Tiger Mothers, etc.

I was planning on blogging about Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother today, but I'm not quite far enough along.  This is the publishing sensation of the month, it seems.  By exposing her wildly demanding approach to parenting, and calling it "Chinese," Yale law professor Amy Chua has made herself both a bestselling author and the Wicked Mom of the East.  Not ready to write much about it, but so far I'm finding the book both entertaining and thought-provoking.  It raises some good questions about what we should want for our kids and also about self-deception.  When are you helping your children do their best, and when are you actually creating trophy kids to boost your own self esteem?  I think the author, Amy Chua, may not be aware of that real and worrisome distinction.  Fortunately, she has a sense of humor about herself, and she does allow a question mark to hang over the whole book.  Is this really the way to go, she seems to want us to wonder, even as she sings her battle hymn.

More next week, maybe.  Meanwhile, 'round the web.  The endless conversation continues.  It's been interesting at many points.   Latest topic--this article, which shows (tries to show?) a spill-over effect. In regions of Europe with more religious people, both the religious and the non-religious are happier. In regions with more atheists, both the atheists and the non-atheists are less happy.  Carol Graham cites this (unpublished) study in the extremely interesting book Happiness Around the World.  My interlocutor (Paul W) is not impressed.

Relatedly, I enjoyed this letter from Stephen Asma, whose Chronicle Review discussion of animism has generated lots of discussion in the blogosphere.

I dropped by this morning at Let Them Eat Meat, and found post-vegan contrarianism is alive and well.  The book Rhys  is discussing (Meat: A Benign Extravagance) looks like one I will need to look at.  Benign?   Well, maybe not quite.  I just discovered this very well-done video, narrated by Paul McCartney--Glass Walls.  The vegetarian group for which I'm faculty adviser recently did a "pay per view" event--$1 to each person who would watch the video.  Good for them! The group has a cool website too.

Last but not least:  does a shaved tiger have any stripes?  Thanks to my husband, who is reading The Tiger, I now know the answer.

The Emperor's Gnu Clothes

I'm always trying to figure out how it could be that I liked the first books of the new atheists so much, but I'm so thoroughly not on board with the so-called "gnus"--the contingent that makes fun of the way new atheists are criticized for militancy by adopting a militant name. (Think gays calling themselves "queer.")  Finally, a moment of clarity.  Jerry Coyne and Ophelia Benson have posts today that make it crystal clear why I've gotten off the train.

But first, let's have a story--"The Emperor's New Clothes."  The emperor marches along the parade route stark naked [ignore the green underwear in the picture], and the adults ooh and ahh about his finery.  One brave girl speaks up and says, naively "The emperor has no clothes!"  Good for her! Hurray!

I saw Dawkins and Harris, in the early days of new atheism, as that girl.  We're not supposed to speak openly about religion, and what's wrong with it, but they did.  I liked their books in just the way I like that girl.

Now we have the sequel:  "The Emperor's Gnu Clothes."  Other kids were impressed with the brave girl.  They started saying the same thing--"The emperor has no clothes!  The emperor has no clothes!"  Soon just saying he had no clothes lost its appeal.  They shouted louder and louder, and called the emperor a fatty and laughed uproariously.

Some of the adults said: "Children. You're right he's naked. The brave girl was perfectly right to say so.  But you've gotten carried away. It's time to think this through. Maybe the emperor actually enjoys being naked. Maybe he really doesn't know he's naked, and he can't figure it out when you're yelling at him.  Maybe when he looks at you, your clothes look ridiculous to him, too!  Control yourselves, think about how you're communicating!"

This made the children very, very angry. They wanted to believe they were just like that first brave girl. They didn't want to see themselves as rude and insulting.  So the children went after the adults who had chided them, and called them names, and derided the whole idea of Communicative Restraint and Politeness, which they called crap for short.

Now, you may or may not like my second story.  For you, the history of new-gnu atheism may be all girl, no follow-up kids.  And so you may think the adults really are out of line.   Yet, at least in general terms, the adults are right, and the "gnu" crowd doesn't even agree in general terms. They are downright dismissive toward the whole topic of communication.

That's where today's clarifying posts come in.  Jerry Coyne chides Chris Mooney for boldly insulting Birthers, but then not being as forthright about religion.  Well of course, it's a different communicative situation.  Different topic, different tone.  You couldn't both chide him for this and take the issue of how/when/why we communicate the least bit seriously.

Ophelia Benson offers a reason why communicative restraint on the subject of God is not required. It's because the non-existence of God is so obvious.  Right, like the emperor was obviously naked.  But obviousness is not a reason to dispense with communicative care. Lots of things are obvious (to me) but the way I communicate about them rightly varies from topic to topic, situation to situation. Of course.

Moral of the stories: be the girl, not the crowd. You have to take the issue of how/when/why we communicate seriously to make that distinction.

Playing with banners...

Testing, testing...it might change again.

Can Atheists be Pluralists?

President Obama's speech in Tucson lead to an interesting post by James Croft, a graduate student who is involved with the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard.  Croft was ambivalent about the religious elements of the speech--

"I feel a similar ambivalence regarding the religious elements of Obama's beautiful speech. I am drawn-in by the poetry of his scriptural references, and I am powerfully moved by the image of a celestial Christina jumping in heavenly puddles. I can see that Obama's faith provides him with both courage and hope - essential qualities in a leader facing dark times - and I am challenged by the thought that much atheist writing provides neither. Yet I recognize, too, that I cannot join the ranks of Americans bending knee to pray while remaining true to my beliefs, to myself. I must express my shock and sadness in another way. I'm standing outside the church, my face pressed against the stained-glass windows, longing for solidarity with those inside, but unable to cross the threshold."

I like the fact that Croft feels, at worst, left out, and not incensed.  There was nothing to be incensed by.  The speech had the right elements to console those most in need of consolation. Period.

But now, what about standing outside "with face pressed against the stained-glass windows, longing for solidarity with those inside, but unable to cross the threshold"?  My reaction is--what's the problem?  Just go in.

I mean that quite literally.  Just go in.  Perhaps that's an impossibility for Croft  because he's a Christian atheist, not a Jewish atheist--and yes  (surprise, surprise) there really is a difference.  For Christians and former Christians, religion is all about belief.  There are creeds and confessions and things you've got to believe so you can have eternal life, and I suppose if you're not on board, you must feel like a terrible impostor.  For Jews, it's not like that.  Yes, strictly speaking there is stuff Jews believe. In fact, I have a book called What Jews Believe.  But Jews don't necessarily believe that stuff.  And they're not less Jewish for being non-believers.

In Jewish congregations it's very easy to find atheists, and agnostics, even among the high and mighty and influential.  I have known people who even converted to Judaism without believing in God--being in fact flat out atheists.  And they still participate, and still find it meaningful.  Kids can go through bar and bat mitzvahs (happily!) without believing. Their parents can stand up in front of the congregation, doing their part in the bar/bat mitzvah service, and say "I don't believe" -- I've seen it with my own eyes.  Even rabbis can be non-believers. It is OK--really OK--to be a non-believer and be part of a religious congregation.

But Christian atheists seem to not "get" this as an option.  Yes, there are aspects of Judaism that are distinctive.  But the essence of the thing is not. I don't see why you can't find the experience of being part of a church enriching, without believing in the basic tenets of the faith.  You might just like the sense of a refuge from everyday life, the aesthetics of the sanctuary, the feeling of harmony you get from singing and even from standing up and sitting down together (Jonathan Haidt talks about that in The Happiness Hypothesis), the focus on life, death, meaning, and values. If you pick the right church, there will be nothing ethically problematic about the messages, nothing hostile to science.  Nobody has to like this sort of thing, of course, but it's not foreclosed as an option for non-believers.

Croft sees it as foreclosed perhaps because he's troubled by a certain notion of pluralism.  As he explains, the pluralist writer Diana Eck thinks pluralism means putting God-the-sun at the center of the universe, and seeing other religions as planets orbiting around him/her/it.  Members of different religions all seek God, "through different trajectories and paths."  Croft says "there's no room for atheists in this solar system."  I suppose, to him, crossing the threshold would mean joining a God-centered solar system, revolving around a non-existent sun. It wouldn't make any sense.

But no--that's not how you have to think about entering a church or synagogue.  A believer might want to think about members of different religions, and even non-believers, as revolving around God, but obviously a skeptic won't buy into that image.   In fact, the image isn't even compulsory for believers.  Pluralism can be nothing but the notion that different religions (and non-religions) are wise in different ways.  They all have their insights.  This is something you can believe without taking any of the supernaturalism seriously.

Actually, that ought to be obvious.  There is wisdom and beauty in the Iliad and the Odyssey, even if there's no Zeus and Athena, and there never was a Trojan War, and some of the moral messages of the books are atrocious (like how Achilles and Agamemnon--heroes!--fight over who gets to rape (yes, rape) Briseis.  There is wisdom and beauty in the bible, and the Talmud, and the writings of later sages, and the same goes for religious traditions I'm not a part of.

Can religious folk accept a pluralism along those lines, instead of presuming that their God is the center of everyone's religious experience? They actually can. In fact, the rabbi at a friend's synagogue gave a sermon last night about what we can learn from members of other faiths, including from atheists.  There was no presumptuous stuff about how everyone else is really (without knowing it) revolving around our God. My son went, listened to this message, and I'm confident he got something positive out of it, even though he's adamantly a non-believer.

So: no need for standing out in the cold.  I believe there are (formerly) Christian atheists who see things the same way--perhaps gravitating toward the Unitarian church. There's really no need to stand out in the cold, if you're attracted to the this-worldly elements of religious experience.

Trees and Chimpanzees

My paper on the great apes is nearing completion...and boy I wish I had more black and white views about this. It would make things easier if I thought chimpanzees had basic rights just like ours, and for that reason, could never be used in biomedical research. Without thinking of them that way, it's difficult to make the case that chimpanzees should be completely off limits, no matter what. Not just when people are doing hideously cruel experiments, or when they're doing pointless, badly designed experiments, or when they're violating the relevant animal welfare guidelines, but permanently, totally, no matter what. How do you argue for that?

It sounds shallow, but I think there's a lot of force to the argument that we simply value chimpanzees in a special way. They're our nearest non-human relatives, they have minds fairly similar to ours, and they reveal interesting things about human origins. Given all that, we want them to be living free lives of their own in the wild, and we're repelled by the thought of chimpanzees (so much like us!) being inoculated with our diseases, repeatedly biopsied, isolated part of the time...and treated as tools for human benefit.

The research advocate will now let out a loud cry. "But what about the people who won't be saved from serious diseases (hepatitis C is the main one studied using chimpanzees), if the NIH is forced to retire its whole chimpanzee population?!" What possible answer can be given to that? Maybe it's not so hard. There are lots of things we will not do to advance medicine. We won't sell off the National Gallery's art collection, for example. We won't offer Dubai the copy of the Declaration of Independence that sits in Washington.

To change the subject slightly...I read somewhere (does this ring a bell with anyone?) that the regal trees that line many French roads predictably distract drivers with their shadows and cause accidents. You could chop them down and save some number of lives every year. But no, losing the trees is not something we're prepared to do to save lives.

When we declare art, the original Declaration, and trees off limits, nobody feels like any one-to-one comparison is being made. It's not "people or art" or "people or documents" or "people or trees." We value people, we value trees...and never the twain shall meet. Surely we can spare chimpanzees in like fashion. It's not a matter of chimpanzees and people becoming equals, any more than we have to think people and trees are equals, when we leave the trees alone.

NB: I don't think chimpanzees are exactly like trees, paintings, or documents. Not even close, because we have direct obligations to them, and not to trees, paintings, or documents. It's interesting, though, that if you leave that out of the picture, you may actually get the strongest possible argument for ending experimentation on the great apes.

My paper is going to center on a real world drama that just recently got resolved.  200 chimpanzees living in Alamogordo, New Mexico, had been requested by the San Antonio National Primate Facility, to be used in Hepatitis C research (they are already using about 160).  The 200 had been saved from the notorious labs of the Coulston Foundation, which the USDA charged with numerous animal welfare violations in the 80s and 90s.  They live in a federal sanctuary, built just for them on the Holloman Air Force base in Alamogordo.  After ten years of retirement, they were going to be sent back to active duty as "medical models."  Governor Bill Richardson protested, Jane Goodall and the Humane Society protested, lots of animal rights organizations protested...and last week the NIH changed  its mind.  The 200 will remain in Alamogordo while the National Academy of Sciences studies the matter for two years.

It's interesting how the narrative here makes all the difference.  Nobody's having a fit about the 160 chimpanzees already being used for biomedical research in San Antonio.  What captures attention is the drama of the Alamogordo animals being snatched out of a safe haven.  They escaped research, only to be sent back? Now that's intolerable.  

Well, I'm not immune to a good story. It is intolerable.  I'm glad the Alamogordo 200 aren't being shipped to San Antonio.  But now the NAS has to put an end to the problems of all the rest.  At this point only the US and Gabon (Gabon?!) still support experimentation on chimpanzees. The UK stopped it in 1997, and the whole EU last year. It's time for the US to catch up with the rest of the world.

It's a wrench to change, to make an explicit sacrifice of potential discoveries. But once we've changed, I don't think the loss will be noticeable.  We don't experiment on people, and never notice the research advances we've forfeited.  Those advances are just...absent, not there. That's what it will be like if we stop invasive research on chimpanzees.

It's the Guns, Stupid

This was a lovely speech, but why do we keep letting these things happen? With all the talk of this factor and that, it seems to me it all comes down to the gun. Why can't we confront the bizarre way that many Americans make gun-ownership a core part of their identity? It's crazy, and it's one of the reasons why this little girl is being buried today.

They Shoot Democrats, Don't They?

And their children too.  This article has to be read.  There are random acts of violence in this country, but was this one? 

Two God Books

"Jesus is the reason for the season," I figured, so this Christmas I asked for Philip Pullman's book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, and also read The God Dialogues:  A Philosophical Journey, by Torin Alter and Robert Howell.  Robert is a colleague of mine at SMU, and Torin teaches philosophy at the University of Alabama. 

The God Dialogues  is a great book for teaching philosophy of religion to undergraduates, but also engaging and enlightening for civilians.  The dialogue goes on between three students traveling around the US--mnemonically named THeo, evA, and GeNe.  You guess what position each takes.  There is amusing banter among them, but mostly they are the ideal interlocuters.  They're clear, they're coherent, they're witty. They even occasionally write out arguments with precision on pieces of paper.

In a book like this, and in philosophy generally, the explainer's job is to present each argument so it makes as much sense as it possibly can. Counterarguments have to be presented charitably as well.  The book is a model of impartiality, but the nice thing is that the interlocutors themselves are invested in their own positions.  That invites the reader to take a stand too.  A more encyclopedic overview of positions tends to make the reader/student just assimilate passively, instead of grappling.

So let's do some grappling.  The great thing about the book is that it tells you everything you always wanted to know about certain arguments, but were afraid to ask.  True confession:  I never quite "got" the modal version of the Ontological Argument.  As I recall from the last time I took a dive into the contemporary literature on the subject, it was pretty technical and dense.  So I was very happy to be enlightened in no more than a few painless pages.

So here we go... starting at page 90, after Theo the theist has given a quick snapshot of the modal version of the ontological argument.

THEO: Surely you think the conclusion follows from the premises.

EVA:  Actually, I'm not sure. It would help to have them...

THEO:  Written out in premise-conclusion form? Already done.

GENE:  Wow. Did you wake up early this morning and prepare for this discussion?

THEO:  Well, yeah.

GENE: You bum.

THEO:  It's better than spending the morning with my head under a pillow.

GENE:  Good point.

THEO:  Thank you. The argument has two parts. The first establishes God's possibility, and the second infers His actuality.  Here's the first part:

1.  It's conceivable that God exists. 
2.  If it's conceivable that God exists, then it's possible that He exists.
3.  Therefore, it's possible that God exists. In other words, there's at least one possible world in which He exists.

GENE:  Okay.

THEO:  And here's part two:

4.  If it's possible that God exists, then it's necessary that He exists. In other words, if He exists in any possible world, then He exists in all possible worlds--including the actual world.
5.  Therefore, God exists in the actual world.  In other words, God exists.

GENE:  I think there's a little verbal magic going on here.

Eva the Atheist makes an interesting concession right away--if you want to block this proof, you're going to have to ramp up your atheism. You're going to have to reject the first part of the argument, and deny that it's even possible that God exists.  You would have thought atheists just believe God doesn't exist, not that he couldn't exist.  The argument thus succeeds in a strategic sense--it pushes the atheist toward a position that seems too strong.

Or does the atheist have to go that route?  I found myself wanting Eva to accept the first part of the argument, but challenge premise 4. The whole idea of God as a necessary being strikes me as peculiar. Theo explains it like this--

THEO:  ... If God existed contingently, then His existence would depend on the way things turned out--on luck, or in any case on something other than Himself. But God, as a perfect, being, simply does not depend on other things.  God is a being that depends on nothing but Himself. (p. 87)

And then on the next page like this--

THEO:  ... If God exists, the it's impossible that he would have failed to exist.  You're not like that. You do exist, but you didn't have to exist--your parents might never have met. (p. 88)

It's easiest to get a grip on necessary facts.  2 + 2 = 4 is necessarily true--true in every possible world.  However things might have gone differently, starting 10 years ago, or 100, or a billion, or from the beginning, it still would have been true that 2 + 2 = 4.  And maybe the numbers themselves are necessary entities--they exist (in some sense) in every possible world.

Maybe there are even some less abstract things that exist in every possible world.  Might we think of space as a necessity?  Or maybe time? Or spacetime?  OK...that doesn't sound crazy.  But what's with the idea of an all powerful, all good being, who exists in all possible worlds?   Could we also construct the concept of a necessary book, or a necessary person, or a necessary mountain?  But obviously none of that even begins to make sense.  Why does it make sense that the omnipotent, omniscient creator of everything would be able to add  necessity to his laurels?  (And don't say it's just "by definition," because the necessary mountain is also necessary by definition, and that makes no sense.)

Another way of making this point occurs to me.  If you already have the Cosmological Argument under your belt, and you think you've shown that a world couldn't get going without God, then God must exist in every possible world--no matter how this world had gone differently, there would still be God.  Necessity would be an upshot of the proof, along with God's existence.  However, the ontological argument is supposed to work from scratch. It would be useless if you needed a different argument for the existence of God in order to make the Ontological Argument work.

Eva actually winds up overcoming the Ontological Argument by turning it against itself (see pg. 93).  You see, two can play that game.  Just take the original and put "doesn't" in front of every "exist" or "exists".  The argument now proves God doesn't exist.  Eva claims this reverse argument is actually more compelling than the original (see pg. 93-6 for details).  But making the reverse argument does saddle the atheist with the view that God is impossible.  That's certainly atheism on steroids!

And now for Pullman's novel--if that's the word for it. This is a retelling of the gospel of Jesus Christ, with Jesus and Christ portrayed as twins.  Let's just say, interesting!  I would call the book a discussion-generator more than a really gripping piece of literature, but it's a great discussion-generator.  It would be a good choice for reading groups of all sorts--especially for Christians and former Christians. I think it must help if you know the gospels extremely well, because no doubt much of the excitement lies in seeing all the departures from the original.  I don't know the gospels well enough to pick up on every intriguing deviation.  The book is ultimately about scripture, and how it comes to be...and if I tell you any more I'll spoil it for you. I had read no reviews at all beforehand, and I was very glad I hadn't.

God Books

The kids are back in school, so it's time to get Focused, and I'm going back to Saturday-only blogging.  This Saturday I'll be talking about two God books--The God Dialogues, by Torin Alter and Robert Howell (great fun), and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman (interesting).  Stay tuned.

Open Thread

This post by Benjamin Nelson lead to a long discussion, which is continuing elsewhere.  Maybe there's more to say here (and maybe there isn't).   Nothing inflammatory please. I'm just thinking constructive conversation might be a possibility. Somehow the beginning of January seems like the time for it.

Catholic Abortion Ethics

A Catholic hospital in Phoenix was recently disenfranchised by the Catholic church for authorizing an abortion in the case of a woman with a life-threatening pregnancy. Even assuming the mother and fetus would have died, had the pregnancy continued, Catholic ethics says the fetus couldn't be killed to save the mother. We must never intentionally kill an innocent person, even to bring about "the greater good."

It's worth thinking a bit about where the biggest problem with the Catholic position lies. There are two parts to the position: one is that the fetus is a person, no different from a baby or an adult. The other is that we must not kill person A to save person B. Rather, we should let both A and B die.

You get the Catholic position on abortion when you add together the two parts. The result is an intolerably perverse view, but wherein lies the problem? I think part one is the problem, not as much part two.

In fact, in real life situations where the alternatives are "kill A to save B" or "let both die" most of us will think "let both die" is at least sometimes preferable. First, imagine a mother is on a sinking lifeboat with her adopted baby. She knows the baby can't possibly survive--she has no food to give her (or whatever). If the mother throws the baby overboard, the lifeboat will stop sinking and she might survive. I think it's at least ethically coherent for the mother to think--no way, I can't do that.

Another scenario--a mother is holding a crying baby as she hides from the Nazis. She knows that if she is discovered, there will be no hope for either of them. So either she smothers the baby to save herself, or she lets them both be discovered and killed. I can certainly see it as at least coherent if she decides she will not kill her child.

Now, in both these cases, it's the mother who sacrifices herself to avoid killing her child. You might think--that's one thing, but a third party would have a very clear duty to kill the child to save the mother, especially if that's what the mother wanted. Suppose in the second scenario the mother can't bring herself to smother the child, and she asks a bystander to do it--someone whose life is not at risk (for some reason). Now we have a situation a lot like the one a doctor is in, when asked to provide an abortion for a potentially terminal mother.

I don't find it utterly beyond the pale if the bystander says "No, I cannot kill that innocent child. Better to let the two die, than for me to kill one to save the other." This is probably not the right view, all things considered, but it's not just a crazy, mind-addled view. You could have that view based on sheer moral reflection, and without any brain-washing by crazy clerics.

So I don't think part two is what makes the Catholic position on abortion so super-crazy. The problem is really part one. The fetus is not in fact a baby, but only a baby-to-be. To my mind, that means a certain level of care and reflection should precede terminating a pregnancy, but the situation is actually nothing like the three scenarios above. A Catholic mother (or any other) who let herself die rather than abort a fetus really would be delusional, I'm afraid, and a third party at a Catholic hospital even more so.

But you could at least say this for them--if there really were a full grown baby in the picture, refusing to kill it to save the mother would be an ethically comprehensible stance--not sheer irrational poppycock.

Happy New Year!

"2011" sure has a futuristic sound. It's like  we might finally have arrived at a time futurists were talking about a long time ago.  From the sound of it, you'd think people might be walking around with little mobile video phones and such.  Wait...

I hope you will pardon just a little navel-gazing.  Courtesy of Blogger, here are the top 10 posts here in 2010 (they began this service in June, so the ranking excludes earlier posts).

CLICK TO ENLARGE

You can see the blog doesn't have a huge readership, but I've got some readers, and I appreciate everyone of you (sob, smile).   I sure do get extra readers when I write about atheism and especially when I involve myself with Giant Kerfuffles.  That sounds like a huge, fat, amorphous green thing, which isn't a bad description of the whole "TJ" affair.

How nice that "Pescatarian" got (and continues to get) so many readers.  All the views for "The Moral Landscape" reveal something interesting.  Just because people aren't commenting on a post doesn't mean it isn't being read.

Happy New Year!

The Same Differences Argument

My mission over the winter break is to finish a paper I'm writing on using the great apes in medical experiments.  The paper will appear in a forthcoming book about debates in bioethics, and I've agreed to argue the "no" side.  That's certainly my intuition, but what's the best way to make the case?  The "no" view has to deal with pressure from both sides.  Research advocates will want to know how we can allow more people to die from AIDS, cancer, and other diseases, if we can prevent these deaths by doing research on chimpanzees.   Animal advocates will want to know why the great apes should be singled out for protection.  Isn't exempting the most human of animals a bit like freeing the whitest of slaves?  So...interesting project, lots to chew on!

One of the arguments I'm going to make is that the case for protection should not rely on what you might call the "Same Differences Argument."  This argument proceeds from the observation that the same differences that separate humans and animals also separate one human from another.  For example, there are just about the same differences between normal humans and chimpanzees as there are between normal humans and impaired elderly people.  If the differences among humans don't stop them from having the same basic rights, then how can the same differences between humans and chimpanzees make for a difference in basic rights?  (This is usually called the argument from marginal cases, but I hate that "marginal cases" talk, and the "same differences argument" is actually a little broader.  It doesn't have to focus on humans and animals "at the margins," though I'll be doing so here.)

I talk about the same differences argument in Animalkind and I've discussed it before here, but I keep on thinking about it.  It's certainly worth a lot of thought.  On the face of it, our attitudes are inconsistent.  We think intra-human differences are immaterial; they're no bar to equality.  But then we think intra-species differences are a big deal, and a complete bar to equality.  Not only does this seem inconsistent, but it seems like the inconsistency must be due to anti-animal prejudice, or "speciesism."

In fact, I think the SDA is a sleight of hand.  The same sort of argument could be used to show things that are ludicrous, which shows there's got to be something wrong with it.  Take, for example, the right to vote.  Both normal adults and impaired elderly people have the right to vote, despite the differences between them.  Elderly Bob might have no idea what the election is about, but still has the right to enter the voting booth.  He may fill in the circles at random, but that's his right.   So the differences between normal adults and impaired elderly people don't stop them from having the same right to vote.  The same differences distinguish normal adults from Chuck the Chimp.  He too has no idea what the election is about, and might fill in the circles at random.  Surely we will have gone wrong somewhere if we conclude that Chuck has the right to vote. It's not inconsistent, and not speciesist, to say he doesn't.

But why isn't it inconsistent or speciesist? Here's how I think this works.  Rights are "multiply realizable."  In other words, a right doesn't always have exactly the same basis.  The primary basis for the right to vote is a certain set of interests and abilities that are possessed by normal adults.  They have a stake in the running of the country, and they have the ability to rationally reflect on who would be the best leaders, which would be the best policies, etc.  But that's not the only basis, and Elderly Bob doesn't have his right to vote on that basis. He has his right to vote on the basis that there would be all sorts of negative repercussions if intelligence tests were administered to people as they age.  This is because of the way younger people would anticipate the testing, and because of the unreliability of the tests, and the way the system might be abused, etc.  So Elderly Bob's right is based on a a very complicated "big" set of facts, not on the abilities that reside in his own head.

Now, what about Chuck the Chimp?  He doesn't have a right to vote on the narrow basis that normal adults do, because he lacks the relevant abilities.  But he also doesn't have a right to vote on the basis that Elderly Bob does. In short, it takes looking "under the hood" at the multiple bases for rights to see why it makes perfectly good sense for individuals as similar as Chuck the Chimp and Elderly Bob to have different rights.  There's nothing speciesist or inconsistent about saying they differ in their rights.

Now, going back to the original argument, which is supposed to establish only the very most basic rights for animals (like a right to life), the same sort of analysis may apply.  The very most basic rights of normal adults have a basis in certain abilities--fairly sophisticated ones like being aware of yourself and having a notion of your own "good."  But there may be a secondary basis for the same rights that accounts for another group having it--say, babies. There can be a tertiary basis that accounts for yet another group having the right--e.g., the elderly impaired.  There can be a whatever-ary basis that accounts for yet another group having the right.   If all of that is correct, then between-human differences in abilities may not generate differences of rights, because the alternative bases are present in various humans; while between-species differences in abilities do generate differences, because both the relevant abilities and the alternative bases are absent.

That is a perfectly coherent possibility, and if it's true, we'd be able to assert that animals have no rights without being guilty of inconsistency or speciesism.  Obviously, the devil is in the details. You can pretty quickly see the primary and the secondary basis of the right to vote, and how Elderly Bob is enfranchised, but not Chuck the Chimp.  There's nothing speciesist or inconsistent going on there.  But is the primary basis for the right to life really that sophisticated?  And what about the secondary or tertiary (etc.) bases that generate the most basic rights in Elderly Bob and babies (etc.) but not in Chuck the chimp?  What are they?

I think they are "big" facts about the whole human community, and how human earlier selves care about their later selves, and about how humans think about and care about friends and family,  and about how humans imagine themselves in the each others' shoes, etc.  Granted, that's sketchy, but what I find very clear is that rights don't emanate from individual abilities, and just individual abilities.  For the "same differences argument" to go through, they would have to. So the argument is no good. 

Bottom line: I'm not going to make a rights argument why the great apes should be protected.  Stay tuned (in coming weeks) for more on the argument I'm actually making.

12/31 (12:05 pm) -- I made a few changes for clarity soon after posting this.

The Poll... and a Visit to Gnufunland

After pondering for a while... I think I've got to agree with the majority, who say believers get more pleasure out of Handel's Messiah. There were some convincing arguments in the "Christmas Poll" thread, but I would add The Argument from This Land is Your Land.   Surely part of the enjoyment comes from having the thoughts about America the song inspires. Ditto, the Messiah.  Can't exult?  Then there's got to be at least a tad less enjoyment.

***

I checked in on the "gnus" yesterday and found the question du jour was whether "gnu atheism" is helping (more here today). I attempted to have an opinion, but then I got confused by the terminology. Is the question about open atheism in general--with all its diverse representatives?  Or is the question about the particular brand of atheism espoused by people who refer to themselves as "new atheists," like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett? Or is the question about the even smaller subset of "new atheists" who call themselves "gnu atheists"?

I'll give credit to the entire category--open atheism--for helping atheists come out of the shadows.  I have too much anecdotal evidence of that to ignore it. As for the effects of smaller subsets (the News and the Gnus), and effects besides greater openness...who gnows?

***

Hope your holiday is proceeding merrily.

Hallelujah!

And for the skeptics...



LOL--

If Science and Religion Conflict....

So here's a fun topic to discuss over Christmas dinner.  Does the first amendment prohibit the teaching of science, assuming science and religion are in conflict?  Michael Ruse has been getting the royal treatment in the atheosphere (as in, "off with his head") for making this argument--

Suppose we agree to the conflict thesis throughout, and that if you accept modern science then religion—pretty much all religion, certainly pretty much all religion that Americans want to accept—is false. Is it then constitutional to teach science?

The first amendment of the U.S. Constitution separates science and religion. (Don’t get into arguments about wording. That is how it has been interpreted.) You cannot legally teach religion in state schools, at least not in biology and other science classes. That was the issue in Arkansas and Dover. (I am not talking about current affairs or like courses.) But now ask yourself. If “God exists” is a religious claim (and it surely is), why then is “God does not exist” not a religious claim? And if Creationism implies God exists and cannot therefore be taught, why then should science which implies God does not exist be taught?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want science removed from schools. I want an answer to my question, one which comes up because of the dictates of the Constitution.

My diagnosis: no need for decapitation, but this isn't convincing.  Here's Ruse's argument, step by step...

(1)  Assume science is incompatible with religion in the sense that they make inconsistent claims about the same domain (e.g. "God made humans"/"Unguided evolution made humans").

(2)  Then science implies that God does not exist.

(3)  "God exists" is a religion claim, and so is "God does not exist."  Neither can be taught in public schools, under the first amendment.

(4)  Creationism implies that God exists and therefore can't be taught in public schools.

(5)  Science implies that God doesn't exist in the same way that creationism implies that God exists.

(6)  Science can't be taught in public schools.

Moral of the story (according to Ruse)--think twice before assuming that religion and science are incompatible, because it leads to a very unwelcome conclusion.  (Of course, this isn't proof of compatibility.  It's just supposed to be a nudge in that direction.)

Ruse is asking science-religion "incompatibilists" to worry about conservative religious folk who might try to drive science out of schools, if (1) is assumed. But I don't think these folks are going to reason from (1) to (6)...at least, not if they're consistent.  This sort of reasoning would lead them places they don't want to go. To wit...

Just as some secularists believe in science-religion incompatibility, many conservative religious folk believe in values-irreligion incompatibility.  So similar reasoning would force them them to think all the values have to be drained out of public education.  There goes teachers being able to talk about virtues like honesty and integrity, the value of literature and art, and good or bad historical events or people.

Reasoning from things like (1) to things like (6) gets you in hot water, pretty fast.  But never fear, nobody really should reason from (1) to (6), even if (1) is true. That's because (5) is false.  "God exists" is a proposition right there in the body of Creationism.  By contrast, "God does not exist" is not a proposition in the body of any science.  To get to it from science, you need to add philosophical premises, and you have to deliberately direct attention away from normal science topics and to clearly religious topics.

Teaching X, where X may indirectly and covertly (and only via philosophical premises) lead to a religious claim, (whether "God exists" or "God doesn't exist")  is surely not prohibited under the first amendment.  Secularists and religious people have reason to agree to that--the first because they care so much about science education, and may think science implies "God doesn't exist.  The second because they care so much about values education, and may think values imply "God exists."

Bottom line...Science-religion incompatibility may be false, but it doesn't have to be false to ensure that public schools keep covering what they ought to cover.

Christmas Poll

Recently I read Paul Bloom's book How Pleasure Works.  The book offers ample evidence that pleasure is not just a question of nerve endings, but of background beliefs. What you believe can alter how something feels, tastes, sounds. For example, believing that you're hearing a million dollar Stradivarius played by a top violinist will make most people enjoy the music more.  So this occurs to me (and occurred to me many times before I read Bloom).  Take music like Handel's Messiah.  Is it more enjoyable for believers, considering that they really do exult in the Messiah's birth, and non-believers don't?  Or do believers and non-believers enjoy it equally?  Take the poll, top right.

Evidence of Relativism?

I'm inclined to think most people believe there are truths about morality.  Students may mouth moral relativism, but if I flipped a coin to assign them grades, they'd say that was really wrong, not just wrong by some personal or cultural standard.  Grades should be awarded for work, not randomly. 

But Joshua Knobe & Co have been studying the question experimentally, and they claim to have found evidence that the folk really do incline toward relativism.

Here’s how one of their studies worked.  Subjects were told about a moral disagreement between X and Y about this incident: Dylan buys an expensive new knife and tests its sharpness by randomly stabbing a passerby on the street.   X thought that was impermissible, and Y thought it was permissible. The subjects were asked to agree (7) or disagree (1) (or somewhere in between) with the statement "at least one [X or Y]  had to be wrong." 

When the subjects were told X and Y were both classmates, the average score was 5--so they leaned toward the view that at least one had to be wrong. Next they were told X and Y were a classmate and a “Mamilon”—a member of a warlike Amazonian tribe.   Subjects were told the classmate thought Dylan’s action was impermissible and the Mamilon thought Dylan’s action was permissible.  Now the average score dropped down to 4. They were more reluctant to think at least one had to be wrong.  When Y was made even more exotic--an alien, the average score dropped down even further, to 3.

Knobe & Co. read this as showing that subjects assess a disagreement between X and Y relative to the standards X and Y bring to the table, instead of by some absolute, objective standard.  When X and Y are culturally similar, there's one standard, so one of them has to be wrong if they disagree.  When X and Y are culturally dissimilar, there can be two standards, so they can both be right if they disagree.  This is a bit like how if two people are in Texas and disagree about the time, one must be wrong, but if two people are in Texas and Iceland and disagree about the time, then they can both be right.

To which I say: hmm.  There's another way to read the shift from 5 to 4 to 3.  It might just show that the subjects feel a duty to be "nice" about exotic people.  They judge what their classmate says, and suspend judgment about the exotic Mamilon.  And he sure is exotic.  Not only is he a member of a primitive, war-like tribe, but the very bizarreness of his judgment about Dylan attests to his exoticism. The alien is even more exotic. That immediately gets us in our non-bullying, high sensitivity, “I better be tolerant” mood. 

That sort of tolerance is explicitly taught in schools.  I distinctly remember the first time I encountered words like "ethnocentrism" and "cultural chauvinism" in 9th grade.   Even more vividly, I remember a big lecture about tolerance on the first day of a college anthropology class.  These days I think children receive massive amounts of tolerance education starting in elementary school.  The more exotic a view is, the more we're supposed to be nice and not judge people who have it.  The studies done by Knobe & Co. don't seem to tease apart relativism about moral truth and a tolerance reaction that increases as the difference between X and Y gets greater.

Just as we are encouraged to be non-judgmental if people think and behave differently, we are also encouraged not to think about exotic victims.  If people are getting stabbed as people try out their knives, so....what?  So I think it would help if the incident weren't quite so bizarre.  That would quiet down our inner anthropologist.  Plus, it would help to increase subjects' concern for victims.  So here goes--an alternative incident and pair of judges.

The incident is that you (dear subject) are studying abroad in Strangeland. You work very hard all semester, and at the end of the semester Professor Strange flips a coin. Heads, A, tails, C.  When you complain about your C, you discover that in that culture, they believe everything happens for a reason.  So the coin wouldn't have come up heads if you hadn't deserved a C.  It saves time, too.

That's the incident. Now here's the disagreement.  A student from that culture says that way of grading is permissible; on the other hand, your classmate back home says it's impermissible.  Suppose subjects are asked about this Stranger vs. classmate disagreement.  Must at least one be wrong? My prediction: no slide from 5 to 4 to 3.  It's going to be all 5 (or 6 or 7).

I could be wrong, of course (ain't armchair X-Phi fun, and easy too!), but I don't think I have to be convinced by these studies, as done so far. They awaken our inner anthropologist too much and do too little to direct attention to victims.

***

On further thought, my example needs more work. As it stands, the Strangers just have a strange belief about the facts. They think everything happens for a reason, so they think coin flips reveal which grade students deserve. I should have set it up so the Strangers have a strange moral belief about grading. Maybe they see grading as "degrading" (for the Professor). So they admire the coin-flipping procedure for its dignity. Details needed...but the point remains the same.

Read, Heard, Saw

Everybody's making top 10 lists, so I will too.  Here goes--what I read, heard, and saw in 2010 and really, really liked.

(1)  Ian McEwen, Solar.  A brilliant Nobel-prize winning womanizer and glutton gets involved in a project that's supposed to solve the problem of global warming.  Beautifully written, hilarious, and thought-provoking.  Must we become virtuous for global warming to be dealt with?

(2)  Margaret Atwood, After the Flood.  In the not too far future, environmentalism-cum-religion are set against rampant technology, genetic engineering, and all sorts of toxicity.  The end of the world is very, very nigh.  Unpredictable, complex, lush, poetic, challenging.  Oryx and Crake, the first part of the trilogy, is great too.  Can't wait for book III.

(3)  Jumpha Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth. Short stories about Indian immigrants in college towns. Her writing never calls attention to itself, but quickly evokes a world, a state of mind, a scene.  Your are gripped by the third sentence. So good I read her other two books this year as well--The Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake.

(4)  Keith Richards, Life.  I don't know why Keith told me all his secrets, but he did, and I really enjoyed it.  Subject of my next TPM column.

(5)  Steig Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Crime thrillers aren't usually my thing, but this is unique, atmospheric, and pleasingly strange.  The Julian Assange story will seem like a sequel, to anyone who's read Larsson's three bestsellers.

(6)  Arcade Fire, Suburbia.  Big rock sound, with complexity like a symphony.  Subtle lyrics, interesting emotional range, a cool Neil Young-ish voice.  So good...

(7)  Eminem, Recovery, and other albums.  Rap is constantly blaring in my house. Don't know if this is Stockholm syndrome, but I've become a fan.  For skeptics:  try this or this or this.

(8)  "The Social Network"  Fascinating movie, interesting question:  can you cut a few moral corners, but still be (basically) a good guy?  The movie made me think the answer is yes.  Perfect movie for discussing Susan Wolf's well-known article "Moral Saints."

(9)  "The Hereafter"  Being able to communicate with the dead sure makes life complicated.  This movie would be irksome if it were really trying to make the case, but it isn't.  It's a "what if?" character study. Engrossing and entertaining.

(10)  "Inception" It took seeing it twice to make me a fan. Maybe that's because I hate being confused. The second time I realized it really wasn't just another virtual reality movie. It's about being powerfully drawn into unreality, not about how we can('t) tell the real from the unreal. 

What did you read, hear, see in 2010?

Health Care for 9/11 First Responders

One of the great mysteries of the universe--how can Republicans in the Senate say no to funding medical care for 9/11 first responders?  Second great mystery:  why are they getting away with it?  Where's the outrage?  

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God Debate, Texas Style

In defiance of the authorities, who have prohibited non-Saturday blogging, I'm sneaking in a quick post here.  Over yonder in Fort Worth, you can hop on a "(Millions of Americans are) Good without God" bus and get trailed by an "I still love you.  -God" bus.  LOL.   What non-DFW folk may not know:  those kinds of messages (the one from God, that is) are on lots of billboards in Texas and (I think) further east.

Is this a great country or what?

Sarah Palin's Killing Spree

If you haven't been watching Sarah Palin's Alaska, you're missing something!  It's fascinating on a lot of levels. Turns out Sarah is quite likeable and appealing, up close and personal.  It's amusing the way her kids talk back to her just  a bit.  Bristol makes fun of her prom hair, the youngest daughter disses her hunting prowess.  I like her get up and go, and I mean it.  I kinda do strongly suspecting gallavanting all over Alaska isn't standard procedure for this tireless family, but look--she's gutsy. Must give her credit.

Part of the show's fascination is that it makes you think (constantly)--This is a prelude to a presidential run?  This woman (whatever her personal qualities) sees herself as suited to the job?  It's mind-boggling.  For which reason I do not apologize for the fact that we have Sarah Palin magnets on our refrigerator (brought to you by The Unemployed Philosophers Guild, no less).

We all enjoy dressing up Sarah and giving her suitable accessories. I keep saying: if she just stops the business about becoming president, we will take it down and say nothing but nice things about her...but this is our way of coping for the time being.

Now about all the killing on the show.  It really is relentless.  She blows away a "young cow" (her Dad's description) in one show, bashes halibut to death in another. There's shooting practice every other minute.  Which raises a very interesting question.  Surely (surely!) everything on this show is meant to enhance Sarah Palin's prospects as a presidential candidate.  But what about all the killing?  You'd think that would hurt her image, but apparently someone's making the calculation that it helps. Why?

 Maureen Dowd was contemplating the same question this week, and writes (in a column called "Pass the Caribou Stew"):

The poor caribou in the Arctic Circle, a cousin to Santa’s reindeer, had to die so Palin could show off her toughness to voters and try to boost ratings on her show that have slipped since its premiere. (Next Sunday, she’s dragging up nine Gosselins to go shooting and camping.)

Sarah’s view of America is primitive. You’re either a pointy-headed graduate of Harvard Law School or you’re eviscerating animals for fun, which she presents as somehow more authentic.
In movies with animals, they often have a line in the credits assuring that no animals were harmed. In “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” they should have a line at the end assuring that “almost every living creature involved in this show was harmed.”

The caribou that waited too pliantly in the cross hairs is doomed to become stew for Palin and an allegory for politics. The elegant animal standing above the fray, dithering rather than charging at his foes or outmaneuvering them, is Obambi. Even with a rifle aimed at him, he’s trying to be the most reasonable mammal in the scene, mammalian bipartisan, and rise above what he sees as empty distinctions between the species so that we can all unite at a higher level of being.

Great stuff, but I'm not 100% satisfied. It's one thing to be tough--like Sarah was when she was climbing in Denali National Park on the first show.  But killing is just a bit troubling, even to people who don't officially disapprove.  How then, does it get to be a political plus that Sarah's doing so much killing up there in Alaska?

I think I get it, thanks to reading Jonathan Haidt a lot in the last few weeks, and seeing a TED speech of his from 2008. You can watch from 4:30 to 10:30 and get the main idea--

Haidt's account of the "moral minds" of liberals and conservatives explains both why liberals are likely to find the killing spree morally unappealing, and conservatives are likely to find it morally attractive. A liberal like me will tend to react negatively because I live (for the most part) in a 2-dimensional moral space, defined by concepts of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity.  Sarah's harming animals, not caring about them; and it doesn't seem fair to sneak up on an unsuspecting "young cow" and blow her away.

Conservatives live (more, anyway) in a 5-dimensional moral space, defined by those already mentioned, but also by authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/pollution.  I suspect killing animals is morally attractive to them because of the authority/respect dimension.  Sarah's killing spree confirms her belief in the hierarchy that places humans over animals.  This also explains the bizarre (to a liberal like me) coupling of guns and God, in the conservative mind-set.  What, huh?  No mystery after all.  It's all about two hierarchies.  Humans over animals (that's the guns part), and God over humans.

Now wait, wait, wait.  There's something to what Maureen Dowd says about Sarah shooting Obambi.  If you're big on hierarchical thinking, shouldn't you show a lot of respect for the president?  So why the conservative disrespect for Obama?  Look away, if you're a conservative who's easily offended.  But I think one factor here is racism.  Remember, the conservative lives in a moral space partly defined by purity/pollution. I think they're none too happy about a (gasp!) black man in the White House, and sad to say, that's what their anti-immigrant fervor is all about too.

And the point is?  Haidt is, as somebody used to say, a uniter, not a divider. He's not actually trying to make liberals and conservatives see each other as foreign, but just the opposite.  On his view, we are all  born stocked with all five "dimensions" of moral thought, but our environments emphasize some dimensions, and de-emphasize others. I see this in my own household, and the way it compares to other people's.  My husband and I have a hard time caring about the authority/respect thing.  When the kids are disrespectful, we don't like it, but we have a hard time working up a big authoritative fit about it.  We know other parents who (believe it or not) even expect their kids to respond to parental commands by saying "yes, ma'am" and "yes sir."

So underneath it all (the idea is) we are all really the same. Plus, Haidt is asking liberals to stop seeing conservative attitudes as anti-moral--blowing away animals, refusing to respect Obama, and keeping out immigrants all do strike me that way.  Rather, we are to see conservatives as seeing morality in more colors than we two-color liberals do. Sarah's killing spree fits into a certain sort of morality that I don't favor, and others do.  And seeing it that way helps us see her less as an alien, and more as a fellow human being.

Good--it's better to understand one another, not demonize other people as utterly anti-moral.  But surely we shouldn't stop there.  Next, we should broach the question of truth.  Is all that authority/respect and purity/pollution stuff really just rubbish?   Should Sarah really be doing all that killing?  Should she (or people like her) really have political power?  Hell no. But it's a fine thing to understand her way of thinking better.

Apology/Preview

It turns out I've been leaving all comments (on old posts) in moderation for a month or two without knowing it.  So if you left a comment and it never appeared, that's why.  Very sorry. I just discovered the problem today and found some good comments in there (along with all the weird spam...which is why I moderate comments on older posts).

Saturday I plan on writing a post about "Sarah Palin's Alaska."  Oh come on, don't tell me you aren't watching!  The big puzzle:  why is it a political asset to do all that killing on camera?  We'll try to figure it out....

"The Atheist Agenda"

Yesterday I attempted to do some shopping while listening to Point of Inquiry on my ipod--the result being that I lost my shopping cart in Target several times, the episodes were so interesting.  I listened to two shows--one a debate between Chris Mooney, Hemant Mehta ("The Friendly Atheist") and David Silverman (president of American Atheists) and the other an interview Robert Price did with John Shook, author of the new book The God Debates.  Right, that's a lot of time in Target.

One of the bones of contention between Mooney and David Silverman was whether today's vocal atheists "want to convert people."  Or perhaps "deconvert people," as John Shook likes to say.   Silverman insisted nobody was going door to door.   Yet Mooney pointed to Silverman's excitement over statistics showing that "none" was the fastest growing religion in the US.  At the very least, energetic atheists do want to see religion vanish from the world, however the change comes about.  Mooney said he didn't especially want that, since some people are better off with religion than they'd be without it.

I think it's too often assumed that atheism is not just a belief--that there is no god--but some set of desires.  Atheism automatically comes with an agenda.  That's what John Shook seems to be assuming in this passage from his blog--"Primatologist and ethnologist [sic] Frans de Waal has recently stated his opposition to atheism’s agenda, unable to imagine a world with no religion."    Atheism's agenda.   Surely there's no such thing.  Atheism is a belief, not a desire or set of desires.

But wait, if you believe something, how could you not want everyone else to believe it too?  Actually, pretty easily.  When I think about free will, I (often) reach the conclusion that there isn't any.  But no, I don't want everyone else to believe that too.  Life probably goes much better if people keep believing in free will.  A different sort of example:  I believe that Tolstoy is the greatest novelist ever.  But I have no particular desire for everyone to believe that.  In fact, the world's probably a better place for the fact that people have different beliefs about what's good literature. Sometimes you want others to share your beliefs, sometimes you don't care, sometimes you do. Having beliefs is one thing, having preferences about who shares them is another.

I think some of the negative charge of the word "atheism" stems from the connotation of an agenda. That's why many atheists don't use the word, or use it, but say "I'm an atheist, but..." (to Richard Dawkins' chagrin).  What they're trying to emphasize is that atheism, for them, is a matter of belief, not of desire.  It's a needed clarification, the more that people like Silverman and Shook take it for granted that there's such a thing as "atheism's agenda."

Elevation and Disgust

So...I'm wrapping up teaching Jonathan Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis.  By a fun coincidence, my class read the chapter about religion (Chapter 9) on a day when I headed for some religion myself.  Last night we went to the annual Hanukah celebration at my temple.

Haidt has an interesting theory about the emotions involved in religion.  Religion fosters experience along a dimension he calls "divinity."  If I understand him right, his view is that the "divine" and the "disgusting" are opposite ends of a single continuum.  In fact, religion deals with both ends--its job is to keep the disgusting at bay, and cultivate the experience of divinity.

Anybody, religious or not, can experience divinity.  It involves having a sense of elevation--possible within religious settings, and also outside of them. In fact, one study of elevation focused on subjects (lactating women, actually) watching people express gratitude on the Oprah show.  The study showed that the emotion of elevation correlates strongly with surging oxytocin.  It's not really surprising that elevation has a hormonal basis, since it has lots of physical manifestations--goose bumps, spine tingling pleasure, tears of joy.

At the service, I was on the look out for feelings of elevation.  Do I have them, despite being a total skeptic? I do indeed.  Starting about 10 years ago, when my kids were going to the temple's pre-school, I started attending kiddie services with them.  I was practically  dragged kicking and screaming, so I wasn't looking for elevation.  I was actually looking to guard them against indoctrination.  Surprise, surprise.  I loved these services.  I think Haidt captures what I felt and still feel: elevation.  What are the the triggers? I think it's the sheer feeling of being part of a group, but also perceived virtues in the group--like perseverance, reverence, and humility. 

At the opposite end of the spectrum (says Haidt) there's disgust.  Conservative religions imagine there's a lot to be disgusted by--menstruating women, mixing meat and milk, homosexuality, etc. Liberal religion is "all elevation, no disgust." Or rather, just ordinary disgust.  I was amused to find out what my students find disgusting (top secret!), but one example of mine is being seated right next to the bathroom in a restaurant. Let's do keep eating separate from excreting.

What I'm trying to figure out is why we ought to think the very same psychological system outputs both feelings of disgust and feelings of elevation.  Why see it that way?  What sort of evidence would show it was one system, not two?  Is it really?