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supporting arguments are unnecessary
Tuesday, May 13 2008
When it comes to New York Times columnists, I don't know whom I find more infuriating, Maureen Dowd or David Brooks. They're both better than Stanley Fish and Bill Kristol, but then so is whatever causes my anus to itch intensely in the wee hours of the night. David Brooks has an unpleasant entitled quality to his writing, as if to simply state something made it so. I suppose this is the way of certain writers, people who feel that reality is something that can be manufactured. But it doesn't make for good or even entertaining writing. Thus my use of the word infuriating in the first sentence of this paragraph.
Today's Brooks op-ed column, entitled "The Neural Buddhists" gave me the idea that one could have a full-time job running a blog just critiquing the theological and quasi-theological idiocy pervading society. The fact that such idiocy could be coming from Brooks is no surprise, given that theology thrives best in a universe where supporting arguments are unnecessary.
Brook's first error is in his paragraph describing the new reductionist paradigm that allowed scientists to finally shed their last shackles of faith.
To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are "hard-wired" to do this or that. Religion is an accident.
The phrase "religion is an accident" is nonsense and reflects the view of precisely nobody, not even Karl Marx. In the view of secular scientists, religion is instead "a placeholder" that stands in for knowledge in a time when not all that much is known. Religion, far from being an accident, is the predictable original state of wisdom. It should surprise nobody that religion is generally full of happy talk for the believer and his ancestors, since, in the absence of facts, people tend to prefer the unsupported beliefs that make them feel happiest and come from people they know well.
The next problematic paragraph is this one:
And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it's going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.
The problem with that paragraph is that it presupposes the reasonableness of people still clinging (and yes, that's the best possible word) to faith in the inherency of the Bible. These people come to nature demanding it to conform in detail to things written in a two thousand year old document. If the elegant simplicity of natural selection can't reach these people, forget about a science as messy and complicated as neuroscience.
Then there's this:
Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.
This is just a failure of imagination on Brooks' part. The beauty of natural selection is that it can result in all sorts of emergent qualities when the various hierarchies of memetic organization respectively compete against their peers in their various overlain ecosystems. Among those emergent qualities are things like empathy, attachment, and fairness. It stands to reason, for example, that a society with basic rules governing the behavior of its individuals would out-compete societies with an anything-goes attitude. What looks to the narrowly-focused as altruism can be shown, on analysis, to be a selfish act, or else the result of a selfish tendency. I won't even bother to demonstrate this for motherly and pair-bonding love; if you can't figure out how natural selection would lead to the development of these you might as well look for answers in Genesis. (Also, remember this: just because you feel something strongly doesn't mean it comes from the divine. A more rational explanation is that instincts are wresting control from your free will.)
Next Brooks claims that neuroscience is leading scientists not toward atheism but instead toward some form of Buddhism. Aside from the easy criticism that the kind of Buddhism Brooks is describing is in fact an atheistic one, it's important to make a further point about the "oneness" among humans that seems to surprise Brooks. He claims, "underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions," and "people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love." None of this should surprise anyone. Anthropologists believe all humans share a common ancestor somewhere between 100 and 200 thousand years ago, and our societies have been in competition with each other from the beginning. It would make sense that we would end up with generally similar moral frameworks. It would also make sense that minds as complex as ours would be capable of states that feel "transcendant" and overflow with feelings. There's an immense toolkit of rewards and punishments in our heads, and anyone who has ever played around with drugs or sleep depravation knows they aren't difficult to access. To conceive of this as "God" is a linguistic trick, and a far cry from the religion that puts creationists on school boards and jets into skyscrapers.
The most infuriatingly Brooksian paragraph in this piece would have to be this one:
In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It's going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.
Wait, defending "the existence of God" against Hitchens and Dawkins was "an easy debate?" Hmm, I must have missed the debate where Dawkins and Hitchens were reduced to smoking ruins by a religious argument. So far, for example, I've yet to see a Christian mount an effective refutation of the basic Hitchens dismissal of Christianity: thousands of years of humans were born, suffered, died, and then went to Hell for their ignorance and only then a supposedly benevolent God sent His Only Begotten SonTM to Earth to die, an act that would somehow save them, promising Jesus would return "soon" (Rev. 1:1), and then letting two thousand years (and counting) pass (a third of all Young Earth time!) without taking any further action.
Brooks' piece ends with a kumbaya paragraph about how science and mysticism are like tunnels boring through ignorance from different directions on their way to an eventual meeting in a grand the hallway of truth. The metaphor he actually uses is more of a cliché: "joining hands." But this is a pure leap of faith, and a completely uninformed one. Since the time of Aristotle, mysticism has been in steady retreat from the territory of what it claims to explain. It's possible mysticism will always hold some small fragments of territory, but the notion that it will ever join hands with its nemesis reason is absurd. Reason's only reason for existence is to drive mysticism away!
I spent most of the day doing little yard chores. Last year I'd planted a domestic grape in a pot in hopes of maybe getting it to grow down the outside of the east deck, but it had done poorly and obviously needed access to more soil. So today I transplanted it to the soil beneath the east deck, and now I'll have to figure out a way to defend it from deer. I also planted a mature greenhouse-raised tomato plant we'd gotten the other day at Hurley Ridge Market. Finally, I saved a bunch of cosmos that were still wilting in the small trays in which they'd been purchased.
Only a week ago, I'd mowed the grass (using exclusively human power) for the first time this season, and today I mowed it yet again, just because it always looks shaggy until it is mowed a second time, and (when using a spool mower) it's best to keep the grass very short.
As the sun was setting, I removed all the wheels from the stripped hatchback and began disassembling the suspension. It won't be long now before I'm cutting it into small pieces.
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