Links and Comments: Scientism; the Arc of Moral Progress; Conservative Resistance and Certain Republicans

Posted on Sunday 13 September 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

What we read from this morning’s newspapers…

New York Times, Simon Critchley, There Is No Theory of Everything.

An essay (which is longer online than the version in print) about science and the humanities and about a teacher of his, Frank Cioffi, who wrote a book about Wittgenstein, with a thesis about the gap between “how we experience the world — our subjective, conscious experiences (qualia) — and the scientific explanation of the material forces that constitute nature; and, second, that such a gap can potentially be closed through one, overarching theoretical explanation.”

Well, yes; this is science, and it’s been working pretty well all these past few centuries. Critchley thinks this is a problem. (My bold, about the part I agree with him.)

This is the risk of what some call “scientism” — the belief that natural science can explain everything, right down to the detail of our subjective and social lives. All we need is a better form of science, a more complete theory, a theory of everything. Lord knows, there are even Oscar-winning Hollywood movies made about this topic. Frank’s point, which is still hugely important, is that there is no theory of everything, nor should there be. There is a gap between nature and society. The mistake, for which scientism is the name, is the belief that this gap can or should be filled.

One huge problem with scientism is that it invites, as an almost allergic reaction, the total rejection of science. As we know to our cost, we witness this every day with climate change deniers, flat-earthers and religious fundamentalists. This is what is called obscurantism, namely that the way things are is not explained by science, but with reference to occult forces like God, all-conquering Zeus, the benign earth goddess or fairies at the bottom of my garden. Now, in order to confront the challenge of obscurantism, we do not simply need to run into the arms of scientism.

Other intellectuals have worried about ‘scientism’ (there was a Leon Wieseltier/Steven Pinker kufuffle a few months ago), needlessly it seems to me, out of some fear that subjective ideas about the humanities will be reduced to some crude reductionism. But that is not what science is only about; science entails finding basic principles, but it also acknowledges emergent principles of complexity. All that ‘scientism’ entails is thinking rigorously about issues of the humanities, if only in terms of comparative cultures, or what science can tell us about the limitations of our perceptions, rather than the standard deference to cultural standards, authority, and tradition.

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Elsewhere in today’s NYT, Steven Erlanger asks Are Western Values Losing Their Sway?. This has been a topic since Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” was overtaken by Islamic fundamentalist attacks on the west…. as well as the odd resurgence of fundamentalism Christianism in the US. It’s not so much about political systems or economic injustices, Erlanger claims, but rather basic issues of humans rights, as I’ve described as the progressive arc of moral history (which description presumes that the fundamentalists will eventually lose).

The fight over values is not limited to democracy. “We think the world is divided by individualism and democracy, but it’s the sexual divide,” Mr. Krastev said — with radical disagreements over the proper place of women and the rights of homosexuals.

In its rejection of Western liberal values of sexual equality and choice, conservative Russia finds common cause with many in Africa and with the religious teachings of Islam, the Vatican, fundamentalist Protestants and Orthodox Jews.

Extreme interpretations of religion, especially in areas of great instability and insecurity, can be a comforting or inspiring response to the confusions of modern life, and can soon become an enemy to religious freedom and tolerance for others…

And of course we see this every day in modern American political discourse, with the curious alignment of conservative fundamentalists and their political champions (Huckabee, Santorum, Cruz) with rival fundamentalists of other religions, an alignment they would no doubt disavow, but which is obvious to the rest of us free of fundamentalist shackles.

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So to close with Jeffrey Tayler’s latest at Salon, Ted Cruz and Kim Davis, true love forever: The right-wing theocracy that threatens the rule of law. Subtitle: “Even The Donald knows the law trumps religion. It is time for someone to explain the Constitution to Ted Cruz.”

“Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny,” writes Cruz. “Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith. This is wrong. This is not America.”

No, senator. America is not a theocracy; in America, the First Amendment inoculates affairs of state against the malady of faith. Davis works for the government – and does so by choice. She has every right to practice her religion, but no right at all to behave in ways that impose it on gays or anyone else she encounters while performing her official duties.

Tayler goes on to address the fantasy industry of fundamentalists who, by cherry-picking and outright lying (cf. David Barton), like to pretend that America’s founding fathers were Christians as ardent as the current fundamentalists.

Nowhere in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence do the Founding Fathers mention anything about Judaism, Christianity, or “Judeo-Christian values.” The United States is not, therefore, a Judeo-Christian country. That a majority are Christian and Jewish matters not; the system of government is what we’re discussing, and it is decidedly secular.

This is no accident. Some of the Founding Fathers held Christianity in contempt. Thomas Jefferson mused that, “Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man . . . There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.” Whether he said this before or after taking scissors to his Bible and cutting out every reference to Jesus’ divinity and the supernatural is worth investigating. John Adams wrote that, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Bonus quotes: Ben Franklin observed that, “Lighthouses are more useful than churches.” Abraham Lincoln, a truly old-school Republican, if not a Founding Father, let it be known that “The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my profession.”

This whole Kim Davis thing is just another example, to me, of how extremist Christians seem to be intent on defining themselves as people who cannot get along in a civil manner with people unlike themselves. And are proud of it.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Human Progress, Morality, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Scientism; the Arc of Moral Progress; Conservative Resistance and Certain Republicans

Links and Comments: Conservative Resistance and Fears; Narratives; Reality Checks

Posted on Saturday 12 September 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon: Kim Davis is the new face of the religious right: Angry, marginalized and increasingly desperate

No doubt Davis is a comical figure whose self-righteousness is only equaled by her ignorance both of the text of the Bible she clings to and what it means to have a job as a government employee. But she’s being used by her legal team and other religious right leaders to spread the idea that religious conservatives are entitled to ignore — or even overthrow — democracy and seize power just because they feel like it.

and

Mike Huckabee has been at the frontlines of pushing the claim that Christian conservatives simply have the right to ignore or overturn democracy to impose their will, and not just because he’s been running around Kentucky, trying to get himself on camera as much as possible in support of Davis’s attempt to ban gay marriage by fiat. He’s also been using the campaign trail to argue that the president should be able to simply end rule of law and start ruling like a dictator.

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This essay at Vox by Todd VanDerWerff claims M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village is an underrated masterpiece. This is not unrelated to the previous item; the story is about an attempt to retreat from the perceived threats of reality into a mythical, idealized past.

The desire to retreat into an imagined past in the wake of trauma is an understandable one, but The Village shows just how empty this idea ultimately is. See, this is a story about what happens when you abandon logic in the name of safety.

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And one more on this theme–another piece from Vox, this by Adam Mongrain: I thought all anti-vaxxers were idiots. Then I married one. Bottom line: it’s all about fear.

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Next, via File 770, excerpt from a Facebook post by David Gerrold about how the ideal of the electronic global village hasn’t quite worked out — and about how we are driven by certain kinds of narratives.

We have built the kind of technology that gives every person on the planet access to vast libraries of information and the ability to communicate with people all over the globe. But even if we’ve built a global village, we haven’t yet learned how to live in it. We’ve brought our prejudices and our beliefs and our parochial world-views.

Here, on this continent, we’ve built a cultural monomyth that carries within it the seeds of our own destruction — the mythic hero. We believe in John Wayne, the strong man who comes to rescue us. It’s a variation on the Christ myth. Or Superman. Or Batman. We’re incapable of being responsible, we need a daddy figure to sort things out for us. (The savage deconstruction of this monomyth is a movie called “High Noon.” It’s worth a look.)

Belief in superheros is an adolescent fantasy — it’s a way of abnegating personal responsibility. Whatever is wrong with the world, the Justice League, the Avengers, SHIELD will fix it.

The counterpoint is that whatever is wrong with the world — it’s not us. It’s THRUSH or SPECTRE or HYDRA or some other unnamed conspiracy. It’s always a conspiracy. …

The underlying idea here is perhaps why I’ve never been interested in superhero movies or stories, any more than I have religious saviors.

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Reality checks:

The True Size of… shows why Greenland is much smaller than the familiar Mercator projection world maps imply, and Africa is much larger.

Interesting YouTube channel: Stated Clearly

And a website: How Do We Know?

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Narrative, Science, Thinking | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Conservative Resistance and Fears; Narratives; Reality Checks

Rereading Isaac Asimov, part 2

Posted on Friday 11 September 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

So over the past four or five weeks, I’ve read (or re-read, in most cases, some 40 years or so since I first read most of these stories in the late-’60s/early-’70s) some 100 Isaac Asimov stories, including the complete contents of (in roughly this order) The Best of Isaac Asimov, I, Robot, Nine Tomorrows, Asimov’s Mysteries, Eight Stories from The Rest of the Robots, The Bicentennial Man and other stories, Earth Is Room Enough, Nightfall and other stories, and — [I read The Martian Way just a couple years ago, and so did not reread the four stories in that book in these past weeks] — and along the way other collections that mostly overlapped those, with a few extra stories in each: Robot Visions, Robot Dreams, and The Complete Robot. I also read Harlan Ellison’s I, Robot screenplay, published in 1994, and segueing from that, his script for “Phoenix without Ashes”, published in original script form in a 1975 anthology Faster than Light, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois [though its premise is contrary to the book’s title…], glanced through Edward Bryant’s novelization, Phoenix Without Ashes (published in 1975), which I read way back when but did not reread just now, and read for the first time the graphic novel version of Phoenix Without Ashes, just published in 2012, with illustrations by Alan Robinson, that is extremely loyal to the original script version.

But Harlan Ellison is a tangent to Asimov (one I might follow up on presently), and I’ve promised to blog about rereading Isaac Asimov. I will drill through many of these stories in subsequent posts, but for now, I will note these general conclusions:

  • Many Asimov stories are basically puzzle stories: descriptions of circumstances that defy obvious explanation, with decontruction and explanations by experts like Susan Calvin (the robot stories) or Wendell Urth (several of the “Asimov’s Mysteries”).
  • The stories collected in I, Robot are the selected robot stories Asimov had written up until that time (the book was published in 1950, collecting stories written over the previous decade) that fit into a common framework of future history, that were relatively consistent among themselves. Reading the many other robot stories Asimov wrote over the decades, it’s remarkable how they reach conclusions different to one degree or another from the canonical I, Robot stories, and from one another.
  • Most Asimov stories proceed on a very methodical fashion, as alluded in my previous post. One of the most remarkable, the late story “The Winds of Change”, is virtually a monologue that, methodically, step by step, undermines his listeners’ apprehension of reality.
  • As a general rule, one appreciates the best stories in any context by reading the many other stories that might have been considered; in Asimov’s case, I’d initially thought to revisit only The Best of Isaac Asimov and perhaps I, Robot. But as methodical and almost predictable as his stories might be, they are at the same time addictive– they’re easy to read, and you can’t read just one, there’s always another at hand. All that extra reading, seeing how Asimov composed his stories, seeing his recurrent themes and patterns, makes one appreciate the truly exceptional stories all the more.
  • And so, for the moment, I would say the best Isaac Asimov stories are: “Nightfall”, “Reason”, “The Dead Past”, “The Ugly Little Boy”, and “The Bicentennial Man”, for various reasons different for each story. There are many other notable stories, worth reading, especially several later stories in which Asimov responded to social developments of the ’70s and ’80s, and I will describe those five, and the others, in a couple subsequent posts.
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Links and Comments: Lawrence M. Krauss, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, confirmation bias

Posted on Wednesday 9 September 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

A fine essay by Lawrence M. Krauss, at The New Yorker: All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists.

He’s reacting both to the current embarrassing kerfuffle about Kim Davis, the Kentucky court clerk who thinks her sincerely held religious convictions trump the law she swore to uphold when she took office, and the general trend in recent years to react against the so-called “militant atheists” by finding some sort of “accommodationist” stance between science and religion. (Jerry Coyne’s latest book addresses and disposes of this succinctly.) In this essay, Krauss is having none of that, in effect calling a spade a spade, and explaining why any thinking person who understands the basis and protocols of science can not at the same time defer to ancient religious myths.

It’s not a long essay and very much worth reading. I’ll resist quoting passages except for this last one:

I see a direct link, in short, between the ethics that guide science and those that guide civic life. Cosmology, my specialty, may appear to be far removed from Kim Davis’s refusal to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, but in fact the same values apply in both realms. Whenever scientific claims are presented as unquestionable, they undermine science. Similarly, when religious actions or claims about sanctity can be made with impunity in our society, we undermine the very basis of modern secular democracy. We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered “sacred.” Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.

If that is what causes someone to be called a militant atheist, then no scientist should be ashamed of the label.

But I will quote this again: “Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.”

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Meanwhile, there are, of course, the right-wing demagogues who either misunderstand the Constitution and its principles, or are (more likely) simply playing to their ignorant base. Today’s best example (of too many to compile and list):

Salon: Mike Huckabee’s cynical zealotry: The rank opportunism in his Kim Davis demagoguery.

Too obvious to bother quoting.

On a slightly different topic, two examples, both about Rick Santorum and climate change, about how the right wing — despite their presumed allegiance to that Commandment about false witness — are happy to misrepresent, and even outright lie, about any scientific conclusion that does not fit their ideological presumptions and religious convictions. Santorum appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher a few days ago, and made a couple claims that Politifact.com has easily discredited:

Santorum: UN climate head debunked widely cited 97% climate change consensus figure

Santorum cites flawed climate change figure, and misquotes it

Actually, I’m not sure that I attribute such incidents to conscious venality. I think rather that these are examples of mental biases, specifically the confirmation bias that we are all prone to, that makes anyone inclined to interpret new information in the context of their previously held religious convictions (or provisional conclusions). It’s hard work to try to understand new information and be ready to change one’s mind (as I like to think that I do try to do). But in the cases of Huckabee and Santorum, I suspect they are smart enough to know, on some deep level, that they are lying to themselves about the conflict between their convictions and what they can’t help but perceive as reality. But they are politicians. It’s their job to lie to themselves, or to their base, to whatever extent is necessary to win an election. It doesn’t matter to them what’s real, and what that reality might affect humanity in future generations, as long as they can try to win the current election.

Posted in Atheism, Conservative Resistance, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Lawrence M. Krauss, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, confirmation bias

Links and Comments: Religion and Science

Posted on Tuesday 8 September 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

The latest essay by Jeffrey Tayler at Salon, Bill O’Reilly’s nonsense “nihilism”: Now the Fox News host is even lying about God, addresses common misperceptions not just about the abstruse philosophical concept of nihilism, but about the general perception that atheists have no moral compass and so are given “anything goes”. Dangerous nonsense, as Tayler explains. It’s the religious extremists who are most willing to kill (and violate the Constitution, I would add, but that’s another post).

The gist of [O’Reilly’s] wrongheaded “Talking Points” memo is that atheists — or, in his twisted verbiage, nihilists — are self-centered, dangerous and even potentially murderous, because, for them, “anything goes.” This is a blundering, volitional misrepresentation of reality. It goes without saying that the terrorists of, for instance, Al Qaida and Boko Haram very much do not believe that “anything goes,” are among the most devout believers around, and, of course, are most willing to kill. As far as the United States goes, it is high religiosity itself that correlates with bad crime rates, deadbeat tax payers, poverty, rampant teen pregnancy, low education, a dearth of life opportunities, early death, and so on. Faith is, in short, part and parcel of a congeries of nasty ills every society should strive to extirpate.

And

The central tenets of the three Abrahamic faiths, which amount to statements about the nature of the world we live in, our place in it and how we are to treat one another, stem from no evidence whatsoever. Toss aside the magic books, the hocus-pocus prayer, the supernatural visions and the unverifiable instances of “salvation,” and you are left with a void. The words of the late Christopher Hitchens come to mind: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” Rational individuals are not in the least obligated to take seriously, much less respect, (faith-based) propositions advanced without proof. And we may dismiss with especial vigor the solipsistic, quasi-deluded New-Age “My religion is true for me” dodge — which even O’Reilly has used, and in one of his (deeply self-embarrassing) interviews with Richard Dawkins, no less.

And concluding

Morality has arisen as evolutionarily propitious: that is, wherever there are humans, there are prohibitions against murder, rape, theft and so on. We would not have survived our plodding progression from African savannah to everywhere else, including the moon, without such prohibitions, which exist in all societies, Christian or not, and including those far older than our own. (Think India and China.) Now that we have developed enough to see through the sham religious norms we inherited from preceding generations, we can create our own — and we are doing so.

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Meanwhile, there’s recently more alarm about scientific studies that aren’t replicated. Here’s a NYT op-ed essay, Psychology Is Not in Crisis, that provides a patient explanation of how science works.

Much of science still assumes that phenomena can be explained with universal laws and therefore context should not matter. But this is not how the world works. Even a simple statement like “the sky is blue” is true only at particular times of day, depending on the mix of molecules in the air as they reflect and scatter light, and on the viewer’s experience of color.

Psychologists are usually well attuned to the importance of context. In our experiments, we take great pains to avoid any irregularities or distractions that might affect the results. But when it comes to replication, psychologists and their critics often seem to forget the powerful and subtle effects of context. They ask simply, “Did the experiment work or not?” rather than considering a failure to replicate as a valuable scientific clue.

Posted in Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Religion and Science

Puppygate and the Progressive Nature of Science Fiction

Posted on Tuesday 1 September 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Locus’ own Gary K. Wolfe pens an article for the Chicago Tribune about this year’s Hugo Awards/Puppygate kerfuffle: Hugo Awards: Rabid Puppies defeat reflects growing diversity in science fiction (if the site asks you to subscribe, try logging in with your Facebook or similar account; worked for me).

This strikes me as a reasonably balanced account of the past several months’ events, though similar accounts (from Blinks: Summaries of Hugo Awards results and attendant issues at Wired, Boing Boing, Wall Street Journal, and Slate) have been criticized — of course — by the Puppies as insufficiently sympathetic to their cause. What I appreciate about Gary’s take is summarized in the last three paragraphs, which note that history has left the Puppies behind, that science fiction is inherently progressive, and always has been.

The final irony in all this is that the Hugo Awards, while more diverse and international in recent years, have never really disdained the kind of adventure fiction that the Puppies claim to champion. I met the winning novelist, Cixin Liu, when he was in Chicago earlier this year, and he made it clear that his idols are classic writers like Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. “The Three-Body Problem” itself concerns communications with an alien race, the Trisolarans, whose plan is to invade the Earth as a refuge for their own endangered civilization — surely one of the oldest plots in science fiction. John Scalzi, who became one of the chief targets of Puppy vituperation, is a white male who won the Hugo in 2013 for “Redshirts,” a space opera adventure with knowing references to “Star Trek.” Among the novellas bumped off the ballot this year by the Puppy slate was Nancy Kress’ “Yesterday’s Kin,” a well-written tale that begins with an alien spaceship parking itself over New York harbor.

The problem, I suspect, is that none of these works are only about revisiting these favored old tropes. Sometimes they satirize them (as with Scalzi). Sometimes they introduce political themes (as with Cixin Liu, whose novel opens with a harrowing account of China’s Cultural Revolution). Sometimes they focus on character and family relationships (as with Kress). What seems to threaten the Puppies is not that science fiction has forsaken its origins (which it clearly hasn’t), but that readers have come to expect more and to welcome different voices. The old-fashioned modes of space adventure and military science fiction still have substantial markets, but it’s probably true that such works show up less on Hugo or Nebula award ballots than their supporters would like.

There will always be readers in any genre who seek to celebrate the past, but awards — not always, but often — go to works that are seen as moving the genre forward in some way — they “ask the next question,” as the classic science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon once put it. Women, LGBT writers, international writers, writers of color, all have made measurable progress in the past few years of Hugo voting — but many still find it hard to get published, or are expected to focus on certain kinds of fiction simply because of who they are. The outright rejection by Hugo voters of the Puppy slate — a few of whom, it must be said, might deserve recognition on their own merits — is not a rejection of a particular mode of writing, but of bullying and bad behavior — and, frankly, bad fiction — and of an almost desperate effort to unravel the progress that has already been made, and that is still far from complete.

Posted in Human Progress, science fiction | Comments Off on Puppygate and the Progressive Nature of Science Fiction

Links and Comments: Religion and Education; Religions around the world; deGrasse Tyson on the history of the universe

Posted on Tuesday 1 September 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

ABC News: latest example of how religious groups reject education, because, of course: NYC to Probe Secular Education at Jewish Schools.

There was no science, no geography and no math past multiplication at the ultra-Orthodox Jewish school Chaim Weber attended. And the only reason he ever heard of the American Revolution was when a seventh-grade teacher introduced it as “story time.”

cf. Boko Haram, and any number of Christian colleges who swear fealty to the Bible, that compilation of Iron Age texts, ahead of any later understanding or acceptance of reality.

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Fascinating map by Business Insider about how the major religions have spread across the world, over the past millennia:

This animated map shows how religion spread across the world.

Virtually all peoples’ religious convictions are based on where they were born and bred. It’s about culture and tradition; not about reality.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains the universe in 8 minutes. (Also via.)

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Religion and Education; Religions around the world; deGrasse Tyson on the history of the universe

Rereading Isaac Asimov, part 1

Posted on Friday 28 August 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

In the past three weeks I’ve read or reread (mostly reread, after decades) some 50 short stories by Isaac Asimov — not yet all of his most notable stories, by criteria of awards or number of reprints or critical discussions, but many of them.

Asimov, of course, was one of the most popular SF authors of the mid-20th century, especially for stories built around a couple big ideas — robots, and his far future Foundation stories, driven by his idea of psychohistory, that describe the downfall and rebuilding of a Galactic civilization. These ideas have had profound consequences on subsequent SFnal thinking, and the influence of SF on the greater world: many current, famous technologists and economists (e.g. Paul Krugman!) still cite these as influential to their careers.

Yet, after all these years, re-reading these stories, the first and most obvious thing to say is that many of these stories, especially those written at the very beginning of Asimov’s career, from 1939 and into the early 1940s, display crude pulp techniques that are embarrassing by contemporary standards. In particular, his characters were exaggerated and he was given to overuse of dramatic adverbs: characters are always speaking “savagely” or “viciously”; they drop their cigars (yes) to the floor in alarm; they pound their fists on the table in emphasis. Examples, from two stories, “Reason” and “Catch that Rabbit”, with page references in my SF Book Club edition of I, Robot [one of the earliest SF books I acquired!]:

P41.4: “There was still a yellowed square of parchment in his hip pocket, and he slapped it down on the desk with vicious force, spreading it flat with the palm of his hand.”
P42.2: “Donovan rubbed his red mop of hair savagely and expressed himself with bitterness.”
P79.6: “’Shut up!’, said Powell savagely.”
P80.0: “Donovan passed out the door, shaking his head viciously.”

Alas, this kind of prose is also evident in his most famous story, “Nightfall”, also written and published quite early in his career. The first line of that story is:

Aton 77, director of Saro University, thrust out a belligerent lower lip and glared at the young newspaperman in a hot fury.

Belligerent! Hot fury!

Asimov toned down this style fairly quickly, by the mid-1950s, as he either matured or recognized that there was a market for stories with relatively less histrionic prose, but this issue is the first sign that these stories would be difficult to recommend and relate to current readers.

Nevertheless– I would say, despite these issues, both “Reason” and “Nightfall” are significant stories, even important and profound stories, for reasons independent of their prose. As I will describe in subsequent posts.

(And I’ll note for now that, despite this issue, “Reason”, one of his earliest Robot stories, is reprinted in The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, published in 2010.)

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Links and Comments: Hand-Picked Truths and Moral Progress

Posted on Wednesday 26 August 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

First, taking the high road, an op-ed by NYT science writer George Johnson, in yesterday’s NYT Science section: The Widening World of Hand-Picked Truths. (The title in print was “The Gradual Extinction of Accepted Truths”.)

This speaks to the increasing divide between religious traditionalists and those who accept the “stunning advances in science”, triggered, Johnson suggests, by the infamous 1966 Time Magazine essay given the cover title “Is God Dead?”. The essay was not a denunciation of religion, Johnson says, but a calm consideration of “how society was adapting to the diminishing role of religion in an an age of secularization, urbanism, and, especially, stunning advances in science.”

Faith would steadily give way to the scientific method as humanity converged on an ever better understanding of what was real.

Of course this has not only not happened, the divide has gotten worse, fueled, as so much else, by the internet and the ability to filter reality to what other like-minded people think, never mind the eventually self-correcting process of science. I’m thinking this must be a consequence of some fundamental aspect of human nature, which, per PvC #2, is evidence of how the human mind is optimized not to perceive what is real, but to understand the world in only the terms that are advantageous for survival, in its many aspects.

Viewed from afar, the world seems almost on the brink of conceding that there are no truths, only competing ideologies — narratives fighting narratives. In this epistemological warfare, those with the most power are accused of imposing their version of reality — the “dominant paradigm” — on the rest, leaving the weaker to fight back with formulations of their own. Everything becomes a version.

With references to creationists (of course), anti-vaxxers, new thinking about autism [the new book by Steve Silberman, mentioned earlier and to be mentioned again], and native resistance to a new telescope on Mauna Kea.

The widening gyre of beliefs is accelerated by the otherwise liberating Internet. At the same time it expands the reach of every mind, it channels debate into clashing memes, often no longer than 140 characters, that force people to extremes and trap them in self-reinforcing bubbles of thought.

In the end, you’re left to wonder whether you are trapped in a bubble, too, a pawn and a promoter of a “hegemonic paradigm” called science, seduced by your own delusions.

My own thought is that people who can see outside their bubble understand that science *works* (thus technology), and appreciate the irony of all those who reject the “hegemonic paradigm” of science while using the internet, and the global positioning satellites that link it, which all depend on the science of the past century that refutes the ancient religious myths, to naively spread their bubble worldview.

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Fascinating essay by Adam Lee, Is Religion Inherently Authoritarian?, which I missed a few weeks ago when it appeared on Alternet. Subtitle: “Compared to secular reasoning, the religious establishment has been slow to act when it comes to moral progress.” This supports my own PvC about the arc of moral progress, and how, of course, resistance to such progress is generally religious. Quotes:

Human history is a story of gradual moral enlightenment. Over the ages, we’ve become less violent, less xenophobic, more tolerant, more committed to the ideals of democracy and equality under the law. Of course, moral progress is painfully slow, with many holdouts and local reversals, and we have a very long way left to go. But it’s hard to deny that the world we live in today is less prejudiced and more peaceful than the world five hundred years ago, or even just one hundred.

But a noteworthy exception to this trend of progress is religion. Secular moral reasoning, founded on considerations of fairness and human good, allows for continual self-questioning and improvement as less-privileged groups speak out to demand justice and call our attention to evils that we’d been overlooking. In sharp contrast to this, the immutable doctrines of religion are supposed to be elevated above skepticism. Even if we know more or see farther than the clerics who once came up with them, religious authorities tell us that we should submit our wills and believe without questioning.

The result is that, in most cases, moral progress has left the churches behind. Like the tide going out and leaving once-submerged rocks high and dry on the shore, the archaic doctrines of conservative religion are increasingly isolated and exposed as the immoral and vicious absurdities they are.

Followed by many examples and links.

Posted in Culture, Morality, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Hand-Picked Truths and Moral Progress

Links and Comments: David Barton; Jeffrey Tayler

Posted on Tuesday 25 August 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon calls out phony baloney historian David Barton: Meet the Tea Party’s evangelical quack: David Barton is Glenn Beck’s favorite “historian”

The larger issue here, of course, is about *narrative*: about how people need to adjust and retell history in order to make themselves feel special and important; and an example of how influential he is within certain Christian bubbles, who view history and reality as something special that they can control. Somehow it doesn’t matter to them that there is plenty of evidence, outside their bubble, that their narrative is self-serving and false.

Beginning in about 2011, two conservative Christian professors from Grove City College, Warren Throckmorton, professor of psychology, and Michael Coulter, professor of humanities and political science, published a critique of Barton’s The Jefferson Lies entitled Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President. The book was received well by scholars, and the authors’ credentials as conservative Christians undermined Barton’s defense that criticism of his work was ideological rather than factual. The Jefferson Lies was withdrawn by its publisher. One might expect under the weight of such resounding rejection, Barton would disappear into obscurity. Yet Barton’s supporters remain as devoted as before. Criticism from scholars (whether Christian or not) is dismissed as liberal, socialist, and even pagan. Discredited in the larger culture, Barton remains influential in the conservative Christian subculture.

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Jeffrey Tayler at Salon keeps us grounded: Hatred is weaponizing Jesus: How violent evangelicals, faith-based con artists & serial abusers are using religion for the purpose of evil.

Such are the questions the tragicomic farce of religion presents us with. We know the answers. We need to act on the strength of our convictions, which must exceed in firmness the determination of the faith-deranged to impose their will on us.

This time, if we fail, we have everything to lose.

Posted in Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: David Barton; Jeffrey Tayler