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I posted this on all of the Facebook threads in which I found myself embroiled in a debate over the relationship between our public discourse and the tragedy in Arizona this weekend. It is an invitation to those on opposing sides to mutually and without acrimony strive to improve our public discourse. If you want to respond to me, please email me at steve.harvey.hd28@gmail.com. I think we all should try to make a social movement out of establishing this process. Thanks.

Rather than continuing to run in circles with the substantive arguments, why don’t we first agree on an attitude and a process? Let’s agree to try to be reasonable people of goodwill working together to govern ourselves as wisely as possible. Then let’s agree that none of us is infallible, that any or all of us may be right or wrong on any given points, and that understanding the world, our role in it, and how to do the best we can to govern ourselves is an on-going challenge. Then let’s agree to try to listen to one another as well as score points off of one another, making honest attempts to understand and acknowledge opposing points of view. Let’s agree that the purpose of public discourse isn’t to defend our own precipitious certainties against the perceived errors of others, but to work together to improve all of our understandings, and our ability as a polity to work together to govern ourselves well and justly. After we have succeeded in laying that foundation, then we can discuss and debate the substantive issues fruitfully.

To those who are going to respond, “good one, Steve, as if you do any of those things,” fine, I’ll concede my own defects and errors, and agree along with all others to just keep trying to do better. To all who are sincere in their desire to be reasonable people of goodwill, this agreement should be completely natural and, indeed, indispensible, for it defines what it means to be a reasonable person of goodwill. To those who want to view the world as those who are right and good (themselves) and those who are wrong and evil (all who disagree with them), then they need make no effort to be reasonable people of goodwill. It is up to each of us to decide who and what we want to be, and what our effect on the world is going to be.

It’s a sincere offer made in good faith. Some may want to accept it in their own time and their own way. That’s fine; it’s something we each can choose to do in whatever way, with whatever people, we are able to. But the more we can include, and the harder and more in earnest we try, the better. It’s worth the effort.

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By “second-order social change” (SOSC) I mean social change that involves changing the algorithm by which first-order social change (FOSC) occurs. For instance, if, today, (first-order) social change occurs as the result of some complex function of mass media dissemination of competing memes (including technological and social institutional innovations) and competing organizational efforts to advance them, SOSC  consists of altering that complex function through which these (and potentially other) variables pass to produce FOSC. A common example of proposed SOSC is campaign finance reform, which would alter the relative weights of the relevant variables and the ways in which they aggregate.

SOSC requires the same organizational efforts, the same mobilization of human and material resources, the same FOSC algorithm that current FOSC requires. But it is directed toward changes less in substantive public policies than in procedural public policies. Campaign finance reform, for instance, isn’t about providing people with health care, or educational services, or increased safety, or child and family services, but rather about changing the way in which one aspect of the processes which lead to such substantive policy decisions operates.

I’ve posted frequently on the importance of, for many purposes, focusing on procedures and methodologies over substantive conclusions and outcomes (see, e.g., Ideology v. Methodology,  The Signal-To-Noise Ratio, The Elusive Truth, Scientific Misconduct: There’s No Such Thing As Immaculate Conception). And I’ve posted on what I believe are the procedures and methodologies that we should strive for in the realm of popular political participation to improve both the quality of policy ideas generated and our ability to implement them (see, e.g., A ProposalThe Ultimate Political Challenge, The Foundational Progressive Agenda“Messaging” From The Heart of Many Rather Than The Mouth of Few). Finally, I’ve posted on the nature of the social institutional landscape that should inform our attempts at SOSC (see, e.g., The Politics of Consciousness , Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future, The Evolutionary Ecology of Audio-Visual Entertainment (& the nested & overlapping subsystems of Gaia), The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix, Counterterrorism: A Model of Centralized Decentralization, The Economic Debate We’re Not Having).

Campaign finance reform, while important and powerful, is a relatively superficial example of SOSC, addressing a relatively superficial layer of public policy formation (electoral politics). Electoral politics exists within a context of popular opinions and predispositions, and the more fundamental forms of SOSC that we might attempt address that context rather than the processes which occur within it. Current grass-roots and organizational political activism focuses too much, first, on the electoral and governmental dimensions of FOSC, and secondarily, the electoral and governmental dimensions of SOSC. By doing so, it not only fails to address deeper foundational and contextual elements of social change, but also replicates many of the errors that such deeper-level SOSC would address.

The question facing those engaged in efforts to effect social change is: How should my time, energy and money be distributed among the various possible investments in social change? For many,  a single substantive issue is compelling enough to attract all of their attention, whether it is a particular substantive policy issue (such as health care, education, or child welfare), or a social issue addressed through private and charitable means (such as raising money to combat breast cancer). Some distribute their investment among a few such substantive issues. And some focus their investment in the political sphere, trying to advance a set of positions on a spectrum of issues by getting candidates from a particular party elected, and by pressuring them to vote in particular ways once elected. All of these are reasonable investments of time, energy, and money in individual attempts to affect our world for the better, and all have a place in the overall distribution of such investments that we, collectively, should make.

But grossly underrepresented in this mix is the investment in affecting the way individual ideological convictions are formed, by using the same ingredients as we use in all other efforts to effect social change, but directing them instead in the combined challenge of advancing the production and successful dissemination of the most well reasoned social institutional understandings and subsequent policy ideas. Taking on the challenge of affecting the zeitgeist, making it better informed and more conducive to the interests of humanity, may seem too vague and daunting, but, I argue, it provides a very large bang-for-the-buck. In fact, failing to address it any large-scale focused way leaves us trapped in the same old vicious cycles of relative ineffectiveness, alternating between euphorias of triumph and depths of despair as we continually find that even our victories seem too small and woefully insufficient.

Fortuitously, SOSC is in many ways easier to pursue than FOSC, and more so the more deeply contextual it becomes, because, for the same reason that efforts are disproportionately invested in FOSC and in relatively superficial SOSC, few people are mobilized to resist attempts to address deeper layers of SOSC, or forms of SOSC that don’t directly threaten any vested interests. Term limit legislation in Colorado, for instance, ended up contributing to a Democratic takeover by openning up Republican held seats that would otherwise have been held indefinitely by the incumbents.

Ironically, term limits in Colorado was championed primarily by Republicans, which demonstrates both just how necessary it is to employ very good analyses when pursuing SOSC so as to avoid undesired unintended consequences, and the extent to which those who might be considered the “losers” of the results of the change are less likely to mobilize opposition to it (in this case, having mobilized support of it instead). I suspect, too, that many of those Republicans who supported term limits did not feel that they had made a mistake when it cost their party the majority in both houses of the state legislature, because they were focused on the value of the reform itself, divorced from its partisan implications. SOSC, more so the more contextual it becomes, has the benefit of appealing to non-partisan values rather than to knee-jerk partisan allegiances, circumventing and penetrating to some extent the obstacles posed by blind ideological partisan convictions.

Those of us who want to work toward improving the quality of life in our communities, our state, our nation, and our world need to invest more of our time, effort, and money in second-order social change, and particularly in deeper contextual varieties of SOSC. Those are the pressure points where dramatic social paradigm shifts can be effectuated (see The Variable Malleability of Reality).

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

(Formerly titled “Improved Communications Technologies & Techniques + Personal, Organizational & Methodological Discipline = Historic Social Change”).

For those who are serious about working for social progress based on reason and goodwill, despite the momentary resurgence of regressive “Political Fundamentalism”, the confluence of factors is currently conducive to a major paradigm shift. The power of decentralized mass media (“social media”), combined with improvements in our knowledge of  relevant disciplines (e.g., cognitive science, microeconomics and game theory, learning theory, complex dynamical systems analysis, network analysis, epistemology and epidemiology, evolutionary ecology, etc.), as a tool for intentional and potentially revolutionary social change, is a theme which requires the weaving together of several separate threads of thought I’ve been developing on this blog.

I’ve posted previously about the processes of cultural evolution and revolution, involving “memes,” groups of memes called “paradigms,” and the revolutionary effects of the accumulation of anomalous memes within a paradigm, leading to “paradigm shifts” (The Politics of Consciousness). And I’ve continued that theme down several avenues, including a discussion of the acceleration of the cultural evolution effectuated by two products of that evolution itself: scientific methodology, and evolving communications and data processing technologies (Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future, The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix).

In another, related, series of posts, I’ve written about the power of decentralization for liberating and mobilizing “the genius of the many” (a term for evolving decentralized but coherent sets of memes and paradigms) to an extent never before possible (Wikinomics: The Genius of the Many Unleashed, Tuesday Briefs: The Anti-Empathy Movement & “Crowdfunding”, Counterterrorism: A Model of Centralized Decentralization), itself a product of the processes discussed in the “human social evolutionary ecology” series. (See also http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html). And in two series of posts largely unrelated to these, I discussed the importance of creating a methodology akin to that of science or law for disciplining the development of political beliefs (Ideology v. MethodologyA Proposal, The Elusive Truth), and the importance of each of us truly committed to social change becoming equally committed to individual change, adopting a personal discipline that will make us the most capable and compelling of messengers (“Messaging” From The Heart of Many Rather Than The Mouth of Few). There are some posts, as well, which combine these latter two themes to some extent (The Foundational Progressive Agenda, The Voice Beyond Extremes, The Ultimate Political Challenge).

But, though these disciplines and methodologies, to some extent yet to be developed, are the key to robust sustainable social progress, we do not have to invent either the products or procedures of reason applied to politics from scratch. We have the academic disciplines I listed above (as well as all others) to draw on. I hope that some of my posts have helped to disseminate a glimpse of their relevant fruits, which is as much as any of us can unilaterally accomplish (e.g., The Economic Debate We’re Not Having , The Real Deficit , The Restructuring of the American and Global Economy , The More Subtle & Salient Economic Danger We Currently FaceA comprehensive overview of the immigration issue, Real Education Reform, The Most Vulnerable Americans, The Vital Role of Child, Family, and Community Services).

“The genius of the many” extends the concept of division and coordination of labor to the development of human consciousness; the ecology of memes that transcends the individuals whose brains are its physical medium (see The Evolutionary Ecology of Audio-Visual Entertainment (& the nested & overlapping subsystems of Gaia). A simple example of the genius of the many is that if a thousand random people guess the number of jelly beans in a jar, the mean of their guesses will be closer to the correct number than any individual guess, including the one made by the most mathematically capable of doing so.

Ironically, the far-right, relying on caricatures of reality, reduces all progressive thought to a hierarchical top-down “statism,” whereas the philosophy I am espousing is just the opposite: A coordinated bottom-up aggregation. The far-right, conversely, advocates for a tyranny of the lowest common denominator, never mobilizing more genius than the least informed among them is already in possession of, and imposing that state of relative ignorance on all of us in the form of information-stripped public policy.

One academic discipline not only informs the progressive policies we should be seeking to design and implement, but also the challenge of bringing more people on board in the effort to design and implement them. George Lakoff, in The Political Mind, explores the underlying metaphors upon which our minds are structured, the differences between conservative and progressive metaphors, and the techniques of messaging that should be employed to activate the narratives of empathy that exist compartmentalized in almost every mind –including conservatives’ minds– in advocacy of progressive policies. Combined with other advances in cognitive sciences (e.g., Evolutionary Psychology, such as espoused by Stephen Pinker in The Language Instinct and How The Mind Works; Semiotics; Frame Analysis), this body of thought provides an encouraging foundation for accelerating the reproductive success of progressive memes and, by doing so, the coming paradigm shift that will favor them.

If enough of us dedicate ourselves to these personal, organizational, and procedural disciplines, utilizing to as great and effective an extent as possible these new decentralized media of mass communications, then the power of that movement will be unstoppable. I have frequently quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. (“The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice”) and John Maynard Keynes (“[People] will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other alternatives”) as a reminder that the momentum of history is on our side. Bigotry and various forms of violence (including institutionalized mutual indifference, and politically organized ignorance) keep rearing their heads and wreaking havoc in the short run, but they are not what defines the historical progression of humanity, which has, overall, been characterized by gradual, inconstant, unequally distributed gains in both prosperity and social justice (and though sustainability has still been woefully insufficiently addressed, there are indications that the momentum of reason will favor it as well, though whether in time to avert disaster remains to be seen).

Those of us who strive to be reasonable people of goodwill are the ones with the wind of time at our back. Those who oppose reason and goodwill are the overabundant debris resisting that wind, stinging and bruising us as we rush through and past them. 

Here I am, conveying this matrix of interrelated memes, this paradigm, on a blog, and on Facebook, utilizing the very media that form one component of what I am discussing, in order to discuss it, to disseminate the information and attempt to persuade others to do so as well, and to refine our efforts in accord with these opportunities and lessons. We can see the acceleration of innovation resulting from some of the variables described above in many spheres of life: “Chaos Theory” (aka “complex dynamical systems analysis”) and numerous non-computer-related technological advances that have resulted from it (in fields such as medicine, engineering, meteorology, etc.), fractal geometry, the internet, the computer revolution, wikis, vastly reduced economic transaction costs, vastly accelerated processes in almost every sphere of life.

Social systems, which have been in so many ways so resistent to reduction through scientific methodologies (though not as resistant as conventional wisdom maintains), are opened up in a variety of ways, as themselves comprising the quintessential complex dynamical system, amenable to the new analytic techniques that come with that paradigm. Social systems are a complex network of linkages and impulses across them, triggering cascading state changes among nodes and clusters of interlinked nodes, reverberating, self-amplifying, mutually reinforcing or suppressing, not unlike the brains that provide the physical medium of their primary constituent unit (memes, or cognitions).

I am not suggesting that we now have the magic bullet, the panacea that will resolve all problems and meet all challenges. Nor am I suggesting that our efforts will suddenly yield spectacular results. Even in our accelerating world, dramatic change takes time, and is dramatic only in retrospect. Few people have recognized any non-military revolution at the time it has occurred, but they occur nonetheless, and are marvels to behold once they become apparent.

Past modern historical occidental social revolutions have been partial and cumulative: the Renaissance recovered some of the grace and aesthetic rationality of classical Greece; the Scientific Revolution gave us a robust methodology for improving our knowledge and understanding of nature; the Industrial Revolution gave us new machines of production and distribution; the very recent and equally consequential Computer Revolution created a quantum leap forward in the speed and capacity of data processing and communication.

At some point, whether now or in the future, these accumulating revolutions will embrace aspects of social organization that have remained thus far elusive, advancing with accelerating leaps forward in the liberation and implementation of the genius of the many in service to humanity. We will look back on that threshold as we look back on those that came before, recognizing that it transformed the world to human benefit in ways that were almost unimaginable prior to it. That inevitable threshold will usher in a new standard of human welfare that becomes completely taken for granted by those who enjoy it, which will be an expanding portion of humanity, both geographically and temporally. Whether that moment has come or not, it behooves those of us who want to speed its (sustainable) arrival to work, in individually and collectively disciplined ways, using the cognitive and technological tools at our disposal, to facilitate that transformation.

The world has been changing dramatically, in cumulative and accelerating ways, and will continue to do so. But those changes have provided humanity with a mixed blessing, creating riches beyond belief to all but those born into them, but also tools of violence, oppression, and depletion and destruction of the Earth on which we depend. There are those who would like to barrel blindly forward, ravaging the Earth and prospering on the backs of the suffering of others. And there are those who want to harness the forces we are unleashing, to create the sustainable and just future that all reasonable people of goodwill should strive for. Our ability to organize to that latter end has never been greater. Now, we have only to see if our determination is sufficient to rise to that opportunity.

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I sometimes hear progressives saying “It’s time for us to get angry; it worked for the Tea Party.” It also defines the Tea Party, and is among the reasons I oppose the Tea Party. I’m not saying that there’s never cause for anger; I’m saying that it should never be allowed to define us.

Instead, we should define ourselves first, and act in the world in service to that ideal, rather than allow ourselves to be defined by our frustrations, by some negative reaction to the world around us. Let others be the chest-thumping mindless apes. Someone has to strive to be the sentient beings, who lead the way toward something better.

What does it take to be sentient beings? A commitment, a desire, a discipline, an endless hunger to grow and aspire and invite and attract others to do the same. Let others thrive on their calls to arms; let’s instead engage in a call to minds. Let’s instead engage in a call to hearts. Let’s instead engage in a call to souls. We have called enough to our baser nature; it’s time to call to our nobler one.

This may be getting repetitive, and for that I apologize. I enjoy, more than anything, to tease out some hidden insight, some novel perspective, some aspect of the dance of nature around and through us that is not obvious, but is worthy of attention. But some things are less delicate, less unfamiliar, but no less worthy of attention for being mundane.

One such thing is our need to move, in as organized and passionate a manner as possible, in the direction of becoming advocates for a discipline that can be more effective, on multiple dimensions, than the sham of activism in which we are, in general, now engaged.

Some may recognize that this isn’t the first time I’ve referred to social institutional shams. I used the phrase “Kabuki Theater” not long ago to describe professional development workshops in public education, which are largely rituals of signifying a commitment to doing better rather than engaging in the actual discipline of doing better. But it is not a defect relegated only to ossified bureaucracies; it is a defect also found in our most passionate social institutional rites. No, the faces are not impassive in the shams of activism, but the results are as hollow.

WE ARE ABLE TO DO BETTER!!!!  I can’t emphasize that enough, or often enough. We can do better. Just as for millenia humanity exercised the power of the mind through the haphazard accumulation of cultural belief systems, finally stumbling upon a methodology that unleashed its powers in phenomenal new ways; just as there was a time when trials by ordeal were all the rage, giving way to systems of law whose procedural discipline seems excessive to those who don’t realize what a triumph it really is; so too can we do better in every sphere of life, in every aspect of our endeavors.

The value of discipline, of methodology, of procedure, is not a new discovery; it has been a hallmark of spiritual and philosophical schools throughout history. The quest for nirvana may seem trite today, but it is no less compelling, no less authentic, than it was two and a half thousand years ago. It is, in essence, some shade of nirvana that we seek, some spiritual success realized through our own ability to tame our egos and realize our full potential in the process.

We do not necessarily have to sit in the lotus position and chant “om mani padme hum” to be, in essence, exercising a discipline that liberates the human spirit. We can, instead, escape the illusion of activism that is blindly invested in a superficial cycle, the endless trials by ordeal, of changing leadership and representation, and embrace in its place the realization of an activism that is more profound, more effective, and more compelling.

I have already sketched out what that discipline looks like (see, e.g., A Proposal, The Ultimate Political Challenge, The Voice Beyond Extremes, The Foundational Progressive Agenda“A Theory of Justice”The Battle of Good v. Evil, Within & WithoutThe Battle of Good v. Evil, Part 2, and “Messaging” From The Heart of Many Rather Than The Mouth of Few). But words are cheap, and acting on them is essential. To those who are already involved in this effort (e.g., “the coffee party”), let’s form bridges among our groups, form new groups, draw in new members, link to groups that are somewhat different in nature (e.g., Kiwanas,Rotary, church groups, HOAs, PTAs, park districts, school districts, everyone who is organized to do good works of any kind), trying to transcend rather than deepen the ideological divides, trying to create common ground rather than merely to smite enemies (and by doing so ensure that they remain enemies), building more hubs and spokes in expanding social networks all coalescing around the will to do better.

There are those who are quick to say that the opposition is not reasonable, and that trying to reason with them is the mistake that they are so angry about. And I say, the world is subtler than that. I do not argue that there is no place for hardball politics; I only argue that not every place is that place. I do not argue that there are not irrational and intransigent ideologues opposed to progress; I only argue that not everyone across the ideological divide is such a person. The real political battle has always been, and remains, the battle over the middle, over those who are not raging ideologues, over those who can be swayed. Such people are not swayed, but rather are repulsed, by raging ideology. While the Tea Party may seem to have been successful by trying to sway them with contorted faces and angry slogans, what they really did was to coalesce a base, and alienate the middle, at exactly the same time that many on the left thought that the smartest thing to do would be to alienate the middle as well, and thus lose the opportunity to be the only attractive political force left.

Obama won not because there was a huge mandate for expansive government, but rather because there was a huge mandate for hope and reason. Not everyone defines those virtues in the same way, and not everyone stayed on board as the policies themselves involved more government involvement than they were comfortable with. But hope and reason, not rage, are the truly attractive forces, the ones that attract not those who are already full of rage, but rather those who are not and don’t want to be.

So let’s recover that force, that momentum, that Obama unleashed in 2008. Let’s recover a commitment to hope and reason. Let’s agree to be slower to refute and quicker to consider; let’s agree to strive to find the words and attitude that resonate with those who can be swayed. Let’s agree to be reasonable, and humble, people of goodwill, working together to do the best we can. And let’s make that an attractive place to be. Real, and sustainable, progress depends on it.

Contact me, here or by other channels, if you’d like to be a part of an effort to organize along these lines. All reasonable people of goodwill have a responsibility to work as hard at turning this vision into a reality as others, all across the political spectrum, work at obstructing it.

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

Progress depends on the effectiveness of those who are working to contribute to it (in all spheres of life), and effectiveness depends on taking responsibility as well as delegating it. The error on the extreme right involves a refusal to delegate, and the error on the extreme left involves a refusal to do anything else.

As I’ve written before, the Tea Party/Libertarian philosophy is based on an ideology of “liberty” divorced from mutual responsibility (see, e.g., Liberty & Interdependence). But there are too many on the Left who make the opposite error: They consider the extent of their responsibility to be to get the right delegates elected to office (see, e.g.,  “The Fault, Dear Brutus….”, “Messaging” From The Heart of Many Rather Than The Mouth of Few, An Open Letter To Angry Progressives).

The former are continually disgruntled by their inability to divorce liberty from governance, and the latter are continually disgruntled by their inability to elect a government able to impose their will on others. These two dysfunctional extremes define political discourse in America, with the most vocal and active ideologues belonging to one camp or the other.

I’ve written about my frustration that too many meetings of “progressive” groups are dominated by those who invest all effort and hopes in control of government, eschewing the responsibilities both of working on the ground to effect non-governmental social change, and of working to liberate and implement the genius of the many (see, e.g., “The Fault, Dear Brutus….”, “Messaging” From The Heart of Many Rather Than The Mouth of Few, An Open Letter To Angry Progressives).

The genius of the many is the product not of individual false certainties, but of collective and methodologically disciplined efforts. It is not the reduction to ideological refrains, but the mobilization of cognitive efforts. It is something we continue to discover rather than already know, and it is much subtler and more liberating than the shackles ideologues of all stripes are so eager to impose on us.

We need a new voice, a new camp, and not a merely moderate one. As (New York Times conservative columnist and PBS News Hour analyst) David Brooks has often said, the weakness of moderates as a political movement is that they don’t have a coherent message such as those on the extremes. But there is a coherent message defined by the transcendence of these extremes, one that is merely awaiting a voice to be given it (as I believe President Obama had tried to in his book The Audacity of Hope, and in his 2008 presidential campaign).

In fact, “moderate” is, in some ways, the wrong name for it. It implies that there is a left-right spectrum on which all political thought falls, and that a voice comprised of some alternative synthesis of the ideologies at those extremes must fall somewhere between them. But that voice can be as passionate, as coherent, and as affirmative as the voices at the extremes.

I have already written extensively on what that voice should look and sound like (see. e.g., A Proposal, The Ultimate Political ChallengeWhat’s Right With America, A Positive Vision For Colorado“A Theory of Justice”, “A Choice Between Our Hopes and Our Fears”). It is a positive one rather than a negative one, a hopeful one rather than an angry or fearful one; one committed to reason and justice and working together for mutual benefit. It is a voice which considers government an agent and a vehicle of free people, who are most liberated by the benefits and responsibilities of effective and informed self-governance.

I’m a “progressive,” in that I’m committed to participating in meeting our shared responsibility to address the challenges and problems that confront us as a people. But I do not presuppose the means to do so, or the optimal balance between government involvement and private sector unencumbrance. The most important principle that an effective progressive movement should be committed to is the principle that we must discipline ourselves, to as great an extent as we each are capable of, in service to liberating our collective genius, which is the true source of our individual liberty (see, e.g., Ideology v. MethodologyLiberty & Society).

We need a new movement whose message is that we are reasonable people of goodwill, wisely uncertain of how best to resolve the challenges that confront us, but dedicated both to developing the personal and intellectual disciplines which best liberate and mobilize the genius of the many to do so, working to disseminate effectively the fruits of those disciplines, and participating with as much commitment as we can muster in exercising our individual liberty through them in service to our collective and individual welfare (see, e.g., A Proposal, The Foundational Progressive AgendaThe Ultimate Political Challenge).

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

Too much of our public debate is over the conclusions we variously arrive at, and not enough is over how we arrive at them. Even some conclusions that more closely correspond to those derived from careful analysis are very often mere articles of faith to those who hold them, a habit which may sometimes embrace good conclusions, but unreliably if embraced blindly.

This is a political challenge that needs to be addressed first inwardly, and then outwardly. Few if any of us have fully transcended the folly of precipitous assumption, of harboring beliefs that snuck into our consciousness without enough scrutiny, and then of defending those beliefs as indisputable truths. We all can do better; we all have an on-going internal challenge to meet.

If we progressives can criticize Tea Partiers, or neocons, or racists, or xenophobes, or homophobes, or ultranationalists, or any number of people holding any number of views that some or all of us perceive to be contrary to the interests of humanity, then we had better learn how to criticize one another and ourselves as well, for the enemy is within far more than it is without. Human folly resides in each and every one of us, myself included, and we had better start spending as much time and effort recognizing it within ourselves as we do recognizing it within others.

The more members of any social group or organization get together to congratulate one another on being the ones who get what others don’t, the more they have failed to meet this challenge.

The real issue is how much we each contribute to moving the world in a direction that improves the human condition. This involves two challenges: 1) identifying and developing the best public policies, and 2) successfully implementing them. Too many people assure themselves that they have accomplished the first with too little justification, and, even when they’re right, the actions thus motivated do not necessarily contribute to the realization of those policies.

If someone claims to be attempting to implement a more equitable distribution of wealth by bombing mansions (to take an extreme example), most of us would agree that their attempts are unlikely to result in the desired ends. Neither the 9/11 terrorists nor Timothy McVeigh succeeded in undermining American (or federal) power, though both succeeded in imposing enormous human suffering on innocent victims to no benefit or purpose. The value of their goals is one thing (whether dubious, as in the preceding cases, or less so); the value of their means is another. It’s not just important what you’re attempting to do, but also how you’re attempting to do it.

The world is rarely comprised of the good-guys and bad-guys that so many so simplistically reduce it to. Moving in a positive direction involves recognizing the complexity and subtlety of reality, a complexity and subtlety that at least the two currently most salient political ideological “extremes” both claim doesn’t exist. And that’s the problem with their ideologies, not how progressive or conservative they are, but rather how open they are to doing a fully-informed systems analysis as the basis for political and policy decisions.

People frequently argue that there is a straight line from where we are to where they think we ought to be. Even when what they identify as where we ought to be is something I agree with (as is sometimes the case), I rarely agree that there is a straight line from here to there. More often, when dealing with even simple systems, let alone complex dynamical ones, you have to do things that are completely counterintuitive to move in the desired direction. And we all have to learn how to incorporate into our convictions realization of that possibility rather than latching onto premature certainties.

An example in a very simple system is driving from Denver to Utah. You drive north on I-25 to I-70, wanting to get onto I-70 westbound. The straight path is turn left, cross the I-25 median, drive the wrong way up an I-25 southbound on-ramp to go west in the I-70 eastbound lanes. It is a straightforward realization of the goal of going west on I-70, but one which is not only going to fail to take you to Utah, but will succeed only in taking you and several other people to the morgue.

You have to turn east to go west, turn right onto the off-ramp to get onto I-70 westbound, turn the opposite of your intended direction. And that is in a completely static system of intersecting lines and curves, not something nearly as complex as human society, in which such nonlinearity permeates almost everything. Examples abound: “You have to spend money to make money.” In some circumstances, lowering taxes can raise public revenues, and in other circumstances raising taxes can increase the wealth of those being taxed. Our world is laden with counterintuitive truths, most of which are not broadly known, and some of which are not yet known by anyone.

Adam Schrager (the pre-eminent Denver political broadcast journalist) once quoted his father as saying (to paraphrase) that people like to think in periods and exclamation points, while reality is characterized by commas and question marks. Those who qualify their statements are often called wishy-washy, though in truth they are often simply doing a better job of tracking the complex systems they are discussing.

Criticisms of politicians are often based on just this discrepency between public reductions and professional expertise. Competing factions of the public zealously demand from their elected officials the implementation of competing certainties. And while there are all too many elected officials who reflect the same mentalities, the best of them don’t, and so are criticized by almost everyone, and adored by few.

That means that we need a different kind of progressive discourse, one which does not presume the answers, but embraces the best processes for discovering them. Process is what gives us perhaps the most robust system for understanding the nature of the world and universe around us (the scientific method), and process is what gives us a very robust system for deciding legal disputes (rule of law, which is fundamentally procedural). And process is where the real progressive challenges are, not presumed answers, but improved and more disciplined methodologies for discovering and implementing them.

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The question of when a person becomes a person, raised again by Amendment 62 on this year’s Colorado ballot (defining personhood as beginning at conception), provides a good example of basing one’s notion of truth on one’s political preferences rather than vice versa.

What raises the issue today is Susan Greene’s column in yesterday’s Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16392181), in which, despite Greene taking the position that Amendment 62 would be disastrous public policy, she was booed by a pro-choice audience for even admitting to any complexities or subtleties to the issue. The audience’s approach is the wrong one; Greene’s is the right one. Explore the issue thoroughly, with the courage to confront the complexities and subtleties, and then arrive at conclusions which are the result of that process.

Before I delve deeper into this issue, a couple of disclaimers: 1) I fervently believe that doing it “the right way” (reasoning applied prior to and informing conclusions, rather than mobilized afterward as rationalizations for them) leads to, in this case, the conclusion that, for legal purposes, personhood should be defined as vesting at birth rather than at conception (or at any intermediate point), despite the fact that I’m about to point out the legitimate ontological counterpoints to that conclusion; and 2) As a matter of political strategy, it is undeniably true that once you form a position on a controversial issue, admitting to some logical validity on the other side does more to shore up the opposition than to increase your own credibility and the strength, through a demonstration of moderation and subtlety, of your own position (as should be the case, in a world that applied reason more scrupulously to political issues). This latter fact is a direct result of the privileging of political strategizing in all-out political warfare: Admissions and concessions provide ammunition for opposing zealots to a greater extent than they generate goodwill among them, and that ammunition is then used in sophisticated propaganda techniques to play on the cognitive dissonance and other psychological vulnerabilities of those in the middle to convince them of the opposing view.

Even so, as tempting as it is to get sucked into this logic, and to “do what it takes” to ensure that we arrive at “the right” political conclusions, I think that, all things considered, it vastly diminishes our ability to progress toward governing ourselves ever-more  intelligently. By reducing politics to a battle of more-or-less arbitrary ideological certainties, rather than trying to raise it to a process of collectively searching for those policies that are best informed and most conducive to the public interest, we obstruct rather than facilitate the deep structural political development that will serve us best in the long run.

On so many levels, in so many ways, politics imposes a constant pressure to continually disregard long-term goals in favor of short-term ones. This is a pressure we have to resist and transcend.

Ontologically, two things regarding the definition of when human life begins seem abundantly clear: 1) A zygote isn’t a “human being” in any legally relevant sense, and 2) The only significant difference between a late-term fetus and a newborn baby is location.

A zygote can be defined as a human being by means of either a religious/mystical assumption or a rigidly typological approach, but both are irrelevant to the legal and moral issues involved. It’s true that, even in a political system which separates church and state, those moral convictions that are nearly universally held by all members of all faiths, rooted perhaps in those faiths, can inform our legal structure (e.g., “thou shalt not kill”). Even if a separate utilitarian argument can’t be made (as it can in the case of a prohibition against murder), if it is something that is a non-contested interfaith moral conviction, then certainly it can be incorporated into law. But once there is significant disagreement, a fundamentally religious belief cannot be incorporated into the law that governs us all, without both violating the First Amendment and undermining the public interest that it protects.

But there is a non-religious justification for defining human life to begin at conception: Conception is the one and only truly bright-line change of state that demarcates the boundary between non-existence and existence. Prior to conception, there is the sperm, which belongs entirely to the father, and the egg, which belongs entirely to the mother; it is only after the former fertilizes the latter that you have a new and distinct full complement of DNA in a single entity that defines the new human being.

But that bright-line change of state, while very convenient, has no relevance to the purposes of the laws regulating the social relationships and interactions among human beings, since that single-celled entity bears no resemblance whatsoever to a socially incorporated human being. It has no consciousness, no independent existence, no attributes of a human being as a member of a society. Conception may be the most logical scientific threshold for defining the beginning of the development of a human being, but it is not the most logical legal or moral threshold.

At the other end of pregnancy, birth is not a significant change of state for the fetus (though it is for the mother!). The fetus in the womb when contractions begin is really pretty much the same being as the newborn baby held in the nurse’s arms at the end of the process (here’s a link to a description of the changes that a fetus does undergo at birth: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002395.htm). This poses a real dilemma: We as a people, probably fortuitously, are not willing to reexamine our nearly universal moral conviction that infanticide is wrong, but are then left with the reality that there is no functional difference, except for the form of the mother’s connection, between a late-term abortion and infanticide.

I believe that this dilemma is a function of human conceptualization, rather than the result of an actual moral imperative. In reality, our moral and legal universe is laden with arbitrary lines in the sand, and really must be. For instance, at what point does expressing anger and hostility toward another person become unacceptable? (Or, where is the line between just being a jerk, or a person acting on their own insecurities and hurt feelings, and being a bully?) It depends both on the relationship to the person, and the form and strength of the expression of anger. There is no bright-line change-of-state boundary involved: Calmly saying “that makes me angry” is acceptable in most contexts, while red-faced rants are unacceptable in most contexts. Somewhere between those two is a not very clearly demarcated line which one can cross, one which is defined by a sense of what best serves the pragmatic purpose of the normative prohibition.

Since there is no legally or morally useful clear line when a fetus becomes a baby, we need to draw the line according to other, similarly pragmatic, considerations. Certainly, there’s a moral argument that can be made for drawing that line somewhere between conception and birth, according to some notion of when the fetus is less like a mere cluster of cells or mass of organic material with a full DNA complement, and more like the baby that eventually emerges. It’s an argument by logical extension: If it’s wrong to kill babies, then it must be wrong to kill them wherever they are located.

Personally, I’m not such a moral absolutist: We’ve drawn the line at defining post-birth infanticide as morally unacceptable, and that’s good. We aren’t therefore under some moral obligation to define anything and everything that logically follows from that moral precept as also morally unacceptable. The moral and legal prohibition of infanticide is a moral line in the sand, no more, and no less. Some hypothetical historical figure might have argued, when moral and legal prohibitions against infanticide were taking root, “Ah, but that’s a slippery slope! If you outlaw infanticide, someday people will insist that we outlaw abortion as well, and think of what havok that would wreak on society!” I say, let’s not slide down any slopes. We can pick where to draw the line, and not be obligated to follow indefinitely the path that we imagine it carves for us.

There are overwhelming practical reasons to define life as beginning at birth for legal purposes. Doing otherwise reduces pregnant women to the legal status of incubators, denying adult human beings the right to decide what to do with their own bodies. It denies those who do not want to give birth -many of whom are teenagers, poor, facing challenges and constrained opportunities of their own- that choice, and leads to all of the problems frequently associated with children born into such conditions, particularly if truly not wanted. (Many readers are probably familiar with the theory from the book Freakonomics that, despite almost universal predictions to the contrary, U.S. crime rates began dropping in the early 1990’s because of the legalization of abortion in the early 1970’s). And it drives women seeking abortions into back alleys, creating what has been in the past a public health nightmare.

Even if one rejects my argument about drawing moral lines in the sand, and takes instead the stand that it is a moral bad to abort late-term fetuses, one can still weigh that against all of these considerations and say, “some bads are worse than others.” If the balancing test has any degree of practicality to it, then the complete protection of a woman’s right to choose is the inevitable outcome.

I am an advocate for moving political discourse in the direction of what I just exemplified above, and away from the no-holds-barred cage matches between precipitous oversimplified absolute certainties. We need to invest in the process by which we arrive at our individual and collective cognitive conclusions, as well as the process by which we select from among them what to implement as public policy. Just as in science and in courts of law we adhere to methodologies and procedures to our great benefit, we need to improve our political procedure as well.

We have developed a pretty good procedure for resolving our differences of opinion in the political arena, but apply almost no procedural discipline to how those competing opinions are formed, or how they compete for adherents. Extending the progress we’ve made in the fields of science, law, and electoral politics to the realm of cognitive politics would be an enormous step forward, and one each of us can choose to advance, both by advocating it, and by modeling it as our own individual approach to political discourse.

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Everyone who advocates any political or social position, and who claims to do so because it serves interests other than merely their own, acknowledges, either implicitly or explicitly, that we are in a shared enterprise. Some think the public interest is best served by an absolutist commitment to “less government,” and some by doing the analysis and making the determination, in each instance, in the light of the specific relevant facts. But regardless of what we value, what we believe, what we insist upon, if we are valuing it, believing it, and insisting upon it in a public forum in an attempt to persuade others that it is the right thing to value, believe, or insist upon, then we believe that we have some shared fate, and some common interest in governing and organizing ourselves wisely. That is the human enterprise.

First, let’s dispense with the artificial distinction above between “governing” and “organizing” ourselves. Those who believe that churches and community organizations and voluntary associations of various kinds are useful, but that government is an impediment to our individual and/or collective welfare (the latter simply being an aggregation of our individual welfare, according to some set of values held by the individual advocating a particular position), are in effect saying that they favor one form of government over another. If government were eliminated or reduced, but voluntary organizations were left to fill the void, then the latter would become governments, and would be subject to many of the same issues, debates, and concerns that current governments are subject to. So, the debate is always over what form and function of government we advocate.

I assume that we can all agree, that in any conflict of ideologies, generally speaking, we are acting on the assumption that some are more useful than others. The logically possible alternatives are that conflicting ideologies are not actually incompatible, or, if they are incompatible, that the public interest is unaffected by the choice between them, in both of which cases there should be no conflict. The existence of conflict demonstrates the belief that some ideologies, some positions, better serve the public interest than others.

I further assume that we can all agree that the purpose of our political process, of our public debate over which ideas to implement, is based on conflicting beliefs over which ideas best serve the public interest. We should all acknowledge that we are engaged in a process the purpose of which is to select those ideas which best serve the public interest, however it is defined.

There are really, implicitly, two interrelated debates taking place under that one rubric: What is “the public interest,” and how is it best served? In other words, there is a debate over how to define the goal, and over the means for achieving it. We routinely conflate these two debates, arguing over means to differently conceived goals without debating the relative merits of the goals themselves, because we are in conflict over policies which, by their nature, are based on particular resolutions of both aspects of this contested terrain.

The first thing we need to do, in service to the human enterprise that we all implicitly acknowledge we are in, is to engage explicitly in the debate over what defines “the public interest,” without leaping to the debate about how it’s best served. This pre-empts the error of various idolatries, including “Constitutional Idolatry” (the treatment of adherence to a particular reductionist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as the necessary and sufficient justification for all policy positions), by requiring attention to the end that is being served, rather than merely advocacy of a particular means for serving it. It requires, in other words, that the argument be made, rather than merely the dogma invoked.

Having to “make the case” is an essential procedural cornerstone of engaging in the human enterprise most effectively. We resolve legal disputes by “making the case” in court, which looks for adherence to a particular set of procedures and rules to best ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information presented. We resolve scientific and academic disputes by “making the case” in peer-reviewed journals, which look for adherence to a particular methodology which maximizes the reliability of data and of the analysis applied to it. We need to learn how to submit political disputes to the same discipline, to a methodology which maximizes reliability of information and of the analysis applied. The starting point for developing such a discipline is the requirement that political positions prevail to the extent that the case for them prevails in a court-like or academy-like procedural crucible, rather than to the extent that they manage to exploit unexamined emotional responses and predispositions (the same predecessor to modern legal and scientific procedures which gave us throwing witches into lakes to determine guilt or innocence, and basing knowledge of nature’s subtleties almost exclusively on popular superstitions).

When we subject the fundamental political conflict over how to define “the public interest” to this constraint, we discover that one set of positions is based on a refusal to make the case, rather than on how well the case was made. The Tea Party and its fellow travelers, invoking the “Constitutional Idolatry” mentioned above, claim that we have an authoritative document that tells us exactly how to pursue the public interest, without requiring any consideration of what the public interest being pursued is. It jumps to advocacy of a methodology for pursuing the public interest (i.e., adherence to a particular interpretation of the Constitution), assuming that the public interest is thus served. It may be, but the case needs to be made, explicitly, to determine if the argument should prevail under a sound methodology applied to political disputes.

Currently, there isn’t really any debate over what the public interest is. There is, rather, a conflict between those who think we should pursue it, and those who think we shouldn’t, the latter, essentially, arguing that the public interest is best served by being disregarded. This latter group is rooted, for instance, in a belief in the justice of inequity, that what each has is what each deserves, and that any attempt to “redistribute” wealth, or to refine property rights in ways which result in the redistribution of wealth, is an injustice against those from whom it is redistributed.

But this position is detached from reality. It doesn’t recognize that current property rights are a legal and political artifact, no more inherent to nature than alternative sets of property rights, and are a particular kind of distribution, not the absence of one. Modifications in these laws are less “redistributions” than “alternative distributions.” All that distinguishes them from the current system of distribution of wealth is that they are more or less efficient (contributing more or less robustly to the production of wealth), more or less fair (distributing wealth and opportunity with less regard for the chances of birth), and more or less sustainable (establishing a stable pattern of rights and responsibilities).

This position that defends strictly defined and inviolate private property rights is detached from history, in which the distribution of wealth extant today is rooted in violence and exploitation, and that the distribution of opportunity today is affected by that historical legacy. It is detached from empathy, in which the injustice of being born into poverty and suffering its effects is a social problem to be addressed rather than someone else’s problem to be disregarded. It us detached from pragmatism and economics, in which our current extreme economic inequality diminishes economic robustness and social mobility, decreasing both aggregate wealth and increasing persistent, long-term social costs imposed on all of us. But most of all, it is detached from consideration of what “the public interest” means, because the economically, socially, and morally dysfunctional commitment to current inequities can only be defended in blindness, for only as long one refuses to face the question of what “the public interest” means. It crumbles under scrutiny as soon as that question is addressed.

The Human Enterprise requires that we address both the question of what defines “the public interest,” and what means (i.e., public policies) best serve it. And it requires that we do so according to a methodology that maximizes the reliabilitiy of information and analyses employed, and minimizes the role of prejudice (i.e., emotional predispositions). It’s time for all of us to engage in that enterprise together.

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I take the title question from The Economist (http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/592), but think it implies a false dichotomy, that religion either is, or is not, a force for good. The truth, fairly obviously, is that in some ways it is, and in some ways it isn’t. Making some assessment of net value (whether religion is on balance a force for good) is fraught with difficulties. But exploring the issue reveals valuable insights into which elements of religion, found both within religion and without, contribute to or obstruct the greater human enterprise.

The title question, furthermore, begs the questions of what constitutes “good”, and what constitutes “religion”, issues trickier and more elusive than they might appear to be at first glance, issues whose on-going clarification is among the universe of “good” to be produced or obstructed by better or worse cognitive tools. And it brushes by the issue of whether it makes sense to discuss “religion” as some monolithic institution that can be, or not be, evaluated en masse in any meaningful way. But, despite these complexities, it raises a fundamental question, with broader implications than are immediately obvious.

In reality, religion is at some times and in some ways, on balance, a force for “good”, and at some times and in some ways, on balance, a force for “evil”, assuming some intuitive definition of these two terms. As a generator of, and focal point for, the “emotional energy” (to use sociologist Randall Collins’ phrase) around which societies coalesce, it may be a fundamental form of the cohesive social force which binds us into functioning collectivities. Just as attendees at rock concerts and sporting events, by sharing an intense emotional experience, feel bonded into something larger than themselves, so too (and to a much greater extent) belonging to a religious order creates a constant undercurrent of that same socially binding emotional energy. This is most evident in religious ceremonies that are designed to excite that emotional energy, sometimes ostentatiously, sometimes in a more subdued form.

One can argue, conversely, that while that was religion’s historical role, essential to the primative formation of both tribal socieities and larger civilizations (almost always defined by a shared religion), it is one which is no longer needed in our modern, decentralized, organically coherent social institutional order. After all, there’s no reason to believe that our modern governments, markets, and plethora of functioning secular social institutions would simply evaporate if religion were suddenly removed from the mix. Religion, arguably, is an archaic remnant of an ancient past, persisting due both to its hold over human imaginations and the vested interests that actively perpetuate it, but no longer either a functional necessity or the most useful of available social institutional tools.

But some religions clearly do some things which most would say contribute to the public good. Leaving aside the question of religion’s value in the lives of individual adherents, there is no denying the “good works” that are performed by religious orders. Soup kitchens, charitable activities, and even community social functions all must be tallied on the positive side of the ledger.

These activities are not always unambiguously good, however. Radical Islamic groups in the Middle East, particularly in the occupied Palestinian territories, at least to some extent definable as religious or religion-based orders, do good works in part in order to gain popular support and recruit people to their cause, a cause steeped in violence. Similarly, Israeli right-wing extremists are often also religious extremists, believing that, since the land was given to them by God, they owe the non-Jewish people who were and are living on it no respect or accommodation. Undoubtedly, their good works among themselves reinforce their solidarity in opposition to others.

This is a fundamental paradox about socially consolidating forces: They increase solidarity within a group, which is beneficial for that group, but also increase the emotional strength of the boundaries between groups, which is detrimental to the ability of those groups to cooperate in order to confront intergroup challenges and opportunities. Like tribalism, nationalism, and even racism, religious solidarity tends to foster interreligious antagonism.

We are served best by vertically (and horizontally) non-exclusive, mutually reinforcing social solidarities, in which belonging at one level facilitates rather than obstructs belonging at superordinate and subordinate levels. While some (far from all) modern religious orders make some (far from comprehensive) effort to move in this more functional direction, it is an effort that swims against the historical current of, at least, the three monotheistic world religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). 

This mutual exclusivity has implications for how “good” is defined. To some, “a force for good” is a force which ensures that their own dogma prevails. In such a belief system, it would be the implacable missionary and jihadist zeal that would be considered a force for good, and the move toward tolerance and mutual accommodation a force for evil. In far too many debates with right-wingers, I am quickly cast as a moral and ontological relativist for not accepting that their moral and ontological assumptions are absolute and irrefutable truths.

Those doing so confuse recognition of fallability for relativism, and ethnocentric chauvinism for mere recognition of a an objectively discernible reality. The more subtle and useful perspective is to recognize that there may be moral and ontological absolutes, but that our ability to discern what they are is imperfect. Therefore, we should not confuse failure of others to adhere to our own convictions with a failure to acknowledge the existence of objective reality.

But even leaving aside this war of competing dogmas (with, for instance, Christian and Islamic fundamentalists being remarkably similar and yet completely incapable of peacefully coexisting), discerning what is “good” is somewhat similar to discerning what “quality” means, a topic which Robert Pirsig intriguingly explored in his cult classic novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a theme I discussed, in reference to moral absolutism, in The Elusive Truth ). Is it better, for instance, to maximize aggregate wealth, or to minimize “the gini coefficient” (the statistical measure of the inequality in the distribution of wealth)? Most (though certainly not all) would probably agree that the maximum good lies in some balance of these two values, though the range of belief of what that balance should be fill the spectrum, with extremists happily ensconced at either pole.

Or, more apropos of religion: Is a greater good served by protecting zygotes from destruction or by helping to expedite the discovery of effective treatments for crippling diseases through embryonic stem cell research? Is a greater good served by preserving the rights of women over their own bodies, or by protecting fetuses from elective abortions? Is a greater good served by ending the discrimination against gay and lesbian couples, or by “preserving the sanctity” of heterosexual marriage? We each may strongly believe we know the answers to these questions, but there is no consensus, and there is no final arbiter to which to turn for the answers as a matter of ontological and moral certainty (though there may be to find the legal resolutions of these disagreements).

Not only is the object (“a force for good”) ambiguous and elusive, so too is the subject. What is “religion”? Most people would say that the defining characteristic is some reference to the divine, by which definition Buddhism is not technically a religion (and Taoism may not be either). But aren’t all-encompassing world views members of some shared category, one which is dominated by religions? Wouldn’t that definition, rather than the reference to the divine, be at least as reasonable a definition? And might that not include most comprehensive political ideologies, including, perhaps, whatever political ideologies you or I consider to be the best and worst, respectively? In which case, some religions, broadly defined, are forces for good, and some for bad, but we’re stuck duking out which is which, not unlike fundamentalist Christians and Muslims.

Furthermore, how broad is “the divine” (if we choose to cling to that more traditional definition)? Does it include all that is supernatural or mystical in nature, such as a belief in ghosts, or in ouija boards, or in New Age fads such as the cosmic-energy-focusing power of tin-foil pyramids on one’s head? If not, why not?

As with many things, our traditional categories are less useful for addressing fundamental, underlying questions than we at first assume them to be. We need to break the world down into more essential conceptual elements, ones that do not have such unstable boundaries. And we need to understand those elemental concepts in terms of continua of variation rather than as dichotomous or mutually exclusive categories. So, for instance, beliefs can be more or less dogmatic, or more or less analytical. It does not really matter whether they are religious or not; it matters whether they serve more to liberate our individual and collective genius, or serve more to imprison it.

While there are similarities that are too often overlooked (such as in their shared foundation in a sense of awe), religious and scientific thought in some ways embody this distinction, in that the former is based on “Faith” (the unquestioning and unquestionable certainty of a proposition) and the latter on “scepticism” (the assumption that nothing should be taken to be the truth until it has been demonstrated to be the truth, and even then, only tentatively so, always subject to new evidence and argumentation). And scientific thought has clearly been a very robust generator of useful knowledge. But the distinction can be exaggerated, and the similarities ignored.

Science, like religion, has immutable precepts at its base, such as the belief in an objectively discernible reality, in our ability to discern it, in the validity of the scientific method as a means of doing so, and in the culturally and subjectively independent validity of its products. Or the belief that reality can be reduced to its constituent parts, without biasing the worldview thus created.

And science, like religion, is based in awe, which may be the real essence of Faith. I have faith that there is some coherent, enormous, systemic reality of which I am a part, far beyond my powers of comprehension, but overwhelmingly compelling in its beauty and complexity and subtlety. That is what I call “pure Faith,” a faith that has no object, no icon, no reductionism on which to hang it, though a recognition that, as in science, various reductionisms can be useful tools in examining it. What we call “religions” are to me part of the huge and gorgeous corpus of world mythology, brilliant, subtle, complex metaphors reaching into the heart of that wondrous suchness and rendering it into stories and forms and rituals that make it accessible.

A scientific understanding of the world divorced from that ecstatic, imaginative “faith-based” one would be dry and incomplete. One can analyze a river, its constituent elements and molecules, the dynamics of flow, but still be missing some appreciation of its essence that is captured in seeing that river as mischievous nymphs singing and dancing their way to the sea. Poetry and fiction are not science, but they are a part of our appreciation and celebration of the world in which we live. Religion is the original context of poetry and stories, one whose essence, at least, should certainly be retained in order to continue to generate such expressions of our passion and wonder.

My dad was a devout atheist, and I saw in him the very same error that had so passionately led him to the absolute rejection of the validity of religious belief: Implacable dogmatic certainty. The problem with such certainty isn’t that it sometimes embraces a good idea, and sometimes a bad one, but rather that it always reduces an infinitely complex reality to some oversimplification or another which then becomes impervious to refinement. We can’t help but to reduce reality to manageable conceptualizations, but we can avoid fortifying those conceptualizations against the lathe of new information and insight.

And that is the crux of the matter. The more strongly one adheres to dogmatic substantive certainties, the more their belief system, whether religious or secular, is a force for bad, by crippling our ability to use our most vital resource, our human mind. And the more one subjugates substantive understandings to a combination of an essentially religious humility with procedural methodologies designed to best allow reason to prevail, to best allow the lathe of new information and new insight to continue to carve our substantive understandings, the more that conceptual framework is a force for good.

Even the substantive beliefs about the procedural methodology have to be subjected to that methodology, so that the methodology itself can evolve. In short, we need to be systematically and imaginatively uncertain, in a way which does not increase certainty, but rather increases understanding.

It is not religion, but rather dogma which is the counterproductive force we must seek to transcend. Secular dogmas are as dangerous and destructive as religious ones, and religious channeling of our wonder and compassion is as productive and useful as any other channeling of such qualities.

The Tea Party, though strongly overlapping with Right-wing Christian fundamentalism, is based on a secular dogma of its own, one which includes what has aptly been called “Constitutional Idolatry”, signalling its quasi-religious nature. But what makes it quasi-religious is its dogmatic reductionism, its reliance on oversimplistic platitudes, not some aspect that is overtly religious.

Even dogma in science is counterproductive, and not in short supply. The premature closing of the mind, the embrace of certainties that are not certain, and are not subtle enough to encompass the complexity they claim to definitively capture, is what we must avoid and oppose, in all contexts.

The best force for good is the best blend of the most useful cognitive material from all sectors of thought and action. Religious recognition of the sublime nature of the universe, our imagination and sometimes ecstatic artistic perceptions, our emotional connection to other people and other creatures, our recognition that in a world of competing factual and theoretical claims all of them must be subjected to an impartial procedures for separating the arbitrary from the well-founded and selecting among competing views, are all components of that cognitive concoction which most effectively liberates the genius within us, and thus best serves our long-term collective welfare.

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

It’s not news that political advertising is deceptive (http://www.denverpost.com/election2010/ci_16264271), that our treatment of electoral politics as a spectator sport trivializes it, and that our oversimplistic reduction of the challenges we face to platitudes and slogans creates a noisy obstacle to governing ourselves intelligently and effectively. The blogosphere does not help, amplifying the noise rather than cutting through it (One Colorado Pols blogger, in a moment of unintentional irony, wrote that my choice to focus on understanding and discussing issues, including spending lots of time talking with people in my district, rather than raising money and playing the political marketing game, made a mockery of the political process). Grass roots movements are choked with the crabgrass of superficiality.

The most fundamental issues we face are not taxes, services, or even campaign finance reform. They’re not health care or civil liberties or any of the other substantive issues that occupy our attention and directly affect our lives. The most fundamental issues are, as always, procedural, on how most effectively to solve substantive issues and resolve political disputes. The most fundamental issue is: How do we refine our political process to better liberate rather than distract our collective genius, to apply our thoughts and actions to the challenge of improving the quality of our lives rather than to the challenge of winning the cock fights of dueling false certainties?

I understand the temptation to focus exclusively on accomplishing small gains through traditional means, rather than acknowledging the need to tackle the fundamental, long-term political challenges we face. It’s as though we’re trapped in a pit, fighting over the scraps within it rather than working together to climb out. It may not be possible to turn our backs on the brawl constantly underway in this pit of politics in which we’re trapped, but we have to find ways to free ourselves enough of its immediate demands that we can attend at least marginally to the ultimate goal: Getting out of the pit. And that means refining the political process, hopefully enough to constitute a complete paradigm shift (see The Politics of Consciousness).

I’ve written that, to confront this fundamental political issue, there are three “virtues” we must emphasize: Reason, goodwill, and humility (or perhaps “skepticism”, the reluctance to assume that anything is true until it is well demonstrated) (The Foundational Progressive Agenda ). I am not arguing that we can just ignore the implications of being trapped in the pit of politics-as-usual, and dedicate ourselves exclusively to promoting these three virtues. As Henry Kissinger once said in a different context, that would only succeed in ceding the world to the most ruthless. But neither should we be satisfied with winning brawls in the pit, never attending to the more fundamental challenge of getting out of it altogether.

The irony and frustration of the human condition is that we’re capable of doing so much better. If we were able to address ourselves, as a society, as a world, to the collective enterprise of creating an ever more robust, sustainable, and fair global civilization, we’d be able to create a far less brutal, and far more accommodating, context for our lives. While it’s true that stating this does not move us toward it, and that the challenge of getting people on board, agreeing to work together to address ourselves to these most fundamental of substantive challenges, is as daunting as any we face, it’s also true that progress can be made on this front. And it behooves us to do so.

We need a new social movement, one that is not about the scraps in the pit, but about getting out of the pit altogether. We need a movement that suspends discussion (in the context of that movement) of all of the particular substantive policies and issues we are brawling over, and addresses instead the challenge of getting us more focused on working together as teammates in a collective endeavor, facing shared challenges and opportunities.

This is not something that candidates and office holders can, or perhaps even should, attend to. This is not something that the political parties can, or perhaps even should, attend to. But it is something that we, as a people, have to attend to. We have squandered the wealth of our genius far too egregiously for far too long.

Human history is about cumulative and threshold advances in how well we tap and utilize our genius. One of the best examples of a threshold improvement is the development of the scientific method, which vastly increased the signal-to-noise ratio in the information we generated through our observations of and inferences about the world around us. Making such advances is neither beyond our grasp, nor accomplished independently of the individual and organized efforts of living human beings to accomplish them.

The similarities between politics and science are not trivial. Both involve competing views, passionately held. Both involve bitter rivalries, brutal battles, and eventual outcomes that favor some ideas over others. Both involve resolutions that affect our lives. The main difference is that, in science, we have tamed this process to a far greater extent than we have tamed it in politics. And the benefits of having done so are astronomical.

The advance represented by the scientific revolution is a procedural one, not a substantive one. It is the creation of a more robust and less arbitrary methodology, reducing the casual and drawn-out processes of trial and error to a focused process of systematic investigation. If we can implement such a wondrous step in how we understand the nature of the world and universe around and within us, then we can certainly at least contemplate the possibility of implementing a similarly wondrous step in how we coordinate and frame our shared existence.

In fact, Science is a special cut-out from the universe of politics. Fighting over what is and is not true is a fundamentally political enterprise (see The Politics of Consciousness). Issues that we now recognize to fall clearly under the umbrella of science were once clearly merely political, with equallly rancorous conflicts of power and organization over which vision of the world would prevail. Eventually, to a large if forever incomplete degree, the preeminence of the scientific method to determine what is true and what isn’t, to frame those brawls within an agreed-upon procedure that maximized the influence of reason upon the outcome, to determine what causes result in what effects, has become widely accepted. The challenge now is to continue to subject all political disputes on matters that can be to scientific methodology (we already do, but relegated to the margins of political discourse), and, more dauntingly, to cultivate an agreement that we will privilege those conclusions over others more haphazardly arrived at.

We need a social movement that advances the notion that investing ourselves in the science of self-governance is good for humanity, that creating a context in which it is not just those who shout the loudest, but those who have best applied reason to the most reliable evidence, that prevail. We need to keep fighting to be a more enlightened society. That is the most fundamental political battle of all.

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards for just $2.99!!!

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