Emotional Discipline

At brunch today, we were discussing, in connection with the rise of sentimentality, the decline of passion and true romanticism. It seems to me that people are no longer willing to assume the emotional risk of deep romantic passion, that intoxicating distraction that comes with giving your heart completely to another. The danger undertaken here is the shattering loss suffered when that love is not returned, or when love returned is suddenly withdrawn.

The hardest task, however, is not just this level of emotional commitment, but the even deeper effort required to refuse to pass blame to the beloved when the relationship fails. To hate what you once loved is to hate a part of yourself, to cut a piece of yourself out and throw it away. In the United States, acrimonious divorces seem to be the rule; it seems much more common in England for couples to part on good terms. Much of this may be due to the litiginous tendencies in America. The urge to turn a profit on a failed relationship is too strong. But the lawyers who urge this course (or curse) upon their clients are doing them a profound disservice. Love makes two people one; to hate the one you love is to sin not only against them, but against yourself. Resisting this easy solution of passing the blame requires emotional discipline. That which does not kill me makes me stronger. But to turn your heart against your lover is to become less than you were. Pain is part of love. Take it like a man.

I have often been in the company of men who denigrate women--fortunately, not too seriously--as the architect of all their woes and heartbreaks. I like to point out to them that they chose to fall in love, knew the risks, and the risks were worth it. Women are not from Venus, they are not alien creatures, only the extraordinary power of men's emotions elevates them to the status of the arcane temptresses. Yet this skewed perception of women, usually mild and even comical in our own society, is held with rabid ferocity in the third world. The belief in the almost diabolical power of women to control men's emotions is countered by an attempt to strip them of all other power. In Guatemala, machismo reigns supreme, with rape squads chanting "death to bitches", and innocent teenage victims being butchered while the police paint these victims as whores. In the Middle East and India, daughters are saddled with the honour of their families, and are subjected to honour killings when they diverge in any way from their families expectations. Meanwhile, Muslim women are required to wear elaborately concealing garments, attacked if they refuse to wear them, and are instructed to kill themselves if they are raped. In all these cases, the atrocious behaviour of men is projected onto their victims. The men are maintained in a vicious, undisciplined, and perpetually infantile state.

A similar situation once existed amongst the Irish, where girls who became pregnant out of wedlock, or who were raped, were condemned to the Magdalene Convents. In North America, the Irish were once considered the lowest of the low; even during the period of slavery, when the Irish moved into a neighbourhood, the blacks moved out. The strongly misogynistic views of the Catholic Church played a large part in this, but in North America, the Catholic Church was a lesser power. This did not change until Irish women got fed up, became bread winners themselves, and laid down the law to the men. The men were forced to grow up. The empowerment of women civilized the men and pulled the Irish out of the slums. This did not happen in Ireland until the decline of the Catholic Church, making Ireland the new economic power house of Europe.

Lest this be viewed solely as a patriarchal plot to dominate women, it must be noted that while men fight physically, women fight socially. The Madonna/Whore vision of women is useful to women who are on top of the ladder, allowing them to establish a pecking order by denigrating other women. What they do not seem to realize in this situation is how quickly the tables can be turned on them. Being caught alone once with a single overenthusiastic suiter, even if he were not a brute, is enough to destroy a woman's reputation and cast her down into the gutter, a fall that other members of the society, both male and female, are only too eager to participate in. Victorian morality worked very well for Victoria, but not for many other women. This, by the way, was an aspect of what intellectuals despised and called bourgeois morality, now largely extinct, a far more vicious version of the mild social one-upmanship we now have in middle class society. In the late nineteenth century, when social mobility was possible but the social scale extended from the aristocracy down to disease infested slums, social standing could mean the difference between life and death, and mere association with those of poor reputation could have a profound affect on your prospects. The European bourgeoisie climbed over each other like rats fleeing a fire.

It is not that women in these societies have no power, but that they give it up too easily for short term, localized gains. The first step in getting someone to hand over their power is to convince them that they don't have it. Men may have the advantage of strength, but brute force will soon fail in civilized society. What has failed in all these cases is civilization itself, particularly the civilization of men. Religion plays a part in this, particularly when the religion is governed entirely by a male clergy with little experience of women. It is curious to hear clerics warn that a man cannot be expected to control himself when subjected to the sight of a beautiful woman. Such raw biological determinism, which reduces expectations of men to no more than slavering brutes, is quite incongruous coming from the very authorities who insist that humans are entirely separate from animals and akin to the angels. No neo-darwinian would ever stoop to so crude a claim.

Yet an equal part is played by the conditions of upbringing. If a boy has no experience of a male role model, he will take his role models from immature adolescent males. Male commitment to marriage helps, but this is only half the battle, and may not count for much in some circumstances. For that matter, the man need not even be the father. The man must be present and engaged in the day to day task of rearing the children. In cultures in which rearing the children is considered women's work, and a distant father merely trots out his children on holidays to boast, the father might as well be absent. The father as distant master of the house is another mere caricature to his children. I suspect that this is the situation which exists in many Muslim households headed by a wealthy man with a harem of wives. Osama bin Laden, for example, had no significant relationship with his father, and was largely raised by a brother not much older than himself.

Irshad Manji is exactly right--providing women in the third world with economic empowerment is the first step in transforming those societies. Men won't learn to take no for an answer unless they hear it often enough, and women won't be able to say no unless they have some mad money. If diamonds are a girls best friend, it is because women, who traditionally had little power of their own, could exchange diamonds (which they wore, and so could depart with at a moments notice) for safe passage, food, and shelter. Or, if women do decide to stay with their slacker men, let them wear the pants for while. In some Muslim African countries, the wife may be left alone at home while the husband heads off to the city to party and maybe pick up a dose of aids to share with her. The woman is not allowed to leave home without the escort of a male family member, which may mean she is not allowed to leave the house at all. There may be a room full of food which is locked, so that the women and children cannot eat what the husband intends to sell. So the wife and children are left to starve, without recourse. Give her the key to that room, rather than the husband. She is usually the one that grows and harvests it anyway.

An Exercise in Futility

Something that I have noticed when talking to evangelicals and fundamentalists is the hermetic seal that exists around their beliefs. There is a strong divide between believers and non-believers, patrolled by emotional fealty on the believers side more than sound causes. I was once a believer myself, and there was a time when my walls were pretty thick too. What eventually broke them down was that I could not believe in their God, a God whose moral character was so repugnant that I wouldn't give him bus fare if I met him on the street, let alone bow down and worship him.

So, in part, I was led away from theism by my scientific background, but the clincher was a belief in a objective standard of ethics and truth which retained their character and content regardless of the will of a cosmic bully. In other words, what was good and true did not depend upon God, but were independent facts by which God himself could be judged. This belief was the lifeline that led me out of the cave of superstition.

When I talk about objective standards of ethics and truth, I am not claiming the finality of any particular expression of what is true or good. I am claiming that there are things that are true regardless of one's historical or cultural circumstances, that science really does permit us to expand our domain of knowledge and attain a good measure of certainty in regard to how the universe works. I also believe that we have made genuine moral progress over the centuries, and now understand to be wrong many of the things that we once blithely accepted as right. The calamities of the twentieth century do not convince me otherwise; it is always possible for any generation in any place to forget what has been learned and to regress to a more primitive standard (and if there is a lesson to be learned from the Holocaust, it is this.) I believe in the possibility of progress, not in its inevitability. The scale of the disasters of the last century is only due to the size of the populations involved, and the efficiency of the tools at their disposal. The malice involved was quite ancient, as passages in the Bible demonstrate.

I'd say I wasted twenty years digging myself out of this religious hole, but it wasn't entirely wasted. I got a good look at the other side--a look that most atheists who escaped at an early age haven't had. What strikes me about the our current breed of religious demagogues is something both new and old. Like Constantine, they are political opportunists. When Constantine had his fateful dream, "In this sign conquer," he recognized that Christianity had already conquered Rome, and he had but to mark his shield and those of his army with the Christian symbol to take Rome without a fight. The same tactic, I am afraid, is now being pursued by the Religious Right.

There is, however, something distinctly modern, indeed post-modern, about their position. Their claim that there is no morality without religion is essentially relativistic, and even nihilistic. In the late nineteenth century the same position was held by Nietzsche and Dosteyevsky. Nietzsche declared that God was dead, and looked to the Overman to impose a standard of ethics and truth by sheer will, the Will-to-Power. Dosteyevsky said that "Without God, everything is permitted," and called for a return to faith. Essentially, Dostoyevsky's God became the ultimate Overman, the tyrant who maintained order by brute authority. But either position leads to fascism (despite Nietzsche's own loathing for it--he would have held the Nazis in utter contempt.) If there is no hope of establishing an objective standard of truth or justice, then rational argument is pointless. The only valid argument is a steel-toed boot. Belief in God does not change this, because God doesn't take interviews, and scripture is as vague as a Rorshach ink blot.

So, if religious extremists make common cause with cultural relativists who claim that truth and morality are in the eye of the beholder, it is because they share this belief. This I call the post-modernist dodge--all truths are equal, until it's our turn to speak, and then, our truth is equaller (to paraphrase Orwell.) This seems to be a new low for absolutists, but their absolutism is a mailed fist in a velvet glove, to be unveiled when power permits. Thus, the religious agenda is essentially a political agenda, a Will-to-Power. Political power allows one to set the law, the law controls the courts, and ultimately, the police and the army. The public-relations campaigns of today make way for tomorrow's boot.

Part of the attraction of this position for evangelicals is brinksmanship. They cannot resist the temptation to claim that social and moral perdition will follow closely on the heals of unbelief. But the consequences of this position can be disastrous. If truth and justice adhere to standards independent of an intentional agent, then there is no one who can be bribed or flattered, no appeal. The consequences of your actions are inescapable--they will ripple through the social fabric, and you are likely to get only as much mercy as you give. But if you are saved by faith, or confession, or whatever ritual your religion prescribes, then party hearty--just get to the church on time. No one really expects to die tonight. Between action and consequence stands a supernatural arbiter, who can weight the dice for you. Maybe you'll get lucky. In fact, the preacher man says I will get lucky, if I drop an extra twenty in the pot. Who needs condoms?

Because they do not believe in any form of objective truth, arguing with evangelicals is pointless. Their references to the Bible are not appeals to reason or evidence, but appeals to authority--a logical fallacy, yet it is the only standard of truth that they recognize, and they are utterly incapable of understanding why this is not convincing to us. I suspect that there is some facility for critical thinking which they genuinely lack. I can understand them, but they cannot understand me. This essentially nihlistic position is dangerous because of its fascistic potential, but it is particularly dangerous in Christians because without an independent standard of truth and justice, all parts of the Bible are on an equal footing. The calls to genocide, torture, slavery, infanticide, the glorification of God's cruelty, the insistence of blind obedience in committing attrocities, all stand on an equal footing with the Sermon on the Mount, and everything since the publication of this bronze age text is swept away. We find ourselves face to face with the barbarity of the ancient world, a barbarity which is already gripping many Muslim nations.

This is not the triumph of Christianity or Islam, but the death of them. This latest breed of zealots no more understands their religion than they do science. Fundamentalism is fossilizing religion. In place of spirituality and ethical consideration, we are confronted by mere memetic replication; people who parrot religious quotations but do not engage them. Israel means "He who struggles with God and wins." These people don't struggle with God at all; having no standard by which to tell between truth and falsehood, they have no way of telling between a real and a false Prophet, or between the truth and an Idol of their own making. To wrestle with God, you have to have something to stand on, and they have nothing beneath their feet.

They have chosen superstition over faith. By faith I do not mean a specific belief, but a general attitude of optimism and trust. To have faith in you is to trust that you are both honest and competent, but it remains faith because the outcome lies in the future. I cannot have proof before the fact. The same goes for faith in myself, and in a more general faith in future outcomes, that difficulties will not be insurmountable. This same definition of faith comprises hope (for positive outcomes), charity (the willingness to give others the benefit of the doubt), and courage (born of optimism.) This is real faith, the very thing that Christianity talks about, since all of the so-called Christian virtues are clustered around it. But I have not mentioned God once in talking about it. Faith is not superstition. Yet superstition is the cause for which Fundamentalist Christians are fighting, and in doing so, they are killing their religion. Not that this will do anyone any good--a dead religion is more dangerous than a living one.

If there is any hope for Christianity, it must abandon its hankering for the occult and swear an allegiance to the truth. It must embrace the project of the Enlightenment, continue to question and refine the ethics which grew out of the Christian tradition but have evolved since, and return to the standards of establishing the truth that science has proven so successful. Other religions have successfully made the transition from superstition to spiritual practice; Bhuddism has come to the West largely free of its metaphysical baggage, and Judaism is making the transition from orthodoxy to orthopraxy. Jesus doesn't need all the smoke and mirrors to be taken seriously as a moral philosopher. I do not expect born-agains to understand a word of this. They would, no doubt, respond to this with their usual list of Biblical quotes, threats of damnation, and a litany of logical fallacies. I don't care, but they won't understand that either.

Nevertheless, they are still a minority, despite surveys that say otherwise. Between atheists and born-agains lie a huge segment of the population, perhaps the majority, whom I call secular believers. These people go to church occasionally, but don't really think much about God (most atheists have probably given more thought to the subject than they have.) They don't know much about science either, but they know they like what it provides, and if they come to see that there is any danger of losing that, they will rise up in protest. And they do believe for the most part, however much or little they think about it, in some objective standard of truth and justice. Work on that. That is really all we need.

The Mother of All Conspiracy Theories

There is at the center of all conspiracy theories a black hole waiting to devour all adherents to the satellites that revolve around it. Whether the conspiracy theory concerns UFO's, The Kennedy Assasination, 9/11 conspiracies, or various economic and social theories, sooner or later the True Believer ends up being pulled towards the Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory of Everything. Eventually, it all comes down to the Jews. Start with any part of the lunatic fringe, and stick with it long enough, and you will one day wake up in bed with Hitler.

This may be the result of conspiracism, the conviction that the social and political sphere has been infected by a foreign agency which, if expelled, will correct the imbalance and solve all of our problems. The inevitable question then, is, who is this enemy who has caused all the trouble? The answer is that there is no enemy.

Part of the disfunction of any society is due to pure self-interest without proper mechanisms of correction, a state of affairs which exists to some extent in all societies, but is far less prevalent in democracies than in corrupt totalitarian regimes. This results in a deficit of faith--not faith in a particular creed or creeds, but a loss of confidence that honest effort will be rewarded, forcing upon all the conclusion that the only way to beat the thieves is to join them.

But even in the best of societies, political, social, and economic arrangements will typically lag behind the demands of the current situation. This is unavoidable, due to the fact that overly progressive modifications to these arrangements can cause as much or more harm as benefit, leading to a reactionary backlash feared by responsible citizens of both conservative and progressive leanings. Indeed, traditional and neo-conservatives distrust progressives, not because they despise progress, but precisely because bold leaps forward can lead to reactionary leaps backward, erasing not only the gains of the current program but solid gains previously achieved. Both progressives and conservatives value progress, but conservatives emphasize caution, while progressive emphasize adaptation.

But this answer requires subtlety, and conspiracists don't have much use for subtlety. They are the very reactionary camp that conservatives fear. Conspiracists are nearly always disenfranchised, and for good reason. The very lack of intelligence, discipline, education, reasoning skills, or personal responsibility which throws them on hard times also makes them prone to believing in conspiracy theories. Their failures cannot be their fault, so someone must be holding them back. And so, they go looking for someone to blame. Still, even for the dedicated conspiracist, economic, political, and social arrangements are so mercurial that it is hard to point to one consistently coherent faction which could draw all of the various conspiracies together into a tidy bundle.

Enter the Jews. The Jews have been around for millenia, and there is a wide variety of anti-semitic material pumped out through the centuries to draw upon, authored by or at the behest of governments, demogogues, rival religions, and fellow conspiracists. Yet, what makes the Jews so attractive as a target is not just the mere fact of their survival, but their success against all odds. The Ashkenazy Jews of Europe are the product of the most intensive cultural selection regime in human history. As dissenters from the dominant religions in every place they have lived for the past two-thousand years, they have never enjoyed a safe haven where they could be certain to avoid persecution. Denied, for the most part, the right to own property, to join guilds, to hold titles or engage in politics, and even suffering exemption from the moral code which protected others of the dominant religion, the Ashkenazy Jews have lived under the threat of attack, loss of property, and sudden expulsion for most of European history.

If you are faced with the possibility of having to pick up and move quickly, security lies in portable wealth, which not only allows you to carry most of your fortune on your person, but to exchange this wealth in return for safe passage. Thus, the Jews came to value gold and jewelry, for the same reason that "diamonds are a girl's best friend." Women, too, were a powerless faction in society--if your husband owned all land, goods, and titles, the best you could hope for, in the event that everything went bad and a quick escape was required, was to take what you could carry. Jewelry is the ultimate mad money. But even jewelry wasn't a sure thing--you could be stopped and stripped by a gang of thieves, who could take everything you had. And after all, they were just Jews. The local constable might even be in on the deal.

Sheer selective pressure led the Jews to discover the one kind of wealth that could not be stolen by thieves: knowledge. You could lose your books, but not what you had learned from them. Knowledge, and the ability to use that knowledge, was the magic formula, and not just for the Jews, but for anyone in human society. And the Ashkenazy Jews had to be a little smarter and a little more adaptive than anyone else, just to land on their feet. As the centuries went by, the advantage that knowledge conferred grew. Jews survived in the worst of times, but flourished in the best of times.

To conspiracists, who seem to cherish ignorance as much as the Ashkenazy Jews valued knowledge, this ability to thrive in adversity must seem almost occult. The conspiracist cannot see how the Jews could do this without cheating, precisely because it is an ability the conspiracist lacks. There must be some cabal, some secret brotherhood, some dark, nefarious means by which the Jews are able to recover and rise to prominence. The myth of the Jewish banking conspiracy had its roots in the fact that the Jews did horde gold, and were not restricted by religion from loaning money with interest. Still, once European Christians figured out there was serious money to be made, they went into banking on a scale the Jews could scarcely dream of. The Rothschildes were successful bankers, but did not control the major banks. And it did not help that constant privation drove many Jews into the underworld--Fagin was not a typical Jew, but his type did exist. But these were exceptions rather than the rule.

Something which may play into the myth of Jewish malevolence is a trait that Jews share with scientists, and with any culture which is in its ascendancy: the bold and almost rapacious collection of knowledge. Americans and the Japanese tend to have the same trait, as the British and Romans did at the height of their Empires. In the terms of the politically correct, they lack "sensitivity". They ask blunt questions, tread casually on sacred ground, and will tear into the heart of another culture, taking what they can use and discarding the rest. To the ears of those who hold that culture sacred, these questions sound profane and offensive. Yet this very tendency is the mark of a vibrant civilization, which is not afraid to assimilate ideas from the outside. When a culture closes in on itself and fends off outside influences, its days of glory are past. It is no longer strong enough to fend for itself in the free market of ideas. To take offence at hard questions is a sure sign that one has stopped asking such questions oneself, the beginning of stagnation and death.

In fact, direct questions are a form of engagement and respect. Postmodern sensitivity is the product of a patronizing conviction that one's own culture is so overwhelming that it would crush all others. This is the attitude of an adult asking a child about Santa Claus, and underlying it is the certainty that the other person really has nothing to teach you--or at least, nothing that they can put into words. But most of all, it is the identification of opinion with ego, the idea that there are no beliefs that have a basis in fact. Postmodernists don't dig for the truth because they don't believe that there is any truth to find. The Ashkenazy Jews could not afford the luxury of relativism; success, and survival, are dependent on a clear picture of reality. An argument is about establishing the truth. It's not about you.

This is something which conspiracists, who are willing to entertain almost any scientific theory except the one supported by evidence, cannot seem to grasp. This is probably why conspiracists will immediately resort of ad hominem attacks when challenged. There is no truth, only authority; if you challenge my opinion, you are challenging me. To someone whose confidence in a theory is inversely proportional to the evidence supporting it, and who sees all contrary evidence as propaganda that proves the conspiracy, there is simply no other way to argue a point. And so, the more evidence that accumulates against the existence of the Vast Jewish Conspiracy, the stronger their belief in it becomes.

The Demonic Meme

I just watched The Possession of Emily Rose. Although there was an attempt to portray both the natural and supernatural explanations for the events that led to the death of the title character, the presentation of those events may appear to favour the supernatural explanation. I liked the way it was done, as the supernatural was always presented through the eyes of one of the characters, but I suspect that this point would have been lost on people who are inclined to believe in the supernatural to begin with.

The interesting thing that came across to me is how the belief in the supernatural itself played into Emily Rose's possession. It is clear from the ubiquitous presence of Catholic iconography around the house that Emily Rose was primed from childhood for a strong conviction concerning the existence of spiritual agencies, demonic as well as divine. When she is struck by what appeared to me to resemble a night terror or sleep paralysis, she interprets this as a demonic attack. It seems likely in the course of the movie that she was afflicted with a form of epilepsy, but it is interesting to note that the terror of this original episode, even if it were a simple case of sleep paralysis, might have been sufficient to lead to the rest of the story.

As the movie progresses, many of the people who make contact with Emily Rose's story become convinced that they are being stalked by the powers of darkness. The priest on trial is the first, but soon the defending attorney is hearing things go bump in the night and interpreting chance occurences as signs. When a doctor who was present at the exorcism comes forward, it becomes clear that he too is convinced that the devil is after him. They have all apparently entered into a war with the devil, and the devil is working against them. Their only defense is in totems, signs, and portents.

Towards the end of her life, after an unsuccessful attempt at exorcism, Emily Rose writes to the priest to tell him that the Virgin Mary offered her an end to her suffering with a quick death, or the choice to continue in agony to prove to the world that God exists. Emily Rose chooses the heroic path, and dies a few weeks later, having refused all further attempts at exorcism. Her ordeal becomes an act of witnessing, to stand as proof to the world that the unseen world is real. Likewise, the priest and defending attorney also feel compelled to tell her story, to also give witness to the existence of the spirit world.

The movie tracks the transmission and fortification of a meme, and a particularly deadly one at that, possibly the most destructive parasitic meme known to humanity. In its more benign form, this meme is the belief in the spirit world, in disembodied intelligent agents who can affect the physical world and those in it. Those who hold this belief are carriers of a virus but manifest few or no symptoms. But there are a rare few, like Emily Rose, who come down with the full syndrome. They become possessed. The simple belief in evil spirits takes root and gives rise to an alternate personality.

The first stage of an exorcism is called the Pretense. During this phase, the exorcist and his assistants seek to tease out the demonic personality from the real personality, treating each differently as separate entities. In the exorcism proper, the exorcist then attempts to extract the name of the demon. The name, according to the lore of exorcism, is essential in controlling the demon. By the old laws of magic, having the name of a thing allows you to understand and control it (this is why the name Jehovah was never to be spoken.) But these two features of exorcism reveal another intent--not merely to draw the demon out, but to actually create the alternate personality. This is a dance of belief, an negotiation leading to the definition of the main character in a shared story. The name is appropriate to the character of the demon; it may be an historical demonic name, or a name indicative of its personality. But once fixed, everyone 'knows' who they're dealing with. The meme acquires a face and a name.

To be present at one of these affairs must be an overwhelming experience. Here a belief already firmly held is extended to its most extreme and absurd form. In the possessed, all the stops are pulled. Pain is silenced or ignored; as with people high on PCP, the absence of pain permits extraordinary feats of strength, because the possessed is unaware of damage done to bone and sinew which would ordinarily check exertion. We already know that hypnosis can be used for pain management. The absence of discomfort can help with some truly amazing facial and bodily contortions as well. It's easy to be an instant yoga master when you just don't care that your limbs are popping out of their sockets. The demonic construct, which shares the belief of all the participants that it will be able to jump clear of the body when it dies, doesn't really mind if the body is damaged. Knowledge rarely employed is drawn upon to create the illusion of supernatural cunning. This isn't all that hard--you just have to be cleverly obtuse. Read Foucault and you'll get the idea. And after a few days of screaming, everyone sounds like the cookie monster, just like the lead singer of most heavy metal bands.

What really gives the game away is that the demon is very naughty, but not really all that evil. It may scratch, bite, kick, swear, and make a mess, but if it were really intent on racking up a body count, it would sit quietly, play nice, and then slit everyone's throat while they were sleeping. This conforms to the account of hypnotised people resisting suggestions which call upon them to violate their ethical code. The naughtiness is another matter; they are, after all, possessed, and no one is going to believe in God if the demon looks fake. This is simply expected of them, and in the Pretense, it is made clear that they'd better perform.

The most convincing aspect, however, is the spectacle of self-destruction involved. But then, part and parcel of the faith is self-sacrifice and the mortification of the flesh. If the reward in the next life is directly proportional to the suffering in this one, then those who are demonically possessed are destined for great things. Christians have been beating themselves up for centuries, and most don't even have demons to blame for this. Auto-sado-masochism is, in my opinion, the very zenith of kink, but when you've been told all your life that everything that feels good is bad, your wiring will tend to get rather crossed. It's funny to say all this, but actually seeing it taken to the extremes present in exorcism would be a truly horrific and profound experience. We can see similar measures of self-annhilation at work in anorexia nervosa, the 'good girl's' disease, but even that pales by comparison. Murder, apparently, is a sin, unless the victim is yourself and you've chosen a spectacularly painful way to do it.

It is, however, still murder. Exorcism contributes to the belief structure that facilitates it, and is as blunt a therapy as performing brain surgery with a pickaxe while blindfolded. But so too does the belief in the afterlife, and contempt for the body. The main purpose of the phenomena of possession is to propogate the meme of supernatural agency. The devil's greatest trick was not, as the old saying goes, to convince the world that he didn't exist, but to convince the world that he did. It is hoped that by convincing people that the devil exists, they will believe in God. But a strong belief in the devil is faith in the power of evil. Jihadists murder civilians because they are convinced all of the West belongs to Shaitan. Nazi propoganda made devils of the Jews, greasing the slope to the Holocaust. The witch craze led to the torture and execution of thousands of innocent men and women. Religious wars have always been driven by the certainty that the enemy is in league with the devil. Giving up the belief in God may not be necessary, if we can just get people to give up their faith in the devil.

Still, the meme marches on. I'm not certain whether it was one of the fictionalized aspects of the story, but Emily Rose was convinced her ordeal would spread her beliefs to others. It worked, and for some people, through this movie, it may still be working.

Why?

The question Why? carries with it an intentional aspect, a presupposition of deliberate choice. We are asking, not for a cause, but for a reason--and a reason assumes motivation and an actor. Consider, for example, the question, "Why is this shirt on the porch?" It may be that the shirt is on the porch because someone dropped it there, in which case the question is well phrased. But what if the answer is "It blew there from the clothes line." In this case, the why is answered with a how, a naturalistic description of how the shirt was carried from the clothes line to the porch, with no conscious agent involved. This satisfies the original question; there is no why, it just happened to land there. There is, in fact, no answer to the question why, only to the question how. Pure blind causality supplants the assumption of intentional volition, and the answer changes the nature of the question itself.

In a debate between Daniel Dennett and Richard Swinburne, Swinburne's arguments for the existence of God fall under this Why? model. Within the question itself is an assumption of intentional volition, to which the answer is that the assumed agent is none other than God. By insisting upon an answer to why, Swinburne guarantees his own answer. But if the reality of the universe is of an n-dimensional solid composed of all possible states, then the state in which life exists, particularly human life, is simply one of the possibilities encompassed by the sum of possibilities--highly unlikely to the whole, but likely in part. We are the lucky benefactors of a local state of being, which is by no means the rule for the entirety. The why is answered with a simple how.

Taking Swinburne's tack, I feel obligated to ask, if it was God's intention to create intelligent human life, than what is all the rest of it for? Even assuming that the laws of our locale are adhered to by the entirety of reality, don't you think that God might have come up with a more efficient means of achieving sentient life? Our own solar system is comprised of nine (or apparently, ten) planets, only one of which supports life. If it were God's intention to create sentient life, why are the rest apparently dead? Why is the EM band not crowded by the boisterous chatter of a host of Martians, Venusians, Uranians, Jupiterians, etc? And why, with all the efforts of the Seti program, have we yet to discover a promising candidate for intelligent life? I'm not saying that it isn't out there, but shouldn't it be, well, more prominent? I would dearly love to have a conversation with the Vorlons, the Minbari, the Vulcans, the Wookies, and all the rest. Where are they?

Compound this with the fact that our planet has been around for billions of years, but hasn't produced intelligent life till the last million, of which all but the last century has offered a life which is nasty, short, and brutish for nearly every human being on the planet. And according to many of Swinburnes co-religionists, God is planning to call it all quits at any minute, rapture up the handful of the faithful, and throw the rest into a flaming pit. All those billions of years, all of those trillions of stars, all that space, just so that the Almighty could gather to himself a handful of syncophants. Hardly seems worth the trouble, if you ask me. And why does a Being so Great crave the adoration of some great apes from the unfashionable arm of a rather low-rent galaxy? Another mystery, I suppose.

And now we come to another of Swinburne's arguments: that assuming an intelligent creator is a simpler premise than the naturalistic alternatives. Given that it took all of this infrastructure just to get a few billion moderately intelligent and generally benign humans to appear on one planet, how is it simpler to assume the existence of an infinitely intelligent and good entity? Where did God come from? The answer is usually that God has always existed, but since Swinburne finds it highly suspicious that particles all follow the same rules across most of space and time, how likely is it that an entity as complex as God would never change? It's no good to say that God is above time, because apparently he intervenes occasionally, which situates Him as an actor in time. It is precisely this temporal existence of the divine that believers crave--a God above time is not interactive. Indeed, an entity above time and space would be so utterly alien as to be completely orthogonal to all human hopes and wishes, ruling the universe by an incomprehensible aesthetic more conducive to blind terror than comfort and hope. Modern theological versions of God are completely at odds with the chummier Man with the White Beard of ancient and medieval conception. The imposition of God as final cause raises the level of complexity of the explanation by exponential orders of magnitude.

Personally, I can imagine a universe in which teaming trillions of sentient beings of every description inhabit planets of all kinds, and ply the space in between with great ships, of cultures with pedigrees that stretch back millions or even billions of years, with means to pierce the mundane dimensions and create entirely new realities, and with the ability to transform themselves from matter to energy to pure information, enabling means of exploration and expression which not only beggar the imagination, but the limits of physical reality itself. I can think of this. Why didn't God?

If God is a being to which all superlatives are extended to an infinite degree, why did He build the zenith of his creation out of spare monkey parts? I have back pains, clogged sinuses, eyes with a blind spot, and all human females undergo tremendous duress during birth because we have a reproductive system built for quadrupeds with small heads. What was He thinking? Did he really build the world in seven days, or did he do a caffeinated all nighter, with our genetic code bearing encrypted comments like "This is a shameless hack... Not very happy about this... FIX ME!!!"

What I find most disappointed about religion is the insistence that I should worship a God who apparently isn't even as smart as I am. And I'm not saying that I'm the sharpest crayon in the box here--in fact, for the all-knowing and all-seeing, outwitting me should be a cake-walk. But apparently, God isn't much brighter than the average believer, or any other person who isn't reasonably well acquainted with the flaws in human physiology or aware of the scale of the universe and our relative insignificance in it. It's almost like they imagined a God just like them... hmmmm...

But never mind the scientific inconsistencies. The theistic explanation of the universe is hymn to human pride. Imagine, all this just for us. I'm reminded of Zaphod Beeblebrox, emerging from the Total Perspective Vortex unscathed, because after all, the universe he was in was created just for him. As the narrator at the end of that episode asked, "Is it really true that Zaphod Beeblebrox has an ego the size of the universe?" Well, apparently the faithful do.

There was something in religion about pride being a bad thing. What was that? Ah, well, couldn't have been very important. After all, the people who belong to all those religions have forgotten it.

Breaking the Spell

Last week I read Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell. Despite some bad--and largely inept (rebutted here)--reviews, I liked it. Dennett demonstrates just how powerful a theoretical bulldozer evolutionary theory is. Most of the objections to it center on the fact that Dennett is an atheist and takes a naturalistic approach to the subject. I have no problem with this. I did find it a little frustrating that the book deals mainly with questions to which there seem to be no answers as of yet, but apparently, even the questions themselves were enough to raise the wrath of the reviewers, as Dennett himself predicted.

Even if, as one reviewer put it, it is evidently human to believe in something beyond what one can perceive, this does not mean that there is any reality that corresponds to that belief. There is a wide variety of cognitive heuristics which can misfire to create the illusion of the supernatural. Nor is Dennett at odds with human culture and ethics, as he is caricatured by his detractors. The biological basis of religion he is searching for is not a simple matter of biological determinism which mechanically produces the articles of faith. Rather, he is looking for the selective advantage which might have encouraged the development of certain traits which make people prone to religious belief. But once established, religion will develop according to its own purposes, which may have little or nothing to do with biological causes. Religion, as a cultural phenomena, develops along a line which is orthogonal to biological necessity. It follows its own rules, which may confer individual or tribal benefits, or which may only serve the purpose of memetic replication. In other words, the religion survives because people adopt and spread it, whether it does them any good or not. Dennett's question, then, is: does religion actually do us any good?

Dennett separates pure belief in God from belief in belief, the latter being the conviction that it is good to believe in God, regardless of whether God actually exists. Belief in belief is based upon the perception that religion is the basis of morality. For some it can be, for others it can be a license to kill. As I have pointed out before, evil men are evil precisely because they consider their actions justified. They do not consider themselves evil, and for them, religion can provide the encouragement they need to pursue their crimes. It is more likely that religion is the repository rather than the source of morality. You will find there what you put into it.

Against the litany of attrocities perpetuated in the name of God, the same old tired trope is paraded out: Nazism and Communism were secular ideologies, and look what they did. But if mere avoidance of God is all that is required to make one secular, then Scientology and Heaven's Gate do not count as religions. Hitler invoked Norse mythology and founded the Church of the Reich, open only to party members, with a copy of Mein Kampf on the altar. Stalin was a seminary student, and the Communists invoked the inevitability of Dialectical Materialism in place of the power of God. As late as the 80's, Russian children were being told that Lenin is the friend of all little children. Nonsense--Lenin had been stuffed and mounted in Red Square for sixty years by this point, and was, for a dedicated materialist, in no condition to be anyone's friend. For the Nazis, there was no God but the State, and the Fuhrer was its prophet. Both Naziism and Communism were wholesale distributers of garbage mysticism and woo-woo science. Both alternately courted and attacked religions--yes, the communists were quite willing to play the religious card when they needed to arouse the support of the people, as Stalin did when the Germans invaded. And when they attacked religion, is was not because they opposed religion per se, but because other religions were competitors on the same playing field. There are many things I would call these ideologies. Rational is not one of them.

My main criticism of Dennett--and of other atheist philosophers and scientists--is that they are preaching to the converted. This is too bad, because I believe they have something to say to believers, even if believers have no intention of dropping their beliefs. Dennett, like Richard Dawkins, strongly suspects that religion is a parasitic meme, an idea or behaviour which spreads across the population but actually damages its hosts, like a virus. Even if you consider this a gross simplification of religion, I believe that there is a type of religion whose sole purpose is only to spread and convert. I call this degenerate religion because, in the process of streamlining itself for rapid transmission and adoption, the religion sheds many of the very attributes that make it worth having.

A good analogy would be a product with a exceptional reputation. Eager to expand their markets, the manufacturer outsources to sweat shops that will produce the goods cheaply and in large quantities--but the resultant product is now garbage. All that remains is the brand name. For a while the market expands, based upon reduced price and wider availability, but at a hidden cost. The product still bears the name, but is in fact no longer the product that its reputation is based on. The result is an empty brand.

When the primary goal of a religion is memetic replication, all other goals become secondary. Assuming a religion was a positive benefit to its believers (and there are some religions that could only be improved by being watered down,) the distortions introduced by a rapid spread will produce a stunted version of the faith. Even for the most ethical religion, it may suddenly become acceptable to lie, cheat, steal, and kill in the name of spreading the faith. The more demanding (i.e. higher cost) aspects of the religion are dropped. New converts loudly proclaim themselves members of the faith--but the faith is no longer what it was. They are converts in name only. The ethical and spiritual aspects of the religion have not been passed on, and, under the sheer weight of numbers, these new converts pull the religion away from its roots. A large following of believers with superficial understanding of the faith is lethal; a religion that does not know itself and sustain a deep wisdom is dead. The religion is hollowed out. It has a huge body of followers, but it has lost its soul.

It would be far better for believers to preach the transcendent values of justice and truth, rather than trying to get others to join their religion. At least that way, when they did win a convert, they would be far more likely to gain the genuine article, rather than some flag waving cretin. What I see when I view clips of outraged mobs in the Muslim world protesting the Danish cartoons are not angry believers, but the same sort of ignorant yabos that tear up stadiums during soccer matches. Like the face-painting flower children at anti-globalization protests, these protestors haven't the foggiest notion of what the real issues are. The cartoons are not instance of idolatry, but the exact opposite. Idolatry would be creating a statue of Mohammed and then bowing in worship to it. Or working yourself into a frenzy over the depiction of Mohammed, as if Mohammed were God Himself. This is Islam as mere trade mark. I can think of no greater offense to the prophet.

But transcendent values are in the public domain, transcendent precisely because they belong to no one and every one. You cannot brand them, or charge admission. They are secular values as well as religious values. Worse, the attempt to brand these values can weaken them. There are very sound and convincing reasons to embrace these values, and understanding these reasons helps you to understand the values themselves. Invoking the Will of God, and blind orthodoxy, is one of the weakest arguments. It's a mind stopper, stunting the growth of mature judgement. And since God is so forgiving, maybe he'll let me off the hook this one time. Religion does not preclude the possibility of ethical maturity, but religion lite foists the heavy lifting off to external authority. A large part of knowing how is knowing why.

Knowing why, however, means coming to a naturalistic understanding. While it is true that faith may have motivated many scientists to undertake their scientific explorations, they did so because they understood that a purely supernatural entity is inscrutable. The true signs of divine will were to be found in nature, not in any ancient work of human authors--the truths of the natural world cannot be tampered with. Yet, having discerned the natural order, the role of God was pushed farther and farther into the horizon. Truth and justice became good in and of themselves; divine will, if it existed at all, became just the icing on a cake that was already quite filling.

Rather than squander their resources on occult sideshows like Intelligent Design, religionists might be better to join forces with the likes of Dennett and Dawkins. Properly directed, their somewhat skewed approach may yield some genuinely useful results. But to achieve anything useful, they would first have to swear an allegiance to the truth, rather than merely court public opinion. That this even needs to be said reveals the sorry state religion is in.

Against Glurge

For some reason, I seem to get a lot of those sickly sweet chain letters, usually falsely attributed to children dying of cancer, a minister, or to some famous person who has gone out of their way to say they wouldn't get caught dead writing this crap and foisting it on the world. A quick check on Snopes usually debunks this stuff, and I dutifully forward the link to the person who sent me the email--unless, of course, I have no reason to maintain ties with the person, in which case I just add them to the spam filter. The word that has been coined for this spam is glurge.

It may seem somewhat cold and distant to despise this stuff, but I have good reasons to do so. Not only are these emails spam, almost always false, and known to be major carriers of viruses and trojans, but the sentimentality they represent is type of false emotion. They are not love for a person, but the idea of love for the idea of a person. I have heard works of sentimentality called emoto-porn, which I think is a good term for them. Like porn, sentimentality is love without the bother of other people. Loving someone else means that you actually have to put up with their human frailties. Sentimentality, on the other hand, is a means of climbing up your own brain stem to ring the bell of the pleasure center, a cheap seretonin rush. Serial killers cannot love, but they're very sentimental. Even Hitler wallowed in sentimentality, and the German people were fooled into thinking that this was evidence of a deeper humanity.

Wherever I detect the strong reek of sentimentality, I also see glaring disfunction. Here are the parents who makes grand plans for what they think their child should want, rather than actually taking the trouble to find out what the child really wants and has an aptitude for. Here is the couple who plan the most ostentatious wedding ceremony, complete with overblown and lengthy romantic vows, only to break up within a couple of years because neither one of them can live up to the romantic ideal. Here is the poet or writer who sets down on the page the depth of his adoration for his lover, while actively despising her in daily life. And here too is the follower of religion who wallows in the warm glow of divine love so casually assumed, and takes this as a sign of certain salvation and a license to condemn others.

Sentimentality is the idolatry of the beloved, but the problem with idolatry is that it is false. It is worship of the image, but not of what the image represents. Loving an image is easy, because the image does, says, and thinks exactly what you want it to. It is, after all, your own creation. Real people, on the other hand, have this exasperating habit of doing what they want, whether you like it or not. Some people have even gone to the trouble of killing the real person because that person keeps spoiling the fantasy. This should tell you just how far sentimentality is from love.

King Lear is Shakespeare's grandest tragedy, but it is also his unequivocal condemnation of sentimentality. Lear partitions his kingdom amongst his three daughters according to how well they can wax poetically about their love for him. Reagan and Gonoril deliver long and impassioned testimonials of love for their father--it's easy for them to perform, because they really don't care. Cordelia, on the other hand, cannot heave her heart into her mouth. She loves her father "according to my bond, no more nor less." This is the unburnished truth. Lear banishes her and gives everything to Reagan and Gonoril, who then proceed to strip him of everything he has left, including his own narcissistic vanity. On the heath, Lear is like a god commanding the storm, but he is also mad and naked; the grandiosity of the gods is not for mortal men, and will soon consume a mortal frame. When at last his pride breaks like a fever, he is left a simple old man. All his haughty grandiloquence is gone. He is left with simple and direct words, but these words are true. Still, the cost of his old folly is pending; he loses all that he loves when he has barely discovered what love is.

Life is bittersweet--that's what we've evolved to deal with, and once you grow into it, it's the finest taste imaginable. Glurge is lard loaded with icing sugar; it doesn't taste like much, but it will still clog your heart and rot your pancreas. Susan Sontag was on to something when she talked about Illness as Metaphor, though she never got around to diabetes. But there it is; a diet of sweets leads to diabetes, which can compromise the circulatory system, and leave you blind, sick, and crippled. If cancer was the metaphor for the twentieth century, diabetes is the metaphor for the twenty-first. We live in a sickly sweet miasma of political correctness, sentimentality, religious feelings, and sensitivity. We don't need to validate all our feelings; frankly, a lot of our feelings are invalid, caused by poor upbringing, weird beliefs, and bad brain chemistry. Just because you feel something doesn't make it real. Fuck Star Wars, forget stretching out with your feelings, and take a moment to stop and think! Realizing that your current depression is just plain bullshit can be a singularly uplifting experience.

Sentimentality trades reality for fantasy, but the fantasy inevitably crumbles, leaving you with nothing. Personally, I love fantasy, but there is a time and a place for it, and I do not want the world to be obscured by a veil of my own making. Love is hard. Sentimentality is easy, and for that most of all, I distrust it. It is as easy as buying the first Hallmark card that falls off the shelf, or clicking send to forward that piece of glurge. If you want to show you care, create something, or choose something carefully. And if you must send glurge, write your own--although, you may find, as Lear did, that real love is more plain than sentimentality would have it.

Choosing to Be Offended

In the past few weeks, a few cartoons published in a Danish Newspaper have aroused a storm of outrage amongst Muslim extremists. They have learned very well how to exploit political correctness, a mailed fist wrapped in velvet which seeks to limit public discourse only to those subjects and expressions which will not offend someone or other. The politically 'sensitive' make much of the decision of the Danish newspaper, and other European newspapers, to print these cartoons. But no mention is made of the choice by those offended to take offense--as if such offense were beyond choice, but a simple given. The debate is thereby not just conceded, but completely forbidden. It seems that Muslims are to be treated like children, whose delicate ears are too tender to be subjected to the conversation of adults. Behind the apparently sensitive, motherly aspect of the politically correct lurks a much older, more sinister figure: the European colonial who, taking up the White Man's Burden, spares his less gifted brown charges from the rigour of civilized thought. The insult to Islam is not the cartoons, but the carefully orchestrated outrage of a few religious demagogues, who encourage this caricature of Muslims as infantile invalids too feeble to withstand the rough and tumble exchange of ideas so common in the West.

I would like to take a moment to talk about the purpose of humour. Laughter is the safety valve of sanity, our means of coping with the absurdity and contradictions of our beliefs and those of others. In a joke you can say what you could not say straight out--the conversation is not given the weight of a serious debate. The joke can be outrageously false or outrageously true. It's bullshit, but bullshit that comes labelled as such, an invitation to play with the subject without serious commitment. Best of all, humour deflates pomposity. The king farts, the gods fall on their faces, the wise men babble. Humour offends pride, but as virtually all religions agree, pride exists to be offended and defeated. If you've lost your sense of humour, you've probably lost much of your humanity.

Pride is the deadliest of sins because it is born of the deep and abiding sense of inferiority, an overcompensation for real or perceived inadequacy. It is a bulwark mounted against criticism, which, if heeded, might lead to real change and correct the faults that criticism addresses. If one of the cartoons depicts Mohammed as wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, the question that should be asked is who put that turban on him--the cartoonist, or the fanatics who seek to make Islam synonymous with intolerance and violence? If those who do evil go to hell, there is a special, deeper hell reserved for those who do evil in God's name, who make good seem evil and evil good.

The governments of Islamic countries are milking this for all it is worth. There's nothing quite like a foreign slight to distract the people from the failings of their own government, and as the Nazis demonstrated, nothing like a scapegoat to make your own people unite. The scapegoat, of course, is never the problem. Denmark is irrelevant to the Muslim world; no one would even have noticed these cartoons had the cartoons not been reproduced and widely distributed amongst Muslims. Also included in the cartoons being circulated amongst Muslims were three additional cartoons which are far more outrageous, which no one can trace the origin of and which have not appeared in any major publication that anyone can name. In short, the riots and protests are the product of a deliberate propaganda campaign. As long as everyone focuses their energies upon such fictional monsters, the real problems will never be solved.

Cultural Adaptation and Faith

Human beings have the ability to adapt on four levels. The most basic, and slowest, is the physical and genetic process guided by natural selection. Also shared with more intelligent animals is the ability to learn, to adapt within a single lifetime to environmental conditions, rather than rely on genetic variation to encode new behaviour. But we have two additional levels of adaptation. One is the ability to imagine and respond preemptively to circumstances--to ask what if. This is the fastest and highest level. But there is another mode of adaptation that stands between physical adapatation and learned behaviour. This is cultural adaptation, which changes over generations but represents a shared body of beliefs which both describe and define human nature. These govern our expectations not only of what is good, but of what is possible or likely in human behaviour.

These cultural norms set the standards for human interaction, and provide the framework by which we can engage in positive sum exchanges. Such exchanges are the secret of homo sapiens' success. I give you something which is easy for me to make in return for something that is easy for you to make, but each gets something which is relatively cheaper than if the individual were forced to provide it for themselves. Specialization and trade permits win-win deals by which both participants are enriched. This is why humans gather together in large concentrations, in villages, towns, and finally, cities. Our social organization has more in common with social insects, like ants or bees, than it does with most mammals, who reach a peak pack size, after which they must split to avoid exhausting resources. If human competition were as simple as social darwinists claim (and scientific darwinists are not social darwinists,) we would never build cities. The concentration of population only works because we are able to organize into large, cooperative, and mutually beneficial social and economic arrangements. Cooperation, not competition, is the primary guiding principle in human interaction. Competition, where it exists, is strongly governed and restrained by moral, legal, and political strictures. The mark of a successful civilization is the ability to harness competition towards cooperative ends. Unbridled competition is war, with all the waste and destruction that war entails.

Religion originates as a cultural myth which depicts in narrative form the ideals of the tribe, community, or society. In religious mythology gods and heroes acts as exemplars of ethical positions, both good and bad. In these stories, the struggle between these figures reflects the struggle which occurs both within the individual and within the society. The narrative format is well suited to transmitting these norms; stories are, for us, the most efficient way for transmitting these ideas. A story expands in our minds, supplied by an understanding that we all share about what it is to be human. Religion is therefore not a depiction of the world as it is, but the world as we would like it to be in a moral sense. It is both an attempt to depict human nature as it is and an intentional act to redefine it in a way that promotes social cohesion. Religion therefore acts within a realm of social ethical freedom, human adapatation at the cultural level. But it is, first and foremost, a means of establishing social and political control.

While the content of religion may deal with ethics, religion itself as a tool for social control is ethically neutral. It may be used for good or ill. The distinction most often drawn between religions and cults therefore usually centers on the intent of those who control it, and how susceptible the sect is to control and abuse by a small group of individuals. Many of the traits often attributed to cults--isolation from outside influence, censorship, strict hierarchy, thought jamming, shaming, ostracism, black and white thinking--can be found to some degree in many religions considered respectable--and indeed, some are practiced to an extent in all social organisations. Many of us would consider these methods to be foul play, a form of brainwashing that runs against our code of conduct of a free society. But the tools of religion are in the public domain. New religions can be built to order, and older, more established religions can be 'hacked'. If a sufficient proportion of the populace belongs to a religion, the leaders of that religion can then use their influence to exert control over politics, economics, and culture. Politics, too, can be hacked.

In fact, the respectability of the older religions usually stems from a system of checks and balances against corruption within its hierarchy, and these generally do not exist until some time after the founder's death. The history of recent religions--the Unification Church, Scientology, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses--suggests that even the our oldest and most honoured religions may have originated as cults in every sense of the word. The transition and moderation of the Mormon church is particularly revealing. Joseph Smith's escapades were so outrageous to the majority of Christians that he was dragged from a jail cell and lynched by an angry mob. Nevertheless, the Church of Latter Day Saints has reformed itself to the point that it is now considered a legitimate faith. One is left to wonder how well Christianity and Islam would fare against someone with a time machine and a small digital camera. How well would the historical founders of our most cherished spiritual traditions stand up to the intense public scrutiny that they would suffer if they lived today?

The point, however, may not be the murky origins of our faiths. Contrary to the claims of biblical literalists, the Jesus of history is irrelevant; it is the Jesus as fictional hero, the ideal man of the imagination, that is important. What does matter is how these systems of faith may be derailed by political opportunists, and to what murky depths they might take them. Two tendencies work against us here: religion provides an ready disguise for authoritarian figures, and outrageous demands can actually encourage strong levels of commitment. The first tendency I call The Man Behind the Curtain. Like the Wizard of Oz, a demagogue can disguise his own agenda and prejudices by throwing his voice into the mouth of the Idol, cherry picking passages from any of the holy texts, which are good for everything from genocide to homophobia. Claims of scriptural infallibility are essentially claims of personal infallibility, since the content of such claims are always interpretations of scripture. The second tendency works because cognitive dissonance renders people less likely to admit that they are wrong when they are very wrong. This underlies the doctrine of the Big Lie--get someone to agree to something that they would be a fool to accept, and they will stick to it rather than admit they are fools. Religions that require a high level of commitment, and adhererance to arbitrary and absurd measures of fealty, are harder to break with. This requires admitting not only that the religion is wrong, but that you are wrong. Pride is a powerful motivator.

While I understand where the adversaries of religion are coming from, there is a flaw in their strategy. Religion may not arise naturally in children who are specifically taught a naturalistic world view, but most children are not so successfully weaned from the magical thinking of childhood. For most, the religious impetus remains strong, particularly if it is not counterbalanced with a profound curiousity which drives the individual to fill in the gaps in their understanding of the natural world. The most prevalent theistic argument is 'God in the gaps'. This exploits educational lapses and inadequacies. The frontal attack on religion is actually far less effective against fringe beliefs than it is against more responsible traditions, who meet such challenges openly and are therefore more susceptible to being weakened by them. What such attacks may achieve is the very worst scenario--a weakening of moderate and reasonable specimens of religion, clearing the field for more virulent and destructive forms. Secular humanism may be a victim of its own success, precisely because it has won over those who were already had the most in common with it. In the wake of such a conversion a new generation arose with no acquaintance with religion; if these same people lack the inherent curiousity and education required to study and grasp naturalistic models of the world, they may easily become fodder for religious demagogues who employ advanced marketing techniques to win converts. This new wave of religious empire builders are exploiting an ideological monopoly. Worse yet, established religions are copying their strategies in an attempt to break into this market.

It is unlikely that we will ever be able to abolish religion. There are too many cognitive and emotional weaknesses that it caters to: conformity, tribalism, need for community, pride, comfort, habit, easy answers, justification of ignorance, a child's wish to be the center of the universe, the illusion of certainty, magical thinking, transformative power, and misdirected theory of mind, amongst others. It would be better to accept this and attempt to curb the more malevolent manifestations of it, to back the moderates against the wackos and Waco's. It is far easier for a quiet Anglican, Presbyterian, or casual Catholic to accept a naturalistic world view than it is for a fanatical fundamentalist or a New Age flake, and for the most part, the former are far less likely to try to ascend to heaven by the power of explosives. Pastors, priests, and reverends have, at least, some training and a broader education, unlike the current pack of lay preachers armed only with their own prejudices and the illusion of their own infallibility. Clerical certification is no guarantee of moral quality, any more than a degree is proof against academic fraud, but it does offer the possibility of establishing a baseline code of conduct.

Perhaps the greatest advance we can make in the reformation of religion is to understand its purpose as a means of communicating those values necessary for harmonious social arrangements, and regulate it towards that purpose. This means that we must understand that religion is not necessarily the best means of discovering those values, and should be subject to scrutiny and correction from without. This exposes religion's greatest weakness--the very notion of the sacred often places doctrine beyond question, and as a cultural form of adaptation it tends to be highly conservative, changing at a generational pace. Nevertheless, change it does, and sometimes for the worse. This is because such change usually occurs below the level of conscious choice, driven by political and economic concerns that may have little use for genuine ethical consideration but which hide their true nature through moral disguises. This process of change, and the motivations that drive it, must be brought into full view.

The best way to avoid being tricked is to learn how the trick is done. This may be dangerous knowledge, but it is knowledge that has already fallen into the hands of the very worst people. There is no question that the magic works; religion has no influence on the physical world but a tremendous influence upon the human world. Rather than teach a specific religion, or even comparative religion, it might be better to introduce people at an early age to the psychology of religion, so that they can understand why people come to believe the unbelievable. It's not all bad news. As already noted, religion is a means of establishing and transmitting cultural norms, for good or ill. So rather than simply study the successful or established faiths, it might be even more instructive to study the cases where it has all gone terribly wrong, to understand the shortcomings in our emotional and cognitive makeup that made these disasters possible. Such an education would be invaluable when it comes time to question the man behind the curtain.

Selfishness and Altruism

In various chat forums around the web, I have come across long discussions about selfishness and altruism. Moralistic posters argue that we should do something for its own sake, not for any benefit that we derive from it. They loudly condemn the hidden agenda behind actions supposedly done out of the goodness of one's heart which actually work to the benefit of the person doing it. If they come to believe that there is a hidden benefit to moral actions, they condemn all human beings as pathetically selfish. On the other hand, you have extreme libertarians, particularly of the Ayn Rand variety (I've heard Objectivists called Randroids, which left me in stitches--it calls to mind Daleks in dark pin-striped suits.) These people argue that there are really no true selfless acts, or if there are, there shouldn't be. They claim that altruists are in fact lazy people who are actually trying to hoodwink honest, hard working people into handing over the fruits of their labour. When faced with the poor and destitute, the Randroids would echo Scrooge's words: Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? And if they be like to die, then perhaps they'd better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

In fact, both these views share a common view of human beings as atomized, disconnected entities, in which the self extends only as far as our physical form. Moralists stress the benefit of all outside this self, while Objectivists stress the benefit only to this limited self. The common error is the belief in this limited self. As we mature, we (hopefully) move beyond this limited self to an expanded self, including first our family, then our tribe (political, social, ideological, or religious,) moving on to a broader conception of the tribe, and ultimately, to identification with all of humanity and even to nature itself. Having a good grasp of ethics simply means that you are mature enough to know that what's good for others is good for you. The whole selfishness-altruism argument is a red herring.

Selfishness is bad for you. Suicides happen because the victim feels disconnected from other people and unable to influence them. We're social animals; we have an inherent need to be with others, and this means sharing. Indeed, the more we cooperate, the more we thrive. Any business that doesn't offer win-win transactions won't be in business for very long. Unbridled greed is as bad for capitalism as poor productivity. The reason that capitalism works so well is that it limits competition to the least common relationships and encourages cooperation in the vast majority of relationships. Monopolies and cartels are broken by the state because they violate this principle; they allow a few people at the top to cooperate and screw everyone else. Communism failed so miserably because, despite all its propaganda about comradeship, it encouraged competition, betrayal, and political in-fighting at virtually every level of society. Regardless of our fetishistic glorification of competition, our most hallowed model of competition is sports. But sports is about a group of people playing by the rules of the game; ritualistically limited competition within a framework of cooperation. When someone breaks the rules, they are penalized. When someone cheats, they get thrown out.

Behaviour which genuinely works against one's own interests is rarely beneficial to anyone, because it usually permits others to break the social contract without penalty. This is called enabling. It permits someone to pursue a course that is ultimately self-destructive well past the point where it would otherwise be prevented. In this relationship, the pair consisting of addict, alcoholic, or criminal, and his accomplice, act as a single destructive unit. The same could be said for the devoted follower of a bloody tyrant. Eventually the bubble bursts; the destructiveness which the enabler seeks to keep at bay overwhelms the enabler, and everyone else along the way.

Apparently selfless behaviour works to establish and maintain a social contract which works in favour of the selfless person as well. The self expands to include others and certain ideals, without which the person would consider life meaningless. A man who sacrifices himself by throwing his body on a grenade to protect the members of his platoon is acting on a social ethic which exists to keep him and all he loves alive. This serves the extended self. This does not make it any less good or selfless. The dying man has simply assimilated a communal ethic to the point that he acts upon it without thinking. He would expect others to do the same. That it fell to him to do it was merely an accident of circumstance.

Religion, and nearly all ethical systems, work to encourage this expanded sense of self. The figure of God represents a commonality amongst all of creation; the communion with God is meant to be an expansion of self without limit, the identification with all people and all things. An infinite self is the same as no-self, because there is no other. This cannot be maintained for more than brief interludes, but it has a powerful impact. Technically speaking, this experience may be a brain-fart--a combination of broken signals to part of our brain, that producing a feeling of dislocation in space. No longer identifying ourselves as being in one point of space, we identify with everything. This is usually combined with a driving certainty in the physical reality of the experience. This confusion of subjective experience as objective reality is called reification. Nevertheless, the outcome of the experience is to try to repeat it and act upon it. If the result is a genuine wish to connect with and help others, then this is a very useful brain-fart. In other words, it confers an adaptive advantage, and should no more be discounted than any other experience.

There is a downside, however, which is that the experience is non-rational, completely subjective, profoundly attractive, and open to a wide variety of interpretation after the fact. If it occurs within a religious, mystical, or occult framework, this sensation of certainty can be hijacked for some rather dubious beliefs. The self, once expanded, is for a while soft and malleable; it is remarkeable not only for what can be included, but for what can be taken away. The result may be a greater love for all humanity, but it can also be redirected towards a simple change of tribal allegiance, with all that is outside of the tribe being considered outside of the experience and therefore not worthy. The tribe can take possession of the experience and charge admission for it. While strong tribal allegiances were beneficial to our ancient ancestors, they can be disastrous in a modern, multicultural world armed with deadly weapons.

While the reification of the mystical experience may be false, there is one fact about the experience that we can be certain of: we enjoy, indeed, we crave the feeling of being connected with more than ourselves. The point of religion should be to expand this connection as far as it can possibly go, to dissolve the opposition between tribes, rather than planting yet another flag on the plain of Armageddon.

The American Dream

The American Dream may be summed up in two words: Social Mobility. The promise of the American Dream is the promise of the Horatio Alger stories, that anyone can make it with enough work and determination. Your fate is in your own hands, and the system is fair and will reward you based upon your own merits. Whether this is generally true or not, there has usually been a sufficient number of cases where this has actually happened to supply anecdotal evidence.

Faith in the American Dream is what keeps both the American economy and American society chugging along. Acording to this doctrine, even the poorest worker is but an aristrocrat in exile, waiting for his big break, his ticket to easy street. If they cannot achieve vast wealth, they can at least attain a decent standard of living and look forward to a comfortable retirement. Social status at birth is no obstacle, or indeed, any guarantee. In the American Dream, America is not ruled by an aristocracy, but a meritocracy.

America has resisted the large labour movements which exist in England, primarily because it represents itself as a society of equals. There can be no class consciousness if there are no classes. The perception of stratification, reenforced in England by the existence of an old aristocracy marked by birth rather than effort, leads those at the bottom of the economic scale to identify themselves as permanent members of that class, and to band together with others of their class to further the interests of their class as a whole. This, too, is an imperfect solution. Class identification reenforces stratification. The solidarity of the workers tends to hold them down even as it locks others at lower economic levels out. The result was the closed shop system, which drew a hard line of division between labour and management, and blocked entry into the shop. Furthermore, the hard antagonism between labour and management impaired productivity, limiting the funds which could be used to pay workers and expand operations, resulting in fewer and lower paid jobs. Unpleasant as Margaret Thatcher was, she at least broke much of this up and provided a better chance for those locked out at the bottom to gain access and climb the ladder.

There have been times when the American Dream has faltered and almost failed: during the early part of the 20th century and during the depression. Both times the spectre of communism loomed large. Karl Marx made one prediction that still holds true: when the workers were not able to afford the products of their own labour, the markets, and the businesses that served them, would collapse, taking the whole system down with them. The first time it was salvaged through the efforts of rich philanthropists, who, convinced of the need for a healthy and contented workforce, poured much of their wealth back into civic improvements, education, and public health. It is ironic that many of these same philanthropists were responsible for much of the damage that they were now seeking to repair, and it is still open to question whether their later efforts for the public good were sufficient to redress the harm they had caused amassing their fortunes. More telling were the early efforts of Henry Ford, who insisted on paying his workers what were essentially dot com wages for the time, creating a working middle class which would eventially form the backbone of American wealth and power. He also promised never to fire anyone who would make an honest effort to work, regardless of ability. Ford himself, though, was a mixed bag; during the depression he employed gangs of enforcers to put down strikers by force, resulting in the death of a number of the very employees to whom he had made these promises.

The second time the American Dream teetered at the brink, it was salvaged by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who instituted large public works projects in the New Deal to sop up the unemployment caused by the crash. Much of the anti-communists ferver of the 50's was a reaction to the flirtations with Communism brought on by the depression. By the 50's, however, much of the motivation for this interest in communism had already dried up. Few people could see any reason to jump a horse that now seemed to have regained its feet, and McCarthyism was simply an exercise in demagoguery, and attempt to seize power by attacking a scapegoat constructed out of an internal enemy that was already too weak to defend itself. The anti-communists, however, had little faith in the judgement of the people, and shared a bizarre conviction with the communists themselves in the power, even the inevitability, of communism's ability to seduce and subvert the will of the people.

The power of the American economy lies not only in it productive capacity, but also in its ability to consume, the strength of its markets, and this is made possible by disposable income in the hands of the vast majority of its people. If there is no one to buy, production becomes pointless. This, at least, was understood by Ford when he paid his workers unprecedented wages, creating a market for his own goods. It is a lesson which needs to be relearned. Low prices based upon low wages leads a race to the bottom, and possibly to a situation where prices which cannot be lowered any further are still too high to be afforded by the majority of the population. This is the America of Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is a classic pyramid scheme, which can only work so long as it grows. Sam Walton was not a villain--he really did intend to share his success with his employees. But he created a trap. Wal-Mart's earlier employees, who were given shares of the company, prospered by holding pieces of an ever growing pie. But the pie has stopped growing, and the result is stagnation, with the vast majority of employees at the bottom stuck on the lowest rung of a ladder whose upper rungs are already too crowded. This stagnation prevents social mobility, setting the stage for the formation of class consciousness, and the death of the American Dream. At this point, Marxism becomes relevant again.

But Marxist solutions are little more than crutches at best, and unmitigated catastrophes at worst. They may be better than nothing, but that does not make them the best solution available. They gain traction only when no other solution is offered. The real solution must come from all levels of society. The working poor are active participants in their own ruin. The key is education. We must all understand that there are consequences to even the simplest of actions, that the price tag on something does not tell us the full cost of what we are buying. Every dollar we spend is a vote. If we spend our money on goods produced or sold on the basis of subsistence wages, we are voting for an economic system which will drag us to the subsistence level. In a globalized market, the poverty of the third world worker is as close as the goods they produce. If their wages are so low that they can never expect to climb out of the hole of poverty and at least buy what they produce, trade deficits become inevitable, and the very gentry who benefit from this arrangement in first world countries will soon find themselves beholden to foreign masters. The workers in third world countries need not make the same as workers in the first world, but they must at least make enough to become consumers themselves, producing a market sufficient to eventually equalize trade between the countries. Any other arrangement puts first world countries on borrowed time.

In the past, at least some of those who held positions of power had sufficient vision to see the wreckage ahead before they reached it, and were able to turn to avoid it. They understood that money will flow from rich to poor, the way air moves from a high pressure area to a low pressure area. This can happen through charity, through a well ordered economic system, or through theft. If charity is scarce, and the economic system is so skewed that vast disparities become entrenched, then the only means of protecting property becomes a police state. And a police state quickly becomes so expensive that a welfare state, by comparison, looks like a dime store bargain. In a police state, the thugs hire out to the highest bidder--but then, the rich are still paying the criminals. And when the thugs figure this out, they find themselves in a position where they can name their price. And there is a danger that the day will come when the enlisted men will turn their guns on their officers, as they did in Russia in 1917. If the police are amongst the working poor, and come to believe themselves trapped in that status, it is only a matter of time before they switch allegiances.

In America that switch is likely to be gradual, a slow erosion of the social contract. The result will not be revolutionary fervour, but a slow rot, powered by the assumption that everyone works in their self interest anyway, so why shouldn't I? If even the illusion of meritocracy collapses, then hard work and idealism will seem naive and be held in contempt. It is faith--real faith, not superstition--that binds a society together, faith even that supports the very value of money. Faith and the ruthless pursuit of wealth have always been bitter enemies; the antagonism between them rings out again and again in every scripture and fable. Evangelicals who rail against the materialism of science have completely missed the point. The real enemy is the materialism of greed, and American Christians seem to have made an alliance with Mammon. They have too many rich patrons to please. This will cost them dearly. It may cost them everything.

The Power of Stories

Barry Callaghan was on Big Ideas today, talking about the importance of stories. At one point he mentioned a book which tries to explain all of the strange and miraculous events of the Bible, attempting to establish an historical basis for them. The results are often comical; for example, mana is explained as being the excrement of insects deposited on leaves. Apparently, the Jews wandered around in the Sinai for forty years eating bug shit. This is particularly odd because the Sinai is rather small and can be crossed in four days, and the Egyptians at the time kept meticulous records of all caravans that crossed the desert, and the Jews are never mentioned. Callaghan points out that this inaccuracy does not denigrate the story as a story, but does heap ridicule upon those who would attempt to explain it as a mere description of events, a chronological record. Aristotle said that chronological descriptions of events are the lowest order of discourse. These are what Northrop Frye called the descriptive mode of language, the mode used in accounting, science, crafting, and empirical science. Mathematics and philosophy use the idealist mode of language, while religion and art employ the metaphorical. It is the vital importance of the metaphorical that Callaghan and Frye are defending.

It is ironic that fundamentalists, who rail against the rise of materialism, are themselves slaves to this mode of language, which is entirely materialistic. Far from being the defenders of the spiritual, they are spiritually tone-deaf. They are not merely unqualified to make pronouncements on religious matters--they are uniquely unqualified, the very last people one should consider as authorities on the matter. Their confusion of the spiritual and the material is evident in their reaction to works of fantasy. Unlike millions of child readers, these people cannot tell that the Harry Potter books are fantasy. The rise of modern fundamentalism is the triumph of materialism. The imaginations of these people are so atrophied that they cannot recognize or appreciate a good story when they hear one. Their only yardstick for the merit of a tale is whether is corresponds to physical events. And so, for them, the truth of the Bible must be literal for it to be true at all.

Stories are living pictures of ourselves and others, and the world as seen from human eyes. There is a correspondence to the world; not the world of matter, but the world of the heart. Good characters come to life when the story is told; we can play with them, imagine them in different circumstances. We can also put different characters in the situation, or imagine how the story would unfold if the situation was slightly different. Plot is the question, the characters are the answer, though they may be the wrong answer, leading to further plot entanglements or a tragic ending. The story can defy historical accuracy, get details wrong, even create an completely alternate world with different physical laws, but if the characters are unbelievable, the story will fall apart. The story has its own logic, its own will.

Twisting a story by slaving it to allegory is clumsy at best, a sign that the teller considers the story itself secondary. It is usually done because the teller distrusts works of pure fiction, believing they must be dedicated to a "higher purpose", or because the message must be cloaked in an allegory to avoid persecution--the story as disguise. The Narnia series by C.S. Lewis is an example of the former; Revelations in the Bible is an example of the latter. J.R.R. Tolkien loathed the Narnia books, believing that the art of the story always comes first. The appeal of the Narnia books do not extend beyond childhood; the stories simply do not have the depth or integrity to interest an adult. As for Revelations, it was written by a Christian in a Roman prison, and was a polemic against the Roman empire, predicting the fall of the Emperor and the Empire. St. John disguised it so completely to avoid detection by his captors that almost two millenia later we still can't make head or tales of most of it.

The merely descriptive, to the ancients, was but a poor cousin to poetry, a begger at the table of civilization. In our society this has been reversed. Poetry is of little value, art is merely a possible investment. Much of this might be blamed on the success of science, but science is not the culprit. Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Nerds, who form a large portion of scientific and technical communities, are notorious for their consumption of fantasy and science fiction, comic books, and fantasy role playing games. It seems that imagination and curiousity go hand in hand. Curiousity leads us to the knowledge that furnishes and fires our imagination, and imagination raises further questions and curiousity.

The prevalent prosaic attitude of our materialistic society is that both curiousity and imagination are of no value. Ronald Reagan asked why the federal government should spend money on intellectual curiousity. The question demonstrates a contempt for the world of ideas and dreams in favour of the material--and not the material world of nature, but the material world of commerce. It is not the laboratory that stands against the world of spirit, but the ledger. The war between money and spirituality is as old as religion itself. Although money may come as a result of following your dreams, the pursuit of money for it's own sake almost always produces garbage. Witness the stream of big budget drivel that pours out of Hollywood. The reason for this is that those for whom the primary goal is money are not interested in anything else except as a means to wealth. Curiousity and imagination take time that they do not have; more to the point, they do not consider it time well spent. There is no obvious material benefit to it. Time is money.

Fundamentalism serves a particularly American need: a religion of convenience. American Christian fundamentalism proves quite pliable in the face of economic demands; far from sharing Jesus' suspicious of wealth, American Christians regard wealth as evidence of divine favour. The very rigidity of fundamentalism is it's strongest selling point. It is clearly defined, easy to grasp, and if not effortless, it at least requires little thought. It therefore confines itself quite comfortably into the time allocated for it, and provides no distractions within the workaday world. Fundamentalists do not daydream. To dream is to wander out of the script. And having little experience imagination, they do not recognize it when it happens. A person well acquainted with works of the imagination will recognize the voice of a character in his head as simply a product of his own mind. Many fundamentalists do not seem to understand this. They take as real the voice of God or Jesus as they imagine it, convinced not only that the voice is from outside, but that its pronouncements are gospel truth. This sounds like psychosis, but I have heard so many born-agains claim to have two-way conversations with Jesus that I can only assume that this is common amongst them. I've enjoyed having many two-way conversations with fictional characters too, but I've always known they were products of my imagination.

Herein lies the proof of the power of imagination: if it is ignored or denigrated, it will assert itself in a way that cannot be denied. I am reminded with a story told in the movie My Dinner with Andre: a mathematician who prides himself on having no fantasy life whatsoever meets a faun in the forest, and returns daily thereafter to converse with it. Apparently his dreams, frustrated by his attempt to ignore them, erupted into the only world he considered worthwhile. So instead of a daydream, he got stuck with a full blown delusion. It seems that the same thing is becoming common amongst religious believers. But while the mathematician can decide to stop meeting the faun if it suddenly turns weird, a Christian would feel compelled to do what ever Christ told him to do. Psychotics are notorious for doing what the voices tell them. If religious believers cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and feel compelled to act upon it, at what point does religious conviction become insanity?