Drugs are behind some of our greatest art

The army of pharamaceutical-fundamentalists marching under the banner of just say no to drugs must be stopped. After all, hasn't the taking — or abuse, as these fundamentalists would have it — of mind-altering substances been an essential help to all truly great artists, even if it sometimes made them seem desperately unhappy and drove them to the brink of destruction?

Will this unreasonable denying the glory of being totally zonked out of your head not end until the art that defines our culture has become bland, boring and completely alienated from the truth that becomes evident when you drop acid?

It's a great tribute to our age that a scientist can still be greeted with more adulation than a pop princess.

Observe the context: They're Dr. Who fans.

Enemies of Scientism

Enemies of Reason pt. 1 is out. It has an excellent soundbite where an astrologer's response to bringing up swapping people's horoscopes is I think what you're up to here is mischief. Ooh-la-la. Remember: scrutiny equals mischief.

Next he says: I just don't believe in the experiment, Richard. It's that simple. (Magical thinking? He can make everything uncomfortable go away by simply not believing in it?)

In defense of his livelihood the Observer astrologer responds (via):

For scientism, however, personal experience is not admissible. Everything must be subject to randomised, controlled double-blind trials, just like medical drugs - 'drugs that work' as Dawkins insists.
...
Scientism, of course, hates meaning. It prefers to view humanity as a random accident, isolated in a cosmos of 'indifferent vastness' - the legacy of the post-Copernican enlightenment that Dawkins claims is now being 'betrayed'. The opposing view, that the world has soul and purpose, that humanity and the cosmos are linked, is to be found not, as he and others claim, in the dogma of religion, but in art and in the depth psychology of Freud and Jung that Dawkins holds in contempt.

What a brilliantly straightforward demonstration of 'meaning' used to signify unwarranted self-importance on the part of humanity.

Hmm, scientism. There's a blemish of a word.

The first quote for the 'overzealous' sense of scientism in OED is Shaw's 1921 Back to Metuselah, running through FA Hayek to the welcoming embrace of people feeling miffed at their bread-and-butter getting questioned.

Huston Smith: Scientism adds to science two corrollaries: first, that the scientific method is, if not the only reliable method of getting at the truth, then at least the most reliable method; and second, that the things science deals with—material entities—are the most fundamental things that exist. You know, material entities, like beams of light. Or perhaps he's using "material" in the sense of not imaginary.

This is from GR Peterson's Demarcation and the Scientistic Fallacy:

Thus, scientism would not be said to occur in the proper discouse of metaphysics and theology, not because these disciplines do not make claims about the ultimate nature of knowledge and reality (they do) but because making such claims is part of the proper function of these disciplines, which are not commonly understood to be among the sciences.

Ahh, I think I get it now. This is about people who are sore because they're afraid that their cushy little gravy-train of never getting questioned might run out of steam.

Good.

[Technorati Enemies of Reason atheist bastardry demarcation faith as shield free respect gravy-train religion magical thinking scientism scrutiny equals mischief suspension of disbelief truth equals mischief unwarranted self-importance]

Genetic cybernetic

So I took Dawkins' own advice, and read The Extended Phenotype.

What struck me afterwards was that the influence from artificial-intelligence types is obvious enough that he could almost have called it animal cybernetics. I mean, apart from the bit where everyone would make horrible jokes about bionic badgers and things.

This is perhaps to be expected from the analogy of parasites pulling levers to manipulate their hosts: after all, the word "cybernetics" comes from concepts of piloting. The difference between cybernetics and the extended phenotype would perhaps be that the extended phenotype is concerned with drawing the shortest lines between genes and behavior. The feedback from behavior to genes is through differential survival, so the feedback loop wouldn't be tight enough, nor the causality tightly enough connected, that we can talk about cybernetic systems proper.

...or maybe we can, if we talk about cybernetic systems on the level of an entire genome and up. Apparently there's something called Schmalhausen's cybernetic approach.

He was the first to propose an evolutionary scenario of interaction of the main components of biosphere, from the subcellular level to the biocoenotic one. Evolution and speciation are considered in this scenario as a cybernetic cycle of regulated processes with direct and feed back

(I'm guessing that last bit would be direction and feedback.)

There's also this, which sounds intriguing, and this which I haven't the faintest idea what is but it sounds totally sci-fi.

eg., biocybernetics seems to be the study of regulatory processes within the organism.

[Technorati Richard Dawkins bionic badger cybergenetics cybernetic cybernetics extended phenotype lever-pulling]

WTC as an anti-religion slogan is ill-advised

The "official Richard Dawkins MySpace presence" is running a campaign (at the bottom of the page) to change people's icons into this thing.

This is a foolish move for a site claiming to be a "clear-thinking oasis." Now, normally I'd be all in favor of hammering the important point home that belief in immortality can make people do horrible things. But just slapping the towers of the World Trade Center on a flyer like this mostly exposes how little you know about their history.

Manhattan architect Laurie Kerr's The Mosque to Commerce, published in Slate on the 28th of December 2001, lays out the history of how the WTC's architect Minoru Yamasaki was heavily influenced not only by modernism and Japanese design but also by Islamic architecture:

Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.

The fact of the matter is, the towers probably symbolized minarets.

So. With "no religion," Yamasaki would probably never have imagined the WTC the way it turned out in the first place. Employing the WTC for a slogan against religion like this requires an act of forgetting, of sweeping inconvenient details under the rug. But apparently we desperately need slogans these days. Because it's the information age, or something like that.

(Mosque architecture? In turn inspired by Byzantine.)

The gateway drug to Stalinism

It seems to be very easy to tar any atheist as an inhumane communist. In addition to the exchange mentioned in my last post, it's a throwaway point in this opinion piece in NYT, by N.D.Kristof:

Granted, religious figures have been involved throughout history in the worst kinds of atrocities. But as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot show, so have atheists.

A slightly less grazing treatment by Rod Liddle in The Spectator:

By far the weakest part of The God Delusion is when Dawkins attempts to explain why atheistic regimes have far outdone religious regimes in their murderousness, their inhumanity. [...]

Isn't that the point, I suggest. That with one set of values removed, another will always fill its place? That if you remove religion, there is a gap which will always be filled — and usually by something worse than belief in a deity? Are we ever worse than when we feel ourselves to be unconstrained masters of our domain, answerable to nobody but ourselves? [...]

By Dawkins's argument, the moral imperatives of 500 years ago were, de facto, right then — and wrong now. In the end, it leaves you without a real sense of right and wrong, merely a constantly shifting plane — and thus open to the malefactions of a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao or a Pol Pot.

(Note the sly little insertion of Hitler, who won an election in a Christian country.)

Anyway, the presumption seems to be that not having a religion to which everyone is expected to conform will almost automatically lead to seduction by malevolent dictators. This sort of thing keeps popping up, so presumably it has some sort of resonance with people.

The best counter I've seen is Sam Harris:

(Who decides what is good in the Good Book? Answer: We do. Our moral intuitions are still primary. It makes absolutely no sense, therefore, to think that we get our basic sense of right and wrong out of scripture).

Presumably there is some feeling that having an Authority gives you the proverbial moral anchor. Which would be why Italy, being anchored firmly to the pope, has no problems with organized crime.

Maybe there's a sense that some types gravitate towards dogmatism, and that it's better for them to join a moderate church than a totalitarian movement. But really, are Dawkins or Harris against free speech, or for outlawing churches? Implicit in this is also that people with these inclinations won't just go for the most dogmatic community he can find, religious or not. Religions are tacitly presumed to be basically mostly beneficial.

As for "answerable to nobody but ourselves," it paints a picture of someone who makes himself out to be a god, rather than someone godless in an actual society. People in a society will develop norms, because this is a very fundamental feature of humanity. Any people, anywhere, will negotiate "social contracts" between themselves rather than just pulling random individual codexes out of thin air.

Anyone truly megalomaniac will easily think to pay lip service to the prevailing deity, if that is what it takes: on this note, check out Liddle's complete non-mention of Mussolini in his list of dictators. Mussolini has to be omitted, of course, as he exemplifies that totalitarian leaders can be quite perpendicular to strong religiosity.

Imaginary relationships

In the Metafilter comments on Terry Eagleton commenting on Dawkins' The God Delusion (Eagleton quoted in italics):

"It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself."

You know, this actually explains a lot. People are in love with the idea of God. Literally. So no matter what God says, no matter how evil the commands from the organization or the little voice in your head become, you mostly just DO them, because you love him/her/it.

Hmph, I'd never thought about it this way before. A large chunk of the world (half, maybe?) would appear to be in an abusive relationship with an imaginary being.
posted by Malor at 1:00 AM PST on October 25

That comment is brilliant, in a slightly similar way to this TMCM strip.

Interestingly, Terry Eagleton himself seems to be the sort of Christian who's gone more than half the way to Taoism:

Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. [...] He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves.

...would that be all theologians, or just the subset of them that happen to agree with you, Dr. Eagleton?

(Of course, any truly sensible person wouldn't disagree with me, because I cannot possibly be wrong.)

Not even wrong, or worse

Michael Shermer of skeptic.com writes an effective putdown, in Scientific American, of the fair-and-balanced meme that makes no distinction on the knowledge put behind opposing positions. This would be the same fallacy that makes "evolution is just a theory" go as far as it does.