications. Yet oddly enough, they are really no more radical than the ideas undergirding over a century of American political, social and economic thought. It is as if they have slowly, quietly been working away behind the scenes, providing the secure foundation from which popular American thought has flowered, yet through a sustained lack of analysis is now so forgotten as if to be unrecognizable.

The essence of this popular rage is simply a fear that government has gone too far. Those on the far right have always felt this. They have never believed in government. They would love to see its over-reach stripped bare. Their position is highly principled and logically very consistent.

But these town hall folks are not the radical right. They would hate to see government all but removed from public life. And yet much of their rhetoric matches exactly what the right has been shouting for years. Socialism! Fascism! Don't distribute my hard-earned wealth! This apparent oxymoron is best summed up by (as I have noted before) the purported words at a recent protest: Don't let the government get its hands on my medicare. One could add to this list schools, social security, roads, parks, clinics, etc.

They do indeed believe in the good that government can do, and has been doing, all their lives. But they have somehow been living in a fantasy world where the government actually doesn't exist. Elderly people magically don't starve to death alone in their apartments. Children are magically offered an education though 12th grade. Bridges repair themselves. Parks are tended to and medication for the mentally ill appears out of thin air.

Then suddenly the economy is on the brink of collapse, and the government roars in (supported mind you, by very well-developed and reasoned rationale) to help. I think for many this was a total shock. They had been living under all these assumptions about the modern world that are actually philosophically quite radical. When forced to make decisions based upon these views, they realized how radical they had become. Or better said, how radical the political mainstream had appeared to have become.

Because if government sponsored health care is socialism, then many more things are. If progressive taxation and social spending are fascist, well then our tax code has been very fascist for a very long time. I assume the radical (economic) right has indeed thought out the logical conclusion of their positions on a truly free market economy. That no one ever describes this future world is evidence of how removed it is from the mainstream.

For if we truly believed that each man was entitled to his own earnings, and was constitutionally (or by whatever higher-power you so presume) subject to only a minimum level of taxation, then America would be a radically different place. I've read amusing libertarian proposals for how things might look similar, owing to fabulous constructs involving great feats of heroics on the part of businesses who have somehow chanced upon perfect alignment of the public good with the private.

But in general no one is seriously proposing anything but minor policy adjustments. To listen to the rhetoric now being trumpeted from the town halls, one would think that Democratic representatives are the only things separating America from communist... err, USSR. Yet were any politician to campaign on a platform espousing policy positions in line with true free-market libertarianism, they would be laughed off the campaign trail.

Or would they? Maybe we have indeed, in the words of another recent town hall protester, "awakened a sleeping giant." Of course, this sleeping giant has truly been sleeping a very, very long time. In fact, I'm not sure it was every quite awake. At least not after accounting for the great social and technological transformations of the past 150 years which have enabled us to enjoy a level of common prosperity only dreamed of by the founders, and basic social safety nets have become not only possible but intrinsic to a modern, civilized ethos.

But it may possibly be that American politics is in for a dramatic swing to the extreme right, with the resulting dismantling of every state and federal social or common good program we have known and depended upon in our lifetime. I almost wonder, by the degree to which this sentiment is borne in stubborn hostility, that only such a transformation may be what it takes to show these people the world they intend to promote.

But, ever the optimist, I doubt it. I think the economy has people scared out of their wits. And they are being forced to digest in a matter of months political ideas which have been brewing in the Western world for centuries. It may have been wrong to try and push health care reform now. It may have been wrong to have relied on the ability of the American public to grasp all the philosophical and policy issues involved to the degree that that they would be able to fully appreciate the sensibility of the proposal's logical coherence.

We are, after all, Americans. What we lack in contemplation we make up for in feeling. I just worry that this all may be catching up with us. And that before we know it we will be forced to remove so much of what so many have worked so hard to build.

The New Racism

I'm troubled by where racism and the right is right now. Everyone knows racism is wrong. In theory. Certainly no one will admit to being racist. If accused, they always back way. Sometimes with legitimate excuses, yet sometimes not - their original conduct was clearly racist yet they still deny it.

This is very weird. I suppose many of them harbor these thoughts in private and just don't want to deal with the political/social/etc. fallout if they took public ownership. But then, many I suspect don't actually believe they are racist (they somehow know racism = bad) and thus genuinely back-peddle and make excuses for their behavior.

I imagine most modern racists fall into the latter category.
Even the white liberal friends of mine, who as liberals are more likely to have done the more complex listening & self-reflecting that begins the process of disentangling cultural prejudices and subconscious bias, still can't escape falling into crude stereotypes or the "other" mentality. I admit to a fair amount of it myself. In that sense we are all modern racists.

Although I think what is key is the continued acknowledgment of the problem - of how deeply embedded it is in our cultural frameworks. Fundamentally it is an admission that we are not perfect, that we are products of our environment, our natures. And our goal is to strive beyond.

Yet the anti-race racist, by reflexively denying his own human frailty (sin, as I think it has been correctly identified by mythological narrative) denies not only his own role, but fails to see it in others. This is a self-perpetuating cycle, as acknowledged evidence of racism in others implies it is still alive as a phenomenon, and thus possibly alive in oneself. Thus denying it in others helps to deny it in one's self.

Politically the right has all the reason in the world to downplay racism as a phenomenon. Every instance of it not only allows the possibility of their own racism, and their own frailty, but also discredits the purity of the American project, both evidenced in "direct" and "legacy" racism. Direct racism actively damages individual freedoms, while legacy racism builds disadvantage into entire communities through community dysfunction or inadequate resources.

As both are vehicles for social inequity, they present a niggling problem for the fundamental meritocratic assumptions of conservatism. Sure, minorities had a reason to be poor when discrimination was law. But now that it isn't, we can wash our hands of the whole problem and expect every man's success or failure to be his own. The existence of racism doesn't allow us to do this, as it is a social injustice that requires intervention. And how to better to do this than government decree.

Except you can't simply will racism out of existence. It requires social transformation, which takes time and effort - and most forcefully, government action. And until it is eradicated, you can't hold each man accountable for his lot in life. Those niggling demographic statistics on race and poverty, education, criminality, etc. are evidence of this.

This is the stuff of white privilege. And to a free market philosophy built on the assumption of every one starting with "their own bootstraps", privilege is really annoying! It throws the whole concept off. Free markets will always have winners and losers, which is a bitter pill to begin with. But it gets that much more bitter when most winners just happen to come from very different backgrounds than do the losers.

I'm still waiting for a conservative explanation for demographic success disparities. Appeals to free will would seem to predict relative random distribution of results year over year, yet there are an enormous number of very solid socioeconomic predictors.

Were I to be a conservative, I would be very concerned with making the playing field level so that my free market could run relatively equitably. How you do this without government intervention is beyond me. Their main line of argumentation right now seems to be that it has actually BEEN government intervention that has perpetuated inequity, via welfare, housing, education, etc. Which seems pretty ridiculous. Sure, these programs have their faults, but one wonders how the the alternative, a.k.a. doing nothing, amounts to anything more than wishful thinking.