I am writing an epic.

I tell a tale of men and war, and of a man

Who saved the world but never fired a single gun;

I tell of how a war of guns and planes was won

By reason and by science, at least as much as bombs.

His enemy is known as the epitome

Of evil, violent hatred and of greed for power;

His name forever lives in highest infamy:

Heir Adolf Hitler, fuhrer of great Germany.

Yet he is not known quite so well; his name remains

In “tests”, in “theses” and “machines” that bear his sign;

It's Alan Turing, FRS and OBE;

A hero whose sad tragedy defines our time.

For Turing after vict'ry was betrayed, by those

He loved and nations he had served and even saved;

How fickle England: highest honors turned to chains

Because of Alan's love that dare not speak its name.

Thus not by gods, scarcely by chance, and not by fate,

Was great and noble hero of out time destroyed;

By men, by human hands, was done this evil crime.

Small consolation can I offer him today:

At least I'll sigh, and speak his name and tell his tale.

A response to Ashis Nandy's “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Toleranc

I'm being required to read this essay for a class, a seminar on “politics of religion and secularism” run by a professor who is the worst kind of faitheist. He actually tried to claim that people can and should believe in faith as trust in God without believing in faith as belief in God. Stop for a moment and think about what this would mean: I trust my mother to tell me the right things, but of course my mother doesn't actually exist. I believe that unicorns will make the world a better place, but of course there are no such things as unicorns. (He admitted that my logic is undeniable, yet didn't seem to care; this was all the more frustrating, since it implies that he has forsaken rational thought.) Yes, this is the state-of-the-art in faitheist discourse.

It was this paragraph that inspired me to blog a response: “Secularism has little to say about cultures—it is definitionally ethnophobic and frequently ethnocidal, unless of course cultures and those living by cultures are willing to show total subservience to the modern nation-state and become ornaments or adjuncts to modern living—and the orthodox secularists have no clue to the way a religion can link up different faiths or ways of life according to its own configurative principles.”

Whatever this is, it isn't secularism. Secularism as I understand it—as I advocate it—is explicitly pluralistic; it destroys “cultures” only in the sense that it integrates culture—gives access to cultural arts and experiences from all societies for all human beings. It destroys us-them thinking, not cultural complexity. My secularism is reading the Bhagavad-Gita while standing in the Sistine Chapel and wearing a kilt and a Bluetooth headset. In the future I imagine, there would be no Muslims, no Catholics, no Buddhists, only humans, humans who are social and cultural animals. I've no love of the nation-state; I think it is at present a necessary evil, and I would very much like to see it die in favor of a species-state or indeed an ecosystem-state. Government is clearly effective at securing stability and preventing violence; but nationalism is fundamentally evil.

Nandy makes a distinction early in the essay that he hardly ever uses later, between “religion-as-faith” and “religion-as-ideology” (I would use instead the words “religion-as-culture” and “religion-as-belief”, but the taxonomy is similar); insofar as this distinction works, I agree with it wholeheartedly, as would any of the New Atheists. Richard Dawkins says grace and celebrates Christmas. Sam Harris often writes of the wisdom in Buddhist literature. Salman Rushdie frequently speaks about the Muslim cultural values he believes in. The people who have made a false association between these two categories are not the atheists, they are the religionists; they are the people who think that you can't respect the Bible as literature without believing that Jesus rose from the dead. A pluralistic, metaphorical, cultural experience of religion is precisely what we New Atheists are trying to achieve. If that's really what you want, you agree with us.

Nandy also goes on about “theories of self” without any actual evidence; all the psychological evidence I've studied shows that people around the world, regardless of cultural identification, are capable of both a fixed and a fluid concept of self.

Nandy's conception of “two definitions of secularism” is more useful; he is right that “be religious at home, but secular in public” is a highly problematic notion. This is why we New Atheists argue for “be secular everywhere”; we think religious belief and religious ideology are fundamentally evil things, and would like to see them eradicated. Separation of Church and State only makes sense if we agree that there must be such a thing as Church; New Atheists precisely deny this. On the other hand, Nandy's second definition is even worse: respect for all religions is precisely the opposite of what makes rational sense. Respect for ideas and practices must be earned by the validity of those ideas and practices.

“His contemporary, Joseph Bradlaugh, on the other hand, believed in a secularism which rejected religion and made science its deity.” Well, except for the idiocy of saying “science its deity”—clearly you know nothing of science and little of theology, for science is a methodology, not an ideology, and it is nothing even remotely like a being—this is in fact the secularism I agree with. Science is true, religion is false; we need no further reason to believe science and reject religion.

He then speaks of a hierarchy of belief; the only change I would make is to say that people who are religious in public but not in private are the worst kind of people, worse even than true believers. The first two I entirely agree with: Rationalists are better than secular theists who are better than everyone else.

Nandy is a fan of ridiculous proclamations about secularism; I doubt anyone seriously thinks that Britain dominated India because Britain was secular and India wasn't. I certainly don't think that—gunpowder and industrialization are far more obvious reasons. Moreover, it's clear that the violence in “secular” Ireland is motivated as much by cultural and religious identity as the violence in “religious” India.

I feel no obligation to defend the way India was run by the British; while secular, it was also evil in plenty of other ways.

And yet another ridiculous proclamation: “To many Indians today, secularism comes as a part of a larger package consisting of a set of standardized ideological products and social processes—development, mega-science, and national security being some of the most prominent among them.” So far this is true, except I'm not sure what “mega-science” is as distinct from plain old science. “This package often plays the same role vis-a-vis” (anytime someone says “vis-a-vis”, expect nonsense to follow; it's an effective heuristic) “the people of society—sanctioning or justifying violence against the weak and the dissenting—that the church, the ulema, the sangha, or the Brahmans played in earlier times.” And now he's gone off the deep end. I challenge you to name one—just one—New Atheist who has once—just once—advocated violence against religious people. You can't do it, can you? And yet, I can find thousands of examples of religious people advocating violence against people who disagree with their religion. Maybe millions. The closest example I can find in secularism comes from Communist tyrants; yet, none of them were actually rational, none of them believed in Enlightenment values, and all of them were insane megalomaniacs. That isn't secularism, it's madness. Such people are beyond the pale of moral behavior, and I do not consider them my allies.

Nandy also likes making assertions without evidence, or even in the face of obvious counter-evidence: “Finally, the belief that values derived from the secular ideology of the state” (like freedom, equality, justice, the dignity of humanity?) “would be a better guide to political action and a more tolerant and richer political life” (like that actually enjoyed in secular countries?) “(as compared to the values derived from the religious faiths)” (like racism, sexism, bigotry, genocide, sectarian violence, irrationality? Oh, and “don't kill people”, because that's not a value secularists believe in?) “has become even more untenable to large parts of Indian society than it was a decade ago.”

Only when he actually makes substantive historical claims does Nandy begin to sound reasonable: “It is not modern India which has tolerated Judaism in India for nearly 2000 years, Christianity from before the time it went to Europe, and Zoroastrianism for more than 1200 years; it is traditional India which has shown such tolerance.” This could indeed be correct; I somewhat doubt it, given the history of sectarian violence in the rest of the world, but perhaps its true. If so, all that shows is that the forced transition to modernity causes violence—something I do not doubt. It does nothing to show that modernity itself is harmful—to do that, Nandy would need to show that Sweden is a more violent and horrifying place than India or indeed Congo or Saudi Arabia. I'm fairly certain he can't do this. And even so, Nandy trusts ancient records to be accurate and comprehensive, which is an absurd trust to have. Even if no one wrote about violence, that doesn't mean violence wasn't happening. Maybe it wasn't—but we simply don't know. What few written records we have from the time period (ahem, The Bible? The Qur'an?) are simply chock-full of genocidal violence, depicted as if it is completely normal and acceptable.

In general, Nandy hates modernity because it challenges his own religious beliefs, and he is trying to convince us that modern times are more violent than the past, when the evidence shows precisely the opposite. Even the most horrible acts of modern times—Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot—were the sort of act that was commonplace in ancient times. The Bible, the Qur'an, the Odyssey, the Aeneid... all the ancient texts we have verify that life was brutally violent for everyone. Genocide used to be a way of life for religious humanity. We feel more violent now paradoxically because we are less violent; we are more aware of the violence and how terrible it is, so when we do still see it on occasion we are more horrified by it.

Overall, I am convinced that Nandy has nothing useful to say, because he systematically distorts secular ideology in order to defend some weird form of “religion” that no one actually believes—except perhaps we New Atheists.

Want to lose weight? Watch people starving.

Consider my consciousness raised.

I think I'll call this the “perspective diet”. It is the diet one begins to eat when one finally internalizes the knowledge that millions of people around the world are facing starvation. It is the diet that happens when you realize that the food you had been taking for granted is in fact a survival need that many people have trouble meeting. It is the diet one eats when food becomes once again biological instead of recreational.

What brought this on? Well, I'm taking a course called “Global Justice: Social Theory and Practice” (currently listed as RCSSCI 360-005, though I'm told next year it will be either PHIL 224 or ECON 224); nothing like reading Peter Singer's “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” and watching Eduardo Coutinho's Boca de Lixo to change your perspective on economics, politics, and, yes, food.

What is Boca de Lixo? It's a little hard to find online, since it shares its name with many other things, probably as an intentional remark on those other things. It is a documentary telling the story of garbage-scavengers in Brazil, people who literally work 16-hour days digging through garbage searching for scraps of metal to sell and scraps of food to feed their children. A whole subculture has grown up around these garbage scavengers; people live and marry and die never leaving the community of garbage-scavenging. Others have begun living this way after losing their jobs in other industries, like fishing and auto repair.

For me, the first change has been to realize just how much I take food for granted, and how much of my slightly-overweight condition is due to this fact. Living middle class in the world's richest nation, I simply presume that there will always be fresh food and clean water. My nutrition is not in jeopardy, so I am free to choose foods that will maximize my pleasure—usually fattening corn syrup products. I don't actually have to work to survive, so I can get by with minimal exercise. I have access to high-tech medical care, so the risk of diabetes I'm incurring doesn't frighten me.

Meanwhile, my own frustrations about swine flu and the University of Michigan bureaucracy suddenly seem... beside the point.

Currently Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme By Richard Brodie see related

Your memes are fit, but are they true?

Brodie does display an enthusiasm for memetics, and for the most part has a good understanding of the theory, but he makes some fundamental errors that call his entire argument into question. He has an engaging and readable style, which is no doubt why his books sell very well—their memetic fitness is high. But his errors and misstatements are too significant to ignore.

First, he does not understand entropy. He essentially uses the Creationist definition, and then in a stroke of boldness declares that evolution is the opposite of entropy—in essence, he is agreeing that evolution violates thermodynamics and then saying that it is thermodynamics which is in error. He writes (p.49), “Evolution is a scientific model of how things become more complex; entropy describes how things become simpler. They are the creative and destructive forces of the universe.” This is wrong. It's not even an oversimplification; it's just basically wrong.

Evolution is a scientific model of how imperfectly hereditary replicators change over time. Every word here is necessary (except perhaps over, which as Pinker would note merely serves to give time a case): the entities in question must replicate (copy themselves) with some heredity (offspring similar to parents) but only imperfectly (some errors and changes are made); the result will be change (future generations more adapted to their environment), but this requires time (many generations of replication). Complexity isn't really the concern here. It is true that evolution can add complexity; but evolution can also remove complexity. Evolution adapts replicators to their environment; it adds complexity when (and only when) complexity serves fitness.

Entropy is a physical quantity representing the amount of thermodynamic information that is inaccessible at the macroscale. S = k ln W. Entropy describes the data loss in transition from “ensemble of protons and electrons with the following positions and velocities: [list of 10^26 variables]” to “1 kilogram of pure water at equilibrium at 274 Kelvin.” Another way of looking at entropy is “energy per temperature”; as the energy in a system becomes more and more devoted to temperature rather than other forms of energy (e.g. mass, electricity, gravity), the entropy of that system increases. DH = DG + T DS. [read the D as a capital Delta]. In many cases this does fit with our concept of “disorder”, since a highly-ordered crystal is usually of lower entropy than an amorphous mass of liquid, and a human being is of lower entropy than a rotting mass of flesh. But this is not always the case; the entropy of a 60 kg mass of bacteria is not much higher than the entropy of a 60 kg human (both are quite low, which is why both need to metabolize constantly to maintain their homeostasis). Further, pseudocrystals actually violate this pattern, having high-order high-entropy states. If you mean to say “disorder”, say “disorder”; if you use the word “entropy”, you should be talking about thermodynamics.

Evolution is entirely consistent with thermodynamics, and both can create either complexity or disorder under particular circumstances.

His analysis of human mating behavior borders on sexism, though he is careful to straddle the line between scientific facts and pop-psych simplifications. Except when being plainly flippant or facetious, Brodie does not ever actually assert anything about human mating that isn't true; he merely delivers it in an insensitive and sometimes crass way, probably to garner attention.

It is in fact the case that in general, males have a stronger Darwinian motive to seek many mates, and females have a stronger Darwinian motive to seek a single, high-quality mate. Nonetheless, human beings are very complicated, their number of offspring is very low, and their parental investment is very high; all of this mitigates against the image of “promiscuous male, monogamous female” without even considering the contribution of society, religion, ethical norms, or traditional practices. Humans have a very odd sort of mating strategy; it's something like “polygynous and/or monogamous and/or polyamorous, but mostly really confused”. I actually think serial monogamy is what most people are most comfortable with, what they would incline to naturally if they were offered the choice. Yet temptations toward other ways of life are always present, and consequences for transgression always enacted. It seems to be in human nature to be confused and frustrated by sex. (We may not be alone in this.)

Moreover, the explanations of “men and women are different” or “women are complicated” could only have been written by heterosexuals. As a bisexual person, I think I can speak especially well to this: people are different, and people are complicated. Forming and maintaining a happy, satisfying relationship is not substantially easier with people of the same sex than it would be with people of the other sex. This is true whether or not you want sex—and woe to those who want sex with those who do not want sex with them. Indeed, given all the various kinds of relationships we form with other people—colleague, superior, subordinate, friend, acquaintance, citizen, leader, buyer, seller, enemy, ally, lover, one-night-stand, partner, spouse—it's not clear to me that sex (either the act or the trait) has much to do with it. Sex isn't completely irrelevant, but it's far from the only consideration, and often not even the primary one. Nor are sex differences very explanatory, since humans are so barely dimorphic that our within-sex variation vastly outstrips our between-sex variation. “Vive la difference!”? Vive que difference? Do you refer to the medium effect-size in mean muscle mass and height? Or the small effect-size in average promiscuity and sex drive? Or the even smaller effect-size in mean visual-spatial scores? Honestly the only things I can see that really constitute the difference between sexes are those that are true by definition—namely primary and secondary sex characteristics. Men have penises, women have vaginas; women have breasts and men don't. To me, that seems to be about it.

Brodie also writes like a self-help author, always entreating us to make our lives better and more meaningful; this is probably because he is a self-help author—all his previous books have been on self-help, not science. At times he gives the impression of a charismatic charlatan, who really has nothing worthwhile to say, but is so very uplifting in the way he says it.

This isn't quite a fair assessment, since Brodie does occasionally have insights to offer. His image of a “virus of the mind” is both compelling and reasonably accurate. His analysis of “levels of experience” (survival at level 1, productivity at level 2, and transcendence at level 3) is simplistic, yet sensible; he explicitly bases his reasoning on Maslow, whose ideas are well-supported and quite respected in the psychological community. He speaks of the quiet desperation of ordinary men, and I share this sense; indeed, being both of philosophical mind and chronic depressive disorder, I feel it particularly intensely. Still, Brodie overstates his case and oversimplifies the issues; it's not enough that we convince ourselves we are happy and transcendent, we must actually seek happiness and transcendence. The latter quest is what is genuinely worthwhile, though surely it is more difficult and more prone to failure. But unless the happy schizophrenic is Brodie's goal, he should be more careful about claiming that the search for pleasant and uplifting memes is our primary objective.

All this would be bad enough, but the book is really far worse than this. Throughout it Brodie makes a series of halfhearted forays into postmodernism. He talks about distinctions, and claims they are all arbitrary (p. 19-20). He starts with the example of “The State of Alabama”; this is surely a paradigmatic example of an arbitrary distinction. Alabama is not a natural kind, and has no physical existence. Then he expands this to “the Earth”, which is a little more dubious—there does really seem to be something different about the Earth compared to the space around it—but might still work, since ultimately what constitutes “atmosphere” and what constitutes “outer space” is a fuzzy-edged and somewhat arbitrary thing. But then he goes off the deep end, asserting that “you”—by which he means your identity as a conscious agent—is a purely arbitrary distinction. This is clearly wrong; there really are certain things that I can do, being me, to myself, that you cannot do to me, because you are yourself. Moreover, in the rest of the book Brodie depends upon this distinction, because otherwise he could not entreat us to make decisions about what we believe (what memes we allow to program us); one does not entreat the universe as a system to change its configuration. (In fact, what Brodie does not seem to grasp is that memes are at their core units of meaning, something only intelligent beings can access. To be “programmed by memes” is really to be persuaded by propositions, precisely the sort of thing a rational being ought to be doing.) He then proceeds to undermine his entire argument by saying that the distinction between reality and concepts is yet another arbitrary distinction.

He then goes on to deny the existence of truth (p. 31-2). This is incredibly stupid, and frankly it made me wonder if Brodie understands the words he is saying or is merely some sort of imitative automaton. He capitalizes True and Truth as if to frighten us; yet his whole argument—indeed, any argument for anything—depends upon the presumption that there is an objective fact of the matter to be discovered and understood. The particular examples he gives are indeed heuristic approximations useful for some purposes but not others; but this does absolutely nothing to undermine the fact that some statements are objectively false and others are objectively true.

Brodie writes, “The truth of any proposition depends upon the assumptions you make in considering it—the distinction-memes you use in thinking about it.” (p.31). This is either trivial, false, or meaningless.

It is trivial if all we mean by “assumptions” is the semantics and syntax of the statement being expressed, so that we can articulate the proposition it expresses. “2+2=4” wouldn't mean anything to someone who had never used the Arabic numeral system, and it might not seem like an objective truth if the speaker and the listener did not agree on the presumption that the domain under consideration is the integers. Nonetheless, it remains the case that “2+2=4” is an objectively true fact.

It is false if by “assumptions” we mean the conceptual paradigms and presumed facts that we already have about the topic at hand. This seems to be what Brodie is trying to suggest—that “2+2=4” could be true for one person, who uses one paradigm, and false for another person, who uses another paradigm. Yet insofar as both parties understand what is being said and what it is being said about, if they disagree then at least one of them is wrong. When someone asserts that the Earth is 6000 years old, that person is wrong; they presume things about the universe that are untrue. They are blind to the evidence, or utilize the evidence incorrectly, or think illogically, or else have been brainwashed by the force of some powerful memes of delusion. Yes, the statement seems true in their paradigm; that's because their paradigm is fundamentally incorrect.

Finally, it is meaningless if we take the word “assumptions” to be so broad that anyone can legitimately assume anything about anything. If all possible syntaxes and semantics are equally valid in analyzing Brodie's statement, then what I read as “The truth of any proposition” someone else could read as “Yellow elephants” or even “view dangerously” (this is tricky to articulate; the sense is something like, what “Yellow elephants” means to me could be the same as what “The truth of any proposition” means to someone else). If we allow assumptions and paradigms to be this broad, then it is not even clear what we are talking about when we assert something about assumptions and paradigms—indeed, it is not clear that we can assert anything at all. Cognitive content and expressive symbol become unhinged. We are making noises and creating little marks on pages, but nothing we say has any real meaning.

Ultimately, I think Brodie was seduced by the power of memetic theory to explain human behavior, and forgot to include the fact that some memes have power precisely because they are correct. The human brain evolved to reproduce human genes—of this there can be no doubt—but in the process of doing so it gained a remarkable capacity not found in much else in the universe: the capacity to reason, to discern truth from falsehood. It does so with difficulty, and often in error; yet it does so nonetheless. A RAM chip will store a sequence of binary digits regardless of its meaning, yet a human brain will demand consistency and sense in the memes it accepts. Indeed, the wonder of the human brain lies in its capacity to in some sense transcend syntax and achieve semantics—this capacity has troubled us in Searle's Chinese Room and thereby become subsumed as a facet of the Hard Problem. On the one hand we can feel; on the other hand we can mean. Experience and intentionality; these two facets of our existence (Are they related? We sense that they are, but cannot be sure) comprise the most difficult questions we have ever asked in our science. Brodie simply brushes them aside as if they were unimportant, or even meaningless. Where behaviorists said “it's all action potentials”, Brodie says “it's all memes”. Both are in some sense true—surely it is, indeed, action potentials, and it is, indeed, memes—yet both are missing something, a level of analysis, or a theoretical breakthrough, that would explain how in fact action potentials are memes are meanings. Because we lack this theoretical understanding, we are unsatisfied by analogies to “there is no water, it's all just H2O” (we can see how water and H2O are the same thing); yet this must be the way of the universe. Whatever minds are made of, they are made of stuff, and stuff follows the laws of physics, whatever they may be. Identity-monism is an inevitable consequence of the fact that we exist and we think—which, per Descartes, is an inevitable consequence of the fact that we think. I think, therefore I am made of stuff.

Behold the Holy Rabbit