Tag Archives: debate

A Secular Scientist’s Argument against the New Atheists

19 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Religion, Science

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David Berlinski and Christopher Hitchens

Moderator: Dr. Berlisnki, you’re not a Christian, and indeed, you’re not religious as I understand it. Why do you argue for a Judeo-Christian influence in society?

David Berlisnki: I presume you are not asking me in the hopes of a personal declaration. And I won’t say that this secular Jew has a remarkable degree of authority when it comes to these moral events: after all, I have lived my own life under the impress of having a good time, all the time. On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to hear these words from someone such as myself, because at least you are hearing them from someone with no conceivable bias in their favor.

In its largest aspect, Western science is of course an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian tradition, especially to the extent, perhaps only to the extent, that it is committed to the principle that the manifest universe contains a latent structure that can be discovered by the intellect of man. I think this is true. I don’t think this is very far from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ declaration that, ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ […]

You know, Stephen Hawking just published a book, one explaining, again, how everything began — why it’s there, why we shouldn’t worry about God, et cetera. And to paraphrase the claim that he now makes: having given up on “A” through “L”, he now champions something called “M-theory” to explain how the universe popped into existence. I respect Hawking as a reputable physicist. But I can tell you this: What is lamentably lacking in every one of these discussions is that coruscating spirit of skepticism which a Christopher Hitchens or a Richard Dawkins would bring to religious claims, and then lapses absurdly when it comes to naturalistic and scientific claims about the cosmos.

Surely, we should have the sophistication to wonder at any asseveration of the form that the universe just blasted itself into existence following the laws of M-theory — a theory no one can understand, whose mathematical formulism hasn’t been completed, which has never once been tested in any laboratory on the face of the earth…

Finally, the fact that the earth, our home, is a small part of the physical universe does not mean it is not the center of the universe. That is a non sequitur. After all, no one would argue, least of all Mr. Hitchens, that the doctrine that home is where the heart lies is rendered false by distance. We should be very careful about making these claims. I agree that the universe is very big; there are lots of galaxies and amazing things. And there is certainly some biological continuity between humans and the animals that came before us. But as for the central religious claim that this particular place is blessed and important, that’s different. No doctrine about physical size rebuts it…

And as to why should a secular Jew open his mouth to questions pertaining to the Christian religion? It’s a big tent. I’m presuming I would be welcomed.

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An excerpt from Berlinski’s 2010 debate with Christopher Hitchens. Berlinski’s erudition reaches almost comical heights in this debate, which is, in my opinion, one of the more compelling Hitch ever did. I like the whole thing, but you can watch the pulled section below.

Continue onward:

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What the Outrage over Cecil the Lion Says about Our Warped Moral Priorities

06 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Interview, Philosophy

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Cecil the LionI imagine you have some thoughts about how well spent the moral outrage of seven billion people has been on Cecil the Lion.

“I do. Look, there’s some reason to believe the dentist did do something wrong. It’s not quite clear; he said he was hoodwinked by somebody else and he thought they had proper permits. And so, you know, if he did something wrong, broke the law, he should be punished. I don’t have any problem saying that. And also, I don’t have any particular love for big game hunting — I may be betraying my own liberal background but I find it kind of a repellant activity.

However, the lack of proportion in this case is astonishing.

I honestly think if the dentist went to Africa and shot an African, there’d be a lot less fuss. Instead he shot this beautiful lion… and the sentimentality combined with the mob attacks has been insane.

Of course, he was not hunting for food, he was hunting for trophies. Personally, I find myself totally unsympathetic to that, even though I can get right up to the door of it. I shoot guns because I’m very interested in self defense, and the truth is it’s incredibly fun to shoot guns…

So I can imagine that hunting is even more fun if you don’t have any scruple about killing the animal. And I’m under no illusions that my position as a non-vegetarian, as someone who eats meat and therefore delegates the killing of animals to others, is more ethical. I think the hunter who eats his kill is in a stronger moral position than I am. He’s owning the full process by which he’s arriving at his hamburger, or in this case, his venison steak…

What matters? What counts as a worse crime than another? What should one be allowed to do? And one can, as a reflective person, rank things. It’s worse to kill somebody than to beat them. It’s worse to steal one-hundred dollars than one dollar. It’s worse to kill an African human than an African lion…

If you feel the killing of Cecil is one of the biggest news stories of 2015, you’ve really got to reassess your values.”

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Remarks from two self-described liberals — Sam Harris and and Yale psychologist Paul Bloom on Harris’s Waking Up podcast last week (these remarks come at the 48 minute mark in the track below).

Bloom touches on many of these themes of moral psychology in his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil.

 

There’s more to see:

The Problem with Our ‘Immigration Policy’ Is We Don’t Have an Immigration Policy

02 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Interview, Politics

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Thomas Sowell

“When only two percent of immigrants from Japan to the United States go on welfare, while 46 percent of the immigrants from Laos do, there is no single pattern that applies to all immigrants. Everything depends on which immigrants you are taking about and which period of history.

One of the things about the immigration debate is they talk about immigrants in the abstract — and there are no immigrants in the abstract.

An additional problem is that we don’t know who those people are that are already here. They may all be PhD’s from the University of Chicago, in which case they should all stay. Or they may in fact be people who majored in sociology at Berkeley, in which case we should get them all out of here as soon as possible.

But we don’t know. And that’s one of the problems of our so-called ‘immigration policy’: we don’t have an immigration policy, unless we control the border. It doesn’t matter what our policy is; if anyone who wants to cross the border can cross, our policy is just a bunch of words on paper.

And especially when they talk about people in agriculture. This is a country that has had a chronic surplus of agricultural output for decades on end, costing the tax payer billions upon billions of dollars. […]

Any discussion of people in the abstract drives me crazy. Because there are no abstract people. One hundred years ago, people understood that. So when there was a debate about immigration, there was a multi-volume set of tomes about the characteristics of immigrants from various countries — how do their kids do in school, what is there crime rate, what is their disease rate. All those things. That matters.”

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From Thomas Sowell’s interview with the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson last December.

In case I need to say it again, I don’t agree with some of the things I post on here. This is one of those things. Still, I love Sowell’s panache in this interview as well as the clarity of his seminal work Basic Economics, a primer on market economies that’s quoted in the opening paragraph above.

There’s more:

Will Self: The Problem at the Heart of Utilitarianism

24 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Philosophy, Speeches

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Will Self

“The principle ideologue of British society is Jeremy Bentham and his Utilitarianism, which puts forward the idea that the aim of society should be to achieve the greatest good/happiness for the greatest number.

But I put it to you that it is precisely this Benthamite ideology that derogates the individual and removes the individual from her immediate experience and alienates her from the social and political process. […]

Take the Utilitarian philosophy where it leads you, and it tells you that human increase can only be a good thing. After all, there’s so much more good to be had when there are more of us.

So on the Utilitarian calculus, we’ll be in really good shape when all day, everyday we’re packed in just as tightly as we are in this hall… That is indeed the underlying prolegomena of the Utilitarian position. It’s an endless yay-saying to more of everything; it’s an endless yay-saying to knowing the cost of everything, because cost can be quantified, and Bentham loved to quantify.

But you can’t cost the real value of life. Just as you cannot know what other people are thinking and feeling. And philosophies that base themselves on such specious quantification throw up specious demagogues.

It’s up to us to be individuals, to discover our own nature of the good, and to respect other people’s idea of the good as well. And not treat them as cogs on a production line or bits in a factory.”

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The inimitable Will Self, presenting his opener in the IQ2 debate on the motion We’ve Never Had It So Good. (He’s one of the most captivating speakers, so don’t just read the text.)

Self’s opposition to this motion is pretty creative. It centers on his claim that you can’t tally up the “good” of a human life, much less of a society; and, by extension, attempts to score and impose goodness of this kind (whether through authoritarian states or utilitarian ethics) will inevitably lead to tyranny. Jeremy Bentham, though an original and very important thinker, produced a philosophy that minimizes the human being by reducing him to easily quantified component parts. In my opinion, utilitarianism is unsatisfying, since, as in the organ donor scenario — why doesn’t one healthy person donate all her organs to save ten people waiting for lung, liver, etc. transplants? — your humanity may be sacrificed for our utility. The autonomy of an individual life can be abolished. Its sanctity and its dignity may be made violable.

This isn’t to say I nod along with Self and disagree with the motion. By a ton of metrics (life expectancy, median wealth, exposure to violence, education, equality, and on and on), we’ve really never had it so good. Pinker is good on this point. And I’m a consequentialist: I believe our moral scales should be tuned more to outcomes than intentions — so metrics really do have a story to tell. But his point is more profound than that. And the idea that “good” should be kept, in some sense, relative — out of our own modesty, our own inability to know what’s the good life for others — appeals to me.

More Self:

Maajid Nawaz: Why Not Calling ISIS “Islamic” Hurts Muslim Reformers

06 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by in Current Events, Debate, Politics, Religion

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Maajid Nawaz

“When President Obama gave his speech, he said, ‘We will not allow these people to claim they are religious leaders. They have nothing to do with Islam.’

No. They are not “Islam” — of course they’re not. Nor am I, nor is anyone, really, because Islam is what Muslims make it. But they have something to do with Islam. If you’re going to argue with one of them — and I do all the time — you’re not discussing Mein Kampf. You’re discussing Islamic texts…

And just to clarify — one sentence:

What is Islamism? Islam is a religion; Islamism is the desire to impose any version of that religion on society.

It’s the politicization of my own religion. What is Jihadism? The use of force to spread Islamism.

The danger of not naming this ideology is twofold. Firstly, within the Muslim context, those liberal Muslims, reformist Muslims, feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, dissenting voices, minority sects, the Ismailis, the Shia — all these different minorities within the minority of the Muslim community — are immediately betrayed.

How are they betrayed? Because you deprive them of the lexicon, the language to employ against those who are attempting to silence their progressive efforts within their own communities. You surrender the debate to the extremists…

The second danger is in the non-Muslim context. What happens if you don’t name the Islamist ideology and distinguish it from Islam?

President Obama in his speech said there’s an ideology we must challenge, and he didn’t name it.

So, think about it, you’re sending out the message to the vast majority of Americans: there’s an ideology you must challenge, but you don’t tell them what it’s called. What are they going to assume? The average American is going to think, ‘Yeah, I’ve got to challenge an ideology — it’s called Islam.’

You’re only going to increase anti-Muslim hatred, increase the hysteria, like ‘he who must not be named’ — the Voldemort effect, I call it — by not naming the ideology. Because the average guy out there is going to assume the President is talking about the religion itself.

But if you distingiush Islamist extremism and say, ‘Look, Islam’s a religion. We’re not going to tell you whether Islam is good or bad, peaceful or not. We’re not going to define that for you. What we can say is you mustn’t try to impose that on anyone else. If you do, that’s called Islamism, and that’s what we have a problem with.'”

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Recent comments from Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamic extremist who was imprisoned for several years in Egypt and escaped to denounce radicalism and found the London-based counter-extremism group Quilliam. If the west is going to make it out of its conflict with Islamism in tact, we need a Muslim voice like Maajid’s to pop up for every extremist mullah. At the moment I don’t think the ratio is in our favor.

I encourage you to watch the entire discussion, which includes the brilliant Douglas Murray, and to buy Maajid’s remarkable book about the making and unmaking of a terrorist Radical: My Journey Out Of Islamist Extremism.

More on the subject:

Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Russia I Respect, the Russia I Despise

01 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in Current Events, Debate, Political Philosophy, Politics

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BHL

“Unlike you, I have absolutely no desire to be Russian or to return to Russia.

I used to love a certain idea of Russia.

I loved and defended this idea of Russian culture, which in the 1970s and ‘80s conjured up a whole hodgepodge, Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, the Slavophiles and Europhiles, the disciples of Pushkin and those of Dostoyevsky, the dissidents on the right and the left and those who, in the words of the mathematician Leonid Plyushch, belonged to neither of these camps but to the concentration camp and the gulag…

Then there’s what Russia has become, what appeared when the breakdown of communism, its debacle — what a mountaineer like your father would call its ‘thaw’ — revealed to the world: the Russia of Putin, of the war in Chechnya, the Russia that assassinated Anna Politkovskaja on the stairway in her building and that the same Anna Politkovskaja described in her wonderful book A Russian Diary, just before she was assassinated. It’s the Russia of the racist packs who, right in the center of Moscow, track down ‘non ethnic’ Russians… the Russia that has the nerve to explain to the world that it has its own “democracy,” a special, local democracy that is quite unrelated to Western canons and rights.

It’s the country of such specialties as its party, the Nashi, meaning ‘our own,’ which, to call a spade a spade, is a Stalin-Hitler combo, the Russia that, incidentally, is giving new life to the anti-Semitic European pamphlets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries… This Russia, which, apart from this kind of idiocy, believes in nothing at all… This Russia, which, the last time I went there, struck me as having had its culture erased and its brain washed, this Russia, whose most discouraging side, according to Anna Politkovskaja, to mention her yet again, was its amorphousness and passivity, the way it accepts, for example, that it hardly has any employment legislation left and that its workers are treated like dogs… In this Russia, no less than under communism, people are ready to betray their parents to steal a broom, a bowl, a badly screwed tap or bits of scrap iron from deserted buildings abandoned by oligarchs on the run or in prison.

Not only does this Russia inspire no desire in me, it fills me with horror. I’d go so far as to say that it frightens me because I see in it a possible destiny for the late-capitalist societies. Once upon a time, during your postwar ‘glory days,’ the middle class was terrorized by being told that Brezhnev’s communism was not an archaism restricted to distant societies but rather a picture of our future. We were wrong: it was not communism but post communism, Putinism, that may be the testing ground for our future.”

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BHL on a tear in his book-form debate with French novelist Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take On Each Other and the World.

Regardless of whether you speak French, I recommend keeping up to speed on Lévy’s work wherever it’s translated. The man has more style and swagger and moral intelligence than several whole societies I can think of.

More from epitomizers of cool:

Below: BHL in Libya (2011), Egypt (2011), Ukraine (2014).

BHL en LibyeBHL place Tahrir

BHL Ukraine

Christopher Hitchens: Resisting Radical Islam 101

08 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by in Political Philosophy

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Christopher Hitchens

“It’s coming to a place near you.

The Qurans that are given out in our prison system, to Muslim prisoners by Muslim chaplains, paid for by Saudi Arabia, are Qurans written to the Wahabi tune. They’re not just your everyday Quran; they’re the Qurans that the Wahabis want you to read, containing direct incitement.

They’re being given out with taxpayers’ money in the prison system, where militias are forming. Next you’ll have militias of this kind with their own chaplains within the United States armed forces. Are you ready for that? Are you ready to have Wahabi preachers in the U.S. armed forces?

You better get ready for it, unless you’re going to take the James Madison view that there shouldn’t be any chaplains in the U.S. armed forces to begin with, or in the prison system. People want to pray, you can’t stop them. But we cannot have state subsidized prayer. We cannot have state subsidized preachers or chaplains.

Give it up, or give it to your deadliest enemy and pay for the rope that will choke you.

This is very urgent business, ladies and gentlemen, I beseech you: resist it while you still can and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which is the next thing.

You will be told, you can’t complain – because you’re Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture, as if it’s an accusation of race hatred or bigotry, whereas it’s only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion.

Watch out for these symptoms… The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it’s your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you.”

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Christopher Hitchens, riffing in a Q&A before his debate with John Lennox in Birmingham, Alabama in 2009.

Our Partisanship as a Moral Failing

02 Tuesday Sep 2014

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David Brooks 32

John Meacham: If our country itself is irreconcilably polarized, then in classic republican — lowercase “r” — thinking, that is going to be reflected in our political system.

David Brooks: I’m coming around to that view, which I was very resistant to over the last ten years. A lot of people have argued that [polarization] begins out in the country, not in Washington. I guess I more or less accept that now.

And I think it’s a moral failing that we all share. Which is that if you have a modest sense of your own rightness, and if you think that politics is generally a competition between half-truths, then you’re going to need the other people on the other side, and you’re going to value the similarity of taste. You know, you may disagree with a Republican, or disagree with a Democrat, but you’re still American and you still basically share the same culture. And you know your side is half wrong.

If you have that mentality that ‘Well, I’m probably half wrong; he’s probably half right,’ then it’s going to be a lot easier to come to an agreement. But if you have an egotistical attitude that ‘I’m 100% right and they’re 100% wrong,’ which is a moral failing — a failing of intellectual morality — then it’s very hard to come to an agreement.

And I do think that we’ve had a failure of modesty about our own rightness and wrongness. And I’m in the op-ed business, so believe me that people like me have contributed as much as anybody to this moral failure. But I think it has built up gradually and has become somewhat consuming.

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David Brooks and Jon Meacham, in conversation when Meacham subbed for Charlie Rose this summer.

More:

  • George Washington rips party politics
  • Mark Leibovich rips our cowardly political culture
  • Meacham and Brooks riff on Jefferson and Hamilton

John Meacham

How Jefferson Fostered Compromise on the National Debt

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Biography, History, Politics

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Thomas Jefferson engraving after painting by Rembrandt Peale.

“Hamilton had argued for a national financial system in which the central government would fund the national debt, assume responsibility for all state debts, and establish a national bank. Money for the federal government would be raised by tariffs on imports and excise taxes on distilled spirits… The assumption proposal, however, instantly divided the nation.

Jefferson knew matters were dire. The Congress seemed paralyzed…

The beginning of wisdom, Jefferson thought, might lie in a meeting of the principals out of the public eye. So he convened a dinner. Jefferson believed things could be worked out, he said, for ‘men of sound heads and honest views needed nothing more than explanation and mutual understanding to enable them to unite in some measures which might enable us to get along.’

No deal meant disaster. It was clear, Jefferson wrote, ‘that if everyone retains inflexibly his present opinion, there will be no bill passed at all for funding the public debts, and… without funding there is an end of the government.’…

The final result, Jefferson believed, was ‘the least bad of all the turns the thing can take.’ It was true that he hated the financial speculation that would result from the Hamiltonian vision of commerce. ‘It is much to be wished that every discouragement should be thrown in the way of men who undertake to trade without capital,’ Jefferson said. ‘The consumers pay for it in the end, and the debts contracted, and bankruptcies occasioned by such commercial adventurers, bring burden and disgrace on our country.’

Yet Jefferson also believed in compromise. He advised his daughter Patsy to approach all people and all things with forbearance. ‘Every human being, my dear, must thus be viewed according to what it is good for, for none of us, no not one, is perfect; and were we to love none who had imperfections this world would be a desert for our love,’ Jefferson wrote in July 1790. ‘All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two.’ It was sound counsel for life at Monticello—and at New York.

In December 1790, a Virginian wrote Jefferson about the state General Assembly’s official protest over the debt assumption. ‘One party charges the Congress with an unconstitutional act; and both parties charge it with an act of injustice.’

So be it. Jefferson had struck the deal he could strike, and, for the moment, America was the stronger for it.”

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From the end of chapter 23 in part VI (“The First Secretary of State: 1789-1792”) of Jon Meacham’s new biography Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

Gordon Wood called The Art of Power, “probably the best single-volume biography of Jefferson ever written.” Pick it up if you’re interested in the man, or take a look at additional posts about Thomas Jefferson.

Check out another text from American history which is especially relevant to the recent debt-ceiling/government shut-down machinations in Washington, DC. In this one, Abraham Lincoln considers political compromise on the eve of the Civil War:

Lincoln

A Shallow Pretext for Extorting Compromise