Rene Benthien

Philosophical differences underlying the secular in-fighting

2009-07-23T08:30:00.001+10:00

The most recent flare-up in a long running personal battle between PZ and the co-authors of Unscientific America is just one instance of many between concerned secularists.

These arguments between the 'appeasers' and the 'fundamentalists' have intensified since the release of the New Atheist books. But they do have a far deeper and broader origin than one of just messaging and presentation.

Yes messaging is important. If the aim is to promote secularism and atheism then the most effective means should be identified and pursued. For me, it was the science that pushed me in the right direction. In particular it was reading A Brief History of Time and other popular physics.

Pushing Atheism and ridiculing religion would have had a counter-productive effort. I would have gotten defensive. I would have retreated back into my faith and wrapped it around me even more tightly.

Suggestions of positive and hopeful alternatives are almost always a better motivator for change than attacking the current status quo.

But having become certain of Atheism, I was still reluctant to come out and say it. I was a closeted Atheist for a long time after. I would call myself an agnostic without really knowing what that meant. I would play nice.

So maybe 'rounding up the base' is more fruitful than converting new people from scratch. Maybe the majority of efforts should be to get the closeted atheists to come out in force. If that is the aim, then PZ, Dawkins and Hitchens are on the right track. It was Dawkins' books that made me drop the agnostic label and come out as an Atheist.

For some of us it is the scientific method that is the ultimate goal. We want people to respect science over anything else. Dawkins would say the main obstacle to science is religion. So we need to attack religion first, then proceed to replace it with science.

Eugene Scott would say science education is the best way to get people to stop believing in superstition.

And I would agree. It worked for me.

If the end goal is science, are we reducing its credibility by conflating it with Atheism? But on the other hand, can we lie and say science and religion can be at peace, when we truly believe they are not? PZ would say a scientist should not lie. Lies damage credibility more than anything else. Lies are the tools of the religious, and us rationalists should not sink to their level.

Thus the 'appeasers' are not appeasers and the 'fundamentalists' are not fundamentalists. They both have their persuasive moral reasons for their respective strategies.

In addition to the messaging problem, we also have the disagreement over 'how bad is religion anyway?' I have a feeling that if we summed up quantitatively all the ill-effects of religion and subtracted all the positive effects of religion then it might turn out to be a wash. I am sometimes one of those that Daniel Dennett disparagingly calls 'believers in belief."

Until there is quantifiable evidence that swings one way or the other, I'm not going to get all flustered up about that argument. In the end, we have to be scientific about this. It is after all the way of knowing the truth.

Michael Collins from the Moon.

2009-07-21T20:28:00.004+10:00

There are some brilliant essays and accounts all over the web commemorating the moon landing. But none of them got to me more than Michael Collins' own words as quoted in an Atlantic article on heroes.

"I really believe," he said, "that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of 100,000 miles, their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogenous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied."

Obligations to the future

2009-07-04T22:25:00.007+10:00

One of the main considerations in ethics is the 'Veil of Ignorance', a concept put forward by John Rawls in Toward a Theory of Justice:

no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.

Racism and sexism are bad for many reasons, one of them being that they violate this social contract. Reasoning from the Original Position also leads me to support public education, and public health care, especially for children and those with genetic disorders.

It is obvious to see why people should not be discriminated on the basis of where they are born. But how about when they are born?

We are polluting the world today, and incurring debt, all at the expense of people who are born 10, 20, 30 or a hundred years from now. They do not have the choice as to when they would be born. They are people just like us, albeit located in a different time.

So when we dismiss their concerns and well being, when we harm their interests to gain immediate benefits for ourselves, are we making a moral mistake somewhat akin to racism?

Why the LHC is the most important thing ever

2009-06-29T22:28:00.003+10:00

Check out the famous Nova documentary based on Brian Greene's 'The Elegant Universe' and then Brain Cox on why we need the LHC and what went wrong.

US response to Iran

2009-06-24T14:45:00.004+10:00

A bullet has been collectively dodged here. Just think of the damage a Bush administration would have done with their predictable reaction to this situation. It makes you feel a little queasy even now.

I actually suspect that President John McCain wouldn't have done what Senator John McCain is now advocating. There aren't too many people left in positions that matter who would be so ignorant of Iranian domestic politics as to advocate America lending its official weight behind the protesters.

All through their lives Iranians have been subject to anti-American propaganda. They are told that the United States is run by 'rich Jews' who want to destroy Islam and the Iranian republic. And they have a whole list of reasons to believe so. Everyone remembers the disastrous policies and interferences by the United States. Even the moderates, the relatively pro-American ones, remember Mossadeigh, the Shah, the war against Iraq and the axis of evil.

When Khāmene’i claimed that the British and the US were pulling the strings, it is like saying Obama was backed by socialists and Islamists. Except the former claim would be accepted by a far greater percentage of the Iranian population than the latter would be by Americans. They have real cause for such beliefs.

There are many Chinese who are certain that the Tienanmen Square rallies were engineered by the CIA. Historical grievances are not forgotten as easily as we would hope, and they provide an unfortunate context to the assessment that an average Chinese or Iranian will make on the cause of various events.

The current US policy towards Iran is almost pitch perfect. Can you imagine the protests even occurring if Bush was still in power? Or McCain with his 'bomb bomb bomb Iran'? The moderates in Iran would have been sidelined into nothing. Achmadi would have won his second term with ease. Hardliners of one camp foster the hardliners in the other.

A night in Iran

2009-06-21T00:19:00.001+10:00

Haunting.

Movie Review: Revenge of the Sith

2009-06-20T22:50:00.001+10:00

Episode III posed an unenviable challenge for Lucas and Co. They had to depict some of the most significant moments of a well-loved cinematic mythology. The film had to deliver a long anticipated emotional payout. It had to convincingly depict the transformation of Anakin Skywalker, the end of the Republic, the fallout between Anakin and Obi-Wan Kenobi, the exile of Yoda and the almost-complete extermination of the Jedi.

The filmmakers were in very easy danger of overshooting the mark. They could have ended up with an overly sentimental and clichéd (recall RotK) transition. On the other hand the filmmakers also had to be careful not to rush through the most important moments. They had to take the time to provide the set-up and structure that is necessary for the credibility of these transformations.

There is no doubt that Lucas delivers a film that is visually spectacular and wonderfully choreographed. The pacing of the action is quick and the screen is always packed with detail and movement. Lucas gets a lot of things right in this department.

However he also gets a lot of things wrong and these mistakes come at the most critical points of the story. The expectations from the film required subtle writing and skilfully consistent acting performances. Instead these legs crumble under the weight of the burden. The uneven acting of all the major characters and much of the clichéd dialogue mar what are sometimes competently built-up moments.

The central arc of the story, and one which the movie needs to get right, is the creation of Darth Vader.

The plot gave enough reasons for Anakin to join the Dark Side. His mother’s death and the massacre of the Tusken raiders should have been the launching pad that I expected this episode to capitalise on. They should have started with an ostracised Anakin. They should have begun by portraying his relationship with Obi-Wan and the rest of the Jedi as distant and cold. This, in addition to his doubts about the motives of the Jedi Council, his fears for Padmé’s life, his frustrations at not being able to control his ego and his other failings as a Jedi, should all be enough to lead to The Fall.

Instead we find him being on the best of terms with Obi-Wan, Windu and Yoda. Lucas had just wastefully reverted all that progression made in Ep II.

The overwhelming feeling, helped none by the acting, was that there just wasn’t enough of an impetus for him to attack Mace Windu or to commit those atrocities. It is true that losing faith in one’s own goodness can lead the person to do terrible things. However Christensen fails to sell this resignation and as a result I couldn’t buy the fact that he would submit completely to the Dark Side or massacre the younglings in the Jedi Temple.

The realisation of Palpatine’s betrayal and deceit should have driven Anakin away from his secret mentor and back to the Jedi fold. His continued allegiance to the chancellor was confounding.

All this made what was always going to be a challenging problem impossible to overcome. It would have taken a special performance by Christensen to make the transformation work but he isn’t up to the task.

The fault doesn’t lie with actor. It lies with the direction and editing. And it lies with the writing. The lines get so clunky that no one can deliver them without engendering a snicker (“from my point of view the Jedi are evil”).

Also, having gotten used to the cold ruthless half-man-half-machine of the Black Suit, that reaction to Padmé’s death was comical. The reaction to Padmé’s death should have been dealt with while he was being operated on, before he gets into the suit. Once he is in that suit he is restricted by the imprinted image of who is possibly the most famous cinematic villain.

The scenes between him and Natalie Portman, even those that were meant to be the most poignant, ended up inducing smirks. The chemistry between the two was non-existent and the uninspired writing of these scenes made it seem like a corny chic-flick.

Cheesiness pervades most of the dialogue, especially the ones given to McGregor. Although I liked the way he manages to change Obi-Wan from being an impatient Jedi Master to the Ben Kenobi of Alec Guinness (the beard probably had a lot to do with it), his reaction to the security hologram, a major emotional point in the film, was given too little time and directed in exactly the wrong manner. Again we are left without the required emotional payout.

The other pivotal character, Palpatine, was given some justice this time round. McDiarmid was poor in Ep II, but I think he manages to regain some lost ground with his performance in this film. His seduction of Anakin is admirably and seductively rationalistic. On this I must commend both the actor and Lucas, who chose not to take the easy way out on this particular point.

Unlike Anakin Skywalker, Palpatine remains a worthy villain for this epic. His deceit is subtle and ambiguous, his reason is almost justifiable, his motives almost understandable and as a result, his character, on a majority of occasions, remains credible.

On to the secondary characters.

Samuel Jackson is thankfully given a larger role. If I had my way it Samuel Jackson would be given all the roles. He is awesome and so was the duel. Jackson should be happy with Mace Windu’s death, it established him as the most powerful Jedi (although the possibility that Palpatine might have lost to sucker in Anakin is interesting to consider).

You know who else is awesome? Yoda. Yoda is super-awesome. Yoda is awesome incarnate and that’s all I have to say about Yoda.

General Grievous on the other hand sucked. Starting with that stupid name, General Grievous annoyed me constantly. Even the scenes without him were scarred by the memory of that annoyance. I laughed out loud (with much annoyance) when Grievous comes to the rescue by saying something that went along the lines of “I’ll take him myself”.

Bail Organa’s character conveyed the correct sense of stateliness and calm and his increased role was much appreciated. However he made me miss Mon Mothma. (She is credited on IMDB but I can’t remember her being there. Did she have a “Captain Antilles” type cameo?)

Speaking of cameos, I loved the opportunity to see Kashyyk but the way Chewbacca was introduced felt a bit forced. The collective “look it’s Chewie!” gasps from my fellow audience members would suggest that they disagreed with me.

As it has become typical of Lucas, the best parts of the films are those that rely on visual effects. The CGI, although not quite as seamless as in that other major motion trilogy (you know, the one that won 17 academy awards), it is still quite breathtaking. The two highly anticipated lightsaber duels between Kenobi and Skywalker and Yoda and Sidious was choreographed and edited with skill. They were brilliantly inter-cut and well set; one in the volcanic planet of Mustafar and the other on the very floors of the Galactic Senate. What could be more poignant?

A lot of the visual allusions in the final three films to the original trilogy were tastefully done. For example there was a sequence in Ep II where the camera scans through a large army of Clones and then rises to the sky, capturing the sinisterly familiar triangle shapes of Republican Assault Ships carrying them to battle. It made the hairs stand up. However that final shot of Lars and his wife looking out at the Tatooine sunset was just hammering it over out heads.

The opening sequence was thrilling. I had to take in a breath when the camera followed the two Jedi over the Star Destroyer and into a very full battle sequence. Then it started dragging on for a bit. The part where those droid thingies got onto Obi-Wan’s ship was unnecessary and a little bit silly.

So was that giant iguana.

And so was the dialogue. One of the reviewers felt that Star Wars would be a perfect candidate for a silent movie. I would’ve agreed if it weren’t for that fantastic score.

The criticism over the overbearing politics in Ep II arose mainly from the poorly written and delivered lines. I like politics and I saw great potential for Ep II and III to explore the way the senate had been crippled, the reasons behind the separatist movement, the increasing mistrust in democracy and the birth of the Empire. But again the execution was clumsy. The whole “you are either with me or with the enemy” allusions get was far too obvious for my tastes. I was wincing through most of that “so this is how liberty dies” stuff.

The clumsiness and heavy-handedness of the film does have one positive effect. It makes one appreciate the light-footed grace of the original trilogy. There was something in the banter of Han, Luke and Leia that all the advanced CGI just could not re-create.

It is true that the prequels, by the very nature of the plot, had to be darker, heavier and more ominous. But did it also have to be so plodding and forced? It felt like we were just slowly ticking off a list of things to get through before we can arrive at that ‘this-is-were-we-came-in’ point again.

6/10 stars

ED: This was written right after release. Reposted.

Movie Review: Frost/Nixon

2009-06-20T14:07:00.002+10:00

I walked into Frost/Nixon thinking it was going to be a dry, 'let's watch this cos it's good for you' kinda film. I was surprised to find myself completely engrossed from beginning to end.

Frank Langella's Nixon is a fascinating exposition on a politician's psyche. He takes out the archetype and wrings it for all its complexity. I'm not sure who is more responsible for the nature of this portrayal, Langella or Ron Howard, but this is exactly the kind of thing artists should be working on; taking pieces of history and illuminating them with an intuitive light not available to those with journalistic constraints.

My favourite scene was one that never actually happened, in which Frost receives a call from Nixon. This occurs well into the second half of the movie, and Frost has spent every trick in the book trying to get Nixon to open up. The President seems completely out of Frost's league by any stretch of the imagination. The producers are facing an impenetrable stonewall, and Nixon is getting his way. He is on the road to the 'rehabilitation' that is dreaded by the journalists.

Then out of the blue, late at night, Frost recieves a call from Nixon. As Frosts stands there, not knowing how or where to lead the conversation, Nixon talks on. His old voice and hunch betrays the unsteady weight of his experience and you can just tell that he wants to let go of all the things he had long learned to suppress so masterfully.

Nixon quizzes Frost on his time at Cambridge then asks the single most revealing question in the film, "did they look down on you too?" He then devolves into a monologue, the performance of which was Langella's finest moment. The ego, the emptiness, the anger and the ambition are all laid bare, and it is truly a spectacle.

Anyone who becomes a president is hyper-ambitious. More ambitious that 99.9999% of the rest of us. They seek to be loved, they seek approval to a much greater degree than you or me. They are far more emotionally vested in their own success than we are. That is why they strive so hard on such a singular goal. Now imagine the psychology of such a person being hated by the entire country.

Anyone who has any kind of success as a politician also must love being with people, have that charm, or 'facility' as Nixon says, to get people to like you. The second revealing question comes again from Nixon to Frost; "you know those parties of yours? Do you actually enjoy them?"

A president never has a private moment, every action is under scrutiny, performed to the benefit of others. Imagine the stress of such a performance when you don't particularly like people. As a private person myself, I understand that tiredness. I feel it every time I'm at a party for a little too long. I'd imagine the weariness to be a hundred-fold for someone in Nixon's position.

The film is an excellent character study. The themes that I've described above are only the most prominent of a multifarious and intertwined exposition by Howard, the writer and the actors. There is a genuine good-hearted curiosity motivating their efforts, and it comes through very endearingly in this story. 9/10 stars.

Is Australia a racist country?

2009-06-04T18:34:00.013+10:00

I woke up today to a Sunrise discussion on whether Australia is a racist country. The Victorian police say 1,447 people of Indian origin were robbed or assaulted in the state in 2007-2008. In the Western Suburbs of Melbourne around 30% of victims were Indian. Although Victoria with its 93,000 Indian students is getting all the attention, the attacks occur here in Sydney as well.

The Victorian police handled this in exactly the wrong way and the Indian press is understandably going ballistic. But I want to know if they are contextualizing the attacks with crime statistics from cities around the world where there are comparable Indian student populations.

I personally haven't encountered too much racism since high school, but then again 90% of my interactions are with the University crowd. They definitely aren't representative of the broader population. I've experienced only one incident of racial abuse in the workplace, but I don't think it was racially motivated. It was motivated by me being a noob at pulling beers and the bloke was a little drunk. He apologized immediately after and tipped me generously before he left.

Over the past few years we've been getting a really bad rap in the international media. The Tampa crisis, the related Children Overboard affair, the Redfern Riots, the Cronulla riots, Sol Trujillo's comments, and the treatment of refugees, have all contributed to this negative image.

I hate that we have to celebrate Australia Day on the day that the Brits invaded the country. It's offensive to the long history of this land and to the indigenous people who carry on its heritage. And as a firm republican with no British background, I find it offensive and exclusionary too.

The Rudd government has done well to reverse some of the damage done during the long Howard era by finally acknowledging our responsibility to the Stolen Generation and changing the asylum laws.

Relatively speaking, Australia isn't as racist as many other countries, including India with its prevalent caste systems. We wouldn't rate too badly against many of the European countries either, where the extreme right wing has seen more electoral success than here in Australia (One Nation was a Queensland aberration).

But we are a country of casual bluntness, our jokes are off-colour and we are easy with the insults. We are so confidant that our egalitarian ethic would be taken as given that we've adopted a laid-back attitude to possible offenses. This straight forwardness is great in most circumstances but I reckon it's doing some real damage when it comes to race issues. It is also providing shelter to the real racists out there.

My Tamil Tigers

2009-05-25T10:04:00.003+10:00

The Tigers have finally silenced their guns. After three decades of war Sri Lanka and the Tamil diaspora begin a new chapter in their tormented history. While the nationalists are in single-minded jubilation, the international Tamil community and many moderate Sinhalese are in the process of trying to make sense of all the loss and suffering that has came along with this historic event.

I grew up without being exposed directly to too much violence, but the war was always in our consciousness. My parents fled to Jaffna from Colombo after their house was burnt down in 83. I was born an year after, arriving into a family traumatised by the pogroms of Black July.

During my early childhood I would be entertained by the young Tiger annas (an affectionate term for older brothers) who stopped by our house from time to time to talk to my dad. These were the years when the peaceful liberation movement had just turned into an armed struggle. It seemed that every Tamil family proudly welcomed 'the boys' into their homes when they needed to hide out from the government or needed medical assistance for their injuries.

Though I was forbidden to speak politics outside the house, I was raised with the tales of their sacrifice and I idolised my Tiger heroes. I saw it as an epic saga of battle between good and evil and I knew of many legendary characters involved in the idealistic beginnings of the LTTE.

There was Lt. Shankar who outran the Government forces whilst bleeding from a fatal bullet wound on his stomach. He managed to lose his pursuers and reach his fellow cadres. He then handed over his gun and fell unconscious in the arms of his friends.

There was Lt Seelan (Charles Lucas Anthony) who when injured and no longer able to run, ordered his subordinate to shoot him so that he wouldn't be caught alive. The first conventional fighting unit of the LTTE was named the Charles Anthony Brigade in his honour and Pirabakaran named his first born after his old second-in-command.

There was Colonel Kittu, who was betrayed by Indian intelligence to the GoSL. Rather than being captured alive or surrendering the weapons he had procured, he chose to blow himself up along with his ship when it was boarded.

My favourite member of the Iyakkam is also possibly the one of the most respected figures in the Tamil diaspora. In 1987, Ltn Thileepan, a soft spoken skinny bespectacled young man, began a satyagraha in response to the Indian occupation. He promised to fast until requests for the rights of Tamil civilians were met. Refusing Prabakaran's pleas to drink even a glass of water, he died after fasting for 11 days. It was Thileepan's death which swung the full backing of the Tamil community unreservedly behind the LTTE.

He was also the one of very few early Tigers whose names are still unsullied by the atrocities that were to be committed in the name of freedom.

The Tigers morphed from a people backed movement into a powerful, secretive, intimidating, military dictatorship. A fanatical personality cult formed around it's leader, and questioning him was tantamount to betraying the cause in some quarters.

Along with the ingenuity and almost fanatical courage that they showed on the battle field, they ruthlessly massacred fellow armed resistance movements. They enforced boycotts on elections and killed politicians who did not subscribe to their own goals. Most unforgivably, they held their own people as human shields in their final desperate struggle to hold on to power.

I understand those who supported them unwaveringly to the very end. I too value the outstanding dedication and bravery shown by the Tiger cadres. I also know of the hospitals, schools, the police and judicial systems run by their efficient administration in the Wanni region.

I appreciate the sacrifice and risk taken by those in the diaspora who donated a large percentage of their own wealth into preserving what they saw as the final defense of their people. When you see an existentialist threat there really aren't too many options left to you.

But I think the Tigers had outlasted their usefulness. They became the primary excuse for the Government to continue on with its persecution, and in the eyes of the International community, they turned what was really a human rights struggle into an ethnic war.

The immediate next step is humanitarian aid to the IDP camps. We need to lobby for the NGOs and media to get in there immediately. We need to lobby governments to pressure Sri Lanka into allowing unfettered access. We need to help remove any more excuses the GoSL has for keeping these camps active. And we need to enlist the help of the expat Sri Lankan community to achieve these goals.

What comes after that will have to wait. We are angry and frustrated. Now is not the time to make lasting mistakes. Now is the time put out the fires. The rebuilding comes later.

Political Compass

2009-05-13T23:47:00.001+10:00

Economic Left/Right: 0.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.03

I scored a bit more to the right before the Global Financial Crisis hit. Now I'm a bit more receptive towards economic intervention by the Government.

No Libertarians in foxholes?

Take the test.

Hitler was an Atheist, Darwin was racist and other fun facts.

2009-05-11T15:08:00.011+10:00

This was originally posted in reply to a blogger who felt that lack of belief in the Creator leads to immorality. Luckily, having just read a couple of chapters in TGD, as recommended to me by Randy from the TNA, my response was ready-made.

I keep an open mind to the possibility that God might exist, but overwhelming evidence suggests that the probability is vanishingly small. Until I’m provided with falsifiable testable predictions and peer-reviewed evidence, I may just continue on with my current assumption, which I feel is the only honest assumption I can make.

My main objective here is to defend Atheism as something that does not automatically lead to moral relativism. The definition of Atheism is just the lack of belief in a Theistic God. The word Atheism does not suggest any specific moral code. You can be a bad atheist or a good atheist. You can be a bad guy with a moustache or a good guy with a mustache. I passionately feel that lack of belief in a Theistic God will not be of any danger to the individual’s moral codes. It may in fact lead to him being morally superior to the Theist as belief in god often comes with static, absolutist immoral proscriptions. It also opens up avenues for rational Universalist frameworks like Utilitarianism where reason can be used to navigate the complex waters of modern ethical behaviour.

Q1: There is plenty of evidence out there that Darwin was very racist.

Darwin’s personal moral character is not relevant to whether or not his science is correct. Evolution is no longer just Darwin’s alone. Countless scientists have tested, verified, modified and built upon his theory in the 300 hundred years since then, especially in the last 50 years with the discovery and analysis of DNA and genetic biology. Atheists don’t consider Darwin to be a prophet or moral guide. Most of us just think he’s one of the heroes of science (along with Newton and Einstein) who’ve contributed most to scientific progress.

Was he actually a racist? By today’s standards everyone was racist in his era, including Lincoln. Darwin was more liberal than most of his contemporaries. He strongly opposed slavery when most of his compatriots didn’t. Some biographers have even gone so far as to suggest his motivations for seeing through the development of this theory was to silence the pseudo-scientific rationale that was bandied around in favour of Caucasian supremacy and the racial subjugation of ‘lesser races’.

Q2: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong were all three atheists. Their governmental regimes killed 100 million combined. It was Stalin who said “1 death is a tragedy, 1 million is a statistic.”

Was Hitler Atheist? There is evidence to suggest he was not. In the Mein Kampf Hitler writes “I be the leader of the nation so that he could lead back his homeland into the Reich.” sank down on my knees and thanked Heaven out of the fullness of my heart for the favour of having been permitted to live in such a time.” There he was referring to his reaction when the First World War was announced. He also wrote “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew. I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” He repeated this statement to the Reichstag in a speech in 1938. Rudolf Hess, his close friend, calls Hitler a “good Catholic”. After his annexation of Austria in November 1938 he says “I believe it was God’s will to send a boy from here into the Reich, to let him grow up and to raise him to be a the leader of the nation so that he could lead back his homeland to the Reich.”

It’s true that he could have been lying about his faith to gain votes and support from the largely Christian public and military. Some of his speeches after 1940 suggest that this might be so. Though he still believed in providence and God he started railing against Christianity. He was obviously not above lying to his people. After all, he is Hitler.

But that leads to the crucial point; the people who carried out his orders, those who actually killed the Jews and allowed the holocaust to happen, the soldiers and generals and citizens of Germany were all pre-dominantly Christian. If Hitler lied about his faith then he was only doing so to encourage and motivate the faithful. Can you imagine an atheist wanting to discriminate against a race of people? The motivation posited for the extermination of the Jews comes from a long European Christian tradition or blaming the Jews for their saviour’s death. Hitler utilised this to terrible effect.

Stalin definitely was Atheist, but he didn’t do his evil in the name of Atheism. He never mentioned Atheism as a motivation for killing people; he did not spur up the Atheistic mob anger to do his killings. He did it for the dogma of Communism and his personal thirst for power. Atheism doesn’t tell you to suppress others and their thoughts. Communism does.

Atheist individuals can be evil, just like religious individuals; but it takes religion and political dogma to make good individuals do evil things.

Q3: Darwin was convinced that eventually the dominant species would win out. Therefore, it seems to me that the whole of evolution is based on the idea that there is inequality. Therefore, it would be contrary to the best purposes of evolution to have a system of morality.

Hitler’s so called ‘Social Darwinism” was pseudo scientific prattle, nothing to do with the scientific theory of evolution. Very much like the pseudo scientific nonsense espoused by Hindus and New Agers to justify their unjustifiable beliefs.

In evolution it is the gene that seeks to survive by replicating and being selfish. The organism itself cannot be considered the basic unit of biological evolution simply because it cannot replicate exactly. To illustrate, my dog will eventually die and cannot clone itself or give birth to an exact copy. So there is no point for the dog itself to be selfish if it weren’t for competition that is occurring at the genetic level. The genes of the dog on the hand will replicate and live on in progeny. The genes of the dog compete in a pool of similarly self-replicating genes. From the perspective of the gene, the organism is merely its expression, a mode of supporting its survival and multiplication.

An organism that is powerful physically and obtains resources at the expense of others will increase the chances of its genes replicating. But this is only the most primitive of tactics.

Most animals live in social structures that help them survive much better than they would in solitary. This requires co-operation and altruism. Being altruistic to your children is the most obvious example, but it extends further. Bees, ants, meerkats, woodpeckers, mole rats look after their younger siblings. This kind of altruism favours genetic kin (linked story is about the debate between kin altruism and group altruism. I think it shows the scientific method in practice, where scientists are pleased when their long-held views are challenged).

The other kind of altruism is reciprocal. Flowers provide bees with nectar in exchange for pollinating. Hyenas hunt in packs and share their kill. Honeyguides search for bee hives and then lead ratels to the hive. Ratels break the hive and share the spoils. Honeyguides do not have the strength to break the hive and ratels (a type of badger) do not have wings to search for them. But together they accomplish their goal.

Humans are at a completely different league when it comes to social structure and we have developed instinctual morality and reason that makes it almost incomparable to what is going on in the rest of nature.

The altruism towards kin is of course very evident. And there is also altruism for the group, similar to that exhibited by individual bees in a colony. For many years we were loyal to our own tribes and hostile to external tribes as we competed for resources. As our social structures grew larger we started cooperating with external tribes and then other civilisations of tribes.

We develop punishments to punish those who don’t reciprocate; we seek out dependably altruistic mates, and friends. We try to be as altruistic as possible and cultivate a reputation for dependability.

Most of this happens on a subconscious level, we just feel fulfilled when we are useful to others and have friends who you can depend on. We crave social affirmation. It is our evolutionary instincts that are telling us social behaviour is desirable, just like it tells the ratel to follow the enticing flight of the honeyguide.

So genes are always selfish but the organism, the human, can be genuinely altruistic. He wants his society to survive, he wants his family and friends to do well, and over the course of human civilisation his feelings of goodwill extends over greater circles of association.

Yes selfish instincts, group loyalty and such that are given to us through evolution, but that is most certainly not nearly the whole picture.

Understanding that the well-being of individual and the well-being of society are driven by evolutionary forces will allow us to use reason to decide on which of our instincts to follow in complex situations. Selection pressures only result in rules of thumb, biological evolution is far outpaced by social evolution. It takes reason to apply our broad evolutionary instincts to specific moral problems.

There are such things as Moral Absolutes

2009-05-06T07:35:00.008+10:00

My main problem with religion is the lack of respect for reality. More importantly the lack of respect, and even derision shown towards the only successful method of discovering the Universe.

Most things in religion are so dangerously arbitrary. They do not follow the logical rules of falsifiability, repeatable testing and empiricism.

How can one trust the moral judgments of someone who backs them up with superstitious motivation? Especially in situations with numerous variables, where right and wrong are hard to discover, except through rational discourse.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education. The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action. - Einstein

I recently stumbled across this post which argued that there were no moral absolutes. I would fully agree that evolution is the source of morals and whether a particular action is ethical or not is dependent on context.

But that should never imply that morals are subjective. For anyone who believes in an external reality, for anyone who is a methodological naturalist, there are right answers and wrong answers to every moral situation. It doesn't matter how complex and grey those situations are. The complexity of the situation only determines for how long we disagree on the exact right answer and for how often we change our minds. It doesn't change the fundamentals of the situation.

If morality is proscribed by evolution, and evolution is a result of natural physical laws, then morality is an apex manifestation of the fundamental laws of nature.

As one of our great righteous heroes pleaded just a few decades ago, 'let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.'

ED: I'm talking about Moral Universalism not absolutism

Science the Random Adaptive Machine

2009-05-01T23:19:00.006+10:00

The machine in this hilarious video reminded me of a passage in Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann's entertaining book The Quark and the Jaguar.

The first section is on Complex Adaptive Systems. These systems seek out rules and patterns in the information that is presented to them. They are then able to make useful predictions. For example a child learning a language does not have a look-up table memorised with every combination of words. Rather she/he constructs tentative rules based on the regularity with which various words occur together and the order in which they occur. Even at a surprisingly young age children can form meaningful (albeit not very grammatically accurate) sentences that they have never heard before.

The following passage is a segue into the chapter entitled "The Scientific Enterprise":

Nowadays robot design might include a form of communication among the legs, but not through a governing central processing unit. Instead each leg would have the capacity to influence the behaviour of the others by means of communication links. The pattern of strengths of influence of the legs on one another would be a schema, subject to variations produced, for example,, by input from a generator of pseudo-random numbers. The selection pressures influencing the adoption and rejection of candidate patterns might originate from additional sensors that measure what is happening not just to an individual leg, but also to the robot as a whole, such as whether it is moving forward or backward and whether its belly is far enough off the ground. In this way the robot would tend to develop a schema that yielded a gait suited to the terrain on which it was traveling and that was subject to alteration when the character of that terrain changed. Such a robot may be regarded as at least a primitive form of complex adaptive system.

I am told that a six-legged robot something like this has been built at MIT and that it has discovered, among other gaits, one that is commonly used by insects...when the robot uses this gait depends on the terrain.

Now consider, in contrast to a robot that learns a few useful properties of the terrain it needs to traverse, a complex adaptive system exploring the general properties, as well as a host of detailed features, of a much grander terrain, namely the whole universe.

Support religious freedom

2009-04-30T14:39:00.000+10:00

This is the best video I've seen defending gay marriage.

Physics guy running for a local Texas school board.

2009-04-30T08:28:00.003+10:00

The local school board doesn't have influence on curriculum matters, but it can't hurt to have someone with a Physics background near the kids. Seems like a reasonable bloke judging from his website.

Best of luck to Joel Walker and anyone helping him out.

Apologies on the comments.

2009-04-26T15:22:00.006+10:00

Experiencing some issues with IntenseDebate comments displaying on my old template. I took the opportunity to pretty-up the blog a little bit.

All I did was change the CSS definitions for a couple of elements on one of the standard blogger templates. Comments will be re-installed shortly. Hopefully I can restore all original comments.

The graphic on the header is a digital sculpture of Prometheus by Scott Eaton.

EDIT: Sorry, IntenseDebate doesn't import back old comments. I've decided to go back to the old blogger comments system. It's clean and fast. ID is a little too buggy for my tastes at the moment.

When is faith not necessary?

2009-04-20T21:22:00.004+10:00

Secularists would agree that we should all endeavour to minimise the influence of faith in our lives. After all, faith is the belief in things unseen, belief without measurable physical evidence.

When a belief is presented for examination, the bar that needs to be cleared is Falsifiability. As Karl Popper originally put it, “it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience”.

Falsifiabitlity has been a ridiculously successful test on the validity of any belief/explanation. The success of which is evident from the usefulness of the scientific process, as opposed to the comparatively negligible amount of knowledge gained from metaphysics and religion.

This criterion humbly acknowledges that none of us are in extraordinary communion with the forces of nature. There is no revelation.

But what if we were to apply the scientific process to every part of our lives? Should we force our friends to go through various tests to certify their loyalty? Should we secretly and repeatedly conduct experiments on our partners’ to measure their fidelity? Should we not wake up from our beds in fear that our senses could be deceiving us on the existence of such a bed to wake from?

Even scientists receive their zeal and hunger for knowledge on the faith that the external world behaves un-arbitrarily, and eventually nature is fully understandable using reason and empirical knowledge alone.

Faith permeates our daily life and reason does not illuminate a great swathe of decisions that we make. Faith is necessary in maintaining relationships, keeping hope, taking courage, and simply getting out of bed.

So to what extent is faith acceptable? Is it really just a matter of degrees? Are we ‘enlightened’ rationalists merely on the same spectrum as the fundamentalist flat-Earthers, albeit slightly less laughable?

Surely there is a quantifiable demarcation as to when we should abandon faith. When is it necessary to act on faith alone, and when is it harmful and against our self-interests?

Some cool Minority Report gadgetry

2009-04-20T16:49:00.002+10:00

via John

Science is hot

2009-04-20T13:55:00.000+10:00

more.

Flowchart: The Scientific Process

2009-04-14T17:22:00.005+10:00

This flash driven flowchart by UCAL's Museum of Paleontology is an invaluable resource. This should be shown to every high school science student.

Science is not just a body of facts.

via: verywide.net

Atheism or Secular Humanism

2009-04-14T15:25:00.002+10:00

Over at the Eye of Polyphemus, the blogger differentiates between straight up Atheism and Secular Humanism:

There is a simple way to decide whether one is an atheist or secular humanist. If you think the world would be a better place without religion, you are a secular humanist. You may call yourself just an atheist, but you are not. You have gone beyond a non belief in deities to a set of arguably cultish beliefs.

Leaving aside his claim of Secular Humanism being a cult, that differentiation is quite interesting.

I am a secular humanist, and I wish everyone else was too. Intellectually I understand the position that someone who believes in the supernatural cannot be trusted to make sound moral decisions in complex situations. The fact that there is even a stem-cell debate is evidence of this.

We are all aware of the ill-effects of religious belief, but there are also benefits. Is society on the whole better off without such superstition? Are we overestimating the rational capacity of humans?

I have personally witnessed someone very close to me seeking solace in religion when her child was seriously ill. Without her belief she would not have had the continual strength and hope to battle on through the great many hardships that were presented to her. Having seen such evidence of the benefits of faith, it is rather difficult for me to indulge myself in the righteous zeal of the Anti-Theists.

Interesting Presentation

2009-04-09T11:41:00.003+10:00

I like this format. You turn the page by going to the corner and flicking the mouse down.

Content is accurate, but a little one-sided.

So much for all that.

2009-04-09T10:07:00.003+10:00

What happened to bi-partisanship?

Unacceptable

2009-04-09T09:22:00.005+10:00

Despite all the good the new administration has done, we cannot excuse this:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Happily this violation has shown that the many Bush critics are not shy of criticizing Obama for the same mistakes. Can the same even-handedness be expected from O'Reilly, Olbermann's counterpart at FOX?

People not Krugman

2009-04-08T08:48:00.004+10:00

Simon Johnson,former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund and professor of Entrepreneurship at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Q&A on the Geithner Plan by Brad DeLong, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the United States Department of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist, professor at Columbia University. recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank.

Adam Posen, deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

The Emnanuel Bros

2008-11-11T19:04:00.004+11:00

The part that stood out: Ezekiel Emanuel spoke of how, in their family, 'failure was not permanent'. They were allowed to fail. They knew the family would be there for them if they did. In a NYT article from June 97 he says ''One thing that I think is very important is the fact that we've all failed.''

It's the apathy that angers us.

2008-11-10T22:22:00.006+11:00

There is a lot of people out there who don't seem to get why people are so mad about Sarah Palin. Why we are still mad even after our guy won?

Sarah Palin's lack of knowledge is frustrating not because it shows a lack of intelligence. Becoming a Governer definitely must have taken a certain degree of smarts.

The reason it's freaking us out is because it shows a lack of empathy. She simply doesn't care enough. She doesn't care enough about the country and she doesn't care enough about the people. At least she she doesn't care enough to spend even a minimal amount of time and effort into understanding basic civics. She doesn't care enough to know about the most pressing problems that we face, let alone have an inkling about the proposed solutions that are out there.

This is especcially agregious considering the core message of her presence on the ticket. That she is the average hockey mum who can empathise with our problems.

We are still angry because we cannot believe that someone so transparently apathetic managed to get so close to holding office in an institution that means so much to us democracy advocates around the world.

Change.gov

2008-11-08T18:36:00.007+11:00

That's a little bit on the ostentatious side

For all his strengths, Obama has a Chicago cockiness that annoys and amuses me as the same time. This is the latest in a series of such displays including the seal, the fireworks, the Parthenon and the Mile High Stadium. The speech in Berlin also was cast as presumptuous.

Luckily he's also self aware. At the Al Smith dinner he provides this insight: "If I had to name my greatest strength, I guess it would be my humility. Greatest weakness, it's possible that I'm a little too awesome." Watch the whole thing.

What a speech.

2008-11-06T12:25:00.004+11:00

Obama had to hold back on the rhetoric over the last few months of the campaign. This is a return to true form. President-elect Barack Obama:

Challenges ahead.

2008-11-05T02:21:00.003+11:00

Ignatius in Post reminds us of JFK's first year in the Presidency. Obama needs to learn and learn fast. Campaigning well does not mean governing well. Carter and Bush are prime examples of this fact.

Prediction

2008-11-04T23:27:00.004+11:00

346 electoral votes..via projection from Nate Silver's www.fivethirtyeight.com. I'm gonna go with that for now.

Poll Tax

2008-11-04T23:20:00.003+11:00

She's been a bit of a hit and miss but this is definitely a point worth making:

Answer the question.

2008-10-08T07:34:00.011+11:00

Mark Halperin of TIME interviews Robert Gibbs on Ayers. The key question: "Does Obama think it's ok to associate professionally with known terrorists?"

Gibbs is Obama's communications director so he's probably very good at what he does. But he fails to answer the question. I hope this is just a one-off thing and the campaign actually does have an answer because it's a fair question to ask.

In the service of his country, in trying to help raise money for schools, Obama joined a reputable philanthropic organisation, the Woods Fund of Chicago, and he felt it necessary to overlook the past of one of the members in order to get some important work done for the kids. It's a matter of what best serves the county.

Easy. Next.

UPDATE: Other Obama supporters are asking the same questions.

Keating.

2008-10-06T12:49:00.007+11:00

When John Kerry was Swift-Boated, he refrained from striking back or even defending himself. He felt that doing so would lend credence to the attacks. Unfortunately the American voters did not see it that way.

Obama is not that kind of guy. From what I've seen in the primaries, when he is attacked, he is not satisfied with just defending himself.

Palin stepped over the line yesterday, overtly casting doubt on a fundamental core of Obama's value system. His patriotism.

Referring to Obama, she said, "this is not a man who sees America as you see it, how I see it...Our opponent though, is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

They are playing with fire. The McCain-Palin campaign is throwing stones from a very precarious position and they should know better.

Governing.

2008-10-06T10:13:00.005+11:00

The McCain campaign has allowed Sarah Palin to do what she does best. In the final stretch of the campaign, the overriding narrative of the attacks on Obama are going to paint him as unsafe. Linking him with Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright.

This is not something that is very different to what you get in a normal presidential campaign. The vicious and spurious kind attack politics was going on even since Jefferson and Adams.

If those two succumbed to that kind of campaigning then it's hard to make too much of a big deal about McCain.

However let's not underestimate the damage this does to the nation.

Negative attacks aren't bad just because they are mean. No one cares about being mean to a politician. Negative attacks are a problem because it interferes with governing.

Obama could go all out and attack McCain on his associations with dubious figures like Pastor Hagee. He could attack him on McCain's treatment of his ex-wife. Those kinds of attacks work because the press will cover them extensively. They are more entertaining and easier to follow than policy debates.

But Obama will also alienate a lot of pissed off republicans. When it comes time to govern, that's going to impede his bipartisan efforts. And let's face it, we need compromise and bipartisanship if anything is going to get done.

Disengaged.

2008-10-05T11:41:00.011+11:00

A lot of fun has been made of Palin's performances so far. A lot of it is deserved, but maybe not all of it.

I'll give her a pass on the Bush Doctrine exchange with Charlie Gibson. That was a stupid question. The term means many different things and anyone would have needed clarification. And the interviewer was a twat.

I also give her a pass on the "I read all of them" comment. She was boxed into a corner by the McCain campaign's strategic war on the press. If she had named a journalistic institution like NYT or Washington Post, she would be diluting the message. She chose to look like an idiot instead.

Her answers on abortion and Gay marriage are no better or worse than any other politician's. Including Obama. She's not quite as crazy as the liberal blogs and Bill Maher make her out to be. Her answer on teaching creationism in schools is actually very good.

What worries me is a her near total lack of knowledge on the economic and national security issues that concern the country and the world today. Her defense of her lack of foreign policy experience is scary not because she doesn't have any, but because she doesn't even know what 'foreign policy experience' means. Does she know anything about the bailout and the financial crisis that is occurring right now? Watch this video till the end and tell me if that makes ANY kind of sense.

All through the convention John McCain and the republicans were attacking the judiciary for 'legislating from the bench'. We all knew it was about just one single issue, and one single case. When asked to name one other bad judicial ruling, Palin was unable to answer.

And did her answer on Palestine sound to you like she knows who Hamas are?

Governor Palin's disengagement says one thing. She doesn't care enough about the troubles of the American people that she hopes to represent. She doesn't care enough to find solutions or to even learn about the solutions other people have come up with. She doesn't care enough to understand their problems. She doesn't care enough to even know about the threats they face.

Her whole 'hockey mom' thing is an act. This was made most evident to me during the debate where she spent most of the time winking and gosh-darning it.

Harsh? Maybe so. But we've just had eight years of that exact same attitude of proud ignorance. The world can't put up with eight more.

Playing the Ref.

2008-10-02T16:22:00.006+10:00

Michelle Malkin et al are up in arms about Gwen Ifill writing a book on the implications of the Obama campaign. How utterly predictable.

But do they have a point? My first thought; she's doing a book in this election cycle. It's been historic and it's going to change things in the way people look at race relations and policy in America. It's going to change the way people everywhere look at America. And it's mostly due to the fact that an African American is the winning candidate.

Then I think, wait, she obviously has a lot of admiration for Senator Obama's run and is possibly not the most impartial person on the planet to be moderating this debate.

In either case, it's unfortunate how they bring it up just before the debate, when there is no way for the Obama campaign to change proceedings. OB08 should have done their research and avoided this trap.

Jon Get's Angry.

2008-10-02T16:20:00.002+10:00

On the Economic Crisis.

2008-10-02T16:11:00.005+10:00

Warren Buffet:

Sorkin re-animates Jed Bartlet at Maureen Dowd's request.

2008-09-29T21:02:00.004+10:00

Barack turns up at Jed's door to get some tips. Jed's got a few things to say. Read the whole thing:

Four weeks ago you had the best week of your campaign, followed -- granted, inexplicably -- by the worst week of your campaign. And you're still in a statistical dead heat. You're a 47-year-old black man with a foreign-sounding name who went to Harvard and thinks devotion to your country and lapel pins aren't the same thing and you're in a statistical tie with a war hero and a Cinemax heroine. To these aged eyes, Senator, that's what progress looks like. You guys got four debates. Get out of my house and go back to work.

"The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama (Review: Part 1)

2008-07-20T21:08:00.031+10:00

I became interested in the senator after his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention and have become a bit of a fan since seeing a number of speeches and interviews, including his appearance on the Jon Stewart show. That's when I first got a look at Obama’s laid-back humour, something that appealed to my Australian-grown sensibilities.

It is true, I have weakness for funny. My other favourite candidate was Mike Huckabee, despite disagreeing with him on almost every issue. I am actually somewhat grateful that the current crop Australian politicians are completely devoid of any such sense of humour, or I might have to refrain from voting. We can't risk voting for a guy who wants teach creationism now can we?

Of course it also helps that my political views align very well with Obama’s and that I find him refreshingly candid about his positions. And whatever side of politics you are on, I think the following is a safe call to make: the elite list of orators that one can compare Obama to is a rather small list indeed.

Since 2004 we have been given ample evidence of Obama's skill with rhetoric. There was that commencement address for SNHU in which he asked graduates to broaden their 'ambit of concern'. Then I read 'Call to Renewal' a deeply empathetic speech on faith, recently brought to deserved prominence by a woefully misguided attack from James Dobson. Then came a slew of remarkable speeches during the democratic primary, beginning with that Iowa victory speech, in which he celebrated the nation 'coming together under a common purpose'. That was followed by the 'Yes We Can' speech in Nashua, the cadence and rhythm of which inspired Will.I.Am and others to sample it in their musical tribute to the candidate. There was also his Victory speech in South Carolina, where a tough defiance came through in response to the Clinton antics during that rough and dirty primary battle.

Then there was the gem of the lot; 'A More Perfect Union'. It was a difficult speech on race, given when the campaign was faltering with the Wright controversy. I along with most others was definitely expecting Obama to come out with his A game. I was expecting soaring, optimistic and beautiful. I was expecting another moving and inspiring tribute to ‘all of us working towards common dreams’ etc, etc…

Instead, what we heard was something unexpected. The speech he ended up giving was stripped of the rising cadence that Obama had become famous for. It was bare and matter-of-fact. It was respectful and empathetic. Most of all it showed a deep understanding of the painful and tortured elements of an issue that was not going to go away any time soon. What was always going to be an amazing speech turned out to be a historical one.

I'd read Dreams of My Father when he had just started out on the presidential campaign. Hillary was on around 40 points in the national polls. But I believed my most trusted political analyst (look at the date on that post) when he said it was going to be close. I read the memoir as a show of support. It was same logic that keeps me up at night when Arsenal loses a match that I failed to see.

As modern literary work on race and identity it is impressive. The guy can definitely write. There were your eloquent literary flourishes and artistic licenses but the book displayed a rare sense of self-awareness, almost to the point of being annoying. It was a memoir written when he was 30 and before his adventures into the political limelight.

I knew I couldn't expect that same candid inward-looking thought processes in his next book, and that is more or less the case. But not unfortunately so. The image that he portrays of himself is clean and careful, and the book revolves around policy and government more so than his own failings and struggles. Revealing personal truths as those found in Dreams of My Father are comparatively scarce. However, it is still a great insight into how the man thinks on the issues, and his overarching philosophical framework and his understanding of the idea of America. In comparison to the guarded and inscrutable faces of most of those in similar public positions, this book is indeed informative for those who want to come to a decision about the candidate.

The media furor over the New Yorker cartoon seemed rather ludicrous to me, especially after reading this. How can anyone mistake him for being unpatriotic? In his two books, and over all of his speeches, lies an underlying theme that reflects his deep affinity with the American ideal. It is almost as if his personal destiny is inextricably linked to the founding documents and the twists and turns in the American experiment. More so than his Christian faith, I feel that it is this that holds up and motivates the man's moral framework.

This is most evident when it is not explicitly stated, but rather when they are weaved through his descriptions of Capitol Hill, the White House, his meeting with elder senators like Robert Byrd and in his long discussion of the Constitution and the tension and compromise between the various ideals that it demands from the country. However he does come close to stating as such explicitly, in the opening of the chapter on values:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only the foundation of our government but the substance of our common creed. Not every American may be able to recite them; few, if asked, could trace the genesis of the Declaration of Independence to its roots in eighteenth-century liberal and republican thought. But the essential idea behind the Declaration—that we are born into this world free, all of us; that each of us arrives with a bundle of rights that can’t be taken away by any person or any state without just cause; that through our own agency we can, and must, make of our lives what we will—is one that every American understands. It orients us, sets our course, each and every day.

What follows is an excursion on the continual difficulty of finding the right balance between competing values. He speaks of historical compromises and concludes with the ones dominating the news today. The compromise between civil liberties and national security, and the dual needs of those blue collar workers whose manufacturing jobs are getting shipped overseas and the needs of the economy to remain competitive. His earnest appeal seems to be the need to show an understanding of where the opposition is coming from and to acknowledge that they were all working for same thing.

From there Obama resumes his observations of the politics as it stands today. The central theme of this book, and particularly the first six chapters, is the "troubling gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics." He doesn't rail against it in the normal hackneyed manner but rather makes an almost exhaustive analysis of why things are the way they are, without assigning blame on any one party. He speaks of the spiraling cycle of vitriol and misrepresentations that seem to swallow up even the most genuine policy makers. His explanation for the political discourse is so compelling that you wonder if there really is any hope of changing this state of affairs, but he then has this to say:

Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there’s no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters.

But I don’t think so. They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, but who have found a way—in their own lives, at least—to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves. I imagine the white Southerner who growing up heard his dad talk about niggers this and niggers that but who has struck up a friendship with the black guys at the office and is trying to teach his own son different, who thinks discrimination is wrong but doesn't see why the son of a black doctor should get admitted into law school ahead of his own son. Or the former Black Panther who decided to go into real estate, bought a few buildings in the neighborhood, and is just as tired of the drug dealers in front of those buildings as he is of the bankers who won’t give him a loan to expand his business. There’s the middle-aged feminist who still mourns her abortion, and the Christian woman who paid for her teenager’s abortion, and the millions of waitresses and temp secretaries and nurse’s assistants and Wal-Mart associates who hold their breath every single month in the hope that they’ll have enough money to support the children that they did bring into the world.

I imagine they are waiting for a politics with the maturity to balance idealism and realism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be compromised, to admit the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point. They don’t always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal, but they recognize the difference between dogma and common sense, responsibility and irresponsibility, between those things that last and those that are fleeting.

They are out there, waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.

This is what Barack Obama is about, this is the value added in electing him to office. It's not about implementing a progressive agenda and it is not about sweeping revolution. His brand is not about liberalism. Those that had thought otherwise are those who had seen a reflection of their own values on a blank slate.

Obama is about compromise and finding common goals. He is an incrementalist and a very cautious one at that. And this is precisely the antidote that is needed after President Bush's resolute belief in his own rightness. We need someone who recognises that the choices before us are complicated and nuanced. Someone who understands that there is a possibility that their own views are wrong. However, after repeatedly calling for such tolerance of views he concludes his thoroughly fascinating chapter on the Constitution thus:

The best I can do in the face of our history is remind myself that it has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty. The hard, cold facts remind me that it was unbending idealists like William Lloyd Garrison who first sounded the clarion call for justice; that it was slaves and former slaves, men like Denmark Vesey and Frederick Douglass and women like Harriet Tubman, who recognized power would concede nothing without a fight. It was the wild-eyed prophecies of John Brown, his willingness to spill blood and not just words on behalf of his visions, that helped force the issue of a nation half slave and half free. I’m reminded that deliberation and the constitutional order may sometimes be the luxury of the powerful, and that it has sometimes been the cranks, the zealots, the prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable—in other words, the absolutists—that have fought for a new order. Knowing this, I can’t summarily dismiss those possessed of similar certainty today—the antiabortion activist who pickets my town hall meeting, or the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory—no matter how deeply I disagree with their views. I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty—for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute.

Those who are disappointed by his so called 'shift to the center' haven't been paying attention. They haven't read The Audacity of Hope. The whole book revolves around finding common ground and empathising with the other side. They've been employing some selectivity when listening to what he says.

He has always been respectful to the second amendment and gun owners. He has always shown difference to the anti-abortion movement. People should not be surprised by his support for faith-based initiatives nor his position on Iraq, both of which have been consistent throughout the campaign.

I think the FISA compromise and the refusal to accept public financing are legitimate causes of disagreement. FISA was not a 'capitulation' as some have been saying but it is a reversal of position. On the campaign finance issue, we need to step back and acknowledge how successful the RNC will be at accumulating funds and at carpeting the swing states with attack ads. It is understandable that Obama chose the option that leaves him with the highest amount of ammunition for a counter attack. However, the way in which he made that announcement was with your garden variety double-speak and he deserves to get some flak for being such a tool.

The storyline that he is abandoning those who carried him out of the primary is a very interesting one, and the media has jumped on it with gusto. Unfortunately, once that storyline gets repeated often enough, every decision a politician makes will be defined through that prism. Every time Obama speaks out on his more centrist views it will be interpreted cynically. Every time he says something about 'absent fathers' it is going to be 'sister soulja moment'. A common-sense statement about listening to the generals on the ground becomes 'flip floping'.

Developing a new storyline and gaining traction with a disinterested public takes effort. Although he has enjoyed favourable press till now, things are going to change. He is no longer the underdog. He will have to take McCain on in an even playing field as far as the media is concerned.

In the book he acknowledges that he has been "the beneficiary of unusually—and at times undeservedly—positive press coverage", before going on to speak about the mechanisms by which partisan talking points take a stranglehold on the discussion:

Every reporter in Washington is working under pressures imposed by editors and producers, who in turn are answering to publishers or network executives, who in turn are poring over last week’s ratings or last year’s circulation figures and trying to survive the growing preference for PlayStation and reality TV. To make the deadline, to maintain market share and feed the cable news beast, reporters start to move in packs, working off the same news releases, the same set pieces, the same stock figures. Meanwhile, for busy and therefore casual news consumers, a well-worn narrative is not entirely unwelcome. It makes few demands on our thought or time; it’s quick and easy to digest. Accepting spin is easier on everybody.

African aid: Weak incentives of good intentions.

2005-07-17T18:33:00.001+10:00

An earnest call for aid to Africa occurred in the 1960s with the conviction that lack of savings in third world countries hampered these economies from making the investments needed to take the first step in the ladder to sustainable growth.

More than four decades later the question is, ‘has aid helped?’ According to the CATO institute Africa has received 450 billion dollars worth of aid from 1960 to 2000 and yet the average GDP per capita of the continent has declined at a rate of 5.9 percent per year. They put this statistic into perspective by comparing the progress made in South East Asia for a fraction of that aid. The report of recommendations presented to the Secretary General by Jeffrey Sachs and the UN Millennium Project also brings attention to this disparity in performance between the emerging economies in Asia and the ones in Africa.

Even though it is unanimously accepted that corruption and the disruption of free markets and trade are the chief causes for the lack of progress in eliminating poverty, there is debate over whether corruption can be reduced by asking for good governance conditions in return for aid.

Empirical research done by the World Bank on 10 countries that receive aid suggests that there is little correlation with the amount of funding and constructive policy change needed for economic prosperity. Some of the 10 countries made very good policy changes, some made negligible reforms while others made no changes or went from bad to worse. The disparity in results suggests that aid has no average impact on policy reforms.

The World Bank study shows that although aid has greatest effect in reducing poverty in countries where there is good governance, donors continue the ill-advised practice of providing greater sums of aid to governments that repeatedly fail to reform while reducing aid to governments who implement good policies.

In a Washington Post article World Bank economist William Easterly comments that broad ranging reforms, what he calls ‘utopian social engineering’, like the ones proposed by the Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Project are far too complex to control and implement effectively and costs are great when they fail. Instead, he argues for an alternative ‘piecemeal approach’:

The piecemeal reform approach (which his book opposes) would humbly acknowledge that nobody can fully grasp the complexity of the political, social, technological, ecological and economic systems that underlie poverty…Large-scale crash programs, especially by outsiders, often produce unintended consequences. The simple dreams at the top run afoul of insufficient knowledge of the complex realities at the bottom…Nor can you hold any specific agency accountable for their success or failure. Piecemeal reform, by contrast, motivates specific actors to take small steps, one at a time, then tests whether that small step made poor people better off, holds accountable the agency that implemented the small step, and considers the next small step.

But according to the Millennium Project report, the reason for past failures is the lack of commitment to big broad ranging plans with broad goals. They imply that the goals of piecemeal approaches have not been sustainable due of the interdependency of various problems. Funding money into specific issues is not enough, as related issues around it have not been solved. The effect is that eventually the good work done on a particular project will be diluted. It also criticises the short-term perspective adopted by piecemeal advocates, saying that the unstable and so far unsatisfactory influx of funds cannot lead to sustained development, i.e. even if the goals were broad enough, commitment to it was lacking.

They also comment on the lack of systematic frameworks for looking at countries and political systems on an individual basis, the result being a generic and inaccurate approach to African poverty. Each country has it’s own unique social, economic, geographical and political problems. For example some countries seem to enjoy fairly competent governments while most others are corrupt to the core. These differences are not being adequately factored in aid provision strategies.

In The Cartel of Good Intentions, William Easterly makes a comprehensive criticism of aid agencies, including the new Millennium Development Goals, which he sees as a re-branding of the same old mistakes. His main thrust is that top-down broad approaches have the usual problems of an inflated bureaucracy not driven by market motivations. Beginning by covering the myriad of administrative processes and informational requirements involved in getting funds to cover a simple task of fixing a road he illustrates the problem of taking on too many tasks in a centralised manner:

Within the World Bank, the transport economist must try to convince the desk economist that a Road Maintenance Loan that would repair this particular pothole merits higher priority than some other project, like say an Education Reform Loan pushed by the education economists…

Easterly tries to explain why it is that aid bureaucracies are finding it hard to change their persistent and ineffective practices. The problem comes from a conflict in incentives. “It is very hard for aid bureaucracies to get constructive feedback from past mistakes because admission of past failure is a threat to getting new aid resources to dispense in the future.” The problem with not learning from past mistakes is that those mistakes are more likely to be repeated.

This is also why we don’t see much work being done in projects that are hard to ‘show off’ to donors, like stocking and maintaining already built facilities. These endeavours have low observability and it looks like not much is being done:

Aid reports for many decades have bewailed the tendency of donors to finance new capital investment projects (easily observable at a point in time) and the neglect of operating supplies and maintenance after the project is completed. Donors consistently refuse to finance maintenance, with the idea that this is responsibility of recipient governments.

There are estimations that suggest that the benefit of spending on books is much higher than actually building new physical facilities, but donors still prefer to fund the later because it looks like they are doing a lot more.

The main source of this bureaucratic dysfunction is that these agencies do not have enough market feedback. They are monopolies and as such they have the same problems that afflict normal monopolies, i.e. they have less of an incentive to provide the quantity of services for relatively low price as a competitive firm.

The article continues on to discuss how the current set-up of the aid system also gets the stick end having multiple agents and multiple principles. It becomes very difficult to pinpoint the actual problem and which party is responsible. There is also a weakening of incentives when multiple principles are being served. There is also a tendency to collude, as agencies are terrified of being outcasts bringing about an increasing likelihood of being blamed for future failures by the rest of the cartel.

‘Something has to change’ is what I get from all this. If this crippling ineffectiveness of aid continues, donors will eventually get fed up with the wastage and funds will dry out. Then it will be too late for any reforms.

The real tragedy of all this is that just in the time that I spent today reading the various papers and writing up this review and just generally wasting away my Sunday, another 10 000 people have died due to starvation.

Blogger v Spaces

2005-07-07T13:05:00.001+10:00

I read somewhere that it was a challenge for software designers to lessen the daunting learning curve for newbies while at the same time providing the functionality they might want once they get past the initial experience.

Obviously MSN Spaces are very easy to set up and run. Unfortunately however, this means trading off high functionality for a low learning curve. This strategy is understandable when we consider its target group.

As a regular user of MSN Messenger, my introduction to MSN Spaces came via the button in Version 7. After doing a few test entries and liking the therapeutic feel of writing it became natural to just stick with it.

However I don’t use it for the purpose of sharing details with family and friends. Just by reading my blog and profile I don’t think you would be able to gather too much about my personal life. I use it as a sounding board to bounce off my thoughts about the state of affairs as a way to test the coherency and consistency in views. Getting comments from people who question those thoughts are an added bonus.

And I like customisation. I like to play around with the look and feel of the site and in that department Spaces is getting a little stale. So I decided to take a relatively closer look at Google’s Blogger.com by populating it with some entries that I made earlier.

I actually signed up for an account fair whiles back, purely out of curiosity, but I never got past the first few entries. They were having some problems with updating the blog on time and new entries failed to appear for days. Now it seems like those issues have largely been resolved and most of the entries that I made went through almost immediately.

The best thing about blogger is that they allow you to edit the template file, and this provides unsurpassable customisation ability, which I am pretty happy about. I actually started with one of the standard templates, changed the colours and a couple of graphics, and I ended up with this.

The biggest downside for a lot of people is that you need to know some basic html to make substantial modifications to the standard selection of templates. But in my case this is actually a positive since this provided me with a motivation for learning html.

They even have some great hacks. For example it is possible to implement a drop-down comments feature like the one we get in Spaces when you use IE. It is also possible to implement expandable entries so that interested readers can see the full text of very long posts while casual surfers can skim through an uncluttered interface. All the tags, both the general tags and the markup for these tricks are well documented.

One of the worst things about MSN Spaces is keeping track of comments. If it's a particularly busy period for your blog, comments get lost. Blogger solves this problem by providing an email notification system so that a copy of every comment pops up in my inbox.

MSN Spaces do have some features that Blogger doesn’t have. An external application is need to maintain a photo album on Blogger, but that is really not an issue for me. The very useful ‘categories’ feature at Spaces cannot be replicated at Bloggers and I will miss that. They also don’t have Lists, but you don’t really need those at Blogger where you can just as easily construct your own list by editing the template.

In my short time playing around with Blogger it has been a positive experience barring the following minor issues: Firstly there is sometimes a slight delay before the blog gets updated, and there is a mismatch in the timing of the update between the addresses theconsigliere.blogspot.com and www.theconsigliere.blogspot.com. I find that the later address updates quicker than the former, so on rare occasions we have two versions of the blog online, one being the older version and the other being the never version.

Secondly the stats are temporarily down and that screws up my profile page. So I had to make it private for the moment until they sort that out.

Thirdly, although posting pictures with your articles are easier with Blogger, the pictures that you upload and the old blogs that you’ve deleted still remain on the server. This isn’t as much of a problem as there is no limit to the amount of pictures you can upload, but it just seems like a waste of space. And some users might get a little suspicious about Google holding their pictures indefinitely.

Fourthly you need to get Haloscan for trackbacks. But trackbacks aren’t big deal for me yet so that issue is largely irrelevant.

So am I going to make the switch? Well, not yet. I am just going to simultaneously post entries to both blogs. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem since I only expect to post an entry every two days or so anyway.

A hit, a very palpable hit

2005-07-04T16:26:00.000+10:00

Deep Impact has just hit Tempel 1 about 30 seconds ago. Been following it on NASA live TV. The TV camera was on the controllers and not on the actual image of the impact as it occurred. So I was looking at everyone getting really exited about the something off screen, making me yell out at the camera guy to turn his camera to the right.

A lot of jumping up and down and clapping and screaming going on in the control room.

Impactor team are wearing red t-shirts and Flyby team in blue

Someone just commented: ‘wow, and we were expecting something subtle!”

Finally, they are replaying the actual image of the impact

Wow. That was pretty huge.

Someone, possibly the mission manager, said “Ok folks we have another vehicle to worry about, so let’s settle down.”

No one is settling down.

Some interesting commentating going on now, with great images of the comet pre-impact from the Impactor itself. The guy is saying how “the navigation was perfect”, “the explosion was much larger than what we expected”.

A few congressmen walking through the room shaking everyone’s hands and congratulating them.

Ok medium resolution image of the impact from the flyby.

‘Flawless’ according to the commentator who is now going to interview a few scientists. I am going to go listen.

Well, everyone else has blogged about this

2005-07-02T21:13:00.001+10:00

No prizes for correct guesses as to the story that had flooded my news aggregator this morning.

Now I must admit to ignorance when it comes to American judicial politics, partly because I had this naïve notion that there wasn’t much politics involved in the judiciary and mainly because I am not American. The only thing I knew about Justice Sandra Day O'Connor before today was that she was meant to be at the centre of a divided SCOTUS and that she was one of the dissenting judges from a disturbing majority decision in that property rights case from a two weeks ago.

So I spent a couple of hours this afternoon reading various articles and listening to a couple of interviews on her life and her approach to the job and I must say, I dig this chick.

This feeling of admiration is probably due in part to the sympathy I feel for those who get accused of being wishy-washy when in fact they really are trying to be as consistent as possible in their values but realise the complexities and individuality of each circumstance and problems that they encounter.

I think this was evidenced in an answer she gave in an interview to NPR’s Nina Totenberg who asked: “what are your feelings about being so often described as a decisive fifth vote?" O’Conner replied, “I think it is ridiculous because all nine people have to cast a vote and there is no way to single out one as being more significant than another.”

Totenberg pursued: “If the court is divided somewhat ideologically and it’s very clear that one person is sitting in the middle and whichever way she or he casts the vote decides the outcome…”. But O’Conner was having none of it: “I am not sure it’s very clear if it’s going to be one way or the other but for one vote, so I get a little impatient with that notion.”

Such faith in the justice system and in her fellow justices after being so involved for so long is quite inspiring.

Of course with her resignation comes all the speculation about the next appointment and I just thought I’d take this opportunity to bring your attention to one of my favourite political bloggers; Jay Cost, who ran the most insightful commentary on the last American presidential election. Now blogging over at Redstate.org his advice is that the President would be better served by a smooth nomination through the Senate. Check out his entry and check out some of the comments below, which argue that maybe a long hard fight is exactly what the President needs right now to remobilise support.

America is good because it doesn't behead people

2005-06-14T21:47:00.001+10:00

An MSN Space that I frequently visit recently pointed to a Washington Post article wherein Fred Hiatt addresses a common criticism aimed at the mainstream media; a criticism that is often echoed in the US Government by folks like DefSec. Rumsfeld:

Two of the country's largest newspapers, for example, have devoted more than 80 editorials, combined, since March of 2004 to Abu Ghraib and detainee issues, often repeating the same erroneous assertions and recycling the same stories"…"By comparison, precious little has been written by those editorial boards about the beheading of innocent civilians by terrorists, the thousands of bodies found in mass graves in Iraq, the allegations of rape of women and girls by U.N. workers in the Congo.

I agree that there is a bias in this discrepancy but unlike Rumsfeld I think the bias is a justified pro-American one, or at least it is an anti-terrorist one. Hiatt explains it better:

But it's also true that The Post has published more editorials criticizing Donald Rumsfeld than Abu Musab Zarqawi. That's partly because, to the extent that editorials are meant to educate or explain, there isn't all that much to say about Zarqawi's evil that isn't evident to most Post readers; and to the extent that editorials are meant to influence, there's no point in addressing messages to the beheaders of the world.

At least with the US Government there is a chance that criticism will be heard and taken into account and there is hope for reform and change.

With the terrorists and suicide bombers there is just no point. Their lack of morality and sanity is obvious and simply beyond our comprehension. The only useful thing we can do is to get rid of them.

Many critics note that the Post and other papers have given much more coverage to the faults of the administration than to the infinitely more serious crimes of mass graves and suicide bombings conducted by Saddam and the opposition.

If someone were to tell me that I am a good bloke because I am better than a guy who beheads people, then I would definitely be offended. What these critics are doing is putting the United States on the same measure of morality as the terrorists and that in itself is an insult to the United States and its allies. Hiatt agrees:

...just invoking such a comparison, even implicitly, amounts to a loss for the United States. If we have to defend ourselves by pointing out that we are morally superior to terrorists, it's a loss.

Of course when the media does increase its reporting on the atrocities committed by terrorists they are criticised (with some justification I must say) for being too negative.

It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t

Morality and the need for God

2005-05-29T23:59:00.001+10:00

According Peter Schwartz, religion is not necessary for a morally stable society. Although hypocritical attacks against the phantom 'left' dominate his article, there is still fading evidence of some logical capability ticking away beneath all that political narrow mindedness:

Morality begins with the individual's life as the primary value and identifies the further values that are demonstrably required to sustain that life. It observes that man's nature demands that we live not by random urges or by animal instincts, but by the faculty that distinguishes us from animals and on which our existence fundamentally depends: rationality.

I’ve said something similar on a previous entry. However the real value of religion is not in the explanation of morality, but rather in the motivation for morality.

Atheists frequently recite the phrase “Good men do good things and bad men do bad things, but it takes religion to make good men do bad things.” Then they go on to cite various religiously motivated atrocities.

It would then be logically inconsistent of them to not follow that argument through to its conclusion; i.e. ‘it takes religion to make bad men do good things.’

Morality may begin with the value given to an individual’s life, but there are many individuals who only care for the welfare of one life; themselves. All this high talk about preserving the rights of the ‘universal individual’ means nothing to them. If they can steal, lie, cheat and get away with it, they would do so. The impact it has on the welfare of the others around them has no bearing on their conscience. They are not hindered by the possibility of everyone acting in this way. These are Nietzche’s 'last men'.

This is where all that fire and brimstone stuff comes in. In childhood (also applicable to the folks in the formative periods of civilisation), individuals initially choose the moral options due to the fear of being deep-fried by a giant thunderbolt. Of course, over time they are mentally conditioned into developing a conscience, and as a result realise feelings of guilt for committing a sin and feelings of joy for committing acts of nobility. Yet, it is that unparalleled motivation arising from self-preservation, which sets them off on that track.

Religion shares much of the responsibility for the progress of civilisation. I am of the opinion that for a much of human history, religions have been a force of overwhelming good.

Secular Law and its enforcement by itself cannot govern a society of people who have no qualms about lying, stealing or killing if they feel that they can get away with it. Thus in a way Justice Scalia is right when he says, “Government derives its authority from God”.

The problem is that at some point civilisation will outgrow the beliefs and traditions that nurtured it and kept it safe for so long. With our knowledge of the universe increasing and changing at such an accelerated rate, it seems only natural that more and more people will begin questioning the existence of long held notions such as Divine Justice, Karma and Final Judgment.

Some believe that this point has already been breached. They feel that the counterproductive influences of religion are slowly catching up to it's positive aspects.

Should we react in fear and choose the option of the fundamentalists? Should we try and turn the clock back? The danger in that is similar to the danger faced by an overly protective parent. The child might rebel not only against the unreasonable restrictions, but also, in it’s eagerness for independence, the good teachings of the parent.

So if 'God is Dead' or is in his death throes, what is his replacement? How do we engender a love for the Human Ideal and respect for it's consequential moral codes? What will now ensure the rights of the individual in a global society?

Personally, I think we are all doomed. Conclusive evidence? Click here.

Is Religion a Force for Good in History?

2005-05-27T22:35:00.002+10:00

First a few qualifications:

I am a Weak Agnostic and my sympathies lie towards Atheism.
I do suspect that religion might be, for better or for worse, approaching its use-by-date.
Religion has played a constant role in human history and I can only take specific examples that illustrate its persistent and fundamental quality as a supreme organisational tool. If this was a contest of how many examples each side can bring to the table, then we will be here for quite a long time.
It may be true that if we were to only look at history since the Age of Enlightenment, religion’s counter productive influences have become increasingly prevalent and steadily negating the impact of the positive role it had played till then.
This has become all the more evident with the changes of the 19th and 20th centuries (I can find no adjective to sufficiently describe the vastness and sheer speed at which these changes occurred).

But if we take a look at history from the beginnings of civilisation, then yes, I do think religion has been, on balance, a positive force and overwhelmingly so.

Allow me to focus on the development of society in pre-Islamic Middle East and Arabia to illustrate, chiefly because I am not completely ignorant about this particular region. Secondly because I have Lapidus’s definitive textbook: “History of Islamic Societies” on my bookshelf and I can quote it liberally. Thirdly, I felt that some of the events provide interesting parallels to the situation we are in now.

Beginning at the era of hunting and gathering communities, we know that they were organised around small familial units. With the advent of agriculture and domestication of animals they start living in tribes of nomadic pastoralists or in agricultural communities.

As these communities grew, the interactions between them became more frequent, especially with the nomads travelling from one agrarian village to another. Customs and beliefs were shared along with the goods and more than one community began worshipping the same Gods.

Motivated by their shared commitment to the service of these Gods, pastoral villages grouped into temple communities. For example the Sumerians believed that the lands they inhabited were the property of the Gods and that they were obligated to create temples in appreciation. They couldn’t do this if the villages didn’t co-operate.

Thus the city-state is born. This was revolutionary in terms of cultural progress. Constructing temples required administration and organization of previously unheard-of quantities of labour. Supporting professions such as artisans and sculptors began to ply their trade. Writing and trade customs were developed. Specialisation of skills and integration of labour meant that the cities became centres of economic growth and individuals experienced a jump in their standard of living.

It is no coincidence that the priests of the temples were also the city’s lawmakers and political leaders. In those formative periods, belief in the divine authority was essential to maintain the stability and security within the society.

Then came the empires. The first empire of the world was created in 2400 BC by Sargon of Akkad in Northern Mesopotamia. As Empires rose and fell, and each created its own imprint on the landscape. Over time Kings replaced priests as the primary mediators between heaven and earth. Quoting Lapidus (2002):

In Middle Eastern conceptions, kingship was justified as the expression of the divine plan for the ordering of human societies. Sacralized political power, as well as religious community, became a vehicle for the unification of disparate communities.

Empires became the new black:

For ancient peoples, the empires symbolised the realm of civilisation. The function of empires was to defend the civilised world against the barbarians and to assimilate them into the sphere of higher culture. For their part, the barbarians, mostly nomadic peoples, wanted to conquer empires, share in their wealth and sophistication, and win for themselves the status of civilized men. Empires commanded allegiance because they were a coalition of civilised peoples against the darkness without. They commanded allegiance because kingship was though of as a divine institution and the king was a divinely selected agent, a person who, if not himself a god, shared in the aura, magnificence, sacredness, and mystery of the divine. The ruler was God’s agent, his priest, the channel between this world and the heavens, designated by the divine being to bring justice and right order to men so that they might in turn serve God. The king thus assured the prosperity and well being of his subjects. Magically he upheld the order of the universe against chaos.

Leaving Mesopotamia, let’s travel forward to the beginning of 6th century Arabia and to a city called Mecca:

Mecca was one of the most complex and heterogenous places in Arabia. Here society had grown beyond the limitations of the clan and tribe to afford some complexity of political and economic ties. Mecca was one of the few places in Arabia to have a floating, non-tribal population of individual exiles, refugees, outlaws, and foreign merchants. The very presence of different peoples and clans – people belonging to no clan, foreigners, people with diverse religious convictions, differing views of life’s purposes and values – moved Meccans away from the old tribal religions and moral conceptions. New conceptions of personal worth and social status and new social relationships were fostered in this more complex society. On the positive side, the imperatives of commercial activity, and Arabia-wide contacts and identifications set individuals free from the traditions of their clans and allowed for the flourishing of self-conscious, critical people, who were capable of experimenting with new values… On the negative side, society suffered from economic competition, social conflict, and moral confusion. Commercial activities brought in their wake social stratification on the basis of wealth, and morally inassimilable discrepancies between individuals situations and the imperatives of clan loyalty...
Arabia was in ferment; a society in the midst of constructive political experiments was endangered by anarchy; strong clan and tribal powers threatened to overwhelm the fragile forces of agricultural stability, commercial activity, and political cohesion.

And it was into this that Muhammad was born. His book and his monotheistic God re-establishes the cohesive society, halts the decline of Arabia and Middle East and by the twelfth century, Islam had taken the region to the forefront of civilisation. It is also useful to note that when the Mongols destroyed Saljuq Empire in 1243, religious conviction of the Islamic refugees and their desire to fight the infidels of Byzantine led to the creation of that small frontier principality in the mountainous regions of Anatolia under the rulership of Ertugrul. His son Osman will of course start a series of conquests that will eventually result in the Ottoman Empire.

One could point out that all these wars and death and destruction were all the result of religious dogmatism. I would counter that by saying without religions there wouldn’t even be a civilisation to fight these wars with. In fact wars themselves are an evidence of the tremendous organisational capability of religion. There is even a possibility that due to this benefit, spirituality is an adaptive biological trait in humans. If it has the power to get someone to go out there and sacrifice his own life, then one cannot underestimate its power in convincing a person to live a moral life.

Is God in Our Genes?

2005-04-23T22:53:00.001+10:00

A summary of an interesting Time (Nov 8, 2004 Aus. ed.) article:

A molecular biologist called Dean Hamer believes that human spirituality is an adaptive trait and claims to have located a gene that is partly responsible. The way the Time article put it is that “Our most profound feeling of spirituality…may be due to little more than an occasional shot of intoxicating brain chemicals governed by our DNA”

He is quoted as saying, “I’m a believer that every thought we think and every feeling we feel is the result of activity in the brain. I think we follow the basic laws of nature which is that we’re a bunch of chemical reactions running around in a bag.”

Another guy they quoted, Michael Persinger, professor of behavioural neuroscience at Laurentian Uni, says “anticipation of out own demise is the price we pay for a highly developed frontal lobe. In many ways, [a God experience is] a brilliant adaptation. It’s a built-in pacifier.”

According to Paul Davies, a professor of Natural Philosophy from Macquarie University in Sydney, “religions represent an attempt to harness innate spirituality for organisational purposes” i.e. a social mortar bringing groups together and enforcing social order.

Some theologians were ‘rankled’ by the implication that faith in God is nothing but a product of natural selection, but as Harmer says “[the] findings are agnostic on the existence of God. If there’s a God, there’s a God. Just knowing what brain chemicals are involved in acknowledging that is not going to change that fact.”

Then the article asks why, if spirituality is an adaptive trait, it is being used to organise ‘armed camps’. Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist from University of Washington says that “while spiritual contemplation is intuitive religion is dogmatic; dogma in the wrong hands has always been a risky thing.”

It ends with a discussion on why some people are more religiously motivated than others and a discussion of environmental factors

Utilitarianism and Religion's Annexation of Morality

2005-04-16T22:25:00.001+10:00

Let us construct a society from scratch. We will begin with a single individual. When one is alone with no potential of interaction with other humans, there is no great need for moral codes. No need for rules that tell you not to lie, cheat or covet another man's wife. However the individual would develop pragmatic rules that prevent him from wasting food, eating poisonous berries, or placing his head into the mouth of a crocodile.

This individual then meets up with another bunch of people. He finds that his life becomes a lot easier if he can get their help to search and hunt for food, make cloths, build shelter, and fight with him against predatory animals. He realises that with specialisation of skills, the talent and economies of scale can be exploited to greater benefit. Thus with the interest of self-preservation he joins a community.

One day this person murders another man, steals the victim's food, takes over the victim's cave and lies with his woman. The others in the community realise that if these kinds of acts are encouraged people will stop doing their own hunting and their own work. The society will crumble. They see the danger that is inherent in allowing such acts to continue and will enact laws to prevent it. The act of killing and stealing becomes immoral as it is so conditioned by punishment. This punishment is not just physical but also psychological (seclusion, derision, enmity). Soon people instinctually realise that it is bad to kill and steal. They feel guilty. They have added that to their social and individual conscience.

As the society becomes more advanced they tried to explain what is going on around them. They envisaged great powerful beings striking down with lightning, crying down the rain, roaring out thunder, asking plants to grow, flowers to bloom and fruits to ripen. They began to explain away in similar fashion, the phenomenon of birth and death, dark and light, of the sky, stars, earth, rivers and the seas. Some societies had gods for every natural occurrence they couldn’t explain.

Leaders of these small societies gradually realised the advantage in imprinting the moral codes in religions, the advantage of having these great unseen yet immensely powerful beings in charge of what is right and wrong. They realised that the community will more readily accept their rules if they believed them to be inspired by the Divine.

A few thousand years forward the community has developed into a civilisation. The religion has changed to meet the needs of this society. As our scientific knowledge increases and we continue to learn about the nature of the Universe, many of these gods become redundant.

But the moral codes that were tied to the religion at its birth are still there. Many people still believe in Divine justice, and many feel that they would be judged in their afterlives for sins they commit.

A significant detail of the way in which morals have evolved is that specific standards change from society to society and time to time. For example merely a century or so ago nationalism was a virtue. Pride in your race and the desire to protect it was a virtue. This attitude was necessary for society to flourish in the face of external threats.

With technological improvements in areas of communication and transport, and the benefits of global trade, most of us have come to believe that nationalism is in fact the cause of wasteful wars and that it is destructive to the welfare of the community. In most advanced nations, nationalism is now considered a vice.

No less than three centuries ago, it was sin to question the Divine Authority of our Kings. It was sin to rebel against the noble blooded aristocracy. This was only natural in societies where strong rulers are needed to govern a nation surrounded by enemies. This loyalty and unquestioning obedience is still encouraged in our armed forces. However in much of the rest of society, where we conduct commerce instead of war, we have begun to recognise equality as a virtue.

The most immediate inference we can make from these observations is that moral codes are linked with welfare and as such morals fit with Jeremy Benthem's theoretical framework of utilitarianism.

Yet it would be a mistake to arrive at the conclusion of all morals are strictly relativistic. It could very well be that moral codes throughout human history are derivative of some fundamental source, whether it be Theistic, Pantheistic, Deistic or any of a multitude of possibilities.

Tolkien and Racism

2005-04-06T23:36:00.001+10:00

The charge of racism has been frequently levelled at Tolkien after the release of Peter Jackson's Lord of The Rings. I have been involved in a lot of discussion with interested viewers and readers who are genuinely concerned with the perceived racial elements of Tolkien. The following FAQ was written about the time of the release of the Return of the King. After seeing the volume of accusatory material on net I thought it might be advisable to compile all the arguments into one single FAQ-style essay so as to save future effort and redundant recycling of arguments. As a biased fan and I may have missed a lot of points so I would appreciate any further arguments from either side.

There are no African, Indian, Japanese (…etc) humans in the story. Is Tolkien guilty of racism because of this?
The story was written as a mythology for Northern Europe and specifically England. Tolkien explicitly states his motivation in Letter #131:

I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country; it has no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, and Germanic, and Scandinavian, and Finnish; but nothing English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing.

This would explain why most human races in the story are 'white'. You wouldn’t expect to see a large number of Caucasians in an Indian, African or Chinese myth would you?

Another factor is that Tolkien had used Celtic and Teutonic myths and the myths of the Anglo-Saxons of pre-medieval England as inspiration for his story.

An internal answer would be that Middle Earth resembles the descriptions of the English countryside, the northern reaches of Scandinavia, Ireland and Scotland therefore it would damage the authenticity of this geographical setting if races from other parts of the world inhabited these lands.

As a testament to how inclusive he was it may be worthwhile (even if it is irrelevant) to mention that he had considered non-European societies when constructing some of his cultures. Evidence of this can be found in Letter #211 where Tolkien compared several significant aspects of the society of Gondor to that of ancient Egypt.

Why was he so concerned about England and Northern Europe over other parts of the world? Isn’t he overly preoccupied with Nordic regions?
Personally I think this question is counter-intuitive but I have heard it being asked in earnestness many times so I will answer it using the following quote from Letter #294:

Auden has asserted that for me ‘the North is a sacred direction’. That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man’s home should.

He also takes offence at the use of the word ‘Nordic’ as "a word I personally dislike; it is associated with racialist theories". And in any case,

the action of the story takes place in the North-west of 'Middle-earth', equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean. But this is not a purely 'Nordic' area in any sense. If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.

Orcs are black and Elves are white. Isn’t this showing that 'black' represents evil and 'white' represents good?
Yes; but I don’t believe this to be racial distinction. Almost all mythology and imaginative stories in human history, whatever culture or society, have made the association of 'Darkness' to Evil and 'Light' to Good. This should not be mistaken for distinction based on colour of skin.

The sun is the primary source of energy for all living things. Humans are diurnal creatures and have always been afraid of the night. Thus it is not very hard to see why light and darkness have created these associations in our historical psyche.

The reasons are obvious as Tolkien states in Letter #131; "Light is such a primeval symbol in the nature of the Universe, that it can hardly be analysed".

Orcs are bad, Elves are noble, Dwarves are selfish and greedy. Doesn’t this mean that character traits are predetermined by race?
It is important to remember that Orcs, Elves and Dwarves are completely different species, not different races of humans. It’s a bit like comparing a domesticated dog to a tiger in the wild. In fact orcs aren’t really even ‘natural’ beings, but were actually manufactured by the Enemy.

How about the different classes of Humans that are defined by their blood and ancestry? In the Gondorian society why are the men of Numenorean decent considered nobler than men of mixed blood?
This is probably the question that has the least satisfactory answer. During Tolkien’s time there was a commonly held conception in his society that blood carried a set of rights with it. Even in this day the British (and many other societies) have a monarch and an aristocracy. This is really more to do with the right of material inheritance rather than the qualities inherent in blood.

We can find a more plausible answer in the story of the Edain, ancestors of Numenoreans, who "alone of the kindred of men fought for the Valar (gods), whereas many others fought for Morgoth." and for this they were rewarded with "wisdom and power and life more enduring than any other of the mortal race have possessed" (from the Akallabeth). I think all three characteristics were not just 'learnt' but were permanently endowed in their biology, to be passed on to their heirs. In addition to this the descendants of Elros further enriched the Numenorean blood. (Elros being the Elf who chose to be a human, one of only two Elves to be given that choice.)

Even given these gifts we know that the Numenoreans commit grievous crimes, eventually resulting in great catastrophe. The damage that they caused due to their arrogance and thirst for power was far greater than any other that Humans or Elves have caused since.

Ok then let us look at the different races of humans, the Haradrim and the Easterlings were described as swarthy and squint-eyed. Tolkien mentioned in the Two Towers that "they were ever ready to His (Sauron’s) will". Doesn’t that imply that they are racially predisposed to evil?
That statement was made by the character Damrod, a Ranger of Ithilien, and thus you must take into account his biased view towards his country’s historical enemies.

It is true that at the time of the War of the Ring, the Haradrim and the Easterlings were allied with the Enemy, but this was not always so. During Nirnaeth Arnoediad, Bór, the Chieftain of the Men from the East allied himself and many of his people with the Sons of Feanor against the forces of Morgoth.

We also have to consider their particular geographic position. The men of the West have access to the knowledge and experience of the Elves and Numenoreans, who have had extensive prior dealings with Morgoth and Sauron. The Southrons and Easterlings on the other hand are left to fend for themselves without such information.

It may also be true that the men of the West are more technologically advanced than those in the south and the east, because they had extensive connections with Numenor in it’s prime. In addition the exiles of Numenor had formed kingdoms and colonies in the west. Unfortunately for the Southrons and Easterlings, they had no such technological advantage available to them, making them a weaker opposition. They simply had to comply with the wishes of Mordor.

In LotR Tolkien has in fact made a point of making sure the reader considers the terrible situation that these 'strange' men were in. He wants us to understand what compelled them to do what they did. Sam, after witnessing the death of an Easterling in a skirmish, wonders "what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil at heart, or what lies or threats had lead him in the long march from home; and if he really would rather have stayed there in peace."

Also as I mentioned earlier, even the Numenoreans, who are considered the most noble of Humans did commit great crimes.

We also know that some of the men of Gondor and Bree are dark skinned.

Aren’t the bad characters predominantly black or ‘swarthy’, i.e. Melkor, Sauron, Bill Ferny?
How about Saruman, Grima, Gollum, Boromir, and Denethor? There are just too many exceptions when you consider individual characters. Melkor is a Valar and Sauron is Maia in any case.

This statement was made by Tolkien in Letter #210: "Orcs are squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." How is this not racist?
This statement gave me a lot of grief initially. At first glance it can be taken as evidence of racism. However as a poster on this board (I’ve infortunately forgotten who it was) mentioned a long while back, the qualifier; "to Europeans" actually proves otherwise. It shows that he actually acknowledges the different measures of beauty existent in different cultures. He shows that beauty is not an absolute quality but is rather in the eye of the beholder whose opinions are shaped by social constraints.

I have to admit that by today’s standards this statement is highly inflammatory and insensitive and can be taken as evidence of his sub-conscious prejudices.

He also stated in Letter #45 (9 June 1941) that: "There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the 'Germanic' ideal." Isn’t this admitting support for the policies of Nazi Germany?
The term 'Germanic Ideal' has been used in modern historic literature, erroneously and far too prolifically, to describe the ideals of Nazi Germany. This identification is racist in itself. The term could very easily mean the ideals of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger or Schopenhauer; all more influential than that “ruddy little ignoramus” (Tolkien’s words); Hitler.

“You have to understand the good in things to detect the real evil”. These words follow almost directly from the above statement. To me this shows a mind more than ordinarily aware of the importance of empathy and understanding of those who are different from us.

And goes on to say that the Nazis are "ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, which I have ever loved and presented in it’s true light."

Tolkien does admit to feeling that obedience and patriotism are virtues, but then again most people still feel this way today.

Here are some further statements made by him that goes a long way in showing that he is in fact ahead of his times when it came to ideas of pluralism and equality:

There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic extermination of the entire German nation as the only proper course of after military victory….The German have just as much right to declare Poles and Jews as exterminable vermin as we have to select the Germans; in other words, no right. – Letter #81

To me this communicates his ability to perceive beyond the prevalent mists of nationalistic antagonism to come to a rational outlook of the whole matter. If only the political leaders of his time and ours had such clear sight.

This next scathing letter was written to German publishers who inquired whether he was ‘arisch’ or Jewish. The laws of Germany at the time required this inquiry before any work was to be published:

…I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by ‘arisch’. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany:…I have accustomed…to regard my German name with pride…

…I cannot, however forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer he a source of pride." – Letter #30 (25 July 1938: Unfortunately his London agents failed to pass on this letter to the intended recipients for fear of financial repercussions.}

In my mind this letter absolves any doubt about Tolkien’s values. He is not only extraordinarily modern and rational but he also has the courage to stand up for his pluralistic values. His tone and dry sarcasm shows how deeply he is offended by the racist attitudes of the German publishers.

As Aule said a while back (in a post that I had luckily saved);

One of the major themes of Lord of the Rings is the coming together of the races in a common cause. It's just that the races are elves, dwarves, men, and hobbits rather than Whites, Blacks, Orientals, etc.

The fact of the matter is that most of us have preconceptions and prejudices in our minds. Tolkien is no exception. But by considering his rhetoric in social context I think we can safely claim that he was indeed far ahead of his time in his inclusive and pluralistic perspective of the world. The key to dealing racism is to accept that they exist within each of us and do everything you can to defeat it within yourself.