The Atheist Thirteen

One of those meme things, courtesy of pj. Why's it called "The Atheist Thirteen"? No idea. I'm to answer the 10 questions below and pass them along. To whom is the tricky part. But how about (almost at random, and possibly not all atheists, and very likely not interested...) stephenlaw, norm, rosiebell?

[Next day. Nice to see how this is spreading around the internet. And now I get it--the challenge started on Friday the 13th.]

Q1. How would you define “atheism”?
The belief that there is no god (and there are no gods). It can be held with or without certainty, and can be either explicit (“I believe God does not exist”) or implicit in other beliefs (“I believe everything is material”).

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?
I was brought up with a strong sense of Jewish identity but with no religious education and no belief in God. There was no hostility toward religion in the house—in fact we had some cool books about religion. We just weren’t religious.

Q3. How would you describe “Intelligent Design”, using only one word?
Obsolete. See Q7.

Q4. What scientific endeavour really excites you?
Animal ethology.

Q5. If you could change one thing about the “atheist community”, what would it be and why?
Less fanaticism, please. Like Jews and Muslims need to coexist and Protestants and Catholics need to coexist, believers and nonbelievers need to coexist. The irreverent polemic has its place, but ultimately everyone needs to master the art of living together with mutual understanding and respect.

Q6. If your child came up to you and said “I’m joining the clergy”, what would be your first response?
Oh my God!

Q7. What’s your favourite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?
I think the argument from design would have persuaded me if I’d lived before Darwin. I mean really—how could there be something as intricate as the human eye without a designer? But then the theory of evolution came along and told us how, rendering the argument from design obsolete.

Q8. What’s your most “controversial” (as far as general attitudes amongst other atheists goes) viewpoint?
The bit about coexisting with mutual understanding and respect (see Q5) gets some people very upset, amazingly enough.

Q9. Of the “Four Horsemen” (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favourite, and why?
I loved Harris’s book when I read it soon after it came out. He was like the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”. His irreverence about Islam was refreshing especially in the hush-hush days after 9/11 when everyone was wondering “why they hate us”. Dawkins is wonderfully smart and entertaining. Both Harris and Dawkins probably need to write “coexist” on the blackboard 100 times, but I still really enjoy them.

Q10. If you could convince just one theistic person to abandon their beliefs, who would it be?
Osama Bin Laden. Maybe then he’d say “I’m sorry.”

More Katha

From an interview with Katha Pollitt at Paper Cuts:

How much time - if any - do you spend on the Web? Is it a distraction or a blessing?

The Web is my drug, my vice, my obsession, the thief of my time, destroyer of my attention span and bewilderer of my memory — and it hasn’t done much for my posture either.

Indeed. Me too. But then she comes up with a good excuse.

Sometimes I think I should avoid temptation by going back to the typewriter, but for my Nation column, the Web is essential. Those hours I spend surfing the blogosphere? I’m working!

I'm not sure I really can say that for myself. Well, of course not--I don't write a Nation column. For the stuff I do write, I regret to say that solitude is helpful. The web and the blogosphere push you here and there and everywhere...except towards thoughts and issues of your own devising.

It's diabolical! I should unplug myself, but will I? Nah. Soon there will be treatment programs and I'll just check myself in for a couple of weeks of rehab.

Thank You Katha Pollitt

Does all the Hillary-bashing of the last several months make you want to vomit? Yeah, me too. Katha Pollitt has a great column in the current issue of The Nation making it clear that everyone owes Hillary a standing ovation, whether they voted for her or not.

Clinton showed herself to be tough, tireless, supersmart and definitely ready to lead on that famous Day One. She raised a ton of money and won 17.5 million votes from men and women. She was exciting, too: she and Obama galvanized voters for six long months--in some early contests, each of them racked up more votes than all the Republican candidates combined. Once the bitterness of the present moment has faded, that's what people will remember. Because she normalized the concept of a woman running for President, she made it easier for women to run for every office, including the White House. That is one reason women and men of every party and candidate preference, and every ethnicity too, owe Hillary Clinton a standing ovation, even if they can't stand her.

And then there's this smart passage about the bashers, especially those of the female persuasion.

Thank you, Hillary, for letting us get a good look at female sexism: the catty fashionistas and Style page dingbats obsessing over her clothes, her hair, her weight, her cleavage, her laugh. Air America's Randi Rhodes calling her a "big fucking whore," Maureen Dowd offering up her twice-weekly dose of vinegar and dozens of women writers musing prettily about why they and their friends all hate Hillary. Could it be they're jealous?

Really, Maureen Dowd should simply be shot, but it's nice of Katha to put the point more kindly.

No, as Pollitt says further down, I don't think Hillary lost to Barack Obama simply because of all the hostility and sexism. It was more complicated than that. But the hostility and sexism have been revolting.

Thank you Katha. Thank you Hillary.

Mama PhD

It was awfully nice to get my copy of Mama PhD in the mail today. I have a slightly soul-baring essay in the anthology--"The Long and Winding Road." Yes, do think of the Beatles song, with all the strings. At least, soul-baring for me. It's not on the order of two books that were reviewed in the New York Times on Sunday--101 Nights of Sex and 365 Nights of Sex (or something like that) No, I just explain why I quite my tenure-track job after I had my twins 11 years ago. By my standards, that's very private stuff. Now I get to read all the other essays in the volume. Fun.

Things Fall Apart

What kind of respect is culture owed? Once you decide, then you can wonder what insiders can rightly do to preserve a culture, and what outsiders ought to do, both extremely difficult questions. But first, why even begin to think of culture as a good?

It seems culture must be a good, considering that the story of a culture coming to an end so often reads as a sad story. In The Old Way Elizabeth Marshall Thomas tells a touching story about the way the culture of the San people of the Kalahari desert has all but died away in the last 50 years. The story of the decline of Eskimo culture after first contact with Europeans reads as a tragedy. In Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe doesn't romanticize Nigerian tribal culture, but it's still a loss when missionaries come along and destroy it.

The best answer I can think of is that a culture is a repository of know-how. The Eskimos had made a life in the arctic world by developing an amazing store of knowledge and skills. Same goes for the San people. This was know-how that enabled them to cope with a particular physical environment, but social knowledge as well. These peoples had ways of dealing with all the exigencies of life, from birth to death. Much of this knowledge has been lost. Some of it is still in books, but that's not the same. (I can read a book about how to hunt for whales, but I certainly don't have that know-how.)

Or you could explain the sadness of these stories without assuming that culture is a good. When things fall apart, people are left at the margins of other cultures. There's loss of pride. There are new wants, derived externally, that can't be fulfilled. The old way of life is gone, but a new way of life doesn't necessarily take its place. People lose their anchor and often become destitute.

I suspect loss of culture is the loss of something good, which is not to say that all cultures are equally good or that they shouldn't be judged, or merit absolute deference. And then there are all the additional costs as well when a culture is destroyed.

So what should insiders and outsiders do to prevent the destruction of a culture? Kwame Anthony Appiah's book The Ethics of Identity makes it clear this is a profoundly difficult question. As sad at it is when a culture disappears, it's awfully tricky, ethically speaking, to stop that from happening.

Summertime and the Bloggin' is Easy

The semester is over, my book proposal has vacated the premises...there's time again for some blogging.

How about this, for starters? I enjoyed Emily Gould's long essay about blogging in the New York Times Magazine yesterday. It's a cautionary tale about someone who turned every square inch of her life into fodder for her blog. The beauty of the article is the way it makes that understandable. It's fun to shape events into stories, fun to immediately put them in a public place, fun to get an immediate response. In fact, it's all so fun it's addictive.

I can relate, even though I mostly blog about issues, and only a bit about my own life. I imagine some of what bloggers experience is just what all writers have always experienced, the difference being a matter of quantity and response time. A blogger can post 10 times a day and get immediate reactions from dozens of people within minutes. Plus, there's the factor of commenters being mostly anonymous and therefore being able to slice and dice and sneer without the slightest risk to their own reputations.

There are things to worry about in this brave new world, but I can't see being a teetotaller. Blogs give people a chance to gather their thoughts, put them into reasonably coherent sentences, and attract conversational partners. So I shall proceed (with caution) to blog a little more over the summer.

Happiness Science

Over the last year or two I’ve read several books in the field of positive psychology (for example, Seligman, Gilbert, Csikszentmihalyi, and best of all Haidt). It seemed like I should, considering the connection between the happiness literature and my own book about the good life (shameless plug). So now I’m in a much better position to engineer a happier me. Or am I? And do I really want to?

I have mixed feelings about the genre, enjoying it and getting some benefit from it while feeling bemused. There are a lot of problems with self-help through happiness science. There’s the classic paradox of hedonism, that happiness eludes us when we pursue it too fiercely. Then there’s the worry that there’s something narcissistic about too assiduously pursuing a happier you. And the even greater worry that the person who is highly happiness-focused might wind up stepping on people or neglecting the world’s more serious problems along the way.

The book Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert, makes aiming for greater happiness seem especially problematic, since people are surprisingly bad at predicting what will make them happy; and they have a fairly consistent “set point” to begin with, so their machinations are likely to make little difference. (More here.)

So–there are lots of reasons not to take the happiness quest too seriously. But I think the main reason why I’m not quite on board with this stuff is that getting happier just isn’t that often my goal. And that isn’t because I’m sublimely happy. Most of the time, I’m just “happy enough”. When people suffer depression, anxiety, and the like, they’re highly motivated to bring that to an end. We want to move out of the negative numbers into the positive. But if your overall mood is reasonably happy–you’d give yourself maybe a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10, does that seem like something you have to bring to an end? Do you really need to stop being level 5 happy and move up to 6?

One of the great things about not being unhappy is being released from the focus on yourself. When you’re at level 5, it’s a relief: now you can focus on music, or learning about ants, or helping your kids with their homework, or responding to the world’s serious problems. The last thing I’m going to do, at level 5, is pick up a volume of positive psychology and try to ratchet myself up to a 6 or a 7. If I find myself at 7 or 8, I’m not going to start pining for 9 or 10!

Happier and happier, without end, just doesn’t strike me as life as we know it. I’m curious whether other people see their own greater happiness as an ever present goal.

This post is also at Talking Philosophy, and open for comments there.

My Blog Diet

I haven't been posting for a while, and thought I'd explain. I am writing a book which I'd really like to finish during this life time. My New Year's resolution was something like this--"more book, less blog."

I blog here but also at Talking Philosophy. I decided I couldn't keep doing both, so chose the blog with the bigger readership. But having my own blog is a lot of fun, and I may decided to "come home" sooner or later.

My blog diet has been wonderfully effective and I'm happy to report I'm making good progress with the book. I'm hoping some day soon it will have a definite title. The working title is "The Wonder of Animals," but my son informs me that sounds like a Walt Disney movie. I can't decide if that's good or bad.

Animal Rights Slide Show

For a while now I've been looking for a video I could show on the first night of my animal rights class--something that gets people thinking about the many attitudes we all have toward animals, that gets them troubled, maybe, but doesn't make my class seem like PETA 101. (In fact, it's not PETA 101!) I finally gave up and decided to create my own slide show: AnimalAnimal.

This is a big powerpoint file (6106 KB) with 52 images. Many of the slides have explanatory notes and links to websites. For a soundtrack I used this interesting guitar instrumental by John Fahey. The music is turbulent and "worried" but not gloomy. It's so easy for music to manipulate, and my goal is get the viewer thinking, not to manipulate.

To use the slideshow with the Fahey soundtrack, you'll have a few technical problems to solve. Email me if you want advice. (jkazez@smu.edu)

Wringing in the New Year

For Christmas I received a spiffy little turoquoise ipod, which I just love, but no experience is complete without a little hand wringing.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma (good book!), Michael Pollan introduces the idea of an ethical price tag. A tomato around here costs about a dollar, but what does it cost in ethical terms? It depends on the damage done to the environment to grow it and transport it to your plate, the treatment of the workers who picked it and sold it, etc. etc. The ipod has an ethical price tag too.

One benefit of an ipod is self-expression I decide what’s on my ipod. The most self-expressive thing you can do with an ipod is create playlists–compilations that select and juxtapose music in just the way that pleases you. So far so good.

The downside is the way an ipod seals each person within her own little microworld. Of course, a lot of things do that. You don’t have to rub shoulders with strangers anymore if you want to watch a movie You don’t even have to wait for your movie to appear on TV. When I was a kid the annual showing of the Wizard of Oz was a grand, collective occasion. Now the movie routinely shows up on TV. And that’s not even a minor occasion, since we’ve got the DVD in our video collection.

An ipod lets you inhabit a private world, but maybe even more so. One night over the Christmas holiday I found myself plugged in while other music was playing over my in-laws’ stereo. You see people everywhere with plugs in their ears and I’ve heard people say their ipod gives them their own private soundtrack to the world. Er, but there’s a comomon world! Isn’t a private soundtrack just a little weird, and virtual, and Matrix-like?

Yes, it’s a little weird, so I’ll have to add a few cents to my ipod’s ethical price tag. But just a few. Overall, I suspect the benefits far outweigh the costs. Handwringing concluded. Happy new year!

We Like Sheep?

I’ve been playing Handel’s Messiah a lot lately. My two 10-year-olds have been suffering terribly over this. It's not just bad music, in their ears, it’s hideous.

Which brings to mind an interesting question. What is an “acquired taste”? It seems odd that something as seemingly thought-free as what something tastes like or sounds like can evolve over time.

The Messiah really sounds awful to my kids, but someday I bet they’ll like it. Wine is an unfathomable thing to them. Is it actually going to taste different to them in 10 years? Coffee is another example. What—does it actually taste different in older mouths?

Then again, some people never come to like wine or coffee or vocal music. Are they immature?

Oh, about the sheep. Another acquired taste? Happy Holidays!

What Becomes a Monday Most?

Answer: A nice book review in the Waikato Times (New Zealand)--

Deep thinking, yet not too weighty

The Weight Of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life, by Jean Kazez (Blackwell Publishing $32.99). Reviewed by Peter Dornauf.

From Aristotle's plea for rational moderation to Tolstoy seeking solace in religion and Nietzsche's scorn of the same, Jean Kazez (a PhD in philosophy) tracks an erudite pathway through and around the question of what it means to live the good life.

The Weight of Things is no flabby self-help manual with pat paperback answers, but nor is it an impenetrable, high-minded, dry philosophical discourse. Here's a book that confronts the perennial questions in an engaging manner that does not disrespect our intelligence.

Kazez manages, with apposite anecdotes and critical analysis, to speak to the general reading public without pomposity, yet several steps above those "how to" and "inspirational" reads.

She can, for example, sum up a philosophical position in a few apt words.

What, for instance, was the essential contribution of 20th-century existentialism in addressing the question of how to live? Kazez' astute reply is helping us to get by with a more honest acceptance of the human condition.

The human condition gives us the problem of mortality, and Kazez then examines the quandary of transience via Tolstoy and Plato. The latter, she points out, would have made a lousy grief counsellor (his theories were too abstract) while Tolstoy, for her part, put too great a store on transcendence in providing meaning and comfort. She would prefer the deluxe model of the world, but knows that it's plain, yet "plainly marvellous".

Her brief for the good life covers various qualities like happiness, autonomy, self expression and morality, but she's quick to point out the complexities associated with these elements. Ethics itself can be a tricky business. The Bible, for one, says nothing against slavery. Stoical detachment can be useful, but can only take us so far. Hedonism goes head to head with Epicureanism, but suffering can also be a valuable ingredient.

This is readable philosophy and an intelligent book that provides a wealth of insight without avoiding the conundrums and ambiguities associated with the questions it raises.

Peter Dornauf is a Hamilton artist, writer and teacher.

My only question is, when can I go...to the area where the paper is published? This is what a website says about it:

The Waikato region, located on the western side of New Zealand’s North Island, is one of New Zealand’s most popular tourist destinations, with its unspoilt beaches, lush forests, hot springs and ancient underground glow-worm caves providing a unique and beautiful adventure experience.

I read about those glow-worm caves in a wonderful discussion of the meaning of life by Richard Taylor. I thought it was a completely obscure reference. Shows what I know. How are we like the glow worms? You'll have to read Taylor if you want to find out (the essay is in the excellent anthology The Meaning of Life, edited by Klemke and Cahn).

The picture at the top of this post. Glow worms on the walls of Waitomo Cave.

The Passage of Time

The semester's over, it's grey and rainy out, the Christmas season is upon us, and then soon to be over. It's the perfect time for an existential crisis!

Having just taught my course on the meaning of life, I've been reading good writing on life and death by the best philosophers around, past and present, people like Peter Singer, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Sartre, Richard Taylor, Victor Frankl, and my favorite despairing novelist, Leo Tolstoy. Oh yes, and I wrote a book that grapples with such things. With all that to draw on, I really ought to have contempt for a one sentence lyric from singer/songwriter James Taylor, he of the pretty songs, right? But here it is--the cure for what ails us, all in one sentence:

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.

Many of the above heavyweight thinkers worry a great deal about things coming to an end, like a semester, a holiday, a stage of life, the whole of a life. The problem is really time and it's awful tendency to ship things off to the past. Can't we just stop the whole thing for a moment? Sorry, but no. Or latch on to things that last for an eternity, like God and heaven? A nice thought, but I suspect there isn't anything like that. The solution is surely enjoying the passage of time.

What exactly would that be like? What is it to enjoy not just moments, or a bunch of moments (an hour, a weekend), but the passage of time? Whether James Taylor said it or a philosophical luminary, I'm going to have to think about it!

Hitchens on Hanukah

It's the last night of Hanukah. The nine candles on the menorah are burning brightly. We've had multiple celebrations over the last 8 days, with latkes, parties, gelt, presents. And then I discover this. Christopher Hitchens calls Hanukah an "explicit celebration of the original victory of bloody-minded faith over enlightenment and reason."

I had thought Hanukah was about the Jews of the 2nd century bc holding their own against their persecutors, but according to Hitchens, they weren't just holding their own, but quashing a sect of Hellenized Jews. And what, asks Hitchens, was so bad about being Hellenized? The Greeks were the "culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theater of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes." This was naturally appealing, by contrast with "the grim old routines of the Torah."

As far as I'm concerned, Hanukah is about...well, it's really about holding your own in a "Christian country" (as some call it). It's the un-Christmas. And it's, well, lots of fun. I could swear I read somewhere that Hitchens has a Jewish wife and they sort of slightly celebrate Jewish holidays with their kids. Would it really be so bad??!

Dec. 12

I was going to say more about this, but now I don't have to because Daniel Radosh says it all so perfectly here.

In Living Color

After six months, why not a name for this blog, aside from my own? Remember when color TV was a novelty? Every show (just on NBC?) was "brought to you in living color" by the sponsor. My blog (and my book) are about philosophical questions that can seem dry and abstract. But they're questions about the way we live and I try to discuss them with color. Thus...the blog is..."In Living Color." Hey, I kind of like it.