Author: Ophelia Benson

A week or two ago I was reading another book about emotions and thinking, The Political Brain by Drew Westen (I read it after reading this article in the NY Review of Books). I was struck by this observation on page 15:

Republicans understand what…David Hume recognized three centuries ago: that reason is a slave to emotion, not the other way around…Democratic strategists for the last three decades have instead clung tenaciously to the dispassionate view of the mind…They do so, I believe, because of an irrational emotional commitment to rationality – one that renders them, ironically, impervious to…scientific evidence on how the political mind and brain work. [italics his]

Hmmmm, I thought – do I have that? So I thought about it (rationally, I hope, despite the wild sobbing and tearing of hair). Well, I at least have an emotional commitment to rationality, I agreed. I don’t think it’s irrational, because I think rationality is better, for reasons I could enumerate – but it could be the case that that commitment causes me to overlook or forget the importance of emotion. I decided to try to do a better job of keeping it in mind.

But anyway, I have no trouble agreeing that it is an emotional commitment. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t care – everyone could be irrational and coercive up one side and down the other, and I wouldn’t care, because I wouldn’t care. The caring comes first – I get that.

Anthony Grayling finds John Gray not altogether persuasive.

In a nutshell the book consists in the repeated assertion that modern secularist thinking is utopian in aspiration, has inherited this aspiration from Christianity, has failed because its belief in progress is false and has in fact been violently regressive…[H]e is against the progressivist ambitions of the secular Enlightenment, and he hopes to annoy its proponents by giving it Christianity for a father and – that weary old canard – Nazism and Stalinism for offspring…In order to establish that secular Whiggish Enlightenment-derived aspirations are the child of Christianity, Gray begins by calling any view or outlook a “religion”. Everything is a religion: Torquemada’s Catholicism, the pluralism and empiricism of 18th-century philosophers, liberalism, Stalinism. He speaks of “secular religion” and “political religion”. This empties the word “religion” of any meaning, making it a neutral portmanteau expression like “view” or “outlook”. He can therefore premise a gigantic fallacy of equivocation, and assimilate secular Enlightenment values to the Christian “narrative” of reformation aimed at bringing about a golden age.

The Humpty Dumpty move – oddly popular with people who want to give the Enlightenment or secularism or atheism or science or all those a good kicking.

[I]n making a nonsense of the word “religion” Gray blurs and blends just where important distinctions are required. A religion is a view which essentially premises commitment to belief in the existence of supernatural agencies in the universe, almost always conceived as having intentions and expectations regarding human beings…Most religions, especially if given the chance, share the totalitarian impulses of Stalinism and Nazism (think Torquemada and the Taliban) for a simple reason: all such are monolithic ideologies demanding subservience to a supposed ideal, on pain of punishment for non-conformity. Now let us ask whether secular Enlightenment values of pluralism, democracy, the rule of independently and impartially administered law, freedom of thought, enquiry and expression, and liberty of the individual conform to the model of a monolithic ideology such as Catholicism, Islam or Stalinism.

No. They don’t.

One thing that cannot be let go by is Gray’s backhanded defence of religion as “at its best … an attempt to deal with mystery rather than the hope that mystery will be unveiled”, and regrets that “this civilising perception” (one gasps) has been lost in the current clash of fundamentalisms. This painfully vague excuse for one of the worst toxins poisoning human affairs will not do: invocation of mystery has been more a potent excuse for evil than a service to the greater good.

An attempt to deal with mystery – sounds oddly like ‘some insights into ways of ultimately enhancing human flourishing.’ Equally nebulous, equally capacious, equally cautiously non-specific. Naughty.

Speaking of morality – Jean has an interesting Ethics Poll: The Talent Show. She wants more takers, so why not amble over and take it (it’s just one question).

More thoughts on morality, Haidt, emotion, confabulation, intuition, reasoning, cultural relativism, disgust, purity, and so on.

Haidt at Edge again:

We all care about morality so passionately that it’s hard to look straight at it. We all look at the world through some kind of moral lens, and because most of the academic community uses the same lens, we validate each other’s visions and distortions. I think this problem is particularly acute in some of the new scientific writing about religion.

I’m not sure that is a problem. I can see that it’s a potential problem, and I can believe it’s sometimes a problem, but I’m not sure it is a problem overall – because I think the moral lens of the academic ‘community’ is likely to be better than many other possible lenses. One of the exceptions is when that ‘community’ gets so excited about the fact that other cultures have different lenses that it decides all lenses see equally well.

Which is not to say that Haidt is not interesting here; he is. To summarize: morality and rationality depend on the proper functioning of emotional circuits in the prefrontal cortex; human morality is the product of natural selection; automatic and unconscious processes can cause much of our behaviour, even morally loaded actions that we thought we were controlling consciously. Emotion matters; morality is hardwired; a lot of what we do is automatic rather than conscious. We’re not all that rational. Furthermore, we confabulate: we make up rational explanations for things we’ve done for unconscious reasons. We’re not all that rational, and sometimes when we are rational we’re just telling a story about something we’ve done for reasons we’re not aware of. Okay. But…

These findings suggested that emotion played a bigger role than the cognitive developmentalists had given it. These findings also suggested that there were important cultural differences, and that academic researchers may have inappropriately focused on reasoning about harm and rights because we primarily study people like ourselves – college students, and also children in private schools near our universities, whose morality is not representative of the United States, let alone the world.

Wait. Why ‘inappropriately’? Does he mean inappropriately in an epistemic sense – that that’s not the way to get a broad sample? Or does he mean in a moral sense – that that’s not the way to think about morality? The first of course makes sense, the second is more dubious. I think what’s going on in this article is that he starts out doing the first and then gradually shades into doing the second – he gradually moves from the descriptive to the normative.

Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds. But I do agree with Josh Greene that sometimes we can use controlled processes such as reasoning to override our initial intuitions. I just think this happens rarely, maybe in one or two percent of the hundreds of judgments we make each week.

Maybe, but on public and contentious issues, don’t we use controlled processes such as reasoning quite a lot? And more to the point, don’t we have to? Is that not the only alternative to simply heeding our visceral initial reactions and then going with them? Wouldn’t that simply push us back into a world where automatic hatred of black people or gays was normal and unproblematic? A world where all our gut-level contempts and dislikes and desires to bully and exploit would grab the reins and bolt?

Mind you, as potentilla pointed out, he does explicitly say he is being descriptive rather than normative – but I’m not always convinced.

My point is just that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

I think that’s wrong. The caste system for instance does not enhance the human flourishing of the people in the bottom castes. Strongly patriarchal ideologies and ways of life do not enhance the human flourishing of women and girls. Chattel slavery did not and does not enhance the human flourishing of the slaves. I’m perfectly willing to agree that my dislike of ways of life that treat some people like shit is emotional first and rational second if at all – but I’m not willing to agree that every way of life is basically good at heart. Mind you, Haidt hedged his bets there – he didn’t say every longstanding ideology and way of life ultimately enhances human flourishing – he said every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some insights into ways of ultimately enhancing human flourishing – which could mean exactly nothing, and be conveniently unfalsifiable. What – even the most reactionary brutal male-dominated way of life sits around having insights into ways of ultimately enhancing human flourishing, then has a jolly good laugh at the whole subject and goes on as before? Well maybe so, but what good is that? Why bother saying it? Why bother saying it if not to rebuke atheists who prefer to second-guess our intuitions?

Thought for the day. Sam Harris replying to Jonathan Haidt at Edge.

The point is that religion remains the only mode of discourse that encourages grown men and women to pretend to know things they manifestly do not (and cannot) know. If ever there were an attitude at odds with science, this is it. And the faithful are encouraged to keep shouldering this unwieldy burden of falsehood and self-deception by everyone they meet – by their coreligionists, of course, and by people of differing faith, and now, with startling frequency, by scientists who claim to have no faith.

Just so. Often we’re not just encouraged to pretent to know what we don’t and can’t know, we’re more or less ordered to. That’s why we keep resisting.

A new course on ‘Islamophobia’…

There are clear parallels in the prejudices, stereotypes and misconceptions of Islamophobia and sectarianism, says Mr Gray. But there are also important differences…“One thing I try to get across to young people is that terrorists are not truly Islamic,” he says. “The word ‘Islam’ means ‘peace’, and if you read the Qur’an it has a message of peace on almost every page. The idea of murder is utterly against its teachings. Any text is open to interpretation, but the fundamental truth of the Qur’an is submission to the will of God, who demands that Muslims are seen to be peaceful people.”

The word ‘Islam’ means ‘submission,’ and if you read the Qur’an it has different messages in different places.

This distinction between Muslims and Islamists is one that pupils on the course it is designed for (S1-2) are able to appreciate, he says. “In my experience, young people are sympathetic to Islam and are not as naïve as some adults think. They can listen to stories on the news, for instance, and say, ‘Hold on, I’ve studied Islam at school and I know that’s not true’.”

Or they can say, ‘Hold on, I’ve studied Islamophobia at school and I know what I was taught in that course’ – which could itself be thoroughly naïve. Mr Gray sounds somewhat naïve himself.

Besides imparting knowledge and developing understanding, a key aim of the course is to foster this kind of questioning among young people. “We have to challenge ideas and guide pupils to becoming independent learners and critical thinkers. That’s very important,” says Mr Gray.

Provided, of course, they question and challenge in the way Mr Gray has taught them to; provided they become independent learners and critical thinkers who reach the conclusions Mr Gray wants them to reach. It doesn’t sound very much as if he wants them to question Islam, or challenge the ‘fundamental truth of the Qur’an’ or become critical thinkers about Islam. It sounds as if Mr Gray wants them to learn that ‘terrorists are not truly Islamic’ and that Islam means peace and that ‘Islamophobia’ is a bad thing. It doesn’t sound as if he’ll be assigning them any books by Ayaan Hirsi Ali or my friend Ibn Warraq. Questioning is as questioning does.

If a scientific investigation says one thing and an ancient epic says another, who ya gonna believe? Well duh – the epic, obviously.

There was a proposed shipping canal project, but

Hindu hardliners say the project will destroy what they say is a bridge built by Ram and his army of monkeys. Scientists and archaeologists say the Ram Setu (Lord Ram’s bridge)…is a natural formation of sand and stones. In their report submitted to the court, the government and the Archaeological Survey of India questioned the belief, saying it was solely based on the Hindu mythological epic Ramayana. They said there was no scientific evidence to prove that the events described in Ramayana ever took place or that the characters depicted in the epic were real. Hindu activists say the bridge was built by Lord Ram’s monkey army to travel to Sri Lanka and has religious significance. In the last two days, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has launched a scathing attack on the government for questioning the “faith of the million”.

Well exactly. If the million, or the billion, choose to believe that Lord Ram’s monkey army and Donald Duck and his three nephews and the infamous worm squadrons of Aphrodite teamed up to build the Atlantic Ocean which thus has religious significance and therefore no one can step in it or fly over it or ride on it in a boat or a laundry tub – then no one must question that belief and no poxy scientists may submit any poxy reports saying there’s no evidence supporting that belief. Even in secular India. Tra la la, the world gets stupider every day.