Screed against Cambridge Journals Online

It's a well known fact that the business of academic journals is a racket, pure and simple. So when I found out I couldn't read an esoteric Philosophy article without paying thirty goddamn dollars, I wrote them this very satisfying missive:

Subject: you people are the scum of the earth

Hello,

I just wanted you to know that, in my opinion, you people are a bunch of rent-seeking societal leeches who contribute nothing to society. Here I am, just an ordinary non-academic person who has taken an interest in David Hume, and who wants to better my understanding of his argument about induction by taking a look at Alan Schwerin's article Hume On Our Notion of Causality. Imagine my disgust when I see that I can have access to this completely obscure academic article for the outrageous sum of $30! Congratulations, you have effectively walled off higher education from the common man and made academic knowledge completely unavailable to a wide audience in a time, ironically, when it costs virtually nothing to disseminate information.

Just what is it that justifies this price for the privilege of downloading an electronic copy of the article, which costs you almost $0.00 to send to me? What value are you adding to the product? What on earth are you doing with the money you receive? Surely, it is not as if you yourselves peer-review all the content of your publication with your own stable of well-paid professional philosophers. And yet that is the only value added from "prestigious" journals such as yourself.

If you're reading this and nodding along and thinking, "I agree buddy, but I'm just a low-level lackey earning my paycheck in a bad economy, like everyone else", then that's fine--we all have to pay the bills. But if you get any satisfaction--or think there's anything noble at all--about the industry you work for, please understand that you are badly undermining the ability of people to pursue knowledge, and what's worse, doing so in pursuit of your own grotesque and stupid greed.

If there's any justice in the universe, your dismal company will soon be replaced by an institution that does everything you do, but for free or at an extremely low cost.

Burn in hell,
David

PS: I see in your "About Us" section your ostensible "commitment...to advance learning, knowledge and research worldwide". More like a commitment to line your own underserving, rent-seeking, stupid pockets with the hard-earned cash of people who want to learn, advance knowledge, and do research. Assholes.

PPS: I mean really.

Asking too much of morality

Andrew Sullivan has a pretty interesting response to Sam Harris' claim that we should not rule out torture as an ethical choice in certain extreme circumstances.

To me, I look at this sort of position--that there are some "ticking time-bomb" scenarios in which torture should be sanctioned--and I start to ask myself if we're asking more of morality than it can give us. After all, human society is a big, complex, organic system. These kinds of systems defy description by analytically rigorous and consistent first principles--you see this all the time in our efforts to model or duplicate things with computers: the more organic something is, the harder it is to duplicate. Figuring out chess moves and modeling proteins comes easy, but things like natural language and even just simple walking turn out to be the difficult problems. With this in mind, it seems weird to me that we would think that there would be an analytic, derived-from-first-principles ethical system that perfectly provides a solution to every possible human choice and dilemma. In other words: even given that there is one true morality, it's weird to think that this morality is complete in the sense of the term used to describe algorithms (an algorithm is complete if it can find every possible solution).

What this means in practice is what we also find to be pretty obviously true: though moral principles guide us through life in general, they don't perfectly apply to every situation, and sometimes remain maddeningly silent on the best course of action. We tend to think of a "moral dilemma" as something we can find our way out of by applying some code of morality ever more judiciously, but it seems to me what causes the dilemma in the first place is the absence of clearly applicable morals. When we're in a dilemma--like the ticking-time bomb scenario--we're beyond morality's ability to help us. There is no "morally right" choice--there's just muddling through.

Note that what I'm saying here isn't that morality is relative or anything like that. It's as universal as you like. It's just that it's incomplete. We're used to the idea that for every choice, our morality can tell us which one is least bad--that morality always shows us the way out. But maybe there are times when there is no way out. There are times when you are--for lack of a better word--fucked. There are times, for example, when you are President and morality tells you that it is wrong to incinerate thousands upon thousands of innocent Japanese people, and yet you do it anyway. Morality tells you to do A, and yet no one in their right mind would do A. Does this mean the moral code that told you to do A can't be right? Only if you assume that the right moral code must be complete. But if you do away with that, another answer suggests itself: you had been ethically checkmated. There was no way out. You were simply fucked.

If this sounds like defeatism, I think things make a little more sense when we think about the crucial role that wisdom must play in exercising morality. Sometimes you end up in a dilemma--an ethical cul-de-sac--out of bad luck. Ask any hard-boiled noir detective, he'll tell you all about it. But sometimes you end up there because of your own foolishness and immorality. (Or maybe it's a little of both.) You can't just run amok and expect to be able to consult your little book of moral rules whenever you have to make a decision. You need to have the wisdom and foresight to avoid getting trapped in those cul-de-sacs in the first place. If you're in a ticking time-bomb situation, the real question isn't what the moral thing to do is--morals don't matter, you're going to torture the guy no matter what--the real question is, how did we get here? This guy's about to nuke a city. Where was the anti-nuclear proliferation strategy that would have stopped this from happening? What about other security measures? Why is this guy so pissed off that he wants to blow up a city?

To me the real sign that a code of morality is correct is that when you zoom out to the macro level and consider the events leading up to these impossible, no-way-out quandaries, it turns out that morality and wisdom work in harmony. It turns out that, if we had only adhered more closely to our code of morals, it would have led, in the long run, to wiser choices, and we would have avoided the ethical cul-de-sac altogether.

A moral code giving you the wrong answer in a highly specific, constrained, and contingent scenario doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't the right code; it could just mean that, through some combination of immorality, foolishness, and plain bad luck, it's already too late and there's no way out. You muddle through as best you can and at the end someone mutters in your ear, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

How a monotheistic God undermines itself by issuing universal proclamations

There is a strain of atheism that rejects belief in God not (only) on empirical grounds, but also because such a God could have no claim to any kind of moral authority. On this view, God is no different in principle than an all-powerful dictator, who issues laws that are not subject to rational scrutiny and cannot be changed by the people who must live under them.

The reply of the religious believer to this is that God is a fundamentally different kind of thing than a human dictator, such that God's actions cannot be morally evaluated in the same way a human being such as Saddam Hussein's actions can be morally evaluated. But this reply lays bare what is at the heart of the matter, which is an ontological disagreement about the possibility--and coherence--of there being fundamentally different kinds of things in the world where different metaphysical rules apply, versus an ontologically flat, materialistic world in which no chunk of matter has any metaphysical privilege over any other chunk of matter.

What I like about this atheist challenge is that it unveils the nub of the difficulty of trying to analytically compare contradicting ontological claims--the one has no truck with the other. For the atheist analytic descriptions of the divine cannot be differentiated from assertions of a profane magic that accompanies certain convenient objects and texts; for the believer, attempts to describe divine being itself run into the same difficulty as describing a sense modality to someone who congenitally lacks that modality--while you can build descriptions in the object layer with someone who shares access to the metalayer/substrate, you cannot build a description of the metalayer/substrate itself that is independent of a reference to a shared human experience. Religious Man and Profane Man find themselves on opposite sides of a communication barrier that cannot be overcome except by a profound change in one or the other's essential way of being.

However, this does not mean that we cannot tease out certain tensions in the religious believer's ontological framework, because certain kinds of assertions imply certain thing about one's ontology. What I am thinking of here is God's penchant for issuing laws that are universally applied--that is, applied to all actors, regardless of the actor's ontological standing. What a universal law ends up doing is ontologically flattening all that it applies to, because suddenly what matters is the action being done, independent of anything about the essential being of the thing doing the action. Murder is wrong; ok, but if it applies universally than it applies equally to a king and to a peasant, thus in this instance placing the two on the same level. In fact, I would go so far as to say that universality is the key driver of any materialistic, flat ontological viewpoint, precisely because of the ontologically equalizing process of factoring a thing's essential being out of the relevant equation.

In any case, the more condensed and monotheistic the God, the more flat will this God's universal proclamations render the ontological landscape. When a universal proclamation is divine in origin, the separation between the divine and the profane is reinforced. However, this separation is doubly reinforced by the fact that these proclamations do not apply to competing entities in the divine space--another, different set of proclamations governs these intramural squabbles within the divine space. So for example, the Hebrew God says "do not kill", which is a diktat to the profane world; however to deal with rival gods, is not a question of binding them to the same rules as the profane mortals must abide by, but rather, attacking them along the appropriate ontological vector: "do not worship those other gods". For an early monotheism that is struggling against a bevy of polytheistic rivals, then, the divine space is a large and bustling one and its protrusions into the profane world many: false idols abound. However, later on a mature monotheism becomes the victim of its own success: with all competing gods eliminated, the divine space contracts to a single point and loses its vibrancy. Without an element of drama to sustain it, it recedes from human awareness except as the 1-dimensional, inscrutable source of universal proclamations that now apply to the whole world--and flatten the whole world--except for that one tiny little dot.

And so the monotheistic religion enables its self-destruction by stultifying the divine and reducing its chaotic protrusions into a profane world increasingly bridled by human will, in the forms of scientific investigation, technological innovation, self-organization, and commodification. The atheist who accuses God of moral bankruptcy is representative of a new kind of humanity that emerges, blinking, in a flat materialistic world whose only essential purpose is to provide something for human wills to work on as they aimlessly proceed through history, eating and procreating and--if they're the lucky ones with material wealth--frittering away afternoons watching Iron Man sequals.

is/ought

Generally speaking, I'm sympathetic to Sam Harris. I read The End of Faith, and found it to be pretty well thought-out and argued--a useful book.

However, recently he did a TED talk in which he argued that science can answer moral questions, and I must say I find his main argument and especially his responses to critics to be pretty underwhelming. You can read one such response here.

Something especially troubling is his insistence that there really are huge moral stakes attached to this philosophical dispute--so much so that he believes people who he disagrees with should be characterized as amoral monsters who condone the hypothetical blinding of innocent people:

At the conclusion of my talk, I fell into debate with another invited speaker, who seemed, at first glance, to be very well positioned to reason effectively about the implications of science for our understanding of morality. She holds a degree in genetics from Dartmouth, a masters in biology from Harvard, and a law degree, another masters, and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of biology from Duke. This scholar is now a recognized authority on the intersection between criminal law, genetics, neuroscience and philosophy. Here is a snippet of our conversation, more or less verbatim:

She: What makes you think that science will ever be able to say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong?

Me: Because I think that right and wrong are a matter of increasing or decreasing wellbeing—and it is obvious that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags, and beating or killing them if they refuse, is not a good strategy for maximizing human wellbeing.

She: But that’s only your opinion.

Me: Okay… Let’s make it even simpler. What if we found a culture that ritually blinded every third child by literally plucking out his or her eyes at birth, would you then agree that we had found a culture that was needlessly diminishing human wellbeing?

She: It would depend on why they were doing it.

Me (slowly returning my eyebrows from the back of my head): Let’s say they were doing it on the basis of religious superstition. In their scripture, God says, “Every third must walk in darkness.”

She: Then you could never say that they were wrong.

Such opinions are not uncommon in the Ivory Tower.

I think Harris is confused here about what function a philosophical argument like this serves--specifically, the sort of skeptical argument offered here by his interloqueter (in this case, skepticism about universal morality/grounding for cross-cultural moral claims). The point of a skeptical argument isn't to argue that such skepticism is justified or that we should walk around actually believing it; rather, it's to draw attention to an inconsistency or lack of explanation in our way of thinking about things. One of my favorite philosophers, Barry Stroud, likened it to Meno's paradox: the point isn't to seriously contend that two objects can never touch (since the closing distance needs to be infinitely halved), but rather to draw attention to an apparent contradiction--or at least bit of weirdness--in our conceptions of numbers, distance, etc. Here Harris being horrified at his interlocutor's skepticism regarding the ability to morally condemn his hypothetical cruel society would be like someone responding to Meno by saying, "I refute it thus", and knocking two rocks together--in both cases, they are missing the point of the exercise.

(Indeed, I think proof that Harris did not understand the point of his interlocutor's questioning is given by the fact that he doesn't include enough of the conversation to understand what the interlocutor was getting at. Rather than turn on his heel, Harris' next question should have been: but that is a counter-intuitive answer; you would think you would be able to make a moral condemnation of the society in such an extreme case. Explain to me why you find such a condemnation is problematic. I will be charitable and assume that you do indeed substantively believe it is wrong to blind people for no good reason.)

I find it hard to believe that Harris' interlocutor is truly a "moral relativist"--that she gives an uncomplicated shrug of the shoulders to cruelties perpetrated by foreign cultures. I also find it hard to believe that Sam Harris truly believes his interlocutor has such a set of beliefs--which makes his pretensions of horror and outrage so tiresome. The truth is, there is quite a lot of distance between someone's avowed philosophical beliefs on a relatively esoteric point in analytic philosophy and someone's actual substantive positions on the various political and moral questions of the day. I'm sure there is someone out there who considers themself to be a proud "moral relativist" or something along those lines, but who nevertheless has a substantive set of beliefs that are not very different from Harris'--I would not call this person any less moral for staking out that philosophical position. Nor would I consider someone who naively doesn't think at all about the validity of their moral claims less moral than someone who thinks a lot about it, all else being equal. Harris is caught up in the melodrama of his own intellectual quest, and is forgetting that real actions and political beliefs make moral monsters, not esoteric philosophical claims.

Of course, Harris' intent seems precisely to infuse his project to science-ize morality with a fierce moral urgency--he wants results, dammit! There are women forced to wear sacks in Afghanistan! All true enough. But if he really cares about those substantive issues--and they are of course serious issues to think about and take action on--then he must know that arguing for a philosophical grounding of morality in science has to be the most ineffective, roundabout way of addressing them of all time. It's not like on Monday you come up with a knock-down argument of Hume's is/ought distinction, submit it to Philosophy Today on Tuesday, and by Wednesday the US government is meticulously implementing your program. Philosophy in general is an ivory tower activity. Thinking it's not is exactly the sort of thing that someone in an ivory tower would think. So Harris' fierce moral urgency shtick is truly misplaced.

I acknowledge this hasn't been a substantive critique of Harris' main argument so much as griping about the way he has conducted himself. But I do think there is something very much awry when someone comes away from a philosophical tiff believing that the person they just spoke to was History's Greatest Monster, when in fact it was probably just a nice lady with lots of advanced degrees.

PS: I'm sure Sam Harris is very smart and all, but I'm also sure that David Hume was probably about a hundred times smarter. And unlike scientific fields such as physics, philosophy doesn't "advance" in a Kuhnian way that renders important conclusions quaint and invalidated years later. It's not like Hume was theorizing about humors in the body or something that a school child could refute today; his epistemological arguments are actually alive and kicking still, and difficult to get a full and complete understanding of, even for dedicated scholars. Philosophy is hard! And yet from this obnoxious passage, you would think that philsophy was a relatively straightforward exercise, and Hume some sort of obscure crank:

Many of my critics piously cite Hume’s is/ought distinction as though it were well known to be the last word on the subject of morality until the end of time. Indeed, Carroll appears to think that Hume’s lazy analysis of facts and values is so compelling that he elevates it to the status of mathematical truth:

Attempts to derive ought from is [values from facts] are like attempts to reach an odd number by adding together even numbers. If someone claims that they’ve done it, you don’t have to check their math; you know that they’ve made a mistake.

This is an amazingly wrongheaded response coming from a very smart scientist. I wonder how Carroll would react if I breezily dismissed his physics with a reference to something Robert Oppenheimer once wrote, on the assumption that it was now an unmovable object around which all future human thought must flow. Happily, that’s not how physics works. But neither is it how philosophy works. Frankly, it’s not how anything that works, works.

And:

I must say, the vehemence and condescension with which the is/ought objection has been thrown in my face astounds me. And it confirms my sense that this bit of bad philosophy has done tremendous harm to the thinking of smart (and not so smart) people. The categorical distinction between facts and values helped open a sinkhole beneath liberalism long ago—leading to moral relativism and to masochistic depths of political correctness.

Look Sam Harris: it's obviously just fine to challenge arguments made by great thinkers. I mean, that's what you're supposed to do. But have some effing respect. "This bit of bad philosophy"? And when you launch a big argument about how science can be a grounding for morality, and you don't call your argument, "My Controversial Argument Against Hume's Is/Ought Distinction", shouldn't you expect the first words out of everyone's mouth to be, "what about Hume's is/ought distinction"?

Milo's Last Show: A Parable (Pt. 1)

It was a few weeks ago that I first saw the boy Milo, as I was hurrying to my reporting assignment at the United Confederation of Planets headquarters in New York. He was easily the most pathetic creature I'd ever seen: not older than ten years old, a face rounded by baby-fat, and a cowed posture that hinted at many years of abuse, if not physical than at least verbal. To make matters worse, we was bound literally by a leash, which seemed uncomfortably snug around his neck. Incensed, I marched straight up to the leash-holder, a burly Italian-looking man with a whimsically large handlebar mustache. The two were standing on a busy street corner, both passing out fliers.

"Just what the hell is this all about?" I said. The anger faded from my voice slightly as I noted that the top of my head came up no further than the rough man's chin.

"Wha?" The bushy eyebrows above his watery eyes arched up as best they could--he looked wounded. "What ees what about, eh? You come to our show?" He handed me the flier:

The Amazing Baldini Presents: the Human Puppet!
THRILL as his every move is predicted!
FRET as you realize that you, too, are no less bound!
$25 at the door; $20 if you bring this flier

I crumpled it up and put it in my pocket. "Why do you have him on a leash like this? Are you his father? Look, it's digging into his throat." I looked down at the boy but he turned away.

"Wha? No, no, no, thees ees Milo, we do tha show. He has no family--I take him from the streets. Here, look." He loosened the leash on Milo. "I'm sorry Milo--you should have said something." Milo didn't speak.

"Look--just, forget about it, " I said, and turned to walk away.

"Hey Mister!" shouted the burly man after me. I turned around. "You an' me--we no different from Milo. We are on a leash. We jus' never met the man who hold the leash." Rolling my eyes, I once again turned around and walked away.

"You come see tha show! You'll see!" he shouted. Breaking into a jog, I made my way quickly to UCP headquarters, putting the disturbing scene behind me and readying myself for two hours of mind-numbing bureaucratic double-talk.

Late night dorm room conversation time: free will

Seeing these silly posts about free will make me all antsy, because Alex and I totally have it all figured out. It's a pretty sweet package that includes: a conception of time that resolves all time travel paradoxes; a scientific account of free will and how it's compatible with determinism; and cameos by the halting problem, 12 Monkeys, and Being. It blows these childish "we all behave as though we had free will" musings (which don't even involve time travel at all) out of the friggin' water.

Pshh.

A rationale for hate crime laws

I left a fairly lengthy comment on a thread that I didn't realize till afterwards was probably dead. Oh well; here's the post, and here's my comment:

How about this:

When an attack on someone is motivated by racial hatred, the crime is compounded, not because the attack itself is somehow made worse due to the attacker’s hatefulness, but because the attack signals–as a matter of fact–a credible death threat against a group of people (gays, in this case). In other words, killing someone because they are gay–besides being an obvious act of murder–is also equivalent to sending a threatening note to every gay person in the community that reads: “I’m going to kill you.” And issuing death threats is, of course, against the law.

The important thing here is that the death threat component to the crime is purely an empirical finding: it is only due to the specific history of violent crime in this country that some classes are credibly “threatened” by hate crimes while other classes are not. So, for example, because there is no history of philosophers being singled out for attack, an attack motivated by hatred for philosophers does not constitute a credible death threat against the community of philosophers. But for a different class, say black people, the threat would be all too credible.

Interestingly, I think using this rationale you could also justify similar “hate crime laws” for situations not involving a broad class such as gays or blacks. For example, say the Hatfield and McCoy families have a long history of attacking each other. If John Hatfield attacks Bill McCoy out of a general hatred for McCoys, then I think you could make an empirical case that all members of the McCoy family were credibly threatened, and that therefore this death threat component should be added to John Hatfield’s crime.

So in the end, the rationale for laws against hate crimes reduces to the rationale for laws against issuing death threats. The final equation is “hate crime = violent crime + death threat”.

What do you think?

(PS: Another interesting twist to this is that I think the requirement that the death threat component be “credible” could have a mitigating effect in some cases. For example, in a town in which KKK attacks are common, a hate crime against a black person would constitute a very credible threat against the wider black population–after all, this is a group of likeminded people whose stated aim is to terrorize blacks and other minorities. However, if the attacker was just sort of this lone actor in a place where racially motivated crimes were extremely rare, the crime wouldn’t pose much of a substantive threat to others–it would mostly be discounted by the targeted minority as a freak occurrence. In this case, I don’t think a hate crime charge would be warranted–because the assailent in this case lacked the capacity to threaten anyone by his crime.)

Modernity, torture

My Blogger Dashboard is littered with half-written posts about what I'm about to talk about--it's just very hard to express clearly, and I'm still finding my way--but I'll just go ahead and try to blurt out something short that hopefully is not complete gibberish.

I've been trying to figure out what lies at the very, very center of modernity and Western thought and so forth, and I think it's something like this: that the whole thing rests on a single foundational insight about truth, namely, that no one is infallible. Or, put another way: it is always possible that you could be wrong.

Everything seems to derive from this one bedrock principle. The moment you acknowledge that any view uttered could be false, any position held could be wrong, it becomes clear that you must assume a position of doubt--one that always leaves open the possibility that you are wrong and that some dissenter is right. And the next thing that springs to mind is a model--the "marketplace of ideas"--where no viewpoint is prohibited (because it is possible that this viewpoint is correct), and where the correct and good viewpoints rise to the top. And in this model, the more that is contributed--the larger the marketplace--the better, because it increases the chances of a good viewpoint emerging. And besides the marketplace being larger, we also want it to be more diverse, because this too will increase the chances of finding a good viewpoint. And suddenly, we begin to structure our ontology around this epistemological need: we view society as consisting of "individuals", rather than the less granular unit of society that is centered on the family or clan, which has the effect of increasing the number of nodes in the marketplace. We encourage "individualism", which increases the diversity of the marketplace. We encourage "equality", so as to maximize the interactions between nodes, which generates more possibilities. Every facet of liberalism, and the general direction of liberal progress over the centuries, seems to be in the direction of increasing the magnitude, the kinetic energy, and the combinatorial explosiveness of this abstract marketplace, which is ever-ratcheting upward to higher and better truths. And it will never stop, because we will always think: well, it is possible that we are not now at the highest and best truth, because it is always possible that one is wrong.

And so the whole liberal project, it seems to me, has this epistemological obsession--a core skepticism that we can ever be certain of the Truth--leading it forward by the nose. (A lot of this, it's interesting to note, is intensely Cartesian: not just the fact that it is founded on a non-negotiable kernal of doubt, but also this very dualistic relationship between the material world and the mental world of the marketplace of ideas. This dualism is really brought out, I think, by the liberal conception of punishment as physical confinement. Crime--doing harm to others--is bad, because it inhibits or destroys other nodes in the marketplace. So by physically confining the criminal node, you prevent this harm from taking place--while also maintaining, to the greatest possible extent, the effectiveness of the criminal node. Note that we do not prohibit criminals from reading or staying connected to the world, nor do we limit their free speech rights. In typical dualistic Cartesian fasion, we jail their bodies but not their souls.)

Anyway, getting back to torture: torture seems to be the precise antithesis of this model and this way of thinking, because it leverages the body against the soul, imposing the will of the torturer node onto the torturee node. Nodes are only valuable in the marketplace so long as they are independent of each other and actually contributing original material; coercing a node to think and express certain thoughts removes the independence of that node--reducing it to a mere extension of some other node's will. When the node is tortured, it is, for all intents and purposes, destroyed. Worse than destroyed, even: enslaved. Converted into a puppet that is wholly controlled by some other individual, and yet nominally still a node-in-good-standing in the marketplace, it submits ideas and thoughts as if they sprung ex nihilo from an independent will but in fact they are the utterances of the zombified empty hulk of an individual. The torturer--the puppeteer--is thus in a position to illegitimately reap all the epistemological benefits of an "independent" voice that just so happens to say exactly what it wants to hear.

Now, some clarification here. What I'm laying out here occupies kind of a weird space. It's not the actual moral argument against torture; rather, it's sort of the--I don't know--anthropology of reasoning out of which the moral argument arises? I don't know. That might be nonsense, but as I said at the outset, I'm still feeling my way on all this.

EDIT: By the way, I notice that the little image I used for the post says something interesting--that modernity is the "yearning for the infinite". I would say this has it backwards: we're not yearning for the infinite, but rather, due to our axiomatic commitment to doubt, we condemn ourselves to infinite yearning--a state of affairs that I think is problematic in a lot of ways, and that I plan on talking about in a future post.

The "gods" of the South

TNC's been doing some quality ruminations about the Civil War and white supremacy; you'd do well to check out his latest, which talks about the interesting idea that white supremacy was about white Southerners turning themselves into gods:

What occurs to me is that some time around the early 19th, late 18th century, a portion of this country decided to make themselves into Gods. They were not the first. And they aren't the last. But I can't get past the simple thrill, the utter charge man gets from dominating man. Southerners referred to white supremacy not just in economic terms, but as a lifestyle. Slavery did not just mean the right to exploit another man's labor, it meant utter and complete dominion over him, his wives, his children and all of his friends.

You could end his life in all manner of ways. Kill him, then take his woman as your own. Sell him, then take his woman and his daughters as your own. Keep him there, and do the same. It oversimplifies things to say, their would be no repercussions--but no one could stop you. In your own eyes, by birth-right, you would be Godkin.

I'd go further, and say that white supremacy was not just a lifestyle for Southerners, but an ontology. It was part of how they situated themselves in the cosmos--as demigods who walked the earth, who adhered to their own peculiar codes of chivalry, honor, and beauty. It's just like the prologue to Gone With the Wind:

"There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South….Here in this patrician world the Age of Chivalry took its last bow….Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave….Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…."

I think this also helps explain why white Southern conservatives are seemingly in a perpetual state of being aggrieved about one thing or another: to them, it's not just that the political or even cultural situation isn't what they want, but rather, that the universe itself is deeply unjust, deeply flawed. In their imagination, 150 years ago they would be in an overclass--they would be special, priviledged, and lead lives of nobility--worthy lives. But this universe has been perverted--by outsiders, the Northerners, the liberals--and turned completely upsidedown. The beautiful, noble creatures, once gods, now languish on the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. The slaves have been elevated above them, and now even rule over them. They are victims of a fickle, unjust universe. And so when they come together to exert political power, it is to complain, to commiserate--basically, to lament the passing of the Old South of their imagination.

The team from my area is superior to the team from your area

Via Sullivan, a hell of a quote:

"The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man extinguished his," - Hugo St. Victor, 12th Century.

It's interesting that we would associate a practiced distance from the accidental properties of ourselves with strength, wisdom--even perfection. I think it's the right way to think about it. I don't know of any kind of wisdom that doesn't start with self-awareness, and self-awareness, I think, is the practice of distancing yourself from yourself, viewing yourself through the eyes of others. What starts as empathy leads inexorably to a kind of universalist outlook, that recognizes that the accidental differences between us are arbitrary and capricious, and so we shouldn't pay them too much heed. Indeed, according to this Hugo fellow, the perfect man shuns them entirely.

But ultimately, all of this relies on exercising the empathy muscle, and this exercise is exhausting. The brain labors to carry out all the psychic computations needed to translate the world into the viewpoint of someone else--and so, just like any kind of grueling task that is good for us, we tend not to carry it out nearly as often as we should. To do it regularly and as an ever-present feature of your thought process is like running a mental marathon. It's so much easier to relax into the cushy couch of our baser tribal tendencies, saying "fuck you" to the out-group while we congratulate each other on having been born in the United States.

That's where the idea, specifically, of strength comes in, I think: you exercise the muscle regularly, and it becomes strong.

The end of philosophy in 800 words or less

David Brooks gets under a lot of liberals' skin, but one thing I've always appreciated is that he seems to have a pretty deep interest in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and is willing to write about it in his op-ed columns. Even if a lot of what he says is not exactly cutting edge stuff, I think he's still performing an important function: introducing key concepts from the brain sciences to a mainstream audience. So when he writes an article called "The End of Philosophy" trying to get across the notion that the Enlightenment-era conception of the mind as the "seat of reason" has been shown by science to be completely inaccurate, I'm sympathetic.

However, plenty of people aren't so sympathetic, and in fact they have a pretty good reason not to be: Brooks' column is terrible. From John Cole's Balloon Juice:

David Brooks has another of his patented “science explains social things but I won’t tell you how or cite any actual articles” pieces today. This one is about the “science of morality.”

And, indeed, Brooks does not cite any articles, and many of the claims he makes are as vapid as they are pithy (e.g., "The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality... challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people." Huh?). While a person who is already familiar with philosophy and cognitive science (ahem) can charitably fill in the blanks, everyone else is left scratching their heads.

The problem, I think, is that Brooks is working in an incredibly constricted format--the newspaper op-ed. Consider all the advantages of a blog: there is no length limit, you can post as often and as much as you want, you can include links, you can include as many images as you want, you can go back and edit posts to make them clearer, you can dialog with commenters or other bloggers, you can vary the difficulty of your posts (as for example Krugman does with his "wonkish" versus non-wonkish posts), etc. Maybe if he were blogging Brooks would do a good job conveying all these difficult ideas to a mainstream audience--but as it is, he is trying to cram everything into 800 words of newspaper print, which I'm pretty sure would be impossible even for Socrates.

Oh, and in case you don't know who Socrates is or what he is famous for, let me give you the Brooks capsule summary:

Socrates talked.

Got that?

A little more about identity...

Another thing to notice about identity is the role it plays in the enlightenment notion of equality (as in, "everyone is equal"). In order to derive that kind of equality, we deliberately factor out precisely the properties of a person that constitute that person's identity--the person's race, religion, creed, lineage, etc. It is not that the Christian and the Muslim are equals qua Christian and Muslim, but rather, they are equal qua human beings, independent of whatever religious beliefs they happen to subscribe to.

And, in fact, you see precisely this process of "factoring out" take place in Rawls' Theory of Justice, with the whole original position thing and it's 'veil of ignorance' (a good, brief summary of the original position can be found here).

A preliminary thought on identity

Lately I've been thinking a bit about identity, and have been meaning to write a post about it but it keeps turning into an out-of-control ramble. So for now I'll just note the following.

Identity seems to rest on this weird ontological transformation, where the fact of something comes to have a quality of there-ness. For example, the fact I was born in America becomes a thing that is there: an American. And in undergoing this transformation from fact to person, this thing exits the domain of reason and ideas and logic and is smuggled into quite a different one, the domain of human social interaction, which is governed by a very different set of rules. It's a move from the rational to the psychological, from the universal to the contextual--and it seems to be a precondition for participating in the grand social project of living a human life.

Anyway, I'll stop there. But that's the entry point I'm taking in thinking more about what identity is and the role it plays in human being.

"Asymmetrical agency" in action

In a recent post I talked about the idea of people in the Israel-Palestine debate employing "asymmetrical agency" to defend their position. Here's an example of what I was talking about, from a pro-Israel Sullivan reader:

You're probably right that Avigdor Lieberman is going to be a major headache. But at least acknowledge one thing regarding the advancement of Lieberman into Israeli politics. The intifadeh and the incessant rocket attacks from Lebanon and Gaza are what laid the groundwork for Lieberman's success and also had the not insignificant result of effectively killed off the liberal peace camp within Israeli society. It wasn't a triumph of Israeli neo-conservatism or innate Jewish racism against Arabs or what have you. It was the fact that the Palestinians, or at least the groups who represent the Palestinians, through their intransigence and the willful malice of characters like Yassir Arafat wiped out the political credibility of anyone in Israel who wanted a final and peaceful settlement for both peoples.

So what the reader does here is admit the badness of Avigdor Lieberman, but turn things around by ascribing agency to the Palestinians only: suddenly, in this discussion of "who is to blame", Sullivan's reader gives us a (naturalistic) causal account of how Lieberman came to power as a consequence of the actions of the Palestinians. The subtle shift in perspective renders Israelis into not fully-formed individuals with free will and moral duties, but sociological subjects to which moral blame is not applicable. Arafat is all-too-human, capable of "willful malice"--but Lieberman is an inhuman empirical fact, a spinning cog in the machine that Arafat decides how to operate.

Of course, Sullivan's reader is not saying anything untrue (I don't think): it's pretty clear that Hamas' various attacks and rhetoric have radicalized Israel and ushered in the current hawkish, right-wing government, elevating certain extreme factions to power. But what does this true causal fact have to do with assessing moral blame? If elevating someone like Lieberman to power is blameworthy, then it is for reasons independent of the moral standing of the Palestinians or the causal chain of events that led to Lieberman's rise. Hamas being evil doesn't justify illiberalism any more than, say, the destruction of the World Trade Center justifies illiberalism.

So Sullivan's reader isn't uttering falsehoods so much as making an argument that never gets off the ground. Sure, Arafat "made" Lieberman; but you could argue back that some Israeli politican or action in the past "made" Arafat. Wherever you choose to pin the first instance of agency is arbitrary and can always be moved one step further back. Neither side can use this method of argument to make any headway in attributing blame to the other side.

So how can we sort out this dialog? There are a couple of different conversations that can be had. The first is a conversation about moral blame, and in this you attribute agency to everyone and judge everyone according to universal moral principles.* The second is a conversation where you try to gain a scientific understanding of the situation, and in this you attribute agency to no one--every actor is treated as the subject of naturalistic enquiry, and normative concepts like moral blame are left out of the picture. The third is a conversation about practical wisdom, where you try to dispense advice to one side as to what actions that side can take to achieve its strategic goals--in this case, you ascribe agency to your audience only (the faction you're advising), properly framing them as moral agents in a naturalistic world that they must carefully navigate in order to survive.


*It is usually in these conversations--about who is to blame--that the dreaded question "Are you pro-Israel or pro-Palestine?" crops up. The correct answer is that no one who embraces modernity is "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine", but rather pro-X, where X is some set of universal principles. Now, if I determine that Israel adheres more faithfully to X than Palestine, then I suppose that, as it happens, I am in a sense "pro-Israel"--but it must be understood that this support is contingent on Israel's behavior vis-a-vis X. So one very real possible outcome could be that one is neither "pro-Israel" nor "pro-Palestine", if it happens to be the case that neither side adheres to X. This whole thing of "choosing a side" obscures this "pox on both houses" possibility and turns the attribution of moral blame into a zero sum game--as if somehow if Israel does something wrong, then that means that Palestine has done something right.

Asymmetrical agency

Following the Israel-Palestine conflict, I've noticed a tendency to sometimes shift agency--and therefore, the implication of moral culpitude--from one faction to the other. For example, consider the following two, undoubtedly true propositions:

(1) Israel's attacks of Gaza had the effect of further radicalizing the Palestinians, diminishing the chances for peace.

(2) Hamas' sporadic attacks of Israel had the effect of provoking them to attack, diminishing the chances for peace.

In (1), we imbue Israel with what I'm calling agency--which is not only the capacity to but the expectation that a person or group will make rational and moral decisions. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are treated as a fact of the naturalistic world--as something that can be scientifically studied, understood, and mastered, and that will react to stimuli in a consistent and reliable way (if you attack them they will be radicalized, just as surely as adding Na+ to Cl- will form salt). In (2), it is just the opposite--we are treating Hamas as the rational, morally accountable decision-maker, and it is the easy-to-provoke Israelis that are the facts of nature.

So what is going on here? I think it's pretty clear that ascribing agency to one side has a very specific use, which is when you are trying to dispense practical wisdom to a particular side. For example, the proper context for (1) would be if I were advising Israel strategically--if I were pointing out the objective effects of Israel's actions. Similarly, the proper context for (2) would be if I were advising Hamas strategically.

In these kinds of strategic contexts, the question of moral culpability is not at issue--however, in normal language a sentence like (1) nevertheless strongly implies the moral culpability of Israel but not Hamas (with the reverse being true for (2)), which can lead to all sorts of confusion, since it sounds like suddenly one side is not being held morally culpable at all.

Specifically, one confusion I saw during the Gaza action would be that bloggers like Ezra Klein or Matt Yglesias would keep making claims similar to (1) in the context of advising Israel on what it should do to accomplish its strategic goals, and right-wing Israel backers would accuse them of disproportionately blaming Israel or failing to acknowledge the immorality of Hamas' actions. But of course, that's just confusing a case of asymmetrical agency with asymmetrical culpability. The other confusion is one that I think subtlely pops up from time to time, which is that someone will try to shirk moral culpability for their side by framing things such that their side does not have agency. For example, if the debate is whether Israel's actions in Gaza were immoral, it would be neither here nor there if the person defending Israel pointed out that Hamas had to expect Israel to respond forcefully to its provokations since that is what any country would do.

Moreover, I think the thing to keep in mind is that when the context is moral culpability, it is a "both and" situation: both Israel and Hamas must be held morally culpable for their actions as judged against a universal set of principles.

Science as maximal reliableness

I'm reading a book called Metascience and Politics by one A.J. Gregor (some PoliSci professor at Cal). I'm only in the second chapter, but came across this interesting passage:

Some of the critical issues that seem to divide political science as a discipline into factions turn on what science is understood to be. First, the suggestion that "unscientific" methods are essential to political inquiry requires that we have at least some understanding of what "science" might be--and secondly, the identification of "behavioralists" seems, generally, to turn on the disposition of some political scientists to attempt to employ the methods of science in their work. Science, and the methods of science, should be, therefore, the first objects of analysis if one wishes to assess the cognitive merits of the "behavioralist-non-behavioralist" dispute.

The effort to unpack the concept "science" and to offer a summary account of "the scientific method," is beset, of course, with innumerable difficulties. The term "science" obviously has persuasive force.... It has also enjoyed a long history. Its specific cognitive meaning is, as a result, difficult to isolate, not only because of the persuasive employments of the term, but because the term has had a long and confused philological history....

Once this qualification is made, it can be argued that the term "science" has taken on a relatively (but not undisputed) specific contemporary meaning: it refers to those procedures, which, as a matter of historic fact, have provided a systematically articulated and comprehensive body of maximally reliable knowledge claims that afford men survival and adaptive advantage by affording explanatory and predictive leverage. Such an explication thus includes both a consideration of "science" as process (that is to say, the term refers to methods and procedures invoked to provide for maximally reliable truth ascriptions) and "science" as product (that is to say, the term has as referent that corpus of linguistic entities to which truth can be ascribed with maximal domain variant reliability). The former is commonly spoken of as the "scientific method," and the latter "scientific knowledge." Both are historic products and both are historically relative.

What this implies is that neither specific observational nor experimental procedures, nor methods of generalization, nor specific logicodeductive strategies, nor any collection of procedural assumptions or presuppositions, nor any technique of measurement or instrumentation is absolutely essential to the method of science. Furthermore, no single existential assertion delivered by scientists, nor any conjunction of such assertions, is absolutely essential to the corpus of science. Science is neither a specific collection of procedures nor a specific body of essential truths. Every truth warranting procedure and every truth claim remains, in principle, subject to review--none are specific to science.

...

The one feature we have gradually come to realize as constitutive of science in whatever form it has taken, a feature pervasive of science both as process and product, is its necessary concern with reliability. Without reliability argument and deliberation cannot proceed. Knowing anything becomes impossible.

...

Our preoccupation with reliability is dictated by the generic human concern with adapting to, and controlling, our complex and changing environment. We find it necessary to anticipate futures--and we do that best by exercising the imagal trial-and-error techniques, and their subtending rationale, that we identify as rational behavior....

[pp. 21-23; all emphasis his]

What I think is interesting here is that science is given such a purely procedural definition: science is X, where X is whatever set of methods and procedures that have generated the most reliable set of knowledge claims that help us predict stuff and adapt to our world. There's no a priori constraint on what those methods or knowledge claims could be--indeed, Gregor says elsewhere that "[i]f intuitions, mystic insights, the dialectic, phantasy, or whispered intelligences from God proved to be maximally reliable in permitting men to empirically adapt to and effectively control their environment, they would become, ipso facto, constituent procedures of science." In other words: science is whatever gets results, dammit!

While the definition of science is in this view procedural, it is still the case that all science candidates must output empirically testable results--otherwise, you would have no common measuring stick by which to compare the reliableness of the different candidates. So a possible science in which you ask the High Priest for the correct answers is permissible, so long as the High Priest is giving predictions that can be verified in an uncontroversial way later on.

Now, Gregor is not coming up with all this in a vacuum--he has a specific purpose in mind, which is to show that--because science has no immutable, first-order claims, it therefore cannot be considered an "ideology". Gregor identifies as an essential feature of ideologies that they have one or more first-order claims that one cannot negate while still claiming to be an adherent of that ideology. For example, one cannot negate that some races are superior to others while still claiming to be an adherent to National Socialism--thus, National Socialism is an ideology. Since science only contains a second-order claim (that is, a claim that is not directly about objects in the world, but rather, one which is about claims that are about objects in the world--in this case, the reliability of such claims)--that science is X, where X is the most reliable set of methods etc.--it contains no individual substantive first-order claim that is truly immutable. It is in this sense forever self-correcting and irrigid--and so definitely not an ideology.

But I wonder if Gregor makes a hash of things in this defense of science. Indeed, it seems that by defining a science solely according to its empirical track record, it collapses the distinction between method and theory. Let's say that we have set of scientific methods M that taken together define a science, and that, adhering to M, scientists generate a set of theories T. In the normal course of events, the scientists would conduct empirical tests of all the various theories in T, and the ones that yielded reliable predictions would be kept as "(provisionally) true" and the ones that yielded bad predictions would be scrapped as "false"--and over time more theories (generated in accordance to M) would be added to T and so on. But now if we face the question as to the legitimacy of M--of the methods that generated all these theories--Gregor would have us apply the exact same criterion to M as we did to the theories in T, namely, that M yields reliable predictions.

But this seems confused. In the first place, it's odd to think of "reliability" as a property of M, when in fact M is not itself making a set of predictions about the world that are true or false--M generates theories that make these predictions. So when Gregor defines science as "those procedures, which, as a matter of historic fact, have provided a systematically articulated and comprehensive body of maximally reliable knowledge claims", he is moving too fast and skipping a step: the procedures that define a science do not themselves "provide" "knowledge claims", they provide testable theories; and it is these theories, once tested, that provide the knowledge claims. Perhaps we can infer that Gregor meant that science is the set of procedures that, as a matter of historic fact, has provided the most successful theories. However, this understanding presents a number of difficulties, chief among them being: what is the point of a scientific method, and what work is it doing for us? Certainly we could not, on the basis of the methods it utilized, dismiss a priori any questionable undertaking that called itself science, since any set of methods is fair game: we would have to wait for this set of methods to to churn out theories over a period of time sufficient for it to be deemed a "historic fact" that the set of methods did not yield a "comprehensive body maximally reliable knowledge claims". In other words, a scientific method, on Gregor's view, can only be evaluated a posteriori. But in this, a scientific method becomes functionally equivalent to what Gregor elsewhere describes as a "methodology"--a specific approach within a science that yields a specific kind of data and prediction, and whose value is determined by the quality of the predictions it makes (for example, in sociology there may be different methodologies--some qualitative, some quantitative, whatever--for determining the quality of life of a class of people, but these methodologies are all consistent with the same scientific method).

Indeed, I was under the impression that the whole point of defining a "scientific method" was so that we could impose some a priori constraints on just what kinds of theories were allowable, so that we could a) situate science in general in a broader philosophical/epistemological framework (or, put another way: as a philosopher, I should be able to talk about science such that it is abstracted from any particular claims it makes, in case I want to have a discussion about, say, the general difference between scientific and ethical claims), but more importantly , b) provide a procedural guarantee that the sort of knowledge claims that the science ultimately produces are of a kind consistent with science qua "human concern with adapting to, and controlling, our complex and changing environment". Now, about (a), don't get me wrong: it is not as if Gregor's definition leaves philosophers with nothing to say about science--he still allows it to be defined such that it must be about generating empirical claims, and science is necessarily tied to a general human activity (adapting to the environment, etc.). But it does seem weird that in a discussion about the rules of induction, you could not, by Gregor's lights, claim to necessarily be talking about something that is relevant to science (the "scientific method" could, after all, be nothing more than writing down the predictions of the High Priest). With regards to (b), it may be true that Gregor's conception of "science as maximal reliableness" is sufficient in most cases to convince us that its claims are of a common type--a type of claim that is characterized by its being in some essential way concerned with helping humans to adapt to their environment. However, the problem is that--while in lots of cases the notion of reliability is straightforward because theories are put to work making predictions--in some cases, a theory is put to work to explain something that happened in the past, and direct empirical testing of such theories is difficult or impossible. For example, cosmologists posit theories about how the universe first unfolded, or evolutionary biologists hypothesize about the sequence of events that led to life developing on earth. In these cases, a theory is created to retroactively explain historical evidence--and so any theory consistent with the evidence must be considered as "reliable" as any other, no matter what method that theory was generated in accordance with. So it is precisely in these cases where the idea a scientific method actually does some useful work: it brings unity to predictive knowledge claims and historical ones by bringing them under the same criterion, not of reliability--which isn't really applicable to historical claims--but of the procedural criterion of having been generated by the proper, "scientific" method. And with this in place, we are thus free to rule out historical (as opposed to predictive) theories a priori that otherwise would be impossible to rule out for lack of the ability to test their reliability.

(As a quick addendum, let me just add that, really, this idea of a One True A Priori Scientific Method is required if we are make any sense of science as something that is concerned with the human activity of controlling and adapting to our environment. The crucial distinction to keep in mind is between that of a science and that of a history. A history is just a straightforward record of stuff that happened, and so of course there's no a priori constraint on what a history might contain besides that it's logically consistent--so for example, there is nothing wrong with a history in which God parts an ocean or where the universe is created 4000 years ago. Its just data, which--true or false--is always admissible as data, as a history. But a scientific theory is not a record, and it is not simply a set of data--it is something like a schematized conditional claim of the form "if X occurs under conditions Y, then Z will occur". So when a cosmologist theorizes that the big bang occurred, properly speaking there is the scientific claim that goes something like "when you have a universe that is infinitely dense, then it will rapidly expand outwards", and, distinct from this, a historical claim that goes something like "15 billion years ago, the Big Bang happened". Of course, anyone who believes that it is acceptable for scientific claims to be used as the basis for the actual Historical Record of the World would have no trouble accepting all of what the cosmologist says, but someone who had, say, certain theological commitments could consistently accept the cosmologist's scientific claim while rejecting the cosmologist's historical claim. But, crucially, what our theologian cannot do is reject the cosmologist's scientific claim (except on scientific grounds)--nor can the theologian ever even submit a scientific theory in which a deity causes something to happen. Such a theory would not be admissible. Why? Because the introduction of divine causation breaks the schema in virtue of which scientific claims are tools of human adaption to the environment (you can use a conditional statement to help you successfully do stuff in the world; but you can't use raw data to help you do anything in the world...although you do need it to generate those helpful conditional statements). You cannot posit "if God comes down from the sky when the Israelites are on the run, then He will part the Red Sea", precisely because God doesn't necessarily act in a rule-like way--he acts according to His own divine will! And indeed, isn't it quite appropriate that a supreme deity who has total control over the universe and all of Creation would be ruled out a priori from a system of generating knowledge claims that purports to be an extension of humankind's dominion over its environment? How could God come under the dominion of humankind?)

Abiding astonishment

In the book God's Presence In History, Martin Buber is quoted as saying this:

The concept of miracle which is permissible from the historical approach can be defined at its starting point as an abiding astonishment. The ... religious person ... abides in that wonder; no knowledge, no cognition, can weaken his astonishment.

This passage gets at what I think is a very important thread in the tangled ball of yarn that is religion: the abiding awe--or astonishment--that comes when we contemplate the question of why there is something rather than nothing. That there is anything at all is a wondrous fact, and no amount of reflecting upon that fact dampens its exhilarating effect on us, or lessens its mysteriousness.

Moreover, note how this "question of existence"--the question of why there is something rather than nothing, of why there should be anything at all--is framed. To talk of "there being something" or "there being anything" is to talk in maximally general terms about the world. We are not expressing abiding astonishment that there is this or that particular thing; it is not that we experience awe because the world is the way it is as opposed to some other less desirable possible arrangement. The source of our astonishment, in other words, is not that we inhabit this or that possible world, but that there are possible worlds. We are celebrating and wondering at the fact that existence exists.

To even conceptualize the world in such a maximally general way requires, I think, a non-trivial feat of imagination. It means really apprehending, in one moment, the all of everything. It is a dizzying experience, and also a frightening one, because apprehending the all of everything naturally leads one to think of the absence of the all of everything--of utter, abyss-like nothingness.

These sensations of dizzying exhilaration on the one hand and utter terror on the other find their religious expression, I think, in the various sensations that God causes in men: the abiding astonishment, the bottomless terror. In religion, humanity's concerns surrounding a maximally general conception of the world--surrounding, in other words, our conception of existence as such--is anthropomorphized, bringing this cluster of difficult and troubling questions into a framework that any human can easily interface with. The question of existence, so elusive before, is now no more difficult to access at a superficial level than some surly authority figure: it walks, it talks, it commands, it emotes, it does stuff in the world (like part oceans).

Of course, many people's conception of God is more refined than a bearded man sitting up in the clouds. If you ask ten different people what their conception of God is, you will often receive ten different answers, each one varying in its degree to which God is conceived as a human-like being or capable of affecting human affairs. However, insofar as God is a window to the abiding astonishment that there is something rather than nothing, all conceptions of God (that are not flatly pantheistic) are flawed--or at least potentially very confusing--because God is a particular thing, and the moment you veer away from a maximally general conception of the world you also veer away from the topic of existence as such. It seems to me that while it is quite possible that a religious person with a sophisticated outlook could be experiencing abiding astonishment at basically the same thing as me but with theological rather than secular/philosophical/analytical window dressing, it is more likely that the God-concept--with all of its anthropomorphic trappings--has led him down a false path to a sort of existential idolatry, where what is generating awe and astonishment is not the higher-order, maximally general conception of the all of everything, but a lower-order conception of a particular possible world: specifically, the possible world in which a being "God" exists that has all manner of amazing and superlative properties.

Quick, someone call a philosopher

I think this Andrew Sullivan reader has it wrong:

A reader writes:

I think that Mr. Ward doesn't understand certain things about the scientific process. He writes:

If a belief is forced (you cannot avoid it), vital (of great practical import), and living (a realistic and plausible option), then, James suggests, it is rational to commit yourself to it even with less than overwhelming evidence. That seems to me to do no more than reflect the practice of good scientists when they believe that “there is no event without a cause,” “there are universal laws of nature,” or “the universe is comprehensible and mathematically intelligible.

These are hypothesis, not just beliefs. There is a difference, and it has to do with whether or not your beliefs can change as the evidence changes. These hypothesis can and have changed as more evidence has accumulated.

Take, for example, the weather. There are no real fundamental scientific issues concerning the weather, and there haven't been for quite some time. There are, for example, no scientists hoping to overthrow General Relativity or the Standard Model by looking at thunderstorms or hurricanes. Likewise, as far as I know, there are no religious bodies that claim that we cannot predict next week's weather because of Weather Gods that make it rain, or that Hurricanes and tornados (both highly organized structures) show evidence of Intelligent Design.

However, we now know that the weather is, in a deep sense, not "comprehensible and mathematically intelligible." The weather is chaotic, and is not predictable more than a few weeks into the future. We will never be able to predict whether it will rain in some location August 1, 2020, at least not until July, 2020, rolls around. This was a surprise to the mathematicians and meteorologist working in weather prediction; they expected to be able to predict the weather like astronomers predict the motions of the planets. John von Neumann even thought we could control the weather by using its chaotic nature. He was wrong and they were wrong and people have adjusted their thinking.

Unlike in (most) religion, there are no scientific hypothesis (beliefs) that could not be changed if the evidence so indicated.

Claims like “there is no event without a cause,” “there are universal laws of nature,” and “the universe is comprehensible and mathematically intelligible" are not hypotheses within science--they are assumptions that science itself rests upon. Indeed, as David Hume pointed out some time ago--and as any freshman Philosophy undergraduate is taught--it is impossible to derive the necessity of cause and effect from empirical data. And, along the same lines, you cannot somehow empirically demonstrate that the universe behaves in a law-like way that is comprehensible to humans.

The example involving weather is quite a bad one. He takes the unpredictability of weather to be evidence that, in at least one respect, the universe is "not comprehensible or mathematically intelligible." But nonlinear systems like the weather are mathematically intelligible--in fact, there is a whole branch of mathematics that deals with irreducibly complex systems like that, and scientists have had much success replicating these systems using computer simulations. So there is nothing incomprehensible or mathematically unintelligible going on there.

In short, this Sullivan reader doesn't know what he's talking about and his response never should have gotten posted to the blog. Indeed, if Sullivan himself were on duty, I'm sure he would have vetoed it, since if I'm not mistaken he has a Philosophy degree from somewhere fancy. But Sullivan is on vacation and his assistent Patrick Appel is running things, so we get this.

Divinity and magic

I want to jump off of something from a previous post:

The criticism challenges the believer to account for just how--or in virtue of what--God is to be distinguished from a human being who claims supreme power. The believer can reply by saying that God is omniscient or infinitely wise, or whatever other assertion of superlative virtue, but it's probably not as strong a claim as the believer wants to make--it rests too much on accidental properties, is still too grounded in this-worldliness. I mean, we can imagine a powerful alien that had all these same superlative virtues, and yet the believer would still say that God is in a whole other metaphysical league compared with this alien. So for the believer it is really about getting across this idea that God exists in a fundamentally different and other-worldly kind of way--it participates in an altogether purer, perfect form of being that regular stuff doesn't normally have access to. But the problem for the believer who pushes this sort of point, in my view, is that his words start to lose their impact, their grip on anything meaningful: the believer falls into the pattern of distinguishing between God and some-ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God by insisting somewhat circularly that God is such that it is just totally not on a par with that ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God. But it becomes very difficult to conceptualize this--this metaphysical secret sauce, this thing in virtue of which God is different--as a thing in its own right, and not just a negatively defined argumentative construct.

This discussion--about the possibility of the divine as a special, purer being that is separate from normal profane (non-sacred) being--is I think a very important one, because it leads naturally to the idea of false or mistaken divinity, or what I call magic (or magical thinking). Simply put, magic is what you get when you take something that is purportedly divine or sacred--which is, ostensibly, of that purer being--and shoehorn it or put it into the context of normal, non-sacred being. For example, I may believe that oak trees are somehow very mystical and sacred, that they perhaps play a special role in the cosmos--but in a different, non-sacred context, these same beliefs, which before were quite epic and meaningful and cosmically important, are now just silly, superstitious, arbitrary, wrong, quaint, and easily dismissed with a condescending chuckle. So what happened here? Clearly there was some kind of mismatch, where either there was a miscommunication, or a mistaken belief, or perhaps, if we want to avoid seeming judgmental, we could say it was a case of two people "living in different worlds". However its put, the important thing is this idea that when divine being is stripped if its divinity, it becomes something debased, profane, and silly: magic.

And so in the conversation outlined in the quote above, what is going on is a struggle, where the believer is trying to get across this idea of divine being, of something fundamentally different from normal being, and the atheist is failing to see or understand this specialness, and instead all of this stuff is registering as mere magic, as no more or less superstitious and silly than the cosmic sanctity of oak trees. There is a mismatch where the believer and atheist are indeed "living in different worlds", and the believer is trying to resolve the mismatch by bringing in the atheist to the world of legitimate sanctity and divinity, and the atheist is trying to resolve the mismatch by trying to bring the believer into the profane world, explaining away the believer's world as a confused bundle of routine falsehoods.

I think what both believer and atheist could do to keep the conservation productive would be to directly address this divinity/magic problem: how can one distinguish between the two--and is the distinction even really coherent? And if the distinction is coherent for the believer but not the atheist, then why is this the case? Is it because the believer has or had access to a special kind of experience that the atheist does or did not, like a direct exposure to the divine, a "conversion experience"? Or is there some other special insight or motivation at work, that does not require some special event in the believer's life-narrative?

Anyway, that's enough for now. I'll have more to build off of this later, but I think I want to keep these to short bursts because otherwise I risk losing focus...

A more satisfying debate about God

Usually any debate between an atheist and a full-fledged believer ends before it ever really gets started because religion entails a whole bunch of empirical claims that there just isn't any reason to believe--for example, that God created the earth, or that God parted the ocean. Ultimately, nothing the believer says about faith or anything else is going to get the atheist to allow miracles or God or any other supernatural thing into his empirical sanctum sanctorum. And this is as it should be: it is not valid to believe an empirical claim to be true when there is a total lack of any supporting evidence--even if you really, really, really, really want it to be true, as is often the case with religion-motivated empirical claims that are not or cannot be substantiated.

However, though I certainly feel that these short-lived debates resolve in the atheist's favor, there is the lingering feeling of having won on a technicality--like nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. And the dogmatic tone of the atheist's argument--These are the rules of empiricism!--makes atheism sound paradoxically religious.

The truth is, there are many more interesting conversations to be had between believer and atheist beyond that initial empirical sticking point. But how do you carry on a conversation about God when there isn't even any agreement at the outset that God exists?

I think one way to break the impasse is to ask a slightly different question than the one usually posed. Rather than, "Does God exist?", the question ought to be: "Is the existence of God possible?" By "modalizing" the question ("modal" means having to do with possibility), we elide the usual questions about evidence and proof and faith and instead focus on a more substantive target: the divine itself. We move the conversation from a primarily epistemological one ("How can we know that God exists; what is the evidence?") to a primarily ontological one ("What kind of a thing is God; is such a thing possible/coherent?"). We set aside the question of which, of all possible worlds, is the one that we happen to inhabit, and take up instead the broader question of divine being, irrespective of which possible worlds this divine being happens to reside.

Indeed, I think a lot of the more compelling arguments against God are the ones that criticize the God concept itself as incoherent, or unable to deliver on its metaphysical promises. For example, acerbic atheist Christopher Hitchens regularly characterizes God--giver of laws and arbiter of good and evil--as nothing more than a dictator in the sky. The criticism challenges the believer to account for just how--or in virtue of what--God is to be distinguished from a human being who claims supreme power. The believer can reply by saying that God is omniscient or infinitely wise, or whatever other assertion of superlative virtue, but it's probably not as strong a claim as the believer wants to make--it rests too much on accidental properties, is still too grounded in this-worldliness. I mean, we can imagine a powerful alien that had all these same superlative virtues, and yet the believer would still say that God is in a whole other metaphysical league compared with this alien. So for the believer it is really about getting across this idea that God exists in a fundamentally different and other-worldly kind of way--it participates in an altogether purer, perfect form of being that regular stuff doesn't normally have access to. But the problem for the believer who pushes this sort of point, in my view, is that his words start to lose their impact, their grip on anything meaningful: the believer falls into the pattern of distinguishing between God and some-ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God by insisting somewhat circularly that God is such that it is just totally not on a par with that ordinary-thing-that-happens-to-have-the-same-properties-as-God. But it becomes very difficult to conceptualize this--this metaphysical secret sauce, this thing in virtue of which God is different--as a thing in its own right, and not just a negatively defined argumentative construct.

Anyway, that's just one example of the direction things can go once the question shifts to the possibility of the existence God, rather than simply the existence of God. And I think it's a much more satisfying and fruitful way to go--for both believer and atheist.