Showing posts with label christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label christianity. Show all posts

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Spiritual Resources for the Religiously Abstemious

Nones are now a plurality in the US. What are we supposed to do?

The Pew research institute recently came out with polling that shows a significantly changed religious landscape in the US. Over the last couple of decades, while the religious right has been climbing the greasy pole of political power, gaining seats on the Supreme Court, and agitating for a return to patriarchy, their pews have been emptying. The religiously unaffiliated, or "nones", comprise 28% of the US population now, almost double the level two decades ago.

One has only to see the rabid support evangelicals give their orange-haired messiah to understand what has been turning people off. Or glance over the appalling chronicle of sexual abuse unearthed in the Catholic church. Maybe the horsemen of the Atheist apocalypse have had something to do with it. Russia under Putin is strenuously demonstrating that the same system can be just as cruel with or without religion. But these patterns of gross institutional, moral, and intellectual failure, and their ensuing critiques, are hardly new. Luther made a bit of hay out of the abuses of the Catholic church, Voltaire, among many other thinkers, ridiculed the whole religious enterprise, and Hitler was a forerunner of Trump in leaning on religion, at least early in his career, despite being a rather token Christian himself (other than in the antisemitism, of course). What is new now?

A dramatic rise in numbers of people with no religious affiliation and little interest, from Pew polling.

I am not sure, frankly. Europe has certainly been leading the way, showing that declining religion is quite compatible with prosperous and humane culture. But perhaps this phenomenon is part of the general isolation and atomization of US culture, and thus not such a good thing. It used to be that a community was unthinkable without a church (or several) to serve as the central hub. Churches served to validate the good and preach to the bad. They sponsored scout troops, weddings, charitable events and dinners, and committees and therapeutic encounters of all sorts. They were socially essential, whether one believed or not. That leaders of society also led the churches knit the whole circle together, making it easy to believe that something there was indeed worth believing, whether it made sense or not.

Now, the leadership of society has moved on. We are mesmerized by technology, by entertainment, and sports, perhaps to a degree that is new. The capitalist system has found ways to provide many of the services we used to go to churches for, to network, to get psychotherapy, to gossip, and most of all, to be entertained. Community itself is less significant in the modern, suburban, cocooned world. Successful churches meet this new world by emphasizing their social offerings in a mega-church community, with a dash of charismatic, but not overly intellectually taxing, preaching. Unfortunately, megachurches regularly go through their own crises of hypocrisy and leadership, showing that the caliber of religious leaders, whatever their marketing skills, has been declining steadily.

The "nones" are more apathetic than atheistic, but either way, they are not great material for making churches or tightly knit communities. Skeptical, critical, or uninterested, they are some of the least likely social "glues". Because, frankly, it takes some gullibility and attraction to the core human archetypes and drama to make a church, and it takes a lot of positive thinking to foster a community. I would promote libraries, arts institutions, non-profits, and universities as core cultural hubs that can do some of this work, fostering a learning and empathetic culture. But we need more.

As AI takes over work of every sort, and more people have more time on their hands, we are facing a fundamental reshaping of society. One future is that a few rich people rake off all the money, and the bulk of the population descends into poverty and joblessness, unneeded in a society where capitalism has become terminally capital-intensive, with little labor required. Another future is where new forms of redistribution are developed, either by bringing true competition to bear on AI-intensive industries so that they can not take excess profits, or by thorough regulation for the public good, including basic income schemes, public goods, and other ways to spread wealth broadly. 


Such a latter system would free resources for wider use, so that a continuing middle class economy could thrive, based on exchanges that are now only luxuries, like music, personal services, teaching, sports, counseling. The destruction of the music recording industry by collusion of music labels and Spotify stands as a stark lesson in how new technology and short-sighted capitalism can damage our collective culture, and the livelihood of a profession that is perhaps the avatar of what an ideal future would look like, culturally and economically.

All this is to say that we face a future where we should, hopefully, have more resources and time, which would in principle be conducive to community formation and a life-long culture of learning, arts, and personal enrichment, without the incessant driver of work. The new AI-driven world will have opportunities for very high level work and management, but the regular hamburger flippers, baristas, cabbies, and truck drivers will be a thing of the past. This is going to put a premium on community hubs and new forms of social interaction. The "nones" are likely to favor (if not build) a wide range of such institutions, while leaving the church behind. It is a mixed prospect, really, since we will still be lacking a core institution that engages with the whole person in an archetypal, dream-like fantasy of hope and affirmation. Can opera do that work? I doubt it. Can Hollywood? I doubt that as well, at least as it applies to a local community level that weaves such attractions together with service and personal connection.


  • Those very highly moral religious people.
  • Molecular medicine is here.
  • Why do women have far more autoimmune syndromes?
  • What to do about Iran.
  • "As we’ll see, good old-fashioned immortality has advantages that digital immorality cannot hope to rival." ... I am not making this up!


Saturday, October 7, 2023

Empty Skepticism at the Discovery Institute

What makes a hypothesis scientific, vs a just-so story, or a religious fixation?

"Intelligent" design has fallen on hard times, after a series of court cases determined that it was, after all, a religious idea and could not be foisted on unsuspecting schoolchildren, at least in state schools and under state curricula. But the very fact of religious motivation leads to its persistence in the face of derision, evidence, and apathy. The Discovery Institute, (which, paranthetically, does not make any discoveries), remains the vanguard of intelligent design, promoting "skepticism", god, alternative evolutionary theories, and, due to the paucity of ways to attack evolution, tangential right-wingery such as anti-vaccine agitation. By far their most interesting author is Günter Bechly, who delves into the paleontological record to heap scorn on other paleontologists and thereby make room for the unmentioned alternative hypothesis ... which is god.

A recent post discussed the twists and turns of ichthyosaur evolution. Or should we say biological change through time, with unknown causes? Ichthyosaurs flourished from about 250 million years ago (mya) to 100 mya, with the last representatives dated to 90 mya. They were the reptile analogs of whales and dophins, functioning as apex predators in the ocean. They were done in by various climate crises well-prior to the cometary impact that ended the Cretaceous and the reign of dinosaurs in general.

Bechly raises two significant points. First is the uncertain origins of Ichthyosaurs. As is typical with dramatic evolutionary transitions like that from land to water in whales, the time line is compressed, since there are a lot of adaptations that are desirable for the new environment that might have been partially pre-figured, but get fleshed out extensively with the new ecological role and lifestyle. Selection is presumably intense and transitional fossils are hard to find. This was true for whales, though beautiful transitional fossils have been found more recently. And apparently this is true for the Ichthyosaurs as well, where none have been found, yet. There is added drama stemming from the time of origin, which is right after the Permian exinction, perhaps the greatest known extinction event in the history of the biosphere. Radiations after significant extinction events tend to be rapid, with few transitional fossils, for the same reason of new niches opening and selection operating rapidly.

Ichthyosaur

Bechly and colleagues frequently make hay out of gaps in the fossil record, arguing that something (we decline to be more specific!) else needs to be invoked to explain such lack of evidence. It is a classic god of the gaps argument. But since the fossils are never out of sequence, and we are always looking at millions of years of time going by with even the slimmest layers of rock, this is hardly a compelling argument. One thing that we learned from Darwin's finches, and the whole argument around punctuated equilibrium, is that evolution is typically slow because selection is typically not directional but conservative. But when selection is directional, evolution by natural selection can be startlingly fast. This is an argument made very explicitly by Darwin through his lengthy discussions of domestic species, whose changes are, in geological terms, instant. 

But Bechly makes an additional interesting argument- that a specific hypothesis made about ichthyosaurs is a just-so story, a sort of hypothesis that evolutionary biologists are very prone to make. Quite a few fossils have been found of ichthyosaurs giving birth, and many of them find that the baby comes out not only live (not as an egg, as is usual with reptiles), but tail-first. Thus some scientists have made the argument that each are adaptations to aquatic birth, allowing the baby to be fully borne before starting to breathe. Yet Bechly cites a more recent scientific review of the fossil record that observes that tail-first birth is far from universal, and does not follow any particular phylogenetic pattern, suggesting that it is far from necessary for aquatic birth, and thus is unlikely to be, to any significant extent, an adaptation. 

Ha! Just another story of scientists making up fairy tales and passing them off as "science" and "evolutionary hypotheses", right?  

"Evolutionary biology again and again proves to be an enterprise in imaginative story-telling rather than hard science. But when intelligent design theorists question the Darwinist paradigm based on empirical data and a rational inference to the best explanation, they are accused of being science deniers. Which science?" ... "And we will not let Darwinists get away with a dishonest appeal to the progress of science when they simply rewrite their stories every time conflicting evidence can no longer be denied."

Well, that certainly is a damning indictment. Trial and sentencing to follow! But let's think a little more about what makes an explanation and a hypothesis, on the scientific, that is to say, empirical, level. Hypotheses are always speculative. That is the whole point. They try to connect observations with some rational or empirically supported underlying mechanism / process to account for (that is, explain) what is observed. Thus the idea that aquatic birth presents a problem for mammals who have to breathe represents a reasonable subject for an hypothesis. Whether headfirst or tailfirst, the baby needs to get to the surface post haste, as soon as its breathing reflex kicks in. While the direction of birth doesn't seem to the uninitiated (and now, apparently to experts with further data at hand) to make much difference, thinking it does is a reasonable hypothesis, based on obvious geometric arguments and biological assumptions, that it is possible that the breathing reflex is tied to emergence of the head during birth, in which case coming out tailfirst might delay slightly the time it takes between needing to breathe and being able to breathe. 

This argument combines a lot of known factors- the geometry of birth, the necessity of breathing, the phenomenon of the breathing reflex initiating in all mammals very soon after birth, by mechanisms that doubtless are not entirely known, but at the same time clearly the subject of evolutionary tuning. And also the paleontological record. Good or bad, the hypothesis is based on empirical data. What characterizes science is that it follows a disciplined road from one empirically supported milestone to the next, using hypotheses about underlying mechanisms, whether visible or not, which abide by all the known/empirical mechanisms. Magic is only allowed if you know what is going on behind the curtain. Unknown mechanisms can be invoked, but then immediately become subjects of further investigation, not of protective adulation and blind worship.

In contrast, the intelligent design hypothesis, implicit here but clear enough, is singularly lacking in any data at all. It is not founded on anything other than the sentiment that what has clearly happened over the long course of the fossil record operates by unknown mechanisms, by god operating pervasively to carry out the entire program of biological evolution, not by natural selection (a visible and documented natural process) but by something else, which its proponents have never been able to demonstrate in the least degree, on short time scales or long. Faith does not, on its own, warrant novel empirical mechanisms, and nor does skeptical disbelief warrant them. Nor does one poor, but properly founded, hypothesis that is later superceded by more careful analysis of the data impugn the process of science generally or the style of evolutionary thinking specifically.

Imagine, for example, if our justice system operated at this intellectual level. When investigating crimes, police could say that, if the causes were not immediately obvious, an unnamed intelligent designer was responsible, and leave it there. No cold cases, no presumption of usual natural causality, no dogged pursuit of "the truth" by telegenic detectives. Faith alone would furnish the knowledge that the author of all has (inscrutibly) rendered "his" judgement. It would surely be a convenient out for an over-burdened and under-educated police force!

Evolution by natural selection requires a huge amount of extrapolation from what we know about short time scales and existing biology to the billions of years of life that preceeded us. On the other hand, intelligent design requires extrapolation from nothing at all- from the incredibly persistent belief in god, religion, and the rest of the theological ball of wax not one element of which has ever been pinned down to an empirical fact. Believers take the opposite view solely because religious propaganda has ceaselessly drilled the idea that god is real and "omnipotent" and all-good, and whatever else wonderful, as a matter of faith. With this kind of training, then yes, "intelligent" design makes all kinds of sense. Otherwise not. Charles Darwin's original hypothesis was so brilliant because it drew on known facts and mechanisms to account (with suitable imagination and extrapolation) for the heretofore mysterious history of biology, with its painfully slow yet inexorable evolution from one species to another, one epoch to another. Denying that one has that imagination is a statement about one's intelligence, no matter how it was designed.

  • Only god can give us virulent viruses.
  • The priest who knew it so well, long ago.
  • A wonderful Native American Film- Dance me outside.
  • With a wonderful soundtrack, including NDN Kars.
  • We need to come clean on Taiwan.
  • Appeasers, cranks, and fascist wannabes.
  • Vaccines for poor people are not profitable.
  • California is dumbing down math, and that will not help any demographic.

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Everything is Alive, but the Gods are all Dead

Barbara Ehrenreich's memoir and theological ruminations in "Living with a Wild God".

It turns out that everyone is a seeker. Somewhere there must be something or someone to tell us the meaning of life- something we don't have to manufacture with our own hands, but rather can go into a store and buy. Atheists are just as much seekers as anyone else, only they never find anything worth buying. The late writer Barbara Ehrenreich was such an atheist, as well as a remarkable writer and intellectual who wrote a memoir of her formation. Unusually and fruitfully, it focuses on those intense early and teen years when we are reaching out with both hands to seize the world- a world that is maddeningly just beyond our grasp, full of secrets and codes it takes a lifetime and more to understand. Religion is the ultimate hidden secret, the greatest mystery which has been solved in countless ways, each of them conflicting and confounding.

Ehrenreich's tale is more memoir than theology, taking us on a tour through a dysfunctional childhood with alcoholic parents and tough love. A story of growth, striking out into the world, and sad coming-to-terms with the parents who each die tragically. But it also turns on a pattern of mystical experiences that she keeps having, throughout her adult life, which she ultimately diagnoses as dissociative states where she zones out and has a sort of psychedelic communion with the world.

"Something peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels, and words. I was looking at a tree, and if anyone had asked, that's what I would have said I was doing, but the word "tree" was gone, along with all the notions of tree-ness that had accumulated in the last dozen years or so since I had acquired language. Was it a place that was suddenly revealed to me? Or was it a substance- the indivisible, elemental material out of which the entire known and agreed-upon world arises as a fantastic elaboration? I don't know, because this substance, this residue, was stolidly, imperturbably mute. The interesting thing, some might say alarming, was that when you take away all the human attributions- the words, the names of species, the wisps of remembered tree-related poetry, the fables of photosynthesis and capillary action- that when you take all this this away, there is still something left."

This is not very hard to understand as a neurological phenomenon of some kind of transient disconnection of just the kind of brain areas she mentions- those that do all the labeling, name-calling, and boxing-in. In schizophrenia, it runs to the pathological, but in Ehrenreich's case, she does not regard it as pathological at all, as it is always quite brief. But obviously, the emotional impact and weirdness of the experience- that is something else altogether, and something that humans have been inducing with drugs, and puzzling over, forever. 

Source

As a memoir, the book is very engaging. As a theological quest, however, it doesn't work as well, because the mystical experience is, as noted above, resolutely meaningless. It neither compels Ehrenreich to take up Christianity, as after a Pauline conversion, nor any other faith or belief system. It offers a peek behind the curtain, but, stripped of meaning as this view is, Ehrenreich is perhaps too skeptical or bereft of imagination to give it another, whether of her own or one available from the conventional array of sects and religions. So while the experiences are doubtless mystical, one can not call them religious, let alone god-given, because Ehrenreich hasn't interpreted them that away. This hearkens back to the writings of William James, who declined to assign general significance to mystical experiences, while freely admitting their momentous and convincing nature to those who experienced them.

Only in one brief section (which had clearly been originally destined for an entirely different book) does she offer a more interesting and insightful analysis. There, Ehrenreich notes that the history of religion can be understood as a progressive bloodbath of deicide. At first, everything is alive and sacred, to an animist mind. Every leaf and grain of sand holds wonders. Every stream and cloud is divine. This is probably our natural state, which a great deal of culture has been required to stamp out of us. Next is a hunting kind of religion, where deities are concentrated in the economic objects (and social patterns) of the tribe- the prey animals, the great plants that are eaten, and perhaps the more striking natural phenomena and powerful beasts. But by the time of paganism, the pantheon is cut down still more and tamed into a domestic household, with its soap-opera dramas and an increasingly tight focus on the major gods- the head of the family, as it were. 

Monotheism comes next, doing away with all the dedicated gods of the ocean, of medicine, of amor and war, etc., cutting the cast down to one. One, which is inflated to absurd proportions with all-goodness, all-power, all-knowledge, etc. A final and terrifying authoritarianism, probably patterned on the primitive royal state. This is the phase when the natural world is left in the lurch, as an undeified and unprotected zone where human economic greed can run rampant, safe in the belief that the one god is focused entirely on man's doings, whether for good or for ill, not on that of any other creature or feature of the natural world. A phase when even animals, who are so patently conscious, can, through the narcissism of primitive science and egoistic religion, be deemed mere mechanisms without feeling. This process doesn't even touch on the intercultural deicide committed by colonialism and conquest.

This in turn invites the last deicide- that by rational people who toss aside this now-cartoonish super-god, and return to a simpler reverence for the world as we naturally respond to it, without carting in a lot of social power-and-drama baggage. It is the cultural phase we are in right now, but the transition is painfully slow, uneven, and drawn-out. For Ehrenreich, there are plenty of signs- in the non-linear chemical phenomena of her undergraduate research, in the liveliness of quantum physics even into the non-empty vacuum, in the animals who populate our world and are perhaps the alien consciousnesses that we should be seeking in place of the hunt through outer space, and in our natural delight in, and dreams about, nature at large. So she ends the book as atheist as ever, but hinting that perhaps the liveliness of the universe around us holds some message that we are not the only thinking and sentient beings.

"Ah, you say, this is all in your mind. And you are right to be skeptical; I expect no less. It is in my mind, which I have acknowledged from the beginning is a less than perfect instrument. but this is what appears to be the purpose of my mind, and no doubt yours as well, its designed function beyond all the mundane calculations: to condense all the chaos and mystery of the world into a palpable Other or Others, not necessarily because we love it, and certainly not out of any intention to "worship" it. But because ultimately we may have no choice in the matter. I have the impression, growing out of the experiences chronicled here, that it may be seeking us out." 

Thus the book ends, and I find it a rather poor ending. It feels ripped from an X-Files episode, highly suggestive and playing into all the Deepak and similar mystical tropes of cosmic consciousness. That is, if this passage really means much at all. Anyhow, the rest of the trip is well worth it, and it is appropriate to return to the issue of the mystical experience, which is here handled with such judicious care and restraint. Where imagination could have run rampant, the cooly scientific view (Ehrenreich had a doctorate in biology) is that the experiences she had, while fascinating and possibly book-proposal-worthy, did not force a religious interpretation. This is radically unlike the treatment of such matters in countless other hands, needless to say. Perhaps our normal consciousness should not be automatically valued less than more rare and esoteric states, just because it is common, or because it is even-tempered.


  • God would like us to use "they".
  • If you are interested in early Christianity, Gnosticism is a good place to start.
  • Green is still an uphill battle.

Saturday, February 11, 2023

A Gene is Born

Yes, genes do develop out of nothing.

The "intelligent" design movement has long made a fetish of information. As science has found, life relies on encoded information for its genetic inheritance and the reliable expression of its physical manifestations. The ID proposition is, quite simply, that all this information could not have developed out of a mindless process, but only through "design" by a conscious being. Evidently, Darwinian natural selection still sticks on some people's craw. Michael Behe even developed a pseudo-mathematical theory about how, yes, genes could be copied mindlessly, but new genes could never be conjured out of nothing, due to ... information.

My understanding of information science equates information to loss of entropy, and expresses a minimal cost of the energy needed to create, compute or transmit information- that is, the Shannon limits. A quite different concept comes from physics, in the form of information conservation in places like black holes. This form of information is really the implicit information of the wave functions and states of physical matter, not anything encoded or transmitted in the sense of biology or communication. Physical state information may be indestructable (and un-create-able) on this principle, but coded information is an entirely different matter.

In a parody of scientific discussion, intelligent design proponents are hosted by the once-respectable Hoover Institution for a discussion about, well, god.

So the fecundity that life shows in creating new genes out of existing genes, (duplications), and even making whole-chromosome or whole-genome duplications, has long been a problem for creationists. Energetically, it is easy to explain as a mere side-effect of having plenty of energy to work with, combined with error-prone methods of replication. But creationistically, god must come into play somewhere, right? Perhaps it comes into play in the creation of really new genes, like those that arise from nothing, such as at the origin of life?

A recent paper discussed genes in humans that have over our recent evolutionary history arisen from essentially nothing. It drew on prior work in yeast that elegantly laid out a spectrum or life cycle of genes, from birth to death. It turns out that there is an active literature on the birth of genes, which shows that, just like duplication processes, it is entirely natural for genes to develop out of humble, junky precursors. And no information theory needs to be wheeled in to show that this is possible.

Yeast provides the tools to study novel genes in some detail, with rich genetics and lots of sequenced relatives, near and far. Here is portrayed a general life cycle of a gene, from birth out of non-gene DNA sequences (left) into the key step of translation, and on to a subject of normal natural selection ("Exposed") for some function. But if that function decays or is replaced, the gene may also die, by mutation, becoming a pseudogene, and eventually just some more genomic junk.

The death of genes is quite well understood. The databases are full of "pseudogenes" that are very similar to active genes, but are disabled for some reason, such as a truncation somewhere or loss of reading frame due to a point mutation or splicing mutation. Their annotation status is dynamic, as they are sometimes later found to be active after all, under obscure conditions or to some low level. Our genomes are also full of transposons and retroviruses that have died in this fashion, by mutation.

Duplications are also well-understood, some of which have over evolutionary time given rise to huge families of related proteins, such as kinases, odorant receptors, or zinc-finger transcription factors. But the hunt for genes that have developed out of non-gene materials is a relatively new area, due to its technical difficulty. Genome annotators were originally content to pay attention to genes that coded for a hundred amino acids or more, and ignore everything else. That became untenable when a huge variety of non-coding RNAs came on the scene. Also, occasional cases of very small genes that encoded proteins came up from work that found them by their functional effects.

As genome annotation progressed, it became apparent that, while a huge proportion of genes are conserved between species, (or members of families of related proteins), other genes had no relatives at all, and would never provide information by this highly convenient route of computer analysis. They are orphans, and must have either been so heavily mutated since divergence that their relationships have become unrecognizable, or have arisen recently (that is, since their evolutionary divergence from related species that are used for sequence comparison) from novel sources that provide no clue about their function. Finer analysis of ever more closely related species is often informative in these cases.

The recent paper on human novel genes makes the finer point that splicing and export from the nucleus constitute the major threshold between junk genes and "real" genes. Once an RNA gets out of the nucleus, any reading frame it may have will be translated and exposed to selection. So the acquisition of splicing signals is a key step, in their argument, to get a randomly expressed bit of RNA over the threshold.

A recent paper provided a remarkable example of novel gene origination. It uncovered a series of 74 human genes that are not shared with macaque, (which they took as their reference), have a clear path of origin from non-coding precursors, and some of which have significant biological effects on human development. They point to a gradual process whereby promiscuous transcription from the genome gave rise by chance to RNAs that acquired splice sites, which piped them into the nuclear export machinery and out to the cytoplasm. Once there, they could be translated, over whatever small coding region they might possess, after which selection could operate on their small protein products. A few appear to have gained enough function to encourage expansion of the coding region, resulting in growth of the gene and entrenchment as part of the developmental program.

Brain "organoids" grown from genetically manipulated human stem cells. On left is the control, in middle is where ENSG00000205704 was deleted, and on the right is where ENSG00000205704 is over-expressed. The result is very striking, as an evolutionarily momentous effect of a tiny and novel gene.

One gene, "ENSG00000205704" is shown as an example. Where in macaque, the genomic region corresponding to this gene encodes at best a non-coding RNA that is not exported from the nucleus, in humans it encodes a spliced and exported mRNA that encodes a protein of 107 amino acids. In humans it is also highly expressed in the brain, and when the researchers deleted it in embryonic stem cells and used those cells to grow "organoids", or clumps of brain-like tissue, the growth was significantly reduced by the knockout, and increased by the over-expression of this gene. What this gene does is completely unknown. Its sequence, not being related to anything else in human or other species, gives no clue. But it is a classic example of gene that arose from nothing to have what looks like a significant effect on human evolution. Does that somehow violate physics or math? Nothing could be farther from the truth.

  • Will nuclear power get there?
  • What the heck happened to Amazon shopping?

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Hand-Waving to God

A decade on, the Discovery Institute is still cranking out skepticism, diversion, and obfuscation.

A post a couple of weeks ago mentioned that the Discovery Institute offered a knowledgeable critique of the lineages of the Ediacaran fauna. They have raised their scientific game significantly, and so I wanted to review what they are doing these days, focusing on two of their most recent papers. The Discovery Institute has a lineage of its own, from creationism. It has adapted to the derision that entailed, by retreating to "intelligent design", which is creationism without naming the creators, nailing down the schedule of creation, or providing any detail of how and from where creation operates. Their review of the Ediacaran fauna raised some highly skeptical points about whether these organisms were animals or not. Particularly, they suggested that cholesterol is not really restricted to animals, so the chemical traces of cholesterol that were so clearly found in the Dickinsonia fossil layers might not really mean that these were animals- they might also be unusual protists of gigantic size, or odd plant forms, etc. While the critique is not unreasonable, it does not alter the balance of the evidence which does indeed point to an animal affinity. These fauna are so primitive and distant that it is fair to say that we can not be sure, and particularly we can not be sure that they had any direct ancestral relationship to any later organisms of the ensuing Cambrian period, when recognizable animals emerged.

Fair enough. But what of their larger point? The Discovery Institute is trying to make the point, I believe, about the sudden-ness of early Cambrian evolution of animals, and thus its implausibility under conventional evolutionary theory. But we are traversing tens of millions of years through these intervals, which is a long time, even in evolutionary terms. Secondly, the Ediacaran period, though now represented by several exquisite fossil beds, spanned a hundred million years and is still far from completely characterized paleontologically, even supposing that early true animals would have fossilized, rather than being infinitesimal and very soft-bodied. So the Cambrian biota could easily have predecessors in the Ediacaran that have or have not yet been observed- it is as yet not easy to say. But what we can not claim is the negative, that no predecessors existed before some time X- say the 540 MYA point at the base of the Cambrian. So the implication that the Discovery Institute is attempting to suggest has very little merit, particularly since everything that they themselves cite about the molecular and paleontological sequence is so clearly progressive and in proper time sequence, in complete accord with the overall theory of evolution.

For we should always keep in mind that an intelligent designer has a free hand, and can make all of life in a day (or in six, if absolutely needed). The fact that this designer works in the shadows of slightly altered mutation rates, or in a few million years rather than twenty million, and never puts fossils out of sequence in the sedimentary record, is an acknowledgement that this designer is a bit dull, and bears a strong resemblence to evolution by natural selection. To put it in psychological terms, the institute is in the "negotiation" stage of grief- over the death of god.

Saturday, November 12, 2022

The Politics of Resentment

Ann Applebaum has seen where all this Trumpism is going ... in Eastern Europe.

Liberals in America are baffled. How could anyone vote for Republican candidates at this point? How could anyone, let alone half the electorate, vote for Trump? We are befuddled and anxious for the future of America, which, far from becoming great again, is turning into a banana republic before our eyes, if, hopefully, not worse. We in California are particularly dissociated, as Democrats run the whole state, and Republican voter registration continues to decline year after year and is now under one quarter of the electorate. What does the rest of the country see that we do not? Or vice versa?

Ann Applebaum has written a trenchant book on the matter, "Twilight of Democracy". She lives in Poland, so has had a front-row seat to the illiberalization of a political system, both in Poland and in nearby Hungary, which seems farther advanced. Eastern Europe has more reason than most, perhaps to be disillusioned with the capitalist orthodoxy, after their rather rough transition from Communism. But this is a world-wide phenomenon, sweeping fringe rightists into power from Brazil to Sweden. What is going on? Applebaum posits that the whole structure of meritocratic representative democracy, with its open competition for (good) public policy, and use of educated expertise over vast areas of state interests from foreign affairs to monetary regulation and education policy, have come under fundamental critique. And this critique comes partly from those who have been shut out of that system: the not-well-educated, not-bicoastal, not-rich, not-acronymed-minority, not-hopeful about the American future. It is, in short, a politics of resentment.

How have the elites done over the post-world war 2 period? They won the cold war, but lost virtually every battle in it, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. They let the lower classes of the US sink into relative poverty and powerlessness vs business and the well-educated classes, in a rather brutal system of collegiate competition, de-unionization, off-shoring and worker suppression. They have let the economy fester through several crushing recessions, particularly the malaise of the 70's and the real estate meltdown of 2008. While the US has done pretty well overall, the lower middle and poor classes have not done well, and live increasingly precarious lives that stare homelessness in the face daily. In the heartland, parents at best saw their children fly off to coastal schools and cultures, becoming different people who would not dream of coming home again to live.

America is heavily red, geographically.

And the elite-run state has become increasingly sclerotic, continually self-criticizing and regulating its way to inaction. A thousand well-meaning regulations have paved the way to a bloated government that can not build a high-speed rail line in California, or solve the homelessness crisis. Everyone is a critic, including yours truly- it is always easier to raise objections, cover one's ass, and not get anything done. So one can sympathize with evident, if inchoate, desires for strength- for someone to break the barriers, bring the system to heel, and build that wall. Or get Brexit done. Or whatever the baying right wing media want at the moment.

The elite party in this sense is the Democratic party - capturing the coastal and well-educated, plus public employee unions. The Republican party, the party of money and the rich, (not the elite at all!), has conversely become the party of the downtrodden, feeding them anti-immigrant, anti-elite, anti-state red meat. It was a remarkably easy transformation, that required only shamelessness and lying to make hay out of the vast reserves of resentment seething in middle America. 

But Applebaum's point is not that the elites have messed things up and it may be time to do things differently. No, she suggests that the new protofascists have reframed the situation fundamentally. The elites in power have, through the hard work of meritocratic institutions, set up pipelines and cultures that reproduce their position in power almost as hermetically as the ancien régime of France and its nobility. That anyone can (theoretically) enter this elite and that it is at least somewhat vetted for competence and rationality is disregarded, or actively spat upon as "old" thinking- definitely not team thinking. The path to power now is to stoke resentment, overturn the old patterns of respect for competence and empathy, discard this meritocratic system in favor of one based on loyalty and fealty, and so bring about a new authoritarianism that brooks no "softness", exercises no self-criticism, has no respect for the enemy or for compromise, and has no room for intellectuals. 

But Hungary is way ahead of us, in the one-party rule department.

A second angle on all this is that conservatives feel resentful for another good reason- that they have lost the culture war. Despite all their formal power, winning the presidency easily half the time, and regularly running legislative branches and judicial branches in the US, their larger cultural project to keep progress at bay, fight moral "decadence" and all the other hobby horses, have gone nowhere. The US is increasingly woke, diverse, and cosmopolitan, and the "blood and soil" types (including especially conservative Catholics and Evangelicals), are despondent about it. Or apoplectic, or rabid, etc., depending on temperament. Their triumph in overturning Roe may allow some backwater states to turn back the clock, but on the whole, it looks like a rearguard action.

This is what feeds disgust with the system, and with democracy itself. Republicans who used to sing the praises of the US government, the flag, and democracy now seem to feel the opposite, that the US is a degenerate wasteland, no better than other countries, not exceptional, not dedicated to serious ideals that others should also aspire to. Democracy has failed, for them. And Applebaum points out how this feeling licenses the loss of civility, the lying, the anything-goes demagoguery which characterizes our new right-wing politics. Naturally the internet and its extremism-feeding algorithms have a lot to do with it as well. Applebaum is conservative herself. She spent a career working in the Tory media in Britain, but is outraged at what Tory-ism, and conservatism internationally, has become. She sees a dramatic split in conservatism, between those that still buy into the democratic, liberal system, and those who have become its opponents, in their revolutionary, Trumpy fervor. In the US, the fever may possibly have broken, after a very close brush with losing our institutions during the last administration, as election after election has made losers of the far right.

Over the long haul, Applebaum sees this as a cyclical process, with ample precedent from ancient Egyptian times through today, with a particularly interesting stop in the viciously polarized Drefussard period in France. But I see one extra element, which is our planetary and population crisis. We had very good times over the last few centuries building the human population and its comforts on the back of colonization, fossil fuels, and new technologies. The US of the mid to late-20th century exemplified the good times of such growth. Now the ecological bells are ringing, and the party is coming to an end. Denial has obviously been the first resort of the change-averse, and conservatives have distinguished themselves in their capabilities in that department. But as reality gradually sets in, something more sinister and competitive may be in the offing, as exemplified by the slogan "America First". Not first as in a leader of international institutions, liberal democracies and enlightenment values, but first as in looking out for number one, and devil take the rest. 

Combined with a rejuvinated blood and soil nationalism, which we see flourishing in so many places, these attitudes threaten to send us back into a world resembling that before world war 1 or 2, (and, frankly, all the rest of history), when nationalism was the coin of international relations, and national competition knew no boundaries- mercantile or military. We are getting a small foretaste of this in Russia's war on Ukraine, which is a product of precisely this Russia-first, make Russia great again mind-set. Thankfully, it is accompanied by large helpings of stupidity and mismanagement, which may save us yet. 


Saturday, October 8, 2022

Science Fiction as Theology

Let's look higher than the clouds. Let's look to the stars.

I have always been rather dismissive of theology- the study of something that doesn't exist. But if one takes it in a larger sense of a culture of scripture, story telling, morals, and social construction, then sure, it makes more sense. But then so do alot of other stories. I have been enjoying the Foundation series via streaming, which is at best "inspired" by the original books, yet takes its premises reasonably seriously and grows a complex and interesting set of story lines to what by the end of the first season is a positive and promising conclusion. I would ding it for excessive adherence to Star Wars-style action and simplistic morality, compared with the more cerebral original, but that is only to be expected these days.

Science fiction is having a golden age, as a way to tell important, probing stories and consider alternative futures. The Star Trek franchise generally sticks with hopeful futures, which I certainly favor. Their world is post-money, post internal conflict, post-disease. But philosophically alive through contact with other civilizations. The theological implications are momentous, as we envision a culture very different from our own, and blessed with various magical means of deliverance, like transporters, replicators, and warp drives. Where the "science fiction" books of the Bible were mostly dystopian (Job, Revelation, Genesis), Science fiction in our era straddles the line, with plenty of dystopian offerings, but also hopeful ones. Whether Star Wars is hopeful might be a matter of debate, since bad guys and bad empires never seem to go away, and the position of the resistance is always impossibly dire.

White male mathematician Hari Seldon takes on the role of god, in the Foundation series. He calculates out the future of the galaxy, clairvoyantly predicting events, and then comes back from beyond the grave to keep guiding his flock through crisis after crisis.

Are Star Trek futures any more realistic than those of Revelation? Are they theologically more sound? I think yes on both counts. Revelation is a rather unhinged response to the late Jewish era in its apocalyptic relations with Rome, as it headed into exile and the diaspora. There is a welter of reworked Old Testament material and obscure references, turning into florid visions that have misled Christians for centuries. Star Trek and the other science fiction franchises, on the other hand, are a bit more restrained in their visionary quests and escatologies, and more hopeful, for abundant futures where some problems have been solved while other forms of politics and history continue to call for strong moral values. This is quite different than the bizarre and ecstatic culmination of Revelation at the end of history, in the last days.

We also get to live out the visions, on a small scale, as technology advances in the real world. Smart phones have transformed our lives, for instance, one promise kept from the early science fiction days. And our only real hope for dealing with climate change is to harness better technologies, rather than going down dystopian roads of degrowth, famine, and war. So there are real futures at stake here, not just visions of futures.

While our current physics totally bars the adventures that are portrayed in contemporary science fiction epics, their theological significance lies in their various visions of what humanity can and should do. They, as Revelation, are always keyed to their historical moment, with America ascendent and technologically advanced over other cultures. But they do not use their magical elements and story arcs to promote quiescence and slack-jawed wonder at the return of the son of god, who will make everything right and mete out judgement to all the bad people. (Or do the opposite, in the case of Job.) No, they uniformly encourage resistance against injustice, and hopeful action towards a better world, or galaxy, or universe, as the case may be.


Saturday, June 11, 2022

God Save the Queen

Or is it the other way around? Deities and Royalties in the archetypes.

It has been entertaining, and a little moving, to see the recent celebration put on by Britain for its queen. A love fest for a "ruler" who is nearing the end of her service- a job that has been clearly difficult, often thankless, and a bit murky. A job that has evolved interestingly over the last millenium. What used to be a truly powerful rule is now a Disney-fied sop to tradition and the enduring archetypes of social hierarchy.


For we still need social hierarchy, don't we? Communists, socialists, and anarchists have fought for centuries against it, but social hierarchy is difficult to get away from. For one thing, at least half the population has a conservative temperament that demands it. For another, hierarchies are instinctive and pervasive throughout nature as ways to organize societies, keep everyone on their toes, and to bias reproduction to the fittest members. The enlightenment brought us a new vision of human society, one based on some level of equality, with a negotiated and franchise-based meritocracy, rather than one based on nature, tooth, and claw. But we have always been skittish about true democracy. Maximalist democracies like the Occupy movement never get anywhere, because too many people have veto power, and leadership is lacking. Leadership is premised naturally on hierarchy.

Hierarchy is also highly archetypal and instinctive. Maybe these are archetypes we want to fight against, but we have them anyhow. The communists were classic cases of replacing one (presumably corrupt and antiquated) social hierarchy with another which turned out to be even more anxiously vain and vicious, for all its doublespeak about serving the masses. Just looking at higher-ranking individuals is always a pleasant and rewarding experience. That is why movies are made about the high ranking and the glamorous, more than the downtrodden. And why following the royals remains fascinating.

But that is not all! The Queen is also head of the Anglican Church, another institution that has fallen from its glory days of power. It has also suffered defections and loss of faith, amid centuries-long assaults from the enlightenment. The deity itself has gone through a long transition, from classic patriarchial king in the old testament (who killed all humanity once over for its sins), to mystic cypher in the New Testament (who demanded the death of itself in order to save the shockingly persistent sinners of humanity from its own retribution), to deistic non-entity at the height of the enlightenment, to what appears to be the current state of utter oblivion. One of the deity's major functions was to explain the nature of the world in all its wonder and weirdness, which is now quite unnecessary. We must blame ourselves for climate change, not a higher power. 

While social hierarchy remains at the core of humanity, the need for deities is less clear. As a super-king, god has always functioned as the and ultimate pinnacle of the social and political system, sponsoring all the priests, cardinals, kings, pastors, and the like down the line. But if it remains stubbornly hidden from view, has lost its most significant rationales, and only peeps out from tall tales of scripture, that does not make for a functional regent at all. While the British monarchy pursues its somewhat comical, awkward performance of unmerited superintendence of state, church, and social affairs, the artist formerly known as God has vanished into nothing at all.


Saturday, April 16, 2022

Love Beauty Truth

Book review of "Finding your Feet after Fundamentalism", By Darrell Lackey. With apologies to the other book.

An old friend has published a book. We had an epistolary relationship, fretting about creationism, intelligent design, and related topics back when those were livelier issues than today (and it directly inspired the birth of this blog). He was on his way out of Christian fundamentalism, and into something more liberal, even post-modern. His new book is a somewhat autobiographical account of the problems of fundamentalism, and of leaving fundamentalism as one's tradition. Naturally, evangelism dies hard, and takes this new form of broadcasting the good news of a more moderate and decent Christianity.

The book hits hardest on the issue of Donald Trump. No scandal has so thoroughly demonstrated the ultimate hypocrisy of fundamentalism than its allegiance to Trump. The transaction has given religious conservatives control of the Supreme Court, (though perhaps that owed more to Mitch McConnell), but in return, they showed their support for the most morally vile and incompetent person ever to hold the job. Lackey relates how he was fully in the FOX news orbit in the 90's, happily imbibing its bile. But then something snapped, and by the time of the Trump election, he had fully left fundamentalism and its communities behind. Living in California might have something to do with it, since liberalism, at least of a lip-service sort, is the dominant way of life here. Something that Republicans have learned the hard way

Yet the interesting part is how strenuously Lackey hews to Christianity, proclaiming that liberal versions are not gateway drugs to atheism. Quite the contrary- close attention to the actual New Testament provides ample justification for things like supporting marginalized communities, helping the poor, afflicting the rich, and viewing one's enemies as possibly reasonable human beings, if not friends in the making. He mentions how false it is for evangelicals to be so eager to spread the good word, but at the same time so deaf to the words of others that actual relationship is impossible- an evangelism of a closed-off community. 

For what are the fundamental values? Lackey cites love and beauty. Love is clear enough, (and damning enough regarding the FOX- driven culture of conservative Christianity), but the role of beauty needs a little more explaining. Religious thinkers have spared no effort in extolling the beauty of the world, but in the current world, serious artists are rarely Christian, let alone make Christian art. Why is that? Perhaps it is just intellectual fashion, but perhaps there is a deeper problem, that art, at least in our epoch, is adventurous and probing, seeking to interrogate narratives and power structures rather than celebrate them. Perhaps it is a problem of overpopulation, or of democracy, or of living in late imperial times, or of modernism. But whatever the framework, contemporary Christian communities have become the opposite of all this- anti-intellectual, tone-deaf, and art-hostile (not to mention power-mad). It must be exasperating to someone with even the least appreciation for finer things and for art that is "interesting".

Jean-Michel Basquiat- too messy for insensitive temperaments.

Beauty has deep Christian connotations. The world is god-made, good, and thus beautiful, as indeed we all feel it to be. But life is also messy, competitive, and dark. Death and suffering are part of it as well. If we refuse to own those aspects of the world, and of ourselves, we become blinded to the true nature of things, and expose ourselves to unintended and invisible expressions of the dark side, as we see in the deep hypocrisy on the subject of Trump, on sexual morals, and countless other areas within fundamentalism / evangelicalism. Lackey ticks off a lengthy list of subjects where conservative Christians have become blind to the obvious teachings of Jesus while fixated on relatively minor cultural flashpoints and red meat- symptoms of a general moral blindness borne of, arguably, flaccid aesthetic and intellectual habits.

So I would like to offer another value, which is truth. As a scientist, it is a natural place for me to start, but I think it is both illuminating of, and interrelated with, the other virtues above. What modern artists seek is to express truths about the human condition, not just ring out positive affirmations and hallelujas. Truths about suffering as well as truths about beauty. What scientists seek to do is to find how this world we find ourselves in works, from the cosmos down to the gluon. And they do so because they find it beautiful, and, like addicts, would like to unlock more of that beauty. Beauty inspires love, and love ... can only survive on truth, not lies. So I think these values live in a reinforcing cycle.

All that implies that there is another step to take for someone who has left fundamentalism. That is, to re-evaluate Christianity as a whole. While the achievement of decency (and better taste) by the renunciation of FOX and its religious satellite communities is an enormous step, indeed a momentous one for the preservation of our country's sanity, grappling seriously with the value of truth would suggest an extra leg to the trip. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Christianity as a whole is a questionable proposition, philosophically. As a narrative and moral system, it clearly has positive as well as negative potentials. But as a "truth"- with its miracles, resurrections, triune deity, and salvation at the end of the line, (whether for the elect, the saved, the good, or for all)- well, it is impossible to take seriously without heavy doses of tradition and indoctrination.

For his part, Lackey has headed in another direction, into the Eastern Orthodox church, finding a place that richly satisfies the fundamentalist urge to return to one of the most traditional and historically continuous churches in existence, and also one that does not tie itself into intellectual knots about literal truth, living biblically, and the like. Orthodoxy accepts mystery, and cherishes its ancient rites and structures as sufficient theology. It is not modernist, or goaded by the enlightenment to make a rational system of something that so obviously resists reason. 

For there is a fine line between lies, illusions, and truths. As anyone who is married will understand (or a citizen of a country, or part of a corporation, or part of any social structure), truth is not the only or necessarily best virtue. A bit of illusion and constructive understanding can make a world of difference. Narrative, ideology, framing, etc. are essential social glues, and even glues of internal psychology. So, given that illusions are integral, the work to identity them, bring them into consciousness, and make positive choices about them is what matters, especially when it comes to social leadership. Do we choose narratives that are reasonably honest, and look forward with hope and love, or ones that go down the easy road of demonization and projection? And what role should the most traditional narratives in existence- those of the ancient religions- have in guiding us?


  • Beautiful? You be the judge.
  • Kasparov on freedom and evil.
  • Kids should be able to navigate neighborhoods.
  • Lies and disinformation are a public health crisis.
  • More variants are always coming along.
  • We are not doing enough against climate heating.

Saturday, April 2, 2022

E. O. Wilson, Atheist

Notes on the controversies of E. O. Wilson.

E. O. Wilson was one of our leading biologists and intellectuals, combining a scholarly career of love for the natural world (particularly ants) with a cultural voice of concern about what we as a species are doing to it. He was also a dedicated atheist, perched in his ivory tower at Harvard and tilting at various professional and cultural windmills. I feature below a long quote from one of his several magnum opuses, Sociobiology (1975). This was putatively a textbook by which he wanted to establish a new field within biology- the study of social structures and evolution. This was a time when molecular biology was ascendent, in his department and in biology broadly, and he wanted to push back and assert that truly important and relevant science was waiting to be done at higher levels of biology, indeed the highest level- that of whole societies. It is a vast tome, where he attempted to synthesize everything known in the field. But it met with significant resistance across the board, even though most of its propositions are now taken as a matter of course ... that our social instincts and structures are heavily biological, and have evolved just as our physical features have.

Saturday, March 19, 2022

(No) Sympathy for the Devil

Blaming ourselves for Russia's attack on Ukraine.

Here we are, in a time warp back almost a century. A European country has elected an authoritarian leader, on the support of a doddering president. That leader went on to resolve the economic and politicial crisis of the country, mostly by taking complete control himself and forming an increasingly repressive fascist state. Nationalist propaganda and lies were ceaselessly conveyed through the state media, paving the way for attacks on other countries, generally portrayed as critical to protect fellow countrymen being oppressed there. The aggression and the lying escalated until here we are, in a full scale international war, with distinct chances of becoming a world war. 

In the US, there are strange convergences of support for the Russian side of this conflict. Those on the fringe left can not tear themselves away from respect for the Russia that was the Soviet union and vanguard of world communism. Nor can they resist bashing the US. The far right is infatuated with the new Russia, with its super-Trump leadership, free-wheeling criminality, and clever propaganda, as many Americans were of Hitler back in the day. But a third stream comes from the foreign policy establishment- the realists, who think spheres of influence are the most normal, god-given organizing principles of international affairs. Thus China should be given its suzerainty over South East Asia, including Taiwan, and Russia over its near abroad, whatever the people actually living there may think. We are to blame for pushing NATO to Russia's borders, we are to blame for injuring Russia's sensitivities and pride, and we have caused their invasion of Ukraine, by luring Ukraine to the West with our sweet blandishments.

Well, each of those views is out of touch in its own way, but the last is especially curious. For what was the post-World War 2 order about, if not about civilized behavior among nations, letting each seek prosperity and freedom, in peace? The realist view would plunge us back into medieval power relations, or perhaps the three-sphere world of George Orwell's 1984. It consigns small countries to the depredations of bullies like Russia, who can not make friends in a civilized manner, but, in Ukraine, has strained every nerve to corrupt its political system, destroy its internet, and obliterate its sovereignty and economy.

It is obvious to all, including Russia, that NATO was and remains a defensive alliance, of countries intent above all else to rebuild after World War 2 without further aggressive encroachment by Russia. And once the Soviet Union fell apart, the Eastern Bloc countries fled as fast as they could to the West, not because they wanted to attack Russia in a new World War 3, but quite the opposite- they wanted to pursue the promise of freedom and prosperity in peace, without bullying from Russia. Russia's much vaunted "sensitivities" are nothing more than toxic, domineering nostalgia for their former oppressive empires, of both Czarist and Soviet times. As the largest country in the world, one would think they have enough room, but no, their sense of greatness, unmatched by commensurate cultural, economic, or moral accomplishment, demands bullying of its neighbors. More to the point, their current system of government- autocracy / fascism by ceaseless lying and propaganda, would be impaired by having their close neighbors have more open, civilized systems. 

All this has a religious aspect that is interesting to note as well. Ukraine recently extricated itself from domination by the Moscow orthodox church, becoming autocephalic, in the term of art. The process shows that even in this supposedly supernatural sphere of pure timeless principle, tribalism and politics are the order of the day. Not to mention propaganda, and fanciful philosophy and history. The narratives that Russia as spun about Ukraine and its invasion are particularly virulent, unhinged, and insulting, insuring that Ukraine would never, in any sane world, want to have anything to do with their neighbor. It is one more aspect of the Russian aggression that spares us from needing to sympathize overly with its "sensitivities".


So, what to do? It is not clear that Ukraine can withstand Russian attacks forever. They have stopped Russia in its tracks, thanks to a lot of Western assistance. They have millions of men under arms, compared to a much smaller invasion force. They have motivation and they have the land. But they need heavier weapons and they need to preserve their air power. With those two things, they could turn the tide and drive Russia out. Without them, they will probably only manage a stalemate. Western sanctions have imposed highly justifiable pain on Russia itself, but historically, such sanctions tend to have as much countervailing effect, consolidating pro-government attitudes, as the opposite. So barring a dramatic turn of events at the top of the Russian system, which is highly unpredictable and rather unlikely, we are facing a very drawn out and destructive war in Ukraine.

In a larger sense, we are facing something far more momentous- the rise and assertion of autocracy (not to say fascism 2.0) as a competing world order. Russia's pattern has been clear enough (and historically eerie)- escalate their aggression and ambition as far as they can get away with. And China is watching carefully. The ability of the West to punish Russia for its completely immoral and cruel attack on Ukraine, and deter future repetitions, will shape the next century. Russia has decisively broken the borders and tranquility of the post-World War 2 order, and that has caused many, especially in Europe, to wake up and realize that coasting along on US coat tails is not enough- they have to actively participate in sanctioning Russia, in resolving their dependence on Russian fossil fuels (as if that had not been patently obvious before), and strengthening the collective defence, as expressed in NATO. Western leaders should make it clear that Putin and his key lieutenants will never be allowed to personally enter the West without being shipped off the Hague for trial. And we should give Ukraine what it needs to defend itself.

Finally, what of our own culpability? Not so much in mistreating Russia, which we have done only to a slight degree, but in committing war crimes of our own, in attacks of our own, based on lies of our own, on innocent countries far distant. I am speaking of Iraq (which ranks first among several other cases). While our justification for that war was far better than Russia's in Ukraine, it was still poor, still caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, was grievously misconceived and mismanaged, and has left a political ruin, not to mention a geopolitical mess. This alone should make George W Bush rank among the worst of US presidents- significantly lower than Trump, who for all his destructiveness, did not destroy whole countries. We should be willing to put Bush and others who made those decisions to an historical and international account for their actions, in a spirit of historical rectitude.


  • In praise of Washington's teaming minions.
  • New thoughts on an old book.
  • A song for Ukraine.

Saturday, February 12, 2022

Origins in the Other: Moses the Egyptian

Stray notes on what Judaism owes to Egypt.

It is a bitter historical irony that Jesus was a Jew, (as were all the founding Christians), yet his religion was taken up by non-Jewish communities who turned its stories against its originators, casting Jews as the betrayers, stubborn heretics, and generally the other, with disastrous consequences. Well, something similar may have happened at the origin of Judaism, as there is a fascinating thread of historical scholarship and speculation that suggests that Moses was Egyptian, and that much of the religion of Judaism was generated as a mixture of inheritances from, or inversions of, the religion and cults of Egypt.

While the Bible is full of Moses stories, no other historical, let alone archeological, attestation exists. Thus the many authors who have striven to unearth the truth of what happened have had to be creative. The whole thing may be an out and out myth, or unrecognizably reworked. Freud wrote "Moses and Monotheism" as an exercise in retro-psychoanalysis, cutting his totemic father figure down in an imagined Oedipal paroxysm of murder, followed by remorse. Jan Assmann more recently, in "Moses the Egyptian", wrote an eliptical tale of cultural hints and suppressed memories and trauma continually expressed and re-interpreted over time in the "othering", adoption, and inversion of cultural patterns. Manetho, a third century BCE Egyptian priest, wrote a history that puts Moses, originally an Egyptian priest named Osarseph, at the head of a renegade (and leper, for good measure) army which terrorized Egypt sometime in the 1300-1500 BCE period, ending in their expulsion and exile. 

The Hyksos, a semitic people, had a distinctive look, in Egypt of ~1900 BC.

Ever since the reign of Akhenaten was unearthed in the late 1800's, it has been tempting to tie his monotheistic revolution (1353-1336 BCE) to that of Judaism, which was putatively founded in the same general time period, when Egypt was at its height of power and regional influence. In both cases, monotheism was a tough sell, and created antagonism that characterized both episodes. The Amarna period ended with complete reversal- Akhanaten being erased from his monuments and records, and Egypt returning to its traditional ways. Judaism, according to its own documents, and despite Moses's teaching, endured a lengthy period of conflict and consolidation before the monotheistic faction gained ascendence in the post-Babylonian exile period. It also generated the enduring enmity of neighboring polytheists, ultimately resulting in the military defeat and dispersal of the Jewish nation.

So what is the evidence? Moses is an Egyptian name. Like Tutmosis, Ahmose, Ramses, and many others, it means "is born", or "is child of". While there are both Hebrew and Egyptian etymologies possible, Moses is also described as practiced in all the arts of Egypt, including various forms of magic and the secret symbols, i.e. hieroglyphs. Egyptians practiced circumcision, which Judaism obviously adopted with gusto. Egyptians worshipped the ram (representing the leading god, Amun) and the bull (Osiris), which the Jews turned around and sacrificed in their rituals. Cooking meat in milk was an Egyptian practice, which may have been the source of the contrary interdiction in Kosher law. Judaism was anti-iconic, completely contrary to the abundant icons of, frankly, all the other polytheistic religions, though new icons have been snuck in, in the form of the ark of the covenant, the Torah scrolls, wailing wall, etc. The Thummim is a judicial badge and device for divination, taken from the Egyptians. It is indeed likely that originators of Judaism were assimilated Egyptians who left, whether by choice or not. The historian Tacitus noted the inverted character of Judaism vs the Egyptian religion. And Maimonides argued that the laws were a form of treatment for withdrawal from idol-addiction, in his case against the "Sabians", which in reality were the Egyptians, if they were any actual culture at all. But it served other purposes as well, such as cultural glue, which continues to be functional even when all other reasons have become irrelevant and many of the less convenient laws have been cast aside.

Whichever pharoh was the one described in Exodus, its Egyptological details, though accurate, come from a substantially later time, the 600's BC, when it was written, not from the time of the events. And Assmann argues that Manetho, for one, conflated several historical episodes to come up with his account. One was a Hyksos colony of semitic peoples that occupied northern (lower) Egypt through the second intermediate period (~1800 BC) to their defeat, about 1540 BC, by Kamose and his successor Ahmose, who were based in the south. There may have, however, been other incursions of semitic peoples from time to time, especially as records through the less organized periods of Egyptian history are sparse. A second episode was the Amarna period, which was officially suppressed, but which Assmann argues remained vivid as a traumatic memory of religious and existential revolution, informing an Egyptian official's view of "pollution" of the Egyptian culture by outsiders. 

Similarly, one can imagine that the idea of monotheism, so suddenly sprung upon the Egyptians, is something that was knocking around for longer periods of time, both before and since. Assmann goes through a long argument by Ralph Cudworth (who wrote long before the hieroglyphs were deciphered) about a possible "esoteric" theology of the Egyptians, which was monotheistic, while the cult for public consumption was polytheistic. That makes little sense, as all royal tombs and decorations hew (religiously!) to the standard story, and so clearly embody a full cast of characters, and their belief in the Osiris story and hope of continued life in the land of the un-dead. Nevertheless, even without such an esoteric/demotic split, it is natural to wonder about origins, such as where this family of gods arose from, which in turn would send thoughts in the direction of possible monotheism. Perhaps the incredible conservatism of Egyptian culture caused such thoughts to be ruthlessly stamped out, but also prone to occasional eruption in incovenient forms. We in our own time are experiencing the thrill of normative inversion, when a subculture decides that black is white, that all norms should be trampled, and a new god worshipped. 

Even if the Amarna period did not directly foster Moses and the Jewish form of monotheism, the latter owes a great deal to Egyptian culture, likely including some glimmer of the monotheistic idea. Within Judaism, it took a second (and certainly real) exile, in Babylon, to bring the monotheistic idea to fuller fruition, as the last set of prophets called for purification and repentance, the Torah was written down, and the second temple built.


  • The sartorial Olympics.
  • The supremes throw lower courts under the bus.
  • Some dog breeds are just too inbred and messed-up.
  • When it comes to swallowing lies, believers have a lot of practice.