Quality IV: Middle-World

So, if we can throw our minds back to the distant past, to a raging conversation about Diversity that blew across the like a hot wind, and specifically to Scott Walters' posts on the lottery (I and II) and the conversation it sparked, I'd like to continue my thoughts on quality that Scott and August Schulenberg helped sharpen for me, and expand a little further. The point I made about quality back there that I want to bring back to mind before I continue is when I said:

I disagree that relativism reduces every argument to absurdity. I think that in our post-modern times, a false opposition was created: Objectivism versus Absurdity -- Objectivism versus nothing. If there's no objective truth, there's no truth at all.

The other day, a close friend of mine mentioned that he was starting to feel that, philosophically, he was a nihilist. I was concerned, because the idea that there is some sort of meaning in the world is very important to me. I asked him what he meant when he said nihilist (because obviously the term is one thing and the actual meaning of the term is another).

He said to me this: in the end, we all die, so what does it matter?

I told him my personal answer to that question, which is that although in an absolute sense, nothing we do matter, because on the scale of the absolute, everything we do turns to dust. (Those of you to whom there is another version of eternity -- whether it be the persistence of energy in the universe or a seat by the hand of God or a transcendent state of nirvana -- have already parted ways with me, assumption-wise. I beg you to indulge two atheists debate the theology of their atheism, if you will).

This is where my point above comes into play. Even though our lives might mean nothing in the absolute, it might still mean something in the relative.

Suppose I am at a moral cross-roads -- whether or not, for instance, to save a drowning child. In the absolute sense, this decision is meaningless. The child dies, now or later, happy or sad, whether or not I intervene.

But at the scale in which we live our lives, this moral choice has meaning. We live our lives on the minute-to-minute scale, and therefore the idea of a child dying now or dying after having lived many years of life is a huge change in both my life and the life of the child.

To some, it seems as though these two statements are a contradiction, or that one gets to the heart of the matter more than the other. To some, the meaninglessness of the absolute wins--all our attempts at meaning are just the pretensions of molecules. To others, the meaningfulness of the everyday wins, and they project that meaningfulness into the absolute -- creating an absolute whose sense of values are exactly the same as ours.

(This is my personal belief as to why advances in astronomy are treated sometimes warily by religion; man was made in God's image, because God is a concept that only makes sense in a human scale. What does the book of Leviticus have to say about Quantum Mechanics or Black Holes?)

At any rate, I happen to believe that it's okay for things to be desperately important to us and unimportant "in the grand scheme of things," for the same reason I think it's fine for theater to be so deeply important to me when, really, we know that we'll only touch so many people in our lives and who is to say how much it will actually impact our culture.

My ideas on this subject were largely shaped by Richard Dawkins. Not only his book The Selfish Gene, but more importantly, this TED Talk:

Middle-World. The scale in which we live our lives. Everything we do is based on those assumptions. And we have the capacity to understand the other scales, increasingly, but there will be limits. That's fine. At the end of the day, we live our lives here in Middle World.

And within middle-world, there's also differences in context, differences in understanding. I'm not saying we need to accept the limitations of our own little contexts, but at the same time, it's fine to have our own yardsticks and contexts. The degree to which people can share that context is the degree to which people can agree on common standards, can form a common culture. And our ability to bridge contexts and translate across contexts is one of our greatest strengths, and one of our highest goals.

When we talk about quality needing to be right from the perspective of the audience, what we mean is, it needs to at least on some level match the assumptions or understandings of that audience. We want to push boundaries, but we don't have to push all of the boundaries--in fact, if we make our desire to "provoke" or "surprise" too central, we'll lose that common context we share with our audience.

I once worked with a director who shared a very different perspective with me on this. We had a big argument, us the cast and him the director, on how we should relate to our audience. One of the cast-members said, "If we make this choice, it's going to hit the audience in the face with a shovel." To which the director responded, "YES! Exactly!"

This is what is wrong with trying to tear apart all of the structures and understandings a person has -- it just simply doesn't work. You can't communicate with them. In William James' Pragmatism, he discusses how people learn. He says that we slowly accumulate theories, assumptions, understandings, and facts, and cobble them together into a web of ideas. When a new theory or fact comes along that doesn't mesh with what we have, we make the smallest adjustment possible to make all of the facts and theories mesh together again. As an artist, you can massage along their understanding, but if you try to shake apart their web of ideas too hard, the easiest thing for them to do will simply be to dismiss you.

This, I think, is what commenter Kiley meant by saying:

... consumers tend to measure new products, services and ideas against that which they are most familiar with, rather than being open to experimenting with something new or unknown. This is despite how potentially beneficially those ideas or experiences might be to them personally or to their collective community. Under this premise, I believe that some / many consumers initially reject most art, consciously or not, particularly that which is not of the immediately pleasing or pacifying nature. Arts ability to prod, provoke, and challenge thus suffers in my mind when it is not wholly support by means external to the marketplace.

I don't know if I agree with the "wholly" part of that sentiment, but the core of it is what I agree with. When faced with an idea that is outside of their own personal "middle-world" (remember that we are all, literally, at the center of our own experiences), they will be hesitant and need some coaxing to come along. You can entice them outside of their comfort zone, but you can't beat them.

In America, this is made more difficult not only because of the market forces, as Kiley rightly mentioned, but also because of the competitive landscape. Consumers can choose what they entertain themselves -- and even if they decide to choose something intellectually stimulating, they can choose to be intellectually stimulated by people who agree with them.

That's part of quality, or of value, or of resonance -- finding that delicate spot where you entice people to some place they didn't think they wanted to go, showing them the other worlds while still resonating in the one they have to live in. Boy that is difficult.

Diversity IX: What I Learned From Dawkins

What I hope will turn out to be a quick thought (although I think I've said that before and I think I've been wrong):

Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene is a must-read, folks. Dawkins' ability to explain evolution is second to none. I promise you, you may think you understand evolution, but you don't really understand how it works until you read The Selfish Gene. One of the key points, for instance, is an explanation of individual benefit as opposed to gene benefit.

Anyways, the other important idea that Dawkins instilled in me -- I mean, I knew it, but I didn't really know it (it wasn't reified as my teacher Mary Overly would say) -- was an understanding that genetic benefit is extremely contextual. The point where he excels at demonstrating this is when he shows that "enlightened self-interest" tends to win out over "greed" or "altruism" (that's an extremely reductive interpretation of an already extremely reductive example).

I think we need to remember that not only is quality/value extremely contextual, so is diversity.

To explain.

I ran some demographic analysis on my theater company this week. It's very weak and shorthand and everything, but I learned the following:

• Major regions in the United States are about equally represented: North-East, South, Mid-West are just about equal; North-West is under-represented, and California (my home state) is over-represented.
• Regions outside the United States are poorly represented. Obviously the sample size is too small to make too big a judgment, but the island territory of Puerto Rico is more represented than usual. Not that surprising, because one of my fellow leaders in the organization is Puerto Rican and it was her show to direct, cast, and staff. Other than that, it's just Germany and Israel, one each.
• Gender is actually almost over-balanced in favor of women. Only 2 of 9 of our permanent staff are men; there's only one man in a leadership position out of five (that's me). When you include non-permanent members (people who are only involved on a per-show basis) men are better represented, but they don't break 40%.
• Age diversity is a complete failure; with the exception of our upcoming show Hamlet, our age range is firmly 20-23, with an outlier at 19. If you include Hamlet, we've got someone in her seventies and the median moves further up, but it's still mostly recent-graduates. This is partly because Hamlet was trying to recruit more older folks, but found it difficult to get older folks to commit a lot of time to an unpaid show, the first fully professional show of a brand-new company.
• Educational diversity is basically a complete failure, with almost everyone involved in the company coming on board because they have a recent BFA in NYU. Plus side - no one has an MFA!
• In our little NYU world, though, we have diverse approaches to theater; folks whose primary training was based on Grotowski, Strasberg, Mamet, Adler, and Meisner. Of course, that's like saying we have a broad diversity from within Manhattan's boroughs (we don't, actually, we're very solidly a Brooklyn/Lower Manhattan gang).
• Ethnic diversity is also low -- after Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic is the next category, but there's low turnout from Africa or Asia, nothing Native American, and I'm not sure I qualify as Middle-Eastern "enough."

Speaking of nationality versus ethnicity, it is difficult to decide sometimes which box to place some of my companions in. I'm half-North African and half Polish, was born in Israel but grew up in California. Also, being Jewish makes me ethnically distinct from the North African or Polish sides (I once had a daydream about running for office in Greenpoint and using my Polish ancestry as a way to get the foot in the door, but I realized that as soon as I explained that the reason I left Poland was because the Polish tried to slaughter every single person in my family and their community, it would turn out that we don't have as much in common as I thought).

Recently, NYU paid another attempt at diversity -- a play that a teacher was passionate about, set at the moment when the Civil Rights movement and the Women's Rights movement decided to split.

I thought about auditioning. I walked into the office and said, "Can I have the sides for the audition?"

The lady at the desk (who is my friend and who I know quite well) said, "Here are your white man sides."

Good lord. Is that the sum of who I am?

It reminds me of how the "dark-skinned Southern Europeans" used to not be considered white. Certainly, Jews weren't considered white until the second half of this century. And definitely, definitely this isn't a bad thing. And definitely, definitely I wouldn't equate my struggles with anyone who comes from genuinely discriminated communities.

All I'm saying is, if you're going to talk about increasing diversity, it might be important to talk about which diversity you want. For instance, the proposal to increase access to public school to arts education will address income diversity directly -- and racial diversity indirectly -- but it won't do a lick of good for international diversity.

So has my company accomplished diversity? When my professor talked about the low percentage of women in leadership positions, I smile -- it's hard for me to find talented male men to recruit to fit my needs. On the other hand, when John, who is directing our Hamlet, insists that we have to find more older people, and turns down perfectly qualified people my age because he wants to find someone older, I want to blush with shame.

Anyways, the reason I bring up this contextual diversity because I feel like this current generation of theatermakers is more diverse than the previous generation. For instance, calling for 50/50 by 2020 is a goal that I think is very achievable. In fact, if you look at womens' participation in my arts program, men have become quite underrepresented.

On the other hand, I don't see the same shift happening for low-income communities (in which certain ethnic communities are overrepresented). In the economy as a whole, the disparity between rich and poor is increasing, and access to equal arts education has been declining (even though education appears to be slowly improving in general).

Things to think about.

Weak-Sense and Strong-Sense Atheism

In response to a discussion as to whether Atheism is a scientific or a philosophical position, Jerry Coyne says:

I’ll call “weak sense atheism” the position that, I think, most atheists hold. It is this: “There is no convincing evidence for God, so I withhold belief.”...Now I don’t know anyone who is a strong-sense atheist. Even Dawkins, as I recall, is a “70% probability” man — he thinks it pretty improbable that God exists, but adds that he can’t disprove the existence of some kinds of gods. I’m pretty much on board with him. You’d be a fool to say that you know absolutely that there is no being up there at all, including one that doesn’t interfere in the workings of the universe.

So let’s take weak-sense atheism (WSA) as the default stance. In its very weakest, “no-evidence-for-God” sense, WSA is absolutely scientific. After all, what is science but the claim that one needs empirical evidence before accepting something as a reality? When one says, “I see no evidence for a god, and therefore refuse to accept his/her/its reality,” one is saying nothing different from, “I see no evidence for the view that plants have feelings, and therefore I don’t accept the idea that they do.”

Now, I really enjoy this sort of article because it sharpens my thinking about things. Before I read that, I would have said that atheism is a philosophical position. But the distinction between WSA and strong-sense atheism (SSA) is a very good one, and I agree with Coyne that WSA is scientific and SSA is philosophical.

I agree with Coyne to say that you know absolutely that there is no being up there at all (we're looking at you, Hitchens). But that doesn't mean that there aren't SSAs like me out there who believe firmly that there is no being up there.

If you ask me what I believe (and that's the key word in that sentence), I'll say that I believe that there is no God. And I do mean that in a stronger sense than "I have seen no evidence, so I withhold belief."

Recently, the author of Why Does E=MC2 And Why Should I Care? was on the Colbert Report, and he said of Einstein that there's a high likelihood that Einstein was somewhat wrong, somewhere among his theories. He also said that this was okay, because Science was the story of slowly exchanging one model for another, making the models better and better as we go along. This fits nicely in line with the philosopher at the center of my heart, William James. Our world-view is a collection of suppositions based on our experiences and our reasoning faculties.

Do I know absolutely that there is no God? No. Would it be scientific for me to assert so? No. But on a philosophical level, the world-view with which I take a look at the world around me not only doesn't include a God or gods, but doesn't have room for one.

For instance, Coyne invokes the possibility of a "god" who does not interfere with the workings of the universe. From my philosophical perspective, what does "exist" mean if you do not interfere with the workings of the universe? After all, in order to be detected, you have to leave some footprint on the universe (we can't measure existence directly, we only measure existence by effect -- light emitted, heat emitted, spaced occupied). If there's a diffuse "god" that cannot be seen, cannot be felt, and does not affect the world, in what way could he be said to exist?

And then, if you have a god or gods who do affect the world, then not only have I not seen evidence for that (with the brief exception the uncanny choice of music my iPod makes when I put it on shuffle), but there is no room for it in my current philosophical model of the world. If evidence came along, my hope is that I would be open to it, but it would take a severe reconfiguring of the world as I currently see it. I would be, in other words, grievously wrong about my core assumptions of the universe.

This is what makes me a SSA and not a WSA. I recognize that this is a philosophical position and I would never confuse it for science. I would never use it as an opportunity to call other people's philosophical worldviews a dangerous virus threatening to poison our children (I'm looking at you, Dawkins).

And to make my pedantic point that I try to keep making, the more we make these sorts of distinctions, the more fruitful our discussions of the issue become.

A Side-Bar About Ethics, Darwinism, and New Athiesm

I've been trying to focus on arts development and arts communities on this blog now, but I was listening to WNYC's peerless Radiolab, which most recently was basically an interview of Richard Dawkins about Darwinism versus Religion, and Darwinism versus Social Darwinism.

I don't really have the time or inclination to go sorting through all of the arguments-- you should go there yourself and take a listen. I just wanted to say that although Richard Dawkins is just as staunchly anti-religious as Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris, I don't think he's quite the same as them, and he's not in quite the same category of New Atheist.

Whereas Christopher Hitchens will argue (in ironically largely illogical arguments) the very foundations of why Religion is wrong and Science is right, Dawkins has a much more elegant and straightforward--and to me, more accurate--rebuttal of religion. His argument against religion is simply that the need to find purpose in systems is an illusion.

Now, Hitchens goes at great length to make Religion the sum total of human evil, and even Dawkins will overexaggerate the evils of religion, but Dawkins is most powerful when he's simply looking at the reason we irrationally search for reason. By showing that our need for purpose overrides the actual reflection of the universe, he's making a far more powerful case than by labeling it as an attack on freedom, or whatever Hitchens' thrust du jour is.

It reminds me this morning of listening to the other incomparable radio show, This American Life, do a fascinating look at the war between Scientologists and Psychiatrists. It starts with the journalist's sense of revulsion at the DSM-IV, with which he managed to diagnose himself with several "disorders" in a manner of minutes, including poor handwriting, poor mathematical skills, etc. He then examined how difficult it is to prove sanity to the psychiatric profession. Through this, he was being guided by a Scientologist who was eager to make an ally out of him. But then at the end of the episode he sits listening to their propaganda about how psychiatrists have caused 9/11, caused rape and slavery, etc. etc., and they've lost him.

This is the position that Scientologists and New Athiests share: they both are facing an institution with many flaws, but by painting the evil with a wide brush, they lose the ability to criticize impartially.

So that was the first part of the Dawkins interview. The second part was Dawkins' elegant defense of a Post-Darwinian rather than Social Darwinian view of society. Listen to the interview. And to hear to a much older, but also well argued version, read Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics.

That's more than I wanted to say on this topic, but I guess it's been on my mind, having just finished The Selfish Gene and halfway through Oliver Sack's Musicophilia and with both Radiolab and This American Life touching the subject.

Coyne Defends Dawkins; I Dissent

Jeff Coyne on the attempt to reconcile science and religion.

Andrew Sullivan picks Coyne's the money quote:

[S]ome theologians with a deistic bent seem to think that they speak for all the faithful. These were the critics who denounced Dawkins and his colleagues for not grappling with every subtle theological argument for the existence of God, for not steeping themselves in the complex history of theology. Dawkins in particular was attacked for writing The God Delusion as a "middlebrow" book. But that misses the point. He did indeed produce a middlebrow book, but precisely because he was discussing religion as it is lived and practiced by real people. The reason that many liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.

Jeff Coyne is correct in stating that Richard Dawkins and other New Athiests write "middle-brow" books because of the common, uncultured religion (if you see Bill Maher's movie Religulous you'll see what sort of religious people are really the target). But those who argue on behalf of a more cultured, philosophical, "high-brow" religion are not arguing in vain. You see, if Dawkins was targeting only fundamentalists, or only the ignorant religious, or only a specific segment of religion, then Coyne's objection would be an adequate defense.

But in my readings of Dawkins (this is actually more true of Hitchens but still seems true of Dawkins) it seems to me that for Dawkins, religion is inherently destructive; that religion is always delusional, that it always fosters hatred and dischord. And if they are trying to argue that all religion is damaging, hateful, etc., then they will have to come to grips with the fact that there are some very smart, reasoned, subtle, liberal traditions of religion as well. Otherwise, what Dawkins is arguing against when he targets religion and religious education is not stupidity, closemindedness, and bigotry inherent in religion, but stupidity, closemindedness, and bigotry that is attached to religion by the human beings who interpret it. The same stupidity, closemindedness, and bigotry that can manifest itself in nationalism (again: Obama's nationalism is not the same as Bush's nationalism) or even economic theory (as Communism/Capitalism proved).

Either Dawkins is targeting religion as a whole, and therefore needs to defend his argument against the intellectual elite of religion, or else he is only targeting ignorant religion, and therefore the burden of proof lies on him to prove that it is religion, and not ignorance.

(I'll quote it again, from Albert Camus:)

The narrator is inclined to think that by attributing overimportance to the praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worse side of human nature. For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy and the general rule. The narrator does not share this view. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clearsightedness.

Genes, Memes, And Temes: Reams of Teeming Beings Seemingly Teaming To Dream

The TED conference is one of my favorite places in the world. I love hearing ideas, hearing what people are thinking of, and seeing new fields of study in their infancy. One of these new fields is Mimetics, which is formed around the concept that brilliant biologist Richard Dawkins created.: memes. Memes, from the Greek word mimesis or imitation, (also related to the root mneme, from memory), are anything that can be imitated. Typically, we think of memes in the context of ideas or social habits (Natural Selection is a meme, as is this blog), but they can be as banal as "You can't HANDLE the truth!" or the Numa Numa dance meme.

The defining aspects of memes are two-fold: they spread through carriers like viruses, and they are subject to Natural Selection. Dawkins first created them as a model for genes, demonstrating that genes are not the only codings of information that Natural Selection can describe.

My interest with memes is that I am interested in culture; if culture is, as I've said before, the sum total of all the creative and spoken and intellectual and social creativity of a culture, than in a way, culture is entirely composed of memes. You could say that the sum total of all the memes in a given set of people is culture. I'm not sure that's the only definition, but if I were a mimeticist (which I am not, bear in mind) I'd probably go with that.

So I was interested to see Susan Blackmore's talk at TED--I was not previously familiar with her, but the title "Memes and Temes" caught my attention. Early on, I suppose, it became clear to me that my opinions about memes (although founded on the same beliefs as hers) have diverged with hers over several points.

• The first point is which she made which I must strongly disagree with is one she made rather offhand, and at first I thought I would leave it out, but having thought about it I realized it was very important. Blackmore at one point makes reference to the fact that only human beings can support memes. I might have agreed with her, but two important references.
  
  The first is When Elephants Weep, an excellent book by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson Susan McCarthy. The point of this book is not to catalogue all of the range of emotions of all of the animals, but if you read it all the way through you are convinced entirely that animals have, at the very least, a complexity of emotional intelligence beyond what we normally give them. You see, the book posits that humans assume that only humans are intelligent, and this causes them to not recognize the differing sorts of intelligences (emotional being the focus of the book) that creatures have. The more specific arguments in the book are hit and miss, but to the degree that animals are smarter and feel more than we usually give them credit, the book argues its point excellently.
  
  The second is another TED talk, given by Joe Klein. Klein, thanks to a cocktail party wager, spent a long period of time researching crows, with the eventual aim of creating a vending machine that crows could be trained to use. The point he was making is that crows are far more intelligent than we believed, and thus we could try to forge a new relationship with them, a more beneficial one.
  
  What these two sources have in common is a belief that not only are animals smarter than we give them credit, they also deserve to be treated in a manner more equal to us. Inserting the meme, as it were, that there is no huge chasm between mankind and animals, but rather that we can come into a new cultural relationship with animals.
  
  Indeed, if it is true that animals have memes--which Joe Klein reveals when he discusses the spread of crows teaching one another to use cars to break open nuts--then that means that animals too have culture (certain tribes of chimpanzees have different levels of tool use, as I understand it). The relationship between two cultures is very difficult than the relationship between one culture and a large number of automata.
  
  
• The second point in which Blackmore lost me is in her new definition of temes. I understand, to a certain degree, that technology develops like verbal or social ideas--but I have no idea why she wants to treat them separately, and why she says that now is the point at which temes are becoming part of our society. When did we cross the "third threshhold" into teme-creating parts of culture? Was it the Industrial Revolution? The invention of the computer? Was it robotics? Or the first use of tools? (which would suggest that crows and chimpanzees are perhaps at the third threshhold already).
  
  
• The third point I disagree with is her contention that each of the three threshholds has a potential to destroy the race. Any mutation has the potential to destroy its bearer. But the cataclysmic turning point in history that she seems to foresee smells of hyperbole and sensationalism.
  
  
• The last point with which she and I don't see eye to eye is her fork-in-the-road for technology: mankind integrating into technology and disappearing, or mankind being replaced by more-competitive temes which don't care about the planet or about us.

The deeper problem that seems to me to unite these problems is the tendency of certain thinkers to try to fit new ideas into pre-constructed narratives. After all, the last point has been the subject of science-fiction writers for many decades now: if you combine the two choices you get The Matrix. But what her entire premise leaves out is mankind's self-consciousness.

I was looking down at the comments for the video and I saw, quite at random, this comment:

Genes don’t have any way of caring about whether they survive or not, and most species don’t have any way of knowing or caring if their species survives or not. The only way we human beings are able to care about our survival is because we host memes that identify us as human beings, as members of biological families, social groups, races, etc.

What memes are you host to? If all races disappeared as distinguishable entities and we all became a homogeneous latte color, would you care, and if so, why? How did you come to harbor a meme that says race is important?

If world culture became homogenized as well, so that we all shared the same language, values, and technology, would you be sad? Why?

If all nations became subsumed under some super union so that national boundaries were no more than administrative districts, would you lament the loss of the USA, France, Japan, etc.?

Suppose we lost the meme that says it’s important for human beings to survive, and instead of identifying with a particular instance of biological evolution--human beings--we became identified with evolution itself in whatever form it takes: animal, vegetable, or mineral. If computers become more intelligent than we are, and self-reflective, and capable of propagating themselves more efficiently than we can, would you lament that we were being replaced by products of evolution?.

The poster, Norman Bearrentine, is making a point that the desire for human survival is, in itself, a meme. And in fact, Bearrentine is pointing to something important: we, as humans, have a self-consciousness that gives us choice.

This brings me to the major point of divergence between Blackmore and myself. The idea behind CultureFuture is that we have the ability to control our own fate by exercising self-consciousness and criticism to guide ourselves forward. It is not natural selection: it is human selection. We, as human beings, have proven the ability to stop natural selection by saving the lives of people who would otherwise die. And we, as human beings, have the ability to look for ways to cooperate rather than compete. And we, as human beings, have the ability to make choices about our future.

Blackmore, in her discussion about the third threshhold possibly killing us all, is making an oblique reference to global climate change. But the very idea that we are discussing global climate change and alternative sources of fuel means that we as a race are invested in changing our fate. One of the most misleading phrases in science or statistics is "if current trends continue." Current trends rarely continue, and they especially don't continue if we see a trend we don't like and choose to make it not continue. We can do that.

It's true: eventually there will be implants. And there will be drugs available that will make people stay up all night without sleeping. But so long as there are hollistic doctors, and the Amish, and luddites, and people who don't trust surgeries, and government regulators, and a world-wide conversation on the effects of our actions, we have our hands on the steering wheel. The only challenge is to get us all to make the right choice.

Blackmore, in the outset, tells us that memes and temes and genes can't "want" and don't "care." But this is missing the point: we humans care. And since we humans generate memes, and temes, and genes, we can learn how to manipulate them to our ends. Sometimes these ends will be destructive--propaganda is the science of using memes to manipulate populations, for instance--but my faith is to believe that we eventually will make the right choices, and will bumble our way towards a tomorrow that is just so slightly better than today. Not through natural selection, but through human selection.



EDIT: [removed the video due to its irritating habit of playing from the get-go. find it at ted.com]

Culture Future II: Absolutism versus Reducible Complexity

It is easy to believe that we cannot change culture, because it is so large. So we throw our hands up and accept it as fate. But it doesn't have to be.

When I wrote this in the first post, I was speaking mainly of our contemporary American culture. In a way, Americans are still caught in the ancient debate of free will versus predestination. Although for some it is still in the old frame of God versus human free will, there are other outlets for that way of thinking. One place where I see this schism developing, which is a very difficult place to disentangle it, is in the realm of health (mental and physical). Am I the way I am because I made certain choices? Were those choices pre-determined by a combination of my genetic code and my upbringing?

This debate is crucial today because the two different views have two different solutions. If our depression (as a for instance) is caused by a plethora of causes beyond our control--our family, our genetic predisposition--then the best solutions will be medical ones (Prozac or Zoloft or some new experimental treatment). But if it is our choices which cause our depression, then it is our choices which will liberate us from it.

Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable – and we believe they can do it again.

John F. Kennedy said that. He was not speaking in the realm of health, but in the realm of culture. He was speaking of American politics, of the direction which America wanted to take, of its growing fear in the face of the Soviet Union.

Our culture is man-made, therefore it can be shaped by man. Although, as I said before, we think we cannot change culture because it is so large, Man can be as big as he wants. There is both good and bad in that.

The discovery that man can be scientifically manipulated, and that governments can turn large masses this way or that as they choose, is one of the causes of our misfortunes.

That statement was written twenty years before Kennedy's speech; it was Bertrand Russell in an essay about religion entitled An Outline Of Intellectual Rubbish. 'Our misfortunes,' which he refers to, is the scourge of Nazism, which at the time was even more dangerous than the Soviet Union of Kennedy's day, purely by virtue of the fact that the Soviet Union was as wary of the United States as we were of them.

Russell is correct that scientific manipulation of societies was the well-spring of Nazism, and of the Soviet Union. It is, of course, also the well-spring of American democracy; but Russell is right to highlight the dangers of mass manipulation. Sociology and communication, for instance, are combined to create propaganda. What went wrong for Nazis and for the Soviets was not that culture cannot be controlled--it is that culture cannot be rigidly controlled.

The current model I enjoy for examining culture is that of the conversation. A good conversation requires two people who are interested in the exchange of thoughts and/or feelings. "Interested" means that they are ready to listen; "the exchange" means that they are ready to speak.

The Nazi Party and the Bolsheviks had something to say, clearly--this is clear by how much they wrote at the time. It was very fashionable for them to write tracts and to make speeches. But they were not willing to respond, not willing to interact with the rest of culture as a whole. They wished to substitute Nazi culture for German culture, to substitute Bolshevik culture for Russian culture, and thus, were not ready to listen. If writing tracts and making speeches shows how willing to speak, then the brutal censorship of tracts and speeches (and those who made them) shows how unwilling to speak they are.

In point of fact, this shows that they had failed the 'scientific approach' to culture that many have ascribed to them. They started with the hypothesis of culture, and they performed the experiment. But by refusing to acknowledge the data which returned, and by refusing to engage in active conversation with other cultures, they were stifling that very same intellectual approach to changing society that first led them to embark. After all, Karl Marx was able to write his tracts on the economy because he was a professor at an English university, able to write what he pleased without fear.

Why were they unable to be in conversation? Because they were absolutists. They dreamed of a utopia, but it was an absolutist utopia. There was no room for non-communism in the Communist ideal; the bourgeois had to be brutally crushed. There was no room for the "impure" in the eugenics of Nazis; the impure had to be brutally crushed. It is specifically in the utopian, absolutist execution of these ideals that they were unable to be in conversation with other cultures. Nothing in the universe is perfect, so an ethos which calls for the destruction of the imperfect is by definition destructive; in fact, it targets everything in the universe. In fact, if these absolutist movements could look at themselves with objective eyes, they'd be forced to destroy themselves. How many of the leading Nazis were genetically pure? How many of the Communist leaders were truly equals to the rest of their society?

In The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross wonders why intellectuals who formed the artistic elite in Vienna found themselves supporting Nazism during its rise. As an answer, he says,

The cultish fanaticism of modern art turns out to be unrelated to the politics of fascism: both attempt to remake the world in utopian forms.

In fact, it is the cultish absolutism of certain modern artists; many of these same artists purported to hate the support of the people because the people were inferior. Take, for instance, Schoenberg:

If it is Art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.

This sort of bloody-minded absolute extremism is underpinned on a hatred of the imperfect. It is unfortunate, for instance, that this absolutism can sometimes arise from religion. I do not believe, like many of the New Athiests and their intellectual forebears, that everything religion touches is evil. But I do agree that absolutism is in religion is perverse and destructive. If, as some purport, we are all touched by sin and born in sin, and God hates sin, then how can God not hate everything?

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

Jonathan Edwards, one of the earlier evangelicals in this country, spoke that in his sermon "Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God." Through the hyperbole of the text, it is clear to see that once you accept the philosophy of absolutism, everything which is not absolute is absolutely wrong; the world is black and white--and in fact, mostly black.

It has often been said of Islam that it is actually one of the most respectful religions, and that today's fundamentalists are perverting the Koran. But the Koran does have passages within it which support today's fundamentalists, just as the Bible supports today's fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Marxists can use the Manifesto to slaughter Capitalists if they so choose. Each of these ideas, when taken absolutely, are incompatible with other cultures--obviously, because absolute cultures refuse to be in conversation with other cultures.

But the hope for the world is not, as Richard Dawkins or George W. Bush might think, to set up an opposite absolutism and let them battle to the death ("Democracy" versus totalitarianism; Hitchens' anti-theism versus theism, etc.), but rather to create the forum for conversation which refuses to tolerate violence and moderates the conversation as it precedes.

The clear example for this is in the creation of the US Constitution. Reading the Federalist papers by Madison and Hamilton reveal something clear about the Constitution: although the Constitution was founded on certain ideals, the machinery of the Constitution was built not for a utopian, ideal community, but rather for the everyday. Rather than hoping that America would never elect a cruel dictator or greedy, self-serving beaurocrats, the machinery was put into place to keep such people in check. This is the center of the concepts of checks and balances. The machinery continues to need tinkering, especially considering the abuses which the Constitution has weathered over the past eight years, but the concept is still sound.

We still have a culture which allows for conversation, although the state of our conversation is still poor. We have a culture which allows for change. Even cultures which attempt to stifle change and innovation find themselves prey to the human spirit. Consider Vaclav Havel, writing in the frozen Czechoslovakia during the oppression of the Cold War.

I am unwilling to believe that this whole civilization is no moer than a blind alley of history and a fatal error of the "human spirit."

But he did not sit and wait for things to happen; nor did he preach some extremist anti-Communist revolution. Rather, he preached the idea of "living in truth," describing in his seminal essay "Power of the Powerless" of a green-grocer who does simply nothing more than stop following the ridiculous laws of the Communist regime. He is not attacking the problem at the center, not trying to topple a powerful and huge regime alone, but rather: he is eroding the ideological and absolutist foundation of the regime. The more people simply stop cooperating, the weaker the regime was. And in fact, that is how the Soviet Union collapsed: not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The problem of "solving" culture is a problem of reducible complexity. It is impossible to change all of culture overnight; that path leads to absolutism. The Soviet Union tried, in one act of revolution, to cure every problem of the Industrial Revolution which had been brewing for a full century, and further to cure every problem of the feudal, monarchal Russia which had been brewing for centuries before that.

At the same time, the Western world was addressing the problems one by one. Today, we have ensured a far higher quality of life than the Soviet Union had, and far higher than the time of the Industrial Revolution. We solved each problem slowly, over the course of the 20th Century. There was a brief period, at the beginning of the Soviet Experiment and during the Great Depression, when actually there was a higher quality of life in the Soviet Union. But because of the absolute and rigid ideology that had created it, the Soviet Union never advanced; in fact, it regressed.

Take for instance, Richard Foreman:

If you’re a big person, carrying your big, heavy, important projects and concerns with you into the theater, when you confront my play it will appear to be an amorphous cloud of molecular particles, circulating in a seemingly random pattern, like Brownian motion. Perceiving it like that, the big person that you are measures the play against the heavy projects you carry around in your head, and you think: ... I want help in resolving such weighty problems, and all this play proposes is an amorphous cloud of circulating molecules, incapable of budging those big solid shapes that fill my life. What I need from a play is a shape bigger and heavier than my own in order to reorganize my own massive shapes.

My art proposes, however, that by shifting your attention to the scale on which atomic events occur...you discover that your own solid shapes are themselves but clouds of molecules in circulation.

Richard Foreman is talking about tackling personal problems on a quantum scale; the model which he's using (metaphorical) is of reducible complexity.

Our society is having trouble doing this. We expect our President to "fix" the education system. But the problems in the education system today are myriad; problems of race, economics, educational theory, and cultural value of education are among many problems which face the education system. Others, seeing the complexity in their face, would prefer to withdraw; give everyone who can the opportunity to flee to private education.

Foreign policy is the same; on the one side, President Bush wishes to attack every problem with an Insta-Solution: democracy. Iran, Russia, North Korea, Iraq, Palestine--all of these problems could theoretically be solved by sweeping aside their leadership, and instituting 'democracy.' This ignores their complex histories, the billions of individual forces which are the swirling and pushing in every different directions. Others, currently led by Ron Paul, have a different approach: withdrawing from the foreign policy sphere. While a movement toward disengagement might be appropriate at the moment, isolationism is not how America can use its considerable position in the world to make it better--for itself as well as for everyone else.

What American politicians lack is the care, attention, and complex conversation with the rest of the world which leads to smart foreign policy. When we discuss foreign policy, we don't reduce the problem; we reduce our approach to it. We approach it in reductive terms; that is to say, reductionist. And reductionist thinking is absolute thinking because what reductionism and absolutism share is an inability to deal with complexity. Complexity is caused by different forces in different directions. Iraq is not just Sunni versus Shiite.

If we attempt to solve the problems facing our culture by reducing complexity into simplicity, and attempting to solve those 'simple' problems with absolute principles, we will fail. If we lump problems together into massive, fear-inducing entities (the War on Terror; the War on Poverty; the War on Drugs), then we will fail. But if we, as a community, break apart these problems into small, workable chunks, then each of us can play a part in solving these problems. We can only solve these many particles of problems if we're in conversation about these problems, but it will no longer be like climbing Darwin's Mount improbable.

Politics: Religious Conversation

In my last two posts, I've written a little about how politicians, journalists, and artists should bring themselves into conversation with the greater community as a whole. In the examples of Sen. Rick Santorum (in that appearance), Jon Stewart, and John Cage, I found positive examples of this conversation occurring. Unfortunately, for my next examination of conversations with culture, I'm going to levy some criticism toward a man who is actually far smarter than me, and who is not undeserving of respect, to illustrate what happens when conversation is not pursued constructively.

There are many, many, many examples of a breakdown in religious conversation in the United States, because of the dislike of moderate religious figures to speak publicly about religion. The moderate position is that religion is a personal belief, and other than speaking to a small congregation of like-minded believers, is not best suited for large public discussion.

Although I can agree with this view to a certain extent, what that creates is a religious power vacuum, where those who are looking for a religious leader find those who are most vocal: those leaders, on a overpowering national scale, can be extremely negative. Fred Phelps, Louis Farrakand, Pat Robertson, Jeremiah Wright, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Ted Haggard, etc.; these names are familiar to us because they typically come with extravagant, hate-filled messages of religion attached, whether it be Phelps protesting at Iraq War veterans' funerals because the Iraq War is a punishment for homosexuality or Jeremiah Wright's invective that 9/11 is a punishment for America's hubris.

I think most of us would prefer moderate religious leaders, who are passionate in their beliefs but holding moderate beliefs, would be preferable: religious leaders cut from the mold of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose religious beliefs inspired him to take on social problems in a manner that was mostly affirming and positive. Of course, sometimes that leadership comes from a non-religious direction; but specifically in religion I believe there need to be leaders who step forward to show what a compassionate, moderate religion would look like, who could bring the flocks of people readily in.

But my post is not about this religious phenomenon: it's about the mirror effect of that phenomenon. This phenomenon is currently happening in atheism, a movement known as New Athiesm. New Athiesm makes Athiesm aggressive and evangelical in the way that neoconservativism makes conservatism aggressive and evangelical. When one asks for prominent athiests, one is led to think of people for whom athiesm is prominent: people who make athiesm into a strong part of their lives.

This is the position of a select few scientists in the current wave of thinking who believe that it is not enough to not believe in God; the mission of an athiest is to spread his teachings (or lack thereof) to as many religious folk as possible. And I feel myself in a privileged position to criticize this New Athiest movement (led by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris): I myself am an Athiest, and I have always been an Athiest and will, likely, always be an Athiest. But this New Athiesm is not serving the greater culture--a culture which has both athiests and religious folk, and agnosts and spiritualists.

To take an example of this effect, I decided to take the most concise work on the subject that I felt still represented a whole argument: the introduction to The Portable Athiest which was written by Christopher Hitchens. Perhaps this is disingenuous, and I should have devoted the time to read God is Not Great or The God Delusion or Letters To A Christian Nation before taking this up, but I have seen all three of the authors speak many times and I have a very strong belief that their conversation is a destructive conversation, rather than being progressive it merely embitters and divides.

Take:

It seems to me that there is what the poet Shelley once called the necessity of athiesm. One cannot avoid taking a position. Either one attributes it to a divine design. (You can tell a lot about friend or foe, depending on how he or she answers this inescapable question, and on how he or she faces its implications.)

Or:

Arguments for athiesm can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of god and those that demonstrate the ill effects of religion.

Or my favorite:

On the part of civilized people,...the main enemy we face is "faith-based"

The underpinning of both of those passages can be simply states as thus: "you are either with us or against us." This is an extremely divisive sentiment to be held; it pushes aside all of those who disagree with you and closes the door on any sort of a compromise. This isn't to say that there is some sort of a middle ground between believing in a spirit other than existence and not believing in it. People shouldn't compromise their beliefs. But at the same time, in terms of how our culture operates, it needs to have space for both sides to air their views and coexist; in that way, the bad parts of religion can be reformed out and the good parts can be preserved.

Of course, this would overshoot Hitchen's belief about religion: that it is wholly a negative force and has no potential for good.

My own response has been to issue a challenge: name me an ethical statement made or performed by a believer that could not have been performed by a non-believer. As yet, I have no takers. (Whereas, oddly enough, if you ask an audience to name a wicked statement or action directly attributable to religious faith, nobody has any difficulty in finding an example.)

This disingenuous challenge is moot: you cannot prove or disprove anyone's motives. It is possible to be kind because of religion; it is possible to be kind in spite of religion; it is possible to be kind irrespective of religion. And the same moves in the opposite direction. For instance, if I were to say that Mother Theresa did her good deeds because of her religion, he would probably counter with an example of an atheist who did the same thing because of religion, and say that therefore people don't need religion because they can do good things anyways. And then, on the other hand, if he were to say that the Inquisition could have only happened in an environment of religion, I might counter with Stalin's gulags.

This whole argument is moot, because we cannot tell the difference between coincidence and causality. Most of the major non-violence movements have been religious; holy wars are always religious. Most of the major abolitionist movement have been religious; most people who drink are religious. Hitchens sees violence as endemic to mankind. But he also admits that religion is endemic to mankind. So is it a chain (mankind is religious, religion is violent) or is it a parallel statement (mankind is religious, mankind is violent)?

The argument is also moot because, from the tone of Hitchens' work, we can presume that he is going to shoehorn any of his observations into his beliefs about religion. His work is dripping with contempt for religion and the religious:

What nonsense this is.

If religion is innate in us, then so is our doubt of it and our contempt for our own weakness.

The bare and narrow and constipated and fearful world of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin and Osama bin Laden

Children (who suffer worse at the hands of the faithful than any other group)

Logic-chopping polemicist

Considering the polemic involved in this text, and the ways in which his correspondence/causality flaw as well as other logical blunders pervade the text, it is ironic that he levy that charge in particular. But at any rate, the question of the book is not, "How can we make religion better?" or "How can we minimize the negative effects of religion," it is, "How can we force people to get over their ridiculous superstition?"

This is not the way that adults talk about grown-up issues, I hope. If I invite Christopher Hitchens over to dinner I won't call him a logic-chopping polemicist, even if I think he chops logic and employs polemic. Frankly, I doubt Christopher Hitchens would like to come over to dinner with me, because I refuse to join his war against religion. I know plenty of people who take positive ammunition from their faith and make the world a better place in spite of or parallel to or because of their faith.