Prophets? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Prophets!

Today a friend linked on Facebook to this tweet by the Canadian blogger Ian Welsh.  It's part of a longish thread, really a sermon, on religion, a subject on which Welsh has shown himself to be careless in the past.  That makes this remark ironic at least:

As I'll try to show, Welsh hasn't done the necessary work either.  On just a factual level, he wrote in an accompanying blog post containing some of the same materials:

Jesus, poor bastard, had his teachings bastardized more than almost any great prophet I can think of: a Christianity which includes the book of Revelations has lost the plot, and I suspect the Old Testament should be ditched as well, because the God of the Old Testament acts in ways opposite to what Jesus teaches.

Either Welsh hasn't read the New Testament or he's imposed his own preconceptions on what he did read.  First he takes a popular position, that Jesus had a pure (i.e., not "bastardized") set of teachings that his followers twisted.  That wouldn't be surprising, but how does Welsh know what Jesus' original teachings were?  He left no writings; we know him only through the New Testament, which is not a reliable source (or rather, collection of sources), but there's no way to get behind it to Jesus himself.  Scholars have been trying to recover the "historical Jesus" for over two centuries, and they're no closer to solving the problem now than they were when they began.

As for the Revelation of John, which is a bugbear to many, it certainly poses many difficulties, but Welsh doesn't indicate why he objects to it.  It appears he doesn't know that its themes of violent judgment and punishment run throughout the New Testament, including Jesus' own teaching as the gospels report it.  You could ignore or remove the Revelation altogether, and you'd still have to deal with an end-of-the-world cult. As the great historian Morton Smith declared in a 1955 review of a scholar who tried to get rid of the end-times material in Mark, "to accept the great majority of the sayings in [Mark] as substantially accurate reports of Jesus' ipsissima verba [i.e., his own words] ... is implausible. But to do this and also get rid of the apocalyptic sayings, is impossible."  Welsh is ready to criticize his "great prophets" for teachings he disapproves, so this shouldn't be a problem, yet he prefers to blame all of the bad parts of Christianity on everybody except Jesus.

As for ditching the Old Testament, once again Welsh expresses a view that is shared by many who haven't done the work necessary to have an opinion worth respecting.  Jesus situated himself in "Old Testament" religion: he quoted the Hebrew Bible frequently, and claimed to be its fulfillment.  When he rejected parts of the Bible, he usually did so to make them harsher: it is not enough to refrain from killing, you must not even get angry; not just to refrain from adultery, you may not even feel erotic desire, so it's better to make yourself a eunuch if you can.  The Hebrew Bible demands the death penalty for some offenses, but Jesus threatened endless punishment after death, to be visited on the overwhelming majority of humanity.  Jesus' more attractive teachings, such as "Love your neighbor as yourself," are often direct quotations from the Hebrew Bible -- Leviticus 19:18, in that case.  Teaching care for the poor is a major theme in Hebrew religion, as in most religions, even if it's honored more in the breach than in the observance, but it's not the core of Jesus' teaching any more than it is of Hebrew religion or any other.

Welsh refers to Jesus as a prophet, along with Confucius, Mohammed, and the Buddha.  But of those four, only Mohammed actually was one.  A prophet is a person through whom a god speaks.  Jesus never said "Thus says Yahweh," as the classical Hebrew prophets did; when he set aside parts of Torah, he did so on his own authority: "But I say to you..."  His disciples reported that some thought Jesus was a prophet, but that's treated as a misconception: he wasn't a prophet but the Messiah, the Son of God.  Perhaps Welsh would dismiss this as another bastardization of Jesus' pure teaching, but if he wants to be taken seriously he would have to give good reasons for dismissing it.  As it is, he doesn't seem to know what a prophet is; he seems to use the word to mean "a really cool guy."

In another tweet in that thread, Welsh declared that "Nobody is God's only or final prophet. Anyone who says or believes otherwise is spreading evil."  This is strangely religious language, but except perhaps for Mohammed, no one seems to have claimed to be only or final prophets.  If Welsh had actually read the Bible, Old and New Testaments, he'd know that ancient Israel was crawling with prophets; much of the Hebrew Bible is the work of some of them; for some reason Welsh never mentions Moses, the prophet par excellence of Israelite religion.  Also, "prophet" was an office in the early Christian churches, as worshipers were possessed by the spirit of Jesus and spoke on his behalf.  And of course, there were prophets and oracles in ancient Greece, from the Delphic Oracle to Socrates and beyond, none of whom was "only or final."  Welsh doesn't seem to know much about the history of religion.  "I have a lot of respect for Confucius, Jesus and Buddha," he writes, but respect born of ignorance is an odd kind of respect.

"The person of reason," Welsh declares,

the moral person, takes these beliefs as arbitrary and inquires as to what parts are good and bad, rather than bowing down before tradition and authority.

This is the path of respect for the great prophets, each of whom came into an imperfect world, was unwilling to accept it, and tried to make it better. Buddha saw suffering and sought a way to end it. Confucius saw rulers savagely mistreating their subjects and sought to bring better rule. Jesus saw people following “the law” and missing the spirit of love and care for fellow humans that was the essence of the love of God. Muhammad’s first followers were mostly women and slaves (as was true of early Christianity) because he offered them a better life than the one they had.

This is a tendentious misrepresentation of all these men.  Welsh's take on Jesus, for example, is a variant of Christian anti-Semitism; Jesus' criticism of those "following 'the law'" was standard "Old Testament" prophetic teaching.  The core of Jesus' teaching was the imminence of the final judgment and the importance of escaping hellfire.  The Buddha was concerned first about his own suffering, the suffering of others was a mirror in which he saw himself, and social justice was not his priority.  About Confucius and Muhammad I know less, but I see no reason to suppose he's any more accurate about them.  I wonder where Welsh got this stuff; it sounds as if he had read a couple of popular books about religion, and never bothered to go any deeper.  He claims he spent "a good 15 years meditating," and denies that he's an atheist, but his take is basically that of the kind of people I call Village Atheists, who picked up their information from crank literature and spun it into conspiracy theories, and who pay lip service to the great teachers they evidently identify with but know nothing about.

I agree with most of Welsh's expressed values, such as his opposition to caste (though he has nothing to say here about Hinduism) and the oppression of women (though he has nothing to say about the deeply entrenched sexism of Western secular science).  But you don't need prophets to take those positions.  Moral positions don't come from gods, and someone who says you shouldn't oppress women because a god says so is part of the problem.

In another tweet Welsh declares "All most religious followers are is indoctrinated slaves; born into a religion they did not choose. It's just another form of identity politics, usually combined with authoritarianism."  Of course, because a prophet is by definition an authoritarian figure: "Thus says Yahweh!"  But does Welsh seriously believe that you can eliminate indoctrination and authoritarianism by getting rid of "religion"?  The real and probably intractable problem lies in the fact that human beings are born helpless and must spend years being brought up in families.  Children don't choose their parents, the language they speak, the culture in which they grow up -- all of which they learn to accept as "nature," the way things are.  "Religion" is just a part of the matrix of indoctrination that goes with being human.  I hope Welsh knows better than to believe that you can raise children without indoctrinating them; that's a fantasy, one that could fairly be called religious.  It's certainly not based in science or reason.

Welsh also either ignores or is ignorant of all the scholarly work that shows how unsatisfactory, misleading, and impossible to define the word "religion" is.  But ignorance never keeps people from pontificating, does it?  Given the ex cathedra quality of his remarks, I wonder if he sees himself as a prophet.

The Sleep of Monsters Engenders Reason

The latter half of Ursula Le Guin's Words Are My Matter consists of book reviews, which are well-written and sympathetic, pointing me to several books and writers I want to check out.  (Just what I need, as I sink slowly but inexorably in an ocean of unread books.)  One, on Salman Rushdie's 2014 novel The Enchantress of Florence, harks back to some of the cliches Le Guin recycled in her discussion of literature more generally.

Apparently The Enchantress of Florence is a quasi-historical fantasy centering on the sixteenth-century Mughal emperor Akbar I, whom Rushdie uses as a ventriloquist's dummy for his own views.  As Le Guin describes it:

Akbar is the moral center of the book, its center of gravity, and provides its strongest link to the issues which have concerned Salman Rushdie in his works and his life.  It all comes down to the question of responsibility.  Akbar's objection to God is "that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves."  The curious notion that without religion we have no morals has seldom been dismissed with such quiet good humor.  Rushdie leaves ranting to the fanatics who fear him.

This is another example of an attitude that has long baffled me as an atheist.  Since God does not exist and is a human invention, he could hardly have "deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves."  (If God did exist, perhaps it would be a different situation, but I'm not sure Akbar-Rushdie would be right even so.)  In fact, human beings did "form ethical structures by themselves," and since they couldn't really prove that they had any authority, they invented God and ascribed those structures to him.  But it isn't necessary to invoke God for this evasion of responsibility.  People can also claim that Logic or Reason or Science tells us what is right, and the humble servants of those principles will gladly act as their spokespersons and enforcers, asking (as Woody Allen once said of the religious) only a small contribution to cover their time and paperwork.

Le Guin (who, for someone who claims to dislike preaching and didacticism in literature, sure seems to tolerate a lot of it in Rushdie) continues:

Some boast that science has ousted the incomprehensible, others cry that science has driven magic out of the world and plead for "reenchantment."  But it's clear that Charles Darwin lived in as wondrous a world, as full of discoveries, amazements, and profound mysteries, as that of any fantasist.  The people who disenchant the world are not the scientists, but those who see it as meaningless in itself, a machine operated by a deity.  Science and literary fantasy are intellectually incompatible, yet both describe the world. The imagination functions actively in both modes, seeking meaning, and wins intellectual consent through strict attention to detail and coherence of thought, whether one is describing a beetle or an enchantress.  Religion, which prescribes and proscribes, is irreconcilable with both of them, and since it demands belief, must shun their common ground, imagination.  So the true believer must condemn both Darwin and Rushdie as "disobedient, irreverent, iconoclastic" dissidents from revealed truth.

I'm sympathetic to some of this.  After all, I once wrote:

Personally, I’m tired of hearing believers in various kinds of spirituality sneering at atheists like me as humorless, literal-minded killjoys who want to reduce the mystery and beauty of the universe to a mindless, soulless machine. As far as I can see, it is the believers who hate mystery: they have to an explanation for everything, and their explanations have all the poetry and beauty of the Los Angeles phone directory. They spit on the loveliness of the human body because it isn’t eternal – when it is beautiful precisely because it isn’t eternal. They despise the material world because they can’t see the soul in it. And their attempts to find an underlying justice in the tragic fragility and brevity of life end up reading like operating manuals for a concentration camp.

And I stand by that: I was, like Le Guin, describing a real problem.  But I made the same rhetorical mistake here that Le Guin did: equating "religion" and "believers" with one aspect and faction of religion and believers.  Religion (like science) is a complex historical and cultural phenomenon that contains opposing tendencies.  Religion also includes "literary fantasy," also known as mythology, from the epic of Gilgamesh to Homer to the Mahabarata to the Hebrew Bible and the fan fiction of the New Testament gospels.  It can also involve "strict attention to detail and coherence of thought," as in the Talmuds, some of the Hindu scriptures, or Thomas Aquinas.

Contrariwise, scientists often demand obedience to their authority, and massive public funding for their pastimes.  Just a few billions for their time, their toys, and their paperwork.  They prescribe and proscribe, and "disobedient, irreverent, iconoclastic" troublemakers arouse their wrath just as it arouses the mullahs'.  (Cf. Edward O. Wilson's "multiculturalism equals relativism equals no supercollider equals communism," and Richard Dawkins's complaint that the philosopher Mary Midgley had been mean to him: her "highly intemperate and vicious paper" was "hard to match, in reputable journals, for its patronising condescension toward a fellow academic."  Like any indignant archmandrite, Dawkins indulged in a wee white lie, claiming that Midgley hadn't read The Selfish Gene before she wrote about it.  Scientists also indulge in what might be called "literary fantasy" if you're feeling charitable.  No, not all of them do all these things, but those who do seldom get into trouble for it.  And neither do all religious believers do these things.

Whether we work in literature or other arts, science, religion, or philosophy, I think we'd do best to recall the simile ascribed to Isaac Newton:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Religion, science, literature, and ethics are not distinct, sharply bounded domains.  They overlap.  What we don't know may not always be vastly greater than what we do know, but we're in no danger of reversing the proportions in the foreseeable future, and we'd do well to keep that in mind.  Twenty years ago a writer named John Horgan wrote a book, The End of Science, arguing that there would be no further "great 'revelations or revolutions'—no insights into nature as cataclysmic as heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics, relativity, the big bang."  He still believes this, as he explains in a blog post for Scientific American.  I was intrigued but not really persuaded by the book, but it is interesting to consider the possibility that human brains have limits that will forestall learning much more than we know now.  If nothing else, the storm of hostile responses Horgan received shows the limits of many scientists' rationalism.

What is going on here, I think, is a version of what Walter Kaufmann called the exegetical fantasy, though it could be called God (or Nature or Law or Mughal emperor) as sock-puppet: one reads one's ideas or beliefs into the universe, and gets them back endowed with authority.  If you've got good arguments and evidence, you don't need authority, and if you don't, no amount of authority will be enough.

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Paula Deen, Paula Deen

One of my liberal friends passed along a meme on Facebook which exulted over the sponsors Paula Deen has lost, and declared that the meme-maker wanted Deen to lose everything.  Here I must draw the line.  What kind of thing is that to wish on anybody?  In the same way, as I've said before, the US of America has a lot of blood on its hands, but I don't want it to be invaded and devastated for its crimes -- I want all countries to stop committing these crimes. Whatever power comes along that is capable of reducing the US to rubble is not likely to stop with us, or to have begun with us.  And you don't have to tell me that it isn't going to happen, I know that very well, but this is what I advocate anyway.  So I want Paula Deen to stop being racist, even to recognize why she's being criticized.  I know that won't happen either.  If I'm going to fantasize, I prefer to fantasize about good outcomes.

Yesterday I noted that Deen had gotten some rather backhanded support from the Reverend Jesse Jackson.  He said that she can be "redeemed."

Jackson says if Deen is willing to acknowledge mistakes and make changes, "she should be reclaimed rather than destroyed."

Now that I look at that post more closely, this doens't look like such a positive remark.  Jackson said "if Deen is willing to acknowledge mistakes and make changes"; that's a big "if."  Besides, I presume, given her background, that Deen is already redeemed, saved, bought and sealed, washed in the Blood of the Lamb.  That only shows how little "redemption" in that sense is worth.  Anyone can begin learning, and can change, at any point in their life.  People who are in a position to talk to Paula Deen should try to get her to listen to and learn from the voices and examples of people -- many of them her age or older -- who risked (and some cases gave) their lives to change the society that produced her.

It also produced them, remember.  When Ta-Nehisi Coates was dissecting Brad Paisley's "Accidental Racist" debacle a few months ago, he made a helpful and positive suggestion.

Paisley wants to know how he can express his Southern Pride. Here are some ways. He could hold a huge party on Martin Luther King's birthday, to celebrate a Southerner's contribution to the world of democracy. He could rock a T-shirt emblazoned with Faulkner's Light In August, and celebrate the South's immense contribution to American literature. He could preach about the contributions of unknown Southern soldiers like Andrew Jackson Smith. He could tell the world about the original Cassius Clay. He could insist that Tennessee raise a statue to Ida B. Wells.

Every one of these people are Southerners. And every one of them contributed to this great country. But to do that Paisley would have to be more interested in a challenging conversation and less interested in a comforting lecture.

This led to an interesting exchange in the comments, which spilled into the discussion of a succeeding post.  After a number of commenters had responded to the piece with devastating wit like "Ah, so Paisley has to pass some type of racial bar exam before he's allow to argue before the court of public opinion?", one asked:

... if I'm upper middle class white and suburban how much reading and studying must I do so that TNC will talk to me without getting ticked off at my ignorance? What's the motivation for taking on the work of being allowed to engage?

Coates replied:

I don't think you understand. The reason to try learn all of this is not to keep me from being "ticked off" at you. And your motivation should not be that I will smile, pat you on the head, and give you a cookie. My alleged anger at you is wholly irrelevant to your pressing desire to understand the history of racism in this country. The last part of that sentence is the only thing in the world matters. Your curiosity is its own blessing. And your ignorance is your own burden ...

Either you want to know--for your own sake--or you do not. Much of what I know about the history of racism I learned from white guys, who'd studied and read and written books. I've talked about their work, with some regularity, right here. Your ignorance has nothing to do with who you are, and everything to do with what you are willing to actually do. If I am not willing to do anything, I generally try to avoid talking like I am.

It's highly significant, I think, that the commenter thought, or wrote as if he thought, that it was all about him getting Coates's approval, or not getting it.  This notion turns up frequently in public discussion of race (but also of sex/gender and sexual orientation): with greater or lesser degrees of explicitness, the white / male / heterosexual sneers: Oh, don't I meet your high standards of Political Correctness?  The real trouble is that the black / female / gay adversary (everything is sports, remember) doesn't meet the former's standards of Political Correctness, or simply that she is insubordinate.  (This can be seen especially when men say that they'll help with the housework, they just don't want to be given a list of things to do: they want to decide how much or how little they'll help.)

It appears, however, that Deen is taking a different, depressingly familiar approach.  She "has called in crisis manager Judy Smith to help her get her empire back in order."

Smith, the muse behind ABC's 'Scandal,' has worked behind the scenes helping calm the international hysteria over the SARS pandemic; advising Kobe Bryant and Michael Vick during their run-ins with the law; and shaping the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's reputation following the 9/11 attacks.

In an interview with Washingtonian magazine last year, Smith described her biggest takeaway about human nature from her encounters with people at some of their lowest points in life: "I like to believe in the good in people. But we're all going to screw up from time to time," she said.

If only Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden had hired Judy Smith!  They too might have been "redeemed."  I'm not saying that Deen is as bad as they were, but notice that Smith has also worked to improve the image of the repressive, brutal Islamist kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  So Saudi Arabia imprisons women for driving a car, and executes sodomites? (Not since 2002, apparently, to be fair.  Just flogging and imprisonment nowadays.)  Well, we all screw up from time to time.  Deen's a media celebrity, so it's not surprising that she's concerned with appearances.  They're so much easier to manipulate and change than actual behavior.

Moral philosophers have been trying for millennia to decide whether the criterion for goodness is being a good person, whether rightness inheres in actions, or whether rightness lies in the consequences of our actions.  I think all of these are involved, though not equally all the time, and no one of them determines what is good or right.  That Paula Deen can apparently see only the suffering of her great-grandfather when his slaves were emancipated, and can't see at all the suffering of the slaves themselves, indicates that she's not a good person.  She should try to empathize with those slaves and their descendants who have suffered from white racism because it's the right thing to do.  It will also have good consequences, by helping to diminish the amount of suffering from racism in the world.  It might not be totally irrelevant that many people will give her approval for doing so, though many other people will disapprove; other factors are decisive.

Do You Have a Personal Relationship with the Null Set?

A friend passed this one along on Facebook today.  I couldn't believe it: though he was surely unaware, Penn Jillette was using a well-worn evangelical trope.  I figure it's well-worn because I first saw it in a book by the great revivalist Billy Graham,* and I doubt he invented it -- it probably had grey whiskers when he used it:

Recently, a friend of ours was converted to Christ.  He had previously led a wild life.  One of his old friends said to him, "I feel sorry for you.  You now go to church, pray, and read the Bible all the time.  You no longer go to the nightclubs, get drunk, or enjoy your beautiful women."  Our friend gave a strange reply.  He said, "I do get drunk every time I want to.  I do go to nightclubs every time I want to.  I do go with the girls every time I want to."  His worldly friend looked puzzled.  Our friend laughed and said, "Jim, you see, the Lord took the want out when I was converted and He made me a new person in Christ Jesus" [128].

That certainly seems clear enough, doesn't it?  Become a Christian and the Lord will take the want out.  But on the very next page Graham admits that "the want" is still there:

Conscious of my own weakness, sometimes on rising I have said, "Lord, I'm not going to allow this or that thing to assert itself in my life today."

Well, there's his problem right there: it's sinful pride for the kind of Christian Graham is to think that he can control his old Adam.  Only the Holy Spirit can keep this or that thing from asserting itself in his life.

Then the devil sends something unexpected to tempt me, or God allows me to be tested at that exact point.  Many times in my life I never meant to do in my mind I did in the flesh.  I have wept many a tear of confession and asked God the Spirit to give me strength at that point.  But this lets me know that I am engaged in a spiritual warfare every day.  I must never let down my guard -- I must keep armed.

Many of the young people I meet are living defeated, disillusioned, and disappointed lives even after coming to Christ.  They are walking after the flesh because they have not had proper teaching at this precise point.  The old man, the old self, the old principle, the old force, is not yet dead or wholly renewed: it is still there.  It fights every inch of the way against the new man, the new force, that God made us when we received Christ.  Only as we yield and obey the new principle in Christ do we win the victory [129f].

It's easy to see how these young people were led into error: they listened when Billy Graham (or someone like him) promised them that their old selves would be killed with Christ and washed clean by the Holy Spirit, and that the Lord would take the want out.  When the want turns out still to be in them, they can then be blamed for it, because they haven't prayed enough or really surrendered their will to the Lord or something of that sort.

But what in the name of Nobodaddy is Jillette doing with this bit of nonsense?  It's a clever evasion of the question it pretends to answer, and will surely snow the rubes, as it's meant to.  He couldn't possibly mean to imply that if you abandon theism, no-god will take the want out.  (Could he?)  He must know that even if he is virtuous enough never to want to do anything bad or harmful to others, many people aren't cut from the same sublime cloth.  It says something about Jillette that he turned it into a question about himself, when it's about other people.

There is no easy answer to that question.  More thoughtful people than Jillette have been arguing about it for a long time.  A better, more serious rebuttal would be to point out that despite their belief in God, Christ, and a personal Hell, most Christians have continued to sin.  Christians know that they shouldn't rape or murder or steal, yet many of them do so anyway.  American prisons are full of Christians; atheists are seriously underrepresented in our prison system.  It could be that being assured of forgiveness leads people to assume that they can misbehave and get away with it if they confess and repent.  In any case, religious belief, including belief in judgment for one's sins, doesn't seem to deter people very much.

But even this begs some questions.  For an atheist as pure in heart as Penn Jillette, there's no problem: he's not even tempted to do bad things.  But what about those who are tempted?  Why should they resist?  A conventional atheist answer -- at least, it's conventional enough that the American Humanist Association selected it for their ad campaign -- is along the lines of "Be good for goodness' sake."  Aside from the tautological irrationality of this line, what is good?  How do you decide what people should or shouldn't do?  It would be nice if there were universal human agreement about morality, but of course there isn't.  Even such widely agreed-on principles as "Don't murder" or "Don't rape" come with gaping loopholes, whether the principles are articulated within religion or without it.  (We have to wipe out the Islamofascists to defend ourselves! and The slut was asking for it, the way she was dressed -- or more subtly, evolutionary necessity requires me to penetrate any pretty girl I see before my colleague gets to her.)  Atheists, haven't from what I've seen, distinguished themselves by their superior rationality where morality is concerned, even or especially when they do so in the name of Science, Biology, Evolution.

I agree with Michael Ruse that there is no absolute morality: the universe doesn't care what we do.  Luckily, we don't need an absolute morality.  A lack of absolutes apparently scares many atheists as much as it scares many theists, however, and "relativism" is an equally harsh epithet in both camps.  I think that it doesn't matter whether the universe cares what we do: what matters is that we, as human beings, care.  Even if there was a god, its interests would not be ours.  (Theists have always been aware of that -- Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi; His ways are not our ways -- but they try to evade its significance.  Scientific non-theists know the same about Nature and Evolution, but still figure Nature is up there in the stands rooting for us if we show the right spirit.)  Human morality has to be decided at the human level.  There's no certain way to decide what is right and what is wrong.  Human beings construct right and wrong over time, and since human beings are fallible, some skepticism about even the most important values is necessary.  There's no impartial outsider to adjudicate the conflicts; we have to do it ourselves; the buck stops here.

Penn Jillette, I understand, is a Libertarian as well as an atheist, and that may be part of the trouble here, though I don't know enough about his version of libertarianism to evaluate it.  But what he articulates here is consistent with a Libertarian / Randite assumption that morality is founded in the individual in isolation.  (Which comes from social-contract theory, a useful but limited heuristic.)  But morality for a social species only comes into play when individuals are in conflict with each other.  If no individuals were ever tempted to kill, lie, rape, or steal, as Jillette claims he is not, there'd be no problem.  If individuals existed in isolation, they wouldn't come into conflict.  But we don't exist in isolation, and it often happens that human beings come into conflict, so we have had to develop structures for trying to resolve these conflicts.  Maybe Jillette isn't as stupid as this meme makes him seem.  I hope not; but he's clearly not as smart as he thinks he is.**

*The Holy Spirit.  Waco TX: Word Books.  As reprinted, New York: Warner Books, 1978.

** I'll freely concede that I'm not as smart as I think I am either, but I don't know how smart I think I am.

Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head

I scooped this one up from Facebook today.  Arthur C. Clarke knew a fair amount about science, but he got into trouble when he strayed beyond his field.  I've had occasion to make fun of him before, so today I'll settle for making fun of this statement.

Two questions: When did Religion "hijack" morality, and more important, from whom did it "hijack" it?  On its face the statement (from his 1991 "Credo") makes very little sense.  As I've pointed out before, a good many atheists talk about Religion as though it were an autonomous entity, virtually a person, that keeps us from being sane and rational.  But religion is a complex of practices, beliefs, and ideas that human beings invented. Saying that religion hijacked morality is like saying that a puppet turns around and punches its puppeteer in the nose, all by itself.  In fact the puppet can only do what a human being makes it do.  To add to the fun, religion (or politics, or science, or philosophy, or art) is like a puppet with billions of puppeteers who disagree with each other, often vehemently, about what the puppet should look like, or do, or say.  But it can't do anything without its puppeteers.

Historically, it's most likely that morality and religion were originally inseparable -- that people worked out moral systems within the context of religious belief and practice -- just as religion and science used to be, or religion and art, or religion and philosophy.  Clarke was disingenuously reversing who really tried to snatch morality from whom: it was scientists who tried to claim morality for Science and Rationality.  It's possible to doubt how much of an advance this was.  Scientists tended to accept a lot of religious morality uncritically; they just wanted to be in charge of enforcement.  So, instead of executing homosexuals or putting them in jail, as the irrational churchmen often wanted to do, scientists favored institutionalization with "treatment," ranging from lobotomies to electroshock to doses of hormones.  Scientists tended to agree that women should not go to college or enter the professions, since it was scientific fact that higher education drove women insane or made them sterile; the history of women in the sciences makes for depressing reading, and reveals the religious roots of science all too clearly.  Scientists continue to embarrass themselves on the subject of rape. The masturbation hysteria of the nineteenth century (and extending well into the twentieth) was the work, not of theologians, but of medical doctors.  Scientific racism is still with us, as is the readiness of scientists to provide politicians with ever more destructive weaponry.

Of course, scientists are not united on these issues, but neither are religious believers. The puppeteers are divided against themselves on just about everything.  That's not bad in itself; I consider it reassuring.  The trouble is that the puppeteers believe that the puppets have lives and minds of their own, which is the kind of irrational magical thinking that people like Clarke like to lament, while sharing it.

Clarke did say one thing I can agree with: "It is amazing how childishly gullible humans are."  It's confirmed by the people who made his remark about religion hijacking morality into a meme, and by those who are spreading it around the Internet.

The Genealogy of Morals

I can't now remember how I came across Morality as a Biological Phenomenon: the Presuppositions of Sociobiological Research, edited by Gunther S. Stent and published by the University of California Press in 1980, but I'm glad I did. Stent's introductory essay, which I want to write about later, is especially interesting, and I'm still working my way through the book.

"The Biology of Morals from a Psychological Perspective," by P. H. Wolff, seems at odds with the general approach of the collection. Wolff, a developmental neuropsychologist in Boston, puts his foot in it on the very first page.

Like other natural scientists, biologists are guided by an ethical code of procedure, but they usually take for granted the values implicit in the scientific method. The scientific study of human morals, however, makes values themselves the subject matter for investigation, and therefore requires an explicit definition of morality and of the criteria by which various behavior patterns can be categorized as moral. The ultimate criterion applied by biologists to evaluate the relevance of social behavior is survival of the genotype. Natural selection operates on social behaviors that promote reproductive advantage, whereas the individuals whose moral behavior has evolved are not, or need not be, aware of the reasons for the selective fitness of their behavioral genotype.

By contrast, moral philosophers, and at least some psychological theories of morality, consider as moral only those forms of human behavior for which intention, deliberate choice among equally determined actions, and awareness of the social consequences of alternative actions can be assumed. Social behavior that is so rigidly determined by biological mechanisms as to be involuntary is considered to have no more moral content than the human sucking reflex or the gaping response of the herring gull. Yet, from a rigorous biological perspective, both reflex behaviors would have moral relevance. The biological and psychological approaches to human morals may therefore diverge so greatly as to be irreconcilable.

By positing survival of the genotype as a necessary and sufficient sufficient criterion of moral behavior, the biological approach either trivializes the central problems of human morality, or dismisses them as irrelevant epiphenomena. ... We are inclined to absolve transgressions of responsibility when medical diagnosis identifies the physiological causes of antisocial behavior, but we insist on moral responsibility when no such causes can be demonstrated. Thus, we arrive at a classification of human morals under which only social behavior is considered to have moral content for which no causal mechanisms can be demonstrated. Should progress in biological research eventually all varieties of pro- and antisocial behavior in terms of metabolic processes, the belief in moral autonomy and freedom of choice would itself be shown to have genetic determinants, and the traditional views of human morality would evaporate as historical curiosities [83-85].

It's true that the ultimate criterion in evolutionary theory is survival of the genotype, but I can't see any reason to call it moral. Scientists are of course free to grab any term they like, redefine it to suit their research program, and use it happily. Physicists who refer to the "color" or "beauty" of subatomic particles are in little danger of confusing non-physicists or themselves with the possibility that beauty in a quark is the same as beauty in a person, let alone that quark beauty is True Beauty, and that traditional views of human beauty are curiosities suitable for museums and the scrap heap of history.

When biologists and wannabes borrow terms like "moral" or "selfish" for their own use, though, trouble usually ensues. Not only the ignorant masses but the scientists themselves have trouble distinguishing between the different meanings, and it doesn't help when scientists claim that their definition is the real deal, and the "traditional view" just a superstitious vanity. So you get someone like Richard Dawkins insisting that the "selfish gene" isn't selfish in the same way people are, that in any case having selfish genes doesn't make individuals selfish, though he also says that we are born selfish, but are able to "transcend" our genes in some mysterious way.

While "the sucking reflex" that enables a newborn to get nourishment from its mother's breast is valuable for its own survival and so for the survival of Homo sapiens as a species, it really doesn't make any sense to call it "moral", even biologically moral. I suspect that behind such redefinition there lurks a Platonic conception of "species" as some sort of transcendental entity more real than individuals, whose survival isn't just a metaphor but a higher truth. I also suspect that the biologists who do this believe that they really are using "moral" correctly according to its platonically true meaning, and that any other use is not just unscientific but wrong, and superstitious nonsense to boot.

To put it bluntly, where the biological and psychological approaches to human morality clash, the biological approach should lose. Wolff should have included the philosophical approach among the alternatives, though, because moral philosophy is the field of study that actually addresses the meaning of human morality on its own terms (however badly it often does its job).

The really bad thing about positing biological morality as genotype survival is that biologists are perennially tempted to apply biological morality to social morality. If survival of the genotype is true morality, then anyone who chooses not to have offspring is immoral for not doing their part -- except for biologically inferior individuals however they are defined, who should not reproduce at all. Homosexuals, the celibate, all are biologically immoral if they don't reproduce; the sick, the lame, the halt are biologically immoral if they do. It also means that biological morality, far from applying to social behavior -- that is, between individuals of the same species -- is really about the relation between the individual and the Genotype. We've been there before.

Also, it doesn't take Darwinian theory or modern medicine to claim that some individuals, because of their physiological condition, are not responsible for their acts. What we suppose to be the true cause of that condition has changed over the centuries, but it's not a modern development to make allowance for people who aren't in their right mind. What is somewhat new is the scientific notion that biology determines behavior totally, and that no behavior whether pro- or anti-social is the result of "metabolic processes," so that choice is an illusion.

I'm not sure to what extent Wolff actually believes all this. After surveying "social learning theory" for a few pages, he advocates "a more flexible approach to sociobiology," and concludes that

The capacity to reflect on and choose among alternative outcomes is inherent to mature human intelligence. ... Biological evolution does not specify what forms of social action regulate moral conduct, but it defines the boundaries of ethical behavior compatible with species survival. Biology does not specify the choices made, but it prepares the structural conditions without which there can be neither intention or deliberate choice [91-92].

It seems, then, that Wolff considers intention and deliberate choice to be realities, rather than the illusions many sociobiologists and other scientists suppose them to be. His conclusion is basically a platitude, though, which requires neither biology nor psychology to state. Like too many scientists, he seems to think that a person with scientific training doesn't need to be informed philosophically about issues like morality, even though science is nowhere near encroaching on them. That was true in the 1970s when Wolff wrote his paper, and it's still true now.

If Anything Is True, Nothing Is Permitted

Back to A Very Bad Wizard. The first discussion that caught my attention was with Michael Ruse, a prolific writer on philosophical topics whose Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry (Blackwell, 1988) I read but remember nothing much about. He's written several books defending Darwinian theory against Creationism (and testified in the famous Arkansas "creation science" trial of 1981). His interest for Tamler Sommers lies in his attempts to connect evolution to ethics.

Starting on page 96:

TS: So it's not morality itself, but this feeling of objectivity in morality that is the illusion -- right? But doesn't that mean that as clearheaded Darwinians, we have to say that there are no objective moral facts? And therefore that it is not an objective fact that rape is wrong?

MR: Within the system, of course, rape is objectively wrong -- just like three strikes and you're out in baseball. But I'm a nonrealist, so ultimately there is no objective right and wrong for me. Having said that, I am part of the system and cannot escape. The truth does not necessarily make you free.

TS: The truth here being that there is no real right and wrong.

MR: Yes, but knowing that it is all subjective doesn't necessarily mean that I can become a Nietzschean superman and ignore it. I take very seriously Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky points out that even if we have these beliefs that there is no right and wrong, we can't necessarily act on them. And, you know, I see no real reason to get out of the system, either. If I rape, I am going to feel badly, apart from the consequences if I get caught. And the reciprocation -- I don't want my wife and daughters raped. But even rape is relative in a sense to our biology. If women went into heat, would rape be a crime/sin? I wrote about this once in the context of extraterrestrials -- is rape wrong on Andromeda?

I disagree with Ruse here, because I disagree with Dostoevsky. It's hard to prove a case in fiction, and I wasn't convinced by Crime and Punishment, where the protagonist Raskolnikov tries to prove his superiority to religious morality by robbing and killing an old woman. He botches the job, and eventually turns himself in -- just as the police are closing in on him anyway. Within the terms of the novel and the problem it poses, this only shows that Raskolnikov isn't a superior being after all; old-fashioned "slave morality" is good enough for the likes of him, and you, and me. There are other objections to Dostoevsky's argument, such as the fact that he considered the state qualified to do things (like killing people) that are immoral for individual citizens, so he had at least a two-tiered morality, and of course God's ways are not our ways, etc. But they aren't pertinent here.

TS: I'm not sure what you mean by "within the system, it is objectively wrong." Do you mean that because we have laws and norms against rape, then rape is wrong? Or do you mean that for our species, given our biology, rape is objectively wrong? If it's the latter, aren't you violating Hume's Law, too?

(Hume's Law is the dictum that you can't infer "ought" from "is", values from facts.)

MR: ... There is no ultimate truth about morality. It is an invention -- an invention of the genes rather than of humans, and we cannot change games at will, as one might change from baseball if one went to England and played cricket. Within the system, the human moral system, it is objectively true that rape is wrong. That follows from the principles of morality and from human nature. If human females went into heat, it would not necessarily be objectively wrong to rape -- in fact, I doubt we would have the concept of rape at all. So, within the system, I doubt that we would have the concept of rape at all. So, within the system, I could justify it. But I deny that human morality at the highest level -- love your neighbor as yourself, etc. -- is justifiable. That is why I am not deriving is from ought, in the illicit sense of justification. I am deriving it in the sense of explaining why we have moral sentiments, but that is a different matter. As an analyst I can explain why you hate your father, but that doesn't mean your hatred is justified.

TS: So then by analogy, Darwinian theory can explain why we have moral sentiments and beliefs, right? So let's get into the details. Why was it adaptive to have this moral sense? Why did our genes invent morality?

MS: I am an individual selectionist all the way. Natural selection has given us selfish/self-centered thoughts. It had to. If I meet a pretty girl and at once say to Bob Brandon [the philosopher of biology at Duke University], "You go first," I am going to lose in the struggle for existence. But at the same time we are social animals. It's a good thing to be, we can work together. ...

TS: I wanted to ask this before -- what is it about human females not going into heat that leads us to be moral?

MR: Human females not going into heat does not make us moral or immoral -- but it is an important fact of our sociality and it is an important fact when we are making moral judgments (which are always matters of fact plus moral principles). I am simply saying that if women did go into heat, then even if we had the same moral principles -- treat others fairly, etc. -- it would simply not make sense to condemn someone for fucking the female if he got the chance. Having to take a shit is a physical adaptation, and it makes silly the moral claim that you ought never shit -- although it does not affect the claim that it is wrong to go to your supervisor's home for supper and end the evening by crapping on his Persian rug.

TS: That's what I meant -- why would it not make sense to condemn someone for raping a human female, if human females went into heat?

MR: Look, in my view, as a naturalist, I think epistemology and ethics are dependent on the best modern science. Look at Descartes and Locke and Hume and Kant. The point is that if women went into heat, then biology really would take over and we would lose our freedom. ... The point is that ought implies a choice, and if women went into heat then there would be no choice. I wouldn't have a hell of a lot of choice even though they also wouldn't. So it's not that we are always moral -- we certainly aren't -- but we have the urge to be moral as one of the package of human adaptations.

TS: Okay, I see why selection has given us selfish thoughts. A trait that leads you to give up the girl to Brandon every time is not going to get passed on to the next generation. Because you need a woman to pass on traits of any kind. At least for now, with the cloning ban. ...

Sorry for the long quotation, but I wanted to do Ruse's argument justice, and there's plenty more where this came from.

It seems to me that both Ruse and Sommers are unclear about what rape is; I want to argue that whether human females go into heat is irrelevant to the moral question Ruse is talking about.

What got my attention as I read this dialogue was that as Ruse frames the issue, rape is a moral issue between men. Women barely feature in it, as is typical of both adaptationist-oriented discussions and traditional moral and legal codes down to very nearly the present. (Yes, Ruse says that he wouldn't want his wife or daughters to be raped; while laudable, it still means in context that he's concerned about the safety of "his" women, and more important, he puts it in terms of "reciprocation", where males try to agree to leave each other's women alone. Not to spare the women's feelings, which are curiously absent from the field, but to spare other men's feelings.) This relates to some previous posts I've written on the subject, from Thornhill and Palmer's Natural History of Rape to other sociobiological grappling with male rut.

Since Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape it's been a cliche in pop-evolutionary talk about sex that, unlike many other species, women don't go into heat -- they're always potentially sexually receptive. Maybe the ethological knowledge has been refined somewhat since then (I found a couple of articles referring to research which indicated that women might be more sexually receptive when they're ovulating, and send out pheromones that bring all the horndogs running; seems to be mostly boyish wishful thinking though), but as I recall, even in species where females do go into heat / estrous / season, they are not totally indiscriminate in accepting males, and males may struggle ("compete") to keep other males away from a female they want to inseminate. The "sexual selection" so touted by evolutionary psychologists really has more to do with women's choices about the men they accept than men's selectivity about the women they pursue; women constitute a reproductive bottleneck in this scenario, since once they're fertilized they won't be available for further breeding for several years, a troublesome obstacle for males who seek to maximize their reproductive success. And blah blah blah -- this is old hat.

In Homo Sapiens sapiens, that's certainly the case: men try to hoard women, preventing other men from getting access to them, and the morality of "rape" is more about keeping women secure and intact from other males than about respecting women's wishes or decisions. I've been annoyed, in the "evolutionary" discussions of rape I've seen so far, by their careful avoidance of the fact that in the real world, rape is not considered such a bad thing after all, that women are presumed be wanting it secretly, and that men are constantly trying to construct scenarios in which a woman forfeits her right to say No. (For example, by saying, "I do" -- once a woman says Yes, she can never again say No.) Indeed, women are regarded in traditional discourse as untrustworthy, devious, wandering critters who'll jump the fence if they can, then blame an innocent feller who didn't even get his wick wet. Did he really force her, or did she lead him on? Did she struggle, did she yell, did she prefer to kill herself than receive his embrace, or was she really willing all along? Why was she walking alone at night in that part of town, dressed that way? Did she have her fingers crossed behind her back?

So Ruse's distinction is probably bogus to begin with, since women's potential approachability has nothing to do with the state of their ovaries, neither does the morality of rape have anything to do with it, partly since he takes for granted that men are always "in heat." It's noteworthy that he throws in that little joke about deferring to a colleague; the "pretty girl" is not consulted, and "I am simply saying that if women did go into heat, then even if we had the same moral principles -- treat others fairly, etc. -- it would simply not make sense to condemn someone for fucking the female if he got the chance." But that is the rationale of rapists in the actual state of human biology. "What could I do, Your Honor? The bitch was out there all by herself, without a chaperone or an armed male escort. A woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can run with his pants down, haw haw haw. She didn't rip my throat out with her teeth, so I could tell she wanted it. How can you condemn a man for fucking the female if he gets the chance, especially a chance like that? Besides, she's ugly as all get out, she should thank me. She wanted it, she wanted it, I could tell she wanted it."

And so on. Pardon the offensive litany of rapists' excuses; I thought it necessary to spell them out since they are a routine part of male culture and therefore of our evolutionary heritage, and yet the evolutionary psychologists' discussions proceed by pretending that they don't exist. (Except when Thornhill and Palmer, for example, drop trou and prescribe classes to teach young women to avoid rape by not dressing "provocatively.") I'm not saying that Michael Ruse would accept them, either; I'm sure that as an educated Western moral philosopher he would reject them in high moral dudgeon. It's just that his discussion never does consider women as full human subjects in the matter; as I said, he frames it solely in terms of men, and ignores the actual moral/legal approach to rape in the real world, in which a woman's consent is secondary to the primary question of whether the man had licit access to her.

Look at Deuteronomy 22, where the disposition of rape cases depends on the circumstances. If a bethrothed virgin is raped out "in the field", the rapist is to be executed and the victim spared, because she "cried, and there was none to save her" (vv. 25-27). If a betrothed virgin is raped in the city, she is to be stoned to death along with her rapist, because she didn't cry out (vv. 23-24). If the victim was not betrothed, the rapist must pay a fine to her father and marry her (vv. 28-29). Rape in the Bible is a crime between men, against each other's property, not a crime against a woman. Ruse's discussion is just as male-centered. That's clearheaded Darwin-informed moral philosophy in the 21st century for you, after forty years of feminist agitation.

Spheres of Influence

Returning to The Pure Society -- Pichot touched on a question that has been on my mind for some time now, ever since I read Stephen Jay Gould's Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999). I've read most of his other books, and Rocks of Ages was the first I couldn't finish. Gould argued for a division of spheres of influence between science and religion, for what he called "non-overlapping magisteria" or NOMA. He actually drew a parallel between this proposed division and the infamous division of the New World into Spanish and Portuguese spheres by the Treaty of Tordesillas, which overrode Pope Alexander VI's bull granting most of the land to Spain. In both cases, there are other claimants to the territories involved, not least the people who are living in them to begin with.

Gould first declared that moral and social questions were the proper sphere of religion, and explanation of the universe was the proper sphere of science. As long as each magisterium kept to its knitting, all would be well. But then he backtracked, admitting that religion hadn't done such a good job with moral questions, and dropped the matter. The author of The Mismeasure of Man might have done better to point out just how badly science had done when it ventured into the moral and social arena.

Richard Dawkins attacked Gould in his normal manner, what Pichot calls the "idiotic hawker" (70) style, in The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). To some extent I agree with Dawkins, as when he asks why religion should be consulted at all:

I suspect that both astronomers were, yet again, bending over backwards to be polite: theologians have nothing worthwhile to say about anything else; let's throw them a sop and let them worry away at a couple of questions that nobody can answer and maybe never will. Unlike my astronomer friends, I don't think we should even throw them a sop, I have yet to see any good reason that theology (as opposed to biblical history, literature, etc.) is a subject at all.

Similarly, we can all agree that science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad? The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free license to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up?

As I already pointed out, Gould had backtracked on the advisability of letting religion pronounce on moral and social questions. One might also ask, though, why anyone would ask Dawkins's advice on morality or any other matter. (Of course "theology" is a subject, if an eminently dismissible one; the idiotic hawker is letting his rhetoric run away with him, as usual.) His discourse on social matters, which has been abundant, is no better than that of "religion" (as though religion were a coherent body of discourse), notable for its incoherence when it isn't just good old-fashioned scientific racism.

I was even more startled when Michael Shermer declared in his The Science of Good and Evil (Holt, 2005, page 6):

Most people don’t go to church to hear an explanation for the origin of the cosmos and life (and if they did, and they knew something about the findings of modern science, they would be dismayed to be told that the Genesis myth of a six-day creation less than ten thousand years ago was to be taken literally). Instead, most folks go to socialize with like-minded friends, neighbors, and colleagues to contemplate the meaning of their lives and life and to glean moral messages from the homilies presented in stories, myths and anecdotes of the knotty problems that life presents to us all. To date science – even scientism – has had little to do or say in this social mode, …

As long as religion does not make quasi-scientific claims about the factual nature of the world, then there is no conflict between science and religion.

Why doesn’t this reassure me? The avoidance of turf wars between two vicious gangs doesn’t necessarily make a better world.

I am still boggled by Shermer's claim that science has had little to do or say in this social mode. As Pichot's book shows, this is completely false, though I knew that long before I'd read Pichot. Shermer lets the cat out of the bag when he says a few pages later (9), "As such, evolutionary ethics is a subdivision of a larger science called evolutionary psychology, which attempts a scientific study of all social and psychological human behavior." Evolutionary psychology is the current alias of sociobiology, the main intervention of "science -- even scientism" into the "social mode."

Pichot says it better (341):

Against these temptations and attempts, it has to be reasserted that the universality of human rights is not based on the genetic identity of the human species. Such a notion leads straight to the differentiation of social and political rights as a function of variations in the genome – whether these are racial variations or not. It is not up to biology to lay down the law, to make decisions of a political and social order, whether on matters of race or of ‘genetic correctness’.

As we have explained, there are two quite distinct social uses of biology … On the one hand, there are uses, such as Pasteurianism, that are essentially technical, and these are perfectly acceptable and even desirable. On the other hand, there are uses, such as those made of genetics and Darwinism, that claim the right (or even the obligation) to intervene in the social-political order and modify this to make it correspond to a [342] supposedly natural order – which in reality is more like an order of profitability. This second category of social uses is totally unacceptable.

In these matters of society and politics, geneticists have nothing to say; it is up to political philosophers to make comments and recommendations. As these latter keep silent and abandon the field to biologists, which they certainly should not do, I shall attempt, for better or worse, to step into their place and maintain that, although the objective physical and intellectual qualities of individuals may be different – whether this difference is hereditary or acquired – this does not affect these individuals in their essential being, because they cannot be reduced to a set of objective qualities. Persons are not objects, ‘human resources’ whose profitability or contribution to progress is to be measured. In this respect, they are neither unequal nor different; they are in fact incomparable. And it is because they are incomparable that they are equal, in an equality that is based neither on measurement nor on comparison, but on an equality of dignity and right. Biological criteria have no place here.

Of course, we mere humans needn't defer to political philosophers either...