Posts filed under ‘Human Behaviour’
Who’s Silencing Whom?
Thank goodness for blogs like Harry’s Place.
I blog because I have things I want to say, and some of those things strike me as being very important, and some of those require a bit of thought and care to put clearly and succinctly, but on most days I just don’t have time or only have time for brief, shoot-from-the-hip posts, and so I often wind up leaving unsaid the things that are most important because I just don’t have time to say them as well as I want to. So it’s great to find just the thing I wanted to say very well formulated somewhere else. I can just quote it, link to it, and feel I’ve done what I really wanted to do, namely add my voice to those saying a certain important thing.
I found one of those things today on Harry’s Place. It’s been said before, but it needs to be said as many times as possible by as many people as possible. It’s this:
The familiar complaint that critics of Israel are being silenced or cowed by charges of antisemitism is in some ways the reverse of the truth. It’s people who call attention to antisemitism, and the enabling or papering over of antisemitism so vividly illustrated by Pilger’s rant, who are being dismissed as Zionist agents, Arab haters, people who can’t possibly be arguing in good faith. We’re not opposing bigotry, the logic goes; we’re employing “the usual tactic,” as Caryl Churchill said of Howard Jacobson when he condemned her ugly [and shockingly anti-Semitic -- Primavera] play Seven Jewish Children.
That was written by David Adler of Lerterland, and I found it via Harry’s Place. Adler goes on to quote Huey Newton:
We realize that some people who happen to be Jewish and who support Israel will use the Black Panther Party’s position that is against imperialism and against the agents of the imperialist as an attack of anti-Semitism. We think that is a backbiting racist underhanded tactic and we will treat it as such.
In other words, we categorically refuse to discuss or acknowledge antisemitism, and we will greet anyone who attempts to do so with unthinking hostility.
And we will loudly (and dishonestly) complain that anyone who brings even the slightest criticism of Israel gets accused of anti-Semitism, and we will congratulate each other for being the brave ones who resist the strangely potent and dark and furtive powers that seek to silence us, even those of us who are experts on different kinds of Jews and openly have Jewish friends and use words like “goyim” and “mitzvah”.
Celebrity Apologies
The matter of institutional apologies is a subject that Normblog has commented on several times, most recently here. I broadly agree with Normblog’s views in this area and Norm’s posts save me from having to set out these various considerations (as I would certainly do less ably) in order to preface – by way of drawing a contrast – my remarks about this spectacle involving a pro golfer called Tiger Woods. But I do need to highlight one question regarding apologies, and that is the question of whether they are made publicly, privately, or both.
In the case of institutional apologies, there may well be value in both. Let us imagine that the current Pope decided to apologise on behalf of the Vatican and the entire Catholic Church for the child abuse first committed, and then covered up, by the Catholic hierarchy. It would be worth something were each victim to receive a personal and private letter of apology signed by the Pope on behalf of the Church. The value of such a direct, personal and private apology could not and would not be replaced by a general and public apology by the Pope, made (in order to be public) before international media. Yet such a public apology would also be of value – value of a different kind, and also important, and the need for it would not be removed by private and personal apologies.
And now to my point: I have always thought it inappropriate that celebrities are not only expected to make public apologies for private sins but seem almost eager to do so, and I think it is unseemly in the extreme.
I never wanted to know about Tiger Woods’ philandering in the first place, and now I don’t want to know how sorry he is. I don’t find any of it interesting in any way, and I’ve never understood why, apparently, so many people find such stories and the ensuing spectacles so endlessly fascinating. If anyone were to ask me what I think he ought to do, I’d say he ought to leave the celebrity circus alone; he ought to have the seriousness, remorse and humility to depart from the media spotlight; and he ought to go home, apologise privately and sincerely to his wife, and then show he means it by changing. Not that it would be any of my business to tell him that, except that he seems to be willingly complicit in having his sordid and unimportant story shoved in front of my face every time I want to see what, of real importance, is happening in the world.
Culture of Complaint Leaps the Channel
Quick is a private company, not a public-sector organisation. If it has restaurants in areas where the population is largely Muslim and it sees an opportunity to increase sales by making those restaurants conform to Halal requirements, then it ought to be free to do so. People who want to eat pork will then just have to go somewhere else.
It occurs to me that even if Quick were a service run by the state, it may have the right to make certain of its restaurants Halal. I’m not sure about this – I’ve not taken the time to think it through completely – but starting from the consideration that the ability to eat pork is not some kind of universal right, it’s at least not obvious that the state would be doing something discriminatory in such a case.
Discriminatory would be, for example, a public swimming pool having “Muslims only” or “ethnic minorities only” hours. At issue in such cases isn’t whether or not having access to a public swimming pool per se is some kind of right (it isn’t; if it were then councils or municipalities that didn’t have public pools would be human rights abusers for that reason) but rather the fact of giving access to some people while denying it to others, and this on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or some other such grouping.
Quick didn’t make certain of its restaurants Muslim-only, denying entry — or access to certain menu items — to non-Muslims. Anyone can walk into any Quick restaurant and order anything they like from the choice available at that restaurant.
Aesthetics Got There Before Cognitive Science
There is an interesting post up at a blog called The Frontal Cortex on how the brain, while listening to music, makes predictions about what’s coming next, and is pleasurably stimulated when those preductions are confounded. The blog’s author, Jonah Lehrer, writes:
There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.
The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of “low-probability notes”. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty – we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns – that’s exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance. (That’s why the unexpected pitches triggered the most brain activity, synchronizing the activity of brain regions involved in motor movement and emotion.) I wrote about this concept in Proust Was A Neuroscientist.
Lehrer then goes on, quoting from something else he’d written earlier, to cite the philosopher and musicologist Leonard B. Meyer in Emotion and Meaning in Music which Meyer published in 1956. I haven’t read that book (yet) but many years ago I read and never forgot an article Meyer had published in 1959, Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music. It’s far shorter than a book but gets across Meyer’s account of what makes great music great very effectively. Unfortunately it appears to still be under copyright so I can’t just post here the copy I have scanned from an old (1980) edition of Aesthetics Today, but I believe that under fair use rules I can send it to you if you e-mail me and request a copy. If you want to know why, for example, Mahler was great while another conductor-composer, Leonard Bernstein, was merely very talented, this’ll explain it.
So Meyer got this worked out half a century before the neuroscientists at Goldsmiths and UCL. I love and respect science, but this seems to suggest that sometimes you can figure something out just by thinking about it.
Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan
Shalom Lappin / King’s Philosophy — Update
In an earlier post I asked what people outside the academy could do to support Shalom Lappin. Here’s one thing you can do: join the Facebook group Stop Philosophy Cuts at King’s College London.
What Can We Do to Support Shalom Lappin?
I’m back, valued readers; sorry for the pause. Was travelling.
Just a very brief post still this evening, to link to a very important one here regarding an academic at King’s College who has been treated very shabbily. In a nutshell, Shalom Lappin was offered a chair with tenure at Hebrew University. After conferring with his institutional superiors at King’s and receiving assurance that his position there was secure, and preferring to remain in London, he turned down the offer from Jerusalem. Little more than half a year later, he was informed that his academic position was being eliminated and he himself being made redundant. He writes:
I now find myself threatened with redundancy six years before scheduled retirement, with totally inadequate pension provisions, while at the height of my research career. This is grossly unfair, and violates statements often made by the Principal and other members of the administration to the effect that excellence in research is King’s priority. This threat is also a serious miscarriage of justice, given my level of productivity, and the fact that I was allowed to give up a very attractive offer on the basis of assurances that have turned out to be without foundation.
Normblog announces that a campaign is under way within the philosophy profession and among King’s students to obtain redress for Shalom Lappin and others. I hope that that campaign can be broadened (or a parallel one launched) to include others who may wish to support, in particular, Shalom, whose writing at Normblog and Engage will be known to many who may not be familiar with his scholarly output.
Crystal-Clear Dishwater
The purpose of this post is to recommend a blog that was just recently called to my attention. That blog is The Daily Dishwater. I’ve had a chance to have a quick scan of it — by no means a thorough read, but a look at the About page, the blogroll, and some of the posts. My impression is that the Dishwater and Primavera have much in common, including both a broad appreciation of Andrew Sullivan’s blogging, and a strong feeling that Sullivan is developing an attitude towards Jews that is, at best, unhealthy.
Here is a recent summary of Primavera’s take on Sullivan:
Several things make Andrew Sullivan a great blogger. One is his immediate, visceral approach: he says what he thinks about something in any given moment. Another is his intellectual honesty: he will say “I was wrong” when new information prompts him to correct or adjust something he’d said. A third (and by no means the last) is his human touch: he lets his emotions show, he comes across as a real person and not a calculated media persona.
Add to this the fact that I also agree with him on just about every substantive issue and it’s no wonder he’s one of my favourite bloggers. What are those issues? The Media. Iraq. Sarah Palin. President Obama. Health Care. Torture. Gay Rights. Israel. And many others.
Whoah, wait a minute — Israel? Absolutely. And why not? As far as I can make out, Sullivan thinks that all of the West Bank and Gaza should become a proper, independent Palestinian state, and so do I. As far as I can make out, Sullivan doesn’t think that Israel has any business building anything at all on territory it conquered in 1967, and neither do I.
No, I don’t have any problems with Sullivan’s positions on Israel/Palestine.
…
But sometimes I’m bothered by some of his symbolism and language.
I would like to note that now I appear to have moved, without having announced it, from giving Sullivan the benefit of the doubt regarding whether or not he has become anti-Semitic to basically now feeling that, yes, he has. But that’s not in fact really the point. Primavera doesn’t need to try to peer into the heart of Andrew Sullivan. All I need to do is read what he writes, and he is now writing anti-Semitic material. The question isn’t in fact whether he himself is anti-Semitic, but whether what he writes is, and, yes, he now writes things that, quite objectively, are.
Sullivan has already been preparing his defence against accusations of anti-Semitism, having evidently known they would be forthcoming. His tactic is not to deal with the accusations at all, but to employ the Livingstone manoeuvre.
He must be called out on that, and it must not be permitted, but at the same time I would like to underline that most of what Sullivan has written that could be seen as anti-Semitic has been about Jews qua Jews, not about Israel per se. See: His patronising self-declared philosemitism, his good-Jews-vs-bad-Jews taxonomy, his invoking of the “darkness” trope, his some-of-my-best-friends-are-Jews moments, his wrapping Anne Frank in a kefiyeh, his use of “neocon” as code for “Jew” and with it his insinuation of divided loyalty and untrustworthiness, and probably more.
So the Livingstone trick doesn’t even apply to much of what is at issue here.
Nevertheless it must be headed off, for some of what Sullivan does is demonisation — not criticism, but demonisation — of Israel. Comparing Israel to the Nazis, for example, as he did when he called Gaza a ghetto. Or: his repeated claims that Israel wants to go to war with Iran, as if Iran weren’t, quite openly and declaredly, threatening Israel’s very existence, and the potential of an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities were from sheer lust for violence and blood on the part of Israel. Or, similarly, his frequent references to Israel “crushing” or “pulverising” Gaza, as if there were no reason in the world for Israel’s strikes against Hamas. The latter two examples constitute not only demonisation; they are also an extension of the age-old blood libel against Jews, portraying them as an incorrigibly bloodthirsty. None of this is negated in the slightest by Sullivan’s hedging moves in which he patronisingly mentions those acceptable Jews who manifest the officially-approved Jewish qualities of gentleness or whatever have you (go read Sullivan’s blog to figure out exactly what Jewish qualities he approves of). On the contrary, that simply has the effect of layering anti-Semitism over more anti-Semitism.
But I’ve already digressed. Read the Dishwater — it does an important job well. Sullivan is a great blogger — one of the greatest. All the more important to call attention to, and protest, that part of his writing that is objectively anti-Semitic.
Not Good Enough, But Still Good
The American Law Institute has now said, not that capital punishment should not be administered because it’s wrong, but that capital punishment should not be administered because, in practice, it cannot be done properly. It would have been better for them to declare that the death penalty is categorically wrong, but that was never going to happen. So we’ll have to be glad for this bit of progress in the fight against this particular, and particularly horrible, barbarism.
What is Naomi Klein’s Carbon Footprint?
It has occurred to me to wonder about this. I’m no environmental Holy One but I bet Her Holiness Naomi’s carbon footprint is many multiples of mine. I mean, she flies around a lot, doesn’t she? So I googled “What is Naomi Klein’s Carbon Footprint”, exact phrase, and found just one hit. Well, now that’s two of us asking. Naomi?
New Fiction by Naomi Klein
Top-tier PAIJ Naomi Klein has an article up on HuffPo about how, for Obama, no opportunity is too big to blow (which in my mind rather triggers the question of whether, for Obama, any Wall Street dick is too big to blow, but that’s another topic). According to Klein, the failure at Copenhagen was all Obama’s fault.
For people like Klein, it’s not about assessing what’s really going on or working with the world of actual reality; it’s about writing something that will please your market and be consistent with your carefully cultivated image.
She claims she understands that Obama is constrained by Congress and can’t promise more than he can deliver, and then in the same breath blithely ignores these factors and berates Obama for not having ignored them himself.
I noted the billing in her HuffPo byline: “award-winning journalist”. That must be why her account of what happened at Copenhagen has so little to do with reality.
Jewish and Feeling Unimportant? Be a PAIJ!
An Anthropology of the BBC
Nick Cohen describes a phenomenon:
We have been at war since the autumn of 2001. Our intelligence services spend virtually all their time countering Islamist plots. Yet Islamist violence barely features in thrillers. Whether the public gets what the public wants or the public wants what the public gets is always an open question, but the spy dramas that have won the largest audiences and greatest critical praise all daintily step around the jihadist in the room.
…
For connoisseurs of the issue-avoiding thriller, nothing beatsSpooks. The real MI5 deals with radical Islam almost to the exclusion of all other threats. The BBC’s fictional MI5 deals with every threat except radical Islam. I appreciate there are better ways to spend my time, but every week I am transfixed by the effort the corporation puts into steering clear of al-Qaeda. In 2005, when real Islamists were bombing London, Spooks seemed to be a truly contemporary drama. Alas, the terrorists it had plotting to destroy London weren’t the followers of Sayyid Qutb but anti-technology Greens, who, say what you will about them, are on the whole a peaceful lot. In 2006, an Islamist cell was once again threatening to commit a crime against humanity. Inevitably, the writers could not confront the existence of actual terrorists and the Islamists turned out to be Mossad agents in disguise. For the BBC, as for the European and Arab far-Right, all Islamist atrocities were the work of the international Jewish conspiracy, that manipulates its dupes like a puppet-master jerking his strings. In the opening episode of the current series, the Sacred Army of Righteous Vengeance staged a mock execution of Harry Pearce, the head of MI5′s Counter-Terrorism Department. But, initiates wondered, why would they want to kill him when the BBC has already made it clear that there are no Islamist terrorists for MI5 to counter? True to form, the Sacred Army of Righteous Vengeance turned out to be yet another front organisation attempting to besmirch the good name of al-Qaeda, this time run by Hindu extremists.
First the Greens, then the Jews, then the Hindus-baffled viewers will be expecting the English Quakers and Burmese Buddhists next. Maybe the BBC will get round to them, but as the eighth series of Spooks draws to its conclusion, we know that for the time being at least, the scriptwriters have identified the real enemy. Episode by episode, Harry and his team have learned about a conspiracy of awesome power. As with Bourne and Bond, it is a cabal that has established itself at the highest levels of Western intelligence services. Once again, the good guys must fight the real menace that comes from the enemy within.
And then explains the reasons for it:
1) Fear. Ever since the Rushdie affair, British editors have feared that criticism of radical Islamists will lead to attacks on their staff and, more pertinently, on themselves. Suppressed panic explains why British newspapers did not follow European and indeed Middle Eastern newspapers in running the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. Although it is absurd to believe that a weak joke about bin Laden would provoke jihadis into bombing Channel 4′s glass and steel headquarters in Westminster, cowards die many times before their deaths and once cowed editors have killed one story, they will kill hundreds more.
2) Racism. Although few television executives say so explicitly, most believe that the bulk of British Muslims support al-Qaeda in an inchoate way. Offending the enemy therefore means offending multiculturalism. If the accusation of “Islamophobia” carries any meaning, it must condemn the assumption that all Muslims are terrorist sympathisers. Although they say they don’t accept the calumny in theory, most in television behave as if they do in practice.
3) Conformism. Once small bands of people have established a prohibition, it is ferociously difficult to shake them out of it. British TV managers are indistinguishable in class, beliefs and tastes. They socialise with each other and swap information and jobs. As any anthropologist will tell you, taboo-breakers in a closed society risk the censure of the tribe.
Hat tip: Harry’s Place
One Understands What One Wants to Understand
Norman Geras hits a nail on the head in this post. And a very important nail it is, too. You’ll have to read his whole post (it’s short) to know what he’s talking about, but what I’m talking about are these words of his:
Many of Israel’s critics not only don’t know it; they seem to have no capacity for grasping why Israelis should feel this way.
Bingo.
Actually there’s a bit more to it than just that, which I think Norm intends to communicate between the lines. It is of course not actually believable that most critics of Israel literally inherently lack the capacity to understand why Israelis should feel threatened. Many of them have, after all, the capacity to ‘understand‘ those who want to mass-murder Jewish babies.
No, it’s not that today’s Groanistas couldn’t understand Israeli fears. It’s that they don’t want to, because understanding Israelis would get in the way of being able to fully savour their marvelously gratifying Israel-bashing addictions.
That’s Bullshit, John Murtha!
The big story at the moment is how the House of Representatives has been caught trying to slip some nifty new jets for itself into a military spending bill. This comes only a few months after this very same House lambasted industry execs for their luxurious travel habits. The public outcry over the House’s hypocrisy has barely begun to build to its inevitable crescendo yet already the House has hastily withdrawn its little scheme. That says something. The Huffington Post reports:
“If the Department of Defense does not want these aircraft, they will be eliminated from the bill,” said Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who chairs the panel that approved the additional spending.
Oh Murtha you fork-tongued old pol, you. You know damn well that the Pentagon never wanted those planes; you and Nancy and all your other House cronies did.
But the best is this:
Murtha said the newer jets were needed to replace older aircraft with safety and maintenance issues that cost a lot more to operate.
So without further ado, without so much as even trying to put this supposedly so important case for safety and cost-savings to the public, you are now rushing to drop these “needed” plans and embrace, instead, a fleet that has safety issues and will cost the public more as well. Yeah, right….
Not Quite The Prez’s Talking Points
Ben Smith of Politico last week picked up something that subsequently got lots of coverage in the blogosphere: right-wing screamer Bill O’Reilly’s “ode” to President Obama.
Barack Obama, a youngster in Hawaii without his parents around, has toughed it out and become one of history’s great stories, no matter what happens going forward, what he has achieved in his 48 years is simply astounding. Consider the odds. The United States is a nation of more than 300 million citizens. Only one person is currently the Commander in Chief. That man had no fatherly guidance, is of mixed race, and had no family connections to guide him into the world of national politics. That adds up to one simple truth that every American child should be told: “If Barack Obama can become the President of the United States, then whatever dream you may have can happen in your life.
Ben Smith says this is “language that could have come out of the president’s campaign talking points.”
Not all of it, Ben. Not this: “of mixed race”. That little phrase betrays an awful lot about Bill O’Reilly. For who talks like that, after all? Who says things like ”mixed race” these days? People who are either openly racist, or uncomfortable talking about “race” because they because they are secretly racist. Birchers. Birthers. Klansmen. Confederate-flag-flying sons of bitches all over the South. And Bill O’Reilly.
The point – O’Reilly’s point, at least — about Obama isn’t really that he’s got one white parent and one black parent. The point is that he’s black, and whether that’s because he’s got one black parent or two is of no consequence.
There’s nothing wrong with making a big deal out of Obama’s being black, because it is a big deal. It’s huge. The first black President of the United States. When he won the elction, I was among the millions who were overcome with the emotion of that moment, and, literally, cried tears of happiness for that reason alone.
There are few black people (or African-Americans if you prefer) in the US who have no non-African ancestry. There are many who have a white parent or grandparent. No normal, reasonably well-adjusted and reasonably non-racist person today calls these people “mixed race”. They are black, or African-American, and that’s just how it is. The reason O’Reilly can’t talk about it in normal language is because he’s got a deep problem with it.
Child Abuse, or Just Using One’s Child?
As has been widely reported, Sarah Palin had this to say (on her Facebook page) late last week:
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
Is Sarah Palin abusing her youngest son? Or is she merely using him?
Richard Ingrams: Illiterate and Can’t Abide Jews?
A Harry’s Place post has reminded me of this old page of Richard Ingrams drivel in the Guardian, in which he begins, “As a seasoned commuter, the scene was a familiar one.” Well may you wonder, Dear Reader, how a scene can be a seasoned commuter. I’m afraid I can’t help you.
I believe I can, however, tell you why, further down the page, Ingrams writes this:
I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.
I think it’s because he just doesn’t like Jews (as a rule, that is; it goes without saying that some of his best friends are Jews). Still today; six years later, he mentions when people are Jewish even when it’s not relevant to anything.
Is Richard Ingrams anti-Semitic? Who knows. But if it walks like a duck…
Andrew Sullivan is a Very Nice Goy
…so he should stop trying to be a Jew. He had a post recently in which he wrote “To watch someone you love blossom and grow and mature and thrive is what my Jewish friends call a mitzvah.” Someone emailed him to correct him about that. He published that, in a post called Me and My Yiddish, but then, in that post, he got it wrong again, writing, “Schepping someone’s nachas sounds pretty gay to me. So I’m in! What I meant, I think, is that it’s a blessing, a mitzvah from God.” Another blooper (and some of us are beginning to cringe a bit).
Look, you’re a gay Catholic married conservative Obama-supporting Brit from East Grinstead. For you that’s not enough? A Jew you also want to be, on top of all that?
On a more serious note, I’m surprised Andrew doesn’t know this but referring to “my Jewish friends” never sounds good — from anyone. It sounds — not saying that it’s the case, but it sounds — like he feels he needs to burnish his non-prejudiced credentials: a sort of mild version of “some of my best friends are Jews”. I’m sure that’s not what it’s about with Andrew, but what it sounds like is what it sounds like, so the best strategy, for everyone, is just to avoid phrases like that altogether. He could just as well have written “To watch someone you love blossom and grow and mature and thrive is what Jews call a mitzvah”. It would still have been incorrect, but it would have sounded much better, much more like the words of a guy to whom the thought has never even occurred that he might have anything to worry about, because he doesn’t.
Marital Infidelity as a Business Idea
I have just discovered that there is a website, metroencounters.com, for people who are (presumably) unsatisfyingly married and would like to have an affair. Am I naïve to be shocked at this? The website’s home page says:
Has the spark gone from your marriage? Are you feeling trapped? Thousands of men and women have just discovered how to get the butterflies back… Join the UKs largest Married Dating site & meet other married people who want to have some fun…
This is of course perfectly disgusting. Is also perfectly legal, as it should be.
Eating Out (and Getting Fat) in America
There are a number of reasons why obesity is such a big problem in the US. I don’t propose to recount all of them here, as they are well rehearsed. I do however want to take note of one of them, namely the size of the portions of food to which Americans are accustomed, and relate that to my own experience. I’m in the US quite frequently and I often eat in the kind of restaurants that many Americans go to: some chains, some family restaurants, some (woefully clueless) places purporting to offer what they call “fine dining”. And almost every time, when whatever I have ordered arrives, I am both amazed and repelled by the sheer amount of food piled on the plate. It puts me off my meal, and it explains a great deal.
Varieties of Religious Experience
There are people who are convinced there was never a moon landing. Some people take the fictional best-seller “The Da Vinci Code” seriously. At the moment, some people in the US are claiming to believe that President Obama was born in Kenya. I’ve never been worried by this sort of thing. But recently I’ve been discovering that some people I know very well, and otherwise think very highly of — people who are, indeed, otherwise outstandingly intelligent — entertain as being at least not entirely implausible the idea that the George W. Bush administration might have been complicit in the September 11 attacks. That’s troubling. There are two ways to counter such nonsense: to dispute that Bush would have been involved in such a conspiracy, and to dispute that he could have. The former is a waste of time. Of course it’s extremely unlikely that Bush would have done such a thing, but why get into an empty debate, with no substantive basis on either side, about this question? But the second approach looks like a clear winner. Could such a thing have been possible? How could the secret be kept, given the vast number of people who would have had to know something? Even assuming Bush would have been capable of willing something like that, it would have been impossible to carry out in practice. It’s just plain impossible on a purely practical level, and quite obviously so.
Religiosity as an Evolved Trait
Atheists and agnostics might wonder: why is religious belief so widespread, and why is it so persistent? Why does there seem to be such a receptiveness to it in the human animal? How is it that a belief in the supernatural seems so natural as to appear almost inborn? Believers will point to this and say, “You see? God has created us with an instinct to believe,” or something along those lines. But there is a better hypothesis that is non-religious, and that is that humans evolved a tendency toward religious belief because this trait is advantageous. As the human species evolved, it became more and more conscious, and as it became more conscious it began to ask questions. Where did everything come from? What is life? What is death? Why are these things the way they seem to be? And so on. And with these questions came, perhaps, a sense of missing something, perhaps what we would today call “meaning”; there came, perhaps, a feeling of wanting more, something we might call, today, a “purpose” to live for. The idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing god (or other supernatural entity) that created “us” and cared about what we did could have been a satisfying answer to such questions and a powerful balm for such feelings. Those who believed in such things might well, therefore, have been happier than others. Evolution might have favoured them — after all, a happy and confident man gets more girls than an anxious and questioning nebbish, and a cheerful and unpreoccupied girl is much sexier than a pensive and uncertain one — and thus, quite plausibly, might a genetic tendency to believe in the supernatural have been selected for, and become almost as ineradicably established in humans as, say, the language instinct. Couple this with the strong tendency of people to pass on to their offspring pretty much everything they themselves were taught as children whether or not they still believe it as adults, and it’s not hard to see why Freud’s predicted “Future of an Illusion” has not yet arrived.
Why “Tolerance”?
There is a broadly accepted moral imperative that one should be “tolerant” of people from cultures, ethnicities, or even just places not one’s own. The thrust of this imperative is right but the language is misleading — or is it perhaps revealing? To “tolerate” something implies that it is in some way undesirable. That is hardly an ideal starting point for true harmony.
Hippocritial, Not Hippocratic
The AMA’s opposition to Obama’s proposed health care reform is naked, cynical self-interest. I know doctors who have always refused to join the AMA because the imperative to heal is not among its top priorities.
