Greg Sanders

Ideology and ideological intolerance

Are more religiously traditional people less tolerant of atheists in public life?  Lee Seigalman over at Monkey Cage summarizes the results of a study that indicates yes.

There are some signs that religious Americans have become more tolerant of those who hold different religious views. But by no means has religious intolerance faded away.

That’s the conclusion of a new report by James Gibson, based on a national survey he conducted in 2007. (For an extended overview of the results, click here.) In brief, based on survey respondents’ answers to a series of questions, Gibson created an index of “religious traditionalism,” some defining characteristics of which are frequent attendance at religious services and belief in God and the devil. The respondents were also asked about their willingness to deny one or more political rights (e.g., to give speeches, hold demonstrations, and run for public office) to atheists...

Gibson speculates that the link between religious traditionalism and political intolerance may “become more serious for American politics in the future,” not less so... "Future research should therefore focus on methods by which all citizens — religionists included — can be persuaded to value tolerance more highly.”

Absent changing the mind of religious traditionalists, I think Gibson's speculation was confirmed by a recent survey.  15% (up from 8% in 1990) of the population now says they have no religion meanwhile the rising numbers calling themselves born again or evangelical might indicate a rise in those hewing towards religious conservatism.   I don't think most of those holding no religion will mirror the desire to restrict the organization rights of the religious, although that would be an interesting study to see.  Even if it isn't mirrored, I think Douthat is right to suggest that the survey indicates that the culture war is likely to get hotter in the near future.

However, what I really would like to see is this study done for ideology the restrictions that fanatics are willing to put on athiests, "to give speeches, hold demonstrations, and run for public office," have been deployed against political groups before.  In America that sort of thing has been done to socialists, let alone communists.  Of course in Germany, such rules are presently employed against neo-Nazis.  Their reasons are understandable but doing exluding anyone from participation, rather than vehemently out-competing them, runs against liberal pluralistic ideals.  Not saying Germany is necessarily wrong here, just that I think the burden of proof for that sort of policy should be very high.

I wonder whether ideologues feel this as strongly as religious traditionalists.  I wonder which systems of belief are most prone to it.  Is it consisitently mirrored or does it sometimes hold on only one side?  This issue is truly vital in young democracies but I don't think it's fully understood even in the developed world.

Purity is obsolete

I’ve been watching an interesting fight between libertarian Will Wilkinson and conservative Ross Douthaht. They’re fighting over Jonathan Haidt’s concept of five pillars of morality: harm/care; fairness/reciprocity; in-group; authority; and purity. Liberals tend to like the first two, conservatives go for all five. Wilkinson gives a great quick summary of Haidt’s larger argument:

As Jon notes, many liberals wonder why the in-group, authority, and purity dimensions of the moral sense count as moral at all. Why doesn’t harm/care and fairness/reciprocity just exhaust the moral field? With characteristic ecumenism, Jon cautions us against underestimating the function of the conservative sentiments in a successful society. “The great conservative insight,” Jon says, “is that order is really hard to achieve, it’s really precious, and really ready to lose.”

However, Wilkinson doesn’t buy it:

The lesson, it seems to me, is that it is dangerous to become too thoroughly liberal, for that way chaos lies. What Jon needs to show is that there is a threshold on the conservative channels of the moral equalizer below which social stability is threatened. In the talk, he barely gestures toward evidence to this effect... Indeed, my sense is that the societies in which the space between high liberal settings and low conservative settings is the greatest–that is, the most imbalanced–are by and large the best places for human beings to live...

If the conservative dimensions are so important, Jon needs to explain why the people of the advanced market democracies are so much more liberal than they used to be, so much less conservative, and yet so much less disordered (i.e., less violence, less war, etc.)...

But I think he’s making a mistake if he think his work points toward the importance of the conservative sentiments. It’s pointing me toward a clearer grasp of the ecological conditions under which those sentiments are functional and adaptive. And we aren’t in them.

Douthat, unlike a lot of the commenters on Haidt’s presentation, does buy the moral breakdown and not surprisingly disagrees with Wilkinson. He buys that there’s some evidence that we may be moving in that direction, but that on the whole it’s too soon to tell. In an earlier argument, he also noted that if we diminish the role for family, community, and religion we’re likely opening the door to a larger state.

Anyhow, I’m not a libertarian, I tend to think there is some utility in in-group and authority although I certainly thing they’re far less important than harm-care or fairness. However, I do agree with Wilkinson on Purity. I think purity has a few uses: preventing self-harm, avoiding getting on a slippery slope for harming others, avoiding disease and food poisoning, and . However, the first two are just functions of harm/care and can be treated as such. The third is where the evolutionary advantage of purity comes in, but we have science now to tell us what’s actually healthy, it’s time to put away childish things.

To be fair to conservatives, Haidt does note that liberals can go for purity when it comes to organic food or not watching television or such. When these things have a basis in health, fine; but I’m quite willing to say that while it’s fine to argue about what we should eat or watch, don’t get self-righteous about it. Most of us have our guilty pleasures and in moderation that’s fine.

Interestingly, I think Christianity makes a partial break with purity rules. Jesus is constantly breaking purity restrictions, sometimes even foolishly so; sorry Jesus, but we should actually wash our hands before eating. Not a moral thing, but a good idea nonetheless. I think a lot of Christian theology gets at the idea that none of us is really pure, so we should stop judging others for lack of purity. However, Jesus as the perfect sacrificial lamb brings those issues back to the fore. I should also note that I’ve heard that the Gospel depiction of Judaism’s purity rules in practice is rather exaggerated.

Does free will exists? Meh

Amanda Marcotte has up a post shooting down the idea of free will. I tend to disagree but although I enjoyed her argument. Mainly I just wanted to drop a quick post on how much I enjoy the Pandagon comment threads. They raise all the points I’d want to make and a few I haven’t thought of.

Anyways, my main response is that free will at this point is a bundle of concepts, some useful, some outdated. I think the general shape of this bundle is actually pretty well determined: are we a blank state? are we controlled by our environment? can we control our own fate? is there a soul or a mini-me making decisions? is human behavior deterministic or random? To which I say meh. Some of these are interesting, some are not. Bundling them together just makes it harder to discuss it nowadays without getting into centuries old arguments with no real grounding in science. This bundle can work out alright theologically or dramatically but outside of those contexts it obscures more than it reveals.

So I’m laying down my arms in this fight. This bundle is not worth fighting for or fighting over. As one of the commentators put it, "free will" isn’t falsifiable.

I’d say the same thing is true when talking about whether religion is a good thing or a bad thing. I think that tends to be the wrong unit of analysis. Better to focus on concepts that show up in some religions as well as some secular movements, such as "those who do not share my doctrine deserve punishment." I think it’s safe to say that said idea has caused much more harm than good and that it’s possible to get along fine without it. There’s a reason things legal codes tend to be based on actions and not beliefs. That said, I’m not looking to punish people who hold such a doctrine.

Rules for Respect[ing opinions you think are wrong ]

Harry Brighouse over at Crooked Timber has an interesting post about how he, as an atheist, can respect religious people. He contrasts this view to that of Simon Blackburn who argues that it’s possible to tolerate religious people but not to respect them on that particular point. I found Brighouse’s criteria rather useful:

The condition is something like this. It is possible to respect someone’s holding of a false belief if you believe that the person is someone of good will, and who has deliberated carefully, and honestly holds the belief given their non-irresponsible reflection on that deliberation and their personal experience.

Brighouse suggests this criteria can apply both to difference over religious belief and to political differences. The only area I might disagree with Brighouse is over the question of self-interest. I tend to think that self-interest has a legitimate role to play in forming ones political beliefs. We’re often better equipped than even a benevolent outside to know what we want. However, Brighouse may just be rejecting self-interest unleavened by sincere reflection, so I’m not sure we disagree.

Regardless, pluralism doesn’t require that we all respect each other, but I think the possibility of respect across religious and political divisions is necessary. While there are now more prominent militant atheists, on the whole I tend to think those without religion have taken a good deal more disrespect than those with. I hope these sorts of discussions are a prologue to atheists being better incorporated into American philosophical pluralism.

[Reene raises a good point in comments. I failed to make clear that the debaters both agree that you can respect someone who you think holds wrong opinions. You may just tolerate that particular belief. It’s a fair question as to whether we need to actually respect the other sides’ specifics belief for pluralism to work or just to respect them as people.]

(Found the post via Sullivan)

Musings about why humans don't seem to be strictly rational

There’s a political science technique called rational choice theory. Essentially it treats people as ’utility’ maximizing units and then tries to calculate how they’ll behave. This can tie into a lot of game theory with specific games like the prisoners dilemma and chicken. Anyways even those that use rational choice theory note that while it can be useful, it certainly doesn’t capture the full range of human behavior.

I think a key part of what it leaves out is allegorical thinking. This may include cultural rules, religious ones, and various other stylized assumptions about how the world works. Moreover, I think that’s okay. Morale, faith, and various other less than rational sentiments can provide and edge in performance or society building. That said, there are obviously a lot of downsides, see religious wars and the spam in your inbox.

Anyways, this was prompted a bit by those recent fake memoir scandals and an interview with pan-religious theologian Karen Armstrong. Armstrong argued that outside of the last few centuries, nobody took most religious texts as literal facts. While I certainly buy that fundamentalism is a more recent movement, I’m highly dubious of that statement. It seems much more plausible to me that people’s ability to solidly differentiate between fact and allegory probably was tied to the development of the scientific method. It’s also not a new idea that perhaps these days a lot of people want more allegory but instead go seeking extraordinaire facts and implausible memoirs.

Anyhow, allegory can be a tough beast to pin down. Its utility varies from person to person, culture to culture, and age to age. I don’t think there is a simple way to integrate it into rational choice theory or that sort of thing. Heck a widely publicized study of allegory may change their utility. That said, I think it’s important to not just evaluate allegories as factual or not, but to analyze them as whether they are useful and whether they accurately describe human nature.

Moreover, I don’t think this is just something that needs to be done for the masses while a rational elite can dispose of them altogether. I tend to think Holden Caulfield is right, we’re can all be phonies at times, and going the absolute rationalist path doesn’t tend to lead to that much success in the happiness part of life (although it is of course quite necessary professionally in many fields including my own). In addition, some use this as a reason to bash atheists. I don’t think that holds, being an atheist means you put all the religious and spiritual stuff in the realm of allegory and not fact. That doesn’t mean there won’t necessarily be allegories that appeal to you.

Anyhow, that was rather rambling, but hopefully can be a basis for making points in the future.

Yglesias on integration in Europe and America

I seem to be having a little difficulty getting back in to non-travel blogging. Oh well, three posts today.

First, Yglesias, who is presently in the Netherlands, has a post up on the differences between American and European secularism.

One thing that I guess I could have learned just pondering the world from my chair but that I don’t think I really understood until I went to the Netherlands and talked to people involved in politics there is the extent to which the "new atheism" -- which is mostly like the old atheism but involves people acting like jerks -- is specifically bound up with some problematic anti-Muslim sentiments. Previously, things like this Christopher Hitchens column bashing Hanukkah had struck me as merely weird...

In Europe, though, the face of "religion" is increasingly Islam whereas elements of the secular consensus are part of a national identity that elements of the right can embrace. It was explained to me, for example, that one thing Dutch people worry about when they worry about Muslim immigrants is that socially conservative Muslim immigrants might spoil their same-sex partnership law. I joked that conservatives should love immigration, then. But in reality the forces of indigenous religious conservatism are way too weak for anything like that to happen. So instead of a system of cross-currents, where both a cosmopolitan left and a traditionalist right find something to admire about growing diversity, you get a substantial block of people pushing against Muslim immigrants from both a secularist and a nationalist perspective.

From the point of view of an American liberal, it’s an awkward situation.

Based on my prior reading and that event on Islam in Europe last week I think Yglesias is missing the main drivers here. In Europe many countries in Europe there’s an underclass that often turns to fundamentalist Islam to express their dissent with the status quo. On several occasions, this has led to violent demonstrations, assassinations, and outright terrorist bombings, although the situation varies greatly form country to country. In the U.S. Islam presently is not strongly associated with the underclass, in fact Muslims do better economically than the average American. As a result, we’re able to handle the violence dimension which is really a key driver of the fears he’s talking about.

That said, I think his general analysis holds, it’s just the drivers he’s talking about are of secondary importance.

Playing with International Relations theory

So, here’s a new IR theory for you: Okay, traditional realism is well expressed in the game Diplomacy. Everyone out for themselves, there are no permanent alliances, the internal make-up of a state doesn't really matter.  Realism has a lot of problems, but it is a fairly effective means for measuring hard power and how it shapes interactions and the world stage.

Sometimes states behavior is broken down on a values versus interest spectrum. 
Values are often associated with ideologies such as liberalism, communism, or fascism (not all values are good obviously).

Alternately, state behavior can be broken down into hard power and soft power.  Joseph Nye came up with this idea and has been plugging it ever since.  He's on the board for a new project at CSIS is running called "smart power" which is about using both types productively.  Until a certain level of independent power is achieved, such groups should be treated as derived variables.

So, cribbing some from Civilization 3+, I wonder if perhaps a good breakdown of power and interests would have three categories: military, economic, and cultural.  The more power you have in any of the three areas, the better able you are to impose your will on the world. (Even if your will is expansion of democracy or the like).  Military power is perhaps the least influenced by internal structure (hence realism) and culture is the most.  Similarly military power is zero-sum and both culture and economics are positive sum games.  Implications after the jump.