Good Reason

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Understanding conservatives: how like a Democrat.

27 April 2007 / / 2 Comments

I have this good friend from childhood who is now a Republican. I was almost as dismayed as he must have been when he found out I was an atheist. I mean, I like him a lot and he’s a great guy, but a Republican? What could have made him align with the most corrupt, incompetant, and dishonest American political movement in living memory?

Today I’m grappling with why people are political conservatives, especially in the current environment. I went through the ‘Stern Father’ theory — that Bush reminds them of their pushy, distant male authority figure. Then I tried out the ‘Obligatory Enemy’ theory, and the ‘Parents Let Them Cry’ theory, followed by the ‘Locked in a Treehouse with Too Little Air in It’ theory. None really explained the phenomenon in a meaningful way. At the moment I’m working off a really unhelpful theory called the ‘Bad Person Hypothesis’. Seriously, what else could turn someone into the trigger-happy, paranoid, finger-pointing, xenophobic, snotty ball of aggression that characterises the right-wing blogospherian? Except that they’re bad people. Like it’s only been a week since a major gun incident, and already Dinesh D’Souza has lambasted atheists, and Newt Gingrich has blamed liberalism. It’s like I’ve been attacked twice, and I haven’t even shot anyone. It’s enough to make you want to… well, you can imagine.

On better days, I decide that conservatives are the way they are because they’re at the mercy of emotions they cannot control nor understand. And if I had to pick one emotion that motivates them, I’d say fear. Conservatives are fearful. Look at how they respond to the fear button, which gets pressed at every opportunity. Out pops the template: “What are you going to do when they come for your…” and then you can fill the space with the noun du jour: guns? or your women? Your hetero marriage. Or your bibles, or your jobs. Your money or your fetus.

Fortunately, fine minds have been working on the psychological profile of the American conservative, and their results appear in this article from 2003: “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition”. Here are some findings from the abstract, and note the numbers:

A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r .50); system instability (.47); dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (–.32); uncertainty tolerance (–.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (–.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (–.09).

Ouch.

The paper helps to answer one of the trickiest questions of electoral behaviour: why do the poorest Americans overwhelmingly vote Republican, even though they are hurt most by its policies?

[M]any of the theories we integrate suggest that motives to overcome fear, threat, and uncertainty may be associated with increased conservatism, and some of these motives should be more pronounced among members of disadvantaged and low-status groups. As a result, the disadvantaged might embrace right-wing ideologies under some circumstances to reduce fear, anxiety, dissonance, uncertainty, or instability, whereas the advantaged might gravitate toward conservatism for reasons of self-interest or social dominance.

Isn’t that something? So if I were a Machiavellian bastard, I’d realise that the more uncertain I could make the lives of the poor, the more I could count on their support. Until they figured it out. Which they never will if I can keep hitting the fear buttons. Fnord! FNORD!

The rest of the paper is dotted with interesting insights. Worth a read, despite the length. I’d be interested in using this thread as a book-club type discussion. Anyone find anything else interesting?

The week in Religion

25 April 2007 / / 7 Comments

The Catholic doctrine of limbo looks set to evaporate.

Pope Benedict XVI has reversed centuries of traditional Roman Catholic teaching on limbo, approving a Vatican report released Friday that says there were “serious” grounds to hope that children who die without being baptized can go to heaven.

This says volumes about science and religion, and the kind of evidence that people are trained to accept. When a scientist says there are ‘serious grounds’ to accept an idea, it means there’s some kind of evidence that other people can examine. When a religious leader says there are ‘serious grounds’ to accept an idea, it means ‘he thinks so’.

But here’s the problem: either people need to get baptised, or they don’t. If they do, then unbaptised babies and heathens are getting shut out of heaven. If these people can somehow get in without baptism, then there can be no entry requirements to get into heaven, not even being Catholic.

I just hope the parents of Edgar Mortara would be posthumously pleased that the doctrine that sanctioned their child’s kidnapping is now considered peripheral.

Veterans can now have a Wiccan symbol on their headstone.

Wicca is silly, but no more than other religions. I hate that it pretends to be older than it is, but at least it accidentally promotes a good idea once in a while. And that the US military wouldn’t (but now does) allow their silly symbol to be on headstones like all the other silly religious symbols was just… silly.

But is the Wiccan symbol the silliest? Of course not. That would be either the Atheist symbol or the Happy Humanist symbol. But you can see them all and decide for yourself.

Religion is good for kids, says Fox News

Unfortunately, Fox News is bad for kids. So are poorly-designed studies.

John Bartkowski, a Mississippi State University sociologist and his colleagues asked the parents and teachers of more than 16,000 kids, most of them first-graders, to rate how much self control they believed the kids had, how often they exhibited poor or unhappy behavior and how well they respected and worked with their peers.

Perhaps that should read: Religious parents underestimate the behavioural problems of their children.

God: Did I miss anything?

18 April 2007 / / 3 Comments

Though I’m not really following the Virginia Tech shooting tragedy, bits of it are leaking into the Australian news. I’m sort of absorbing it from an Australian perspective. I’m guessing that this event will not reignite the gun debate in America in any long term way — the power of the NRA and the reluctance of the American left has ensured the gun debate’s been canned for the next twenty years, no matter how many people get shot. I watch and wonder if America will ever learn to stop this.

I don’t know what to do about gun violence. Crazy people get guns. It even happened in Australia once. Once. But contrast that to the grim regularity with which these stories come out in the USA. The theme of ‘gun rampage/closed-room slaughter/suicide’ has become a script, an American story that grows with each retelling.

As a believer, I used to respond to the problem of evil by explaining that God refused to curtail our agency. If we decided to kill a hundred people, it was allowed so that we’d be justly judged by our actions in the hereafter. It didn’t occur to me that God was a being that could see the future and already knew what we were going to do.

Now that explanation seems unsatisfactory. I imagine what kinds of events would take place if there were no supreme intervening being, and it looks like… well, pretty much like what’s going on right now.

Still, this doesn’t stop a dissembling ferret like Dinesh D’Souza, whose blog features the most invitingly punchable face in all conservativedom, from wondering how athiests deal with the problem of evil.

Where Is Atheism When Bad Things Happen?

Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine mercy and spiritual healing.

Notice something interesting about horrible tragedies in progress? God is nowhere to be found. Sure, people talk about God afterwards. Talk and talk and talk.

What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho’s shooting of all those people can be understood in this way–molecules acting upon molecules.

If this is the best that modern science has to offer us, I think we need something more than modern science.

Fine. What has he got to offer? A magical man who finds car keys and parking spots, but is eternally late for real emergencies. An absent father. A failed superhero.

So D’Souza finds science less comforting than stories about heaven. Fair enough. It probably is in some ways. But an idea is not true in proportion to its comfortingness. Part of becoming an adult is learning to deal with some pretty bleak truths, and Christianity (and theism) forestalls that part of our development by offering baseless fluffy stories.

D’Souza thinks atheists have a problem that they need to explain. I think theists do. The real issue is bigger than ‘where is God during shootings’. It’s this: Why does the universe consistently fail to show the kinds of things that we should be seeing if theism were true?

In praise of Biblical ignorance

14 April 2007 / / 1 Comment

It’s been noted that many people who identify as Christian have an abysmal knowledge of what’s actually in the Bible. No surprises there; scriptures are rich texts with multiple interpretations, so church-goers are generally much more knowledgable about their church’s interpretation of scripture than of scripture itself. Take it, Dr Prothero.

In a religious literacy quiz I have administered to undergraduates for the last two years, students tell me that Moses was blinded on the road to Damascus and that Paul led the Israelites on their exodus out of Egypt. Surveys that are more scientific have found that only one out of three U.S. citizens is able to name the four Gospels, and one out of 10 think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. No wonder pollster George Gallup has concluded that the United States is “a nation of biblical illiterates.”

For a particularly funny (or rank) example, check this clip of Georgia Congressman Lyn Westmoreland, who sponsored a bill to require a display of the Ten Commandments in federal buildings, and yet found himself unable to name more than three of them.

Okay, so people don’t know about the Bible. Whatever to do about it? Two ideas. a) Nothing, and b) Divert educational resources toward teaching the Bible in schools, for some reason. Let’s see what this author opts for.

One solution to this civic problem is to teach Bible classes in public schools.

Door number two. Surprise, surprise.

We already have huge buildings whose purpose is the teaching of the Bible. They’re called CHURCHES! Churches! You can go to a church and find out everything you’d like to know about the Bible. If even people who go to church aren’t getting it, this tells me that churches are falling down on the job. Perhaps they could work on that, instead of invading public schools to make them more Jesusy.

But here’s an argument:

Biblical illiteracy is not just a religious problem. It is a civic problem with political consequences. How can citizens participate in biblically inflected debates on abortion, capital punishment or the environment without knowing something about the Bible? Because they lack biblical literacy, Americans are easily swayed by demagogues on the left or the right who claim — often incorrectly — that the Bible says this about war or that about homosexuality.

Ooo, some tempting bait. Indeed, (you’re meant to think) perhaps if people were better informed about the Bible, they’d come around to a sensible way of thinking, instead of believing people who say that the Bible says things in favour of war, against homosexuality, and for the death penalty.

Except you know what? Last time I checked, the Bible actually did have verses that said all those things. And you know what else? It also had verses against all those things too. At least, according to someone’s interpretation. Well-educated scriptorians do not necessarily come to agreement on scripture. Like I say, scriptures are rich texts that can be enlisted to support just about any view. Vegetarianism? Slavery? Polygamy? Alcohol? No alcohol? It’s in there.

Oh, and of course, the Bible is the only book that deserves The Public School Treatment. Why?

[T]he Bible is of sufficient importance in Western civilization to merit its own course. Treating it no differently from, say, the Zend-Avesta of the Zoroastrians or Scientology’s Dianetics makes no educational sense.

Usually op-ed writers are better at concealing their biases. Not here. Eyeroll of the week.

No, the best way to avoid bad scriptural arguments is to avoid scriptural arguments altogether. They contribute nothing to a factual discussion. Instead, let’s try to settle public policy questions somewhat pragmatically. We need to focus on what outcomes we’d like to see, and then try to find out what will bring those about. And check out what’s happened elsewhere to see if it worked. Maybe it won’t much easier without the Bible than with it. Maybe we won’t even be able to agree on outcomes. But we may get a little farther then we’re getting now when we drag mythology into the discussion. The process won’t be helped with the inclusion of made-up opinions purportedly from a magical man.

There’s nothing wrong with ignorance of the Bible when the Bible lends itself to biased and ignorant interpretations.

UPDATE: Still don’t think you can find anything you want in the Bible? Here’s Michael Medved to tell you why the Bible says it’s wrong to give to the poor.

Leviticus 19:15 declares: “You shall not commit a perversion of justice: you shall not favor the poor and you shall not honor the great, with righteousness shall you judge your fellow.”
…
It should, indeed, come as a revelation and a rebuke to all liberals that Holy Scripture identifies “favoring the poor” as “a perversion of justice.”

As I argued in my recent townhall column about the essence of liberalism (posted on March 21st), the outlook of the left insists upon favoring the poor and the unfortunate—and thereby injecting unfairness and discrimination into the very core of politics and government.

BYU students protest Cheney, meekly.

12 April 2007 / / 2 Comments

Someone at the dear old BYU was dumb enough to invite the Dark Lord Cheney to speak at commencement. And students — normally obedient, complacent, and Republican — are taking it to the barricades.

The invitation extended to Vice President Dick Cheney to be the commencement speaker at Brigham Young University has set off a rare, continuing protest at the Mormon university, one of the nation’s most conservative.

Some of the faculty and the 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students, who are overwhelmingly Republican, have expressed concern about the Bush administration’s support for the war in Iraq and other policies, but most of the current protest has focused on Mr. Cheney’s integrity, character and behavior.

Really? Like what?

Several students said, for example, that they were appalled at Mr. Cheney’s use of an expletive on the Senate floor in a June 2004 exchange with Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.

Gah! Right answer, wrong reason! Are naughty words all these people care about?

Here’s someone who gets a bit closer:

“It just feels like too much sleaze and not the right values for B.Y.U.,” Mr. Woodworth said. “We espouse honesty, chastity, integrity, ethics, virtue and morality, and he does not epitomize those values.”

Maybe he knows something about Cheney that I don’t know. I just know that I didn’t need that image.

Several students said they would welcome Mr. Cheney on campus at a forum where he could be questioned. “I just don’t feel that Cheney represents what we want B.Y.U. to represent,” said Sharon Ellsworth, 23, a junior and a Democrat from Marietta, Pa. “It would be cool to have him in a different setting.”

This would be delicious. Imagine Darth thinking he’s heading into the Green Zone, and instead he gets pelted with marshmallows. Stale ones.

But what’s this? A swipe at Bush from the chair of College Dittoheads?

Some students said they were looking forward to Mr. Cheney’s speech. David Lassen, 23, the chairman of the B.Y.U. College Republicans, said he hoped to present the vice president with petitions of support for his appearance on campus, signed by about 2,000 students and alumni.

“We’re excited for the world to see what B.Y.U. really is,” Mr. Lassen said. “No matter what you think of Cheney, he’s easily the most powerful man in the world.”

Choice.

But fear not, Utah citizens. Cheney will speak at the commencement, with only one minor incident: some wild-eyed radicals will attempt to shout something during the address, and will be quickly subdued by the studentry. The 12th Article of Faith will carry the day. That’s the one about not questioning authority of any kind, ever.

The Secret? Feh.

12 April 2007 / / 3 Comments

There’s not much convergence between Good Reason readers and Oprah followers, which I’m proud of. But both of you have probably heard of the latest feel-good karma-drenched new age horsecrap known as ‘The Secret‘.

It’s the publishing phenomenon of the year so far, a small book with a parchment-brown cover engraved with the image of a red wax seal.

“The Secret,” its title proclaims matter-of-factly, as if the slim volume held the answer to life’s deepest mysteries.
…
“Everything that’s coming into your life you are attracting into your life,” Byrne writes. “You are the most powerful magnet in the universe . . . so as you think a thought, you are also attracting like thoughts to you.”

Yep, just by sending out ‘energy’ in the form of ‘thoughts’, you attract things to you. This is why it’s vitally important not to think of things like torture, global warming, or chlamydia. By just thinking of torture, global warming, or chlamydia, you are attracting torture, global warming, and chlamydia to you. Thinking about those things is just asking for it. Do not think of torture, global warming, or chlamydia.

But if you want stuff, and you follow the book’s recipe of ask, believe, and receive, the universe will grant it to you. As long as you’re not keeping track very closely.

Why do I say that The Secret is horsecrap? Because it’s vastly inferior to the Magical Wishing Ferret.

Meeeeeeep…

He’s been doing the Prosperity Guru thing for years now. Look how prosperous and cute he is. And he wants to help you to get whatever you want. As opposed to those bastards behind ‘The Secret’, who just want to sell you crappy books and DVDs and trick you into thinking that their stupid Law of Attraction is getting you a job, and then blame you for not believing hard enough when it doesn’t work. Nope, the MWF is the real deal.

Just make a wish, and rub his tummy. For maximum effect, give me chocolate. (I’ve mentioned the chocolate part before, you cheap sods. Now get sending. So what if I don’t hand out my address? You’re just going to have to put some effort into it and find a way to deliver. Good stuff, please.) And as mentioned before, unlike other religions, it’s very important to not believe in the MWF. If anyone believes in him, it may not work.

The Magical Wishing Ferret is now soliciting testimonials, which (as we all know) is the only truly reliable kind of evidence you will ever need, as far as you know. If you’ve made a wish through the Magical Wishing Ferret, and then something happened which could possibly be construed as making your wish come true, please leave your testimony in comments.

Evidence for Exodus

8 April 2007 / / 2 Comments

Interesting article from the NYT on this Easter holiday:

Did the Red Sea Part? No Evidence, Archaeologists Say

It didn’t look like much — some ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, often promotes mummies and tombs and pharaonic antiquities that command international attention and high ticket prices. But this bleak landscape, broken only by electric pylons, excited him because it provided physical evidence of stories told in hieroglyphics. It was proof of accounts from antiquity.

That prompted a reporter to ask about the Exodus, and if the new evidence was linked in any way to the story of Passover. The archaeological discoveries roughly coincided with the timing of the Israelites’ biblical flight from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land.

“Really, it’s a myth,” Dr. Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom.

It’s a bit difficult to imagine what evidence there could be for this kind of event. Wave fossils? Sedimentary chariots?

I’m a bit more interested in the idea that the Hebrews were never in Egypt at all. One linguistic argument is that if they had been, we should expect to see lots of Egyptian loan words in Hebrew, and we don’t. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

[N]otwithstanding the long sojourn in Egypt, the number of Egyptian words that have found a place in the Hebrew vocabulary is exceedingly small.

This is probably something I’ll be posting on more as I learn more about it.

Blind Party mulls one-eyed candidate

4 April 2007 / / 2 Comments

Perhaps Giuliani would have made a good Democrat.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told CNN Wednesday he supports public funding for some abortions, a position he advocated as mayor and one that will likely put the GOP presidential candidate at odds with social conservatives in his party.

“Ultimately, it’s a constitutional right, and therefore if it’s a constitutional right, ultimately, even if you do it on a state by state basis, you have to make sure people are protected,” Giuliani said in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash in Florida’s capital city.
…
“I’m in the same position now that I was 12 years ago when I ran for mayor — which is, personally opposed to abortion, don’t like it, hate it, would advise that woman to have an adoption rather than abortion, hope to find the money for it,” he said. “But it is your choice, an individual right. You get to make that choice, and I don’t think society should be putting you in jail.”

Like Giuliani, I’d love to see fewer abortions. (I wish they’d promote contraceptives more aggressively in schools, actually.) But how’s the Right going to react to this? When you make an ounce of sense once in a while, it tends to disqualify you in the eyes of those who make no sense.

Schelling games

1 April 2007 / / 14 Comments

I opened Monday’s class by splitting my 150+ students into pairs for a few Schelling games. (Seventy-five pairs can be noisy.) To win at a Schelling game, all you have to do is guess the same thing that your partner guesses. And of course, they’re trying to guess the same thing you are. For example, if you can choose between heads or tails, which should you choose? You guessed it — almost everyone chose heads.

Schelling games are relevant to linguistics. Herbert Clark points out that dialogue works because there’s a tendency for people to try and coordinate their activities together using talk. This is true even when you’re working with someone you may not know well. You may not share much common ground with them, but you can still rely on a kind of garden-variety context.

The second round was ‘pick a number’. Here are the choices: 7, 13, 99, 261, 555. Which would you pick if you were trying to match someone who was trying to match you?

People who won tended to pick 13, although there were some interesting other answers. One pair won with 261.

“You both picked 261?” I asked. “That’s rather surprising.”

“We’re brother and sister!” they said.

Which made Clark’s point rather nicely. People who have no common ground will fall back on normal-seeming answers if they want to agree, but when two people have a lot of shared knowledge, unexpected things can take on a salience of their own.

Let’s try a Schelling game now. You win a free trip to any city in the world, but only if you choose the same city that your partner does. And your partner is me, and I’m trying to guess what you’ll guess. My answer is in comments.

Hate the messenger, deny the message.

28 March 2007 / / 1 Comment

An interesting opinion piece from Jonathan Chait about Republicans who deny global warming.

Last year, the National Journal asked a group of Republican senators and House members: “Do you think it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?” Of the respondents, 23% said yes, 77% said no. In the year since that poll, of course, global warming has seized a massive amount of public attention. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a study, with input from 2,000 scientists worldwide, finding that the certainty on man-made global warming had risen to 90%.

So, the magazine asked the question again last month. The results? Only 13% of Republicans agreed that global warming has been proved. As the evidence for global warming gets stronger, Republicans are actually getting more skeptical. Al Gore’s recent congressional testimony on the subject, and the chilly reception he received from GOP members, suggest the discouraging conclusion that skepticism on global warming is hardening into party dogma.

The politics of the Right have been driven by the limbic reptile brain for a long time. Global warming would normally be difficult to explain away, but the establishment of an anti-Al-Gore meme allows them to do exactly that. The pieces interlock.

Worth a read.

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