Against the Stream

Adventures in Misogynist Public Policy

Redstate.com's Eric Erickson went on Fox Business the other day and made some rather ... amusing ... comments about the scientific evidence that men are supposed to be the "breadwinners" in the family because ... birds, I suppose.

In response, Ed Kilgore made a very astute observation about the nature of the world that conservatives think we should all go "back" to, a world where the men do the working and the women raise the kids (which is, not work?). Ed wonders what the policy implications should be of desiring such a world:

If you are a conservative misogynist who doesn’t believe in using government to achieve desired social means any more than is necessary, it gets tough .... After all, many women are in the work force instead of staying home to be “full-time moms” not because they are lacking the beneficent servant-leadership of a man, but because the menfolk can’t earn enough to support a family alone. An economy characterized by high and growing inequality isn’t terribly conducive to large families and stay-at-home mothers outside the very privileged classes. And anyone saying “it used to work” might want to consider the kind of collective bargaining agreements, minimum wage laws, and subsidized housing arrangements we “used to have”—back before we all understood that those items were socialistic and hence un-American.

And this is really the crux of it. Conservatives have a mythic view of society, one that doesn't conform to any actual society that's actually existed, but which is best understood by imagining that all conservative policy is based on watching repeated Leave It To Beaver marathons.

Gun Control Studies

One of the perennial arguments that I've seen made by gun control opponants in my arguments about guns these past months is that gun control legislation won't, apparently a priori and by definition, work. Of course, there's actually a lot of data out there to the contrary, but how do you publicize it?

Well, that leads me to this post, and however many subsequent posts I can manage on this topic. Whenever possible, I will list one or more studies on the topic of firearms control that demonstrates, to a greater or lesser degree, the ways in which gun control is effective. I'll provide links to full texts whenever possible, but in a lot of cases I may only be able to provide links to abstracts. Either way, I invite readers to go and read the studies for themselves. Feel free to leave (civil!) responses in the comments.

First up then:

"The Effectiveness of Gun Control: Multivariate Statistical Analysis"

The purpose of this study is to statistically and empirically evaluate the effectiveness of the gun control laws that have been adopted by states and municipalities. States are divided into two groups: states with no restrictions as to gun use and states with restrictions (e.g., waiting periods, license, etc.). Multiple linear regression models are used to evaluate the relationship between the number of gun related deaths in 1990 and sets of determinants which include state laws and regulations governing the use of firearms. The study results indicate that gun control laws have a very mild effect on the number of gun related deaths while socioeconomic variables such as a state's poverty level, unemployment rate and alcohol consumption, have significant impact on firearm related deaths. These findings suggest that any reduction in resources spent on social programs tied to the Crime Bill may be counter-productive.

"The Effectiveness of Legislation Controling Gun Usage: A Holistic Measure of Gun Control Legislation"

Results from past research on the effectiveness of gun control legislation have been mixed. This study posits that one of the reasons for these conflicting results is the use of individual laws as the major variable. Instead, this study uses a holistic and comprehensive measure of state gun control laws, grouping states into extreme and lax gun control states. A multivariate linear regression analysis is used to investigate the relationship between a set of determinants, including the holistic gun control measure, and firearm deaths per 100,000 inhabitants of each state. The results show that comprehensive gun control legislation indeed lowers the number of gun-related deaths anywhere between one to almost six per 100,000 individuals in those states that have the most extreme gun-related legislation. Our study also reveals that socioeconomic and law enforcement factors play equally important roles in containing gun-related fatalities. These findings suggest that gun-related deaths have a variety of causes and that attempts to legislate a solution to this problem will need to be correspondingly complex and multifaceted.

Comment:

These are the first two peer-reviewed studies I was able to find on a quick search of the issue. I intend to continue digging and post what I find here. But what these studies indicate is that a) gun control legislation is effective, but it is clearly not a panacea. Other social factors enter into the equation and must be dealt with alongside reasonable gun-control legislation.

Far from supporting the contention that gun control laws are ineffective then, then evidence seems to suggest that they do exactly what they are intended to do: Reduce firearm injuries and deaths. But by themselves, they won't result in massive overall improvements. That leads me to conclude that legislation is necessary, but is only part of the larger puzzle of solving the problem of gun-related violence.

As I find peer-reviewed studies that pertain to the issue, I'll post them here, along with any studies that offer a dissenting point of view. Again, feel free to offer civil commentary, including links to peer reviewed studies that offer the other side of the argument.

A Bit More About Materialism

Conor Cunningham offers a critique of the kind of "ultra-Darwinist" materialism, in particular its epistemological incoherence:

 

 As Cunningham points out, if everything we believe in is an illusion, including not only our understanding of God or our sense of self, but anything that we believe to be true about our world. It creates a self-destructive paradox: Materialism is in this regard no more a "true" description of the world than religion is, it is simply one meme among others, and gives us no more reliable a guide to the way that the world "really" is. Materialism this throughgoing, Cunningham points out, "fatally undermines itself.

Perhaps it is for this reason that so many materialists are so eager to keep the full implications of metaphysical materialism under wraps.

The Psychology of Moral Agency

Via Andrew Sullivan, a conversation between cognitive scientist Joshua Knobe and psychologist Kurt Grey, on the subject of how our perception of another's moral agency affects our interpretation of their moral action: In particular, the idea that we tend to judge moral agents more harshly than moral victims. In other words, if we know others to be capable of goodness, we are more likely to condemn them when the fail to be so.

 

More "Church for Freaks" Coming

The last few weeks have been a bit hectic. I hope to resume my "Church for Freaks" series this coming week with some reflections on the nature of the church as a community, and questions of ethics. Watch this space!

Theology and Science Fiction

Charlie Jane Anders at io9 has written an article on the big theological questions that should be tackled in science fiction. Fred Clark at Slacktivist offers his perspective:

I would like to see science fiction used to explore what it would mean if Calvinism were true. I’m talking predestination. TULIP. The works.

For those unfamiliar with the acronym, TULIP — outlined indelibly by the great George C. Scott here — stands for total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.

That framework is only sustainable, I think, because our knowledge is incomplete and imperfect. Calvinists know that some few are among the elect, and that Jesus’ atonement is not for all/most. But Calvinists have no way of knowing, with certainty,who the elect might be.

If that knowledge were available — if it were obvious and certain — then Calvinism would not last another generation. It would collapse partly due to ethical incoherence and partly due to ethical horror.

Fred of course has been dealing for years with the pain of inept world-building in his massive review of Left Behind (a task for which there really should be an award of some kind). So the idea of asking how the world would be different if you tweak one dimension of reality is a genuinely interesting prospect.

The best science fiction of course is great because it creates a compelling world in which its characters can dwell. Tweaking it in a theological dimension could yeild some very interesting results.

Evolving Religion

In The Chronicle of Higher Education Tom Bartlett looks at attempts by evolutionary biologists to move beyond neo-atheist claptrap and consider the question of the role religion plays in the process of human evolutionary development. The neo-atheists, such as Dawkins and company, of course, simply believe religion is bad, full stop:

The implication—that religion is basically malevolent, that it "poisons everything," in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens—is a standard assertion of the New Atheists. Their argument isn't just that there probably is no God, or that intelligent design is laughable bunk, or that the Bible is far from inerrant. It's that religion is obviously bad for human beings, condemning them to ignorance, subservience, and endless conflict, and we would be better off without it.

But would we?

Before you can know for sure, you have to figure out what religion does for us in the first place. That's exactly what a loosely affiliated group of scholars in fields including biology, anthropology, and psychology are working on. They're applying evolutionary theory to the study of religion in order to discover whether or not it strengthens societies, makes them more successful, more cooperative, kinder. The scholars, many of them atheists themselves, generally look askance at the rise of New Atheism, calling its proponents ignorant, fundamentalist, and worst of all, unscientific. Dawkins and company have been no more charitable in return.

There are of course many dimensions to the conversation about the social and biological utility of religion, and the article considers some of the prominant theorists on the biological front. But the idea that religion serves an important social function, irrespective of the truth of its metaphysical claims, is by no means a new theory, and is given sociological form in the work of Max Weber and Emil Durkheim and their followers.

The article is well worth reading in its entirely, if for no other reason than to get a sense of both what these scientists are arguing about the evolution of religion, and how poorly they've been received by some of their fellow evolutionary biologists.

Defending Ayn Rand

Not me! God, no. But Cathy Young has a piece in The Boston Globe defending Rand's philosophy, sort of. Her argument basically boils down to this: If you pretend that Ayn Rand's ideas weren't as repellant as they actually are, then her philosophy is defensible. For example:

Was Rand’s individualism too radical? Yes. Her hostility to the idea of any moral obligation to others led her to argue that, while helping a friend in need is fine, doing so at the expense of something it hurts you to give up is “immoral.” In her fiction, even private charity as a vocation is despised; so, mostly, is family. Rand made little allowance for the fact that some people cannot help themselves through no fault of theirs, or that much individual achievement is enabled by support networks.

Yet great insights can come from flawed thinkers. Rand’s anti-altruism tirades often turn their target into a straw man, but she is right that the knee-jerk habit of treating altruistic goals as noble has aided evil — for instance, blinding well-meaning Westerners to communism’s monstrosity. When pundits alarmed by Rand-style individualism scoff at the “myth” of individual autonomy, we should remember that this “myth” gave us freedom and human rights, and unleashed creative energies that raised humanity’s welfare to once-unthinkable levels. Rand’s work offers a powerful defense of freedom’s moral foundation — and a perceptive analysis of the kinship between “progressive” and “traditionalist” anti-freedom ideologies.

Got it: So Rand made overblown arguments and attacked strawmen, but if you treat her arguments as though they weren't overblown, interpret them in such a way that they don't say what they actually say, and pretend that her strawman arguments were valid, then she's got a point ... of ... some ... kind.

After all, it's not like there were any more reasonable figures, using better arguments and more careful analysis making a more moderate defense of liberal society, individual autonomy, and creativity during the same period, right?

Young concludes thusly:

Rand is best viewed as a brilliant maverick. But there are reasons this woman attracted hordes of followers, influenced many others, and impressed smart people from journalist Mike Wallace to philosopher John Hospers. Those who treat Rand as a liberal bogeyman will forever be blindsided by her appeal.

On the contrary, I suspect that Rand's liberal detractors understand her appeal quite well: She appeals to the inner 15-year old boy in each of us (at least each of us males), who want what we want now, and don't want to be told what to do by anybody. I can truly understand the appeal, and as a 15-year old boy, had my own torrid love affair with Ayn Rand (or at least, her philosophy). But like most 15-year old boys of a philosophical bent, I grew out of it, and found better and deeper resources for my philosophical reflections.

But there will always be a subset of 15-year boys who never quite get over their love for Rand. That's OK, unless that is you become a 42-year old man who is running for Vice President. Then it might be a problem.

God and the God Particle

The big science news over the last several days has been the discovery of the Higgs Boson, or at least something that has many of the Characteristics of the Higgs Boson (sometimes called the "God particle," to the annoyance of many scientists and theologians!).

So, if you're not a physicist, the first question you may be asking yourself at this point is "what's a Higgs Boson?" Perhaps this will help:

 

However, it should be noted that, whatever it is that's been discovered at CERN, there are still many, many unanswered questions that remain in light of this discovery. And even the question of what's been discovered is very much up in the air:

If you were to say July 4, 2012 was the day the Higgs boson was officially discovered, you wouldn't really be wrong. As CERN Director General Rolf Heuer put it, "As a layman, I think we have it." That's about as unequivocal a statement as you're likely to get from CERN, which is understandably conservative when it comes to announcing possible physics-shattering discoveries. But then, there's a second half to Heuer's quote, one that probably won't get as much attention: "But as a scientist, I have to say, 'What do we have?'" That's a huge question, one that won't be answered today, maybe not this year. Today's announcement is just the beginning of the Higgs story, definitely not the end. (emphasis added)

That hasn't stopped a great deal of speculation on the implications of the Higgs Boson for religion, which is I suppose inevitable when you dub something "The God Particle." I think there is some suggestion that, once the Higgs has been discovered the last nail in the coffin of religion as a rational way of understanding the world will have been placed, but really there is no reason to believe that this is the case.

The central problem from my perspective is in the poor understanding that most people have of what is being discussed when the word "God" is deployed. As Frank Schaeffer noted in the video I posted yesterday, the deepest wells of the theistic tradition, at least in the Christian framework, understand that whatever we may say about God, we are confronted with a reality that is beyond our capacity to comprehend in any kind of adequate way. So any statement about the divine is an attempt to understand an impenetrable mystery.

Now, I think many people, both of a religious and an anti-religious persuasion, think that this is a cop-out. I can remember an old George Carlin routine where he complained that, whenver he asked the local priest some deep theological question about God, or the incarnation, or the Trinity, he'd be met with "It's a mystery!" Which seems like a wholly inadequate answer when coming from someone who's supposed to be in on the mysteries. And of course, many religious people seem to think that believing in something innately mysterious is leaving too many questions about their own state of salvation up for grabs, and so they prefer their religion to come prepackaged with all of the answers included.

But this is a misunderstanding of what is meant by the word "mystery" here. A mystery isn't a puzzle of which we haven't put the pieces together yet, and it's not simply anothe way of saying "I don't know, quit asking so many questions." To say that something is a mystery in the religious sense is to say that we are confronted with a dimension of existence that is in principle beyond our capacity to totally comprehend. We may catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of our eye, or we may come to understand it partially in terms that make some sense to us, but we never get the whole picture, or really much more than the tiniest fragment that can fit into our consciousness. This is a very different thing than simply not knowing something. As in the novel Flatland, it is as though we were a two-dimensional figure trying to explain the concept of three-dimensions to a two-dimensional world.

But as regards the Higgs and God, it should be said that, however much the Higgs winds up being able to tell us about the physical characteristics of the world around us, no one should realistically believe that it will provide all answers or dispell all mysteries. And from a theological perspective, it ought to be made clear that there is no knowledge of the natural world that can stand, in itself as a refutation of the existence of a transcendent and omnipotent God.

This is what I mean when I say we need to use the word "God" properly in this context. Properly understood, God in the theistic tradition (for the most part, there are certainly some exceptions, such as some brands of process thought) is not a being within the universe. Rather, God, understood as creator, is understood to be a) a necessary being and b) therefore necessarily existing outside of the universe of created things. By "necessary being" here, I mean a being whose existence is not contingent or dependent on any other thing. All things within the universe -- from trees to people to duckbilled platypuses to the Higgs boson -- are contingent and dependent. In other words, it is possible for them to not exist. But God refers to a being whose existence is not contingent and (if you buy Anselm's ontological argument) is not capable of not being.

What this means is that any new knowledge about the nature of the universe of created things, while it will increase the overall fund of human knowledge about the world, and thereby glorify God, cannot give us new insight in its own right about the nature and character of God.

This is not to say that scientific discoveries cannot raise genuine questions about the nature and character of God as implications of their findings. Thus, darwinian evolution raises genuine questions about God's goodness and omnipotence, if in fact nature is "red in tooth and claw" and evolution is an undirected process. Similarly, our knowledge about the size and age of the universe raises substantial questions about divine providence and the place of human beings in God's plan. But in themselves, these issues do not serve as refutations of any particular theological principle, though they do raise substantial theological questions that theologians ought to be both willing and eager to explore as a part of their work.

From that perspective then, the Higgs offers a wealth of new material for theologians to consider, and no doubt as we learn more about how it functions and what we can learn about the nature of the world through our study of it, it will continue to offer new challenges for theologians and philosophers, as well as physicists and cosmologists.

The Singularity is Where?

At Religion Dispatches, Andrew Aghapour discusses Ray Kurzweil's evangelizing on behalf of the emergence of "the singularity" as evocative of new religious movements:

Over the last 15 years a brilliant and charismatic self-made man has been campaigning across the United States, describing a near-future event that will deliver human salvation, immortality, and unlimited creative potential. After this event, he claims, the trappings of earthly life will no longer plague us: we will no longer age or get sick; we will be able to create our own worlds to our exact preferences; and we will no longer be restricted to our current physical forms. 

This man’s vision has become the center of a growing movement that already has tens of thousands of adherents, dozens of shared texts, and its own non-profit school that aims to “assemble, educate, and inspire a cadre of leaders” to one day “address humanity’s grand challenges.”

This might sound like a run-of-the-mill new religious movement, but what makes Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” movement unique is that it doesn’t consider itself religious at all. Singularity Theory holds that technology will continue to grow exponentially until “human” and “digital” forms combine seamlessly.

There are of course a great many parallels between singularity theory and religion, but is singluarlarity theory best understood in terms of religious categories? That's unclear to me. It's an interesting experiment in futurism, and certainly applies well to our strange technological age. Whatever light the theory of religion may shed on the topic, the underlying question of our reliance on technology deserves to me carefully explored from religious, moral, and sociological points of view.