Evolutionary biologist and atheist free thinker Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution is True
blogged on a recent short article at The Raw Story about remarks made by Karen Taylor, neuroscientist and author of the book Brainwashing: The science of thought control.
The headline leads with her speculation that certain religious beliefs might eventually be treated as mental illnesses, with religious fundamentalism as the cited example. This was slightly misleading because her point wasn't really about religion, but that a developing science and technology of thought intervention opens up possibilities and realities that are not morally neutral and that we should start preparing our ethics to handle them. A reliable technology for disposing of a belief and replacing it with another would force decisions on us we currently don't have to think about. The right decision it might not be as easy as banning it's use.
Of course the ensuing discussion in the comments covered all the bases about the moral pitfalls of treating beliefs as illness. Commenters called out the dubious ethics of labeling someone who disagrees with you as sick (that this makes up a sizable fraction of all internet discourse was not discussed). The Soviet enforced hospitalization and "treatment" of dissidents as proxy punishment was properly brought up. Coyne and followers were also dubious of the epistemic validity of equating beliefs with illness, and at first I agreed.
Religious beliefs can hardly be thought of as mental illness. Taking the word of large numbers of people or even the word of as little as one very charismatic individual is common human behavior. These are just purchases in the marketplace of ideas, not signs of underlying disease.
But the more I thought about it, the more I thought I might still be missing the point because of the different ways we think of mental illness versus illness in general.
The general construct illness is fairly broad and contains many variations on the theme.
One may be ill as the result of a hereditary or congenital problem with one's own structural or functional physiology, e.g.. Spina bifida, Prader-Willi syndrome, juvenile diabetes, or cystic fibrosis. One may be ill as the result of a spontaneous malfunction that develops in an otherwise normally functioning body; multiple sclerosis say, or developing breast cancer as a result of having BRCA1. The common thread of these illnesses are that they are the result of being put together wrong somehow or something in you spontaneously failing. The source of the illness being an internal and inherent quality of one's particular body. On the other hand, one may be ill as the result of infection by some external pathogen (e.g. food poisoning, measles, aids) or exposure to some kind of toxin. The illness is not the result of your individual variation, but of widespread human susceptibility to the outside agent like the Spanish Flu of 1918. We also understand that there are interactions. Dangerous allergies are the result of a nominally harmless (or minimally harmful in the case of say bee stings) external agent interacting with a unique inherent individual physiology. Likewise external carcinogens do not induce disease uniformly, interacting more pathologically with the physiology of certain individuals.
On the other hand when we think of mental illness our current conventional wisdom doesn't include the pathogen or toxin model that would support a concept of a belief as an illness in and of itself. At least part of the reason is easy to spot. This is incompatible with concepts of absolute liberty of thought supported by free will. Beliefs are just thoughts, volitional products of our own agency. If they are bad, it is because the brain holding them is too faulty to act at liberty with free will. A bad belief (if there is even such a thing) can't be an infection of an intact brain. Ergo, mental illness must be inherent. You cannot be MADE mentally ill by the thoughts that get into your head. The logic being that if the just the thoughts were making you ill, you'd just flush them out yourself and replace them with better thoughts of your own.
The failure of the free will doctrine undermines this however. So it's quite reasonable (albeit potentially frightening for all the reasons lightly touched in the third paragraph) to talk about thoughts as agents of sickness the same way we talk about having a cold or exposure to poison ivy or ingesting strychnine.
One source of our fear is of course the social stereotype and stigma of mental illness. While the term itself denotes the mere fact of being sick in or by ones thoughts and emotions, the social connotations imply a severe, intractable, quasi-criminal existential threat, or a permanent invalid. This not only causes people to react to mental illness in inappropriate, unhelpful and excessive ways, it also causes them to require claims that something is a mental illness meet that criteria. There's even a confounding ambivalence between the conceptions of threat vs. sufferer. There's an insidious cultural mythology about schizophrenia that the psychosis somehow overrides the ability to be miserable. Spend a week on a psych ward and you learn that is not the case. Psychosis is a wholesale distributor of profound human misery and despair.
But the fact remains, mental illness in the public mind implies permanent menace or permanent uselessness. In our minds, there are no mental health equivalents to having a cold, or being laid up with a mental equivalent of home-puking-your-guts-out-you-poor-thing. In those physical analogs the ailments are mere impediments to flourishing, calling for the right measures of aid, healing, and understanding. We have trouble seeing mental illness this way. It's getting better but we have a long way to go. This is not to say that we don't respond to mental suffering or struggle properly either. Coming to the aid of someone mentally and emotionally overwhelmed by circumstances (divorce, job loss, death of loved one) is common practice. So is trying to help someone who we realize has misunderstandings that cause them to suffer and grossly impede their ability to flourish. Yet we can't quite bring ourselves to acknowledge them as sickened or afflicted in the same fashion we acknowledge someone with Influenza. They have to be broken by it some way first, and even then there are lots of reservations.
The point of all this being that until our conception of mental illness develops the same level of nuance that our conception of physical (read not-mental) illness has, tagging anything as a mental illness will be problematic. The originator may have a very properly nuanced claim about why a certain thing can be properly called such, and may even articulate the nuance well. Yet until society is ready to receive that nuance without recasting it into the misconceptions that currently hold sway this this will remain a risky business indeed.
Still one can't rule out an eventual utility to letting some beliefs get treated as illness. Take a case where a person has trust issues and has come to believe their spouse is unfaithful. There may have even been a past indiscretion, but they've worked hard to reconcile. The transgressor has repented, and is genuinely sorry, and for all practical purposes can be trusted, but their spouse just can't shed the belief in their infidelity. They know that this is because of the trust issues. They have an adult understanding of the psychogenic source of the the belief's persistence. If there were a reliable methodological aide to changing that belief, and if they wanted to access it for the purpose of allowing their relationship to flourish going forward, would it be ethical not to provide it? It may not be possible to abdicate our obligation to solve ethical questions just because they wouldn't exist without the methodology.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Would our extinction be so bad?
It's bad enough that we have to contemplate our own mortality and that of those we love and care for, but our understanding of our state of affairs is forcing us to contemplate the reality that species don't last either.
Humans, being a species, are not immune, so it's certain that at some point down the line there will no longer be anything recognizably homo sapiens sapiens.
The first thought we tend to have about this eventuality is that it's a disaster, and I'll agree that if were talking about (geologically) sudden extirpation of our kind, say by asteroid, it's pretty easy to put it on the VERY-BAD-NOT-GOOD side of the ledger. But say that in, oh, maybe 400,000 years the earth no longer hosts a single human being, would that be a bad thing? What should we feel about such an eventuality?
It could depend on how the disappearance came about. Would my australopithecene great-to-the-Nth grandfather lament the differences between Lucy and my daughter Claire? Should we see ourselves as their triumph through the ages or the record of their eventual downfall? If we view it as triumph, than if we are simply displaced by a new branch of evolutionary descendants, we should see it as surviving. After all, we already know our descendants are going to be a little different, if they eventually become a lot different, how bad would that be?
On the other hand suppose our ecological niche slowly disappeared and our numbers dwindled down to zero. Or a virus evolved that impaired our ability to reproduce with the same result. Would that be so awful? If so, why?
Humans, being a species, are not immune, so it's certain that at some point down the line there will no longer be anything recognizably homo sapiens sapiens.
The first thought we tend to have about this eventuality is that it's a disaster, and I'll agree that if were talking about (geologically) sudden extirpation of our kind, say by asteroid, it's pretty easy to put it on the VERY-BAD-NOT-GOOD side of the ledger. But say that in, oh, maybe 400,000 years the earth no longer hosts a single human being, would that be a bad thing? What should we feel about such an eventuality?
It could depend on how the disappearance came about. Would my australopithecene great-to-the-Nth grandfather lament the differences between Lucy and my daughter Claire? Should we see ourselves as their triumph through the ages or the record of their eventual downfall? If we view it as triumph, than if we are simply displaced by a new branch of evolutionary descendants, we should see it as surviving. After all, we already know our descendants are going to be a little different, if they eventually become a lot different, how bad would that be?
On the other hand suppose our ecological niche slowly disappeared and our numbers dwindled down to zero. Or a virus evolved that impaired our ability to reproduce with the same result. Would that be so awful? If so, why?
Monday, April 22, 2013
Skepticism vs. Absolute Freedom of Thought
Is there an irreconcilable conflict between absolute freedom of thought and skepticism?
If we define skepticism as the insistence that all truth claims must be vetted through reason, evidence, and otherwise sound epistemology, then were imposing strong restrictions on our true belief. If absolute freedom of thought implies zero duty to concede anything to anyone; if there are no restrictions on true belief under absolute freedom of thought, whence the necessary restrictions of skepticism?
A skeptic provides a priori the standards, benchmarks, and requirements by which they are willing to be convinced. This represents a partial abdication of their absolute freedom in favor of saying, "rather than merely believing whatever appeals to me, I will follow the data and the logic to it's best conclusion independent of what I expect or want." A skeptic has obligations.
If we define skepticism as the insistence that all truth claims must be vetted through reason, evidence, and otherwise sound epistemology, then were imposing strong restrictions on our true belief. If absolute freedom of thought implies zero duty to concede anything to anyone; if there are no restrictions on true belief under absolute freedom of thought, whence the necessary restrictions of skepticism?
A skeptic provides a priori the standards, benchmarks, and requirements by which they are willing to be convinced. This represents a partial abdication of their absolute freedom in favor of saying, "rather than merely believing whatever appeals to me, I will follow the data and the logic to it's best conclusion independent of what I expect or want." A skeptic has obligations.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Why are you safe from me?
There will be a lot of talk about security and prevention over the next few months. As you listen and take part in these conversations, I would have you keep this in the back of your mind.
We walk past each other daily, most of us as strangers. We rarely notice just how simple and easy it would be to inflict grievous harm on our fellows. Something heavy in the hand, an earnest well-aimed blow, and just like that, a human being is killed or maimed by our hand. Add some other tools and the right knowledge and it becomes even easier to do--to even more people, but such tools and knowledge are not necessary, and in any case they're not difficult to obtain.
The idea that all our security apparatus, and police, and weapons, and retributive justice do the bulk of prevention of such behavior is a fantasy. They have some effect out on the margins for sure, but their effect pales compared to what really prevents this kind of violence. Desire.
Like almost everyone I know, I have never crushed anyone's skull, or set someone on fire, or poisoned them, or blown them to bits with explosives. The reason seems to me very simple. I've never really wanted to do so. Sure I've been angry, and like anyone my mind has indulged abstract notions of doing harm to someone for some real or imagined grievance. Fortunately this has never risen to the level of my taking action. If (forbid it) my mind works into a state of truly wanting to make such things happen, and I keep this reasonably to myself so that no one knows how dangerous I have suddenly become, what's to stop me? For all practical purposes, nothing.
Maybe you're feeling a little creepy wondering just how much time I spend contemplating whether to commit one of these gruesome acts. Very little, per se, let me assure you. It's just that we have been mired in a long public conversation about security from national to personal for years, and that conversation is usually framed in terms of "What protects me from others?". I imagined a partial answer was available by casting myself as the potential threat and instead asking "What protects others from me?" The grim musings are a part of this thought experiment.
It seems obvious that what protects others from me, is, well, me. I am the chief impediment, or more properly my lack of desire to do harm is. This is marginally augmented by the social protections and sanctions of society and it's laws, as well as the threat to me if my intended victim has a chance to act in their own defense, but only marginally.
So while the issue of public and private security is revisited in the context of the Boston Marathon bombings, keep in mind that security flows not from its apparatus, but the cultivation of trust, loyalty to strangers, and above all our mutually learning not to want the destruction of other human beings.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Sorry, this wasn't the real battle with big money
Loath am I to harsh the well-earned mellow this fine shining morning, but before too much of the adrenaline wears off, a warning. Dark money gets more bang for its buck in the mid-term elections where turnout tends to be low (i.e when the voters suppress themselves). The GOP knows the demographic tides they swim against and they already have plans in place to re-stock the war chests and push ahead for 2014. Even now they hope to achieve again what they accomplished in 2010, floating bizarre reactionaries into office on a tide of money while the bulk of the electorate stays home.
So while it was critical for all of us to work and turn out for yesterday's outcome, our harder fight is coming. They are waiting for us to stop punching, to stop guarding our heads. Ruling classes never quit--ever.
If yesterday's gains from our investment is to become a growing portfolio we have to keep working, because as encouraging as the results were, they are not all that big.
If you are serious about not having yesterday's results cut out from under us in the short term, treat the next two years like you treated the last two, maybe even more so. The tactics are the same.
Write many letters. Handwritten if possible. Send them to officeholders on both sides.
Raise money.
Communicate regularly with allies.
So while it was critical for all of us to work and turn out for yesterday's outcome, our harder fight is coming. They are waiting for us to stop punching, to stop guarding our heads. Ruling classes never quit--ever.
If yesterday's gains from our investment is to become a growing portfolio we have to keep working, because as encouraging as the results were, they are not all that big.
If you are serious about not having yesterday's results cut out from under us in the short term, treat the next two years like you treated the last two, maybe even more so. The tactics are the same.
Write many letters. Handwritten if possible. Send them to officeholders on both sides.
Raise money.
Communicate regularly with allies.
Fact-check relentlessly and publish and share all things necessary to drag the opposition into the light.
Be true. The reality-based community swims against a strong tide, but it successfully forced blatant falsehood have a pretty bad day yesterday. We need to sustain that. Hammer reality home at every chance.
Above all, DON'T. GET. COCKY.
They have a lot of money to play with.
Be true. The reality-based community swims against a strong tide, but it successfully forced blatant falsehood have a pretty bad day yesterday. We need to sustain that. Hammer reality home at every chance.
Above all, DON'T. GET. COCKY.
They have a lot of money to play with.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Glen Beck calls Hurricane Sandy God's Last Warning to Vote Romney.
C'mon.....you know he's thinking it. He has to be.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Myriad Problems with Pascal's Wager.
For those of you who don't know, Pascal was a 17th century French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. For most of his early life he was ambivalent about religion, taking it up only to drop it again. Then at the age of 31 he had an intense religious experience late one night in bed, after which he became devoutly Catholic. Still, as a philosopher he realized there was a problem. In the absence of such an experience what compelling reason would there be to believe. Rigorous skepticism, with which Pascal was intimately familiar as a scientist, would suggest not believing. One must expect therefore a considerable number of people "so made as they cannot believe" on perfectly reasonable grounds. What of them? As a probability theorist, Pascal attempted to solve the problem mathematically as a wager in the following terms.
In short,
If you bet on the truth of atheism and are wrong, you suffer an infinite infinity of misery in hell.
If you bet on the truth of atheism and are right, it has little to no effect on your outcomes.
If you bet on the truth of Christian doctrine and are wrong, it has little to no effect on your outcomes.
If you bet on the truth of Christian doctrine and are right, you enjoy an infinity of infinite happiness in heaven.
Therefore, Pascal argues, even if the truth of the Christian Doctrine is extremely unlikely, one should still choose to believe in it to maximize your expected outcomes. Why? Because of the math.
The expected outcome of any binary wager is the sum of the two outcomes weighted by their respective probabilities. Say the probability that Christian doctrine is true is ten million to one, or 0.0000001. That sets the probability that atheism is true at 0.9999999. What happens if you bet on atheism. If atheism turns out to be right as the odds suggest, you have simply ended up with some fixed quantity of benefit from your one-and-only life. If you were fortunate it was pretty good even if it seemed a little too short. On the other hand it may have sucked but at least its over now, que sera. In either case its a finite quantity, lets call it X. If atheism turns out to be wrong though, you get an eternity of infinite suffering tacked on after death, which we express as the quantity minus infinity (-inf). The expected return E of a bet on atheism is then negative infinity.
E=0.0000001*(-inf) + 0.9999999*X = -inf
Because even 1 tenmillionth of negative infinity is a negative infinity, and it remains so even if you add 9,999,999 ten millionths of a finite quantity to it. The presence of an infinite quantity overwhelms the finite probabilities and the finite outcome X.
Flip it around and for exactly the same reasons, a bet in favor of the Christian doctrine where the reward for being right is an eternity of infinite happiness, or plus infinity (+inf), gives an expectation value of
E=0.0000001*(+inf) + 0.9999999*X = +inf
Therefore, says Pascal, using the same logic you would apply to any game of chance, or an investment portfolio, bet on the Christian Doctrine.
That all seems straightforward, right? . Obviously one should believe in the Christian Doctrine.
Well, no.
Notice first how Pascal drastically and artificially limits the possibilities. Only Atheism or the Christian doctrine are permitted. Then the associated outcomes after death limited to three possibilities: oblivion, infinite eternal torment, or infinite eternal happiness. These are added on to whatever one's worldly life amounts to, which only counts, in Pascal's scheme if Atheism is correct, because then your one and only worldly life is all you get.
Pascal gets away with only two options because most of us spend our lives embedded in a society with one dominant religion. Having one option to unbelief seems natural. But there and have been thousands of religions based on myriad gods, with incompatible dogma and doctrines. This means that at least most of them have to be wrong. Pascal just excludes these out of hand, but we have to take all comers. I would argue that as the minimum number of candidate religions that must be wrong grows, the odds that all of them are probably wrong goes up too. Even if we can be sure that there is a correct choice, we should expect to get it wrong given the sheer number of options.
We also must ask what constitutes an acceptable wager on Christian Doctrine under Pascal's conditions. When Pascal tells us to just go ahead and believe, what does that mean? How does that go? Starting from a point of unbelief, a lot depends on what holds is necessary and sufficient for Christian salvation. If you have to genuinely believe, then Pascal is assuming that for the right reward (instead of a convincing case) we can, of our own volition, create true belief; spinning it fully formed out of a sliver of doubt in our atheism. On the other hand, if true belief is not required, Pascal would appear to be telling us that we should simply act as if we believe. This runs right up against the debate about whether Christian salvation is a matter of what you really believe, or what you say or appear to believe, or dependent on act commensurate with the doctrine.
Neither seems very plausible. Belief isn't a matter of volition. I cannot arbitrarily decide that I believe the the Earth is a flat disc; I KNOW it's a sphere. Is it plausible that merely for some reward (say $2,000,000), I could actually stop thinking that? No! That is not how true belief and knowledge work. On the other hand it's even less plausible that feigned belief would pass as a hedge bet by a true unbeliever. It implies a God that accepts phony Bad Faith, which seems a bit sleazy.
It's also no accident that Pascal needs the stakes to be so exaggerated, otherwise there would be nothing to offset the utter lack of evidence on which to base a decision. This is simple game theory. Who would buy a $1 Lotto ticket at 47 million:1 odds if the max payout was $15? No one. The stakes HAVE to be outrageous. This is the heart of Pascal's argument.: Given the unlimited size of the purported "Jackpot" isn't even a remote chance worth the gamble?
Well, No. Exagerating the stakes in cases where the odds against are astronomically high is merely an exploitation ploy against human psychology. This is how people are duped into buying Lotto tickets, or penny stocks. Most of us lack the intuition to grasp really large and really small values. When outrageous claims are in play, it becomes almost certain that someone is being played for a sap on that basis.
The last thing wrong with the wager is it's faulty assessment of the cost of belief. Pascal asserted that the cost was essentially nil. If there is no god, no heaven, the true believer simply dies and ceases to be regardless of his belief. In this case, since he is not even alive to be disappointed, Pascal sees this as a wash.
But is this true? True Belief spawns large and small changes in one's behavior. A sizable portion of these changes serve to benefit the faith as an institution much more than the believer as an individual. True Believers invest significant portions of their money and time, and cede a lot of their autonomy to the church and its observances. For the private unbeliever, who is merely trying to hedge his bet per Pascal's recommendation the situation is worse. He is still compelled by his strategy to act out as if he were a true believer. To cover remote chance that salvation will be needed, he must make the best show of belief he can muster. If what he really thinks doesn't matter, the quality of his pretense is all that's left. This is the most insidious hidden cost ignored by Pascal. It is physically and emotionally painful to break the integrity between how we truly think and feel and how we speak and act. It feels good to be honest with and about ourselves, both privately and publicly, whereas we suffer when we are false. There are certainly exceptions, and our ability to tolerate a certain amount of ambiguity is one of our better traits. Still, the evidence is that we are more miserable, perhaps most miserable, when we deny true selves.
This is not to deny value of the community, solidarity and moral teamwork one finds in church involvement. This can offset some of the real cost of belief, but that's the point. Such things have to be counted because Pascal is wrong in his basic assumption. Belief, true or pretended, comes with a real bill which is often high.
- "God is, or He is not"
- A Game is being played... where heads or tails will turn up.
- According to reason, you can defend either of the propositions.
- You must wager. (It's not optional.)
- Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
- Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (...) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.
In short,
If you bet on the truth of atheism and are wrong, you suffer an infinite infinity of misery in hell.
If you bet on the truth of atheism and are right, it has little to no effect on your outcomes.
If you bet on the truth of Christian doctrine and are wrong, it has little to no effect on your outcomes.
If you bet on the truth of Christian doctrine and are right, you enjoy an infinity of infinite happiness in heaven.
Therefore, Pascal argues, even if the truth of the Christian Doctrine is extremely unlikely, one should still choose to believe in it to maximize your expected outcomes. Why? Because of the math.
The expected outcome of any binary wager is the sum of the two outcomes weighted by their respective probabilities. Say the probability that Christian doctrine is true is ten million to one, or 0.0000001. That sets the probability that atheism is true at 0.9999999. What happens if you bet on atheism. If atheism turns out to be right as the odds suggest, you have simply ended up with some fixed quantity of benefit from your one-and-only life. If you were fortunate it was pretty good even if it seemed a little too short. On the other hand it may have sucked but at least its over now, que sera. In either case its a finite quantity, lets call it X. If atheism turns out to be wrong though, you get an eternity of infinite suffering tacked on after death, which we express as the quantity minus infinity (-inf). The expected return E of a bet on atheism is then negative infinity.
E=0.0000001*(-inf) + 0.9999999*X = -inf
Because even 1 tenmillionth of negative infinity is a negative infinity, and it remains so even if you add 9,999,999 ten millionths of a finite quantity to it. The presence of an infinite quantity overwhelms the finite probabilities and the finite outcome X.
Flip it around and for exactly the same reasons, a bet in favor of the Christian doctrine where the reward for being right is an eternity of infinite happiness, or plus infinity (+inf), gives an expectation value of
E=0.0000001*(+inf) + 0.9999999*X = +inf
Therefore, says Pascal, using the same logic you would apply to any game of chance, or an investment portfolio, bet on the Christian Doctrine.
That all seems straightforward, right? . Obviously one should believe in the Christian Doctrine.
Well, no.
Notice first how Pascal drastically and artificially limits the possibilities. Only Atheism or the Christian doctrine are permitted. Then the associated outcomes after death limited to three possibilities: oblivion, infinite eternal torment, or infinite eternal happiness. These are added on to whatever one's worldly life amounts to, which only counts, in Pascal's scheme if Atheism is correct, because then your one and only worldly life is all you get.
Pascal gets away with only two options because most of us spend our lives embedded in a society with one dominant religion. Having one option to unbelief seems natural. But there and have been thousands of religions based on myriad gods, with incompatible dogma and doctrines. This means that at least most of them have to be wrong. Pascal just excludes these out of hand, but we have to take all comers. I would argue that as the minimum number of candidate religions that must be wrong grows, the odds that all of them are probably wrong goes up too. Even if we can be sure that there is a correct choice, we should expect to get it wrong given the sheer number of options.
We also must ask what constitutes an acceptable wager on Christian Doctrine under Pascal's conditions. When Pascal tells us to just go ahead and believe, what does that mean? How does that go? Starting from a point of unbelief, a lot depends on what holds is necessary and sufficient for Christian salvation. If you have to genuinely believe, then Pascal is assuming that for the right reward (instead of a convincing case) we can, of our own volition, create true belief; spinning it fully formed out of a sliver of doubt in our atheism. On the other hand, if true belief is not required, Pascal would appear to be telling us that we should simply act as if we believe. This runs right up against the debate about whether Christian salvation is a matter of what you really believe, or what you say or appear to believe, or dependent on act commensurate with the doctrine.
Neither seems very plausible. Belief isn't a matter of volition. I cannot arbitrarily decide that I believe the the Earth is a flat disc; I KNOW it's a sphere. Is it plausible that merely for some reward (say $2,000,000), I could actually stop thinking that? No! That is not how true belief and knowledge work. On the other hand it's even less plausible that feigned belief would pass as a hedge bet by a true unbeliever. It implies a God that accepts phony Bad Faith, which seems a bit sleazy.
It's also no accident that Pascal needs the stakes to be so exaggerated, otherwise there would be nothing to offset the utter lack of evidence on which to base a decision. This is simple game theory. Who would buy a $1 Lotto ticket at 47 million:1 odds if the max payout was $15? No one. The stakes HAVE to be outrageous. This is the heart of Pascal's argument.: Given the unlimited size of the purported "Jackpot" isn't even a remote chance worth the gamble?
Well, No. Exagerating the stakes in cases where the odds against are astronomically high is merely an exploitation ploy against human psychology. This is how people are duped into buying Lotto tickets, or penny stocks. Most of us lack the intuition to grasp really large and really small values. When outrageous claims are in play, it becomes almost certain that someone is being played for a sap on that basis.
The last thing wrong with the wager is it's faulty assessment of the cost of belief. Pascal asserted that the cost was essentially nil. If there is no god, no heaven, the true believer simply dies and ceases to be regardless of his belief. In this case, since he is not even alive to be disappointed, Pascal sees this as a wash.
But is this true? True Belief spawns large and small changes in one's behavior. A sizable portion of these changes serve to benefit the faith as an institution much more than the believer as an individual. True Believers invest significant portions of their money and time, and cede a lot of their autonomy to the church and its observances. For the private unbeliever, who is merely trying to hedge his bet per Pascal's recommendation the situation is worse. He is still compelled by his strategy to act out as if he were a true believer. To cover remote chance that salvation will be needed, he must make the best show of belief he can muster. If what he really thinks doesn't matter, the quality of his pretense is all that's left. This is the most insidious hidden cost ignored by Pascal. It is physically and emotionally painful to break the integrity between how we truly think and feel and how we speak and act. It feels good to be honest with and about ourselves, both privately and publicly, whereas we suffer when we are false. There are certainly exceptions, and our ability to tolerate a certain amount of ambiguity is one of our better traits. Still, the evidence is that we are more miserable, perhaps most miserable, when we deny true selves.
This is not to deny value of the community, solidarity and moral teamwork one finds in church involvement. This can offset some of the real cost of belief, but that's the point. Such things have to be counted because Pascal is wrong in his basic assumption. Belief, true or pretended, comes with a real bill which is often high.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Thank you for smoking: Olympic Edition
A recent trend on twitter was #RejectedOlympicEvents. Most of them were pretty lame--Quidditch and Twerking came up constantly, but after a little thought I think I have a good one.
Winter Speed Smoking!
This event would be based on what those few remaining nicotine fiends at work have to do in December on break now that most public spaces forbid smoking. They would start from a sitting position at a desk. At the gun they would dash to the elevator (or stairs), race-walk outside past the No Smoking Perimeter, light up in the wind and snow, and smoke as many ciggies as possible while still getting back to their desk in 15 minutes. You’d get points for the number of cigarettes you smoked but penalized if you were late getting back to your desk, or for stepping into a No Smoking area with a lit cigarette. You could have separate events for pipe and cigar, or rolling your own.
Can you imagine the kind of withered, green-faced tar-fingered, brown-toothed specimens who would excel at this? The winners would have to be helped up on to the podium with their little O2 tanks and nasal canulas. The winners anthem would start and you wouldn’t know whether they were just putting their hand over their heart or clutching at their angina.
Winter Speed Smoking!
This event would be based on what those few remaining nicotine fiends at work have to do in December on break now that most public spaces forbid smoking. They would start from a sitting position at a desk. At the gun they would dash to the elevator (or stairs), race-walk outside past the No Smoking Perimeter, light up in the wind and snow, and smoke as many ciggies as possible while still getting back to their desk in 15 minutes. You’d get points for the number of cigarettes you smoked but penalized if you were late getting back to your desk, or for stepping into a No Smoking area with a lit cigarette. You could have separate events for pipe and cigar, or rolling your own.
Can you imagine the kind of withered, green-faced tar-fingered, brown-toothed specimens who would excel at this? The winners would have to be helped up on to the podium with their little O2 tanks and nasal canulas. The winners anthem would start and you wouldn’t know whether they were just putting their hand over their heart or clutching at their angina.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
There really is no such thing as Supernatural.
Advocates for the real existence of spirit entities (whether they be ghosts or gods or the immaterial soul or what have you) or of magic or psychic phenomena, often claim that atheists and skeptics "by ruling out the possibility of the supernatural, are merely being dogmatic in the same fashion that they so love to criticize".
I would like to put this foolish old shibboleth to rest once and for all. I know this is probably a vain hope. Old dogs may not learn new tricks, but they never forget their old ones. Still, with a sigh, I will try to make clear that the concept of supernatural itself is meaningless.
We start with the word. What does it mean? As an adjective it simply means above or beyond the natural. From the Oxford Dictionaries more specifically:
Before that we must next ask what it means to be beyond the laws of nature. Nature as a word has many meanings, and this can obscure rather than clarify.
I submit that for this discussion it does not mean
Therin lies the problem. Whenever somebody talks affirmatively about souls, or ghosts, or gods, or spirits, or anything else that gets lumped under the term supernatural, they always end up ascribing an actual nature to them. They have to. This is what it means to describe things that way. So when they claim that someone they know is a real fortune teller, they are saying that it is in that person's nature to transcend the arrow of time to have experiences of the future in advance. When they talk about a god, they might start by claiming it is essentially unknowable. They will strongly suggest that it is impossible for the deity to be constrained in any way. Yet saying this god is unconstrained by nature, is the same thing as saying that it doesn't have a nature of its own. There's no way around this. To have a nature is by definition to be constrained. At heart believers know this to be the case. In any conversation with someone who believes in a god they will eventually make explicit claims about what that god's nature is and isn't, what that god does and does not do.. Make an assertion counter to their account, and they will correct you instantly. They will say, sure, god can be anything, except that. The same is true for believers in ghosts and psychics, immaterial souls. For the believer, these things can be expected and eventually observed to behave in particular ways and not in others according to the nature of what they are. In the end to be knowable is to have a nature, Supernatural is a useless term.
Which returns us to the idea of something "beyond scientific understanding". As long as your goal is to determine what is the case, you are inquiring after the nature of things. Once you expect to observe something behaving in a particular way, you have exited the realm of "other ways of knowing", and fully entered the realm of science. That is the problem with the doctrine of knowledge by faith which asserts that there are two spheres, one where things can only be known through reason, evidence and sound epistemology--science, and a second where you can know things in some other way without those requirements. This assumes we have the capacity to tell the difference. It would not work otherwise. Without being able to tell which approach to use in a particular case, we end up just guessing and hoping. I can report that have found no evidence for such a capacity within myself. I don't think it exists in others. However, even that might not be important in the end. If science is what we use to vet claims about the nature of those things expected to have observable effects, the only thing we have left to vet by "other ways of knowing" like faith are things without a nature of their own which are not expected to have observable effects. I can't imagine what such things would be. How would we attempt a conversation about them? For all practical purposes this sounds like a null set.
So this insistence that true critical thinkers must admit to the possibility of the supernatural is at heart bogus, because the term is empty. Supernatural is an abstract point of departure that one has to retreat from the minute any meaningful conversation starts.
I would like to put this foolish old shibboleth to rest once and for all. I know this is probably a vain hope. Old dogs may not learn new tricks, but they never forget their old ones. Still, with a sigh, I will try to make clear that the concept of supernatural itself is meaningless.
We start with the word. What does it mean? As an adjective it simply means above or beyond the natural. From the Oxford Dictionaries more specifically:
We must then ask what it means to be beyond scientific understanding. It could mean indistinguishable from non-existent. As McKown memorably quipped "The invisible and non-existent look very much alike". However, to those who make affirmative claims regarding the supernatural, it means definitely understandable, but just not via science. If they are of a more agnostic or diplomatic frame of mind, they might soften this to, we shouldn't rule out the possibility, we must take it seriously. Each view is rooted in the idea that we can somehow bypass the requirements of physical evidence, reason and rigorous epistemology, i.e science, and validate claims about what is actually the case in some other way. We must accept the possibility of Other Ways of Knowing. There are difficulties with this, which I will get to.
Before that we must next ask what it means to be beyond the laws of nature. Nature as a word has many meanings, and this can obscure rather than clarify.
I submit that for this discussion it does not mean
- the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations
- the basic or inherent features, character, or qualities of something: (informal) the inherent and unchangeable character of something.
Therin lies the problem. Whenever somebody talks affirmatively about souls, or ghosts, or gods, or spirits, or anything else that gets lumped under the term supernatural, they always end up ascribing an actual nature to them. They have to. This is what it means to describe things that way. So when they claim that someone they know is a real fortune teller, they are saying that it is in that person's nature to transcend the arrow of time to have experiences of the future in advance. When they talk about a god, they might start by claiming it is essentially unknowable. They will strongly suggest that it is impossible for the deity to be constrained in any way. Yet saying this god is unconstrained by nature, is the same thing as saying that it doesn't have a nature of its own. There's no way around this. To have a nature is by definition to be constrained. At heart believers know this to be the case. In any conversation with someone who believes in a god they will eventually make explicit claims about what that god's nature is and isn't, what that god does and does not do.. Make an assertion counter to their account, and they will correct you instantly. They will say, sure, god can be anything, except that. The same is true for believers in ghosts and psychics, immaterial souls. For the believer, these things can be expected and eventually observed to behave in particular ways and not in others according to the nature of what they are. In the end to be knowable is to have a nature, Supernatural is a useless term.
Which returns us to the idea of something "beyond scientific understanding". As long as your goal is to determine what is the case, you are inquiring after the nature of things. Once you expect to observe something behaving in a particular way, you have exited the realm of "other ways of knowing", and fully entered the realm of science. That is the problem with the doctrine of knowledge by faith which asserts that there are two spheres, one where things can only be known through reason, evidence and sound epistemology--science, and a second where you can know things in some other way without those requirements. This assumes we have the capacity to tell the difference. It would not work otherwise. Without being able to tell which approach to use in a particular case, we end up just guessing and hoping. I can report that have found no evidence for such a capacity within myself. I don't think it exists in others. However, even that might not be important in the end. If science is what we use to vet claims about the nature of those things expected to have observable effects, the only thing we have left to vet by "other ways of knowing" like faith are things without a nature of their own which are not expected to have observable effects. I can't imagine what such things would be. How would we attempt a conversation about them? For all practical purposes this sounds like a null set.
So this insistence that true critical thinkers must admit to the possibility of the supernatural is at heart bogus, because the term is empty. Supernatural is an abstract point of departure that one has to retreat from the minute any meaningful conversation starts.
Friday, March 9, 2012
On beating up a cub scout. Rush Limbaugh's Mike Tyson moment.
Let's be clear.
I don't want to silence Rush Limbaugh, no matter how dangerous I find his maniacal rantings, or the crazed voice of extreme right-wing radio pundits. I think its better to know how bad, how ugly, how crazy the ideas are that are being injected into our intellectual currency. Racial bigots, for example, have proven to require some watching, so knowing who they are is actually a good thing.
However, I don't begrudge what's happened to him over his attacks on Sandra Fluke.
A lot of hay is made over the lack of civility in public discourse these days, and rightly so. Contempt, so it seems, is the new national pastime. Still, the history of our public conversation reveals a consistent distinct and somewhat separate arena of ugly confrontation, an inevitable consequence of our rights to free expression. Those who have made some study of this often point to the scurrilous broadsides Thomas Jefferson had published against John Adams, which didn't so much question his fitness for the office of President, but whether it was safe to allow him to roam at liberty in society at all. The broadsides were, by any reasonable definition of the term, gross public libel.
The reason they were not treated as libel was the public acceptance of that same accepted sphere of ugly confrontation. The rules governing what happens in the arena seem very different than those without, and we find this acceptable. In a sense its a lot like boxing or any other violent sport. If I slam my fist into your face in a legally sanctioned bout its just a part of a contest. If I do it to you on the street its a felony without some extreme extenuating circumstances (e.g. you would have to be an unavoidable threat to life and limb). Even if its preceded by our mutually agreeing to have a such fight in the street, its still a felony, because in the absence of a grant of exception by law, fighting is illegal.
The thing about these arenas, whether of ugly confrontation, or physical violence, is that nowadays they're populated with people who walked in with both eyes open looking for, or at least being open to that kind of fighting. The Roman Coliseum where prisoners or slaves were dragged in along with the seasoned professional gladiators is no longer an acceptable model for this kind of thing. This makes the question of who's in and who's out, who's playing and who's not, important. In highly public discourse there might be some ambiguity about who's in the ring and who's out, but that doesn't mean there are no reasonable answers when the issue comes up.
There's a final important distinction to be made. Even in the arena there are definite fouls (a boxer after all can't just knee his opponent in the groin). Still there's a difference between doing so in the ring and outside of it. In the ring you get penalized in the context of the game, possibly even to the point of loss, or qualification), but you usually don't get dragged into court later. (Although a recent NHL case of a player being clubbed in the head from behind with a stick by an opponent did lead to formal criminal charges, of which he was acquitted.).
What sets Imus' and Rush's gaffes apart is that they fail on both fronts. The Rutgers girls weren't in that arena of ugly confrontation any more than Ms. Fluke was. To the contrary, Fluke and the Rutgers team were operating in very distinct, formally ethical managed contests (sworn testimony before congress, and sportsmanship guided athletics). Imus and Limbaugh were doubly wrong in that they committed what would have been a major foul in the arena, to people who weren't even in it. It was like seeing Mike Tyson bite of the ear of a cub scout.
Let's be clear.
I don't want to silence Rush Limbaugh, no matter how dangerous I find his maniacal rantings, or the crazed voice of extreme right-wing radio pundits. I think its better to know how bad, how ugly, how crazy the ideas are that are being injected into our intellectual currency. Racial bigots, for example, have proven to require some watching, so knowing who they are is actually a good thing.
However, I don't begrudge what's happened to him over his attacks on Sandra Fluke.
A lot of hay is made over the lack of civility in public discourse these days, and rightly so. Contempt, so it seems, is the new national pastime. Still, the history of our public conversation reveals a consistent distinct and somewhat separate arena of ugly confrontation, an inevitable consequence of our rights to free expression. Those who have made some study of this often point to the scurrilous broadsides Thomas Jefferson had published against John Adams, which didn't so much question his fitness for the office of President, but whether it was safe to allow him to roam at liberty in society at all. The broadsides were, by any reasonable definition of the term, gross public libel.
The reason they were not treated as libel was the public acceptance of that same accepted sphere of ugly confrontation. The rules governing what happens in the arena seem very different than those without, and we find this acceptable. In a sense its a lot like boxing or any other violent sport. If I slam my fist into your face in a legally sanctioned bout its just a part of a contest. If I do it to you on the street its a felony without some extreme extenuating circumstances (e.g. you would have to be an unavoidable threat to life and limb). Even if its preceded by our mutually agreeing to have a such fight in the street, its still a felony, because in the absence of a grant of exception by law, fighting is illegal.
The thing about these arenas, whether of ugly confrontation, or physical violence, is that nowadays they're populated with people who walked in with both eyes open looking for, or at least being open to that kind of fighting. The Roman Coliseum where prisoners or slaves were dragged in along with the seasoned professional gladiators is no longer an acceptable model for this kind of thing. This makes the question of who's in and who's out, who's playing and who's not, important. In highly public discourse there might be some ambiguity about who's in the ring and who's out, but that doesn't mean there are no reasonable answers when the issue comes up.
There's a final important distinction to be made. Even in the arena there are definite fouls (a boxer after all can't just knee his opponent in the groin). Still there's a difference between doing so in the ring and outside of it. In the ring you get penalized in the context of the game, possibly even to the point of loss, or qualification), but you usually don't get dragged into court later. (Although a recent NHL case of a player being clubbed in the head from behind with a stick by an opponent did lead to formal criminal charges, of which he was acquitted.). What sets Imus' and Rush's gaffes apart is that they fail on both fronts. The Rutgers girls weren't in that arena of ugly confrontation any more than Ms. Fluke was. To the contrary, Fluke and the Rutgers team were operating in very distinct, formally ethical managed contests (sworn testimony before congress, and sportsmanship guided athletics). Imus and Limbaugh were doubly wrong in that they committed what would have been a major foul in the arena, to people who weren't even in it. It was like seeing Mike Tyson bite of the ear of a cub scout.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Musings on Susan G. Komen and Planned Parenthood
By almost any measure the recent Susan G Komen affair is an amazing story.
Here are some of my musings.
To start with, Susan G. Komen for the Cure stands on its own as an exhibition of the primacy, power, and pathology of the branding process in modern culture. In a near-perfect articulation of the marketer's art, the gaudy pink of the SGK brand infiltrated our daily lives in a manner that has been, if you'll pardon the expression, virtually metastatic. Within the last few years a few suspicious grumblings about the wisdom, value, or even good intent of this unchecked march have percolated into the public consciousness, and a few instances of their market penetration have smacked of the bizarre (all that pink clashing with NFL team colors anyone?). The thought nagged that, as with many brands, their relentless presence was becoming its own purpose. Still, their momentum seemed unstoppable, their aura saintly, their position secure.
Their case also illustrates the how the complementary imperative of protecting the brand works on the institutional psychology of corporations, and often not to the good. Charlie Pierce spoke wonderfully to the force of this drive in a recent article about Penn State's handling of the child rape case, replying to any who would wonder "How Penn State could have let such evil stay hidden?" with... It happens because institutions lie. And today, our major institutions lie because of a culture in which loyalty to "the company," and protection of "the brand" — that noxious business-school shibboleth that turns employees into brainlocked elements of sales and marketing campaigns — trumps conventional morality, traditional ethics, civil liberties, and even adherence to the rule of law. It is better to protect "the brand" than it is to protect free speech, the right to privacy, or even to protect children.
The point here is not that SGK lied or covered up anything. In that respect the stories differ. What they have in common is how once a brand gets to be a certain size, the drive of its leadership and its loyal following to protect it can border on manic paranoia. The larger and more established the branded institution, the more relentlessly protective they become. It is this fact about institutions, more than any other, that sits at the heart of Komen's Planned Parenthood debacle.
While it is difficult to pull the exact reality out of the storm of reports and editorials, a reasonable summary of the affair goes something like this. A failed right wing anti-abortion gubernatorial candidate from Georgia, Karen Handel, was hired as a Senior Vice President of Communications at SGK. Whatever else she did to serve the SGK cause, it appears she also came packaged as a classic Trojan Horse hiding a clandestine plan to get SGK to take a public whack at Planned Parenthood. The plan was not one of honest persuasion of the SGK leadership, but rather by a disingenuous political maneuver. A policy was introduced under which SGK would refuse to fund organizations under government investigation. The masking rationale for the policy was protecting the SGK brand from involvement with controversy (a genuine part of Handel's purview). The true rationale was to tie SGKs hands later when Senator Cliff Stearns called for a federal audit of Planned Parenthood, forcing SGK to execute the policy, and terminate its funding for PP's cancer screening programs in low income areas. While the financial impact of the termination was negligible compared with PP's overall budget, the expected political payoff was a different story. They could clobber Planned Parenthood politically as having been found unworthy by the large publicly sanctified and beloved Komen organization. It was planned as a hit and run PR coup for the movement, and a feather in the caps of those who pulled it off.
At first, on the surface, this looked like a political black-op of almost Mephistophelean cunning, especially the playing of SGK's large institutional paranoia for its brand to set up the attack and then set the pieces in motion. Then almost overnight it all went marvelously, horribly, wrong. Instead of getting their free-hit on and subsequent public ridicule of Planned Parenthood, they instigated a virtual mob to rise up and overwhelm SGK stripping it of its public sanctity, and wrecking a sizable portion of if its brand image, and in all likelihood diminishing its revenue generating power for the immediate future. Even worse, the political and financial fallout for Planned Parenthood was all positive, with compensating donations flooding in, including $250,000 dollars in matching funds from Michael Bloomberg. When your own party's closest approximation to Vladimir Putin pays your actual target a quarter of a million dollars in reparations, your political theater piece has gone from a John LeCarre intrigue to a Peter Sellers' farce in world record time.
There are only three speculations possible about how to view the role of SGK leadership in all this. Either they were fairly duped by clever people after the manner of Bernie Madoff's victims, or they were not-very-bright rubes that never should have fallen for it, or they fully understood what was happening and thought they were going to be OK. In all but the first case, they can probably be held culpable for what they actually brought on themselves. If you grant the validity of the need to protect your enterprise from the effects of controversy when your enterprise isn't controversial, it seems obvious you have to two basic strategies for deciding who you work with. One is to be controversy blind and work with anyone willing to work with you toward the common goal. Disease eradication efforts by NGO's work this strategy all the time. They take the strict line "We're here about the disease and getting rid of it. Whatever grievances lie behind your local internecine squabbles, we're only here to make sure that when you resolve them the disease will be gone too. Whaddya say?" The second possible strategy is to be controversy avoidant, and limit yourself to only the most vanilla, of non-controversial partners. Here the line is "Don't call us until you work out your problems. We don't want any trouble." The scope of a controversy blind enterprise is potentially larger by virtue of unlimited collaboration than that of a controversy averse enterprise. However if you adopt the first strategy, you have to stick with it. You can't be the slightest bit fickle about your commitment to unaligned benevolence. It will be hard enough to get people to take it seriously when its consistently true. If you give the slightest hint of preference you're lost. The natives will bury you. This I think is what happened to Susan G. Komen this week, and if the leadership was fully aware of what they were doing, then they can be reasonably seen as incompetent rather than innocent.
In the meantime, SGK has recanted its decision, recommitted itself to funding PP's breast cancer programs, but many of the angered have expressed unwillingness to let bygones be bygones. That may even be the best thing for the overall public good. An aura of sanctity rarely disposes individuals or institutions to behave at their best, and SGK may be better off without it. Also, if there is any merit to the criticism that they were overgrown and had become big simply for the sake of being big, then the backlash will have been a tonic, possibly even curative. Mostly though, it is reasonable to wonder whether the entire Susan G. Komen for the Cure enterprise is a quixotic venture. Its important to compare them with the organization from which they drew their cachet--the national effort to eradicate polio or The March of Dimes. There's something essentially misleading about the comparison this invites us to make. The effort to eradicate polio was vastly different from the ambition to cure breast cancer. At the time of the of the Mother's March there were ... things we knew for certain that made it rational to think the effort would succeed. First we knew polio was a virus, Second we knew that it was the kind of virus to which humans developed permanent immunity after infection. Third, since Jenner and Pasteur, we knew the fundamental theory of vaccination. Infect the subject with enough of something identical to the virus that doesn't give them the disease and let the body do the rest. This was hard knowledge, not hopeful speculation. We didn't have to figure out what would eradicate polio, we already knew. We just didn't know how to make it. Figuring out how to make it, and then scaling that up to a safe and reliable industrial process, then verifying product safety and efficacy in the population, was the whole purpose of the March of Dimes. Since the only real question was how soon we would have it and since we wanted it as soon as possible, the law of diminishing return on investment was a moot point. By contrast there is no such foundation underlying the efforts of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The research they support by nature operates on the boundary of diminishing returns, and factoring in the opportunity costs the value of throwing more funding at Breast Cancer research is a serious issue. Which is all another way of saying that a smaller Susan G. Komen might be a better one. And if it means those ghastly pink football shoes go away too, no one will be happier than me.
Here are some of my musings.
To start with, Susan G. Komen for the Cure stands on its own as an exhibition of the primacy, power, and pathology of the branding process in modern culture. In a near-perfect articulation of the marketer's art, the gaudy pink of the SGK brand infiltrated our daily lives in a manner that has been, if you'll pardon the expression, virtually metastatic. Within the last few years a few suspicious grumblings about the wisdom, value, or even good intent of this unchecked march have percolated into the public consciousness, and a few instances of their market penetration have smacked of the bizarre (all that pink clashing with NFL team colors anyone?). The thought nagged that, as with many brands, their relentless presence was becoming its own purpose. Still, their momentum seemed unstoppable, their aura saintly, their position secure.
Their case also illustrates the how the complementary imperative of protecting the brand works on the institutional psychology of corporations, and often not to the good. Charlie Pierce spoke wonderfully to the force of this drive in a recent article about Penn State's handling of the child rape case, replying to any who would wonder "How Penn State could have let such evil stay hidden?" with... It happens because institutions lie. And today, our major institutions lie because of a culture in which loyalty to "the company," and protection of "the brand" — that noxious business-school shibboleth that turns employees into brainlocked elements of sales and marketing campaigns — trumps conventional morality, traditional ethics, civil liberties, and even adherence to the rule of law. It is better to protect "the brand" than it is to protect free speech, the right to privacy, or even to protect children.
The point here is not that SGK lied or covered up anything. In that respect the stories differ. What they have in common is how once a brand gets to be a certain size, the drive of its leadership and its loyal following to protect it can border on manic paranoia. The larger and more established the branded institution, the more relentlessly protective they become. It is this fact about institutions, more than any other, that sits at the heart of Komen's Planned Parenthood debacle.
While it is difficult to pull the exact reality out of the storm of reports and editorials, a reasonable summary of the affair goes something like this. A failed right wing anti-abortion gubernatorial candidate from Georgia, Karen Handel, was hired as a Senior Vice President of Communications at SGK. Whatever else she did to serve the SGK cause, it appears she also came packaged as a classic Trojan Horse hiding a clandestine plan to get SGK to take a public whack at Planned Parenthood. The plan was not one of honest persuasion of the SGK leadership, but rather by a disingenuous political maneuver. A policy was introduced under which SGK would refuse to fund organizations under government investigation. The masking rationale for the policy was protecting the SGK brand from involvement with controversy (a genuine part of Handel's purview). The true rationale was to tie SGKs hands later when Senator Cliff Stearns called for a federal audit of Planned Parenthood, forcing SGK to execute the policy, and terminate its funding for PP's cancer screening programs in low income areas. While the financial impact of the termination was negligible compared with PP's overall budget, the expected political payoff was a different story. They could clobber Planned Parenthood politically as having been found unworthy by the large publicly sanctified and beloved Komen organization. It was planned as a hit and run PR coup for the movement, and a feather in the caps of those who pulled it off.
At first, on the surface, this looked like a political black-op of almost Mephistophelean cunning, especially the playing of SGK's large institutional paranoia for its brand to set up the attack and then set the pieces in motion. Then almost overnight it all went marvelously, horribly, wrong. Instead of getting their free-hit on and subsequent public ridicule of Planned Parenthood, they instigated a virtual mob to rise up and overwhelm SGK stripping it of its public sanctity, and wrecking a sizable portion of if its brand image, and in all likelihood diminishing its revenue generating power for the immediate future. Even worse, the political and financial fallout for Planned Parenthood was all positive, with compensating donations flooding in, including $250,000 dollars in matching funds from Michael Bloomberg. When your own party's closest approximation to Vladimir Putin pays your actual target a quarter of a million dollars in reparations, your political theater piece has gone from a John LeCarre intrigue to a Peter Sellers' farce in world record time.
There are only three speculations possible about how to view the role of SGK leadership in all this. Either they were fairly duped by clever people after the manner of Bernie Madoff's victims, or they were not-very-bright rubes that never should have fallen for it, or they fully understood what was happening and thought they were going to be OK. In all but the first case, they can probably be held culpable for what they actually brought on themselves. If you grant the validity of the need to protect your enterprise from the effects of controversy when your enterprise isn't controversial, it seems obvious you have to two basic strategies for deciding who you work with. One is to be controversy blind and work with anyone willing to work with you toward the common goal. Disease eradication efforts by NGO's work this strategy all the time. They take the strict line "We're here about the disease and getting rid of it. Whatever grievances lie behind your local internecine squabbles, we're only here to make sure that when you resolve them the disease will be gone too. Whaddya say?" The second possible strategy is to be controversy avoidant, and limit yourself to only the most vanilla, of non-controversial partners. Here the line is "Don't call us until you work out your problems. We don't want any trouble." The scope of a controversy blind enterprise is potentially larger by virtue of unlimited collaboration than that of a controversy averse enterprise. However if you adopt the first strategy, you have to stick with it. You can't be the slightest bit fickle about your commitment to unaligned benevolence. It will be hard enough to get people to take it seriously when its consistently true. If you give the slightest hint of preference you're lost. The natives will bury you. This I think is what happened to Susan G. Komen this week, and if the leadership was fully aware of what they were doing, then they can be reasonably seen as incompetent rather than innocent.
In the meantime, SGK has recanted its decision, recommitted itself to funding PP's breast cancer programs, but many of the angered have expressed unwillingness to let bygones be bygones. That may even be the best thing for the overall public good. An aura of sanctity rarely disposes individuals or institutions to behave at their best, and SGK may be better off without it. Also, if there is any merit to the criticism that they were overgrown and had become big simply for the sake of being big, then the backlash will have been a tonic, possibly even curative. Mostly though, it is reasonable to wonder whether the entire Susan G. Komen for the Cure enterprise is a quixotic venture. Its important to compare them with the organization from which they drew their cachet--the national effort to eradicate polio or The March of Dimes. There's something essentially misleading about the comparison this invites us to make. The effort to eradicate polio was vastly different from the ambition to cure breast cancer. At the time of the of the Mother's March there were ... things we knew for certain that made it rational to think the effort would succeed. First we knew polio was a virus, Second we knew that it was the kind of virus to which humans developed permanent immunity after infection. Third, since Jenner and Pasteur, we knew the fundamental theory of vaccination. Infect the subject with enough of something identical to the virus that doesn't give them the disease and let the body do the rest. This was hard knowledge, not hopeful speculation. We didn't have to figure out what would eradicate polio, we already knew. We just didn't know how to make it. Figuring out how to make it, and then scaling that up to a safe and reliable industrial process, then verifying product safety and efficacy in the population, was the whole purpose of the March of Dimes. Since the only real question was how soon we would have it and since we wanted it as soon as possible, the law of diminishing return on investment was a moot point. By contrast there is no such foundation underlying the efforts of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The research they support by nature operates on the boundary of diminishing returns, and factoring in the opportunity costs the value of throwing more funding at Breast Cancer research is a serious issue. Which is all another way of saying that a smaller Susan G. Komen might be a better one. And if it means those ghastly pink football shoes go away too, no one will be happier than me.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Using the Right Words for Impact
(I originally posted this on the critical thinking website Does This Make Sense , an excellent collection of writers, hosted/edited by the wonderful Nikki Stern. I repost it here as a backup.)
Certain sports are now being forced into a deep conversation about concussive head injuries, with attendant changes in the terms of the discussion. To begin, the linking of the words head and injury is itself a change. Traditionally sport makes a distinction between the terms hurt and injured. When an athlete is hurt they are in pain but safely able to play, maybe at a reduced capacity, whereas an injured athlete is damaged to the point of being unfit for play or at risk for even graver damage unless they stop playing. Until recently in the culture of sport, to have a concussion, at least in all but the most severe cases, was to be hurt, not injured. Effective lobbying and awareness campaigns by medical advocacy and other groups are largely responsible for changing this culture to where concussion is now being counted as an injury to the brain. The change was helped along by the fact that the victims of these concussions represent a substantial economic asset to their respective professional enterprises as well as themselves.
Also significant is the growing body of preliminary but ominous evidence for long term physical and psychological damage in retired professionals in violent sports. Granted, dementia pugilistica, the medical term for punch drunk, which is the neurpsychological deficits seen in aging professional boxers that result from a career spent being punched in the head, has been part of the lexicon for a long time, but it is restricted, at least conceptually, to a particular sport. Now an increasing number of aging football and hockey players are reporting a similar diffuse spectrum of cognitive and affective mental health problems over their lifespan, to a degree that has become impossible to ignore. Concern has risen to the point that respective NFL and NHL players associations have started including it in their collective bargaining positions regarding player retirement benefits.
The most dire evidence has come from the involvement of of neuroscientists who have brought new more sensitive tools to the study of the brain and behavior. Histological analysis, which reveals details at the level of brain cells and their component large molecule protiens, is finding a characteristic neural degeneration in brains of those with history of repeat head trauma. They have introduced a new term into the lexicon: Chronic Traumatc Encephalopathy or CTE. The term was born after a set of post mortem case studies of the brains of a handful of NFL players who died at very young ages, all but one by suicide of one form or another, and who's post football life was characterized by a host of severe neuropsychiatric symptoms and/or bizarre behavior. All their brains showed dramatic evidence of neuronal damage at the fine structural levels now revealed by the neurological assays. (A perfusion of work and writing on the subject is available. I refer the reader to Malcom Gladwell's 2009 essay, Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football?, Christopher Nowinski's 2006 book Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis, Ken Dryden's current article on Grantland.com Concussions in the NHL: Waiting for Science, and The Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy website, for further reference.)
The NFL and NHL, to their credit, have taken this new evidence and the new way of talking about concussion to heart. While there is some question in my mind whether their measures are sufficient, concussed players are now being afforded more protection and time to heal. Yet, by publicly responding to the problem, the NFL and NHL have also exposed what a Pandora's Box it is, and just how normal it is for their players to have concussions. Cases like NHL star Sidney Crosby who spent 11 months waiting to recover from post-concussion syndrome, only to be re-injured by an incidental blow to the head after less than a month back, serve to underscore the point. The magnitude of the problem only seems to grow the closer one looks at it. This is true of the continuing post-mortem brain research as well, which, if anything, grows more grim. More brains of athletes from sports involving violent collision will have to be studied to get a definitive answer to how many develop CTE, but the preliminary data point frighteningly in the direction of a high rather than low number.
Which brings me to my closing modest suggestion, that we stop using the term contact sport or violent sport as our general term for these contests and use the term impact sport. Impact sports would be defined as those that employ impacting blows, especially of unrestricted force, and particularly where increased force of impact confers competitive advantage. Thus football would be an impact sport but wrestling would not, although both would be violent contact sports. Hockey would be an impact sport, water polo would not, although both are contact sports. Boxing would be the prime example of competitive advantage with greater impact, since if you hit someone hard enough to give them a concussion, you win the game. The point of the term impact sport would be to prevent these distinctions from confusing the conversation, while also avoiding focus on specific sports. Since there are many impact sports it makes no sense to have one conversation about football, one about hockey, etc. The term would also exclude those sports that are merely dangerous, where an accidental impact is a significant risk without being a formal element of play. Soccer players collide at high speed, downhill skiers and cyclists crash, divers hit their heads on springboards, yet these would not constitute impact sports. Also, excluded from the definition are sports where players are required by rule to avoid impact, such as charging in basketball. What I am suggesting is that we acknowledge that impact is part of some sports in ways it is not part of others, and that unrestricted impact is the single most important factor in the concussion debate. Not contact, not danger, not risk, not even violence.
In conversation the most valuable result is not just the exchange of ideas, but the negotiation of better ways to talk about an issue. When the language does not conform to what is the case, the resulting discussion can't make reasonable headway. Using injured instead of hurt for sports concussion has represented progress in this sphere, and has already helped a great deal. Having a proper term for the kind of sport we're really talking about can only help further.
Also significant is the growing body of preliminary but ominous evidence for long term physical and psychological damage in retired professionals in violent sports. Granted, dementia pugilistica, the medical term for punch drunk, which is the neurpsychological deficits seen in aging professional boxers that result from a career spent being punched in the head, has been part of the lexicon for a long time, but it is restricted, at least conceptually, to a particular sport. Now an increasing number of aging football and hockey players are reporting a similar diffuse spectrum of cognitive and affective mental health problems over their lifespan, to a degree that has become impossible to ignore. Concern has risen to the point that respective NFL and NHL players associations have started including it in their collective bargaining positions regarding player retirement benefits.
The most dire evidence has come from the involvement of of neuroscientists who have brought new more sensitive tools to the study of the brain and behavior. Histological analysis, which reveals details at the level of brain cells and their component large molecule protiens, is finding a characteristic neural degeneration in brains of those with history of repeat head trauma. They have introduced a new term into the lexicon: Chronic Traumatc Encephalopathy or CTE. The term was born after a set of post mortem case studies of the brains of a handful of NFL players who died at very young ages, all but one by suicide of one form or another, and who's post football life was characterized by a host of severe neuropsychiatric symptoms and/or bizarre behavior. All their brains showed dramatic evidence of neuronal damage at the fine structural levels now revealed by the neurological assays. (A perfusion of work and writing on the subject is available. I refer the reader to Malcom Gladwell's 2009 essay, Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football?, Christopher Nowinski's 2006 book Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis, Ken Dryden's current article on Grantland.com Concussions in the NHL: Waiting for Science, and The Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy website, for further reference.)
The NFL and NHL, to their credit, have taken this new evidence and the new way of talking about concussion to heart. While there is some question in my mind whether their measures are sufficient, concussed players are now being afforded more protection and time to heal. Yet, by publicly responding to the problem, the NFL and NHL have also exposed what a Pandora's Box it is, and just how normal it is for their players to have concussions. Cases like NHL star Sidney Crosby who spent 11 months waiting to recover from post-concussion syndrome, only to be re-injured by an incidental blow to the head after less than a month back, serve to underscore the point. The magnitude of the problem only seems to grow the closer one looks at it. This is true of the continuing post-mortem brain research as well, which, if anything, grows more grim. More brains of athletes from sports involving violent collision will have to be studied to get a definitive answer to how many develop CTE, but the preliminary data point frighteningly in the direction of a high rather than low number.
Which brings me to my closing modest suggestion, that we stop using the term contact sport or violent sport as our general term for these contests and use the term impact sport. Impact sports would be defined as those that employ impacting blows, especially of unrestricted force, and particularly where increased force of impact confers competitive advantage. Thus football would be an impact sport but wrestling would not, although both would be violent contact sports. Hockey would be an impact sport, water polo would not, although both are contact sports. Boxing would be the prime example of competitive advantage with greater impact, since if you hit someone hard enough to give them a concussion, you win the game. The point of the term impact sport would be to prevent these distinctions from confusing the conversation, while also avoiding focus on specific sports. Since there are many impact sports it makes no sense to have one conversation about football, one about hockey, etc. The term would also exclude those sports that are merely dangerous, where an accidental impact is a significant risk without being a formal element of play. Soccer players collide at high speed, downhill skiers and cyclists crash, divers hit their heads on springboards, yet these would not constitute impact sports. Also, excluded from the definition are sports where players are required by rule to avoid impact, such as charging in basketball. What I am suggesting is that we acknowledge that impact is part of some sports in ways it is not part of others, and that unrestricted impact is the single most important factor in the concussion debate. Not contact, not danger, not risk, not even violence.
In conversation the most valuable result is not just the exchange of ideas, but the negotiation of better ways to talk about an issue. When the language does not conform to what is the case, the resulting discussion can't make reasonable headway. Using injured instead of hurt for sports concussion has represented progress in this sphere, and has already helped a great deal. Having a proper term for the kind of sport we're really talking about can only help further.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
A reply to a freind
An expansion of a recent short exchange I had on facebook.
The questions were posed by my friend Peg (before she took up the sailor's life.)
This question is remarkable only for its utter lack of mystery. Religious authority has been losing its position as the definer of truth in many things--government, education, natural philosophy to name a few—for centuries. They tried to hold the line on these fronts, but inevitably came up short. Marriage has been one remaining refuge where their longstanding priority in saying what goes is still more or less intact. Even after their power to influence sexual mores began to erode, marriage has been a bulwarked fortress from which they have had little cause to retreat. Yet, that, as the saying goes, was then, and this is now. Society is shifting towards dramatically increased tolerance of homosexuality. Worse, there are open demands that homosexuals be allowed the covenant of marriage. The religious realize they face a society that believes it has outgrown clerical authority on yet another topic. They simply find this difficult to bear.
All very good points and well-said. But the person I am trying to reason with is concerned only with the implications of legalizing CIVIL marriages.
It doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. Certainly in a society where freedom of religion and separation of church and state are the law of the land, a civil administration of marriage is to be expected. But it is also true that our society in practice has greatly deferred to clerical authority in matters of marriage more than in any other arena. How many people do we know that still get married by a cleric, even if their personal beliefs are agnostic at best. The historical bargain of the establishment clause may have required the various sects and faiths to share power in matters nuptial, but the religionists understood that it was still mostly their game, and their ball. To this day faithful of many stripes expect that status quo to be upheld. It does not matter to them, therefore, that a law allowing civil marriage would not encroach on their right to refuse to proffer the sacrament to homosexual union. The point is that in matters of what marriage is going to be in society they still expect to have the last word.
The questions were posed by my friend Peg (before she took up the sailor's life.)
When I advocate in favor of gay marriage, I sometimes hear "it will hurt the marriage institution." My response, that gay marriage can't hurt marriage anymore than straight marriage has, is ignored. Would someone explain the rationale behind the "bad for marriage" argument to me?
This question is remarkable only for its utter lack of mystery. Religious authority has been losing its position as the definer of truth in many things--government, education, natural philosophy to name a few—for centuries. They tried to hold the line on these fronts, but inevitably came up short. Marriage has been one remaining refuge where their longstanding priority in saying what goes is still more or less intact. Even after their power to influence sexual mores began to erode, marriage has been a bulwarked fortress from which they have had little cause to retreat. Yet, that, as the saying goes, was then, and this is now. Society is shifting towards dramatically increased tolerance of homosexuality. Worse, there are open demands that homosexuals be allowed the covenant of marriage. The religious realize they face a society that believes it has outgrown clerical authority on yet another topic. They simply find this difficult to bear.
One cannot completely discount the role of fear and hatred in all this, but we must resist the temptation to assume it is in total control of the reaction. Consider. If even the modest estimates of the proportion of gays in the Roman Catholic priesthood can be trusted (which they probably can, boy howdy can they), then homosexuality has to have been an open secret among thousands of clerical colleagues over years and years. Yet they have gone on rubbing elbows together in the arms of Mother Church without flinching. This is hardly a climate of rampant homophobia. The idea that they simply can't bring themselves to understand the equivalence of a same sex union in terms of love, honor, commitment and growth is false. The claim that if they could only be made to see this their opposition would evaporate is utter nonsense. They are perfectly capable of seeing that, and the more intellectually reflective of them have probably already acknowledged it to themselves. They might even acknowledge it openly. The bottom line is that they just couldn't care less. The hate card makes good rhetoric, but it doesn’t frame the real issue.
No, the thought process that sets off the alarm in the authoritarian clerical mindset is their unshakable belief that marriage IS what the church says it is, and only the church is allowed to say what it is. Of course they'll rephrase that to say “what GOD says it is”, making sure to speak for him if he doesn’t make an appearance. It is one of the areas where they still hold a truly dominant share of the market. Were they to bow to shifting societal attitudes regarding marriage, they would be conceding away one of their last remaining spheres of dominance. The stakes for them are therefore enormous.
In a sense they are perfectly right. Societal introduction of gay marriage contrary to church instruction destroys the institution as they understand it, but only because that would mean it was no longer their sole province. They know damn well what they are being asked to give up.
All very good points and well-said. But the person I am trying to reason with is concerned only with the implications of legalizing CIVIL marriages.
It doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. Certainly in a society where freedom of religion and separation of church and state are the law of the land, a civil administration of marriage is to be expected. But it is also true that our society in practice has greatly deferred to clerical authority in matters of marriage more than in any other arena. How many people do we know that still get married by a cleric, even if their personal beliefs are agnostic at best. The historical bargain of the establishment clause may have required the various sects and faiths to share power in matters nuptial, but the religionists understood that it was still mostly their game, and their ball. To this day faithful of many stripes expect that status quo to be upheld. It does not matter to them, therefore, that a law allowing civil marriage would not encroach on their right to refuse to proffer the sacrament to homosexual union. The point is that in matters of what marriage is going to be in society they still expect to have the last word.
This leaves them in a bind. First, what they are trying to uphold is not a legal privilege as much as a Gentlemen’s Agreement. They may feel the legalization of civil union violates their purview, but what can they do? The more stridently religious can scream about sanctity, an explicitly religious concept, but that won’t stand long in the face of the establishment and separation clauses. They can prattle about the offense of forcing believers to respect a bond sanctioned by the civil authority in violation of their deeply held religious laws, but that won’t hold up to scrutiny either. In this society, the reach of religious law is short, and does not increase with the passion with which the faithful embrace it. Otherwise, orthodox synagogues would preclude the establishment of pig farms in the same neighborhood.
Second, a number of clerics and denominations have broken ranks and come out in favor of same sex marriage. Some offer the sacrament where possible, either in accordance with or in lieu of existing civil recognition. One effect of this is to turn the legal landscape a full 180 degrees. It makes proffering the sacrament of marriage a matter of differing religious opinions. The Constitution makes it very hard to ask the state to take a position adjudicating between such differences, all other things being equal. Our best rule of thumb in such cases is for the state to remain neutral and proscribe sufficient room for all to practice as they see fit. This invariably favors the civil allowance of same sex union for those who want it.
Given all this, what can be said in defense of the old status quo? Not much. The fall back becomes a preservationist argument. Marriage as defined in the old terms is claimed to be such an important and meaningful concept that it must be preserved in toto. Not a dram of its meaning can ever be allowed to evolve or pass away. They might say something like “What would anyone add to or cut away from the Mona Lisa?” They will accuse us of trying to do something like that to marriage.
I can think of a few objections to this position. First, it’s based on an assumption of some kind of perfection in the marriage concept they wish to preserve. This is very problematic. They can trot out the theological “God made it perfect” claim in support of this, but it puts them squarely back in the arena of civil vs. clerical separation. Beyond that, is there anything to suggest perfection in the institution? Its common practice certainly doesn’t, nor does its history of evolutionary change. At one time it meant a subjugation of a woman’s legal independence to her husband. We’ve worked hard to rid ourselves of that, with some way yet to go, but the point is that if we thought the marriage concept was perfect, we wouldn’t be still working on it like that. Other examples of change in the marriage concept can be brought readily to mind. Without some kind of static perfection to fall back on the preservationist argument starts to leak oil.
Even if we granted some kind of perfection to the traditional concept, that wouldn’t necessarily preclude anything new. To reply to the Mona Lisa analogy at its face value: Just because we want to keep Leonardo’s masterpiece intact doesn’t mean we have to tell Renoir or Pollock or O’keefe to lay down their brushes, or restrict them to pounding out duplicates of one portrait of an Italian merchant princess. Worthy things can coexist: the more the better. When Rodin crafted The Thinker, he did not detract from but added to the value of Michelangelo’s David. Excellent yet different conceptions side by side offer far more than they do separately.
Finally the preservationist argument is a ploy: an attempt to get you to agree to manacles in advance of the debate. It’s based on the knowledge that growth and change attends an annihilation of some fraction of the original. Instances where growth is exclusively amplification or simple addition are rare. Natural, desirable, inevitable change usually discards some part of its beginning. Insect and amphibian metamorphosis shows this in extremis. The caterpillar is continuous with the butterfly, yet only a small necessary amount of the caterpillar identity is preserved. The flaw in the maneuver intended by the status quo defender becomes clear. They will argue it does not matter what is gained by the expansion of the definition of marriage, if even the slightest bit of the original is discarded or lost, they will demand that it must not be done. They deny growth, adaptation, and experiment: an excellent strategy, if the goal is to learn or invent absolutely nothing.
So the next time anyone asks you to put on the “preservationist” handcuffs, tell them no, it just doesn’t turn you on. Some may like, even need, bondage to be part of intellectual intercourse, but you simply have to have your hands free thank you very much. If they complain, suggest that if they can’t “perform” under those circumstances the fault might not lie with you.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
In political theater the playwright you use matters
Its been over a week since the undue attention was paid to a grandstanding Florida cleric. My thoughts are definitely out of synch with the news cycle but hey, the country was founded on letters that took weeks to deliver. I might still be in some window of opportunity.
Let me say up front: the threat to burn Koran’s by Terry Jones’ congregation should be seen exactly as they meant it to be seen. It is an aggressive provocation of another faith through desecration of its sacred objects, and a cynically intentional piece of political shock theater based on a Nazi trope. Their intention to “fan the flames” to create an increasingly visceral climate of intimidation toward muslims as a people in this country is obvious, and equivalent with the painting of a swastika on a synagogue by the KKK. (One point of exception here--the Klan itself never bothered to buy any synagogue before bombing or defacing it. Perhaps if that were required they might have been thwarted by the demands of frugality). Still, although its probably assumable that Jones’ tiny group of yahoos don’t have the stones to engage in violence on their own, there is every reason to treat them as if they intend to foment violence. If they can ignore decency and the lessons of history to play the Brownshirt, we can take it at face value. If they’re only faking, then as the Lerner and Lowe song says, “Well aint that too darn bad”.
However this does raise the issue of what to do when an American community of faith comes under threat from other parts of the populace. A fundamental obligation of all civil authority is to protect freedom of worship, but no less than for any other civil liberty constitutionally proscribed. We have to understand that this is true even to the threat or application of deadly force: as when the National Guard escorted students into schools ordered to integrate. The message needs to be unequivocal. A segment of the population may have rights properly granted through due process. Some other antagonist segment may vow that those rights will be exercised only over their dead bodies. If they force the issue to that extreme, then the civil authority must be ready saying, “If you really won’t reconsider. If you’re really calling our bluff, so be it”. If this results in the antagonist’s corpses gracing the occasion per their own draconian ultimatum, that’s unfortunate. It’s sad, but not necessarily bad. This does not justify a hair trigger in such cases. Such action must always be a remedy of last resort. Still there’s a core of principles that must lead us to say at the appropriate time “No, I’m afraid we’re really going to have to insist you leave people to the rule and protection of the law. We’ll repeat this up to a point, but then we’re just going to open fire”. That’s the backstop behind the rights, as Hobbes duly pointed out. It’s also the essence of what President Jefferson told the Baptists of Danbury regarding the Congregationalists of Danbury whom they feared. Jefferson’s letter is a beautiful essay on religious freedom and separation of church and state, but also a tacit reassurance that the government would behave as outlined above should the Congregationalists fail to leave the Baptists to live and worship in peace.
It’s a mistake to think that the driver behind this reality was a desire to assure the preservation and promotion of religion per se. This view has kind of grown up to inform many people’s understanding of the first amendment. Believers and even a considerable portion of unbelievers think this. But the peaceful promulgation of faiths in order to enjoy benefits from them we can’t otherwise obtain was not the thing about the rights that everyone agreed on. To think this is nonsense. The purpose of separation of church and state was to blunt the repeatedly demonstrated transgressions by religious authority, and to keep them from competing to get their hands on the levers of civil power. It’s a civilized alternative to sentiments exemplified in Diderot’s call to “hang the last tyrant with braided entrails of the last cleric”, which he believed would be necessary to fight the compulsion of religions to make men and the world over in their own image.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Mangled Myths (a division of Fractured Fairy Tales)
A little nonsense now and then ...
The last winged horse, the kind that could fly one directly to heaven, had to be put down after breaking a leg in a stakes race on Mt. Olympus in 823 A.D. They tried to splint the thing, but horses being what they are, it wouldn't stay off its feet, and they sent it to the celestial glue factory. Tragic really.
Since then all the Valkyrie have taken to riding mountain bikes. It’s really got them in shape too. Traditionally they carried a lot of body mass, but now they all have flat stomachs, legs like gymnasts and shoulders like Olympic swimmers. They can’t go anywhere without being hit on by unwed demigods, (male and female alike who can still live up to their ancient reputations if you know what I mean).
Sadly though, when they lost the weight, they lost their famous upper vocal range. They just can't quite hit the high notes of Wagner anymore. Now when they ride down Bifrost singing wildly, its usually some soul or Motown tune—Aretha Franklin mostly—which they bring off quite well. They tried ABBA once, and while the Scandinavian angle seemed like a good fit at first, it just didn’t work out. Nobody, and I mean nobody wanted to be born aloft in glory from the battlefield to Dancing Queen.
Since then all the Valkyrie have taken to riding mountain bikes. It’s really got them in shape too. Traditionally they carried a lot of body mass, but now they all have flat stomachs, legs like gymnasts and shoulders like Olympic swimmers. They can’t go anywhere without being hit on by unwed demigods, (male and female alike who can still live up to their ancient reputations if you know what I mean).
Sadly though, when they lost the weight, they lost their famous upper vocal range. They just can't quite hit the high notes of Wagner anymore. Now when they ride down Bifrost singing wildly, its usually some soul or Motown tune—Aretha Franklin mostly—which they bring off quite well. They tried ABBA once, and while the Scandinavian angle seemed like a good fit at first, it just didn’t work out. Nobody, and I mean nobody wanted to be born aloft in glory from the battlefield to Dancing Queen.
In spite of their new found fitness, the braided maidens really missed their horses. Out of sympathy the Aasgard dwarves tricked out their bikes with these amazing Gotterdammerung and Ragnarok paint jobs that burst into billowing smoke and fire when they ride. They undid their braids to let their golden hair stream behind their helms, and they wear dark Oakley wrap-arounds. Its no longer opera and noble steeds across the Rainbow Bridge, but they get their point across. When a warrior falls in battle, they bear him home: a swarm of stunning, frenzied bike couriers.
Out of your league dude, trust me
Every Valkyrie used to wear a gilded breastplate that was at least a DD-cup, but after trimming down most aren’t more than a “C” these days. Once some sexist old deity tried to get cute about it with that "more than a mouthful is wasted darlings" wisecrack, but the buff heralds of Woden all carry much heavier spears and shields than in the old days. They opened a can of whup-ass on him like you never saw, all the while singing What you want, baby I got it, and You-better-think-(THINK!)-think-about-what-your-tryin-to-do-to-me. Somehow word of it reached humanity, and this German philosopher Fred Nishy (I think that was the name) reported the deity didn’t survive. Not so. He’s just in rehab with his jaw wired shut, living on a diet of burnt-offering smoothies--totally sworn off women. He tries to say, “I am the LORD thy GOD”, but it comes out “Hy-uma-HOR-eye-GAH”. Its hard to take him seriously, especially if he's just made that slurping sound with his straw in an empty cup. Since then the Valkyrie get R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and plenty of it...even from the demigods.
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