Rowan Williams, Again

Posted on July 25, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see England’s Archbishop of Canterbury is at it again:

If religion is pushed into private spaces, as increasingly it tends to be by our public discourse, we lose one of the most emotionally and imaginatively resourceful ways of seeing human behaviour; we lose something of the sense that certain acts may be good independently of whether they are sensible or successful in the world’s terms. I suppose you could say that we lose the “contemplative” dimension to ethics, the belief that some things are worth admiring in themselves.

Most of the passage that Andrew cites is what you’d expect a clergyman to say, so, however foolish, it’s nothing to be worried about. The opening passage, however, is intriguing either as delusion or attempt to delude:

If religion is pushed into private spaces, as increasingly it tends to be by our public discourse…

Good grief. Has this poor parson not noticed that there is a religion called Islam that now has a significant presence in Britain? You can think what you want about that faith, but the one thing you cannot say is that it has been pushed into a “private space”.

Andrew, meanwhile, goes on to add this:

If you haven’t read Marilynne Robinson’s “Absence Of Mind”, it speaks powerfully to the civilizational loss that a failure to grapple with, let alone understand, religious discourse and culture can bring.

Life is probably too short for me to want to find time to read Ms. Robinson’s book, so I’m a little reluctant to comment in too much detail, but “civilizational loss” is quite some claim. While a decent working knowledge of the more important varieties of religious belief is undeniably essential for an understanding of mankind’s history, present and, let’s face it, future, “grappling with” religious discourse is a more dubious activity—something about angels and pinheads, if I recall—of interest to some, of none to others, and mainly of benefit as a brake on fanaticism within the ranks of the faithful, except, of course, that all too often it is just the opposite…

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When Imperatives Collide

Posted on July 24, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

From the intriguing new website Big Questions Online here is a thought-provoking piece by Susan Jacoby. In this extract she sets the stage:

My mother, at 89, lives with a sound mind in a failing and frail body. She has had a living will for decades, and it specifies that no extraordinary medical measures — including artificial feeding — be used to prolong her life if there is no hope of recovery. She has explicitly told my brother and me, who have the legal power to make her health-care decisions if she is no longer able to do so, that she wants nothing done to keep her alive if her mind is gone. You can’t get much clearer than that.
In spite of the advance planning for which my mother is legendary, she might be in real trouble if she were unfortunate enough to be taken in an unconscious state to an emergency room at a Roman Catholic hospital. The moral values of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — not her own values — could dictate her care.
The bishops’ most recent health-care directives, issued near the end of 2009, make it clear that they consider it the duty of Catholic health-care providers to impose artificial nutrition and hydration on patients in persistent vegetative states. My brother and I would, of course, take immediate steps to have our mother removed from a setting where her wishes would be ignored. But what if she had no living children or, like some two-thirds of Americans, had procrastinated about putting her instructions in writing?
Here is an issue involving the separation of church and state that is, at its core, a question of whether individual liberty of conscience really means liberty for all…

Discuss among yourselves

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The Shaman of Sullivan Street

Posted on July 24, 2010 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via the New York Times:

Sometime around 9:30 a.m. on weekdays, Itzhak Beery enters a second-floor office in Greenwich Village to preside over his piece of the material world. It is an advertising agency, the latest he has owned in a 30-year career. Five computers await him, each thrumming with software for graphic design. Shelves hold the awards he has won.

On Sunday mornings, though, Mr. Beery returns to cover all the practical apparatus with sheets. From a cabinet, he withdraws volcanic stones, candles, finger cymbals, bottles of rum and cologne, each with symbolic value. He arranges these on a red cloth, and lays beside them a carton of eggs and bunches of red and white carnations.

Such are the instruments of the shaman of Sullivan Street….

Oh dear.

Read the whole thing.

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When liberals pray

Posted on July 24, 2010 by Heather Mac Donald

Opponents of Arizona’s new immigration law have been praying for its reversal in court.  The Wall Street Journal today has a photo of parishioners sitting outdoors on folding chairs at a prayer session for the demise of the law, which asks local police officers to verify the immigration status of individuals they have lawfully stopped if the officer has reasonable suspicion that the person stopped is in the country illegally.  Church coalitions throughout the country have been urging God as well as politicians for help in dismantling SB 1070. 

If the federal judge now hearing challenges to SB 1070 from the federal government and various advocacy groups overturns key portions of it, all those who have been praying for judicial nullification will claim divine vindication.   How will Glenn Beck, who regularly advises his radio listeners to pray, Sarah Palin, Mark Levin, Newt Gingrich, and every other conservative figurehead or foot soldier who views belief in God as a central component of conservative identity and who supports stronger immigration enforcement respond?  Did God in fact answer the prayers of SB 1070 opponents?  And if so, why?  Because the opponents were more organized in sending their prayer packets to the great pollster in the sky or because God agreed with them on the merits? 

Or will the conservative believers suddenly incline towards skepticism?  Might they ask such questions as: How do we know that God influenced the judge’s ruling and that it wouldn’t have happened anyway?  Where is the control group of judges whose decisions were not prayed about–how did they rule?  And what about those other judicial rulings that have upheld Arizona’s other  immigration laws—requiring verification of citizenship status to vote, for example, or requiring employers to verify the legal immigration status of their workers—why did God allow those laws to stand and not this one? 

More likely, however, religion-promoting immigration restrictionists will not allow such potential complications to cross their minds at all, and will simply go on to the next issue. 

Of course, if U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton upholds SB 1070, the conservative prayer advocates will appreciate God’s understanding of illegal immigration while the law’s religious opponents will, in theory only, face their own theological conundrums.

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Jim Webb and the “dark matter” of American diversity

Posted on July 24, 2010 by David Hume

Jim Webb has returned to his populist roots in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege. Webb is the author of Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. Of Scots-Irish descent himself he is explicitly conscious of the diverse streams within Anglo-America, outlined in more scholarly works such as Albion’s Seed and The Cousins’ Wars. An underlying superstructure to the sectional conflicts which have erupted over the arc of American history, with the Civil War an exemplar, has been the divisions across the Anglo-American folkways. Most modern Americans, schooled only in the value of racial diversity, or vaguely aware of the massive wave of Southern and Eastern European immigration between ~1900 and 1924, remain totally ignorant of this ethnic “dark matter.”

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Sarah Palin 2012

Posted on July 22, 2010 by David Hume

Noah Millman mulls the chances. Noah is not a fan, to be sure. I’ve increased my probability that Palin will be the nominee in 2012 a fair amount since I last thought about this. Also, since we’re midway through 2010, closer to the point where the nomination will be de facto secured, my uncertainty window has decreased. I assumed that the Republican establishment would simply screw her at some point before 2012, but my assessment of that establishment’s strength has diminished (e.g., their candidate did not win in the Kentucky or Nevada primaries). Additionally, I think the passage of the spring health care bill reduces Romney’s chances, who is probably ideally positioned to catch the backing of the establishment.

So if I had to guess I would say a 25% probability of securing nomination in 2012 for Sarah Palin. This underestimates my new evaluation of Palin because I don’t know for sure whether she’s running. I’d guess a 60% chance she runs seriously, so that means a 42% probability of winning if she ran.

I judge that Mitt Romney’s chances are not very high right now, mostly because it’s just too easy to depict him as a milquetoast moderate flip-flopper with no real charisma. It’s too easy because there’s a lot of validity to those charges. I wouldn’t say 0%. There were times when John McCain looked dead in late 2007. But I’d probably pin Romney at 5% at most as his current ceiling.

Let me end by saying that I don’t follow politics closely, so the numbers above are more to give you a good precise sense of my vague impressions, than anything I have real confidence in. My uncertainty is probably +/- 10% standard deviation for the Palin probabilities.

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G.O.D. Is Great

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Bradlaugh

I am reading Andy Ross’s new book with pleasure & instruction.  It’s better put together than Mindworlds & has less the feel of a core dump.  (That expression dates me as an old mainframe-head … but then, so’s Andy.)  The binary numbering of sections is a bit hokey, and there’s some Popular Mechanics gee-whizzery here & there, but on the whole a good read with a pleasing density of interesting ideas.

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Beliefs as descriptions, and beliefs as identities

Posted on July 17, 2010 by David Hume

Stephen Prothero has a piece up, Hinduism’s caste problem, out in the open. Prothero points out that religionists often use logical constructs to play word games which reinforce their in-group. Caste is not a problem with Hinduism per se, but is a cultural problem. The treatment of women is not a problem with Islam per se, but a cultural problem. The history of European anti-semitism was not an issue of religious conflict per se, but a detail of history.

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The conservative tendency

Posted on July 13, 2010 by David Hume

A blog which some readers may find of interest, Conservative tendency. The most recent post is a bit of a pedantic muddle:

I had a friend who was raised in China in the 1970s (the daughter of a general, in fact), and she was in a deep sense a conservative, though she was not interested in Western politics. She was educated in Confucian values and classical Chinese literature by her maternal grandmother, who had been a concubine, and yet she was also deeply affected by Maoist Communist ideas.

The point I’m making is that I know there is no simple left/right dichotomy. I am interested in how people think and form their values, and, if I tend to identify with “one side” of politics, I am not totally sure of my position and I remain respectful towards and sometimes fascinated by those with views very different from my own.

I say pedantic muddle as a compliment. When it comes to political discussion it is easy enough to find plain and precise assertiveness, distilling a complex subject down to a potent pith in an unselfconscious manner. A rarer find is that of the humility to admit that the task at hand may be more than one’s tool are fit for.

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Atheists may lack essence

Posted on July 12, 2010 by David Hume

Just listened o Paul Bloom, author of How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, on a podcast (mp3). He notes that the chain of possession of items impacts how much pleasure we gain out of ownership, or at least our attachment to them. As an example, it is not unknown for people to be attached to the clothes and other personal items of a loved one who has passed away. The attachment may not derive from any sensory empirical rationale; rather, it is knowing the chain of possession and a sentiment that an essence of the loved one has been imparted (yes, I know that clothes may sometimes retain distinctive scents, but discount those details. The example holds true for objects such as pens which retain no sensory trace).

The strength of this sentiment varies from person to person. Bloom observes that there are individuals who have no sentimental attachment to objects at all. That is, individuals for whom objects are simply means to a bundle of ends, pure utility. So long as the bundle of elements remains invariant objects can be substituted at will. Bloom contends two demographic variables seem to common among this set of individuals who lack any sentiment toward objects:

1) Overwhelmingly male

2) Invariably atheist

(note that this does not entail that most males or atheists are circumscribed by this set!)

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