Wish upon a star

Review of Eric Reitan's "Is God a delusion?"

Thanks to the local Catholic library, I got the opportunity to read philosopher Eric Reitan's book, Is God a Delusion? (a reply to religion's cultured despisers). Finely written and extremely temperate and sincere in its impulses, it marshals a variety of arguments against Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and its ilk. (In fairness, I'll note that of these new atheist books, I have read only Dennett's, and didn't like it much.) I apologize for the length of this review, but the book was remarkably pleasant to read and interesting to engage with, in marked contrast to other books in the field. I recommend it highly, while disagreeing with it extensively.

Chapter one takes us through the obligatory "What, me?!" defense. If I may paraphrase... Dawkins's target is not recognizable as my religion or my God. My religion is very liberal, even mystical. God is good and has nothing to do with hell. Indeed, here in Oklahoma, I have to drive my family an hour just to get to a church I like (take that, God's creation!). Thus, not only is Dawkins completely wrong, but most Christians in America are wrong too. I'd even say they aren't truly religious! (Take that, fundamentalist heretics!)

(Me again...) What this demonstrates most directly is that, going by the numbers, Dawkins hits the nail of popular religion far better than does Reitan. It also is a fine example of how no one really knows what they are talking about when they talk about God. Which might lead a skeptic to a very simple conclusion- that it doesn't exist.

Chapter two extends the discussion of what God is. Dawkins is apparently mistaken in positing that God is complex. Anselm told us that God is simple. Thus for Reitan God is simple, despite his creating the universe and all the creatures, being all-seeing and all-knowing, listening to all our prayers, contacting us through schizoid experiences, and blogging on the side through more or less exemplary prophets. Now Reitan disavows most of these properties imputed to God (though his God remains personal by mystical contact), but he is not clear which ones. Does he believe the Bible to be completely human in origin, or semi-inspired? Being against inerrantism (as he is, vociferously) is all very well, but then what, if any, of scripture is sound or reflective of God at all? This utterly arbitrary theological approach to God simply reinforces the theme of Chapter one, indicating that no one knows the least thing about it, once again leading the skeptical observer to the hypothesis that ... it may very well not exist.

In this chapter (and continuing on through chapter three), Reitan also arrives at his own definition: "'God' names that which, in our intuitions and numinous visions, suggests that our ethico-religious hope is not in vain." As a specimen of wishful thinking, one could hardly do better. There is nothing objective even proffered. Whatever we think is good, there is God. Whatever we think not so good, (like much of the Old Testament), there God is not. This turns God into a totem of liberal do-goodism and feel-goodism, which as an atheist I entirely understand and applaud, but which surely must make serious religious believers feel rather adrift, if not hostile.

So why is God believable when there is no serious evidence, a complete lack of knowledge, an extremely tenuous definition at variance with common belief, and psychological clues aplenty to its very human origin? Chapter four delves into the unique scope of the God hypothesis- that since it presumes to run the whole universe and exist outside and prior to it (i.e. it is transcendant), it is more believable than your garden-variety undisprovable celestial teapot and its many mocking colleagues. In big lie parlance, the very size of the lie should inspire respect, if not awe and belief. (I'll treat transcendence more directly below.)

This chapter also offers a minor God-in-the-gaps argument from chance events like quantum indeterminacy- that possibly the transcendent realm may interface with ours through non-random twiddles, applicable both to our souls, through brain effects, and perhaps to other worldly effects. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, when physicists say "random", they mean it. Really random, not pseudorandom. If random events, such as matter spontaneously coming out of the vacuum and going back in, were twiddled by God, it would leave traces of lack of conservation of energy/mass/information, which have not been observed. Much like the other gap arguments that occupy the rest of the book, this one is not strong, and is also susceptible to progressive gap closure by way of continuing observation and study. Reitan even spends a paragraph on why it is not a gap argument, because it accepts current science rather than exploiting a gap in understanding. Yet current science not only finds quantum indeterminacy, but also deals with its predictably random consequences, expressed quantitatively in probability distributions rather than in, say, occasional biasses towards prayed-for outcomes.

Chapter five really gets Reitan's blood going, impeaching Dawkins for not reading Aquinas's Summa Theologica. But Reitan himself devotes only a few pages to the issue, and does not have very good things to say about its arguments either (aside from the basic cosmological argument, dealt with below), so it is unclear why the supporting material would be terribly helpful. He is certainly right that Dawkins misunderstood Aquinas, (using web resources to do so!), but if his many later sympathetic interpreters thought so little (or could make so little) of Aquinas's arguments, then it is not clear why Dawkins needs to go the extra mile here. Biologists are not against reading Darwin, for instance, but we strongly recommend the profusion of more modern treatments first, since they both present the arguments more efficiently, and benefit from later developments in data and theory. Doesn't theology progress in similar fashion?

Gaps

Reitan's core arguments (chapters 6, 7, 8) boil down to two, which are first the cosmological argument, and second, the argument from mysticism. To put it extremely briefly, these are both God-in-the-gaps arguments, offering the possibility, or "hope", of God in what currently remain as the two prime mysteries of our universe. But these mysteries are mysterious to quite different degrees.

The bare cosmological argument says that the origin of our universe has no good explanation as yet, and might as well be due to some super-being creator as to a multiverse, an odd vacuum fluctuation, or the super-string tango of more regular speculative physics. That we really don't know is hardly in dispute. This classic deism, very common among the founders of the United States, has no terribly strong arguments against it, positing a clockwork universe that was set in motion by this marvelous Being, continuing unmolested to the present day. While such a system may be benevolent in the most distant and ultimate sense, it is hardly a source of personal hope to wish upon.

It has no terribly strong arguments for it either, of course, since as Hume pointed out most trenchantly, the origin of this deity would be itself a mystery to be solved, it being simply unacceptable to wave it away with the classic theological mantras of the uncreated creator, the unmoved mover, the self-sufficient being, and so forth. At any rate, if evidence (better than the so-called "proofs" of Anselm and Aquinas) crops up on the matter, I'll be the first to pay attention.

Deism also offers no support for the florid fixations of popular religion, such as hell, the answering of prayers, the enjoyment of sacrifices, and the twiddling with evolution, tribal politics, international relations, the weather, and so forth (which Reitan decries with some passion as well, going so far as to state a preference for the astringent nullity of atheism over the absurd elaborations of fundamentalism and of orthodox theology more generally). One can't even responsibly call this originating cause a "Being" to invoke anthropomorphic shades, as Reitan habitually does- it might be something like the electron, or other ur-particle or force field. One look through a telescope indicates the extreme improbability that we humans have any special place in this deity's massive work, unless that deity be embarrassingly inefficient, slow, and wasteful, as it has been all over again in the wantonly brutal process of evolution here on earth. Deism appears to be the thinnest of theological gruel.

Mind

The other great mystery of the universe is that of the human mind and particularly the personal mystical experience. Here Reitan really hangs his hat, drawing on Simone Weil, William James, and Friedrich Schleiermacher for support. However, as gaps go, this one is narrow and getting narrower all the time. Already in James's time, he concluded that there really was no way to intellectually defend religion- that it arises from feelings first, with intellectual theology added for ornamentation. And secondly, various mystical experiences, while not routinely explicable, were close enough to the common run of mental deviations and defects that these also were scant grounds for belief, whether citing the experiences of others or one's own.

James ended up with a wan and labored decision, eked out with little conviction, that he could in some good conscience hold to an unjustified and uncompelled "over-belief" in Christian theism to keep himself sane and happy (and in his academic and social positions, one might add).

Schleiermacher, a hundred years before James, similarly founded theism on the bare religious feeling, which Reitan agrees with and likens to the Einsteinian position of simple awe and wonder. However, Schleiermacher had fewer doubts that this all somehow adds up to Christianity, even in the teeth of his own generation of atheist "despisers" and the perennial problems of the very same impulse finding expression the world over in fundamentally different theologies and Gods. Reitan's hope rests here, in the end, that these experiences, the fundament of religious feeling, mean what we think they mean, instead of being bare emotions, conveniently interpreted through the lenses of indoctrination.

In our time, the brain is a highly contested space, poked and prodded with some disregard for its sacredness, not to say for propriety. Its operations are fundamentally bounded by materialistic theory as far as the scientists involved in its study are concerned, and thus it is an ever more unlikely source of transgressive and revelatory contact with the "other side", transcendent reality, or God. That is not to say that it can't feel that way- who hasn't done a few too many mushrooms from time to time? But no objective sign has yet emerged that the mystical experience connects with anything other than our internal psychological depths.

But Reitan sticks with Schleiermacher, and claims:

"At the root of our experience, in our awareness of our own existence, there is a seminal awareness of a transcendent reality upon which our entire being depends.

...

when we do, [notice it], why should we doubt its veridicality any more than we doubt our other feelings? When we don't doubt it and focus our attention on its object, a rich vista of insight opens up as surely as when a scientist trusts her senses and begins to explore the empirical world."

pp 161-162

Where to start? Whether most people experience a seminal awareness is open to question, but that it reflects a transcendent "reality" (rather than just seems that way) is even more open to question. To go with Descartes, I think therefore I am. Thus if I no longer think, I no longer am, implying directly that my ability to think lies at the heart of my being. Whether my ability to think is mechanical or partakes of the divine, the dependence is the same, and thus for me as a thinking being, whatever founds my ability to think and experience will seem/feel equally transcendent, however mundane its actual workings.

This is the crux of the issue- that the feeling of transcendence can not say anything about the nature of that transcendence. As I view current cognitive science, which is hastening to complete the anti-narcissist revolutions of the enlightenment which removed humans successively from the center of the solar system, from their divine pedestal above biology, from the center of the universe, and even from the sovereignty of our own minds, the workings of the mind give every (objective) evidence of being astounding, remarkable, and incredibly intricate, but also entirely material.

There is also every reason to directly doubt the veridicality of spiritual feelings and their content. Not that they don't exist or feel powerful, but that they imply the reality of culturally entrained concepts such as Christ, God, Allah, the creator of the universe, Bodhisattvas, or other such notions. Human history is littered with claims of great "insights", even seminal insights, that descended on recipients of such experiences. At best such insights amount to love, which is ever in short supply, but not a novel idea. Other examples include such horrors as the Book of Revelations, which we can all be thankful was far, far, far from veridical. No instance has granted insights that could not have come from the dreams and thoughts of the subject. Personally, I see great artistry in such visions, like those of Hildegard, and we should give their originators their due as creative geniuses, whether willing or unwilling. But as does all art, they plumb the inner psychological depths of humanity, not the parameters of the universe.

Lastly from the quote above, if focusing on such mystical objects leads as surely to insight as does engagement with the empirical world, then why has their objective return been so paltry (as opposed to their artistic return)? The simplest reason is that Reitan's claim is incorrect. Indeed, it is slandering scientists to liken their "trusting of her senses" to faith in spiritual impressions from religious experiences. Scientists do not trust their senses- they calibrate them, they double-check them, they invent new ones to take the place of our built-in unreliable and limited ones. They critique relentlessly, based on evidence coming from all possible calibrated senses. Whatever the scientific method is, it is first and foremost a matter of psychological insight, about our gullibility and suggestibility. Trust gets science nowhere, and nowhere is trust less merited than in issues of "faith" and mystical emotion.

Transcendence

There is fascinating formal relation in this book, and in theism generally, between the transcendence invoked for brain functions and the transcendence invoked for the cosmos as a whole. Each are systems which theoretically must arise from external causes which can not be perceived by inside observers, leading to the label of "transcendent". (This follows, as Reitan explains, from the principle of sufficient reason, PSR, which I mostly agree with.)

In the case of the mind, glimmers of transcendent feeling are, to a naturalist and brain scientist, clearly the sense of, as Schleiermacher would put it, "absolute dependence", on the brain substrate, especially when whacked out of its nomal rut by hallucinogens or meditation, etc. Subjectively, minds are dependent on their substrate and can know nothing about that substrate from their internal perspective. In this case, however, there are two escape hatches- our senses are pointed outside the mind system, allowing some amount of external, self-observing perspective, and we live in a world of other brains which observe each other in increasing scientific detail. So this kind of transcendence is now not at all mysterious in principle, even if all its internal feelings (i.e. consciousness, mysticism) have not yet been fully demarcated from the outside perspective.

Likewise, the universe as a whole including energy, mass, space, and time itself, originated at a point, and thus has some cause of which we as yet know nothing, and about which it may well be impossible to know anything from our entirely inside vantage point. (Note that in the absence of time, the idea of causality itself may be problematic, which may have some impact on PSR, if one wants to be highly speculative.) Labelling this cause 'God' hardly does us much good. If we lived in a multiverse society of other universes which we could see and converse with, we might be able to figure out exactly what was going on, just as in the case of brains. But alas, that is not the case, and we probably have to settle for not knowing at all, whether we label that state ignorance or deism.

Hope

Reitan does not claim to argue for theism conclusively, but only to open a space for the philosophical acceptability of theistic belief, in view of the cosmic unknowns and the mystical experiences of life. If one wishes to stake one's beliefs on things unknown instead of known, then this is a theology with some attraction. But as the domain of the unknown dwindles, slowly but steadily over the years, it would seem to be an increasingly barren and isolated outpost.

The underlying project of the book, of course, is to preserve a sense of hope, religion being in the words of Marx, "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions". Hope and meaning are the inner resource by which we live, and atheists, with their smug intellect and heedless destruction of all that others hold sacred, are thus, even if right, enemies of humanity in this sense. (Unless religion is not, after all, our only hope.) Marx hoped that his worldly revolution would redeem us:

"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

...

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower."

Unfortunately, communism failed utterly to cast off the chain of capitalist struggle and mundane existence, so our choice may well be between bearing the chain without flowers and bearing it with flowers. Philosophers should probably choose the former.

Chapter nine transitions to the "sell" part of the book, where the imagination tools (as the new agers here in Marin like to put it) get revved up in service of the Christian message. No longer is belief just putative or reasonable in the face of uncertainty. It is probable. And not only that, it is the only thing that stands between a horribly, unimaginably abused and destroyed person (Reitan provides grisly scenarios), and total despair.

Now, it escapes me why, just when the world has kicked a person in the teeth, Reitan would like to tell her that the world is, by his philosophy, intrinsically good and looking out for them. That would seem palid, even insulting. Perhaps this is a matter of temperament, or it may presume cultural indoctrination that also has little to do with truth or philosophy. At any rate, I would think that the hope we live by should have solid foundations- in us, as hoping beings doing good- not fantastical ones, pulled out of tenuous theological arguments. Reitan admits that theodicy- the resolution of evil- is not theology's strong point, yet by his narration it is also its main point, providing essential hope and sustenance against the evils that abound. In short, we end up where we began, swirling within an enormous exercise in wishful thinking.

Chapter ten makes a plea for the worth of organized religion as the leading way to integrate positive spiritual emotions with the negative ingroup-outgroup dynamic inherent in human nature and human communities. I agree fully both that divisiveness and xenophobia is perhaps humanity's leading defect, and that the spiritual/pan-empathic emotion is humanity's best and opposite emotion. It is ironic that Reitan is happy to trot out an evolutionary explanation for the former (with which I agree), but not for the latter, which Chimpanzees apparently experience as well. Since he takes the intuitive appearance of experience seriously for positive mysticism (as being "veridical"), then he should also accept reports in the vein of "the devil made me do it" for less positive emotions. But that would admit a dark deity, which is contrary to Reitan's wish/definition of God as all-good. Such imbalances pervade the book, despite its extremely sincere efforts to leaven its apologetics with an understanding and appreciation of the other side of the argument.

And not to put too fine a point on it, it is theology that transmutes the better emotions of love/agape into the worse emotions of group identity and competition, by devising fabulistic group-specific narratives and interpretations that harden into "truths", which one group "knows", and others don't, based on celebrity prophets and their lineages of interpreters. Reitan is well aware of this dynamic and offers only the most brief and personal endorsement of the Christian story with Jesus as its star as the best of all elaborations of the pan-empathic impulse (as did James and Schleiermacher before him). But why indulge in such preferences at all?

We feel drawn to symbols of the unseen and dimly understood inner life, and rightly treasure communal and artistic expressions of these deep currents, of which the spiritual/pan-empathic emotion is the very best. Reitan is correct to put prime emphasis in his theology on its source in dreams, visions, and mystical experiences- the personal transcendant function (or more simply, the unconscious). But it is mistaken to equate this with the cosmic transcendent function, firstly because we know nothing whatsoever about cosmic origins or of any remotely plausible connection between the two phenomena. And secondly because such vastly inflated and inflating claims feed the logically unbounded, grandiose, and divisive aspects of religion.

There was a time I used to reject those who where not of my faith. Now,

my heart has grown capable of taking on all forms.

A pasture for a gazelles, a convent for Christians.

A temple for idols, a Kaba for the pilgrim.

A table for the Torah, a book of the Koran.

My religion is love. Whichever the route love's

caravan shall take, that path shall be the path of my faith.

-Ibn Arabi

• Ruse follows Reitan on the middle way, but from the other side
• On brain cultivation
• The courage to be girls
• Moments of life
• Phineas Gage gets a face: a picture of the tragic neurology subject has recently been unearthed.
• BBC religion show treats neuroscience and the mystical experience
• Mr deity gives and gives [video]
• One way to stop big coal
• Nice talk by Francis Collins, introducing his directorship at NIH [video]
• Cosima reviews the mind & AI

Pauline Marxism

Borg and Crossan proclaim the revolutionary nature of Paul's version of Christianity

I've enjoyed a short book (The First Paul) by a couple of liberal theologians (Marcus Borg and John Crossan, or B&C), reconstructing the history of Paul of Tarsus and his message. Their readings of Paul seem a little strained in places, but on the whole, the book is very convincing and also quite uplifting. Little of what they say is new (liberation theology and all that), but it is very well presented with penetrating historical insight, and also worth remembering in this time when the most vocally religious among us bleat about the horror of socialized medicine, among other communitarian evils.

B&C write quite concisely, so I will follow them and summarize some of their main points:

- Only about a third of Pauline writing in the new testament is authentic. Later writings diverge increasingly with time, until they become diametrically anti-Paul.

- Paul reached an agreement with his fellow apostles in Jerusalem that he should preach to gentiles without the requirement of keeping Jewish law, while the others (Barnabas, James, et al.) would convert Jews and maintain the law.

- Paul's mission ended up being a systematic approach to gentiles who were already "attached" to synagogues in large cities of the eastern empire. About half of Antioch's synagogue attendees, for instance, were counted as gentiles not keeping the law, but interested in the god of the Jews. How they were attached is not entirely clear, though this may have something to do with the Essene and Therapeutae movements mentioned in a prior post. Gandy and Freke liken these relationships to Madonna's latter-day dalliance with the Kaballa.

- Paul did not preach Jesus's sacrificial atonement for individual human sins, nor for original sin. Instead, he preached the horror and injustice of Jesus's sacrifice- that it held a mirror to the injustice of the world, contrasted with the new world possible through love.

- Paul's core teaching was a rejection of the ambient Roman ethic of peace through violence, terror, and hierarchy, in favor of peace through egalitarian distributive justice and love, arising from what B&C term "a spirit transplant" from Christ crucified.

- Communities that Paul founded were "share" communities, where all were supposed to help others in need, share equally in sacred meals, and contribute what they could. Freeloaders became a problem early on, exemplifying the classic economic problem of monitoring who is freeloading (who is truly a widow, for instance).

- Paul's gentile communities were supposed to contribute monetarily to the Jerusalem-centered Jewish Christian communities that represented "true" Christianity (characterized as "utopian" by B&G). A falling-out between Paul and his Jerusalem colleagues at the Jerusalem temple seems to have resulted in his being packed off to Rome for imprisonment and eventual execution, eerily echoing the fate of Jesus himself, though B&G only piece/surmise this together- it is not reported directly in Acts.

Most striking of all this is the proposition that Paul's agenda was strongly social and explicitly revolutionary. Not only were the reigning gods and emperor of Rome left by the wayside with the repeated and insistant cry of "Jesus is Lord", but the reigning power-ethic of Rome was turned on its head, with slaves and women given equal status in the new communities. The Corinthian community, with substantial inequality of wealth, found this quite hard to swallow, leading to heated remonstrations from Paul.

It is this agenda that explains why the new Christian community was persecuted so consistently. Their doctrine as well as practice was an ongoing rebuke to the powers that be, whose reply was to use their default ethic of oppression and expurgation to blot them out. Yet it also accounts for the attraction Paul's communities held for the rootless and exploited of the urban empire (the alienated proletariat, one might almost say), especially when he dropped the need to follow Jewish law in all its own oppressiveness.

Paul's program (partly channeling Jesus), was a critique of the ambient Roman system, much like Communism was a critique of our ambient capitalist system. Rome's hierarchy reached from the emperor-gods at the top to the most cruel mining slavery at the bottom. It depended on military conquest to get slaves, to subjugate competitors, to gain resources and markets. And it was unthinkable to change this system which combined church and state with an antique, time-honored ethical system. (Though as I have discussed, gradual amelioration was also happening in the empire, apart from Christian influences).

In our own day, Communism has been the most radical and sustained critique of capitalism. Heaven knows that capitalism needs a critique- it is cruel and heartless, alienating to its workers and destructive of social decency. The elevation of greed as its outstanding moral guide is repugnant, and the relentless gravitation of every sphere of life into its maw of commercialization is also disturbing, if not appalling. While through a great deal of work and struggle for amelioration we have arrived at a more moral point than the Roman ethical system of antiquity, (with depressingly frequent backsliding in the antebellum American South and elsewhere), we still live mired in a system that divides our souls and fails to give us the elemental happiness possible in the most primitive family/tribal settings.

Yet economics must have its due. The communist/socialist critique, however trenchant in the hands of Marx, Jesus, Paul and others, has not provided a replacement to take us to the promised land. Communism was particularly deficient in this regard, and one might make a similar point about Christianity. As early Christianity spread, Rome's economic basis was shrivelling from ongoing corruption / concentration of economic power by leading landholders and from lack of new resources via conquest. While Constantine, Theodosius and successors saw Christianity as a new hierarchical glue to hold the empire(s) together, it was not a helpful economic glue. Quite the opposite- its preoccupations were doctrinal and otherworldly, leaving this current world largely to rot. Its charities ameliorated in some small degree the harshness of economic failure, whether ancient or modern, but its doctrines were and remain disinterested in, even antithetical to, vibrant economic activity (excepting, perhaps, the controversial Protestant view of salvation through hard work).

Squaring the circle of morality, ethics, communitarianism, and economic performance remains the great pending work of modern political economy, and this work is actually becoming more and more interesting as we learn more about man's irrationality and basic unsuitability to classical economic theory.

• The New Yorker does Judas.
• More on those death panels.
• Gawande reinforces his message on health costs.
• Health care in the larger picture.
• The WSJ (John Mackey) does health reform. Most charming quote: "Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?"
• Leading "Intelligent Design" scientist William Dembski asks students taking "Christian Faith and Science, masters course" at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to (and I am not kidding): "provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you’ve made on “hostile” websites, the posts totalling 2,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade)".
• Jerry Coyne writes another dispatch vs religion, in TNR.

Trotsky

The Trotsky trilogy by Isaac Deutscher

or,

Running dog lackey of the imperialist exploiter (Soviet edition)

This survey of Leon Trotsky's career is one of the great biographies of the twentieth century. Lovingly written and researched by a highly sympathetic author, (Deutscher claims to have been the first member expelled from the Polish Communist party for Trotsky-ism, in the early 1930's), the three volumes are a fascinating read of delirious Boshevism as seen through the battered, if still-rose-colored, glasses of mid-century international communism.

I confess I am only half-way through the set, but the narrative is harder and harder to bear as the story of Stalin's rise to power plays out in all its horror. (Stalin's agents eventually assassinate Trotsky, exiled in Mexico, in 1940). So I thought I would offer a quick review now, before I forget some of the pivotal themes. The climax of Trotsky's career occurs late in the first book, as the October 1917 revolution succeeds, carried off virtually single-handedly, as Deutscher would have it, by Trotsky's oratorical prowess in front of the Petersburg Soviets and a few other forums, such as the sailors of Kronstadt, near Petersburg.

In the quote below, Deutscher describes Trotsky's position a few years after the ensuing civil war, circa 1924, as Stalin was starting to collect all the levers of power and outflank the man who played such a leading role in the 1917 revolution. Unlike Trotsky, Stalin assiduously built a network of personal patronage in the nascent Soviet government, which then allowed him free reign over his subordinate's loyalty, thoughts, and eventually, lives.

"The Bolshevik [Trotsky] felt alienated from his own work- the revolution. His own state and his own party towered high above him. They appeared to have a mind and will of their own which bore little relation to his mind and his will and to which he had to bow. State and party appeared to him as blind forces, convulsive and unpredictable. When the Bolsheviks made of the Soviets 'organs of power' they were convinced, with Trotsky, that they had established 'the most lucid and transparent political system' the world had ever seen, a system under which rulers and ruled would be closer to one another than ever before and under which the mass of the people would be able to express and enforce its will as directly as never before. Yet nothing was less 'transparent' than the single-party system after a few years. Society as a whole had lost all transparency. No social class was free to express its will." p.262, volume 2

While Deutscher contributes perspectives like this and writes exceedingly well, he also shares in the grand delusion, being a dedicated communist himself, if exiled to England (England!) while working for the Economist magazine (the Economist!). Working in the 40's and 50's, he did not know exactly how decrepit the Soviet system would become, and how completely history would sweep its dreams into the proverbial dustbin. But he did know and suffer from Stalin's Orwellian depredations on truth and history, specifically on the memory of Trotsky, and he thus offers this labor of love to set that record straight.

Trotsky's story has the ingredients of Greek drama, except that his failings brought untold misery and death to tens of millions, not just himself. One can, in the end, have scant sympathy for him. He lived very much by the sword, both in his vigorous political agitation for the revolution, and in his brutal conduct of the civil war afterwards. That he then died by the sword of the revolution he did so much to create is ironic, but far from surprising. He shows a shocking lack of reflection on the lessons of history that were freely available in works like the Federalist papers. There is no appreciation (as indicated in the quote above) for the delicate art of founding a working government, such as our own founders evinced. That would be altogether bourgeois! This lack of grounding in political science shows in his (and all the Bolshevik's) marination in Marxist and Leninist dogmas- what was in essence a messianic eschatology almost completely divorced from a realistic appraisal of human nature.

Trotsky was a fierce intellectual and the leading thinker of his circle, and this makes him relatively sympathetic compared with the scoundrels and psychopaths who accompanied and followed him in power. As co-founder of a new government of a great nation, his duty was to heed historical experience and general prudence. In this, he was an utter failure, as were Lenin and colleagues. They viewed governing as some kind of parlor game where the best argument, penned in long "works" of obscure Marxist litany, pursuaded friends ensconced in an idylic post-revolution dictatorship (of the proletariat, one hastily adds). Little thought was given to the ongoing structure of political conflict, to checks and balances, let alone democracy and openness. All eyes were glued to the brass ring of power, with nary a thought about how power had corrupted every previous government in history.

Most of all, they had no time for legitimacy by popular appeal (and popular vote). They ascended to power on the back of the worker's unions (the soviets, i.e. the proletariat), conscripted the workers to fight the civil war, which in turn destroyed the industry that employed those workers, and finally expropriated them politically through the inexorable logic of single-party discipline (termed substitutionism by Trotsky) that concentrated power, step-by-step, at higher and higher levels. Expropriation happened because the party inherently represented a minority and had to close ranks to remain in power. It happened because, in the absence of a structured opposition and an overarching commitment to majority rule (another bourgeois concept!), let alone freedom of expression and journalism, no line could be drawn between dissent and disloyalty. Later, a few looked back wistfully to a time before the revolution when every party and party faction had its own freely published newspaper!

Something similar, of course happened in the case of the Catholic church and its own messianic eschatology, which also ended up concentrating power in an infallible father figure with the power to re-write history and burn opponents at the stake- in this case the pope on the Apostolic throne of Peter, instead of Stalin atop the Kremlin mausoleum.

One might ask whether the difference between the durability of the Catholic church and the Soviet system has something to do with an underlying humanism inherent in the former that was absent in the latter. (Not to mention the awesome power of religious, superstitious propaganda.) The Bolsheviks were atheists, as were all good communists and Marxists, but that was not the real problem, as shown by the functionally atheist countries of Scandinavia today. The Bolsheviks were deeply humanistic in theory, seeking the best possible world for all people. Yet it was a twisted and unsophisticated humanism, common to utopian visions, where the future they were certain of was more important than the present they were transcending, leaving them adrift and all too easily corrupted by their first brush with power.

It is a credit to the Catholic church, in a way, that its vision of heaven and the kingdom to come on earth has always been secondary to its own temporal hierarchy, power, pastoral relationships, and sophisticated vision of the human condition. And, perhaps, that its messiah was not a crackpot economist, whatever his beef with the moneychangers!

• Hitchens revisits his old friend, Marx
• The DPRK keeps up the delightful art of political invective and sycophancy
• Another view of native americans
• Remarkable example of Republican spin, by Senator Charles Grassley, on health care. At all costs, we must save the private health insurance industry!
• One more sad comment on our rape of the oceans

The soul of Francis Collins

Soon-to-be NIH director Francis Collins believes in souls and miracles

President Obama has nominated Francis Collins to be the next director of the NIH. Since the NIH is by far the largest funder of biomedical research in the US, (and the world), this will make Collins the leading voice and leading policymaker in this area of research and in medicine generally. Collins is an excellent researcher, and a top-notch administrator and politician. He will do well at the NIH, and 97.2% of his decisions will be good for the agency and the country.

However, there are a few looming problems. Collins holds the philosophical position (which I will refer to as compatibilism; also related to Stephen Gould's NOMA) that science and religion do not (or at least do not have to) conflict. He has been loudly vocal in his faith in Jesus, and in the compatibility of miracles, resurrections, and other articles of faith with the scientific corpus. A staunch defender of evolutionary theory, Collins sees no problem with the idea that human moral traits were specially implanted by god, rather than a product of the rough-and-tumble of .. well, evolution. Well versed in physics, he also believes that the total lack of contemporary miracles fails to impeach the fundamental violation of physical law that Biblical miracles represent. For, if one leads by faith, then all things are possible and god would, a priori, have no difficulty suspending physical law for the resurrection of his son or the multiplication of fishes and loaves.

The Stanford review put it this way, after a talk Collins gave on campus: "After evolution had “prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’” in the human being (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of free will, good and evil, and a soul. God used DNA as an information molecule; thus DNA is the language of God."

Collins is not alone in this position, of course. The National Academy of Science takes an official compatibilist position as well- that while evolution (among other theories) is absolutely, categorically, true, there are many scientists who find a way to have faith and think scientifically as well. Perhaps not at the same time, but definitely in the same brain. This is politically astute, even imperative, though it involves the Academy in adjudicating between more or less literal faiths, a position of some delicacy, not to say incoherence.

However incoherent, it would be harmless enough if it were not passed off as the promising reconciliation of faith and reason the West has been awaiting for a millenium. But so it is, and with the funding of one of leading religious philanthropies in the US- the Templeton foundation- Collins has founded a website and organization called Biologos to spread this gospel of compatibilism. As an effort against biblical literalism and fundamentalism, it is certainly positive. But quite a bit of Biblical literalism remains behind in a cherry-picked mix of the holy and the profane.

The Templeton foundation is based on a pile of money left by the mutual fund pioneer John Templeton, in order to strengthen religion in the US and worldwide. Their current motto is "Supporting science, investing in the big questions". How do they support science? They fund an annual prize given to the scientist they believe best supports religion (which they term "spiritual reality"), or to the most long-winded philosopher who works to denigrate science (e.g. Charles Taylor).

The foundation funds conferences devoted to bordeline science and religion ("Water of Life"- a two-day symposium to explore the gap between the investigation of fine-tuning in physics and cosmology with the investigation of fine-tuning in chemistry and biochemistry; "Spirit in the World"- The Dynamics of Pentecostal Growth and Experience; "Evolvability" The Evolution Of Evolution Conference , which dealt with limitations of evolutionary theory).

The foundation also grants money to people and organizations far and wide susceptible to compatibilist theology (Princeton Theological Seminary awarded "Science for Ministry" grant; Forgiveness Illuminated: Forgiveness, Resiliency and Survivorship Among Holocaust Survivors; "Science of Virtue" University of Chicago scholars will use two-fold definition of science to better understand human virtue; "Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health" Duke University Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development.)

Templeton's project seems basically one of giving megaphones to the small slice of the scientific community that is willing to mix religion with science, and with their money subborn scientists, journalists, and scientific institutions to propagate a compatibilist theology that does not bear close examination on either theological or scientific grounds. Its work is far more subtle than that of the Discovery Institute, which explicitly declares science to be the enemy of religion, to be denegrated through a "wedge" strategy of politicization, sophistry, and culture war.

The Templeton fundation does good work in many fields. It even does some honest science funding, like of a study of intercessionary prayer that found (and published) zero effect from such prayer on the health of heart patients. It exhibits strong internal tensions between supporting what its staff knows to be theologically true, and supporting science that finds what is actually true. Their internal tension is reflected in their public face and effects, muddying the boundaries between rigorous intellect and faith. To me it seems somewhat dangerous for one of the nation's leading scientists to be in bed with such an organization, entangled both financially and philosophically with its questionable methods and aims.

Collins has promised to be "minimally involved" with Biologos- to step down from its board and not speak on its behalf when he is director of the NIH. But his wife is and will remain on the board. And Collins himself is clearly in the running for one of those rich Templeton prizes for the reconciliation of religion and science. His voice in science policy and ethics will be weakened by this association and by his conflicting attitudes in general, as onlookers suspect firstly that his thought process is not entirely sound, and secondly that ulterior motives may be at play in some kinds of decisions. In his book, Collins declared that the origin of his belief lay in a mystical experience of seeing three waterfalls in a frozen state. He puts it in an interview:

"I turned the corner and saw in front of me this frozen waterfall, a couple of hundred feet high. Actually, a waterfall that had three parts to it -- also the symbolic three in one. At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The next morning, in the dewy grass in the shadow of the Cascades, I fell on my knees and accepted this truth -- that God is God, that Christ is his son and that I am giving my life to that belief."

On the other hand, with most of the nation sharing his faith, he may have greater influence than otherwise on societal ethical and medical issues. The quality of his influence, however, depends on his positions being well thought-out and based on knowledge and reason, which is undermined by this underlying philosophy.

The science of the NIH is largely well-insulated from the whims of the director, except for some pet projects/initiatives (the NIH even hosts a congressionally-mandated institute of alternative and complementary medicine). Extensive layers of peer review will continue to direct money to the best research, judged on social and scientific merit. The current time is a golden age of biomedical research in many fields, including genetics, evolution, social science, and neuroscience.

One of the ironies of this appointment is that neuroscience is steadily chipping away at the idea that the mind is due to anything other than the brain- that supernatural entities such as "souls" are needed to explain the wonder of consciousness. Likewise, our moral senses are being ever more firmly situated in inborn traits and quantitative evolutionary origins that belie a special qualitative status for humans, let alone require the intervention of dieties for their implantation. Perhaps Collins will preside over a research enterprise that will do away for good with some of his most cherished, if wrong-headed, sentiments.

• An alternate view of the Templeton foundation's work, from the inside.
• Outstanding set of podcasts on Beethoven's symphonies
• Cash for clunkers- obviously, the government could have gained far more environmental benefit for its (our) money.
• Health care status quo, anyone?

Plato vs Aristotle

Some of us believe in forms- others, in particulars

As I continue reading up on the Gnostic issues posted last week, I encountered an very fine book. Richard Smoley's "Forbidden Faith" describes how, of the many, many heresies the Catholic church has stamped out over the years, the Gnostic heresy was and remains the "arch-heresy" (or thought-crime, in modern parlance). This is because it attacks the church at its empty heart- the substitution of ritual, dogma, and authority for direct, personal, idiosyncratic experience, which wells up perennially in new movements, drawing again and again on the same fount of personal "gnosis" of divine (if disorganized) experience.

More to the point I am interested in here, Smoley also touches on Greek philosophy's influence on the Gnostics. While Aristotle tended to work from the particular to the general, (perhaps too enthusiastically!), Plato was a partisan of ideals, whether in physics, theology, or ethics. Plato was a strong influence on Christianity, and on the Gnostics in particular, and Smoley reviews the Platonic influence briefly:

"Plato explains reality in a way that could be described as *esoteric. This word does not refer to the difficulty or obscurity of his though. Originally it meant that many of his teachings were given only to relatively advanced pupils, people who were 'further in' the circle (the word comes from the Greek *esotero, which means 'further in'). But it points to another meaning as well: it indicates that these teachings are essentially about inner experience. Unlike modern thought, which views the invisible and internal dimensions of life and thought as purely subjective (and hence unreal), esotericism says these inner dimensions have a genuine reality and can be known and intelligently described. Plato even went so far as to flip conventional wisdom on its head and say that the world we see is itself unreal. The solid objects of ordinary reality are merely copies of imitations of ideal entities that he called 'forms' - abstract images that exist in the realm of thought. The forms alone are real, Plato said, because they are eternal and unchanging, unlike the ceaselessly shifting world here below."

To which I scoffed: "Spoken like a true philosopher!" Whereupon my wife retorted: "But he's right!"

And there we have it- one of the most basic divides in human nature- whether we take ideas and inner experiences as realer than real, or whether we deprecate them as fantasy- subject, at best, to empirical verification. It is a difference that tests the very capability of language to describe. It is a deep temperamental difference. It is a difference at the heart of theist vs atheist debates, with one virtually incapable of understanding the other because each experiences a different reality. It also touches on the Gnostic vs Orthodox divide, because while Orthodox dogma is based to some extent on the visions and inner experience of an originating prophet/messiah and sundry saints, ultimate authority rests elsewhere- in the body of the church and its very this-world hierarchy.

Who is right? What could be a trickier question? As I've noted elsewhere, our inner experience can be construed as the whole world and the origin of the universe, all being conjured on our behalf by the magic of consciousness. And not only that, but any progress we make or change we author, whether outside or inside, has its origins within, in inspiration and motivation- in the mysterious workings of creativity. It is the artists, mathematicians, theorists, and leaders who regard reality as less than interesting- as mundane.

Earth-bound as I am, however, I would offer another perspective- that of population genetics and evolution. Inner vs outer-oriented temperament seems to be one of those fascinating traits subject to balancing selection. Which is to say that there is no one optimal temperament for being human, but only an optimal society made up of many different types of people having many different temperaments, each selected for in small proportion. After a week of Apollo 11 reminiscence, we are reminded of the merging of many talents, from the visionary to the detail-oriented, that made such an adventure possible. And also the various strands in ourselves as onlookers that make us appreciate it, from the mystical to the scientific.

Incidental links..

• I take back the aspersions I cast on the historicity of Jesus last week. Historians seem to give it general credence, so I will grant it high probability.
• Krugman gets it on medical reform
• Blue dogs hear unusual high-pitched sounds...
• Plumbing the economic crisis.
• Fie on blasphemy!

Gnosticism

Who were the Gnostics, where did they come from, and what did they think?

I happened to run across an small book published by the Theosophical press: "Jung and the Lost Gospels: Insights into the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library", by Stephan Hoeller. Unlikely as it sounds, it turned out to be excellent, providing extensive insight into pre-Christian and early Christian times as illuminated by those manuscripts. (See also a series of books by Freke and Gandy.) When first found, much of the Dead sea scroll material was taken under the wing of Catholic clergymen and suppressed for decades before publication. Why? The reasons become quite apparent when the connections between the two corpi, found only a year or two apart circa 1945 and 1946, are illuminated. Both are authentic expressions of heterodoxy, first vis-a-vis the Jewish power structure, then versus the nascent Christian powers, which the early church patriarchy had labored long and hard not only to refute, but to erase.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were written at least in part by Essenes, a Jewish mystic and healing sect of 150 BCE to 70 CE. They were motivated to go into exile (near the Dead Sea) by the usurpation (as they viewed it) of the priesthood by the Hasmonean (Maccabeean) dynasty, whose successful revolt against threatened paganism (of the Seleucids) had brought them to the throne in Jerusalem. The Essenes favored the more traditional priesthood, which fell to the tribe of Zadok and was separated from the throne, and cursed the Hasmonean "wicked priests".

Far from being a minor twig on the tree of Judaism, Essenes were a major dissenting group from the worldly (and religiously literalist/fundamentalist) Pharisees and Saducees. The Essenes were influential around the Eastern Mediterranean as healers and mystics (also called Therapeutae, and regarded as proto-gnostics), somewhat akin in reputation to the Egyptians who also were widely regarded to possess and transmit occult knowledge. It is apparent from this book and other studies of this time that the earliest Christian communities were very likely to have been direct descendents, by teaching if not by membership, of a wide-spread Essene community that had already templated essentially all the teachings either adopted and transmitted by Jesus or put into his mouth later on. Incidentally, the Essenes also prefigured the non-temple and non-sacrificial Judaism that was to become mainstream in the diaspora.

Their doctrines included sacramental meals, baptism, asceticism, pacifism, collectivism, antipathy to slavery, renunciation of animal sacrifice, belief in life after death, conviction of the fallen-ness of the current world, expectation of its immanent demise, and expectation of a savior, a "teacher of righteousness". Though the data is extremely sketchy, the book indicates that a teacher of righteousness was recognized circa 100 BCE, and was killed by the Jewish powers that be, prompting an outpouring of bitterness and apocalypticism, some of which is recorded in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This clarifies substantially the timeline of the period, both in terms of the origins of the teachings involved, and in growth of the early Christian community, whose organized and far-flung nature within years of the presumed mission and death of Jesus is otherwise difficult to understand. It also clarifies some of the so-called heresies of the early Christian period, most of which were continuations and developments of the Essene creeds that were related to or eventually became what we call Gnosticism, and which became, as all mystical creeds will, anathema to an organized, hierarchical, orthodox patriarchy.

Which brings us to the other set of writings, the Nag Hammadi library of books, apparently secreted by a sect of Christian mystics in response to a decree banning non-canonical manuscripts, describing their gnostic beliefs dating back to perhaps 80 CE and thereafter, with the books themselves dating to the 200's and 300's CE. Gnosticism was equally derived from the Essene tradition as was Christianity, and both off-shoots intertwined in their Jesus-based theology, though the Gnostics were not as hung up on the literalism of the Jesus story, focusing on and recasting the mythical aspects of a story that was, in all probability, mythical to start with.

As a classic Gnostic deity, Jesus came into the world (in Plato's terms symbolized by the cave) to give knowledge of humanity's true nature and origin (god within), and hope of a better life after death, as long as one shared in this knowledge (later reduced in orthodoxy to the dictum to believe in Jesus or go to hell). The knowlege of the man being in god and god being in man, in agreement with typical mystical experience, expresses a one-ness with the universe which is both salving for the individual and also benificent in spreading love of all and everything through the community and the world.

The key difference between Gnosticism and orthodoxy lay in the value of personal, interior experiences. The Gnostics didn't concern themselves so much with organization and hierarchy as with continuing revelation by personal experience, led by a succession of visionaries providing "gnosis", or direct spiritual knowledge. For an organized religion, revelation has to stop somewhere, or else nothing that went before (and no one) can be authoritative. (This is a problem that Protestantism has dealt with repeatedly as sect after sect cleaves off and redivides in the absence of final authority). Gnosticism, on the other hand, drew continuously from streams of mystical thought and personal experience, starting with the Essenes (and many prior esoteric traditions), then extensively from Egyptian esoteric traditions, through John the Baptist and the associated messianic movements, continuing right up to the recasting of gnostic ideas in the present day by Mormonism and Scientology.

A key developer of Gnosticism proper was Simon (Magus), who was a Jewish Samaritan whose tradition was closely allied to that of the Essenes, being heterodox with respect to the major Jewish sects. He was a disciple of John the Baptist, and appears in the book of acts. He was apparently the originator of the peculiar brew of mysticism that became what we recognize as classical Gnosticism, which had both an intense concern with interior mystical experience along with a florid mythical vision of what those experiences meant. These visions made humans unfortunate inheritors of a fallen world subject to the whims of evil gods. But also possessors of a spark of divinity unknown to those not initated in the Gnosis, which was carried from the highest godly levels by Sophia, the healing and promethian goddess (and the inspirer of philo-Sophia, or philosophy).

Simon was prone to take spiritual flights, much like Muhammed after him and Ezekiel before him. More importantly, he had a female partner, Helen, much as Jesus had Mary Magdalene, who embodied wisdom granted by the goddess Sophia to seekers who were sufficiently pure and ready to renounce earthy things (equivalent to Chokma, the late Essene goddess). Gnosticism was far more open to feminine spritual powers and participation than was orthodoxy. The Nag Hammadi library contains alternate versions of old testament scriptures, liturgies, Gnostic commentaries and myths, especially concerning the feminine principle, lives and sayings of both Jesus and some apostles, as well as other learned miscellany such as portions of Plato's Republic and Zoroastrian texts.

To summarize, the Jesus story is essentially a variant of pre-existing proto-gnostic myths and motifs shared by esoteric pagans and the Essenes, for which an actual person by the name of Jesus may or may not have given further impetus. Paul may have been a gnostic who had little to say about Jesus as an actual person. The later church, in the hands of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and other propagators, writers and forgers, came to insist that their story, unlike all the other stories, was really, really, really true, as a badge of differentiation among the many honestly mythical cults of late Roman times. The story got altered, hardened, and repeated in a quadruplicate set of tales, while scores of competing stories were erased and their adherents hounded out of the church. After which the church contracted an alliance with the Roman empire and commenced to convert the remainder of its inhabitants by force, followed by a long dark age.

Aside from the sad loss of honest spirituality in the wake of Christian literalism, one small irony of this story is that Gnostics have ever been in quest of man's true nature, which, by way of active imagination and spiritual seeking was believed to be partly divine, trapped in a realm of semi-darkness and semi-light, oppressed by an evil set of fallen angels, while receiving occasional messages of hope from the upper realms of total light where reside our ultimate progenitors. But the answer of our true nature has in the fullness of time duly arrived, courtesy of Charles Darwin. It may not be the exhalted answer of the Gnostic imagination, but if one cares about either the word "true" or the word "nature", the answer is in hand, in magnificent scope and detail.

"If the flesh has come to be because of the spirit, it is a wonder, but if the spirit has come to be because of the body, that is a wonder of wonders."

- Jesus, in the Gospel of Thomas

• Outstanding podcast on Gnosticism (second half) and the historicity of Jesus (first half).
• Interview with Stephan Hoeller, for those interested, quite lengthy.

Market medicine

There are two real market participants in the medical system- doctors and insurers. Who wins?

The New Yorker ran a deeply insightful piece by Atul Gawande on cost in the medical system. His conclusion was that cultural differences between areas of the country that show huge medical cost disparities (up to 3-fold between county-size areas) come down to how willing doctors are to fleece their patients, (financially speaking, of course).

In high-cost areas, doctors obey market incentives, ordering extra tests and procedures, buying ownership shares in hospitals and other facilities to which they then herd their patients, collecting kickbacks from drug companies and medical sub-contractors, and so forth. In low-cost areas, doctors are not so closely attuned to the modern medical market and have not caught on to how easy it is to make money by "practicing" a lot of medicine. Or they may be part of special systems like the Mayo clinic which has a dramatically different incentive system. Much of the pressure in high cost areas may arise unconsciously from an excess population of doctors, who then keep themselves in business the best way they know how.

Notable here is that the putative consumer is not really a market participant. As Obama recently told the AMA, "We (health care consumers) do what you tell us to do". Likewise, drug and device manufacturers show through their marketing who makes the choices, spending far more on swaying doctors (or telling patients to "ask their doctors") than on direct consumer marketing.

On the other side of the equation are insurers, who are trapped in a bizarre system of paying whatever doctors order, though slowly, reluctantly, and with a maximum of paperwork. Who wins? Obviously, the doctors win. Everyone wants the best care, and is willing to do what the doctors deem the best care, with "most" care often filling in for best if doctors are corrupt as well as lazy. Insurers can draw the line at useless treatments and outright fraud, but there is vast scope for plausible treatment up to that point, given the immense arsenal of modern medicine.

The implication for health care reform is that, if cost control and improved care are its goals, then doctor's (and insurer's) incentives need to be fundmentally changed. Creating new markets by which insurers get squeezed by customer/employer consortia, while also being further regulated to pay out all plausible claims and cover all claimants, will simply not address the problem. Reducing payment rates on a per-procedure basis, which is currently the typical method of cost containment, only motivates doctors to turn around faster- treat patients more rapidly, with less attention, and with more costly procedures. The problem is the piecework nature of medical reimbursement.

How can doctors be motivated to practice with patient outcome and cost as their true guides (in that order)? The article describes the success the Mayo clinic has had by paying doctors salaries and making promotions and raises dependent on teamwork and patient outcomes. This system is oriented towards teamwork and integrated care, counteracting the ever-increasing complexity of modern medicine. Teams are rewarded for their focus on patient well-being, and doctors can take the time needed to consult with each other and meet jointly with patients to coordinate care.

The amazing thing is that this system decreases overall cost, since doctors are not shooting at dart boards in hurried (and self-serving) attempts at diagnosis and treatment, but focus on each care situation with enough dilligence to make better diagnoses, thus achieving more efficient care. This dilligence includes reviews after the fact with colleagues, which is an essential part of medical school training, but then disappears for most doctors in practice today. Mistakes in diagnosis and treatment not only waste resources and time, but often complicate subsequent care and make the patient worse off, including, in some cases, killing them.

Switching to an integrated and re-incentivized system generally would not have much to do with who pays the bills- insurance could still be run by private insurers (constrained to pay on an HMO basis, perhaps) or a single payer system. The key part is to transform doctors from the atomized go-it-alone/treat-it-in-isolation private buccaneers of today into collaborative parts of an integrated system motivated to get each caregiving contact right rather than to make it pay.

Modern medicine, while amazing and definitively better than such alternatives as the old-fashioned shaman and "alternative medicine", still leaves very much to be desired. Understanding of many areas such as metabolic syndromes, mental illness, and cancer is still primitive, and treatments such as radiation, psychotropic drugs, and diet alterations are likewise a swamp of ignorance. Even when a great deal is known in an area of medical science, expecting individual practicing doctors to keep abreast of that knowledge is quite unrealistic.

Doctors are only human and face a medical literature of oceanic dimensions. Being in contact with colleagues for individual cases, while very helpful, will still not be enough. They will need computerized systems to assist with diagnosis and treatment, not only to put the medical literature at their fingertips, but also as expert systems that lead the diagnostic process to better outcomes, based on the constantly changing standards of care and advanced expertise.

Caveat Emptor Medicinae!

Incidental links:

• Typical case of bad diagnosis followed by hugely expensive treatment
• Tom Tomorrow wonders about health care
• Medical expert systems exist, but also have legal issues
• David Brooks, as usual, gets it half-right
• Our incurable superstition
• Excellent review of cap-and-trade

For the love of God

Theologians abuse rhetoric and call it philosophy

As I have become familiar with the writing of one of Dawkins's so-called "fleas", Eric Reitan, (author of a book entitled "Is God a delusion?"), it has become increasingly apparent that, while professionally employed as a philosopher, his methods are more those of a rhetorician wedded to a theology that he defends despite all incoming argument. An apologist, in short (which should have been clear from the title of his blog, "The piety that lies between").

The foundation of Reitan's view is that the spiritual experience (experiencing the transcendent, as he typically puts it) strongly, or even necessarily, implies that there is a transcendent order that exists separately from us that we are somehow "tapping into", or sensing by the modality of prayer or meditation.

His judgements are usually couched in smooth equanimity, such as: "True humility involves, as I have argued, being open to the possibility of a transcendent reality touching and transforming us in ways that offer wisdom unattainable through our ordinary cognitive faculties."

Who wouldn't want to be "open"? Who wouldn't want to be "humble"? Who wouldn't want to be open to "wisdom", let alone "reality"? The problems, however, are many. First is whether there is any sign of a transcendent realm, and second, even if there is such a realm, whether and how we have access to it, perhaps demonstrated by radical and accurate knowledge. On the other side is the competing hypothesis that points out that brain states like meditation are exactly those prone to imagination and subjective transport, and whose complete dissociation from reality is well-known by novelists, artists, and daydreamers of all stripes.

The modern scientific enterprise has blazed trails into actual reality beyond the wildest dreams of ancient philosphers, mystics, and theologians. Only the Indian Hindus and Buddhists, in their infinite rigor, came close to the vast stretches of time involved in the past eons of earth and cosmos. Scales from the great to the infinitesimal have far outstripped and defied transcendentalist description. Whatever conceptions had previously been floated about origins were fanciful tales (twice-told, in the case of Genesis) plucked straight from the imaginations of ancient poets. If they were in touch with transcendence, it was evidently with transcendent feeling, not transcendent reality-touching.

So not only has the vast knowledge of our current scientific corpus not found a transcendent realm, but those supposedly benefiting the most from transcendent wisdom have ended up wildly off the mark, usually spending their newly-enlightened time authorizing patriarchal systems, damning unbelievers, or creating bizarre food prohibitions (not to mention convenient rules about how many extra wives they could have).

Very well, the absence of evidence does not constitute the absence of transcendence, right? Perhaps the realm properly defined as perpetually beyond the reach of skeptical observation yet exists, and we have a special portal to it through the process of day-dreaming. But brain science has nothing but bad news on this front too. Brains are chemical entities, and either take in sensations from the outside world or compute on those sensations internally. Known modes of sensation have been widened substantially by modern cognitive science and neurobiology (body postion sense, several types of touch sensation, etc.), but no transcendent sensory mode has emerged. Indeed, studies of meditators have shown brain areas activated that made eminent sense in terms of reduced outward sensation and focus on imaginative and bodily inner states.

Again, the fruits of access to the transcendent realm also belie its existence, since one would think that the source of such wisdom would grant knowledge of amazing things- the origins of existence, the ground of all being, and the face of god. Yet the various faith traditions have come up with vastly differing elaborations of all three, almost as if they were making it up as they went along based on vague and common feelings, rather than observing some common and transcendent reality through the portholes of prayer.

One has to conclude that a great deal of humility is indeed in order- humility about transcendent claims. While naturalists, scientists, philosophers and people of good will are open to new findings and ways of looking at the world, the particular one of transcendent transport has proven something of a dry hole philosophically speaking, however beneficial it has been for the arts and for practitioner's health and well-being. Philosophers who insist in the teeth of evidence that there is something "veridical" about what is in essence day-dreaming are not only centuries out of date, but doing a serious disservice to their putative profession.

But hey, it could be worse. One of Reitan's colleagues at Oklahoma State University spends his time counting the number of persons within the person of god. One wonders whether OSU would hire a "philosopher" of Islam, or a "philosopher" of Voodoo, just to spice things up. Still, to see someone of Eric Reitan's eloquence and evident dedication to philosophy take the football of reason so far downfield only to decide to stop at the 10 yard line and call it a win remains disturbing.

Altruism through genocide

Did human morals and altruism arise from intergroup warfare?

One of the long-standing problems of evolutionary biology is how to account for altruism as a trait of human nature when the Darwinian mechanism is relentlessly individualistic. To sacrifice one's self for non-relatives is abhorrent to a dyed-in-the-wool Darwinist, and even towards relatives, the calculus yields rather modest sacrifices, rapidly attenuating with distance.

In "The Selfish Gene", Dawkins (following Williams) even proclaims the individual to be an epiphenomenon- the temporary abode of genes which are the true (and semi-immortal) objects of selection, to whom their habitation is a feeding and replicating robot. (One could make the same point about individual nucleotides within genes, to take this analysis to a reductio ad absurdum.) In contrast, Stephen Gould wrote a miasmic defense of multi-level selection that incorporated individuals, groups, and even species and higher groupings as objects of natural selection. But he was slightly ahead of his time, for group selection has only now begun to come back into the evolutionary literature in earnest.

It is to group selection we must turn to investigate the origin of moral traits, since morals (such as altruism) concern how we treat others, and especially how we moderate our selfishness in the service of larger groups. This is not a new story in evolution, since cooperation happens among bacteria, (mutualist associations among methanogens and methane oxidizers come to mind, as do other mixed species biofilms), plants (lichens are a simple example, as are corals), and insects (ants, termites, etc.), among many, many others. Grouping and cooperation has been a winning strategy many times over in the history of life, including the critical innovation of the eukaryotic consortium over its bacterial ancestors.

Darwin himself suggested this rationale in human evolution, proposing selection of groups with "a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid, and defend each other ... would spread and be victorious over other tribes." (Descent of man, quote taken from the paper being reviewed). The problem has always been figuring out in quantitative population genetics terms whether this made any sense, especially how a strategy of altruism could survive against cheating from within the group as well as from gene dilution from outside sources. There are strictly individualistic rationales for some level of cooperation among organisms, but they never rise to the level of the ultimate sacrifice, as exhibited by cells in our body committing suicide rather than turn cancerous, or soldiers offering their lives on the battlefield.

Population genetics revolves around the concept of "fitness", which quantitates differential reproductive success. In common parlance, fitness refers to traits that enhance survival (thicker fur, higher intelligence, disease resistance, etc.), but as used in evolutionary biology, fitness refers to the end effect of trait differences, expressed in the proportion of the individual's genes in the next generation, divided by the proportion in the current generation. Neutrality would be a value of 1, and comparisons are usually expressed as differential fitness, between alleles of a gene, or between whole genomes. The author mentions that a fitness differential (or cost) of -0.03 would drive its occurrence from 90% of the population to 10% in 150 generations, illustrating how small differentials can have large effects over time.

The paper at issue, by Samuel Bowles ("Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of human social behaviors?"), is mathematical, creating a model of small populations with given amounts of gene flow from outside (or, conversely, inbreeding), given amounts of warfare in which groups extinguish other groups and expand accordingly, and given amounts of altruism, expressed as individual costs (death in warfare by warriors) and group benefits (success in warfare). Then the paper draws on various other sources to decide on reasonable bounds for these various values, plugs them in, and comes up with the finding that altruism in these simplified terms could be selected for, even at substantial individual cost.

The equation Bowles comes up with for his model is:

Where c is the individual fitness cost to altruists (set at 0.03, as above), k (kappa) is the probability per generation of being in a conflict with another group, L (lambda) is is the probability of group survival in such a contest, F(ST) is the inbreeding coefficient of the group (higher means more inbred), and n is the group size. The equality represents the boundary case, where increased c, the individual cost of altruism, breaks even versus its group benefits. These benefits are represented by L as arbitrarily adjusted (subscript A) by the presence of altruists, where an extreme value of 3.3 means that a group with 10% more altruists than its competitor suffers half the mortality in a contest. Bowles admits that there is no way to empirically estimate this parameter, and offers a curve of possible values, from 0 (no effect) to a high of 3.

Another key variable is delta, the overall rate of adult violent mortality (somewhat determinable empirically), taken to represent warfare in some proportion. k equals 2*delta, as a simplified estimate, assuming half the combatants win and half lose on average.

Bowles then estimates some semi-empirical values from the ethnographic and archaeological literature. First, for conflict-derived mortality (delta), he settles on 14% as an estimated rate of violent death in prehistoric cultures among all adults (note how vastly higher this is than what we experience in contemporary life). This is transformed to rates of conflict (k) and rates of defeat or victory in such contests (L), adjusted by the putative in-group altruism factor. Group sizes and inbreeding rates have been extensively studied elsewhere, so are not a special focus in this article. Group sizes are averaged at 26, (though an infinite group size is also treated), and several possible inbreeding coefficients (ratio of between-group genetic variance to total variance) are offered in the derived curves (below).

The graph shows solutions to this equation with these various values plugged in. The equation is satisfied and altruism favored for areas above and to the right of each curve.

"Wartime mortality (delta) and the effect of altruism on success in conflicts (L, or lambda A) sufficient for the proliferation of an altruistic trait with individual fitness cost (c)=0.03 for three estimates of the extent of genetic differentiation among groups (F(ST)). Shown are the values of c consistent with Eq. 6 for the estimated F values from (12, 17). The representative values of delta are from Table 2. Populations on the horizontal axis in italics are from the ethnographic sample; the rest are from the archaeological sample." (from Bowles, 2009)

So, granted that this is a quite artificial situation, and that I am no expert in the field, what this paper does is to establish inter-group selection as plausible and quantifiable mechanism in accounting for trait-based altruism in the form of warrior behavior and sacrifice. The empirical boundaries seem plausible, while some of the mathematical simplifications seem less so (in this model, each conflict results in extermination of one group and doubling of the other, for instance. On the other hand, all non-altruists get to survive if their group wins a war, while altruist warriors die with 20% probability). Specifically, the right-ward parts of the curves indicate that given realistic rates of death (delta) from conflict, altruism could be selected for despite substantial costs (c) and modest group benefits (L). There are many other possible rationales for selection of in-group altruism traits, so this setting of warfare should not be seen as exhaustive.

The analysis just codifies and works out in population genetic terms the basic insight that groups are quite evidently objects of selection. As long as there are genetically distinct human groups, and those groups are being killed by other groups, (richly detailed and cheered on in the old testament, in the epics of many other cultures, and recently witnessed in the Balkans, Rawanda, etc.), there is evolutionary selection of groups going on. One focus of this selection would then be for group-related traits, which is to say, suggestibility, altruism, willingness to sacrifice all, and even communal spirituality.

One clear reflection of this in human nature is the enormous importance we put on group membership versus outsider status. The ten commandments never had anything to do with non-Jews. Killing was just fine outside the group, and laws were only relevant inside the group. Indeed, their point was to cement group identity. The same is evident throughout ancient history. Greek cities of antiquity were in perpetual warfare with each other, either killing opponents or enslaving them into a life of (at best) modest reproductive success. Likewise, much of adolescence is devoted to acquiring membership and status relations within ever-shifting groups.

The lesson for today is quite simply one of globalization- the urgent need to unite humans in a single affective group, transcending the national groupings which have been so powerful both in focusing human aspirations for the last few centuries and in providing vehicles for mutual extermination. Thankfully, there are many forces carrying universal messages, from the Olympics and crass Western consumerism, to the amazing computer and cell phone revolutions that allow a global audience to follow video tweets from the streets of Iran.

Are religious messages a positive influence? Yes and no. Religious doctrine and organization has through history been perhaps the most powerful creator of group identity (and thus also enters into the group selection arguments above). The probability that any one form of religion will capture the entire market and thus unify humanity is exceedingly low (however fervently wished-for). The best hope therefore is to mitigate religious particularities, dialing down dogma such that spirituality retains an empathetic, unifying pan-humanistic strength, while the divisiveness of fabulistic and group-identifying doctrinal commitments fades away.

Incidental links

• Bowles gives series of lectures on the above subjects
• Oh, the kitchen computer... we hardly knew ye.
• Overfishing status, and cited article
• More on California's mess
• Communism, RIP
• Psychology and the housing mess

In the garden of Eden

Don't sleep, there are snakes: Life and language in the Amazonian jungle, by Daniel Everett

This is one of those rare books that inspires aching disappointment that it will have to end. It offers daredevil adventures, life and death drama, warm introductions to the most exotic people on earth, data that shatters received scientific paradigms, moving memoir, and deep meditations on the meaning of life and truth.

Daniel Everett has spent his life as a missionary and student of the language of the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN) on the Maici river in the central Amazon. Graduating at the top of his class from the Moody Bible Insitute, he undertook the most arduous possible mission to what were known as the most recalcitrant native people in the world- who had rejected missionary activity for 300 years and counting. Daniel became the first outside person to thoroughly understand the language and later served as translator for the Brazilian government which had no interpreters of its own when it began the process of protecting the tribe's land.

The Pirahã are people of many superlatives, numbering only about 300, strictly hunting and gathering, who do not indulge in abstractions, worry about the future, or regret the past. They trust only first-hand information, disregarding accounts from long ago or far away. They have no gods, creation stories or other myths (though they do see spirits in people and physical objects, and dramatize them in theatrical productions.) They treat children on equal terms as adults, with minimal correction and no corporal punishment. They have virtually no mental illness or problems with adolescent adjustment. The can't count, and Everett spent eight months to no avail trying to teach them that 1+1=2.

They are neither matriarchal nor patriarchal, nor do they prevent divorce and remarriage when one partner wants it. Their severest punishment is ostracism. They change their names from time to time, as the spirit strikes. Their language is tonal and has several distinct modes, including hummed, sung, yelled, and whistled. The male version has one more letter than the female version. Oh, and they are the happiest people on earth.

One of my favorite paragraphs was:

As I became more fluent in Pirahã, I began to harbor a suspicion that the people were keeping their speech simple for my sake. When they spoke to me, the sentences seemed short, with only one verb each. So I decided it would be worth listening more carefully to how they spoke to one another, rather than basing my conclusions on how they spoke to me. My best opportunity, I knew, would come from Báígipóhoái, Xahoábisi's wife. Each morning she talked loudly, beginning around five o'clock, sitting up in the hut in the dark, with Xahoábisi getting the fire going strong, only a few feet from my bedroom. She spoke to the entire village about what she had dreamed. She asked people by name what they were going to do that day. She told men leaving in canoes what kind of fish to catch, where the best places to fish were, how foreigners could be best avoided, and on and on. She was the village crier and gossip rolled into one. She was enjoyable to listen to. There was a certain artistry to her discourse, with her deep voice, the range of intonation in her talk (from very low to very high and back down again), the stylistically different way she pronounced her words- as if breath were going into her lungs and mouth rather than coming out. If ever there was a speaker that was speaking Pirahã for Pirahãs and not for me, the linguist, Báígi was it. Important for me, as I recorded then transcribed her sentences, they were structured identically to the sentences spoken to me by Kóhoi and other teachers- just one verb each.

One might say that this culture has, for complex cultural/linguistic reasons, declined to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and appears to be quite the happier for it.

Incidental links:

• Discussion of California's budget mess
• "God, he's moody"
• Good discussion of the historicity of Jesus, especially on the guest's side

Explaining away

What constitutes an explanation?

Correspondent Eric Reitan makes a provocative point in an interview (ignore the first 5 minutes) and elsewhere, that the naturalistic world view has to explain away many realities (such as religious belief and ideas) in a way that does not do it credit. If we just took our inner experiences more seriously, (not assigning them to "the brain" and related scientific accounts, sometimes further derided as "scientistic"), they would be taken to point to realities as real as the much-vaunted "empirical" realities of modern scientific naturalism.

The most popular form of naturalism today extends a preferential bias to empirical experience. It begins with the assumption that only experience of this sort is veridical (that is, it assumes that only experience of this sort connects the subject to a reality “out there,” tracking it in such a way that one can learn about that reality through the kind of careful examination of the content of the experience that scientists engage in). It then constructs an account of reality on the basis of this kind of experience alone. And when other kinds of experience, were they to be treated as veridical, would require one to posit orders of reality transcending this “naturalistic” account, naturalism explains away these other experiences as epiphenomenal by-products of entities whose reality is endorsed by the naturalist metaphysics (e.g., the brain).

Hence, for example, my immediate sense of my daughter’s intrinsic value is not treated as an experience of something real “out there.” Since there is nothing in the naturalistic account of reality that corresponds to “intrinsic value,” the experience I am having is explained away as nothing but an inner psychological phenomenon, a product of brain activity whose neural subroutines probably evolved because of their role in promoting reproductive fitness.

As Reitan says, naturalism has a working model (though partial) for how emotions like his regard for his daughter arise. They come from specific locations like the amygdala upon the perception of things we are highly attached to- attachment that arises from prior learning and memory. People have been known to assign such value to pet rocks or to blankets. The subjective feeling consists of brain activity, though we do not have an account of exactly how that relation works- what qualia or conscousness really "is", bridging the subjective / objective divide. But much of the circuitry is clear, and the study of oxytocin gives a compelling example of the chemical underpinning of social bonding, helping explain its mechanism and origin.

Is that an explanation? People with strokes and dementia lose this valuing connection to people they have known their whole lives. How can this connection and sense of value then be spoken of as real and "intrinsic", if it is actually ephemeral and mechanistic, however strongly felt? If it is a matter of computational data storage, just as the naturalistic account has it? Whether the naturalistic account is sufficient as an explanation of these emotions or not, it is certainly a necessary component. Even as advanced theists posit that god works "through" evolution, so must she work "through" the brain mechanisms to generate thoughts and emotions, leaving aside the question of whether the assumed external actuation makes any sense or is supported by any evidence.

Explanation is a process of creating a narrative of whatever it is that we wish to "understand", which is to say, creating an abstract model of a phenomenon that serves to simplify its workings and relations, hopefully to the extent that we can mentally project its activities backward and forward in time. That is the whole point of our big brains- to understand (or explain) social relations and other aspects of the world in order to bend them to our needs. To understand an episode of a TV show means that we have knowledge of the setting, the predicament, and the traits of the characters, such that we "get" why they conspire to defraud their friends, or whatever the plot developments happen to be.

Such understanding depends on accurate knowledge of all the components that make up the phenomenon- the causes and effects that surround it, which in turn make up a consistent model we can use to work with the phenomenon. That consistency is the hallmark of accurate models of reality versus other worlds of imagination and dream, since outer reality is both self-consistent and also is the object of our very extensive sensory capacities that give us a leg up in evaluating it (in contrast to our extremely poor internal senses). Thus the critical importance of empiricism when making explanations of "reality".

Do intuition and spritual feeling amount to other forms of "knowing", thus also to understanding and explanation? That is a tricky question. These ideas and feelings are certainly real subjectively. They exist. They are even "empirical experience". They may guide one to a correct model of reality. Our instincts and intuition can be incanny in their accuracy. Yet they can also lead us terribly astray. The sense of value you ascribe to another is a datum about you, but it is quite simply not a datum about the other. Rather it is a projection, which in our social world is all we have to rely on and is extremely important. But that projection is evanescent, and can turn (subjectively) into its opposite with tragic consequences, as dramas are only too ready to illustrate.

There is no way from the content of hunches, dreams, and visions alone to verify their correspondence with reality, even while they may be accompanied by the strongest possible "sense of truth". Intuition is a good bet in areas where it has been honed over evolutionary time- estimating how hard to throw a stone, guessing which plant might be edible, figuring whether to trust someone with your money. Science has shown time and again, however, that the farther a phenomenon from our common experience, the poorer intuition is in deeply understanding it.

Lightning is a simple example, where intuition leads directly to supernatural explanations, while the corrective of empirical science has substituted a more naturalistic one. Supernatural explanations have the virtue of extraordinary simplicity. For the cost of one mystical being or realm, all other mystifying phenomena can be swept under its rug. But they have little to do with reality or the consistency that is reality's hallmark, since they do not rely on detailed knowledge of the phenomena in question, nor on a system of logic in explaining it, other than the ad-hoc and jerry-rigged. Attempts to make such systems more "explanatory" end up with pantheons of gods and reams of myth, like those of ancient Greece, which in the end do more harm than good to the credibility of the enterprise, though they are highly entertaining.

But whyyyyy?

Like children driving a parent crazy, the last refuge of the theist is to say that for all that science tells us, it can not "explain" the really deep questions- why we exist and where our meaning lies. But these questions have been answered, (Darwin and all that ...), just not to the satisfaction of those who believe we have a purpose dictated by a higher being and communicated by way of maddeningly contradictory scriptures. Only if one imagines and assumes that we need a cosmic meaning does the question even arise. Far from being deep, these questions simply restate theism as an assumption rather than a hypothesis.

In the end, it seems cheap rhetoric to disparage detailed naturalistic explanations as "explaining away". If they are wrong, then impeach them on their merits and details. If they are right but not complete, then extend and deepen them. If their perspective is different from your own, then put up your own explanatory narrative to compete on the merits of clarification, unification, and predictive value (and empirical detail), keeping in mind the premises that you are importing and their plausibility. The only improvement to be made on a bad explanation is a better one, since explanations are by definition our mental narratives of all phenomena.

It is particularly wrong-headed to fault science on its explanations of human cognition, just when it is making so much progress. The impulse to tap "transcendent orders of reality" to account for our behavior and thoughts completely ignores the bounds of basic biology and physics, and takes the experience of consciousness as a fundamentally inexplicable and mystical datum, which it is not. Articles just in the last month have tackled the computation of social behavior and the nature of cognitive attention by way of long-range gamma wave coupling across the brain, each of which speak to our regard for our children, among other things. The extraordinary resistance of theists to regarding themselves as computational machines will lead them to grief as this last bastion of mysticism and human special-ness is breached by serious explanations.

• Evolutionary psychology explained.
• Religion explained.

American Taliban

A long-standing campaign of intimidation, terror, and killing ... forgive my anger about it.

Much was made of the "American Taliban"- Silver Spring and Marin county-raised John Walker (now Hamza) Lindh, who in a fit of teenage spiritual seeking wound up in Afghanistan fighting with the Taliban. He joined a fundamentalist movement clothed in religious garb dealing death and oppression to all who came in contact with it. Lindh was a part of the Taliban, but not part of an American Taliban. For that, we need to look at the anti-abortion movement.

Of all the fixations of the right, this is surely the most fixed and relentless. Just as the Taliban sought a re-norming of society in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan, including the definitive oppression of women, adherence to a fantastical interpretation of Islam, all covering a lust for absolute power, fundamentalist Christians seek a renorming of American society, extensive regression in women's rights, schooling in accordance with a fantastical interpretation of the Bible, all covering a lust for absolute power, signaled by their formula that ours is a "Christian nation".

For all its talk of love and life, the right is tellingly served by its media, which massages its erogenous hate-zones with talk radio and FOX news, including numerous incitements to attack abortion providers such as George Tiller. How different is this from the mosques in Europe and elsewhere that stream denunciations of the kaffir, hatred of the societies that host them, and all those opposed to the triumph of Islam? Where democracy demands reasoned debate premised on pragmatic grounds of mutual understanding and forbearance, the right cleaves to authoritarianism and absolutism, yearning for an emotionally secure hierarchy of God in his heaven, (Republican) president in his White House, pastor in his church, and father in his family. Patriarchy is central to the emotional needs of traditionalists, leading to their various fixations- on executive power, on the imagined absolute morals of religion, and on the "proper role" of women.

The quiverfull movement is a fascinating example of this mind-set, going far beyond home-schooling and stocking the basement for the apocalypse, to a complete subjugation of the women to be barefoot and pregnant, to spend their lives raising children, satisfying their men, submitting to his every decision, and "opening" their wombs to the lord's desires, be He celestial or domestic.

But it is with abortion that the right has found its most potent issue- a club with which to bludgeon the larger secular culture. If framed solely around the fetus, it is a heinous act, expecially if one posits that conception conjures an everlasting soul which will meet and reprove its mother in the hereafter (fathers, well, they get off scot free, I believe). But what of the mother's frame- a mother who may not want, or can not have, another child, who had accidental sex, who may want to plan for children farther in the future, who in any case is far more sentient and morally valuable than the fetus she carries? (Or is she? The right might say otherwise.) The extremists insist on seeing the dilemma through one frame only when it suits their political agitation, though when their own daughters get into difficulties, it suddenly becomes a personal choice.

The moral calculus is not black and white. Life is increasingly valuable as it is developed, raised, educated, and conscious. Making a fetish of fetuses that have meager or no consciousness or ability to suffer is to create a peculiar imbalance in the moral order. And the point of this imbalance is as clear here as it is in Afghanistan- to disempower women. Rightists want to treat women as vessels, as fields planted with the male seed, as wombs whose most serious purpose is to carry children.

If the principle were truly to preserve and multiply all human life, it would in the first place be abhorrent, since there is already an excess of human life on the planet, from which we need to find some way to climb down as humanely as possible. Generating 12 billion, 24 billion, and more people as we are on a natural path to do will be catastrophic for humanity and for the biosphere- an unsustainable path that ends in monumental suffering. In the second place, rightists tend to be wildly inconsistent, cheering on killing in the form of death penalties and wars, (and apocalypses targeting the unrighteous), even while imagining themselves adherents of an iron-clad, absolute commandment to not kill.

As with the subtle workings of the muslim hijab, the anti-abortion movement has even enlisted women in their own disempowerment, playing on their compassion and love as a front for asking the state to tell all women that once they are successfully impregnated, they must lose control of their bodies and destinies. Why the boundary must be at the point of conception, and not the production of eggs, or sperm, is somewhat mysterious- they are all potential life, all vulnerable to heartless disregard. Now it turns out that all the cells of our bodies are potential new life, by the miracle of cloning technology. Is it immoral to discard skin cells?

The status of women evokes deep-seated feelings. Indeed if any feelings can be said to be "deeply held", it would be these. The Catholic church makes a fetish of Mary as inert immaculate mother, while denegrating women's capacities for spiritual experience and leadership, indeed banning them from office, and not only opposing abortion, but also opposing condom use, as if breeding like rabbits (or sheep) were the highest lay aspiration.

In the US as elsewhere, opposition to abortion is a stalking horse for misogyny and patriarchy- the devaluation and oppression of women in the guise of saving innocent life, tradition, and nature itself. That is why the killing of George Tiller is not an isolated incident. It is part of an extremist effort to turn back the clock of the modern world using religiously cloaked campaign of intimidation, terror, and killing to send the women of America back into the shadows of hearth and home. The movement may tepidly distance itself from this particular killing and killer, but it has spent decades inciting his actions as it has terrorized and intimidated women, doctors, and politicians who disagree.

The status of women is one of the most important global issues of our day and of the future. It is women who scare the heck out of the Afghan Taliban (and the Saudi monarchy, and the Iranian mullahs, etc.) and will break its back politically if given the chance. It is empowered women who care for their children enough to have few rather than many, advancing both human development and environmental protection, and it is empowered women who bring peace to world politics, putting compassion and sustainability over competitiveness and conflict.

• Tom Tomorrow considers this modern world
• Ellen Goodman on the larger picture of intimidation
• Frank Rich gets it too
• Gosh- perhaps we do have a problem, after all
• But let's not overreact or anything
• What did Tiller do?
• Douthat on compromise
• Phenomenal lecture on religion and the human condition, by Robert Sapolsky
• Fascinating meditation on work and meaning
• And remember to ditch that cable TV