Not sheepish, but individ-ewe-al

A human is built from dust and their fate is dust. They spend their life earning a living. A life like a breakable cup, like withering grass, like a fading flower, like a passing shadow, like a melting cloud, like a fleeting wind, like scattering dust, like a fading dream…

High Holy Days liturgy, R Amnon of Mainz, c 1100

Cities and Thrones and Powers,
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,
The Cities rise again.

This season’s Daffodil,
She never hears,
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year’s;
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days’ continuance,
To be perpetual.

So Time that is o’er-kind,
To all that be,
Ordains us e’en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
“See how our works endure!”

Rudyard Kipling, 1906

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:2-9, c 250 BCE

Consider the following pair of statements:

A] God created the world.
B] A combination of random mutation and natural selection gives rise to new species.

There seems to be a persistent assumption that A implies not B. Even worse, there is a minor industry based on the false corollary that B implies not A, which really has no logical basis at all. This annoys me, because a lot of energy is being expended on debates which are logically stupid, but which also have harmful effects.

A is of course commonly known as creationism, and B is commonly referred to as the theory of evolution. I would argue that the two statements are almost independent. Without violating logic, a person could easily assent to both statements, or hold that both statements are false, as well as the more typical configuration of assenting to A and not B (the stereotypical fundamentalist Christian creationist), or not A and B (the stereotypical strictly materialist atheist).

Consider, for example, a Buddhist who does not believe statement A, because he holds that the world has always existed, and that there is no supreme being who could reasonably described by the English word God. I don’t think we can predict anything about what this person believes about whether or not new species evolve by mutation and natural selection. Consider also a positivist materialist type who is absolutely convinced that no such thing as a deity could possibly exist (not A). There is no reason to assume that this person believes in Darwinian evolution (B); she could for example be a strict neutralist, who believes that the persistence of some variants in a population is totally stochastic and natural selection has no significant effect. As for someone who assents to both A and B, I don’t have to make up an example; I myself hold both statements to be true (though my attitude towards the two statements is not at all identical).

Clearly the root of the problem is not in fact poor logic, it’s the existence of a very vocal group of people who say that they believe A, when in fact they also believe α, namely that the creation account in the book of Genesis is “literally” true. α can reasonably be said to imply not B, because if all the species were there at the moment of creation, then there is no speciation and no evolution. In fact, it’s not totally unreasonable to say that α and B are fully mutually exclusive; B doesn’t strictly imply not α (because Genesis could be literally true, but the standard interpretation of its literal truth could be wrong), but it’s close enough.

The people who are putting serious effort into convincing everybody of α and not B are, I believe, rather dangerous. Let’s call them political Creationists (to distinguish them from the much larger group of everybody in the world who believes A; that distinction is going to be important for the development of this argument). I don’t think that ultimately, political Creationists really care whether the account in Genesis is literally true. The originators of this philosophy are American fundamentalist Christians, and they have two rather unsavoury aims. The first is to force their brand of Christianity into a position of direct political influence, including in public schools. That means they’re working to undermine the US Constitution whose First Amendment prohibits establishment of any religion. In one way that’s kind of a local issue, but American politics does tend to spill over into the rest of the world.

The second aim is to undermine the credibility of science in general. In order to increase the powerbase of a fundamentalist religion, political Creationists are trying to make critical thinking more difficult. That’s what makes it really scary for those of us who are not Americans. It also explains why people who are not at all American fundamentalist Christians are getting involved in this, including a growing minority of Muslims and a few rather wacky Jews, as well as some other Christian groups. It seems like these other groups want a slice of the power that fundamentalists in the US are accumulating, and political Creationism looks like a way to achieve that.

It’s understandable that people are worried about this phenomenon. But I find there’s a big problem with the measures being taken to combat it. I think the people who are writing books and making TV programmes in which they eagerly try to convince people that evolution really does happen, claiming that this shows all religion is false, are actually allowing the unpleasant element to frame the debate. I am not saying that arguing with them gives them legitimacy, exactly, but more that arguing with them on their terms is already giving them a significant advantage, even if their arguments are weaker. (There’s also the fact that the militant atheist crowd annoy me because of the lack of logic mentioned at the start of this post; there’s no good reason to assume that all people with any religious views at all necessarily believe α, and it’s entirely fallacious to claim that evidence in favour of evolution is evidence in favour of atheism.) But more seriously, arguing as if verifying the Darwinian view somehow “proves” that God doesn’t exist (B implies not A), is only encouraging people who don’t understand or don’t find the theory of evolution satisfying towards the theist, creationist view (not B implies A). For one thing the theory of evolution is hard to understand and not at all intuitive. For a second thing, Darwin himself said some things that were wrong, and other evolutionary biologists have also occasionally said wrong things. Nobody sensible is claiming that scientists are infallible. But the way the debate is being framed by the political Creationists, and the way that framing is accepted by the militant atheists, make it tempting to infer that if Darwin was wrong, then fundamentalist Christians must be right.

In order to “win”, all the political Creationists need to do is to convince people that there’s a legitimate controversy about the theory of evolution. They don’t have to convince people that their version of the origins of life is correct, simply that the standard scientific model is “just a theory”, and it’s a matter of pure personal preference whether you decide to “believe” in evolution or in literal-according-to-the-fundamentalist-interpretation-of-Genesis Creationism. That’s enough to challenge the scientific edifice. Once this false controversy is legitimized, it’s easy to promote other similar false controversies, because you’ve encouraged an atmosphere where the scientific method is worthless, and it’s all just a matter of what view seems most appealing. There are similar bits of propaganda about climate change, with a false controversy about whether human activity is altering the global environment or whether God promised there would never be another flood so no person of faith needs to worry about sea levels rising. And about the effectiveness of various kinds of contraception and exactly how certain medical procedures work. If there’s believed to be a controversy, most people’s sense of fairness means that they want to give equal consideration to the two “sides”, even if in fact one side is utterly disingenuous and will say anything until they come up with something that sounds plausible, while the other is based on empirical evidence and entirely open to legitimate challenges.

Let me make a note about the different values of belief for the two statements. A is clearly a statement of religious belief. You can try to challenge it on logical or empirical grounds if you really want to, but you’re probably just going to end up annoying the people who hold the belief. I would venture that the vast majority of people who hold religious beliefs do not hold them because they are completely convinced by some practical evidence or some irrefutable logic. They hold the beliefs because they find them emotionally appealing, or perhaps because they come from a community where those beliefs are common currency. That goes for a lot of atheism too, I would argue. People who hold a particular philosophical or religious belief may try to rationalize it by presenting arguments and evidence, but in the end the justification is primarily a way to make them feel better about themselves, it’s not the reason for believing a certain way. (My personal opinion is that anyone who claims they can “prove” God’s existence is believing in something that isn’t God, and anyone who claims they can prove God’s non-existence has misunderstood the nature of religion.)

B is a scientific theory. I happen to think the evidence for it is pretty solid at this point, and it does seem to make good predictions about how biology works. Rationalists defending the theory of evolution often make pious (sic) pronouncements about how scientific theory can always be challenged by new evidence or a better interpretation of current evidence. In principle that’s true, but really, how many people have personally examined all the evidence in favour of Darwinian evolution and found it satisfactory? I know I haven’t, and I’m a professional biologist! So to some extent people believe B as a matter of trust; we believe in the scientific method, with its empiricism, its peer review, its assumption of induction. And we believe in the scientific establishment as people who are true to the principles of the scientific method, and who genuinely are willing to revise their models when new evidence appears. We accept things as being true because scientists have come to a consensus on them, which is essentially an argument from authority, when it comes down to it.

Now, I do happen to think that science is about the best method we have of understanding the world. But I also think that we shouldn’t go too far in assuming that “Science” has access to the Ultimate Truth, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is an element of trust and assumptions involved. This situation also implies that scientists have a responsibility to communicate their results clearly and honestly to the non-scientific world, and people who are not scientists have a responsibility to be educated enough to maintain a reasonable level of skepticism.

Anyway, the main conclusion is that statements A and B are independent because they are different kinds of statements. If people want to argue for or against one, they shouldn’t muddy the waters by trying to talk about the other. The secondary conclusion is that there are some extremely unpleasant people who have a vested interest in convincing people of not B, and that decent people should be very careful in how they argue against such unpleasant elements, to avoid accidentally playing to their hidden aims.

More and more, I am noticing a really pernicious meme: the substitution of health for religious virtue, or even salvation. And the notion of virtue that is being replaced with health was a bad and dangerous frame for morality anyway. A blog post like this is only the tiniest of drops towards countering this bad meme, but I would rather make the post than do nothing. And of course I welcome any criticism or development of my argument.

The other week I was in synagogue for a Progressive service. The rabbi commented that the prayerbook we were using omitted the traditional practice of reciting the passage from Deuteronomy which states that if you follow God’s law you will have good weather and good harvests, and if you don’t you will have famines. I might question the wisdom of drawing attention to passages that you have decided to omit, but anyway. The point is that most people see this as a pretty nonsensical position; they either conclude that the Bible is rubbish, or they read it in such a metaphorical way that the plain meaning vanishes out of sight, or they don’t read it at all, depending on their approach to Scripture. (The commonest Orthodox practice, by the way, is to read it, because you mustn’t change the liturgy, but in an undertone because it makes people uncomfortable.)

Of course, religions come up with all sorts of devious ways to explain the problem that transparently, people aren’t happy in proportion to their moral or religious virtue. For example, apologists may regard undeserved suffering as a test of faith, or they may relegate the reward and punishment business to the afterlife or other incarnations. To my mind, this kind of thing is pretty bad theology. Anyway, it’s very hard for anyone taking any sort of rational approach to believe that good people get rewarded while anything bad that happens is a punishment.

However, many rationalists who would laugh hilariously at anyone who tried to take literal reward and punishment seriously, are quite prepared to accept something completely analogous when it comes to health. Everybody knows that it’s important to eat a balanced diet, do proper exercise, refrain from ingesting toxins, and avoid obvious unnecessary risks. Let me be perfectly clear: I’m not denying that all those things are important and desirable.

But it doesn’t follow that if you live healthily, you won’t get sick or have any debilitating accidents. Everyone dies eventually. Everyone. You don’t attain immortal life by following the appropriate magic ritual. And the very great majority of people get sick at some point during their life; at the very least people either die young or grow old. On average, people who make healthy lifestyle choices are healthier. But that average tells you absolutely nothing about a particular individual.

It most certainly doesn’t follow that anyone who does get sick must have made bad choices. Just as Christianity goes way off the rails when it preaches that people who are rich must be enjoying God’s favour because of their good moral choices while anyone who is poor must deserve it, any philosophy which argues that everybody whose health is less than perfect must have done something to bring it on themselves, is complete bullshit. Stated like that, of course, few people would agree with that position, yet many people argue as if that were a valid assumption and take positions which do very much boil down to the idea that “good”, ie healthy, people get rewarded and “bad” people who deliberately choose to be unhealthy in spite of all the evidence get punished.

One parallel with bad theology is that what is considered to be healthy behaviour consists of a set of rules that are extremely baroque, not at all internally consistent, and often simply arbitrary. Plenty of people think I’m weird for keeping kosher and avoiding pork and shellfish, but are perfectly happy to cut out whole major food groups from their diet such as fat or carbohydrates. There’s definitely a kind of asceticism going on. A healthy diet is a sparse one, and any food that tastes good or drug that produces good emotional feelings is treated as decadent, even “sinful”. (This ties in with the false connection between health and thinness, which I’m not going to go into here because that’s too much flamebait even for me.)

And there’s the hierophantic aspect of authority. Who gets to decide what is healthy or unhealthy? The mysterious “They”, or “scientists” or “doctors” or even “the government”. Scientists are playing the role of priests here. They are initiated into the mysteries; as a scientist myself, I don’t deny that it does take years of study to become one! And the ordinary lay people (now, there’s a significant word, don’t you think?) must simply accept the wisdom from on high. And of course, most scientists and experts don’t bother to communicate directly with the unwashed masses; we get our information about health filtered down through the media, and through groups that are blatantly manipulating us, either for our own good (one hopes) in the case of government propaganda, or simply for the sake of profit when it’s snake-oil merchants peddling their latest diet plan. Or perhaps somewhere in between. Of course, there are all kinds of rival cults each claiming that they have the One True Way; just observe a debate between supporters of Conventional Medicine and believers in Alternative Medicine some day.

Indeed, there’s a very direct link between equating richness with virtue in bad forms of religion which have degenerated into just props for a corrupt political establishment, and equating richness with health. Not everybody has equal ability to make “right” choices. Yes, it is theoretically possible for a person in financial straits, lacking access to good education, and perhaps with a tendency towards addiction, to live healthily. But it’s very unfair to hold disadvantaged people to the same standards as privileged people. Rich people are almost always healthier than poor people, and better able to deal with any health problems they do have. This does not mean rich people are morally superior, just that the definition of virtue we currently have is one that is vastly easier for rich people to live up to than poor.

There are a myriad of factors which are not within an individual’s control. Of course, that doesn’t mean people should give up trying, but those factors are important and being too busy rushing to moral judgements to account for them is dangerous. To go back to the economic issue, nobody chooses to live somewhere that is unsafe in terms of exposure to violence or toxins, but many people can’t afford to live anywhere generally healthy. No amount of eating up your greens will prevent you from getting sick if you are constantly exposed to asbestos or can’t afford to heat your poorly insulated house properly or you are forced to work unreasonably hard in a stressful job. These issues need to be tackled at a societal level, and blaming individuals who fail to be absolutely saintly in a bad situation is a huge distraction, as well as being morally wrong.

There’s also just random bad luck. This is a concept that many people have a really hard time dealing with, but that’s just how the world works. Sometimes a person gets sick or has an accident not because of anything they did wrong, or because they suffered the consequences of bad politics, but for no reason at all. It’s easy to see why it’s tempting to believe that a healthy lifestyle will keep you safe and healthy; knowing that you do all the right things allows you to be confident that you are one of the “saved”, but it’s a completely false confidence. You might just as well believe that if you do the right magic ritual, some benevolent spirit will keep you safe from harm. And it’s not just that this belief is wrong, it’s also actively harmful to people who do suffer from bad luck, because they get blamed as a psychological defense mechanism so that healthy people don’t have to confront the possibility that something terrible might happen to them too.

A couple of additional notes, to pre-empt the most likely criticisms I expect for this essay. Firstly, I’m not in the least saying that Christianity is terrible or any worse than any other religion. I think some of this view of virtue may be partly influenced by Protestantism, but that’s a guess I can’t prove. It happens that Christianity has been a dominant influence in our society for a long time, and there’s nothing more to any bias in my depiction than that.

On other occasions when I’ve made arguments similar to this, I have found myself getting distracted into stupid debates about whether people should take responsibility for their actions. I absolutely believe that people should take responsibility and should know and accept that their choices have consequences. That’s a given, as far as I’m concerned. But taking responsibility is a completely different thing from believing in magical rituals, or trying to claim that virtue is always rewarded.

Both our internal information people and the local press are
getting very excited because some Karolinska people have made some
pretty good progress towards developing a test that will predict
dementia 20 years ahead. [Press
release, with links to the original article] It’s cool science, no
doubt about it, but I can’t help wondering, would you want to
take a test at the age of 50 that might predict that you had a high
chance of being senile by the time you were 70? I guess it’s the same
problem as with any predictive medical testing: in the absence of a
cure or even sensible prevention, what’s the point of knowing?

I think it’s the timescale that bothers me, in part; I don’t have the
same objection to, say, cervical smears which tell me whether I might
be at risk for cancer in the coming few years. That allows me to do
something about it in terms of possibly readjusting my life plans. But
I can’t plan on the basis of some terrible thing that might happen in
20 years’ time; I’d just have to live with the knowledge that this was
likely to happen to me, which I don’t think would be good
psychologically.

It’s true that almost everybody expects to be mortal (the exceptions
are a few religious people and a few quasi-religious geeks who think
the Singularity is going to cure death). So you always have to run
your life on the basis that you have a few decades at best and
possibly even less. But I’d still rather not know the probable time
and manner of my demise more than a few years in advance, I think.

My friends, I am having a crisis of faith. (Not the religious kind; I don’t have much of that anyway, and I wouldn’t bore you with noodlings about details of theology.) No, I am starting to question my faith in communication.

I have always believed that communication is really, really important. Before I was even verbal my mother used to lecture me about how you should always be careful to communicate exactly what you mean and tell those close to you how you are feeling. And I’ve always lived with that principle.

The doubts started when a friend pointed out that in fact good communication is no guarantee of a good relationship, and most relationships that go wrong go wrong for other reasons apart from communication problems. We were talking mainly about romantic relationships but it’s applicable to other kinds too. For example, if one person stops loving their partner and prefers someone new, the original partner is likely to be hurt and upset, and no amount of communication about what the situation is is going to change that the situation is in fact bad.

There’s also all the issues around attraction and sex and that sort of thing. It’s something I spend a lot of time worrying about: what if he thinks I’m flirting with him when I’m not, what if I say something general and it’s taken as a personal insult, and so on. But it’s possible that this fear is exaggerated, it’s a leftover from adolescence when none of us had any clue about these things, and now that we are adults we don’t need to spell everything out because we have enough shared assumptions and common sense that this kind of disaster isn’t likely any more.

Sartorias made a really interesting post about marriage in fiction. She points out something that I hadn’t thought of: misunderstanding is a convenient way of creating narrative tension while still maintaining sympathy for both characters involved. (Of course, it can get really annoying if it’s over-done to the point where the reader is left thinking, if only they’d bothered talking to eachother on page 1, the whole novel would have been unnecessary!) But just because a lot of fictional relationships run into this particular set of problems, it doesn’t mean that this is a proportionately huge danger in real life.

I still think good communication is better than bad communication, and some communication is better than none. But I am really wondering if I’m making too much of it. If one feels obliged to discuss every detail of one’s feelings and thoughts, that has the potential to get boring. And several people have suggested to me that my very direct style of dealing with attraction can be unromantic or even intimidating, compared to the more expected style of flirting based on lots of hints and allusions and playfulness.

Of course, there’s a huge sample bias here; since I believe communication is very important, I’m drawn to people who also care about communication. Indeed, some of the people I love best in all the world are the people I trust to tell me about anything I might want to know of their inner state, and to clarify and make effort to be sure we understand eachother always. But I do know empirically that there are people who are perfectly happy in their relationships and friendships, without basing their interaction on talking about absolutely everything or even really on conversation at all.

If communication isn’t the whole story, the major factor that makes the difference between good and bad relationships, then what else might there be? I’m tentatively inclined to propose the assumption of goodwill. Perhaps if there is mutual trust that the people involved care about eachother and don’t mean eachother harm, any misunderstandings that might arise will be temporary and easily dealt with, and not the big terrible tragedy that I expect them to be.

I certainly don’t intend to stop trying to make sure I listen and communicate to the best of my ability. But perhaps I should be less obessive about this point. What do people think?

It occurred to me the other day that I don’t really care about immortality. This may be a common theme to quite a few of my quirks.

Woody Allen is supposed to have said I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. It’s meaningless to ask the question whether I would choose to live forever if I had the option; a world where literally not dying was a possibility would be so different from this world that it’s impossible to guess who I’d be or predict what decisions I would make. But the point is that none of the usual consolations proposed impress me very much.

I’m not interested in an afterlife. I find it unlikely that personness, the soul if you don’t mind religious language, could persist after the death of the body. I’m prepared to be surprised, but it’s not a big factor in how I think or in my religious approach. I suppose this fits in with the cliched view of Judaism that Judaism focuses on this life (in contrast to Christianity which is perceived as being obsessed with reward and punishment after death). That’s an over-simplification of both religions, but the bit about focusing on this life is definitely true of my own religious approach.

I’m not too interested in the metaphorical kinds of immortality either. I’m not expecting that anything I have done or created will continue to have much impact after my death. I would hope that my friends will cherish good memories of me, but that’s only going to last for a short while after I die. As for my work, well, I’ve chosen a very fast-moving field where any contribution is likely to be ephemeral. OK, it’s part of the mythology of science that everything builds on what has gone before, but I suspect the extent that my experiments will matter in a hundred years will be so small that it might as well be random chance. It won’t measurably matter whether I existed or not. And that doesn’t bother me.

This possibly also explains why I’m not a creative person. I am quite resigned to the fact that my life will be irrelevant to the world within, at best, a few decades of my death. So I’m not attempting to make any art that might “live on” after I’m gone.

And I’m childfree, very. I have no interest in passing on my genes. I feel I’ll still be just as dead with descendents as without, so I might as well devote my life to my own interests, rather than nurturing random people who share some of my genes.

I’m not of course arguing that all creative people, or all parents, are trying to cheat death. But I wonder if I might take a different path through life if some shot at immortality were a motivation.