Summing up the decade on New Year's Eve 2009

"The decade where people communicate as indirectly as possible but as often as possible while sharing as much information as possible and as useless of information as possible." — a friend on Facebook

"Throughout the decade, the real world pursued, hectored, harassed. Ignorance was punished. Hubris found its comeuppance. The optimists were routed, the pessimists validated. . . . This was a decade when things you didn't know about could really hurt you." — Joel Achenbach

"The aughts were ruined by not letting good crises go to waste." — Will Wilkinson

"Who do you trust?"

Good question!

Here are some of Joel Achenbach's answers:

Google and Wikipedia are pretty good, but they're just starting points in the quest to find out what's going on....

I trust nature, resilient and resourceful as it has shown itself to be for some 4 billion years in these parts.

I trust the scientific method, for being so relentlessly self-correcting, and for having the courage to view truth as provisional.

I trust the future. Could be foolish. But trust always has an element of faith. I trust the future to give us a better world. (Cross my fingers.)

Achenbach picked up the "Who do you trust?" meme from this nicely short Washington Post piece, in which Philip Kennicott asks the same question in the wake of the death of Walter Cronkite. Kennicott writes:

It was deeply disturbing, but not terribly surprising, to learn that under the guidance of a stern man in a lab coat, ordinary people would torture innocent victims in the infamous Milgram experiment carried out at Yale University. Cronkite was a white man in a tie, with a calm, reassuring voice, and he could have talked us into almost anything, if he wanted to. But his legacy is a paradox: We trusted him to teach us to trust less.

The nostalgia for Cronkite is nostalgia not for a lost golden age, but for a brief time when three large media corporations held a monopoly on the airwaves, when trust could be sorted out easily and quickly with the shorthand of race, class and education....

But there is no aura of trust that public figures can put on like a bespoke suit. Trust has been shattered into a million little pieces, which was, perversely, the name of a dubious memoir endorsed by Oprah, unofficially the most trusted woman in America. Replacing it is a host of smaller and more precise ideas. Transparency. Authenticity. Accuracy. A different world, and not necessarily a worse one.

(Photo of Encyclopedia Brittanica by Stewart Butterfield.)

Robert Wright's self-contradictory attack on the "new atheists"

Robert Wright, who has a new best-selling book out called The Evolution of God, explains his problem with the "new atheists" -- an unfortunate term that presumably includes Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris (see below for the video version):

I think now it is more acceptable for intellectuals to openly ridicule religion than it was 15 years ago. But anyway, whatever the case . . . this bothers me, and it is part of the motivation for my writing th[e] afterword [in The Evolution of God]. And here's one reason it bothers me. In a way, at the root of that afterword is the belief that . . . being human is hard. . . . I think even harder is trying seriously to lead a moral life and be human.... If somebody is really making an earnest effort to lead a moral life, in the face of all the obstacles ... and really moral by our lights: they're decent, gentle people. They're trying to help. They're not going on jihads and killing people. It makes me just almost nauseous when someone walks up to them and say: "Don't you understand, the basis for this noble struggle is just not as intellectually sophisticated as I am?" OK? That just makes me sick. . . . But John, you do that! [He's talking to John Horgan. -- JAC] You're anti-religion! You want to wipe religion out!

I think that "nauseous" statement is wrong on a few levels.

First, I don't see how Wright could reconcile it with his comments in a diavlog between him and Joel Achenbach (again, scroll down for the video):

Achenbach: Is it not a fact that I asked you a straightforward question, I said -- these are the exact words -- "Bob, is there a God?" And you came up with this sort of Clintonesque answer ... "Depends on what the meaning of 'God' is," or something like that.

Wright: Well, don't you think it kind of does, Joel? I mean, for example, if you defined God as a laptop computer we could both just look around us and go, "Yeah, God exists." So it does depend on the definition.

Achenbach: First of all, it's the entity that's accountable for everything. OK? Has created everything and, ideally, cares about us.

Wright: No, wait, let me read exactly what you said on your little blog -- I mean your blog. You said: "We all know what we mean by God, which is someone who cares about us and has unlimited power." Now, I can tell you right away, that kind of God doesn't exist.

Achenbach: How do you...

Wright: Because if God cared about us and was omnipotent, could do anything, we wouldn't suffer as much as we do, Joel! So that one's easy: no, that kind of God doesn't exist.

Achenbach: OK, I'm glad we cleared that up.

Wright: For crying out loud! But you know, most gods that people have believed in for most of history have not been those kind. They have not been omnipotent. That's, like, this Judeo-Christian, this Abrahamic hang-up.

(Previously blogged here.)


Note that he doesn't just deny the Christian/Jewish/Islamic God's existence, but he also takes a distinctly pugnacious tone (it's "obvious"; the Abrahamic religions have a "hang-up," etc.).

He makes a similar statement in the same diavlog where he makes the above "nauseous" statement:

Horgan: Bob, let me just ask you, right to your virtual face: do you believe in a loving god?

Wright: Do I believe in the sense of having confidence that one exists?

Horgan: Just answer the question, Bob!

Wright: Well, the answer to that is no.*

* I've left in more discussion in the video below. If you watch the video, do you think he accurately characterizes what atheists necessarily believe about morality?





Now, Wright has publicly stated that he was raised devoutly Southern Baptist and rejected the religion. He's said he doesn't strictly follow any religion but is, at most, a "bad Buddhist." If he really believed that Abrahamic religion were essential to being good, presumably he'd still believe in it. But actually, he says that his sense of right and wrong comes from thinking about concrete facts in the world within a utilitarian framework.

Wright doesn't seem that different from Sam Harris, one of the "new atheists" he excoriates. (I don't think Harris is very concerned with disproving the existence of God, hence the scare quotes -- but that's how Wright and others refer to him.)

Both Sam Harris and Bob Wright reject Christianity/Judaism/Islam and prefer a vague Eastern mystical alternative. They both view the world through a modern/secular framework in which science tells a lot about the physical world but doesn't provide everything you need to live a meaningful life. They both recognize that a lot of evil has been done in the name of religion, and that Christian/Jewish/Islamic sacred texts include a contradictory mix of good principles (don't kill, don't steal, give to charity, etc.) and bad ones (advocating or at least condoning violence, slavery, prejudice, etc.).

The main difference I see is that Harris tends to see religion as the cause of things like the Crusades and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Wright thinks that's ridiculous because those conflicts were actually motivated by land disputes. Both of them are being far too confident that they know what would have happened in a world without religion. We'll never know what that counterfactual would have looked like. So I think it's futile to try to point to human behavior -- whether it's war or donating to charity or anything -- and say: "Aha, this was caused by religion! Gee, isn't religion good/bad/___?" Harris and Wright have each decided to adopt a posture -- Harris's being more anti-religion, Wright's being more pro-religion -- and they'll relentlessly interpret the facts to fit this stance.

I also take issue with Wright's language (in the first clip in this post) about how the "new atheists" hold themselves out as being on such a lofty intellectual level that the commoners should defer to their superior intellects. Maybe this is a fair critique of Dawkins's The God Delusion. But I don't think Harris (in The End of Faith) or Hitchens (in God Is Not Great) say anything of the sort. You don't even get that sense from reading between the lines of their books. Those books actually aren't written on an especially high intellectual level. They're easy, fast reads. (I say this as a very slow reader.) The M.O. of both authors is to collect a bunch of facts -- many of which are readily accessible and will be familiar to the average reader -- and make common-sense observations about them.

Another undertone to Wright's "nauseous" comment -- with its vivid language about the new atheists "walking up to" religious people and so on -- is that Harris and Hitchens are simply rude to write their books. (I'm picking on Wright, but many others have made this argument.) Well, the content of most nonfiction books that make persuasive arguments would be rude if you repeated it in the wrong company. If you've noticed that your co-worker has a lot of anti-war bumper stickers on their car, you probably won't tell them about all the great arguments made in the book you just read by Robert Kagan -- but Kagan still writes smart books about foreign policy that are worth reading.

I think it's quite common for people to have blunt discussions about what they like and don't like about this or that religion (or about those who don't subscribe to any religion). You might not choose to talk about it, say, at work, or even with certain close friends or family members, but maybe you'll have the conversations with other close friends or family members. I don't see what's wrong with writing books about these issues that people are going to think about and talk about anyway.

It's also too easy to forget the fact that criticizing religions -- even in a harsh or over-the-top way -- isn't unique to the "new atheists." It's done all the time by people of all religious stripes. The adherents of one religion will regularly criticize those of other religions. People within a religion will even criticize other followers of the same religion. And when there are criticisms being made out there in the world, they're probably going to be reflected in books if they're on enough people's minds. Whether you like it or not, Christians (for instance) are going to write books supporting their Christian views, secular humanists are going to write books supporting their secular humanist views, and so on.

Now, the fact that secular humanists enjoy this kind of freedom of expression along with religious people hasn't been true for most of human history. But we're not in most of human history; we're in 2009. It's inevitable now.

And I'm not too worried about the possibility that Hitchens/Harris/Dawkins might hurt religious people's feelings. People who are easily offended by criticisms of religion aren't likely to read those books anyway. But to many people -- including people who are kept up at night wondering if they're evil for disagreeing with the faith of their family, and including gay people who wonder if they're going to go to Hell, and even including devout believers who simply enjoy reading an honest polemic from the other side -- the books might be quite welcome.

So, go ahead and criticize the "new atheists" for making specific points you disagree with. But don't criticize them just for harshly criticizing religion -- unless you're also going to criticize everyone else who does so. That includes a whole lot of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. And it certainly includes Bob Wright.

Let's remember how much science we don't know.

A lot.

My favorite quotes from a year of blogging

The following are my favorite quotes by other people that I've blogged in my first year of blogging (April 12, 2008 to April 11, 2009).

For the sake of readability, I've removed all formatting (italics, etc.) and alterations (ellipses and brackets). If you happen to need a more exact quote, just click the attribution link and look for it in the original post.


LIFE

"My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it." -- Daniel Gilbert

"Don't confuse simple, reasonable honesty with radical silliness. There is no reason to try to articulate blurry feelings or over-explain every detail. The point is to be honest instead of internalizing, not to try to extract juicy confessionals out of everyday life." -- Summer Anne Burton


WORK

"Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable." -- Bertrand Russell

"One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to 'do what you love.' If you tell yourself that your job has to be something you'd do even if you didn't get paid, you'll be looking for a long time. Maybe forever. So why set that standard? The reward for doing a job is contributing to something larger than you are, participating in society, and being valued in the form of money. -- Penelope Trunk


ENVIRONMENT

"You might declare that global warming and energy insecurity, not to mention urban sprawl and pollution, have intensified the sin of indulging one's motoring desires. And I would not argue with that point. You're right. I am a bad man. But over the long term, if you want to develop a new transportation and energy policy, you'd probably want to err on the side of assuming that people won't change much. And it is human nature to like to be empowered." -- Joel Achenbach

"If you're a progressive, if you're driving a Prius, or you're shopping green or you're looking for organic, you should probably be a semi-vegetarian." -- Mark Bittman

"On the one hand, we are told that our overconsumption is polluting and cluttering up the earth with garbage, using up resources and showing insensitivity to all the needy people in the world. On the other hand, we are told that until we start buying more goods and services, the economy will be in the dumps and we will leave many of our fellow citizens jobless, homeless and hungry. Something is wrong with that picture." -- Ina Aronow


THOUGHT

"We have grown terribly -- if somewhat hypocritically -- weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace -- as their predecessors did -- big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth -- however provisional it might be." -- Cristina Nehring

"Is Mount Everest more 'real' than New York? I mean, isn't New York 'real'? I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean, isn't there just as much reality to be perceived in the cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there's nothing that different." -- Wallace Shawn

"Complexity and obscurity have professional value -- they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery." -- John Kenneth Galbraith


DOUBT

"It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects." -- Colin McGinn

“Instead of explaining why this recession (or depression) is just like the others, we should attend to what is new and especially problematic about the current downturn and why it may not respond to policies modeled on avoiding the errors of the past. To speak of a crisis of financial epistemology may sound abstract, but it has had very concrete and disastrous consequences.” -- Jeffrey Z. Muller

"And this is the point in which I think I am superior to men in general, and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than other men -- that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know." -- Socrates


RELIGION

-- "Is life in general more rewarding if you are spiritual, and a real believer? Does someone who truly believes that God is watching my every step, God is taking care of me, whatever happens to me is somehow approved by or helped by God, does that person live a richer, fuller life than someone who thinks: we're on our own here?"
-- "It depends on your specific conception of God, because belief can equally well leave you with this constant sense that you're coming up short and you're being judged and you're not doing quite the perfect thing. You know, I was brought up very religiously, and I never totally lost that sense, you know, that I'm screwing up." -- Joel Achenbach and Robert Wright

"Our general repression of matters disgusting prevents us facing up to a serious health problem. If we are the 'god that shits,' then we are in full flight from ourselves. I even wonder whether religion itself and the whole idea of a god is produced by our self-disgust." -- Colin McGinn

"Every religion I know of has changed its views with respect to concrete controversies over long periods of time. People's views about the morality of homosexuality are likely to undergo some change, even though they're making judgments based on their religious beliefs. Because in fact, religion is an extremely durable, and yet flexible, way of trying to apprehend what's good and what's bad in the world. In fact, its durability comes from its flexibility. Now, speaking from inside a religion, it's hard to talk that way." -- Jack Balkin


SCIENCE

"It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning, rather than any special scientific doctrine, that makes science and religion look like competitors today. Scientism emerged not as the conclusion of scientific argument but as a chosen element in a worldview -- a vision that attracted people by its contrast with what went before -- which is, of course, how people very often do make such decisions, even ones that they afterwards call scientific." -- Mary Midgley

"If a psychological Maxwell devises a general theory of mind, he may make it possible for a psychological Einstein to follow with a theory that the mental and the physical are really the same. But this could happen only at the end of a process which began with the recognition that the mental is something completely different from the physical world as we have come to know it through a certain highly successful form of detached objective understanding. Only if the uniqueness of the mental is recognized will concepts and theories be devised especially for the purpose of understanding it." -- Thomas Nagel

"We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)" -- Robert Wright


GOVERNMENT

“Something that’s unsustainable, like a dysfunctional relationship, can go on longer than you expect, and then end faster and messier than you think.” -- President Obama's budget director Peter Orszag, as quoted by David Leonhardt

"The confidentiality of the judicial process would not matter greatly to an understanding and evaluation of the legal system if the consequences of judicial behavior could be readily determined. If you can determine the ripeness of a cantaloupe by squeezing or smelling it, you don't have to worry about the produce clerk's mental processes." -- Richard Posner

"And that was an unedited interview with the secretary of state taped earlier this morning from Jordan. We appreciate Secretary Powell's willingness to overrule his press aide's attempt to abruptly cut off our discussion as I began to ask my final question." -- Tim Russert


ANIMALS

"I'm not a vegetarian. Now, don't get me wrong -- I like animals. And I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. Kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left." -- Mark Bittman

"If you eat meat, something like that is going on in the background for you too." -- Ann Althouse


GENDER

"Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing. Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men, and are even more powerful." -- Pashe Keqi, as reported by Dan Bilefsky

"No matter how bad things get for boys/men, well, they're men, so they can look after themselves. Women, on the other hand, need a Presidential Council to make sure they're doing all right, even if by many metrics they are outperforming men." -- "Sofa King"

"[quoting this New York Times article:] 'Women's desire is dominated by yearnings of self-love, by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.' A lot of feminist writing would say that the culture has oppressed women by presenting them as the object of male desire. What if that originates in the woman? Well that would shake the foundations of feminism!" -- Ann Althouse

"From the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women. It's not just that men take on greater risks and pursue more hazardous vocations than women. There are poorly understood -- and underappreciated -- vulnerabilities inherent in men's genetic and hormonal makeup." -- Marianne J. Legato


RIGHT and WRONG

"We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters." -- Ed Hickling, as reported by Gene Weingarten

"Those subject to capital punishment are real human beings, with their own backgrounds and narratives. By contrast, those whose lives are or might be saved by virtue of capital punishment are mere 'statistical people.' They are both nameless and faceless, and their deaths are far less likely to be considered in moral deliberations." -- Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule

"Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part." -- Bertrand Russell


ART

"The devaluing of the visual goes along with the theory that there is no such thing as quality, i.e., good versus bad, a theory that inevitably comes to parody itself as a prejudice against the beautiful." -- Richard Lawrence Cohen

Can you tell good art from bad?

Achenblog (Joel Achenbach) says:

Just hit the art gallery on M street with all the Obama art. I can't tell good art from bad, but I did discern a heavy "Obama" theme, as these pictures attest.

The honesty of the boldfaced phrase is refreshing. We need more of that.

As for me, I do have some ability to distinguish good art from bad. I certainly agree that this art the New York Times promoted last summer was "incredibly bad." I seriously question the taste of whoever chose to highlight it.

But then, I also know there are plenty of people who are better at judging art than I am. If I go to an art museum, I feel lucky if I get something out of maybe half the works there, while not seeing the point in the other half.

In contrast, I almost always have an opinion about music. I always trust my own opinion and don't worry if it deviates from some supposed consensus. (That doesn't mean I always have a firm opinion on first listen.)

I'm worst with poetry. I can recognize plenty of bad poetry, but I cannot read good/great poetry and honestly say things like, "Hm, that's pretty good but could be better," or simply, "That's great poetry." I've read T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson in classes, and I've tried to convince myself that I perceive their greatness, but I'd be lying if I said I did.

I like Bertrand Russell's theory, even though it might seem to contradict some of this blog post:

Suppose one man likes strawberries and another does not; in what respect is the latter superior? There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good, to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live. . . . Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days.*

Of course, the same applies to art, music, poetry, and a lot more.

* That's from pp. 125-6 of The Conquest of Happiness.


IN THE COMMENTS: My dad says:

The sickness of contemporary gallery art is that it is no longer about visual content. It is about a) the artist's self-dramatizing gestures, and b) the "ideas" that the work is proclaimed to signify by the artist's statements, symposia, colloquia, grant and commission applications, pitches to dealers, etc., where the artist shares the stage (literally or figuratively) with critics and curators, who are considered the true custodians of the art spirit. The devaluing of the visual goes along with the theory that there is no such thing as quality, i.e., good versus bad, a theory that inevitably comes to parody itself as a prejudice against the beautiful. Work that is visually appalling and emotionally juvenile is considered "interesting" . . . if it makes gestures of tagging along with fashionable ideologies, gestures that are offered and accepted as manifestations of the creative intellect. These offerings are dues paid to the guild of academic artists. The upshot: galleries are no longer where the visual art is.

Why do we drive more than necessary even though it harms the planet?

It all has to do with the fundamental evil of human nature.

Or, to be more specific, the urge for power regardless of the costs.

Achenblog (Joel Achenbach) explains:

If I could change one thing about myself it's the way I'm the embodiment of all that is wrong with America and the human species more broadly. Don't get me wrong - my self-esteem is in the normal range, but if I could tinker with my existence it would be to make myself something other than a detestable, oozing, suppurating lesion on the body of civilization.

Time constraints prevent a full accounting of what I'm talking about here, but let's take a look at just one example: I am a self-indulgent motorist.

On weekends I engage in countryside motoring as if it's a form of exercise. Worse, during the week, despite the availability of mass transit, I almost always drive to work, a five-mile jaunt on surface streets past one bus stop after another.

Why do I drive? Power. Raw, unbridled power, at my fingertips and toetips.

My Honda Accord is an empowerment device. It gives me the option of going anywhere on the spur of the moment without heed of bus schedules or fear of Metro delays. I could just start driving, and head West, across the continent, and then veer down through Mexico, and onward to Patagonia. Having a car is like sitting in a restaurant near the door. ...

Now, you might declare that global warming and energy insecurity, not to mention urban sprawl and pollution, have intensified the sin of indulging one's motoring desires. And I would not argue with that point. You're right. I am a bad man. And let us note that advertising campaign (I've seen it all over the place -- from some fossil fuel company I think) in which smiling people are seen thinking to themselves, "I will leave the car at home" or "I will take the bus more often" and whatnot. All this is good. But over the long term, if you want to develop a new transportation and energy policy, you'd probably want to err on the side of assuming that people won't change much. And it is human nature to like to be empowered.

"Is there a God?" And what's wrong with punching a robot? And can an atheist truly enjoy Thanksgiving?

I agree with just about everything Robert Wright says in this excellent discussion of whether God exists:



That's Robert Wright -- whom I've blogged repeatedly -- and Joel Achenbach, who writes the Achenblog.

Here's a transcript of the whole conversation, via Bloggingheads.