Hate Is The Object

In my post Hating The Andromeda Galaxy I looked at the necessity of hate in politics. I discuss some of the repercussions of that in Strange Connection.

Today I came across a site discussing those very issues from a biological perspective. The Market for Sanctimony.

Two unspoken questions that religions and quasi-religions, in practice, have to answer are "Whom do I have permission to use as a scapegoat?" and "What lies may I tell myself in order to feel morally superior to my competitors?" In Jerry Falwell's church, you have permission to use homosexuals as scapegoats. At a Green Party meeting, you have permission to use capitalists as scapegoats.

Yep. Which is one of the reasons I suggested the human race unite in hating the Andromeda Galaxy. We could then be united in hatred.

When it becomes too embarrassing for people to engage in a particular kind of moral fraud, they will usually substitute a different kind of moral fraud rather than give up their feelings of moral superiority. Thus, to a first approximation, we have a principle of "Conservation of Irrationality:"

(1) much of the irrational behavior associated with religion is related to people having a craving for ego justification,

(2) changing a person's theological beliefs has little effect on his tendency to crave ego justification, and

(3) politics is the continuation of religion by other means.

Irrationality is Conserved? All the more need for a War On
Andromeda.

Andromeda (1869) Edward Poynter

Well that last bit was just an excuse for a picture of a naked lady. Art don'cha know? Besides. I'm partial to red heads. And blonds. And brunettes. And given the right circumstances even green hair. Uh. Where was I?

...it's impossible to diagnose a problem correctly if the actual cause is not a member of the approved boogieman list, and one is committed to only blaming members of the approved list (having "ideological blinders" or what Eric Raymond called "historical baggage").

Question: "Why do you keep hitting that nail when what you have to do is tighten the screw?" Answer: "I hate nails. I'd rather be hitting nails than screwing." Yep there are folks out there like that. Almost all of them in fact.

The next bit doubles down on that question and answer in spades. (Can you double down in Hearts?)

Part of the reason for the "slippery slope" phenomenon is that Progressivism is a positional good. The point of Progressivism is to distinguish oneself as being smarter than and morally superior to the average voter. One consequence of this is that Progressives have no fixed goal for the optimal size and scope of government. There is no such thing as "enough." Whatever the average voter has become acclimated to has to be "not enough" so that the Progressives can be smarter than average.

The solution for out-of-control government is not constitutional change, but psychological change. To paraphrase what Andrei Codrescue said of the USSR, what we need are not economic advisors (or constitutional lawyers), what we need are psychiatrists.

Progressives want mommy to make it nice (especially for them) and Conservatives want to find the designated miscreants and punish them. Libertarians just want to be left alone. Forgetting Trotsky: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Which is to say that in more than a few cases it is better to get them before they get you.

Different flavors of moral fraud may be equally irrational, but they are not equally harmful. By analogy, smallpox and cowpox are both diseases, but smallpox is very often fatal, whereas cowpox almost never is. Furthermore, cowpox provides immunity from smallpox, just as, to a lesser extent, I claimed above that different flavors of moral fraud (ie. various flavors associated with Christianity and Socialism) tend to compete with one another (conservation of irrationality). Mencius Moldbug describes "Revelationist" Christianity as a "counterparasite" for "Universalism" (the modern Left).

I'd rather live without parasites (dogma). But that is just me. Evidently most people can't live without them.

There is an answer:

We know enough about the sociology of religion to identify a number of key properties that a good religion should have. A successful religion will inevitably have scapegoats; ideally these scapegoats should be beyond human capacity to harm, and should also be unlikely to inflict harm on humans as a result of being vilified. Gods or god substitutes (demigods) are also pretty much unavoidable, for reasons that are outside the scope of this essay. (See Paul Bloom regarding people's cognitive biases, but also Laurence Iannaccone on the advantages to practitioners of the supernatural of having gods on whom to blame their failures. Supposedly irreligious people often project semi-divine qualities onto the State.) A low religious Herfindahl index is good for society, so it is desirable if a religion forms schisms easily or can be given features that limit its market penetration to a few percent. It is desirable for a new religion to have a cosmology that is compatible with its target audience (we need naturalistic demigods, not supernatural ones, to attract scientifically literate converts). A spectacular eschatology (ie. fire and brimstone) is also nice to have to add color and purpose. Any scientific claims that an attractive religion makes should be at least as plausible as global warming catastrophism.

Well Christianity comes pretty close so what is wrong with it?

Q. ...why don't you embrace Christianity?

A. Do you mean "embrace" in terms of me joining a Christian church, or "embrace" in terms of applauding the spread of Christianity? I am relieved to hear reports of evangelical Christianity spreading in China and Latin America. Also, as a living religion, Christianity continues to evolve, so I think it's possible that some new versions of it will make a major comeback in the first world. But as it stands, Western intellectuals have had plenty of exposure to it, and they have turned their noses up at it. And it is the rich, powerful West, where I live, that I most care about. So I do embrace Christianity in the sense of wishing there were more "skeptical enlightenment" Christians in the West, and fewer "radical enlightenment" types, but I'm not holding my breath. Also, I don't really trust Christianity in any of its many versions not to revert to its romantic roots, which historically is where much of the impetus of the American "progressive" movement came from (Jonah Goldberg documents this in Liberal Fascism, for example pp. 215-220). In other words, the Christian "cowpox" doesn't provide reliable enough immunity to the Socialist "smallpox."

Well I'm not promising Utopia. Which is where most religion goes wrong. I'm promoting war on the Andromeda Galaxy.

I have only excerpted from the exposition. The essay is both amusing and confronts a real problem at the interface between human nature and governance. Go read the whole thing. And if you have to hate: the Andromeda Galaxy is just out there waiting for your attention.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Government As A Moral Enterprise

David Harsanyi has a column up about the shocking lack of faith in America and all the trouble it is causing in politics. You really need to read it. But I want to excerpt a bit from his closing remarks.

...progressives regard government as a moral enterprise. And in church, you gotta have faith.

There are a lot of Progressives who claim to be conservatives. You know. The kind claiming to belong to the One True Culture Club. (Its a joke son)

H/T Instapundit

Matters Of Faith

Wretchard at Belmont Club is having a discussion of the nature of faith prompted by an Obama speech Honoring the Fort Hood dead. Faith is an interesting thing. An engineer labors on because he has faith that questions will turn into answers. And not just any answers. Answers good enough to earn a profit. That severely limits the solution space. We see the same thing in farmers. They have to believe that they can steer around unpredictable obstacles well enough to harvest a crop and make a profit. Faith is an every day thing for that kind of business. But it is an uncertain faith. Sometimes faith is unwarranted. Difficult business that.

Well a few words on the subject:

I have always liked Hunter S. Thompson’s Commentary on Faith.

I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me. Hunter S. Thompson

I will admit it is not a religion suitable for children.

God and I have a special relationship. I believe God exists and that c********* had better straighten up and fly right or I’m going to kick some serious arse when I get a holt of the summabitch.

Of course I really don’t need faith. God talks to me every day. Or it could just be my mild schizophrenia.

You want mild schizophrenia to help you? Lower the filters. You know, be born again. Stop making so much internal noise. Replace it with external noise. Because there is signal hidden in that noise. All true religion consists of teaching you how to be born again. Being the technical geniuses we are in the West some day we will invent a pill. Maybe we could call it TFW. Temporary Filter Wipe.

So what is the value of faith? It gets you to labor on, despite the fact that there is no objective way out of the current difficulties. Faith overcomes depression. And sometimes that extra effort is enough to get you out of the mess. Or it gives you something to do until the solution arrives. Survival advantages. And it doesn't need much advantage to make faith propagate - genetically if not by word of mouth.

H/T RD in the comments at Find God Or Your Money Back

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Success Of Science

The video is an interview with Richard Feynman who is discussing faith and doubt. Especially when it comes to science. Doubt is the key to science. As soon as "scientists" proclaim certainty they have left the realm of science and have entered the realm of faith.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning. - Aleister Crowley

There are other videos in this series:

Richard Feynman #1
Richard Feynman #2
Richard Feynman #3
Richard Feynman #4
Richard Feynman #5

And the above video:
Richard Feynman #6

H/T Molon Labe in the comments at Watts Up With That

Where Is The Faith?

From the comments at Honest Government And Fiscal Responsibility by commenter auh2ogirl:

The fact that prop 8 was voted through, as prop 2 was here in FL, was in large part due to the black and latino vote, yet Obama won FL and CA tells me that the time for candidates to be elected on socially conservative platforms is over.

The GOP is going to get votes because they have convinced people that the R platform is better on reform, liberty, and economics. People can take care of their own souls without the help of government.

Of course Republican Cultural Socialists don't believe that people can take care of their own souls without the help of government.

Oh ye of little faith.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Blessed Are The Believers

An interesting little tit-bit from a while back about culture and law in Israel.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel has granted a Palestinian a rare residency permit after the man, who is gay, said his sexuality put his life in danger in the West Bank, a Defence Ministry official said on Tuesday.

The 33-year-old Palestinian from Jenin was issued a temporary permit to live with his Israeli partner in Tel Aviv after arguing he faced death threats from fellow Palestinians who disapproved of him being gay, the official said.

Israel's Interior Ministry rarely issues permits for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank who want to live with their partners in Israel, regardless of sexuality. Requesting such a permit can take years.

"In this case the man's lawyer said his life was in danger because of his sexual preference," said Peter Lerner, spokesman for Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, whose office comes under the defence ministry.

"On this basis we issued the temporary permit," he said.

It is things like this that make it hard for me to figure out groups like Queers For Palestine. They claim to be for liberation. All I see is a group favoring liberation for oppression rather than liberation from oppression. I guess Hope and Change spring eternal. Reminds me of the famous Biblical quote, "Blessed are the believers because they will follow idiots."

In fact Instapundit brought to my attention a post on that very subject by Eric S. Raymond.

Faith In Science

The only faith that science subscribes to is that the universe is orderly and the nature of that order can be discovered.

Every thing else is up to the individual.

No Doubt, Not Science

The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty--some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don't know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question--to doubt--to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained. - Richard P. Feynman * "The Value of Science," address to the National Academy of Sciences (Autumn 1955)

Let me add that of all the scientific disciplines engineers are the most doubtful. Murphy is a constant companion.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Why Science Is Not Religion

Science is based on doubt.

Religion is based on faith.

Prompted by the discussion at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Then there is scientism which amounts to faith in science. We know scientism is not a scientific position, because science never knows anything. All science can say is "this is the best answer we have so far".

The Scientific Consensus

There are a number of reasons why scientific consensus is not definitive.

One of them is phlogiston.

Faith

Personally, I have faith in doubt.

Coalition Warfare

Voting coalitions are ruled by the least commited members.

So the question to the cultural conservatives is: do you want 2004 to be the Republican high water mark or would you like to extend the string.

BTW I have yet to get an answer from any of my "we need a law" anti-abortion friends on why a black market in abortion services and abortion drugs would be a good thing.

All I hear is "if there was a law there would be no abortion". Sure. Well I suppose it is nice to have faith.

So tell me if your faith is so strong why do you need a law (men with guns) to enforce your position?

So what have the cultural conservatives learned from alcohol prohibition? From drug prohibition?

I'd say aproximately nothing.

I actully had a commenter on the subject say that abortion was different. OK. So what happens to policing and criminal justice when 300,000 miscarriages a year are each turned into a murder investigations? Aren't 30 or 40 thousand murder investigations enough?

What will reality look like (as opposed to utopia) if you get your wish?

I call this whole exercise Republican socialism.

In any case if you get your wish expect to see the Democrats make gains. A lot of RINOs will leave the coalition.

Look at how Keyes did in Illinois vs. Bush.

So is this the high water mark or the beginning of the end?

Do you want to make gains on the economic front and on the war or is abortion so important that you would give up further progress in those areas?

And how pray tell is it that smaller government people want to enlarge government in this area?

Oh. Well.

BTW I voted Bush/Obama. If you look at Illinois Bush got 1 million more votes than Keyes.

And that is just one RINO state. You take hits like that (or even 1/4 of that) in States Bush won and you would be howling like a post election Democrat.

Well any way I predicted these post election Republican purges in May of '03. I knew the cultural conservatives could not withstand the scent of power. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Did any of you remember Bush asking for the RINO vote in the last days of the campaign ("you may not agree with all my positions but I want your vote")? So you going to throw them off the bus now that you have won? That is not nice. People remember.

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