First of all, and despite the inflammatory nature of the title, I would like to say that I came to Dennett's work with a relatively open mind. I had seen some of his lectures on YouTube and I had heard about his advocacy of atheism. He seemed to be a relatively rational thinker and a proponent of similar beliefs. I was wary of his advocacy of meme theory, but nothing in his mainstream presence suggested any hint of what I was to find when I started reading his latest book, my first and last Dennett work, Breaking the Spell.
I thought Dennett might be a safe bet because he comes highly recommended by Richard Dawkins. While I disagree with Dawkins' advocacy of socialist politics and his own claims to meme theory, it has always struck me that Dawkins' attachment to memes is more of a kin to humoring an interesting analogy as opposed to seriously proposing it as a foundation for rational debate. He introduced it in The Selfish Gene, a work otherwise highly commendable for its astute and forthright explanation of evolutionary theory. But after reading Dennett's work, I am forced to reevaluate my estimation of Dawkins' intellectual honesty as well. I will give him the benefit of doubt and withhold my judgement till I have further explored Dawkins' works. As for Dennett....he embodies everything that I feared would happen in the world of philosophy when I first encountered Dawkins' suggestion.
Dennett tries to sell his book as an attempt "to investigate religion in a scientific manner". Now, I am an anti-theist, which means that I not only do not believe in any god or supernatural presences, powers, or forces whatsoever, but it means that I think such beliefs are fundamentally harmful to humanity and destructive of science and progressive humanistic thought. In this sense, I mean "progressive" as in advancing in a beneficial manner and "humanistic" as in pertaining to the notion that the lives of human beings should be the standard and focal point of philosophic enquiry. I came across Dennett as one of the so-called "Four Horsemen" of modern atheism, the others being Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. It is in fact the recent spate of media coverage in recent years that drew me to start investigating their works, and Dawkins' own sense of consciousness-raising that inspired me to start this blog as an expression of my own beliefs.
Harris, while his arguments against religion are indisputable, leaves much to be desired when he starts to argue for anything. He tends to convey the impression that his assertion is sufficient to justify any demand on our moral judgments and seems quite confident that the majority of his atheist peers are as hopelessly liberal as he is. While he rightfully condemns moral relativism, he unwittingly falls into the trap of being a moral relativist, as he argues in defense of torture. This is an issue which it is impossible to defend morally unless one assumes that one party is always in the right simply for the reason that it is one's own. He blatantly ignores that if one is to relinquish the moral high ground by engaging in the debased tactics of one's moral rivals, that one sacrifices the grounds from which such one-sided moralizing can be justified in the first place. Harris seeks to undermine the universality of human rights and his argument is half-based on assumptions of some vaguely stated moral solidarity with the American vox populi.
Dawkins, as I have already stated, is at his best when he is addressing his speciality of biology and evolutionary theory. Especially as the only pure scientist of the four, this is to be expected. However, as I have also argued elsewhere on this site, Dawkins is comitted to a form of socialist politic which ignores many of his own conclusions. But I see this contradiction stemming from only the slightest of moral misdirections, his lingering attachment to christian morality and his desire to force it into biology so as to rationalize his view of morality in a world that cannot logically accommodate it. But his attachments to Harris who favors torture and now Dennett who is much worse, seriously demand that Dawkins philosophical work be scrutinized more closely. That is a task which I must regrettably leave for later. I also have not yet had the opportunity to investigate Hitchens' work closely, but that, too, will be addressed in due time.
No, the topic at hand is Dennett and his book Breaking the Spell. What it should be called is Hail the Meme and Other Unsubstantiated Assertions. I could not get more than one third through this book before I became physically ill for trying to choke down the slew of outrageous propositions he tries to foist on the reader. A book, I might add, for which Dennett says, "a reader-friendly flow for a wider audience was more important than the convenience of scholars."
Certainly scholars should have nothing to do with this book whatsoever. Of course the first two chapters deal with relatively innocuous subjects like why we should investigate religion and whether or not scientific investigation is appropriate to or capable of the task. It is the third chapter, "Why Good Things Happen" that starts to rank of shoddy (or perhaps even consciously deceptive) reasoning. I was left wondering that if this is the best Tufts has to offer in the realm of philosophy, perhaps Tufts is not quite worthy of the respect it has been accorded.
The reason is memes. Unlike Dawkins' scientifically cautious approach to the concept of memes, Dennett charges head-on taking all sorts of wild conjectures for granted. I quote:
"If boatbuilders or potters or singers are in the habit of copying old designs "religiously," they may preserve design features over hundreds or even thousands of years. Human copying is variable, so slight variations in the copies will often appear, and although most of these promptly disappear, since they are deemed defective or "seconds" or in any event not popular with the customers, every now and then a variation will engender a new lineage, in some sense an improvement or innovation for which there is a "market niche". And lo and behold, without anybody's realizing it, or intending it, this relatively mindless process over long periods of time can shape designs to an exquisite degree, optimizing them for local conditions."
...The italics are Dennett's....the confusion is mine.
First of all, as a linguist, I cannot help but notice that Dennett strategically uses the passive voice to avoid betraying who or what it is that is acting upon the design process of boats and pots and songs. He also strategically places these "customers" in the circumstance of the phrase. An approach that those familiar with Halliday's functional grammar will recognize as being extremely useful for hiding the impact of a participant or obfuscating their role almost entirely. The fact that Dennett is desperately trying to obscure is that boats do NOT design themselves. That the process of copying or innovation is something which is consciously decided by human minds, by active participants in their own existence, by active participants in the contents and products of their own minds.
But to state that humans actually DO something would be to give up the game and declare from the start that what he intends is ludicrous tripe. In fact, in order to substantiate even the possibility of his beloved memes, Dennett must beg the question by first assuming that there is no such thing as free will, as self-modification of one's mental structure, as the ability to choose which ideas one accepts and which ideas one rejects and which ones and how one modifies. Dennett must use the passive voice to obscure these facts because when they are placed directly next to the assertions he draws, it becomes obvious that what he is saying isn't worth the paper on which it is printed.
Again I quote: "Here we have the design of a human artifact-culturally, not genetically transmitted-without a human designer, without an author or inventor or even a knowing editor or critic."
THIS of boatbuilding. Where, one is forced to ask, would Dennett be if there was not some convenient boat to copy? Presumably he would be up the creek without a paddle, because he has already dismissed the possibility that somebody could conceive of a new idea and create a paddle much less a boat to carry him. Without a human designer? How could a boat come to be without a human designer? I am really forced to wonder if not only Dennett but his editor and publisher were not all smoking crack when they were going over this drivel.
If only because they permitted Dennett to start from this rather dramatic and unsubstantiated assumption and progress to "make a point that should be uncontroversial: cultural transmission can sometimes mimic genetic transmission, permitting competing variants to be copied at different rates, resulting in gradual revisions in features of those cultural items, and these revisions have no deliberate, foresighted authors."
No authors? Who is supposedly making these cultural artifacts if not human beings? Of course Dennett has already decided that humans have no free-will or control of their consciousness, so naturally they cannot be an active participant in the creation of anything. Dennett sees some undefined class of artisans who mindlessly copy designs passed down by some mysterious and undefined source and who copy even mistakes mindlessly without appraisal with no judgment whatsoever as to the content of that work. One is forced to question whether this isn't what Dennett truly hopes that humanity is and is desperately trying to substantiate it as opposed to truly scientifically investigating human nature at all.
He then moves on to try and appropriate linguistics to substantiate his 'meme-ological' musings. Language is well-understood to be a characteristically unique cognitive function. The interrelationship between language and thought is anything but a settled issue. And strong versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have been almost thoroughly ruled out by rigorous scientific study. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis basically states that our cognitive functions are influenced by our language. The strong form of this theory would imply that a person's cognitive processes are defined by their language. Theoretically, this would mean that a person cannot conceive of ideas that are not encoded in the language. This is clearly not true, as new words are coined to accommodate new concepts and inventions as they are introduced into the environment. This is a major factor which drives the invention of words, something that Dennet ignores completely. By saying that language evolves itself without any conscious modification, he is ruling out the participation of the actors, the ones who actually voice and write language, us, the human beings.
"On even rarer occasions," he says, " individuals may set out to invent a word or a pronunciation and actually succeed in coining something that eventually enters the language, but in general, the changes that accumulate have no salient human authors, deliberate or inadvertent."
?!
How would Dennett then explain the invention of words like "computer", "robot", "bug", "virus" or the slew of technical computer-based terminology which inundates us today? The invention of these terms was not an outgrowth of already extant phrases that somehow "evolved" through the accumulation of minor changes via the reproduction process and limited by natural selection. These were terms and senses that sprang out of their functional necessity, out of the emergence of new objects which had previously not existed. Objects, machines, devices, which were created, not out of some natural process, but by the dedicated application of human thought to solve real problems in a real universe, not in some magic fantasy land of actorless dynamics like the foggy cloud of disembodied determinism gone mad that rattles around Dennet's echoing chamber of a cranium. Changes in the existential universe mandated changes in language. So, too, changes in modes of thought, changes in our understanding of things have always mandated changes in our language. Language and cognition are intricately intertwined.
However, even though the words we use, through the influence of things like accent, can produce an almost evolutionary shift in language so that German becomes English or Latin becomes Portuguese, the concepts expressed by language remain steadfastly connected to ultimately concrete descriptions of the world around us. As such, the word's meaning does not change as much as Dennett would like us to think. Perhaps words can be shifted to mean things that they were not originally intended to mean, like "gay" or Dennett's pet term "bright". But when they do so, the concepts (for as long as they remain valid concepts in human knowledge) will engender the birth of new phrases which are then needed to express potentially ancient concepts which have been left unheralded by the detachment from the word which had previously served that function.
"Cat" may be "gato" or " neko" or any number of words in any number of languages, but a cat is still a cat, no matter which language you're speaking. And it doesn't take a genius to see that a word is very different from a boat. So, one once again wonders why Dennett doesn't realize this.
After becoming physically ill at this point from trying to understand how someone could present such a mishmash of arbitrary assertions which contrast so starkly with physical reality, I decided to cut to the chase and read Dennett's proffered Appendix which is a reproduction of his article "The New Replicators" originally published in the Encyclopedia of Evolution from Oxford University Press. It was hoped that reading something a bit more technical could help dispell some of Dennett's own mumbo-jumbo.
Unfortunately, fully dissecting that would take another post almost as long as this one, and it would simply be a reiteration of the arguments I have already presented. To sum it up, while accepting that there is no basis in physical reality for the existence of memes, he claims that they are simply because they are possible. However, their very possibility once again assumes that people do not have free-will or active control over the contents of their own minds or the products of their labor. In short, it assumes that ideas are generated by the very processes that would need to be established to prove the existence of the process proposed. If this circle of logic makes you dizzy, then you can sympathize with the motion sickness I got while reading Dennett's book in my living room.
Perhaps Dennett is happy ruminating on his prophesied day "when a cleverly turned phrase in a book gets indexed by many search engines, and thereupon enters the language as a new cliche, without anybody to read it." But if nobody reads it, it is doubtful that it can be said to have entered the language at all. At the very least, it can only be hoped that both Dennett and his abuse of human reason are not long for this Earth. Although with the support and following of so many prominent intellectuals, it may be that he will instead be remembered as the messiah of a brand new breed of totalitarian rhetoric, yet one known to readers of Ayn Rand's philosophical work as the "Aristocracy of Pull." For once you have abdicated belief in you own mind, then you will be very easy to control.
And petty hacks like Dennett have long yearned to pull the trigger in the face of humanity.
Translator
Showing posts with label dawkins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dawkins. Show all posts
Friday, June 27, 2008
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Dawkins and the Fallacy of the Meme
If you've been following this blog, then you'll probably have gathered that I hold Richard Dawkins in pretty high regard. After all, he's one of the people who has made it to my "Some people I admire..." corner. The reason is that he generally presents well-reasoned arguments supported by fact. I think this is why his argument for the gene's eye view of evolution is so strong. It is a strength derived from simplicity.
Genes propagate which are successful at surviving and reproducing. The twin pressures of survival and reproduction vary depending on the demands of the physical environment, the consumable resources available, and the level of competition between varying phenotypes for those resources. The genes--inherent in the genetic combinations embodied by the "gene machines" which carry them--are propagated in direct correlation to how well that body is adapted to the demands on its reproductive and survival capacity. Due to the imperfection of the reproduction process of genes and the cumulative effect of evolutionary pressures over time, diverse species come into existence. This is the essence of our modern understanding of evolution. Having reached this point, I can see how it would be tempting to drive the Darwinian argument even further. I mean once we have established the social behavior of animals as attributable to their genetic make-up and Darwinian pressures not only on their genetics but on their learned behaviors, then I can see how it may become difficult to draw the line on where Darwin ends and psychology begins.
It is at this murky middle ground that Dawkins introduced the idea of the meme. His argument runs that just as genes are units of genetic information which guide how a being is constructed, memes are units of conceptual information, ideas. He holds that evolutionary pressures apply to memes in a way similar to the way in which they apply to genes. This is basically proposing that ideas battle for survival in the same way as genes do. Ideas compete to be propagated by receptive brains.
The error in this analogy should be glaringly obvious and it frankly surprised me when I saw it wedged into his latest book, The God Delusion. I could understand the nature of the thought experiment when it was first introduced in The Selfish Gene back in the 70s. It seemed a playful hypothesis the intent of which was to illustrate how a Darwinian system could apply to other things than genes. Taken as a simple illustration or an analogy I suppose it's harmless enough. But put forth as a serious concept of how ideas come to be in our heads, it is blatantly irresponsible.
The force which eliminates faulty combinations of genes, or gene complexes, is death. The inability to sustain life sufficiently to procreate means that that collection of genes isn't passed on. If a gene complex is arranged such as it is ineffective at procreating it also fails to continue. Death and disfigurement are brutal adjudicators of whether a gene survives or not. The root of how they evolve is in their imperfect reproduction. But the measure by which inefficient genes are eliminated is death.
So, the basic fallacy of memes lies in this. Whereas genes require no conscious adjudicator to evolve, their ability to survive or not is purely decided by the factual constraints of their existence, memes require a conscious adjudicator to reproduce, modify, and also to be negated.
Dawkins vision of the meme paints us as passive receptacles for our ideas just as we are passive receptacles of our genes. The fault should be readily apparent. Whereas I have absolutely nothing I can do about the genes that I have in my body, I actively choose which ideas I adhere to, which ones I bother to propagate, and which ideas I reject and fight against. I choose this. This "I" is my consciousness. And even if this I is reducible to deterministic parts, the self-referential capacity of people's minds to modify and monitor their own internal content is not something which should be passed over so lightly or surrendered so readily as the argument for memes would have us do.
This self-referential capacity is what grants us the power to monitor our ideas, to select them by standards that we set ourselves. That is why it matters little what instincts and genetic persuasions are embedded in our genes. We have the power to choose the ideas, the beliefs, the ideologies we desire to pursue. We have the power to do this, because we are self-referential and self-modifying beings. We, in short, have the power to rise above our genetic limitations. This is what most prominently sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Memes also differ from genes in that memes are non-verifiable. You cannot isolate a meme. You can't test for it. You can't even define it. How much of an idea is a meme? Dawkins tries to cover this by broadening the concept to cover "meme-plexes" Well, this makes as little sense as memes. We arrive at the same question. What is a memeplex? How can you isolate it? How do you even begin to define what one would be in reality? As a scientifically unverifiable concept, it is strange that it should be introduced by an author who has a reputation for scientific rigor.
There is perhaps one possible circumstance under which the meme theory of the propagation of ideas may have some merit. And that would be to describe the manner in which ideas come to be in people who either do not have the ability or lack the capacity to be self-referential or self-modifying, if such people truly do exist. Children , perhaps, could be considered to be in this state and that is a good argument for having special rules to protect them from abuses of their burgeoning conceptual system. For everyone else, the acceptance and survival of ideas is something which is actively decided.
Even as is the case with bad ideas that we held prior to receiving some new piece of information or being introduced to some new perspective that we hadn't been previously aware of, we make a choice as to whether to continue holding our prior belief or to discard it in favor of something new. Yes, this can be traumatic, especially the more deeply held and fundamental the belief in question. But it is done on a regular basis by people every day. The whole long history of science is a documentation of this process. Things which were not known before, were discovered. Answers were actively sought and explanations obtained.
To render the whole history of human thought as a passive process inacted on our brains by some vague undefined process of memes entering our brains without our consent and potentially reworking our mental processes, is to spit in the face of every scientist who has ever contributed to the advance of knowledge, to every person who has ever attempted to advance our comprehension of morality.
In short, it annihilates the very concept of morality. Something which becomes less surprising as one continues reading the God Delusion to see Dawkins' argument for evolutionary morality. He does not waste much time before referring to Kant to back up his claims that altruism is somehow an evolutionary imperative. Something which is ironically diametrically opposed to his entire argument for the gene's eye view of evolutionary theory.
What he insists on calling "reciprocal altruism" may just as easily be labeled "natural capitalism" for it has the same net effect and apparently the same motivations as any parties which would come to work together for mutual advantage. He makes the subsequent logical misstep of sliding between definitions of altruism. He starts with "reciprocal altruism" something which arises out of different creatures developing symbiotic relationships in response to evolutionary pressures and then proceeds to equate this with moral altruism, the belief that it is good to sacrifice oneself to strangers. Cooperation between friends and family which has obvious survival benefits cannot be directly connected to anonymously altruistic behavior. And in order to explain this away, Dawkins says that this is perhaps due to a misfiring of the altruistic protocol in our genes.
This could, perhaps, have saved him from stumbling into the trap he'd set for himself, but he repeatedly marches into the morass of claiming how much better altruism is than selfish pursuits and how science and all creation back him up on it. Unfortunately for Dawkins, his argument for altruism is bound entirely to his careful merging of definitions and a kind of lexical sleight of hand. Despite the word "altruism" being used in two ways, there is absolutely no similarity between observed "reciprocal altruism" as perceived in the biological world and "moral altruism" as promoted by Kant and company. This connection is false, and if an argument is to be made for it, it must be made explicit. I do not accept at face value that altruism is "good". This is simply a clever way to try and avoid justifying the claim.
The unfortunate thing is that this casts a shadow over the entire book. One that I thoroughly enjoyed until I started getting into where Dawkins starts grasping for moral straws from evolutionary science. His arguments against religion are succinct, logical, and damning. Theists will have a hard time convincing anyone who has read this book of the existence of God. And I wager that it will be an encouragement to many others to renounce their belief as irrational.
That is why I cannot understand why he had to try to foist this arbitrary Kantian nihilism into another perfectly salient critique of religion. The only possibility that comes to mind is that he has an ideological agenda apart from that of removing religiosity from its dominating hold on people's lives. Just like Sam Harris had to squeeze in an arbitrary assertion for the legitimacy of torture into his End of Faith, so too has Dawkins had to try and squeeze in an argument for moral altruism into a book on the same subject and with the same goal.
What baffles the imagination is that the issue of severing our subservience to religion is too important to risk in harnessing it to pet political and ideological pursuits especially those which effectively harness the morality of most organized religions and swallows them whole without question. Altruism is the morality of the religious. And religion cannot be swayed effectively until the proponents of reason learn to reject altruism as axiomatic of good. As long as the moral high-ground is effectively surrendered to the institution if not the literal word of religion, then all we can expect is a replay of the tragedies of the 2oth century as many critics rightly point out.
The reason why Dawkins, Harris et all cannot effectively combat the criticism of Stalin, Hitler, Zedong, etc, as being atheists is because they are all inherently committed to the idea that altruism is the moral ideal. Religious institutions are often committed to expressing the same values that they are proposing as being good. Their argument is that the literal teachings of religions are usually brutal, incoherent, and incompatible with modern society, which is true. They handicap their arguments because they don't want to accept the alternative to altruism, which would be objectivist rational self-interest.
They could easily repel the accusations that Stalin, Mao, and Polpot were all atheists. They could do this by pointing out that yes, they were atheists but their brutality was not a factor of their atheism. It was a factor of their altruism and the altruistic systems which they were manipulating. They were thrust into power because of movements that cried for sacrifice for the common good. They were revolutionaries seeking to establish a collectivist utopia on earth, and the sick thing is that they succeeded. Apologists come afterwards to say that well, that's not really how socialism is supposed to work. But the dedication to an altruistic moral ideal is the only unifying explanation that can be used to condemn both the horrors of religious authority and the horrors of secular collectivist authority.
Avoiding this argument leaves proponents of atheism in the much weakened position of claiming that religions are brutal because of their ideas, but that the brutality of atheist regimes stems from their leaders. It is obvious that the brutality stems from the ideas on both sides. The thing that Dawkins does not accept is that the true terror is one that is deeper than religion, it is rooted in altruism. Altruism is the death cult. Altruism is the cause greater than oneself that all can be sacrificed for. Altruism is the greater good for whom Jihad is deemed necessary. If only Dawkins would shift his arguments just a bit deeper and aim at the heart of the problem, then his arguments would be stronger and the cause of atheism would be greatly furthered. Unfortunately, he still chooses to cling to the morality of Christian tradition, even having renounced Christian fables. And the choice he leaves us with ends up not to be that much of a choice after all.
Genes propagate which are successful at surviving and reproducing. The twin pressures of survival and reproduction vary depending on the demands of the physical environment, the consumable resources available, and the level of competition between varying phenotypes for those resources. The genes--inherent in the genetic combinations embodied by the "gene machines" which carry them--are propagated in direct correlation to how well that body is adapted to the demands on its reproductive and survival capacity. Due to the imperfection of the reproduction process of genes and the cumulative effect of evolutionary pressures over time, diverse species come into existence. This is the essence of our modern understanding of evolution. Having reached this point, I can see how it would be tempting to drive the Darwinian argument even further. I mean once we have established the social behavior of animals as attributable to their genetic make-up and Darwinian pressures not only on their genetics but on their learned behaviors, then I can see how it may become difficult to draw the line on where Darwin ends and psychology begins.
It is at this murky middle ground that Dawkins introduced the idea of the meme. His argument runs that just as genes are units of genetic information which guide how a being is constructed, memes are units of conceptual information, ideas. He holds that evolutionary pressures apply to memes in a way similar to the way in which they apply to genes. This is basically proposing that ideas battle for survival in the same way as genes do. Ideas compete to be propagated by receptive brains.
The error in this analogy should be glaringly obvious and it frankly surprised me when I saw it wedged into his latest book, The God Delusion. I could understand the nature of the thought experiment when it was first introduced in The Selfish Gene back in the 70s. It seemed a playful hypothesis the intent of which was to illustrate how a Darwinian system could apply to other things than genes. Taken as a simple illustration or an analogy I suppose it's harmless enough. But put forth as a serious concept of how ideas come to be in our heads, it is blatantly irresponsible.
The force which eliminates faulty combinations of genes, or gene complexes, is death. The inability to sustain life sufficiently to procreate means that that collection of genes isn't passed on. If a gene complex is arranged such as it is ineffective at procreating it also fails to continue. Death and disfigurement are brutal adjudicators of whether a gene survives or not. The root of how they evolve is in their imperfect reproduction. But the measure by which inefficient genes are eliminated is death.
So, the basic fallacy of memes lies in this. Whereas genes require no conscious adjudicator to evolve, their ability to survive or not is purely decided by the factual constraints of their existence, memes require a conscious adjudicator to reproduce, modify, and also to be negated.
Dawkins vision of the meme paints us as passive receptacles for our ideas just as we are passive receptacles of our genes. The fault should be readily apparent. Whereas I have absolutely nothing I can do about the genes that I have in my body, I actively choose which ideas I adhere to, which ones I bother to propagate, and which ideas I reject and fight against. I choose this. This "I" is my consciousness. And even if this I is reducible to deterministic parts, the self-referential capacity of people's minds to modify and monitor their own internal content is not something which should be passed over so lightly or surrendered so readily as the argument for memes would have us do.
This self-referential capacity is what grants us the power to monitor our ideas, to select them by standards that we set ourselves. That is why it matters little what instincts and genetic persuasions are embedded in our genes. We have the power to choose the ideas, the beliefs, the ideologies we desire to pursue. We have the power to do this, because we are self-referential and self-modifying beings. We, in short, have the power to rise above our genetic limitations. This is what most prominently sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Memes also differ from genes in that memes are non-verifiable. You cannot isolate a meme. You can't test for it. You can't even define it. How much of an idea is a meme? Dawkins tries to cover this by broadening the concept to cover "meme-plexes" Well, this makes as little sense as memes. We arrive at the same question. What is a memeplex? How can you isolate it? How do you even begin to define what one would be in reality? As a scientifically unverifiable concept, it is strange that it should be introduced by an author who has a reputation for scientific rigor.
There is perhaps one possible circumstance under which the meme theory of the propagation of ideas may have some merit. And that would be to describe the manner in which ideas come to be in people who either do not have the ability or lack the capacity to be self-referential or self-modifying, if such people truly do exist. Children , perhaps, could be considered to be in this state and that is a good argument for having special rules to protect them from abuses of their burgeoning conceptual system. For everyone else, the acceptance and survival of ideas is something which is actively decided.
Even as is the case with bad ideas that we held prior to receiving some new piece of information or being introduced to some new perspective that we hadn't been previously aware of, we make a choice as to whether to continue holding our prior belief or to discard it in favor of something new. Yes, this can be traumatic, especially the more deeply held and fundamental the belief in question. But it is done on a regular basis by people every day. The whole long history of science is a documentation of this process. Things which were not known before, were discovered. Answers were actively sought and explanations obtained.
To render the whole history of human thought as a passive process inacted on our brains by some vague undefined process of memes entering our brains without our consent and potentially reworking our mental processes, is to spit in the face of every scientist who has ever contributed to the advance of knowledge, to every person who has ever attempted to advance our comprehension of morality.
In short, it annihilates the very concept of morality. Something which becomes less surprising as one continues reading the God Delusion to see Dawkins' argument for evolutionary morality. He does not waste much time before referring to Kant to back up his claims that altruism is somehow an evolutionary imperative. Something which is ironically diametrically opposed to his entire argument for the gene's eye view of evolutionary theory.
What he insists on calling "reciprocal altruism" may just as easily be labeled "natural capitalism" for it has the same net effect and apparently the same motivations as any parties which would come to work together for mutual advantage. He makes the subsequent logical misstep of sliding between definitions of altruism. He starts with "reciprocal altruism" something which arises out of different creatures developing symbiotic relationships in response to evolutionary pressures and then proceeds to equate this with moral altruism, the belief that it is good to sacrifice oneself to strangers. Cooperation between friends and family which has obvious survival benefits cannot be directly connected to anonymously altruistic behavior. And in order to explain this away, Dawkins says that this is perhaps due to a misfiring of the altruistic protocol in our genes.
This could, perhaps, have saved him from stumbling into the trap he'd set for himself, but he repeatedly marches into the morass of claiming how much better altruism is than selfish pursuits and how science and all creation back him up on it. Unfortunately for Dawkins, his argument for altruism is bound entirely to his careful merging of definitions and a kind of lexical sleight of hand. Despite the word "altruism" being used in two ways, there is absolutely no similarity between observed "reciprocal altruism" as perceived in the biological world and "moral altruism" as promoted by Kant and company. This connection is false, and if an argument is to be made for it, it must be made explicit. I do not accept at face value that altruism is "good". This is simply a clever way to try and avoid justifying the claim.
The unfortunate thing is that this casts a shadow over the entire book. One that I thoroughly enjoyed until I started getting into where Dawkins starts grasping for moral straws from evolutionary science. His arguments against religion are succinct, logical, and damning. Theists will have a hard time convincing anyone who has read this book of the existence of God. And I wager that it will be an encouragement to many others to renounce their belief as irrational.
That is why I cannot understand why he had to try to foist this arbitrary Kantian nihilism into another perfectly salient critique of religion. The only possibility that comes to mind is that he has an ideological agenda apart from that of removing religiosity from its dominating hold on people's lives. Just like Sam Harris had to squeeze in an arbitrary assertion for the legitimacy of torture into his End of Faith, so too has Dawkins had to try and squeeze in an argument for moral altruism into a book on the same subject and with the same goal.
What baffles the imagination is that the issue of severing our subservience to religion is too important to risk in harnessing it to pet political and ideological pursuits especially those which effectively harness the morality of most organized religions and swallows them whole without question. Altruism is the morality of the religious. And religion cannot be swayed effectively until the proponents of reason learn to reject altruism as axiomatic of good. As long as the moral high-ground is effectively surrendered to the institution if not the literal word of religion, then all we can expect is a replay of the tragedies of the 2oth century as many critics rightly point out.
The reason why Dawkins, Harris et all cannot effectively combat the criticism of Stalin, Hitler, Zedong, etc, as being atheists is because they are all inherently committed to the idea that altruism is the moral ideal. Religious institutions are often committed to expressing the same values that they are proposing as being good. Their argument is that the literal teachings of religions are usually brutal, incoherent, and incompatible with modern society, which is true. They handicap their arguments because they don't want to accept the alternative to altruism, which would be objectivist rational self-interest.
They could easily repel the accusations that Stalin, Mao, and Polpot were all atheists. They could do this by pointing out that yes, they were atheists but their brutality was not a factor of their atheism. It was a factor of their altruism and the altruistic systems which they were manipulating. They were thrust into power because of movements that cried for sacrifice for the common good. They were revolutionaries seeking to establish a collectivist utopia on earth, and the sick thing is that they succeeded. Apologists come afterwards to say that well, that's not really how socialism is supposed to work. But the dedication to an altruistic moral ideal is the only unifying explanation that can be used to condemn both the horrors of religious authority and the horrors of secular collectivist authority.
Avoiding this argument leaves proponents of atheism in the much weakened position of claiming that religions are brutal because of their ideas, but that the brutality of atheist regimes stems from their leaders. It is obvious that the brutality stems from the ideas on both sides. The thing that Dawkins does not accept is that the true terror is one that is deeper than religion, it is rooted in altruism. Altruism is the death cult. Altruism is the cause greater than oneself that all can be sacrificed for. Altruism is the greater good for whom Jihad is deemed necessary. If only Dawkins would shift his arguments just a bit deeper and aim at the heart of the problem, then his arguments would be stronger and the cause of atheism would be greatly furthered. Unfortunately, he still chooses to cling to the morality of Christian tradition, even having renounced Christian fables. And the choice he leaves us with ends up not to be that much of a choice after all.
Friday, May 16, 2008
A Rebuttal to Some Arguments Against Objectivism
(This post may be hard to follow if you're not familiar with objectivist philosophy, but I'll try to make my rebuttal as concise as possible)
Well, the inspiration for this post comes from the following video. :
Please watch the video as I'll be destroying the objections raised therein one by one.
(First of all: the Axioms)
The video claims that objectivist axioms are not automatically accepted by anyone trying to attack them. I hold that they are. Let us see what his arguments are.
(1.1 Existence exists)
The video claims that the statement of identity is tautological and that this renders it meaningless? It's an axiom. Axioms are simply statements of reality. They are the bedrock upon which an argument is based. A tautological axiom would seem to be a given. I fail to see what the problem is in starting a logical derivation from something which is universally accepted (i.e. tautological).
The video then goes on to propose this question as being the truly essential point, "Is there existence apart from my experience in the first place?" Well, in short....yes. And of course the creator of this video accepts this because they went to the trouble of making the video in the first place. If this person truly rejects the idea that there is a common existence outside of his experience, then to make the video in spite of that would be truly mad. That, in itself, would be enough to disqualify this person from the status of "rational".
He then proceeds to prove that he is mad by proposing that "existence can be denied". How then is it possible that I am writing this critique of something which he created, put on the internet, and I subsequently viewed? Existence exists. This statement, which the video's creator initially conceded was a TAUTOLOGY (something which is ALWAYS true), is now contradicted by the statement "existence can be denied." This is a contradiction and renders this line of argument invalid. At best, this approach is intellectually dishonest. To paraphrase koenichfuerst, I think that's a sneaky way of pushing relativist nonsense down your throat from the very start. If "existence" exists by definition, as it would have to in order to be a tautology, then, by definition, it cannot be denied.
He then moves on to suggest that the great debate of metaphysics is to establish whether or not sense perception actually exists or if we are all Keanu Reaves in the Matrix. (Oh, boy....pop analogies here we come...). Once again, if all of our perceptions are wrong, and he truly believes this, then why are two human beings able to communicate at all? Why are we able to read each other's words and understand the content? How are we able to reach any agreements on anything whatsoever if the nature of existence is indeed so subjective?
I'm jumping ahead but koenichfuerst later invokes evolution as a support of a later argument. Evolution would have no meaning if our perceptions were all illusory. The whole theory of evolution is based on the idea that living beings change bit by bit over time. But one of the agents of that change is the environment in which they live. The better adapted to that environment they are, the better they are at surviving and in passing along their genes. Those who aren't as well adapted die off without the chance to pass them along. Evolution demands a direct correlation between survival and reality, between existence and life. You can't dismiss the identity principle as "begging the question" and subsequently use a theory which would be meaningless without it for support. This is another sign of intellectual dishonesty. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I hope that this is sufficient to brand koenichfurst as a charlatan and a liar. No wonder he didn't want to stick his face to this nonsense.
But, let's continue just to clean up all his inaccuracies.
koenichfuerst: 0
American Antitheist: 1
(1.2 Free Will)
Basically he is saying that free will cannot exist in a deterministic system. So, he says that if we accept physics, evolution, biology...in short the scientific explanation of existence and rule out any supernatural mumbo jumbo, that there is no room left for free will. If the man had any familiarity with cognitive science at all, then he would realize that this is just not so.
Of course objectivism supports the scientific view of our existence which rules out the possibility of a metaphysical soul. But, if you take a look at cognitive science, and in particular the work of Douglas Hofstadter, you will begin to see that it is possible to explain consciousness from within a deterministic framework. The window is called self-referentiality. For a detailed exploration of this concept I recommend you to Hofstadter's book, Godel, Escher, Bach. Although I must note that Hofstadter is in no way connected with objectivism and some of his personal opinions run definitely counter to it. However his initial theory of strange loops and tangled hierarchies seems to have a lot of value in the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. And it is an eloquent depiction of just how likely it is that deterministic science and free will can co-exist.
Never say never, dude.
koenichfuerst: 0
American Antitheist: 2
(2. Ethics)...oh, goody...let's see what he has in store for us....
He is saying that the biological goal of life is reproduction not survival.
Well, he's half right, but mostly wrong.
The biological goal of genes is reproduction. And they have worked under evolutionary laws for so long that the "gene machines" or bodies they have constructed to carry and reproduce them have become highly effective at enabling them to do so. From a post-Dawkins Darwinian perspective, genes are the principle actors in evolution and from the gene's perspective it is most definitely concerned with survival. A gene can survive for thousands and thousands of years and the gene's "goal", so to speak, is to survive indefinitely. It is by the process of evolution that it "hopes" to do so. Of course the gene doesn't actually "hope" for anything or have goals, but the analogy helps to visualize the aggregate effects of natural selection at the gene level. Of course, this is too highly intricate a concept to be dealt with in a paragraph. I refer the reader to Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for a fuller treatment of the idea. Of course, Dawkins is not an objectivist either, but since objectivism is a philosophy of reason, it can freely draw from science to support itself. And Dawkins is a brilliant evolutionary biologist.
The problem here is that genes are intent on survival which means that we have a drive to replicate, but for the genes to continue to exist and to optimize their chance for survival, their hosts or bodies must survive, and be able to survive for as long as necessary. And even then, aside from gene theory, let's just look at observations of the animal kingdom. How many animals knowingly commit suicide? Let's see..........ZERO. The reason is that any animal that had a genetic propensity to kill itself off, would succeed and would no longer exist. Evolution would allow it its wish and it would cease to be. Let's weaken it then, would any animal even exist which worked against it's own survival? NO. Why? Well, same thing. If an animal worked against itself (or did not work to preserve its own life) then this would be a huge disadvantage and it would become extinct due to evolutionary pressures. So, you can't use evolution to say that animals don't try to sustain their lives.
Furthermore, Ayn Rand does not claim that life is the ultimate value of all living beings. Animals cannot have values, because they do not have choice, they are merely programmed by those genes. Human beings, on the other hand, have that already established free-will. So, they can CHOOSE not to live and commit suicide. They CAN work against themselves if they wish. Only IF you choose life as your ultimate value, will the is-ought gap be bridged. Why? Because then the answer to things' optimal use is answered. If the ultimate goal is life, then all things, all rules of existence must be utilized in the way which is optimal for your own survival and then again survival in accordance with your nature as a human being. Continued survival in a state which is in accordance with your human nature is what we call happiness. If you choose to hold death as your ultimate value, then you are free to do so, but it will not bring you happiness.
Of course, if you choose not to hold life as your ultimate value, then you are in an immoral state, as he points out. As such, you can leech off of whoever is willing to support you, whether it be the blood money raped from the labor of others and dispensed by a welfare state, or if it is simply the charity of others upon which you can depend (or demand as the case may be). Of course, you can also die as do people who commit suicide, or do suicidal things.
As for the example of the praying mantis, it is highly debatable whether the male is aware of the fate that will meet it when it copulates. Most likely, it is simply driven by its genes as are all animals. I'm sure that it would much prefer to go on living if it could, but once again a praying mantis has no choice in the matter. People do. And I fail to see how surviving genetically equates with existing. The male CEASES to exist. It dies. Once again (third time) this is a case of intellectual dishonesty where koenichfuerst is switching definitions mid-sentence. The intent is to confuse your frame of reference so as to cram his argument down your throat, so to speak. (Pardon the paraphrase.)
koenichfuerst: 0
American Antitheist: 3
Finally, the Albert Ellis defense holds absolutely no weight whatsoever. Ellis developed Rational Therapy. And just by checking out the Wikipedia article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Ellis
we find,
"RT required that the therapist help the client understand — and act on the understanding —that his personal philosophy contains beliefs that lead to his own emotional pain. This new approach stressed actively working to change a client's self-defeating beliefs and behaviors by demonstrating their irrationality and rigidity. Ellis related everything to these core irrational beliefs such as "I must be perfect" and "I must be loved by everyone". Ellis believed that through rational analysis, people can understand their errors in light of the core irrational beliefs and then construct a more rational position."
I fail to see how this is an attack on objectivism. Demanding that everyone love you would seem to be a chronic problem of someone without self-esteem or self-worth who is desperately seeking validation from everyone around them. As for the seeking of perfection, it depends entirely upon what your concept of "perfect" is. If it is based on the irrational, then of course pursuing it will lead to problems. If it is based on the rationally attainable, then there is nothing impossible about it. Perfection can be attained as long as your notion of perfection is defined by reality and does not consist of an attempt to redefine reality to meet your conception. As a philosophy which preaches that full acceptance of the reality of the world is fundamental to all else, objectivism would demand that people keep their goals realistic. If anything, given this article, I would think that RT is fully compatible with objectivism. Of course I'm not fully versed in the method, but the principles seem non-contradictory.
koenichfuerst: 0
American Antitheist: 4
Obviously, he's too busy to read any of the works he refers to, or research any of the ideas he's criticizing. Remember, koenichfuerst...ignorance is not a rebuttal. Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it isn't true.
Cheers.
(If you're interested, Koenichfuerst replied to this post, and I posted a link to his rebuttal along with my counter. It should be interesting to note that he has yet to respond to it. Here's the link: http://anamericananti-theistabroad.blogspot.com/2008/05/further-defense-against-koenichfuerst.html)
Well, the inspiration for this post comes from the following video. :
Please watch the video as I'll be destroying the objections raised therein one by one.
(First of all: the Axioms)
The video claims that objectivist axioms are not automatically accepted by anyone trying to attack them. I hold that they are. Let us see what his arguments are.
(1.1 Existence exists)
The video claims that the statement of identity is tautological and that this renders it meaningless? It's an axiom. Axioms are simply statements of reality. They are the bedrock upon which an argument is based. A tautological axiom would seem to be a given. I fail to see what the problem is in starting a logical derivation from something which is universally accepted (i.e. tautological).
The video then goes on to propose this question as being the truly essential point, "Is there existence apart from my experience in the first place?" Well, in short....yes. And of course the creator of this video accepts this because they went to the trouble of making the video in the first place. If this person truly rejects the idea that there is a common existence outside of his experience, then to make the video in spite of that would be truly mad. That, in itself, would be enough to disqualify this person from the status of "rational".
He then proceeds to prove that he is mad by proposing that "existence can be denied". How then is it possible that I am writing this critique of something which he created, put on the internet, and I subsequently viewed? Existence exists. This statement, which the video's creator initially conceded was a TAUTOLOGY (something which is ALWAYS true), is now contradicted by the statement "existence can be denied." This is a contradiction and renders this line of argument invalid. At best, this approach is intellectually dishonest. To paraphrase koenichfuerst, I think that's a sneaky way of pushing relativist nonsense down your throat from the very start. If "existence" exists by definition, as it would have to in order to be a tautology, then, by definition, it cannot be denied.
He then moves on to suggest that the great debate of metaphysics is to establish whether or not sense perception actually exists or if we are all Keanu Reaves in the Matrix. (Oh, boy....pop analogies here we come...). Once again, if all of our perceptions are wrong, and he truly believes this, then why are two human beings able to communicate at all? Why are we able to read each other's words and understand the content? How are we able to reach any agreements on anything whatsoever if the nature of existence is indeed so subjective?
I'm jumping ahead but koenichfuerst later invokes evolution as a support of a later argument. Evolution would have no meaning if our perceptions were all illusory. The whole theory of evolution is based on the idea that living beings change bit by bit over time. But one of the agents of that change is the environment in which they live. The better adapted to that environment they are, the better they are at surviving and in passing along their genes. Those who aren't as well adapted die off without the chance to pass them along. Evolution demands a direct correlation between survival and reality, between existence and life. You can't dismiss the identity principle as "begging the question" and subsequently use a theory which would be meaningless without it for support. This is another sign of intellectual dishonesty. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I hope that this is sufficient to brand koenichfurst as a charlatan and a liar. No wonder he didn't want to stick his face to this nonsense.
But, let's continue just to clean up all his inaccuracies.
koenichfuerst: 0
American Antitheist: 1
(1.2 Free Will)
Basically he is saying that free will cannot exist in a deterministic system. So, he says that if we accept physics, evolution, biology...in short the scientific explanation of existence and rule out any supernatural mumbo jumbo, that there is no room left for free will. If the man had any familiarity with cognitive science at all, then he would realize that this is just not so.
Of course objectivism supports the scientific view of our existence which rules out the possibility of a metaphysical soul. But, if you take a look at cognitive science, and in particular the work of Douglas Hofstadter, you will begin to see that it is possible to explain consciousness from within a deterministic framework. The window is called self-referentiality. For a detailed exploration of this concept I recommend you to Hofstadter's book, Godel, Escher, Bach. Although I must note that Hofstadter is in no way connected with objectivism and some of his personal opinions run definitely counter to it. However his initial theory of strange loops and tangled hierarchies seems to have a lot of value in the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. And it is an eloquent depiction of just how likely it is that deterministic science and free will can co-exist.
Never say never, dude.
koenichfuerst: 0
American Antitheist: 2
(2. Ethics)...oh, goody...let's see what he has in store for us....
He is saying that the biological goal of life is reproduction not survival.
Well, he's half right, but mostly wrong.
The biological goal of genes is reproduction. And they have worked under evolutionary laws for so long that the "gene machines" or bodies they have constructed to carry and reproduce them have become highly effective at enabling them to do so. From a post-Dawkins Darwinian perspective, genes are the principle actors in evolution and from the gene's perspective it is most definitely concerned with survival. A gene can survive for thousands and thousands of years and the gene's "goal", so to speak, is to survive indefinitely. It is by the process of evolution that it "hopes" to do so. Of course the gene doesn't actually "hope" for anything or have goals, but the analogy helps to visualize the aggregate effects of natural selection at the gene level. Of course, this is too highly intricate a concept to be dealt with in a paragraph. I refer the reader to Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for a fuller treatment of the idea. Of course, Dawkins is not an objectivist either, but since objectivism is a philosophy of reason, it can freely draw from science to support itself. And Dawkins is a brilliant evolutionary biologist.
The problem here is that genes are intent on survival which means that we have a drive to replicate, but for the genes to continue to exist and to optimize their chance for survival, their hosts or bodies must survive, and be able to survive for as long as necessary. And even then, aside from gene theory, let's just look at observations of the animal kingdom. How many animals knowingly commit suicide? Let's see..........ZERO. The reason is that any animal that had a genetic propensity to kill itself off, would succeed and would no longer exist. Evolution would allow it its wish and it would cease to be. Let's weaken it then, would any animal even exist which worked against it's own survival? NO. Why? Well, same thing. If an animal worked against itself (or did not work to preserve its own life) then this would be a huge disadvantage and it would become extinct due to evolutionary pressures. So, you can't use evolution to say that animals don't try to sustain their lives.
Furthermore, Ayn Rand does not claim that life is the ultimate value of all living beings. Animals cannot have values, because they do not have choice, they are merely programmed by those genes. Human beings, on the other hand, have that already established free-will. So, they can CHOOSE not to live and commit suicide. They CAN work against themselves if they wish. Only IF you choose life as your ultimate value, will the is-ought gap be bridged. Why? Because then the answer to things' optimal use is answered. If the ultimate goal is life, then all things, all rules of existence must be utilized in the way which is optimal for your own survival and then again survival in accordance with your nature as a human being. Continued survival in a state which is in accordance with your human nature is what we call happiness. If you choose to hold death as your ultimate value, then you are free to do so, but it will not bring you happiness.
Of course, if you choose not to hold life as your ultimate value, then you are in an immoral state, as he points out. As such, you can leech off of whoever is willing to support you, whether it be the blood money raped from the labor of others and dispensed by a welfare state, or if it is simply the charity of others upon which you can depend (or demand as the case may be). Of course, you can also die as do people who commit suicide, or do suicidal things.
As for the example of the praying mantis, it is highly debatable whether the male is aware of the fate that will meet it when it copulates. Most likely, it is simply driven by its genes as are all animals. I'm sure that it would much prefer to go on living if it could, but once again a praying mantis has no choice in the matter. People do. And I fail to see how surviving genetically equates with existing. The male CEASES to exist. It dies. Once again (third time) this is a case of intellectual dishonesty where koenichfuerst is switching definitions mid-sentence. The intent is to confuse your frame of reference so as to cram his argument down your throat, so to speak. (Pardon the paraphrase.)
koenichfuerst: 0
American Antitheist: 3
Finally, the Albert Ellis defense holds absolutely no weight whatsoever. Ellis developed Rational Therapy. And just by checking out the Wikipedia article here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Ellis
we find,
"RT required that the therapist help the client understand — and act on the understanding —that his personal philosophy contains beliefs that lead to his own emotional pain. This new approach stressed actively working to change a client's self-defeating beliefs and behaviors by demonstrating their irrationality and rigidity. Ellis related everything to these core irrational beliefs such as "I must be perfect" and "I must be loved by everyone". Ellis believed that through rational analysis, people can understand their errors in light of the core irrational beliefs and then construct a more rational position."
I fail to see how this is an attack on objectivism. Demanding that everyone love you would seem to be a chronic problem of someone without self-esteem or self-worth who is desperately seeking validation from everyone around them. As for the seeking of perfection, it depends entirely upon what your concept of "perfect" is. If it is based on the irrational, then of course pursuing it will lead to problems. If it is based on the rationally attainable, then there is nothing impossible about it. Perfection can be attained as long as your notion of perfection is defined by reality and does not consist of an attempt to redefine reality to meet your conception. As a philosophy which preaches that full acceptance of the reality of the world is fundamental to all else, objectivism would demand that people keep their goals realistic. If anything, given this article, I would think that RT is fully compatible with objectivism. Of course I'm not fully versed in the method, but the principles seem non-contradictory.
koenichfuerst: 0
American Antitheist: 4
Obviously, he's too busy to read any of the works he refers to, or research any of the ideas he's criticizing. Remember, koenichfuerst...ignorance is not a rebuttal. Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it isn't true.
Cheers.
(If you're interested, Koenichfuerst replied to this post, and I posted a link to his rebuttal along with my counter. It should be interesting to note that he has yet to respond to it. Here's the link: http://anamericananti-theistabroad.blogspot.com/2008/05/further-defense-against-koenichfuerst.html)
Monday, April 28, 2008
The Real War
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8307333/
I present for your perusal the above link in the hopes that it will bring to your attention the nature of the real war against terrorism and what it implies for our future. It is evident that as terrorism becomes increasingly decentralized, that it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible to stamp out. More than military action, more than headhunting the leaders of these organizations, we need to consider what it is that is driving this seemingly endless supply of suicidal mass murderers.
I think Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have been particularly eloquent on this issue and I highly recommend their books. Despite what flaws I see in their arguments when it comes around to supposing what ethics should replace those offered by religion, or in stating that ethics are evolutionarily determined (as though we didn't ultimately choose what we believe), I think it is undeniable that religious thought is and has been the fundamental cause of the greater share of all the war, atrocity, suppression and misery in this world.
We need to cut away the institutionalized harbors of religious zealotry. We need to get religion out of schools, off our money, out of the pledge to allegiance. We need to elect atheist politicians, who will select atheist judges, who will uphold people's rights to not participate in this organized hysteria. We need to criticize the very fundamental roots of these misguided philosophies. And as Dawkins as said many times, we need to take off the kid gloves when we're talking about religion.
Religion does not deserve respect. It deserves ridicule. And those who would blindly march to undo scientific learning and replace it with fatwahs and Hallelujahs need to be exposed for what they are. Purely and objectively evil. We tend to give religious people the benefit of the doubt as to their motivations, but in light of the scientific achievements of the last hundred years, there is simply very little doubt to be left to them. There is no God. There never was. Objections to the teaching of scientific thought based on superstitious lullabies should be laughed out of every school board in the nation rather than worryingly coddled and nurtured. Religious themed schools should receive absolutely no money from public sources, let them earn it themselves from the zealots who support them. Why encourage its proliferation?
What does this have to do with terrorism? Well, the way I see it, Islamic fundamentalism is not that far removed from Christian fundamentalism. It just so happens that a brilliant man by the name of Thomas Jefferson thought it was a good idea to keep religion out of politics. That combined with the massive success of the American experiment, helped to influence Western culture so as to follow suit for the most part in practice if not in theory. Unfortunately we have, as of late, been quick to regret our declarations of human rights, the fundamentals which made America strong in the first place. No, we would much rather have security at home, while we get medieval abroad. We would much rather convince ourselves that while religion breeds fanatics, that religion is not in itself fanatical. We would much rather partition our brains to insulate ourselves from a constant stream of contradicting and irrational conflicts in our hypotheses rather than admit the lie and remove the contradictions. In Islamic nations religion IS politics and politics is religion. There is no separation and brutal dictatorships, death worship, and terrorism is what this has bred.
We will never win the war on terror as long as we submit to religion ourselves. As long as we allow the followers of Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism to convince themselves that this belief is compatible with life in the modern world, then we are feeding the very sickness which threatens to wipe us all out. We will never be able to secure rights for all human beings until we recognize that our society is merely the sum of all the contributions of the individuals in that society.
Of course, those individuals must be free to believe what they wish and say what they wish and do what they wish (within limits obviously). But that does not give them license to speak without rebuttal or to act without consequence. They must be debated and defeated in debate, over and over and over again. They must be challenged in the newspapers, on TV, in the movie theaters, in books, in blogs, on the street, in your neighborhood...anywhere and everywhere they are. Whenever they make a decision based on some mouldy tome of ancient myth. The Real war is a war of ideas. And if we do not confront them, or grant too much benefit for too little doubt, or defer to a false sense of mutual respect, then we may find that confrontation comes too late, that there is no more doubt and that that sense of respect was used against us and to the advantage of those too barbaric to ever countenance such a thing as rights.
Could you imagine a Muslim tolerating your right to free speech? Ridiculous, they have riots over cartoons....CARTOONS!!?? You've gotta be kidding me! Well, go take a look at the list of books your local church group wants to ban, and give up the lie that there's all that much keeping Christians from raising swords steeped in the blood of infidels.
The real war is in our heads and in our hearts. We have to win it there or we'll never have a hope of winning the military one. We need to undo God as a concept worthy of respect and awe. We need to place humanity in it's rightful place at the fount of all creation.
Get busy living or get busy dying. It really is that simple.
I present for your perusal the above link in the hopes that it will bring to your attention the nature of the real war against terrorism and what it implies for our future. It is evident that as terrorism becomes increasingly decentralized, that it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible to stamp out. More than military action, more than headhunting the leaders of these organizations, we need to consider what it is that is driving this seemingly endless supply of suicidal mass murderers.
I think Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have been particularly eloquent on this issue and I highly recommend their books. Despite what flaws I see in their arguments when it comes around to supposing what ethics should replace those offered by religion, or in stating that ethics are evolutionarily determined (as though we didn't ultimately choose what we believe), I think it is undeniable that religious thought is and has been the fundamental cause of the greater share of all the war, atrocity, suppression and misery in this world.
We need to cut away the institutionalized harbors of religious zealotry. We need to get religion out of schools, off our money, out of the pledge to allegiance. We need to elect atheist politicians, who will select atheist judges, who will uphold people's rights to not participate in this organized hysteria. We need to criticize the very fundamental roots of these misguided philosophies. And as Dawkins as said many times, we need to take off the kid gloves when we're talking about religion.
Religion does not deserve respect. It deserves ridicule. And those who would blindly march to undo scientific learning and replace it with fatwahs and Hallelujahs need to be exposed for what they are. Purely and objectively evil. We tend to give religious people the benefit of the doubt as to their motivations, but in light of the scientific achievements of the last hundred years, there is simply very little doubt to be left to them. There is no God. There never was. Objections to the teaching of scientific thought based on superstitious lullabies should be laughed out of every school board in the nation rather than worryingly coddled and nurtured. Religious themed schools should receive absolutely no money from public sources, let them earn it themselves from the zealots who support them. Why encourage its proliferation?
What does this have to do with terrorism? Well, the way I see it, Islamic fundamentalism is not that far removed from Christian fundamentalism. It just so happens that a brilliant man by the name of Thomas Jefferson thought it was a good idea to keep religion out of politics. That combined with the massive success of the American experiment, helped to influence Western culture so as to follow suit for the most part in practice if not in theory. Unfortunately we have, as of late, been quick to regret our declarations of human rights, the fundamentals which made America strong in the first place. No, we would much rather have security at home, while we get medieval abroad. We would much rather convince ourselves that while religion breeds fanatics, that religion is not in itself fanatical. We would much rather partition our brains to insulate ourselves from a constant stream of contradicting and irrational conflicts in our hypotheses rather than admit the lie and remove the contradictions. In Islamic nations religion IS politics and politics is religion. There is no separation and brutal dictatorships, death worship, and terrorism is what this has bred.
We will never win the war on terror as long as we submit to religion ourselves. As long as we allow the followers of Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism to convince themselves that this belief is compatible with life in the modern world, then we are feeding the very sickness which threatens to wipe us all out. We will never be able to secure rights for all human beings until we recognize that our society is merely the sum of all the contributions of the individuals in that society.
Of course, those individuals must be free to believe what they wish and say what they wish and do what they wish (within limits obviously). But that does not give them license to speak without rebuttal or to act without consequence. They must be debated and defeated in debate, over and over and over again. They must be challenged in the newspapers, on TV, in the movie theaters, in books, in blogs, on the street, in your neighborhood...anywhere and everywhere they are. Whenever they make a decision based on some mouldy tome of ancient myth. The Real war is a war of ideas. And if we do not confront them, or grant too much benefit for too little doubt, or defer to a false sense of mutual respect, then we may find that confrontation comes too late, that there is no more doubt and that that sense of respect was used against us and to the advantage of those too barbaric to ever countenance such a thing as rights.
Could you imagine a Muslim tolerating your right to free speech? Ridiculous, they have riots over cartoons....CARTOONS!!?? You've gotta be kidding me! Well, go take a look at the list of books your local church group wants to ban, and give up the lie that there's all that much keeping Christians from raising swords steeped in the blood of infidels.
The real war is in our heads and in our hearts. We have to win it there or we'll never have a hope of winning the military one. We need to undo God as a concept worthy of respect and awe. We need to place humanity in it's rightful place at the fount of all creation.
Get busy living or get busy dying. It really is that simple.
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