Abandon Text! - Books

Pantheism and Global Warming

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:36:00 -0700

As a side-note to our earlier conversation about pantheism, I thought it was interesting to see how that religious philosophy was playing out in the global warming debate. I just finished SuperFreakonomics (really enjoyed it, more on that later) and I had heard on the news that the authors, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, had gotten lambasted by various prominent environmentalists for daring to suggest that geoengineering was a promising strategy for averting global warming. Evidently, backing any solution that does not revolve around carbon reductions is considered "aiding and abetting the enemy," since it takes the wind out of the carbon-reduction cap-and-tax (oops, I mean, cap-and-trade) schemes currently being pushed. After finishing the book, I read the critiques from Elizabeth Kolbert and Raymond Pierrehumbert, as well as Dubner and Levitt's replies.

Let me start by saying: I have no idea who's right. I generally agree with Dubner and Levitt's basic assertion that it will be well-nigh impossible to get 6 billion people to all forego their self-interest for sake of averting a possible crisis hundreds of years from now. The outcome in Copenhagen only bears that out – the costs of the proposed solutions (slowed growth, lots of money changing hands) is still too high to get everyone on the same page, and you need everyone on the same page to avert a tragedy of the commons. So I think it's only sensible to look for some game-changing technological breakthroughs instead of relying on altruism and changes in human behavior. I also know that Malthusian doomsayers have been predicting the end of the world for centuries, and they routinely overestimate the hazards and underestimate the effects of new technology. On the other hand, I think geoengineering is so rife with the potential of unintended consequences that it also deserves some serious skepticism – even if we succeed in changing the earth's climate, it's impossible to predict the side-effects. So on the facts of the matter, I'm not taking any sides yet.

What interests me about this debate, though, is how absolutely nasty some of the environmentalists were in their reactions. Dubner and Levitt maintain a basically cheerful but factual tone in their writing, while Kolbert and Pierrehumbert drip with condescension, insult, and innuendo. Dubner and Levitt notice it, too, and they suggest the reason some environmentalists are so upset about geoengineering is because it offends a moral sensibility rather than an intellectual one. Dubner and Levitt just wanted to find the best strategy for cooling the earth, while environmentalists like Al Gore are trying to live in harmony with Mother Earth.

It does seem like a lot of environmentalists are carrying around certain pantheistic assumptions:

The Earth is sacred, and shouldn't be molested or interfered with
The Earth is perfect, and if we just left it alone it would return to its natural (that is, perfect) state
Mankind is Bad. We mess up the perfection of the earth. The concerns of mankind – feeding, clothing, and caring for humans – cannot trump the sacredness of Nature. We are mortals, but Nature is divine.

Someone with that kind of world view will perceive global warming very differently than those who don't. For the pantheist, global warming is a moral issue. We haven't merely created a difficult situation; we have sinned against the Goddess. The problem isn't that global warming will cause all kinds of problems for humanity; the problem is that a global economy, capitalism, consumerism and technology have offended the gods. Sometimes it seems like averting global warming is only the convenient pretext for a much larger agenda for reshaping society into a socialist, vegan, agrarian, earth-worshipping retro-utopia (with environmentalists as the high priests, of course). So of course geoengineering would be a heresy – that's only more "interfering" with Nature. That's why even safe, non-polluting thorium-based nuclear energy still ruffles their feathers. A purely technological fix only interferes with their plans to stick it to the capitalists.

Ok, maybe that's too much. I don't want to descend to Kolbert's level of snark. I think everyone in this debate is well-intentioned and even well-informed. I also think everyone in this debate has self-interested motivations and underlying philosophies that affect their positions (even me). We might as well root them out.

1776

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:02:47 -0700

I just finished David McCollough's history 1776, which had sat on my shelves for years until I heard a lecture by the author on NPR. What did I learn from it?

Anyone who wants to write fiction, or be a story-teller of any kind, should read history . . . or, at least, history the way McCullough write it. Like most of my contemporaries, I suffered through incredibly dry history classes that consisted of unenthusiastic teachers reciting encyclopedic facts about events from long ago, with token efforts at explaining the "context" and "significance" of particular events. That sort of thing should convince you that plot is not what really drives a story. It's not enough to tell people what happens – you have to tell them what it's like to be there. Some of that what-it's-like effect comes from the facts of the matter, but most of it is coming from the minds of the characters: what people think about what's happening, what they are hoping and fearing, who they like and dislike, what are the events that change their minds about things. That is the heart and soul of McCullough's book, which is packed with excerpts from letters, journals, diaries, and every kind of public and private writing from the participants in the war.
I've never thought much about keeping diaries – I usually had no illusions that the events of my day-to-day life were worth chronicling. But this book made me think better of it. One of the tricky things about history is you're never quite sure when you're witnessing it.
The war depended, from beginning to end, on morale. Morale is one of those words that have been ruined by management consultants, now thought of as a squishy phantasm of HR departments. But for a volunteer army fighting such a prolonged, punishing battle against formidable odds, morale was everything. There was no such thing as stop-loss; when enlistment periods were up, the men could go home if they wished. Or sooner, since desertion was commonplace. That meant the men must continue to believe in the cause. Talk about spin; the whole endeavor was hanging on whether people believed in the war, believed it could be won, and that they believed that other people believed it. The real action in the war was taking place within the minds of men.
One also has a newfound respect for intelligence in war. So much depended on knowing what the enemy was doing, or going to do. The balance of power shifted often based on a night movement -- the colonial army seizing the heights above Boston, forcing a British evacuation, or the British stealing up Jamaica Pass to take Long Island, or Washington crossing the Delaware to surprise the Hessians.
The struggle for intelligence also showed how decisive decisiveness was. Washington's political sensitivity made him ideal for working with the Continental Congress, but also kept him from giving direct and decisive orders to unruly generals. The only complaint any of Washington's many admirers had was that he wouldn't make up his damned mind.
Put those three factors together -- morale, intelligence, decisiveness -- and you realize the importance of individual people. Calling George Washington "the father of our country" is not jingoistic hyperbole -- he really was the guy who pulled it off, who held the whole venture together in the face of overwhelming odds, and perhaps more importantly, against his own doubt and despair. Heroes I had never even heard of before -- Henry Knox, Nathanael Greene -- made decisions on which the whole war turned (and neither of whom had ever been soldiers before, much less generals).
That, I think, is the reason David McCullough writes. His goals for the book, I imagine, were these:
- "Remember that getting our own country was really, really hard."
- "Remember that it was the result of individual people putting everything on the line."
- "Remember that you too could make the difference for everyone, some day."

What the Wizard Saw

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:17:37 -0700

It's Friday, and I'm tired, and moreover I'm strung out on all the hyperlogical arguments of the last couple of weeks. I have tried to follow logic where logic will lead, without regard to the outcome, and with faith that somehow it will get me closer to the truth. But I don't much like where it leads, and I have only so much tolerance for existential dread.

So, as an antidote, let me offer an extended passage, one of my favorites that I take out and read at least once or twice a year. I don't know how, exactly, it relates to the discussions we've had, but it resonates with me, and never ceases to move me. This is from The Farthest Shore, by Ursula K. LeGuin, which is widely considered to be one of the classics of high fantasy. The characters in this scene are Ged, a powerful and wise wizard, and Arren, a young prince. They have travelled together to the literal ends of the earth, hunting another wizard who is on the verge of destroying the world in his quest for immortality.

They followed the lowest, outmost range of hills, mostly within sight of the ocean. The grass was dry and short, blowing and blowing forever in the wind. The hills rose up golden and forlorn upon their right, and on their left lay the salt marshes and the western sea. Once they saw swans flying, far away in the south. No other breathing creature did they see all that day. A kind of weariness of dread, of waiting for the worst, grew in Arren all day long. Impatience and a dull anger rose in him. He said, after hours of silence, "This land is as dead as the land of death itself!"

"Do not say that," the mage said sharply. He strode on a while and then went on, in a changed voice, "Look at this land; look about you. This is your kingdom, the kingdom of life. This is your immortality. Look at the hills, the mortal hills. They do not endure forever. The hills with the living grass on them, and the streams of water running . . . In all the world, in all the worlds, in all the immensity of time, there is no other like each of those streams, rising cold out of the earth where no eye sees it, running through the sunlight and the darkness to the sea. Deep are the springs of being, deeper than life, than death . . ."

He stopped, but in his eyes as he looked at Arren and at the sunlit hills there was a great, wordless, grieving love. And Arren saw that, and seeing it saw him, saw him for the first time whole, as he was.

"I cannot say what I mean," Ged said unhappily.

But Arren thought of that first hour in the Fountain Court, of the man who had knelt by the running water of the fountain; and joy, as clear as that remembered water, welled up in him. He looked at his companion and said, "I have given my love to that which is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?"

"Aye, lad," said Ged, gently and with pain.

They went on together in silence. But Arren saw the world now with his companion's eyes and saw the living splendor that was revealed about them in the silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in every blade of the wind-bowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.

David McCollough and the Value of History

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 07:28:20 -0700

Shortly before Christmas, I was running some late-night errands when I heard a lecture by David McCollough, the Pulizer Prize-winning historian, on NPR. It was an unexpected Christmas gift.

Our culture does not appreciate history much. We are a people of industry and innovation and technology – we think only the present and the near future matter. With the increasingly rapid pace of change brought on by technology, even ten years ago feels like the distant past, and almost by definition irrelevant. (See, for example, the Onion's coverage: "Internet Archaeolgists Find Ruins of 'Friendster' Civilization".) Why, then does history matter at all?

History is not merely useful or good. McCollough maintains it is vital to the education of our children, and most especially to our leaders:

We are descended from a long line of ancestors who worked hard and sacrificed much, all with pretty much one aim: to make sure their descendants had a better life. If we don't know, and don't care, about what they gave us, and what it cost we run the risk of losing it. "That's not just ignorance – that's being rude," said McCollough. We can't begin to appreciate the blessings of our society without learning what it was like before. "Theirs was not a happier, simpler time. Their lives were difficult, complicated, and so much harder than ours."
History gives us the perspective to meet that challenges that currently face us. America has been through tremendous challenges before, and survived, mostly through the efforts of its citizens and often through luck. It helps to remember that. We will be less discouraged if we remember past victories. "People say 9/11 was the worst threat the United States has ever faced," said McCollough, "And those people have absolutely no sense of history. Yes, 9/11 was terrible and awful and threat to the United States . . . but it's not the worst thing we ever faced." It's so easy for us to forget that the outcomes of the American Revolution, or the Civil War, or World War II, were anything but foregone conclusions. The Revolution itself could have been lost on half a dozen occasions, just in the first year.
History informs our moral choices. The heroes of the American Revolution – George Washington, Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox – were extremely aware of the historic context of their actions. They all studied history – the classical liberal education, including the study of Greek and Latin, was entirely geared towards preparing students to read the classics of history and literature. They all knew that future historians would judge them and their actions, just as they had judged those who came before them. It was extremely important to them to carry that duty carefully. One of Washington's favorite lines he often quoted was from the historical play Cato: "Tis not in mortals to command success, but we'll do more . . . we'll deserve it."
History is essentially a long set of case studies in leadership. We read primarily about the leaders of the past: what they did, why they did it, what worked, what didn't. We come away from reading history with an appreciation of what it means to be a leader. In McCollough's opinion, the most important qualities are persistence in the face of adversity, honor, and an ability to spot and use the talents of others.
Human beings are creatures who love stories. For almost as long as human beings have existed, most of our knowledge, culture and values have been transmitted through the medium of stories. History, properly done, is the story of people. History can teach us more than anything else because, simply, that's how our brains are built. I heard a joke once, among some AI scientists: "All the scientists of the world worked together for many years, and they finally had built a computer so power and complex that it could completely understand the human mind. They powered it up, and they asked it: "What's the meaning of life?" And the computer answered: "That reminds me of a story . . ."

After hearing the lecture, I went back to my bookshelves and found a gift from several Christmases past: a copy of 1776, McCollough's best-selling history of the beginning of the American Revolution. It is every bit as good as the critics proclaim. One of the advantages of my relative ignorance of history: it makes for an exciting story when you read it for the first time.

Heidegger and a Hippo

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 11:22:00 -0700

Every writer (or reader, for that matter) can't help but watch the bookstore shelves. We know the relative dimensions of the Barnes & Noble sections better than the supermarket aisles. One trend I had noticed is the philosophy section growing significantly larger. About ten years ago, genuine philosophy books took up about two shelves, wedged between three bookcases of Religious Inspiration and two bookcases of New Age. Now, philosophy is occupying about two bookcases, with two whole shelves just dedicated to the "new atheism." About three shelves are given over to the "Philosophy and…" books. Evidently the popular culture has a taste for philosophy as long as it is liberally mixed with its favorite music, television, movies, and/or pulp fiction: "Philosophy and Superheroes". "Philosophy and Def Leppard". "Philosophy and Twilight". The publishing trend is noticing something the SKS has recognized for decades: people (especially young people) are interested in philosophic ideas, so long as they are made relevant to the things they care about, and framed up in compelling narratives instead of abstract principles.

Maybe it's just a matter of title inflation. After all, the big-box bookstore came into being in my lifetime, and now there's five times as much of everything. Christian Inspiration now has one side of an entire aisle. But still, the Long Tail is making for more and better philosophy offerings.

I've always been somewhat ambivalent about these "Philosophy and…" hybrids. I got into philosophy by reading popularizations like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which made high-falootin' thinkers accessible to a high school senior. So I'm usually for anything that brings the wisdom to the masses, no matter where they are at. On the other hand, it's a little sad that Plato can't get a hearing in our culture unless he dresses up in a clown suit. I'd feel a lot better about the popularizations if they led people to read the actual texts, or better yet, to write them.

I got an unexpected taste of the Philosophy and [insert pop culture fad] trend in a stocking stuffer this year: Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates. This is a sequel to Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes. (I am notoriously difficult to shop for, Puritanical Stoic that I am, so a lighthearted book on philosophy was a safe bet for Santa to make.)

The book was . . . much better than I expected. The jokes were only so-so -- there were only one or two worth the retelling. What surprised me was how heavy the philosophy was. The book opens with a discussion of Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, which is the correct place to start with talking about death, but it's no laugh riot. Kierkegaard gets a surprisingly detailed treatment as well, in spite of hilarious titles like "Fear and Trembling" and "The Sickness Unto Death". For all of their lighthearted banter, the authors don't pull any punches. They keep up the banter strictly because it's the only way to sugar coat a bitter pill. "We're all going to die, and that really sucks! Hahahahahahaha!" Rather than hewing to the chicken-soup recipe of feel-good visions of heaven, they deconstruct it. It turns out our common popular notions about the afterlife -- clouds, harps, meeting loved ones, etc. -- are more the result of paintings and movies than scripture, and the authors make it fairly clear that even a fundamentalist (especially a fundamentalist) will not find a lot of scriptural backing for a continued existence in the hereafter.

I give them credit for tackling not only the unpopular ideas, but the hard-to-understand ones, too. The nature of consciousness, qualia, time and eternity -- no philosophical distinction is too subtle for their undertaking. That's tough sledding, especially if you want to keep Joe Six-Pack's attention.

Even more surprising: the authors reference the same pop culture items that had been part of the SKS canon for years. For instance, Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?" or Tim McGraw's "Live Like You Were Dying." And best of all: Thornton Wilder's Our Town. I'm glad we're not the only ones who noticed.

After all their wise-cracking explanations, do they take a stand on anything? Do they have an answer to the question of Death? Not really . . . but they are mostly honest about it. They candidly admit that the promises of religion are not credible, the offerings of existentialism are cold comfort, and technological immortality is currently unobtainable and not even necessarily desirable. They have a consolation prize from Williams James, a get-out-of-angst-free card that defends our "right to believe anything that is live enough to tempt our will." In effect: "Unless you have direct contradictory evidence, you're free to believe whatever you darn well please. Whatever works for you, baby, that you're thing." That sounds like a great way to avoid offending anyone, but throws wide the gate to all kinds of rationalizations. As many devout Pastafarians can attest, once you're free to believe in something without evidence, you are free to believe anything . . . which ultimately devalues the very notion of belief. The whole reason we have beliefs is because they are true (at least, conditionally true), and truth helps us navigate the universe. If we use our beliefs to guide our actions, then there is an inevitably price to be paid for holding false beliefs. And if we don't use our beliefs to guide our actions – if a belief is so harmless that it has no impact on the way you live -- then it's hardly worth having, is it?

Earnestness is everything

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:27:18 -0700

The writers at the New Yorker keep coming up with new angles on a recurring theme: talent is Out, effort is In.

I had already written previously about Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Outliers, in which he details how effort and opportunity are more important than talent in creating super-successful people. Now, in another article, "How David Beats Goliath," (The New Yorker, May 11, 2009) he asks a seemingly simple question for a dedicated basketball fan such as himself: "Why don't more teams play the full-court press?" It doesn't take a genius to realize that a weaker team can dramatically slow down a superior team by playing the full-court press: guarding their opponents they moment they get the ball, and doing everything in their power to stop them from advancing to mid-court in the required 10 seconds. And yet, you rarely see that strategy pursued, at any level of play.

Gladwell followed up on those who did use the full-court press -- a team of 12-year-old girls in the National Junior Basketball league, and the teams of college coach Rick Pitino -- and found that they triumphed . . . at a price. The full-court press is an exhausting strategy, one that requires players to run and run and run. Few teams, it turns out, are willing to work that hard. It also makes for rather ugly basketball, a rushing and flailing of arms and legs instead of the graceful passes and shots players like to make and fans like to watch. The full-court press is stigmatized -- those who use it are met with both anger and contempt, and some officials make biased calls to discourage its use.

All this would be interesting enough on its own. But Gladwell loves isomorphisms -- he wants to see if this same phenomena maps to other sorts of struggles. And before you know it, he draws parallels with the military history, and academic studies of how underdogs prevail in battle. Lawrence of Arabia played the military equivalent of the full-court press, using the everywhere-at-once attacks of his Bedouin troops in the places his foes were weakest. They prevailed because the hustled, and refused to play by the rules that favored their opponents. Those same tactics -- small, fast, non-traditional, and out-of-bounds -- have now redefined modern warfare in an age of terrorism and insurgency. David can win against Goliath, but only by using methods Goliath finds repellant.

The triumph of effort found another voice this week in another New Yorker article ("Don't! The secret of self-control," May 18, 2009) that looked at the unexpected results of psychological research in the sixties. Some researches had created "the marshmallow test," a simple exercise to see how long four-year-olds could resist eating a treat in order to earn a greater reward later. Kids' abilities to defer gratification varied significantly, but they could also be taught cognitive tricks to make it easier. The researchers didn't realize the significance of their findings until they followed up on their subjects decades later . . . and found that the marshmallow test was profoundly predictive of success in later life. Those who passed the marshmallow test scored higher on the SAT. Those who couldn't resist the marshmallow were more likely to have behavioral problems, had trouble paying attention and maintaining friendships.

For years educators and parents have been focusing on IQ as the most important cognitive measure, when it turns out willpower was more significant. And willpower, they've found, is not some mysterious quality of character, but rather a specific skill for controlling one's attention, focusing on certain thoughts and tuning out others. Persistence of attention and effort are what ensure lifelong success.

What does this mean for our culture? I hope it signals a rejuvenation of the American meritocracy, restoring our faith that people can control their destinies, if they are willing to pay the price. The "land of opportunity" is really "the land of the opportunity to work." Effort is not omnipotent, but it's the closest thing to it.

The Taboo against Meaninglessness

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 06:40:10 -0700

Some good comments from Gary and Kenny; let me return to those in a moment.

Pinker had another point in The Stuff of Thought (another of his books that I just finished and am still digesting) that seemed relevant to the discussion, about the nature of taboos. A taboo is a cultural norm, but it's not just that a certain action is proscribed, but rather that even directly thinking about something is forbidden. You can violate a taboo just by mentioning it in conversation, or otherwise inviting other people to think thoughts that should not be thought. Taboos are kinda weird, because it's not that the taboo subject is completely unknown to the people who respect the taboo – it's just that they don't want to think about it directly, or behave as if it's a subject for rational contemplation.

Sex used to be a taboo subject in our culture. You could offend someone just by mentioning its existence. Everyone, of course, knew all about sex and certainly engaged in it – it was just not a subject for conversation or contemplation. Over the last fifty years or so that taboo has faded considerably, given what you see on TV, but you will still see some boundaries in what most people will comfortably talk about in public. Religion was also a great taboo that has faded over time; there is more talk now about the "religious marketplace" in which people freely mix and match religious traditions and beliefs. But with religion, too, we become conscious of certain taboos when we see them violated. Recently, the atheists started crossing a taboo line by boldly, publically declaring the non-existence of God. Lots of thinkers declined to believe in divine personage over the centuries, but their opinions tended to be quiet and oblique. It is still largely considered rude to announce one's atheism loudly in a dinner party.

Why do we have taboos, if everyone knows about what we're not talking about? In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker suggests some taboos are related to the terms on which we define our relationships. The anthropologist Alan Fiske categorized all human relationships into three broad categories: Communality (freely sharing among kin and community), Authority (using power to claim resources), and Exchange (trading resources for mutual gain). Each kind of relationship has its own rules and logic, and if you mismatch the rules to the situation, the result is a faux pax. A man who gets up from his mother's Thanksgiving feast (Communality) and offers to pay her $200 for it (Exchange) will certainly offend her and everyone present. Likewise, if a waiter in a restaurant provides good service in hopes of receiving a big tip (Exchange) and instead gets a hearty "thanks!" from the patron (Communality), the waiter will be offended.

Some topics, then, are taboo because they frame the relationship with the wrong set of instinctive relationship-logic. Pinker gives the example of the pre-nuptial contract. Since half of all marriages in our country now end in divorce, you might logically think everyone ought to get a pre-nuptial contract spelling out how a divorce would be handled. Yet most couples strenuously resist even discussing prenuptials, because it engages Exchange mentality ("I'll give you this if you give me that") at precisely the time they want to be emphasizing Communality ("what's mine is yours and what's yours is mine") to ensure a committed marriage. Even thinking the thoughts can bring about the outcome they are trying to avoid in the first place.

I think religious taboos follow a similar sort of logic. People don't want to discuss religion because it undermines the intuitive logic of Communality ("we are all children of God") and Authority ("He alone is the Lord") which defines the nature of our relationships with each other. Whether there actually is a God is not the point – we just want to keep treating each other as if there is a God. And while specific religious traditions have blurred into one another in the multicultural melting pot, the most basic common elements of religion as a definer of our relationships persists: a belief in God (though barely defined), and a vague consensus on a moral reality.

Which brings us up to the current conversation about the genesis of morals. Whenever I pursue moral arguments out to their logical ends (as Singer does), I wind up standing at the precipice of this final taboo: no one wants to admit that our morals are hanging in space with no visible support. Even atheists such as Pinker, who are perfectly comfortable declaring God to be "palpably unreal," are unwilling to say that "there is no moral law." Even after demonstrating that the emotions that support morality and ethics are evolved mechanisms, he will still vehemently insist there really is such a thing as right and wrong. Pinker suggests that maybe morality is the necessary result of logical truth: it always stands to reason that everyone is better off if everyone helps everyone else. Maybe our brains evolved the moral emotions to perceive an objective truth, just like we evolved the mechanism to understand mathematics. These explanations are hardly explanations; to define morality as merely enlightened self-interest is just to say, once again, that we only have self-interest and all we do is look out for ourselves. To say that morality is character of the universe simply begs the question: morality is real because it's real. I have to suspect that Pinker is holding back for reasons other than logic. Perhaps even he can't override the programming in his brain that says right and wrong are real. Or perhaps he just knows it's taboo: to declare morality to be non-rational is social suicide. Nobody trusts the man who has no law.

The Price of Truth

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 06:32:44 -0700

In his comments to yesterday's post, Kenny writes:

I love what you're doing with this. I love the careful analysis of the basis of the moral instinct which I exploited, but did not examine at all, in my essay.

But where I feel like you are headed, or at least where my brain heads once I start down this path, is to the ultimate question: why, in fact, is it a bad thing to boil babies? If Pinker is right--if "Boiling babies is bad" is just a convenient shorthand for "Humans have a hard-coded instinctive aversion to boiling babies"--then, as Bergman's knight says, life is an outrageous horror. Nothing really matters at all. Pinker can't even say to me "You should face the truth," because any sentence that contains the word "should" is fundamentally meaningless in his world.

Believe me, I understand dangers of nihilism when asking these questions. These posts have taken me a very long time to write, because I keep alternating between the excitement of knowing I'm asking the right question, and the stark depression of realizing I don't like the answers I'm finding.

Pinker devoted an entire book – The Blank Slate – to showing the awful mistakes that come from rejecting a truth when it threatens to overturn your world view. Pinker was just trying to state what he thought was obvious: that there is such a thing as human nature, and that certain things about our nature are built-in, hard-wired capacities of our organism. But lots of forces lined up against him – progressive liberal academia as well as right-wing fundamentalists – because they couldn't comprehend how there could be human nature and still preserve the things they held most dear: moral responsibility, free will, self-determination, or an immortal soul. The result is that otherwise rational beings twist themselves into knots trying to sustain their world-view, trapped in self-contradictions and sometimes spinning out disastrous policies as a result.

We've all seen this sort of conceptual evolution in others, and even in ourselves. In this week's Independent I saw an interview with Bart Ehrman, author of Misquoting Jesus and Jesus, Interrupted. Ehrman was an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian who wanted to learn as much as possible about the scriptures, and who found himself inexorably dragged into questioning his faith as he learned of historical critiques of the Bible. It's relatively easy for someone like me or Kenny to look a fundamentalist in the eye and say: "Look, I know you think that everything hinges on the Bible being absolutely true. It feels like if the Bible is taken away, everything is going to crumble and you'll be left in total darkness in a meaningless universe. But I'm telling you, it's not like that. You will not become a bad person by doubting. You might even become a better person. It takes some getting used to, living in the doubt. But eventually you'll realize that dealing with the doubt is better than caging yourself in a lie. And you might even find the real truth, the thing you were hoping to find in the scriptures to begin with."

We are no better, though. When the evolutionary biologists come along, telling us that our morals are evolved mechanisms for reciprocal altruism, we plug our ears and say, "LALALALALA -- I'm not listening! I know you're probably right, but if I start believing that, I will live in a meaningless universe, and I don't want to live in a meaningless universe." And Pinker say, "Look, I know it feels that way right now, but . . ."

I'm not saying anything Kenny doesn't already know. Kenny wrote that essay on poverty because he believes in trying to face the truth, even if it's a truth he can't handle. He put his moral conviction out for all to see, in spite of the fact that he couldn't live by it himself, because he trusts that facing the truth will ultimately lead to the best possible outcome. I agree with him . . . which is why I'm going to keep going down this rabbit hole.

Rand and Evolution

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 03:34:31 -0700

I have continued chipping away at Atlas Shrugged while on the elliptical machine. It has made for timely reading, since during the period I was reading it the financial system melted down. Lots of Ayn Rand fans have commented on the fact that current events somewhat parallel the events of Atlas Shrugged – government efforts to serve the needs of the unproductive leads to economic failure, which leads to more government interventions, which leads to more failure, etc. I must admit, Congress' platitudes about helping out the little guy by pushing Fannie and Freddie into ludicrous loans, and then the Wall Street rush to exploit this unsustainable generosity, looks an awful lot like the "looters" of Ayn Rand's magnus opus.

If current events made Rand's philosophy look more plausible, though, it was counteracted by the fact that I was also reading Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works at the same time. Evolutionary psychology blows a lot of big holes in Rand's philosophy, and it looks like the critics of Objectivism have noticed. It was screamingly obvious to me that Rand's view on sexuality – that people are sexually attracted to those who manifest their highest ideals – was perfectly consistent with what evolutionary psychology would predict for a woman. Females' genetic interests are best served by mating with the most fit male, i.e. the wealthiest, most productive one, and since they have such a high investment in having a baby, they will tend to be very selective of their mates. That same formula doesn't quite work for the males, though – males get much more genetic, ahem, bang for the buck by being promiscuous, since the have to invest much less than the female in generating offspring. Rand concocts a contorted theory that only men who hate themselves could be promiscuous, and that promiscuity is antithetical to their true nature. I didn't buy it. Even men who are profoundly committed to monogamy (such as yours truly) will admit that it is not the natural state of affairs – if commitment was natural, why would we have to make vows to stick to it? Evolutionary psychology presented a cleaner explanation than Rand, in this case.

The gaps were even more noticeable in Rand's notion of the virtue of selfishness, and the sin of altruism. Evolutionary biology points out that people are self-interested, but not exclusively self-interested. We are also predisposed to helping our relatives, since they share our genes, and helping our mates, since their genetic interests are mostly identical to ours. Rand would have us believe that altruism is nothing but an illusion and a sham, but in fact our inmost nature tells us otherwise. There are no children in Rand's books, because love for one's children blows apart most of her ideas. Nearly all parents do believe in sacrificing their own interests for the sake of their children's interests – and no amount of arguing will make us think otherwise. Again, evolutionary biology perfectly explains what Objectivism strains to cover.

If she was so wrong about human nature, then, why does her philosophy appeal so strongly to so many? The world-view in Atlas Shrugged is not implausible – I often find myself seeing life as a war between the competent producers and the incompetent freeloaders. There still may be some truth to be mined from it.

Reason, Handmaid of Emotion

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:25:21 -0700

For most of my life, and most of my career as a spiritual seeker, I had a classically Romantic notion of reason and emotion:

Reason was the primary driver and rightful ruler of behavior.
Emotions were messy, unpredictable side-effects of living in a body, the "primitive" leftovers of our mentality, which continually interfered with the smooth functioning of Reason.
Mental life was primarily the ongoing struggle between these two forces – Reason trying to direct and control, Emotions ready to run off the rails at any moment.

In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker inverts this model. Pinker asserts that the mind is an evolved mechanism, and as such any complex mechanism in the mind must have served a survival function. And that function is not the lowest of functions, but rather the highest.

Pinker posits that if you had a perfectly rational, sophisticated cognition machine without emotions (say, a robot, or Dr. Spock) and you set it lose in the world with no instructions, it would do . . . absolutely nothing. Intelligence has no use at all unless it has goals – it has to want something. It has to have a motive. And intelligence itself cannot generate the motive; it can figure out how to achieve a goal, but it can't figure out what goals to achieve. The highest-level goal has to come from somewhere else. And that's where the emotions come in. Pinker: "The emotions are mechanisms that set the brain's highest-level goals. Once triggered by a propitious moment, an emotion triggers the cascade of subgoals and sub-subgoals that we call thinking and acting."

So, rather than reason controlling emotion, it's exactly the other way around – emotions mobilize reason to fulfill goals. Every emotion we have is evolutionarily designed to meet some challenge in the world. Pinker spends most of the second half of the book deconstructing the design and survival value of every human emotion: fear, disgust, happiness, friendship, gratitude, sympathy, romantic love, guilt, grief, etc.

For now, though, just consider the ramifications of that simple formulation: emotions trigger responses that lead to action. It becomes a sort of mindfulness meditation: what emotion is motivating my thoughts and actions right now? If you want to change your behavior in some way (after, of course, considering the emotions that make you want to change your behavior) you will probably have to consciously manage your emotions – figure out what environmental cues trigger the emotions that generate the thoughts and behaviors that are manifesting in your life.

These ideas were not entirely new to me – I was always partial to Hume's formulation: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." But this was the first time that I heard a strong scientific case for that position. And rather than seeing the emotions as "primitive" or somehow undesirable, Pinker gives the emotions their due as sophisticated, engineered, essential aspects of cognition. It makes it that much easier for me to accept them and understand them for what they are.

Be Not Afraid

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:40:22 -0700

Steven Pinker is an atheist; in How the Mind Works he is not shy about stating, without fanfare or argument, that the explanations of religion are "palpably not true." Why, then would this book be high on my list of recommended reading for the spiritual seeker? Am I trying to argue people out of their faith, with Pinker as my secret weapon?

Steven Pinker demonstrates the best attitude towards finding the truth. He's not afraid to ask the hard questions, and not afraid to accept the hard answers, and (most astounding of all) not afraid to admit what he doesn't know. He's not afraid of giving opposing views a hearing, nor is he afraid to ruthlessly critiquing them, while still avoiding being outright snarky. He is, simply, not afraid. He has a marvelous equipoise that makes you remember that science is a noble manifestation of Reason, with a capital R, and not just an excuse for the geek-and-wonk crowd to bully you with their assertions. And his inquiries have gotten him in trouble -- in fact he wrote an entire book, The Blank Slate, to explain why so many people -- both the religious conservatives and the liberal intelligentsia -- will fight tooth and nail against the notion of human nature.

Maybe it's just a result of his extremely clear, friendly, and witty style, that he seems so fearless. But frankly, I could have used a little more of that in youth. In my teens, everyone who talked about spirituality used the language of fear. Back then it seemed my only possible choice was to exchange the fear of eternal damnation (courtesy of traditional Christianity) for the fear of existential nothingness (thanks a lot, rational intellect). I latched onto mysticism because it seemed like the only way out of perpetual anxiety. Why guess, when you could know? Sometimes I think my philosophy might have gone down a different path, had I just known a few more people who had the guts to face the Unknown without ducking for cover or shitting their pants. Rather than working out my salvation with fear and trembling, I might have spent a lot more time just really paying attention.

That fearlessness only counts, though, if someone is fearlessly asking the right questions. I don't have much use for people who are fearless because they don't have a thought in their head, or who choose to stay in their philosophic bunkers and not go outside into the Doubt. And that's the biggest reason Pinker should appeal to spiritual seekers -- he doesn't shy away from the question of Consciousness. Most other cognitive scientists, after happily explaining why you're just one big ball of algorithms, will just wave their hands indignantly at consciousness. They pretend it doesn't exist, that it's an illusion, or that it doesn't matter, or that it's a question to ask another day, maybe in another hundred years or so. But Pinker, bless him, recognizes that consciousness is THE question, the one we most care about. If there is one thing we know with more certainty than anything else, it's that we are Aware . . . and what the hell is that about?

And, even more interestingly, Pinker is willing for now to let consciousness defy the computational theory of mind. No algorithm or neural network can satisfactorily explain how you come to have the experience of red, with all its redness. Pinker even suggests that it might be truly unfathomable for the human mind, because the human mind never needed to evolve the capacity to understand such things. Our ability to solve problems and predict the future was mighty handy for our ancestors on the African savannah -- but the nature of consciousness might be outside of our ability to comprehend it, because our ancestors never needed to in order to survive. This also feels intuitively true -- if there is any possible way to understand consciousness, it's going to be an entirely different sort of understanding than we're used to.

Pinker has lots of useful insights to share about every other kind of thought and feeling that occupies your philosophic contemplation. But the biggie, the best, the pearl of great price, is this: keep your eye on consciousness, because THAT'S what science can't touch, and that's where all the action is. If God is ever to be found to be "palpably" real, it's going to be there.

Armageddon in Retrospect

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:40:00 -0700

I bought the collection of posthumously published Kurt Vonnegut stories, Armageddon in Retrospect, with low expectations. Unpublished stories are often unpublished for a reason – their creator didn't feel them worthy of seeing the light of day. No editor would ever turn down anything from Kurt Vonnegut – the New Yorker would happily print his grocery list, had he asked -- so I must assume it was Vonnegut himself who put these stories in the bottom drawer and forgot about them.

As I mentioned a couple days ago, the secret to pleasant surprises is setting the bar low. As his son Mark says in the introduction, the stories hold up well by themselves, with no more need of commentary. I enjoyed Mark's introduction – he clearly studied his father's style carefully, and attempted with sincere admiration to emulate both his caustic humor and his tender compassion for human suffering.

He said a few things that caught my attention:

Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.
"If you cant' write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do," he told me.

The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service.

The book opens with a photographed copy of a typewritten letter Vonnegut sent his family from Europe, telling them of his ordeals as POW in Germany. It's as beautiful and shocking and real as anything else he's ever written, and all the more telling because it's his life.

Most people will buy it for his last public address, the very last thing he ever wrote, which was actually delivered by his son Mark in his stead. It's . . . ok. I share Mark's estimation of it – sometimes you're asking, "How does he get away with this crap?" But it's very Vonnegut, and any of his fans will feel fondness for his ability to say plain truths simply with just enough twist to make them profound.

All of the stories have war as their theme. Nearly all are about hapless soldiers or other wise and miserable bystanders of destruction. One character, a Saxon peasant oppressed by Norman conquerors, sums up all their themes: "The wreckers against the builders! There's the whole story of life!" I thought that was a pretty workable, functional definition of Good versus Evil. I also was somewhat struck that almost exactly the same formulation comes from Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged, who is about as different from Vonnegut in style and attitude as you could possibly imagine. Both loved the builders, and had absolute, utter contempt for the wreckers. Hmmmm.

What Rand Got Wrong

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:00:40 -0700

Before anyone accuses me of being an Objectivist, I guess I better make some quick, pointed critiques of Rand's philosophy. Nothing is quite so off-putting as someone who is too enthusiastic about a new philosophy. Every philosophy has its problematic parts; even Jesus got some 'splainin' to do. Anytime someone preaches a gospel that doesn't seem to have a downside, the audience suspects they have not lived with it long enough to hit the catch. As C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed: "Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I will listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."

Part of the appeal of Atlas Shrugged is how clear it makes everything. One senses that with the light of reason, you could plot a clear and unambiguous course through life, freed from messy emotions and bothersome moral imperatives and liberated to pursue one's "happiness as the moral purpose of one's life." Of course, the reason it all seems so clear in the book is because (duh) it's a story. Rand's characters are black-or-white cut-outs, unambiguous manifestations of good or evil. In Rand's imagination, every self-interested industrialist is a paragon of action and intention who just loves to create; meanwhile, every altruist is a worthless, sponging bastard who uses political intrigue to steal what they want. Nobody is quite so simple as that; if they were, we wouldn't need moral philosophies at all. I understand that Atlas Shrugged was deliberately written to be overstated and unambiguous; however, the real test of a philosophy is how well it holds up in the face of ambiguity.

The biggest problem I have with Rand's "virtue of selfishness" is that it does not completely "save the appearances," as they say in philosophy: it doesn't fully explain things that we can plainly see in the everyday world. Sure, some calls for altruism are just smarmy ploys to win mercy for oneself and excuse weakness . . . but it I have also seen 100% bona fide altruism, where strong and capable people help others, just because they can and should. Nor does rational self-interest inevitably lead to moral perfection – Rand doesn't even begin to contemplate the possibility of repressive economic regimes, true robber-barons and such. I agree with her that talk of "selflessness" inevitably runs afoul of some "performative contradictions," as Ken Wilber would say; you can't negate the self without negating life. But glorifying the self just makes the opposite mistake. Something fishy is going on . . . and I think it all hinges on how we define the self.

Selfish and selfless, material and spirit

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:44:04 -0700

Ok, let me take another stab at the take-home Objectivist message from Atlas Shrugged. The other day I showed how Augie uses objective fact to drive spiritual progress, but I didn't really tie back to Rand's book.

Atlas Shrugged has two (and only two) kinds of characters – the Good kind we are supposed to admire and identify with (Dagny Taggart, Hank Reardon, Ellis Wyatt, etc.), and the Bad kind by whom we are supposed to be repulsed and exasperated (Jim Taggart, Mrs. Reardon, and a long line of looter businessmen, politicians, and journalists). Everyone is black-or-white. Ordinary man-on-the-street types are just muted versions of the same two colors: men and women silently longing for real virtue, or quietly wallowing in self-pity.

The Good characters are constantly paying attention to objective measures – "Can I get the railroad built?" or "Will the bridge hold up?" – and ignoring all the subjective factors – "Do people like me?" or "Am I having any fun?" Meanwhile, all the Bad characters are doing just the opposite, making excuses about their objective failures – "It's not my fault the factory went under" – and justifying themselves with their lofty intentions – "I think we should care about the common man" or "Let's consider the social obligations."

Rand repeats this formula again and again and again, for hundreds of pages, until her philosophic attitude becomes embedded in our consciousness. Repetition of examples is a powerful teaching tool – generally, human beings learn faster from a bunch of examples than from abstract descriptions of ideals. Some of the more influential pop moral teachers, like "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger, hash countless case studies until their audience gets an instinctive feel for their philosophic principles. They might not be able to answer, "What are Dr. Laura's five basic principles?" but they will be able to look at any situation and know, "What would Dr. Laura say about this?" Augie Turak does the same thing, mostly through story-telling. He does articulate the abstract principles, but the reason people understand him is because he illustrates with countless examples and analogies.

After a few hundred repetitions of the same sort of dialog, the reader starts to recognize the patterns of the Good and the Bad characters. The Good ones are supposedly coldly rational and have no interest in other people – and yet they are the ones who really care about things that really matter. Dagny is more concerned about the state of the country more than anyone else around her, because she sees the economic collapse that awaits them if she doesn't build her line. Dagny and Reardon claim to be utterly selfish, but in the end they provide other people the things they need most: confidence in their commitments. They speak the truth, and they do what they say they are going to do. Because they are supremely rational, they value what is obviously good and effective and shun whatever isn't. Their attention is fixed on material achievement, but they ultimately see the material realm as the matrix within which the spirit operates: a railroad might be solid steel, but it's really the manifestation of the engineer's thought and intent. The key point is: their virtue derives from paying attention to the objective.

The Bad ones, however, are doing just the opposite. They claim to be full of selfless values and concern for their fellow human beings, but actually they are completely self-absorbed. The worry constantly about who will blame them for their failures, who will like them for their flattery; meanwhile, they neglect to actually get anything done. They talk endlessly about their good intentions, and never stop to evaluate the actual objective effects of their action or inaction. Because everything they care about – praise, blame, intention, whim – is in their own heads and disconnected from objective reality, their philosophies (if they have any at all) are shot through with contradictions and irrationality. All values get turned on their heads: virtue must apologize for itself, greatness must be humbled, weakness is to be praised and served in the name of "fairness", profit is bad and failure is good. They claim to be unconcerned with brute physical existence and committed to "higher" things, and yet when they look at a factory or a railroad all they can see is physical labor and substance, and have no understanding whatsoever for the mental and spiritual virtues that made it possible. They are selfish and stupid and irrational, because they are disconnected from the objective.

I guess I should also point out that Augie is not an Objectivist. For all I know, he never read Ayn Rand at all. But I feel the same spirit moving in both their philosophies – they love the Truth, and want people to live according to the Truth, and they have utter contempt for delusion and self-deception.

The Gospel of Objective Fact

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 04:55:02 -0700

I've been continuing to listen to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged during my morning workouts. I figure that if you're going to listen to philosophy while you're working out, it might as well be a muscular, individual-empowering, can-do philosophy. It seems to fit the activity better than The Purpose-Driven Life or The Marriage of Sense and Soul ever did.

Rand's philosophy, Objectivism, draws its name from one of its central tenants: that valid concepts and values are "determined by the nature of reality, but to be discovered by man's mind." Facts are facts, and the only valid way to live is to live in accord with the objective reality of things.

On first blush, that sounds pretty simple and uninspiring. What's the big deal about objective reality? Until I started reading Atlas Shrugged, I didn't get it. Now I do . . . but only because I worked for Augie Turak for six years.

Augie is first and foremost a spiritual teacher. But in his previous professional life, Augie was a salesman, the best I've ever personally known. All salesmen live and die according to one – and only one – thing: their sales numbers. How much did they sell? Nothing else matters. Companies don't care about sales reps' attitude, their intentions, their values, their ideas – just their numbers. If the numbers are good, the salesman makes a ton of money. If the numbers are bad, they lose their jobs. Like many sales managers, Augie put a big white board up in the middle of his company, where all salesmen updated their sales numbers day by day and moment by moment. As Augie put it: "The board doesn't lie." Sales numbers were inescapable objective facts. The board showed, with bright clarity, exactly how well everyone in the company was doing. (Augie didn't limit the board to just sales, either – every other quantifiable aspect of the company, like its account receivable and total cash in the bank, were also updated daily and visible on the board.)

People who have never worked in sales usually look upon this numbers-only approach to life with a shudder of dread and revulsion. "Oh, ugh, there's more to life than just numbers." But those who do work in sales know that the numbers are extremely inspiring. When the numbers are down, the salesman goes through deep soul-searching: "Is it me? What am I doing wrong?" When the numbers are high, the salesman basks in an unparalleled euphoria: "I DID IT!" The satisfaction is magnified ten-fold by the fact that it was objective -- undeniable, unchallengable, real.

Augie loves the numbers, not because he wants to make money (which he usually did) but because he loves the Truth. He wants to know what's real. And often, the best way to understand the contents of our souls is to look at how it is reflected in the objective reality around us. Of course, Augie will constantly talk about attitudes, values, morals, processes, and a million other invisible factors in life – but he also knows that all those things ultimately manifest themselves in the world around us. What makes Augie such an effective spiritual teacher – and so unlike most teachers, these days – is his unflinching ability to face objective reality, and his ability to help others do the same.