ain’t that the truth

Recently read an omnibus (pluribus?) edition of Richard Brautigan’s “Revenge of the lawn”, “The Abortion: An historical Romance”, and “So the wind won’t blow it all away”. And,  since I have not been publishing for awhile, and since I have reasonably strong opinions on these books, I felt that I would write about them and my opinions. Sort of like a review, but more like an in review.

And that (and this) right there (here) is one of the things I (like)d about this guy.  He has, in terms of sentences, a real knack for ignoring the rules of common decency and just saying the thing that gets his point across. A mixing of tense and form to create a syntactic emotion. He writes innocent, like a five-year-old, with too much enthusiasm and too-bright descriptions. But the sensation that I get from it, and the reason that I like it so much I think, is one of warmth and affection, instead of what I would expect from my description: uncomfortable style and affectation.

First thing in this book, direction wise: “Revenge of the Lawn”: a collection of (extremely) short pseudo-fiction.  Actually, I’m not sure that that’s true. I have no idea how much of these stories are true and how much of them are just pleasant little descriptions of events that he witnessed or remembered. Frankly, I don’t care. They’re pleasant, or upsetting, whichever they were intended as, but not much more. This is starting to sound too much like a review.

So. “The Abortion.” This is, I think, what every man (the occasional man) dreams of as the perfect romance. A man, understanding his part of the world the best that any man could possibly understand it, meets a(n overwhelmingly) beautiful girl and is the only one to understand her beauty correctly. The thing is, “understand” is my particular interpretation. It’s probably the wrong word for you. This novel is a picture of various ways of fitting in the world, and it’s a superb dream of satisfaction and normality.

“So The Wind Won’t Blow it All Away” so that you understand where I’m coming from: the past is simultaneously immutable and already destroyed. It is exactly where you put it and it is exactly what you remember, and except that your memories are what you remember them to be and the past is only sometimes what you want it to be. A reconstruction of a winter afternoon in a summer afternoon previous.

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He kneels above her back with sweat beading on his elbows and knots in his palms. Silhouettes in a well-lit room, the world flickers and whirls around them. Conversation goes as it does, in ebbs and flows of insight and sympathy. Touching on deep muscles and cold winters, past and memories and not those things as well.

There is a knot on her left shoulder.  It reminds him of that time at the beach. A short sunset, waves forever, sand in sandwiches. The sand-castle builders had been out, there must have been a contest because there were so many and they were so big. And some of them had people inside. Always happy people; some with feathers and wings, others with scales and fins, smiling and waving or laying. And there had been that volcano, it was huge with rivers of sand-lava and forests of sand-trees and cracks of sand-destruction. And the real wind had been at it. And the forests were collapsing in on themselves. And the rivers of lava were shallow and ignoble. And after minutes of scrambling she had climbed it. The sun had just gone down for him, so he imagined that she could have seen it had she turned around. She looked at him and smiled at him, and he smiled at all the smiling sand-faces and the ruined sand-trees, at her footsteps ruining the volcano, and at her butt that he thought was enjoying its own sunset. He was smiling at her and at her sand-future, thinking of the ways they were, together. He let out a laugh and ran towards the volcano, jumped the moat of mud-lava, crushed the town at the base, tore through the forests and the trees and the rivers of molten rock. Tore up the earth in his rush to get to her while the volcano grew active again and pushed up tons of rock and grew with greater speed and furor the more he rushed. And he couldn’t get closer no matter how he tried, but he couldn’t give up and he knew that he would never stop and the moment was over and he reached her in his embrace and the volcano was dead again. But he knew that the sand and cold of sunset was an illusion and that he would never reach her, that she would be dancing while the earth carried her away and the wind ate her and time turned her into birds and fish, giving her all their trappings. He could see that her eyes were already scaled over, and that the magic of the light bouncing out of them was really the reflection from the reptilian patina blocking her sight. But she wore it well. And they collapsed together laughing, her left shoulder tucked in his right armpit, her head on his chest, knees intertwined. And they watched the clouds being ruined by the wind.

There is a knot on her left shoulder. It has been hurting her for days, only she didn’t know. He gets to it; she sighs. Her mind is all blackness and warmth.

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So there’s this post over at Cognitive Daily, a post which i would have titled something more like how i titled this post.  But that’s OK, they’re cognitive psychologists not marketers. God knows we need more people like them. I’m going to give a brief  summary of what they’re reporting on before i get to what i got out of it, but really you should go read it, it’s fascinating.

Very, very short version of it though: experimenters decide to check if being primed–having an idea stuck in their brain without the experimentees  realizing it–with a god concept before being given $10 and told that they could leave however much they wanted behind for a second volunteer, would make people leave more money behind. It’s called the dictator game. Anyway, here’s the graph:

 Holy crap but thinking about god makes people halfway decent!

Yeah, so you know from the title of this post that that’s not the whole story. Maybe that’s why they titled their report the way they did. (Although i’d still go for provocative over suspenseful  any day of the week.) The researchers then went ahead and said “well, we don’t know if that was just god or our test population (college students) or what” so they did it again. This time with a broader population and priming people not only with supernatural concepts, but also with ideas like “civic,” “contract,” etc. Here’s the graph:

Wow, huh? Purely materialistic ideas have a completely equivalent effect to otherworldly ideas, subconsciously. Not atheists–and they did ask about religious belief, see the CogDaily article for details–rationalizing some sort of ad hoc “we’re moral too” stuff. Nope: everybody was affected the same by the secular prime. And, perhaps not surprisingly the atheists were not affected by the god prime.

Now, that’s not surprising, but it is very significant.  Because that says that god is less effective than secular ideas. A higher percentage of people were affected by the  secular ideas than by the god ones. Add to this the fact that christians wish evil onto muslims, and that muslims do evil unto christians, and that everybody just likes beating on the jews, And this adds a new twist to the old “argument” between religious morality and secular morality: not only does a secular morality not demand violence be perpetrated against people merely because of their beliefs, it also makes more people good people.

[tags]morality, experiment, atheism, dictator game[/tags]

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In the two days since my post on the topic of Siegel’s prejudiced essay, more (plenty more) has been said.  So, i’m going to try and keep this brief and just touch on one thing that i feel hasn’t been said; which is excruciatingly difficult, every single sentence that tries to contain a fact is wrong! There is so much in his critique of imagination that is stupid and insulting that i almost don’t know where to begin. So i’ll start at the beginning :

In their contempt for any belief that cannot be scientifically or empirically proved, the anti-God books are attacking our inborn capacity to create value and meaning for ourselves.

No. Hasn’t he ever heard of existentialism? It’s been pretty big for over a century, and one of its core contributions to human self-understanding is the idea that all meaning is created by us, individually as parts of a collective whole. Take god out of the picture and all of a sudden meaning is not some thing thrust upon us by an angry father-figure, it is something we create for ourselves. It’s specifically ironic that he phrases it the way he does: it’s not that we “are attacking our inborn capacity to create value and meaning for ourselves”, we’re showing that it has always been us making value and meaning, and that if we would just recognize that fact then maye we could make progress towards people leading lives filled with meaning and happiness, instead of fear and anger.

…When our anti-religionists attack the mechanism of religious faith by demanding that our beliefs be underpinned by science, statistics and cold logic, they are, in effect, attacking our right to believe in unseen, unprovable things at all. Their assault on religious faith amounts to an attack on the human imagination. For the imagination is what embodies concepts, ideas and values that cannot be scientifically verified and that have no practical usefulness. Because the existence of God is undemonstrable, unverifiable and the object of an impractical leap of faith, religion, it seems to me, is one of imagination’s last strongholds.

Once again this is just wrong. First of all the only thing that we’re attacking is your right to lie to (through ID creationism etc.) or kill (through holy wars fought by our army) our children. And second of all imagination is the single most important attribute in the modern world. Information technology has de-valued mindless labor while increasing the wealth that imaginative people can accrue. And science is just pure imagination:

Imagination is not that which “embodies concepts, ideas and values that cannot be scientifically verified and that have no practical usefulness,” it is the human capacity for exploring the unknown and the desire for a better world. It is our ability to think of anything that has not been thought before. It is our ability to use words to represent thoughts and things. It is not our ability to believe things that are not true. To suggest that attacking the truth of bronze age myths is an attack on one of the most fundamental human faculties is insulting and idiotic.

…The more difficult it is to believe, the stronger the faith that flies in the face of absurdity. Your willingness to stake your life on the possibility of an impossibility makes a fact out of a fantasy.

That’s just stupid. Jumping off a cliff believing that pegasus will save me won’t make him save me.

You don’t have to be a religious person to cherish the idea of faith in the absurd. When artists have an unverifiable, unprovable inspiration, and then seek to convey it in words or images, they take a leap of faith every bit as vertiginous as that of the religious person.

No, they don’t. They–taking a simple view of art for the purpose of this conversation–try to express an underlying truth or experience. They hope you understand what they’re trying to say, and they try to say it as well as they can. There is no faith involved. This is as stupid as saying “when [speakers] have an unverifieable, unproven [thought], and then seek to convey it in words…, they take  a leap of faith every bit as vertiginous as that of the religious person.”

…After all, you cannot prove the existence of truth, beauty, goodness and decency; you cannot prove the dignity of being human, or your obligation to treat people as ends and not just as means. You take a gamble on the existence of these inestimable things. For that reason, when you lay scientific, logical and empirical siege to the leap of faith at the core of the religious impulse, you are not just attacking faith in God. You are attacking the act of faith itself, faith in anything that can’t be proved. But it just so happens that the qualities that make life rich, joyful and humane cannot be proved.

You only need to prove controversial things, everything obvious is taken as true unless it is disproved. How silly would i sound if i tried to prove the existence of a rock? If i tried to prove that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line? If i tried to prove that humans have, or at least want to have, dignity? These things all had to be said, and proofs have been attempted, but in the end all these things are just fundamental parts of reality and proofs of them are just matters of ostension. And their nature as part of reality and not some superphysical spirit-layer is what makes rational people see them, and what makes it so easy for religious fundamentalists to ignore them in favor of their non-physical beliefs. If you don’t believe in anything except reality then there is no way of getting out of the fact that people have dignity without being a lier or a hypocrite. But if your entire worldview is based on deluding yourself it is easy to convince yourself that your opponents are joyless, inhumane, and undignified.

Technorati Tags: atheism, philosophy, siegel

Technorati Tags: atheism, essay

Lee Siegel from the LA Times doesn’t understand what the “latest rash” of atheists are doing. Despite that, he has written a piece in the LA Times in which he questions our techniques, language, and most importantly goals. I’m not just saying that he doesn’t understand us to be trite, or to cast facile  aspersions upon him: there is nothing in this article (via samharris.org) to suggest that he knows what we are doing.  It does not contain any positive statements about the social programme this new wave of acerbic reasonable people have said or are trying to achieve. Instead it is filled with questions that lead somewhere that no atheist i have read or met would even suggest. It is filled with so many of the misunderstandings of atheism that occur in the liberal left, the kinds of misunderstandings that people whom i like have. So it seems like an excellent opportunity to join some others in knocking some holes in common misconceptions. In a future post i’ll tackle his absurd views on secular philosophy in some detail.

[No one could] know from reading the latest rash of anti-God books that promiscuous sex and polymorphous sexuality are taken for granted in modern-day America (let’s see a conservative Supreme Court try to roll that back); that the separation of church and state is inscribed in our Constitution; that no priest, minister or rabbi holds any top position in the federal government; and that even the state board of education in Kansas recently forbade the teaching of creationism.

The first four phrases of that paragraph are concerned with showing how secular, perhaps how irreligious, our culture is. But that fourth phrase is telling: “even the state board of education in Kansas recently forbade the teaching of creationism.” The fact that even this well-known bastion of religiosity Kansas–they outlawed barney, remember–is legislating a secular worldview means “OMG look how progressive we are!” First of all, this is 2007. Evolution has been well-established scientific fact for well over 100 years. There is no excuse for any person responsible for educating children not understanding how important evolution is, period. And second of all it was a close decision that has a good chance of being reversed next time there is a school board election in Kansas–it’s happened several times before and Kansas is not alone in having a populace that wants to deceive its children.

The other three phrases of that sentence are even more misleading, if not quite so self-contradictory: “promiscuous sex and polymorphous sexuality are taken for granted in modern-day america”? Has he ever known a conservative, let alone a conservative christian? And what’s that crack about the supreme court, is he joking about the potentially imminent reversal of fundamental liberties in this country, and all the suffering that would engender? Next he points out that “the separation of church and state is inscribed in our constitution”, but doesn’t bother to mention the sustained efforts of a vocal minority to overthrow that and turn this country into a theocracy. Let’s not forget his last point: “that no priest, minister or rabbi holds any top position in the federal government”. OK, yeah, nobody in any government HR department is dealing with them, but there is the funny story of Ted Haggard, (good name) a man who claimed weekly meetings with the president. It apparently doesn’t strike Siegel as contradictory to his purpose to mention this, “the religious right’s enormous influence on president bush” explicitly in his next paragraph. Perhaps he’s hung up on material legalities of the law, instead of its spirit.

I’ve established that Lee (i hope he doesn’t mind me calling him that) doesn’t understand the state of religion in America. I hope that is what i’ve demonstrated, because the only other option is that he understands it and decided to mislead his readership. Religion may be weaker in America than it has ever been anywhere else in the world–though i’m certainly not making that claim–but we are also the country with nukes and 1/3 of global military spending. (there’s a pie chart about 1/5 of the way down that page) Even a small force in such a huge machine has dramatic effects.

Now i want to just point out that he doesn’t know what we’re saying or who we’re saying it to. This shouldn’t be controversial, he says it himself:

Who is the ideal reader of these attacks on belief in God? … It’s hard to imagine anyone abandoning his faith after reading Harris’ condescending polemic, or the science of Dawkins and Dennett, or Hitchens’ vitriol.

And he’s right, except for all the ways he’s wrong. He’s right in the sense that essentially all of the people we’re railing against pride themselves on their irrationality, and are just about the last people i would expect to ever go out of their way to understand the kinds of arguments we present, let alone be persuaded by them. So then who is our audience? The quiet ones who thought they were alone or insane, the smart ones who were raised with an odd default perspective, the men and women who have never really thought about it. Most importantly our audience is society’s discourse with itself.

That discourse has been taking on more and more of the character of that one guy hogging all the champagne at his cousin’s wedding. Yes atheists are strident, acerbic, and at times bombastic. But for pete’s sake the guy just jumped up and down in the cake. It’s well past time for the best man to stand up, get some friends together, and make sure that the drunk guy doesn’t run off with the wife screaming and slung over his shoulder. These new voices are the best men asking for our friends to stand up and help get the situation under control.

Next!

The attacks in the books often don’t make much sense either. For instance, Bush and his gang preach Christian values while lying us into a slaughterhouse overseas, ransacking our public coffers and ignoring social inequities and iniquities at home—and so our heroic anti-religionists attack . . . Christian values.

OK, this is just equivocation plain and simple. And i really don’t know how to talk about this without implying that Siegel is being deceitful. The thing is, “Christian Values” is a broad term that means different things in different situations, and here Lee uses two different meanings without changing the words. The first “christian values” obviously refers to such things as empathy, valuing life, caring for your neighbor, truth, goodwill. The values that, no matter who you are or who you’re talking about, you praise people for. These are human values.

The second use of “christian values” is the pernicious meme that atheists don’t value all those good things. Ironically and unfortunately, the only reason this idea can spread is because of how strongly humanists believe in them. So strongly that it forces us to reject so many other religious values: ridiculous surety in our own correctness, war against everything that does not support our correctness, valuing our beliefs over the lives of others, belief in a coming apocalypse, belief in an all powerful war god. Notice that these are all the kinds of things that strongly religious people praise when they agree with what is being said and consider evil when it is other beliefs that are being said.

Both groups of beliefs are espoused by the bible and by the religions of the world. It is terrible that the second kind of value always overrides the first, leading to war and pain. However, atheists praise the human values and universally criticize the religious values. We are consistent, not changing what we value just because someone who disagrees with us said it. Perhaps a religious reader would read this and say “that’s not true: they have ridiculous surety about the lack of a god, don’t they? Isn’t that what this is about?” Well, no. You can’t prove a negative, and atheists don’t claim to. If you ask any of us, we quickly and easily admit to being technically agnostic. But we don’t believe.

The saddest part about Siegel’s argument that we are throwing out all of christian values just because some of them are bad–which as i just said we don’t do–is that he relies on the philosophic notion of a ‘category mistake’, and that his equivocating is a wonderful example of one. The second time that he makes the mistake he is accusing us of making.

There’s a lot more in that article, as usual with critiques of atheism all of it has been said before though. And it’s late, and this is already pretty long. I’m planning on going on to the second half and criticizing his ‘unique’ take on the value of absurdity, and definitely attacking his misunderstanding of the value of imagination in a secular society. So, stay tuned.
[tags]atheism, siegel, LA Times[/tags]

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