Postmodernism and Mediocrity

The disparity in intelligence amongst various members of the human race is one of the most disappointing facts that intellectuals, particularly left-leaning intellectuals, have to contend with. It is so disheartening that many on the left would like to deny that it even exists; they put this disparity down to lack of opportunity or education, poverty, or poor self-esteem. Or they invent a variety of other "intelligences". This is curious, by the way, given that so many condemn intellectuals for their arrogance, when in fact the fondest wish of many intellectuals is that they are no smarter than anyone else. Yet low intelligence is usually of dire consequence, unless it is openly admitted to be the case by all concerned, including those afflicted with it. This may be why the genuinely retarded may actually fare better than those of marginal capacity. We make allowances for the retarded, but those near the borderline are expected to play on an open field, and they get mauled.

Not understanding how the world works, they fail to grasp even the connections between their own actions and the consequences. Theodore Dalyrymple notes despairingly the use of the passive voice by common criminals. "I'm sorry for what happened," they say, as if they had nothing to do with it. The criminal act in question is often a spontaneous explosion of violence, or an impetuous act, which they felt they had no control over given the circumstances. As Phillip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment proves, circumstances can make monsters of us all. But with a certain competence in life comes the ability to avoid such hair trigger circumstances--to forsee the ends of a certain course and turn aside before it goes too far.

I'm happy to admit that a well developed facility for empathy seems to be somewhat independent of raw cognitive ability, and that this alone is sufficient to prevent the worst excesses that may result from poor rational judgement. But even this can go only so far; you can still do the wrong thing for the right reason. Doing the right thing requires understanding the situation.

In a conversation with my friend Pat, he pointed out that for religious believers below a certain threshold of intelligence, God is just some big friend in the sky who does stuff for them. Interesting: below a certain level of intelligence, religion is just magic--but then, so is science and technology. But this may also explain much about the rise of postmodernism. Originally a critique of dominant ideas which might skew or limit certain fields of inquiry, postmodernism quickly devolved into a blanket claim that everything was hocus pocus, the imposition of the will of the powerful on the weaker, which somehow charms or curses them into doing the bidding of their masters. Note the terminology--the imposition of will is also a common thread in magic. "As I will it, so mote it be." I suspect that postmodernism is in fact due to the influx of mediocre minds into academia, for whom nothing is comprehensible and so everything is a trick. They don't understand how anything could be true because they cannot see how anyone could figure out a way to establish the truth.

This may have happened as early as the late 19th century, as science became arcane enough that it took dedicated study to understand how it worked. I'm talking about Nietzsche here, who was the first to declare that science was the imposition of the views of a particular social faction (the slave mentality) upon the rest. One of the reasons that Nietzschians cannot recover morality from the ash heap of nihilism is that they reject reason as well as empathy; they don't understand the world, or the people who live in it. I have always sensed in Nietzsche an overcompensation--he talks about the over-man, but he himself was anything but. It reminds me over a rather pathetic book that came out in the 80's, Power sits at another table and observations on the business of power, written, as the very title admits, by a man so marginal that no one of any significance would even sit next to him. The very title drips with a fawning admiration for influential people, but no acquaintance or understanding of them. This man wanted to write about them, but he didn't understand them at all. It was all charisma, all shadow and appearance, signs and portents--all magic.

Nietzsche's disdain for the ethic of compassion, reason, science, and any form of morality appears to be the first postmodern attempt to move the goalposts, to create a fictitious standard of merit that one already meets, or to abandon all standards and so abandon the effort. It is one thing to say that the dominant religions are outdated and need to be fixed or replaced. It is another thing to throw everything out and replace it with a wisp of a fantasy. The ubermensch is often translated as the Superman, and it's no accident that this is also the name of a comic book character. Nietsche neither experienced power nor understood it. The nobility of old, whom he took as the model of his ideal man, themselves aspired to a model of justice, one which they invented. It was never foisted upon them by their slaves--who, even by Nietzsche's logic, never had the power to do so. That ideal was weak by our standards--it did, after all, include slavery itself, and the practice of slavery probably contributed more to undermining the ancient nobility than any mere philosophy. England's abandonment of the practice forced them to invent new ways of creating wealth, and made them a great empire. America's abolishment of slavery had the same effect. The fact is that the strong attain their position through forming alliances with others, by being good managers, and by dealing at least fairly enough that others would deal with them. They did not do it by simple fiat of will. Subservience makes slaves of everyone, even the masters.

What is The Secret but a dime-store repackaging of Nietzsche's Will to Power? The very term, Will to Power, is a magical invocation, more at home in the Magick of Aleister Crowley than in a work of philosophy. It is fond hope that the simple invocation of firmly held belief will somehow lead to the ends dreamed of. Ayn Rand does the same thing. Somehow, her character Roark's buildings apparently rise fully constructed out of his mind--the people who pay for them, build them, live in them, and work in them, don't seem to exist. Frank Lloyd Wright was great because he considered all these people. Roark would have been an abysmal failure as an architect.

I think that's why Nietzsche went catatonic--not because of the syphilis, or even from cosmic despair, but because he crashed when he realized that all he ever wanted to be was the over-man, and he never would be (his last book, Ecce Homo, was a raving proclamation of his own genius--something by then that I suspect he had lost all confidence in.) His despair was personal. And to anyone like him, who wants the claim that all of this stuff--science, truth, compassion, and evidence--don't matter, it would be a crushing defeat to admit that they do matter, and that they have no idea how any of it works, or how to go about it.

Farewell, Harry Potter

I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on Sunday two weeks ago--the whole thing in about six hours over the course of the day. I had planned to discipline myself, limit it to small portions each night over a week. I couldn't do it. I never could.

J. K. Rowling is a master of character and story, using magic to magnify and illuminate her characters--which is precisely what magic should do in a story. The metaphor of magic is the logic of the heart writ large, in language that all can understand. Well, almost all. But anyone who cannot understand and appreciate the Potter books has no business reading the Bible--no business at all. So we will dismiss the objections of religious pedants as the braying of spiritual incompetents, and move on.

Her prose is economical and tight, ideal in a storyteller, with flawless dialogue and description which illuminates in brilliant and relevant flashes. This, to most of us, is all that matters. The opposite of this is Joyce, who chose to bury his stories in prose so opaque that the story was lost. Neil Gaiman, a writer I also greatly admire, is a member of group called the post-Joycian society, whose main argument was that story matters, and that language should be put to the service of that end. Robert Fulford celebrated the triumph of narrative, the return to the primacy of storytelling. Rowling's Potter series is all this, with a vengeance, a stake in the heart of those who would indulge themselves at the price of simple human connection.

The best, I think, is her final chapters, to which she had been building for seventeen years. Nothing was left to chance here, each word chosen with utmost care, particularly the last chapter before the epilogue, where the battle comes to a climax. Every dot is connected, the outcome built out of pieces assembled in all of the books. As a programmer, I can easily debug a broken chain of logic, missing links that make the outcome less than certain, gaps which demand too much suspension of disbelief to be tolerated. Even in some hard science fiction books, I find a certain abitrary nature to the conclusion, a free-falling speculation that renders the ending, not surprising, but simply radically contingent and unconvincing. Rowling makes none of these mistakes, and yet, she is dealing with the dream logic of magic. The closest I can think of is Ursula K. LeGuin. There are reasons for what happens, reasons based in character, in circumstance, and in the rules of her magic system.

I remember a writer who, giving advice to other writers, said that you have to like people to make your readers care about your characters. This is that certain something that is often missing from fiction; the nagging doubt as to why you should bother reading about the people in the book. I've read books of far superior writers who are nevertheless a trial of endurance to finish. Slogging through three hundred pages to encounter, once again, the conclusions known to anyone acquainted with the black dog that comes in the waking hours of a troubled night, seems a waste of my time and self-indulgent of the writer. We are all familiar with the problems of this world. Have you any suggestions about how to meet them? But I have also met, even amongst the most flawed and troubled of anti-heroes, characters I identify with. Empathy illuminates even the darkest of souls.

Rowling's characters are all near and dear to us, even the most flawed. Voldemort himself is a study in sociopathy, a serial killer in the terminal stages of madness, a supreme narcissist impervious to all indications of his own limitations. The best of her characters are close friends, the worst so accurate to type that those who have met them in our own lives wonder where Rowling met the real thing. But the theme of redemption runs throughout the stories; redemption by love, by courage, by loyalty. Harry's greatest strength is not his magical skills, though they are formidable. Harry forms bonds of loyalty, by forgiving, encouraging, and supporting others. He's not perfect--sometimes you want to slap him to wake him up. But if he were too good, you would doze off. Harry--and Dumbledore--are already close to the limits of human perfection. Their flaws are what make them real. Without them, these characters would be made of cardboard.

In this book, Dumbledore is brought into focus, taken from the pedestal and made human. The mistakes hinted at on the lake in the sixth book are revealed, but Rowling does an excellent job on this--first by trashing Dumbledore through the muck journalism of Rita Skeeter, and then telling Dumbledore's real story, through those actually involved. Harry makes his mistakes too, but when he hits his stride, the story takes off. There is a repeat of book five, where the obsessions of Voldemort spill over into Harry's mind, brought on by Harry's own willingness to understand his enemy (is this really a failing?) but tragedy snaps him out of this, and he learns how to avoid this mistake from then on. After this, the action never really stops, although side excursions occur to fill out the story and connect the dots. This allows the reader to rest in what would otherwise be an action rollercoaster.

I cannot think of any books more suitable for the moral development of children, growing, as Harry does, from child to adult. Rereading book one, I found it disappointingly simple, having grown used to the complexity of character and language of book seven. These books are meant to be read one per year, from the age of 11 to the age of 17. Yet through all, Harry, Dumbledore, Hermione, Ron, and Harry's friends display a nobility and courage that makes one reconsider the hard, judgemental stances that we take towards people we consider to be unworthy of our time. Harry's sufferage and mercy towards the most unappetizing of characters is reminiscent of Frodo's tolerance of Gollum--who, in the end, salvages Frodo's quest from ruin, when Frodo himself seems beyond help. As with Tolkien, faith in others is the right choice, while distrust and contempt lead to a bad end. Even the best of Rowling's characters makes this mistake from time to time, and learns from their mistakes the hard way. Rowling, like Tolkien, understands what real faith consists of, and never confuses it with mere superstition.

The finish is spectacular, though I would have preferred more of an epilogue. There is another book to be written, in my opinion; the mopping up of the death eaters, the banishment of the dementors, Harry's answer to his detractors and his rise to the rank of renowned auror, and the grief for the fallen. There are many new beginnings and final endings still to be rounded out. Perhaps, after a few years, Rowling will feel the tug again, and write this final chapter. But for now, at least, this is enough.

Farewell, Harry. We will miss you.

Altruism and Tribalism

I have been thinking of David Sloan Wilson's argument against Dawkins, in which he stresses group selection and the regulatory role of religion in social conduct. I have already pointed out one of the flaws in it--a major flaw, in my opinion, which is that religion may be subverted and this regulatory role corrupted for personal gain. Wilson's excursion into viral reproduction seems rather beside the point--I fail to see what an overly reproductive virus has to do with human altruism. The closest behavioural equivalent to this case would seem to be our domestication of animals.

The issue of group selection is critical to his argument. Here I have to side with Dawkins; the unit of transmission is the gene, and the vehicle in which the resulting trait is tested and selected for is the individual. This, I think, is something that Dawkins got exactly right. You cannot pass along a trait you don't have, and those who don't reproduce do not pass on their traits. Group dynamics, however, may enhance the surviveability of members of that group. This does not make the group the unit of selection, but it does mean that the traits of members of the group are more likely to survive. It may well be that homo sapiens outcompeted neanderthals through their ability to form extended social networks and long range trade--if so, this is an example where practices between members of a group enhance the fitness of the individuals. Dawkins himself talks about this dynamic in the chapter of the Selfish Gene entitled Nice Guys Finish First. Individuals who work cooperatively will tend to appear in clusters linked by family ties. The mutual support afforded by this trait would give the members of this extended clan a considerable advantage over those who did not share it, and were not part of the clan.

Yet, to preserve this trait amongst the clan, the members of the clan would also likely evolve a desire to screen entrants to the clan through marriage and reproduction, so that the members of the clan would 'breed true', and offspring would also have the altruistic trait. Those who did not have this trait would be refused entry into the clan through marriage or sexual access. The tribe would come to identify itself with a code which stressed reciprocity and interdependence over individual gain. As a signal that one shares this code, certain expensive behaviours would be required which indicated that the individual holds certain values to take precedence over individual gain. These behaviours are not like the peacock's tail--an extravegance which advertises fitness sufficient to survive a significant handicap. Instead, they are behaviours which benefit others, but which work in tandem with matching traits in the tribe, allowing the potential suitor, should he join the tribe, to reap the benefits of tribal altruism. The handicap becomes an advantage.

Amongst the members of the tribe, those who wish to specialize in setting the code of the tribe must exhibit altruistic behaviour towards the tribe to an extraordinary degree. Their generosity and self-sacrifice must be exceptional. This is the root of our regard for heroes, those whose physical and economic generosity go beyond the call of duty. Amongst the Norsemen, kings were often called "ring givers", cementing loyalty and a reputation for generosity with extravagant gifts. The heroes of ancient legend were men who fought, and died, for the protection of the tribe. In many cultures, even families who are not wealthy may push their resources to the limit in lavish dinners and parties, and in public acts of philanthropy. This display of personal sacrifice for the common good establishes their reputation as a member in good standing, worthy to draw upon the generosity of others in time of need.

Ascetics make the most extravagant display of personal sacrifice, giving away all that they have, owning no property, and having no means of self-sustenance beyond the generosity of others. All of their energies are turned towards the tribal code. This ostentatious display of selflessness is no less than an attempt to raise altruism to a perfect art. In return for this severe handicap, the ascetic is granted an unparalleled reputation. His advice is sought by all, even by the wealthy and powerful. His sacrifice is a shiboleth, a stamp of authenticity and authority, for by its very nature no purely self-interested person would choose this path.

Amongst Catholics with large families, it was a tradition that the first son would take over the family fortune, and the second would enter the priesthood. The priest, of course, took a vow of poverty, and renounced all reproductive rights--apparently a losing strategy, from a reproductive point of view. But the contribution of one child to regulative class gained the family access to the common wealth, tied them closer to community, and buffered them from transitory misfortune. The other siblings stood to gain much from this association. It was the equivalent of attaining membership in a welfare state, from which one could draw in time of need. That, at least, was the unspoken intent. As I have already pointed out in my essay on Sanctity, this is not how it usually works out.

The dark side of altruism is the screening process--the desire of the tribe to deny access to freeloaders. Freeloaders have two means of gaining entry: direct admission, and genetic admission through offspring. Because of the much greater investment in offspring by females, the sexual conduct of women comes under much greater scrutiny. It is far easier to disown the offspring of an undesirable female of another tribe than it is to disown the offspring of the females of one's own tribe. The philanderings of a wayward son may be accepted, even joked about, but the illegitimate offspring of a female, by a male who demonstrates his lack of commitment to the tribe by refusing responsibility, is another matter. The double standard should be readily apparent. Birth control also makes these practices obsolete.

Entrance into the tribe is strictly guarded, by elaborate courtship rituals, parental and familial approval, and a long process of familiarization. Strangers must prove themselves. This is the root of resistance to immigration, in which foreigners are admitted to the common wealth of the nation, and resistance to the welfare state, where simple need is granted access without consideration of past contribution. The welfare state, and immigration, rely on a more optimistic view of human nature--that most people will contribute when they are in a position to. Given the thousands of years of tribal selection, this is a reasonable assumption. The welfare state also recognizes that in a fluidly mobile society with large population concentrations, people can be fall through the cracks. Individuals may be separated from their families and friends, and in large cities, you may know hardly any of the people you see.

Expulsion from the tribe can occur in cases where freeloading is observed amongst existing members of the tribe. Those who have previously demonstrated their commitment to the tribe are far more likely to be given aid in hard times than those who are chronically in need. The temporarily unfortunate are a better risk. And there are different types of poverty; the ascetic demands little and contributes much, while the genuinely incompetent or selfish are a net drain. In Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt bitterly recalls how the Catholic Church cast his family aside as lost causes. This was a direct contradiction to Christian ethics, but not to old instincts. It also proved to be a miscalculation; none of McCourt's family, other than his father, proved to be chronically incompetent, and they never returned to the church.

In all of this, we can see some of the rudiments of religion. One thing notably absent in this picture is God himself. God, or the gods, were invoked as a catch-all explanation to natural events; we not only have a predilection to seeing intentionality where none exists, we also regard intentional conscious beings as atomically simple. Our ability to deal with other conscious beings is so specialized and deeply ingrained that we mistake a human mind, the most complex natural phenomena that we know of, as a fundamental building block. But God as cause or intentional being does not require the moral aspect of religion, and the moral aspect of religion does not seem to require God. Cognitive errors inspire belief in the God of Creation, but not the God of Judgement.

But the character of God is an ideal shorthand for the code of the tribe. We are ideally suited for telling stories about people, and telling a story about a divine persona which embodies our ethical principles is the simplest, most efficient, and highest fidelity means of transmitting shared values. The God of Judgement becomes fused with the God of Creation. Loyalty to the god of the tribe is an indicator of loyalty to the tribe. The god favours the tribe, the tribe is united under the god, and the values of the tribe are expressed in the character of the divine personality. The God of Judgement is the God of the Tribe.

Uniting the two gave a ring of objective reality to the morals of the tribe. Their laws were written in stone. Absolute power, reality, and goodness were united in one subject. The contemplation of the deity bound the tribe together, in a way that abstract principles could not, particularly to an illiterate population.

This answers a question that has plagued me for a long time: why the religious obsession with sex? But if sex is the principle access point to membership to the tribe, permitting undesirable traits to enter the population, then this may be one of the oldest parts of religion, possibly predating religion itself. It also explains why domination of women is so common, and why female genital mutilation and even honour killing have appeared in multiple cultures--Islam is used to justify these practices, but they are not part of the religion itself, and even conservative Imams have no problem denouncing them. All of these practices guard entry points into the tribe by curbing female sexuality. But beyond their sheer barbarity, the exasperating thing about these practices is that they don't even serve their original purpose. Birth control would do that, yet sheer force of tradition maintains these primitive practices. Once again, our genes make fools of us.

Complexity

This evening I was sitting at the cafe reading, and at the table next to me were a couple of men talking about their faith. One was avidly quoting to the other certain passages from the Bible, in a way that suggested that they were trying to understand the rules laid down by God on how to live. Perhaps the only parallel to this mode of discussion in my own experience is in trying to figure out the rules of a game, mathematical methods, or how a body of code works. They were trying to arrive at the simplest way of getting right with God--this, for them, was the way to figure out how to live, by a simple process of rote performance.

During their conversation, it became obvious that they were struggling with the meaning of many of the words, as they were using the King James version; words, like asunder, which I understand and use rather commonly. They talked about prophecies in Revelations, and I overheard one saying to the other "Gee, I hope that doesn't happen here." The other answered, "No, that probably won't happen here in Ottawa." I should perhaps also point out that they seemed to be rather heavily medicated, slow in speech and movement.

It is perhaps one of the greatest disappointments to those, particularly on the left, who would like to believe in human perfectability and the blank slate, that there are many people who simply cannot grasp the complexity of modern life, and who may reach desperately for a simpler model of reality. Raw intelligence, unfortunately, is a fixed quantity that resists all efforts towards radical enhancement. Many other things can be learned, but even these are capped by innate intellectual ability. Diligence will overcome much, and without it even intelligence will come to nothing, but certain limits are set at birth. I resisted this idea for a long time--it seems so elitist, and so undemocratic.

Those who are saddled with such restrictions must take as a great blessing the idea that there is only one book that need be mastered to understand life in all its complexity. Many of us who have read thousands of books still feel that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg, and still encounter daily ideas which leave us wondering, "Why haven't I ever heard of this before?" The more you know, the more you realize you don't know. But what must it be like to not even understand the words, let alone the ideas? It must seem to them that if they can just understand this one book, they can get a handle on all of it.

That book, however, is flawed, compromised, often dealing with subject matter that is reached for but never grasped, written in a code that has been lost, by disparate voices that can never be truly reconciled. It is archaic, sometimes brutally primitive in its ethical advice, poetic rather than descriptive, rife with factual inaccuracies, and in all liklihood is largely opaque to anyone who has not also read thousands of other books which deal with its influences, historical setting and references, issues of translation, and corrections to its long litany of mistakes. It is first and foremost an invitation, indeed an imperative, to learn, rather than an excuse to remain ignorant; the first step on the journey, not the destination. Nor is there any reason to assume that the journey leads anywhere remotely like the starting point.

But the Bible is also, first and foremost, a book of mythology. To understand the trick, you need to see it done. You must also read Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Blake, and more recently, Frank Herbert, Neil Gaiman, Phillip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, J.R.R Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, Ursula K. Le Guin, and other writers of fantasy and science fiction. You must understand that words may have power without being literally true, that to the ancients, the metaphorical mode of language was of greater importance than the merely descriptive. You must understand that a story can be just a story and still be true, but not in the way that a manual or a research report is true. And you must understand that there are other stories that are just as true, if not more so, and that inspiration did not end two thousand years ago.

And yet, this book sits alone, without warning, in hotel rooms all over the world, as if it were sufficient unto itself. Its very presence alone in a bedside table makes the most grandiose and misleading of claims: this is all you need.

Sanctity

Long ago while playing Dungeons and Dragons, my character was presented with a supposedly good cleric whom he suspected was evil. To test him, I asked him to lead a service in the temple of that god. The cleric did so without ill effect--but later, it turned out that he was evil, and not even a cleric. I pointed out to the friend running the game that the god in question would have struck down the pretender for doing what he did. He shrugged and said that there were plenty of real clerics who were quite evil, but led religious services all the time. What he didn't understand was that in the fantasy world of D&D, the gods were real--and that changed everything. I realized then that a fantasy world would be remarkably different from our own, even our own in ancient or medieval times--for in our own world, people merely believed that magic was real. Real magic and real gods, however, would radically alter the social, political, and economic reality in which humans lived. Clerics would be afforded sanctity--the certainty, in the eyes of others, that the cleric is everything he appears to be, because there is a divine authority watching over him constantly, advising him, and ready to unseat him should he violate the codes of conduct.

Understanding what some of these differences would be can help us to understand some of the unspoken premises that believers and the superstitious hold. If the gods are real, then they interfere in the affairs of men. That's what it means do be omnipotent--or even, for your old school pagan gods, very powerful--you notice events in the world and affect them. Even those that are not omnipotent will have their attention drawn to acts of worship. This means that those who lead this worship will be under the direct scrutiny of their god, and must be scrupulously faithful to the moral tenents of their faith. This is why Divine Right was such a useful ploy; the king can't be all bad, or God wouldn't let him rule, would he?

Now consider a large group of people operating upon this premise. Their leaders cannot be wrong, because God would not permit it. The assurance and peace of mind that this would provide cannot lightly be written off. If they are lucky enough to have a genuinely ethical clergy and competent, moral leaders, then they will enjoy the best of all possible situations; their world is in good hands, and they don't have to worry about it. If, on the other hand, they have a leader like Jim Baker, or a pedophile priest, or God help them (if you'll excuse the expression), Jim Jones, then they are sheep being led to the slaughter.

But still, what are the odds that the worst will happen?

Pretty good, actually. There is nothing so attractive to the truly villainous as a station in society which is above question. As Frank Herbert put it, it is not so much that power corrupts, but that power attracts the corruptable. And there is no power so attractive to the sociopathic as the veil of sanctity, an armor which deflects all accusations. The worst of humanity claim the highest of motivations. Bin Laden claims the sanction of Islam; Stalin began his career in a seminary and later invoked the secular faith of communism; Hitler and Goebbels invoked Christianity and public morality while embarking on a course that was nothing short of Satanic. Charlie Manson's followers thought he was Christ. L. Ron Hubbard, Sun Myung Moon, and a long list of cult leaders attest to the attraction of sanctity for those without conscience. Idolatry, again, arises and proves itself the corrupter of the religious impulse.

Sanctity lays at the very root of problems which occur when politics are mixed with religion. David Sloan Wilson, objecting to Dawkins characterization of religion, talks about the Jains. The impoverished ascetics go from household to household begging--but in households which do not adhere to the customs and ethics of Jainism, the ascetic will refuse the food--a strong rebuke and embarassment to the members of the household. This, Wilson argues, serves as a strong policing mechanism for the members of the community. But take note--the ascetics are dirt poor! This simple fact, this lack of political and economic power, makes the role of the ascetic completely unappealing to the sociopath, who is, after all, out for personal gain. The police are themselves policed by the extreme sacrifices demanded of them.

Contrast this with Christian and Islamic religious leaders. Bishops live in a palace, sit on a throne, wear a ring and robe of office, and are, in all respects, nobility--the last nobility left in many Western countries. Televangelists and the leaders of Mega-Churches control pools of wealth in the millions, are afforded expenses and large homes, and wield great political power. Imams pass laws and often control the government, and draw upon the wealth of the Mosque. All of these people are in a position which would make the unscrupulous drool.

Like the Jain ascetics, Jesus and his followers lived hand to mouth. So too did the Cathar ascetics. Indeed, Jesus' career was so disastrous to his own personal fortune that Christians felt compelled to put a happy ending on it. Yet we instinctively understand that where the lure of wealth and power is, we are likely to find people of questionable motives--or we would know this if we are not blinded by faith. Even if the ascetics get it wrong (and there is no guarantee that they don't), we understand that the mistake is an honest one. Wilson takes issue with Dawkins for dismissing all religion--and yet, the overwhelmingly predominant form of religion which is now rising in the West holds the impoverished in contempt and believes that God will shower you with wealth if you pay proper obeisance. In the Muslim world, religion is politics. Like so many of religion's defenders, Wilson has mistaken a small proportion of believers as a representative sample. But they aren't, and I suspect that they never were.

More pizza messages

This is part of what I do during my day job--tell people to order pizza on thursdays (so I get mine cheap.) It has since become expected that I will be inventive in this venture. So here are some of the brain farts that have resulted.

Thursday Pizza Spam
=====================================================
Viagra! Make quick money at home! This adorable five year old child is dying a horrible death because you don't pray hard enough! And of course, order Pizza! All of this can be yours for the low low price of $5.25 for half a slice, if you order now and forward this message to at least 20 of your friends.

If you don't forward this message, terrible things will happen to you. One guy I knew refused to forward this message, and he was sodomized by a grizzly bear for six hours. Granted, he's a twisted freak who spent three years training the bear to do this, but still, YOU DON'T WANT THIS TO HAPPEN TO YOU! Another guy I know drank rat pee from the top of a soda can and died. Well, I didn't know him that well. Never met, him at all, in fact. Alright, I MADE HIM UP! But this is the kind of nasty stuff that will happen to you if you don't immediately proceed to clog the inbox of everyone you know with this digital turd.

And remember, when writing spam or scare mail, THE CAPS LOCK KEY IS YOUR FRIEND!!!

Deadwood Pizza
=====================================================
Timmy the Censor Squirrel says "Careful, Kids, bad words ahead!"

It has come to my attention that this is yet another fucking wednesday, which requires that this poor benighted gin-sodden cocksucker, namely myself, extend welcome and induces his fellow bit-bulls to order some fucking pizza. Now I am usually required to come up with something fucking clever for the occasion, which Jennifer suggested should take the tone of dialogue from Deadwood, being a cross between velvet Victorian verbiage and skankiest words that ever seeped out of a whorehouse door. This I have and am doing, so if you're feeling fucking offended by all this, lighten up, it's all in the spirit of the thing (160 fucking proof, mind you.)

And if you're feeling so anyway, go fuck yourself. And I shot that squirrel and cut his fucking nuts off.

In Russia, Pizza orders you!
=====================================================
Comrade, you don't know how lucky you are to have pizza order on network and get pizza so fast and easy. In Russia, only pizza place available was Ivanovich Podpull Yackoff's place, Gulag Pie, where pizza was delivered within thirty days or sucked to be you. And even when pizza came, the delivery man took some for family, and the Kommissariat took piece, and sometimes pizza was censored, as when pepperoni was confiscated for being decadent and imperialist. And only one drink was available, vodka, and sometimes I think crust was baked sawdust, but still, was only way to get book by Solzhenitsyn, if you could read words through sauce...

Pizza Evolves!
=====================================================
According to the Journal of Irreproducible Results, two American scientists known only as Bubba and Jed have discovered what they claim to be the fossil an early proto-pizza, located on a dig beneath a Brooklyn land-fill site. "Yep," said Bubba, "you can still kinda make out the primitive pepperoni on it." Asked whether this constituted additional evidence for evolution, Jed said he hadn't really thought of it, or anything else. Fundamentalist Christians caught wind of this and staged a protest against Godless pizza, just in case. "Somebody told me that this is an insult to everything I believe in, so I'm holding this sign they gave me," said an aggressively buxom woman named Tawny. Reporters called on Richard Dawkins, author of the Selfish Gene and staunch defender of evolution, at his home in Oxford. "They're all barking mad" said Dawkins, "And so are you. It's three o'clock in the bloody morning!" Dawkins then ran the drunken reporters out of his house with a cricket bat.

Fully evolved pizza is available for order here.

Cosmic Pizza
=====================================================
[Begin Transmission]
"I'm approaching the monolith now."
"Be careful, Dr. Bowman."
"Roger. Slowing and holding at... three feet from alien artifact."
"Can you describe the object?"
"It appears to be about two and a half feet long and orange."
"Uh, roger that. Are there any distinctive markings on it?"
"There seem to be some sort of strange alien markings on it... Pizza Pizza, I think. Moving the camera around... Can you see it."
"Yes, we have a visual."
"I'm moving in. It looks like some sort of container."
"Roger. Approach with caution, Dave."
"Okay, I think I see an opening. I'm going to try to pry the container open. It's... ..."
"Bowman, we have lost visuals! Dave, are you there?.... Please respond..."
"...My God, it's full of stars..."
[End Transmission]

Star Wars Pizza
======================================================

STAR WARS

Episode 7: Thursday Pizza
-------------------------

It has been thirty years since the fall of the Empire.
The Republic has been restored, and they fed all those
annoying Ewoks to the Wookies. Everyone is just peachy.
Well, almost everyone. Fluke Streetwalker has cut his own
head off trying to shave with his lightsaber, Princess Layer
Organic is considering Empress as a possible career path,
and compulsive porn pirate Hand Solo has been busted hauling
fifty thousand copies of Jawa Lust.

But a new threat is emerging even as you read this. George
Lucas is threatening to devote this entire movie to Jar Jar
Binks, and we all know what that means; five more years of
people from LucasArts wining about how piracy is ruining their
business, instead of admitting that George can't write character
or dialogue to save his life and his best movies were rescued
by script doctors...

Ahem... sorry. A new threat is emerging. The evil Dr. Camm has
kidnapped the plucky but stylish droid Arty Deco and his
suspiciously effete cohort, Pee Seepio, and has plans to install
Windows on both of them and turn them into mail servers, which may
soon be delivering things like Thursday Pizza messages. We join
our heroes as the Princess attempts to fix the awful lines that
have been written for her...

Iranian Pizza
=========================================================

Welcome to the Theocracy of Iran. During your stay, please observe the following fatwas.

Pizza is no longer pizza, but shall be known as elastic loaves. Pizza is made by infidels. Danishes are no longer danishes, but Roses of the Prophet Mohammed. Danishes are made by infidels. You cannot get a bottle of Shiraz in Shiraz, that is made only by infidels in Australia now. Death to infidels. In fact, all alcohol is prohibited, unless you find a private rave in Tehran, where you can get anything and party like it's 1999. If you cannot find a private rave, or if we find you at a private rave, you can party like it's 999. A guard will assist you in getting suitably medieval.

The weather today is a sunny 41 degrees, 48 degrees for women in a jilbab, or 55 and dark inside a bhurka. Yes, we live in the desert and dress our women like polar bears. We would invite you to have a pleasant time during your stay, but all fun is prohibited. A member of the Revolutionary Guard will be around to confiscate your smiles shortly.

Thank you, and have a day.

====================================================

There is more... much more. All work and no play makes Mark a crazy boy. Repeat 50,000 times. You get the idea. What more could you ask for?

Dead things. More teeth.

Nihilism, and the Last Dogma

The root of fanaticism is not faith, but a lack of faith. It is a lack of faith in everything but God--and ultimately, in God as well.

If someone lacks faith in humanity, in the ability of most ordinary people to do the right thing most of the time, then values must be based elsewhere than in human judgment or an innate moral sense which may or may not be well developed. To establish a moral code, these people must see it as being based upon an extra-human absolute authority. The slow, gradual accumulation and preservation of human wisdom is not enough for them; humanity is ultimately flawed, and there can be no moral system that relies upon merely human judgment.

Meanwhile, even as they reject religious dogma, there is a single article of dogma that is not questioned: Kierkegaard's Either/Or, between religious devotion and nihilism. Religious leaders argue for a false dichotomy between absolute Divine certainty and nihilism—the establishment of values must be seen to originate from Divine authority. Inherent in this argument is the premise that human beings cannot establish truth by any means, cannot discover values on their own, cannot even improve their circumstances. This last fragment of religious dogma is never questioned, never even examined--it lingers as a background premise, unstated. To reject the church is to reject objective moral standard and drift in a current of mere opinion. But if they follow a religion, the individual decision of what values they assent to must be hidden from view; the source must be external, rather than the product of their own judgment. It is they who choose the religion, the church, the minister, the interpretation, yet they must deny their own role in this choice, or lose confidence in that choice. The perfect is the enemy of the good. They demand perfect morality, or none at all.

This is a demand for absolute certainty which we as human beings can never claim. The root of this is a lack of faith in human beings, so that the human element must be removed from the mix in order for it to be considered sound. Without religion, there can be no morality. If they accept religion, they must conceal, even from themselve, their own responsibility for their choices. And yet, they continue to make these decisions, but take them to come from above. The idea that we might have evolved a fairly trustworthy sense of ethical conduct never occurs to them.

So, the problem seems to be solved. Their lack of faith in humanity is countered by their faith in God. But not so fast—if the judgment of human beings cannot be trusted, then they must be told what to do by their religious elders. This may include telling them how to vote, but really, democracy itself is flawed, because it leaves too much in the hands of poor foolish mortals. Best to do away with it entirely. The same can be said for any law established by human beings, any knowledge discovered by human beings, and even for personal private choice. All these must be brought under the aegis of God. Freedom leads to ruin. Liberty can only be surrender to God. The community is a single body with a single brain--God, as interpreted by his clerics. The body, or any part of it, when it is not subject to God, becomes a mere beast. Man is fallen, he has lost his original innocence and become tainted, and nothing he can do on his own is worth anything.

And yet, every part of religion is covered with greasy human fingerprints. God, apparently, is such a crippled, powerless, feebleminded invalid that he cannot defend himself, cannot even raise his voice enough to for us to hear him, but must be protected by his apparently fatally flawed human followers. Not only can he not punch his way out of paper bag, he can't even make a decent man. It's almost as if his followers were fighting to defend their own frail egos. Do you see a pattern here? The nihilism which underlies fanatacism eventually eats the religion itself. Ultimately, the evil that they see in humanity comes to triumph over all. God cannot save even himself, let alone his followers. The Devil is lord of this world. The cool-aid, the suicide bomb, is waiting. The nihilism presented as the alternative to faith, and which lies at the root of fanaticism, devours all.

This is the last dogma, the one that lingers long after the rest is gone, and it springs from a profound distrust of human beings, probably learned at an early age. Underlying the most fanatical form of faith is a deep and abiding lack of faith, a hard core of nihilism, and that is where this article of dogma originates. But the either/or itself is false.

FUBAR

FUBAR is a military acronym for the state of a target after a bomb has hit it. It stands for the tongue-in-cheek expression "Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition." It also perfectly expresses the state of nearly all religions.

David Hume argued that ethical principles rest upon personal preferences and cultural traditions; that you cannot get an ought from an is. Yet these preferences and traditions rest upon innate cognitive building blocks similar to those which support reason and aesthetics. As Steven Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists point out, we are not born a blank slate, but come into the world with a set of tools which act like simple proteins, capable of constructing complex rational and moral systems but which, themselves, are so basic as to be indescribable. And yet, we employ these faculties constantly.

One cannot argue against the validity of reason without employing reason itself. The contradiction in the argument lies in the very act of posing the argument itself. What is generally not realized is that moral arguments--even those against the very reality of ethics itself--rely upon the moral faculty as well. The very act of engaging in discussion is dependent upon an exercise of concern, a moral ordering of values--indeed, the very act of talking to another relies upon a continuous exercise of reciprocity, itself based upon the valuation of ideas and the act of empathy. Profoundly autistic children, who lack the ability to mirror the thoughts and emotions of others, become incapable of even this level of engagement--they lack the empathy required to connect. And even the most repugnant of criminals, serial killers, for example, operate in a cooperative mode most of the time, and it is this vestigial level of moral judgement which allows them to escape detection for as long as they do. The very attempt to argue against some innate capacity for moral judgement, and against the objective nature of that capacity, stands as proof of the very thing it attempts to deny. And the fact that this innate ability was selected through evolutionary pressures establishes it as a product of objective reality. It reflects a condition of material existence which selected it as the best survival strategy.

Of course, human beings can become morally stunted, just as they can become irrational. The development of this capacity into a fully principled ethical system takes time and effort, just as learning the principles of critical thinking takes work. Indeed, critical thinking itself is required for the effort of developing a system of ethics. The problem arises when a system of ethics established by tradition overrides the moral faculty itself. In this case, the followers of this ethical ideology become passive subscribers rather than active participants in developing their moral code. The very ethical faculty which creates such systems becomes atrophied. The tradition becomes an obstacle to genuine moral consideration, and those who accept it come into possession of an ethical code which is rigid, incomplete, and usually inconsistent. Having delegated these judgements to an external authority, adherents to this ideology have no capacity to judge that authority itself, nor to fill in the gaps introduced by novel situations and new information.

In the scientific method, this type of dogmatism is considered abhorrent. Examples of it include Lysenkoism, Creationism, various forms of 'alternative' medicine, and other forms of pseudo-science. Each of these refuses to respect the weight of evidence and instead begins with a dogmatic belief which adherents then attempt to shore up by ignoring huge volumes of contradictory evidence. Reality is subjugated to opinion. While it is true that the scientific community sometimes lags behind the curve of new evidence, this is the result of a general conservativism which resists wild speculation, rather than a genuine resistance to evidence. What proponents of these ideologies do not understand is that science is not a set of dogmas, but a method for refining our understanding of reality. It is not based upon accepted authority, but upon a continous effort to check each other's work, in which the rewards go to those who successfully challenge accepted ideas, as well as to those who make new discoveries or establish better theories. The better established a theory, the more attractive a target it becomes--but the challenge must be based upon solid research. Pseudo-science eschews the hard work of science in favour of flimsy unsubstantiated claims, usually with the intent of fleecing the gullible. This preference for dogma over truth is just called bad science. Religion has a better term for it: idolatry.

Idolatry can be summarized as a preference for a particular representation of a thing over the reality of the thing itself. It is not the simple act of representation, but the uncritical acceptance, and even worship, of that representation. And contrary to the beliefs of many religious adherants, a representation need not be graphical or concrete in nature. It can be a book, an opinion, an idea, or a current or historical figure of authority. The critical factor is that this representation is imposed upon the real in such a way that reality itself becomes obscured. Truth is sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and opinion. Worshippers are caught in the Veil of Maya, trapped in a world they have constructed which they have pulled over their eyes to hide the truth.

According to virtually all religions, this is the greatest sin you can commit. And yet these same religions have become encrusted with the products of moral intuitions, products which believers take to be the final word. The religions have become a set of dogmas rather than a method, and the dogmas have become brute obstacles to the development of this central moral faculty. The religions have stalled, ground to a halt under the weight of their own traditions and the idolatrous regard for those traditions. Rather than approaching the originators of these traditions, to attempt to understand them and extend and adapt that understanding to novel circumstances, the faithful continue to worship them from afar, eternal children to a long dead parent.

While the pronouncements of these historical figures may be an improvement upon the primitive moral state of the most ignorant members of our society, they also impede the progress of people who can and should know better. Entire civlizations remain in orbit to bronze age and iron age ethical positions, which constantly threaten to pull us back into a state of near barbarism. In the case of Islam, the idolatry of a single figure, Mohammed, and a single book, the Koran, has created a cultural black hole from which few can escape. As Homer Simpson said about alcohol, Islam has become the cause of and the solution to all of life's problems. It is Marx's opiate of the masses, which dulls the pain that might cause them to seek more realistic solutions. It is also the perfect meme, in that it behaves as a cognitive virus which is almost incurable. The level of idolatry at work here is made glaringly obvious by the Danish cartoon controversy, in which millions of Muslims were apparently scandalized by mere drawings of a man. The proper reaction should have been to point out that they were themselves engaging in an orgy of idolatry, and that they themselves had beecome the infidels.

This lesson is not lost on Fundamentalist Christians, who are seeking to construct a black hole of their own centered of the idolatry of Christ and the Bible. This is, of course, an absolute betrayal of the most fundamental of all religious principles. If they succeed, Western Civilization may implode at the cost of billions of lives and unspeakable misery. The cultural sterility of fundamentalism of all kinds should sound a strong warning. If those who pride themselves on being made in the image of the Creator show no creativity themselves, what does that say about them? The flesh is weak, and the spirit is dead.

The difference between these dead husks and the vital struggles which long ago inspired them is astounding. Rather than pick up the cross, Christians have become content to bow and worship while Christ carries it. Rather than worshipping him as a God, they should stand up, look him in the eye, and try to understand, not just what he thought, but how he thought, and then bring those thoughts up to date. It isn't impossible; we were all born with the capacity to make moral judgements. Only a superstitious awe keeps us from doing so. Yet the farther we drift into idolatry, into the worship of scriptures and the people behind them, the farther we drift from the spirit which created them.

As it is, Christianity and Islam are FUBAR.

An Embarrasment of Riches

A few months ago, on CBC's Ideas, I heard a conductor say that there was no place for Beethoven anymore, because it was too grandiose, given recent experiences in the West. No doubt he was talking about the Holocaust. Apparently he thought that music should now reflect the uncertainty and embarrasment that Europeans feel about recent events in their history.

What this indicates is only that they do not understood the historical context of the Holocaust. For millenia, genocide has been something of an international sport to every race and nation which found itself in the position to pursue it. The Old Testament includes long dreary passages which depict the ancient Hebrews pursuing the extermination of other tribes whose sole crime was to be in their path. Fortunately these accounts are, in all likelihood, historically innacurate. The Jews in Babylon, having been expelled from Israel, felt the need to create a myth of themselves as conquering heroes. But the very occurence of such myths says much about the ethic of the time and of most of the history since. If you had the power, you slaughtered everyone in your path who might be able to oppose you, and took the rest as slaves.

Genocide was practiced by the Turks against the Armenians, by the Russians in progroms against the Jews, by the Americans against the Natives, and by the English against the Irish--to name a recent few. None were particularly successful, because these efforts were not particularly well organized, and the technology for mass extermination did not yet exist. Mostly it was done by neglect, or by a sort of backhanded strategy, because killing a lot of people deliberately took a lot of work and resources. But the invention of automatic weapons changed all that. It became possible to kill a lot of people with a few guns.

But then, of course, there was the problem of corpse disposal. If you were going to kill that many people, you had to get rid of the bodies, and the best way to do that was to cremate them. And if you're going to cremate them, you might as well industrialize the murder as well, and... well you can see where this is going. And we did, in the Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis took an old pursuit and modernized it. They built death factories. Their innovation was not the goal, only the means to bring it about.

But doing it that efficiently, and that systematically, they got caught. Finally, someone got caught, red handed, in the act, and there was no denying what they were up to, and we had the people responsible, and hard evidence that they'd done it. There was no denying the intent. But again, the intent was nothing new. What was new was that someone actually defined that intent and set out to do it in a systematic fashion, so there was no doubt what they were up to. And for perhaps the first time, they were the only ones in the vicinity doing it (at last, none of the observers were inclined to wink and look away.) The act was very clear, and stood in stark contrast to accepted practice elsewhere (well, almost--Stalin's mass starvation of the Ukraine comes to mind.)

Still, only the methods and the situation were new. The monster revealed in Nazi Germany had been around a long, long time. But the type of horror and disgust that it aroused were also new. Many people in the West thought that they had encountered an entirely new demon. They thought that this demon had appeared for the first time in Germany, aided and abetted by other Europeans who had cooperated. They thought, for this reason, that this demon was uniquely European, and that something in Europe was uniquely responsible for creating it. This strikes me as tragically naive. The supposedly learned people who hold this opinion are stunned and apalled by a fact that was common knowledge even to most of the unlettered peasantry of the Dark Ages: the demonic potential that lays coiled within human nature itself.

I find nothing particularly significant in the fact that the Germans were the ones who got caught in the act--they just happened to systematize it first. Nor is there anything particularly significant in that the Jews were the target--although the fact that the Jews were the target yet again is worthy of notice (the ongoing spectacle of anti-semitism is a testament to human stupidity and venality.) Nor do I find it particularly significant that it happened in Europe. Far more significant was that the people who did it got caught, condemned even by their own children, and that the whole episode earned the contempt even of the very nation found guilty of it. That is new. Prior to this, everyone who had ever been engaged in this sort of thing denied it, downplayed it when denial didn't work, and were generally let off the hook even when that failed by other nations who were, usually, indulging in the same dirty practices.

Oscar Wilde said "All of us are lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." The human potential for evil should not be news. And it must also be understood that we have an equal potential for good. The German persecution of the Jews was old news; in 70 AD, the Romans razed Jeruselem to the ground--but for a few stone walls in the desert, no one would have known it was ever there. It has not stopped since. The Ashkenazy Jews have been subject to a level of persecution for two thousand years which no other race or people has ever suffered. But what is new is that Western Civilization has recognized this fact, and has vowed, for the most part, never to let it happen again. This is progress.

Beethoven said, essentially, that his life told nothing, but his music said everything. Those who are too timid to play his music apparently assume that it was based upon a naive view of the world which has failed. In fact, if anyone is naive, it is the people who believe this; I doubt that one could claim that Beethoven was unaware of the miseries of life or the faults of humanity. We have not failed. Against the grandeur of the Universe, even the music of Beethoven seems timid and understated. Play his music. We have not finished. We have not even begun.

Gratitude

Richard Dawkins presents an interesting perspective on life: out of the possible set of genetic and environmental permutations of humanity, more numerous than the atoms in the universe, you got to live. You won the ultimate lottery. You're here. And you, and all the people who have lived or will live, are but a handful of sand taken from a beach that stretches to the horizon in both directions.

Not only that, but if you're reading this, you are probably a well-educated citizen of a first world country living in a time when the benefits of science have yielded the highest life expectancy, highest level of understanding, and the highest standard of living in human history. Furthermore, we enjoy a political system which provides us with the greatest freedom of expression and enterprise, and the greatest freedom from oppression and exploitation, than have ever been enjoyed by any society in human history.

Even if you are lower middle class, you live better than Kings did only two hundred years ago. Yes, this has been quantitatively demonstrated, by measuring the labour equivalent of our household appliances, economic efficiency, and technical competance. You have at your beck and call the equivalent of dozens of servants, provided in the form of mechanical and commercial assistance, public infrastructure, and sheer technical and scientific competence, in your daily life. Chances are that a century or two ago, you would have been dead by now, or you would have lived in abject poverty or under political, economic, or physical duress. Millions have worked, and stuggled, and fought, and even died, for the priveleges that you now enjoy.

We are not done. You live on a planet ideally suited to the sustainment of life, a pale blue speck which forms the basis for the very possibility of all that you take for granted. So far as we now know, it is the only one of its kind. Statistically, we expect that there may be others, but we have never found one, and that should tell you how rare this is. It is possible that there are other environmental configurations which sustain an alternate form of life, but we have yet to find one. The SETI project has not yet found a signal out there that would indicate intelligent life. So far as we know, we're it. And that means that every breath we take is incredibly improbable. In a universe this large, where the only survivable environment that we know of is the one we live in, we find that, far from being ideally suited for the occurrence of life, our universe is overwhelmingly hostile to life. In all but a vanishingly small domain of our universe, we would be dead in thirty seconds or less.

Mercy is breathing. Anyone who takes a breath for granted knows nothing about the reality of this universe. Anyone who takes a breath for granted takes life for granted. To understand the universe that we live in is to be grateful for each breath, and to make each exhalation an Alleluia. If you do not take delight merely in being alive, you are wasting your time on nonsense. And yet, none of this in any way assumes the existence of the divine.

If one assumes that all of this was created for us, that God has loaded the dice specifically for our purposes, that life was inevitable from the outset, than all that we know is to be taken for granted, and we are justified in asking "Why not more?" If God guarantees life, and caters to the individual needs of each believer, then anything falling short of that promise is a disappointment. But to understand our very improbability, the single chance in trillions to the power of trillions that each moment of our existence represents, is to revel in even our most trivial delights as a gift beyond all value.

Yet daily life is taken for granted, for believers expect an eternity to eclipse their lives in the here and now. Indeed, some expect an entirely new world to be built for them to replace this one--the miraculous improbability of this world is simply not enough for them. In service to that imagined eternity, many will turn this life into a living hell, a pinched pursuit of spleen-driven persecution and destruction. What, I wonder, would be enough? Nothing, I suspect. For the one thing that we could never escape in eternity is ourselves--that same ingrateful self which dismisses the delights of the moment in favour of the imagined bliss of eternity. In the end, even eternity would be a dreary burden for these people. Colloquial expression encourages me to say 'Thank God for death and the loss of the self', but God is not necessary for this gift, nor is this loss of self consistent with religious mythology. We can only be grateful that death does indeed bring an end to such madness.

A New Twist on White Man's Burden

At first glance, it would appear that the western opinion of Muslims is largely split between those who consider them the enemy, and those who consider them the victims of western aggression. Of these two positions, the first may arise from racism, but the second is also typical of a form of racism which is all the worse for its patronizing attitude.

Consider: there are only 9 Muslim Nobel Prize laureates, only 2 for science. There have been 178 Jewish Nobel Prize winners, 156 for science. 1.2 billion people vs. 15 million, and look at the difference. Scott Atran, at the Beyond Belief conference last November, argued that Muslim terrorists do what they do not because of their Muslim beliefs, but because they are marginalized and crave respect. Yet he, like many other apologists for Islam, ignores the elephant in the room. The reason that there are so few Muslim Nobel Prize winners, the reason that the infrastructure in Muslim countries is kept running by imported western labour, the reason that the Middle East served as a chew toy for every world power that took an interest in it, and the reason that they are marginalized and that no one respects them, is that they are saddled with a religious ideology which makes them culturally, scientifically, politically, and economically sterile. They produce no art, music, science, technology, and the few that dare to write something of value take their lives in their hands. Nobody respects someone who contributes nothing.

Muslims are oppressed by Islam. There's simply no other coherent explanation for their poor performance in all these areas. Or did you think they were genetically inferior? Racism takes many forms. White Man's burden has been given a whole new packaging; we feel responsible for the downtrodden and oppressed--which makes us just a little bit superior to them, doesn't it? My, how wonderful and powerful we must be to control the destiny of everyone else! But it never occurs to anyone to wonder whether the reason they are oppressed is that we play into it by our patronizing attitude. We treat them like pets. The only way to continue to exploit the victim card is to remain a victim. You cannot demand pity and respect in the same breath, and expect to gain both.

This same attitude prevails with respect to blacks in the ghettos, North American Natives, and Australian Aborigines. We set lower standards for them. We consign them to hell holes where they have nothing to do but slowly kill themselves and each other. As John Ibbitson said in the Globe and Mail, "If you’re an Indian in your 20s living on a reserve, you need to leave right now." We seek to preserve a culture which is already long dead, or a culture which is born out of dysfunctional poverty, as if their misery was somehow an enriching experience for us. Being that it is what they know, they are, of course, willing to go along, even as that culture slaughters their children and compounds horror upon horror. It's the devil they know.

Maintaining and supporting dysfunctional cultures is a waste of resources, and helps preserve in the first world the very conditions which many of the people of those cultures may be attempting to flee. Even if, like the people from Jamaica or Somalia, they have come to escape conditions in those countries but still seek to preserve their culture, we must ask whether that very culture is itself the cause of those conditions. If it is, we are doing them no favour by collecting them in ghettos where those cultures predominate. All we have done is abandon them to pockets governed by the very conditions which they have fled. We wall them off, throw just enough money over the wall to keep them quiet, and leave them to wallow in destitution and prey upon each other. But we are doing them no favours. The ideal of multiculturalism is predicated upon the belief that all cultures are equally conducive to the well being of those who belong to them. This is obviously not the case. It is no accident that the colonies which were governed longest by the English now fare better than those which were never colonies, or were governed by other European powers. The English were no angels, but at least they imparted to their colonies the same economic and political principles by which they governed themselves, and those principles have worked very well both for the English and their former colonies. We owe it to immigrants to teach them the best that we know, rather than marginalize them and treat them like quaint figurines on our mantlepiece. We owe them a piece of the pie, and they will never get it if we continue to sideline them in the same conditions they have come to escape. And we have to make this change soon, or the disparity between us and them will grow as those conditions stigmatize them and arouse habitual prejudices in the future.

My opinion may not be politically correct, but I suspect that future generations will look back upon our treatment of these communities in the same light that we now look back on the Crow laws of the old south. Affirmative Action is not the answer either--gains cheaply made are less valued, and each newcomer, in any group, is expected to prove their value to those already in the group, or they can never earn the respect of that community. Efforts in political consciousness raising to overcome this attitude have failed, because it has produced the very patronizing attitude that I am arguing against here. The experiment has gone tragically awry; all we have done is taught the monster to smile and whisper soothingly as it kills. Prior to the orthodoxy of multiculturalism, each new ethnic community was forced to earn respect by making standing on its own feet and contributing to our society. Macho poses do not accomplish this. The Irish were the biggest brawlers and thugs ever to set foot in North America, but only when we grew up and faced our responsibilities did we gain the respect we so craved. We stopped being green or orange, and became Canadians. No one respects a gangster, not really. Irish women got fed up with men behaving like boys, and insisted that they act like men. Threats and posturing may gain momentary concessions, but they will never earn respect.

Of course, there remains the problem of whether attitudes in the home impair education. This should be a serious concern for immigration officials--a culture which devalues learning will be a serious impediment anywhere. But perhaps we should make it clear to immigrants that we expect them to integrate into our society, rather than promise them that we will attempt to preserve them in their current culture. At least then, those unwilling to make the sacrifice would choose not to come, and the rest would know the price they are prepared to pay.

We regard only children and the insane as not responsible for their actions. So which are the Muslims, the Aborigines, the Indians, and others who fall into the ghetto trap--children, or lunatics? Let's start treating them as adults, stop patronizing them with pity, and expect them to take responsiblity for their own fate, just as we would anyone in our own society, anyone we considered equal.

Islam is even more of a problem for Muslims than it is for us. It's time we stopped making excuses for it.

The Weekly Pizza Message

I work in a strange place. It's a game development company, filled with strange and wonderful people, and this allows me to do strange and wonderful things. Like order pizza every Thursday, and send out strange and wonderful emails to everyone in the company the day before to remind them to order.

So here is a sampling of those messages, and I will post more in the future, more or less in order...

Thursday is road-kill day...
=====================================================
...or for those with an aversion to that sort of thing, there's always pizza.

Thursday is Pizza day
=====================================================
Much better than deep fried dog turd. Order yours here.

Thursday is capitalist imperialist snack day!
=====================================================
Do your part for the revolution! Order your pizza here.

Thursday is frilly lingerie day!
=====================================================
Um, sorry, that's Tuesday. On thursdays we order pizza.

Thursday is extortion day!
=====================================================
Order pizza. Because you know I'm going to come around for the money anyway.

Thursday is naked lunch day.
=====================================================
With a variety of new and interesting toppings. Order here before your computer turns into a giant bug.

Thursday is AAAAAAGGGHHHHH...
=====================================================
Something to do with Pizza.

(Silly person. People don't write AAAAAGGGHHHHH. I mean, no one would go to the trouble of writing it out, now, would they? If you were dying, you might say AAAAAGGGHHHHH, but you wouldn't have time to write it, you'd just see the writing and then it would just stop in the midd

The Thursday Ritual
=====================================================
Here at Artech we have a ritual, practiced every Thursday, in which we don black latex gimp suits and torment our co-workers by spanking them with dried salted halibut while loudly playing songs sung by William Shatner...

Or you can order pizza.

Real men eat Pizza on Thursdays!
=====================================================
And real women too!

Uh... that is, real women eat pizza too, not that real men eat real women too. Well, yeah, okay, they might, but not for lunch. I mean, they don't swallow...er, that is... never mind...

Thursday

=====================================================
pizza

Re: Thursday
=====================================================
Alright, I thought I would take the minimalist approach and go down to two words, but it seems some sort of razzle dazzle is required to annouce pizza.

For this reason, we have enlisted the delicious talents of one Dilly Salzbanger, late of the Megadrome Consumerama, and her life partner and prime doorstop, Screech Headcranker, former head of quality assurance for the recreational drug division of Leary and Hopper Pharmeceuticals. Dilly will perform her one-woman show, entitled Forty-Five Erotic Poses Not Normally Permitted By Human Physiology Or The Law.

Screech, officially pronounced brain-dead in 1993 and 'neurologically fascinating' at the Bio-Psychology Conference and Rave of 1997, is not guaranteed to do anything, but is prone to significant moments. They should be here around noon--or not, as Screech is flying the saucer.

Thursday is the day that dares not speak it's name...
=====================================================
In keeping with our tradition of pizza day extraveganzas, Baron Mungo Attrosso will lead a chorus of Tuvan throat-singers in a endless repetition of the chorus of Home on the Range, while his tiny mexican assistant Paolo performs the fire-ant dance in polyester boxer-shorts. Possibly the most annoying sound known to man, this performance is likely to produce psychotic breaks and homicidal tendencies in all spectators within half an hour. Your best bet is to surreptitiosly jam a bit of pizza crust in your ears--but you can't very well do that if you don't order pizza, can you? Well, don't say I didn't warn you...

The Pizza Pixie
=====================================================
On Thursdays the pizza pixie flutters in on her tiny gossamer wings to bestow upon all the good little girls and boys the pizza of their choice. Then she gathers all the boys and girls together and sings cheerful songs of life in pixie land, spreading warmth and pixie dust and good fortune to all who hear her.

At least, that's what used to happen before Mike Morris shot her and made a pixie sandwich out of her.

Now we have to pay for our pizza, which is delivered by a furry, sweaty, irritable little man in a Pinto. Pixies now being extinct, we have to order from Domino's. Oh, well, order pizza anyway...

Pizza traps
=====================================================
The exotic and furtive Artech people live in dark caves where they serve and are amused by their glowing electronic idols. Once a week, on every Thursday, we leave pizza by the door of their cave. Those that emerge, drawn by the scent of this tasty snack, we beat over the head with a large stick, so that we may later add them to our collection of rare and extinct species--rare and extinct, of course, because we have beat so many of them over the head with a large stick...

On Thursday we sacrifice a goat to the old ones...
=====================================================
In the hopes that our ancestors will be pleased with us and shower us with much pizza, we annoy our livestock by picking one at random and killing it in a showy manner. We used to do this with a person instead, until someone suggested that we kill the ugly old priest instead of another beautiful young virgin, and the villagers brightened and thought this a capital idea. However, since the priests get to eat the goats they kill, the people of the village still suspect that something is not quite on here, and we may be flipping the head priest on the barby any day now.

The Carrion Eaters

It occurs to me that the death of religion might not mean the disappearance of it so much as a surfeit of garbage religion and superstition. The dead and dying cannot defend themselves from those who want to gnaw on them as they lie there, and the explosion of irrational nonsense that we now see is as much an affront to the old religions as it is to rationalists. Their churches are being ransacked by political empire builders, and yet, the only strength they seem to be able to muster is against atheists, because they think it's a safe fight.

Consider the loathsome crowd of vultures that now feed on the carcass of the major faiths, the likes of Falwell, Robertson, Bin Laden, and Haggard. There was a time when these faiths had the strength to fend these carrion eaters off. There was a reason why fundamentalist christians were relegated to the backwoods: someone was minding the store. Or consider the lunacy of the Rapture. The noisome little man who first loosed this brain fart was promptly packed off from the Anglican Church to obscurity. Now legions of believers spout this dime store fantasy, and the only voice that can be heard to object comes from secularists. Heresy is rampant, and the old faiths are now taken to mean so many different things to so many people that they effectively mean nothing at all.

It now seems that the old religions are so desperate to make their faiths a happenin' thang that they will hold their nose and embrace any mangy beast that appears to have a talent for attracting a crowd. They can't even rouse themselves to the effort of challenging other religions. And when the rallying cry of the Christian right is against gay marriage--the only thing that seems to be able to unite them is a thinly veiled hatred of homsexuals--you know the whole train has gone off the rails. I certainly don't miss the inquisition--the same stick they beat heretics with was also used on atheists--but when they can't even work up a lather against blithering heresies, you can stick a fork in their ass. They're done.

Against Metaphysics

When I first started taking philosophy in University, metaphysics appeared to be a very promising pursuit. It seemed to me to be the gateway to magic; it held the possibility of alternate universes ruled by different orders. If materialism denied the existence of magic, well then, just do away with it--it was just one metaphysical premise amongst others, and the best part of metaphysics was that you could spin conjectures to your heart's content, and never be called on to prove any of them, except by a clever twist of logic and a big maybe (and who could prove me wrong?) It was, after all, meta-physics, supposedly the basis of physics itself, except that, being non-empirical, you didn't have to bother with all of that annoying evidence. All the worlds of fantasy and science-fiction beckoned--and somehow, I could justify them. But as I learned more about it, metaphysics lost its lustre.

Metaphysics isn't about magic or the supernatural--at least, not necessarily. It is a discussion of the ultimate nature of reality. It is, however, beyond the bounds of the empirical or strictly logical. This means that mathematics is not a branch of metaphysics, unless you assert that a particular mathematical model describes ultimate reality independent of empirical verification. If the model corresponds to reality and is demonstrated empirically to do so, then you're doing physics. This is why some physicists have become dismissive of string theory. So much of it lies outside of the bounds of empirical testing that by claiming that it represents physical reality, theoreticians may in fact be practicing metaphysics. But it is not the mathematics itself that make this metaphysics, only the claim that they represent reality without empirical justification. You can construct an infinite variety of mathematical worlds by varying your basic axioms, but most of those worlds will have no bearing on reality as we know it. Exploring these worlds mathematically is just mathematics. Asserting that these worlds actually underpin physical reality, without any empirical evidence to back this claim, is metaphysics.

What distinguishes metaphysics from physics, or branches of logic or mathematics, is that it makes truth claims without any means of verification or disproof, either through induction or deduction. This is the key point that many people seem to miss--if you can actually prove the claim, you are not practicing metaphysics, but science. And conjectural musings about alterate universes without truth assertions are fiction, usually science-fiction or fantasy.

To say that everything is metaphysics isn't really saying much, because it amounts to saying that everything is based upon the ultimate nature of reality. But that does not mean that all theory is metaphysical, because metaphysics consists entirely of conjectural assertions. If all theories are metaphysical, then all theories, regardless of correspondence with observable fact, are equal. For any metaphysical claim, there are contrary claims which stand on equal footing. Since metaphysical claims cannot be proven or disproven, lumping science into metaphysics places it on equal footing with alternate metaphysical systems which have no empirical basis. Even the emphasis on empiricism becomes negotiable, and this is where magic can be reintroduced. If you don't have to prove it, you can believe anything you want. This is the launch point for systems of New Age magic, and the same position has now been adopted for the defense of religion. This is why religious believers want to argue metaphysics--as soon as you join in the discussion on this ground, you've lost. You have unwittingly agreed to the premise that empirical evidence has no bearing on truth, and once you've done that, they can claim anything they want, and there's nothing you can do about it.

So while not all metaphysics leads to magical beliefs, all magical beliefs begin with metaphysical assertions. And since metaphysical assertions are, by their very nature, beyond proof or disproof, metaphysical arguments can never be resolved. Metaphysics is thus the final refuge of philosophical scoundrels, whose intentions are to force you to acknowledge your ignorance in a domain where there is nothing but ignorance, and use this admission of ignorance to sneak their argument past you. The only way to win an argument on metaphysics is to refuse to engage in it, which is precisely what scientists do. This is not dodging the point, but recognizing that there is no point.

This idea, by the way, has its equivalent in analytic philosophy, in some forms of mysticism, and in apophatic theology. The thrust of these traditions is that you cannot talk about the unknowable because you are talking nonsense, and worse, you may convince yourself that the nonsense you are arguing about is true, leading you away from the real truth.

The Evolutionary Basis of Morality

This weekend. on Sam Harris's site, I ran into yet another fundamentalist claiming that there is no basis for morality or human rights without religion. Here is my response:

The basis of human consciousness and self-awareness is that we evolved the ability to model and anticipate the actions of other intentional entities. This ability spans from the simple action of throwing a spear to where the deer will be, rather than where it is, to anticipating the actions and reactions of other human beings like ourselves, so that we can anticipate threats, form alliances, and even manipulate or resist manipulation by others. Out of this initial advance came the ability to create respresentations, express those representations in language, and create a representation of one's self just as one could create a model of the intentions of other people. This self representation became 'I', self awareness, and we became conscious beings.

What this means is that we are essentially social creatures, who have a strong empathy for others of our kind, and even for other animals. This empathy is the basis of human rights, expressed in what we now call the Golden Rule (which, though expressed in the Bible, predates it by millenia): Treat others as you would like to be treated. This is no more or less than the expression of an evolved capacity common to all human beings who are not stunted by development or upbringing. We understand each other as being like ourselves, and are affected (in the most literal sense of the word) by their pain, pleasure, sadness, or joy. In order for this bond to be broken, we must cease to see the other as human. This capacity for empathy is present even in many other mammals; we, as conscious beings, are able to codify it. As we continue to understand ourselves better, we improve upon the expression of it. Our current standard of human rights is a recent achievement, which is not reflected or prefigured in the bronze age values enshrined in the Bible.

But the root of it is and always has been in our genes, and survived there because it conferred a strong adaptive advantage. The ethics of the Bible is simply an earlier, more primitive, expression of this innate ability. I do not wish to harm others because I know they are like myself; I literally feel their pain, and share their joy. I support the codification of mutually supportive conduct because it works in my favour as well as everyone else's, ensuring our safety, well-being, aid in the event of need, and the delight of peaceful human coexistence. This is all that morality and human rights require. I neither ask nor need more.

If you do not feel this human bond, and require the ministrations of a cosmic tyrant to hold you to civil conduct, then you have my pity--but not my respect.

The Law and the Prophets

A friend of mine mentioned an idea to me a while back, which seems to make more sense as I think about it. I brought it up on Slashdot with a Muslim, and by his reply I'm guessing he sort of smoked and vibrated and turned red and then exploded. Terrible, angry bits everywhere, no survivors. So I got no coherent opinion there. And yet, what he said, which prompted me to bring up this idea, convinced me that he was representative of the very tendency that I suspect runs through Islam.

This tendency is summed up and expressed in the word Inshallah: If God wills it. In Islam it seems that the will of God is mutable and unbound; even science is irrelevant, because God can break the laws of nature at will (this is precisely what the exploding Muslim said.) In contrast, there is a tradition that is common to Judaism, Christianity, Greek philosophy, and science which respects established laws, which God may establish but which even He is bound to. This runs through the Jewish idea of the Covenant, in Plato's Idealism and his argument that the gods do good because it is Good, rather than defining the Good by their words and actions, and in the basic premise of natural science. Both the Jewish and Greek versions of this idea heavily influenced Christianity.

It is this foundation of established laws and principles which allowed the societies dominated by this tradition to gain ground, ratcheting themselves forward by establishing sound principles, testing them for solidity, and then using them to advance to the next. They were able to move forward because because they had solid ground under their feet; ground which they found or discovered as they advanced. Legal jurisprudence, philosophical principles, and scientific theories are all established and built upon, step by tentative step, sometimes faltering or even falling back, and occasionally leaping forward.

This movement is also intrinsic to the tradition. If the world is governed uniformly in all aspects by certain principles, then we can always learn more by querying the world and each other. The world itself is imbued with wisdom, waiting to be discovered. The rules are fixed, but our understanding of them can change and grow, and the rule book is all around us. Nor is there any contradiction between this and religion. If God is both legislator of and governed by these laws, understanding them allows us to understand the mind of God. The scriptures themselves may be corrected in this way.

If, however, God is free to change his mind by whim, and can change the world as he chooses, then God is the only source of knowledge, and anything learned any other way is inherently unstable and therefore of little value. This was the point that the Muslim poster kept returning to; he'd built an impenetrable wall around himself, with this repeated on every brick. Since the agreed upon communication from God occurred only in a few ancient texts, progress becomes nearly impossible--Islam is caught in an endless cycle of return. Everything hinges on the interpretation of those texts. If the texts aren't extraordinarily precise--and most scriptures of any religion are as vague as a Rorshach ink blot--everything hinges on the interpretation, and the authority of the interpreter. The society is fixed in a medieval pattern of successive cults of personality. Just as the personality of the king informs the character of the feudal society which he governs, the position of the dominant clerics sets the tone for the people who follow them.

What appears to be absolute is in fact completely relative, because it is based entirely upon personal opinions which are supported in a self-referential matter. There is no objective methodology, no means of checking their facts, no legal library to consult for precedence. Even logic and evidence are overruled, so previous philosophical refutations carry no weight. Truth is established by force, not because all clerics build their reputations by authoritarian measures, but because those who don't have the option of force will be overwhelmed by those who do, and the winners will rewrite the history and sign God's name to it.

All of this goes a long way towards explaining the state of the many of the countries of the Middle East as political, social, economic, and cultural invalids sustained by a petroleum drip. It is even more disturbing to realize that many fundamentalist Christians aspire to the same world view, hoping to sweep aside the entire history of Western civilization to return to Biblical principles, ignorant of the reality that the world they are trying to undo is itself largely the result and proper inheritor of those very principles. These Christians are aliens in the modern Western world, but I suspect they would be very much at home in Iran. Religious triumphalism is sufficient to encourage return and stagnation, but fortunately the West, so far, has resisted this. But it seems that multiculturalism provides a fog of moral relativism while post-modernism encourages epistemological relativism; fundamentalists of all denominations are quickly learning to exploit this. It seems that the extremes of the left and the right are drawing closer together the more they attack one another, even as moderates on the left and right find common ground.

It's ironic that I would have no interest in converting those who would most likely be converted; moderate, rational Christians who are essentially deists, have little or no belief in miracles, no argument with science, and who go to church for solace and community. The people I would most like to convert are precisely those who exist in a near solpsistic bubble which includes only themselves, their God, and a handful of "True Believers", of which even 95% of Christians wouldn't qualify. They are impenetrable, and that is precisely what makes them dangerous. They would gladly roll back 2000 years of human progress to return to what they imagine to be the fundamentals of their religion. In fact, that religion has moved on, and the real Christian tradition leads through scholastic philosophy to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, science, and secularism.

If the laws of nature are the laws of God, then nature itself is scripture, and understanding the laws of nature is to come closer to knowing God. Where written scripture is in conflict with nature, it is scripture that is wrong, since these writings are the work of men while nature is the direct work of God. In essence, God is reality, and reality is God: "I am who am." If God vanishes into the laws of science, then that is the natural outcome of this tradition. By this point, if religious faith persists, it should persist as some form of deism that makes no truth claims about the physical world.

What Christian fundamentalism represents is not a fork in the Christian tradition, but a radical break from it, an alien parallel that deviates from Christianity even in pre-biblical times. Fundamentalism is marked by bibliolatry (worship of the Bible), false prophecy (radical misinterpretations of Biblical writings, particularly apocalyptic writings which refer to historical events of the writers' times), idolatry (radical alterations in the character and nature of the divine, combined with frequent literal representations of it), and blasphemy (using the name of God to endorse personal or political views.) The danger is that fundamentalists do not consider themselves ultimately bound by any law, even the laws of nature or the traditions of their own religion. The higher authority they appeal to is not God, but their own interpretation of the Bible, or the interpretation of their chosen leader. In Catholicism, you have one Pope who is infallible. In fundamentalist Christianity, you have thousands or even millions of Popes who are all infallible. But behind their absolutist claims is an abyss of ethical and epistemological relativism. There is no objective standard by which to judge their claims, no method of proof or disproof, no long incremental tradition of philosophy, legal precedents, scientific research, or even theological debate. What remains is essentially a feudal system of a series of cults of personality, which range in size from the entire membership of a mega-church to a cult of one who considers himself a law unto himself.

This does much to explain the bizarre attitude of George Bush towards the law and his belief that his own powers supersede it, and why he prefers unilateral action to the force of international law. To him, the law is a mere inconvenient technicality which he obeys, not out of respect, but out of expediency. The same contempt for the constitution and even for democracy can be found in the opinions of other fundamentalists, who hint that it's high time that all this be set aside in favour of the rule of God--their God. This sentiment is behind criticisms of judges as "activist judges", when in fact these judges are only acting upon established laws and precedents. The campaign waged by Christian conservatives to reduce the power of the courts is not an attack against judges, but against the law itself, which like science is based upon evidence and reason. They wish the law to bow and give way before fascistic waves of emotional populism. And to call it fascism is not an overstatement; fascism is built upon relativism and cults of personality. If there is no truth, and even reason is not respected, the only valid argument is a steel toed boot.

Dostoyevsky wrote, "If God exists, everything is possible; if there is no God, everything is permitted." But the survival of our current population level on this planet is made possible only by the advance and benefits of science, and the order and freedom that we enjoy is the fruit of a long battle for legal precedents and wisdom over centuries. Without these, nothing of our way of life would be possible. And if mere opinion, disguised by appeals to Biblical infallibility, is the only standard, then the dialogue of civil society dissolves into a cacaphony of competing, shouting voices, and who can say what is right or wrong. So it would be more accurate to say that if truth exists, everything is possible; if there is no truth, everything is permitted.