I have changed the default posting and commenting settings so that I have to approve posts and comments before publication. I will try to gradually change the individual settings for those who have already made relevant posts and comments, so that they can continue to do so freely and instantly, and will do the same for new posters and commenters once they have demonstrated that they are here to use rather than abuse the site. I apologize for this unfortunate necessity.
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One would think that such a title could only be given to an attempt at humor, for how could such a question ever be taken seriously? But, though humor may well be the highest form of human discourse, I’m not attempting it today. Today, I am using the following absurd line of reasoning as a springboard into a steam of thought: If “man is made in God’s image,” and that image (i.e., form) is one that defecates, then why wouldn’t God defecate as well?
The perhaps tasteless title of this essay is meant as a portal into a labyrinth of questions and contemplations about the nature of the divine and its relationship to both the physical universe and to human beings. Given that one large swathe of humanity has anthropomorphized our gods since at least the days of Homer and Hesiod, it seems reasonable to ask: Just exactly how anthropomorphic are they? The Greek (and other Indo-European) gods, for instance, were not so transcendent that they didn’t squabble and feud, engage in petty jealousies and vendettas, and in general act very much as ordinary humans do, albeit with a bit more bite to their bark. Yahweh, the direct prototype of our own Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, was prone to fits of anger and, certainly in the case of Job, enjoyed playing cruel mind-games to test the loyalty of his followers.
If we are “made in God’s image,” and that image includes some traits that go beyond the mere superficial appearance, then where, exactly, is the line drawn? And if at some place that someone would be willing to point to, why there?
This isn’t meant, as it may appear at first glance, to denigrate religious beliefs, or trivialize the concept that forms the core of this particular inquiry (i.e., the posited self-similarity of deity and human being). I have indeed argued so robustly against dogmatic atheism (see A Dialogue on Religion, Dogma, Imagination, and Conceptualization) that the person arguing the opposite point of view became quite upset with me, and, prior to that, made a similar argument in “Is Religion A Force For Good?”. I have also previously posited my own theory about the human “resemblance” to god in terms of a particular conceptualization of “consciousness,” which may be in part (in one of its forms) understandable as mutating and proliferating packets of information competing for reproductive success (see The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix). (More broadly, this particular conceptualization of consciousness identifies it as the underlying fabric of the almost infinitely complex and subtle systemicness of nature.)
To be clear, I neither praise nor condemn religion per se. I praise imaginative, disciplined, compassionate wonder, and condemn dogmatic, divisive, destructive false certainty. It doesn’t matter to me whether the former takes the form of religion, nor whether the latter takes the form of secular ideology (or atheism itself). We see the defects of dogma in realms far removed from religion, and too often too close to home. Not only do we see it in a nationalistic American ideology which can justify any degree of violence toward any number or type of “other,” but also among those who claim to oppose this error. There are too many on the Left as well as the Right who have turned their ideology into just another blind dogma, and rally to it as just one more incarnation of the tribalistic impulse against which progressivism should most staunchly stand.
Returning to the title question, if god and humans share a form, why wouldn’t gods defecate? And if gods don’t defecate, what does it mean that “man is made in (their) image”? Isn’t it a bit bizarre to think that God merely has some human-like form or appearance, without anything beneath the image? One would think that God would be more, rather than less, “substantial” than a human being, more than an empty image, more than a mere shell of the organic replica, more than a facade encasing nothing.
Ironically, it is less the facade which is similar, than the processes which that facade encompasses. Humans are less the physical image of God than the functional image of God, an echo of an echo of the fabric of “consciousness” that forms the coherent universe, creating new echos of its own (see The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix). By embracing this step away from the literal and toward the literary, we open up the beautiful imagery and insight of all the world’s religions, reaping their allegorical wisdom without becoming entangled in their thorny vines of blind dogma and irrational reductionism.
Before I answer the title question, I must be explicit about what I mean by “deities.” In this context, deities are our representations of the natural superordinate systemic layers of manifested consciousness that comprise our universe. The god or gods imagined to be the creator of life on Earth is our representation of the process of evolution, a process which preceded, produced, and is the prototype of our own human consciousness. Our imagery representing the complex dynamical systems of which the universe is comprised, always more complex and subtler than our minds can grasp, are the deities that populate that universe, that we fruitfully imagine and conceptualize not just in terms of our reductionist sciences, but also in our metaphors and stories and awe-inspired incarnations, allowing our minds to grasp aspects of that wonderful sublime systemic complexity in ways that elude mathematical models and cause-and-effect paradigms. For the purpose of this conversation, let’s focus not on the imagery we use, but on the systems it represents.
With this definition of “deity” in mind, and for no good reason other than to let the question continue to act as an enzyme on our mind, we can answer the title question. On one level, deities both do and don’t “defecate,” because deities both are and aren’t like human beings. Lacking a literal human body with a literal human digestive system, they do not engage in an identical process of waste discharge that humans do. But, being systems in the fractal organization of nature, of which we are a self-similar set of sub-strata, they engage in analogs of our process of defecation. Natural systems are open systems, parts of larger systems, a tangle of overlapping and encompassing processes in which the outputs of one form the in-puts for another. Just as human (more generally, animal) feces provides food and fertilizer for other organisms, so too does the Earth itself take in enormous meals of energy from the Sun, and emit into space that which passed through its systemic processes.
On another level, it might be argued that the universe is by definition a closed system, and that therefore it can emit no waste that is taken up by larger or external systems. So, while deities may defecate, one might argue that the deity, the monotheistic God, doesn’t.
Of course, these “answers” to the title question aren’t really what matter (nor are they particularly meaningful; any “answer” that followed similar thought processes would be just as accurate and useful); the attitude and habit of looking at the world and universe from a variety of different and novel angles are. Asking the question is what matters, even though the question itself is superficially trivial and ridiculous, because we pry open our understandings not by staying locked into the familiar and normal, but by finding unfamiliar and uncharted mental paths down which to wander and wonder.
At core, the title question is a whimsical version of a more basic and familiar question: Where is the line between the spiritual and material, the sacred and mundane? I think that the highest forms of spirituality erase that line, and instead see everything as divine, nothing as mundane. All lives are a glorious story, all of nature an expression of that ubiquitous consciousness that we cast as God or gods or animistic spirits or the Tao…. All of our tools for exploring it, including both our robust and far-reaching imaginations and our more anchored, disciplined processes of applying reason to evidence, can and should articulate into one single enterprise.
The more we, as individuals and in groups, can gravitate toward this realization, toward a disciplined commitment to reason and imagination and compassion and humility all in service to human welfare, and, even if only by extension, therefore to the welfare of this wonderful planet on which we live, the more surely we will move forward into the far brighter future we are capable of creating together.
The obstacles to this are enormous and ubiquitous, within each of us and throughout our national and regional societies. Here in America, a political and cultural force that has long festered has taken one of its most concentrated forms in opposition to this vision of who we are and who and what we can be, clinging instead to a divisive and regressive set of dogmatic convictions, and, by doing so, struggling to drag us all down against those of us struggling to lift us all up. It is an old story with a new veneer, humanity being humanity’s own worst enemy, inflicting on ourselves a tragedy born only of small minds, hardened hearts, and shriveled imaginations.
But there is another force among us more insidious than this movement of organized ignorance and belligerence which inflicts such suffering on us, that is an unwitting partner to it, more similar than different when examined closely: It is non-engagement, indifference, a recoiling from the challenge of confronting the obstacles to our collective welfare, whether in terror or despair or just due to a lack of will. Those who simply live their own lives and let the currents of human history sweep them along are complicit in the suffering and injustice inflicted by those more explicitly motivated by ultra-individualistic and ultra-nationalistic (and anti-intellectual, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and just generally hateful and destructive) ideologies, because in both cases it is a case of people rejecting our shared purpose, our shared humanity, our interdependence and shared responsibility to one another.
So, just as “all roads lead to Rome,” all questions (even “Do Deities Defecate?”) lead to one answer: We are challenged, individually and collectively, to exercise our imaginations, our reason, our compassion, our humility, and our will in disciplined and dedicated service to humanity, in service to this wonderful Consciousness of which we are a part, living with minds and hearts and hands reaching ever farther into the essence of what is in order to cultivate in that fertile soil the endlessly wonderful garden of human existence.
And may the deities continue to defecate on it….
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Most readers are aware that the title phenomenon is commonplace in human affairs, but, especially in the blogosphere, it is so pervasive, so ubiquitous, that the direct and constant encounter with it is overwhelming. On various blogs and comment boards, I have found that merely by relentlessly questioning people’s assumptions and conclusions, arguing on-topic and without ad hominems, I have consistently become a lightening rod for the most persistent, obsessive, and abusive vitriol imaginable. I regularly attract virtual stalkers and harassers, some of whom react with an almost Tourette-like reflexiveness to any scent of my existence.
On a prominent (and, in many ways, exceptionally good) Colorado political blog on which I participated for years, after such experiences repeated at an accelerating rate over that entire period of time, in an email exchange with the nominally anonymous owner of the blog, I felt as though I had stepped through the looking glass, for this individual (who, along with his real or imaginary partners, strives mightily to assume an aura of disembodied authority, using the first person plural in all self-references, habitually assuming a dismissive and disdainful tone), for he ascribed the vitriol to me, while blithely exonerating the stalkers, harassers, and frothers-at-the-mouth, implicitly agreeing with them that the publication of relentless intellectual arguments that cause discomfort in others is what is the true affront to human decency.
Don’t get me wrong: I do not claim, and have never claimed, that my personal defects and faults are not a part of this dynamic. Clearly, I could be more diplomatic, more solicitous of other people’s sensibilities, less “pompous” and “condescending” (some of the kinder descriptors of me favored by my detractors). I won’t try to determine to what extent these perceptions of my personality are an artifact of the broader dynamic I am describing, and to what extent they are truly my own, but I will admit that I believe that both components are implicated.
But our humanity is always a part of the equation, our imperfections and personality flaws always affecting our interactions. Why would extreme, explosive, obsessive expressions of rage or hatred be considered less vitriolic than the perceived pomposity and condescension of compelling and focused arguments? Both the “more legitimate” reason that such perceived pomposity and condescension communicates a lack of respect, a lack of acknowledgement of one’s own reality, and the “less legitimate” reason that the perception of such pomposity and condescension is an artifact of one’s own investment of ego in the false certainties that are being challenged, point to the same thing: Such discussions are perceived in terms of competing egos unless great pains are taken to ensure that they are perceived otherwise.
In a sense, I’ve just brought into question my own premise described in the title of this post: Is such “belligerence” really irrational? Isn’t it, on some level, true that what those others perceive as my pomposity and condescension is, in fact, an expression of my ego gorging on my ability to “win” an argument? And isn’t that an aggressive act, a kind of assault on others that invokes legitimate feelings of rage?
Yes, on some level I think that this is true. But it is also like resenting your opponent in an athletic match for out-performing you, because those same people are engaging in the same “competition,” striving to assert their own egos through their arguments on the topics of discussion. One woman, for instance, insisted that to believe in god was to adhere to a neolithic absurdity, and became very upset with me when I presented what I think was a pretty sophisticated argument why this is not necessarily so (see A Dialogue on Religion, Dogma, Imagination, and Conceptualization, though the ad hominems are omitted). Another became very hostile when I challenged her passionate insistence that the best thing progressives could do now would be to withdraw all support from the Democratic Party. Another regular poster reacted with similar (though more clenched) hostility when I effectively challenged his assumptions on education reform. In all these, and other, cases, their egos were no less invested than mine; they, no less than me, in a contest that they wished to win.
Yet, it all depends on what set of rules you have implicit in your mind while playing this “game.” For instance, few if any regulars on the blog in question appear offended by, or even cognizant of, the disdainful and dismissive aura of disembodied, superior authority cultivated so assiduously by the blog owner(s), though I find it far more “pompous” and “condescending” than my own form of argumentation, which never fails to admit to my own defects and humanity, but focuses intensely on mobilizing compelling arguments both untempered by social niceties and unreliant on ad hominem attacks.
I believe that this is because the rules of their game are: 1) Do not ever challenge the premise that, while people have strongly held conflicting opinions, the goal is not to reduce mutual false certainty and arrive together at improved understandings, but rather only to win political victories that advance one’s own dogmatic beliefs at the expense of the dogmatic beliefs of others; 2) It is perfectly acceptable to be vitriolic, disdainful, and dismissive of others, if you do so without violating rule number 1.
In other words, it’s acceptable to argue a position, but only if it is done without any intention of actually challenging the assumptions and conclusions of others; rather, it must be done in service to superficial political victories rather than any attempt to affect human consciousness. This is why it’s just as acceptable among these particular actors to focus in on completely irrelevant issues with which they might score political points as to make a compelling argument, and, in fact, more acceptable to do the former than to do the latter if the latter is done in a way which too profoundly challenges people’s assumptions and conclusions.
This was in fact summed up by one poster on the same blog, less inclined to vitriol and less antagonistic toward me than others, who counseled that I shouldn’t keep asking people to question all that they think is true. I replied that that’s not such a bad role to play, and there should be room on each forum for at least one person to play it.
And that gets to the crux of the matter: He or she who plays it becomes the center of a storm of vitriol for playing it, because what people least want is to have their comfortable false certainties challenged. One of the posters recently most antagonistic to me, assuming the job of posting constant, meaningless, snide attacks following every comment or post of mine, summed this up in an unintentionally flattering way: He wrote, “just drink the hemlock already, Socrates” (the point being that Socrates, who was famous for forcing people to question their own assumptions and conclusions, was sentenced to death for “corrupting the youth of Athens” by inducing them to question the certainties that the Athenian people considered sacrosanct).
A column printed in last Sunday’s Denver post, by syndicated columnist Froma Harrop, “The Op-Ed Pages Are No Tea Party” (http://www.projo.com/opinion/columnists/content/CL_froma21_08-21-11_C7PQ3VU_v11.390da.html), addresses one aspect of this issue: People resent compelling arguments that challenge their beliefs. As she writes:
My definition of incivility is nonfactual and uninformed opinions hidden in anonymity or false identities, and Internet forums overflow with them. When the comments gush in from orchestrated campaigns, other thoughtful views get lost in the flood. That can create two desired outcomes for the organizers. One, the writer gets cowed into thinking he or she has done something awful and holds back next time. Two, commentators outside the group see what’s up and don’t bother participating.
Vitriol without a smart argument is a bore. It’s not the vitriol alone that makes people most angry. It’s a strong argument that hits the bull’s-eye.
I would amend what she says slightly: It’s not only orchestrated campaigns that drive out other voices, but spontaneous group think, especially the highly aggressive and vitriolic kind. This is one aspect of the dynamic I’ve experienced, particularly on that Colorado political blog on which I participated frequently for a long period of time: While I was quite popular at first (winning or being runner up in their periodic “poster of the months” elections several times in succession), the belligerent voices of resistance to the role I was playing grew in number and intensity, while the calmer and more friendly voices correspondingly fell silent.
It wasn’t, I think, initially that very many of the latter group defected to the former, but rather that they ceded the field to them, loathe to get mired in the muck of contesting those angry voices. Then, over time, the growing imbalance creates a self-reinforcing impression of general consensus, that more and more people feel compelled to either acquiesce or actively adhere to. In fact, the one poster who has been most relentless most recently, appears to have been so to gain entry into the “clubhouse” with the sign out front “no stinky Steve Harveys allowed.” The vitriol serves to help consolidate a group-identity defined by the unwritten rules I stated above, rules which I consistently violated.
This dynamic permeates political discourse and political action, pushing out the questioning of assumptions or the quest for anything transcendent of current realities, enshrining and entrenching a certain kind of shallow ritualism, a competition of relatively arbitrary (and underexamined) opinions, played out professionally by strategists and tacticians rather than by those whose aspirations look beyond those exigencies of politics. And all of this is in service to the definition of borders between in-groups and out-groups, ultimately the least progressive and most regressive of all human forces.
An example of the professional political dimension is apparent in a correspondance I had with Senator Mark Udall’s office. First, I want to emphasize that I like Senator Udall, and do not aim this criticism particularly at him or his staff; it is, rather, indicative of something endemic to politics as it is currently practiced, and understandably so.
I sent Senator Udall (and a slew of others) a synopsis of my “Politics of Reason and Goodwill” proposal (see The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified). His office sent back a letter, signed by him, blandly thanking me and stating his belief that, yes, reason and goodwill are laudable goals. It was clear that whoever responded to my proposal either did not read it or did not understand it, because it really has very little to do with some bland reaffirmation that “reason and goodwill are good” (rather, it’s a detailed, systemically informed plan for how to increase the salience of reason and goodwill in public opinion and policy formation).
The generic response from his office, totally missing the point, to a novel idea reaching beyond the mud-pit of politics is illustrative of how foreign these concepts (i.e., reason and goodwill) really are to politics, so beaten out of the actual practice that the mention of them triggers a reflexive dismissal of the reference as naively oblivious to political reality. As I said, I don’t really blame Senator Udall and his staff: This is how they’ve been trained and socialized. This is what experience has taught them. And that, combined with the time pressures on them and the volume of correspondence they receive virtually guarantees such a knee-jerk response (if any response is given at all).
Neither among the rank-and-file, nor at the highest levels, can we easily break through our investment in our current level and form of consciousness. Among the chattering masses, pushing in that direction violates a jealously guarded norm of conduct. Among the seasoned professionals, it violates the perceived lessons of history and experience. But it is precisely the most profound and important of all challenges facing us.
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(The following is an exchange that took place on another blog. I have omitted some other interjections by other participants.) IP: If you can give me demonstrable proof that can be duplicated in a lab that there is a god, I will concede the point; until then you are talking about an imaginary invisible sky fairy. Key point being something imaginary. I can imagine unicorns pooping rainbows while being ridden by mermaids and leprechauns, that doesn’t make it real. SH: The real problem here is that people think “reality” in general is something hard and fast, when it is something more complex and fluid than what we hold in our mind, where it is reduced to conceptualizations with which we can work. The more abstract the concept, the more tenuous its representation of reality, but that doesn’t make the concept useless or meaningless. Those who reject it because it seems literally preposterous are making a mistake very similar to those who accept it as literal truth. IP: Then for you the concept of schizophrenia doesn’t work, because schizophrenia is based on the idea that their reality doesn’t match our reality. SH: You’re sort of right. We live in a shared reality, intersubjectively produced over the ages, with an imperfect but real connection to “objective” reality. Those whose individual realities diverge too dramatically from that intersubjective reality are considered insane, a condition that can be the result of anything from an unusually creative and insightful mind, to an internal cognitive landscape that has trouble articulating with our shared cognitive landscape. The latter condition leads to real problems, both for the individual and for society, but the reduction of it to a simple pathology, one pole in a dichotomy defined by the absence or presence of a mental illness, is one of those concepts of ours that tracks reality very imperfectly, and in many ways dysfunctionally. Our current overreliance on psychotropic drugs, based on a largely fabricated history of “rebalancing chemical imbalances in the brain,” is one consequence of that divergence between our popular (and professionally dominant) conceptualization, and the ever-elusive reality. IP: Actually I think that the outdated need to rely on a concept from the Neolithic Era, ie god, is a mental illness. People needed a god to explain things like how the sun rose and set. Science has explained how that has happened. The need, then, for a god is outdated and simplistic. If I do x, then my imaginary god will give me y. It seems silly to me.SH: Let’s look at some of the factors that generated that “outdated” concept that has existed throughout human history, all around the world, in virtually every culture in every time and place.
1) We live in a world and universe that is mindbogglingly complex, and are gradually realizing that a biological rather than physical paradigm best captures that complexity. The science of chaos, of complexity, is the science of non-linear living systems, and applies to many systems that we have normally conceptualized as non-living.
2) Consciousness is one of the elements of that universe. In the modern tradition of human exceptionalism, we atheists have come to see human consciousness as just a happenstance product of random forces, and yet, we see echoes of it all around us, in evolution (which looks remarkably like a conscious and purposeful progression, the one which, coincidentally, produced something that resembled it: Human consciousness). There’s nothing stupid or absurd about conceptualizing the universe in terms of consciousness (not human consciousness, but something more diffuse and fundamental) rather than in terms of mechanics. In fact, that seems to be the direction in which logic and evidence lead.
3) Our minds are fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Even mathematics, that least poetic of conceptual languages, is essentially a set of metaphors disciplined into a complex system of logical thought. To metaphorically conceptualize this living universe, this complexity and subtlety of which we are a part, this coherence which transcends our capacity for comprehension, in the forms of gods and spirits and supernatural forces, is no less “off the mark” than to claim that we live in a dead, mechanical universe. Both are imperfect conceptualizations of an almost infinitely complex and subtle reality.
4) The real problem, on both sides of this equation, is not understanding the nature of our conceptualizations, and of our relationship to reality. We never hold within our minds an exact representation of a precise and unambiguous reality, but rather reduce a complex and incomprehensible reality to dimensions and forms we can grasp. World mythology has produced marvelous packages of complex and subtle thought with which to track that complex and subtle reality. Understanding that our error is in taking our conceptualizations literally rather than in embracing this or that imperfect conceptualization would be the cure to the problem you perceive.
5) In my opinion, someone who only understands a river in terms of hydrodynamics and the hydrological cycle and not at all in terms of singing spirits dancing their way from mountain springs to frothing seas, has a less complete understanding than someone who triangulates a bit more, and understands a river in various ways, through various modalities.
6) Concepts of god and gods and supernatural forces can enrich our understanding of our world, of nature, of ourselves, or they can form reified false idols that divide us and blind us to the complexities and subtleties of the world around us and within us. It is not the concepts that are at fault when the latter occurs, but rather how we use them and how we relate to them.
IP: In all of your 6 points you didn’t address the simple premise that the concept of god was started in our Neolithic past. All people had a Neolithic past so the fact that people came up with a god to explain natural phenomena is not unusual. People also lived in caves in the Neolithic era. Why should we hold on to a concept that doesn’t work and is divisive. Religion has killed more people than any other force on this planet, no god, no religion. The world would be much safer and peaceful without god. SH: Lots of concepts began in our Neolithic past, including the concepts of red, orange, yellow, blue, green, etc., and the concepts of up and down, forward and backward, probably love and hatred, right and wrong, joy and sorrow, and many others of enduring value. Whether such concepts retain their utility has nothing to do with when they originated.Personally, I do agree that we could do better than to cling to Neolithic conceptualizations of god, and even to the very non-Neolithic developments of those original conceptualizations, that have led through the Mesopotamian religions, to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheisms with all of their trappings (and through other cultural pathways to Buddhism, Taoism, various polytheisms, and a variety of tribal religions).
But it is not some conceptualization of god that is divisive; rather it is the illusion of exhaustive absolutes that the world and universe can be reduced to, such as whether there is or isn’t a god, and, if so, which particular version is the one true one.
Some things are relatively amenable to such reductionism, and those things tend to fall within the mathematical and observable ranges of phenomena. Not all phenomena, nor all subjects of human contemplation, fall within those ranges, and so not all are so reducible.
There are two ways of formulating your final statement, taking into account the reality of differing perspectives and conceptualizations: 1) “The world would be much safer and more peaceful if everyone accepted my one absolute truth as THE one absolute truth,” and 2) “The world would be much safer and more peaceful if everyone accepted the variable reducibility of reality, and accepted complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity as fundamental aspects of reality beyond which we may not be capable of further reduction.”
“Everyone should just accept the absolute truth that there is no god” belongs to the first category, and is essentially the same as “everyone should just accept the absolute truth that there is only one god, and it is the one described by my religion.”
Clearly, there is no easy cure to our divisiveness, because even the suggestion that we adhere to less literal, more flexible, more subtle and accommodating conceptualizations of reality is divisive, in that all of those who strongly adhere to some absolute dogma or another will fight tooth and nail against any such suggestion!
Or, to put it more simply, the world would be a much safer and more peaceful place without dogmatic certainty, particularly dogmatic certainty regarding what are essentially metaphorical conceptualizations of reality, including the dogmatic certainty of atheism.
You think that it is an absolute and irrefutable fact that there is no god. My dad was a devout atheist, who shared your perspective completely. But his religion was as divisive as anyone else’s.
The irony is, of course, that even my own devout epistemological (rather than ontological) relativism is divisive, in much the same way, because any position vigorously held implies and inevitably generates (if one doesn’t already exist) an antithesis which is also vigorously held.
But, just to be clear, I think that your certainty that there is no god is as arbitrary as anyone else’s that there is a god. We atheists think of our consciousness as unique in the universe, or as some kind of anomaly in an otherwise unconscious mechanical universe.
But observation throws this into doubt: Clearly, what we experience as human consciousness is on a continuum with what other forms of life experience. When we see a spider scurry away to save itself, it looks a lot like a small, scared little creature acting like a miniature version of a human being. We know that it isn’t, but this resemblance isn’t quite completely arbitrary either; it is a product of the same dynamic which produced human beings (the one in which genes in competition with one another cluster together and produce vehicles for their relative reproductive success), and the resemblance is due to being a product of that process following a logic inherent to being such a product.
And what is so fundamentally different between an individual organism and an ecosystem, or a human society? The latter is a diffuse version of the former, with packets of information transmitted across generations forming into systemic, coherent, enduring wholes. Just because we subjectively experience our own consciousness doesn’t mean that something similar in essence isn’t a basic part of the fabric of reality. And the more we explore the underlying nature of that reality, the more support we discover for that conceptualization, scientifically and mathematically.
So why wouldn’t we conceptualize that wondrous, sublime, infinitely complex global, universal “consciousness,” that is the coherence and systemicness of the universe, in ways that are accessible to our imaginations? I disagree with you about the net value of religion: The world would have been greatly impoverished without world mythology, its brilliant stories, its framings of reality in rich and colorful ways.
It’s no coincidence that the ancient society that had the richest mythology also had the richest natural philosophy: Both are aspects of the same human imagination, working with the same materials, in much the same ways. We would not very likely have our wonderful florescence of scientific knowledge without a concomitant florescence of religious wonder.
Not only ancient Greece, but also modern Europe, were characterized by these two working in tandem. The modern European era was born with the Renaissance, which was an aesthetic rediscovery of classical forms, and the Reformation, which was a reinvigoration of religious energy. The Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment followed on their heels.
Religion isn’t the enemy: Dogma is. Believing in god isn’t the enemy; believing in a rigid reality which neatly reduces to our conceptualizations of it on all dimensions is. What would “save” us isn’t an end to religious thought, but a beginning to a deeper and more subtle and more open sense of wonder that takes that thought a step further, and synthesizes it with our scientific and philosophical and mathematical thought. Our future hope isn’t in contracting our minds and imaginations to fit within one preferred package, but expanding them to flow among ultimately compatible channels, exploring the wonder of a world far beyond our wildest imagination, and the potential of human consciousness more fully liberated and mobilized.
IP: I am more comfortable with confucianism and buddhism because there is no god, it is a philosophy more than a dogmatic set of beliefs.
On [this blog] there is someone who believes that the earth is 6k years old, because that is what his preacher told him. The enforced and celebrated ignorance of modern religion and dogmas are antithetical to intelligent and rational discussions….
SH: Beliefs range from more to less subtle, more or less well tracking an almost infinitely complex reality. You scoff at monotheists who scoff at polytheists who scoff at animists. Science was largely born from monotheism (just as monotheism was from polytheism, and polytheism was from animism), the latter having reduced the arbitrariness of Creation from a chaos of competing gods and spirits to a coherent single systemic whole and thus making it more amenable to systematic investigation.
Some aspects of some religions are incompatible with science, asserting as matters of faith (ie, beliefs insulated from evidence and skepticism) issues of causation and systemic dynamics that are, in fact, better understood through scientific methodology than religious narratives. Some aspects of religions occupy completely separate realms, going where science can’t really go because science doesn’t address all questions (particularly questions of value or judgment). And then there are realms to which both apply, but in different ways (such as the celebration of wonder and awe at the incredible complexity and subtlety of the world and universe we live in).
It’s fine to advocate for more rather than less subtlety, and to critique those who fail to continue to strive to do so. It’s folly to believe that you have found the end point of that journey, and to scoff at others for having failed to find the one absolute truth of which you are aware and they are not.
IP: Does your god care what food you eat?
SH: Psycholinguist Stephen Pinker, in How The Mind Works, posited that religious dietary restrictions evolved as a means of preventing members of more economically marginal societies from defecting to richer neighboring societies by making their food less attractive. So, for instance, in the case of Jewish dietary restrictions, shell fish would be found in neighboring coastal societies but not among the Hebrew desert nomads themselves, and pork would be found among (wealthier) sedentary populations rather than (poorer) nomadic ones.
The point isn’t that many religious ideas and proscriptions can’t be better understood as products of human history and psychology than as products of a divine mandate, but rather that different modalities of thought can coexist, and, where they reinforce rather than obstruct their respective competencies, can be useful and productive rather than dysfunctional and destructive.
Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Desmond Tutu were all highly religious men, who used their religious convictions in service to their charismatic leadership and their missions of social justice and universal goodwill. The Civil Rights Movement in America benefited enormously from the social organizational capital of the southern black church infrastructure, without which that movement might never have happened, and certainly would have had to have happened with far less capacity for grass roots organizing than it in fact had at its disposal.
The goal of peace and human welfare is not best served by insisting that one’s own conceptual tyranny prevail over all others, whether it is the conceptual tyranny of a dogma that contains literal gods or one that does not (e.g., Marxism, Libertarianism, Dogmatic Atheism, etc.). Conceptual false idols don’t have to be supernatural to be socially destructive.
The goal of peace and human welfare is best served by recognizing that we have a plethora of conceptual modalities at our disposal, and that those modalities have varying uses and competencies, that they can be articulated in ways which reinforce rather than undermine one another, and that doing so provides us with more rather than less insight.
The fact that the opposite also occurs, that the incompetencies of each modality assert themselves at the expense of the competencies of the others, is something to strive to transcend, whether it is religious assertions about how faith is more reliable for ascertaining the validity of factual and causal information than is scientific methodology, or pseudo-scientific assertions that science “disproves” something which is a conceptual rather than factual matter.
One of the big obstacles to making this leap is the misconception that the products of our imagination are distinct from “reality,” and that reality is understood by some means other than our imagination. In truth, our imagination is our portal onto reality, our means of tracking it with our minds. Some of the modalities we use are good for some purposes, and may be more attractive to some people; while others are good for other purposes and may be more attractive to other people. But the notion that some of these modalities of human imagination are “right” and some are “wrong” is an unfortunately unimaginative position to take!
…
SH: (In response to another poster insisting that the burden is on IP to prove that God doesn’t exist, since no one in the conversation asserted that he/she/it does.) It’s a meaningless question. This is what people don’t get about the whole “do you believe in god” thing: It’s like asking “do you believe in charpadarka, a color that humans can’t perceive that occupies the spectrum of light frequencies from about 900-920 THz.”
Well, if you choose to call that range of the spectrum of light not visible to the human eye a “color,” and then name the color “charpadarka,” then you believe in it. If you choose not to call that range of the spectrum of light not visible to the human eye a “color,” and refuse to name it, then you don’t believe in “charpadarka.”
The objective reality is what it is. It can be conceptualized in multiple ways. It makes no sense to argue about whether one or another conceptualization is “true” or not.
(No one can) prove that “God” doesn’t exist, and no one . . . can prove that “God” does exist, because “God” is a concept, just like everything else we hold in our minds to represent reality. It is not an argument over an empirically verifiable or refutable assertion, or about an empirically and analytically more or less supportable theory or paradigm; it is an argument over semantics and conceptualization, and therefore a meaningless and absurd argument to have.
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The notion that it is better to address the root causes of any problem or ailment than merely treat the symptoms may seem obvious to most of us, but it is often neglected and rarely unpackaged. It is relevant in multiple ways on multiple levels to multiple issues. And it forms a pathway toward continuing refinement of both our understandings and our actions.
In my new capacity on the Board of Directors of ClearMinds, Inc., a recently established non-profit dedicated to a more holistic, root-cause oriented approach to mental health care, this distinction is front and center. ClearMinds is the brain child of my friend Dr. Mark Foster and Amy Smith, a mental health services consumer who had testified to Congress several years ago on behalf of legislation favoring the status quo, only later to discover by accident how truly dysfunctional the status quo really is.
Amy’s experience involved an accident which prevented her from taking her medications for several days. She describes the effect as that of having woken up after a long stupor, fully alive again for the first time in many years. Mark’s experience comes from what he has seen in his practice as a family physician, and then discovered through research on his own, a discovery which paralleled that of science writer Robert Whitaker, who wrote Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, detailing how America’s reliance on antipsychotic, antidepressant, and antianxiety drugs has, far from being the miracle solution to the supposed chemical imbalances at the heart of various psychoses and neuroses, fueled an explosion in the rate and severity of mental health problems in America.
This leads to one interesting thing to note about the search for root causes: If not done honestly, it leads us astray. The conventional wisdom, echoed by many in the mental health care industry, is that we are addressing root causes with these various psychotropic drugs, when in fact we are merely addressing symptoms, and doing so in the most counterproductive of ways. The historical lauding of such drugs as “chemical lobotomies,” supposedly more humane and less intrusive than physical lobotomies, captures the truth perfectly: These drugs dull the mind and reduce the lucidity and vitality of their users.
It may be the case that for certain people, at certain times, such dulling of the mind, such a “chemical lobotomy,” is preferable to the alternative, when one’s mental health problems inflict so much damage on one’s ability to function that even being half-dead is a superior alternative. But story after story emerges of someone who describes the experience of finally getting off their meds, rarely on the advice of their doctor, as that of waking up after a long stupor, discovering a quality of life they had been told was unavailable to them, and enjoying that quality of life thereafter, treating their mental health problems in more balanced and restrained ways. This suggests that, while the judicious use of psychotropic drugs still has a role in a complete mental health care portfolio, we need to be more alert to the preference of not using them when not necessary, and striving to make them in almost all instances a mere temporary foot-in-the-door on the way to establishing a healthier and more life-affirming mental health regime.
Despite the rising awareness of the influence of genetics on personality, it increasingly appears to be the case that mental health is more deeply rooted in social context than in biological interventions after all. The citizens of those countries with strong families and communities but little access to psychotropic pharmaceuticals enjoy far better mental health than we do. While biological factors are undoubtedly in play, the environmental factors are the ones that have the greatest impact on how they affect one’s life.
There are many other areas of life in which this distinction between symptoms and root causes, and the quest for working our way ever deeper into the latter, form a critical challenge for us to meet. This is perhaps most evident in the political sphere, where those most passionate and engaged tend to be most focused on the symptoms of our political deficiencies, and least focused on root causes. Two examples illustrate my point:
The first example is that of eruptions of violence, whether in the form of ordinary violent crime, domestic terrorism, or international terrorism. The latter two are easily understood as a form of political action gone awry, with fanatical organizations or unbalanced individuals pursuing some political end through a misguided and violent means. But all of these forms of violence, I believe, are symptoms of deeper causes, and should be addressed by increased attention to those deeper causes.
After every such violent act, there is always a chorus of voices decrying the act in vengeful tones. Ironically, I consider this reaction to be as much a part of the problem as the act itself, because it forms the sea of anger and hatred from which those cresting waves of violence emerge. The anger and hatred in which so many participate, to so many various degrees and in so many various ways, is, I think, a deeper root cause of the violence than the mere malice or political agendas of the perpetrators of the violence.
There are many, of course, who dig a little deeper, and cite mental instability as a root cause, and even go a bit deeper than that and cite our failure to adequately address mental health issues as a root cause. This points to something I will talk about below: Digging deeper, and recognizing a root cause of a symptom that itself is a symptom of deeper root causes. Because, while recognizing the salience of mental health issues, and of our mental health care policies, as root causes of eruptions of violence are steps in the right direction, I think we can go deeper still, and recognize that our easy recourse to anger and hatred, often treated as harmless and normal in many contexts in which they are non-violently expressed, combined with our ideological tendency toward extreme individualism, is at the heart of both this aspect of our mental health deficiencies, and our failure to address those deficiencies with adequate public policies.
The second example from the political sphere is the distinction between electoral politics and public attitudes. Enormous amounts of energy and passion are devoted to affecting electoral outcomes, and, in the course of doing so, specific public attitudes on specific issues have come to be seen as an important battlefield on which this political struggle is waged. But we address those attitudes as means to an end, seeking the most effective marketing campaigns to affect perceptions on a very superficial and transcient level, mostly ignoring the underlying attitudes that would make people more or less inclined to favor this or that public policy or candidate.
In political debates about political outcomes, the focus is always on political strategies and tactics, but almost never on how we as a society, acting in organized ways, affect how we as a society, diffusely, fundamentally understand the world we live in. I have often said that the real political battlefield is the human mind, and that the greatest long-term investment political activists can make is to nurture an understanding of the world compatible with the policies that they favor.
This distinction between symptoms and root causes is less a dichotomy than a continuum, from the more superficial to the more profound, with the most easily identified root causes of particular symptoms being themselves symptoms of deeper root causes. Therefore, we should never be complacent that we have found the ultimate underlying answer to any question, or the ultimate treatment regime for any disease or social problem. Just as the fictional character Algono found that every solution to every puzzle was itself a part of a subtler puzzle to be solved (see The Wizards’ Eye), we are forever on a path into increasing subtlety of understanding, tracking a world far more complex than any of our models or conceptualizations.
That is why the starting point of all wisdom is the recognition of not knowing. More than any other habit of thought, more than any other virtue, this skepticism, this humility, is at the heart of our ability to grow and improve and do better. With it forever front and center in our consciousness, we can continue to dig ever deeper through the layers of symptoms and root causes, increasing both the subtlety of our understandings and the effectiveness of our practices, increasing our mental health as individuals and our social and economic and cultural and political health as a state, nation, and world. This is the real challenge, and glorious endeavor, of human existence.
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Schede (Scheherazade) and Buttercup; Love at first sight.
I’ve been sleeping on the floor in the hallway outside the kitchen for the past week, on a pile of blankets that do not add up to a mattress. My almost-eight-year-old daughter, Scheherazade (whose nickname is pronounced “sheh-DAY”), joined me one night, and fared far better than me, which is a testament to the greater resilience of an almost-eight-year-old than an almost-fifty-two-year-old (our birthdays are a day apart, or, more precisely, one day less than 44 years apart).
The reason for this unenthusiastic return to something similar to the childhood wonders of camping out under blanket tents held up by encyclopedias (from the days when encyclopedias were big fat books rather than skinny little disks) was not nostalgia, nor a fight with my wife, but rather a new puppy named Buttercup. Buttercup is a rescue puppy from Texas, apparently brought up to Colorado in a great puppy drive, perhaps with puppyboys on stick horses rounding them up as they made the treacherous trek northward to their new ranches…. Or maybe they were transported in some modern vehicle that imposes less of a burden on the puppies themselves. Probably something more like the latter.
The puppy loves us, and we love her. She loves us so much that she can’t stand to be parted from us for the night, and we can’t stand to let her roam free in the more comfortable portions of the house where I would prefer to sleep but we’d all prefer for her not to…, you know, do what puppies do. My wife is even more adamant than Schede or me that Buttercup not be allowed to turn our house into a puppified den of odors and stains, though I think her love of the puppy is softening her fear of the inevitable gradual contamination of our indoor (and backyard) environment.
And, being the chivalrous lover of puppies and children that I am, I am the family member elected by unanimous mutual spontaneous consensus among the other two human-language-speaking members (as I seem always to be in such circumstances), and possibly by the one non-human-language-speaking member as well, to sleep on a pile of blankets in a narrow hallway outside the toddler gates containing our lonely little puppy in her linoleum tiled kitchen.
My wife Lolis, Buttercup, myself, and Scheherazade
It’s a happy duty to perform, uncomfortable sleep and morning aches not withstanding. There’s something about a furry little critter wanting and needing your attention that more than off-sets the minor inconveniences involved. And I firmly believe that every child should have a pet, preferably a dog (and certainly something more than a goldfish or a gerbil). It’s a chance to learn to love, and to care about others, in ways that children aren’t likely to learn in their relationship with parents they know are there to protect and nurture them. In other words, nothing is more humanizing than having someone who depends on you, and whom you love enough to ensure that they always can.
I’ve always been a bit intrigued by the human-pet relationship (because, of course, I’m a little bit intrigued by most everything). In some ways, it resembles slavery, with the animal being the property of the “owner,” and the owner lording it over the animal (“NO! SIT! COME!”). There was a time in my youth when I tended to consider it immoral for this reason.
But I have since come to see the world in a more nuanced light, and recognize that this is a type of relationship that has evolved over millenia, like many other symbiotic relationships in nature, and offers many mutual advantages to the species and creatures involved. Those animals, even wild ones confined to zoos, arguably have a pretty good deal, at least if the zoo is a particularly good one. It’s nice to be able to bask in the sun without worrying about predators, and to enjoy a meal that you can rely on. Of course, as to wild animals in captivity, a strong counterargument can be made as well, that their lives have simply been reduced in quality for our benefit, that they live most fully in the wild, predators and all.
But domestic and domesticated animals fall into a different category altogether: Their existence as species, as we currently know them, is a function of their having been domesticated. Dogs, in fact (according to what I believe is the most well-respected modern theory), domesticated themselves, by hanging around pre-historic human garbage dumps. In a sense, then, they made the overture, that humans accepted, to form an interspecies partnership, one which both sides seem to enjoy and benefit from.
I know that I’m benefiting from this one. Buttercup is a sweet and lovable little bundle of warm puppydom, a bouncing, slipping and sliding, shoelace pouncing, tail-wagging, hand-chewing source of joy and laughter. And I know that by adopting her into our family I owe her a happy and healthy life, to the fullest extent of my ability to provide it. It’s a small price to pay for such a rich source of the one thing there’s just never enough of.
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When you’re mugged in a dark alley at gunpoint, a win could be losing your wallet but keeping your life. America is being mugged in plain view at economic gunpoint, and too many of the 300 million American bystanders think the ones holding the gun are the good guys and the nation being mugged will be better off for being deprived of its wallet. Under such conditions, a win might be getting out of the situation with our national life still intact.
The political reality is that enough of the American people, extremely foolishly, helped put into place enough inflexible fanatics with an irrational agenda that arriving at a reasonable policy solution to the current combined debt ceiling/national debt reduction “crisis” (a crisis created by the gun now pointed at our head by those who claim to be dedicated to averting the crisis) may simply be impossible. Those elected fanatics and their fanatical followers wield enough pivotal political power in Congress that their insane will cannot simply be shunted aside. And they have dug in on the notion of not compromising.
The left complains that Obama did not stand firm enough, but does anyone really believe that having stood any firmer would have led to any other conclusion? Without Congressional approval, the nation (those of us that are rational and sane, that is) is left with a few extreme possible maneuvers, such as the president unilaterally invoking the 14th amendment provision (section 4) stating that ” [t]he validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned.” That, or another similar legal maneuver, might well be the right choice, but it might not be. A careful cost-benefit analysis is required to make that determination, and such maneuvers are by no means costless.
My point is not that what The Economist magazine has called an “economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical” refusal to include revenues as part of any debt-reduction plan is in any way defensible policy -it isn’t (it will cost jobs, reduce services, shrink the economy, and, in the long run, both exacerbate our national debt problem while simultaneously decimating our quality of life)- but rather that the question now may be one of how little self-inflicted harm we escape from having to suffer.
I use the word “might” in the title of this post very purposefully: All hope is not yet lost, and we might indeed be able to escape this situation with a better deal than the one we seem now to be careening toward. But it is not at all clear that that is possible, and it is quite clear that it may not be, so we (that is, again, the rational and sane among us) need to brace ourselves for the possibility that we are indeed going to be victims of an act of political sabotage of our national and world economy, and that the goal for us (again, the rational and sane among us) might indeed be minimizing the damage caused by that act of political sabotage.
I suspect that this will be one of my least popular posts among those who appreciate my perspective, and I hope that their greater optimism and faith in our ability to ensure that reason prevails, at least to some degree greater than the almost non-existent degree that I am conceding may be the greatest degree currently possible, is warranted and that I am proven wrong in my present pessimistic caution about what can be expected, and about what can be immediately accomplished by the rational and sane among our elected officials. But my purpose in writing this unhappy post is to advise my friends that we can suffer great acts of violence from within or without, whether physical or social institutional in nature, and survive to recover and grow stronger and wiser and healthier even so. And that completely or largely averting such acts of violence and their consequences, as we so often see throughout human history, is not something that the rational and sane among us always have within our power to do.
When dealing with irrational people who have acquired some form of power, whether it is a gun with which to mug a stranger in the street, or elected office with which to mug a nation in plain view, it is not always possible to arrive at rational or fair or productive outcomes. Sometimes, you just have to deal with the fact that irrational people have power, and act rationally within the context of that reality. Brace yourselves for that possibility, and spare those who were forced by their own sense of responsibility to give in from the brunt of your just rage over the crime which forced them to do so.
Yes, shame on those fanatics, both those elected to office and those who voted for them. But there is indeed a gun to our heads, and while we don’t want the muggers to get away with the crime they are committing against us, we even more definitively don’t want them to pull the trigger.
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The title refers to the ultimate challenge of popular sovereignty, for while populism too often isn’t smart enough, its absence too often isn’t just enough or wise enough. Therefore, an ever-urgent question seems to be: How do we create and maintain “smart populism”? But before addressing it, I’m going to take a moment to situate this (only very marginally new) concept within the cognitive landscape I’m developing here.
Obviously, there is no magic wand to wave which will fundamentally change reality. Humans will be, by and large, what we have been, and the foibles that characterize the recent past are virtually guaranteed to characterize the near future. But loyal readers know that I view our collective endeavor as human beings in terms of the evolutionary ecology of our cognitive (and thus technological and social institutional) landscape, an evolutionary ecology in which we actively and consciously (if not always consciously enough) participate.
(See the series of essays linked to in the first box at Catalogue of Selected Posts, such as Adaptation & Social Systemic Fluidity, The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions, The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology, The Fractal Geometry of Law (and Government), Emotional Contagion, The Politics of Consciousness , Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future, The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix.)
For every fundamental, long-term challenge we identify, the essential question is: How do we negotiate the dynamical, evolving cognitive social organism described in The Fractal Geometry of Social Change in ways which increase the salience of reason and compassion and imagination (or, collectively, of wisdom) in the ongoing historical life-course of that social organism?
I’ve offered, as grist for the mill, a plethora of specific ideas and concepts to keep in mind (e.g., Ideology v. Methodology, The Signal-To-Noise Ratio, The Elusive Truth, Collective Action (and Time Horizon) Problems, The Genius of the Many, The Variable Malleability of Reality, and many others linked to in the various boxes at Catalogue of Selected Posts), as well as applications to specific policy areas (e.g., Humanized Markets, The Real Deficit, Real Education Reform, The Vital Role of Child, Family, and Community Services, The Most Vulnerable Americans, Sound Mind, Sound Body, Sound Society; Sound Good?, Lords and Serfs on the Global Manor: Foreign Aid as Noblesse Oblige, Problems Without Borders, “Democracy IN America,” But Not BY America, The Brutality of War is Relevant, Gaia & Me, A comprehensive overview of the immigration issue, Godwin’s Law Notwithstanding, Rights v. Security, Freedom & Coherence, etc.), as well as an overarching paradigm of how to engage in this long-term program of conscious and conscientious social change (see, e.g., Transcendental Politics, A Proposal, The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified, How to make a kinder and more reasonable world, Meta-messaging with Frames and Narratives, The Ultimate Political Challenge, Second-Order Social Change, “A Theory of Justice”, The Power of “Walking the Walk”, Community Action Groups (CAGs) & Network (CAN)).
These essays form one microcosm of the dynamical fractal of our shared cognitive (and thus social institutional and technological) landscape, as one expression of one example of the way in which each individual mind does so, not as a separate and distinct thing, but as a moment of something larger, woven into that something larger, inhaling from it and exhaling into it in a constant cognitive respiration.
“Smart Populism” is thus one new sub-swirl, one new eddy within larger eddies, I wish to add to the developing cognitive framework I am proposing here on Colorado Confluence, a cognitive framework that I hope more and more people inhale, process, and contribute to. It clearly links closely to, or nests within, many other concepts here, such as The Genius of the Many, Discipline & Purpose, The Ultimate Political Challenge, The Signal-To-Noise Ratio, and Ideology v. Methodology. It is, in a sense, an act of ongoing triangulation, getting at The Elusive Truth from one more angle, like Richard Dreyfus in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind obsessively refining his model of the mesa where the extraterrestrials were going to land.
“Smart Populism” involves incorporating the suggestions woven through other essays into our individual and organized approaches to political activism. For instance, it refers to embracing the humility of knowing that we don’t know as much as we often pretend to, and thus investing more in the disciplines and methodologies which increase accuracy, or “signal,” and decrease error, or “noise.” Doing so requires us to identify, head-on, the logical and emotional fallacies that seduce us, and create a program for addressing them effectively.
To illustrate, let me offer an example of what I consider to be “dumb populism”: Elsewhere in the blogosphere, I got into a debate with another poster who insisted that what progressives need to do is to withhold their support of Democratic candidates, because Democratic candidates aren’t giving progressives enough of what progressives elected them to give. This, of course, mirrors the Tea Party attitude of insisting that the candidates they worked to get elected give them exactly what they elected those candidates to give them. The result, of course, is gridlock. But not only gridlock: also a reduction in the ability of the relatively sane and responsible office-holders to act as a bulwark against a powerful and destructive ideological fever sweeping across the nation.
(See, e.g., “Political Fundamentalism”, “Constitutional Idolatry”, Liberty Idolatry, Small Government Idolatry, The Tea Party’s Mistaken Historical Analogy, Liberty & Interdependence, Social Institutional Luddites, The Inherent Contradiction of Extreme Individualism, Liberty & Society, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” American Political Edition (Parts I-V), A Political Christmas Carol, and An Open Letter To The American Far-Right).
To be more precise, the argument depended on the notion that the Democrats in office are following a strategy, en masse, inferior to the strategy preferred by the poster. This is a frequent refrain, offered in varying strains from across the ideological spectrum, but one that is unlikely to be true in any given instance. And it is at the heart of “dumb populism,” because it does not respect the accumulated knowledge embedded in our shared cognitive landscape, and the marginal (but important, and sometimes quite dramatic) role that any one innovative new idea plays. The best innovations are those that dance with what is; the worst are those that erroneously believe they are superior to, and can and should completely displace, the extant “genius of the many.”
The error involves a logical fallacy that an economic historian I knew dubbed “dumb peasant theories.” Under Dumb Peasant Theories, the explanation for the inferior efficiencies of (for example) Medieval farming in comparison to pre-industrial modern farming were due to the peasants just not knowing any better, and eventually learning how to do it right.The problem with these theories is that they don’t explain anything, and just don’t make much sense. Sure, accumulated knowledge is, in a superficial sense, the reason for the changes, but why did it accumulate as it did, and what differences in context made changes in methods more attractive (and effective) in one period than another? There is, as described in my “evolutionary ecology” and “fractal geometry” series of essays, a pattern to these developments, a pattern of interrelated changes, involving an evolving coherent whole.
Implicit in failing to recognize this systemic whole is the implication that people are just smarter in one time and place than in another, an implication co-opted, for instance, by ultra-nationalists and racists to justify their own sense of superiority. People, in large numbers, are not much different in essence from one time or place to another time or place, so to explain differences in performance, attributing it to one population being smarter or more talented than another is generally not getting at the heart of the matter, and does not move our collective consciousness in the most productive direction.
The reason for differences in Democratic and Republican power or outcomes is not that we have a bunch of dumb Dems in power who, if only they knew what this or that poster on this or that blog knows, would turn the tide of history. It’s pretty clear that there is something else at the heart of the phenomena we’re talking about than that our elected officials, en masse, just aren’t as smart as any particular blogger or group of bloggers who thinks they have the final decisive answer to the problem.
If we really want to make headway against the complex social forces that are obstructing progress, then we have to avoid the temptation of indulging in Dumb Peasant Theories, and other emotionally gratifying but counterproductive ways of thinking and acting.
The problem isn’t that Democratic elected officials are a bunch of dumb peasants who just keep letting those wily Republicans outfox them. The problem is the complex structure of power and ideology in America, in which both Democrats and Republicans are embedded, and which is currently unfavorable to progressives. There is no short-cut, no panacea, that will resolve that problem easily, and acting as if there is is far more likely to exacerbate it than reduce it.
But that does not mean that it is our job to defer blindly to their wisdom, either. We, the polity, are one of the vital forces (hopefully, the most vital force) in this systemic whole. We need to articulate our will and diffuse wisdom most effectively into the process of governance, injecting more signal than noise, doing so with more rather than less discipline, doing so in service to ideas developed more methodologically than ideologically.
And that is why I have cited and linked to the corpus of thought on this blog, because it comprises one outline of how to do so. Smart Populismmust include an exploration and modeling of the nature of the social institutional landscape and the nature of our individual cognitive landscapes, considering how we can most effectively and beneficially articulate the latter with the former. It must take a synoptic view, considering the whole of our endeavor, and then working downward into the details. It must be based, to whatever extents we are capable of individually and collectively, on consciousness rather than reflex, on analysis rather than dogma, on channeled and disciplined passions rather than on unreflecting emotional reaction and self-gratification.
The fact that, as human beings, our foibles and defects will forever form a part of the challenge we face does not mean that facing it is impossible or irrational. We must recognize and work with reality to improve upon it. But the fact that humans are not, as it happens, persuaded as much by reason as by emotional appeals does not mean that reason cannot, through our efforts, be made to play a greater role. Over the course of the past several centuries, various forms of institutionalized reason (most archetypically scientific methodology) have developed and played increasingly crucial roles in our collective existence. Populism should not stand in opposition to that social evolutionary current, but in articulation with it, humanizing it, channeling it, internalizing it, and participating in it. That is how we, as a people, can best thrive.
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The current Tea Party concept of “liberty” to mean “what’s mine is mine” was most eloquently articulated by John C. Calhoun in Union and Liberty, in which he argued that any attempt to deny southern slave owners of their right to own slaves was an infringement on their (the slave owners’) “liberty,” and should be opposed as such with arms (which, of course, happened a couple of decades after he published it). Calhoun also argued for the protection of “minority” rights, by which he meant the rights of southern slave owners to own slaves.There is a direct and unbroken line connecting those who opposed ratification of the U.S. Constitution, through those who advocated “nullification” doctrine (that each state has the right to ignore the federal government at will), through the southern secessionists, through the southern opponents to Civil Rights legislation and jurisprudence, to the modern Tea Party.
They are, happily, the losers of American history, whose loss has meant real freedom and real opportunity for hundreds of millions who would otherwise have been denied it. But those whose ideology keeps getting thankfully relegated to the dust heap of history are relentless, incessantly trying to “take back America,” by which they mean a return to some semblance of previous eras characterized by Jim Crow, slave ownership, and the completely dysfunctional Articles of Confederation, not to mention the onset of The Great Depression.
The connection to slavery and Jim Crow is a historical continuum, not a current identity. Virtually no one today identifies themself as an advocate of slave ownership. Relatively few, but some, state opposition to the federal engagement which put an end to Jim Crow. Many oppose current federal efforts to address the legacy of that history still extant today.My point is not that by being a modern Libertarian you are an advocate of slave ownership, but rather that the history of modern Libertarianism belongs to those who were advocates of slave ownership. Those who succeeded to slave owners defended Jim Crow. Those that succeeded to defenders of Jim Crow oppose any federal commitment to social justice.
It is a logical continuum, with a shared underlying philosophical thread: “What’s mine is mine, as a matter of basic principle, regardless of the injustice of that distribution of wealth and power, regardless of the historical violence implicit within it, and regardless of how politically and economically dysfunctional the belief is.”
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