Book Review: Religion for Atheists

Religion for Atheists
By Alain de Botton
Pantheon Books, New York, 2012

Alain de Botton thinks religion is too useful to be left entirely to the religious. In his latest book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion, he looks at some of the “best bits” of religion that he thinks can help non-believers live better lives.

My reading of the book was helped by having heard two presentations by the author: a talk he gave a few weeks ago here in Seattle sponsored by Seattle Arts and Lectures; and his excellent TED Talk Atheism 2.0. Here’s my review.

De Botton is an avowed atheist, but he wants to move beyond today’s strident debate about the existence of God. (In his Seattle talk, he characterized this as a debate between two equally condescending sides: believers looking down on atheists as damned; and atheists looking down on believers as stupid.) Instead, de Botton wants to focus on the more important and practical questions of how we should live our lives.

Religions, he says, satisfy two central human needs:

“… first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.” p. 12

De Botton believes there are elements of religious practices, methods and structures which, stripped of their supernatural content, are still useful to secular society. Humans need guidance, morality and consolation, and religions have worked out over centuries how to provide these effectively. They do a much better job than secular society and so de Botton irreverently suggest we “steal” these ideas and practices from religion.

The bulk of the book is devoted to examining different aspects of religion that secular society should emulate with some suggestions (not always practical in my view) about how this could be done.

Community: One of the most common laments about modern secular society is that we’ve lost our sense of community. We live in big cities surrounded by millions of strangers. We often don’t know our closest neighbors. It’s rare to form new friendships after the age of 30. Government agencies perform many of the functions formerly carried out by communities. For many of us, the closest we come to community is through our work associates. Religions, by contrast, are particularly adept at building community. Common beliefs and practices help form communal bonds among their members. Religions provide safe spaces – buildings – in which to meet strangers and to develop new friendships. They provide rituals and practices for offering each other comfort and mutual support. While communities can sometimes be oppressive and insular, imposing nonsensical rules and brutally enforcing conformity, secular society needs institutions and practices designed to foster community.

Guidance: Ethics originated in the need of early societies to control human tendencies towards violence. So ideas like patience and forgiveness developed, as well as a recognition that we are all flawed and thus all in need of rules and guidance. Today, the legal system takes care of enforcing rules against violent and criminal behavior. But religions go well beyond the law. Religions, de Botton says, recognize that the state intervenes too late, that in order to prevent bad behavior we need much more detailed guidance about how to behave towards each other; acting with kindness, humility, and charity for example. In other words, religions provide detailed instructions on positive behaviors, as well as injunctions against negative ones.

De Botton says we still need this detailed guidance in order to reduce the cruelty, humiliation and rudeness that are part of daily life. We need to act, as religions teach us,  with kindness towards each other.

De Botton doesn’t mention it, but many corporations already do this.  They have codes of behavior – sometimes called “company values” – that tell employees how to act at work. Their purpose is the smooth and efficient functioning of the organization, rather than society as a whole, but the idea is the same. Inside corporations and other large organizations, people of many different backgrounds, religions, and origins are expected to work together cooperatively to reach organizational goals. Company values, while at times sounding like feel-good drivel from Human Resources, are intended to enable this.

Education: Both religion and secular society view education as critically important. They conceive of it, and deliver it, in radically different ways. The difference begins with how they view us, the students. Secular universities, de Botton says, believe we are basically mature, rational, capable people and that what we need is information, especially information that will help us obtain a well-paying job. So the university sees its purpose as mainly to provide information. It does this primarily through lectures.

Religions, on the other hand, view us essentially as children, deeply flawed children, who need strong guidance and constant reminding. They view the purpose of education as teaching use how to lead good lives and how to be better people. They do this in a variety of ways, through sermons, for example, delivered with skilled oratory. (De Botton suggests that university professors could benefit from time spent studying the techniques of Pentecostal preachers.) Religions also structure time, using the calendar to give us annual reminders of certain events, or people, and related moral lessons so we will encounter them at least once each year. Lastly, through rituals – physical actions – religions teach not just through the intellect, but through the body as well.

Universities have long since abandoned the task of teaching wisdom and how to live a good life. Religions focus on this, and are well-organized for it.

Tenderness: During times of crisis, setback or defeat, humans need consolation, reassurance and tenderness. Atheism doesn’t acknowledge this need or sees it as something we should grow out of. Religions provide consolation, often through a mother figure, such as Christianity’s Mary, because they recognize childhood needs persist into adult life.

It’s also because religions take a more pessimistic view of our prospects for success and happiness than we do in the secular world. Religions often postpone happiness until the next life or the afterlife. They provide comfort by publicly acknowledging that we are not alone in our suffering and our troubles.

Perspective: De Botton believes we suffer from “insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.” Most of us end up disappointed, humiliated, and defeated by the struggles and cruelties of life. In order that our egos do not get the better of us, religions provide gentle reminders of our insignificance. Often this is done by reminding us of the incomprehensibility of the universe and thus the impossibility of understanding God or God’s “mysterious ways.” Looking at the moon and the stars, de Botton suggests, could be a secular version of the same thing. In a strange way, we find comfort in knowing that our problems, worries, and setbacks, large though they may seem to us, are in fact insignificant at the scale of the universe.

Art: As with education, secular society puts a high value on art. De Botton notes that museums have become our new churches. But, he says, museums present art as something that needs to be understood through the intellect rather than felt. They are not designed to provide the visitor with a coherent experience. de Botton suggests museums and galleries should arrange art by subject matter – beauty, love, forgiveness, etc. – not by artist or period or country of origin.

For religion, art is part and parcel of the educative, sermonizing function. It appeals to both reason and the senses. Religious art is designed to remind us of key religious teachings; what we should worship and love, fear and avoid; that we are not alone in our suffering. We should emulate religions and use art to remind us how to be good, wise, and compassionate.

Institutions: Lastly, individuals writing books have very limited power, de Botton admits. What secular society needs are institutions, analogous to religions ones, that cater to people’s spiritual needs. Institutions provide structure, consistency, continuity, branding and scale.

Unsolicited Feedback

De Botton is a much livelier and wittier speaker than writer. The book is a little stuffier, a little more academic and a lot less humorous than his spoken presentations. His outlook is a lot more somber too. His views about our prospects for achievement, happiness and leading a good life seem very much in line with those of Judaism and Christianity from which he borrows a good many ideas and practices.

That said, I like the main idea of the book, that religions meet certain human needs quite well, and that while secular society may discard the supernatural elements of religion, we should not throw out the baby with the holy water, so to speak.

There are two main problems with Religion for Atheists, as I see it. The first is that it doesn’t hang together. De Botton freely even gleefully admits he’s serving up religion à la carte. He also says he’s deliberately trying to avoid the mistakes of the “intermittently sane” French sociologist Auguste Comte who attempted to form a new secular religion during the 1800’s. The advantage of this approach is that he’s able to sift through different religions to find elements that can be useful and beneficial to everyone. The problem is the net result is a grab-bag of practices and structures. It’s not clear if or how they are supposed to fit together. By contrast religions excel at packaging up these elements into a coherent whole.

There are some glaring omissions too. For example, de Botton doesn’t address the question of transcendence – the idea of connecting to something greater than ourselves – which is central to almost all religions and from which many people draw purpose and meaning for their lives.

The second problem with the book is that most of it cannot be put into practice by individuals, families or even small groups. Actual implementation of de Botton’s ideas requires large, established communities or institutions, and a great deal of capital. For example, his idea about reorganizing museums along thematic lines; interesting, but in the absence of any museums structured in this way, what can we do as individuals and families?

There’s a certain “you can’t get there from here” quality to Religion for Atheists. Without these quasi-religious institutions, atheists and other non-believers are unlikely to find the morality, guidance and consolation de Botton quite correctly says we all need by merely cherry-picking from religion.

Good weekend for articles on writing

From the NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=opinion

“Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.”

Flipping it around, there are some hints here for writers on how to make words more evocative, how to stimulate a stronger response in readers.

And,

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/my-lifes-sentences/

I haven’t (yet) read any of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novels – probably a gross omission on my part! – but I have read and enjoyed several of her shorter pieces, mainly about food as I recall.  This one’s about writing, about writing sentences in particular.  I particularly like:

“The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.”

“… [sentences] need to contain a charge.  A live current, which shocks and illuminates.”

Book Review: Reinventing the Sacred

Reinventing the Sacred
By Stuart A. Kauffman
Basic Books, New York, 2008

I really admire the scope and boldness of Stuart Kauffman’s 2008 book Reinventing the Sacred. Prof. Kauffman is a biologist and complexity theorist. He sets out not merely to reconcile science and religion, but, as the title suggests, to reinvent our notion of sacredness and along the way to redefine God.

Kauffman’s goal is to define a shared space, built on a common view of the sacred, where all of us – believers and non-believers – can create a new global ethic, a moral and spiritual framework in which we can live together peacefully. But there’s a longstanding problem, Kauffman argues: the gulf between reason and faith, between science and religion. That gulf needs to be bridged so we can all participate in building this new global ethic that incorporates both scientific and cultural knowledge. Being a scientist, Kauffman starts from the scientific end of the bridge and moves towards the moral and spiritual.

Reinventing the Sacred is heavy going in places (as you might expect), repetitive in others, and it vacillates between technical science and moral philosophy. Yet the book is courageous and worthwhile and deeply thought-provoking.

This is a complex book and it took me a couple of readings to understand how it all fits together. What I’d like to do in this review is trace out Kauffman’s main arguments at a high level and then give my own reflections at the end.

* * *

Kauffman starts off with a critique of the prevailing scientific worldview known as reductionism, showing how it is inadequate both as an approach to fully understanding the universe and as a guide to living within it. He presents an alternate worldview based on the idea of emergence that can form a scientific foundation for morality and spirituality.

Reductionism

Reductionism is the idea that complex things can best be understood by breaking them down into their constituent parts and looking at how those parts interact. In other words, a thing is the sum of its parts, no more, no less.

Reductionism has been the hallmark of science since the Enlightenment. It’s an incredibly powerful approach to deepening our understanding of the world and ourselves. Kauffman quotes Nobel laureate physicist Stephen Weinberg who probably speaks for most scientists when he says,

“All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.”

In the end, everything in the universe is reduced to particles and motion (OK these days maybe it’s strings and vibration).

Along with reductionism comes the belief that the universe can be completely described by natural laws. Newton’s Laws of Motion and Einstein’s Laws of Relativity are prime examples. These laws enable us to both explain and predict natural phenomena. The laws governing the movement of objects in space, for example, allow us to predict lunar and solar eclipses with stunning accuracy, If there are phenomena that we don’t yet understand, or for which we have no law, well most scientists would say it’s only a matter of time before we develop an understanding and discover the applicable law.

So if reductionism has been so successful, what’s the problem?

Well according to Kauffman there are several.

Emergence

The first problem is that reductionism is incomplete. There are many things — possibly the most important things — that arise naturally in the universe but cannot be reduced to physics alone. They are emergent.

Take temperature. It makes no sense to speak about the temperature of a single atom or molecule. Temperature emerges as a phenomenon once we have a collection of matter. Knowing the properties and behavior of a single molecule of water would not allow you to predict that water would freeze at 0°C and boil at 100°C. The same is true for other physical properties like rigidity or chirality, the asymmetry — left- or right-handedness – of certain chemical compounds. These too cannot be predicted merely by looking at the constituent atoms.

These seem like trivial examples, but the point is crucial: as we move up through higher and higher levels of complexity, from atoms to molecules, to cells to organisms to ecosystems, new phenomena emerge. These phenomena don’t violate the laws of the layers below, but they are not completely governed by them either.

Not all the explanatory arrows point down. This is a constant refrain throughout Reinventing the Sacred.

When we get into the evolution of the biosphere, emergence takes on greater significance because of course life itself is emergent. Kauffman asserts that the emergence of life and its evolution in the biosphere are natural phenomena. They are the result of “ceaseless creativity” in the universe. This creativity does not break the laws of physics, but it is partially outside them. Similarly, human culture, technology, and history are also emergent.

Emergence is part of a new scientific worldview that has begun to challenge reductionism.

From “Is” to “Ought”

The second problem with the reductionist worldview, says Kauffman, is that it gives us no guidance about how to live our lives.

Science describes what is, but not what ought to be; what happens but not what we ought to do.

Worse, it leads to a world utterly devoid of meaning. Again, Steven Weinberg:

“The more we know of the Universe, the more meaningless it appears.”

This may be true in the reductionist worldview, but I think most of us want meaning in our lives. We want to know that our lives serve some purpose, hopefully a higher or transcendent purpose that is somehow greater than ourselves. To find meaning, we turn to religion, devote ourselves to our family and friends, throw ourselves into our work, get involved in our communities, write, paint, dance and sing. In all these things reductionist science gives no guidance, indeed seems to play no part at all.

But this is not true in Kauffman’s emergent worldview.

For Kauffman, a critical phenomenon that emerges very early on in evolution is agency. Agency is the ability of an organism to perform actions on its own behalf, whether it is a bacterium consuming a glucose molecule, or a caveman hunting an antelope. Agency, according to Kauffman, violates no physical laws but is not predicted or governed by them either.

Along with agency come two equally important concepts value and meaning. Agents want certain outcomes to happen and other outcomes not to happen. There is value attached to outcomes, and because they have value, these outcomes also have significance and meaning.

In the emergent worldview science can encompass agency, meaning and values, and can therefore serve as a foundation for spirituality and morality. In other words, it can help us get from “is” to “ought.” I’ll elaborate on this later.

The Two Cultures

The third great problem with the reductionist worldview, according to Kauffman, is that it has cut us off from our full humanity.

During the Enlightenment, the breakthrough successes of scientists like Newton and Galileo, and growing opposition to Church dominance, caused a split, in Europe at least, between science and religion, and more broadly between reason and the humanities.

This schism is illustrated by a famous anecdote about the French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace. Laplace gave a copy of his book Celestial Mechanics to Napoleon. When Napoleon asked Laplace why his book contained no mention of God, Laplace apparently replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.” Since the Enlightenment, science has been seen by many as the preeminent path to knowledge and truth.

But there’s a price, Kauffman says. Atheists, agnostics and others who adopt a scientific worldview are disconnected from spirituality. This doesn’t mean they cannot be spiritual people, just that their spirituality is detached from any underlying scientific principles.

The split into what British scientist C.P. Snow called The Two Cultures leaves us cut off from our history and our culture – valuable sources of knowledge and approaches to truth. We need to recombine the two cultures in order to claim our full humanity, Kauffman says.

Living Forward

We live our lives forward, into the unknown, into mystery, as Kauffman puts it. We cannot know what will happen in the future – neither reductionism nor emergence help here – but we must still act.

Therefore reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives.

We need other sources of guidance, other paths to truth. This is one reason why the disconnect between science and the humanities needs to be bridged: so that we can turn to our culture – our histories, myths, and stories for example – for moral and spiritual guidance.

Another reason is that in our emerging global civilization we need a global ethic; a framework of values that spans traditions and cultures so all people, secular and believers, can live forward together peacefully.

So to recap; reductionism, the dominant and highly successful scientific worldview, is incomplete, devoid of meaning and leaves us bereft of cultural sources of knowledge and truth.

* * *

Kauffman points to emergence, based on “ceaseless creativity” in the universe as a way to overcome the limitations of reductionism. But what is this ceaseless creativity? How does it work? And what part does it play in shaping a new global ethic?

Ceaseless Creativity

Kauffman asks us to imagine a set of organic molecules that can combine in different ways via simple, single-step chemical reactions. Some of these reactions will produce molecules that are already in the set. Other reactions will create new molecules that were not members of the original set. Kauffman uses the term “adjacent possible” to describe new molecules that can be “reached” through these single-step reactions. Now these molecules plus the original set form a new, larger set that can go through another iteration of single-step reactions into a new adjacent possible. Repeat this cycle for a few billion years and you get the trillions of organic compounds that exist on Earth today. This “explosion into the adjacent possible” lies at the root of the creativity of the natural universe and is the driving force behind emergence and evolution.

Further, these compounds, and the more complex structures and systems they form will exhibit emergent properties that are not predicted by and are not reducible to physics alone.

Kauffman spends several dense chapters explaining the biochemistry of how life could have emerged naturally from simpler organic compounds expanding into their adjacent possible. I won’t attempt to summarize them – they form the technical heart of the book. The critical point is that he lays out a credible scientific explanation for the natural emergence and evolution of life that both cannot be reduced to physics and does not require a supernatural Creator God.

Life emerged and continues to evolve through the creativity in the universe. Kauffman describes this creativity as wild, persistent, ceaseless, radical and explosive. Most importantly, it’s unpredictable, operating at least partially outside natural law. No one can predict how evolution will play out. He notes for example that the number of possible proteins is virtually infinite, and all of evolution has thus far created only a miniscule fraction of the possible ones.

This creativity is also characteristic of human history. No one can predict how our technology or economy will evolve, for example. 50,000 years ago humans produced perhaps a few hundred or maybe a thousand different goods and services, according to statistics Kauffman cites. Today that number is around 10 billion. Economic evolution has led to explosive growth in the number of goods and services we produce.

In the emergent worldview, then, a complete scientific picture of the universe requires both natural law and ceaseless creativity partially outside natural law. This drives emergence and evolution, which give rise to agency, meaning and values, which in turn can form the basis for morality and spirituality.

Reinventing God

Now here’s where Reinventing the Sacred starts to diverge from your typical popular science book: Kauffman believes the ceaseless creativity in the universe is worthy of reverence, that it is in fact sacred. He chooses to name this creativity “God.”

“This creativity is stunning, awesome and worthy of reverence. One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures.” (p. xi)

Kauffman deliberately chooses to use the word “God” here, knowing it could anger and alienate some people. He makes this choice because, he says, across all religions and cultures “God” has always been the name for our most powerful symbol.

Let’s pause for a moment to consider the characteristics of this God Stuart Kauffman is proposing. (He doesn’t explicitly state all of these; some are my interpretation.):

• First of all, this is a natural God embedded in the universe, not a supernatural God separate and distinct from the physical world.

• Kauffman’s God has no character or personality. This God is neither a He nor a She. This God does not love you; it is in fact incapable of love. This is not a vengeful or jealous God; it is incapable of vengeance and jealousy.

• God cannot answer your prayers. Praying to this God, at least in the sense of appealing to God to intercede in your life in some way, is utterly pointless. (Kauffman does not discuss prayer in the broader sense of contemplation, reflection or meditation.)

• This God is not omniscient or omnipotent, but I think you could argue it is omnipresent, at least in the biosphere.

• God does indeed work in mysterious ways. Emergence and evolution are unpredictable, and partially uncontrolled by natural law.

• Lastly, God is a human invention. We, or at least Kauffman, have decided to revere the ceaseless creativity in the universe, to hold it sacred, and to consciously elevate it symbolically to the status of God. Humans have created this God, not the other way around.

For people who already believe in a God or gods, this new definition may be unnecessary, inadequate, even downright offensive. But for atheists, agnostics, secular humanists and other non-believers Kauffman suggests this may be “God enough.” He thinks this God can help rejoin the two cultures by providing a scientific underpinning for morality and spirituality.

He’s not claiming this should be the only view of God, just that this view can serve as common ground for both secular and believing people.

“It is this view that I hope can be shared across all our religious traditions, embracing those like myself, who do not believe in a Creator God, as well as those who do. This view of God can be a shared religious and spiritual space for us all.” (p. 6)

In that shared spiritual space, Kauffman invites us to work together to develop a new global ethic

Towards a Global Ethic

In our increasingly globalized world we interact with, compete with, and sometimes fight with more people and peoples than at any time in human history. We need a global ethic, a set of principles by which we can live peacefully with each other in an ever-evolving world we co-create. What would a global ethic based on the emergent worldview look like? How does emergence help us get from “is” to “ought”? Well he doesn’t lay it all out Ten Commandments style, but Kauffman does outline some principles (Again, some of this is my interpretation.)

• Responsibility: Humans created God, not the other way around. It is up to us to choose what we value, what has meaning. God cannot tell us. Equally important, we possess agency. We are therefore responsible for our lives and the decisions we make.

• Humility: We live forward into mystery. We do not know and yet we still must act. Therefore, humility must be at the core of our ethics.

• Tolerance: A direct corollary of humility. We must be tolerant of other views, approaches and cultures both because we do not know and could be wrong, and also out of mutual respect for each other because we are all participants in the co-creation of the world. Intolerance, extremism, and fundamentalism all run contrary to this ethic.

• Respect for diversity: This flows naturally from tolerance and humility since diversity is a direct outcome of creativity.

• Reverence for life: Not just human life, all life and the entire ecosystem, since all of life evolved together.

• Freedom: Kauffman calls creativity a “vast freedom” and of course human creativity has always broken free of any artificial constraints placed upon it.

• Evolving world: Evolution is deeply embedded in the natural world. It’s embedded not just in the biosphere, but also in human culture, technology, and law. Since agency, meaning and value arise from evolution then, “evolution is not the enemy of ethics but its first source.” (p. 260).

• Evolving morality: There are no absolute and universal moral principles. Our world evolves and we are its co-creators. Our ethics must evolve too.

“To say that our morality evolves is not to invoke blind moral relativism. Rather, it is to invite respect for past moral wisdom, a hesitancy to alter old moral holdings, with enough flexibility to adapt to new facts.” (p. 271)

“We must not, therefore, seek self-consistent moral axioms that that hold forever and settle all moral questions self-consistently. “ (p. 271)

“… there are no self-consistent axioms from which we can derive all moral behavior, Rather there are convergent and conflicting moral views, and as thoughtful, reflective, mature people, we engage in moral reasoning with our full humanity about situations, laws, practices, and ways of life,” (p. 287)

The history of legal reasoning and evolving jurisprudence based on British Common Law is a good example of this.

Some of these principles, or versions of them, can be found in most religions, others are unconventional and bound to be controversial. To be fair, Kauffman isn’t claiming to start a new religion here, though when you redefine God you are, to say the least, dipping your toes in those waters. Whether these principles can gain wide enough acceptance to be the basis for a shared global ethic remains to be seen.

* * *

Unsolicited Feedback

Until now, I’ve tried to set my own views aside (mostly) and just summarize the book. In this last section, I’d like to offer some thoughts — my unsolicited feedback.

First, some obligatory disclosures: My heritage and upbringing are Jewish, but today I’d call myself an atheist. I tend to put my faith in the power of reason and science. I particularly like the scientific philosophy of Karl Popper as well as some of his social philosophy, such as his support for liberal democracy. And I think evolution is a powerful framework that helps explain a great deal about our environment and about human society.

That said I recognize there are things about the universe we do not, and maybe cannot, comprehend through reason and science alone. It’s hard to walk through an old growth forest or swim along a coral reef and not feel awed by the beauty, variety and abundance of life. Do we perhaps feel some deep connection to a “life force”, the creativity in the universe? Similarly, when we visit a museum or an art gallery, when we walk through a cathedral or temple, when we listen to a symphony orchestra or a group of Taiko drummers, we feel something stirring deep within us. Something like reverence mixed with transcendence perhaps; a connection to something greater than ourselves. Maybe what we feel is a connection to the creativity in the human spirit. Perhaps we feel an echo of this spirit within ourselves.

Well, I’m not a poet or an artist, so I won’t carry on like this too long. The point I want to make is that I think Kauffman has hold of something profound in his reverence for the ceaseless creativity in the universe. I’ll even go along with calling it sacred.

I agree with him when he says reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives.

By providing a scientific underpinning for agency, meaning and values, I think Kauffman has made a start at describing a worldview that could help bridge the two cultures. This is perhaps the book’s greatest contribution. There’s a long way to go to see it fully developed. Kauffman suggests this is the work of generations. I think he’s right. We still need moral guidance, we still need community, and we still need rituals to celebrate and mourn seasonal and life events. Alain de Botton suggests in his excellent TED Talk Atheism 2.0 that we should “steal” some of the rituals and practices of established religions to accomplish these things.

I like how Kauffman emphasizes the need for dialog in moral reasoning. This echoes the need for dialog and conversation put forward by Princeton philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah in his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. But where Appiah says there are universal moral principles (even if we may never agree on them) as well as local ones, Kauffman flat out asserts their non-existence.

I just really, really wish he hadn’t named it “God.” He’s not the first to suggest that humans create their gods; plenty of historians and social theorists have said the same thing. I understand why he’s done it: Kauffman is trying to position the emergent worldview as common ground across established religions and traditions, and to do that he apparently believes he needs to appropriate our most powerful symbol. It’s a bold stance, no question, and it certainly grabs attention. But pragmatically, from the standpoint of getting his ideas accepted and adopted, I think Kauffman has done himself a disservice that detracts from the goals of the book. It’s a shame really, because the goals are worthy.

One of Kauffman’s aims is to define a shared spiritual space where we can build a global ethic that spans cultures and religions. But by choosing to define a new God, Kauffman automatically invites comparison to existing gods. He sets up a competition with other religions. Introducing a new God doesn’t help create common ground, it just stirs up already contested ground.

Another goal is to heal the rift between the two cultures. He has started to do this by establishing the scientific basis for agency, meaning and values. This is apparently a radical idea, even within the scientific community. Adding God into the mix won’t heal the rift any faster. On the contrary, atheists, agnostics and other non-believers probably find God unnecessary – they have no need of that hypothesis – and believers probably find Kauffman’s God inadequate if not offensive

Kauffman himself anticipates many of these objections.

“The very notion that we might choose to reinvent the sacred may be too threatening to embrace, or may seem pointless to billions of people of faith, or equally to secular humanists; indeed, it is important to realize that for millions if not roughly a billion of those of us who do not believe in a Creator God, we the secular children of the Enlightenment often feel that the very words sacred and God are utterly corrupted. Many who feel this way are revulsed by the death wrought in the name of God, and the aggrandizing certainty of some religious fundamentalists. The same secularists rightly fear any “sacred” for fear that it can become totalitarian.” (p. 282-3)

Yes sir! I think that about sums it up for me.

It boils down to this: We need spirituality, transcendence, and connection to our full humanity. A revered and even sacred creativity helps provide those things. But secularists don’t need a god, and believers already have all the God or gods they need.

Many faiths ascribe the creativity in the universe to a God or gods. Virtually all faiths and cultures have a creation story. Emergence could very well serve as the creation story for the secular world. Better yet, it’s a continuing story, one we all participate in. And like all creation stories, this one carries moral lessons too.

Whether we believe in god or not, the creativity in the universe is a source of wonderment and does indeed deserve reverence. It doesn’t have to be God to be sacred.

Book Review: Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 2006

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, is about finding ways for different people, and peoples, to live together in our increasingly globalized world. Born in England, raised in Ghana, and now a professor of philosophy at Princeton University in the United States, he brings a personal and practical approach to the problem.

Interactions between people of different cultures and different values are becoming more frequent, more inevitable. How do we to live together on our shared planet?

For Appiah, cosmopolitanism is a large part of the answer. He defines cosmopolitanism as universality plus difference. Everyone matters. We therefore have obligations to each other, to everyone in fact. We share, or should share, a universal concern for each other. Yet there are also legitimate differences among us. There are many sets of values worth living by. We should therefore be concerned about, and interested in, the lives of particular individuals within particular cultures.

Without clearly articulating what they are, Appiah argues there are values that are universal and those that are local. There is room for both.

Appiah’s approach is based on a conversation: particular individuals with particular differences need to keep talking with each other to build understanding and at the very least to get used to each other.

The book starts with an examination of the question of universal truths. Is our grasp of truth like looking into a shattered mirror where we each hold fragments of a common universal truth, yet none of us has the whole? Or are there really multiple mirrors, possibly one per person, and therefore multiple truths? Appiah, while stating that there are universal values, seems to come down on the side of multiple mirrors where often the best we can do is agree to disagree.

Interestingly, he doesn’t go into the scientific view which would be that we approach truth gradually, hopefully asymptotically, even if we never reach it, although that is in fact what his conversational model seems to lead to.

Doesn’t this all just lead to moral relativism? Nobody seems to like relativism. Those who think their set of beliefs are best and ought to be universal of course reject it. Appiah rejects it too because as he says it just leads to silence, not conversation.

Appiah discusses various types of moral disagreements. At the highest level, we can disagree about moral values, such as, for example the value of a human life. However, even if we have a shared vocabulary and understanding of certain values, we often disagree on their application to specific circumstances. And then, even in cases of agreement on value language and application we can differ on the weight given to different circumstances or moral rules. He describes values as “essentially contestable.”

These differences can occur both within and between groups.

Fortunately, we don’t actually need to agree on values in order to get along. All we need to do is agree on how to act towards one another and to live in harmony with each other – a far easier task.

Appiah argues that agreement on universal moral principles is not necessary for dialog. Such agreement is anyway hard, if not impossible. The point is to engage in conversation with particular individuals of particular cultures, find some common ground, some share value and build understanding from there.

“… the points of entry to cross-cultural conversations are things that are shared by those who are in the conversation. They do not need to be universal; all they need to be is what these particular people have in common. Once we have found enough we share, there is the further possibility that we will be able to enjoy discovering things we do not yet share. That is one of the payoffs of cosmopolitan curiosity. We can learn from each other, or we can simply be intrigued by alternative ways of thinking, feeling and acting.” (p. 97)

Change comes from getting used to a new idea, even if we don’t agree with it (at first). Conversation helps us get used to new ideas and to each other.

He also says we don’t need shared identity in order to build connections between people. That is, we don’t need to share nationality or faith or other identity attributes. Connections between people are built not through shared identity, but despite difference. We are already connected to each other through our shared humanity, our shared human potential, and through imagination. In fact, traditional connections through identity attributes are no less a product of the imagination.

Appiah comes closest to articulating a set of universal moral principles in the final chapter of the book when discussing our obligations to strangers.

“People have needs – health, food, shelter, education – that must be met if they are to lead decent lives. There are certain options that they ought to have: to seek sexual satisfaction with consenting partners, to have children if they wish to, to move from place to place, to express and share ideas, to help manage their societies, to exercise their imaginations. … And there are certain obstacles to a good life that ought not to be imposed upon them: needless pain, unwarranted contempt, the mutilation of their bodies. To recognize that everyone is entitled, where possible, to have their basic needs met, to exercise certain human capabilities, and to be protected from certain harms, is not yet to say how all these things are to be assured.” (p. 163)

Accepting all this, what then are our obligations to strangers, especially distant ones?

Appiah takes a pragmatic approach, outlining some parameters without claiming a final answer:

• Our obligations to each other are met first and foremost within the framework of nation states. It is nation states that are primarily responsible for ensuring the needs of their own people are met. And it is also through nation states that we help others when their own local states fail to meet their needs. Appiah notes the importance of good governance as a prerequisite. Famines may be triggered by natural disasters but they don’t happen in democracies, for example.
• Our second obligation is to do our fair share; but to recognize we do not bear the burden alone. We are not obliged, for example, to bankrupt ourselves in order to help the poor.
• Thirdly, both our obligations and our sentiments are naturally greatest towards those closest to us.
• Lastly, Appiah suggests we take into account diverse values and priorities. Many things matter to a good life, and we don’t all agree on what these are, nor what their priorities are.

There’s something fundamentally hopeful and pragmatic in this approach. There are universal moral values, and particular local ones. We can’t hope to ever finally enumerate and prioritize moral values across cultures, Appiah says. But that shouldn’t be the goal, and maybe shouldn’t matter at all. The point is that conversation between particular people is the way to foster understanding and acceptance, even if agreement can never be completely achieved. That is the cosmopolitan project.

Jeffrey Sachs @ Seattle Town Hall

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs spoke yesterday evening at Seattle Town Hall about his new book The Price of Civilization:  Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity. 

For anyone not familiar with his work, Jeffrey Sachs is about as far left as you get here in the US.  Paul Krugman is the only other person I can think of who comes close.  It’s kind of ironic really since he first came to fame (or at least I first heard of him) back in the 1990’s when he was prescribing “shock therapy” to Eastern European countries moving from Communism to market economies.  Right is the new left, I suppose.

Sachs book, and his talk last night, are about the current economic and political crisis in the US.  I haven’t read the book, but I scribbled a few notes. Here’s a summary of his remarks.

Sachs traces the roots of the current crisis back to the 1970’s when the US faced a number of serious challenges, including:

• The end of the Bretton Woods system, the international monetary system that had been in place since the end of World War 2. 
• The oil price shocks of 1973 and 1979 which set off a period of prolonged high inflation
• The long, painful ending of the Vietnam War
• Watergate
• The beginning of the end of US dominance of the auto industry as Japanese car makers started to make inroads in the US market
• Lastly, and most significantly but least recognized at the time, the opening of the Chinese economy to world markets in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping. 

According to Sachs, today’s crisis originates in a misdiagnosis of these events by Ronald Reagan (elected president in 1980), by Reagan’s reaction to them, and by the continuation of Reagan’s policies more-or-less unchanged by every Administration since, Democratic and Republican. 

Reagan’s diagnosis was his famous assertion that “government is the problem.”  To “fix” it he set about dismantling the US government; a trend which continues to this day.

The Republicans, Sachs says, have for the last 30 years demonized government and cut taxes for the rich.  The Democrats have done basically the same thing, they just agonize about it.

What the events of the 1970’s really signified, Sachs claims, was the beginning of the modern era of globalization.  While globalization has had tremendous benefits, it also causes real problems.  For the US, the main problem has been the elimination of millions of manufacturing jobs.  More precisely, globalization has eliminated a path to the middle class for people with a basic high school education.  As evidence, Sachs notes that median real incomes for male workers in the US has been flat since 1973. 

This in turn is leading to a more divided, unequal and less socially mobile society.  A high school education is no longer a path to a decent middle class life in the US.  People with college and higher education – only about one third of the US work force – have done much better, and their unemployment rates are far lower.  Income and wealth inequalities are larger today than they’ve been at any time since the Great Depression.  

Sachs prescription won’t appeal to many people:  higher taxes.  On income, wealth, corporate profits, financial transactions, and carbon.  He didn’t have time last night to go into details about who would pay how much, but it’s going to be mostly people at the top since all the economic gains of that last 30 years have gone to that group.

His rationale is that if we want “civilization”, that is, a society that provides decent health care, affordable college education, research in basic science, a system of justice, environmental protection, etc. we need a functioning government to provide them.  The free market won’t.  And in no other industrial country do people expect the market to provide them.  (Sachs uses the countries of northern Europe as his “touchstones”.)  Government must.  It’s absurd to think we can accomplish all these things by slashing spending and cutting taxes, in other words by dismantling government.

I think Sachs’ analysis of the situation – his diagnosis — is really compelling.  In the US today, with a gridlocked Congress reflecting a deeply divided electorate, we have a situation where there’s vehement disagreement about what the problem is, let alone what the solution should be.  Sachs’ asks us to take a step back and look at the situation from a longer term perspective.  I think this leads to some pretty important insights.  He’s saying the US has never seriously addressed the challenges posed by globalization.  This makes sense to me.  It helps explain the deep-seated sense of frustration and unfairness that’s felt across the country these days, and seems to be driving the recent “occupy X” protests.

Like most people, I’m not wildly excited about paying more taxes, and I certainly do not believe “government is the solution” in all cases either.  But the truth is the US is about the lowest taxed industrialized nation.  It doesn’t appear we’re much better off though.  In fact by important metrics such as life expectancy we’re worse off.  And it really is ludicrous to think the country can reduce its deficit, get the economy growing again and have the kind of “civilization” we want without increasing the revenue side of the government’s budget.  (Sachs quips that once you cross the border into D.C. “arithmetic stops.”)

With an election in just over a year, and a completely dysfunctional Congress, it’s highly unlikely any of Sachs’ ideas will get implemented.  Still, in the face of Tea Party nihilism, it’s valuable to have a voice like Sachs’ on the other end of the political spectrum providing a deeper, more coherent understanding of our current predicament, and urging us to recognize there are other paths we as a society can choose to follow. 

Pakistan’s War with Itself

Pamela Constable gave a talk at the UW Law School this evening to the Seattle World Affairs Council about her latest book, Playing with Fire: Pakistan at War with Itself.   Constable is a deputy foreign editor at the Washington Post.  She has extensive experience reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other places in South Asia.  Here’s my summary of her talk.

Pakistan is the sixth largest country in the world, by population.  For most of us, it is “a country of events,” as she put it, a place where things, usually bad things, happen.  Constable’s goal this evening was to help us understand the political, social, and religious challenges facing the country. 

The core paradox about Pakistan is that historically it’s a democratic, moderate Muslim, militarily powerful country with enormous natural & economic resources that has failed to achieve its potential.  Worse yet, political and religious extremists are essentially at war with the moderate center of the country – hence the title of her book. Why?

Her talk was a little rambling and anecdotal, but in the end managed to illustrate the problems facing the country.  Here are a few key points I took away:

• Ordinary people in Pakistan have essentially no access to justice.  Corruption is rampant from the courts on down to local police and city officials.  More importantly cases are decided not on the basis of legal merit but on the relative political clout of the people involved. 
• State-run schools are terrible and leave a void that madrassas, often Saudi funded, have moved to fill.  Worse there are no jobs for well-educated Pakistanis to move into, so many leave the country.
• People, led by politicians, blame external forces – the West and India are favorites — for Pakistan’s problems and are in denial about the domestic origins of many of them.  The military has only recently begun to acknowledge that militant groups created originally to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan have turned against the Pakistani state. 
• The most disturbing trend Constable discussed in the increasing emotional attachment of people, even well-educated people, to extremist religion, and the use of religion as a justification for violence.  For example, She described the Jan. 2011 assassination of Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab province.  Taseer, an Islamic moderate, was killed by one of his own bodyguards, apparently in retribution for his opposition to harsh anti-blasphemy laws.  Thousands of people demonstrated in the streets – in support of the murderer!
• And lest I forget, did the Pakistani authorities know that Osama bin Laden had been living in their midst in Abbottabad? Constable thought that someone in Pakistan certainly knew but she doubted the highest authorities, especially military authorities were aware of it. Her rationale is that the military leaders were so humiliated by the US operation and its blatant disregard for Pakistani sovereignty that the damage to the Army’s prestige is on par with the loss of Bangladesh.  I dunno …

In her wrap-up, Constable talked about the need to strengthen the political and religious center in all countries. Extremists, she said, are the real threat everywhere.

I must say that after listening to this talk, the future of Pakistan looks pretty bleak to me. There doesn’t appear to be a competing narrative to compete with religious extremism that can offer its people hope and dignity. 

Tropic of Chaos

Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, gave a talk this evening sponsored by the Seattle World Affairs Council.

I haven’t read the book yet, but here’s a synopsis from this evening’s talk.  Parenti argues that climate change, far from being some medium- to long-term threat, is having a direct impact today on global conflicts primarily in the developing world.  He worked through a few examples to illustrate his thesis.

In Afghanistan, the United States and its allies are attempting to eradicate the poppy crop.  They’re using a variety of means including destroying poppy fields and attempting to induce farmers to switch to other crops. However, it turns out that poppies are drought-resistant.  They require only one-fifth the amount of water as wheat, and Afghanistan is experiencing one of its worst droughts in decades.  Farmers literally cannot survive growing wheat.  Meanwhile the Taliban apparently favors allowing farmers to grow whatever crop they choose. 

In Kyrgyzstan, most of the country’s power comes from hydroelectric generation.   A recent drought has caused water levels in the dams to drop dramatically, reducing the amount of power that could be generated.  This in turn led the government to ration power.   In 2009-2010, Kyrgyzstan was hit by one of the coldest winters in memory, further driving up demand for scarce power to heat homes.  Meanwhile the country’s president, in preparation for privatizing the government-owned utilities, doubled electricity rates.  People took to the streets.  The government was thrown out of power.

In India, a Maoist group known as Naxalites has been fighting an insurgency against the Indian government, starting in West Bengal in the 1960’s and moving south into Andhra Pradesh, fighting for land reform.  Farmers in this region, known as the “Red Corridor,” can no longer obtain low cost loans for seeds or fertilizer from the government and instead turn to loan-sharks.  Loan-sharks insist the farmers grow cotton rather than wheat (farmers could eat the wheat crop in case of emergency, depriving the loan-sharks of their collateral).  But as more cotton is grown the price falls leaving farmers further in debt.  Here too drought is causing crop failure to become more frequent, and indeed as the drought moves south, so too does support for the Naxalites.

These are just three examples of a pattern of events in which climate change interacts with other social and political conditions to create or exacerbate conflict.  Other important causal factors he cites are:

• Lingering side-effects of the Cold War including social upheaval but mainly the availability of massive quantities of cheap weapons. 
• Withdrawal of state support for local farmers and herdsmen under new neo-liberal economic policies, forcing these groups to look elsewhere for support. 
• Counter-insurgency tactics by the US and other militaries which often involve migration of villages and the destruction of local social fabrics. 

Here in the US, Parenti asserts, that the government’s response has varied from anemic to the outright denial of climate change by the GOP.   Interestingly, the Pentagon is among the most thoughtful branches of government on this issue.  They take climate change very seriously, and do not question the validity of climate change science.  Instead in their Quadrennial Defense Review the Pentagon notes that it will likely be involved in more conflicts caused by climate change.  Alas, their plan for dealing with such conflict will rely heavily on counter-insurgency which Parenti notes makes matters even worse.  However, the Pentagon is not responsible for the policy decisions; that rests with the politicians. 

Overall this was a really interesting, though somewhat grim talk.  Parenti showed how a variety of complex and inter-related factors – now including climate change – are converging to create or exacerbate conflict and violence. 

I’m looking forward to reading the book.