Ancient and Modern Morality, Examples

  • David French and Stephen Breyer on originalism;
  • Short items about how Trump is out of his mind (from Robert Reich), his “blood bath” comments, and his threat to shut down the media;
  • Jamelle Bouie on how the election isn’t about Biden and Trump, so much as two differing visions of American government — whether it exists to help people, or to rule over others;
  • An article about GOP hypocrisy, on moral matters, specifically about LGBTQ+ people threaten “vicarious immorality,” as I’ve been saying for years.

Here’s a brief opinion piece (on the paper’s website’s “The Point” blog) that relates to yesterday’s post about the Supreme Court’s motivated reasoning.

NY Times, David French, 18 Mar 2024: Justice Breyer Is Only Partly Right About Originalism

Continue reading

Posted in Morality, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on Ancient and Modern Morality, Examples

EO Wilson, CONSILIENCE, 10

Chapter 11, Ethics and Religion

The chapter in the book that would most challenge conservatives, or anyone who thinks morality and religion are handed down from on high.

Key points in this chapter:

On ethics:

  • Author summarizes arguments on both sides, the transcendental and the empirical, for the origin of ethical sentiments.
  • Theologians see natural law as an expression of God’s will, despite allowing the faithful to justify war, slavery, and genocide.
  • Wilson is an empiricist, of course. “The primary origin of the moral instincts is the dynamic relation between cooperation and defection.” That is, our moral instincts arose as rules to solve ethical dilemmas in the primitive environment, e.g. regarding money, status, power. Thus we evolved cooperation, remorse, shame. The dark side of these sentiments is xenophobia.
  • “Ethical and religious beliefs are created from the bottom up, from people to their culture. They do not come from the top down, from God or other non-material source to the people by way of culture.”
  • And yet moral sentiments can change — as a result of new knowledge and experience; certain rules may be relaxed, others devised. That’s why we find things like slavery unpalatable today.
  • Ultimately ancient sentiments will adapt for the conditions of modern life. Wilson sees the result as likely democratic, to the detriment of rival ideologies and religions, though it will be slow.

On religion:

  • Religions are born, grow, compete, reproduce, and eventually die. They begin as cults. They involve a creation myth and a mystery only devotees have access to.
  • The religious drive arises from the survival instinct, i.e. fear of death. It provides an understanding and control of life, explained via mythic narratives, and the supernatural as evidence of another world so desperately desired.
  • Humans are easily seduced by confident, charismatic leaders, especially in religious organizations.
  • People are attracted by transcendentalism since empiricism seems sterile and inadequate. But passion and desire are not the same as truth.
  • Theology is a history of abstractions: the Hebrews resolved the pantheon into a single person; later philosophers have moved away from God as a literal person.
  • “The essence of humanity’s spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another.”
  • We’re learning too much about how the world works for this contradiction to remain.
  • Yes, people need sacred narratives. And so religion must incorporate the discoveries of science in order to remain credible. The result will be the secularization of the human epic, and of religion itself.

\\

Comments:

Continue reading

Posted in Book Notes, Human Progress, Morality, Science | Comments Off on EO Wilson, CONSILIENCE, 10

Motivated Reasoning, Supreme Court Edition

Just one short, but provocative, item today.

This is the opening piece in the “Talk of the Town” section in the March 18th issue of The New Yorker. It cuts to the core of Supreme Court, and conservative, thinking.

The New Yorker, Jill Lepore, 10 Mar 2024: Will the Supreme Court Now Review More Constitutional Amendments?, “After their ruling on a Fourteenth Amendment case, which keeps Donald Trump on the ballot, will the Justices be willing to revisit Dobbs, or Second Amendment cases?”

Continue reading

Posted in conservatives, Psychology, Social Progress | Comments Off on Motivated Reasoning, Supreme Court Edition

A Potential Revolutionary Scientific Reinterpretation

No one thinks that all of physics, or cosmology, is solved; the reigning problems in cosmology include contradictory conclusions about the age of the universe, and the nature of “dark matter” and “dark energy,” both terms being placeholders for unknown quantities needed to explain first, the amount of gravity in the universe, given observations of attraction among distant galaxies, and second, why the universe is expanding faster than expected.

This story has been floating around for a week or two, in various venues, to the point where it’s worth mentioning here. (A lot of radical ideas are put forth, many in pop venues, that gain no traction, and which therefore I don’t mention here.)

Phys.org, 15 Mar 2024: New research suggests that our universe has no dark matter

Continue reading

Posted in Cosmology, Science | Comments Off on A Potential Revolutionary Scientific Reinterpretation

EO Wilson, CONSILIENCE, 9

Chapter 10, The Arts and Their Interpretation

Here we have perhaps the area most resistant to the idea of biological or psychological interpretation. Because it doesn’t occur, especially to the artists themselves, why people tell certain kinds of stories and not others, why they find certain subjects of paintings pleasant and not others, and so on; they may not even realize there are other kinds of stories (paintings, yes, I suppose). (But that’s my gloss.) And this might be the chapter of most relevance to science fiction, which of course as a type of literature, is a kind of art.

Key points in this chapter:

  • The consilient channel from the natural sciences to the arts is interpretation, guided by knowledge of science and the understanding that human nature exists, in preference to postmodernism or other intuitive approaches;
  • Wilson again summarizes gene-culture coevolution, and concludes that this view favors a more traditionalist view of the arts;
  • We can easily find groupings of archetypes that underlie most myth and fiction, from “In the beginning” to “The hero embarks on a journey” and many others;
  • Human evolution entailed the shocking recognition of the self, the finiteness of personal existence, and the chaos of the environment. The arts were spawned by the need to impose order on the confusion perceived by intelligence.
  • Cave paintings reveal ancient tendencies for sympathetic magic, that remain today in the names of sports teams;
  • Other evidence of how genetically-driven perceptions affect the arts includes how brain waves respond best to 20% redundancy among random patterns, and how this is reflected in abstract designs around the world; and how the beauty industry plays on human attraction to supernormal stimuli;
  • The arts nourish our craving for the mystical, our yearning to see what lies beyond the rim of the world, and as the entire world is now home ground, we look beyond it to the stars.

Comments

Continue reading

Posted in Book Notes, Human Progress, Psychology, Science | Comments Off on EO Wilson, CONSILIENCE, 9

OnlySky, Religions, Cults, and the Crazies

  • The end of OnlySky;
  • What the difference between religions and cults is;
  • Items about the crazies: Hillary’s acid, executions, God’s law, and how vaxxed people are inhuman.

*

Alas, the end of OnlySky, which might have been called a safe space on the web for nonreligious people.

OnlySky, 7 Mar 2024: The end of OnlySky — an experiment in secular news and storytelling

Continue reading

Posted in Lunacy, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on OnlySky, Religions, Cults, and the Crazies

EO Wilson, CONSILIENCE, 8

Chapter 9, The Social Sciences

Now Wilson begins takes his conclusions about human nature and searches for ways to bring insight, if not explanation, to various aspects of human culture, in particular studies in the humanities that are supposedly resistant to scientific analysis or insight.

Key points in this chapter:

  • The social sciences, in contrast to the medical sciences, do poorly in dealing with complex problems;
  • The social sciences don’t speak a common language, are not grounded in the physical realities of human psychology, and are hobbled by social activism and tribal loyalty to original grand masters, like Durkheim, Marx, and Freud;
  • The social science best poised to bridge the gap to the natural sciences is economics, which measures things and constructs models to try to predict things. Still, its success is limited, due to lack of fundamental laws, or even a solid foundation of units and processes.
  • And the models are simplistic, relying on folk psychology, including the idea that people make choices based on their background and environment, not human nature.
  • Wilson recognizes heuristics, in the beginning (in the 1990s) of studies about psychological biases; these traits are commonplace, he says, especially among “cult members, the deeply religious, and the less educated.”

Comments:

Continue reading

Posted in Book Notes, Human Progress, MInd, Psychology, Science | Comments Off on EO Wilson, CONSILIENCE, 8

Emotional Intelligence and Con Men

  • Robert Reich on Trump’s stupidity — except for his emotional intelligence, which manifests as his being a con man;
  • Peter Wehner on “Fifth Avenue Republicans”;
  • Tom Nichols about why Trump shouldn’t be given security briefings;
  • Music: Neil Finn’s “Into the Sunset,” with its beautiful pendant melody.

*

One of the best takes on Trump I’ve read.

Robert Reich, 14 Mar 2024: Seriously, again, how dumb is Trump?, subtitled “And why has his extraordinary stupidity fallen off the radar during his third run for the presidency?” (Also at AlterNet, here)

Continue reading

Posted in conservatives, Music, Politics, Psychology | Comments Off on Emotional Intelligence and Con Men

EO Wilson, CONSILIENCE, 7

Chapter 8, The Fitness of Human Nature

This is perhaps the core chapter of the book, in that it brings together ideas about the mind, genes, and culture from the previous two chapters, and sets up a basis for the examination of several aspects of human culture in the subsequent chapters.

Key points in this chapter:

  • Human nature is “the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another…”
  • This is not genetic determinism;
  • Examples of some of these regularities include kin selection and altruism; parental investment; differing mating strategies of men and women; status; territorial expansion and defense; and contractual agreement.
  • A particular example that illustrates these principles is incest avoidance.
  • With my comments (at the end) about the attraction of these ideas and their relationship to science fiction.

Summary and Quotes:

Continue reading

Posted in Book Notes, Culture, Human Progress, MInd, Science, science fiction | Comments Off on EO Wilson, CONSILIENCE, 7

More Dispatches from Alternative Realities

  • How Katie Britt, like other clueless Republicans, claims victimhood, and pleads for cash;
  • Robert Wright on how the Trump-Biden choice won’t solve anything;
  • Short items about Trump’s obsession with Hitler; how violent crime is down but you wouldn’t know it from Fox News; and how Ben Shapiro thinks that people who retire die within five years.
– – –

Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder, 12 Mar 2024: “My heart is broken” — Disgraced Sen. Katie Britt begs MAGA suckers for cash after becoming global laughing stock

Continue reading

Posted in conservatives, Culture, MInd, Politics | Comments Off on More Dispatches from Alternative Realities