Consider two situations: you die tomorrow, or you live for a certain number of years and then die. Using algebra, you can represent the first case as “D” (for death), and the second as “L + D” (for life plus death). If you want to know the difference between those situations, you perform the cosmic subtraction: (L+D) - D = L. "D" drops out of the equation. You are left with "L": your life. But whatever the value of "L", all such expressions have a "D" in them. Being as young and healthy as a person can be might call for an "L" of 100, but the "D" is still there in "100 + D". It is hard to keep the view of life as "L + D" firmly in mind. A more common actual view of life is "L + d", where the lowercase "d" is something like, "well, sure, I'm not going to live forever", or "L + ..." as in "I'm going to live for the indefinite future".
Whimsical algebraic formulations aside, death is inevitable. Contemplating one's own death elicits complicated emotional, intellectual, and spiritual reactions. They are usually unpleasant reactions, so we avoid the contemplation until death is within view. However, avoiding the issue can lead us away from seeing the world clearly. I suggest that there is no reason other than procrastination why we can't do our contemplation homework 20 or 50 years in advance. We are not going to gather any new data about "D" merely by letting the years go by. Working on it soon is prudent, since we never know when there might be a pop quiz -- or final exam. On the other hand, carrying on with this investigation isn't very healthy either -- obsession can get in the way of enjoying life. There's a lot to be said for writing the (metaphorical or literal) paper and storing it on the shelf. We might take a fresh look at it every few years, but mostly we can ignore the contents as long as we keep in mind that it is there.
If we keep the inevitability of “D” in mind, then what matters most is the years of living and what we do with them. People who lose track of it are apt to be more comfortable in wasting time. We see this in the common reaction of people when death's reality rudely confronts them, through a friend's death, a death narrowly averted, or a terminal illness. They regret wasting time and encourage others to keep the important things in mind.
There are other consequences to losing track of "D". Consider our reactions to fatal and nonfatal injustices. If the result is death, I sense that the outrage we feel is tinged with a qualitatively different touch of mystical dread. If someone survives after a lengthy unjust imprisonment, or has been maimed, or has been tortured, we are angry, but it is missing that extra dimension. We tally up the American losses in Iraq by counting the dead, not those who have suffered terrible injuries. The "death" part of an injustice gets a bit stronger reaction than it deserves, and the nonfatal parts get less. Murder shortens "L", it doesn't create a new "D" that was not already in the victim's future.
Denial of death is a fundamental roadblock to getting health care costs under control. When someone says to the doctor, “I demand the most advanced treatment available to try to save my father's life”, it's hard to feel comfortable saying no. If phrased as “I demand the most advanced treatment available if it can on average prolong my father's life by an extra month of a mediocre quality of life” it's easier to weigh the costs and benefits. The very concept of "saving a life" invites us to deny death. You can never truly save a life, you can only prolong it.
One perhaps odd way of putting it is that whenever you do get around to dying, you are saving yourself the trouble of dying later.
My attempts to not procrastinate in figuring out the significance of "D" leave me pretty much scratching my head; my paper on the shelf certainly doesn't deserve a high mark. But I don't think that further study will improve it much -- at least not this decade.
I don't claim to live my own life fully in accord with these ideals -- what I write of here is an ideal I think I see, not one I live up to. Meanwhile, I am continually amazed by "L": the complexity, the wonder, the love, the humor. Existence is amazing and wonderful.
Notes:
1. What I mean by "D" is some constellation of issues pertaining to not existing any more, not whatever tail ends of life (the "dying") precede it.
2. Surely the calculus is different for anyone who believes not only in an afterlife but that the fundamental character of that afterlife varies depending on how we live.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Friday, November 16, 2007
Wikipedia is great
I have urged caution in attending too much to the news. My first-line antidote is Wikipedia. Whenever you give Wikipedia a word or phrase, you get the big picture. Origins, history, connections with popular culture, and developments right up to the present -- sometimes within the last hour if the subject is of great interest.
For those who might not know, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is open for anyone to edit. I was skeptical when I first heard about it, since people could through malice or mere ignorance enter misleading or incorrect material. But this is a case where the better part of human nature triumphs. There are many more people who want to write the truth than to cause trouble.
The absence of a central decision-making editorial board that is part of other encyclopedic ventures has advantages. Changes can be made instantly without taking time for review. The choice of what topics to cover is simple: whatever people feel inspired to enter. Coverage might be a little weak on the third-century rulers in some out-of-the-way province in China, but if no one bothered to write about it, the chances are good that few people will be disappointed to find it missing. But trivia from TV shows, internet rumors, and characters from obscure computer games are covered. An editorial board would be inclined to consider them too frivolous.
It is true that you can't believe everything you read. If it is vital that you know the real truth or if you are inquiring about a controversial issue, you must go further, but Wikipedia is still the best place to start. If the issue isn't controversial, 99% of the time you will be reading the truth. Keep in mind that you can't believe everything you read on a controversial issue anywhere else, either. With Wikipedia, the cause for caution is apparent, while with other sources it is hidden.
Google is also a favorite tool, but it has limitations. Around every corner and behind every bush is someone trying to sell you something. Often when I click on a link I land on a page in the middle of some context I don't understand -- who has written it and why. Overt commercialism is banned in Wikipedia. You can also find a high school student's C paper with Google. Unlike Wikipedia, there's no one to correct the faults in the paper.
I confess that I am not very knowledgeable about all that is available on the web, and I will be happy to hear of even better tools that are available.
There is one less positive aspect, though. In recent decades our society has offered instant gratification in a variety of areas, eroding our willingness to work for what we want. Wikipedia grants a measure of instant gratification with regard to learning. You can get an overview of a subject -- instantly.
For those who might not know, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is open for anyone to edit. I was skeptical when I first heard about it, since people could through malice or mere ignorance enter misleading or incorrect material. But this is a case where the better part of human nature triumphs. There are many more people who want to write the truth than to cause trouble.
The absence of a central decision-making editorial board that is part of other encyclopedic ventures has advantages. Changes can be made instantly without taking time for review. The choice of what topics to cover is simple: whatever people feel inspired to enter. Coverage might be a little weak on the third-century rulers in some out-of-the-way province in China, but if no one bothered to write about it, the chances are good that few people will be disappointed to find it missing. But trivia from TV shows, internet rumors, and characters from obscure computer games are covered. An editorial board would be inclined to consider them too frivolous.
It is true that you can't believe everything you read. If it is vital that you know the real truth or if you are inquiring about a controversial issue, you must go further, but Wikipedia is still the best place to start. If the issue isn't controversial, 99% of the time you will be reading the truth. Keep in mind that you can't believe everything you read on a controversial issue anywhere else, either. With Wikipedia, the cause for caution is apparent, while with other sources it is hidden.
Google is also a favorite tool, but it has limitations. Around every corner and behind every bush is someone trying to sell you something. Often when I click on a link I land on a page in the middle of some context I don't understand -- who has written it and why. Overt commercialism is banned in Wikipedia. You can also find a high school student's C paper with Google. Unlike Wikipedia, there's no one to correct the faults in the paper.
I confess that I am not very knowledgeable about all that is available on the web, and I will be happy to hear of even better tools that are available.
There is one less positive aspect, though. In recent decades our society has offered instant gratification in a variety of areas, eroding our willingness to work for what we want. Wikipedia grants a measure of instant gratification with regard to learning. You can get an overview of a subject -- instantly.
Friday, November 9, 2007
To kill a mouse: thoughts on treatment of animals
THIS WAS WRITTEN A LONG TIME AGO, IN JUNE OF 2002.
I killed a mouse last night. I heard the distinctive click of the mousetrap, impressing itself through layers of sleep. And this morning, there was the hind half of a mouse, trailing an impressive tail, protruding from the mousetrap, still and quite dead. And on the way to dispose of the corpse behind the shed (surely nature knows how to recycle a dead mouse?), Imarveled at the exquisite detail in this creature of nature, the fine fur and complex pads on the bottoms of the hind feet. This new-fangled mousetrap that I bought yesterday has a cover so the squeamish customer has no need to see the squashed head or neck, and no need to worry that their hand might brush against mouse fur during the disposal process. I felt a certain affinity for this mouse, having discovered her first causing a racket while trying to drag a Hershey's Dark Chocolate With Almond candy down through a burner into the stove. I didn't see her for several days, and thought she might have left. But later, having ignored potatoes and onions, and convicted by her droppings, I found she had stolen four individually-wrapped Andes Candies (mint). Chocoholic -- a mouse after my own heart.
In the dawn I dreamed of dead mice in traps. I dreamed of finding a rat in the trap, only wounded, who spoke and said, "Well, Bart, it's come to this, has it?" I dreamed of recovering a dozen baby mice, now doomed. Killing creatures bothers me. I've heard this is a natural reaction, extending back into our prehistory. We humans can surely inure ourselves to this reaction, as farmers and herders have done reliably through the generations. Our soldiers adjust to killing fellow humans -- in the relevant, efficient short term, even if scars remain.
Why this primal reaction? I suppose it has to do with empathy -- our ability to put ourselves in another's shoes. A very useful skill for living in social groups. A useful skill for hunting previously unknown prey, to understand them the better to feast on them. Maybe just an offshoot of our general intelligence. The connection is easier the more easily we can map from our parts to their parts. Fellow mammals are a shoo-in. Ants, with their recognizable heads, bodies and legs, are easier to identify with than worms. Fish have eyes and mouths going for them, though their fins are foreign. Trees are a stretch, but with their size and limbs, they have it over moss and mushrooms. Dolls can get our empathy because they are crafted to look like us, despite lacking life force.
More recently, we have brought our reason to bear on how we feel about our fellow creatures. When our science tells us that a loved one is brain dead, and has no chance of recovery, we consent to hastening the death of the remaining physical body so others can benefit from organs, though our primal empathy with this body remains so strong.
We also try to figure out systematically how similar animals are to us. For which purpose we need to know: Who are we? We experience this world -- it has a "seemingness" to it, the wonder of consciousness. For all the magnificent structure our science has sketched for us about why things areas they are, it has been astonishingly silent on why consciousness should exist. But exist it does -- and when we stop to reflect, we realize that this consciousness is the one thing we are sure of -- something is seeming! With no clear evidence about why we are conscious, most of us figure that animals who are similar to us must be conscious too, and have an experience of life. This experience includes pleasure and pain. This consciousnes shas a value, this pleasure and pain has weight, and if we are thinking about a just and harmonious world, animal pain is bad.
Another recent realization has been the existence of ecosystems and biodiversity, and our all-too-real power to destroy them. As fascinating and complex results of evolution, they have value in their own right. We realize that extinction is bad because a type of being is lost forever. All individual organisms are mortal, but populations can go on indefinitely. I certainly value efforts to preserve ecosystems and biodiversity, but think it is largely a separable issue from animal rights. The last passenger pigeon and last wooly mammoth did not suffer extra stress and agony because neither knew they were the last, nor could their heads hold such a concept.
So aside from feeling pleasure and pain, what do we think animals do? Some seem to have plans and goals. They remember things. Do they reflect on their consciousness, as we do? It's hard to know. We have some evidenc efrom our own experience as children -- the idea that we know we are conscious comes as a revelation, long after we know a great deal and exhibit as much foresight as the most advanced animals. Monkeys typically react to their reflection in a mirror as if it were another monkey. Great apes (chimps, gorillas, orangutans) don't, and a clever experiment was done to show that they realize they are looking at themselves. The subject apes were anesthetized, and a patch of red dye was put on their forehead. Whenpresented with a mirror, these apes suddenly became distressed, feeling their forehead repeatedly even after the mirror was gone. It doesn't prove much, I suppose, but recognizing ourselves in a mirror is something we pick up very early as children, and if only our fellow great apes can do so, it doesn't speak well of the philosophical capabilities of all the other animals.
What are reasonable goals for our domestic animals? Here are a couple possible answers. One is that since they are under our control and we have taken responsibility for them, they should get the best of everything. This is how some well-off animal lovers treat their pets. They may not always understand what their animals want, and may project human desires onto them, but their goal is that the animal should have the best. A classic dilemma is whether this lame, arthritic dog is enjoying life, or (having no fear of death itself) would be better served by euthanasia-induced nonexistence. Another possible view is that the animal should get as fair a shake at life as a similar wild animal. This is a far lower standard. For all her intricacy and wonder, nature is not kind to individual animals. They suffer from starvation, disease, and predation. By this standard, a steer who lives his short healthy life grazing on the range before being rounded up and slaughtered is getting a pretty good deal. This steer would have been castrated (as we neuter many of our domestic animals), a physical trauma, but in the absence of gonads to create the appropriate urges we have no reason to think that the animal misses its sex life.
So what about exploitation or slavery, aside from physical suffering? These are wrong for people, because people know about exploitation and slavery, and want to be free. Beyond the most egregious abuses, we in the human world have much to debate concerning equality, equality of opportunity, responsibility and reward for past choices. A different subject entirely.
I don't think animals understand exploitation. They live and react. Our need to respect animals is either in their role as part of a treasured ecosystem, or as rather dim beings with limited awareness, not as individual victims of exploitation. I've also heard concern among animal rights groups over the fear or anxiety an animal may experience on its way to the slaughter. Is this out of line with what nature metes out? One thing the animal is not doing is reflecting on the end of its life and an eternity of nonexistence. This moment has no special status to the animal compared to other fears or anxieties.
What is wrong, I think, is raising animals in a way so that the bulk of their lives is spent in misery. Confinement of veal calves seems wrong. Raising any animal in excessively cramped and crowded conditions seems wrong. These wrongs are most glaring when their only purpose is the maximization of profit. These wrongs are much easier to address than the more far-reaching agenda of having all animals within our reach have wonderful lives. If I'm right, vegetarianism for the sake of animals is not in itself an answer. Animals might suffer more to produce dairy products than to produce meat. What matters is how the animals live.
It's much harder to evaluate what animals suffer for the sake of scientific research. It's possible to wonder whether chickens or fish feel pain. It's possible to wonder whether modern computer programs have any conscious experience. We can say they surely don't, since we can understand how they work mechanically. Yet it ignores the possibility that some day we may understand how human brains work, but still have no idea why we are conscious. Could consciousness arise somehow from certain kinds of complexity?
In the end, I think my mouse had a good life. She did not have time to suffer. I chose to end her life because of my own convenience, wanting to reserve my space and my food for humans. The trap is still there, awaiting any pals my mouse may have.
I killed a mouse last night. I heard the distinctive click of the mousetrap, impressing itself through layers of sleep. And this morning, there was the hind half of a mouse, trailing an impressive tail, protruding from the mousetrap, still and quite dead. And on the way to dispose of the corpse behind the shed (surely nature knows how to recycle a dead mouse?), Imarveled at the exquisite detail in this creature of nature, the fine fur and complex pads on the bottoms of the hind feet. This new-fangled mousetrap that I bought yesterday has a cover so the squeamish customer has no need to see the squashed head or neck, and no need to worry that their hand might brush against mouse fur during the disposal process. I felt a certain affinity for this mouse, having discovered her first causing a racket while trying to drag a Hershey's Dark Chocolate With Almond candy down through a burner into the stove. I didn't see her for several days, and thought she might have left. But later, having ignored potatoes and onions, and convicted by her droppings, I found she had stolen four individually-wrapped Andes Candies (mint). Chocoholic -- a mouse after my own heart.
In the dawn I dreamed of dead mice in traps. I dreamed of finding a rat in the trap, only wounded, who spoke and said, "Well, Bart, it's come to this, has it?" I dreamed of recovering a dozen baby mice, now doomed. Killing creatures bothers me. I've heard this is a natural reaction, extending back into our prehistory. We humans can surely inure ourselves to this reaction, as farmers and herders have done reliably through the generations. Our soldiers adjust to killing fellow humans -- in the relevant, efficient short term, even if scars remain.
Why this primal reaction? I suppose it has to do with empathy -- our ability to put ourselves in another's shoes. A very useful skill for living in social groups. A useful skill for hunting previously unknown prey, to understand them the better to feast on them. Maybe just an offshoot of our general intelligence. The connection is easier the more easily we can map from our parts to their parts. Fellow mammals are a shoo-in. Ants, with their recognizable heads, bodies and legs, are easier to identify with than worms. Fish have eyes and mouths going for them, though their fins are foreign. Trees are a stretch, but with their size and limbs, they have it over moss and mushrooms. Dolls can get our empathy because they are crafted to look like us, despite lacking life force.
More recently, we have brought our reason to bear on how we feel about our fellow creatures. When our science tells us that a loved one is brain dead, and has no chance of recovery, we consent to hastening the death of the remaining physical body so others can benefit from organs, though our primal empathy with this body remains so strong.
We also try to figure out systematically how similar animals are to us. For which purpose we need to know: Who are we? We experience this world -- it has a "seemingness" to it, the wonder of consciousness. For all the magnificent structure our science has sketched for us about why things areas they are, it has been astonishingly silent on why consciousness should exist. But exist it does -- and when we stop to reflect, we realize that this consciousness is the one thing we are sure of -- something is seeming! With no clear evidence about why we are conscious, most of us figure that animals who are similar to us must be conscious too, and have an experience of life. This experience includes pleasure and pain. This consciousnes shas a value, this pleasure and pain has weight, and if we are thinking about a just and harmonious world, animal pain is bad.
Another recent realization has been the existence of ecosystems and biodiversity, and our all-too-real power to destroy them. As fascinating and complex results of evolution, they have value in their own right. We realize that extinction is bad because a type of being is lost forever. All individual organisms are mortal, but populations can go on indefinitely. I certainly value efforts to preserve ecosystems and biodiversity, but think it is largely a separable issue from animal rights. The last passenger pigeon and last wooly mammoth did not suffer extra stress and agony because neither knew they were the last, nor could their heads hold such a concept.
So aside from feeling pleasure and pain, what do we think animals do? Some seem to have plans and goals. They remember things. Do they reflect on their consciousness, as we do? It's hard to know. We have some evidenc efrom our own experience as children -- the idea that we know we are conscious comes as a revelation, long after we know a great deal and exhibit as much foresight as the most advanced animals. Monkeys typically react to their reflection in a mirror as if it were another monkey. Great apes (chimps, gorillas, orangutans) don't, and a clever experiment was done to show that they realize they are looking at themselves. The subject apes were anesthetized, and a patch of red dye was put on their forehead. Whenpresented with a mirror, these apes suddenly became distressed, feeling their forehead repeatedly even after the mirror was gone. It doesn't prove much, I suppose, but recognizing ourselves in a mirror is something we pick up very early as children, and if only our fellow great apes can do so, it doesn't speak well of the philosophical capabilities of all the other animals.
What are reasonable goals for our domestic animals? Here are a couple possible answers. One is that since they are under our control and we have taken responsibility for them, they should get the best of everything. This is how some well-off animal lovers treat their pets. They may not always understand what their animals want, and may project human desires onto them, but their goal is that the animal should have the best. A classic dilemma is whether this lame, arthritic dog is enjoying life, or (having no fear of death itself) would be better served by euthanasia-induced nonexistence. Another possible view is that the animal should get as fair a shake at life as a similar wild animal. This is a far lower standard. For all her intricacy and wonder, nature is not kind to individual animals. They suffer from starvation, disease, and predation. By this standard, a steer who lives his short healthy life grazing on the range before being rounded up and slaughtered is getting a pretty good deal. This steer would have been castrated (as we neuter many of our domestic animals), a physical trauma, but in the absence of gonads to create the appropriate urges we have no reason to think that the animal misses its sex life.
So what about exploitation or slavery, aside from physical suffering? These are wrong for people, because people know about exploitation and slavery, and want to be free. Beyond the most egregious abuses, we in the human world have much to debate concerning equality, equality of opportunity, responsibility and reward for past choices. A different subject entirely.
I don't think animals understand exploitation. They live and react. Our need to respect animals is either in their role as part of a treasured ecosystem, or as rather dim beings with limited awareness, not as individual victims of exploitation. I've also heard concern among animal rights groups over the fear or anxiety an animal may experience on its way to the slaughter. Is this out of line with what nature metes out? One thing the animal is not doing is reflecting on the end of its life and an eternity of nonexistence. This moment has no special status to the animal compared to other fears or anxieties.
What is wrong, I think, is raising animals in a way so that the bulk of their lives is spent in misery. Confinement of veal calves seems wrong. Raising any animal in excessively cramped and crowded conditions seems wrong. These wrongs are most glaring when their only purpose is the maximization of profit. These wrongs are much easier to address than the more far-reaching agenda of having all animals within our reach have wonderful lives. If I'm right, vegetarianism for the sake of animals is not in itself an answer. Animals might suffer more to produce dairy products than to produce meat. What matters is how the animals live.
It's much harder to evaluate what animals suffer for the sake of scientific research. It's possible to wonder whether chickens or fish feel pain. It's possible to wonder whether modern computer programs have any conscious experience. We can say they surely don't, since we can understand how they work mechanically. Yet it ignores the possibility that some day we may understand how human brains work, but still have no idea why we are conscious. Could consciousness arise somehow from certain kinds of complexity?
In the end, I think my mouse had a good life. She did not have time to suffer. I chose to end her life because of my own convenience, wanting to reserve my space and my food for humans. The trap is still there, awaiting any pals my mouse may have.
A measured approach to radical Islam
THIS WAS WRITTEN A LONG TIME AGO, IN OCTOBER OF 2001
This is an email in reply to another FUSN member "Pete". Passages from the email I was replying to are in quotes.
"I am puzzled why some of us so faithfully point out deficiencies of the U.S.A and equally faithfully neglect to point out what is so good about the U.S.A that so many from outside our borders would like to live here."
Against the backdrop of a general cultural perception that the US is great and always has good intentions, critics naturally want to say the part that isn't being said: that the US in its foreign policy is often very self-interested. Foreign policy and domestic policies can be quite different. There's no conflict between wanting to enjoy the fruits of an empire domestically while also wishing it would treat subject peoples more humanely. The Roman and British empires come to mind. British subjects in India could reasonably want to both move to Britain and end British rule inIndia.
"I am puzzled as to why some of us cannot disentangle what we must do to become a more ethical player in the world from what we must do to defend ourselves against lethal enemies."
I think the crux of the disagreement is here. For the moment let's set aside every moral consideration and take a hypothetical amoral goal only: to make life as safe and pleasant as possible for (non-Muslim) Americans, whatever the cost to anyone else. Very harsh actions (like expelling all Muslims from the US or slaughtering them elsewhere in the world) will get in the way of that: the outrage this would cause will either put us in constant physical danger, or we will have to drastically curtail any mixing with other parts of the world (which would lead to a drop in trade and a big sag in our economy and standard of living). It may be true that Radical Fundamentalist Islam has strong currents that want us dead, and it may be true that they have power to cause us considerable harm. But their power is far from limitless, and in the wake of September 11 we have taken countermeasures to make large-scale attacks on us much harder.
I could be wrong, but I think the main reason people bring past self-interested and cruel US foreign policy actions into the debate is not to paralyze us. One purpose is to point out that since we have messed things up in the past, we should be suspicious that we are messing things up again, and scrutinize the Bush policy very closely. Perhaps even more important is to point out that anti-American sentiment elsewhere in the world is a reasonable reaction that reasonable people will have. You stated in an early post, Pete, that you didn't particularly care to understand why the fundamentalists hated us. I disagree on moral and spiritual grounds, but I also disagree on purely amoral grounds of self-interest, which is the point I will take up here.
Restricting our attention to Islam, I think a good model is that there is a broad range of sentiment. At the left extreme are some who idolize America, toward the middle are some who respect and understand us even if they are envious of what we have, a little further along are those who don't like what has happened to their world and think we have a lot to do with it, more to the right are those who choose freely to attend rallies and shout anti-American slogans, and then further along are those who might turn a blind eye to those plotting terror against the US, and finally are those who actually call for, organize, and carry out terror attacks. From our purely amoral perspective, it's not at all clear to me what to do. I have a strong hunch that if there are thousands in the last group, and we start killing them and many innocents too, then many of the millions who shout anti-US slogans might be moved to terrorism so we then have swelled the last group to tens of thousands. I care about this very much. I would like to see a sort of "Muslim opinion poll", where we can describe various US actions and see how various Muslims would react. Actions that outrage large numbers are almost certainly a bad idea. It's possible that money is the scarcest resource, so we could have solved our problem best without killing anyone at all. If we hadn't killed anyone, it's possible that some significant number of moderate Muslims would have been willing to infiltrate the radical groups as spies and give us the vital intelligence we need to thwart their plans.
Bringing ethics back in, it is just possible (he said slyly) that if we had a strong ethical basis to our foreign policies and combined that with a deep understanding of what goes on in the minds of various groups of Muslims, the culture of hatred against us would eventually dry up.
"I am puzzled by the so-called peace demonstrations in the U.S.A which have a kind of flower-power or naive quality for me. I certainly understand and sympathize with the humaneness behind such demonstrations, but they just don't work for me. Were the demonstrations to occur in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, to ask the governments of *those* countries to desist from violence, I'm not sure how many of the demonstrators would survive to demonstrate again. What *is* permitted (or governmentally orchestrated) in those countries are demonstrations *for* violence and hate, especially (maybe only) if directed at the U.S.A. or Israel."
I'm not sure what the relevance of this is. Should we suspend civil liberties because other societies don't have them? I hope not. Should we voluntarily refrain from criticizing our government? Until some foreign army threatens to invade our soil, I don't see any reason to even think about it. Popular will is felt even in repressive societies, as the governments of Egypt, Algeria, and Pakistan are finding out. The popular will there seems to be much more anti-US than the governments.
"I just don't understand how many wake-up calls we need."
I don't think the US government needs any wake-up calls. Some pacifists and people who want to proceed with caution may not be fully informed, but some hawks are also ill-informed, and that doesn't invalidate anyone's views.
"There is a world view, Radical Fundamentalist Islam, which has arrived on the world stage, and it is mortally incompatible with every humane culture or work-in-progress for a humane culture. Imperfect as our American culture is, it needs to be defended, and I see the the best way to defend it is by destruction of those who adhere to Radical Fundamentalist Islam."
It's possible, though I doubt it very much. It is very hard to kill ideas and belief systems, especially ones that have already shown they have widespread appeal. Killing those who espouse the beliefs hasn't worked in the past. I think our best bet is to crack down on preparations for terror itself where we can, find a balance between a level of terror attacks we can tolerate and a level of security we can tolerate, address legitimate grievances from around the world, but mostly wait for the conditions of the world to change. Like many of us, I grew up in a world where the US/USSR Cold War defined the landscape of international relations. It was very hard for us to see how this competition between two nuclear-armed states could ever resolve itself in a peaceful fashion. And despite Russia's current woes, it did resolve itself without a single battle or nuclear explosion. Those who advocated we "wake up" and risk a nuclear confrontation with the USSR turned out to be very wrong.
This is an email in reply to another FUSN member "Pete". Passages from the email I was replying to are in quotes.
"I am puzzled why some of us so faithfully point out deficiencies of the U.S.A and equally faithfully neglect to point out what is so good about the U.S.A that so many from outside our borders would like to live here."
Against the backdrop of a general cultural perception that the US is great and always has good intentions, critics naturally want to say the part that isn't being said: that the US in its foreign policy is often very self-interested. Foreign policy and domestic policies can be quite different. There's no conflict between wanting to enjoy the fruits of an empire domestically while also wishing it would treat subject peoples more humanely. The Roman and British empires come to mind. British subjects in India could reasonably want to both move to Britain and end British rule inIndia.
"I am puzzled as to why some of us cannot disentangle what we must do to become a more ethical player in the world from what we must do to defend ourselves against lethal enemies."
I think the crux of the disagreement is here. For the moment let's set aside every moral consideration and take a hypothetical amoral goal only: to make life as safe and pleasant as possible for (non-Muslim) Americans, whatever the cost to anyone else. Very harsh actions (like expelling all Muslims from the US or slaughtering them elsewhere in the world) will get in the way of that: the outrage this would cause will either put us in constant physical danger, or we will have to drastically curtail any mixing with other parts of the world (which would lead to a drop in trade and a big sag in our economy and standard of living). It may be true that Radical Fundamentalist Islam has strong currents that want us dead, and it may be true that they have power to cause us considerable harm. But their power is far from limitless, and in the wake of September 11 we have taken countermeasures to make large-scale attacks on us much harder.
I could be wrong, but I think the main reason people bring past self-interested and cruel US foreign policy actions into the debate is not to paralyze us. One purpose is to point out that since we have messed things up in the past, we should be suspicious that we are messing things up again, and scrutinize the Bush policy very closely. Perhaps even more important is to point out that anti-American sentiment elsewhere in the world is a reasonable reaction that reasonable people will have. You stated in an early post, Pete, that you didn't particularly care to understand why the fundamentalists hated us. I disagree on moral and spiritual grounds, but I also disagree on purely amoral grounds of self-interest, which is the point I will take up here.
Restricting our attention to Islam, I think a good model is that there is a broad range of sentiment. At the left extreme are some who idolize America, toward the middle are some who respect and understand us even if they are envious of what we have, a little further along are those who don't like what has happened to their world and think we have a lot to do with it, more to the right are those who choose freely to attend rallies and shout anti-American slogans, and then further along are those who might turn a blind eye to those plotting terror against the US, and finally are those who actually call for, organize, and carry out terror attacks. From our purely amoral perspective, it's not at all clear to me what to do. I have a strong hunch that if there are thousands in the last group, and we start killing them and many innocents too, then many of the millions who shout anti-US slogans might be moved to terrorism so we then have swelled the last group to tens of thousands. I care about this very much. I would like to see a sort of "Muslim opinion poll", where we can describe various US actions and see how various Muslims would react. Actions that outrage large numbers are almost certainly a bad idea. It's possible that money is the scarcest resource, so we could have solved our problem best without killing anyone at all. If we hadn't killed anyone, it's possible that some significant number of moderate Muslims would have been willing to infiltrate the radical groups as spies and give us the vital intelligence we need to thwart their plans.
Bringing ethics back in, it is just possible (he said slyly) that if we had a strong ethical basis to our foreign policies and combined that with a deep understanding of what goes on in the minds of various groups of Muslims, the culture of hatred against us would eventually dry up.
"I am puzzled by the so-called peace demonstrations in the U.S.A which have a kind of flower-power or naive quality for me. I certainly understand and sympathize with the humaneness behind such demonstrations, but they just don't work for me. Were the demonstrations to occur in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, to ask the governments of *those* countries to desist from violence, I'm not sure how many of the demonstrators would survive to demonstrate again. What *is* permitted (or governmentally orchestrated) in those countries are demonstrations *for* violence and hate, especially (maybe only) if directed at the U.S.A. or Israel."
I'm not sure what the relevance of this is. Should we suspend civil liberties because other societies don't have them? I hope not. Should we voluntarily refrain from criticizing our government? Until some foreign army threatens to invade our soil, I don't see any reason to even think about it. Popular will is felt even in repressive societies, as the governments of Egypt, Algeria, and Pakistan are finding out. The popular will there seems to be much more anti-US than the governments.
"I just don't understand how many wake-up calls we need."
I don't think the US government needs any wake-up calls. Some pacifists and people who want to proceed with caution may not be fully informed, but some hawks are also ill-informed, and that doesn't invalidate anyone's views.
"There is a world view, Radical Fundamentalist Islam, which has arrived on the world stage, and it is mortally incompatible with every humane culture or work-in-progress for a humane culture. Imperfect as our American culture is, it needs to be defended, and I see the the best way to defend it is by destruction of those who adhere to Radical Fundamentalist Islam."
It's possible, though I doubt it very much. It is very hard to kill ideas and belief systems, especially ones that have already shown they have widespread appeal. Killing those who espouse the beliefs hasn't worked in the past. I think our best bet is to crack down on preparations for terror itself where we can, find a balance between a level of terror attacks we can tolerate and a level of security we can tolerate, address legitimate grievances from around the world, but mostly wait for the conditions of the world to change. Like many of us, I grew up in a world where the US/USSR Cold War defined the landscape of international relations. It was very hard for us to see how this competition between two nuclear-armed states could ever resolve itself in a peaceful fashion. And despite Russia's current woes, it did resolve itself without a single battle or nuclear explosion. Those who advocated we "wake up" and risk a nuclear confrontation with the USSR turned out to be very wrong.
Pacifism, almost always
THIS WAS WRITTEN A LONG TIME AGO, IN SEPTEMBER OF 2001, SHORTLY AFTER "9/11"
I've grappled with the issue of pacifism over the years. Where I have ended up personally is that violence is not always wrong, but that in real-world situations people usually jump to violence too soon.
When people weigh in on what to do about our war against terrorism, I imagine a giant see-saw. If you know which way you want it to tilt, it's pretty easy to just jump on the end. To the degree that we have a voice in what the final national policy is, it doesn't matter that much whether we give a carefully nuanced position about exactly what the final tilt of the see-saw should be. But if each of us imagines that we are suddenly thrust into the decision-maker's chair and we are making the final decision, opinions might converge a little more. Good intelligence tells you there are 50 terrorists finalizing plans for a new wave of terror at a remote location in a hostile country, and you can prove it, and they will disperse shortly. I would authorize the air strike to kill them, and maybe some ofthe others who jumped on the pacifist end of the see-saw would too. On the other hand, some of those who have advocated massive indiscriminate bombing of Afghanistan (none from within FUSN so far) might decide against it if the final responsibility for the attack fell on them (this I fervently hope).
The real situations will fall in the middle between those extremes. I am somewhat comforted to think that our intelligence services, state department, and military are staffed with enough non-partisan professionals that they will veto a wide range of actions that would by any reasonable measure turn out badly. I could be eating my words shortly, but I think they realize that air strikes that kill thousands of civilians, or trying to invade and then actually rule any part of a hostile country such asAfghanistan or Iraq would be hugely counterproductive. They may still undertake missions that turn out badly, or that I will find immoral, but the fact that our government has waited a week without lashing out is a good sign that the worst mistakes have been avoided.
One other perspective that might bridge the gap between us at FUSN is to think about our goal. Here's a suggestion: We want the best future world we can have. Could we agree that actual terrorist organizers should be in jail if the alternative is that they are walking free? Could we agree that we want to minimize future terrorism? Could we agree that we want to minimize loss of innocent lives? If so, then our differences are about means rather than about ends. (I realize that varying importance attached to these goals is still an area for disagreements, but it's a start.) Some people might argue that we should seek revenge even if we know that it will lead to increased terrorism in the future, because revenge is an end in itself; I strongly disagree with this. For those who feel that strong revenge will lead to a better future world situation, I may disagree but I do see it as an empirical question and I respect your view.
In the early 1970s I applied for and got a CO (conscientious objector) status from my draft board. With draft number 35, I would have done alternative service had draft call-ups not been ended my year. For a couple years right after college, I considered myself a Quaker, and as many of you will know, there is a strong peace testimony in Quakerism which is often taken as absolute. One note from history is interesting: after the Quakers settled the Delaware Valley, an enterprising band of pirates discovered this was a great place to operate since the pacifist Quakers put up no defense. After much soul-searching, the Quakers hired some mercenaries to hunt down the pirates by what they surely knew would be violent means.
Some of us have quoted Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, great people who achieved great things with nonviolent resistance. But the success they enjoyed in particular circumstances hardly settles any general question. Quotations rarely do, even (especially?) quotations attributed to God.
I was also very interested in social justice from a leftist perspective during the 1976-86 period, and there were many opportunities to think about the role of violence in those struggles. For a while I thought violence as a means to ending apartheid in South Africa might be justified, but as history has turned out, it seems like it was not. The vast majority of leftist guerrilla movements have turned out badly, whether they ultimately lost or won. The brutal Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union played a major role in defeating Nazi Germany, and then became the less brutal Brezhnev regime and ultimately disintegrated into its component republics -- all without external violence.
It took me a long time to find a war where I could easily see myself picking up a gun and heading off to the front, but I found a pretty clear case during the Bosnia war: if I had been a Muslim resident of Sarajevo during the Serbian siege, I would have been able to go off and defend the trenches with a clear conscience. The price of failure in that violent struggle would be the killing or expulsion of my people from their home. It's much harder for me to judge earlier wars because I have only the information supplied by history, not the information available at the time.
I've grappled with the issue of pacifism over the years. Where I have ended up personally is that violence is not always wrong, but that in real-world situations people usually jump to violence too soon.
When people weigh in on what to do about our war against terrorism, I imagine a giant see-saw. If you know which way you want it to tilt, it's pretty easy to just jump on the end. To the degree that we have a voice in what the final national policy is, it doesn't matter that much whether we give a carefully nuanced position about exactly what the final tilt of the see-saw should be. But if each of us imagines that we are suddenly thrust into the decision-maker's chair and we are making the final decision, opinions might converge a little more. Good intelligence tells you there are 50 terrorists finalizing plans for a new wave of terror at a remote location in a hostile country, and you can prove it, and they will disperse shortly. I would authorize the air strike to kill them, and maybe some ofthe others who jumped on the pacifist end of the see-saw would too. On the other hand, some of those who have advocated massive indiscriminate bombing of Afghanistan (none from within FUSN so far) might decide against it if the final responsibility for the attack fell on them (this I fervently hope).
The real situations will fall in the middle between those extremes. I am somewhat comforted to think that our intelligence services, state department, and military are staffed with enough non-partisan professionals that they will veto a wide range of actions that would by any reasonable measure turn out badly. I could be eating my words shortly, but I think they realize that air strikes that kill thousands of civilians, or trying to invade and then actually rule any part of a hostile country such asAfghanistan or Iraq would be hugely counterproductive. They may still undertake missions that turn out badly, or that I will find immoral, but the fact that our government has waited a week without lashing out is a good sign that the worst mistakes have been avoided.
One other perspective that might bridge the gap between us at FUSN is to think about our goal. Here's a suggestion: We want the best future world we can have. Could we agree that actual terrorist organizers should be in jail if the alternative is that they are walking free? Could we agree that we want to minimize future terrorism? Could we agree that we want to minimize loss of innocent lives? If so, then our differences are about means rather than about ends. (I realize that varying importance attached to these goals is still an area for disagreements, but it's a start.) Some people might argue that we should seek revenge even if we know that it will lead to increased terrorism in the future, because revenge is an end in itself; I strongly disagree with this. For those who feel that strong revenge will lead to a better future world situation, I may disagree but I do see it as an empirical question and I respect your view.
In the early 1970s I applied for and got a CO (conscientious objector) status from my draft board. With draft number 35, I would have done alternative service had draft call-ups not been ended my year. For a couple years right after college, I considered myself a Quaker, and as many of you will know, there is a strong peace testimony in Quakerism which is often taken as absolute. One note from history is interesting: after the Quakers settled the Delaware Valley, an enterprising band of pirates discovered this was a great place to operate since the pacifist Quakers put up no defense. After much soul-searching, the Quakers hired some mercenaries to hunt down the pirates by what they surely knew would be violent means.
Some of us have quoted Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, great people who achieved great things with nonviolent resistance. But the success they enjoyed in particular circumstances hardly settles any general question. Quotations rarely do, even (especially?) quotations attributed to God.
I was also very interested in social justice from a leftist perspective during the 1976-86 period, and there were many opportunities to think about the role of violence in those struggles. For a while I thought violence as a means to ending apartheid in South Africa might be justified, but as history has turned out, it seems like it was not. The vast majority of leftist guerrilla movements have turned out badly, whether they ultimately lost or won. The brutal Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union played a major role in defeating Nazi Germany, and then became the less brutal Brezhnev regime and ultimately disintegrated into its component republics -- all without external violence.
It took me a long time to find a war where I could easily see myself picking up a gun and heading off to the front, but I found a pretty clear case during the Bosnia war: if I had been a Muslim resident of Sarajevo during the Serbian siege, I would have been able to go off and defend the trenches with a clear conscience. The price of failure in that violent struggle would be the killing or expulsion of my people from their home. It's much harder for me to judge earlier wars because I have only the information supplied by history, not the information available at the time.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
When our reaction to the news is bad for other people
In "When the news is bad for you", I argued that when we get our impressions of the world from news, we overestimate the chances that an event in the news might apply to us. Our reactions to the news also profoundly influence how we act in the world at large -- how we affect other people.
Most of us take the news as the primary way we think about the world outside of our personal experience. If we accept the news at face value, our opinions and actions will be distorted. Some of what follows is widely understood, I think:
News organizations have a great deal of power. News tends to be slanted towards the views of those with the money -- owners and advertisers. Whatever groups with enough savvy and expertise orchestrate their strategies within the framework of the news. This includes politicians, businesses, nonprofits -- and terrorists.
Corporations will package many sorts of losses as a single "charge", of perhaps billions of dollars, to have one news story about a large amount rather than a series of stories about smaller amounts that are still large enough to be news.
Sophisticated terrorist organizations know that steady attacks killing ten people a day become routine and fall out of the news, whereas a single large, unexpected attack will make the news.
Compare on the one hand how we deal with grisly murders and how we deal with drunk driving deaths. One reaction to grisly murders is to urge the death penalty. Many heinous crimes are news stories, and execution of a perpetrator is also a news story. There are relatively few grisly and relatively few executions. A death penalty proponent has in a sense urged a news story as a reaction to a news story.
Deaths from drunk driving, on the other hand, are very common and usually are just local news. News reports will often note that drunk driving deaths are common, and briefly cite statistics to back up that claim, but they will spend more of their report focusing our attention on the suffering of a particular victim and family. And there will still be more stories about grisly murders than about drunk driving, even if drunk driving deaths are a hundred times more frequent.
How to prevent deaths from drunk driving is not something I feel at all knowledgeable about, but surely there are things we could consider: increasing penalties for repeat offenders, a form of ankle bracelet that alerts authorities if someone on probation gets into the driver's seat of a car, mandated living situations without cars. Just about any such measure would do far more to save lives than the death penalty. It is true that a great deal of progress has been made on this issue in the past thirty years, but the deaths from drunk driving still dwarf most other non-medical causes.
In the words of Tom Lehrer, in an early 1960s song lampooning the Boy Scouts, "Be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you". Politicians are more concerned with news stories covering the fact that they took action on an issue than the effectiveness of the action. One small instance that struck me occurred in the wake of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. There was a passage in the tax form 1040 instructions concerning certain special treatment available for families of astronauts who died. Surely compensation to survivors of seven people could have been handled far more efficiently by direct payments than by special tax legislation. Could it possibly be that the PR value of that passage in the tax code was more important to the politicians than the compensation?
The rationale for federal assistance in a disaster area is that the damage is large enough that local resources are not sufficient to provide relief. But I suspect that a more compelling motivation might be to be perceived in the news as helping with a disaster that made the news. I think I saw an implication of this in the wake of the New Orleans hurricane disaster. This was a disaster of sufficient scale that extraordinary aid was called for. Many other communities along the Gulf Coast were devastated, and the awkward question was how far away that extraordinary aid should reach. It was the same hurricane, but the flooding of New Orleans was truly extraordinary news, while devastation from hurricanes is unfortunately a relatively common occurrence.
As for the war on terror, that is a topic for a different day.
So how might things be different? I fear there is no sexy or dramatic antidote. Some of the news bias is intentional: corporations with their PR, politicians with sound bites, and terrorists with orchestrated terror. Many of us understand these manipulations and try to counter them. I think most of us could try harder, and I include myself. It is more relaxing to read or listen to the news with a sense of safety and trust than with a healthy dose of skepticism and suspicion.
I think it is even harder to counteract news bias when it is not intentional. When we hear of a grisly murder, especially of a child, it's hard to blame the news media for covering the story, since it really is news and does grab our interest. We appropriately feel outrage, and it's hard to be open to the possibility that there isn't anything we should do about it (even if we can). Perhaps the human cost of keeping hundreds or thousands of not-very-dangerous people locked up indefinitely is just too high. If we don't take that into account, then in an important sense what we are saying is that we place more value on avoiding the shocking news story than actually minimizing the suffering in our society -- when it includes that borne by those whose lives aren't newsworthy. We could help far more people by encouraging greater awareness of the potential for abuse within families, including the very common instance of brothers abusing sisters.
Individuals shouldn't have to make all these adjustments on their own. We should be able to find others who take the same attitude and pool our resources, and support organizations with the same view.
Progressive organizations are not the answer. Most are just as eager to manipulate us as those of the powers that be. I used to get some letters with the following basic message, but am now inundated since I am handling my parents' mail: "This particular moment is unlike all others and you simply must give us more money or uniquely terrible things will happen." They will cite any news story that supports their message, to play on our feelings. To be clear, I do think that progressive organizations are vital and I do support some of them some of the time. They are no worse than conservative organizations. It's just that they aren't a solution to the problem of news bias.
One could imagine an organization dedicated to truth, regardless of whether it supports a liberal or conservative view and how unpleasant or politically unpopular the conclusions. It could not exist for long, especially after a few reports that are politically unpopular with just about everyone.
To some extent it is professional government experts (we might call them bureaucrats) who can serve this role. They have the time to study these matters in depth and the skill and training to consider what is best for everyone, all considered. They are not (or should not be) subject to immediate political pressure. My impression is that it is the radical Republicans, starting with Reagan and dramatically extended by "W", who have convinced people not to trust the experts, if not to view them with outright derision. (Yes, experts can be biased and self-serving too.)
The judiciary can help to some extent. But I believe judges are exasperated and demoralized by mandatory sentencing guidelines that do not take into account the realities of life for ordinary citizens who are not newsworthy. The sentencing guidelines come from legislation passed in response to political pressure arising from -- news stories.
Education about news bias is an important lesson we could give to our children in how to be a responsible citizen.
Most of us take the news as the primary way we think about the world outside of our personal experience. If we accept the news at face value, our opinions and actions will be distorted. Some of what follows is widely understood, I think:
News organizations have a great deal of power. News tends to be slanted towards the views of those with the money -- owners and advertisers. Whatever groups with enough savvy and expertise orchestrate their strategies within the framework of the news. This includes politicians, businesses, nonprofits -- and terrorists.
Corporations will package many sorts of losses as a single "charge", of perhaps billions of dollars, to have one news story about a large amount rather than a series of stories about smaller amounts that are still large enough to be news.
Sophisticated terrorist organizations know that steady attacks killing ten people a day become routine and fall out of the news, whereas a single large, unexpected attack will make the news.
Compare on the one hand how we deal with grisly murders and how we deal with drunk driving deaths. One reaction to grisly murders is to urge the death penalty. Many heinous crimes are news stories, and execution of a perpetrator is also a news story. There are relatively few grisly and relatively few executions. A death penalty proponent has in a sense urged a news story as a reaction to a news story.
Deaths from drunk driving, on the other hand, are very common and usually are just local news. News reports will often note that drunk driving deaths are common, and briefly cite statistics to back up that claim, but they will spend more of their report focusing our attention on the suffering of a particular victim and family. And there will still be more stories about grisly murders than about drunk driving, even if drunk driving deaths are a hundred times more frequent.
How to prevent deaths from drunk driving is not something I feel at all knowledgeable about, but surely there are things we could consider: increasing penalties for repeat offenders, a form of ankle bracelet that alerts authorities if someone on probation gets into the driver's seat of a car, mandated living situations without cars. Just about any such measure would do far more to save lives than the death penalty. It is true that a great deal of progress has been made on this issue in the past thirty years, but the deaths from drunk driving still dwarf most other non-medical causes.
In the words of Tom Lehrer, in an early 1960s song lampooning the Boy Scouts, "Be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you". Politicians are more concerned with news stories covering the fact that they took action on an issue than the effectiveness of the action. One small instance that struck me occurred in the wake of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. There was a passage in the tax form 1040 instructions concerning certain special treatment available for families of astronauts who died. Surely compensation to survivors of seven people could have been handled far more efficiently by direct payments than by special tax legislation. Could it possibly be that the PR value of that passage in the tax code was more important to the politicians than the compensation?
The rationale for federal assistance in a disaster area is that the damage is large enough that local resources are not sufficient to provide relief. But I suspect that a more compelling motivation might be to be perceived in the news as helping with a disaster that made the news. I think I saw an implication of this in the wake of the New Orleans hurricane disaster. This was a disaster of sufficient scale that extraordinary aid was called for. Many other communities along the Gulf Coast were devastated, and the awkward question was how far away that extraordinary aid should reach. It was the same hurricane, but the flooding of New Orleans was truly extraordinary news, while devastation from hurricanes is unfortunately a relatively common occurrence.
As for the war on terror, that is a topic for a different day.
So how might things be different? I fear there is no sexy or dramatic antidote. Some of the news bias is intentional: corporations with their PR, politicians with sound bites, and terrorists with orchestrated terror. Many of us understand these manipulations and try to counter them. I think most of us could try harder, and I include myself. It is more relaxing to read or listen to the news with a sense of safety and trust than with a healthy dose of skepticism and suspicion.
I think it is even harder to counteract news bias when it is not intentional. When we hear of a grisly murder, especially of a child, it's hard to blame the news media for covering the story, since it really is news and does grab our interest. We appropriately feel outrage, and it's hard to be open to the possibility that there isn't anything we should do about it (even if we can). Perhaps the human cost of keeping hundreds or thousands of not-very-dangerous people locked up indefinitely is just too high. If we don't take that into account, then in an important sense what we are saying is that we place more value on avoiding the shocking news story than actually minimizing the suffering in our society -- when it includes that borne by those whose lives aren't newsworthy. We could help far more people by encouraging greater awareness of the potential for abuse within families, including the very common instance of brothers abusing sisters.
Individuals shouldn't have to make all these adjustments on their own. We should be able to find others who take the same attitude and pool our resources, and support organizations with the same view.
Progressive organizations are not the answer. Most are just as eager to manipulate us as those of the powers that be. I used to get some letters with the following basic message, but am now inundated since I am handling my parents' mail: "This particular moment is unlike all others and you simply must give us more money or uniquely terrible things will happen." They will cite any news story that supports their message, to play on our feelings. To be clear, I do think that progressive organizations are vital and I do support some of them some of the time. They are no worse than conservative organizations. It's just that they aren't a solution to the problem of news bias.
One could imagine an organization dedicated to truth, regardless of whether it supports a liberal or conservative view and how unpleasant or politically unpopular the conclusions. It could not exist for long, especially after a few reports that are politically unpopular with just about everyone.
To some extent it is professional government experts (we might call them bureaucrats) who can serve this role. They have the time to study these matters in depth and the skill and training to consider what is best for everyone, all considered. They are not (or should not be) subject to immediate political pressure. My impression is that it is the radical Republicans, starting with Reagan and dramatically extended by "W", who have convinced people not to trust the experts, if not to view them with outright derision. (Yes, experts can be biased and self-serving too.)
The judiciary can help to some extent. But I believe judges are exasperated and demoralized by mandatory sentencing guidelines that do not take into account the realities of life for ordinary citizens who are not newsworthy. The sentencing guidelines come from legislation passed in response to political pressure arising from -- news stories.
Education about news bias is an important lesson we could give to our children in how to be a responsible citizen.
When the News Is bad for you
This was originally written in October.
We humans are very clever animals. Like many other creatures, we learn from our experiences. Don't eat those plants with the leaves of a certain shape because the last time you did you got really sick. Like some other clever animals, we learn from the experiences of others. Don't eat them if you saw someone else in the tribe eat some and get sick or die. Where we are really very clever is in learning from experiences we didn't actually witness, through our use of language. After we all crossed the mountains to a new land, the report is that someone in the next village got very sick after eating the plants with the leaves that are shiny, in groups of three and with smooth edges. Our language lets us learn of events that happened in the past or in a different spot so we can do better in life by adjusting our behavior accordingly.
Where our ancestors evolved the total number of people within a person's range of communication was something under a thousand, I would guess, and probably more like a hundred. Whatever happened, for ill or for good, to one of those hundred was worth paying attention to.
Today, there are several billion of us potentially covered by … the News. Any truly unusual event in the lives of those billions can find its way onto our TV screens, newspapers, or internet browsers. We are still as interested in unusual events as ever and adjust our behavior accordingly, but we have made little allowance for the jump from a hundred to a billion. That means the news can be bad for us.
In theory, we humans not only learn from experience, learn from observation, and learn from language, we also learn from statistics and mathematics. In theory. In practice, the use of basic quantitative tools is a recent innovation that is not built in to our feelings, fears and behaviors.
So what's on the news? A tsunami kills thousands. Two teenagers bring weapons to a school and open fire, killing a dozen students. A small child is kidnapped by a total stranger and murdered. A swimmer is killed by a shark. An airliner crashes with the loss of all aboard. An innocent bystander is killed by a stray bullet in a shootout between gangs. A teenager dies after driving too fast when drunk. A number of laptops are stolen from cars that were left unlocked.
Tsunamis are very rare, so when one happens anywhere in the world it is big news. Should we not go to the beach? The statistics suggest we shouldn't worry much because of the rarity and the small fraction of the world's coastline that is likely to be affected by a given tsunami. Should we stop swimming in the ocean for fear of sharks? Certainly not, if the swimmer was swimming in Australia and that is the only fatality reported lately for all beaches and all swimmers worldwide.
On the other hand, should we be more careful about locking our car doors when we leave laptops inside? It's worth considering, because this is a story from Newton [the city where FUSN is located], a small community compared to the domain of contemporary news. Whatever happens here dozens of times is far more relevant than something that happens only dozens of times in the whole United States. With our brains wired for groups of a hundred, we will still overestimate the likelihood of something reported from the group of a hundred thousand that is Newton. We don't publish newspapers on a street-by-street basis, but if there have been a few break-ins on your street, our hundred-oriented brains will serve us well and lead us to take precautions. We will rarely hear of an individual drunk-driving death except in local news, but statistics would indicate it is very much worth doing what we can to keep our sons and daughters from driving drunk. It's obvious that the closer to home some event occurs, the more likely it is to affect our lives, but exactly how much to discount far-away events is not at all obvious.
The problem comes down to probabilities. I have sometimes thought there ought to be a profound way of linking probability and spirituality, but I still haven't figured it out. Life has its ups and downs, and a lot of it is beyond our control. In many aspects of life the best thing to do is play the odds.
I wish there were authoritative compilations of probability estimates that were geared to the practical matter of helping us know how to lead our lives.
Suppose you react to all of these instances above by realistically discounting the likely relevance of a news story and adjusting your actions accordingly. There is a different way the news can be bad for you. It is hard to keep the news stories from affecting your feelings.
It is extraordinarily unlikely that a child will be abducted (let alone murdered) by a stranger, but because of a few well-publicized stories, it's hard to get that picture out of your mind. Even if you go with the probabilities and let your child walk somewhere alone, it can be hard to feel totally relaxed about it because that news story lingers in your mind. It may be hard to swim without looking out for that fin cutting through the waves. When I fly, I find myself a little anxious about the possibility of a crash, even though I know it's not a likely enough eventuality to warrant the concern.
There was a posting to the FUSN list not so long about important safety tips for women. It included this line: "It's always better to be safe than sorry. (And better paranoid than dead)." It sounds reasonable, but is it? Surely a fair measure of caution is warranted. But if you curtail your activities to avoid the highly improbable, you are paying a heavy price. You even pay a price for reading the email (which is a form of news) and thinking about the upsetting anecdotes even if you decide not to follow some of the suggestions.
I have only been considering one aspect of the news. Much news reporting does include an indication of how common something is, and the editors who decide what is worth printing or airing take frequency into account. But there is a tension in news organizations between straight news and sensational stories that grab people's interest. Increasing market share involves increasing the sensational.
Obviously the news is useful in many respects and we need to absorb some of it. Does the medium matter? If we are watching news for its value in guiding our lives, written news may be better than TV, where we both see and hear disasters in a way that is more likely to engage our feelings.
I've considered above news that is bad news. The same arguments apply to good news.
Suppose word gets around that one of the hundred people in your tribe stood in a certain spot with his spear on several days and one time he bagged a large and juicy antelope. It might be worth heading out to that spot yourself. But suppose you hear on the news that John Smith bought a lottery ticket and won $50 million. By the reasoning evolution has endowed you with, it would be worth buying a lottery ticket. But on average, of course, it's not (quip: the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math).
The news is also full of superstars. Let's consider one of the less glamorous kinds of superstars: successful fiction writers. In an interview, they will sincerely and truthfully describe their own path to success, suggesting that others who follow those steps would succeed too. But there is no accounting for the thousands of others who may have done all the right things but for whatever reasons of talent, character, or just plain luck will never be famous. If going by statistics rather than the news, many aspiring fiction writers might aim for more modest but attainable goals. Of course, there are many ways that writing could be considered a success without the author becoming famous, but where being widely read is part of the definition of success, accurate probabilities are important.
Whether the news is bad or good, we are by nature inclined to overestimate its direct relevance to our lives.
We humans are very clever animals. Like many other creatures, we learn from our experiences. Don't eat those plants with the leaves of a certain shape because the last time you did you got really sick. Like some other clever animals, we learn from the experiences of others. Don't eat them if you saw someone else in the tribe eat some and get sick or die. Where we are really very clever is in learning from experiences we didn't actually witness, through our use of language. After we all crossed the mountains to a new land, the report is that someone in the next village got very sick after eating the plants with the leaves that are shiny, in groups of three and with smooth edges. Our language lets us learn of events that happened in the past or in a different spot so we can do better in life by adjusting our behavior accordingly.
Where our ancestors evolved the total number of people within a person's range of communication was something under a thousand, I would guess, and probably more like a hundred. Whatever happened, for ill or for good, to one of those hundred was worth paying attention to.
Today, there are several billion of us potentially covered by … the News. Any truly unusual event in the lives of those billions can find its way onto our TV screens, newspapers, or internet browsers. We are still as interested in unusual events as ever and adjust our behavior accordingly, but we have made little allowance for the jump from a hundred to a billion. That means the news can be bad for us.
In theory, we humans not only learn from experience, learn from observation, and learn from language, we also learn from statistics and mathematics. In theory. In practice, the use of basic quantitative tools is a recent innovation that is not built in to our feelings, fears and behaviors.
So what's on the news? A tsunami kills thousands. Two teenagers bring weapons to a school and open fire, killing a dozen students. A small child is kidnapped by a total stranger and murdered. A swimmer is killed by a shark. An airliner crashes with the loss of all aboard. An innocent bystander is killed by a stray bullet in a shootout between gangs. A teenager dies after driving too fast when drunk. A number of laptops are stolen from cars that were left unlocked.
Tsunamis are very rare, so when one happens anywhere in the world it is big news. Should we not go to the beach? The statistics suggest we shouldn't worry much because of the rarity and the small fraction of the world's coastline that is likely to be affected by a given tsunami. Should we stop swimming in the ocean for fear of sharks? Certainly not, if the swimmer was swimming in Australia and that is the only fatality reported lately for all beaches and all swimmers worldwide.
On the other hand, should we be more careful about locking our car doors when we leave laptops inside? It's worth considering, because this is a story from Newton [the city where FUSN is located], a small community compared to the domain of contemporary news. Whatever happens here dozens of times is far more relevant than something that happens only dozens of times in the whole United States. With our brains wired for groups of a hundred, we will still overestimate the likelihood of something reported from the group of a hundred thousand that is Newton. We don't publish newspapers on a street-by-street basis, but if there have been a few break-ins on your street, our hundred-oriented brains will serve us well and lead us to take precautions. We will rarely hear of an individual drunk-driving death except in local news, but statistics would indicate it is very much worth doing what we can to keep our sons and daughters from driving drunk. It's obvious that the closer to home some event occurs, the more likely it is to affect our lives, but exactly how much to discount far-away events is not at all obvious.
The problem comes down to probabilities. I have sometimes thought there ought to be a profound way of linking probability and spirituality, but I still haven't figured it out. Life has its ups and downs, and a lot of it is beyond our control. In many aspects of life the best thing to do is play the odds.
I wish there were authoritative compilations of probability estimates that were geared to the practical matter of helping us know how to lead our lives.
Suppose you react to all of these instances above by realistically discounting the likely relevance of a news story and adjusting your actions accordingly. There is a different way the news can be bad for you. It is hard to keep the news stories from affecting your feelings.
It is extraordinarily unlikely that a child will be abducted (let alone murdered) by a stranger, but because of a few well-publicized stories, it's hard to get that picture out of your mind. Even if you go with the probabilities and let your child walk somewhere alone, it can be hard to feel totally relaxed about it because that news story lingers in your mind. It may be hard to swim without looking out for that fin cutting through the waves. When I fly, I find myself a little anxious about the possibility of a crash, even though I know it's not a likely enough eventuality to warrant the concern.
There was a posting to the FUSN list not so long about important safety tips for women. It included this line: "It's always better to be safe than sorry. (And better paranoid than dead)." It sounds reasonable, but is it? Surely a fair measure of caution is warranted. But if you curtail your activities to avoid the highly improbable, you are paying a heavy price. You even pay a price for reading the email (which is a form of news) and thinking about the upsetting anecdotes even if you decide not to follow some of the suggestions.
I have only been considering one aspect of the news. Much news reporting does include an indication of how common something is, and the editors who decide what is worth printing or airing take frequency into account. But there is a tension in news organizations between straight news and sensational stories that grab people's interest. Increasing market share involves increasing the sensational.
Obviously the news is useful in many respects and we need to absorb some of it. Does the medium matter? If we are watching news for its value in guiding our lives, written news may be better than TV, where we both see and hear disasters in a way that is more likely to engage our feelings.
I've considered above news that is bad news. The same arguments apply to good news.
Suppose word gets around that one of the hundred people in your tribe stood in a certain spot with his spear on several days and one time he bagged a large and juicy antelope. It might be worth heading out to that spot yourself. But suppose you hear on the news that John Smith bought a lottery ticket and won $50 million. By the reasoning evolution has endowed you with, it would be worth buying a lottery ticket. But on average, of course, it's not (quip: the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math).
The news is also full of superstars. Let's consider one of the less glamorous kinds of superstars: successful fiction writers. In an interview, they will sincerely and truthfully describe their own path to success, suggesting that others who follow those steps would succeed too. But there is no accounting for the thousands of others who may have done all the right things but for whatever reasons of talent, character, or just plain luck will never be famous. If going by statistics rather than the news, many aspiring fiction writers might aim for more modest but attainable goals. Of course, there are many ways that writing could be considered a success without the author becoming famous, but where being widely read is part of the definition of success, accurate probabilities are important.
Whether the news is bad or good, we are by nature inclined to overestimate its direct relevance to our lives.
Leaving AAA behind
This was originally written in May of 2007. I had asked the FUSN list for opinions about AAA (the American Automobile Association), after noting that I had heard bad things about its lobbying activities.
Based on what I've heard, I personally am planning to join the program of BetterWorldClub.com. I didn't know such things existed, and it is the information that makes all the difference for me.
Here's how I look at it:
Sure, AAA has done lots of good for many of us over the years. Some of the stories [of how AAA helped] are quite moving. But it doesn't mean we can't move on. When competition came to the phone industry, I for one didn't stick with AT&T because I was grateful for all those wonderful phone calls they had let me have. I also don't see AAA as a kindly organization which has foregone other opportunities counting on a long-term relationship with us.
I am not moved by the argument that it is only fair that an organization for drivers should be advancing spending on roads. To the degree one feels (as I do) that in this age of global warming driving is a necessary evil, an organization that supports that stand seems the better choice.
What AAA does is far from benign. Apparently they lobbied against the Clean Air Act in 1990. Here's one link to their misdeeds:
http://www.betterworldclub.com/articles/Harpers2002may.htm
The maps and discounts may be be useful for some people, but it seems the road service is the key thing. There's no guarantee that Better World Club will have road service as good as AAA's, but it's a risk I'm willing to take in the service of doing the right thing and also helping the organization grow. If I had small children or was in questionable health I might think twice.
Just my opinion. Your mileage may vary (cough).
Based on what I've heard, I personally am planning to join the program of BetterWorldClub.com. I didn't know such things existed, and it is the information that makes all the difference for me.
Here's how I look at it:
Sure, AAA has done lots of good for many of us over the years. Some of the stories [of how AAA helped] are quite moving. But it doesn't mean we can't move on. When competition came to the phone industry, I for one didn't stick with AT&T because I was grateful for all those wonderful phone calls they had let me have. I also don't see AAA as a kindly organization which has foregone other opportunities counting on a long-term relationship with us.
I am not moved by the argument that it is only fair that an organization for drivers should be advancing spending on roads. To the degree one feels (as I do) that in this age of global warming driving is a necessary evil, an organization that supports that stand seems the better choice.
What AAA does is far from benign. Apparently they lobbied against the Clean Air Act in 1990. Here's one link to their misdeeds:
http://www.betterworldclub.com/articles/Harpers2002may.htm
The maps and discounts may be be useful for some people, but it seems the road service is the key thing. There's no guarantee that Better World Club will have road service as good as AAA's, but it's a risk I'm willing to take in the service of doing the right thing and also helping the organization grow. If I had small children or was in questionable health I might think twice.
Just my opinion. Your mileage may vary (cough).
What's your God (if any) like?
This was originally writtein March of 2007.
What can we know as to whether God exists, and what properties God might have?
1. Not just feelings
Part of religious experience is feelings, dreams, and other aspects of our mental life. They can be profoundly important to us. But there is no need for any of these things to even makes ense, let alone be something that different people agree upon. What I want to discuss below is the part of religion that people believe has a reality that goes beyond their own feelings, a reality that exists outside of our dreams and applies to all people. It does not require that we expect people to agree with us.
If the distinction is unclear, consider the case of whether Jesus during his time on earth ever visited India. Suppose I say he did, and you say he didn't. We might each respect the other's position, and know that the other might be right, but no one would say we might both actually be right -- that is, that he both did and did not.
On the other hand, consider the question of whether strawberries taste better than blueberries. We might disagree, but we can certainly both be right. How good a fruit tastes is a reality that is particular to an individual. So for the time being I want to set aside matters which can be different for everyone and focus on areas where a single reality applies to all of us, however uncertain we may be about it.
2. Getting off the ground
One view of the world is that there is nothing but the physical. Human beings are a product of evolutionary biology. Any ideas we have about right or wrong, the beautiful, the awe-inspiring, or anything else beyond the mundane are just by-products of how we have evolved. Such ideas might be adaptive from an evolutionary perspective, but they can have no inherent truth to them. They are at best convenient fictions. The scientific method can in principlebe brought to bear on and explain everything there is. This view is consistent and logical. I think many non-religious people in the West would agree with it.
I believe the strongest evidence for something beyond the merely physical is consciousness. This term can mean various things, but the meaning I am interested inhere is that life has a "seemingness" to it. You actually see the computer monitor, and hear sounds, and feel the pressure of the chair on your body. Science can study and might eventually predict exactly when and why you might have various experiences, but it seems permanently silent on why reality has this extra dimension of consciousness. It can explain how humans can be astonishingly complex information processing systems, and how the various aspects of the world that "seem"to us have precise correlates in our brains -- but not why there should be any "seemingness" at all. I believe this is vital to our sense of morality. Can suffering or pain exist without consciousness? If science makes a robot that is to all appearances a perfect replica of a dog, we have no sense of outrage if someone kicks this dog-robot, however much it whimpers.
Consciousness as "seemingness" should give pause to those who believe there is nothing but the physical world, but we can hope for more. Consider the simple belief that killing is wrong, all else being equal. We all believe that. Now, if you mean it as a shorthand for the idea that it is in your nature as a person to believe that killing is wrong, then that is consistent with a belief in nothing beyond the physical world. But if you believe that killing actually IS wrong, I think you must believe in something more, something that the scientific method cannot address. For as powerful as science is, it has never had anything to say about right or wrong. Science is amoral. It only speaks about what is, not what should be.
3. Just barely above the ground
So what is there to say about the realm of belief that is just above "science only"? First, from a historical perspective any system of beliefs that makes unequivocal claims about how things work in the physical world has gotten badly beaten up by progress guided by the scientific method. Early theologies said the earth was the center of the universe. Oops! God created all the species of living things in the beginning, and none has arisen since. Oops! Human beings are totally different from the animals. Oops! My sense is that when religions in the past have said the world is configured a certain way, they have meant that it is true in an absolute sense and that the truth of it is in some sense guaranteed by God. When we later discover that some such claim about the world is false, we conclude that the religion has some rethinking to do. If it happens repeatedly, all other claims the religion makes become suspect, including knowing anything about the nature of God. In considering a religion today, you could believe that its leaders have finally solved the problem and that although there were errors in the past, they have been corrected and now what the leaders say is immutable truth. If you take that step, consider how you might feel if and when science reveals that that too is no longer true.
Next, a great deal of what people believe comes from authority or tradition. They believe it because lots of people have believed it for a long time. This is surely a wise way to proceed in life, since we can't test everything for ourselves. However, we all know that in questions of religion there is great disagreement across the world, so if we "think globally"then we cannot be comfortable with an appeal to authority. Widely-held beliefs do sometimes change, and one step in that process is individuals looking at the evidence and changing their minds.
4. Your turn
At this point I have run out of arguments that are persuasive (even to me) about the nature of anything beyond the physical world, so I will switch to the quintessentially UU mode of asking questions as a guide to advancing your personal beliefs.
What I think of as the classic agnostic dilemma -- does the Christian God exist, or is there nothing at all? -- is far too constrained. Even if you considered the possibilities advanced by all major religions, your thinking would be unwisely limited. I suspect that if my questionnaire falls short, it will be because I didn't pose enough questions, not that I posed too many.
The questionnaire:
We all recognize there is a world of mental life, encompassing thoughts, feelings, dreams, hunches, and so forth. Science presumes that all of this mental life is the result of brain activity, and that any relationship between activity in one brain and anything else in the universe is mediated by measurable physical processes. Do you believe our minds connect to each other or something else in a different way?
Some people are generally regarded as having hallucinations or delusions. Others may believe in the existence of different spirits in individual natural objects, in demons, witchcraft, astrology, phrenology, seances with the dead, or in multiple gods. None of these are popular beliefs today in our culture. Others believe in a single God of varying description. I think it is fair to say that there is no scientific evidence in favor of any of them -- though often no evidence against them if they concern the nonmaterial world. Are all of these beliefs equally valid? If not, what criteria would you use to determine which are valid and which are not?
Does whatever exists beyond the material have coherence? Is it "thing-y" at all? Many things?One thing? To the extent it lacks coherence, what more can you say about it? If there are many things, how do they relate?
Many would be tempted to label a single coherent non-material entity to be God. But it would be wise to put that word on the shelf for the time being and retrieve it later. Words can get in the way of truth. You have heard "God" used in many ways by different people, and it quite possibly has powerful associations from your childhood. I think the best way to clarity is to first understand what you believe, and then worry later about what to call it. Instead of something bureaucratic-sounding like "SCNME" (for"Single Coherent Non-Material Entity"), or clever like "WIMB" (for "Whatever It Might Be") I will call it simply "X".
Are the properties of X knowable by us humans?
Did X have a beginning? If so, what created it?
Is X alive? Does it grow?
Does X have power? Unlimited power? Is the power something used in the past? Present? To be used in the future?
Could X have arranged reality so that two plus two did not equal four? Did X create the universe?
Does X have knowledge? Unlimited knowledge?
Does X know about earth? (If this question seems strange, note that there are 70,000 million million million stars in the known universe).
Does X have preferences? If so, to what extent are its preferences commensurate with ours?Does it have feelings?
Does X have a moral component, or is it amoral?Immoral?
Does X exhibit such qualities as love or compassion? Does X care about human beingsas a group? As individuals?
If X has great power, it surely makes sense to fear it, and to do what will keep it from harming you. But to worship it would require a sense that it is good. How can you tell if it is good? Is your sense of what is good something that comes from within you, or X? If it comes from within you, note in passing that X is not needed for morality to exist. If X put it there, then can you trust that your sense of "goodness" that X gave you really is good? Roughly speaking, how can you tell a God from a Devil?
If X has great power and knowledge it could make it plain to all of us with great precision anything it wanted, perhaps by engraving text in stone, or spelling words with clouds, or having each of us hear a voice with an identical message. Why does it not do this? If there is an X that wants us to honor and obey it even though it has not givenus any clear or consistent evidence of its existence or properties? If so, can we understand why?
Traditional religions like Christianity teach the existence of something like X, and they call it God. It has these properties (I think; I was raised as a lapsed Unitarian): You should love God, and God loves you. God is all-knowing, and all-powerful, and all-good. You may not understand God's purposes, but you should have faith that they are for the best. God listens to your prayers. God can answer prayers, and is more likely to do so the more that you do as God would like you to do. God will forgive your sins if you are truly repentant. But this situation will change. More will be revealed later.
With that as preamble, do you believe in such an X? These properties are also typical of how an adult might fondly remember what they believed as a child. Try rereading that paragraph with "parent" substituted for "God". Is the similarity accidental? Did X arrange it that way? If there were competing religious ideas in a culture, would this one be particularly appealing?
5. My personal answers
I will unabashedly say that I cannot find an X that I believe in. In considering the questions above, I can't get to the "coherent" part where X enters stage left.
I understand that one common part of believing in God is to have faith. It is a different way of knowing, I am told. A person believes because they choose to believe.
It is in part the bewildering variety of questions to ask about the nonmaterial world, as posed above, that makes that unappealing to me. How can I choose what to have faith in and what not, if there is no evidence to go on? I could just go with the flow and pick a local and venerable religious tradition. But knowing that were I in India I would adopt incompatible beliefs makes that idea profoundly unsatisfying.
But I do have a faith, and a hope. My faith is that a basic belief like "killing is wrong" is true and that killing really is wrong and not just some convention or fluke of my human nature. Like many who have a more ambitious faith, mine sometimes wavers. My hope is that there really is more purpose behind our existence here than reason alone would suggest.
6. When it matters
I don't believe that a person can know much of anything with confidence about the non-material aspects of existence. Is it important to spread the word? I can think of a very good reason to persuade fundamentalist Christians or Muslims to abandon virulent intolerance. To the extent that certainty of religious belief is behind the intolerance, the message of uncertainty is one I would like them to understand. How one might actually go about bringing more humility to a fundamentalist is an entirely different question. (Appearing with a flaming question mark and intoning "Doubt, doubt!"doesn't sound very promising.)
7. When it doesn't?
At the very beginning I wanted to set aside religious feelings that did not pertain to a reality that applies to all of us. Now I want to consider them again.
[Note to blog readers: The following discussion concerns the social dynamics of our particular FUSN congregation, and should be understood in that light.]
I think that many who come to FUSN have a feeling that there is something wonderful and amazing in the universe beyond what the popular culture would suggest, and that there is hope and meaning. They want to be in a place with other people who have those same basic feelings, and where Sunday services have such presuppositions. Like me, such people might feel a spiritual joy in hymns and sermons, in our glorious sanctuary, in meditation, in small group ministry or the new ideas offered in adult education.
None of that requires that we agree on an underlying religious reality. At the level of emotional experience, all is well.
On the other hand, many of us would not happily agree if told that their religious beliefs were all in their heads and in the same category as whether we are inspired by Mahler's music, or whether strawberries taste good.
But I have a hunch that most of us haven't considered in detail their beliefs about the nature of a shared religious reality and really don't want to. Since our culture views the main choice as between atheism or belief in God, they describe themselves as believing in God, or pick an intermediate value on a dial which goes from zero to God.
Should they feel they need to answer my questionnaire or something of that general nature?Should they be comparing their answers to the questionnaire with others? Some of us might be eager to do so, but others might not.
Why should those who are uninterested explore the roots of their religious feelings with a sharper instrument? I can't think of a very good reason.
Consider that science (psychology, in this case) has determined that believing in God is good for your health. Some people might find it upsetting to discover just how different other people's views are. Or they might find it upsetting to discover inconsistencies, contradictions or uncomfortable holes in their own views.
As part of a sermon last fall Cheryl Lloyd spoke of two friends who had had a deep quarrel but found a way to reconcile years later, not by getting to the bottom of what happened but by forgetting the parts that were difficult. They discovered that "what we sometimes need in order to find forgiveness is not more clarity but more'fuzziness.' " What works for forgiveness surely works even better for avoiding conflict in the first place.
But for me, at least, it helps to note that I am choosing to be fuzzy. We can still share a great deal on the level of religious feelings.
What can we know as to whether God exists, and what properties God might have?
1. Not just feelings
Part of religious experience is feelings, dreams, and other aspects of our mental life. They can be profoundly important to us. But there is no need for any of these things to even makes ense, let alone be something that different people agree upon. What I want to discuss below is the part of religion that people believe has a reality that goes beyond their own feelings, a reality that exists outside of our dreams and applies to all people. It does not require that we expect people to agree with us.
If the distinction is unclear, consider the case of whether Jesus during his time on earth ever visited India. Suppose I say he did, and you say he didn't. We might each respect the other's position, and know that the other might be right, but no one would say we might both actually be right -- that is, that he both did and did not.
On the other hand, consider the question of whether strawberries taste better than blueberries. We might disagree, but we can certainly both be right. How good a fruit tastes is a reality that is particular to an individual. So for the time being I want to set aside matters which can be different for everyone and focus on areas where a single reality applies to all of us, however uncertain we may be about it.
2. Getting off the ground
One view of the world is that there is nothing but the physical. Human beings are a product of evolutionary biology. Any ideas we have about right or wrong, the beautiful, the awe-inspiring, or anything else beyond the mundane are just by-products of how we have evolved. Such ideas might be adaptive from an evolutionary perspective, but they can have no inherent truth to them. They are at best convenient fictions. The scientific method can in principlebe brought to bear on and explain everything there is. This view is consistent and logical. I think many non-religious people in the West would agree with it.
I believe the strongest evidence for something beyond the merely physical is consciousness. This term can mean various things, but the meaning I am interested inhere is that life has a "seemingness" to it. You actually see the computer monitor, and hear sounds, and feel the pressure of the chair on your body. Science can study and might eventually predict exactly when and why you might have various experiences, but it seems permanently silent on why reality has this extra dimension of consciousness. It can explain how humans can be astonishingly complex information processing systems, and how the various aspects of the world that "seem"to us have precise correlates in our brains -- but not why there should be any "seemingness" at all. I believe this is vital to our sense of morality. Can suffering or pain exist without consciousness? If science makes a robot that is to all appearances a perfect replica of a dog, we have no sense of outrage if someone kicks this dog-robot, however much it whimpers.
Consciousness as "seemingness" should give pause to those who believe there is nothing but the physical world, but we can hope for more. Consider the simple belief that killing is wrong, all else being equal. We all believe that. Now, if you mean it as a shorthand for the idea that it is in your nature as a person to believe that killing is wrong, then that is consistent with a belief in nothing beyond the physical world. But if you believe that killing actually IS wrong, I think you must believe in something more, something that the scientific method cannot address. For as powerful as science is, it has never had anything to say about right or wrong. Science is amoral. It only speaks about what is, not what should be.
3. Just barely above the ground
So what is there to say about the realm of belief that is just above "science only"? First, from a historical perspective any system of beliefs that makes unequivocal claims about how things work in the physical world has gotten badly beaten up by progress guided by the scientific method. Early theologies said the earth was the center of the universe. Oops! God created all the species of living things in the beginning, and none has arisen since. Oops! Human beings are totally different from the animals. Oops! My sense is that when religions in the past have said the world is configured a certain way, they have meant that it is true in an absolute sense and that the truth of it is in some sense guaranteed by God. When we later discover that some such claim about the world is false, we conclude that the religion has some rethinking to do. If it happens repeatedly, all other claims the religion makes become suspect, including knowing anything about the nature of God. In considering a religion today, you could believe that its leaders have finally solved the problem and that although there were errors in the past, they have been corrected and now what the leaders say is immutable truth. If you take that step, consider how you might feel if and when science reveals that that too is no longer true.
Next, a great deal of what people believe comes from authority or tradition. They believe it because lots of people have believed it for a long time. This is surely a wise way to proceed in life, since we can't test everything for ourselves. However, we all know that in questions of religion there is great disagreement across the world, so if we "think globally"then we cannot be comfortable with an appeal to authority. Widely-held beliefs do sometimes change, and one step in that process is individuals looking at the evidence and changing their minds.
4. Your turn
At this point I have run out of arguments that are persuasive (even to me) about the nature of anything beyond the physical world, so I will switch to the quintessentially UU mode of asking questions as a guide to advancing your personal beliefs.
What I think of as the classic agnostic dilemma -- does the Christian God exist, or is there nothing at all? -- is far too constrained. Even if you considered the possibilities advanced by all major religions, your thinking would be unwisely limited. I suspect that if my questionnaire falls short, it will be because I didn't pose enough questions, not that I posed too many.
The questionnaire:
We all recognize there is a world of mental life, encompassing thoughts, feelings, dreams, hunches, and so forth. Science presumes that all of this mental life is the result of brain activity, and that any relationship between activity in one brain and anything else in the universe is mediated by measurable physical processes. Do you believe our minds connect to each other or something else in a different way?
Some people are generally regarded as having hallucinations or delusions. Others may believe in the existence of different spirits in individual natural objects, in demons, witchcraft, astrology, phrenology, seances with the dead, or in multiple gods. None of these are popular beliefs today in our culture. Others believe in a single God of varying description. I think it is fair to say that there is no scientific evidence in favor of any of them -- though often no evidence against them if they concern the nonmaterial world. Are all of these beliefs equally valid? If not, what criteria would you use to determine which are valid and which are not?
Does whatever exists beyond the material have coherence? Is it "thing-y" at all? Many things?One thing? To the extent it lacks coherence, what more can you say about it? If there are many things, how do they relate?
Many would be tempted to label a single coherent non-material entity to be God. But it would be wise to put that word on the shelf for the time being and retrieve it later. Words can get in the way of truth. You have heard "God" used in many ways by different people, and it quite possibly has powerful associations from your childhood. I think the best way to clarity is to first understand what you believe, and then worry later about what to call it. Instead of something bureaucratic-sounding like "SCNME" (for"Single Coherent Non-Material Entity"), or clever like "WIMB" (for "Whatever It Might Be") I will call it simply "X".
Are the properties of X knowable by us humans?
Did X have a beginning? If so, what created it?
Is X alive? Does it grow?
Does X have power? Unlimited power? Is the power something used in the past? Present? To be used in the future?
Could X have arranged reality so that two plus two did not equal four? Did X create the universe?
Does X have knowledge? Unlimited knowledge?
Does X know about earth? (If this question seems strange, note that there are 70,000 million million million stars in the known universe).
Does X have preferences? If so, to what extent are its preferences commensurate with ours?Does it have feelings?
Does X have a moral component, or is it amoral?Immoral?
Does X exhibit such qualities as love or compassion? Does X care about human beingsas a group? As individuals?
If X has great power, it surely makes sense to fear it, and to do what will keep it from harming you. But to worship it would require a sense that it is good. How can you tell if it is good? Is your sense of what is good something that comes from within you, or X? If it comes from within you, note in passing that X is not needed for morality to exist. If X put it there, then can you trust that your sense of "goodness" that X gave you really is good? Roughly speaking, how can you tell a God from a Devil?
If X has great power and knowledge it could make it plain to all of us with great precision anything it wanted, perhaps by engraving text in stone, or spelling words with clouds, or having each of us hear a voice with an identical message. Why does it not do this? If there is an X that wants us to honor and obey it even though it has not givenus any clear or consistent evidence of its existence or properties? If so, can we understand why?
Traditional religions like Christianity teach the existence of something like X, and they call it God. It has these properties (I think; I was raised as a lapsed Unitarian): You should love God, and God loves you. God is all-knowing, and all-powerful, and all-good. You may not understand God's purposes, but you should have faith that they are for the best. God listens to your prayers. God can answer prayers, and is more likely to do so the more that you do as God would like you to do. God will forgive your sins if you are truly repentant. But this situation will change. More will be revealed later.
With that as preamble, do you believe in such an X? These properties are also typical of how an adult might fondly remember what they believed as a child. Try rereading that paragraph with "parent" substituted for "God". Is the similarity accidental? Did X arrange it that way? If there were competing religious ideas in a culture, would this one be particularly appealing?
5. My personal answers
I will unabashedly say that I cannot find an X that I believe in. In considering the questions above, I can't get to the "coherent" part where X enters stage left.
I understand that one common part of believing in God is to have faith. It is a different way of knowing, I am told. A person believes because they choose to believe.
It is in part the bewildering variety of questions to ask about the nonmaterial world, as posed above, that makes that unappealing to me. How can I choose what to have faith in and what not, if there is no evidence to go on? I could just go with the flow and pick a local and venerable religious tradition. But knowing that were I in India I would adopt incompatible beliefs makes that idea profoundly unsatisfying.
But I do have a faith, and a hope. My faith is that a basic belief like "killing is wrong" is true and that killing really is wrong and not just some convention or fluke of my human nature. Like many who have a more ambitious faith, mine sometimes wavers. My hope is that there really is more purpose behind our existence here than reason alone would suggest.
6. When it matters
I don't believe that a person can know much of anything with confidence about the non-material aspects of existence. Is it important to spread the word? I can think of a very good reason to persuade fundamentalist Christians or Muslims to abandon virulent intolerance. To the extent that certainty of religious belief is behind the intolerance, the message of uncertainty is one I would like them to understand. How one might actually go about bringing more humility to a fundamentalist is an entirely different question. (Appearing with a flaming question mark and intoning "Doubt, doubt!"doesn't sound very promising.)
7. When it doesn't?
At the very beginning I wanted to set aside religious feelings that did not pertain to a reality that applies to all of us. Now I want to consider them again.
[Note to blog readers: The following discussion concerns the social dynamics of our particular FUSN congregation, and should be understood in that light.]
I think that many who come to FUSN have a feeling that there is something wonderful and amazing in the universe beyond what the popular culture would suggest, and that there is hope and meaning. They want to be in a place with other people who have those same basic feelings, and where Sunday services have such presuppositions. Like me, such people might feel a spiritual joy in hymns and sermons, in our glorious sanctuary, in meditation, in small group ministry or the new ideas offered in adult education.
None of that requires that we agree on an underlying religious reality. At the level of emotional experience, all is well.
On the other hand, many of us would not happily agree if told that their religious beliefs were all in their heads and in the same category as whether we are inspired by Mahler's music, or whether strawberries taste good.
But I have a hunch that most of us haven't considered in detail their beliefs about the nature of a shared religious reality and really don't want to. Since our culture views the main choice as between atheism or belief in God, they describe themselves as believing in God, or pick an intermediate value on a dial which goes from zero to God.
Should they feel they need to answer my questionnaire or something of that general nature?Should they be comparing their answers to the questionnaire with others? Some of us might be eager to do so, but others might not.
Why should those who are uninterested explore the roots of their religious feelings with a sharper instrument? I can't think of a very good reason.
Consider that science (psychology, in this case) has determined that believing in God is good for your health. Some people might find it upsetting to discover just how different other people's views are. Or they might find it upsetting to discover inconsistencies, contradictions or uncomfortable holes in their own views.
As part of a sermon last fall Cheryl Lloyd spoke of two friends who had had a deep quarrel but found a way to reconcile years later, not by getting to the bottom of what happened but by forgetting the parts that were difficult. They discovered that "what we sometimes need in order to find forgiveness is not more clarity but more'fuzziness.' " What works for forgiveness surely works even better for avoiding conflict in the first place.
But for me, at least, it helps to note that I am choosing to be fuzzy. We can still share a great deal on the level of religious feelings.
Mundane (but important) human limitations
My daughter liked her introductory psychology course at college so much that I was inspired to read the textbook this summer. ("Psychology" by David G. Myers, 2003.) I have three academic degrees in psychology, but I learned a lot that surprised me.
Below is further support for the saying "Don't believe everything you think" though from a different vantage point than we usually assume.
Here are some of our less endearing traits:
1. Muddled and self-serving
People have a self-serving bias, believing they are responsible for their good deeds but circumstances are responsible for their bad ones.
Most people see themselves as above average.
People's predictions of the future are systematically more optimistic than reality warrants. (Seldom heard: I'll buy those pants on the loose side because I'm likely to gain moreweight...).
When asked to rate how confident they are about an answer to a question, the confidence rating is higher than the actual probability of being correct.
People find it obvious after the fact why something happened.
When a group of people is told that scientific studies have shown that "out of sight, out of mind" is a property of human affection, they after discussion can explain with confidence why it is obviously correct. A different group told that "absence makes the heart grow fonder" will with equal confidence explain why that is obvious. (The actual correct answer: "out of sight, out of mind.")
When shown a series of random digits, people believe that the naturally-occurring streaks are evidence of nonrandomness. What they view as random sequences in fact have too few streaks to be random. Related result: there are very few if any "hot hands" in stock market prediction. Random variation is sufficient to explain observed results.
When people have a theory about something, they have a confirmation bias: they seek information that confirms the theory, but avoid information that might show the theory to be mistaken. For instance, if shown sequences like "3 4 10", "1 2 7" and "3 9 12" and told they follow a rule, people will hypothesize that the numbers have to be in ascending order. If told that they can ask about whether other sequences do or do not follow the pattern, they will usually only ask about other cases where the numbers are ascending, not examples that do not conform to their hypothesis that might show that the pattern is (for instance) that only the first two numbers must be in order. This has interesting implications for prejudice and closed-mindedness more generally.
2. Memory
People tend to remember situations as simpler than they were and with ambiguities edited out. People experience memories as vivid and feel certain of them, but they are constructed from more abstract information and are often wrong. Important lesson: people who report remembering things that didn't happen are generally not lying, but sincere and just mistaken. This includes those who claim to have been abducted by aliens.
One of the things people get wrong most often in a memory is the source: they often mistake things they have read or seen on TV for things that really happened.
People accurately remember no experiences from before the age of about 3.
Older children's memories are often profoundly influenced by the adults who question them. A passage worth quoting verbatim: The experimenters "had a child choose a card from a deck of possible happenings and an adult then read from the card. For example, 'Think real hard, and tell me if this ever happened to you. Can you remember going to the hospital with a mousetrap on your finger?' After 10 weekly interviews, with the same adult repeatedly asking children to think about several real and fictitious events, a new adult asked the same question. The stunning result: 58 percent of preschoolers produced false (often vivid) stories regarding one or more events they had never experienced."
Our memories of how pleasant or unpleasant an experience was are based on two factors: the peak emotion and on how the experience ended. To consider one practical application of this principle: after an (uncomfortable) colonoscopy with a moving probe, one group of patients then had an extra few minutes tacked onto the procedure where the probe did not move (uncomfortable but not as uncomfortable). This latter group later remembered the procedure as less unpleasant and were more likely to go to follow-up visits.
-----------------------
All that said, human beings are wonderfully complex beings capable of amazing mental feats, amazing insights, compassion, love, and good deeds. I've focused on the negative above, but I do not want anyone to think I've lost sight of our positive traits. We may often wonder why there is evil in the world or why people are not kind, caring, altruistic, etc. But we less often wonder about our much more mundane frailties. Awarenessand understanding of them could help us compensate for them.
Below is further support for the saying "Don't believe everything you think" though from a different vantage point than we usually assume.
Here are some of our less endearing traits:
1. Muddled and self-serving
People have a self-serving bias, believing they are responsible for their good deeds but circumstances are responsible for their bad ones.
Most people see themselves as above average.
People's predictions of the future are systematically more optimistic than reality warrants. (Seldom heard: I'll buy those pants on the loose side because I'm likely to gain moreweight...).
When asked to rate how confident they are about an answer to a question, the confidence rating is higher than the actual probability of being correct.
People find it obvious after the fact why something happened.
When a group of people is told that scientific studies have shown that "out of sight, out of mind" is a property of human affection, they after discussion can explain with confidence why it is obviously correct. A different group told that "absence makes the heart grow fonder" will with equal confidence explain why that is obvious. (The actual correct answer: "out of sight, out of mind.")
When shown a series of random digits, people believe that the naturally-occurring streaks are evidence of nonrandomness. What they view as random sequences in fact have too few streaks to be random. Related result: there are very few if any "hot hands" in stock market prediction. Random variation is sufficient to explain observed results.
When people have a theory about something, they have a confirmation bias: they seek information that confirms the theory, but avoid information that might show the theory to be mistaken. For instance, if shown sequences like "3 4 10", "1 2 7" and "3 9 12" and told they follow a rule, people will hypothesize that the numbers have to be in ascending order. If told that they can ask about whether other sequences do or do not follow the pattern, they will usually only ask about other cases where the numbers are ascending, not examples that do not conform to their hypothesis that might show that the pattern is (for instance) that only the first two numbers must be in order. This has interesting implications for prejudice and closed-mindedness more generally.
2. Memory
People tend to remember situations as simpler than they were and with ambiguities edited out. People experience memories as vivid and feel certain of them, but they are constructed from more abstract information and are often wrong. Important lesson: people who report remembering things that didn't happen are generally not lying, but sincere and just mistaken. This includes those who claim to have been abducted by aliens.
One of the things people get wrong most often in a memory is the source: they often mistake things they have read or seen on TV for things that really happened.
People accurately remember no experiences from before the age of about 3.
Older children's memories are often profoundly influenced by the adults who question them. A passage worth quoting verbatim: The experimenters "had a child choose a card from a deck of possible happenings and an adult then read from the card. For example, 'Think real hard, and tell me if this ever happened to you. Can you remember going to the hospital with a mousetrap on your finger?' After 10 weekly interviews, with the same adult repeatedly asking children to think about several real and fictitious events, a new adult asked the same question. The stunning result: 58 percent of preschoolers produced false (often vivid) stories regarding one or more events they had never experienced."
Our memories of how pleasant or unpleasant an experience was are based on two factors: the peak emotion and on how the experience ended. To consider one practical application of this principle: after an (uncomfortable) colonoscopy with a moving probe, one group of patients then had an extra few minutes tacked onto the procedure where the probe did not move (uncomfortable but not as uncomfortable). This latter group later remembered the procedure as less unpleasant and were more likely to go to follow-up visits.
-----------------------
All that said, human beings are wonderfully complex beings capable of amazing mental feats, amazing insights, compassion, love, and good deeds. I've focused on the negative above, but I do not want anyone to think I've lost sight of our positive traits. We may often wonder why there is evil in the world or why people are not kind, caring, altruistic, etc. But we less often wonder about our much more mundane frailties. Awarenessand understanding of them could help us compensate for them.
Shareholder activism as a tool for social change
This was originally written in October of 2006.
I have been thinking lately that shareholder activism might be one very effective method of instigating social change. There are certain mutual funds, among them Domini Social Equity Fund, that actively examine the corporate policies of funds they invest in and put forth shareholder resolutions in support of progressive policies.
I find this sort of report heartening:
"Domini helped convince JPMorgan Chase -- a $1.1 trillion bank with operations in more than 50 countries -- to adopt a comprehensive environmental policy, addressing global warming, illegal logging, protection of habitats, and the rights of indigenous peoples. It will impact the bank's loans, investments, research and lobbying activities, employee training, and internal operations. Our coalition, led my Christian Brothers Investment Services, helped convince the bank to hire its first Director of Environmental Affairs in 2004."
Corporations can easily ignore all but the most prominent and newsworthy popular protests. Management is responsible to its shareholders, not the public. But if the protest comes from the shareholders themselves, that is a different matter. Management is extraordinarily sensitive to anything that can affect the share price by even a small amount. Any shareholder resolution necessarily comes to the attention of all shareholders, and even the psychological effect of a losing resolution is of concern tomanagement.
I suspect that there are many progressives with sums of money large enough to invest. They might make modest contributions to progressive causes, but are reluctant to give much of their money away. This is a natural and understandable human tendency. But as a result they conduct their investment decisions largelyc ompartmentalized from their personal activities for socialchange.
Investing in activism funds is a way to break down that compartmentalization at very little cost to investors. The socially responsible mutual funds earn rates ofreturn that are comparable to those of other funds. Domini's current expense ratio is 0.95%, which isn't too bad. At some level the shareholder activism itself has to be paid for, of course. But we have a potent force for social change if an investor breaks down the wall between their personal involvement in progressive causes and investing, and views their slightly lower return as a form of doing good.
The Unitarian-Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) engages in shareholder activism,(http://www.uusc.org/info/shareholder.html), but presumablythis is with dollars that have already been designated for the purposes of doing good, and thus far less money than progressive individuals hold.
The concept of socially responsible investment also includes more passive approaches, such as not investing in companies trafficking in weapons, tobacco, or alcohol. This is good as far as it goes, but the effect of shareholder activism is going to be far greater. Merely keeping one's own hands clean in this way may be completely invisible to the relevant companies.
A few relevant links:
http://www.iccr.org
http://www.domini.com/shareholder-advocacy/index.htm
I am interested in whether other people find this analysis to be on target or are aware of other thinking on the subject.
I have been thinking lately that shareholder activism might be one very effective method of instigating social change. There are certain mutual funds, among them Domini Social Equity Fund, that actively examine the corporate policies of funds they invest in and put forth shareholder resolutions in support of progressive policies.
I find this sort of report heartening:
"Domini helped convince JPMorgan Chase -- a $1.1 trillion bank with operations in more than 50 countries -- to adopt a comprehensive environmental policy, addressing global warming, illegal logging, protection of habitats, and the rights of indigenous peoples. It will impact the bank's loans, investments, research and lobbying activities, employee training, and internal operations. Our coalition, led my Christian Brothers Investment Services, helped convince the bank to hire its first Director of Environmental Affairs in 2004."
Corporations can easily ignore all but the most prominent and newsworthy popular protests. Management is responsible to its shareholders, not the public. But if the protest comes from the shareholders themselves, that is a different matter. Management is extraordinarily sensitive to anything that can affect the share price by even a small amount. Any shareholder resolution necessarily comes to the attention of all shareholders, and even the psychological effect of a losing resolution is of concern tomanagement.
I suspect that there are many progressives with sums of money large enough to invest. They might make modest contributions to progressive causes, but are reluctant to give much of their money away. This is a natural and understandable human tendency. But as a result they conduct their investment decisions largelyc ompartmentalized from their personal activities for socialchange.
Investing in activism funds is a way to break down that compartmentalization at very little cost to investors. The socially responsible mutual funds earn rates ofreturn that are comparable to those of other funds. Domini's current expense ratio is 0.95%, which isn't too bad. At some level the shareholder activism itself has to be paid for, of course. But we have a potent force for social change if an investor breaks down the wall between their personal involvement in progressive causes and investing, and views their slightly lower return as a form of doing good.
The Unitarian-Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) engages in shareholder activism,(http://www.uusc.org/info/shareholder.html), but presumablythis is with dollars that have already been designated for the purposes of doing good, and thus far less money than progressive individuals hold.
The concept of socially responsible investment also includes more passive approaches, such as not investing in companies trafficking in weapons, tobacco, or alcohol. This is good as far as it goes, but the effect of shareholder activism is going to be far greater. Merely keeping one's own hands clean in this way may be completely invisible to the relevant companies.
A few relevant links:
http://www.iccr.org
http://www.domini.com/shareholder-advocacy/index.htm
I am interested in whether other people find this analysis to be on target or are aware of other thinking on the subject.
Global warming: personal vs political responses
This was originally written in October, 2006. It was written in response to suggestions on the church list of combatting global warming by recycling, using less air conditioning, and walking instead of driving.
When I watched Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", I noted that in the "what you can do" section the first several items were about reducing your own energy consumption, and only then was the idea of political organizing raised. I found that disappointing, because my sense is that even if the entire population of ecologically-minded US citizens cut their energy use to zero it would make very little difference. It's a good thing if an individual installs energy-efficient light bulbs. But if that assuages their conscience and lets them happily check off "did something about global warming" on their list and go on with life, I'm not sure that's so good. If on the other hand it becomes the first small step that leads to getting an energy audit on their house to save heating costs or buying a hybrid car, that is good. I don't know which reaction is more common. But I do think we need to eventually get a fairly large number of us to act in the political arena or we're going to have trouble making progress.
While giving up air conditioning can make us feel virtuous (and in fairness also be a real savings), contemplating such a step can lead in another direction. You might simply say that you don't have the discipline to make the sacrifice, so you're going to forget about it. Combine this with the "tragedy of the commons" [individuals reap the benefits but everyone bears the cost] and it is a recipe for inaction.
The way to avoid commons-tragedy issues is to pass laws that apply to everyone. If for instance a law said that no air conditioner could be set lower than 78 degrees, I would feel much better about being on the warm side than I would if I felt others weren't sharing my discomfort.
There are a great many things we as a society can do without causing much pain. Raising fuel efficiency standards on vehicles is an obvious first step. Subsidizing wind or solar power is another. Requiring stringent scrubbing mechanisms on burning of coal is another. The idea of carbon sequestration was a new one to me until recently --actually taking the carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it somewhere. Research on it could be generously funded.
Actions that people take as individuals seem to me to cut both ways. You may feel virtuous to the extent you are giving something up rather than the extent to which you really are saving energy. Then if you fall from your virtuous program you may be more demoralized than the lapse warrants. I for one have decided not to worry much about leaving the lights on around the house. When I feel bad about what I'm not doing to help with global warming, it's those missing letters and calls and visits with politicians that I feel guilty about, not leaving the lights on or taking that trip to Cape Cod that I really didn't need to take.
In an earlier energy crisis, one solution the US adopted was the 55mph speed limit. I don't know how much energy it saved, but it strikes me that it was profoundly irritating to a whole lot of people. Minute by minute people were aware of what they were giving up on roads that really were designed to handle higher speeds. At the time there was something akin to mass civil disobedience in ignoring the limit. I think in the future we need to choose our public collective acts of sacrifice more carefully.
I was heartened to read somewhere (I think it was MIT's Tech Review) that if the price of electricity were a mere four times what it is today, we could get as much as we wanted from solar cells. I hope it's true. That price increase would represent a major change in our economy, but not the end of moderate affluence. None of these measures alone will solve global warming, but putting them (and others) together might do the job.
When I watched Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", I noted that in the "what you can do" section the first several items were about reducing your own energy consumption, and only then was the idea of political organizing raised. I found that disappointing, because my sense is that even if the entire population of ecologically-minded US citizens cut their energy use to zero it would make very little difference. It's a good thing if an individual installs energy-efficient light bulbs. But if that assuages their conscience and lets them happily check off "did something about global warming" on their list and go on with life, I'm not sure that's so good. If on the other hand it becomes the first small step that leads to getting an energy audit on their house to save heating costs or buying a hybrid car, that is good. I don't know which reaction is more common. But I do think we need to eventually get a fairly large number of us to act in the political arena or we're going to have trouble making progress.
While giving up air conditioning can make us feel virtuous (and in fairness also be a real savings), contemplating such a step can lead in another direction. You might simply say that you don't have the discipline to make the sacrifice, so you're going to forget about it. Combine this with the "tragedy of the commons" [individuals reap the benefits but everyone bears the cost] and it is a recipe for inaction.
The way to avoid commons-tragedy issues is to pass laws that apply to everyone. If for instance a law said that no air conditioner could be set lower than 78 degrees, I would feel much better about being on the warm side than I would if I felt others weren't sharing my discomfort.
There are a great many things we as a society can do without causing much pain. Raising fuel efficiency standards on vehicles is an obvious first step. Subsidizing wind or solar power is another. Requiring stringent scrubbing mechanisms on burning of coal is another. The idea of carbon sequestration was a new one to me until recently --actually taking the carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it somewhere. Research on it could be generously funded.
Actions that people take as individuals seem to me to cut both ways. You may feel virtuous to the extent you are giving something up rather than the extent to which you really are saving energy. Then if you fall from your virtuous program you may be more demoralized than the lapse warrants. I for one have decided not to worry much about leaving the lights on around the house. When I feel bad about what I'm not doing to help with global warming, it's those missing letters and calls and visits with politicians that I feel guilty about, not leaving the lights on or taking that trip to Cape Cod that I really didn't need to take.
In an earlier energy crisis, one solution the US adopted was the 55mph speed limit. I don't know how much energy it saved, but it strikes me that it was profoundly irritating to a whole lot of people. Minute by minute people were aware of what they were giving up on roads that really were designed to handle higher speeds. At the time there was something akin to mass civil disobedience in ignoring the limit. I think in the future we need to choose our public collective acts of sacrifice more carefully.
I was heartened to read somewhere (I think it was MIT's Tech Review) that if the price of electricity were a mere four times what it is today, we could get as much as we wanted from solar cells. I hope it's true. That price increase would represent a major change in our economy, but not the end of moderate affluence. None of these measures alone will solve global warming, but putting them (and others) together might do the job.
Cousin nomenclature, explained and expanded
Some people find the concept of "second cousin once removed" to be confusing. I did once. Here's how it works. You first figure out how many generations you have to go back from each of the people to find a common ancestor. If it's the same for the two people, then they are just cousins, without any of this removal stuff. If you have to go back just two generations on either side, then the people are first cousins. If you have to go back three generations, then they are second cousins, and so forth. The removal part comes in when the number of generations you go back for the two people is different. In that case, the cousin number is determined by the person who has fewer generations to go back. The removal number is then the number of additional generations the other person has to go back. Probably some of you knew all that, and some didn't. (For those who score high on the nerd test, "CousinNumber = min(G1, G2) and RemovalNumber = abs(G1-G2). Removal number of zero must mandatorily be omitted.")
Another thing about cousin relationships is that they are always symmetrical. If I am your first cousin twice removed, you are my first cousin twice removed. But this leaves a lot to be desired. This first cousin twice removed is either two generations older than you or else two generations younger. That makes a big difference in how you think about this other person, I dare say! So I suggest we could modify that a bit to convey more information, so "first cousin twice removed" is someone younger than you, but "twice removed first cousin" is someone older.
The fact that you have to go back two generations to be first cousins is a little odd. Why not go back two generations to be second cousins? Those who specified the cousin nomenclature maybe didn't do the best job. But if we are stuck with how they started out, there is an obvious extension, see. If going back two generations finds your first cousins, then going back one generation finds your zeroth cousins. Who are they? Your brothers and sisters! Here's why: go back one generation to find your common ancestor -- your parent. But extending the idea doesn't have to stop there. If you go back no generations at all, you can find your minus first cousin, or -1th cousins (say it "minus oneth cousin"). And who is that? You yourself!
The classical cousin nomenclature doesn't convey anything about genders, so it is preferable in that regard in today's society where we have struggled without success for decades to solve the "she/he" problem. So with all this in mind, we can gain a fuller and deeper understanding of some of those relationships terms we just take for granted:
0th cousin = sibling, brother, sister
0th cousin once removed = niece, nephew
Once removed 0th cousin = aunt, uncle
0th cousin twice removed = grandniece, grandnephew
Twice removed 0th cousin = great aunt, great uncle
-1th cousin = you, a man, woman, girl, or boy
-1th cousin once removed = child, son, daughter
Once removed -1th cousin = parent, mother, father
-1th cousin twice removed = grandchild, grandson, granddaughter
Twice removed -1th cousin = grandparent, grandmother, grandfather
We can also reconsider an old expression. "Looking out for number one" might be better thought of as "looking out for minus one"
Another thing about cousin relationships is that they are always symmetrical. If I am your first cousin twice removed, you are my first cousin twice removed. But this leaves a lot to be desired. This first cousin twice removed is either two generations older than you or else two generations younger. That makes a big difference in how you think about this other person, I dare say! So I suggest we could modify that a bit to convey more information, so "first cousin twice removed" is someone younger than you, but "twice removed first cousin" is someone older.
The fact that you have to go back two generations to be first cousins is a little odd. Why not go back two generations to be second cousins? Those who specified the cousin nomenclature maybe didn't do the best job. But if we are stuck with how they started out, there is an obvious extension, see. If going back two generations finds your first cousins, then going back one generation finds your zeroth cousins. Who are they? Your brothers and sisters! Here's why: go back one generation to find your common ancestor -- your parent. But extending the idea doesn't have to stop there. If you go back no generations at all, you can find your minus first cousin, or -1th cousins (say it "minus oneth cousin"). And who is that? You yourself!
The classical cousin nomenclature doesn't convey anything about genders, so it is preferable in that regard in today's society where we have struggled without success for decades to solve the "she/he" problem. So with all this in mind, we can gain a fuller and deeper understanding of some of those relationships terms we just take for granted:
0th cousin = sibling, brother, sister
0th cousin once removed = niece, nephew
Once removed 0th cousin = aunt, uncle
0th cousin twice removed = grandniece, grandnephew
Twice removed 0th cousin = great aunt, great uncle
-1th cousin = you, a man, woman, girl, or boy
-1th cousin once removed = child, son, daughter
Once removed -1th cousin = parent, mother, father
-1th cousin twice removed = grandchild, grandson, granddaughter
Twice removed -1th cousin = grandparent, grandmother, grandfather
We can also reconsider an old expression. "Looking out for number one" might be better thought of as "looking out for minus one"
The human species is not literally doomed
THIS WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN FEBRUARY OF 2006
This concerns the long-term fate of our species over hundreds or thousands of years, and was in response to a discussion the FUSN list in which several people thought our survival time as a species was limited.
Barring an astonishing revolution in our understanding of cosmology, life on earth itself has outer limits imposed by entropy, or another big bang, or our sun going nova. A colossal meteor impact beyond anything the earth has known before could surely doom us all too. We can reasonably hope that none of these things will happen for millions or even a few billion years. Humans will not survive literally forever.
But I think we are very likely to survive lesser cataclysmic tragedies, including another large meteor impact of the sort that caused widespread extinctions in the past. Within this category I also include a massive set of nuclear explosions all over the world, an event which seemed entirely possible during the Cold War era. One worst-case scenario from such dire events is a winter of a hundred years during which all agriculture ceases. I am convinced that bands of us will survive. Small groups will be able to fight the cold by living underground. In various pockets around the world, there will be ample food supplies left dotted over the landscape as our food processing systems collapse. Hungry masses will eat most of these in their futile attempts to survive, but some will be left. The bands who survive may well earn that status by armed victory over many others. They will be eating stockpiles of canned soup and canned tuna for a hundred years. When all but a few of us have stopped fighting over this food because we have died, the survivors will be able to mount expeditions to recover more.
When the winter lifts, wild plants will flourish again. Seeds will be left over from our civilized years, as will books on agriculture. Some zones will be relatively free of radiation, if nuclear war was what hit us. Some crops and some people will be more resistant to radiation damage than others.
Another doomsday scenario is the appearance of a microbe that is so virulent and so contagious that we all die. One likely protection is isolated geographical pockets to which it does not spread. We also have our genetic diversity. There is the fascinating story of the gay man who survived multiple exposures to the AIDS virus because he had two copies of a rare gene linked to resistance against the Black Death in Europe. If one in 10,000 are immune to this new bug, that is enough for us to survive.
Our small bands will be able to repopulate the earth. We humans can reproduce fast when we put our minds (and other parts) to it. The raw materials, knowledge and mindset in this newly fertile world will be available for rapid technological development. I think that this sort of survival skill, perhaps repeated multiple times, will get us through many thousands of years. If 200 bands globally meet conditions as we forsee them, there is still room for 90% failure due to unforseen circumstances to leave us with a healthy 20 bands.
I will be interested in others' views on whether these scenarios for survival are persuasive, or references to literature that deals with the topic.
Perhaps during some cataclysm, in a tiny band some genetic change -- a very small change -- will occur to create a new species, which might come to crowd out the old-style humans. But I think these new beings will be essentially people, very similar to us, very recognizable to us, and very much our children. They will be heirs to our entire culture. I would not think of their dominance as the end of humanity.
In all of the above, I have assumed an extreme case. It is surely easier to imagine survival if an entire region did retain its biological integrity.
I'm not sure why people tend to think we will not survive. Perhaps it is that our starting point is our own civilization, and as we imagine horror upon horror involved in its destruction, it seems only a few more steps to reach extinction, when (I argue) it is actually a great many. Perhaps too there is the scorn many of us feel for survivalists, who have turned their backs on solving problems here and now. I think preserving civilization is an adequate motivation to action without needing to contemplate actual extinction.
It is a fact that we have been in the past ten thousand years enjoying an unusual warm spell, compared to the past few hundred thousand. From that perspective, global warming might slightly delay the reappearance of the glaciers [I now believe I was wrong about this, comment added November 2007]. Yet the glaciers do not threaten our survival. They spare the tropical regions.
None of this makes me any less concerned about the environmental catastrophes that loom within the next decades and centuries, but that's another topic. I do predict that if things deteriorate to the point where billions are starving, that would not end civilization. I believe the rich countries or regions would harness their superior organization and technology in the name of survival and protect what is theirs.
My views on this make me an optimist, from one perspective. I am an optimist with regard to human survival.
What is implicit in much of what I have written above is horror, cruelty, and the abandonment of all standards of civilization. I could be considered a pessimist in thinking it likely that survival under extreme duress will require this.
It is possible that the lack of ethics that keeps us from making progress in our current world will help save us when our survival is threatened. Consider that the ethical solution to a situation where a few survive while others starved might be to all starve together. Selfishness and violence might be required for a few to survive.
But the same genetic endowment that keeps us from making permanent advances in our moral compass also keeps us from suffering permanent losses. From survival and savagery can spring forth our good qualities again, when circumstances are favorable. The genes we bear today have all passed through countless individuals who have been the scum of the earth, murderers and rapists, not to mention swindlers and liars and the unfaithful. Despite that, we have emerged as mostly decent people, civilized people.
After a severe cataclysm, we can not only survive. Civilization can rise again.
This concerns the long-term fate of our species over hundreds or thousands of years, and was in response to a discussion the FUSN list in which several people thought our survival time as a species was limited.
Barring an astonishing revolution in our understanding of cosmology, life on earth itself has outer limits imposed by entropy, or another big bang, or our sun going nova. A colossal meteor impact beyond anything the earth has known before could surely doom us all too. We can reasonably hope that none of these things will happen for millions or even a few billion years. Humans will not survive literally forever.
But I think we are very likely to survive lesser cataclysmic tragedies, including another large meteor impact of the sort that caused widespread extinctions in the past. Within this category I also include a massive set of nuclear explosions all over the world, an event which seemed entirely possible during the Cold War era. One worst-case scenario from such dire events is a winter of a hundred years during which all agriculture ceases. I am convinced that bands of us will survive. Small groups will be able to fight the cold by living underground. In various pockets around the world, there will be ample food supplies left dotted over the landscape as our food processing systems collapse. Hungry masses will eat most of these in their futile attempts to survive, but some will be left. The bands who survive may well earn that status by armed victory over many others. They will be eating stockpiles of canned soup and canned tuna for a hundred years. When all but a few of us have stopped fighting over this food because we have died, the survivors will be able to mount expeditions to recover more.
When the winter lifts, wild plants will flourish again. Seeds will be left over from our civilized years, as will books on agriculture. Some zones will be relatively free of radiation, if nuclear war was what hit us. Some crops and some people will be more resistant to radiation damage than others.
Another doomsday scenario is the appearance of a microbe that is so virulent and so contagious that we all die. One likely protection is isolated geographical pockets to which it does not spread. We also have our genetic diversity. There is the fascinating story of the gay man who survived multiple exposures to the AIDS virus because he had two copies of a rare gene linked to resistance against the Black Death in Europe. If one in 10,000 are immune to this new bug, that is enough for us to survive.
Our small bands will be able to repopulate the earth. We humans can reproduce fast when we put our minds (and other parts) to it. The raw materials, knowledge and mindset in this newly fertile world will be available for rapid technological development. I think that this sort of survival skill, perhaps repeated multiple times, will get us through many thousands of years. If 200 bands globally meet conditions as we forsee them, there is still room for 90% failure due to unforseen circumstances to leave us with a healthy 20 bands.
I will be interested in others' views on whether these scenarios for survival are persuasive, or references to literature that deals with the topic.
Perhaps during some cataclysm, in a tiny band some genetic change -- a very small change -- will occur to create a new species, which might come to crowd out the old-style humans. But I think these new beings will be essentially people, very similar to us, very recognizable to us, and very much our children. They will be heirs to our entire culture. I would not think of their dominance as the end of humanity.
In all of the above, I have assumed an extreme case. It is surely easier to imagine survival if an entire region did retain its biological integrity.
I'm not sure why people tend to think we will not survive. Perhaps it is that our starting point is our own civilization, and as we imagine horror upon horror involved in its destruction, it seems only a few more steps to reach extinction, when (I argue) it is actually a great many. Perhaps too there is the scorn many of us feel for survivalists, who have turned their backs on solving problems here and now. I think preserving civilization is an adequate motivation to action without needing to contemplate actual extinction.
It is a fact that we have been in the past ten thousand years enjoying an unusual warm spell, compared to the past few hundred thousand. From that perspective, global warming might slightly delay the reappearance of the glaciers [I now believe I was wrong about this, comment added November 2007]. Yet the glaciers do not threaten our survival. They spare the tropical regions.
None of this makes me any less concerned about the environmental catastrophes that loom within the next decades and centuries, but that's another topic. I do predict that if things deteriorate to the point where billions are starving, that would not end civilization. I believe the rich countries or regions would harness their superior organization and technology in the name of survival and protect what is theirs.
My views on this make me an optimist, from one perspective. I am an optimist with regard to human survival.
What is implicit in much of what I have written above is horror, cruelty, and the abandonment of all standards of civilization. I could be considered a pessimist in thinking it likely that survival under extreme duress will require this.
It is possible that the lack of ethics that keeps us from making progress in our current world will help save us when our survival is threatened. Consider that the ethical solution to a situation where a few survive while others starved might be to all starve together. Selfishness and violence might be required for a few to survive.
But the same genetic endowment that keeps us from making permanent advances in our moral compass also keeps us from suffering permanent losses. From survival and savagery can spring forth our good qualities again, when circumstances are favorable. The genes we bear today have all passed through countless individuals who have been the scum of the earth, murderers and rapists, not to mention swindlers and liars and the unfaithful. Despite that, we have emerged as mostly decent people, civilized people.
After a severe cataclysm, we can not only survive. Civilization can rise again.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Humans: neither perfectible nor degradable
THIS WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN JANUARY OF 2006.
There was a news story about Google striking up a deal with China. What I wrote is a response to two passages in an email exchange, by different people:
"First, I'm an enormous fan of Google. That freely acknowledged, I'm deeply concerned with the recent deal Google has cut with China. Let's cut to the chase. By any reasonable definition China is a fascist state, interested mostly in economic advance at least so long as it doesn't hamper the power of the state itself."
One refreshing thing about Google's deal with China is that it is saying exactly what it is doing and why. It's out in the open. (Google may be doing shady things in secret, but any such secret activities aren't what we're discussing here.) As a news item, it has highlighted China's censorship policies.
Also, I don't think demonizing China's government is helpful. Judging a country against modern western ideals rather than its own history and potential is a mistake. It is a view that sets the stage for thinking that invading Iraq was a good idea. Naive right-wingers thought Iraq could become democratic, happy, and prosperous once Saddam Hussein was removed from power. The history of the ordinary person in China is long and quite bleak. Despite extreme poverty, peasants are probably better off today than they have been before. The economic boom offers prosperity to some and hope to many more. China does not have a tradition of a meaningful democracy that was reversed by the current regime.
======
"A compelling need to behave in an ethical manner is still not part of the general human psyche, and considering that the prescription for behaving in such a way has been with us for over 3000 years, it is starting to appear that it never will be a part. Our weapons development has so exceeded our ethical development that one really has to wonder whether there is any long term future for us."
It's been a good long while since I thought that we humans were on the road to making great leaps forward in ethics. For me the bedrock of understanding our condition is our biology as shaped by natural selection. I just finished a delightful book, "Lucy's Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution" by Alison Jolly. It is not the first book to make a convincing case for an evolutionary basis for this basic arrangement: love in families, cooperation within the group, but hostility towards other groups. We are not limited by our evolutionary tendencies -- we can overcome them, but the effort must be constantly renewed, since our biology does not change. Civilization, like liberty, requires eternal vigilance. As a measure of how we have extended our basic goodwill from a small band to our society at large, I would consider traffic. Incidents of road rage and rude driving exasperate us, but I see them as occurring against a background in which the vast majority of drivers and pedestrians, the vast majority of the time, cooperate amazingly well in helping others get where they are going efficiently.
By the measure of history, the developed world today is an amazing success. Most people are healthy, the vast majority of children live to adulthood and a ripe old age to boot, and we live in comfort unimaginable to most of our forebears. Despite a few recent worrisome developments, we are largely free to do what we want, and we live in an economy where most of us can find jobs. I can't think of an oppressed group that isn't much better off than it was 100 years ago. I think there is something profound in the observation that in the US, poor people are fat instead of skinny. Despite our tendency for hostility towards other groups, in Europe and America and many other places we have not been slaughtering each other wholesale for a full 60 years now. The immense danger today is that we are destroying our environment. Even if the US can't manage it, a lot of other nations can at least sign the Kyoto accords.
The European Union provides a (far from ideal) model of how we can regulate capitalism if we develop the political will. I believe that they have made some decisions that food should be healthier even if it costs more. It may be very hard for an individual shopper to resist the item that is half the price, but if by a collective act of will the item isn't on the shelf, it's not so hard. We tout the goal of "free trade" but it is far from free, with rich countries and powerful industries awarded exceptions. There is no fundamental obstacle (though devilish details, to be sure) to imposing tariffs on products from countries to the extent that wages are low or political liberty is weak. The UN today imposes sanctions on countries that step out of line, however clumsy and imperfect; the IMF also imposes sanctions, though not according to values I hold dear.
My main point is that we have been able to make the world a much better place without needing a fundamental advance in our ethics.
Many among us see how the world isn't as we would like it to be, we despair of its imperfections, and we work towards its improvement. There are quite a few of us who look beyond our own selfish interests in this way. When I try to put myself in the shoes of posterity looking back at us from a few hundred years in the future, I see an exasperation that even people of goodwill spent such comparatively little time working against the destruction of the environment. If Europe really does take on the climate of Siberia, and Brazil and India come to resemble the Sahara, people may wonder why we were worried about the national aspirations of some ethnic group, equal rights in this country, or the improved treatment of some rare disease. But our focus on these issues does fit with our evolutionary heritage, where concern for the environment was not important. Keeping your clan healthy and competing favorably with other clans was.
There was a news story about Google striking up a deal with China. What I wrote is a response to two passages in an email exchange, by different people:
"First, I'm an enormous fan of Google. That freely acknowledged, I'm deeply concerned with the recent deal Google has cut with China. Let's cut to the chase. By any reasonable definition China is a fascist state, interested mostly in economic advance at least so long as it doesn't hamper the power of the state itself."
One refreshing thing about Google's deal with China is that it is saying exactly what it is doing and why. It's out in the open. (Google may be doing shady things in secret, but any such secret activities aren't what we're discussing here.) As a news item, it has highlighted China's censorship policies.
Also, I don't think demonizing China's government is helpful. Judging a country against modern western ideals rather than its own history and potential is a mistake. It is a view that sets the stage for thinking that invading Iraq was a good idea. Naive right-wingers thought Iraq could become democratic, happy, and prosperous once Saddam Hussein was removed from power. The history of the ordinary person in China is long and quite bleak. Despite extreme poverty, peasants are probably better off today than they have been before. The economic boom offers prosperity to some and hope to many more. China does not have a tradition of a meaningful democracy that was reversed by the current regime.
======
"A compelling need to behave in an ethical manner is still not part of the general human psyche, and considering that the prescription for behaving in such a way has been with us for over 3000 years, it is starting to appear that it never will be a part. Our weapons development has so exceeded our ethical development that one really has to wonder whether there is any long term future for us."
It's been a good long while since I thought that we humans were on the road to making great leaps forward in ethics. For me the bedrock of understanding our condition is our biology as shaped by natural selection. I just finished a delightful book, "Lucy's Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution" by Alison Jolly. It is not the first book to make a convincing case for an evolutionary basis for this basic arrangement: love in families, cooperation within the group, but hostility towards other groups. We are not limited by our evolutionary tendencies -- we can overcome them, but the effort must be constantly renewed, since our biology does not change. Civilization, like liberty, requires eternal vigilance. As a measure of how we have extended our basic goodwill from a small band to our society at large, I would consider traffic. Incidents of road rage and rude driving exasperate us, but I see them as occurring against a background in which the vast majority of drivers and pedestrians, the vast majority of the time, cooperate amazingly well in helping others get where they are going efficiently.
By the measure of history, the developed world today is an amazing success. Most people are healthy, the vast majority of children live to adulthood and a ripe old age to boot, and we live in comfort unimaginable to most of our forebears. Despite a few recent worrisome developments, we are largely free to do what we want, and we live in an economy where most of us can find jobs. I can't think of an oppressed group that isn't much better off than it was 100 years ago. I think there is something profound in the observation that in the US, poor people are fat instead of skinny. Despite our tendency for hostility towards other groups, in Europe and America and many other places we have not been slaughtering each other wholesale for a full 60 years now. The immense danger today is that we are destroying our environment. Even if the US can't manage it, a lot of other nations can at least sign the Kyoto accords.
The European Union provides a (far from ideal) model of how we can regulate capitalism if we develop the political will. I believe that they have made some decisions that food should be healthier even if it costs more. It may be very hard for an individual shopper to resist the item that is half the price, but if by a collective act of will the item isn't on the shelf, it's not so hard. We tout the goal of "free trade" but it is far from free, with rich countries and powerful industries awarded exceptions. There is no fundamental obstacle (though devilish details, to be sure) to imposing tariffs on products from countries to the extent that wages are low or political liberty is weak. The UN today imposes sanctions on countries that step out of line, however clumsy and imperfect; the IMF also imposes sanctions, though not according to values I hold dear.
My main point is that we have been able to make the world a much better place without needing a fundamental advance in our ethics.
Many among us see how the world isn't as we would like it to be, we despair of its imperfections, and we work towards its improvement. There are quite a few of us who look beyond our own selfish interests in this way. When I try to put myself in the shoes of posterity looking back at us from a few hundred years in the future, I see an exasperation that even people of goodwill spent such comparatively little time working against the destruction of the environment. If Europe really does take on the climate of Siberia, and Brazil and India come to resemble the Sahara, people may wonder why we were worried about the national aspirations of some ethnic group, equal rights in this country, or the improved treatment of some rare disease. But our focus on these issues does fit with our evolutionary heritage, where concern for the environment was not important. Keeping your clan healthy and competing favorably with other clans was.
A small taste of the complexity of language
THIS WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN JANUARY OF 2006.
Many people might think of language more or less like this: Sentences have words, and if you look up the words in your dictionary one by one and know the basic grammar of English, you know what the sentence means.
One aspect of English that is seldom understood is how much of our vocabulary is contained in chunks of two or more words, where knowing what they mean individually is no help in figuring out what they mean as a unit.
In the service of a product that translates text from English to Japanese, the company where I work has developed a pretty detailed dictionary of English. About one third of the entries (excluding proper names) are composed of two or more words.
I'll offer a sample of one small corner of this dictionary for your amusement.
"They ran up a big hill." and "They ran up a big bill."have different structures. Consider that the shortened forms "They ran up it." and"They ran it up." tell you which one you started with. This second form"run up" is known in our system as a VT07, meaning transitive verb of the 7th type (there are at least 22 types of transitive verbs in all).
Here are some other examples of that one form:
We ran it down (and then let it go)
We ran the points off.
We ran him out. (with tar and feathers)
We ran it over. (to the church office)
We ran it through. (I hate blood).
We ran it up. (the bill, again)
They took it away.
They took it back.
They took it down.
They took it in.
They took it off.
They took it on.
They took it out.
They took it over.
They took it up.
Why not make it out?
Why not make it over?
Why not make it up?
Why not make it over into a stew? ("make over into" -- a different subtype of VT07)
Why not make it over to the bank?
Why not make it up to him?
Why not make him up with paint?
For "They took it in", how many VT07 meanings can you think of?
There are details aplenty to quibble about or expand upon, but it's a pretty cool language, don't you think?
Many people might think of language more or less like this: Sentences have words, and if you look up the words in your dictionary one by one and know the basic grammar of English, you know what the sentence means.
One aspect of English that is seldom understood is how much of our vocabulary is contained in chunks of two or more words, where knowing what they mean individually is no help in figuring out what they mean as a unit.
In the service of a product that translates text from English to Japanese, the company where I work has developed a pretty detailed dictionary of English. About one third of the entries (excluding proper names) are composed of two or more words.
I'll offer a sample of one small corner of this dictionary for your amusement.
"They ran up a big hill." and "They ran up a big bill."have different structures. Consider that the shortened forms "They ran up it." and"They ran it up." tell you which one you started with. This second form"run up" is known in our system as a VT07, meaning transitive verb of the 7th type (there are at least 22 types of transitive verbs in all).
Here are some other examples of that one form:
We ran it down (and then let it go)
We ran the points off.
We ran him out. (with tar and feathers)
We ran it over. (to the church office)
We ran it through. (I hate blood).
We ran it up. (the bill, again)
They took it away.
They took it back.
They took it down.
They took it in.
They took it off.
They took it on.
They took it out.
They took it over.
They took it up.
Why not make it out?
Why not make it over?
Why not make it up?
Why not make it over into a stew? ("make over into" -- a different subtype of VT07)
Why not make it over to the bank?
Why not make it up to him?
Why not make him up with paint?
For "They took it in", how many VT07 meanings can you think of?
There are details aplenty to quibble about or expand upon, but it's a pretty cool language, don't you think?
Veterans' Day in perspective
THIS WAS WRITTEN A LONG TIME AGO, NOVEMBER OF 2005
I think it is right to remember veterans and the sacrifice they have made, and right to honor them. Yet I do feel some ambivalence. We have not one but two holidays honoring our soldiers, Memorial Day and Veterans' Day. I myself have lost track of just why we have two. My best reconstruction is that Memorial Day is honoring those who died in battle while Veterans' Day is honoring them whether or not they died that way or whether they have died yet, but it seems like a pretty fine distinction to warrant separate holidays. There are definite military overtones to Independence Day as well. (There is one holiday we now have in honor of nonviolent resistance to oppression, Martin Luther King Day, though that is not its only meaning and perhaps not its primary one.)
Fundamentally these are holidays celebrating not just our soldiers but most definitely our soldiers. They are national holidays. I am proud of my country in the grand scheme of things, but on the whole I am least proud of our wars, and mostly ashamed.
Where is the holiday honoring the foreign soldiers who have died fighting against us? Where is the holiday honoring civilian victims of war? (We in the US are fortunate to have had very few such victims, as we have not had any wars on our territory since 1865, and even then I believe the civilian victims were few.) Surely one can think of a great many more causes and groups to honor with holidays. They may all have them, in fact, but to have a big time holiday in your honor people have to get off from work.
Of course by holidays I am speaking of national holidays, and that assumption is a reflection of the fact that our primary identity these days is with our nation, and not state or city (go, Newton!). ButI like to think of myself as a citizen of the world first, one who happens to be an American.
General goodwill aside, there is also a practical side for any nation in honoring its veterans. It creates a culture where people are more likely to join the armed forces. If you know that people will honor you with holidays and by putting your name on plaques, offering to die for your country is more appealing. It's worth reflecting that in honoring today's veterans we are encouraging others to become veterans in turn.
I think we mostly assume that a soldier who joins the military is taking an honorable step, and what the nation chooses to use the military for is not the ethical responsibility of the soldier. We don't expect them to understand the nuances of foreign policy. Yet at times I think we could. If someone chose to join the US Army in 1972, when the wisdom and morality of the Vietnam war was being hotly debated, I think it's reasonable not to honor that person's service but perhaps even to hold it against them. A draftee from the late Vietnam era deserves respect, and a volunteer who joined out of economic necessity can be given the benefit of the doubt. Applying these standards to a different time and place, I would suggest that a volunteer in Hitler's army (certainly after it became clear what he was going to use it for) does not deserve our respect, but perhaps the draftees in his army do.
It's hard to know just how to apply these standards to today's world. We hear reports of soldiers in Iraq who are demoralized to find themselves risking their lives to defend people who don't want them to be there. I offer them my deepest sympathy. When they joined they didn't know they would fight in this Iraq war. Yet I think we should urge those thinking of joining the military to do a little research on what the US army has been doing these past few decades, and join with their eyes open.
Yet, to return to the beginning, I do think we are right to honor our veterans for their sacrifice. But perhaps also to consider it in perspective.
I think it is right to remember veterans and the sacrifice they have made, and right to honor them. Yet I do feel some ambivalence. We have not one but two holidays honoring our soldiers, Memorial Day and Veterans' Day. I myself have lost track of just why we have two. My best reconstruction is that Memorial Day is honoring those who died in battle while Veterans' Day is honoring them whether or not they died that way or whether they have died yet, but it seems like a pretty fine distinction to warrant separate holidays. There are definite military overtones to Independence Day as well. (There is one holiday we now have in honor of nonviolent resistance to oppression, Martin Luther King Day, though that is not its only meaning and perhaps not its primary one.)
Fundamentally these are holidays celebrating not just our soldiers but most definitely our soldiers. They are national holidays. I am proud of my country in the grand scheme of things, but on the whole I am least proud of our wars, and mostly ashamed.
Where is the holiday honoring the foreign soldiers who have died fighting against us? Where is the holiday honoring civilian victims of war? (We in the US are fortunate to have had very few such victims, as we have not had any wars on our territory since 1865, and even then I believe the civilian victims were few.) Surely one can think of a great many more causes and groups to honor with holidays. They may all have them, in fact, but to have a big time holiday in your honor people have to get off from work.
Of course by holidays I am speaking of national holidays, and that assumption is a reflection of the fact that our primary identity these days is with our nation, and not state or city (go, Newton!). ButI like to think of myself as a citizen of the world first, one who happens to be an American.
General goodwill aside, there is also a practical side for any nation in honoring its veterans. It creates a culture where people are more likely to join the armed forces. If you know that people will honor you with holidays and by putting your name on plaques, offering to die for your country is more appealing. It's worth reflecting that in honoring today's veterans we are encouraging others to become veterans in turn.
I think we mostly assume that a soldier who joins the military is taking an honorable step, and what the nation chooses to use the military for is not the ethical responsibility of the soldier. We don't expect them to understand the nuances of foreign policy. Yet at times I think we could. If someone chose to join the US Army in 1972, when the wisdom and morality of the Vietnam war was being hotly debated, I think it's reasonable not to honor that person's service but perhaps even to hold it against them. A draftee from the late Vietnam era deserves respect, and a volunteer who joined out of economic necessity can be given the benefit of the doubt. Applying these standards to a different time and place, I would suggest that a volunteer in Hitler's army (certainly after it became clear what he was going to use it for) does not deserve our respect, but perhaps the draftees in his army do.
It's hard to know just how to apply these standards to today's world. We hear reports of soldiers in Iraq who are demoralized to find themselves risking their lives to defend people who don't want them to be there. I offer them my deepest sympathy. When they joined they didn't know they would fight in this Iraq war. Yet I think we should urge those thinking of joining the military to do a little research on what the US army has been doing these past few decades, and join with their eyes open.
Yet, to return to the beginning, I do think we are right to honor our veterans for their sacrifice. But perhaps also to consider it in perspective.
"You know you're from Boston when..." deconstructed
THIS WAS WRITTEN A LONG TIME AGO, OCTOBER of 2005
Let me apply my analysis skills to a momentous problem, the structure of this list of things that people from Massachusetts will "get".
"You know your from massachussetts when..."
I suppose that knowing how to spell the name of the commonwealth isn't that common anywhere, but it would seem it's more common around here.
I propose dividing the propositions into classes:
Class A:
1.You think crosswalks are for wimps
3. You know how to cross four lanes of traffic in five seconds
5. You think it's not actually tailgating unless you're touching the bumper of the car in front of you
6. You know that a yellow light means that at least five more people can get through and a red one means two more can
12. You believe using your turn signals gives away your plan to the enemy
14. Someone has honked at you because you didn't peel out the second the light turned green
15. You have honked at someone because they didn't peel out the second the light turned green
16. All the potholes just add to the excitement of driving.
17. Stop signs mean slow down a little, but only if you want to.
23. The person in front of you is going 70 MPH and you're cursing them for going too slow
27. You've slammed on your brakes to deter a tailgater.
32. You've pulled out of a side street and used your car to block oncoming traffic so you can make a left
38. You feel the rest of the world needs to drive more like you
49. You almost feel disappointed when someone doesn't flip you off when you cut them off or steal their parking space
Class A might apply (figuratively, mostly) in any large urban area where traffic is intense. It's not really that much worse in Boston, is it? Maybe traffic difficulties are the product of chaotic patterns (Boston is high) and overall population (Boston is just an average urban area).
Class B
2. You think if someone is nice to you that they either want something, or they are from out of town and lost
4. You're amazed when traveling out of town that people at McDonalds actually speak english
8. You could own a small town in Iowa for the cost of your house
10. There are 24 Dunkin Donuts shops within 15 minutes of your house
30. You know at least three Tony's, one Vinnie, and a Frank
31. Paranoia sets in when you can't see an ATM or CVS
Class B could apply to just about any city as viewed from the rural or small-town perspective.
Class C
9. Subway is a fast food place
22. You can go from one side of town to the other in less than fifteen minutes and see at least fifteen losers you went to high school with doing the same thing they were doing when you saw them last
Class C would apply to a smaller city as viewed from (9) New York, or a very few other cities, or (22) any city or area with fewer neighborhood roots.
Class D:
18. Six inches of snow is considered a dusting.
19. Three days of 90 degree heat is definitely a "heat wave" and 63 degrees is "a little on the warm side"
29. You keep an ice scraper in your car all year round
Class D are true in a large variety of northern parts of the US as viewed from places farther south.
Class E
7. The transportation system is known as the "T"
11. When people talk about "The Curse Of The Bambino", you know what they're talking about, and believe it, too (well, at least you USED to)
13. If you stay on the same road long enough, it eventually has three different names.
20. You cringe everytime you hear some actor or actress imitate the "Boston Accent" on TV or in a movie...if you don't have it, then you're never going to get it, even if you were born here
24. You know how to pronounce towns like Worcester, Haverhill, and Cotuit
25. You know what they sell at a "packie"
26. You have never been to the Cheers bar
33. You've bragged about saving money at The Christmas Tree Shop
35. You can navigate a rotary without a problem
36. You have been to Fenway Park
37. You refer to the New York Yankees as the 'evil empire'
40. You use the words "wicked" and "good" in the same sentence
41. You know what a frappe is
42. Saint Patrticks Day is your second favorite holiday
43. You are proud to drink Sam Adams and think that the rest of the country owes Bostonians a thank you
44. You never say "Cape Cod"; you say "the cape"
45. You went to Old Sturbridge Village and Plymouth Plantation in elementary school
46. You can drive to the mountains and the ocean all in one day
48. You know the Mass Pike is some strange weather dividing line
Class E, really do arguably have something to do with being from Massachusetts -- but sometimes only Boston, and sometimes New England more broadly.
Class F
21. At the ice cream shop, you call chocolate sprinkles "jimmies".
28. You still try to order curly fries from Burger King
34. You know what a "regular coffee" is
39. When someone calls you a "masshole", you take it as a compliment
47. You have a special place in your heart for the Worcester Firefighters
Class F may resonate with people from Massachusetts, but they're news to me. My family has been hanging out around these parts since 1630 or 1640, though I myself grew up in southern New Hampshire.
Class G
50. You actually get all of these jokes, AND pass them on!
I suspect it *is* more likely someone will forward this list if they not only get them, but think all of them really do have to do with being from Massachusetts, which might often happen if they are not very well informed about how things are elsewhere.
There, didn't I do a good job of seeming ridiculously serious about something lighthearted?
Let me apply my analysis skills to a momentous problem, the structure of this list of things that people from Massachusetts will "get".
"You know your from massachussetts when..."
I suppose that knowing how to spell the name of the commonwealth isn't that common anywhere, but it would seem it's more common around here.
I propose dividing the propositions into classes:
Class A:
1.You think crosswalks are for wimps
3. You know how to cross four lanes of traffic in five seconds
5. You think it's not actually tailgating unless you're touching the bumper of the car in front of you
6. You know that a yellow light means that at least five more people can get through and a red one means two more can
12. You believe using your turn signals gives away your plan to the enemy
14. Someone has honked at you because you didn't peel out the second the light turned green
15. You have honked at someone because they didn't peel out the second the light turned green
16. All the potholes just add to the excitement of driving.
17. Stop signs mean slow down a little, but only if you want to.
23. The person in front of you is going 70 MPH and you're cursing them for going too slow
27. You've slammed on your brakes to deter a tailgater.
32. You've pulled out of a side street and used your car to block oncoming traffic so you can make a left
38. You feel the rest of the world needs to drive more like you
49. You almost feel disappointed when someone doesn't flip you off when you cut them off or steal their parking space
Class A might apply (figuratively, mostly) in any large urban area where traffic is intense. It's not really that much worse in Boston, is it? Maybe traffic difficulties are the product of chaotic patterns (Boston is high) and overall population (Boston is just an average urban area).
Class B
2. You think if someone is nice to you that they either want something, or they are from out of town and lost
4. You're amazed when traveling out of town that people at McDonalds actually speak english
8. You could own a small town in Iowa for the cost of your house
10. There are 24 Dunkin Donuts shops within 15 minutes of your house
30. You know at least three Tony's, one Vinnie, and a Frank
31. Paranoia sets in when you can't see an ATM or CVS
Class B could apply to just about any city as viewed from the rural or small-town perspective.
Class C
9. Subway is a fast food place
22. You can go from one side of town to the other in less than fifteen minutes and see at least fifteen losers you went to high school with doing the same thing they were doing when you saw them last
Class C would apply to a smaller city as viewed from (9) New York, or a very few other cities, or (22) any city or area with fewer neighborhood roots.
Class D:
18. Six inches of snow is considered a dusting.
19. Three days of 90 degree heat is definitely a "heat wave" and 63 degrees is "a little on the warm side"
29. You keep an ice scraper in your car all year round
Class D are true in a large variety of northern parts of the US as viewed from places farther south.
Class E
7. The transportation system is known as the "T"
11. When people talk about "The Curse Of The Bambino", you know what they're talking about, and believe it, too (well, at least you USED to)
13. If you stay on the same road long enough, it eventually has three different names.
20. You cringe everytime you hear some actor or actress imitate the "Boston Accent" on TV or in a movie...if you don't have it, then you're never going to get it, even if you were born here
24. You know how to pronounce towns like Worcester, Haverhill, and Cotuit
25. You know what they sell at a "packie"
26. You have never been to the Cheers bar
33. You've bragged about saving money at The Christmas Tree Shop
35. You can navigate a rotary without a problem
36. You have been to Fenway Park
37. You refer to the New York Yankees as the 'evil empire'
40. You use the words "wicked" and "good" in the same sentence
41. You know what a frappe is
42. Saint Patrticks Day is your second favorite holiday
43. You are proud to drink Sam Adams and think that the rest of the country owes Bostonians a thank you
44. You never say "Cape Cod"; you say "the cape"
45. You went to Old Sturbridge Village and Plymouth Plantation in elementary school
46. You can drive to the mountains and the ocean all in one day
48. You know the Mass Pike is some strange weather dividing line
Class E, really do arguably have something to do with being from Massachusetts -- but sometimes only Boston, and sometimes New England more broadly.
Class F
21. At the ice cream shop, you call chocolate sprinkles "jimmies".
28. You still try to order curly fries from Burger King
34. You know what a "regular coffee" is
39. When someone calls you a "masshole", you take it as a compliment
47. You have a special place in your heart for the Worcester Firefighters
Class F may resonate with people from Massachusetts, but they're news to me. My family has been hanging out around these parts since 1630 or 1640, though I myself grew up in southern New Hampshire.
Class G
50. You actually get all of these jokes, AND pass them on!
I suspect it *is* more likely someone will forward this list if they not only get them, but think all of them really do have to do with being from Massachusetts, which might often happen if they are not very well informed about how things are elsewhere.
There, didn't I do a good job of seeming ridiculously serious about something lighthearted?
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