waka waka waka

Every year the website Edge.org poses a provocative question to some of the world’s brightest bulbs. The 2009 question is out.

Drumroll, please:

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I have said often in these pages that I view the human propensity for religion as a cognitive adaptation that has flourished because it tends to improve the cohesion of social groups, thereby increasing the fitness of those groups in competition against others. As David Sloan Wilson argues in his book Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, this idea of “group-level selection”, though out of favor among Darwinian theorists for many years, is now becoming repectable again, and is an appropriate place in which to look for adaptive explanations of various sorts of social behavior.

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We are traveling today, so will likely be off the air until tomorrow. Please browse our archives, try the “Random Post” link at right, or join the ongoing conversation about the situation in Gaza. (Or all three.)

Charles Krauthammer, in today’s column, responds to those who see Israel as being at fault for bullying the Palestinians once again. His essay begins:

Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.

Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis — 6,464 launched from Gaza in the past three years — deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people.

This has two purposes. First, counting on the moral scrupulousness of Israel, Hamas figures civilian proximity might help protect at least part of its arsenal. Second, knowing that Israelis have new precision weapons that may allow them to attack nonetheless, Hamas hopes that inevitable collateral damage — or, if it is really fortunate, an errant Israeli bomb — will kill large numbers of its own people for which, of course, the world will blame Israel.

For Hamas, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians. The religion of Jew-murder and self-martyrdom is ubiquitous.

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The storm ended late last night, and as the clouds broke up the temperature fell sharply, down into the low teens. Today was sunny, but it was very windy, with a high of only about twenty degrees. This afternoon at about two-thirty or three I went back out to take some more pictures.

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We are up in Wellfleet for the holiday, and were treated to a winter nor’easter that took the form of an impressive blizzard. It began at about ten this morning, and before long the roads were covered, the wind was blowing hard, and the visibility was down almost to zero. I got into my reliable all-wheel-drive vehicle at about one o’clock, and went out for a spin, camera in hand. Here’s a side of this popular seaside getaway that the throngs who crowd the place in August will never see.

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Over the transom today comes another item from our friend Jess Kaplan, mentioning yet another eccentric Russian academic. This time around it is a mathematician by the name of Anatoly Fomenko.

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Our friend Jess Kaplan has sent us a link to an article in the Wall Street Journal informing us that according to a prominent Russian political analyst, the U.S. is about to fall apart.

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The debate continues at Mangan’s; the issue is whether one can genuinely be interested in conserving the virtues of Western society while at the same time publicly questioning the truth of the central claims of Christianity. The Christians in the conversation would, unsurprisingly, like us to agree that Western civilization is essentially and inextricably bound up with Christianity, and that therefore no “true conservative” should go around suggesting that its beliefs are false. Meanwhile others of us, including Dennis, our host, feel that although Christianity has of course been the dominant religion of the West thoughout most of its long history, the cultural and philosophical core of the West is not in itself distinctly Christian.

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I’ve just got my hands on something I’ve been looking for, off and on, for a couple of years now: a bottle of Dogfish Head 120 Minute India Pale Ale.

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In a comment to a recent post, reader Greg Estren raised a question that has been implicit here for quite some time. Should we encourage religious belief, even if we think religion’s claims are false? We asked this same question, regarding the notion of objective moral truths, back in September: are these beliefs genuinely necessary in order for us to lead worthwhile lives, or are they, as Daniel Dennett has suggested, more like Dumbo’s magic feather — a helpful fiction that helps us learn to fly, but which we can let go of once our skills have matured?

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Our pal Kevin Kim, in a recent post, linked to a video clip featuring Carl Sagan’s famous “Pale Blue Dot” monologue. On Valentine’s Day of 1991, at Sagan’s request, the spacecraft Voyager 1 was turned toward the Earth to capture an image of its faraway home. The doughty little doohickey was, by then, about four billion miles away, and in the photo (which you can see here), the Earth appears as nothing more than, well, a pale blue dot. Sagan, who during his too-short life created a body of work that should stand as case-closing evidence that atheists can nevertheless have a deeply reverential sense of the numinous, used this photo to illustrate, in poignantly poetic terms, how small we really are, and how fragile and precious the beauty of our remarkable little world.

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To all of you, with heartfelt appreciation and warmest wishes.

(Yes, I appreciate the ironic juxtaposition of this and the previous post, but even we Godless heathens can enjoy this winter holiday. We had it first, anyway.)

If you have gone to look at the post and comment thread about Christianity over at Dennis Mangan’s, you will have seen that Dennis, an unbeliever who considers himself a conservative, must confront the assertion put to him by Lawrence Auster: that it is simply not consistent to be both a conservative defender of Western civilization and to disdain the Christian religion.

It would be easy enough, and correct, simply to say it all just depends on how one defines “conservative”, but that is uninteresting, and ignores a legitimate charge. If, as is surely the case, Western culture owes many of its essential qualities to its Christian heritage, then if one wants to repudiate Christianity, one must give some account of exactly what it is, then, that one expects to conserve. If our culture has Christian bones, argue the believers, you can hardly fillet it and expect it to stand.

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Democracy is best for the unexceptional man.

Have a look at the picture below. Whom would you say is in charge?

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From number 136, in the Krailsheimer edition:

Sometime, when I set to thinking about the various activities of men, the dangers and troubles which they face at Court, or in war, giving rise to so many quarrels and passions, daring and often wicked enterprises and so on, I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Pascal saw in Man’s constant need for diversion our terror of the abyss of wretchedness we must confront if we are brave enough to look within ourselves. In this he was exactly right.

Man has not changed: the wretchedness is real enough, and the diversion more cacaphonous than ever. What can be done? For Pascal, the answer lay in God. But is God as real as the wretchedness? If not we need another approach.

If only H. L. Mencken were with us today. We do have some gratifyingly caustic talents currently in harness, but when Mencken was feeling the warp-spasm he was incomparable. I have no doubt that Christopher Hitchens would go dry for a year just to have lunch with the man.

What Mencken would have to say about recent political and economic events will have to wait until we meet on the far bank of the river, but the acerbic conservative writer John Derbyshire has recently excerpted a pungent morsel that might give us some idea. Taken from the Chrestomathy, the passage imagines the hatching of the New Deal by Harry Hopkins and his chums:

Four preposterous nonentities, all of them professional uplifters, returning from a junket at the taxpayer’s expense, sit in a smoking car munching peanuts and talking shop. Their sole business in life is spending other people’s money. In the past they have always had to put in four-fifths of their time cadging it, but now the New Deal has admitted them to the vast vaults of the public treasury, and just beyond the public treasury, shackled in a gigantic lemon-squeezer worked by steam, groans the taxpayer.

If you cup your hand to your ear, you can hear them stoking the boiler.

The thread has lengthened over at Dennis Mangan’s since I linked to his recent post about religion, and again I urge you all to go and read it. He has been engaged primarily with the conservative writer Lawrence Auster, who has been defending his Christianity against Mr. Mangan’s skeptical atheism. No, that is wrong: Mr. Auster is on the attack, and Dennis is demonstrating, with masterful skill and saintly patience, that religious arguments against the nonbeliever — and Mr. Auster mounts the assault as well as any I’ve ever seen — break harmlessly upon a rational, skeptical worldview. It is a lot to read, but very much worth your time.

Sorry about the blank page yesterday; I expended what fuel I had in the comment thread of this recent post. It might be worthwhile to sum up a little later in a new one, and to promote some remarks made in that discussion to the front page, but today is a busy day. Meanwhile, then, here is a tart offering, garnished with a savory and piquant comment, from our friend the estimable Deogolwulf.

A couple of years ago we mentioned the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2,100-year-old clockwork device that was recovered in 1902 from a Mediterranean shipwreck. The gizmo has baffled the boffins since the day it was found, as it represents a level of engineering expertise that nobody would have imagined to have existed in 80 B.C. (and which was not seen again until the 1700’s). It stands defiantly alone, its provenance a great and frustrating enigma.

The Mechanism has been subjected to intense scrutiny in recent years, using the latest imaging technology (of the sort that has not, so far, been found in any ancient shipwrecks), and now an English engineer has built a fully operational replica. Have a look here.

You should all drop in on Dennis Mangan, who has been having a conversation about God. It seems his views are nearly, if perhaps not entirely, congruent with my own.

Reader Court Merrigan, in a comment to last night’s post about New York State’s proposed “obesity tax”, quite rightly calls me on the carpet for likening the Paterson administration’s plan to the public-health policies of the Nazis. As he suggests, I ought to be able to make my case without resorting to such analogies — the point being that the Nazis represent such enormity of evil, such a moral black hole, that any argument or simile that comes within their event horizon is simply dragged down out of existence. Making comparisons to them is worse than useless: in terms of perfidy the Nazis are seen as not just enormous, but infinite, rendering any comparison with any scurrilousness before or since absurd, and utterly discrediting any argument that attempts to do so. He’s absolutely right: it was ugly and counterproductive, and I should have thought better of it.

So to David Paterson and his staff (and to any of you who thought my remarks were offensive and uncalled-for): I sincerely apologize. You are not Nazis, and I lowered myself by invoking their name to criticize your proposal — which was presumably well-intentioned, however frightening.

I do not apologize, however, for likening the proposed policy to Fascism, because it is exactly this sort of thing that is Fascism’s hallmark.

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Somalia, probably the most dangerous place on Earth, is in the news again. The UN Security Council today voted unanimously to adopt a US proposal to take “all necessary measures” to bring piracy under control. Our insider sources tell us that it appears that arrangements are already being made for land operations as well as naval action.

This is a complex situation: Somali pirates, as the folks at Information Dissemination have pointed out, cause far more discomfort to our international rivals, and in particular our Islamist enemies (who are, meanwhile, on the move themselves in the region), than to U.S. interests. Keep your eye on this; it may be about to get interesting.

New York’s economy is in big trouble. The state has an enormous budget gap to close, and toward that end the Paterson administration has proposed a measure that is such an egregious miscarriage of governance, as well as being so audaciously stupid, that I can hardly find appropriate language with which to disrespect it.

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Dividing my time, as I do, between New York City and Wellfleet, MA, I hang with a pretty liberal crowd. In social settings, if the conversation gets round to politics, human nature, economics, religious pluralism, or a number of other topics, it’s pretty much given that at some point I am going to be glared at, often by several pairs of eyes at once. I know the look all too well, by now, and it is not pretty. It betokens not intellectual disagreement, but stern moral judgment — the kind of look a Taliban cleric might give Amy Winehouse.

I stay calm, and I think I do a pretty good job of defending my corner, but once these “red-diaper babies” imprint you as a conservative, they suddenly lose the ability to descry any philosophical daylight between you and Rick Santorum.

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Number 113, in the Krailsheimer edition:

It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it.

This is excellent, though Pascal, a man of his time and culture, sees himself and the universe as distinct. But in us the universe has simply put forth a part of itself: a mirror in which it can behold itself upon awakening.

Having trouble getting in the Christmas spirit? With yet another hat tip to our reader ‘JK’, here’s a story that has it all: solid religious content, a prophet in the wilderness, and, if the story’s true, an impressive display of lights.

From this evening’s Borowitz Report:

Yankees Sign Iraqi Hurler
Shoe-throwing Right-hander Impresses Scouts

In their latest bid to beef up their pitching rotation for the 2009 season, the New York Yankees today signed Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zeidi to a three-year deal worth $32 million.

The right-handed al-Zeidi, 28, impressed the Yankee scouts with his performance in Baghdad yesterday when he threw both of his shoes at President George W. Bush.

While neither of the shoes hit their target, both throws “had great velocity and good movement,” said Yankee owner Hank Steinbrenner.

“The first shoe was high and outside but the second one was right down the middle,” Mr. Steinbrenner said.

The Yankee boss said that he was also impressed with Mr. al-Zeidi’s fighting spirit when Secret Service agents tackled him.

“That could come in handy when we have a series with Boston,” he said.

Making the rounds at my office last week was a video clip about the exponential pace of technological change. To the accompaniment of an urgent techno-pop soundtrack, in an onimous minor key, it presents a series of factoids illustrating the implosion of accustomed time-frames, giving the viewer the impression that the acceleration of technological, social, and economic evolution is now so great that we are hurtling into an unforeseeable future faster than we can possibly hope to adapt. The tone of the video is tawdry and sensationalist, but the impression is, I think, correct.

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We are back in Wellfleet for the next few days, having driven up here after work yesterday. We arrived at about one a.m., under a startlingly brilliant full moon, with an icy wind shaking the pines and bare oaks.

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With yet another hat tip to our friend JK, who has been tirelessly throwing odds and ends over the fence, here is an item that falls squarely in the “odds” category (though I suppose it involves “ends” as well).

My insider sources tell me there is an “uptick” in the “chatter” lately; this is their way of saying that the murmurous rustle of nefarious voices has got louder, or more insistent, or something, and that it seems more likely than usual that some horrible and murderous attack might be imminent.

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Here’s an item I meant to mention a few days ago. Published on December 5th, the 75th anniversary of Prohibition’s repeal, it is an eloquent call for an end to our nation’s misguided war on drugs. While our neighbor to the south sinks into violent anarchy, and the Taliban enriches itself producing opium, we continue to fight a puritanical, unwinnable and immeasurably costly crusade against a natural human appetite, and fill our prisons with an arbitrarily created criminal class — when all the while we could be reaping enormous fortunes in taxes and tarriffs, and depriving civilization’s foes of a virtually limitless source of income.

I lean to the right on some issues, but not this one. With the recent shift of fortunes in Washington, perhaps we can finally get something done about this insane policy.

I realize that people have strong, and divergent, opinions on this issue. Your thoughts?

Number 47, in the Krailsheimer edition:

Justice and truth are two points so fine that our instruments are too blunt to touch them exactly. If they do make contact, they blunt the point and press all round on the false rather than the true.

In commenting on a recent post, our reader and commenter Addofio, parsing the distinction between truth and opinion, says that “it all depends on what we mean by ‘true’”. Kevin Kim takes a good preliminary poke at the question over at his place.

Or, as my friend Anthony Bouza once explained it, in closing a commencement address:

Beauty is Truth,
and Truth is Beauty;
Rooty-toot-toot
and-a-rooty-toot-tooty.

As Addofio says, it all depends.

Something new for our sidebar, courtesy of our friend David Duff: Sister Wolf.

Reader JK, who has his ear to the ground at all times, alerts us to some worrisome news. Apparently the prevalence in the environment of certain chemical pollutants has reached such high levels that a broad assortment of vertebrate species are producing increasingly “feminized” males.

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There was a news item a day or two ago about some advertising put up in several cities by an association of Godless heathens. The ads suggested that folks should reconsider their belief in a supernatural deity; one went so far as to make the direct assertion that there is no God at all. The ads have aroused considerable indignation, it seems, which I suppose shouldn’t be terribly surprising, given the strength and durability of the social shield that protects religion from criticism.

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Any one who has paid any attention to neuroscience in the past few decades knew of the sad, strange case of “H.M.”, who, as a young man in 1953, underwent brain surgery to control persistent seizures. The operation did indeed quiet the storm inside his skull, but a terrible cost: the surgeon had removed part of his hippocampus, and so the patient lost the ability to form new memories.

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Number 47, in the Krailsheimer edition:

“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

Thomas Friedman, in his column in today’s Times, notes the usual silence from the world’s “moderate” Muslims in the wake of yet another despicable act of mass murder in the name of their religion.

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I have several email accounts, and I get plenty of spam, just everybody else. Every now and then, though, something comes in that I simply cannot, for the life of me, imagine why anyone would bother to send. Here’s the latest example:

Hello ,
Am David i want to know if u carry (Aluminum Planks) For Sale. If i have not mention the size that you have you can tell me the one you have now and ready to sell … What is the price of one (Aluminum Planks) so that i can purchase .I want to know if you Accept Credit Card for this order as payment .Hope to hear from you soon .
Best Regard

David, if you are out there, thanks, but no planks.

In yesterday’s Times the conservative columnist William Kristol notes how reluctant some are to acknowledge the Islamic roots — and explicitly Islamic agenda — of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai last week.

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I do hope readers will forgive me for rather a rambling post yesterday. (My editorial staff was off for the holidays.) I think some clarification is in order.

The post was written as part of an ongoing discussion of the appropriate limits of tolerance. I have been upbraided on occasion for discussing certain topics, particularly those having to do with religion and the clash of secularism with fundamentalism, in harsh, and perhaps polemical, terms. Such a tone strikes some as insufficiently respectful of the people who believe and espouse the ideas in question, and organize their lives in accordance with them.

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In a challenging and thoughtful comment on our recent post about tolerance, our reader Addofio chides me for the disdainful tone I have taken in some of my criticism of religion. She recommends that we discuss ideas, however preposterously absurd, in emotionally neutral terms, as a gesture of respect for the people who hold them. Should we try always to do this when discussing any idea, no matter what the idea, or the context? Is it even possible to do so? What are emotions for, anyway? And is everyone entitled to this sort of respect?

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I have a difficult time, occasionally, maintaining a seemly façade of unconditional respect for my fellow hominids. I try, I really do, but the older I get, the more I see of my conspecifics, and the more I come to understand of our origins, the more difficult it becomes. The recent sectarian barbarism in India gave further testimony as to what kind of creatures we really are, if anyone had any nagging doubts. But it certainly doesn’t require centuries of insane religious conflict and persecution to get us acting naturally. Why, right here at home, when we jingle Pavlov’s bell at the start of the holiday-shopping season, a few dollars off at Wal-Mart is more than enough to snap the leash.

To all of you, a safe and happy Thanksgiving. Even on this day, as civilization’s foundations shudder and its enemies raise their bloodstained hands once again, we have much to cherish, and to be grateful for.

“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”

To all of the many friends I have met on these pages, thank you for enriching my life.

More about Somali pirates: reader JK directs us to this insightful item by “Galrahn” over at Information Dissemination.

Ah, the Clintons. Ah, Christopher Hitchens. In a brief and piquant essay, the latter reminds us why the last thing we need is another stiff dose of the former. Here. Also, if you feel like a longer and deeper mud-wallow, Mr. Hitchens’s piece links to this eight-page article by Todd Purdum on how the former scoundrel-in-chief has been occupying himself since leaving office.