The Counter Counter Counter Enlightenment

Stephen Pinker apparently imagines he is on a crusade to save the Enlightenment.  To those who disagree with him, he has this (among other things) to say:

Some [of the vitriol] is turf-protective: some highbrow pundits, cultural critics, literary intellectuals, humanities professors, and other members of C.P. Snow’s “Second Culture” resent the incursion of science, data, and quantification into territories traditionally fenced off and claimed by them. And a surprising number are cultural pessimists who despise the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress. They prefer hermeneutic [textual interpretation] to analytic reasoning (one of the reasons they are sympathetic to religion even if they are atheists), valorize the consumption of elite art (as opposed to the well-being of the mass of humanity) as the highest moral good, and believe that Western civilization is on the verge of collapse and is so decadent and degenerate that anything that rises out of the rubble is bound to be an improvement.

The title of that article is "Counter-Enlightenment Convictions are 'Surprisingly Resilient'".  So yes, he really does believe he's defending the ivory towers of the Enlightenment from the barbaric hordes of postmodernism.

(A true story from my days in graduate school.  I took a class that met at night, which meant many of the professors came and many graduate students doing their doctoral work came to pontificate at each other.  I know how prone I am to do that, but I am still a piker compared to those who remain in memory green around that table.  One night the talk turned to what we are all doing there, as students and professors, and one professor, waving his hand in the direction of the football stadium, declared we in that room were defending the treasures of civilization from the barbaric hordes, meaning the people who filled that stadium and most of the students on campus.  It was a state school, not a private one, so it wasn't exclusive enough, I'm sure.  I don't remember now, 40+ years later, his precise words, but I remember the tenor, and I burst out laughing.  I was sure he meant it as a joke, it was such a cliche.  No one else laughed, and I might just as well have shit on the center of the table for the effect my laughter had.  Any idea I had of taking a Ph.D. in English ended that night, a decision I've never regretted.)

Let me first say Pinker doesn't understand C.P. Snow's argument at all, and second point out that even "analytical reasoning" is a hermeneutic (and not a unitary one; there are many kinds of analytical reasoning, but I'm sure Pinker insists there is only one true "analytical reasoning," much as Robert Jeffress would insist there is only one true Christianity, and he is the judge of it.).  To call it a hermeneutic, of course, is to remove it from the pantheon of Truths, or even from the pedestal of The One Truth, which he clearly thinks it is.  Part of the problem of scientists with no background in the humanities imagining they don't need to understand the humanities  but can just dismiss it in the name of Science, Truth, and Analytical Reasoning (which are a holy trinity, since they are all the same thing, right?  Funny how that works out.)  I don't resent the intrusion of science, data, and quantification into the humanities (has this guy ever studied prosody?  History?  Textual analysis?), but he clearly seems to resent the intrusion of hermeneutics (philosophy) into his science and quantification.  Maybe I should introduce him to Godel's Theorem of Incompleteness; it is, after all, based on mathematics, and is practically the underpinning of postmodernism.

I know I'm sidestepping the rest of his comment, for the moment; I'll come back to it.  Maybe.

The funny part about this conversation, prompted by Pinker's new book (and it turns out he's a psychologist?  I'd have sworn he was a linguist.  Well, that explains a lot, too.) that I stumbled into via Vox.  Pinker himself wrote this second book because the first book, about the "angels of our better nature," didn't actually bring the entire world to acknowledgment that Stephen Pinker had Figured It All Out.  No, really:

“I had thought that a parade of graphs with time on the horizontal axis, body counts or other measures of violence on the vertical, and a line that meandered from the top left to the bottom right would cure audiences” of their delusions and “persuade them that at least in this sphere of well-being the world has made progress,” he recalls near the beginning of “Enlightenment Now.” But Pinker’s inability to “cure audiences” and “persuade them” doesn’t mean he has reconsidered his rhetorical approach; 300 pages after bemoaning those poor souls who read “Better Angels” and weren’t bowled over by his panoply of statistics, Pinker doubles down with still more data. “We have seen six dozen graphs that have vindicated the hope for progress by charting the ways in which the world has been getting better,” he writes.

Being a teacher of composition and argument, my first thoughts on reading this go to Aristotle's four elements expressed in the rhetoric:  Ethos, Logos, Pathos, and Kairos.  Of the four (Ethos relates to the character of the speaker; Logos to the reasoning of the argument; Pathos to the ability of the speaker to connect emotionally to the audience, and Kairos, the current situation the audience is most interested in), only one rests on charts and graphs.  As I tell my students, the most logical argument in the world would appeal to robots (theoretically) or sentient computers (again, theoretically), but not to human beings.  3 of Aristotle's 4 elements concern audience response; without those three, logic is useless and ineffective.  Of course, Aristotle is not part of the Enlightenment, and his ideas of rhetoric don't take account of the power of science, data, and quantification; so what does he know?

I mean, really, this isn't rocket science.  And for all its accomplishment, the Enlightenment didn't reinvent the wheel.  Then again, I suspect Pinker's education not only didn't include humanities, but anything regarded as "the classics" (i.e., Greek and Roman writings).  One reason "if Voltaire or Leibniz or Kant stepped out of a time machine and commented on today’s political controversies, we’d think they were out to lunch."  More likely Voltaire, Leibniz, and Kant would regard Pinker and those who think him intelligent as uneducated boors.

 Part of the argument here is carried on in the Vox article, albeit rather weakly (especially as the author there identifies himself as a scholar, and dismisses the NYT review of Pinker's new book as the work of a "generalist"), that argument being that  SURPRISE!  SURPRISE! the Enlightenment was not a unitary thought project of Europeans who all thought as one because "analytical reasoning" can yield only one conclusion, and that conclusion = TRUTH!*

Who'da thunk it?

I was going to carry it on a bit and straighten out some of the weaknesses of the Vox article (IMHO, of course), but why bother? (Indeed, having read the NYT review of his book, I think the writer at Vox made the cardinal error of taking Pinker and his argument too seriously).  Pinker is a flyweight, a Sam Harris with tenure and minus the blatant racism; he's Jordan Peterson with better credentials than a YouTube audience provides.  But Immanuel Kant would have only been a university professor without his writings to leave behind, and despite Pinker's veiled swipe at people who are more highly regarded and likely to be better remembered than him, like Jacques Derrida (Derrida, not exactly an atheist but not exactly a confessing believer, was a professor of philosophy of religion; I think his "success" stings Pinker, so he alludes to Derrida as preferring hermeneutics, a common subject of Continental philosophy, over "analytical reasoning," the hallmark of Anglo-American philosophical schools.).  The examples of Kant and Derrida point up Pinker's failing:  he hasn't established anything worth discussing, nothing really lasting.  Daniel Dennett explained consciousness, and no one seems to have noticed.  Pinker has assured us, twice now, that this is the best of all possible worlds, but we all keep talking about Candide.  Oh, wait, sorry, that was a novel; no room for science, data, or quantification there, eh?

I all but promised to dig deeper into Pinker's statements quoted here, and I fully set out to do so; but why bother?  It's impossible to take him seriously when he thinks charts and graphs say all that need be said.  All I'm left with is Shakespeare's derisive dismissal, from the mouth of a university student, no less, and a student of human life:  "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  Or captured in a graph with time on a horizontal axis, for that matter.  But then, "analytical reasoning" that isn't turned upon reasoning itself is not really analytical at all, is it?  I'm sure C.P. Snow would agree with me, just as I'm sure Stephen Pinker would dismiss me as being anti-Enlightenment.  Given Pinker's argument, I'd take the critique as a compliment.  And spend my time watching Wim Wenders documentary about Pope Francis.

*Part of the problem in the Vox article is the defense of the Enlightenment project as being a promotion of knowledge as a good, a benefit.  There is some acknowledgement that "progress" always has its cost, and that too is part of the knowledge that should be promoted; but the very idea that "knowledge" is good is so mundane and anodyne it can't really be called a product of the Enlightenment; at least not without committing Pinker's sin of ignoring the bulk of human history, knowledge, literature, and recorded experience.  Knowledge has always been considered better than ignorance, else why tell stories, why write poems, why invent written languages and methods of preservation?  What kind of knowledge may be of particular interest to the figures of the Enlightenment, but even then too narrow a definition is just putting blinders on.  The better term, in fact, is wisdom; which is considerably beyond knowledge, although not superior to it.  Well, not necessarily, anyway.

Prologue to a discussion of Christ and Culture

I'm not a fan of Steven Pinker anyway, but the opening paragraphs of this recent New York Times Magazine article surprised even me:

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.

I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish.

The assumption here is that an "objective" assessment is ever and always an unalloyed good. By this measure, of course, Bill Gates and Norman Borlaug are both better persons than Jesus of Nazareth (who, after all, only healed a handful of people, and that's only hearsay, at best; "Go, and sin no more"? Talk about an "air of sanctity"!), or Mahatma Gandhi (sure he liberated a country, but how many people did he feed? Did he leave any charities behind to continue his work?).

Yes, the comparisons are more than a bit absurd, but you get the idea. Morality as measured by material benefit; is that really morality? Is utilitarianism truly the only measure of "good" possible in this world? Of course, the opposite extreme cannot be argued as the only measure, either. Morality that doesn't provide some good to the agent is a pretty dessicated thing. That's one understanding of why Jesus of Nazareth reportedly performed healings and other miracles, as a sign that the "good life" had its own rewards.

Pinker's point is, of course, that objectivity has its own rewards. He concludes:

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.

But only, of course, once we recognize the universal good of science, and the awesome truthiness of objectivity.

Pardon me if I sound skeptical; but I've heard this argument before, and it's about as subtle (and persuasive) as any argument against religion that I've stumbled across, or had shoved in my face, on the Web. I don't, for one moment, deny Pinker's thesis: science can certainly add to our knowledge of something so fundamental to human existence as morality. But used this way science remains a tool of utilitarianism (interestingly enough, the "morality" of those "who have blunted emotions because of damage to the frontal lobes become utilitarians." Hmmmm.....) and the advance he seeks is defeated by the claims he makes.

What Pinker seems to be doing is trying to place morality on a scientific basis, the better to get us all to agree on what morality is, or what rules should be followed. Ah, would that it were that simple. Morality, for example, is not necessarily limited to "a ... reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish." That's the basis of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and while it's a perfectly valid basis for assessing "good" and "not good" (to avoid the judgmental overtones of "bad") conduct, we would do well to conduct this discussion by first separating "ethics" and "morality." Contrary to popular opinion, they are not mere synonyms for each other, like "far" and "away" or "null" and "void." I find it far more useful to separate ethics (how should I behave in a community to maximize my happiness; a/k/a Aristotle's standard) from morality (how should I behave on a desert island?). It's a distinction Pinker thoroughly fails to recognize, and thereby hang a number of problems with his analysis.

Where am I going with this, besides engaging in pointless Pinker bashing (after all, what does he care what I have to say)? I'm building an approach to the topic of ethics, and morality, because I'm re-reading Richard Niebuhr's classic work of Christian ethics Christ and Culture. I also have a new book, a 'conversation" between Vattimo and Rorty, which promises to provide some interesting insights into questions of religion (including the fact that post-modernism is neither), and I need a starting point for that discussion. Niebuhr, for example, makes much of the conundrum of Christ as presented in the gospels, and the conundrum is, quite apparently, an ethical (not to say moral) one:*

Ancient Roman civilization, says Gibbon, was bound to reject Christianity just because Rome was tolerant. This culture, with its great diversity of customs and religions, could exist only if reverence and assent were granted to the many confused traditions and ceremonies of its constituent nations....But Christ and Christians threatened the unity of the culture...with their radical monotheism, a faith in the one God that was very different from the pagan universalism which sought to unify many deities and many cults under one earthly or heavenly framework....Divinity, it seems must not only hedge kings but also other symbols of political power, and monotheism deprives them of their sacred aura. The Christ who will not worship Satan to gain the world's kingdoms is followed by Christians who will worship only Christ in unity with the Lord whom he serves. And this is intolerable to all defenders of society who are content that many gods should be worshipped if only Democracy or America or Germany or the Empire receives its due, religious homage. The antagonism of modern, tolerant culture to Christ is of course often disguised because it does not call its religious practices religious...and also because it regards what it calls religious as one of the many interests which can be placed alongside economics, art, science, politics, and techniques. Hence the injunction it voices to Christian monotheism appears in such injunctions only as that religion should be kept out of politics and business, or that Christian faith must learn to get along with other religions. What is often meant is that not only the claims of Christ and God should be banished from the spheres where other gods, called values, reign. The implied charge against Christian faith is like the ancient one: it imperils society by its attack on its religious life; it deprives social institutions of their cultic, sacred character; by its refusal to condone the pious superstitions of tolerant polytheism it threatens social unity. The charge lies not only against Christian organizations which use coercive means against what they define as false religions, but against the faith itself.

H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row 1975), pp. 7-9

The ancient criticism of Christians bears consideration in light of Pinker's critique of Mother Teresa. Is there a universal standard or morality, or not? If there is, what is it? Everything old, you see, is new again.

Dig a little deeper into Pinker's argument, you find all kinds of assumptions running wild in it. F'rinstance, he makes much of studies which show that people on the Web all think alike, despite their culture. Culture, however, isn't all that distinctly ethnic, and as could be argued from the recent phenomenon of Ron Paul raising a record amount via the Internet, while failing to make more than a marginal showing in any Republican primary (or even to surprise one pollster with his electoral successes of failures), samplings from the Internet may seem very broad, but are actually very thin. The aggregation of the like-minded from the world population that has Internet access is hardly statistically significant of anything, except the ability to aggregate the like-minded with the aid of communications technology. Branching away from that, Pinker cites brain studies involving different ethnicities again (which, for Pinker, stand for different cultures). But how fundamentally different are modern cultures which have access to, and understanding of, modern medical technology of the type which can scan and survey and record brain activity? These studies, in other words, aren't exactly of people in "fringe" regions far from the influence of Western culture (which pretty much dominates the globe, at least in terms of countries which could employ such technologies, and the people who would submit to them for purposes of biological studies). Do these studies prove biology underlies all human behavior? Well, only if they first remove the possibility that culture does so, and that Western values haven't become largely universalized at least broadly enough to account for the similarities of judgment Pinker relies on.

I do not mean to say that such similarities cannot exist. One of my seminary professors introduced me to the study of the works of Emmanuel Levinas by telling a story I haven't otherwise corroborated, wherein Levinas saw a man save a child from an oncoming car on a busy street. The child and the man were strangers to each other, so Levinas began to wonder what forces were at work in this interaction, and being a philosopher rather than a biologist (or a linguist!), he began to develop a philosophy of relationship based on the concept of the Same and Other. Which is only to say there are several possible explanations for such altruistic behavior, and if science is going to lay claim to presenting the "true" one, it's going to have to do better than Pinker's presentations.

What Pinker is not discerning here, in any way, is the nature and influence of culture on any ethical or moral judgment. Which is not entirely surprising; Niebuhr takes several pages to carefully describe in the most general terms what "culture" is for the purposes of his discussion, after first averring he is describing it in "...tenuous fashion." Still, he comes up with seven basic elements, which he elaborates better than I can do here (we'll get back to this, I hope):

1) Culture is social, "it is inextricably bound up with man's [sic] life in society...Individuals may use culture in their own ways; they may change elements in their culture, yet what they use and change is social. Culture is the social heritage they receive and transmit. Whatever is purely private, so that it neither derives from nor enters into social life, is not a part of culture. Conversely, social life is always cultural."

2) "Culture, secondly, is human achievement....[W]e are dealing with what man [sic] has purposefully wrought and with what man can or ought to do. The world so far as it is man-made and man-intended is the world of culture."

3) "...the world of culture is a world of values....What men have made and what they make, we must assume, is intended for a purpose it is designed to serve a good. It can never be described without reference to ends in minds of designers and users....To be sure, the ends that human achievement serves may change; what was intended for utility may be preserved for the sake of aesthetic satisfaction or of social harmony; yet the value-relation is inescapable wherever we encounter culture."

4) "...the values with which these human achievements are concerned are dominantly those of the good for man....In defining the ends that his activities are to realize in culture, man begins with himself as the chief value and the source of all other values. What is good is what is good for him."

5) ...culture in all its forms and varieties is concerned with the temporal and material realization of values." Niebuhr links this, not to mere material gain, but to efforts "to embody in concrete, tangible, visible, and audible forms" the ideals of the culture, or "what has been imaginatively discerned." It seems to me here we have a definite linkage between rational ends, which flow from desires, and emotional needs, which determine (after all) what we consider "rational."

6) "Because all these actualizations of purpose are accomplished in transient and perishing stuff, cultural activity is almost as much concerned with the conservation of values as with their realization....Culture is social tradition which must be conserved by painful struggle not so much against nonhuman natural forces as against revolutionary and critical powers in human life and reason." When Pinker identifies thoughts which are repugnant even questionnaires, has he identified a principle of biology, or of sociology? "Never think my thoughts, never share my hearth, whoever does such things."

7) "Finally, attention must be directed to the pluralism that is characteristic of all culture. The values a culture seeks to realize in any time or place are many in number....Culture is concerned with that is good for male and female, child and adult, rulers and ruled; with what is good for men in special vocations and groups, according to the customary notions of such good." One quick example is from the tale of Gilgamesh. When Enkidu is created by the gods to be a companion to Gilgamesh, he is all animal. A temple prostitute goes to him, and they copulate for several days, until he is civilized. The value, of course, is for culture to have stable persons in it, persons who fit in the community. The people have asked for Enkidu because Gilgamesh, their ruler, is himself so uncivilized and wild in his appetites. The method by which Enkidu is civilized would hardly satisfy a post-Victorian Western society, or even occur to the post-"Free Love" American culture; but the value of such "civilizing" is apparent to all. Is that value, however, biological? Or is it merely a concomitant of human communities, one without which communities cannot function, or sometimes even survive?

From these brief description alone you can already question Pinker's reliance on the studies he cites. Is what he sees in those results the consequence of culture, or of biology? Which of these tenets of culture, in fact, can be said to be wholly biological, even if they could be said to be shared by human societies as different as those of Gilgamesh and Beowulf and Shakespeare's Othello? Are these similarities not as likely to come from the human need for community, and for the social orders that arise therefrom? The society of Gilgamesh barely resembles that of Beowulf, or that of Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (the Wife of Bath is particularly unimaginable in either of the other two contexts), yet the ways of ordering that we call "culture" are fundamentally the same in each. It takes a bit more than a political boundary or an ethnic designation to answer that question, and Pinker frankly fails to address it.

In the end, Pinker is not wrong, but his assumptions are as specious as those of the advocates of the Social Gospel which Niebuhr's brother Reinhold (ironically, Christ and Culture is dedicated "To Reinie.")dissected in Moral Man and Immoral Society. Like the advocates of the Social Gospel, Pinker wants to find a system of thought which will eradicate all disagreement:

The science of the moral sense also alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions. 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.

Though wise people have long reflected on how we can be blinded by our own sanctimony, our public discourse still fails to discount it appropriately.
...
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.”

Once we all become objective enough to see the truth as Pinker does, once we, in other words, all think like Pinker, then we can usher in the new millenium; or at least all learn to get along. Unfortunately, as "Reinie" pointed out, it will never be that simple:

While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves. Though educators ever since the eighteenth century have given themselves to the fond illusion that justice through voluntary co-operation waited only upon a more universal or a more adequate educational enterprise, there is good reason to believe that the sentiments of benevolence and social goodwill will never be so pure or powerful, and the rational capacity to consider the rights and needs of others in fair competition with our own will never be so fully developed as to create the possibility for the anarchistic millennium which is the social utopia, either explicit or implicit, of all intellectual or religious moralists.

All social co-operation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion. While no state can maintain its unity purely by coercion neither can it preserve itself without coercion. Where the factor of mutual consent is strongly developed, and where standardised and approximately fair methods of adjudicating and resolving conflicting interests within an organised group have been established, the coercive factor in social life is frequently covert, and becomes apparent only in moments of crisis and in the group's policy toward recalcitrant individuals. Yet it is never absent. Divergence of interest, based upon geographic and functional differences within a society, is bound to create different social philosophies and political attitudes which goodwill and intelligence may partly, but never completely, harmonise. Ultimately, unity within an organised social group, or within a federation of such groups, is created by the ability of a dominant group to impose its will.

....

The limitations of the human mind and imagination, the inability of human beings to transcend their own interests sufficiently to envisage the interests of their fellowmen as clearly as they do their own makes force an inevitable part of the process of social cohesion. But the same force which guarantees peace also makes for injustice. "Power," said Henry Adams, "is poison"; and it is a poison which blinds the eyes of moral insight and lames the will of moral purpose. The individual or the group which organises any society, however social its intentions or pretensions, arrogates an inordinate portion of social privilege to itself.

And that's without even bringing in the prospect of "Original Sin."


*I won't attribute my distinction between "ethics" and "morals" to Niebuhr. The terms are usually used interchangeably, even in discussions of ethics and morality; but part of my presentation is, that they shouldn't be.

These things that pass for knowledge....

The joke at my UCC seminary was about the graduate who came to face his ecclesiastical council in order to be ordained, and confessed that, due to seminary, he had lost his belief in God.

But it was the UCC, so what could they do? They ordained him anyway.

It's a jest on the UCC, but also on seminary. In his biography of Martin Luther King, I remember a passage where King was surprised to find one of his seminary professors attended church. Why? Because the professor so challenged King's church derived beliefs, the doctrines he brought to seminary from his childhood, that King was sure the man was an atheist. Seminary is not "Bible College." It is not a place to have your Sunday school aphorisms affirmed and your faith reassured. There was always some lively speculation in seminary as to which professors were secretly atheists, and a general reluctance to put too much stress on piety, and not enough stress on intellectual foundations.

Which I thought of while I watched this story on "UP with Chris Hayes" this morning. I don't want to pass judgment on Mike Aus (his is a non-denominational church, I'm not sure what title he carries, if any) . But the discussion of how he lost his belief (not his "faith," I would argue; he simply transferred that to something else. Watch this discussion from earlier in the show, and replace "trust" with "faith," a perfectly legitimate transfer as the Greek word in the Gospels translated as "faith" can be equally translated as "trust." You'll see, as Anthony points out here from time to time, that we all "believe" in something. The question is, do we ever examine the roots of that belief, be they science, or religion?) is interesting because he credits two guests on the show: Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker.

Dawkins I've written about before; and Pinker, too, to a lesser degree. Later in the show Pinker defends his thesis that human life is "progressing" towards at least non-violence, first by pointing out violence is down since 1946 (probably due more to the Pax Americana than to "progress," but I digress) and that this decline in violence is due to institutions, not individuals.

Which is interesting on two fronts: one, it tacitly accepts the concept of "original sin," at least as espoused by Christopher Hedges and Reinhold Niebuhr, if not by the local Bible thumper. Two, Mr. Pinker would be hard pressed to exclude the Church, at least in the West, from the institution most to be credited for the improvement he argues has, and is, occurring (and perhaps he doesn't exclude it. My point is the same, with or without his concurrence.).

Here is Niebuhr on the question of sin and national innocence:

A further consequence of modern optimism is a philosophy of history expressed in the idea of progress. Either by a force immanent in nature itself, or by the gradual extension of rationality, or by the elimination of specific sources of evil, such as priesthoods, tyrannical government and class divisions in society, modern man [sic] expects to move toward some kind of perfect society. The idea of progress is compounded of many elements. It is particularly important to consider one element of which modern culture is itself completely oblivious. The idea of progress is possible only upon the ground of a Christian culture. It is a secularized version of Biblical apocalypse and of the Hebraic sense of a meaningful history, in contrast to the meaningless history of the Greeks. But since the Christian doctrine of the sinfulness of man [sic] is eliminated, a complicating factor in the Christian philosophy is removed and the way is open for simple interpretations of history, which relate historical process as closely as possible to biological process and which fail to do justice either to the unique freedom of man or to the daemonic misuse which he may make of that freedom.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Intepretation, Vol. I (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press 1996), p. 24.

And here is Chris Hedges, on much the same point:

We have nothing to fear from those who do not believe in God; we have much to fear from those who do not believe in sin. The concept of sin is a stark acknowledgment that we can never be omnipotent, that we are bound and limited by human flaws and self-interest. The concept of sin is a check on the utopian dreams of a perfect world. It prevents us from believing in our own perfectability or the illusion that the material advances of science and technology equal an intrinsic moral improvement in our species. To turn away from God is harmless. Saints have been trying to do it for centuries. To turn away from sin is catastrophic. Religious fundamentalists who believe they know and can carry out the will of God, disregard their severe human limitations. They act as if they are free from sin. The secular utopians of the twenty-first century have also forgotten they are human. These two groups peddle absolutes. Those who do not see as they see, speak as they speak and act as they act are worthy only of conversion or eradication.

Chris Hedges, I Don't Believe In Atheists, New York: Free Press, 2008, p. 13-14.

As if to underline Mr. Hedges point, Richard Dawkins declared everyone who doesn't think as he does unmutual . He told Chris Hayes that all Roman Catholic politicians should be challenged on the doctrine of transubstantiation; those who didn't refute it should be humiliated for believing such an obvious myth. To his credit, Chris Hayes and the rest of the more Jeffersonian panel considered that a disastrous concept of civility. But Mr. Dawkins' sentiments were perfectly clear.

Almost no one in public life any longer speaks of human spirituality (although given the tenor of this televised discussion, I shouldn't be), even though the spiritual emptiness of modern life has been a staple of American literature for over a century now:

The German-American has made contributions to our national life, but they have been economic rather than spiritual. He has served the body of our nation well, but his contribution to its soul-life seems to have been inadequate. In developing our national resources, particularly the agricultural resources of the Middle West, the German-American has had no inconspicuous part. His thrift and industry are proverbial, and these virtues were employed to good advantage upon our countrysides and prairies. The industry of the German immigrant converted our prairies into fruitful fields; his thrift contributed to the prosperity of the nation which established his own. By virtue of his prosperity and affluence, and by virtue also of his well-known qualities of dependability and prudence, he has become a potent influence in the communities in which he had been placed. Where the interests of the nation and his own interest were identical, the German-American can has served the interest of the nation well.

But, unhappily, the interests of the nation are not always identical with those of the individual. They often require sacrifices on the part of the individual, and they always demand large social sympathies. In these qualities the German-American seems to be deficient. His virtues seem to be individualistic rather than social. He has unwittingly served the nation through his qualities of prudence and thrift, but he has been rather indifferent to the problems of the nation that did not directly affect him. He has manifested no great interest in a single one of the great moral, political, or religious questions that have agitated the minds of the American people in late years. His failure to do so is all the more striking because he comes from a country where interest in community welfare on the part of the individual has reached its highest development. This indifference toward our national ideals and problems was vaguely felt by the American people even before the outbreak of this war. Perhaps it is the reason why German-Americanism had only to manifest itself as a definite element, to arouse the resentment of the American people. They had not known it to be hostile to our ideals, but they had felt it to be indifferent to our problems. The German-American had poorly fortified himself by solid achievement against the day when his loyalty would be, justly or unjustly, questioned.

We really have reduced all considerations in public life to matters of economics. The Paul Ryan budget, the concerns over the deficit, the outcry about funding Planned Parenthood or even providing insurance coverage that might pay for contraceptives, is ultimately all about money, and not about people. Money trumps every question of spirituality or human value, because it is only money that matters, it is only money that can be quantified, counted, assessed, and truly valued. It is perfectly clear, across the Western world in the throes of an economic crisis, that people are too damned expensive, and saving money from the people who would consumer is the greatest good and highest duty of society. In some recent speeches Obama has sounded the note emphasized in that second paragraph; but who has echoed it for him? And why is this kind of talk so important? Why is spirituality so valuable to modern democracy?

John Adams in his warnings to Thomas Jefferson would seem to have had a premonition of this kind of politics. "Power," he wrote, "always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party." Adams's understanding of the power of the self's passions and ambitions to corrupt the self's reason is a simple recognition of the facts of life which refute all theories, whether liberal or Marxist, about the possibility of a completely disinterested self. Adams, as every Christian understanding of man has done, nicely anticipated the Marxist theory of an "ideological taint" in reason when men reason about each other's affairs and arrive at conclusions about each other's virtues, interests and motives. The crowning irony of the Marxist theory of ideology is that it foolishly and self-righteously confined the source of this taint to economic interest and to a particular class. It was, therefore, incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency.

The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr. Charles Scribners' Sons, New York, 1952, p. 21-22.

None of this came up among the public intellectuals and pontificators on Chris Hayes show Sunday morning. None of these ideas were presented as fair challenge; discussed; even considered. Nothing pierced the rather simplistic bubble of the conversation aside from Mr. Dawkins' outrageous demand against Roman Catholic politicians. I found, after a while, that I couldn't look at Stephen Pinker and not think: Here is a man of extraordinary privilege sitting at the very pinnacle of a pyramid that is literally international in scope and reach and which provides that privilege to him, out of all the billions of human beings alive in the world at this moment, and all the millions of Americans and Canadians who might, out of all the other billions on the planet, have any hope of laying claim to the same privilege and comforts Mr. Pinker enjoys. And he is absolutely Panglossian in his assertion that this is the best of all possible worlds and it's only getting better and violence is going down as we all become better people thanks, of course, to Western civilization (he's not enough of an anthropologist to give any attention to any other form of civilization). From his perch he gets to scan human history and see nothing but improvement which leads inevitably to his comfortable place, and which will, with his added insight and wisdom, soon guide us all to the new millenium of human perfectability. It's not just the Calvinist and Niebuhrian in me that laughs at his presumption, it is the knowledge that any situation, when you simplify it enough, looks tractable and even eminently explicable. Mr. Pinker is no wiser than Gulliver, no more thoughtful than Pangloss, no less naive than Candide. He assumes his enormous privilege is deserved rather than wrenched from the mouths of children he will never know, who will die because of a system that ignores, if it doesn't exploit, them, just as much as it serves the every comfort of the Stephen Pinkers of the world, and it does the latter only by doing the former. From Mr. Pinker's perch, there are signs of progress; from the perch of the children shot by the US Army Sergeant? Or dragooned into involuntary military service by Kory? Or who will die of starvation, malnutrition, dehydration, across the planet, at any given moment? What progress in the affairs of common humanity do they enjoy?

And just this week I hear doctors warning that an over-reliance on antibiotics may bring an end to medicine as we know it, because of the "superbugs" which prove ever more resistant to those very antibiotics. Technology that has made life such a blessing, may soon leave us where it found us: having tasted paradise, and then cast out again, forevermore. Technology which has already made life a blessing for those on one end, makes it a hell on earth for those on the other, right down to the discarded electronic waste with its heavy metals and poisons that decay in foreign (to us) landfills where people not us, live. Global warming is not the result of bushmen in Australia burning campfires, yet they will be affected by it. Resource wars for water and oil are predicted to be on the horizon, the product of the very progress in science and rise of civilization which Mr. Pinker avers is responsible for the decline in human institutional violence. Surely the people are grass!

But that's alright, because the reliance on violence is declining! That could as much be because the long arm of the powerful, as it was for the Romans in their heyday, is so much longer and more powerful than it is for the recipients of that violence. How does one counter a tank, except with an IED? How does one counter a drone, if at all? How does one shoot back against a bomber, or a cruise missile? Who, in the world, truly possesses the weapons of mass destruction, and who possesses only the ability to kill at best many at a time? Three planes on 9/11 killed 3000 people. How many millions did we manage to kill in retaliation? The great violence of the two world wars was more because of the ability of the two sides to inflict massive injuries on each other over a sustained period. The battles since have been far more one sided. Statistic alone do not indicate the presence of the trend Mr. Pinker is looking for.

And his argument, too, is based on the fact that Samuel Pepys went to a public place to see a hanging, or a quartering, or some other act of violence actually inflicted on another person, as a form of entertainment (as well as an assertion of the power and authority of the State). What's changed now is that we can see such violence 24 hours a day in the comfort of our own homes, and the only difference now is that it's simulated violence. Does that really matter to the audience? Did they really care about the lives of the gladiators any more than fans today care about the lives of "professional wrestlers"? In modern day entertainment, we pretend to hurt people, and even when the violence involves children, we find a good reason for it; or at least we find it entertaining. Perhaps it is better that we don't slaughter people outright for our pleasure; but we still find violence as compelling a subject of spectacle as ever we did. Whether it is real or staged doesn't matter much to us, as we want our faked violence to be as realistic as possible. Even in the movie of "The Hunger Games," the bodies of the children being killed by children were realistically presented as dead, and in some cases their deaths were portrayed as very painful. Do we really care any more about the actors playing the minor roles (the red shirt in "Star Trek," the henchman in any James Bond or other action film; many of the dead children in "The Hunger Games") than the audience cared about the gladiators who were slain? My daughter knew one of the actors in "The Hunger Games" from her school; but she was a minor character, and I can't even remember if she died on screen or not.

And let me just back up and say the idea, presented again by Robert Wright on Chris Hayes' panel, that morality comes only from God is not a theological proposition, but a 19th century secular one. It arose primarily out of concern for the rising atheism of the educated (read: ruling) classes, especially in England, who reasoned that if they couldn't subjugate the masses with a fear of hell and visions of sinners in the hands of an angry God, all public morality (read: the social order that keeps us at the top!) might be undone. It had far more to do with the Great Chain of Being than with Moses giving the law to the tribes of Israel, and for Mr. Wright and others to continue to beat this shibboleth as if it were a real (but dead) horse says far more about their ignorance and credulity, than it does about the least knowledgeable believer in any world religion.

Even as I divest myself of these opinions (prick me and I bleed a gallon of response), I wonder who I think I'm talking to. Stephen Pinker is comfortable in his amorally moral universe, and Susan Jacoby (also on Chris Hayes) was, frankly, incoherent (not that I was much of a fan). Robert Wright is a spent force in this arena (when he isn't, as Chris Hedges would put it, simply illiterate), no more deserving of serious consideration than Pinker or Dawkins. Pinker declares that the angels of our better nature are being wooed on a world-wide basis by institutions? And where do those institutions come from, and from whence comes their beneficent influence? Space aliens? Selfish genes? The progress of Western civilization? Or is it more likely from human beings, and human nature? Has Pinker so much as heard of Reinhold Niebuhr, so much as read sociology or anthropology? Niebuhr's central insights into institutions and morality absolutely turn Pinker's bland assertions and statistics inside out. And I speak as a serious student of the subjects they think themselves qualified to dabble in. Most other serious students know these "ideas" (I use the word cautiously) aren't worth the effort it takes to refute them, and the majority of the world's religious believers don't give a wet snap what the four of them say, or who they say it to. This is a conversation conducted by a small group ignorant of everything except their own preconceptions, impervious to understanding and of no real consequence to the course of human history. Not, at least, when it comes to the very human realm of the religious.

I know I'm not Kierkegaard; but neither am I taking on Hegel or the State Church. And I am reminded of two things; or is it three?

"The core of most religions is not doctrinal. In non-western traditions and even some strands of western monotheism, the spiritual life is not a matter of subscribing to a set of propositions. Its heart is in practice, in ritual, observance and (sometimes) mystical experience . . . "

"My church comforts the sick and the dying. My church feeds the hungry. What does your church do? Oh, that's right, you don't have a church!"

And: Those who can't do, teach. Or, at least, they talk a lot; without getting very much done.

These are not, of course, refutations. No idea is ever refuted, ever finally put to rest; no idea, good or bad, is ever ended. But at some point it is apparent that there are discussions worth having, and discussions not worth bothering with. And there is a reason Kierkegaard wanted his audience to eventually leave behind the philosophical works, and take up (and truly learn from) the edifying discourses.

So this is not a refutation; consider it more of a rejection. Again.

Mimi is right in her comment below; I would be better off ignoring this subject, unless I can turn some good out of it. And that good would be to make efforts to refocus the discussion away from the supremacy of materialism and back toward the necessity of spirituality.

And maybe one day I'll learn to leave it lay where Jesus flang it.

Addendum to the Pinker Post

School shooting in Texas. Early reports not looking good. God bless all!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2018

More to the point:  what he hell does he mean by it?

I teach composition and rhetoric, and one of the things I teach is rhetorical analysis (in one week!  No, we don't cover it deeply).  I usually focus on the phrase "God Bless America," asking my students to consider what it means and what it even is.  Is it a command, an imperative, requiring God to "bless" America (I'll explain the quotes in a minute)?  It is a plea, with the "Please" or "May" implied but unspoken?  And what, I always ask, does "bless" mean?  We use it almost entirely in a religious context.  Christians churches  ask for the blessings of God, or speak of the blessed poor, the blessed meek, the blessed mourners; but what does "bless" mean?  Good things from God?  That's one.  But how are the meek "blessed"?  Or the mourners?

Or is it even perforative language, meant by the expression to create a state of affairs?

Outside the religious context, does the word "bless" have any meaning at all?  "Bless your heart" is a Southern phrase that is meant both as a benediction and as a euphemism.  In the right context it is the most polite way of taking pity on a fool that one can muster; but it can also mean to be a comfort, and it's sometimes hard to be sure which is meant.  But there isn't necessarily a religious connotation in it, especially when its used as the most anodyne of insults.

Which brings me, in far too roundabout a fashion, to this:

Of course, Pinker’s confidence in the righteousness of his own cause may come across as similarly beatific (he’s an atheist who’s confident enough to use the word “blessed” without a hint of irony), but as he repeatedly tells us, the evidence is on his side.

I do wonder what Pinker means.  I don't have the context.  I presume it's in his new book.  I understand the reference to irony, but is it essential?  I understand the idea of a blessing; but I have to say I find "Congratulations!" a lot more straightforward and understandable.  The more I think about "bless" or "blessed" or "blessing," the more I wonder if I know what I should be expecting, or if I've just been told I'm a benighted fool who doesn't even understand the insult.*

*I was reminded last night of the other use of "blessing," that given by an authority figure (a father, The Godfather) to those under that authority.  Which is the real irony of Pinker's use of the word.  Where does the blessing he thinks has been dispensed (he uses the past tense) come from?  The Enlightenment, one presumes?  Huh.  You know, real philosophers are more careful about their language than that.

"We Make Things Go"

I am left watching this new debate and wondering "but what is 'violence' and what is 'intelligence'?" Which leads me to first wonder how much the decline in battlefield deaths is due to intelligence that avoids war, and how much is due to intelligence that repairs the wounded, so they aren't the dead. Which are two very different kinds of intelligence, indeed.

I have a vague memory of this discussion occurring earlier, with the Crimean War being a touchstone because it was the last big war prior to modern medicine. The death tolls were high, largely because so many died of their wounds. The death toll in Iraq has been low, comparatively, because so many soldiers don't die of their wounds. Head traumas alone, which would have guaranteed death in earlier wars (and which are only possible because of modern technology which can produce IED's), are now wounds, not fatalities. The number killed in wars has declined as much because of battlefield medical treatment as because we are "less violent." Perhaps. Inquiring minds, at least, would like to know.

As for these numbers:

_ Murder in European countries has steadily fallen from near 100 per 100,000 people in the 14th and 15th centuries to about 1 per 100,000 people now.

_ Murder within families. The U.S. rate of husbands being killed by their wives has dropped from 1.2 per 100,000 in 1976 to just 0.2. For wives killed by their husbands, the rate has slipped from 1.4 to 0.8 over the same time period.

_ Rape in the United States is down 80 percent since 1973. Lynchings, which used to occur at a rate of 150 a year, have disappeared.

_ Discrimination against blacks and gays is down, as is capital punishment, the spanking of children, and child abuse.

I'm not sure all discrimination counts as violence, but perhaps that's too much of a quibble. I do wonder what the murder rate is in America, Russia, Asia, Africa, Australia. Or are we going back to Europe as the pinnacle of humanity and the apex of education? As for murder within American marriages, I'd point out that divorce is now quite common, and it may be not that husbands and wives are better educated or simply smarter (Pinker's thesis), but that they get divorced before they get violent. Murder was probably once seen as the only way out of a bad marriage, in other words. I don't know that, of course; but bald statistic don't tell you anything; it's the interpretation that reaches the conclusion, and what is that interpretation based on? Pinker wants to see it as signs of rising intelligence; if I see it simply as a sign of changing social strictures (divorce is no longer taboo), which of us is right?

Yes, rape is down, and lynchings are down. But the latter were a public spectacle much more than a private crime (they were finally relegated to anonymity), and American society has never had the stomach for public violence that the English once did (one of Pinker's widely related examples is Pepys attending a public execution. To this day the British laugh at physical horrors that most Americans blanch at, and I don't mean that as a slight on the British. But only Englishmen could come up with the Black Knight in Monty Python's "Holy Grail" movie, and there is a greater tolerance in British culture for violence as humor than there is in American culture. We love our violence, but we don't like to laugh at it. We take it too seriously; it's a moral punishment. But that's another topic, for another time.). If rape is down, is it because we are smarter? I don't know; I don't see a connection between intelligence and the desire to rape someone. And while we don't engage in public executions, they are still a thriving business in many states in the Union. The violence of them (hanging, shooting, electrocution) has certainly diminished, but the desire for them has not. And is this because we are more intelligent? Or because we are becoming more moral?

And no, I don't think the two are joined at the hip.

I've made a purely personal observation that of the European countries with violence in their histories, the Scandinavian countries with their Viking heritage seem the most consistently peaceful today. Is this because of education, or because of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? One answer works as well as the other. If this is a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces seem to be identical: either fits. But is it a jigsaw? Is this cut out of a pre-determined mold, and it is simply up to us to assemble it correctly? Of that I'm not so sure.

The question, then, is: how do we measure violence? Battlefield deaths? But we can't measure that without measuring technology, especially medical technology. Maslow's hierarchy could answer just as well, if we decide that what keeps mankind alive is food, clothing, and shelter, and once those are assured there is less reason to go to war and seek new resources. That was the popular argument a few decades back, when the idea began that democracies never go to war against each other, and countries with trade relations have no reason to fight each other (an assumption that ignores history and even literature. Homer's warriors before the walls of Troy battle individually all day long, and find out they are practically family, that their grandfathers were great friends and when this war ends, if they are alive, they will re-establish the old ties.) Perhaps violence is down statistically, but is that because we are less violent, or because the non-warrior class now outnumbers the warrior class, and markets work better than military oppression? Rome survived on its military might first; it had virtually no market economy at all. It's social stability derived from patronage, and whenever that stability was threatened the soldiers turned on the Roman citizens or those they were supposed to protect, and no one thought it cruel and unfair. One reason NATO intervened in Libya was because Gadaffi was "attacking his own people." Are we more intelligent than Rome? Or simply operating under different standards because there are more of us on the planet, and a power like Rome's is now impossible?

If we measure violence by rapes, what about assaults and gun deaths, or violent deaths in general? Are those down, up, the same? Perhaps Pinker addresses this in his book, but even if he does, how do we know why this is, or what it means, or even if it means anything? I don't have an answer, I just have questions. This is a fantastically complex issue, and to rest it on matters like "IQ" (which Stephen Jay Gould, among others, has shown to be a chimera. Identify "intelligence" for me, and then tell me how you measure it the same way you can measure length or weight or height, or even velocity. The notion of comparing "IQ" levels is laughable. You might as well compare the length of unicorn horns over the centuries.) I have also known very intelligent people who were very compassionate; as well as very intelligent people with no compassion or concern for others at all. Intelligence is not inextricably linked to behavior, and can't be assumed to be the weight that tips the scales in favor of the outcome we'd all like to see.

There's also the simple fact that violence is the favored form of entertainment, at least in America. Now, of course, we're back to defining "violence". Is it the antics of the Three Stooges? My mother thought so, when I was young and watching them poke each other in the eye, or strike each other with hammers. Is it the violence of a slasher film or a horror movie? Is it the violence of an "action film," or the highly choreographed fights of the new "Three Musketeers" movie, or the Robert Downey, Jr. versions of Sherlock Holmes? The comic book violence of The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Iron Man? Dalton Trumbo remarked, in his preface to his book Johnny Got his Gun, that during the Vietnam War we read daily "body count" statistics in the newspapers, and instead of thinking of the pile of arms and legs and torsos that number represented, and throwing up at the horror of it, we reached for our coffee cups. Does anyone even pay attention to the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan anymore, or know why we continue it? War we can still always pay for, but people? Surely if we were more intelligent, Johnson's Great Society and RFK's compassion for the poor wouldn't have been erased from public discourse quite so rapidly.

And here, perhaps, I do the argument a disservice; but then, what is the argument? That according to numbers, we don't kill quite as many of our fellow humans as we used to? Well, perhaps not. But we certainly employ a great many people in endeavors directly related to violence, either real or imaginary; and we certainly have many industries devoted to the production of violence, again either real or imaginary. And we continue to do daily violence to the poor, the marginalized, the invisible, the oppressed, the neglected, the forgotten, the dispossessed, the ignored.

But to the extent we don't, is that because we are better educated, more intelligent? Or is it because we are more compassionate (and yes, education could increase that, too. Education is not merely the method by which intelligence is increased, although Mr. Pinker seems to think so.)?

I suppose it's all a matter of how narrowly, or broadly, you define "violence." Or maybe it's a question of how we define "intelligence." And also of how much "intelligence" is really worth in human history. I can guess Stephen Pinker's answer on that issue. I can also guess I would think him quite wrong.*


Concluding Unscientific Postscript:

One other point, which may or may not undermine the argument that violence is down because compassion is up (I'm not sure it is, I just think morality is as valid a cause for this perceived effect as intelligence is, and probably a more comprehensive answer. Anyway....): the focus on violence as an indicator of the "angels of our better nature" is an interesting one, since violence is always a personal problem, i.e., a problem of personal security. Violence is always about what is done to me and mine, not about what I can, or should, do for others.

Violence is bad, but it's worse when it's done against me. Nothing motivates a country like being attacked (violence against us); witness America's reaction to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. But who is poverty done against? It's always done against another, and it's easy to blame the victim for the problem. Even when we don't, what motivates a country to care for the helpless, the hungry, the marginalized and dispossessed? Apparently not intelligence, which should at least tell us their interests are our interests, their hunger and poverty will be ours if we are not more equitable. Yet is there a rise in compassion for the poor comparable to the alleged fall in violence? Has anybody thought to ask? And isn't it really a more important issue? Yes, violence is bad; but I would argue poverty is infinitely worse, especially since the measures of violence seem to be death and single acts (like rape). Poverty, unlike death, is actually lived through. But poverty requires an action on my part; violence requires a lack of action on my part.

Small wonder one seems more important than the other, more a reflection of our "better angels" than the other. It's a small thing, but the more I think about it, the more it bothers me. Are we really better off, as a species, because violence is down, because the physical threat against any one of us is arguably lower now than at any time in history? Is that really good news for the poor? Does this debate promise healing for the brokenhearted, preach deliverance for captives, mean recovery of sight for the blind? Because it seems to me that, until it does, it's just rearranging the first-class deck chairs on the Titanic.

The Conceptual Hoax and its Adherents

Just to be 100% clear: Anyone who jumps on, and stays on, that gender studies hoax bandwagon is neither a rationalist nor a skeptic.

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) May 20, 2017

CUNY slaps Harvard and Oxford!

Been waiting a while for somebody to actually say this:

As a skeptic myself, I am cautious about the constellation of cognitive biases to which our evolved brains are perpetually susceptible, including motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, overconfidence and belief perseverance. That is partly why, as a general rule, if one wants to criticize a topic X, one should at the very least know enough about X to convince true experts in the relevant field that one is competent about X. This gets at what Brian Caplan calls the “ideological Turing test.” If you can’t pass this test, there’s a good chance you don’t know enough about the topic to offer a serious, one might even say cogent, critique.

But here's the funny part:  it's part of an article about the "Conceptual Penis" hoax, and that hoax apparently caught a number of "luminaries":

As the historian Angus Johnston put it on Twitter, “If skepticism means anything it means skepticism about the things you WANT to be true. It’s easy to be a skeptic about others’ views.” The quick, almost reflexive reposting of this “hoax” by people like Dave Rubin, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Christina Hoff Sommers and Melissa Chen reveals a marked lack of critical thinking about what exactly this exercise in attempted bullying proves.

The links to Twitter there are mine.  Nothing says "high quality peer-reviewed" quite like Twitter, eh?  Such is the state of public intellectuals in America, where people gleefully engage in mocking postmodern theories and anything else they don't begin to understand.  Trump is a useful metaphor here:  after all, if he doesn't understand it, it must not be important, right?  Well, maybe not.  As for the three horseman of the dumbocalypse (credit me, please!), what they understand about Continental philosophy (the roots of postmodern theory) would fill a thimble, yet that makes them experts on the topic.  Their praise of this hoax indicates only that they, themselves, were hoaxed.

The story here, if you haven't heard, is that Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay wrote an article meant to parody gender studies, then found a journal to publish it.  Far from being a "high-quality peer reviewed" journal, as Pinker claims (and the authors themselves claim), they got published in a vanity publication, one where the authors pay to be published.  The authors claim they didn't pay to get their article published, but that doesn't raise the standards of the journal to something reputable or "peer-reviewed."  And then, to really twist the knife:

If anything, the hoax reveals not the ideological dogmas of gender studies but the motivating prejudices of the authors and their mostly white, mostly male supporters against social justice — a term that simply refers to the realization of fairness and just relations among citizens of a society. 

Which description certainly applies to Dawkins, Harris, and Pinker.

The fact is, reasoning is hard, and the basis of reasoning, of logical analysis, of critical thought (and not just "skepticism") is discerning what is true from what you want to be true.  Even religious belief is subject to skepticism, as the believer tries to divine what is from the deity v. what is from his/her own heart.  As the God of Abraham notably puts it to Jeremiah:

The heart is devious above all else;
it is perverse--
who can understand it?
I the LORD test the mind
and search the heart,
to give to all according to their ways,
according to the fruit of their doings.

Jeremiah 17:9-10

The "test" there is not reasonableness, but outcome.  It is a concept separate from critique, but not alien to it.  It relates to the question of certainty, of knowing what is right.  It is a problem we've known about since the "Bronze Age," as so many children on the internet like to call the age of the Hebrew Scriptures (and of Plato and Aristotle, who somehow escape condemnation for that), and yet we're still re-inventing that wheel and re-discovering that fire.  Or at least still discovering it's validity in what passes for intellectual discourse in social media.  Who needs to even pay for an article to be published when you can put your opinion on Twitter for free?

Some of these "public intellectuals" just prove the old adage that you can't shame a whore.

Or, to quote a review I found via Thought Criminal (and it will need a bit of context, but read it first):

Instead, The Swerve’s primary achievement is to flatter like-minded readers with a tall tale of enlightened modern values triumphing over a benighted pre-modern past. It’s no accident, I think, that The Swerve’s imagined Middle Ages bears a strong resemblance to America’s present era of superstitious know-nothing-ism. Or that Lucretius’s secular, principled-pleasure-minded values bear an equally strong resemblance to the values of Greenblatt’s cultural peers — including, presumably, the jurors who awarded him two national literary prizes. The Swerve presents itself as a work of literary history. But really it is a salvo in the culture wars; an effort to lend an aura of historical inevitability to the idea that religious faith has no place in a modern democratic society.

The Swerve is the book under review.   The thesis of the book rests on a badly imagined version of the so-called "Middle Ages," that period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance (and named by the Renaissance, which also got to name itself.  How fortunate!).  It's the last sentence that's the key:  the "effort to lend an aura of historical inevitability to the idea that religious faith has no place in a modern democratic society."  Which always rests on ignorance and know-nothing-ism, which is not a condition limited to those you disagree with.  Whenever you set your sights on your preferred conclusion and then go seeking evidence to support it, you're going to find such evidence, whether it's there or not.  Again, the metaphor of Donald Trump and most fact-finding by politicians is instructive.

We can expect better of our public intellectuals, even if we can't often get it.

...although most of us are probably smarter than Steven Pinker.

Are you smarter than a third-grader?

It would add too much to the post below, so let me present this as an appendix of sorts.


I get the following from The Thought Criminal.  It is from a review of Stephen Pinker's The Angels of our Better Nature, a book more suited to be a Slate article back in the day when Slate's reputation was built on Michael Kinsley's "counter-intuitive liberal" persona.

But I digress.

The connection to the post below should be pretty clear:

Let's start with the presidential I.Q. study upon which Pinker relies. I.Q. tests did not even exist until the early 20th century, so most of its ludicrously precise estimates—Martin Van Buren (132.9), James Buchanan (122.8), Ulysses S. Grant (115.0)—deserve horselaughs. John F. Kennedy is conveniently credited with an I.Q. of 156, though his tested I.Q. was 119, or roughly 10 points lower than George W. Bush's.

I would submit that everything you want to know about IQ is contained in those three sentences.  What one does or says is clearly a product of one's intelligence, so outcomes we prefer are clearly intelligent outcomes; those we don't like, clearly come from lesser abilities to cogitate.  So George W. Bush has the lowest Presidential IQ on record, while John Kennedy, from his accomplishments, clearly has a vastly superior IQ (156, if I remember my IQ scorings correctly, is a very high genius range.  Anything above 130 is considered quite remarkable.)

Except, of course, Kennedy had a very standard IQ score.

So tell me again what "IQ" measures, and how we know its measurements are accurate, and how they relate to a world where taking tests is about the last useful skill a human being can have?

"Let's See If You Can Spot A Pattern"

Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right
https://t.co/YtmRG9TkMP

— Raw Story (@RawStory) June 8, 2021

 I remember watching clip after clip of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens debating Christians, Muslims and "purveyors of woo," exposing the fatuity of their faith-based beliefs in superstitious nonsense unsupported by empirical evidence, often delivered to self-proclaimed prophets by supernatural beings via the epistemically suspicious channel of private revelation. Not that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were saying anything particularly novel — the inconsistencies and contradictions of religious dogma are apparent even to small children. Why did God have to sacrifice his son for our sins? Does Satan have free will? And how can the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be completely separate entities but also one and the same?

The beam in your eye, the splinter in your brother's eye:

Let's see if you can spot a pattern: 

Hang on to that quote; it's going to be an important one.*

(When Harris believes he's right about something, it becomes virtually impossible to talk him out of it, no matter how many good arguments, expert opinions or hard data are presented to him. Like Donald Trump, he's pretty much unteachable.) 

I dare say even a child can see the problem there; and the contradiction.  Not with Harris' thinking (only), but with the argument of this article.

But be careful: Shermer has also acknowledged, in writing, that he's fantasized about murdering people. "Or, if not actually killing the particular bastard," he reports, "at the very least I imagine dislocating his jaw with a crushing roundhouse knuckle sandwich that sent him reeling to the pavement." This comes from his book "The Moral Arc," which received an extended, glowing blurb from Steven Pinker.

Let me connect that to this:

New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.

What moral clarity is there in an adolescent fantasy about violence, one that reveals the dreamer knows "a crushing roundhouse knuckle sandwich" only from pulp viction or action movies?  What did happen to the "moral clarity" of "New Atheism?

Let's ask that question again, with the example of Lawrence Krause and the "she looked 16!" defense of child rape:

[Krause] was dismissed from his job as director of the Origins Project after an investigation found that he had violated the sexual harassment policy of the university "by groping a woman's breast while on an ASU-funded trip in late 2016." He has also repeatedly and vigorously defended his onetime friend Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex trafficker, who "donated $250,000 to the Origins Project over a seven-year span." According to a 2011 Daily Beast article, Krauss claimed, "I don't feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it," adding that he didn't believe the "beautiful women and young women" surrounding Epstein were underage. 

Not much moral clarity there.

The best comes (almost) last:

Richard Dawkins: Once a heavyweight within the world of evolutionary biology, Dawkins energized atheists the world over with his book "The God Delusion."

No, sorry; Dawkins is a zoologist who wrote a book about genetics, a subject he knows nothing about, which wowed non-scientists who thought he must be writing about "evolutionary biology" (a subject I doubt any of his fans could define any better than a random GOP politician can define Critical Race Theory today).  Dawkins was a "heavyweight" among people who thought he sounded clever; people who knew no more about the field of genetics than Dawkins did, in other words.  The same ignorance and appeal to the credulous was true of his “God Delusion” 

Over time, though, it became increasingly clear that he's neither an adult-in-the-room nor a particularly nice guy. For some bizarre reason, he obsessively targeted a Muslim teenager in Texas, who was arrested after a homemade clock he brought to school was wrongly thought to be a bomb. He also flipped out over what came to be called "Elevatorgate," which began with Rebecca Watson calmly asking men to be thoughtful and considerate about how they make women feel at conferences — for example, in the enclosed space of an elevator. This resulted in a flood of rape and death threats directed toward Watson, while Dawkins mocked the situation by writing a shocking letter addressed "Dear Muslima," in which the first line was "Stop whining, will you." More recently, he's made it clear that he isn't bothered by the allegations against Krauss, and posted seemingly anti-trans comments on Twitter. When asked why Twitter has caused him so much trouble, he claimed: "I love truth too much." (For Dawkins' troubling views on aborting fetuses with Down Syndrome, see this.)

I had forgotten Dawkins' catalogue of sins.  And attacking a Muslim,again; imagine that. But Dawkins was never the adult in the room; that was his British accent and Oxonian attitude of superiority.  Nor was he ever a “nice guy.” This tweet, by the way, is still up:

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 8, 2013

Classic British snobbery and condescension. Not much insight, though.  The pattern cotinues here:

James Lindsay: Once a promising young atheist, Lindsay published "Everybody Is Wrong About God" in 2015 and, three years later, "How to Have Impossible Conversations," co-authored with Peter Boghossian (below). Referring to himself as "apolitical" but boasting a profile page on the right-wing, anti-free-speech organization Turning Point USA, he is now one of the most unhinged crusaders against "critical race theory" (CRT), an idea about which he seems to have very little actual knowledge. (This is unsurprising, given that Lindsay has literally argued that he doesn't need to understand "gender studies" to call for the entire field to be canceled. See #10 here.) 

There are other people referenced in the article, two more I've never heard of, and Stephen Pinker, whose intellectual accomplishments are on par with his apparent racism (I'll leave that evidence to the original article). We have to get back to "religion":

At the heart of this merger was the creation of a new religious movement of sorts centered around the felt loss of power among white men due to the empowerment of other people. When it was once acceptable, according to cultural norms, for men to sexually harass women with impunity, or make harmful racist and sexist comments without worrying about losing a speaking opportunity, being held accountable can feel like an injustice, even though the exact opposite is the case. Pinker, Shermer and some of the others like to preach about "moral progress," but in fighting social justice under the misleading banner of "free speech," they not only embolden fascists but impede further moral progress for the marginalized.

The metaphor highlighted there means, of course, a movement devoid of reason and based wholly on unexamined ideas which don't bear the weight of the simplest of critiques.  William James' oft-cited definition (which he rejected) that the young boy knows "faith" is "believin' what you know ain't so" is actually meant to apply here, with "religion" replacing the term "faith."  But that's too easy.  The people listed in this article know that what they think IS so, and they can't understand the benighted ones who don't see it that way.  Then again, that was the "pattern" in New Atheism:  how could anyone believe the foolish ideas they attributed to the religious, from the racist anti-Islam thought of Sam Harris (who was always that way) to the snobbery of Dawkins (ditto), to the rest? If anything, time only revealed them for what they always were: weak thinkers who fall back on vague and glittering generalities.  You can see the pattern here, too:

What ties these people together is an aggrieved sense of perpetual victimhood. Christians, of course, believe that they are relentlessly persecuted (note: they aren't). The IDWs similarly believe that they are the poor helpless victims of "CRT," "standpoint theory" and other bogeymen of woke academia. But really, if "Grievance Studies" studies anything, it should be how this group of extremely privileged white men came to believe that they are the real casualties of systemic oppression.

I've read about a lot of people who display their "Christianity" quite prominently, using it to build their personal and financial power.  They've learned, rather recently, to present themselves as victims, especially in a world where church attendance (the only measure that seems to count in the media) is not what it once was.  Big deal.  When 41% of the American population regard themselves as regular churchgoers, we'll be back where we were in 1906.  Deal with it.  I've never met a "Christian" yet who thought they were "relentlessly persecuted," so spare me the baseless generalities.  They have no more application to reality than the white supremacist rhetoric of most of the "New Atheists" the article critiques; but that's the pattern, isn't it?

To conclude, let me bring things full circle: At least some studies have shown that, to quote Phil Zuckerman, secular people are "markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian" than religious people. It's a real shame that New Atheism, now swallowed up by the IDW and the far right, turned out to be just as prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, closed-minded and authoritarian as many of the religious groups they initially deplored.

Most of Phil Zuckerman's analysis is based on work by:  Phil Zuckerman (I followed the link in the original).  He misinterprets Psalm 14, too, and cherry picks statements by philosophers whose work I am familiar with, probably taking them wholly out of context.  It'd be in keeping with most of the work of "New Atheists" who don't really know anything, but who know what they don't like.  Hmmmm....rather like Trump, eh?

New Atheism wasn't "swallowed up" by anything; it became what it started out as.  And it did it because it was never about overcoming prejudiced, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, close-minded and authoritarian ideas: it espoused them.  What else was New Atheism but deeply prejudiced against anyone who didn't think as the individuals identified here did, who were dogmatic in their ignorance? None of them betrayed the least knowledge of philosophy, theology, anthropology (which includes the study of world religions), or philosophy of religion, much less compassion.  Who needs that, when you are closed-minded and authoritarian?  Ideas get in the way of righteous and ignorant rants!  Compassion is for wimps. Just ask Donald Trump!

I could end this with my own righteous screed.  But I came across these words from Pope Francis during a visit to Philadelphia in 2015, and I can't improve on them:

In this place which is symbolic of the American way, I would like to reflect with you on the right to religious freedom. It is a fundamental right which shapes the way we interact socially and personally with our neighbors whose religious views differ from our own. Religious freedom certainly means the right to worship God, individually and in community, as our consciences dictate. But religious liberty, by its nature, transcends places of worship and the private sphere of individuals and families. Our religious traditions remind us that, as human beings, we are called to acknowledge an Other, who reveals our relational identity in the face of every effort to impose a uniformity to which the egotism of the powerful, the conformism of the weak, or the ideology of the utopian would seek to impose on us. 

I don't see even a ghost of that idea in the work of the "New Atheists," nor of the writer so disappointed that they turned out to be what they always were.  What, indeed, in atheism, was ever going to produce such a change, or "reveal[] our relational identity"?

Just asking for a friend.

*You may notice I skip blithely over the critique of Harris from the article, contenting myself with only two sentences.  Harris actually sets the rule for the New Atheists:  he’s been a rabid Islamophobe and generally an ignorant and uninformed thinker ab initio.  I wouldn’t say Harris influenced the rest of them, but they are all cut from the same bolt of cloth.