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Mercy for Abortion

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Pope Francis proclaimed today that during the Jubilee year starting on December 8th, priests will be allowed to absolve contrite women of the sin of having procured an abortion.

Francis hails from a region with both a high rate of abortion and relatively religious populations. As my mother continued an active role in church after starting birth control in the ’60s, I wonder how many women who have had an abortion continue quietly to participate in Catholic life. The proclamation of mercy may simply be a concession to practical realities.

I have offered meditations on the problem of abortion. In the wording of his proclamation, I feel that Frances has a heart that is open to the realities described in my first post. Abortion is not a choice that any woman would seek, and it indeed leaves scars. Those scars deserve healing. It is here that I find Pope Francis’s message to be yet a little tone-deaf, in that it trumpets “mercy” rather than healing.

When incarnation has already occurred, among the most significant scars of an abortion arise from the struggle of the infant spirit to disentangle itself from its mother’s womb. I know of two ways of solving this problem: one is for the chastened mother to seek a stable relationship in which a baby will thrive, and to bear the worthy father of a child. Church should be an incubator for such relationships, and keeping women out of Church is contrary to that purpose. The second mechanism is for a mature spiritual practitioner to aid the infant spirit in its liberation. This is an intercession by Divine Love that priests are supposed to mediate.

I also am frustrated that the conditions of mercy are limited to “a contrite heart.” I have voiced the opinion that religion should be seen as the mechanism by which we bring people out of primitive spirituality into a rational engagement with the divine powers. Cain was not punished for the murder of Abel, but sent away to reflect and learn. I believe the same is true for any sin, including abortion. The repentant woman should be asked not only “Are you sorry?” but “What did you learn, and how have you changed your life as a result?”

There are women trapped in circumstances in which the answer will be “Nothing.” I offer my own proclamation here: whether or not the Catholic Church is willing to forgive you, Christ will be with you when you are ready to receive healing. That may be in the final moments of your life, when the hold that the pimp or abuser or pusher has on you slips away. Be unafraid, and open your heart to healing. It is from the heart that unclean things come, but it is also from there that the light of Christ enters into the world. When you receive it, those that have forced themselves into you will be infected with compassion, and you will enter into the ranks of the angels.

Yes, Francis, I think that you understand me: it is the place of the Church to help the burdened carry their cross, rather than to beat them down with it.

Adulterated Security

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When the Ashley Madison breach was announced, the most confusing aspect of the reportage came directly from the screen capture of the site’s home page. It reads:

Life is too short. Have an affair.

That’s right. Not “hug your child” or “save a tree”, but “engage in conduct destructive to the stability of your marriage that involves logistics almost certain to lead to eventual discovery.”

The press coverage of the incident has focused on the misfortune facing those whose membership in the site has been exposed to the public. The dire predictions presented the image of a tidal wave of attorneys descending upon the nation’s family law courts. In general, the tone is sympathetic towards consenting adults facing the consequences of public reaction to conduct often considered immoral. One case often cited are couples that have open marriages by consent (although why such people would be concerned about exposure is unclear to me). As for the rest, I wonder whether those of us that believe in the sanctity of marital vows shouldn’t be motivated to take action to shut down sites that, like Pirate Bay, are used to hide the identity of people that prey upon our trust.

Discretion was part of the Ashley Madison promise. The image on the home page presents an attractive female face with a finger before pursed lips. Again, given the logistics that make eventual discovery almost certain, a smoking gun would have been a better metaphor than a finger.

Unless of course it was a middle finger. It turns out that Avid Life was defrauding their clientele, fabricating female accounts and collected money for services that they did not perform. Specifically, they did not delete the accounts of users that paid to have them removed.

Now think about this: the subscribers to this service are providing sensitive personal data to an organization that seems to not have any business ethics. Obviously Avid Life is concerned only with maximizing their bottom line. Is anybody watching the store? What evidence do we have that Avid Life was not selling this information on to other companies?

There was another incident in recent history that resonates with this one in my mind. Employed as a systems administrator in the national security industry, Edward Snowden purportedly became alarmed that he and his peers had access to secret information that they were not authorized to view. His way of exposing this to the public was to steal and release government secrets. It was not a limited or targeted release – it was a snowstorm of national security data including unflattering character assessments of many people, both private and official.

What if this is another Snowden-like case? What if an insider at Ashley Madison became aware that the company was planning on selling personal data for direct marketing by other companies? What if that person became outraged that the release would include information on people that had paid to have their accounts deleted?

Would the “hacker” then be a hero, rather than a criminal?

Design by Discipline

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When I received my Ph.D. in Particle Physics in 1987, I was qualified as among the wonkiest elite in science. If I had been concerned with proving that I was smart, I might have stayed in physics, but the expectations for practical applications of fundamental physics had eroded greatly after my freshman year. I wanted the larger world to benefit from the work that I did, so I took a job at a national laboratory. After a brief post-doc in fundamental physics, I moved over to environmental science. Throughout, the growing importance of computerized control and simulation meant that I enjoyed a distinct competitive advantage over my peers, as I had learned to program from one of the foremost practitioners in his generation – my father. When I became a full-time software developer, my background in physics allowed me to collaborate with engineers, to the extent that I would be brought in on engineering meetings when my peers were unavailable.

Now this may seem like just bragging, but the point is that my career has been a dynamically evolving mash-up of science, engineering and programming. My experience was filtered through a practice of systems analysis that led me to examine and control the way that those disciplines interact. So when I think about science, I don’t think about it as “what scientists do.” I do consider myself a scientist, but I do engineering and programming as well, and I perceive the three disciplines as very different activities.

I took a course on philosophy of science as an undergraduate, and I won’t drag you, dear reader, through all the definitions that have been offered. Most of them hold that Frances Bacon’s articulation of the scientific process was a magic portal for the human intellect, as though practical efficacy and the rational ordering of knowledge had not been recognized virtues among the ancients. This leads many philosophers of science to be overly concerned with truth, when what is really of interest to us as people is what has yet to be true.

The power of science is in allowing us to pierce the shadowy veil of possibility. In biology, understanding of the variety of living things and their mutual dependencies gives us the power to sustain agriculture, breed robust animals, and improve our health. Chemistry empowers us to predict the stability and properties of new substances. And physics probes the fundamental mechanisms that determine both the stability of the world around us and our ability to manipulate it.

So science provides us with pure knowledge, unconstrained by our desires or intentions. It therefore tends to attract people that are driven by curiosity. That may sound like a trivial thing, but to find order in the chaotic milieu of nature is a source of great hope. Calendars that predict the seasons allowed agricultural societies to improve their harvests and so avoid famine. The germ theory of disease motivated doctors to wash their hands, transforming hospitals from centers of disease incubation to places of healing. Scientific curiosity – to ask neurotically “why?” – is the source of great power over the world.

That power is visible in the manufactured reality all around us: the houses, roads, dams and microchips. None of these things would have existed in the natural world. The artifacts exist only because people have a purpose for them. That purpose may be as simple as cooking dinner for our children, or as grand as ensuring that the world’s knowledge is available through the internet to any person, anywhere, any time. Which of our goals are realized is largely a matter of economics: are enough people invested in the outcome that they are willing to pay to see it accomplished? We don’t have to have a kitchen in every home, but few of us can afford to go out to dinner every night, so we pay for a kitchen. The cost and delay of moving information via mail drove the growth of the internet, at an expense that I would imagine (I can’t find numbers online) has run into trillions of dollars.

Now when people invest a substantial sum of money, they want some assurance that they’ll get what they’re paying for. Appreciating that gold does not tarnish, the sultan seeking to protect the beauty of his marble dome does not want to be told, “All natural gold originates in supernovae.” Or, worse, “If we smash heavy elements together in an accelerator, we can produce ten gold atoms a day.” Those kinds of answers are acceptable in scientific circles, but they are not acceptable in the engineering world. In the engineering world, when somebody comes to you with money and a problem, your job is to design an implementation that will realize their goal.

Since we’re a species of Jones-chasers, most of the time the engineer’s job is fairly simple. People come wanting something that they’ve seen, and the challenge is to understand how it was done before and adapting the design to local conditions. But every now and then somebody comes in to ask for something completely novel. They want to build an elevator to space, for example, or create a light source that doesn’t produce soot. The engineer has no way of knowing whether such things are possible, except by reference to science.

It is into the gap between the formless knowledge of science and the concrete specifications of engineering that programming falls. Considering the light bulb, the scientists know that heated objects glow, but also burn. Applying an electric voltage to a poor conductor causes it to heat as current flows through it. The filament will burn when exposed to oxygen, so we need to isolate it from air. Using an opaque material as the barrier will also trap the generated light. However, some solids (such as glass) are transparent, and air permeates slowly through them.

The illustration is a cause-and-effect analysis. It looks at the desirable and undesirable outcomes of various scientific effects, attempting to eliminate the latter while preserving the former. The cause-and-effect analysis leads to an operational hypothesis: if we embed a wire in a glass bulb and apply a voltage, the wire will heat and emit light. This is not an engineering specification, because we don’t know how much the light bulb will cost, or how much light it will emit. But it also isn’t science, because the operational hypothesis is not known to be true. There may be no filament material that will glow brightly enough, or the required voltage may be so high that the source sparks down, or the glass may melt. But without the operational hypothesis, which I have called a “program,” engineering cannot begin.

We examined the challenge of software engineering in the first post in this series, focusing on the rapid development in the field and the difficulty in translating customer needs into terms that can be interpreted by digital processors. Today, we have arrived at a more subtle point: the algorithms written in our programming languages process information to produce information. The inputs for this process arise from nature and humans and increasingly other machines. Those inputs change constantly. Therefore very few programs (except maybe that for space probes) are deployed into predictable environments. That includes the hardware that runs the program – it may be Atom or Intel or AMD, and so the performance of software is not known a priori. For all of these reasons, every piece of software is thus simply an operational hypothesis. It is a program, not a product.

SCOTUS on Marriage Equality

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The Supreme Court rendered its decision on Marriage Equality, finding for the petitioners in Obergefell v. Hodges. I have expressed my spiritual views on this matter. Suffice to say that I am broadly sympathetic.

What is curious to me is the content of Roberts’ dissenting opinion, in which he ends with the pouty “Don’t celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.”

Roberts’ argument is that the Court was acting in a legislative role, redefining the meaning of a term of legal parlance (“marriage”) in a way that was not supported by the 14th Amendment. He references precedents concerning just compensation that the court later recognized overstepped the bounds of the 14th Amendment. Roberts also accuses the majority of undermining the process of democratic debate that was slowly turning the tide of public opinion in favor of same-sex marriage.

I find Roberts’ interpretation of judicial activism in the application of the 14th Amendment to be manipulative. As he asserts, certainly in the precedents he cites the Court should not have been trying to determine what is “fair” compensation. However, the 14th Amendment was established to address the issue of lack of compensation (slavery). Compensation for labor is a fundamental right.

In reading the majority opinion, I find validity in the conclusion, reached through detailed analysis, that marriage is such a fundamental right. They also establish clearly that denial of the right imposes burdens, both psychological and material, on same-sex couples. I believe that their opinion establishes a sound philosophical basis for application of the 14th Amendment, which exists precisely to overthrow long-held social prejudice that denies rights to minorities.

Roberts also makes a hysterical reference to the First Amendment, warning that religions that fail to perform same-sex marriage may lose their tax-free status. However, the establishment clause actually, in this case, applies in the other direction. There are religions that perform same-sex marriage, and no one has suggested that they be denied their tax-free status. The existence of laws that deny legal rights to same-sex couples joined by such religious authority is actually a form of establishment, and should be repelled.

I would be impressed if the dissenters addressed the substantive reasoning of the majority. As it is, I am afraid that they are simply going to fire the anger of those that find the definition of marriage to be a fighting matter.

Amartya Sen on the Necessary Distinction Between Austerity and Economic Reform

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Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998, Sen is widely recognized as the leading moral voice in the field of economics. The New Statesman carries his analysis of debt and its relationship to economic reform and growth. He points out that debt levels were far higher in the aftermath of WWII, but confident and intelligent investment in growth steadily reduced debt even while social services expanded.

The New Statesman has published his remarks.

Sen’s most heartfelt cry is against the destruction of human capital: in Kansas and other “austerity” states, educational levels and consumer spending are collapsing. In Greece, half of all young adults have never had a job (or at least a job that generated tax revenues). As Adam Smith pointed out in his writings, it is human capital that underpins the ability of nations to generate wealth.

While Sen decries his inability to influence policy-makers imposing disastrous austerity on their constituents, I don’t have any need to be politic. I’ll just follow the money.

As described in The Grand Pursuit, the Great Depression was an existential threat for free market economics because it revealed that the financial elite would not invest in long-term growth when falling prices guaranteed increased purchasing power for their accumulated wealth. It was in their short-term interest to exacerbate unemployment, thereby reducing both demand and wages. It was Keynes who convinced the governments to stimulate demand with deficit spending that brought Europe and America out of the Depression.

In the current era, government debt is in the short-term interest of the financial elites. It is the ready stream of bond placement and foreign exchange fees that fuel the financial system. Reducing debt is against their interest. That they fund candidates that have implemented policies to reduce tax revenues while expanding debt is no mystery.

Sen points out that most electorates suffering under austerity are beginning to recognize that growing poverty proves those policies wrong. Whether they can organize themselves to restore intelligent fiscal policy is another question. There are so many other issues to distract them, and voter restrictions in many states disenfranchise the working poor. (Fundamentally, I don’t see why elections should be on a weekday: anyone for a constitutional amendment to move them to Saturday?)

In the United States, we have been propped up by the Federal Reserve, which has kept interest rates low and pumped cash into the economy. However, that is no substitute for governmental action: when interest rates rise, that cash must be soaked up lest inflation run out of control. This will suppress growth. However, in Europe things have been far worse: the Central Bank has been part of the system of austerity, and is only now beginning to follow the lead of its American counterpart.

Can ‘We’ Be Selfish?

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I need to try this argument out, because I am being driven crazy by a pattern that has developed in my conversations with rational people.

The pattern is, when arguing about morality, to observe that I identify specific benefits to myself of caring for others. Those rewards (such as joy, a sense of purpose, and spiritual strength) are interpreted as evidence that I am simply being selfish like everyone else.

There are two points to be made here. The first is to assert the definition of selfishness. From OxfordDictionaries.com, we have:

lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure

In other words, to be selfish is to disregard the effects of our choices on others. When we are selfish, the survival and rights of others are of no consideration when we set out to acquire resources or satisfy our bliss. In fact, that lack of consideration is an important psychological element in preparing us to destroy others in the service of our self-interest.

The lie of selfishness is that acquisition of power and pleasure makes us better prepared to survive. Raw power can serve any purpose, but requires skill in the wielder. If we focus only on power, we never learn to channel it in acts of creation, because to create is to consume power. We are required either to share our power with those that have learned to create, or fall into the terrible abyss of acquiring resources through the destruction of the people that hold them. The latter course ultimately renders us powerless, because without people we have no means of converting the resources that we have accumulated into value.

The second point is that of the three benefits of caring for others, joy and purpose are entirely subjective. Only spiritual strength is a resource to overcome life’s challenges. But spiritual strength arises as a projection from those we serve. It is to assert “Yes, I want this person in the world.” That good will follows us around like a cloud, and pushes against the will of those that seek to harm us.

As that description makes clear, spiritual power is contingent upon our continued commitment to consider the well-being of those that affirm us. It is to assert reciprocally “Yes, I want this person in the world.” It is to surrender some of our spiritual power to them.

The proposition of “We” is that the individuals in mutually supportive communities enhance their odds of survival by distributing power. In that state, the selfish have no particular reason to target any particular individual, yet when we face difficulties we have the pool of distributed resources to draw upon. And when resources are plenty, our creative efforts are amplified by the inspiration of others.

Of course, there are no guarantees. What happens when the challenges facing the community overwhelm its resources? Who is going to survive? To the loving person, facing the loss of all that they hold most dear, the response is simply “Who would want to?”

The promise of religion, of course, is that surrendering the flesh under those circumstances opens the gates to a far better reality. The power we store in things is lost when we die. The power conserved in our spiritual relationships endures.

Why do we feel driven to believe that acting in our self-interest is selfishness? I think that rather the opposite is true: we have been so indoctrinated to believe that “greed is good” that we simply cannot accept that selfishness (the belief that only “I” have any meaning) is just a really stupid idea. Our self-interest is in nurturing a caring community. It is to submit the needs of the “I” to the “we.”

Capitalism: Friend or Foe

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This is a response to Kiss Me On a Burning Barricade and other recent post at Gods and Radicals. I do sympathize very much with the intentions and energy of this forum. I would just hope to see it focused more precisely on human behavior, rather than abstract ideology.

A speaker at a recent conference exhorted liberals to reclaim Adam Smith, whose concerns regarding abuse of workers under the system of capital have been ignored by the “Greed is Good” and “Invisible Hand” libertarians that took over the Republican Party during the Reagan era. Smith saw capitalism as simply the use of wealth to invest in technology that would amplify the effects of labor. It was this process that finally overturned Malthusian poverty (see The Grand Pursuit) because while the cost paid per shirt went down, the cost of a shirt fell even faster.

Under your definition of productivity, the core problem in the situation that you describe is psychopathy, which is subtle and seductive and has infected many of our institutions. In Smith’s work, this is articulated as the problem of the Commons: well-meaning people create value for one another, accumulate wealth, and then the psychopaths come in and steal it from them.

For example, the sleepy Savings and Loan industry of the ’60s and ’70s allowed the middle class to pay itself interest at 6% while borrowing at 7%. Reagan deregulated the industry, allowing raiders to take the assets it had accumulated and transfer them to high-risk instruments. Now the middle class borrows at 18% and gets interest on deposits of 0.2%.

Regarding the specific situation you outline, there is a movement among the restaurant workers to establish humane working conditions in an industry that exploits mercilessly. Among the industry’s crimes include lobbying against a general working wage increase in order to protect an extremely low minimum wage for their industry. As agitators document, in many states the tips we leave are in fact the bulk of the worker’s wage.

Abstracting from Smith, the theory of Capitalism and productivity is a means for organizing information about economic activity, including work practices. While proponents of capitalism cite the benefits in increasing productivity, the information they gather can also be used to identify psychopathic behavior. The reason that you have the numbers to criticize the workplace practice is because of that theory. Don’t blame the messenger – attack the root cause.

The Moral Arc

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As a scientist and mystic, I am frustrated with the conflict that divides the scientific materialists from the Biblical literalists. Both camps contain people that are well-meaning who tend to focus on the defects in the world-view of their disputants, rather than considering the good that can be done by joining forces.

When I first framed this debate at everdeepening.org, I celebrated three great threads of human thought: science, which is concerned with creating languages that accurately model objective reality; philosophy, which refines language to ensure that we understand one another; and spirituality, which is concerned with the negotiation of the boundaries between the I and the we (encompassing politics as well as religion). I have argued here that science can explain spiritual experience, but we cannot avail ourselves of its predictive powers to control spiritual growth. We simply cannot establish initial conditions without mutilating the personality that we would like to study. As a result, moral growth is unavoidably consensual.
The Moral Arc
Looking at the moral liberation of humanity from that perspective, with a balance between material and spiritual experience, I summarize our moral growth in the figure. We began as animals, completely amoral creatures. This is to say that morality was not initially a consideration of our existence: we simply did what needed to be done to survive. As relative newcomers on the spiritual scene, the weight of mammalian behavior patterns overwhelmed rational analysis. The exit strategy towards moral discourse was monotheism: a cold and callous rejection of all spiritual associations that were not wholly human in their origin.

Was this a clean process? No, it was a bootstrap process (witness the Bible). People exhibiting animalistic behaviors had to learn painfully from experience the consequences of failing to think carefully about the consequences to others of our actions. They had to develop languages to support moral analysis (philosophy), and they had to form communities willing to surrender resources to those pursuing that study. The Bible is best understood as one culture’s experience of that growth.

The rise of moral philosophy that culminated with Jesus of Nazareth asserts that Unconditional Love, which is the divine presence, propels our ascent. In part, it is because the contract is that the moral analyst must commit himself to the service of others.

Not everyone can master the nuances of moral discourse. What the faithful can do instead as moral actors is to invest their hearts and souls in caring for the world. There is no social system that can guarantee that investment – in fact, most of our social structures tend to consolidate the gains of those that abuse the contract. Only by reliance upon a divine external source can the less clever be ensured that their investment in moral conduct will be made good. Does this presence actually exist? Well, that is a matter of faith and personal experience (see the closing paragraph).

The difficulty in modern moral discourse is that the power of science outraced our philosophy. The world is changing rapidly around us, and most of humanity is still mired in amoral patterns of behavior. The power of science is often unleashed with terribly destructive consequences. This creates fear in the faithful that the institutions that safeguard our spirituality will be destroyed.

The counter of the scientist is to reject spirituality in favor of pure rationality (top of the diagram). What they seem not to understand is that most of humanity is not capable of participating in the discourse under those terms, but requires the deep psychological immersion of religion to substantiate trust in the mysteries tended by the intellectual elites. The faithful can only judge the trustworthiness of that elite by their pronouncements. Words like “stupid”, “sheep”, and “irrational” obviously will be interpreted as inconsistent with reliable moral stewardship, and tend to push the faithful into the arms of sociopaths that promise to protect them (as if that were possible, given the problems that we have mounted up against ourselves).

My experience is that economic exchange exploits our strengths and exacerbates our weaknesses. Obviously, it is in the interest of intellectuals to trumpet and enhance their virtues. But what I find, with Hume, is that spiritual engagement with such people is often hollow in the heart. The substitution of science for monotheism elevates rationality without replacing the guarantee of moral stewardship. In my own experience, that guarantee takes this form: when my heart is ready to break under the burden of the pain in the world, I open it a little wider and a great flood of love rushes through. I know that power is not mine.

In the Year 2525: Big Science, Big History, and the Far Future of Humanity

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I went out to Pasadena yesterday to Caltech, where the Skeptics Society held its annual conference. The theme was set by Michael Shermer, whose latest book “The Moral Arc”, framed the conversation.

Shermer’s basic premise is that charting the course of science shows that it correlates with an improvement in moral decision-making. I would tend to caution that correlation does not imply causation. But let’s look at how the conference speakers responded to that framing.

The first speaker, Don Prothero, raised an alarm about the dangers of science denial. We are skating on the edge of ecological disaster. Species extinction is occurring at a rate never before seen in the history of the planet, and global climate change threatens human survival as well. Prothero pointed the finger at science deniers who have impeded the implementation of policies such as those pursued by Germany and France to reduce their fossil fuel dependency. But where did the power to extract and consume so much fossil fuel come from, Dr. Prothero? From science, of course. In conversation, I also pointed out to him my sense that the political investments made by the Koch brothers probably reflect a basic understanding of the science of economics.

Ian Morris did not look deeply into the future, but commented on the correlation between social moires and energy consumption in foraging, farming and fossil fuel societies. He noted that the citizens in the last stage consume nearly 100 times as much energy as those in the first stage. Only farming societies tend to accept hierarchical structure, while foraging societies accept violence. The fossil fuel culture has created a kind of “sweet spot” for citizens that are largely free from violence and also allowed personal liberty (although that conclusion seems weaker if we look at what we’ve done to the rest of the animal kingdom – pigs, chickens and cows might beg to differ). The future depends greatly upon discovery of alternative sources of energy.

Jared Diamond framed his comments on the perception of danger against his experiences among the natives of New Guinea. His charming vignettes included the wisdom that parents in New Guinea allow their children choice. While I agree that far too much of our children’s time is prescribed for them, I found his admission that his household ultimately held 150 or so reptilian pets to reflect more an allowance for children to decide for their parents. The overall flow of the presentation, however, seemed to argue against Shermer’s hypothesis: the medical benefits of advanced cultures comes with emotional disassociation and irrational anxiety that is unknown in tribal cultures.

Carol Tavris offered an amusing and enlightening look at gender and sexuality. Mostly it was directed towards disassembly of social stereotypes regarding gender and sexuality. The most significant revelation for the attendees should have been the debunking of studies that suggested that sexual orientation was a biological predisposition rather than a choice. The intervening years have demonstrated that there is no biological factor that determines sexual orientation, and sociologists have described societies that have age groups that engage in homosexuality before entering into hetero adulthoods. Tavris also emphasized that feminine rights (with a focus on the frightening practice of castration and mutilation) depended upon economic opportunity for women. Both observations have significant political consequences, and led to turbid discussions regarding Western cultural imperialism.

John McWhorter was on far safer ground in considering the future of languages. Many languages will die, and attempting to preserve languages that are dying is a lost cause – their structure is simply too irregular for anyone to master who hasn’t learned them from the cradle. In fact, the relative elegance of many modern languages is related to the need to bring adult learners (emigrants) into the social system. The language had to be “dumbed down.” For this reason, McWhorter confidently states that Chinese, although the language spoken by the most people, would not overcome the tide of English. The tonal and contextual subtleties of Chinese make it impossible for an adult to master.

After the lunch break, Shermer and Richard Dawkins had a conversation that was advertised to consider the future of religion, but became rather focused on the suitability of Darwinian theory as a moral weathervane. It was nice for Dawkins to admit that he would allow for an advanced alien species (a type of “God”), but that it would have to have arisen out of evolution. I found the discussion to be frustrating, and stood up in the Q&A to offer that human behavior and evolutionary success is driven by Lamarckian processes (due to the enormous plasticity of the brain, human adults pass traits acquired during their lifetimes on to their children). While competitive selection still applies in human society, attempting to use Darwinian processes to explain human morality is a broken proposition.

Esther Dyson gave humble and uplifting introduction to the work that she is doing in trying to change the systems that cultivate poor health choices in the economically disadvantaged segments of our society. She shied away from any claims to scientific process. I had to stand up and applaud the empathy demonstrated by her choice to feel the pain of these people, and respond by wading in to do something.

My assessment of Leonard Krauss was summed up in person to him. Since I left the field of particle physics in 1990, I have become concerned that physicists talk about mathematical constructs as though they were observed physical fact. Krauss agreed that was an issue, but when I asked what the corrective was, he simply said “people lose their funding.” I did try to introduce some of the concepts I’ve outlined here. The conversation was an experience that hopefully will prepare me to do better in the future.

David Brin was to talk about privacy and security, but ended up developing a philosophical framework for political action. I found his presentation to be fascinating, in that I think that he was actually trying to deal with moral complexity that the others escaped by narrowing their focus. However, it wasn’t terribly scientific: Brin’s claim that developed nations have a “diamond shaped” power structure (a broad middle class) ignores the third-world critique that we’ve merely exported our poverty (globally, the pyramidal structure still applies). Brin did characterize the war on the middle class as an upper-class “putsch”, and considered that a reflection of behavior held over from our Darwinian past. I was heartened by one particular marching order: liberals need to reclaim Adam Smith, whose thinking has been corrupted by the neo-conservatives.

Gregory Benford spoke about the future of space travel. He echoed Prothero with an alarm that if we don’t start pulling our space junk out of orbit, the gateway will close: we won’t be able to launch rockets through the debris generated by colliding fragments. He then considered economic models for resource extraction from the asteroid belt, which are apparently related to long-term (100 million years) plans to boost the earth from its orbit so that it won’t be dried out as the sun heats. As for the prospect for travel to other solar systems, Benford invoked the lack of foresight of Thomas Jefferson, who thought it would take 1000 years for Americans to settle the continent, and the importance of the explorer spirit to human culture: politics, rather than science.

Returning now to the framing set by Shermer, I offer this: science is the study of the behavior of things that lack personality. It has long been recognized that the stepchildren of political and social science struggle because the participants don’t sit still long enough to be studied – introduce a change in the system, and they’ll change their behavior. So while trying to manage morality must be a rational exercise, this conference offered weak indications that scientific practices are going to have an impact. Where the question of the basis of morality was addressed, it was in gross abstractions that were often contradicted by the evidence offered by other speakers.

The lesson that I would hope a skeptic would draw from this is that they should have far more sympathy for the struggles faced by leaders of religious and political organizations. St. Augustine, for example, was a rational philosopher whose thought shaped moral discussion for more than a thousand years. His writings might be worthy of consideration.

The danger of convocations such as the Skeptics’ Conference is that they create an echo chamber. The fact is that most of society cannot keep up with the developments described by these worthy speakers: we lack either the mental capacity or the time. In that context, ritual and mystery are essential and valuable props to social development. So don’t tell Christians that they are unscientific. Tell them that we need intelligent design, and since they are exhorted to be Godly, why not get into the game ourselves?

Pope Francis Submits to Scientific Materialism

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Last week, the Irish Republic, long dominated by the Catholic Church in its management of public morals, stood up on its feet and granted marriage rights to same-sex couples.

Hallelujah!

The response of the Pope is to claim that humanity “lost” on that day. That claim is rooted in a Biblical passage that asserts marriage is between a “man and a woman.”

As I have discussed before, many same-sex couples involve a masculine personality and a feminine personality. Since I hold that the domain of religion is the soul, I see such pairings are sacred before God. Actually, I would assert that any relationship that brings love into the world is sacred to God, because as we were taught by John, God is love.

Pope Francis, unfortunately, has submitted to a philosophy known as “scientific materialism.” In that world view, it is only the material presentation that matters in judging right and wrong. A “man”, in that world view, possesses a penis that is used to penetrate the vagina of a “woman.” And, of course, God’s primary purpose is in seeing to it that the global ecology is destroyed by human overpopulation.

Yes, Francis, humanity has lost something indeed when even the Pope holds that what we do with our bodies counts more than what we do with our souls.