This isn't the kind of post I'd normally make. What I'm trying to do, normally, is to share ideas I find interesting or puzzling, and perhaps provoke some discussion of them in the comments thread so as to get new and better insights. I may illustrate some of these ideas with personal anecdotes, or give a bit of personal background as to how I came to be thinking of them, but the posts themselves are not intended to be about me. They're about the ideas.
Yet I have noticed, particularly when I post about religious ideas, that some commenters feel the need to try to convert me to their religion. In the past I've had long religious discussions in email as a result of articles on my old web page, also aimed at convincing me to adopt this or that set of beliefs. I've also enjoyed my discussions with the Jehovah's Witnesses and other proselytizers who come to me door on occasion.
I do enjoy such discussions, but they're not always directly appropriate to the topic at hand. While it might well be true that if I believed this or that claim about the Gospels, I'd no longer care about the question posed in a blog post, the fact is that I am at the moment interested in the question, and so might any reader who took the time to read the original post.
So the purpose of this blog posting is to provide an appropriate comment thread in which to persuade me that I should accept the Bible as the literal Word of God, and of whatever it is that you might think follows from that claim. I don't mean to imply that people posting in this thread are unwelcome to contribute in other comment threads as well, but I do request that comments be related directly to the subject of the posting that starts the thread.
I suppose I should begin by giving my reasons for not currently accepting the Bible as the literal word of God. For one, there's a basic epistemic hurdle: the only basis I've seen for taking it as God's Word is that, well, other people have earnestly said it is, and I while I tend to trust people as being generally honest, I don't trust them never to be mistaken. True, there are some passages in the Scriptures that make some claims to divine authority, but those also suffer from a similar problem: just because someone claims to be speaking the Word of God doesn't mean he is. He could be lying, or sincere but deluded.
But another reason is that, in my reading of the Bible so far, most of the books do not claim to be divinely authoritative, and in many cases identify themselves as the works of identifiable mortal humans. Indeed, pretty much all of the New Testament consists of epistles from this or that disciple (Paul being the most voluminous) to various recipients, preaching about God but for the most part not claiming to be God. The Gospels, too, are presented as the testimonies of authors known as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and thus presumably represent the differing perspectives of individual humans on the events described within. And in the Old Testament, though tradition states that Moses himself wrote the Pentateuch, that seems unlikely, given that he dies before the end of Exodus, and no explanation is given as to how he'd be a reliable authority on the events of Genesis. (One might assume God told him, but that can only work to sustain the premise that the Bible is God's word; it cannot count as evidence for the premise.) Plus, having just finished Psalms and now slogging my way through Proverbs, I can't help but see a lot of this stuff as historical text written by people with political agendas (Solomon proposing to cut the baby in half as a veiled threat to tear apart the kingdom in a civil war, for example) and self-indulgent ego-fests like Mao's Little Red Book. (Seriously, Psalms seems like a collection of King David's Greatest Hits (and some not-so-great which no one would dare to call less than great), while Proverbs reads like Solomon sat down and scribbled out a couple of hundred, perhaps planning on selecting just the best for a small collection of pithy sayings, and some toadying yes-man of an editor told him, "Sire, they're ALL so good! I couldn't bear to cut a single one!" Even though an awful lot look like edits and re-edits of the same trite observation.)
So in other words, it really doesn't read like God wrote it. Not that I have any idea how God writes (though I'd kind of expect high standards), but I don't see anything about the style, structure or organization that sets the book apart from any other human creation. In short, it looks to me like exactly what you'd expect from a collection of ancient myths, historical/political texts (and a few straight attempts at narrative fiction, poetry and philosophy, like Job, Psalms, Proverbs and the Song of Solomon), combined with the newer quasi-historical accounts and evangelical letters of the New Testament, all arbitrarily selected by the Council of Nicea in accordance with the dominant religious agenda of the time. I see no compelling reason to see it as anything other than a human text, about God, perhaps, but not by God except in the same empty sense that everything else is as well.
That's how I see it, anyway. I hereby cordially invite any and all of you use the comments thread to persuade me why I should (or shouldn't) adopt a different view of the Bible.
Monday, 13 February 2012
Saturday, 11 February 2012
The Care and Feeding of Trolls
Trolls have been in online forums for as long as there have been online forums, and there are generally two types: the good and the bad. The good ones are more akin to satirists; they present an idea or a statement that is demonstrably false, but plausible, and do so in the spirit of play; people who clue into it are welcome to play along and share in the joke. The bad trolls, on the other hand, get their amusement by stirring up trouble with inflammatory posts, starting flamewars, and just generally seeing other people get worked up over nothing; the angrier people get, the happier the bad troll.
The conventional wisdom on how to deal with the latter type is simple: don't feed the trolls. The theory is sound; trolls are looking to provoke a reaction, so if you ignore them, they'll eventually get bored and go away. Personally, however, this is not my policy. I never feel comfortable with assuming someone is a troll, in part because I know there are real people out there who genuinely believe outrageous things, and so someone I dismiss as a troll could actually be sincere. Moreover, in a public forum, even if someone is trolling, it doesn't necessarily follow that everyone in the audience of lurkers recognizes that; there might be someone who might actually agree with what the troll says, and who therefore is in need of a healthy dialogue on the subject. So my policy has always been to take posts at face value, and not to concern myself with whether or not the person posting it actually believes it.
I first started consciously using this policy about 14 or 15 years ago, when I decided to put my money where my mouth was on the subject of free speech. (I've always argued that the solution to hate speech is not censorship, but vigorously debunking the hate speech. In other words, vaccination rather than quarantine.) I spent a few month arguing in the Usenet newsgroup alt.politics.white-power.
Now, I didn't have any illusions going into this. I didn't expect to convert any racists into champions of tolerance. I assumed that anyone actually arguing with me probably had made up their mind and would be at least as resistant to changing it as I was (and I've invested a fair bit into my anti-racist position, having not only entered into an interracial marriage but produced a healthy hybrid child by it). My purpose there was primarily for the lurkers, and those among them who might not have completely made up their minds.
That's why I adopted for myself some ground rules. I committed myself to always be as polite and respectful as possible, and to consider the ideas presented as fairly and rigorously as possible. I never wanted to leave a lurker wondering why I left some question unanswered, or worse, indirectly insulted them by saying that anyone who could believe such rubbish was an idiot. Calling people idiots (even if they are) doesn't really gain you much credibility or respect, and if anything, makes them more resistant to your arguments.
Of course, I have no idea how successful this approach was with the lurkers, since of course they're lurkers; I wouldn't likely hear from them if I made any difference. But I did enjoy a rather surprising indicator of success: several months after I retired from that particular arena, I got an email from one of the people who had been openly arguing with me in the newsgroup, thanking me for taking the time and being patient and respectful, and telling me that he'd come to see he had been wrong about the race thing. Admittedly, he wasn't one of the most hardcore and dogmatic there, but was immensely gratifying to have had a tangible effect. And I like to think that if my approach was effective enough for that, perhaps it helped a good number of lurkers, as well.
That's why I've chosen to use the same approach in dealing with trolls. Remember that for the most part, the bad trolls are trying to provoke a flamewar, so responding emotionally to inflammatory posts plays right into their hands. If you can't respond rationally, then of course it's best to ignore them, but if you can remain calm and logical, a polite and respectful response is often more effective. And it might even be useful to someone some day, googling for an answer to a question no one else seems to think it worth taking the time to answer.
So that's my policy on trolls. Except for the good ones, with whom I hope I'm clever enough to catch on and play along.
The conventional wisdom on how to deal with the latter type is simple: don't feed the trolls. The theory is sound; trolls are looking to provoke a reaction, so if you ignore them, they'll eventually get bored and go away. Personally, however, this is not my policy. I never feel comfortable with assuming someone is a troll, in part because I know there are real people out there who genuinely believe outrageous things, and so someone I dismiss as a troll could actually be sincere. Moreover, in a public forum, even if someone is trolling, it doesn't necessarily follow that everyone in the audience of lurkers recognizes that; there might be someone who might actually agree with what the troll says, and who therefore is in need of a healthy dialogue on the subject. So my policy has always been to take posts at face value, and not to concern myself with whether or not the person posting it actually believes it.
I first started consciously using this policy about 14 or 15 years ago, when I decided to put my money where my mouth was on the subject of free speech. (I've always argued that the solution to hate speech is not censorship, but vigorously debunking the hate speech. In other words, vaccination rather than quarantine.) I spent a few month arguing in the Usenet newsgroup alt.politics.white-power.
Now, I didn't have any illusions going into this. I didn't expect to convert any racists into champions of tolerance. I assumed that anyone actually arguing with me probably had made up their mind and would be at least as resistant to changing it as I was (and I've invested a fair bit into my anti-racist position, having not only entered into an interracial marriage but produced a healthy hybrid child by it). My purpose there was primarily for the lurkers, and those among them who might not have completely made up their minds.
That's why I adopted for myself some ground rules. I committed myself to always be as polite and respectful as possible, and to consider the ideas presented as fairly and rigorously as possible. I never wanted to leave a lurker wondering why I left some question unanswered, or worse, indirectly insulted them by saying that anyone who could believe such rubbish was an idiot. Calling people idiots (even if they are) doesn't really gain you much credibility or respect, and if anything, makes them more resistant to your arguments.
Of course, I have no idea how successful this approach was with the lurkers, since of course they're lurkers; I wouldn't likely hear from them if I made any difference. But I did enjoy a rather surprising indicator of success: several months after I retired from that particular arena, I got an email from one of the people who had been openly arguing with me in the newsgroup, thanking me for taking the time and being patient and respectful, and telling me that he'd come to see he had been wrong about the race thing. Admittedly, he wasn't one of the most hardcore and dogmatic there, but was immensely gratifying to have had a tangible effect. And I like to think that if my approach was effective enough for that, perhaps it helped a good number of lurkers, as well.
That's why I've chosen to use the same approach in dealing with trolls. Remember that for the most part, the bad trolls are trying to provoke a flamewar, so responding emotionally to inflammatory posts plays right into their hands. If you can't respond rationally, then of course it's best to ignore them, but if you can remain calm and logical, a polite and respectful response is often more effective. And it might even be useful to someone some day, googling for an answer to a question no one else seems to think it worth taking the time to answer.
So that's my policy on trolls. Except for the good ones, with whom I hope I'm clever enough to catch on and play along.
Friday, 10 February 2012
A Problem with "Because God Says So!" as a Basis for Morality
Atheism is often criticized by Christians on the grounds that it does not provide any basis for morality. To these Christians, morality is a matter of following God's commands, and if there's no God to give this guidance, to establish values, then how can there by any morality?
In return, atheists often pointed out that obeying the literal commands of God (assuming that the literal commands of God are in fact recorded in the Bible) leads to some pretty horrific results, particularly if you look at the Old Testament. Are we really expected to stone adulterers to death? How can that possibly be a moral thing to do?
One answer I've often heard is that most of that Old Testament stuff no longer applies. Most recently, a Christian friend of mind argued that Jesus fulfilled the Levitican commandments (including the commandment to stone adulterers, but also the many kosher rules still observed by Jews today), and so they no longer need to be followed.
Okay, so that gets us off the hook for having to follow those old rules, and maybe the only obligations remaining are the ones that we all can feel nice and warm about, the ones that make moral sense to us today because they're rooted in the general principle, "love thy neighbour". And that's how I used to feel about the argument, until just after my friend brought it to my attention again, when it suddenly occurred to me that this doctrine creates greater problems than it solves.
Consider what it means for people living before Jesus came along to fulfil the commandments. It means that in those days, God wanted us to stone adulterers, and consequently that it was not just culturally acceptable, but morally right to do so! Something which, today, we consider morally outrageous and barbaric -- partially burying a living human being and then throwing rocks at the exposed parts until the person dies -- was good and proper at some time in the past. The very nature of morality has apparently changed.
I find this argument rather shocking, especially coming from a tradition that condemns moral relativism. I, too, have little patience with people who look at the various cultural practices going on today in other parts of the world, such as female genital mutilation and, yes, stoning adulterers to death, and say we can't judge it to be wrong because it's a different culture. Wrong is wrong, and just because something is culturally accepted somewhere doesn't make it right. I rather think it would go without saying that this is true across time as well as across space; if it's wrong to stone adulterers today, then it was wrong yesterday and wrong three thousand years ago. Conversely, if it was right three thousand years ago, it should be right today.
It also seems to me to be far more damaging to the idea of biblical literalism than even young-earth creationism. After all, there is something to the creationist rebuttal to scientific claims about origins: "Were you there? Did you see any of this?" No, of course, I wasn't there, and didn't see what happened with my own eyes, and it is conceivable that things unfolded differently from what modern science has inferred from the evidence. But claims about moral principles are different. I may not know the circumstances of any particular act of ancient adultery, but don't need to have lived 3000 years ago to say with great confidence that it would generally be wrong to stone someone to death for adultery. Wrong is wrong, and fundamental moral principles do not change over time, although our understanding of them certainly does evolve. Slavery was always wrong; it just took us a while collectively to recognize that.
I don't see a way out here for the theory that God's commandments are definitive of morality, or at least not one that also preserves the biblical literalism so many Christians insist upon (and which I've criticized as idolatrous (typo corrected Feb 13, 2012: I originally wrote "adulterous" by mistake) in an earlier post. You could say that the fundamental principles of morality are given by God, but encoded into the fabric of reality like the laws of physics or mathematics, rather than accurately described in the Bible, and that ethical philosophers like Kant, Mill, Jesus, Lao Tzu and Confucius have been adding to our understanding over time. Or you could just bite the bullet and insist that yes, the principles of morality really did change drastically when Jesus fulfilled the Levitican commandments, in which case it becomes rather puzzling to consider how Confucius came up with his version of the Golden Rule back in the days when the Golden rule couldn't possibly have applied because it really was morally right to stone people to death, to slaughter the Canaanites, and so on.
In return, atheists often pointed out that obeying the literal commands of God (assuming that the literal commands of God are in fact recorded in the Bible) leads to some pretty horrific results, particularly if you look at the Old Testament. Are we really expected to stone adulterers to death? How can that possibly be a moral thing to do?
One answer I've often heard is that most of that Old Testament stuff no longer applies. Most recently, a Christian friend of mind argued that Jesus fulfilled the Levitican commandments (including the commandment to stone adulterers, but also the many kosher rules still observed by Jews today), and so they no longer need to be followed.
Okay, so that gets us off the hook for having to follow those old rules, and maybe the only obligations remaining are the ones that we all can feel nice and warm about, the ones that make moral sense to us today because they're rooted in the general principle, "love thy neighbour". And that's how I used to feel about the argument, until just after my friend brought it to my attention again, when it suddenly occurred to me that this doctrine creates greater problems than it solves.
Consider what it means for people living before Jesus came along to fulfil the commandments. It means that in those days, God wanted us to stone adulterers, and consequently that it was not just culturally acceptable, but morally right to do so! Something which, today, we consider morally outrageous and barbaric -- partially burying a living human being and then throwing rocks at the exposed parts until the person dies -- was good and proper at some time in the past. The very nature of morality has apparently changed.
I find this argument rather shocking, especially coming from a tradition that condemns moral relativism. I, too, have little patience with people who look at the various cultural practices going on today in other parts of the world, such as female genital mutilation and, yes, stoning adulterers to death, and say we can't judge it to be wrong because it's a different culture. Wrong is wrong, and just because something is culturally accepted somewhere doesn't make it right. I rather think it would go without saying that this is true across time as well as across space; if it's wrong to stone adulterers today, then it was wrong yesterday and wrong three thousand years ago. Conversely, if it was right three thousand years ago, it should be right today.
It also seems to me to be far more damaging to the idea of biblical literalism than even young-earth creationism. After all, there is something to the creationist rebuttal to scientific claims about origins: "Were you there? Did you see any of this?" No, of course, I wasn't there, and didn't see what happened with my own eyes, and it is conceivable that things unfolded differently from what modern science has inferred from the evidence. But claims about moral principles are different. I may not know the circumstances of any particular act of ancient adultery, but don't need to have lived 3000 years ago to say with great confidence that it would generally be wrong to stone someone to death for adultery. Wrong is wrong, and fundamental moral principles do not change over time, although our understanding of them certainly does evolve. Slavery was always wrong; it just took us a while collectively to recognize that.
I don't see a way out here for the theory that God's commandments are definitive of morality, or at least not one that also preserves the biblical literalism so many Christians insist upon (and which I've criticized as idolatrous (typo corrected Feb 13, 2012: I originally wrote "adulterous" by mistake) in an earlier post. You could say that the fundamental principles of morality are given by God, but encoded into the fabric of reality like the laws of physics or mathematics, rather than accurately described in the Bible, and that ethical philosophers like Kant, Mill, Jesus, Lao Tzu and Confucius have been adding to our understanding over time. Or you could just bite the bullet and insist that yes, the principles of morality really did change drastically when Jesus fulfilled the Levitican commandments, in which case it becomes rather puzzling to consider how Confucius came up with his version of the Golden Rule back in the days when the Golden rule couldn't possibly have applied because it really was morally right to stone people to death, to slaughter the Canaanites, and so on.
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Pro-Business versus Pro-Business: Mistaking Universals for Particulars
One of the ways in which our thoughts often seem to go astray is in the ambiguity of how we can use nouns in English. If I say, for example, "I believe in the rights of the individual to freedom of speech and belief," you might reasonably ask (particularly if you're not a native English speaker), "Which individual?"
Of course, that's a pretty obvious one, and just about everyone knows that in that kind of context, speaking of "the individual" really refers to all individuals. Yet I think that sometimes it's dangerously easy to slip into that trap, and to mistake the particular for the universal and vice versa.
In particular, I'm thinking of how often politicians fall into the trap of thinking that if they help a particular business or even a particular industry sector, they're "pro-business" in the abstract universal sense, rather than just being pro-that-business. I used to think, when I was younger and even more cynical, that it was simply corruption, that the politicians were deliberately helping their cronies and disingenuously proclaiming themselves as pro-business or pro-free-enterprise. But now I'm not so sure, and even if that is the case, I feel obliged in good faith to charitably assume it's a subtle (and corrigible) cognitive error, perhaps the very one I'm describing here.
It's not that far-fetched, after all. The arguments that implementing policies to benefit a particularly important employer in the community will create jobs and bring prosperity can be pretty persuasive, and may actually be true in many cases. It might well be the case sometimes that keeping a particular factory or mine open is in the general interest of a community. And so it can be very easy to slide into the ambiguity of thinking, without any deliberate corruption or cronyism, that being (generally) pro-business actually means helping out particular companies or businesses, even awarding them monopolies at the expense of other businesses.
Of course, that's not what it means at all, or it's not what it is supposed to mean. Being pro-business in terms of policy means fostering an environment in which businesses generally can flourish, not simply where one particular business is better off. But I can understand, now, how one could make that honest mistake.
It's even easier to make that mistake when a well-organized business interest lobbies for some concession or handout and manages to present itself as representing the entire industry, or a majority of the community. This is a common tactic whenever a professional sports team asks for a new stadium; they play up how popular it'll be with all the sports fans (and of course every respectable politician is a loyal fan of the home team, right?) and how many jobs will be created and how local businesses will benefit. It's not always true, but it gets a lot of momentum and it becomes hard to challenge the conventional wisdom established: new arena = boost to local business generally.
I think we're seeing the same thing right now with the music and film recording industries, and their aggressive lobbying for reforms to copyright law. They present themselves as representing artists, and of course it's true they do represent some artists, but by no means all and in fact, only a rather tiny minority of artists, generally those who have enjoyed some degree of commercial success. Those who don't have a contract with a label, or roles in Hollywood establishment films, are simply not included.
Here's an example of how measures intended to help "artists" can end up harming artists. Years ago, when I was in a garage band, we set out to make a demo tape. (In those days, the late 80's or so, we actually used tape.) Since we were going to be renting a high-quality reel-to-reel unit, rather than an ordinary old cassette, we had to go buy a proper reel of tape for it. We were a little surprised to discover that there was a surtax to be paid on such recording media, to go towards paying royalties to the established artists whose work would presumably be pirated onto some of the recording media sold.
Now, think about that for a moment. I'm not insensitive to the plight of recording artists who lose sales of their music to piracy, but look who was paying for it! Here we were, wanting to record our own performance of our own original compositions, and we were being forced to pay good money to musicians (or perhaps more accurately, their recording companies) who were already established and commercially successful. It was a regressive tax that rewarded established musicians for their past success, while discouraging new creative talent from even getting started.
Yet I don't doubt for a minute that the politicians who passed that law sincerely felt that they were really helping artists generally, even though they were helping some particular artists at the expense of a great many more. And they were able to think that, in part, because our language has an inherent ambiguity between particulars and universals: "the artist" can mean "this artist" or "all artists", just as "the individual" or "business" can be arbitrarily extended or narrowed by context.
So, I suppose, the point of today's sermon is this: Be wary whenever someone (including you) speaks in apparent generalities, and if there's any doubt, insist on clarification. Are you really talking about all artists, or all businesses, or all citizens, or only a particular subset? It's okay to speak for just the subset, of course, but just be clear about it.
Of course, that's a pretty obvious one, and just about everyone knows that in that kind of context, speaking of "the individual" really refers to all individuals. Yet I think that sometimes it's dangerously easy to slip into that trap, and to mistake the particular for the universal and vice versa.
In particular, I'm thinking of how often politicians fall into the trap of thinking that if they help a particular business or even a particular industry sector, they're "pro-business" in the abstract universal sense, rather than just being pro-that-business. I used to think, when I was younger and even more cynical, that it was simply corruption, that the politicians were deliberately helping their cronies and disingenuously proclaiming themselves as pro-business or pro-free-enterprise. But now I'm not so sure, and even if that is the case, I feel obliged in good faith to charitably assume it's a subtle (and corrigible) cognitive error, perhaps the very one I'm describing here.
It's not that far-fetched, after all. The arguments that implementing policies to benefit a particularly important employer in the community will create jobs and bring prosperity can be pretty persuasive, and may actually be true in many cases. It might well be the case sometimes that keeping a particular factory or mine open is in the general interest of a community. And so it can be very easy to slide into the ambiguity of thinking, without any deliberate corruption or cronyism, that being (generally) pro-business actually means helping out particular companies or businesses, even awarding them monopolies at the expense of other businesses.
Of course, that's not what it means at all, or it's not what it is supposed to mean. Being pro-business in terms of policy means fostering an environment in which businesses generally can flourish, not simply where one particular business is better off. But I can understand, now, how one could make that honest mistake.
It's even easier to make that mistake when a well-organized business interest lobbies for some concession or handout and manages to present itself as representing the entire industry, or a majority of the community. This is a common tactic whenever a professional sports team asks for a new stadium; they play up how popular it'll be with all the sports fans (and of course every respectable politician is a loyal fan of the home team, right?) and how many jobs will be created and how local businesses will benefit. It's not always true, but it gets a lot of momentum and it becomes hard to challenge the conventional wisdom established: new arena = boost to local business generally.
I think we're seeing the same thing right now with the music and film recording industries, and their aggressive lobbying for reforms to copyright law. They present themselves as representing artists, and of course it's true they do represent some artists, but by no means all and in fact, only a rather tiny minority of artists, generally those who have enjoyed some degree of commercial success. Those who don't have a contract with a label, or roles in Hollywood establishment films, are simply not included.
Here's an example of how measures intended to help "artists" can end up harming artists. Years ago, when I was in a garage band, we set out to make a demo tape. (In those days, the late 80's or so, we actually used tape.) Since we were going to be renting a high-quality reel-to-reel unit, rather than an ordinary old cassette, we had to go buy a proper reel of tape for it. We were a little surprised to discover that there was a surtax to be paid on such recording media, to go towards paying royalties to the established artists whose work would presumably be pirated onto some of the recording media sold.
Now, think about that for a moment. I'm not insensitive to the plight of recording artists who lose sales of their music to piracy, but look who was paying for it! Here we were, wanting to record our own performance of our own original compositions, and we were being forced to pay good money to musicians (or perhaps more accurately, their recording companies) who were already established and commercially successful. It was a regressive tax that rewarded established musicians for their past success, while discouraging new creative talent from even getting started.
Yet I don't doubt for a minute that the politicians who passed that law sincerely felt that they were really helping artists generally, even though they were helping some particular artists at the expense of a great many more. And they were able to think that, in part, because our language has an inherent ambiguity between particulars and universals: "the artist" can mean "this artist" or "all artists", just as "the individual" or "business" can be arbitrarily extended or narrowed by context.
So, I suppose, the point of today's sermon is this: Be wary whenever someone (including you) speaks in apparent generalities, and if there's any doubt, insist on clarification. Are you really talking about all artists, or all businesses, or all citizens, or only a particular subset? It's okay to speak for just the subset, of course, but just be clear about it.
Monday, 6 February 2012
The Paradox of Unemployment
I have always found something a little bit paradoxical about the whole issue of unemployment. When unemployment is high, we often say there's no work available. This is a problem, of course, because without work, the unemployed cannot earn the money needed for food, shelter, clothing and so forth. Therein lies the paradox, because it seems to me that if there are people without adequate food, clothing and shelter, there's work to be done: people to feed, clothe and shelter.
So the problem isn't really unemployment itself; if there were really no work to be done, then we'd all have cause to celebrate, relax, engage in leisure activities and so forth. Rather, unemployment is a market problem; no one is willing or able to pay for the work that needs to be done. Or more generally, it's a distortion introduced by a market system that only measures value in certain ways.
Let me be clear: I'm not condemning free market capitalism here. Any economic system involving more than one participant will introduce some kind of market distortion, and the overall gains in productivity and general welfare that accrue from free markets usually outweigh the costs of the distortions, often by a huge margin. But it does seem obvious that we can make our system better in various ways, some of which I expect I'll talk about in future posts.
Talking about unemployment is further complicated, though, by some unconscious biases associated with the work ethic, which made perfect sense in a time when communities desperately needed every available hand to help out bringing in the harvest, threshing the grain, and with countless other tasks that needed to be done to ensure people wouldn't starve that winter. It was entirely appropriate to condemn idleness, when there was so much work to be done. And, to be sure, laziness is still properly considered a vice (of which I am dreadfully guilty).
This attitude, condemning idleness as a moral failing, is rather misplaced in our current economy, and I suspect it gets in the way somewhat when we try to think about solutions, because it attaches a stigma to unemployment that is inconsistent with the economic reality. We just don't need everyone to help out with the harvest anymore to ensure that no one starves this winter. And as the enormous growth in the labour-efficiency of agriculture spreads to manufacturing and other industries, it's actually possible in principle to support the entire population at a reasonably high standard of living on the labour of a relatively small number of people. So the historical reason for condemning idleness is now irrelevant.
That's not to say I believe a few people should support the rest of us, free of charge. That would be unfair to the few working, and bad for the freeloaders' psychological health as well. However, there's clearly something wrong when large numbers of people have only their labour to sell, and no one's buying.
So the problem isn't really unemployment itself; if there were really no work to be done, then we'd all have cause to celebrate, relax, engage in leisure activities and so forth. Rather, unemployment is a market problem; no one is willing or able to pay for the work that needs to be done. Or more generally, it's a distortion introduced by a market system that only measures value in certain ways.
Let me be clear: I'm not condemning free market capitalism here. Any economic system involving more than one participant will introduce some kind of market distortion, and the overall gains in productivity and general welfare that accrue from free markets usually outweigh the costs of the distortions, often by a huge margin. But it does seem obvious that we can make our system better in various ways, some of which I expect I'll talk about in future posts.
Talking about unemployment is further complicated, though, by some unconscious biases associated with the work ethic, which made perfect sense in a time when communities desperately needed every available hand to help out bringing in the harvest, threshing the grain, and with countless other tasks that needed to be done to ensure people wouldn't starve that winter. It was entirely appropriate to condemn idleness, when there was so much work to be done. And, to be sure, laziness is still properly considered a vice (of which I am dreadfully guilty).
This attitude, condemning idleness as a moral failing, is rather misplaced in our current economy, and I suspect it gets in the way somewhat when we try to think about solutions, because it attaches a stigma to unemployment that is inconsistent with the economic reality. We just don't need everyone to help out with the harvest anymore to ensure that no one starves this winter. And as the enormous growth in the labour-efficiency of agriculture spreads to manufacturing and other industries, it's actually possible in principle to support the entire population at a reasonably high standard of living on the labour of a relatively small number of people. So the historical reason for condemning idleness is now irrelevant.
That's not to say I believe a few people should support the rest of us, free of charge. That would be unfair to the few working, and bad for the freeloaders' psychological health as well. However, there's clearly something wrong when large numbers of people have only their labour to sell, and no one's buying.
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
Evolution of the Soul
Why is it that almost every human culture has some notion of a soul? I don't necessarily mean the idea of an immortal soul that persists after death, but some kind of spirit or essence of self which is distinct from the body. There must be some reason for the near ubiquity of such a concept, and I am inclined to suspect an evolutionary survival benefit.
Years ago, when I was at graduate school, a confluence of three experiences got me to thinking about this. The most significant was the death of my grandfather. When my wife and I arrived at the airport and met my sisters and mother, they recounted having gone to view the body earlier that day, and I was struck by how each of them remarked that it wasn't really him. That is, it was clearly his body, but he wasn't there.
Within a few weeks of this, I was driving to pick up my wife after her night shift at work at the hospital, when I spotted three pigeons in the road in front of me, two of them dead. Fortunately, at 5 in the morning, there was virtually no traffic, so I slowed down to give the one live pigeon the opportunity to get out of the way. It seemed reluctant to leave its companions, however, and took a few moments to decide. At last it hopped up onto the curb, and I was able to proceed, my tires missing the fallen fowl by a healthy margin.
Almost the next evening, I recall watching a nature documentary on TV in which a gnu had just delivered a stillborn calf, attracting the attention of some hyenas. The mother gnu valiantly protected her calf through the whole night, while the hyenas waited with evident patience. At last, the mother gave up and left, and the hyenas ate.
The pigeon and the gnu I thought about for some time after that. It was kind of touching how the pigeon didn't want to abandon its friends, and the gnu's predicament was absolutely heartbreaking. Although I was not a parent yet myself, I could certainly identify with her, and could scarcely imagine a circumstance in which I would abandon my own child to hyenas.
And that's kind of when it struck me, reflecting on my grandfather's funeral and the viewing of the body. He wasn't there, in his body. There was no imaginable circumstance in which we would willingly cremate or bury my grandfather, but this was just a lifeless body, not him.
And so I suspect that we (and probably other species) have evolved a tendency to combine a number of sensory factors (things like temperature, movement, breathing, a pulse, and the like) into a kind of holistic sense of the presence or even identity of a person, distinct from the body itself. Something that would allow us to abandon our dead to the hyenas, without seriously compromising our powerful instinct to protect our living kin. We would not abandon our kin just because they had been injured or lost some simple tangible property, like a pulse; we'd need to be able to believe that they no longer inhabited the body, that they were no longer the person we cared about. Hence, something like a soul, a spirit, an intangible essence that we nonetheless feel we sense through all the tangible vital signs.
This doesn't mean we have a soul, of course. (Nor does it necessarily mean we don't.) It's simply an account of why all human cultures would have some kind of related concept, and incidentally a response to the common argument that we must have souls because every human culture believes in them independently.
Years ago, when I was at graduate school, a confluence of three experiences got me to thinking about this. The most significant was the death of my grandfather. When my wife and I arrived at the airport and met my sisters and mother, they recounted having gone to view the body earlier that day, and I was struck by how each of them remarked that it wasn't really him. That is, it was clearly his body, but he wasn't there.
Within a few weeks of this, I was driving to pick up my wife after her night shift at work at the hospital, when I spotted three pigeons in the road in front of me, two of them dead. Fortunately, at 5 in the morning, there was virtually no traffic, so I slowed down to give the one live pigeon the opportunity to get out of the way. It seemed reluctant to leave its companions, however, and took a few moments to decide. At last it hopped up onto the curb, and I was able to proceed, my tires missing the fallen fowl by a healthy margin.
Almost the next evening, I recall watching a nature documentary on TV in which a gnu had just delivered a stillborn calf, attracting the attention of some hyenas. The mother gnu valiantly protected her calf through the whole night, while the hyenas waited with evident patience. At last, the mother gave up and left, and the hyenas ate.
The pigeon and the gnu I thought about for some time after that. It was kind of touching how the pigeon didn't want to abandon its friends, and the gnu's predicament was absolutely heartbreaking. Although I was not a parent yet myself, I could certainly identify with her, and could scarcely imagine a circumstance in which I would abandon my own child to hyenas.
And that's kind of when it struck me, reflecting on my grandfather's funeral and the viewing of the body. He wasn't there, in his body. There was no imaginable circumstance in which we would willingly cremate or bury my grandfather, but this was just a lifeless body, not him.
And so I suspect that we (and probably other species) have evolved a tendency to combine a number of sensory factors (things like temperature, movement, breathing, a pulse, and the like) into a kind of holistic sense of the presence or even identity of a person, distinct from the body itself. Something that would allow us to abandon our dead to the hyenas, without seriously compromising our powerful instinct to protect our living kin. We would not abandon our kin just because they had been injured or lost some simple tangible property, like a pulse; we'd need to be able to believe that they no longer inhabited the body, that they were no longer the person we cared about. Hence, something like a soul, a spirit, an intangible essence that we nonetheless feel we sense through all the tangible vital signs.
This doesn't mean we have a soul, of course. (Nor does it necessarily mean we don't.) It's simply an account of why all human cultures would have some kind of related concept, and incidentally a response to the common argument that we must have souls because every human culture believes in them independently.
Saturday, 28 January 2012
Living with Uncertainty: Knowing versus Understanding
My last post, in which I argue against taking religious scriptures as ultimately authoritative, has got me to thinking about why some people cling so tenaciously to the Bible, and I think it has to do with the grave discomfort some people have about uncertainty. The other thing that's got me thinking along these lines, of course, is my chemotherapy: I've just (as of this writing) begun round 11 of a 12-round regimen, and I'm struggling with trying to decide whether or not to go ahead with round 12. Struggling, because I have virtually no useful data upon which to base my decision.
A little bit of medical background. After my surgery (they took a section of my colon out, which contained a golf-ball-sized tumor), I was told that with no further action, there was a 50% chance that in five years I'd be cancer free, but with the best chemo regimen they had, it would be 70%. Now, my gut feeling (with admittedly less gut than before) is that I'm already on a favourable region of that bell curve; I figure the odds of them having got out all the cancer were better than 50%. Still, even if there's only a 30% chance I have a couple of treasonous lymph nodes plotting my demise, I figured it was worth going ahead to improve my odds.
I was aware, of course, that it's ONLY a matter of improving my odds, not a guarantee. I'm quite familiar with uncertainty, and as a philosopher quite comfortable with it, for the most part. However, I really do wonder if it's worth having all 12 rounds of the therapy. If I've already had ten, what's the marginal benefit of rounds 11 and 12? I know with a high degree of confidence that the side effects will continue to get worse; they've been very consistently cumulative so far, with each round being a bit more unpleasant than the one before it, but I have no idea how important round 12 is to the overall likelihood of success for the treatment. And the doctors can't tell me, either, because there really haven't been any studies on it. (Although talking to my oncologist today, I learned that such a study is underway, and it does seem that more of the benefits of the treatment come from the first six rounds than from the last six. But we just don't know how much.)
So really, all I have to go on is a bunch of guesswork, possibly tainted by wishful thinking. I just have no idea at all if I should go ahead with round 12 or not, and it's very difficult and very frustrating to make a decision when I have so little data to work with.
And so I also begin to have some sympathy for those who long for the illusory certainty offered by the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy. How much more comfortable to just know something as absolutely true, and not have to worry about being wrong! Especially so when being wrong might have such catastrophic consequences as eternal damnation.
But this is wrong on several counts. I'm not going to get into all the evidence that suggests the Bible is a document fallibly written, transcribed, translated, edited and redacted by ordinary mortal humans. (I don't believe it's impious with respect to God to be doubtful of the fallibility -- and the claims of infallibility -- of one's fellow mortals, even if they are called prophets.)
The most crucial way in which it is wrong to cling to certainty via the Bible is the inescapability of human fallibility, which I like to think of as like Original Sin, except that it can't really be washed away. We can be wrong, and it feels exactly like being right. Even if we accept that holy scriptures are divinely authoritative, there's no escaping the weak link: our interpretation thereof. We just cannot know that we've interpreted it correctly, and the fact that so many religious sects actively and passionately disagree over doctrine, each fervently believing they've got it right, shows vividly that we are prone to error even about divinely revealed truth: at least one party must be mistaken. Yet each party is steadfastly convinced it's the other.
One of the most important virtues, perhaps the most important, is humility, the recognition of one's own fallibility, or to put it another way, the recognition that we are not Gods. The call to Christianity (or Islam, for that matter) is not a call to be comfortable, but a call to struggle valiantly against the adversities of this world, one of which is the overwhelming uncertainty the confronts every thinking being. You can be wrong about everything you believe, and that's a darned scary thought. There is no cheat sheet, no solidly reliable answer key to refer to, no way to be sure of anything.
So how do we survive and thrive in this sea of uncertainty? I think the problem is this desire we have for knowledge. I have found it useful to seek understanding instead of knowledge. Knowledge is concerned with an unattainable standard of certainty, while understanding is much more practical. I can understand that, given premises about the definitions of numbers and addition and equality, 2+2=4, without committing myself to the truth of those definitions, or that they necessarily apply to anything in the "real" world. I can understand the world better by adopting the theories of science, without committing myself to the belief that the world isn't just a big virtual reality designed to give the illusion of an ancient, evolved Earth.
And so while it is frustrating to have so little data upon which to decide whether or not to continue with my chemotherapy, I am at least free of the worry that I might make the "wrong" decision. I will try to make the best decision I can, based on my understanding of the situation at the time, and if it turns out to have unpleasant consequences, well, too bad. Sometimes even good decisions lead to bad consequence. I have accepted and embraced the inescapable uncertainty of life, and that probabilities are pretty much all we've got. There are no guarantees, and we have to live -- and die -- with that. That's why we need virtues like courage and humility and yes, a certain kind of faith.
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