Peter Woit: “The LHC has to have a winter shutdown so that the residents of Geneva don’t freeze to death, and that will start in late November.”
Spinoza wouldn’t have minded a lack of electricity. Oh how modern technology makes us weak and spoiled. Genevois, grow some backbone already for the sake of science.
Posted in Uncategorized
AP reports: Vatican: It’s OK to believe in aliens
The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, says that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.
In an interview published Tuesday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes says that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures.
Imagine the shock Funes will get when said aliens arrive on Earth and they have no idea what this god thing is he keeps on going on about. Or even worse, perhaps the aliens imagine themselves to be gods, and that we are their creatures. Perhaps it might even be true, and they are just checking up on us. Maybe they’ve got Jesus and Mohammed coming along for the ride. I feel a South Park episode coming on.
Seriously though, I think it much more likely that there are aliens around than that transubstantiation works, the dead can be resurrected and miracles happen — mainly because you don’t need to suspend the laws of physics for aliens to exist.
Update: The BBC carries much more from the interview, including the revelation that aliens may be free from original sin. Try telling that to Ripley.
Posted in Stupid Cartesians
Baruch! Albert Einstein, world-famous physicist but little-known fellow Spinozist, is having a letter sold at auction this week whose contents should finally put to rest that silly notion that Einstein was religious.
We know Spinoza left a strong impact on Einstein. I visited Spinoza’s home in Rijnsburg a few years ago and saw with my own eyes Einstein’s signature in the visitor’s book, dated 1920. In 1929 a Rabbi alarmed by the suggestion that Einstein’s theory of relativity might present a slippery slope to atheism asked Einstein for a clarification of his beliefs:
New York’s Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein asked Einstein by telegram: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words.” In his response, for which Einstein needed but twenty-five (German) words, he stated his beliefs succinctly: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”
Spinoza’s God, of course, is exactly analogous to “Nature”. Unlike anyone else before him, Spinoza maintained that “God, or nature” is intrinsic to the universe (as opposed to extrinsic, e.g. a God that can create a universe). Thus, postulating the existence of God is no different than postulating the existence of a universe governed by physical laws. And that is something atheists can live with.
So what does the letter being sold at auction this week reveal about Einstein’s religious views? Einstein was writing in 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, and here is what he wrote, among other things:
The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.
[...] For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.
Those words could have been uttered by Spinoza 300 years earlier, and indeed Spinoza’s writings make those very same arguments. At one point, Spinoza writes that perhaps not everyone has the mental fortitude to abandon conventional religion — that his abstract notion of God = Nature may only really be accessible to a philosophical elite — and that conventional religion would suffice to bring happiness to the rest. In Steven Nadler’s Spinoza: A Life (p.290) we get this response from Spinoza to his landlady when she asked him if she has chosen the right religion:
One day, when Van der Spyck’s wife asked Spinoza whether he thought she could be saved in the religion that she professed, he replied: “Your religion is good, and you need not search for another one in order to be saved, as long as you apply yourself to a peaceful and pious life.”
In other words, belief is merely a means to an end; what is more important is good deeds. Still, you might think Spinoza is being a bit patronizing here to a good but not particularly clever soul.
Myself, I am a little less sanguine about belief — happiness at the expense of a realistic world view seems like too high a price to pay. Perhaps, however, I’ve been lucky, and I can’t fathom the kinds of misery that make the crutch of religion a necessity for many.
Posted in Uncategorized
Baruch! We have (gasp) competition: Necessarily Eternal: A Catablog of (All) Things Spinoza
Posted in Fellow Collegiant, Philosophising
Barurch, when we maintain that Spinoza’s life is especially relevant in these trying times, this is not what we had in mind:
David Grossack, an attorney representing an elderly couple whose home is being foreclosed on, argued in a letter to a Boston rabbinical court, or beit din, that his opposing counsel, Jewish lawyers who represent the Federal National Mortgage Association, have defied Jewish law and therefore should be excommunicated. To be specific, Grossack is seeks for them to be put in what’s known as cherem, or full exclusion from the Jewish community. This legal feature in Halacha, or Jewish law, was famously applied to philosopher Baruch Spinoza in the 17th century but has been used very rarely in modern times.
If this legal practice were to gain currency, perhaps we can hope for more lawyers converting to a life of introspective philosophising. Or is that wishful thinking?
Posted in Uncategorized
Dear agony aunt Baruch,
So I meet this girl, she appears nice, and she suggests we meet again next week — she’ll send me the invite. I’m all eager to see more of her, until I see the invite:
No, I am not alone in the big city, and I am _never_ bored, and I already have it together, thanks for asking, and a life too. But above all I cringe at the prospect of being in the company of people who think this is a cool flyer, who think those people in the pictures are archetypes of interesting potential, erm, soul mates. Double cringe.
What I want, Baruch, is my own little circle of fellow collegiants, just like Spinoza had. What’s the chances of that you think, in a country where 99% of respondents in a recent Pew poll on religiosity say you must believe in God to be moral? Here’s the chart from the PDF, page 37:
It turns out my move from Sweden to Egypt was across the biggest God-gap on Earth. No wonder I’m feeling naughty. Maybe I should go meet and greet after all. What would Spinoza do, you think?
Posted in Barbarians, What Would Spinoza Do?
Dear Baruch,
So there I was, eight days into a two week trek through Ethiopia, staying in Axum in the North, when I had my breakdown. I just couldn’t go on like this, so removed from the internet for so long. I headed up the road, entered the nearest telecenter, and surfed.
That in itself was an adventure, what with a 56K modem and a spotty phone connection. Most web pages took actual minutes to download. But I persevered, and an hour later had paid $10 to a happy proprietor to print out 35 pages of interesting articles, which I took to the hotel to devour greedily.
The article that made most of an impression on me in that bunch was Steven Pinker’s The Moral Instinct, in the New York Times. It is a good overview of what psychologists, philosophers and evolutionary biologists have been working on recently to better understand the phenomenon of morality. In particular, Pinker talks about the work of a Jonathan Haidt, who counts five basic moral principles that all humans possess: “harm [avoidance], fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity”. While we all subscribe to these principles, we can rank them differently, and a society’s overall moral compass is determined by how its members predominantly rank them.
The “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” prescription that guides my morality is thus one that prioritizes harm avoidance and fairness over the others. But other societies, such as the one in Tigre that I found myself in as I read the article, might value a sense of community and authority more than I do.
I found this fascinating, as it offers an explanatory framework for comparing and contrasting the dominant moralities of the world’s different societies without requiring us to enter into the moral relativism trap. We can now presumably start to discuss which of these principles are the most useful in a world that is growing increasingly connected and technologically advanced. For example, I believe that blind obeisance to community, authority and purity is dangerous in a globalizing world (heck, it was dangerous in the first half of the last century too).
But is an absolute aversion to harm and a love of fairness also dangerous? Haidt’s talk at the just-ended TED argues that we should at least consider the possibility. Via Ethan Zuckerman’s notes:
Why should liberals care about these other three moral values? Because there’s a tendency for social order to decay. [Haidt] shows us the Hieronymus Bosch “Garden of Earthly Delights” – reading from left to right, we see purity, then sexual excess, then hell. This is true artistically, but it’s also true in terms of behavioral economics – research shows that cooperation in games delays without punishment. We may need authority and purity to maintain social order.
[I think he means that positive sum games don’t work if you don’t punish defectors.] It’s too soon for me to come out with conclusive statements about all this, but that is why I’m blogging it, so you can destroy any faulty logic. For example, I’m thinking that an obsession with purity makes sense in poorer societies, where contagious and infectious diseases are an ever-present danger, but that as we grow more well off, the usefulness of this impulse fades. And some of these moral precepts are surely there through a process of “natural” selection: More militant “patriotic” societies would tend to wipe out, over time, societies attaching less importance to militantly defending the community.
I’m sure Spinoza would have been intrigued by the notion of a taxonomy of moral principles. He came up with something similar, and also from the psychological perspective, but never really extended his work from the individual to the sphere of comparative sociology. At the same time, I’m not sure if Haidt’s taxonomy is complete. How would he explain mob rule, of the kind that tore Spinoza’s friends the de Witts to shreds? Community minus order minus authority? And is my strong belief in freedom of speech truly just a lack of regard for authority, or might it be a positive value, let’s call it tolerance? Might an affinity for rationality not be a moral precept? It’s the bedrock of the scientific method, after all. Your thoughts, Baruch?
Posted in Philosophising, What Would Spinoza Do?
Dear Baruch,
Another example of how the conventional wisdom is wrong, and how we Spinozists can rejoice a little at the prospects for our and future generations:
Survey: Americans switching faiths, dropping out
(AP) — The U.S. religious marketplace is extremely volatile, with nearly half of American adults leaving the faith tradition of their upbringing to either switch allegiances or abandon religious affiliation altogether, a new survey finds.
[...] One in four adults ages 18 to 29 claim no affiliation with a religious institution.
So no, Americans are not becoming more religious, but less, and we have demographic trends to thank. One in four is still not all that much, but at least more and more people are understanding that it is a logical fallacy to think that the faith of your parents is true because it is the faith of your parents. (Of course, we’re still stuck with an Ireland full of Catholics and an Iran full of Shi’ites, and not vice versa, but it’s a start.)
This is perhaps a good time to bring up what I believe is another piece of fallacious conventional wisdom: That Islam is on the rise as a religion. It certainly seems that way at 30,000 ft.: More veiled women in the streets, more Muslims in western countries, a militant streak among a few… But the situation on the ground is different: Well over 90% of programming that the innumerable satellite dishes of Cairo can receive is thoroughly western in format and aspiration. The music videos and radio songs are by (very) unveiled vixens girating in ways that can give Kylie a run for her money. Muslims in Europe are doing a great job of assimilating, and more want to join them for the opportunities that are there. The west is a threat to religious conservatives precisely because it is being so successful at luring the faithful to the pleasures of this life as opposed to those of the next one.
The “resurgence”, then, is something of a last stand, a shoring up of the faithful to combat this (accurately perceived) smothering of traditional cultural and religious values. I don’t think the conservatives stand much of a chance, in the very long run — I see them read the same book over and over again, ad nauseam, in the Cairo subway (and nobody ever reads any other book), parrotting the words to themselves; it’s not conducive to intellectual vitality or new ideas, but it provides a sense of rootedness in a world where most things you want aren’t endemic but come from a civilization you perceive as different.
The situation is reminiscent of 19th century Russia. It was the poorest and most backward of the European nations, but its conservative backbone, the Russian Orthodox Church, was convinced it guaranteed the empire’s moral superiority. They might not have been as advanced technologically, but at least they had true religion. It was a mighty struggle between the Westernizers, who looked to emulate the West, vs. the Slavophiles, who wanted to build something uniquely Russian. This tension simmered for a century, until we got something uniquely Russian alright: Bolshevism.
Posted in Philosophising
