Category: History

Autonomous Ethical Reasoning

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I got my first run in today after two months off. It was refreshing in that I was finally moving beyond the pain, but it also gave me that runner’s high oxygenation that lifts my spirit and fuels my thoughts. My wife and I decided a change of lockdown venue was in order so we relocated to New Mexico (after completing and checking our ballots in Arizona, I will note). My run took me up into the local mountain range and around an iconic rock formation. A coyote was sniffing around the trail until I spooked him. Some things are constant across the West, including the numinous sense of peace and calm that overtook me while I recovered under some trees and watched a few fanned-out contrails slowly drift in the high winds.

The fragility of American democracy keeps coming up in the run-up to tomorrow’s elections. Hostility, disinformation, legal actions, disruption, and general uncertainty have overtaken what was once a fairly simple process (Florida in 2000 notwithstanding).

Richard Just wrote a long-form piece in The Washington Post Magazine titled How Religion Can Help Put Our Democracy Back Together, though the title is shockingly more certain than the actual article that rebuilding is possible. Here are some of the ideas that Just circulates:

  1. If we were all a bit more attuned to the great mysteries that religions promote we would be more humble in our political engagement.
  2. Perhaps our shift away from religious involvement means that we instead idolatrously attach to political leaders.
  3. We have become obsessed with politics and lost the sense of inner peace that religions can provide.
  4. Religious communities are trust building, unlike other kinds of community involvement.
… Read the rest

Measuring Belief and Quackery

Mark Davis1 Comment

While reviewing reporting on the RNC this afternoon, I found myself curious about the protocols at news organizations with respect to their editorial boards. For instance, does the Washington Post editorial board require that claimed facts within all opinion pieces are not clearly disputed? Does the New York Times? I suspect yes, which is what we see in the lawsuit filed by Sarah Palin against the New York Times concerning the suggestion that Palin’s campaign was relevant to the shooting of Gabby Giffords. There was at least a debate that rose to the level of the Opinion Editor, if not the board.

I was investigating this because I am curious how WaPo handles Trumpy columnists like Mark Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt, who are mostly cheerleaders without baggage for the current president, with only occasional whataboutisms and other distracting suggestions about Biden’s candidacy. They don’t defend lies and cons. They just cheer. Meanwhile, the board itself came down hard on the repeated falsehoods of Pamela Bondi and the ongoing slaughter of truth in the service of the Trump 2020 campaign.

The mainstream press represents Trump and cronies as conmen and women, manipulative, self-serving, corrupt, cruel, ignorant, ineffectual, morally questionable, and out-and-out liars. And the press uses facts to do so. Yet Trump maintains a remarkable following despite this evidence, with many quizzical onlookers at a loss as to the psychology of Trump’s followers.

In this modern example, there are many, many resources that can be used to fact check and form opinions. Yet people choose to rely on only a few and discount others as being biased.

I was recently reading some fairly detailed Bayesian analysis by philosophers concerning Hume’s argument against miracles.… Read the rest

Innocents in Intellectual History

Mark Davis1 Comment

In 1999, I lived in a modest, rented townhouse in Redmond, Washington with my wife and a year-old baby. I had just quit my academic R&D position in a fit of pique over issues of contracts and conscience, and had uprooted our lives to go to Microsoft to be a program manager while still harboring an academic’s independent streak. I had hair down to nearly my waist that I tied back in a ponytail after it dried a bit on my way to work. I had a coordinating goatee, too. On dark, overcast days I would sometimes reach back to reposition my hair tie and the cinched area would still be mildly damp into the afternoon.

In Seattle that year, the World Trade Organization came to meet and with it violent protests over, well, what was it over? Some of it had to do with the notion of globalization of the economy. Some of it had to do with a hope for labor empowerment. Some of the participants were just anarchists, it seemed. I had a run-in one morning with a door guard-type who thought I had tailgated her through a security door at Microsoft. We had been warned in a corporate-wide email about security concerns were the protests to come out to the suburbs. I dutifully backed out, pulled the door shut, and ran my access card to open the door. Curiously, even after that, she decided not to ride the elevator up with me, a look of uncertainty and fear in her eyes.

And then there were the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 that felt similar to those Seattle actions of more than a decade before.

Kurt Andersen, author of the memorable Fantasyland, has a new book and a new Atlantic essay, College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots, that continues his theme of capturing intellectual history as a series of consistent trends that are easily observable and digested.… Read the rest

Post Pale and Nerdy

Mark Davis1 Comment

White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert Jones is making the interview and excerpt cycle, here and here. I’m on the fence whether to read it since I think I get the gist from the excerpts and interviews, though I do often read controversial social criticism, social science, and religious thinking (Charles Murray, Coming Apart; Ehrman, Heaven and Hell; etc.). I inevitably learn something new. Here, though, the meta question is how a major religion that makes truth and moral claims to its adherents can harbor and tolerate something as repugnant as slavery and racism. Now, it might be argued that slavery and racism were simply part of our shared human past where tribes and nations vied for resources and land, but this of course argues against the possibility that religious traditions reflect some kind of special truth insofar as we are wedded to the idea that slavery and racism are bad, always and everywhere. Yet, from the “curse of Ham” to the endless support for slavery in the Old and New Testaments, and even the skin color tribal curses in Book of Mormon, there was plenty of ammunition for recent religious communities in America to be supportive of white supremacy, much less slavery.

And this is where the pale and nerdy comes in. In his review of Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing (which I also own) in the New York Times, physicist and philosopher David Albert took Krauss to task for bothering with the whole effort of trying to seriously engage with religious arguments concerning the origins of the universe at all:

When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human.

… Read the rest

Critical Surveillance in the Showman State

Mark Davis1 Comment

I’ve been watching the steady stream of citizen-captured videos of bad actors in our little democracy. From racist police murders, to super-Karens, to anti-Antifa gun toters exercising intimidation, the mobile phone capture is revealing—and the internet is amplifying—the angry and ugly aspects of society that were once just local phenomena. Traditional media could promote them, but only when the events fit the channel restrictions on content, time, relevance, and taste. Now the channels are constantly expanding and the nascent ugliness is too.

Positive effects of this newfound awareness include policy changes like the requirements of body cameras for police, though some have argued that such videos violate the privacy of the subjects of police enforcement as often as they mitigate illegal behavior on the part of the police. Still, there is no going back. I purchased Google Glass during the beta period and experimented with the unit. I still own it and it still boots up. When they first came out there were reports of violent actions by people who were unhappy being subject to potentially always-on video recording. Now we have “Hey Siri, I’m being pulled over” audio triggers that are designed to enhance one’s recourse in the event of police misbehavior. Meanwhile, drones and license plate scanners by private companies can be subscribed to by police to be able to locate cars anywhere in metro areas quickly and efficiently, while at the same time the legality of attached GPS transponders for tracking suspects is constantly under judicial scrutiny. And facial recognition systems are racially biased, resulting in false-positive arrests of racial minorities (and likely others, too).

There is an entire field of Continental Philosophy that derives from Marxist theory and that goes by the title “critical theory.”… Read the rest

Originality, History, and Twee Cliché

Mark Davis1 Comment

The American composer John Adams recently complained during a stay-at-home streaming interview from his composing shack on California’s Lost Coast that Baroque composers had it easy. Their compositions had to conform to about four patterns. But for a modern composer every single piece has to be an original invention. It is daunting, intellectually and emotionally. I’ve noticed this in my own search for new voices in writing, whether my own or those of others.

I’ve been an enthusiast in the past, from the crystalline inward revelations of Goethe in translation to the angry unreliable narrators of 90s transgressive fiction. I reveled in Nabokov’s multilingual estrangement and in Pynchon’s anachronistic dialect in Mason & Dixon. In essays there are the hollowed-out abstractions that form an evocative background in writing about art and architecture, the verbose polysyllabic scrums of political writers at the fringes of liberalism and conservatism who are trying to trace out a living intellectual history, and even the conceptual ambiguity of Continental Philosophy that seems to purposefully undermine its own analytical efforts at clarification.

Martin Amis, in his collection of essays, The Rub of Time, has one central message: don’t do cliché. His second message is don’t write memoirs because they are just crude weapons for attacking your historical enemies, from family to critics. Yet there is a feeling, in retrospect, that the reverse-time narration of Time’s Arrow or the end-reveal of London Fields are a bit gimmicky. The writing is more accessible than a Pynchon, but the mechanics are more akin to short stories from 60s sci-fi, just labored at with greater literary travail.

So, yes, I’ve been an enthusiast in the past but am a critic now.… Read the rest

Overcoming Projection and Fear in the 2020s

Mark DavisLeave a comment

The end of 2019 has come with a soul-searching of sorts. While the politics of America is in an unexpected tribal divergence given the recent good economic performance combined with a world not in major conflicts, there are also undercurrents of religious change that many see as threatening to the established order. Religion in America is on the decline for the last decade, with young people, especially, indicating that they have no particular affiliation, and with the rise of atheism and related thinking in print and online.

Let’s take a look at some of the most recent journalism on the topic. We will start with an example of how, I believe, it contributes to this decline, then segue to some sage survey work and science concerning how people regard these ideas.

The Washington Times is almost always filled with sloppy journalism, editorials, scholarship, and thinking, but here we have quotes suggesting that lack of religious affiliation is “pagan.” (Wrong: paganism was and remains highly religious). Or editorialization that overthrowing “blue laws” is linked to the decline of religious adherence (or, perhaps, a better separation of church and state). Shakespeare’s jokes require biblical understanding? Perhaps some, but many others required (pagan) mythological and historical understanding. The hit list goes on and on: evangelization like in the Age of Exploration? Swords out, anyone?

But this kind of sloppiness reflects mostly a desire to denigrate religious skepticism and project onto it the fears of the religious themselves, at least according to this survey from the Public Religion Reseach Institute, as reported in the Washington Post, which is the anti-Times for some. The Christian religious right sustains a fear of losing their religious freedoms that is not actually desired by atheists or the non-affiliated.… Read the rest

Pro-Individualism, Pro-Social, Anti-Cousin

Mark Davis1 Comment

I tend towards the skeptical in the face of monocausal explanatory frameworks, especially for ideas as big as human history and the factors that shaped it. The risk of being wrong is far too high while the payoff in terms of anything more than cocktail banter is too low, be it as a shaper of modern policy or bearer of moral prerogatives.

So the widely covered discussion of Schulz, et. al.’s AAAS Science paper, “The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation” (paywall) is a curiosity that admits to cautious reading at the very least. The hypothesis is that Catholic Church prohibitions on consanguine marriage that began in the medieval period in Western Europe explain globally unusual aspects of the psychology of the people of those regions. By banning cousin marriage even out to the 6th degree in many cases, the Church forced people away from tribal ideas and more towards neolocal family structures. That, in turn, led to pro-social attitudes based on social trust rather than family power, and towards more individualistic and independent psychologies overall.

The methodology of the study is fairly complex: look at the correlations between consanguine marriages patterns and psychological attitudes, then try to explain those correlations away with a wide range of alternative data patterns, like the availability of irrigation or proximity to Roman roads, and so forth. Data experiments that look at Eastern Orthodox versus Western Church differences, or even between northern and southern Italy are used to test the theory further.

In the end, or at least until other data supervenes, the hypothesis stands as showing that reducing cousin or similar marriages is a “causal channel” for these patterns of individualism and social trust.… Read the rest

A Most Porous Barrier

Mark Davis2 Comments

Whenever there is a scientific—or even a quasi-scientific—theory invented, there are those who take an expansive view of the theory, broadly applying it to other areas of thought. This is perhaps inherent in the metaphorical nature of these kinds of thought patterns. Thus we see Darwinian theory influenced by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of economic optimization. Then we get Spencer’s Social Darwinism arising from Darwin. And E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology leads to evolutionary psychology, immediately following an activist’s  pitcher of ice water.

The is-ought barrier tends towards porousness, allowing the smuggling of insights and metaphors lifted from the natural world as explanatory footwork for our complex social and political interactions. After all, we are as natural as we are social. But at the same time, we know that science is best when it is tentative and subject to infernal levels of revision and reconsideration. Decisions about social policy derived from science, and especially those that have significant human impact, should be cushioned by a tentative level of trust as well.

E.O. Wilson’s most recent book, Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies, is a continuation of his late conversion to what is now referred to as “multi-level selection,” where natural selection is believed to operate at multiple levels, from genes to whole societies. It remains a controversial theory that has been under development and under siege since Darwin’s time, when the mechanism of inheritance was not understood.

The book is brief and does not provide much, if any, new material since his Social Conquest of Earth, which was significantly denser and contained notes derived from his controversial 2010 Nature paper that called into question whether kin selection was overstated as a gene-level explanation of altruism and sacrifice within eusocial species.… Read the rest

Doubt at the Limit

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I seem to have a central theme to many of the last posts that is related to the demarcation between science and non-science, and also to the limits of what rationality allows where we care about such limits. This is not purely abstract, though, as we can see in today’s anti-science movements, whether anti-vaccination, flat Earthers, climate change deniers, or intelligent design proponents. Just today, Ars Technica reports on the first of these. The speakers at the event, held in close proximity to a massive measles outbreak, ranged from a “disgraced former gastroenterologist” to an angry rabbi. Efforts to counter them, in the form of a letter from a county supervisor and another rabbi, may have had an impact on the broader community, but probably not the die-hards of the movement.

Meanwhile, Lee Mcyntire at Boston University suggests what we are missing in these engagements in a great piece in Newsweek. Mcyntire applies the same argument to flat Earthers that I have applied to climate change deniers: what we need to reinforce is the value and, importantly, the limits inherent in scientific reasoning. Insisting, for example, that climate change science is 100% squared away just fuels the micro-circuits in the so-called meta-cognitive strategies regions of the brains of climate change deniers. Instead, Mcyntire recommends science engages the public in thinking about the limits of science, showing how doubt and process lead us to useable conclusions about topics that are suddenly fashionably in dispute.

No one knows if this approach is superior to the alternatives like the letter-writing method by authorities in the vaccination seminar approach, and it certainly seems longer term in that it needs to build against entrenched ideas and opinions, but it at least argues for a new methodology.… Read the rest