Crises, Real and Manufactured
While I’m busy blogging the Tibet crisis on the other blog, see Pastor Dan on the Jeremiah Wright/Barack Obama flap.
March 15, 2008
Spotlight
February 28, 2008
IRS Investigates Obama’s Church
At the Washington Post’s “On Faith” site, The Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite writes,
The Internal Revenue Service has notified the United Church of Christ that the IRS has opened an investigation into Senator Barack Obama’s address at the UCC’s 2007 General Synod. The IRS is accusing the UCC of engaging in “political activities.”
I believe the “political activities” are on the other foot. The UCC General Synod was in June of 2007, celebrating that denomination’s 50th Anniversary. It is only now fully nine months later, when Senator Obama has become the front-runner in the race for President, that this investigation is launched. Further, the IRS did not contact the UCC or communicate with them while coming to this decision.
I was present when Senator Obama gave this speech at General Synod (along with 10,000 of my closest church friends and neighbors). There were no campaign buttons, signs, electioneering or other such politically related activities. Indeed, the UCC leadership took care to instruct the assembled about the fact that this was a faith event and we were welcoming a member of our church to talk to us about his personal faith in the public square.
John Wilson writes at Huffington Post:
The national United Church of Christ is under attack from the IRS, the AP reports, because the church invited one of its members, Barack Obama, to speak at the church’s national conference last summer. The invitation came before Obama had decided to run for president. What’s at stake here is not just religious freedom, but the freedom of speech of all nonprofit groups. The danger is that when nonprofit groups are silenced, corporate America will be able to dominate even more thoroughly the public debate.
The IRS letter to the United Church of Christ is particularly disturbing, threatening to revoke the church’s tax-exempt status. The sole basis for the letter is that Obama gave a June 23, 2007 speech to the church’s members (he was invited before he decided to run for president), and Obama campaign staffers had tables outside the building promoting him. Inside the building, the church actually banned all Obama signs and literature, and announced that it was not a campaign speech.
If this rule is taken literally, it might ban all politicians from speaking at any nonprofit location.
He wasn’t even officially running for President yet. Please. This is nothing but political harassment.
Spotlight
February 26, 2008
Religion News
Being a bit burned out by the elections and nefarious Bushie plots, I searched for something else to write about and found an interview in Salon of the ever-dreary Amy Sullivan. Amy is once again lecturing us that white evangelicals might vote for Democrats if only Democrats could learn to talk about abortion correctly.
I don’t like the [pro-choice] label. I guess the reason I wrote about abortion the way I did in the book is because I have serious moral concerns about abortion, but I don’t believe that it should be illegal. And that puts me in the vast majority of Americans. But unfortunately, there’s no label for us.
If you don’t believe abortion should be illegal, the standard label for you is “pro-choice.” And wouldn’t it be nice if someone who gets as much attention on the abortion issue as Amy Sullivan actually had a bleeping clue what she was talking about.
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Also at Salon, former evangelical John Marks predicts that more white evangelicals will be voting for Democrats in the future, anyway. Marks told interviewer Louis Bayard,
When George W. Bush came along, there were a number of issues — gay marriage, repeal of sodomy laws, the Ten Commandments on the courthouse — all those issues allowed activists to go to pastors and say, “Look, this is coming right into your own backyard. These new laws are going to change your world, and they’re going to lay the groundwork for the America your children will inherit. So either you vote or you let the country go and you lose your place it.”
It was a moment of both political awakening and political naiveté. Because all of a sudden there was a sense of power that the evangelists could have as one bloc. But then they began to look at what they got for their vote, and they began to look more closely at the policies of the president that they had rallied behind.
The war didn’t turn out well, and that had been seen, in some quarters, as an ordained venture. People said, “If we’re really going to look at the Bible and Jesus as a model for our political involvement, what are we talking about? Christ never talks about homosexuality and talks a great deal about poverty. What about that?” Rick Warren, the most influential evangelist in America right now, is talking about AIDS in Africa. That has to do with a whole different part of the teachings of Christ.
We’ll see.
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I want to give a shout out to my brother About.com Guide Austin Cline, who covers the agnosticism/atheism beat. He has an article up on “Barack Obama’s Religious Beliefs & Background” that I think, praised be, is accurate and unbiased. Wow.
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Yesterday the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a survey that said nearly half of American adults leave the “faith tradition” they were raised in to either join another religion or drop out of organized religion altogether.
Some of this is old news. The old “mainline” Protestant congregations continue to shrink, while the membership of non-denominational churches and the ranks of the unaffiliated continue to grow.
This is new: The unaffiliated — people who say they are religious but don’t claim allegiance to any particular institution or tradition — are now the fourth largest religious group in America.
Also, from the report:
Groups that have experienced a net loss from changes in affiliation include Baptists (net loss of 3.7 percentage points) and Methodists (2.1 percentage points). However, the group that has experienced the greatest net loss by far is the Catholic Church. Overall, 31.4% of U.S. adults say that they were raised Catholic. Today, however, only 23.9% of adults identify with the Catholic Church, a net loss of 7.5 percentage points.
However, the number of Catholics in America remains fairly steady, mostly because of Latino immigration.
Neela Banerjee writes in the New York Times:
Prof. Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, said large numbers of Americans leaving organized religion and large numbers still embracing the fervor of evangelical Christianity pointed to the same desires.
“The trend is towards more personal religion, and evangelicals offer that,” Professor Prothero said, explaining that evangelical churches tailored much of their activities to youths.
“Those losing out are offering impersonal religion,” he said, “and those winning are offering a smaller scale: mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”
I’m not sure what Prothero says about smaller ministries makes sense, but I agree with what he says about “impersonal” religion. Someow just getting dressed up on Sunday morning and going to church just to hear a sermon and sing a couple of hymns ain’t workin’ for people.
But I think there are other factors. The time crunch experienced by two-income families with children might make “going to church” just one more burdensome thing on an already full plate. The breakup of communities possibly makes church attendance seem less compulsive. After years of televangelism, maybe people just expect church services to pack more of an emotional wallop, or at least be entertaining.
What Pew says about Buddhism is discussed on the other blog.
Spotlight
February 13, 2008
On My Other Blog …
Some of you might appreciate my complaints about why I can’t write about Nirvana without getting it wrong.
Spotlight
February 5, 2008
Shameless Plug
Today on About.com: Buddhism — Burmese residents of Singapore screen the new Rambo movie. Blood! Revenge! Buddhism?
Spotlight
February 4, 2008
Announcement
The big news is that I was recently contracted to be the Guide to Buddhism at About.com. Today it’s official.
The Buddhism section has been without a Guide for about a year, so that part of the About.com site is pretty much dead in the water and rough around the edges. It will take me a few weeks to get it up to standards.
My plan at the moment is to blog politics here but to blog religion and spirituality there. Since I’ll be on probation for the next three months, and since About.com likes very short blog posts, I probably won’t be writing one of my signature 5,000 treatises there anytime soon. However, there is a forum I’ll be riding herd on, and as soon as the About.com techies get some glitches ironed out I’ll set up some new categories. Feel free to start threads on anything having to do with spirituality, though.
Spotlight
January 14, 2008
Quest for Certitude
Excellent article at TomDispatch — this is a point I tried to make in the Wisdom of Doubt series. Quoting Ira Chernus:
Candidates increasingly keep their talk about religion separate from specific campaign issues. They promote faith as something important and valuable in and of itself in the election process. They invariably avow the deep roots of their religious faith and link it not with issues, but with certitude itself….
… When religious language enters the political arena in this way, as an end in itself, it always sends the same symbolic message: Yes, Virginia (or Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina) there are absolute values, universal truths that can never change. You are not adrift in a sea of moral chaos. Elect me and you’re sure to have a fixed mooring to hold you and your community fast forever. …
…In itself, faith in politics poses no great danger to democracy as long as the debates are really about policies — and religious values are translated into political values, articulated in ways that can be rationally debated by people who don’t share them. The challenge is not to get religion out of politics. It’s to get the quest for certitude out of politics.
Somehow, we got the idea that Certitude Is All. Certitude is better than competence or smarts or even facts. As Peter Birkenhead wrote, a major hallmark of the Bush Administration is an almost psychotic (I’d leave out the “almost”) false optimism and self-confidence that whatever Bushies do is Good. President Bush speaks of doubt as if it were a venereal disease. Right-wingers cling to their grab bag of ideological myths – tax cuts, guns and free markets fix everything –and no amount of reason or empirical evidence can shake them. Even questioning their beliefs is disloyalty to the tribe. Certitude is the ultimate virtue.
Voters reward faith talk because they want candidates to offer them symbols of immutable moral order. The root of the problem lies in the underlying insecurities of voters, in a sense of powerlessness that makes change seem so frightening, and control — especially of others — so necessary.
The only way to alter that condition is to transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires. That would be genuine change. It’s a political problem with a political solution. Until that solution begins to emerge, there is no way to take the conservative symbolic message of faith talk out of American politics.
” … transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires.” Elsewhere Chernus writes,
The essence of our system is that we, the people, get to choose our values. We don’t discover them inscribed in the cosmos. So everything must be open to question, to debate, and therefore to change. In a democracy, there should be no fixed truth except that everyone has the right to offer a new view — and to change his or her mind. It’s a process whose outcome should never be predictable, a process without end. A claim to absolute truth — any absolute truth — stops that process.
The right-wing extremists who have dominated our national political discussion for years have done a great job of stopping the process. As a nation, we can’t even engage in rational debate on issue after issue, because the Right shouts down anything that doesn’t conform to their phantasm of an ideology. Too many Americans don’t seem to understand that government is even supposed to be responding to our will to solve problems. We’ve forgotten the most basic premise on which our nation was founded.
I have argued elsewhere that certitude has a similar effect on religion. The monotheistic religions rest on some basic doctrines — that there is a God, Jesus died for our sins, etc. — and through the centuries true believers have tormented each other over their beliefs. But for mystics — people like Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart — those doctrines were only the beginning of a quest for deeper understanding. When religion degenerates into nothing but tribal loyalty to dogma, the spiritual quest has been stopped.
People cling to certitude because it gives them comfort, but certitude really is a big impediment — to progress, to understanding, to everything.
Spotlight
January 13, 2008
Reading Comprehension and Wingnuts
“Christian Libertarian” blogger Vox scores big in his comments on the Steven Pinker article that I discussed yesterday. Vox writes approvingly of Pinker’s article,
I can only marvel at the way my various atheist critics get tremendously upset when I point out the very same conclusion that secular scientists are reaching. If God does not exist, then no objective and universal morality exists either. This is really not up for debate among anyone who is sufficiently educated and capable of basic logic.
And furthermore, this is precisely why the secular position gravitates so readily and reliably towards totalitarianism, because in the absence of any objective and universal morality, one must be created and imposed.
The only flaw here is that Pinker argued exactly the opposite point — that morality can be built on reason and rational thought and does not have to rest on religious doctrine. If you read in particular the last two pages of Pinker’s article, you see he was quite explicit on this point.
Way to go, Vox! (What is it with wingnuts and reading comprehension? Somebody should do a study.)
Spotlight
January 12, 2008
Brain Wiring
There’s a fascinating article on morality by Steven Pinker in the Sunday New York Times magazine. Research on brains and behavior is revealing that morality has psychological and neurobiological foundations. Here’s a snip:
The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).
The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”
The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”
This was particularly fascinating to me:
We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.
I suggest that the “moralizers” here have formed an ego-attachment to their vegetarianism. It isn’t just something they do; it’s something that defines who they are. And from there they set up the ol’ Us-Them dichotomy and designate all meat eaters as the Other.
It reminds me of a wise woman I met years ago at a Zen center. Her diet was mostly vegetarian, she said, but she ate meat now and then just so she couldn’t call herself a vegetarian. Way Zen.
Anyway, Pinker goes on to explain how we as a culture moralize and un-moralize various activities. Smoking has been moralized, for example. Divorce has lost its stigma and has been un-moralized. But the list of things we get sanctimonious about seems very arbitrary.
I’ve noticed that as a culture we often will fixate on one activity and blow it up into a big bleeping deal disproportionate to the actual harm it does. Disposable diapers come to mind. When they first came out they were met with outrage by baby butt purists. They were bad for babies and taking up too much space in landfills, the purists said. But they weren’t bad for babies, and there are all sorts of other non-biodegradable items taking up even more space in landfills that no one gets outraged about. (And, anyway, washing cloth diapers puts phosphates into lakes and rivers!)
Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.
… But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.
By means of thought experiments that Pinker explains in detail, psychologists have shown that moralization often is irrational.
People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.
Yep, ain’t it the truth?
Researchers have found a few themes or “spheres” universal to human cultures that determine whether something is “moral” or not. These are whether an act causes harm; whether it is fair (although cultural ideas about “fairness” vary widely, I suspect); whether it shows loyalty or disloyalty to one’s designated group; whether it respects authority; and whether the act is “pure” — “they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.”
There’s all manner of evolutionary biology figuring into this, of course.
The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.
Pretty much what George Lakoff has been saying for a while.
Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.
I’m skipping big chunks of this; you really ought to read the whole thing, if you have time. I thought this paragraph fascinating:
The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
Maybe it’s because I think like a Buddhist, but I don’t understand how something that’s a product of brain wiring is less “real” than something that’s not a product of brain wiring. And I think pretty much all aspects of human culture are a kind of collective hallucination. Economies, for example, are created by our thoughts, are they not? Money only has value because we all agree it does.
Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.
Moral reasoning can be rational:
Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.
One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.
The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.
Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.
This resonates nicely with the Buddhist view of morality, which basically is that true morality is based on compassion, and true compassion comes from the wisdom that dividing the world into self-and-other is delusional. Morality that is based on an external set of rules is, to me, a crude and flawed kind of morality.
The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.
Craving and ego-attachment are the source of all evil and suffering, the Buddha said.
Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.
Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I think I will save them for tomorrow.
Spotlight
January 3, 2008
Well, Well
Huckabee wins decisively. The screams of despair you hear are coming from “movement conservatives,” neocons and the drown-gubmint-in-the-bathtub, Club for Growth, tax-cuts-uber-alles crowd.
The bobbleheads are saying the New Hampshire GOP primary will be between McCain and Huckabee. Romney is in big trouble. The Giuliani campaign seems to be dead in the water, although there’s still a glimmer of a possibility he could come back.
As I keyboard it’s clear Barack Obama has won the Dem Caucus. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are in a virtual tie for second, but Edwards is staying a dozen votes ahead. Will this (dare I hope?) put the myth of the Inevitable Hillary to rest?
There will be tons of analysis tomorrow. My initial take is that the unprecedented turnout of younger and first-time caucus goers tonight ought to be taken very seriously by both parties. Hillary Clinton’s “experience” is with delivering cautious little mini-tweaks of Republican policies. Also, the economic populist message sold very well in Iowa, especially considering that Huckabee’s campaign leaned more in that direction than did the other GOP candiates’.
There are indications that Chris Dodd will drop out of the race tomorrow, which would be sad, because in many ways I think he’s the best guy running. Other than that, however, I’m happy.
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Also: My technical problems are not completely resolved. I hope the site doesn’t go down again, but for the time being I have to keep comment moderation turned on because I’m getting comment spam by the hundreds per hour, and if I activate the spam filter I’m afraid the site will go down again. I don’t know why that would be so, but I don’t want to take any chances.
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Update: I like this quote, from shamanic:
With Huckabee and Obama apparently winning the Iowa Caucus, I can’t help but think I’m seeing the Democratic Party be reborn into the party of America, and watching the GOP fade to become the party of home schoolers.
Spotlight
— Next Page »
IRS Investigates Obama’s Church
At the Washington Post’s “On Faith” site, The Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite writes,
The Internal Revenue Service has notified the United Church of Christ that the IRS has opened an investigation into Senator Barack Obama’s address at the UCC’s 2007 General Synod. The IRS is accusing the UCC of engaging in “political activities.”
I believe the “political activities” are on the other foot. The UCC General Synod was in June of 2007, celebrating that denomination’s 50th Anniversary. It is only now fully nine months later, when Senator Obama has become the front-runner in the race for President, that this investigation is launched. Further, the IRS did not contact the UCC or communicate with them while coming to this decision.
I was present when Senator Obama gave this speech at General Synod (along with 10,000 of my closest church friends and neighbors). There were no campaign buttons, signs, electioneering or other such politically related activities. Indeed, the UCC leadership took care to instruct the assembled about the fact that this was a faith event and we were welcoming a member of our church to talk to us about his personal faith in the public square.
John Wilson writes at Huffington Post:
The national United Church of Christ is under attack from the IRS, the AP reports, because the church invited one of its members, Barack Obama, to speak at the church’s national conference last summer. The invitation came before Obama had decided to run for president. What’s at stake here is not just religious freedom, but the freedom of speech of all nonprofit groups. The danger is that when nonprofit groups are silenced, corporate America will be able to dominate even more thoroughly the public debate.
The IRS letter to the United Church of Christ is particularly disturbing, threatening to revoke the church’s tax-exempt status. The sole basis for the letter is that Obama gave a June 23, 2007 speech to the church’s members (he was invited before he decided to run for president), and Obama campaign staffers had tables outside the building promoting him. Inside the building, the church actually banned all Obama signs and literature, and announced that it was not a campaign speech.
If this rule is taken literally, it might ban all politicians from speaking at any nonprofit location.
He wasn’t even officially running for President yet. Please. This is nothing but political harassment.
February 26, 2008
Religion News
Being a bit burned out by the elections and nefarious Bushie plots, I searched for something else to write about and found an interview in Salon of the ever-dreary Amy Sullivan. Amy is once again lecturing us that white evangelicals might vote for Democrats if only Democrats could learn to talk about abortion correctly.
I don’t like the [pro-choice] label. I guess the reason I wrote about abortion the way I did in the book is because I have serious moral concerns about abortion, but I don’t believe that it should be illegal. And that puts me in the vast majority of Americans. But unfortunately, there’s no label for us.
If you don’t believe abortion should be illegal, the standard label for you is “pro-choice.” And wouldn’t it be nice if someone who gets as much attention on the abortion issue as Amy Sullivan actually had a bleeping clue what she was talking about.
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Also at Salon, former evangelical John Marks predicts that more white evangelicals will be voting for Democrats in the future, anyway. Marks told interviewer Louis Bayard,
When George W. Bush came along, there were a number of issues — gay marriage, repeal of sodomy laws, the Ten Commandments on the courthouse — all those issues allowed activists to go to pastors and say, “Look, this is coming right into your own backyard. These new laws are going to change your world, and they’re going to lay the groundwork for the America your children will inherit. So either you vote or you let the country go and you lose your place it.”
It was a moment of both political awakening and political naiveté. Because all of a sudden there was a sense of power that the evangelists could have as one bloc. But then they began to look at what they got for their vote, and they began to look more closely at the policies of the president that they had rallied behind.
The war didn’t turn out well, and that had been seen, in some quarters, as an ordained venture. People said, “If we’re really going to look at the Bible and Jesus as a model for our political involvement, what are we talking about? Christ never talks about homosexuality and talks a great deal about poverty. What about that?” Rick Warren, the most influential evangelist in America right now, is talking about AIDS in Africa. That has to do with a whole different part of the teachings of Christ.
We’ll see.
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I want to give a shout out to my brother About.com Guide Austin Cline, who covers the agnosticism/atheism beat. He has an article up on “Barack Obama’s Religious Beliefs & Background” that I think, praised be, is accurate and unbiased. Wow.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yesterday the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a survey that said nearly half of American adults leave the “faith tradition” they were raised in to either join another religion or drop out of organized religion altogether.
Some of this is old news. The old “mainline” Protestant congregations continue to shrink, while the membership of non-denominational churches and the ranks of the unaffiliated continue to grow.
This is new: The unaffiliated — people who say they are religious but don’t claim allegiance to any particular institution or tradition — are now the fourth largest religious group in America.
Also, from the report:
Groups that have experienced a net loss from changes in affiliation include Baptists (net loss of 3.7 percentage points) and Methodists (2.1 percentage points). However, the group that has experienced the greatest net loss by far is the Catholic Church. Overall, 31.4% of U.S. adults say that they were raised Catholic. Today, however, only 23.9% of adults identify with the Catholic Church, a net loss of 7.5 percentage points.
However, the number of Catholics in America remains fairly steady, mostly because of Latino immigration.
Neela Banerjee writes in the New York Times:
Prof. Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, said large numbers of Americans leaving organized religion and large numbers still embracing the fervor of evangelical Christianity pointed to the same desires.
“The trend is towards more personal religion, and evangelicals offer that,” Professor Prothero said, explaining that evangelical churches tailored much of their activities to youths.
“Those losing out are offering impersonal religion,” he said, “and those winning are offering a smaller scale: mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”
I’m not sure what Prothero says about smaller ministries makes sense, but I agree with what he says about “impersonal” religion. Someow just getting dressed up on Sunday morning and going to church just to hear a sermon and sing a couple of hymns ain’t workin’ for people.
But I think there are other factors. The time crunch experienced by two-income families with children might make “going to church” just one more burdensome thing on an already full plate. The breakup of communities possibly makes church attendance seem less compulsive. After years of televangelism, maybe people just expect church services to pack more of an emotional wallop, or at least be entertaining.
What Pew says about Buddhism is discussed on the other blog.
Spotlight
February 13, 2008
On My Other Blog …
Some of you might appreciate my complaints about why I can’t write about Nirvana without getting it wrong.
Spotlight
February 5, 2008
Shameless Plug
Today on About.com: Buddhism — Burmese residents of Singapore screen the new Rambo movie. Blood! Revenge! Buddhism?
Spotlight
February 4, 2008
Announcement
The big news is that I was recently contracted to be the Guide to Buddhism at About.com. Today it’s official.
The Buddhism section has been without a Guide for about a year, so that part of the About.com site is pretty much dead in the water and rough around the edges. It will take me a few weeks to get it up to standards.
My plan at the moment is to blog politics here but to blog religion and spirituality there. Since I’ll be on probation for the next three months, and since About.com likes very short blog posts, I probably won’t be writing one of my signature 5,000 treatises there anytime soon. However, there is a forum I’ll be riding herd on, and as soon as the About.com techies get some glitches ironed out I’ll set up some new categories. Feel free to start threads on anything having to do with spirituality, though.
Spotlight
January 14, 2008
Quest for Certitude
Excellent article at TomDispatch — this is a point I tried to make in the Wisdom of Doubt series. Quoting Ira Chernus:
Candidates increasingly keep their talk about religion separate from specific campaign issues. They promote faith as something important and valuable in and of itself in the election process. They invariably avow the deep roots of their religious faith and link it not with issues, but with certitude itself….
… When religious language enters the political arena in this way, as an end in itself, it always sends the same symbolic message: Yes, Virginia (or Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina) there are absolute values, universal truths that can never change. You are not adrift in a sea of moral chaos. Elect me and you’re sure to have a fixed mooring to hold you and your community fast forever. …
…In itself, faith in politics poses no great danger to democracy as long as the debates are really about policies — and religious values are translated into political values, articulated in ways that can be rationally debated by people who don’t share them. The challenge is not to get religion out of politics. It’s to get the quest for certitude out of politics.
Somehow, we got the idea that Certitude Is All. Certitude is better than competence or smarts or even facts. As Peter Birkenhead wrote, a major hallmark of the Bush Administration is an almost psychotic (I’d leave out the “almost”) false optimism and self-confidence that whatever Bushies do is Good. President Bush speaks of doubt as if it were a venereal disease. Right-wingers cling to their grab bag of ideological myths – tax cuts, guns and free markets fix everything –and no amount of reason or empirical evidence can shake them. Even questioning their beliefs is disloyalty to the tribe. Certitude is the ultimate virtue.
Voters reward faith talk because they want candidates to offer them symbols of immutable moral order. The root of the problem lies in the underlying insecurities of voters, in a sense of powerlessness that makes change seem so frightening, and control — especially of others — so necessary.
The only way to alter that condition is to transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires. That would be genuine change. It’s a political problem with a political solution. Until that solution begins to emerge, there is no way to take the conservative symbolic message of faith talk out of American politics.
” … transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires.” Elsewhere Chernus writes,
The essence of our system is that we, the people, get to choose our values. We don’t discover them inscribed in the cosmos. So everything must be open to question, to debate, and therefore to change. In a democracy, there should be no fixed truth except that everyone has the right to offer a new view — and to change his or her mind. It’s a process whose outcome should never be predictable, a process without end. A claim to absolute truth — any absolute truth — stops that process.
The right-wing extremists who have dominated our national political discussion for years have done a great job of stopping the process. As a nation, we can’t even engage in rational debate on issue after issue, because the Right shouts down anything that doesn’t conform to their phantasm of an ideology. Too many Americans don’t seem to understand that government is even supposed to be responding to our will to solve problems. We’ve forgotten the most basic premise on which our nation was founded.
I have argued elsewhere that certitude has a similar effect on religion. The monotheistic religions rest on some basic doctrines — that there is a God, Jesus died for our sins, etc. — and through the centuries true believers have tormented each other over their beliefs. But for mystics — people like Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart — those doctrines were only the beginning of a quest for deeper understanding. When religion degenerates into nothing but tribal loyalty to dogma, the spiritual quest has been stopped.
People cling to certitude because it gives them comfort, but certitude really is a big impediment — to progress, to understanding, to everything.
Spotlight
January 13, 2008
Reading Comprehension and Wingnuts
“Christian Libertarian” blogger Vox scores big in his comments on the Steven Pinker article that I discussed yesterday. Vox writes approvingly of Pinker’s article,
I can only marvel at the way my various atheist critics get tremendously upset when I point out the very same conclusion that secular scientists are reaching. If God does not exist, then no objective and universal morality exists either. This is really not up for debate among anyone who is sufficiently educated and capable of basic logic.
And furthermore, this is precisely why the secular position gravitates so readily and reliably towards totalitarianism, because in the absence of any objective and universal morality, one must be created and imposed.
The only flaw here is that Pinker argued exactly the opposite point — that morality can be built on reason and rational thought and does not have to rest on religious doctrine. If you read in particular the last two pages of Pinker’s article, you see he was quite explicit on this point.
Way to go, Vox! (What is it with wingnuts and reading comprehension? Somebody should do a study.)
Spotlight
January 12, 2008
Brain Wiring
There’s a fascinating article on morality by Steven Pinker in the Sunday New York Times magazine. Research on brains and behavior is revealing that morality has psychological and neurobiological foundations. Here’s a snip:
The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).
The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”
The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”
This was particularly fascinating to me:
We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.
I suggest that the “moralizers” here have formed an ego-attachment to their vegetarianism. It isn’t just something they do; it’s something that defines who they are. And from there they set up the ol’ Us-Them dichotomy and designate all meat eaters as the Other.
It reminds me of a wise woman I met years ago at a Zen center. Her diet was mostly vegetarian, she said, but she ate meat now and then just so she couldn’t call herself a vegetarian. Way Zen.
Anyway, Pinker goes on to explain how we as a culture moralize and un-moralize various activities. Smoking has been moralized, for example. Divorce has lost its stigma and has been un-moralized. But the list of things we get sanctimonious about seems very arbitrary.
I’ve noticed that as a culture we often will fixate on one activity and blow it up into a big bleeping deal disproportionate to the actual harm it does. Disposable diapers come to mind. When they first came out they were met with outrage by baby butt purists. They were bad for babies and taking up too much space in landfills, the purists said. But they weren’t bad for babies, and there are all sorts of other non-biodegradable items taking up even more space in landfills that no one gets outraged about. (And, anyway, washing cloth diapers puts phosphates into lakes and rivers!)
Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.
… But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.
By means of thought experiments that Pinker explains in detail, psychologists have shown that moralization often is irrational.
People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.
Yep, ain’t it the truth?
Researchers have found a few themes or “spheres” universal to human cultures that determine whether something is “moral” or not. These are whether an act causes harm; whether it is fair (although cultural ideas about “fairness” vary widely, I suspect); whether it shows loyalty or disloyalty to one’s designated group; whether it respects authority; and whether the act is “pure” — “they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.”
There’s all manner of evolutionary biology figuring into this, of course.
The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.
Pretty much what George Lakoff has been saying for a while.
Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.
I’m skipping big chunks of this; you really ought to read the whole thing, if you have time. I thought this paragraph fascinating:
The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
Maybe it’s because I think like a Buddhist, but I don’t understand how something that’s a product of brain wiring is less “real” than something that’s not a product of brain wiring. And I think pretty much all aspects of human culture are a kind of collective hallucination. Economies, for example, are created by our thoughts, are they not? Money only has value because we all agree it does.
Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.
Moral reasoning can be rational:
Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.
One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.
The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.
Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.
This resonates nicely with the Buddhist view of morality, which basically is that true morality is based on compassion, and true compassion comes from the wisdom that dividing the world into self-and-other is delusional. Morality that is based on an external set of rules is, to me, a crude and flawed kind of morality.
The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.
Craving and ego-attachment are the source of all evil and suffering, the Buddha said.
Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.
Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I think I will save them for tomorrow.
Spotlight
January 3, 2008
Well, Well
Huckabee wins decisively. The screams of despair you hear are coming from “movement conservatives,” neocons and the drown-gubmint-in-the-bathtub, Club for Growth, tax-cuts-uber-alles crowd.
The bobbleheads are saying the New Hampshire GOP primary will be between McCain and Huckabee. Romney is in big trouble. The Giuliani campaign seems to be dead in the water, although there’s still a glimmer of a possibility he could come back.
As I keyboard it’s clear Barack Obama has won the Dem Caucus. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are in a virtual tie for second, but Edwards is staying a dozen votes ahead. Will this (dare I hope?) put the myth of the Inevitable Hillary to rest?
There will be tons of analysis tomorrow. My initial take is that the unprecedented turnout of younger and first-time caucus goers tonight ought to be taken very seriously by both parties. Hillary Clinton’s “experience” is with delivering cautious little mini-tweaks of Republican policies. Also, the economic populist message sold very well in Iowa, especially considering that Huckabee’s campaign leaned more in that direction than did the other GOP candiates’.
There are indications that Chris Dodd will drop out of the race tomorrow, which would be sad, because in many ways I think he’s the best guy running. Other than that, however, I’m happy.
___________________
Also: My technical problems are not completely resolved. I hope the site doesn’t go down again, but for the time being I have to keep comment moderation turned on because I’m getting comment spam by the hundreds per hour, and if I activate the spam filter I’m afraid the site will go down again. I don’t know why that would be so, but I don’t want to take any chances.
___________________
Update: I like this quote, from shamanic:
With Huckabee and Obama apparently winning the Iowa Caucus, I can’t help but think I’m seeing the Democratic Party be reborn into the party of America, and watching the GOP fade to become the party of home schoolers.
Spotlight
— Next Page »
Religion News
Being a bit burned out by the elections and nefarious Bushie plots, I searched for something else to write about and found an interview in Salon of the ever-dreary Amy Sullivan. Amy is once again lecturing us that white evangelicals might vote for Democrats if only Democrats could learn to talk about abortion correctly.
I don’t like the [pro-choice] label. I guess the reason I wrote about abortion the way I did in the book is because I have serious moral concerns about abortion, but I don’t believe that it should be illegal. And that puts me in the vast majority of Americans. But unfortunately, there’s no label for us.
If you don’t believe abortion should be illegal, the standard label for you is “pro-choice.” And wouldn’t it be nice if someone who gets as much attention on the abortion issue as Amy Sullivan actually had a bleeping clue what she was talking about.
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Also at Salon, former evangelical John Marks predicts that more white evangelicals will be voting for Democrats in the future, anyway. Marks told interviewer Louis Bayard,
When George W. Bush came along, there were a number of issues — gay marriage, repeal of sodomy laws, the Ten Commandments on the courthouse — all those issues allowed activists to go to pastors and say, “Look, this is coming right into your own backyard. These new laws are going to change your world, and they’re going to lay the groundwork for the America your children will inherit. So either you vote or you let the country go and you lose your place it.”
It was a moment of both political awakening and political naiveté. Because all of a sudden there was a sense of power that the evangelists could have as one bloc. But then they began to look at what they got for their vote, and they began to look more closely at the policies of the president that they had rallied behind.
The war didn’t turn out well, and that had been seen, in some quarters, as an ordained venture. People said, “If we’re really going to look at the Bible and Jesus as a model for our political involvement, what are we talking about? Christ never talks about homosexuality and talks a great deal about poverty. What about that?” Rick Warren, the most influential evangelist in America right now, is talking about AIDS in Africa. That has to do with a whole different part of the teachings of Christ.
We’ll see.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I want to give a shout out to my brother About.com Guide Austin Cline, who covers the agnosticism/atheism beat. He has an article up on “Barack Obama’s Religious Beliefs & Background” that I think, praised be, is accurate and unbiased. Wow.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yesterday the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a survey that said nearly half of American adults leave the “faith tradition” they were raised in to either join another religion or drop out of organized religion altogether.
Some of this is old news. The old “mainline” Protestant congregations continue to shrink, while the membership of non-denominational churches and the ranks of the unaffiliated continue to grow.
This is new: The unaffiliated — people who say they are religious but don’t claim allegiance to any particular institution or tradition — are now the fourth largest religious group in America.
Also, from the report:
Groups that have experienced a net loss from changes in affiliation include Baptists (net loss of 3.7 percentage points) and Methodists (2.1 percentage points). However, the group that has experienced the greatest net loss by far is the Catholic Church. Overall, 31.4% of U.S. adults say that they were raised Catholic. Today, however, only 23.9% of adults identify with the Catholic Church, a net loss of 7.5 percentage points.
However, the number of Catholics in America remains fairly steady, mostly because of Latino immigration.
Neela Banerjee writes in the New York Times:
Prof. Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, said large numbers of Americans leaving organized religion and large numbers still embracing the fervor of evangelical Christianity pointed to the same desires.
“The trend is towards more personal religion, and evangelicals offer that,” Professor Prothero said, explaining that evangelical churches tailored much of their activities to youths.
“Those losing out are offering impersonal religion,” he said, “and those winning are offering a smaller scale: mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”
I’m not sure what Prothero says about smaller ministries makes sense, but I agree with what he says about “impersonal” religion. Someow just getting dressed up on Sunday morning and going to church just to hear a sermon and sing a couple of hymns ain’t workin’ for people.
But I think there are other factors. The time crunch experienced by two-income families with children might make “going to church” just one more burdensome thing on an already full plate. The breakup of communities possibly makes church attendance seem less compulsive. After years of televangelism, maybe people just expect church services to pack more of an emotional wallop, or at least be entertaining.
What Pew says about Buddhism is discussed on the other blog.
On My Other Blog …
Some of you might appreciate my complaints about why I can’t write about Nirvana without getting it wrong.
February 5, 2008
Shameless Plug
Today on About.com: Buddhism — Burmese residents of Singapore screen the new Rambo movie. Blood! Revenge! Buddhism?
Spotlight
February 4, 2008
Announcement
The big news is that I was recently contracted to be the Guide to Buddhism at About.com. Today it’s official.
The Buddhism section has been without a Guide for about a year, so that part of the About.com site is pretty much dead in the water and rough around the edges. It will take me a few weeks to get it up to standards.
My plan at the moment is to blog politics here but to blog religion and spirituality there. Since I’ll be on probation for the next three months, and since About.com likes very short blog posts, I probably won’t be writing one of my signature 5,000 treatises there anytime soon. However, there is a forum I’ll be riding herd on, and as soon as the About.com techies get some glitches ironed out I’ll set up some new categories. Feel free to start threads on anything having to do with spirituality, though.
Spotlight
January 14, 2008
Quest for Certitude
Excellent article at TomDispatch — this is a point I tried to make in the Wisdom of Doubt series. Quoting Ira Chernus:
Candidates increasingly keep their talk about religion separate from specific campaign issues. They promote faith as something important and valuable in and of itself in the election process. They invariably avow the deep roots of their religious faith and link it not with issues, but with certitude itself….
… When religious language enters the political arena in this way, as an end in itself, it always sends the same symbolic message: Yes, Virginia (or Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina) there are absolute values, universal truths that can never change. You are not adrift in a sea of moral chaos. Elect me and you’re sure to have a fixed mooring to hold you and your community fast forever. …
…In itself, faith in politics poses no great danger to democracy as long as the debates are really about policies — and religious values are translated into political values, articulated in ways that can be rationally debated by people who don’t share them. The challenge is not to get religion out of politics. It’s to get the quest for certitude out of politics.
Somehow, we got the idea that Certitude Is All. Certitude is better than competence or smarts or even facts. As Peter Birkenhead wrote, a major hallmark of the Bush Administration is an almost psychotic (I’d leave out the “almost”) false optimism and self-confidence that whatever Bushies do is Good. President Bush speaks of doubt as if it were a venereal disease. Right-wingers cling to their grab bag of ideological myths – tax cuts, guns and free markets fix everything –and no amount of reason or empirical evidence can shake them. Even questioning their beliefs is disloyalty to the tribe. Certitude is the ultimate virtue.
Voters reward faith talk because they want candidates to offer them symbols of immutable moral order. The root of the problem lies in the underlying insecurities of voters, in a sense of powerlessness that makes change seem so frightening, and control — especially of others — so necessary.
The only way to alter that condition is to transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires. That would be genuine change. It’s a political problem with a political solution. Until that solution begins to emerge, there is no way to take the conservative symbolic message of faith talk out of American politics.
” … transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires.” Elsewhere Chernus writes,
The essence of our system is that we, the people, get to choose our values. We don’t discover them inscribed in the cosmos. So everything must be open to question, to debate, and therefore to change. In a democracy, there should be no fixed truth except that everyone has the right to offer a new view — and to change his or her mind. It’s a process whose outcome should never be predictable, a process without end. A claim to absolute truth — any absolute truth — stops that process.
The right-wing extremists who have dominated our national political discussion for years have done a great job of stopping the process. As a nation, we can’t even engage in rational debate on issue after issue, because the Right shouts down anything that doesn’t conform to their phantasm of an ideology. Too many Americans don’t seem to understand that government is even supposed to be responding to our will to solve problems. We’ve forgotten the most basic premise on which our nation was founded.
I have argued elsewhere that certitude has a similar effect on religion. The monotheistic religions rest on some basic doctrines — that there is a God, Jesus died for our sins, etc. — and through the centuries true believers have tormented each other over their beliefs. But for mystics — people like Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart — those doctrines were only the beginning of a quest for deeper understanding. When religion degenerates into nothing but tribal loyalty to dogma, the spiritual quest has been stopped.
People cling to certitude because it gives them comfort, but certitude really is a big impediment — to progress, to understanding, to everything.
Spotlight
January 13, 2008
Reading Comprehension and Wingnuts
“Christian Libertarian” blogger Vox scores big in his comments on the Steven Pinker article that I discussed yesterday. Vox writes approvingly of Pinker’s article,
I can only marvel at the way my various atheist critics get tremendously upset when I point out the very same conclusion that secular scientists are reaching. If God does not exist, then no objective and universal morality exists either. This is really not up for debate among anyone who is sufficiently educated and capable of basic logic.
And furthermore, this is precisely why the secular position gravitates so readily and reliably towards totalitarianism, because in the absence of any objective and universal morality, one must be created and imposed.
The only flaw here is that Pinker argued exactly the opposite point — that morality can be built on reason and rational thought and does not have to rest on religious doctrine. If you read in particular the last two pages of Pinker’s article, you see he was quite explicit on this point.
Way to go, Vox! (What is it with wingnuts and reading comprehension? Somebody should do a study.)
Spotlight
January 12, 2008
Brain Wiring
There’s a fascinating article on morality by Steven Pinker in the Sunday New York Times magazine. Research on brains and behavior is revealing that morality has psychological and neurobiological foundations. Here’s a snip:
The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).
The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”
The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”
This was particularly fascinating to me:
We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.
I suggest that the “moralizers” here have formed an ego-attachment to their vegetarianism. It isn’t just something they do; it’s something that defines who they are. And from there they set up the ol’ Us-Them dichotomy and designate all meat eaters as the Other.
It reminds me of a wise woman I met years ago at a Zen center. Her diet was mostly vegetarian, she said, but she ate meat now and then just so she couldn’t call herself a vegetarian. Way Zen.
Anyway, Pinker goes on to explain how we as a culture moralize and un-moralize various activities. Smoking has been moralized, for example. Divorce has lost its stigma and has been un-moralized. But the list of things we get sanctimonious about seems very arbitrary.
I’ve noticed that as a culture we often will fixate on one activity and blow it up into a big bleeping deal disproportionate to the actual harm it does. Disposable diapers come to mind. When they first came out they were met with outrage by baby butt purists. They were bad for babies and taking up too much space in landfills, the purists said. But they weren’t bad for babies, and there are all sorts of other non-biodegradable items taking up even more space in landfills that no one gets outraged about. (And, anyway, washing cloth diapers puts phosphates into lakes and rivers!)
Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.
… But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.
By means of thought experiments that Pinker explains in detail, psychologists have shown that moralization often is irrational.
People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.
Yep, ain’t it the truth?
Researchers have found a few themes or “spheres” universal to human cultures that determine whether something is “moral” or not. These are whether an act causes harm; whether it is fair (although cultural ideas about “fairness” vary widely, I suspect); whether it shows loyalty or disloyalty to one’s designated group; whether it respects authority; and whether the act is “pure” — “they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.”
There’s all manner of evolutionary biology figuring into this, of course.
The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.
Pretty much what George Lakoff has been saying for a while.
Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.
I’m skipping big chunks of this; you really ought to read the whole thing, if you have time. I thought this paragraph fascinating:
The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
Maybe it’s because I think like a Buddhist, but I don’t understand how something that’s a product of brain wiring is less “real” than something that’s not a product of brain wiring. And I think pretty much all aspects of human culture are a kind of collective hallucination. Economies, for example, are created by our thoughts, are they not? Money only has value because we all agree it does.
Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.
Moral reasoning can be rational:
Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.
One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.
The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.
Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.
This resonates nicely with the Buddhist view of morality, which basically is that true morality is based on compassion, and true compassion comes from the wisdom that dividing the world into self-and-other is delusional. Morality that is based on an external set of rules is, to me, a crude and flawed kind of morality.
The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.
Craving and ego-attachment are the source of all evil and suffering, the Buddha said.
Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.
Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I think I will save them for tomorrow.
Spotlight
January 3, 2008
Well, Well
Huckabee wins decisively. The screams of despair you hear are coming from “movement conservatives,” neocons and the drown-gubmint-in-the-bathtub, Club for Growth, tax-cuts-uber-alles crowd.
The bobbleheads are saying the New Hampshire GOP primary will be between McCain and Huckabee. Romney is in big trouble. The Giuliani campaign seems to be dead in the water, although there’s still a glimmer of a possibility he could come back.
As I keyboard it’s clear Barack Obama has won the Dem Caucus. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are in a virtual tie for second, but Edwards is staying a dozen votes ahead. Will this (dare I hope?) put the myth of the Inevitable Hillary to rest?
There will be tons of analysis tomorrow. My initial take is that the unprecedented turnout of younger and first-time caucus goers tonight ought to be taken very seriously by both parties. Hillary Clinton’s “experience” is with delivering cautious little mini-tweaks of Republican policies. Also, the economic populist message sold very well in Iowa, especially considering that Huckabee’s campaign leaned more in that direction than did the other GOP candiates’.
There are indications that Chris Dodd will drop out of the race tomorrow, which would be sad, because in many ways I think he’s the best guy running. Other than that, however, I’m happy.
___________________
Also: My technical problems are not completely resolved. I hope the site doesn’t go down again, but for the time being I have to keep comment moderation turned on because I’m getting comment spam by the hundreds per hour, and if I activate the spam filter I’m afraid the site will go down again. I don’t know why that would be so, but I don’t want to take any chances.
___________________
Update: I like this quote, from shamanic:
With Huckabee and Obama apparently winning the Iowa Caucus, I can’t help but think I’m seeing the Democratic Party be reborn into the party of America, and watching the GOP fade to become the party of home schoolers.
Spotlight
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Shameless Plug
Today on About.com: Buddhism — Burmese residents of Singapore screen the new Rambo movie. Blood! Revenge! Buddhism?
Announcement
The big news is that I was recently contracted to be the Guide to Buddhism at About.com. Today it’s official.
The Buddhism section has been without a Guide for about a year, so that part of the About.com site is pretty much dead in the water and rough around the edges. It will take me a few weeks to get it up to standards.
My plan at the moment is to blog politics here but to blog religion and spirituality there. Since I’ll be on probation for the next three months, and since About.com likes very short blog posts, I probably won’t be writing one of my signature 5,000 treatises there anytime soon. However, there is a forum I’ll be riding herd on, and as soon as the About.com techies get some glitches ironed out I’ll set up some new categories. Feel free to start threads on anything having to do with spirituality, though.
January 14, 2008
Quest for Certitude
Excellent article at TomDispatch — this is a point I tried to make in the Wisdom of Doubt series. Quoting Ira Chernus:
Candidates increasingly keep their talk about religion separate from specific campaign issues. They promote faith as something important and valuable in and of itself in the election process. They invariably avow the deep roots of their religious faith and link it not with issues, but with certitude itself….
… When religious language enters the political arena in this way, as an end in itself, it always sends the same symbolic message: Yes, Virginia (or Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina) there are absolute values, universal truths that can never change. You are not adrift in a sea of moral chaos. Elect me and you’re sure to have a fixed mooring to hold you and your community fast forever. …
…In itself, faith in politics poses no great danger to democracy as long as the debates are really about policies — and religious values are translated into political values, articulated in ways that can be rationally debated by people who don’t share them. The challenge is not to get religion out of politics. It’s to get the quest for certitude out of politics.
Somehow, we got the idea that Certitude Is All. Certitude is better than competence or smarts or even facts. As Peter Birkenhead wrote, a major hallmark of the Bush Administration is an almost psychotic (I’d leave out the “almost”) false optimism and self-confidence that whatever Bushies do is Good. President Bush speaks of doubt as if it were a venereal disease. Right-wingers cling to their grab bag of ideological myths – tax cuts, guns and free markets fix everything –and no amount of reason or empirical evidence can shake them. Even questioning their beliefs is disloyalty to the tribe. Certitude is the ultimate virtue.
Voters reward faith talk because they want candidates to offer them symbols of immutable moral order. The root of the problem lies in the underlying insecurities of voters, in a sense of powerlessness that makes change seem so frightening, and control — especially of others — so necessary.
The only way to alter that condition is to transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires. That would be genuine change. It’s a political problem with a political solution. Until that solution begins to emerge, there is no way to take the conservative symbolic message of faith talk out of American politics.
” … transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires.” Elsewhere Chernus writes,
The essence of our system is that we, the people, get to choose our values. We don’t discover them inscribed in the cosmos. So everything must be open to question, to debate, and therefore to change. In a democracy, there should be no fixed truth except that everyone has the right to offer a new view — and to change his or her mind. It’s a process whose outcome should never be predictable, a process without end. A claim to absolute truth — any absolute truth — stops that process.
The right-wing extremists who have dominated our national political discussion for years have done a great job of stopping the process. As a nation, we can’t even engage in rational debate on issue after issue, because the Right shouts down anything that doesn’t conform to their phantasm of an ideology. Too many Americans don’t seem to understand that government is even supposed to be responding to our will to solve problems. We’ve forgotten the most basic premise on which our nation was founded.
I have argued elsewhere that certitude has a similar effect on religion. The monotheistic religions rest on some basic doctrines — that there is a God, Jesus died for our sins, etc. — and through the centuries true believers have tormented each other over their beliefs. But for mystics — people like Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart — those doctrines were only the beginning of a quest for deeper understanding. When religion degenerates into nothing but tribal loyalty to dogma, the spiritual quest has been stopped.
People cling to certitude because it gives them comfort, but certitude really is a big impediment — to progress, to understanding, to everything.
Spotlight
January 13, 2008
Reading Comprehension and Wingnuts
“Christian Libertarian” blogger Vox scores big in his comments on the Steven Pinker article that I discussed yesterday. Vox writes approvingly of Pinker’s article,
I can only marvel at the way my various atheist critics get tremendously upset when I point out the very same conclusion that secular scientists are reaching. If God does not exist, then no objective and universal morality exists either. This is really not up for debate among anyone who is sufficiently educated and capable of basic logic.
And furthermore, this is precisely why the secular position gravitates so readily and reliably towards totalitarianism, because in the absence of any objective and universal morality, one must be created and imposed.
The only flaw here is that Pinker argued exactly the opposite point — that morality can be built on reason and rational thought and does not have to rest on religious doctrine. If you read in particular the last two pages of Pinker’s article, you see he was quite explicit on this point.
Way to go, Vox! (What is it with wingnuts and reading comprehension? Somebody should do a study.)
Spotlight
January 12, 2008
Brain Wiring
There’s a fascinating article on morality by Steven Pinker in the Sunday New York Times magazine. Research on brains and behavior is revealing that morality has psychological and neurobiological foundations. Here’s a snip:
The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).
The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”
The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”
This was particularly fascinating to me:
We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.
I suggest that the “moralizers” here have formed an ego-attachment to their vegetarianism. It isn’t just something they do; it’s something that defines who they are. And from there they set up the ol’ Us-Them dichotomy and designate all meat eaters as the Other.
It reminds me of a wise woman I met years ago at a Zen center. Her diet was mostly vegetarian, she said, but she ate meat now and then just so she couldn’t call herself a vegetarian. Way Zen.
Anyway, Pinker goes on to explain how we as a culture moralize and un-moralize various activities. Smoking has been moralized, for example. Divorce has lost its stigma and has been un-moralized. But the list of things we get sanctimonious about seems very arbitrary.
I’ve noticed that as a culture we often will fixate on one activity and blow it up into a big bleeping deal disproportionate to the actual harm it does. Disposable diapers come to mind. When they first came out they were met with outrage by baby butt purists. They were bad for babies and taking up too much space in landfills, the purists said. But they weren’t bad for babies, and there are all sorts of other non-biodegradable items taking up even more space in landfills that no one gets outraged about. (And, anyway, washing cloth diapers puts phosphates into lakes and rivers!)
Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.
… But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.
By means of thought experiments that Pinker explains in detail, psychologists have shown that moralization often is irrational.
People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.
Yep, ain’t it the truth?
Researchers have found a few themes or “spheres” universal to human cultures that determine whether something is “moral” or not. These are whether an act causes harm; whether it is fair (although cultural ideas about “fairness” vary widely, I suspect); whether it shows loyalty or disloyalty to one’s designated group; whether it respects authority; and whether the act is “pure” — “they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.”
There’s all manner of evolutionary biology figuring into this, of course.
The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.
Pretty much what George Lakoff has been saying for a while.
Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.
I’m skipping big chunks of this; you really ought to read the whole thing, if you have time. I thought this paragraph fascinating:
The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
Maybe it’s because I think like a Buddhist, but I don’t understand how something that’s a product of brain wiring is less “real” than something that’s not a product of brain wiring. And I think pretty much all aspects of human culture are a kind of collective hallucination. Economies, for example, are created by our thoughts, are they not? Money only has value because we all agree it does.
Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.
Moral reasoning can be rational:
Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.
One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.
The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.
Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.
This resonates nicely with the Buddhist view of morality, which basically is that true morality is based on compassion, and true compassion comes from the wisdom that dividing the world into self-and-other is delusional. Morality that is based on an external set of rules is, to me, a crude and flawed kind of morality.
The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.
Craving and ego-attachment are the source of all evil and suffering, the Buddha said.
Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.
Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I think I will save them for tomorrow.
Spotlight
January 3, 2008
Well, Well
Huckabee wins decisively. The screams of despair you hear are coming from “movement conservatives,” neocons and the drown-gubmint-in-the-bathtub, Club for Growth, tax-cuts-uber-alles crowd.
The bobbleheads are saying the New Hampshire GOP primary will be between McCain and Huckabee. Romney is in big trouble. The Giuliani campaign seems to be dead in the water, although there’s still a glimmer of a possibility he could come back.
As I keyboard it’s clear Barack Obama has won the Dem Caucus. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are in a virtual tie for second, but Edwards is staying a dozen votes ahead. Will this (dare I hope?) put the myth of the Inevitable Hillary to rest?
There will be tons of analysis tomorrow. My initial take is that the unprecedented turnout of younger and first-time caucus goers tonight ought to be taken very seriously by both parties. Hillary Clinton’s “experience” is with delivering cautious little mini-tweaks of Republican policies. Also, the economic populist message sold very well in Iowa, especially considering that Huckabee’s campaign leaned more in that direction than did the other GOP candiates’.
There are indications that Chris Dodd will drop out of the race tomorrow, which would be sad, because in many ways I think he’s the best guy running. Other than that, however, I’m happy.
___________________
Also: My technical problems are not completely resolved. I hope the site doesn’t go down again, but for the time being I have to keep comment moderation turned on because I’m getting comment spam by the hundreds per hour, and if I activate the spam filter I’m afraid the site will go down again. I don’t know why that would be so, but I don’t want to take any chances.
___________________
Update: I like this quote, from shamanic:
With Huckabee and Obama apparently winning the Iowa Caucus, I can’t help but think I’m seeing the Democratic Party be reborn into the party of America, and watching the GOP fade to become the party of home schoolers.
Spotlight
— Next Page »
Quest for Certitude
Excellent article at TomDispatch — this is a point I tried to make in the Wisdom of Doubt series. Quoting Ira Chernus:
Candidates increasingly keep their talk about religion separate from specific campaign issues. They promote faith as something important and valuable in and of itself in the election process. They invariably avow the deep roots of their religious faith and link it not with issues, but with certitude itself….
… When religious language enters the political arena in this way, as an end in itself, it always sends the same symbolic message: Yes, Virginia (or Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina) there are absolute values, universal truths that can never change. You are not adrift in a sea of moral chaos. Elect me and you’re sure to have a fixed mooring to hold you and your community fast forever. …
…In itself, faith in politics poses no great danger to democracy as long as the debates are really about policies — and religious values are translated into political values, articulated in ways that can be rationally debated by people who don’t share them. The challenge is not to get religion out of politics. It’s to get the quest for certitude out of politics.
Somehow, we got the idea that Certitude Is All. Certitude is better than competence or smarts or even facts. As Peter Birkenhead wrote, a major hallmark of the Bush Administration is an almost psychotic (I’d leave out the “almost”) false optimism and self-confidence that whatever Bushies do is Good. President Bush speaks of doubt as if it were a venereal disease. Right-wingers cling to their grab bag of ideological myths – tax cuts, guns and free markets fix everything –and no amount of reason or empirical evidence can shake them. Even questioning their beliefs is disloyalty to the tribe. Certitude is the ultimate virtue.
Voters reward faith talk because they want candidates to offer them symbols of immutable moral order. The root of the problem lies in the underlying insecurities of voters, in a sense of powerlessness that makes change seem so frightening, and control — especially of others — so necessary.
The only way to alter that condition is to transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires. That would be genuine change. It’s a political problem with a political solution. Until that solution begins to emerge, there is no way to take the conservative symbolic message of faith talk out of American politics.
” … transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires.” Elsewhere Chernus writes,
The essence of our system is that we, the people, get to choose our values. We don’t discover them inscribed in the cosmos. So everything must be open to question, to debate, and therefore to change. In a democracy, there should be no fixed truth except that everyone has the right to offer a new view — and to change his or her mind. It’s a process whose outcome should never be predictable, a process without end. A claim to absolute truth — any absolute truth — stops that process.
The right-wing extremists who have dominated our national political discussion for years have done a great job of stopping the process. As a nation, we can’t even engage in rational debate on issue after issue, because the Right shouts down anything that doesn’t conform to their phantasm of an ideology. Too many Americans don’t seem to understand that government is even supposed to be responding to our will to solve problems. We’ve forgotten the most basic premise on which our nation was founded.
I have argued elsewhere that certitude has a similar effect on religion. The monotheistic religions rest on some basic doctrines — that there is a God, Jesus died for our sins, etc. — and through the centuries true believers have tormented each other over their beliefs. But for mystics — people like Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart — those doctrines were only the beginning of a quest for deeper understanding. When religion degenerates into nothing but tribal loyalty to dogma, the spiritual quest has been stopped.
People cling to certitude because it gives them comfort, but certitude really is a big impediment — to progress, to understanding, to everything.
Reading Comprehension and Wingnuts
“Christian Libertarian” blogger Vox scores big in his comments on the Steven Pinker article that I discussed yesterday. Vox writes approvingly of Pinker’s article,
I can only marvel at the way my various atheist critics get tremendously upset when I point out the very same conclusion that secular scientists are reaching. If God does not exist, then no objective and universal morality exists either. This is really not up for debate among anyone who is sufficiently educated and capable of basic logic.
And furthermore, this is precisely why the secular position gravitates so readily and reliably towards totalitarianism, because in the absence of any objective and universal morality, one must be created and imposed.
The only flaw here is that Pinker argued exactly the opposite point — that morality can be built on reason and rational thought and does not have to rest on religious doctrine. If you read in particular the last two pages of Pinker’s article, you see he was quite explicit on this point.
Way to go, Vox! (What is it with wingnuts and reading comprehension? Somebody should do a study.)
January 12, 2008
Brain Wiring
There’s a fascinating article on morality by Steven Pinker in the Sunday New York Times magazine. Research on brains and behavior is revealing that morality has psychological and neurobiological foundations. Here’s a snip:
The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).
The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”
The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”
This was particularly fascinating to me:
We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.
I suggest that the “moralizers” here have formed an ego-attachment to their vegetarianism. It isn’t just something they do; it’s something that defines who they are. And from there they set up the ol’ Us-Them dichotomy and designate all meat eaters as the Other.
It reminds me of a wise woman I met years ago at a Zen center. Her diet was mostly vegetarian, she said, but she ate meat now and then just so she couldn’t call herself a vegetarian. Way Zen.
Anyway, Pinker goes on to explain how we as a culture moralize and un-moralize various activities. Smoking has been moralized, for example. Divorce has lost its stigma and has been un-moralized. But the list of things we get sanctimonious about seems very arbitrary.
I’ve noticed that as a culture we often will fixate on one activity and blow it up into a big bleeping deal disproportionate to the actual harm it does. Disposable diapers come to mind. When they first came out they were met with outrage by baby butt purists. They were bad for babies and taking up too much space in landfills, the purists said. But they weren’t bad for babies, and there are all sorts of other non-biodegradable items taking up even more space in landfills that no one gets outraged about. (And, anyway, washing cloth diapers puts phosphates into lakes and rivers!)
Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.
… But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.
By means of thought experiments that Pinker explains in detail, psychologists have shown that moralization often is irrational.
People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.
Yep, ain’t it the truth?
Researchers have found a few themes or “spheres” universal to human cultures that determine whether something is “moral” or not. These are whether an act causes harm; whether it is fair (although cultural ideas about “fairness” vary widely, I suspect); whether it shows loyalty or disloyalty to one’s designated group; whether it respects authority; and whether the act is “pure” — “they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.”
There’s all manner of evolutionary biology figuring into this, of course.
The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.
Pretty much what George Lakoff has been saying for a while.
Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.
I’m skipping big chunks of this; you really ought to read the whole thing, if you have time. I thought this paragraph fascinating:
The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
Maybe it’s because I think like a Buddhist, but I don’t understand how something that’s a product of brain wiring is less “real” than something that’s not a product of brain wiring. And I think pretty much all aspects of human culture are a kind of collective hallucination. Economies, for example, are created by our thoughts, are they not? Money only has value because we all agree it does.
Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.
Moral reasoning can be rational:
Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.
One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.
The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.
Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.
This resonates nicely with the Buddhist view of morality, which basically is that true morality is based on compassion, and true compassion comes from the wisdom that dividing the world into self-and-other is delusional. Morality that is based on an external set of rules is, to me, a crude and flawed kind of morality.
The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.
Craving and ego-attachment are the source of all evil and suffering, the Buddha said.
Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.
Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I think I will save them for tomorrow.
Spotlight
January 3, 2008
Well, Well
Huckabee wins decisively. The screams of despair you hear are coming from “movement conservatives,” neocons and the drown-gubmint-in-the-bathtub, Club for Growth, tax-cuts-uber-alles crowd.
The bobbleheads are saying the New Hampshire GOP primary will be between McCain and Huckabee. Romney is in big trouble. The Giuliani campaign seems to be dead in the water, although there’s still a glimmer of a possibility he could come back.
As I keyboard it’s clear Barack Obama has won the Dem Caucus. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are in a virtual tie for second, but Edwards is staying a dozen votes ahead. Will this (dare I hope?) put the myth of the Inevitable Hillary to rest?
There will be tons of analysis tomorrow. My initial take is that the unprecedented turnout of younger and first-time caucus goers tonight ought to be taken very seriously by both parties. Hillary Clinton’s “experience” is with delivering cautious little mini-tweaks of Republican policies. Also, the economic populist message sold very well in Iowa, especially considering that Huckabee’s campaign leaned more in that direction than did the other GOP candiates’.
There are indications that Chris Dodd will drop out of the race tomorrow, which would be sad, because in many ways I think he’s the best guy running. Other than that, however, I’m happy.
___________________
Also: My technical problems are not completely resolved. I hope the site doesn’t go down again, but for the time being I have to keep comment moderation turned on because I’m getting comment spam by the hundreds per hour, and if I activate the spam filter I’m afraid the site will go down again. I don’t know why that would be so, but I don’t want to take any chances.
___________________
Update: I like this quote, from shamanic:
With Huckabee and Obama apparently winning the Iowa Caucus, I can’t help but think I’m seeing the Democratic Party be reborn into the party of America, and watching the GOP fade to become the party of home schoolers.
Spotlight
— Next Page »
Brain Wiring
There’s a fascinating article on morality by Steven Pinker in the Sunday New York Times magazine. Research on brains and behavior is revealing that morality has psychological and neurobiological foundations. Here’s a snip:
The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).
The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”
The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”
This was particularly fascinating to me:
We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.
I suggest that the “moralizers” here have formed an ego-attachment to their vegetarianism. It isn’t just something they do; it’s something that defines who they are. And from there they set up the ol’ Us-Them dichotomy and designate all meat eaters as the Other.
It reminds me of a wise woman I met years ago at a Zen center. Her diet was mostly vegetarian, she said, but she ate meat now and then just so she couldn’t call herself a vegetarian. Way Zen.
Anyway, Pinker goes on to explain how we as a culture moralize and un-moralize various activities. Smoking has been moralized, for example. Divorce has lost its stigma and has been un-moralized. But the list of things we get sanctimonious about seems very arbitrary.
I’ve noticed that as a culture we often will fixate on one activity and blow it up into a big bleeping deal disproportionate to the actual harm it does. Disposable diapers come to mind. When they first came out they were met with outrage by baby butt purists. They were bad for babies and taking up too much space in landfills, the purists said. But they weren’t bad for babies, and there are all sorts of other non-biodegradable items taking up even more space in landfills that no one gets outraged about. (And, anyway, washing cloth diapers puts phosphates into lakes and rivers!)
Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.
… But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.
By means of thought experiments that Pinker explains in detail, psychologists have shown that moralization often is irrational.
People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.
Yep, ain’t it the truth?
Researchers have found a few themes or “spheres” universal to human cultures that determine whether something is “moral” or not. These are whether an act causes harm; whether it is fair (although cultural ideas about “fairness” vary widely, I suspect); whether it shows loyalty or disloyalty to one’s designated group; whether it respects authority; and whether the act is “pure” — “they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.”
There’s all manner of evolutionary biology figuring into this, of course.
The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.
Pretty much what George Lakoff has been saying for a while.
Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.
I’m skipping big chunks of this; you really ought to read the whole thing, if you have time. I thought this paragraph fascinating:
The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
Maybe it’s because I think like a Buddhist, but I don’t understand how something that’s a product of brain wiring is less “real” than something that’s not a product of brain wiring. And I think pretty much all aspects of human culture are a kind of collective hallucination. Economies, for example, are created by our thoughts, are they not? Money only has value because we all agree it does.
Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren’t in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.
Moral reasoning can be rational:
Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.
One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.
The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.
Not coincidentally, the core of this idea — the interchangeability of perspectives — keeps reappearing in history’s best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle — the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.
This resonates nicely with the Buddhist view of morality, which basically is that true morality is based on compassion, and true compassion comes from the wisdom that dividing the world into self-and-other is delusional. Morality that is based on an external set of rules is, to me, a crude and flawed kind of morality.
The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.
Craving and ego-attachment are the source of all evil and suffering, the Buddha said.
Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.
Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I think I will save them for tomorrow.
Well, Well
Huckabee wins decisively. The screams of despair you hear are coming from “movement conservatives,” neocons and the drown-gubmint-in-the-bathtub, Club for Growth, tax-cuts-uber-alles crowd.
The bobbleheads are saying the New Hampshire GOP primary will be between McCain and Huckabee. Romney is in big trouble. The Giuliani campaign seems to be dead in the water, although there’s still a glimmer of a possibility he could come back.
As I keyboard it’s clear Barack Obama has won the Dem Caucus. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are in a virtual tie for second, but Edwards is staying a dozen votes ahead. Will this (dare I hope?) put the myth of the Inevitable Hillary to rest?
There will be tons of analysis tomorrow. My initial take is that the unprecedented turnout of younger and first-time caucus goers tonight ought to be taken very seriously by both parties. Hillary Clinton’s “experience” is with delivering cautious little mini-tweaks of Republican policies. Also, the economic populist message sold very well in Iowa, especially considering that Huckabee’s campaign leaned more in that direction than did the other GOP candiates’.
There are indications that Chris Dodd will drop out of the race tomorrow, which would be sad, because in many ways I think he’s the best guy running. Other than that, however, I’m happy.
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Also: My technical problems are not completely resolved. I hope the site doesn’t go down again, but for the time being I have to keep comment moderation turned on because I’m getting comment spam by the hundreds per hour, and if I activate the spam filter I’m afraid the site will go down again. I don’t know why that would be so, but I don’t want to take any chances.
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Update: I like this quote, from shamanic:
With Huckabee and Obama apparently winning the Iowa Caucus, I can’t help but think I’m seeing the Democratic Party be reborn into the party of America, and watching the GOP fade to become the party of home schoolers.
