"Dignified" v. "efficient"

Following up on my thoughts yesterday about the wasteful character of the U.S. political system, here’s a nice observation from a BBC piece on the subject:

In the middle of the 19th Century, Walter Bagehot [noted] the distinction between what he described as the “dignified” and the “efficient” elements of the British constitution.
The “dignified” part was, of course, the monarch (with some help from the royal family and the House of Lords). The “efficient” part was the prime minister (along with the cabinet and the House of Commons). No doubt Bagehot over-simplified, but it was an arresting formulation, it has (if anything) become more true since his own time, and it describes a way of doing things which has been widely replicated elsewhere in British life, whereas it is relatively rare in the US.

Is (dis)belief in damnation more important than (dis)belief in God?

I’ve just finished reading “Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness” by the philosopher and inveterate riddler Raymond Smullyan. It’s less of a “study” than a collection of thoughts on three topics, loosely inspired by his reading of Martin Gardner’s “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener”. The first part is about the relationship between belief in God and belief in an afterlife, and for me it was spoiled by the casual and uncritical assumption of dualism. (How can you endorse the idea of life after death without taking a look at the arguments for and against dualism?) The third is all about “Cosmic Consciousness”, and my instinctive reaction of “Woo” was exacerbated by random nonsense about “planes of existence” and the supposed directionality of evolution. Ugh!
But in chapter two, Smullyan takes on Hell, and this is worth the price of admission.
Martin Gardner argued that the question of (non-)belief in god was “the deepest, most fundamental of all divisions among the attitudes one can take toward the mystery of being.” Smullyan seems to argue that a more important dichotomy is between those who believe in ((And “endorse”, to eliminate belief based on fear.)) the doctrine of eternal, infinite punishment and those who reject it. Obviously, most atheists reject the doctrine ((“Most”, because theism and life after death are logically independent, and I’m no expert on the consequences of beliefs about reincarnation and karma.)), but so do many Christians. Smullyan distinguishes four groups of Christians: ((He doesn’t have much to say about Judaism, and even less about Islam.))

  • An ultra-soft Christian believes that there is no such thing as eternal punishment.
  • A soft Christian believes that God is unable to prevent the sufferings of the damned.
  • A hard Christian believes that God is unwilling to prevent the sufferings of the damned.
  • An ultra-hard Christian believes that eternal punishment is good and just, and that a truly good person will take pleasure in the sufferings of the damned.

Smullyan introduced an amusing approach to the question. “If God asked you to vote on the retention or abolition of Hell, how would you vote?” Not surprisingly, many of the believers that he asked were strongly conflicted about their responses!
For me, the most depressing part of the book was reading the poisonous language of “ultra-hard” thinking. Most of Smullyan’s quotations date back to the 18th and 19th century (Jonathan Edwards, for example), but we have all encountered plenty of contemporary examples. They believe that the “suffering of the wicked” is good in itself. And these beliefs have consequences in the real world. As Smullyan says:

I firmly believe that all of us – the best of us! – have cruel and sadistic tendencies; that is part of our animal heritage. And the one socially acceptable outlet for our sadistic needs is retribution. I cannot fault a person for feeling retributive – that is only natural, as I have indicated. I fault only the approval of retribution. I believe that retributive ethics is one of the main forces – if not the main force – that is holding back our civilization. I predict that as we become more civilized, the decline in retributive ethics, the decline in the belief in hell, the decline in the approval of capital punishment, the decline of war, the decline in crime – all these things will come to us hand in hand.

It seems to me that the emergence of a vocal atheist “opposition” has in large measure been provoked by a “hardening” of the religious population. “Hard Christians” (and, presumably, “hard Muslims”) seem all too ready to appoint themselves as the agents in this world of an uncompromising, and essentially sadistic God. In this confrontation, it seems to me that “ultra-soft Christians” should logically be allied with the atheists. (Smullyan argues, and I agree, that the “soft Christian” position is incoherent.)

The strange state of the GOP, and other thoughts

Over at Orcinus, Sara has some interesting thoughts on the strange state of the Republicans in this election: ((UPDATE: Josh’s comment at TPM: “At this point it seems clear that the big take away from the Republican debate is that these are six pretty tired old guys who can barely get enthusiastic enough to answer the questions.” Another reader wondered “Is it me, or do Thompson and McCain seem like those old guys who sit in the balcony on the Muppets?”))

It’s striking how many of this year’s GOP hopefuls were guys who would have had zero chance, who wouldn’t have even made it through the money primaries, in any other year. The very motliness of the crew is a testament to the fact that the center is no longer holding — because if it were, they wouldn’t be there. A functional Bush regime would have picked a successor, and used the past four years to position him for a win. The fact that that didn’t happen is yet another testament to their looming failure. Nobody’s interested in continuing their policies. Nobody even wanted so much as their blessing.

This got me to thinking about the opposite kind of problem which the Democrats have. In recent years I’ve come to the conclusion that the US system is intrinsically wasteful of talent. Things are arranged so that natural allies are forced into a long drawn-out fight. Because they tend to share policy positions, they are forced to rely on personal denigration, thus guaranteeing that they won’t be able to work together after the primaries.
Back home in the UK, for example, the Democrats would have a dream team, a cabinet ready to take over and govern effectively on all fronts. They’ve got a PM, a Chancellor, a Foreign Secretary, a Home Secretary… But over here, they’re forced through a meat-grinder of a system which pretty much ensures that most of that talent will be wasted. ((And of course the whole toxic mess discourages many talented people from even putting themselves forward.))
Presidents ought to be symbolic leaders, restricting themselves to opening highways, holding garden parties, leading charitable appeals, and giving the eulogies at state funerals for national heroes. If you let them do more than that, they’ll try to become kings or emperors, and that always ends in tears.

Reacting to the imminent recession

As the US economy lurches towards recession, the WSJ came up with an appropriately pessimistic survey piece: Economists React: ‘Looking for a Bunker to Hide in’. This attracted various comments, including the following gem:

Gosh, I knew that $300 tax rebate Bush gave me six years ago couldn’t fuel the economy forever, but I was hoping it would at least last through his term so we could blame the Democrats for the recession. Darn it!
Comment by James – January 4, 2008 at 3:54 pm

Huckabee's supporters won't be disappointed, then

Seems like an odd way to pick a candidate… According to the Seattle Times:

Only 4 percent of [Huckabee’s] backers said they wanted a contender with experience, and 2 percent said they were looking for a Republican who can win the White House in November.

Of course the whole Iowa caucus system is a complete nonsense: a throw-back to deeply corrupt 18th and 19th century political practices. To my mind, it has only one virtue: on the Democrat side, it hints at the benefits of a more equitable voting system, such as STV. But even that small idea is drowned out by the cash registers. Hitch points this out (adopting his best Mencken tone); everybody else seems to give it a pass because they’re caught up in the theatre…

Goldstein on Popper on falsifiability

In her contribution to The Edge, Rebecca Goldstein takes on the Popperian idea that scientific thinking inevitably involves falsifiability, and the false (but seductive) inferences that can follow:

Finally, I’ve come to think that identifying scientificality with falsifiability lets certain non-scientific theories off the hook, by saying that we should try to find good reasons to believe whether a theory is true or false only when that theory is called “science.” It allows believers to protect their pet theories by saying that they can’t be, and shouldn’t be, subject to falsification, just because they’re clearly not scientific theories. Take the theory that there’s an omnipotent, omniscient, beneficent God. It may not be a scientific hypothesis, but it seems to me to be eminently falsifiable; in fact, it seems to have been amply falsified.   But because falsifiability is seen as demarcating the scientific, and since theism is so clearly not scientific, believers in religious ideologies get a free pass. The same is true for many political ideologies. The parity between scientific and nonscientific ideas is concealed by thinking that there’s a simple test that distinguishes science from nonscience, and that that test is falsifiability.

"What have you changed your mind about?"

Every year, John Brockman and the folks at The Edge pose a big question. Their Annual Question for 2008 is a classic:

When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?”

I’m going to have to think a bit before giving my own answer, but I can’t wait to read the responses from everyone from (alphabetically) Allan Alda to Richard Wrangham. If I have one concern, it is that there may be too many contributions this year. I’d prefer quality over quantity. We’ll see.
UPDATE: Having read them all (so far – there are new writings and corrections, arriving all the time), I have to say that there are some excellent pieces, together with a fair number that shouldn’t really have made the cut. Some writers – especially “Edge newbies” – don’t really address the question. Never mind. Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll has put together a good summary of the more interesting offerings.

Happy New Year '08 Seattle

Yesterday eveningFireworks from the Space Needle. I made my way to Jon and Laura’s party, up on Capitol Hill, and there was good conversation accompanied by copious libations. Just before midnight we took glasses and a couple of bottles of champagne up on to the roof of their apartment block. I should have brought a decent camera and tripod, but I had to make do with my iPhone to capture the skyline and the fireworks on the Space Needle. Pictures here.
And yes, the fireworks stopped after a few seconds due to “a computer glitch”. ((There’s widespread speculation about the operating system involved…)) We headed back down to the apartment, and watched the delayed – and manually controlled – display from indoors. The Quantum Pontiff has a great picture of the fireworks on his blog.