Decline and Fall

Most of Glenn Greenwald's posts are indispensable, but this one is especially so. As usual, I can find nothing to contribute to it. I endorse the whole thing. So go read it.

One thing that struck me about his post was the easy way he invokes Adam Smith to describe the affinity that the warmongering classes have for wars fought far away and at very little personal danger. Here's the passage he cites, a spot-on description of all of my right-wing friends who love to sit around and watch videos of terrorists getting killed by our superior firepower:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies . . . .

They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

What struck me about that was how impossible I once thought such a reference could be. People like David Horowitz often claim that the Universities aren't teaching the classics* anymore, and that if students read more classics, they would learn to embrace traditional values, whatever those are. The Right has claimed the mantle of the "defenders of the classical tradition" in the campus cultural wars, but when you read passages like this, you wonder if those crusaders have actually read the books they are hawking. And yet here's a bona-fide librul, quoting a dead economist who isn't Marx or Keynes, and getting the quote right!

A decade ago I, a studious young conservative who took the ISI's admonitions to heart, began working my way through the canon. What I found then, and when I subsequently got serious about the classics at St. John's College, where that's all the students read, was that there was nothing particularly "conservative" about these books.

There's no unified set of "values" running through the great books; in fact, one of the things that makes those books so great is the way they bucked the orthodoxies of their time and pushed the debate along by the sheer force of their arguments in the face of the absurdities of their ages. Reading through the likes of Aristotle, Descartes, Hume and Kant is much more likely to cause the thoughtful student to question whatever traditions he's embraced than to cause him to instinctively reject radical changes. He's more likely to give thought to the arguments of the reformers than to shun them instinctively, as Russell Kirk might have expected him to. In short, a grounding in the classics will usually serve to make a student more skeptical of received wisdom and thus more objectively liberal (though less radical) than he would have been had he simply been fed a diet of Bill Bennett's moralizing bedtime stories.

That was certainly what I found, and what happened to me, when I went to St. John's. I entered a conservative, came out a confused moderate, and am now settling into a skeptical leftism, thanks primarily to the "orthodox" education in the classics. Perhaps I extrapolate too much from my own experience, but you can see for yourself if you ever visit the campus: the student body is as left-wing as any in the nation, despite the ringing endorsement of St. John's in the National Review College Guide. Most the alumni I know are left-wing as well.

None of this is to say that any given classic will strike the modern reader as especially liberal in the modern context, nor that Greenwald hasn't engaged in a bit of quote-mining here, but I would at least like to see the reverential intonation of the great books removed from the wingnut campus agitators' bag of tricks. The fact that a lefty such as Glenn Greenwald could so easily employ the great expounder of capitalism in one of his hateful, unpatriotic and no doubt communist posts should at least give the lie to the idea that an education in the great books lends support to conservative orthodoxies.

* I use the term "classic" and its derivations throughout to refer to the whole of the Western Canon, not just the Greeks and Romans.

Labels: academia, conservatism, reason

Gee, publish one item indicating the possibility that the powers-that-be are comin' to getcha, and you wouldn't believe who comes out of the woodwork. Prior to publishing my piece on Blackwater's Air Force and some other things that scare me, I had gotten maybe 1500 or so hits during the entire life of this blog, many of which were me, chacking how many hits I've had. I'm now pushing 10,000.

Most of them seem to have come here via the website of Jeff Rense, who is apparently fond of accusing the Jews of training chupacabras to implant radio sensors in the brains of neocons so that they won't leak the truth about Roswell, which is the site of ancient Atlantis. Or something like that. So let this be a lesson to you newbie bloggers: if you want to be read, publish a conspiracy theory.

I've received a few comments on the Blackwater story, most of which either accuse Blackwater of pushing the zionist agenda or the christianist agenda. One favorite ties Allah with the god of ancient Atlantis, which is just so amazingly far out there (read the Timaeus and the Critias some time: Socrates made up the city of Atlantis for the sake of argument) that I had to read it a few times to trace the mental leaps. I've seen what happens when you engage cranks (if you don't know what that is or how to spot one, check out the denialism blog and their Denialists' Deck of Cards for a humorous look at the phenomenon) so I'll avoid that here.

But there was a comment worth responding to at length, from a "Canadian Looking Dispassionately At The American Experience":

The problem with this article is it shows EXCESSIVE bias towards paramilitary groups which is what Blackwater is. Bias is good becuase it is an opinion, but excessive bias is fanaticism in its own right.

The author should also know that they are NOT generally disunited, unambitious and lacking discipline, unfaithful, unvaliant before friends, nor are they cowardly before enemies since the majority of Blackwater Associates have already been in service as Navy Seals, Army Rangers, Ex-Delta Forces, British SAS, etc. They're neither stupid nor untrained and in many cases DO IN FACT do their JOBS with professionalism and tact!

It does help to focus one's mind that 100 Grand A year + bonus is yours if you just DO YOUR DAMN JOB but many join Blackwater because they LIKE being professional soldiers and like the lifestyle. So you don't always have to rail against Blackwater since they do provide a useful service in uncivil times and being paid much more than regular forces can be sent to do the "Dirty Jobs" no one else wants to do!

Well yes, of course my piece is biased. It's my opinion, which is subject to change. Whether my bias is "excessive" or not is another story. I've spent nearly two years of my life in Iraq, and I have encountered many an employee of Blackwater and the other security firms who have security contracts here. (Technically speaking I'm a mercenary, even though I'm not even authorized to carry a weapon.)

Have I found that they are disunited, unambitious, lacking discipline, unfaithful, etc.? That's really an individual thing. They often, as my Canadian interlocutor asserts with a bit too many capital letters, "in many cases DO IN FACT do their JOBS with professionalism and tact." I'll admit, they do tend to be patriotic Americans, but that can take many forms. One form is the one that many on the Right take, which asserts that patriotism means following the President no matter what. They accuse those who protest the current state of American society of anti-Americanism. Many Blackwater contractors share this opinion. Actually, it's been my experience that this opinion is the default one among many sectors in Iraq, as this post indicates. I don't doubt that these people are patriots, but I'm really disturbed by the prospect of them flying around our country in military aircraft designed for close ground support.

I'm disturbed by the prospect of anyone doing that, though.

For most of the Blackwater types I've met, this definitely describes them: "they LIKE being professional soldiers and like the lifestyle." Sure they do--that's why they took a high-paying job to come over here. I do take issue with the "they're all former SEALs and Green Berets line, though: a good rule of thumb is that when someone claims to have been in Special Forces and starts telling stories about it, they're lying. The actual SOF guys I've known have tended to not brag much at all. The Blackwater guys I've known can't shut up about how awesome they are. A close friend who once worked for Blackwater told me that they all claim to have had some sort of high speed career, but most of them turn out to have been garden-variety infantrymen who served, it should be noted, in the 80's and 90's, when there wasn't much combat to be had.

Returning to my point, Blackwater is the closest thing we have to a Foreign Legion, and that should worry anyone who is concerned about civil liberties, if for no other reason that foreign legions, if they must exist at all, ought to be limited in their scope to foreign countries. I think my commenter hits the nail on the head when he says that they "can be sent to do the "Dirty Jobs" no one else wants to do." That's what scares me about them. Sure, right now they're all fighting the fight that our elected officials have sent Americans to fight. No matter how much deceit went into getting us into this war, Congress did, in fact, declare this war, and the President is our Commander in Chief. But what happens when that mission changes? Will our legislative branch have any say whatsoever in any domestic missions a Blackwater would conduct during peacetime? There's no reason to suspect that they would. In that case, they would be an armed wing of whoever paid them, in this case the Executive Branch of the United States government. Need I remind my readers that there is no provision in the constitution for such a thing?

Those "dirty jobs" are dirty not just because no one wants to do them, but also because they are in many cases illegal and the military can't do them. I'm one of those people who likes the fact that there are defined limits to the scope of what the military of a Constitutional Republic can do. That's why I find the Blackwater phenomenon dangerous, and that is why I think my short discussion of NSPD-51 is germane.

And for the record, I suspect that many Blackwater Paramilitary Troops would go AWOL rather than provide close air support to the suppression of, say, an anti-WTO demonstration. But do we really want to trust the individual consciences of these people to protect us should they ever be given that order?

Labels: conspiracies, mercenaries, military, politics, reason

Via Stranger Fruit.

Labels: conservatism, humor, reason, religion, science

Last week I had a conversation with someone who sincerely believed that she was not born on this planet. Wanting to know how anyone could come to such a conclusion about their life, I asked her how she knew this, what evidence she had for her belief. But it turned out she had no evidence, only some sort of intangible belief. She simply smiled at me and said, "I just know."

I mention this because she is apparently not alone. Karl Rove, the power behind the Bush throne, said something yesterday so fantastically delusional that I can only imagine he would give the same response if challenged. He was asked whose idea it was to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq and responded,

I think it was Osama bin Laden's.

Osama bin Laden's. He said that. He meant it. Even though his boss and puppet recently admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Even though there have been no operational links between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda. Even though the entire world knows this already and has known it for years.

Well, not the entire world. His comment was greeted "with a round of applause."

At what point do we get to vote no confidence in these people? Or, as Thoreau asked last week, what does it take to get fired?

Via The Questionable Authority, The Cosmic Tap, and Think Progress.

Labels: Bush, conservatism, Iraq, reason

Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up about the fundamental dishonesty of the Creationist leaders. Money quote:

It took me a while to realize that the 'professional creationists' were not intellectually honest either. I am not referring to those who follow them, or those who are simply not very knowledgable about evolution. I receive emails asking me about evolution and creationism (particularly issues related to microbiology), and, believe it or not, I answer them politely (if not always quickly...).

Everyone can be misinformed, ignorant, or simply have not thought things through correctly. What I will not tolerate is willful ignorance. Creationist leaders and spokesmen are willfully ignorant. How many times do they have to be told what scientists mean by a theory? How many times will they misstate the basics of evolutionary theory, such as claiming that natural selection is a tautology? The list goes on and on. These creationists have heard the evidence-based rebuttals of their false arguments many times.

Quite true, as far as that goes. I cannot believe that the people at Answers in Genesis or the Discovery Institute have seriously considered the arguments against their position. There's just too much evidence to the contrary.

But what of the masses who follow them? Are they maliciously ignoring the evidence and fitting facts to their worldview? The answer is both yes and no. That they selectively cherry-pick evidence and arguments cannot be denied. But is it malicious? I don't think so.

Marx has often been quoted saying that "religion is the opium of the people." The corrollary to this is not often stated, however. As much as Marx believed that religion is the illusory happiness of the masses, his program merely substituted another belief in its place, rather than eliminating the need for opiates altogether. His insight was that no matter what, the people will always seek something to believe in. I define this something as ideology. (To be fair, he seems to have believed that Communism would eliminate this need, but that's the problem with ideology, and opiates: they're terrible at seeing themselves for what they actually are.)

Why do I bring up Marx in this context? To make a point about malice when arguing for logically indefensible points: as much as those of us who value intellectual honesty want to believe that our position is widely held, it isn't. We are as blinded by our belief in reason as a panacea as the fundamentalist Christian is by his belief in biblical inerrancy. It's not malicious to succumb to the temptation to see the world through your own narrow perspective, it's human.

Don't take this as one of those relativist "science-is-just-a-belief-system-like-all-the-others" arguments that one occasionally hears from post-modernists and fundamentalists (see the Sokal Affair for more on this). The scientific method has developed the clearest, most rigorous check on bias that has ever been known. Science is superior to ideology precisely because it acknowledges the bias problem and has put procedures (peer review, reproducibility, falsifiability) in place to counter it. But scientists and their fellow travelers (I'm one of the latter) do have a tendency to be blind to the extent to which the rest of the world doesn't think the way do, which is to say they proceed from different values and assumptions.

So what is to be done about the problems with ideology? Continue making the arguments, continue to show where professed Christians bear false witness in order to make their arguments, and persevere until the idea that the universe is only 6,000 years old is as antiquated as the idea that the earth is the center of the universe. But I don't think we should hold out too much hope for the ultimate tiumph of reason: as soon as one myth is shattered, a new one takes its place. My prediction is that people will be more inclined toward silly beliefs in aliens, horoscopes, crystals and biorhythms as their reliance on biblical inerrancy falls to the wayside. But it could be anything, really.

Labels: creationism, reason, religion, science

Best quote I've seen in a long time:

I can sum it all up in three words: Evolution is a lie.

Thanks for brightening my day, Stupidity Tracker.

Labels: creationism, reason, religion, science

The truth is that this is a shameless, perhaps quixotic, attempt to influence the internet powers-that-be by shaping the results of google searches via the tried-and-true methods of google bombing. But it seems like fun and it's for a (relatively) good cause, so why not? Truth is, more people should read the truth.

(More people should read The Science Creative Quarterly too, but that's another story.)

Labels: reason, science

There's an interesting discussion going on at Mixing Memory about the way atheists approach the topic of religion. Citing the obvious sense of "superiority" of atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and the plain fact that religion itself shows no sign of going away, he asks the question:

Would it not be better to recognize that the content of specific religions has, historically, varied according to the spirit of the times, and therefore the most effective avenue for social critique is to focus on changing that spirit, thereby necessarily effecting change in the content of religion? If you want to make the religious less intolerant, and less hostile towards members of outgroups, wouldn't it be better to work towards a society that is itself less intolerant and hostile towards members of outgrups?

Well, of course I agree. (Just look at my comments!) It seems to me that there is approximately zero chance that belief in the supernatural will ever go away. But there is ample reason to believe that the religions that have stuck around for as long as they have will change to fit the times. Christianity has managed to disavow the Crusades, the geocentric theory of the universe, and almost the whole of Levitical Law. This is not a small change. But it only happened as a direct result of societal changes that found such things as the injunction to kill uppity children (Exodus 21:17) incompatible with basic moral behavior.

The perfect should never be made the enemy of the good. Although I would love to see people embrace reason as wholeheartedly as the Pope embraces superstition, this isn't about to happen. Religion is too ingrained to disappear altogether; fighting against belief in that which cannot be seen is the definition of tilting at windmills. But we can find ways to get along, and I would submit that it is the atheist's duty, as he who would claim moral superiority, to find ways to make this argument without resorting to childish ad hominem attacks or belittling people for whom their faith is an important and civilizing force in their lives. I'd be happy to settle for a world in which religion sees morality through a human lens, embracing the golden rule rather than certitude about God's will.

Labels: reason, religion

Andrew Sullivan ponders the significance of a study that says conservative Christians are more likely to have been divorced than atheists and agnostics. I don't find this surprising at all. I've long thought that the trend toward fundamentalism is a product of the perception that the world is getting worse and that something stringent needs to be done about it. We can see this in the Muslim world, where the increasing liberalization of their traditional way of life is changing their society in new and unseen ways; and we can see it in America, where people are turning more and more toward more radical and literal interpretaions of our version of the good book. People turn to strict observance of age-old dogmas because they are afraid of the modern world.

Add to that the zeal of the newly-converted, and you have set the conditions for fundamentalism to flourish.

My own parents serve as an object-lesson in this. Both of them lived through the 60's, and while neither participated fully in the "tune in, turn on, drop out" culture of the bay area in those days (Dad was a grad student at Berkeley and Mom lived in San Francisco in 1969), they didn't reject it out of hand, either. After the societal degradation they witnessed during the 70's, they were searching for something real, something to make sense of the crazy world they had seen change before their eyes. When Christ came a-knocking (in the form of their 6-year-old son, yours truly, who wanted to go to church because the girl down the street did) they grabbed at it. It was what presented itself in their moment of need.

A couple of years later, they were homeschooling me in the ways of Christian fundamentalism: we watched the 700 Club every morning, we learned all about the "holes" in the theory of evolution, and we learned about the "Christian History" of America, as taught by charlatans and faux-historians such as Rousas John Rushdoony, David Barton and Peter Marshall. Mom even chaired the Pat Robertson for President campaign in our area. They indoctrinated me into the religious right, which, to their credit, was what they believed to be the truth.

I was able to escape that dogma through keeping an open mind and doing research of my own, but I often wonder if part of the reason I was able to see behind that curtain was simply a function of having never had it as bad as they did; at least in terms of world-upheaval. I didn't grow up in the post-war boom, I never saw the Eisenhower years, I missed Watergate entirely, and I never had to deal with the excesses of the drug culture.

My parents did, ultimately, teach me to seek the truth behind the way the mainstream presents it. This bit of skepticism turned out to be the foundation of my own skepticism, which has led me to atheism (or at least agnosticism, which in my case is practically the same thing), distrust of government, and distrust of authority, even religious authority.

I well remember learning about how John Wycliffe bravely challenged the prevailing Catholic orthodoxy to publish the Bible in English. I managed to translate that lesson into challenging the puritanical American orthodoxy's stranglehold on what constitutes "Christian" behavior. I also learned to be scrupulous about telling the truth and being humble about my estimation of my own abilities. I also learned to value the American experiment for its focus on the reason ("God's viceroy," to quote John Donne) of the average person. I was brought up to be a child of God, I ended up being a child of the Enlightenment.

Another thing about my parents: one was a divorcee (the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree there) and the other had a child out of wedlock. So they had made mistakes they weren't keen on repeating. In a lot of ways this caused them to rear me correctly, which has ultimately, ironically, made enough of an independent thinker of me to make a free thinker of me.

So I'm not surprised that conservative Christians are more likely to have been divorced. It is precisely that sort of foundational experience (or "Primal Scene," to use Freud's term) that lends itself to such an abrupt and total change in outlook.

Labels: fundamentalism, personal, reason, religion

In honor of Darwin's Birthday I watched Flock of Dodos yesterday . It was an entertaining documentary that pointed out the main problem with the science side of the intelligent design/evolution debate: scientists really suck at public relations.

Take the ID slogan, "Teach the Controversy," for instance. As noted in the movie, there is no corollary on the other side of the debate. The feeble suggestion, "Teach the Science," clearly doesn't pack the same rhetorical punch, so the ones who actually have the facts on their side in this argument are seemingly doomed to lose the popular war; and only because no one in the scientific community seems to be able to string two sentences together in a way that makes the case for truth appealing.

As Aristotle noted in his Rhetoric, there are three elements of a good argument: logos, or the logical quality of the argument; ethos, or the credibility of the one making the argument; and pathos, or the way the argument is framed. I've debated the question of which of these is most important before, but now I realize that I have grossly underestimated the degree to which the silver-tongued presentation trumps the superior logic of a credible source. More than half of Americans now believe that human evolution is a hoax by a cabal of godless scientists. To put it simply: the scientific community is all logos and ethos, and no pathos, and as a result, the sophists are winning the war.

There was some discussion after the film, featuring several U of A professors, and this lack of pathos was the main topic. One professor pointed to the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science as a step that has been taken toward "selling" the scientific angle. I haven't spent much time with their site, but at first glance this looks feeble. Nothing like the PR blitzes we've seen from the likes of the Discovery Institute and other bald-faced liars in the name of god (who I won't link to here for ethical reasons).

Won't somebody hire a decent PR firm for the National Academies of Science?

Labels: creationism, reason

When politicians and other non-scientists get involved in discussing science, science almost invariably loses. The LA Times recently published an article by Chris Mooney and Alan Sokal about the war on science, which in recent years has shifted from attacks by the postmodern academic left to attacks by the fundamentalist political right. Their critique of current goverenment poicies is pointed:

...many if not most scientific agencies of our government have become embroiled in scandals involving the misrepresentation or suppression of scientific information, gag orders on scientist employees, or other interferences with the processes by which science feeds into decision-making. Tracing these intrusions back to their source, we almost always uncover the same pattern: It concerns an issue in which one of the two principal constituencies of the current administration — religious conservatives or big corporations — has a vested interest.

You've probably guessed that those vested interests include opposition to stem-cell research, the "morning after" pill and the scientific consensus on global warming.

This attitude toward science as an agency of political dogma directly retards the role that science has historically played in our culture--that of dispassionate investigator interested in the pursuit of furthering understanding of ourselves and our world and making the world a better place to live. The attacks on science from various ideological quarters, be they PETA's opposition to animal testing or the religious right's determination to "teach the controversy" over evolution in public schools, only serve to weaken students' trust of science at a time when their understanding is rapidly falling, especially in relation to students elsewhere in the world.

The authors' concrete recommendations for de-politicizing science are to establish firm whistlblower protections for scientists, revive the Office for Technology Assessment (which was eliminated by the Gingrich Congress), and encourage congressional investigations into the Bush Administration's abuse of science.

These are good and necessary first steps, but in order to free science to do what it is designed to do, there needs to be a fundamental shift in the way the media treat science and the way the public understands it:

At the same time, journalists and citizens must renounce a lazy "on the one hand, on the other hand" approach and start analyzing critically the quality of the evidence. For, in the end, all of us — conservative or liberal, believer or atheist — must share the same real world. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria do not spare deniers of evolution, and global climate change will not spare any of us.

On the issue of the journalistic treatment of science, the problem lately has been the insistence upon "getting both sides" of an issue in order to fend off criticisms of media bias. This approach worksfairly well with strictly political issues, such as tax reform and education policy, but it has no place in science coverage. As Mooney noted in another article a couple of years ago,

the journalistic norm of balance has no corollary in the world of science. On the contrary, scientific theories and interpretations survive or perish depending upon whether they’re published in highly competitive journals that practice strict quality control, whether the results upon which they’re based can be replicated by other scientists, and ultimately whether they win over scientific peers. When consensus builds, it is based on repeated testing and retesting of an idea.

Unfortunately the media is either too ignorant of the special treatment that science requires or too cowed by the haranguing they have received for decades by the right's obsession with the media's "liberal bias" (a conservative article of faith that doesn't hold up to scrutiny) to report science objectively. As the AEI bribery story shows, "experts" can always be trotted out to write non-peer-reviewed articles attacking the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community.

This is not an academic issue. This affects our society at all levels, notably public health. America has long been the world's leader in scientific innovation and education, but this recent trend could put an end to all that. Let's hope congress heeds their recommendations and pursues this issue vigorously.

Mooney, incidentally, blogs here.

Labels: global warmiing, reason