For background, please take 1 minute to watch the following Monty Python clip:

In the commentary on Life of Brian, John Cleese said that the depictions of the fractious, factiony Jewish Revolutionaries were a satire on the left wing activist groups of the 1970s. “They were so interested in ideological purity,” he said, “that they never accomplished anything.”

The last couple years have seen a lot of this kind of thing on the left and the right–the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are not as disparate as their rhetoric makes them seem. To speak in very broad terms, both of these movements are responses to the theft of trillions of dollars from the public and private purses by the collusion of regulators with industry.

The history behind this theft, though, are non-trivial and often subtle, and it’s going to take a lot more than slogans like “Taxed Enough Already” or “We are the 99%” to get anything done. For an in-depth analysis of how this all happened, and a discussion of some things (that are unpopular with all four of the most visible political parties) that can be done, I recommend taking a look at this analysis:

The trouble with both OWS and The Tea Party, in my view, is that these groups have both succumb to the Judean People’s Front syndrome: when faced with a crisis, they have both run home to their pet ideologies as the source of all wisdom, created an insular culture with a bunker mentality, and then started shouting loudly about those who disagree. The Tea Partiers are blaming the socialists for the bailouts and agitating for a radical repeal of taxes and regulations (without agitating for any substantive budget cuts that would make such a repeal feasible), the OWS folks are latching on to a caricatured version of anarcho-syndicalism (the philosophy of Noam Chomsky) or democratic socialism (i.e. European-style central planning and social safety net).

And while everyone is shouting at each other, something vital is being missed:

The Loyal Opposition
When two people disagree about the best course of action, but agree on the goal or on the problem, and both share a true concern for the matter at issue, you have the right ground for the formation of a Loyal Opposition.

This is a basic value of republican society (note the small “r”)–another name for it is pragmatism. Such a system works very well at enhancing liberty and prosperity, as it allows you to watch out for the corruption you find most intolerable, while trusting that the other parties will be watching out for corruption that might slip past your radar. It’s “I’ll watch your back, you watch mine.” The world, and especially politics and economics, is a complex place, and the loyal opposition is vital to the continuation of the Enlightenment civilization.

The trouble is, it’s more comfortable to be in an echo chamber where those who share your views congregate, even if they do not share your values. Jeffersonian Libertarians, for example, have very few values in common with theocrats–but they’re both populating the tea party. Progressive Liberals (i.e. those who believe in working for incremental progress toward the liberalization of society) have very few values in common with Marxists. But these coalitions persist because it is more comfortable to talk in terms of this years electoral policy proposals than it is to talk in terms of long-term goals and agendas.

Different Kinds of Revolution
Broadly speaking (like everything in this post), there are two kinds of political revolution: The Populist, and the Coalitional.

Populist Revolution
Populism has always been the tool of the demagogue. The October Revolution, The Fascist Revolutions, The Cuban Revolution, and the other revolutions that darkened the 20th century were populist in nature. These are movements that start out of vague popular unrest, are backed by a lot of rage and irritation, and explode almost spontaneously on the scene. During the explosion phase, they grasp about, looking for a unifying voice, and that void gets filled by someone who can speak the right homilies–code phrases about class warfare, or about a Christian nation, or about a return to old-fashioned values, or about social justice. That someone is–very often–a demagogue: someone who is willing to say the popular thing and cloak themselves in the mantle of a humble savior, and who promises radical reform, redemption, or revolution. These movements are characterized by their pursuit of ideological purity, of utopian dreams, and of simple solutions that, while they sound appealing, do not stand up to rational scrutiny.

After all, it doesn’t follow that installing a revolutionary dictatorship will result in a better life for people who were suffering under the boot of a corrupt monarchy or corporate-controlled state (as happened in Russia and Cuba respectively). It doesn’t follow that returning to agrarian existence will make the country strong and morally pure and free from imperial oppression (as happened in China). It doesn’t follow that a return to Catholic morality will fix a crumbling infrastructure (as happened in Italy), or that embracing Protestant Lutheranism and Teutonic Identity Politics or exterminating the Jews will rescue a country’s looted economy (as happened in Germany).

Populist revolution is, and has always been, one of the two chief dangers faced by democracy (the other is popular apathy combined with a culture of fear, which invites aristocracy).

Coalitional Revolution
Coalitional Revolution happens when disparate interests with specific agendas team up around their few common goals. Because of the tenuous nature of the coalition, the aims of the Revolution look, necessarily, decidedly modest. “No taxation without representation” is a very, very thin goal, politically speaking, compared to “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

There have only been a handful of coalitional revolutions in world history, and they are the only ones that have not lead, in short order, to dictatorship. Two that spring to mind are the Athenian Revolution and the American Revolution (though there have been several others).

To take the case most of us are most familiar with, let’s look at the American Revolution. This was a period where anarchists, antimonarchs, property barons, industrialists, free trade advocates, theocrats, farmers, merchants, and socialists banded together for a single common goal: to end British Rule in the Americas. They were able to do this because of an implicit (and sometimes explicit) agreement that those who fight get a seat at the table to form the new government. There was no common cause, there was no common leader, and the Constitutional convention was filled with people who would just as soon have seen each other dead (fun fact: there have been a handful shoot outs and duels between senators during congressional sessions).

How do you create a revolution out of that? Thomas Paine found a way, by writing a book called Common Sense and encouraging open debates to get people to think about the two issues they could all agree on: that foreign kings were obsolete, and that a people had the right to chose their own government.

The American Revolution was preceded by years of public education and debates, of long and boring discussions and arguments and fistfights (and sometimes gunfights). In all of this time, the one thing that was never in the cards (despite how some people agitated for it) was a grand unifying vision for the country that would result. It was the only way it could happen, in a landmass populated by colonies that were both urban and rural, both slave and free, theocratic and religiously liberal, separatist and cosmopolitan. The people who pushed the revolution realized that the only way to make meaningful change was to table the question of reforms until they were in the place to implement them.

And who can blame them? Patrick Henry wanted a theocracy. Madison wanted a secular state. Franklin wanted scientific socialism. Jefferson wanted anarcho-capitalism. The Baptists in New England wanted the Quakers in Pennsylvania burned, deported, or tried for heresy. Some wanted universal slavery–others wanted it abolished at the outset. The agendas were so diametrically opposed that the Revolution would never have happened had they not believed one another capable of honor–and had the strength to hold each other to the obligation to hash out compromises the hard way.

In school, we learned about the uncompromising men, heroes or villains–people like Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and Adams, but “uncompromising” is the one thing that they weren’t. Because when they sat down in Philadelphia, they did nothing but compromise. They did not trust each other with the power to take their property, their land, their freedom, or their labor if given a chance, so they hammered out a compromise that let each of them keep what they held most dear, without giving them the power to take those things from other people.

They found a kind of permanence in an ideal that Marx articulated eighty years later, but never understood: The Permanent Revolution.

Why It Blew Up in Oakland
Reading about a coalitional revolution, you might hear in it the echoes of the Civil Rights movement, and you’d be right. Martin Luther King was very well aware of the techniques of Coalitional Revolution, and during the 60s you could find, at many protests, tents for the sharing of ideas. Little universities, at which people shared reports from the front lines and (at least before 1969, when things started to fall apart) welcomed disagreement and discussion. There were people who were in the business of working out compromises–southern churchgoers side by side with Marxist Jews from New York, Republicans side by side with Democrats, disagreeing about the best policy framework while all agreeing that segregation, lynching, and systematic repression had to go.

But one of the camps in that movement DID lose: The Race Warriors. All across the country, there were people invested in the ideals of violent, populist revolution. They agitated for (and tried to create) a full-blown civil war around the subject of race.

For better or worse, a lot of those people still live in Oakland, and they have a cottage industry called professional agitation. It doesn’t take much effort to learn that crowds on the street can be turned violent very easily. In a group of ten thousand, you only need a few dozen people positioned in the right places to turn a peaceful protest into a riot–either by goading the protesters into misbehavior, or by attacking the cops directly, forcing the cops to push back and escalate. These few folks in Oakland and their brethren throughout the U.S. (and also members of various intelligence services, who have non-classified manuals on the technique) are very good at this kind of destabilizing work.

This is why New York might have had a few police skirmishes early on, but Oakland is the place where things went batshit crazy. Oakland is a city whose underlying social history (on both sides of the blue line) guarantees that, if a riot is going to become a war, Oakland is where it starts.

Street wars are one of the fertile germinating soils of populist revolution, and they are a very, very dangerous thing. So far, the OWS movement in New York seems to be holding their shit together in spite of repeated skirmishes–let’s hope they continue to do so, rather than letting misguided solidarity with Oakland push them into escalating (and let’s hope the vast majority of the Oakland protest keeps its cool heads even as the agitators try to work their dark magic).

Becoming The Judean People’s Front (or not)
Without a non-partisan, unambitious slate of achievable objectives, Occupy and The Tea Party are both going to fail. So long as the members remain committed to utopian ideologies or uncompromising agendas, all they’ll achieve is sewing more and more discord and partisanship in a country that is already suffering from deep-rooted, demagogue-driven populist vitriol.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Tea Party, and Occupy, and most of mainstream America agree on the basic problem:
Government and industry (in this case, the financial industry) have colluded in such a way as to create massive opportunities for fraud and theft, and they then colluded to reward those who perpetrated the theft by protecting them from the consequences of their actions (and all this in a climate of grab-it-while-you-can budgetary policy).

That has to stop, and stopping it without ruining our economy or our environment or our stability as a civilization is a solvable, short term, practical goal.

But people from both camps, and from the vast silent majority, have to start narrowing their focus and talking to each other. We have to rediscover the loyal opposition.

The Real Value of Occupy and The Tea Party
Because of how easily they are gamed, subverted, and perverted, street protests and agitation are often a very, very ineffective tools of political change. They can be valuable though, and if a coalitionary revolution arises from them, they can be world-changers. The small goals that the coalition achieves sends ripple effects throughout the world (look at what’s already happening just with the small amount of liberalization brought about by Arab Spring).

Taking to the streets in useless demonstrations of emotion and unfocused frustration can, and often does, defuse those emotions, which can render the reform impulse impotent.

But for all these objections, both of these movements share something of real value even in their most useless and wasteful demonstrations:

The are reminding people of their civil rights, and of their importance. The right to peaceably assemble, the right to petition the government, the right to bear arms, the right to free speech–these are rights that are again unpopular among vast swaths of the population.

When the powers that be push back disproportionately, it reminds people that this is America, and the very rights to not be gassed and to not be provoked to riot by the cops that are supposed to prevent a riot, are sacred. And they have to be, if we want to continue to live in an open society where argument, and experimentation, and discourse are allowed.

Keeping those rights front and center shores up the ornery nature of the American public, and makes them less likely to accept dictatorial solutions.

Yesterday, I had occasion to visit an old friend–a conservative Rancher who’s occasionally been very active in Republican politics, who I hadn’t seen in close to five years.

After the normal catching up, talk turned to writing and ranching, new projects and old, when from nowhere came a question of the species I’d been dreading:

“I just don’t get what the deal is with these homos.”

In earlier years, I’d have dodged the issue–or, if I’d been in a surly mood, I’d have taken it as picking a fight. But this was neither an attempt to needle me or an attempt to be self-righteous. There was an edge of worry in his voice that made me think that there was a sincere question underneath. Maybe one of his foster kids was having a sexual identity crisis? Maybe one of his grandchildren? I didn’t know, and I still don’t, but there was something there that told me it was important.

So we talked, nearly for an hour. And the questions he asked are VERY instructive:

Basic, informational questions. Not question begging sneering, not homophobic hate mongering, just questions. It was a productive discussion, but eventually I had to ask why he was asking? This man from the World War 2 generation, who’s been a religious right activist for thirty years, said:

I just don’t get why it’s a big deal. It’s none of my business who has sex with who. It’s like the color of someone’s skin, or if they like football instead of baseball: it doesn’t mean anything. It’s none of my business.

— — — —

If this was just an isolated incident, I might not have commented on it, but it was the second incident this week that brought me up short. The other was from another longtime religious right affiliate, who said to me, almost incidentally:

“Actually, with the DNA exonerations, I’ve decided that our system is too broken. I’d like to see the death penalty done away with. ‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt’ is too low a burden of proof. There’s no excuse for executing an innocent person.”

— — — —

These two things, taken together with a lot of other things I’ve seen recently, constitute a big deal, because it shows up a place where liberals and libertarians are missing the boat in a way that could make a profound difference in our politics and our culture.

There are two kinds of so-called conservatism in this country. One of them champions self-reliance, individual responsibility, civil rights, personal initiative, the integrity of legal process, and civic engagement. It’s the kind of conservatism you hear in old radio dramas from Democrats like Jimmy Stewart, or Republicans like Barry Goldwater. To people like this, whether you’re a naturalized American or an immigrant, you’re a fellow traveler, and they’ve got no problem with you if you pull your weight. They don’t mind disapproving of some things about you (for example, your sexual preferences or your taste in movies), because they don’t think their disapproval should mean anything to you–after all, it doesn’t mean a thing to them if you disapprove of their religion or their taste in shoes.

The other kind is the reactionary conservative, and these are the folks getting the airplay. These are the theorcrats, the folks that are convinced that science is a covert attempt to drive out religion. These are the folks that never met a conspiracy theory they didn’t like, who think Kirk Cameron is a proper authority figure, who cheer like a mob when the state executes someone, and who are jolly well fine with torture because they figure the bastard must deserve it.

You see a lot more of the reactionaries these days, because they’re politically useful. They’re useful to right-wing strategists and commentators and demagogues, because they have a lot of energy, they make great spectacle, and they are motivated to get out and vote–and, more importantly, to spread fear among their friends who are conservatives of the first kind. There are folks–cynical folks with cameras and microphones, and sincere folks with pulpits–who are making a lot of money and gaining a lot of power spreading fear and disinformation to turn conservatives of the first type into conservatives of the second type.

There are also a lot of cynical folks with blogs and newspapers and elected office that are making a lot of money and gaining a lot of influence doing the same thing. They’re the ones you hear talking about “The Conservatives” as if they’re a monolithic block of groupthinky voters, interchangeable and equally groupthinky as “The Republicans.” These are the same folks who pioneered identity politics, who imagine that walking the euphemism treadmill can somehow change how people think, and who also run THEIR entire operation on fear.

What you’re seeing from the crowd at the Republican debates, what you’re seeing from Fox News, what you’re hearing the folks at AlterNet say about the conservatives in this country, what happens when the talking heads that come on the TV or the radio for a good screaming match? That’s all theater. It’s spectacle. It’s designed to make a political and monetary profit out of polarizing the country, draining away our ability to debate, and replacing it with a determination to beat the other guy.

The left wing’s hatred of the other is every bit as unreasoning as the right wing. The paranoia from both is infectious, and the factual foundation of their rhetoric is as flawed as it is poisonous. And it masks an underlying truth that most people (including me) often lose sight of:

The good guys can still win. The last ten years have given sane folks a lot more in common than the issues that they argue over. Ask a sane Republican or Democrat, or a sane independent (over 40% of voters now) about civil rights, and while you may get quibbles over particular policies, everyone agrees in principle that sexual orientation and skin color should be equally immaterial. Ask them about domestic policy, they’ll be upset about the bailouts and the insane spending spree and the partisan bickering.

But the good guys can only win if we stop taking our cues on how to view each other from the folks looking to divide and conquer. Since the 1970s, folks from Orange County and the deep south have been waging a civil war against folks from New England–using San Francisco and New York as proxy whipping boys. The Beltway Crowd and Hollywood have retaliated with more and more disgusting stereotypes of folks from “flyover states”–attacking their culture and their right to exist as people rather than arguing with them. It’s an old cycle, one that goes all the way back to before the Civil War.

Smug northern bullying and self-righteous southern crusading are creating a hell of a mess. But we proved in World War 2, and in the Internet Boom, and around Apollo, and at dozens of other times that the South and the North and the West (and the subcultural presences they have in almost every community) all have unique–and complimentary–cultural strengths.

Wherever you sit on the political spectrums, maybe it’s time to stop watching your enemies on the news, and start arguing with them over coffee. You might find you have a lot more values and dreams in common than you imagined possible.

The temptation persists to substitute a few nouns…

In vino, veritas. Pliny the Elder nailed it: Wine tells the truth. It doesn’t make you do things so much as it lets you do things. You can learn a lot about yourself, and about your friends, by watching what happens when they’re well-buzzed.

National holidays can do the same thing to people–and not just because of the amount of alcohol people tend to consume given half an excuse. Like all things, love of one’s country can come in a lot of flavors. Soviet dissidents, for example, loved their country while hating its system–they loved its culture, its geography, its weather, the shared history in which their identity was rooted. Members of totalitarian systems, on the other hand, are trained to identify the system with the country, and to see non-conformity as so unpatriotic as to deserve death. Some people are patriotic about countries where they’ve never lived, so much so that they’ll move across the world to live in them, because they’ve fallen in love with the ideology, or the people, or the culture of that country. You can learn a lot about a person by watching the flavor of their patriotism.

Writing a political thriller series these last few years, I’ve carefully watched the political micro-climates around the world and studied how they relate to the version of love of country I carry around in my own psyche. Call it a love affair with the Jeffersonian vision of freedom: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

This year has been an amazing year around the world for the struggle against different forms of tyranny, and as an Americans it’s been more exciting than I can say to watch the most action-packed year of calculated struggles against tyranny since the late 80s and early 90s (it’s also more than a little embarrassing how little my home culture seems interested in carrying on their struggle on the home front, but that’s a topic for another time). It’s quite possible that the Arab Spring, the Iranian struggles, and the other protests and revolutions around the world will all come to bad ends in the same way that the revolutions of the twentieth century almost all ended in dictatorship, civil war, and genocide; still, I have a thin hope that some of the people who are laying down their lives–for reasons as simple as the next loaf of bread or as idealistic as bringing democracy and universal suffrage to cultures where such notions are without precedent–may have read history and learned from the missteps of the last hundred years.

Because of that, in celebration of the first revolution that actually worked (if imperfectly), I’ve dedicated Free Will (my new book about revolution) as follows:

This volume is dedicated to the men and women
Who sat in Tahrir
Who crossed the Wall in Berlin
Who fell at Tiananmen Square
Who bled in the streets of Tehran
Who lost their lives in Boston
And all those like them before and since.
To them we owe a debt we cannot repay
Save that we make their dream come true
For Everyone
Forever.

I’ll be seeing you soon, with the rest of the book. Have a safe weekend–and spend it however you want to. The ability to make that choice is a remarkable thing in the history of the world.

It raises the obvious question: At what age does an adult undergo a mandatory brain wipe and forget about what it’s like to be a teenager? Even teenagers with nothing evil happening in their lives directly know friends who have awful things going on. More than that, teenagers are coming to grips with mortality and sex in two important respects: in both cases, they are confronting both the knowledge that they can make decisions that will give them power over the death and over the sexuality of other people, and with the equally uncomfortable realization that other people can have that kind of power over them (and that, at least with death, there will eventually be nothing they can do to stop it). This is to say nothing about their own desire both for sexual gratification and for some (safe) experience of violence and danger. Sex and death, folks. It don’t get more real, or dark, than that.

Now, I know the author of the article didn’t espouse the “all children’s entertainment must be sanitized” view, but nonetheless her basic argument rests on the assumption that children are somehow innocent (and that teenagers are somehow children). It’s a pernicious lie sitting close to the heart of one of the major culture wars, and frankly it offends my intelligence. It should offend yours, too.

Ask yourself: Is it a coincidence that YA books have been hotbeds of incest, taboo, tragic death, drug abuse, murder, domestic violence, mindfuckery, rape, evisceration, perversion, and demonic possession since the genre has existed? I doubt it. Anyone that ever sat around a campfire has told those tales themselves at that age, sometimes to the great dismay of adults listening in. Adults who have somehow forgotten that it’s natural, proper, and vital that teenagers call up the spirits that dwell on mortal thoughts. After all, would you want to live in a world where thought experiments were impossible? You may as well prohibit toddlers from walking, for fear that falling down might frighten or discourage them.

But there’s another part to this reality check: Teenagers aren’t “innocent,” except perhaps when they’ve been criminally sheltered. Most gradeschoolers aren’t innocent. Innocence doesn’t survive contact with the hypocrisy of adults, with the dominance games on the playground, or with those first rushes of power at age three when a clever child discovers the ease with which even the most clever of adults are manipulated.

Innocence also doesn’t survive contact with the neighborhood. Even a “good” neighborhood. For example, with the exception of two years in a very rough neighborhood (during which I was so young I didn’t realize I was playing baseball in the middle of gang warfare, literally), I grew up in a good neighborhood with very little crime and respectable middle class family values. I attended church in an even wealthier neighborhood, and spent the majority of my time among educated, mild mannered conservative Christians who were, by and large, not hypocrites. And in THAT environment, here’s a few of the things I encountered either first or second hand by the age of ten:

Embezzlement, blackmail, suicide, rape, murder, pedophilia, socially sanctioned and approved ostracism and scapegoating, gang violence (both formal and informal), degenerative disease, mind control games (not administered by any church), professional malfeasance, institutional corruption both in academia and in religious circles, brainwashing, pathological dishonesty, alcoholism, wanton sadism directed at people and animals of all ages and persuasions, petty gossip, delusions, insanity (clinical, diagnosed insanity), burglary, domestic violence, incest, and appallingly bad dress codes.

That’s an abbreviated list. There are a lot of things that could be on it that don’t fit into a two or three word sound bite, and a lot more things that should be on it that I frankly don’t wish to discuss in public. Now, read that list over again and bear this in mind: With the exception of getting beaten up on by other kids in school, I was not abused as a child; I walked through my darkest places later. This is not a litany of my private miseries, just a partial list of what a privileged white kid runs into growing up in a good neighborhood before the age of ten. Call it a reality check.

Children are not stupid, nor will adults ever succeed in keeping them ignorant without moving into the wilderness and isolating them (I’ve got a friend who grew up this way. I don’t recommend it). And teenagers, for all their wild emotional swings and poor judgment, are not children. They’ve got a full decade of sophistication in the ways of the world on a preschooler, and a good proportion of preschoolers already have a good (if limited and unnuanced) idea about the darker or more scandalous things in the world. It is only adults, who have learned how to be frightened of knowing dark things (because they remind us of dark experiences), who think children can, or should, be protected from knowledge of dark things. It is only adults, who admonish their children to honesty, who could view the world so dishonestly that they could construe lying to children (by omission) a virtue. And it is only adults who have successfully forgotten the difficulty of growing up who can possibly imagine that teenagers aren’t already thinking, talking about, and experimenting (in fantasies) with things far darker than they’ll find in any book…

…assuming, of course, that those teenagers are the fortunate few who haven’t been on the receiving end of a rape, or privy to a murder, or the victim of a cover up, or affected by a death, or the target of institutional or domestic or peer abuse. Because, by the numbers, most “kids” are, at one time or another. And if their books too must be bowdlerized and Disneyfied, how exactly do you think that’s going to help them learn to live in a universe painted in shades both of light and dark?

If you find this post useful or thought provoking, please consider donating to the tip jar at the top right of this site, or buying a copy of any of the books you’ll find listed in the right sidebar. Writing is how I make my living–I enjoy it and would like to keep it up!

You have goofy ideas too–I know you do, because one of my goofiest ideas is that reality is to some extent knowable (which puts me two goofy steps out from the perspectives of certain Hindus and Buddhists I know personally), and in a universe this big the statistical likelihood of anybody actually having all the right answers to all the possibly questions is pretty much zero.

Still, it’s kind of rude to say someone has goofy ideas, isn’t it? Particularly when you use words with more bite than “goofy”–words like “screwy,” “stupid,” “false,” “questionable,” or worst of all, “wrong.” It rubs a lot of people the wrong way, like it’s contrary to the spirit of tolerance–or, maybe, it devalues the person who holds the goofy idea.

I think it’s quite the opposite. Without overstating methods, I humbly submit that recognizing that people have goofy ideas is the soul of tolerance and the backbone of civil society. As Douglas Adams observed, the universe is an unsettlingly big place, so most beings attempt to move somewhere smaller of their own devising. He tells the story of a curious race on the planet Hogloroon who live their entire lives in a small and crowded nut tree–the only Hogloroonians who ever leave the tree are those that are thrown out for the heinous crime of speculating whether any of the other trees might be capable of supporting life. He concludes the parable by saying:

“As exotic as this behavior may seem, there is no being in the universe who is not, in some way, guilty of the same thing.”

Through most of the world, throughout most of history, the proper and expected response to a person who trespasses upon your ideology has been to cast them out of the tree–and often to slit their throat or bash their head in before you throw them out. Even more important than family, the ideas you have about reality, morality, and knowledge are the things by which we demonstrate our belonging to certain groups.

The problem is, when ideas are this important, civil discourse is impossible. But when we can share ideas, our ideas (as Matt Ridley puts it) can have sex. They affect each other, and they allow us to do more extraordinary things than we could do alone. Libraries, Internet forums, twitter, and universities (where they don’t enforce idealogical conformity) are essentially idea brothels with an open orgy policy.

On the other hand, ideas really are important. As recent history demonstrates, the way we perceive reality severely restricts the courses of action and the kinds of creativity available to us (a six-day creationist will almost never make an important scientific discovery–the idealogical framework into which he’s invested is too restrictive, and the stakes for violating it are too high).

The genius of civil discourse is that we can separate the ideas from the people who hold them, even while understanding that some kinds of goofy ideas, which I’ll call “evil,” can damage or pervert the personalities of the people who hold them. We can let our ideas have sex, we can cull the herd of culture through conversation, and never feel so threatened that we must hurl someone else out of the tree. Sometimes we might be tempted, but we know through experience that we don’t have to do it. As long as someone’s actions and character comport with civility and a willingness to accept responsibility, we don’t ever have to throw them out of the tree. In fact, the goofiest ideas will often move their owner to jump out of the tree voluntarily, because the goofier an idea is, the more prone its owner is to feeling insecure.

In a universe this vast, we’re all bound to have goofy ideas. In a liberal society, when we don’t chose to jump out of the tree to find somewhere smaller of our own devising, we’re going to have acquaintances, or even friends, whose ideas we consider goofy, wrong, immoral, or truly evil.

I have a lot of friends like that. Because of the stridency and vociferous of many of my opinions (particularly in culturally sensitive areas), I’m fairly sure that some of those friends feel the same way about my ideas. But our ideas have sex anyway, because we recognize the fuzzy boundary between the idea and the individual.

And, so far as I can tell, we’re all enriched by the experience. So let’s embrace the Doctrine of Goofy ideas. Let’s argue Let’s fight. Let’s get into the boxing ring and duke it out–and then let’s go out for a drink afterwards. It is the most remarkable thing about our civilization, and this very minute it’s in the process of disrupting very old parts of the world.

I think that’s something worth celebrating.

Vanity
For your starter today, I’ve recently finished Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape. We recently had a three episode set discussing the premise and arguments Harris addresses in the book. I’ve also posted a review at Goodreads. It’s an interesting and provocative book–if you have an interest in ethical philosophy, I highly recommend it.

Whimsy
This is an oldie, but goodie, video of a squid filming its own escape from a skin-diver.

Civil Liberties
Are you offended and frightened by the recent shooting? Wish you could silence people who are talking about “targeting” and “taking down” the opposition? Think that such speech is the moral equivalent of a terrorist threat? I humbly suggest that you might want to rethink your position in light of this excellent piece from Slate.

In a similar vein, the attempt to silence political speech on the Internet has been whole-heartedly embraced by the Obama administration. EFF brief here.

Politics
In the “I reserve skepticism but it’s starting to look like I was wrong” department, there’s encouraging news about the early effects of the new health care bill.

Business and Writing
In the “cool research for Steampunkers” department, the Guardian talks about the FEMALE criminal underworld in Victorian London.

Ever wondered what the real scoop is on the most important part of you’re book’s marketing (i.e. the cover)? Turns out that Laura Resnick did a very extensive series of articles a few years back that goes in depth on how the whole business of covers works. Well worth the read.

The charming Kate Elliot posts a great article at SFWA offering advice to teen writers from someone who’s been there. If you’re a teen writer, check it out.

Bob Mayer expresses admirably why I’ve not yet done a book trailer, and why it would take a special project for me even to consider it. A quick read, worth the click.

For your treadmill-listening pleasure, Gail Carriger gives a delightful and characteristically witty interview with SF Signal, discussing the impact of social media on the book industry and the author’s business model.

Nathan Lowell’s publisher Robin Sullivan does a guest blog for J.A. Konrath in which she busts some myths about indie publishing and talks about the sales growth curve of her authors. Interesting, useful stuff.

If you thought 2010 was tumultuous for the publishing industry, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Borders is in the process of a crash-and-burn, and depending on how it goes down, it could do anything from expanding the print-book market to seriously shrinking it over the near-to-medium term (though I doubt it will actually sink any of the publishing houses along the way, it may mean a lot less cash going around to buy new titles). If you have print books on the market or on the way to market, it behooves you to read Joshua Blimes’s excellent and thorough Borders post-mortem report.

Science and Technology
As an enthusiastic tender of a bacteria culture (lacto bascillus San Francisco), this kind of stuff fascinates me. An in-depth article, with sub-links, on the unique ecosystems that exist within cheeses.

Perhaps I’m showing my age–and I can’t believe I just said that–but I’m still blown away by the return of lay people to the sciences. Last week, a ten-year-old girl discovered a brand-new supernova, and setting a world-record in the process.

The Singularity (in the loose sense) continues apace with the development of contact lenses that display information directly in the field of vision. This is the very epitome of “augmented reality” technology. Wonder how long it’ll be until we can buy them at Walgreens.

Another nifty extra-solar planet discovery–this one very like Mercury.

It’s early days yet, but there’s more rumblings from legitimate autism research that might just have nailed down one of the reasons for increasing incidence and prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorders in the last couple decades. Encouraging news, as this one is completely preventable. Also weird as hell, which tickles my interest-o-meter.

In archeology news, physicists seem to have cracked the secret of the Mayan ability to make dyes that last forever.

At the end of December, the BBC did a wonderful 1-hour documentary on the most world-shaking scientific and technological advantages which, thanks to the marvels of YouTube, you can now see for yourself.

Along similar lines, here’s an article on 8 Science Fiction gadgets and plot devices that became a reality in 2010.

Laser weapons deployed for use on the high-seas! That’s right, non-lethal stun lasers are now being tested for use against pirates. No joke!

And, for the sake of great science-fictiony fun, here’s a great essay by Ronald Bailey speculating on the GOOD things that the lack of ET signals could portend.

Orwell
In other news, moral crusaders continue to Bowdlerize and lie about history “for the sake of the children.” If I can point to the single most harmful strand of human nature, aside perhaps from the propensity to commit genocide, this is the one I’d pick.

On the other hand, there are people of genuine moral fiber still circulating in the world. If you want something that will make you cry or stand up and cheer, check out this statement by the father of one the 9-year-old girl slain in the assassination attempt this week. Someone who takes his responsibility as a member of the body politic seriously enough that he’s unwilling to call for the curtailment of the civil liberties of others as salve for his grief? Uncommon! And displays most excellent character.

Weird Apps
Digital Life has info on an app for all you iPhone folks that will tell you when you can leave the theater to hit the bathroom without missing any plot points in currently-released movies. Behold, RunPee!

And that’s it for this time. Catch you around next time the world gets weird!

Vanity

On the ever-so-self-indulgent subject of, well, me, there are a few items potentially of interest.

First, I released a second Clarke Lantham novel. When Clarke Lantham goes home for Christmas, the results can’t be good.

Meanwhile, the first Clarke Lantham book has been getting some attention. KindleAuthor just interviewed me about it, View from Valhalla loved it, and Seth Harwood, Gail Carriger, and Philippa Ballantine all liked it well enough to provide blurbs. If you haven’t read it yet, you can check out the first couple chapters here. For that matter, you can check out the first part of book to, A Ghostly Christmas Present, here. Enjoy!

Art and Writing
If you’re an artist, or a writer, and you live somewhere that the influence of Hollywood reaches (i.e. everywhere), it’s very easy to forget that being “in shape,” “fit,” or “athletic,” doesn’t mean the same thing as “lean,” “6-pack abs,” or “what I saw on the cover of Vogue this month.” Forgetting this basic fact of life robs stories and paintings and graphic novels of realism, even if slightly. So, for your benefit and mine, here’s a photo essay featuring over 100 Olympic atheletes in phenomenal shape, each featuring a very unique body type.

Odd how the two most “offensive” words in the English language at the moment were words that were only mildly naughty 30 years ago. While one of these will continue to be a problem for a while, the other is redeemable. Check out Hal Duncan’s brilliant linguistic history of “cunt,” and his take-down of the implicit sexism sold with the demonization of what is, after all, a very cute word for a very delightful organ. He also goes into depth in the way usage varies on either side of the Atlantic. Unusually thought-provoking, and not played for shock value. Very useful for writers who write cross-culturally.

Publishing
We all know publishing is changing — snooze, hit the alarm, pull the other one, etc. We read about it in the New York Times a hundred times, which one would expect, as publishing is a big presence in New York. But when you read about it in the LA Times you know the movement’s gone big. Of course, this is the LA Times, which isn’t exactly a bastion of non-sensationalistic accuracy. Even so, it’s a fun read full of links to authors doing innovative things. Fun stuff!

TeleRead posted an interesting overview of the history of book piracy, it’s sociodynamics, and economics, with a follow-up column speculating on what it means for the industry. Some interesting stuff here by Chris Meadows.

For those of you who, like me, have a huge library full of books by dead people that will never be released in e-book format (or, at least, not for anothe decade or two) there is an inexpensive non-destructive way to digitize your books. This method is legal and ethically benign so long as you do not share or sell the resulting digital books. As an open source advocate and DIY culture member, I am very much in favor of projects like this. As an author who makes his living off his intellectual property, I work hard to make sure my work is always available in forms that do not strip the reader of his or her fair use rights. The other side of that contract is that the reader doesn’t steal or pirate the creative work of the entertainers whose work they consume. So, with that caveat, enjoy the workshop experience I’ll keep writing ‘em if you keep reading ‘em.

Speaking of piracy, Paul Cornell writes a provocative ethics article about illegal downloading filled with many good and some rather flacid points. Worth a read, nicely thought-provoking.

Got a book available on Kindle? You can now post the sample on your website with the Kindle for the Web app. This post from indieKindle gives instructions for embedding the app on your site or in a blog post.

And, speaking of e-books…solar powered e-reader, anyone?

Beauty
A really fun time-lapse of what looks like the blizzard from hell — over 3 feet in less than 24hrs. Most impressive – the best 30 seconds you’ll spend today.

Terry Gilliam, whose work has always been kinda steampunky anyway, is producing a steampunk puppet movie that looks really damn cool if this short film version of it is any indication.

Not to be out-done on the time-lapse front, NASA brings you a time-lapse of a sunset from another world. Click here to watch a Martian sunset.

And for breathtaking, how bout a collection of photos of man-made footprints on other worlds?

Science & Technology

Recycling. We all do it for the environment, but some kinds of recycling–like recycling plastic–are a waste of energy, resources, money, and doesn’t yeild an environemntal or economic gain. This isn’t true for everything–aluminum, scrap metal, electronics, and (thanks to a recent breakthrough in dealing with treatment of toxic de-inking chemicals) paper–all yeild tremendous benefits when properly recycled. But plastics…man, plastics are a problem. They’re all chemically different, they have to be very carefully sorted, cooked, and then are downcycled (made into things further down the supply chain) rather than recycled to the same quality. It’s a dirty secret, and it’s been a bit of a problem and embarassment for a couple decades now. That might not be true for much longer. Seems that, rather than resorting to dogmatism and moral guilting on one side, or lazy-bones naysaying on the other, one scientist has figured out a process for recycling all plastics that’s inexpensive, energy efficient, and a net environmental gain. Bravo!

In the realm of philosophy of science, Alvin Plantinga, an otherwise respected epistemologist from Harvard, is in the process of dipping his face in egg when it comes to philosphy of science. His companionable discussion with Daniel Dennet gives you the bulk of his case in his own words, and P.Z. Meyers (whom I consider entertaining but not exactly one for nuance) takes him apart very effectively here.

Research on different kinds of invisiblity continues apace. This article talks time distortion effects of certain kinds of meta-materials, and gives a roadmap for a proof-of-concept. I’ve been having a blast watching this field go from the stuff of dreams and science fiction to the stuff of serious, hard-core well-funded research in the last ten years. I can’t wait to see–or not see–some metamaterial-based invisibility prototypes in action.

In other news, 3D image editing for anaglyph is coming soon to a computer near you.

The field of linguistics has long been one of those in-between sciences–not quite a real hard science, but something more quantitative than a social science. Google Books looks to be changing that. Ronald Bailey talks about the new trend in tracking linguistic and cultural evolution using quantitative analysis of Google’s book database.

You know the insomnia you get after a traumatic experience? Turns out that trying like hell to get to sleep might not be such a good idea after all.

If you’ve heard about geopolitical unrest because of China’s attempts to lock down the rare-earth metal market, don’t worry. Turns out they’re not the only country with lots of the “rare” stuff.

Education

If you’re a strong autodidact like me, you’re always on the prowl for new educational stuff. OpenCulture just updated their list of free online courses from major universities this month, and the selection is getting really impressive. Even scarier, as one who grew up in academia, I’m starting to recognize a lot of names on that list.

Meanwhile, one of the most excellent shows on the history of technology, James Burke’s Connections, has made its way onto YouTube. Bears multiple re-watchings. Check it out.

If you’re like most people, you’ve heard about the Theory of Relativity (E=MC^2) and have a vague idea that it means all matter is energy or something like that, but you’ve never really been able to get your head around the math to understand what it really means. Well, fear not — the always-readable Bertrand Russel wrote the definitive popularization of general relativity, and Derek Jacobi read it. Now, it’s available for free to the public as an audiobook. Go grab it now, give it a listen, and prepare to have your mind turned inside-out. Fun stuff

Also in the “good clean fun” department, someone with actual sexual experience on the order of decades is now producing a sex education series on youtube. Funny, clever, and no-bullshit, he calls it the “Guide to Getting It On,” and he hits a lot of points that younger, hipper educators often miss.

Politics

This is the only political article this time, and I’m including it because of how much of a shocker it is. Francis Fukyama’s analysis of where liberal econimcs went wrong by embracing the liberalization of financial markets instead of trade-goods markets. It’s very interesting watching the Keynsians, the Monetarists, and the Hayekians all starting to converge on this point in the wake of the recent banking crisis. More interesting to me is that Adam Smith got there two hundred years ago–and that politicians and policy makers still aren’t listening.

— — — —
I got tons more in my salad bowl, but that’s already a more substantive meal than I had planned to serve up. Hope you enjoy — and have a great New Year!

But first, I begin with a special treat for my free-wheeling brewer friends. Beer has always been a problem in space — not because of drunk piloting, but because weightlessness does weird things to the sense of taste. There’s also the question of what the bubbles will do to the body, and how drinkable beer will be in zero G anyway. Fortunately, someone is officially working on these problems so that we can take into space with us the drink that made civilization possible in the first place: Click here for Space Beer!

Now, on to the main courses:

Consumerism
As part of the Book Retailer wars, Sears will double your Christmas shopping budget by effectively giving away free books.

Autodidacticism

Can’t afford a Harvard education, but have the drive and desire to get one? Well then, today’s your lucky day. Harvard has started offering some classes online for free

History
Bet you, like most people born after WW2, thought Color Photography didn’t really get going until the late 1930s, right? Well, think again. Here’s some gorgeous Color Photos from the great depression in Colorado and some even more amazing Color photos from Imperial Russia (the Ukraine and Uzbekistan, near as I can make out).

Writing
If you live with a writer, or are dating a writer, or think writers are sexy (we are), there are a few things you should know.

Here’s some advice I should pay more attention to: How to write magnetic headlines

An attempt to make an IMDB for Speculative Fiction books and audio: SpecFicDB

For those of you looking to get press for your new indie book, or those of you looking to sample something that’s not just published slush, here’s an Aggregate list of indie book reviewers

Some delightful fan mail from the Golden Age Science Fiction magazines, all written by girls.

Jordan Summers has a series of reports from the Novelists Inc. conference on piracy, some low-down contractual moves by publishers as they panic in the new marketplace, and more. A must read for any writer.

Vanity
Fair Warning: These next couple writing-related links feature me. First, my post on The Creative Penn’s blog about How To Survive the Ebook Apocalypse

And then, there’s an hour of me talking turkey and story with Mark Jeffrey on his video podcast This Week in Books The goofy looking guy is me.

Science
The man who gave us The Thumbprint of God, Benoit Mandlebrot, died this week. Check out his glorious TED talk here. If you don’t know who Mandlebrot was, or how he and a few of his friends fundamentally changed the game in ever sphere of life, check out This BBC Documentary

Over in Climate-change land, the fight has broken into four camps: The alarmists, for whom we are all doomed and deserve it as punishment for our technological/capitalistic sins; The Warners, who think we’d better do something so we don’t royally screw ourselves; the Skeptics, who are cautiously doubtful of policy prescriptions but also cautiously accepting of a preponderance of evidence; and the Deniers, who think it’s all a left-wing anti-business plot (this taxonomy stolen shamelessly from Stuart Brand). Sometimes, there’s an interesting dataset that allows the skeptics and Warners to make common cause, despite any underlying differences, because they share the same respect for good science. Here’s one such instance, very intelligible to laypeople: a climate history that takes into account all known natural climate cycles AND anthropogenic effects.

If you ever lost a pet as a child, chances are you heard some version of the “Doggie Heaven” story. The one I heard was that Heaven will be happy, and if I want my dog when I’m there, she’ll be there waiting for me. Of course, as we get older we realize that this is a lie told to us by well-meaning parents who, regardless of whether they believe in human heaven or not, don’t really believe in doggie heaven. After all, dogs don’t have a spirituality, do they? Well, according to new neurological research, if humans have anything that can be called “spiritual awareness,” then so do dogs, and most other higher animals.

Social Scientists have a lot to say about educational policy,economics, politics, family values, and culture, so sometimes it’s important to step back and take a long hard look at what they do and do not actually know at this point in history. (This is an excellent article)

Ethics:
And, finally, from the philosophy of ethics department, a paper that argues lucidly that you can’t be good without Science Fiction.

More Reprobates and the final Balticon Adventure next week!
And don’t forget to buy the new Clarke Lantham mystery And Then She Was Gone next Friday!

It’s been two years since I started putting my fiction out into the aether through podcasts, selling stories, and otherwise subjecting the universe to my…shall we say “colorful” mental meanderings. My readers and listeners have been good enough to send me feedback throughout the endeavor, which is excellent market research as well as great motivation to keep on.

If there is a single topic – beyond “you cliffhangering bastard” – that I get hit with most, it’s about how I deal with sex in my stories. There are the occasional “that’s really hot” comment, but more often there are the complaints, such as “I can’t stop listening, but do you really have to have so much sex/homosexuality/eroticism/etc.?” I find it fairly ironic, in these post-Heinlein days populated by paranormal romance, vampire erotica masquerading as everyday fiction, and abstinence porn, that treating sex merely as a normal part of life could raise so many hackles, but there you are.

More interesting than that, though, is how little I hear complaints about the violence, which is every bit as unflinching (or, in the words of one reviewer, clinical), as the sexual content. There are moments in Predestination or The Man In The Rain which turn my stomach
reading them, and yet they pass with relatively few comments compared to, for example, the sex scene between Joss and Cassy toward the end of Predestination or pretty much anything in Down From Ten.

As an American, I’ve been hearing about the double-standard between sex and violence most of my life – over the last two years I’ve been able to see it in action through my audience and through the eyes of non-American colleagues such as Philippa Ballantine, who once quipped to me: “On American TV sure, we’ll show murder and mayhem, but God forbid you show a boob!”

We all know this, right? Or at least we’ve heard it before. Most Americans ignore it in one fashion or another. Toward the conservative end of the cultural spectrum it can even look like a good thing: Robert M. Price once told me in an interview that he found Hostel powerful because it shows that the trivialization of sex through pornography and prostitution leads directly to slavery and torture (he’s not alone in this assertion – there’s a broad coalition of feminist and fundamentalist philosophers who share the same general conclusion, though their core values otherwise differ).

Normally I keep my trap shut about things like this, unless someone asks me about it directly, because it’s the kind of topic on which people tend to be partisan. That changed this week, though, when I watched through a TV series called Harper’s Island – a nice little mystery thriller made for CBS last year. The premise is simple – it’s Ten Little Indians done in the style of a slasher film, and it’s remarkably effective. It’s effective, well-executed (no pun intended), and deeply twisted.

I had a lot of fun watching it until it occurred to me, sometime in the middle of the series, that this was done for broadcast TV – not cable, not satellite or premium channels, but broadcast. This series which features the kind of gore that, even today, would earn it a hard R rating in the theater, was broadcast on American TV.

You know, American TV, where three frames of breast exposure is enough to cause a national crisis? Where Bono saying “fuck” on an awards show costs the network hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines? Where the word “piss” is bleeped out of Mythbusters episodes that air on cable? America, the land of the free that banned Carlin from the radio? The America that is so culturally brittle that it can’t stand the freedom of speech enshrined in its own constitution for fear of what might happen to the children?

There was a time not too long ago when you could expect the similar levels of sex, violence, and “bad” language on TV. Quality adult programming required a wink and a nod sometimes, but a good writer could do it – and recently there’s been a flowering of really good adult entertainment as broadcast has had to compete with cable and the Internet. It was censorship, and appalling, but there at least seemed to be a consistency about it – a sense that some level of intensity (about anything) was for adults, and thus not okay for broadcast where anyone of tender years might be watching.

Now, the situation seems to be changing, and in a bad way. Harper’s Island features some of the most grisly violence I’ve seen this side of a slasher film – done well enough to make the makeup artist part of my brain goggle in wonder, to be sure – frosted by a sense of calculating sadism and paranoia worthy of the villains (or heroes) of Thomas Harris. It’s not an exploration of violence, it’s merely a thrill-ride, and a remarkably effective and occasionally nauseating one.

Does it feature the kind of language people might use when being stalked by a serial killer? Does it show anything sexual beyond the briefest acknowledgments that its characters have some kind of sexuality? Of course not! Children might be watching.

Growing up as I did on the cultural right wing, I long considered the American double-standard to be harmless and quaint. I understood the fears that lay behind it, even though I thought they were ridiculous. I chuckled at the amount of effort certain groups put into the mind games behind sexual purity, and the money they waste on meaningless political and cultural campaigns. I thought it was understandable, and maybe silly, but not really harmful.

It took seeing Harper’s Island to realize how much my views have changed. The cultural conservative picture of sex, and the double-standard it dictates isn’t just quaint, silly, or something that can be condescendingly shrugged off as the product of too much insularity. It’s an insidious, destructive lie that is now so baldfaced that we can watch dismemberment on prime-time broadcast while anthropology documentaries censor tribal nudity (I kid you not).

A basic part of adulthood is the ability to deal with the world as it really is. Every social creature – including every human – has sex organs, sexual appetites, and sexual inclinations. The bonding impulse is as foundational to life as the need for food. Everyone touches, everyone eats, everyone dies, and virtually everyone has orgasms. To pretend otherwise is unbecoming the dignity of an adult.

It’s also genocidal. That’s because there is, after all, a link between sex and death and violence. The lack of willingness to deal realistically with sex is something that endangers the lives millions of people every day. In the age of AIDS, the price of childish delusion and the illusory comfort it brings can be measured by a metric once used exclusively for strategic warfare: Megadeaths.

I have a very high violence tolerance. I believe that violence in art and entertainment can be life-affirming and useful as it caters to our visceral natures. It helps us cope with the prospect of death. Violence can even be a social good (though such circumstances are far fewer than they once were). It can help us feel keenly alive in ways that we in civil society can’t access in any other way without harming those around us. But in no way is it more life-affirming than our primary bonding impulses, or touch and pleasure, or the difficulties of love and friendship.

In an article on Beliefnet this week, Michael Ruse argues that the “new atheists” are a “bloody disaster.” He argues using a mixture of caricatures, complaints, and criticisms, so before I go into why I think the man is full of organic fertilizer on the broader issues, I will address the salient ones:

[Cut for opinionated rantings that might irritate some readers]

Caricatures:
1) “…the “new atheists” – people who are aggressively pro-science, especially pro-Darwinism, and violently anti-religion of all kinds, especially Christianity but happy to include Islam and the rest.”

Among the “new atheists” he names Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens, P.Z. Meyers, and Jerry Coyne. Notably absent from this list is the movement’s galvanizing voice, Sam Harris, whose book The End of Faith busted the market wide open for everyone else. Harris is familiar with a number of religions, and in The End of Faith and in his lectures at the Beyond Belief symposiums makes nuanced arguments about the relative merits and demerits of different religions and different flavors of different religions, all while insisting that faith must no longer be socially sacrosanct. He argues that not all false ideas are equally destructive, and it may be that not all religious ideas are equally false, but that it is dishonest, dangerous, and foolhardy to continue to behave as if religious ideas are especially immune from criticism when compared to political, moral, ethical, economic, philosophical, scientific, or artistic ideas. His arguments may have problems – anthropologist Scott Atran has given them an extensive critique – but they do not fit the brush Ruse is painting with in the slightest.

A call to level the intellectual playing field by practicing what Harris calls “conversational intolerance” of religious ideas is the central program of the New Atheists. It’s what Dawkins, Dennet, and Hitchens explicitly advocate, and it’s what Meyers and Coyne deliberately practice. Dawkins frames it as “let’s have an argument.” Dennet frames it as “let’s break the spell that makes religious ideas specially immune from criticism.” Meyers desecrates communion wafers and pulls other provocative stunts to raise discussion and demonstrate that, when it comes to inquiry, nothing is sacred.

The charge that the New Atheists are violently anti-religion is, to put it frankly, a lie. None are in favor of any form of violence towards religion – all advocate argument. Nor is it true that their ire falls especially on Christianity. While Dawkins and Dennet talk about Christianity more than any other religion, neither says that “Christianity is the worst” – quite the contrary. In both cases, being raised in Christian environments, they focus on it simply because they are more familiar with Christian history and theology than they are with, say, Confucianism. On the other hand, Hitchens and Harris are familiar with a variety of western and non-western religions and single out Islam and some of the other more easterly religions out for more severe criticism than they level at Christianity.

Ruse is engaging in well-poisoning on this one. Shame on him.

2) “Francis Collins has been incurring their hatred…since Collins is a devout Christian.”

Ruse is here referring to the controversy over the recent appointment of Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, as head of the National Institutes of Health, but Ruse’s characterization of the controversy is disingenuous. As the head of the NIH, Collins will have influence in areas where he has a dogmatic ax to grind: embryonic stem cell research. At no time that I’ve seen (granting that the web is a big place and I can’t be everywhere at once) have any of the New Atheists impugned Dr. Collins’ scientific credentials, even when directly attacking some of the less scientific things he’s said in print. Check out Michael Shermer’s blog entry on the topic for a quick, representative summary. The question at issue is not Collin’s credentials, and it’s not Collins’ religion. It’s whether his non-rational dogmatic commitments compromise his ability to do the job of overseeing research budgets, and it’s every bit as legitimate a question as asking whether a Quaker or a Jain is an appropriate pick for Secretary of Defense.

Complaints:
1) Ruse complains that the “new atheists” are terribly mean to him – meaner than they are to the religious folks.

To be perfectly frank, I think Ruse’s complaint that the New Atheists have insulted him in their writings is more than a little childish, and also more than a little hypocritical.
First, as demonstrated by the depths he sinks to in this essay, he’s not above reckless and dishonest ad hominem attacks himself – complaining that someone is mean when you’re dishing it right back and worse is gradeschool behavior.
Second, he doesn’t publicly hold the people in the creationist community he considers friends (Gish, Dembski, Johnson) who are even ruder in print and in public (see Dembski’s nasty little cartoon about the Judge in the Dover case for an example).

It should also go without mentioning that, in the war of ideas, people can and do say very aggressive, hard things while telling the truth as they see it. This is an adult world, and Ruse should have learned at University that science and philosophy are not disciplines for the timid.

That said, let’s put this complaint in context, and consider the charges that the “new atheists” level against the priesthood(s). Religious leaders are, according to Dawkins and Hitchens, “child abusers” for their promotion of the doctrine of hell and of infant circumcision. Hitchens further characterizes the Catholic Church’s youth outreach activities as “No Child’s Behind Left.” They all accuse Imams of fostering an environment that might lead us to nuclear war, and Dispensationalist Christians of breathlessly searching for a silver lining (i.e. The Rapture) in the prospect of Manhattan going up in a mushroom cloud.
Whether these accusations are defensible or not is not at issue here. What is at issue is that Ruse evidently thinks a book review calling his ideas “so nonsensical that only an intellectual could believe them,” a book calling his condescending attitude towards religion “appeasement,” and a blogger labeling him “a clueless gobshite” is worse than being called a pedophile, a child abuser, a genocidal warmonger, and a fanatic.

I must say, his semiotic score-keeping system mystifies me.

2) Ruse complains that the New Atheists are mean to him because he doesn’t think all believers are evil or stupid, and that science and religion do not have to clash.

If Ruse honestly believes this is the source of the invective he’s found himself on the receiving end of, he is sorely mistaken. The book Jerry Coyne reviewed is stunning both in its ambitious scope and, more importantly, in its lack of intellectual rigor. The book in question, Can A Darwinian Be A Christian? might be a worthy subject for a book, but Ruse’s method in the book is blinkered toward both religion and with science. Its methods and hermeneutic are only applicable to a very small minority of Western Liberal Protestants and Catholics – the rest of the religious universe (including well over 80% of the world’s Christian population) is unaddressed by his argument, which tries to show the God-of-the-Gaps as the starting point for making Christianity and evolutionary biology mutually reinforcing.

Contrast this with a religious scientist that the New Atheists do not attack, Ken Miller. A conservative Catholic teaching at Brown University, Miller is the author of Finding Darwin’s God, perhaps the most nuanced and well-argued defense of theistic evolution ever written. In his book and arguments, he refuses to give short shrift to science in order to give comfort and shelter to his doctrines, and does not engage in the normal “God of the Gaps” or “NOMA” nonsense. He is an unapologetically religious man who has the courage of his convictions, both religiously and scientifically, and is very much respected by both his peers and his adversaries for that fact.

Criticisms:
1)“Their treatment of the religious viewpoint it pathetic to the point of non-being.”

Unfortunately, with the exception of singling out Dawkins for being philosophically simplistic (a criticism that is, to my mind, pretty near the mark), Ruse provides nothing to back up this assertion. He certainly doesn’t engage any of the arguments offered up in the New Atheist books, nor does he seem to notice that the “new
atheists” are in dialogue with believers. The notion that the New Atheists are boxing with a straw man is belied by the fact that believers in Islam and Christianity overwhelmingly pay lip service to scriptural inerrancy, prophetic infallibility, and a whole slate of other doctrines that the New Atheists are aggressively attacking.
Judging by his comments about Christianity in other contexts, it seems that Ruse considers as straw manning arguments that do not engage liberal theologians such as Bultmann, Tillich, et. al. These men are eloquent writers, and theologically subtle, but such men hold a position in the borderlands between religion and atheism, being held to their religion by personal spiritual experience but utterly unable to defend with argument a single doctrine, not even the existence of God. They are of interest to the academy, but not of much interest to the average pew-sitter. When it comes to the culture war, they are largely irrelevant.

Dennet, of course, isn’t engaging in this kind of argument anyway. He raises questions about how religion got the way it is, how it might have served an adaptive function, what is it that, if we discover parts of it are false, should we hold on to and learn from?

P.Z. Meyers and Jerry Coyne are interested in scientific education and intellectual rigor in that field, and make precious few forays into arguments against religion except when directly addressing the Intelligent Design crowd.

Harris and Hitchens are the only two left, and both have come under a goodly amount of fire for generating more heat than light. However, Ruse’s notion that they are philosophically naive or religiously uninformed is bogus – that they differ in outlook from him is certain, but disagreement does not idiots make. In The End of Faith, Harris articulates an entire epistemology that dialogues with Kant, Bacon, Descartes, addresses postmodernism, and takes heavy account of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper.
Hitchens, on the other hand, is highly conversant with all of the great socialist thinkers, and references many of them directly in his book, as well as A.J. Ayer, C.S. Lewis, Bertrand Russel, and many others that would take too long to list here. There may be places where their arguments are sloppy or just plain wrong, but to dismiss the entire crowd as “poor quality,” “pathetic,” “a disservice to scholarship,” and “knowing nothing” of the subject matter is calumnious.

2) “The new atheists are doing terrible damage to the fight to keep Creationism out of schools.” Ruse develops this further, saying that “if science generally and Darwinism specifically implies that God does not exists, then teaching science generally and Darwinism specifically runs smack up against the First Amendment.” He goes on to say “This is the claim of the new atheists.”

Ruse again proves himself aptly named by gracing his audience with a rhetorical ruse. Taking these items in reverse order, the new atheists do not say that science generally and Darwinism specifically imply that God does not exist. The closest you can come, other than statements of personal conversion moments (such as when Christopher Hitchens relates his childhood revelation that our eyes are adapted to the environment and not vice versa, or Dawkins’ lack of ability to comprehend how someone can believe in a god that would ordain a bloodthirsty process like evolution), is Dennet’s observation in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that the idea of natural selection acts as a universal acid, dissolving away our common-sense notion that things are designed from the top down rather than the bottom up.

Now, that may imply that the God promulgated by religion is less likely than not, but let’s not confuse weak implication with necessary conclusion.

Secondly, Ruse is manifestly wrong on the question of Constitutional law. Children are exposed to facts in school which contravene their religious heritage all the time. From Galileo onward, the western world has been inundated with facts that strongly imply that some religious doctrine or another is false, from the corruptible heavens to the expanding universe, from the realization that species can go extinct to the discovery of geologic strata, from the atomic theory of matter to the heliocentric solar system expanding universe, from the discovery of female gametes to neurologically embodied mind, from plate tectonics to ancestral genetics to evolutionary theory.
We forget now, because we don’t realize how profoundly these scientific discoveries affected the doctrinal development of different religions – we assume that the religions we have today are as they always were. But that’s not the case. Each one of the above accepted scientific paradigms either threatened to unseat or completely obliterated at least one accepted religious doctrine that was, at the time, considered fundamental to the faith of Christians, Mormons, Muslims, and/or Jews. The Constitution does not protect believers from inconvenient facts in a government-run school, it protects everyone from proselytization by anyone representing the government. Saying “The Grand Canyon was formed by geological forces over millions of years” is not a religious dogma, even though it specifically gives the lie to the Genesis creation and flood accounts and, if the evidence is followed down the geologic column, eventually calls into question the foundations doctrines such as original sin and biblical inerrancy.

This criticism, the ultimate point of Ruse’s entire essay, also turns out to be wrong on both the facts and the logic, and thus the whole of his article amounts to little more than vacuous grandstanding.

For myself, the thing I find most disturbing about Ruse’s little diatribe is the lack of intellectual honesty (the same problem I have with Gould’s NOMA nonsense). The epistemology Ruse espouses in this article is highly unethical, as his strategy (again, like NOMA) is a bait-and-switch con game with believers. Does this sound unfair? How else can you describe someone who says “We must not tell people that Darwinism implies that there is no God, because it endangers science teaching.” [paraphrased]. If Darwinism does imply that God doesn’t exist, then telling religious folk that “only a few cranks think that” is a lie. If Darwinism does not imply that God does not exist, then all that need be done is argue with the people who say that it does. In neither case is it necessary for an honest person to perpetrate a confidence trick upon people whom he’s trying to sway to his side.

In the article, he also conflates two disparate concerns. First, the scientific:
While what people believe about the universe is their own business – I certainly have my own weird handful of notions – if one wants to play in the science classroom one must adhere *at least* to the doctrine of falsifiability. Thus far, all creationist hypotheses have proved false on every testable point. This is true of even the strong version of Intelligent Design, known as irreducible complexity, whose original examples of irreducible complexity (the immune system, the bacterial flagella, etc.) have since been proved reducible, thus falsifying the hypothesis.

Of course, the weak version of ID (“There must be some designer somewhere out there”) doesn’t make a falsifiable claim, which makes it a philosophy without even an hypothesis. It is not even bad science. To quote Wolfgang Pauli, it’s “not even wrong.”

Second among Ruse’s conflated issues is the sociological:
People love their pet beliefs, particularly when it comes to notions about creation or design, which most people erroneously conflate with metaphysical notions of purpose. Fortunately, affection doesn’t give one the right to have their beliefs coddled in a science classroom, nor should it. Science has always, and (so long as it continues to progress) will always be a philosophically and theologically unsettling enterprise – not just for the religious, but for all of society. As our data about the universe changes, our ethics, philosophy, beliefs, laws, and values change in reaction to it. Sometimes it’s subtle – sometimes it’s hugely traumatic. In neither case may one claim an exemption from coping with that fact because it conflicts with something someone taught in a church or read in a holy book.

The argument over the teaching of evolution is one of four major arguments now brewing that effect the whole of the scientific endeavor. The others are neurology, biogenetic research (particularly, but not exclusively, on human embryonic stem cells), and nanotechnology. All three of these fields profoundly threaten a variety of doctrines from a variety of religions in ways at least as profound as evolutionary theory does – and all of them are indispensable in dealing with climate, famine, pollution, disease, and a host of other engineering challenges that either loom on the horizon or are already with us. Ruse’s strategy of accommodationism didn’t work in the last 50 years of the 20th century – it seems that a different set of tactics are needed. Direct confrontation and argument is a more honest and, quite possibly, a much more productive mode of engagement in the culture wars of all sorts than is ingratiation.

In every form it has been hitherto proposed, creationism is either a falsified hypothesis, a con game, or an assertion without
any content. We scientifically literate folk should treat our adversaries in this culture war with the dignity that they’re due as adult human beings and be clear that, in so many words, we’re fairly certain that they’re full of shit. It is both dishonest and insulting to pat them on the head and point at the sandbox in the corner and say “over there we have a little room for your theology, and we promise not to wreck your sandcastles – at least not today.”

Of course, there are different levels of pugilistic engagement – P.Z. is a provocateur, and proud of it. So be it – the world needs people like that, lest we all get so afraid of offending someone else that we lose our willingness to participate in the arena of ideas. A free culture needs its assholes like a pond needs water.

Friends arguing philosophy over beer in a pub have the option to be kind – that’s the kind of forum I participate in at Apologia, and I’m proud to do it. But friends don’t generally take kindly to being treated like children by their peers, and there is a difference between kindness and mealy-mouthed passive aggression; practicing the latter in a friendly conversation might well get you snubbed at the next get-together, because it displays both cowardice and condescension.

However, intellectual pugilists in the arena of ideas do not have the option of sparing the feelings of the other side. It is possible for one side to be completely wrong on a given issue, and in such circumstances, seeking a middle ground is dishonest. So, I say “Hooray” for the new atheists, and wish more people, especially those who think they’re assholes, would actually read them. I’ve known more than a few Christians (including very conservative ones) who find the new atheists refreshingly honest and who can make common cause with them in the matter of intellectual ethics, even as they disagree completely on matters of theology, morality, politics, et.al.

Let us stop honoring opinions as sacred, and instead honor those who are willing to have an argument – regardless of what they believe.
And let’s honor them by informing ourselves and actually engaging the argument, rather than complaining that they don’t like us.

*** Appendix ***

In the comments below, Todd Stark points out a basic dichotomy of approaches to intellectual arguments – how some see them as a fight, while others see them as a conversation. He’s right about this, but his comments point up that I wasn’t clear enough about the basic premise from which I was operating.

I don’t think “argument” equates to “fight” – but then, I also don’t think “adversary” equates with “enemy.” There is a place for the friendly conversation (for example, Apologia). There’s also a place for the boxing match. Both are an argument, defined well by Michael Palin in the Monty Python sketch “An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.” It’s not “the automatic gainsaying of something the other person says,” neither is it abuse. In such a sense, both are conversation, fraught with all the normal difficulties you point up in conversations.

In other words, The fact that open societies exist shows that people can be pragmatic about their irreconcilable differences. Argument separates the substance of the opinion from the person holding it for the purposes of understanding – you may think I’m batshit crazy for thinking it’s worthwhile to have humans living on mars, and I might think you’re batshit crazy for reading a horoscope, but I know from arguing about those things with you that you’re ethical in the way that you think, so we can still have a business relationship, or a friendship.

I think the whole reason to have an argument is to ferret out the substantive differences from the semantic ones, whether that argument is friendly or adversarial, the basic structure remains: I’ll stack my facts and logic up, you stack up yours, and we’ll critique each other.

Some particularly colorful arguments, particularly those between public intellectuals like Ruse and Meyers (or William Dembski and anybody, or Christopher Hitchens and anybody), can contain abuse, but if abuse is the entire argument, then there’s nothing to see. My objection to Ruse’s paper is that it consists of very few facts (almost all of them wrong), with the balance spent abusing his opponents while complaining that they abuse him. He has jumped into the boxing ring and is complaining that he’s getting hit, which seems, to me, childish.

Thanks for the comment and the constructive criticism, Todd!

—Also check out the responses to Ruse by two of his targets. Jerry Coyne’s reaction is here. P.Z. Meyers’ reaction is here.

Jacqueline Novogratz discusses markets and foreign aid and underclass empowerment in Africa. Worth every second.

Scientific knowledge has progressed astoundingly fast since most of the current party political alliances were formed seventy years ago, and that pace has accelerated since the last medium-sized realignment thirty years ago. The lessons of history in that same period of time are also momentous – if anyone actually cares to look at them. And most don’t. This creates a problem.

I’ve had a lot of fun this election year tweaking my left-wing and right-wing friends by telling them I’m voting ‘No’ for President this year. “It’s the most important election of the last fifty years!” they tell me “You must participate.” They may be right – it could be a hugely important election, which is precisely why I’m not voting for either major party candidate of for either of the two big minor party candidates.

You see, I’m sick to the teeth of Democrats claiming the mantle of science while ignoring economics any time the findings of that discipline contradict the New Deal Keynsianism that infects the party. I’m sick of Republicans being in favor of “free markets” when they bail out failing businesses. I’m sick of both parties claiming that they are forward looking when their major alliances are built on late-1960s political expediency. I’m sick of the Libertarians pretending that anarchy and liberty can co-exist in a meaningful way, and I’m sick of the Greens claiming that opposing GMO crops and technological advance while embracing pseudo-Marxist economic policies are the key to an environmentally viable future.

In 1862, in his address before Congress, Abraham Lincoln called “Bullshit” on the way partisan politics were polarizing the north on the issues surrounding the Civil War. He said: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.” The same is true today. Thirty years ago, “left-winger” David Brin and “right-winger” Ronald Bailey could never be seen as allies, and yet now, while they have some minor quibbling disagreements on taxation policy and public research funding and other minor points here and there, both are in fundamental agreement on issues of science, technology, trade policy, environmental concerns, human morality, reproductive technology, and civil rights. The same kind of shift has occurred everywhere, as the facts of the world have shifted beneath the complacent, religious devotion of people to their political parties.

It used to be that you could marry theocrats to conservatives who loved traditional freedoms, because both were opposed to social change that seemed too rapid for the country to handle. That kind of alliance doesn’t work anymore, because the country has adapted to the rapid rate of change while preserving its heritage of individualism.

It used to be that you could bring Left-wing Malthusians together with humanist scientists over environmental concerns. But as science shows that the only way towards responsible environmental stewardship is technological innovation on a grand scale rather than a scaling back of industry, that alliance becomes just as inviable.

There is a political divide in America. But it’s not between the “left” and the “right.” It’s not even between the Keynsians and the Hayekians, although that argument will remain very important for decades to come. No, the divide is fundamentally between those who see humans as a legitimate part of the natural world and those who do not.

Those who do not see humans as a viable part of nature tend to see them instead as either a blight upon nature or the rulers of nature, but they agree that science and technology are fundamentally tools by which humans exercise dominion over nature. They may not agree on abortion, but they do agree about genetic engineering. They may not agree about tax policies, but they do agree that taxation should be a tool of social engineering. They may not agree on the ultimate destiny of humanity, but they do agree that a peaceful society must be fairly ideologically uniform. And, militarist or peacenik, they also tend towards cultural and economic isolationism.

Meanwhile, those who do see humans as a legitimate part of nature form a group that is generally favorable towards both technological advance and environmental stewardship. Favorable towards both a peaceful world and economic freedom. Opposed towards both the enforced repression of minorities and towards the prescriptive Newspeak that comes from the New Right and the New Left. And, militarist or peacenik, this group tends towards a policy of active international engagement on cultural and economic levels. This natural alliance might find internal division over issues such as gun rights, or minimum wage, but those differences are minor compared to the differences in parties of the past.

This political realignment has been in progress for some time now, and it may take quite a while for it to conclude. But personally, I’m sick of participating in a quadripolar political game that is fifty years out of step with the fundamental facts of the world. Since I live in California I have the luxury of my vote not counting no matter what I do, so this year I’m taking advantage of it to make my point.

Whichever way you vote, take time to consider the fundamentals of your political philosophy. Dig down below your policy positions, figure out what really matters to you. Examine your positions and values critically, and see if they really line up. See if they line up with the candidate you support. Don’t just vote out of habit.

As for me, this year I really am voting “No.” On everything.

This recent opinion piece on abortion illustrates the point nicely, although the language is very religious and the whole essay is shot-through with magical thinking. Even removing those magical elements, the view articulated there holds true even for many Republicans whose worldview is primarily secular (yes, they really do exist).

Of course, this view of abortion doesn’t just rest on religious authority, it claims to be rooted in a clear understanding of history and to take seriously the view that if we mess around with our biology we are playing God (a job we’re not qualified for). A zygote is a living organism that, if left alone, will develop into a human, therefore abortion ends a human life, therefore it must be murder, and any ethical gerymandering to the contrary can’t change that fundamental fact. Ditto for stem cell research, which destroys human embryos, or for hybrid experimental cloning, and for dozens of other biotech research techniques.

At first blush, that seems to be a pretty solid rooting in biology – but it’s not. A true ethical grounding in biology has to contend with a few other facts that make the connections between point A and point B very tendentious.

The first problem is evolution: All life is made from the same stuff, and human life on a biological level is in no way distinctive. Human nature and human biology are subject to the same selective pressures as the rest of the biosphere, plus the internally imposed selective pressures of human culture. It’s not impossible to make a case for human exceptionalism (I’m a human exceptionalist myself), but it’s not axiomatic.

The second problem is embryology: only somewhere between 25% and 60% of all zygotes become viable pregnancies, and 8% of those that do fail to make it to term without any intervention. Not every conception results in a life – and most wouldn’t even if medical abortion were never discovered. George Carlin had it right: If life begins at conception, then every sexually active woman who’s had at least three periods is a serial killer.

The third problem is technology: Since the conception of a zygote creates a life, and if that life is seen to have value because it is a potential human being, then technology poses a new and frightening problem. A zygote has only a minority potential of surviving to birth – and so does a clone. Although cloning tech is still in its infancy, it is now possible to artificially split embryos in vitro, making every IVF procedure the potential ancestor of countless offspring in one generation. More importantly, it is now possible to take the genetic material from an adult skin cell and implant it in the nucleus of an ovum, throw a few hormonal switches, and have a viable zygote. With this the reality, every time I scratch my arm I’ve engaged in a holocaust of potential human beings.

The fourth problem is medical: We now know beyond any doubt that the seat of human consciousness is the central nervous system (i.e. the brain). You can argue about souls all you want – whether there is a ghost operating the machine or whether we are all machine – but the machine does not operate at all without a brain. Before the 22nd week of gestation, there isn’t enough of a brain there to operate the machine. Any ghost that may exist can’t have moved in yet. Citation.

These four problems are not the only problems with Republican attitudes towards biotech. There’s also the question of those who die from potentially curable diseases if research is suppressed – are their lives worth less than, or more than, the lives of potentially viable zygotes and blastocysts?

Banning pre-viability abortions, banning biotech procedures, or banning government funding of either will neither reduce the number of murders in the world, nor will it reduce eugenics. It will not further respect for human life – in fact, as demonstrated in the book Freakanomics, an abundance of unwanted children leads directly to an increase in violent crime and a lessening of the social value of human life. Therefore here, as with the Democratic equation of "mitigate global warming by reducing energy consumption," the policy prescriptions will not – and can never – achieve the aims they are meant to achieve. And yet right-wing Republicans and abortion, just like left-wing Democrats and global warming, the prescriptions themselves are a matter of doctrine, not of reason, and it’s a damn shame.

Join me for my concluding thoughts on the whole topic in Part 3

William James hit a lot closer to the truth when he spotted that Americans are a fundamentally religious bunch. We don’t usually like to think of ourselves that way – even most of us who are religious in a traditional sense tend to pride ourselves on being independent, pragmatic thinkers. We like science – we really do – but most of us don’t really know what science is, and this is where we get into trouble. Even our scientists often mistake ideology for science.

Looking at things through a scientific lens (that is, a perspective that is empirically grounded), one would expect political philosophy among scientfically-minded folk to change as the experience of history and the accumulation of knowldege schools us in the ways of the world. That doesn’t mean that all political opnion should converge on a common conclusion: It’s quite possible, through differences in priority order, for clear-thinking people to disagree on what particular actions should follow from a given and agreed-upon body of knowledge (and that kind of disagreement is healthy). However, this isn’t what happens in today’s America.

Douglas Adams nailed the way politically-minded folk tend to think in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, where a main character talks about a computer program that helps people make decisions. It doesn’t work forward from problem to solution, instead it allows the user to chose his desired solution (for example, owning a Porche when he can’t afford the payments) and then work backwards to the present situation, creating a bulletproof logical scenario that nobody can shoot down (not even the financing director at the Porche dealership). This is not goal-oriented thinking and planning, it’s maturbatory self-justification, and it’s pretty much de rigeur politics. Perhaps that’s just human nature – but here’s where it gets tragic and irritating.

The 21st century has seen the cementing of a very strange dynamic in American politics, whereby each side of the political discussion picks its own facts and tries to ignore the rest.

For example, if you don’t like second-hand smoke you’ve got a custom-made political movement already on your side. All you have to do to fight alongside them is pretend that studies showing an actual elevated disease risk through continued exposure over a long period of time actually mean that anyone anywhere who smells second-hand smoke is being poisoned. It’s really easy, all you have to do is ignore the single most basic law of biochemistry: The dosage makes the poison.

The same kind of dynamic goes for nuclear power, or carbon dioxide, or private property rights, or environmental regulation, or evolutionary theory, or lowering the drinking age. You can pick a side, and find a custom made political machine ready to spin reality in the direction you’re already sympathetic to.

This election year is a fun exercise in spotting this kind of thing, because we have one candidate (Obama) who’s deliberately positioning himself as the pro-science guy, in opposition to the Bush administration and the McCain candidacy. He supports NASA. He supports stem cells. He’s on record saying that he doesn’t think blastocysts are human beings. He even (in opposition to major blocks of his own party) supports Nuclear power. He positions himself as a pragmatic man who intends to implement real-world solutions, over/against the fuzzy thinking of his opponent.

On the other hand, we have another candidate (McCain), who has picked a running mate specifically to appeal to the rural romantic consitutency of the country. He talks about freedom and saving the economy, and he’s running with someone who speaks in tongues, thinks humanity begins at conception, and thinks the Earth was created in six days not-too-long-ago.

On the face of it, it seems like a pretty clear choice for anyone who cares about science. On one hand you have a guy who cares about going to Mars – on the other hand you have a guy who thinks a planetarium projector is an “overpriced overhead projector” akin to a futuristic SharpVision.

I wish it were that simple, but it’s not. The curious political alignment of the early 21st century has produced an environment where each party has become very good at spotting pseudoscience and antiscience bullshit in the other party, but can’t smell it in their own even when it’s shoved up their nose. Here are two examples, one from each party’s list of pet issues, to illustrate my point.

Democrats, for example, tend to assume a straight-line cause-and-effect relationship between the scientific fact “CO2 is a greenhouse gas, whose concentrations are rising rapidly, and this drove most of the climate change in the 20th century” and the policy conclusion “we must conserve energy in order to prevent as much damage to the bioshpere as possible.” But no such obvious relationship exists. You can make a case for such a relationship, but in order to do it you have to ignore another whole field of science: economics.

Without getting too technical, economics is the study of the monetary, social, and political systems that result from human interaction in a given set of conditions. As with most social sciences it’s a contingent and contextual field, but the thing that sets it apart from most other “soft” sciences is its quantifiability. Economic phenomena can be measured, and based on the measurements falsifiable predictions can be made, and over time, a more coherent picture of how the economic world works has been built from earlier theories and ideologies that have been subjected to testing in real-world laboratories.

Energy conservation is a fun economic study, because there’s one thing that energy conservation always results in: net energy usage increases. That’s because as demand for energy for a particular application falls, due to more efficient technologies, the money and resources previously devoted to that task get freed up. When that happens, any or all of three things happens: money previously spent on a small number of energy-intensive activities gets spent on a larger number of less energy-intensive activitie. 2) task which used to be too expensive for a segment of the populationn (because they couldn’t afford the energy costs) become accessible, due to increases in efficiency and consequent lower costs of operation. 3) a short-term collective decline in demand results in a short term drop in energy prices, as supply exceeds demand on the market. Any of these three eventualities leads to a net increase in energy usage – all three operating together leads to large net increases in energy usage, even while the per-application energy usage and costs fall through the floor. If you’re an environmentally conscious person who wants to reduce greenhouse emmissions and pollution, you’re not going to achieve your goal through mandating more efficient technologies, or promoting a cap-and-trade carbon scheme, or encouraging energy conservation among the hoi polloi. Those measures will instead reliably lead to higher and higher levels of net energy consumption – both per capita and in aggregate.

Continued in Part 2

For those of you who haven’t stumbled upon this conference yet, here’ s a brief history:

The Beyond Belief Conferences started three years ago in response to the culture wars arising from the new era of jihad, the resurgence in American religiosity, the wars over science in school, and the so-called “New Atheist” movement. Meeting at the Salk Institute, a number of America’s (and Europe’s) top scientists joined in a three day interdisciplinary conference entitled Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, and the Future of Reason. At the conference, it became clear that the split between the antireligious and the generically secular scientists drove as deeply as does the cultural divide between fundamentalists and mainstream believers. However, one thing that seemed unanimous was that the future of the West depends upon a culture-wide renewal of scientific inquiry and thinking.

Year two’s conference was entitled Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 and focused upon the different kinds of relationships people have with science. It got really interesting as several speakers on economics presented their recent research and different attendees talked about the entrenchment of their own political biases and how it effects the way that they cope with different scientific disciplines.

This year, the conference is entitled Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark in honor of the late Carl Sagan’s final book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Specifically, the conference gets its focus this year from the following paragraph from the introduction to Demon-Haunted World:

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

Written in 1996, that quite seems remarkably prescient today – even if Sagan’s views on economics were outdated and somewhat simplistic (an argument for another time), the notion of a technocracy where only an elite knows anything about how the technology works, where the common person is swallowed in superstition, and where all dissent is centered around marginal (and, frankly, stupid) issues like “Should we post the Ten Commandments in our courthouses?” and “Did he have sex with that woman?” and “Why do I have to pay money to see a doctor?” is both chilling and familiar. After all, such issues do distract us from debating issues that might actually effect how we make account of ourselves in terms of preserving and furthering liberty and prosperity, intelligently engaging holy wars without and within, limiting nuclear proliferation, and creating alliances that decrease the incentives for warfare.

I can’t speak yet to how year three is, because I’m about to start watching them this afternoon as they become available on Google Video. However, there are a number of reasons why you should take the time to watch it (as well as the previous two conferences):

1) It is easy to think of the scientific community as an ivory tower free from the concerns of the real world. The truth is far more radical: scientific inquiry has advanced to the point where very few things that we discover fail to have a direct bearing on how day-to-day life unfolds. The reach of this phenomenon is astounding. It also gives the lie to postmodernist claims that scientific knowledge is a fictional construct designed to serve white male power structures.

2) If ever you’ve thought that “scientists say xxx” is a meaningful statement, you need to watch these conferences. These are the best and brightest minds in the English-speaking world, and they disagree violently on a number of important issues. As an exercise in critical thinking, watching the conferences is fabulous, as you sit through lectures, presentations, panel discussions, and sometimes shouting matches, you see how prone even the best among us is to the tug of ideologically-driven magical thinking, and how frightening integrating new discoveries can be. There is very little in the way of consensus science practiced here – the constant call from the audience is “show me the evidence.”

3) On the flip side, all of you who keep hearing about The Secret or What the Bleep Do We Know?or the “Intelligent Design” philosophy (no, it’s not a theory, by admission of its proponents at the Dover Trial – read the transcripts) and think that scientific controversy means that there’s support for your claims, you’d do well to give this a watch too. “Controversy” doesn’t mean “a theory in crisis” any more than “consensus” means “it is proven.” Reality is far subtler, and you won’t get a better baptism by fire than watching scientific conferences where such things are discussed.

4) The best reason I can think of to watch it: You’re curious. You want to learn about the world, but it’s too big and you don’t know where to start. Well, start here. These scientists are witty, intelligent folks, many of them have excellent senses of humor, and very little of what gets discussed is dry. And, dammit, it’s *fun.*

And on the topic of this year’s election, economic meltdown, and other things: as I look out over the blogosphere, I see a lot of party-line thinking. In a world as complicated as ours, under an Republican President AND a Democratic Congress with some of the worst records in history, party-line thinking doesn’t cut it. If you continue to go to your party and your partisan activist groups as your primary source of truth, you’re asking for trouble.

You know how the Intelligent Design folks say “teach the controversy?” Well, if you’re a curious person, or you’re a politically or socially active person, then you damn well better understand the controversies you care about – and that means reading the other guy’s newspapers and blogs. A climate skeptic? You’d better be reading RealClimate.org. A Global Warming believer? When was the last time you read ClimateAudit.org? A bioconservative or a transhumanist? Have you read Kurzweil, Bailey, Fukiyama, and the Report of The President’s Committee on Bioethics? Not every issue has two sides – and some issues have ten sides, but if you’re feeding your brain on only the stuff you find agreeable, you don’t have an informed opinion. So, if you’re of voting age and you have a pet issue, and you can’t articulate the controversy from an opposing point of view (in language that the opposition would find agreeable) then, frankly, you probably don’t understand the issues you care about well enough to vote on them, and we’d all be better off if you stayed home.

You want to be informed and involved? Well, then, have a Candle, and maybe it can help you get an Election. If not, you can still have a lot of fun with the Candle.