Richard Carrier has replied to my post on Friday with a forthright defence of the ancient world combined with a bit of retreat from his previous rhetoric. I’ll be saying a bit more on the question on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins is back. This time he is going after astrology, spiritualism, homeopathy and the new age. His new series, The Enemies of Reason, begins on Channel 4 on 13th August. There is a lengthy interview and preview in the Sunday Times which generally approves of the enterprise. Melanie Phillips in the Daily Bigot (whoops, I mean the Daily Mail) is rather less sympathetic. Personally, I find the phrase ‘breaking a butterfly on the wheel’ comes to mind when I think of setting Darwin’s rottweiler on a bunch of harmless hippies.
Finally, in this rather disconnected blog entry, I’ve recently finished reading Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman by Frances Stonor Saunders (published as The Devil’s Broker Seeking Gold, God, and Glory in Fourteenth-Century Italy in the US). It’s OK. Saunders is a journalist whose previous book was on the CIA’s covert work to influence the arts and culture. Quite why this qualified her to write about late-medieval Italy, I have no idea. But in the weird and wacky world of publishing, having a successful book to your name and journalistic contacts is worth far more than being competent to write the book in question.
Anyway, as I said Hawkwood is OK. Saunders can write clearly and has done a fair bit of leg work in the library. There are occasional patches of the purple prose which is now obligatory in popular history, but just make it look like her editor has asked her to liven things up. The story she has to tell is a good one and it is reasonably well told. The problem is simply that she has not really grasped the material. Although there is a lengthy list of primary sources in the bibliography, most of her quotations come from secondary works. Saunders does not appear to have sat down and read all the contemporary chronicles and sources. She has clearly read the Canterbury Tales and some Dante, which is a start, but there is no sign she has mastered anything that isn’t available in English translation. The result is her narrative is often cursory and disconnected. Stuff happens, wars are lost, cities surrender and Saunders has absolutely no idea why. It maybe no one else does, but there are ways for historians to handle this. Hawkwood should have been a work of narrative history based on the original sources of the kind patented by Runciman, Wolfson, Freeman and Lord Norwich. Sadly, it is a much lesser beast although its little light does shine brighter in the murk of the current popular history market.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Monday, August 06, 2007
Friday, August 03, 2007
Stirrups, horse harnesses and Richard Carrier
Apologies for the lack of a post on Wednesday. I had my PhD viva and could hardly lift a finger after two and a half hours of being grilled on sixteenth century natural philosophy and mathematics.
In a recent post on his blog, Richard Carrier has attacked the work of the distinguished American medieval historian Lynn White. Scroll down to the section headed ‘Horse S**t’ in the blog post here. Carrier’s motive is quite clear from his references to the ‘Horse collar of Christ’ and heavy cavalry as a miracle of Jesus. In fact, the relevant book by Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, makes almost no mention of Christianity. While White was certainly a Christian, he is most famous for a 1967 article blaming our current environmental problems on Christianity, which is hardly the action of an unqualified admirer of the religion. Carrier, of course, is up to his normal anti-Christian bashing that we have come to expect from this luminary of Internet Infidels.
Carrier mentions White's theory about the stirrup. White correctly notes that this made heavy cavalry possible and that European warfare was revolutionised by it. Carrier sneers at this. He points out that the Romans used four horned saddles which worked almost as well as stirrups. What he doesn’t tell us is that these saddles were big, heavy and expensive. There is simply no way that you could equip a large contingent of light cavalry with them and stay within budget. And Carrier admits they were no good for heavy cavalry who really did need stirrups to function. He then tries to suggest that heavy cavalry did not radically alter warfare because it could be seen off by infantry in a defended position. True enough – everyone knew attacking dug-in troops with cavalry was suicidal (though that didn’t stop some fools from trying it). But once the infantry started to move, heavy cavalry could smash it to pieces in the field and often did. Witness the Battle of Hastings where the Saxon shield wall held off the Norman cavalry all day. But as soon as they broke formation they were dead meat. It was not until the fourteenth century that the real answer to heavy cavalry appeared – the pike. These long spears allowed infantry to form a prickly hedgehog that cavalry could not penetrate. The trouble was that pikes require trained professional soldiers who are able to move in formation. These didn’t exist in the feudal armies of the High Middle Ages or the barbarian hordes that preceded them. Warfare is a game of paper, scissors, stone. If you have heavy cavalry, you rule the roost until someone invents scissors.
The horse-collar too, was an improvement that, coupled with horse shoes, three field rotation and heavy ploughs, allowed agriculture to increase yields well beyond what the Romans managed. Where White went wrong was to assume these changes happened overnight. Of course, as we learn from Robert Fossier in the New Cambridge Medieval History, progress was actually much slower and the agricultural system that White assumed was in place by 900AD did not in fact become ubiquitous until after 1200.
So, White’s work has been criticised, adapted and finessed. That’s all within the rules of the game. But his fundamental point that the Middle Ages were a period of technological advance is unchallenged. Carrier’s blinkered hatred of Christianity is also preventing him from see the facts.
By the way, further to my recent post, it seems the Jesus Project is coming a part at the seams. Jim West and others have been finding all sorts of people are listed as fellows who know nothing about it including Richard Bauckham and Dom Crossan. Both have asked to be removed. Richard Carrier is still listed as a fellow though....
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
In a recent post on his blog, Richard Carrier has attacked the work of the distinguished American medieval historian Lynn White. Scroll down to the section headed ‘Horse S**t’ in the blog post here. Carrier’s motive is quite clear from his references to the ‘Horse collar of Christ’ and heavy cavalry as a miracle of Jesus. In fact, the relevant book by Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change, makes almost no mention of Christianity. While White was certainly a Christian, he is most famous for a 1967 article blaming our current environmental problems on Christianity, which is hardly the action of an unqualified admirer of the religion. Carrier, of course, is up to his normal anti-Christian bashing that we have come to expect from this luminary of Internet Infidels.
Carrier mentions White's theory about the stirrup. White correctly notes that this made heavy cavalry possible and that European warfare was revolutionised by it. Carrier sneers at this. He points out that the Romans used four horned saddles which worked almost as well as stirrups. What he doesn’t tell us is that these saddles were big, heavy and expensive. There is simply no way that you could equip a large contingent of light cavalry with them and stay within budget. And Carrier admits they were no good for heavy cavalry who really did need stirrups to function. He then tries to suggest that heavy cavalry did not radically alter warfare because it could be seen off by infantry in a defended position. True enough – everyone knew attacking dug-in troops with cavalry was suicidal (though that didn’t stop some fools from trying it). But once the infantry started to move, heavy cavalry could smash it to pieces in the field and often did. Witness the Battle of Hastings where the Saxon shield wall held off the Norman cavalry all day. But as soon as they broke formation they were dead meat. It was not until the fourteenth century that the real answer to heavy cavalry appeared – the pike. These long spears allowed infantry to form a prickly hedgehog that cavalry could not penetrate. The trouble was that pikes require trained professional soldiers who are able to move in formation. These didn’t exist in the feudal armies of the High Middle Ages or the barbarian hordes that preceded them. Warfare is a game of paper, scissors, stone. If you have heavy cavalry, you rule the roost until someone invents scissors.
The horse-collar too, was an improvement that, coupled with horse shoes, three field rotation and heavy ploughs, allowed agriculture to increase yields well beyond what the Romans managed. Where White went wrong was to assume these changes happened overnight. Of course, as we learn from Robert Fossier in the New Cambridge Medieval History, progress was actually much slower and the agricultural system that White assumed was in place by 900AD did not in fact become ubiquitous until after 1200.
So, White’s work has been criticised, adapted and finessed. That’s all within the rules of the game. But his fundamental point that the Middle Ages were a period of technological advance is unchallenged. Carrier’s blinkered hatred of Christianity is also preventing him from see the facts.
By the way, further to my recent post, it seems the Jesus Project is coming a part at the seams. Jim West and others have been finding all sorts of people are listed as fellows who know nothing about it including Richard Bauckham and Dom Crossan. Both have asked to be removed. Richard Carrier is still listed as a fellow though....
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Religion as an extended phenotypes
A few posts ago I explained why I didn’t find two popular evolutionary explanations for religion very convincing. I attacked the idea that religion was a harmful by-product of something useful and the idea that it was a meme that was good at spreading itself despite being harmful to its host.
Ironically, it was Richard Dawkins who also produced the most popular exposition of what I think is the best way to study man’s religious impulse, in his book The Extended Phenotype. In that book, he explained that it was not just bodies that genes could build and evolution could act on. Things like a bird of paradise’s dance, a termite nest and a beaver’s dam are also evolutionary adaptations just as much as the peacock’s tail and gubby’s spots. That, I think, is probably also true of the religious instinct. It is a part of our extended phenotype, an adaptation that humans have evolved because it is good for us. After all we have been religious for an extremely long time if archaeological evidence of burial practices and cave paintings are anything to go by. Even if it started off as a by-product, the religious instinct has clearly been selected for in the meantime. In fact, many evolutionary adaptations start off as useless appendages or features that natural selection works into something much more productive. Perhaps the initial impetus was from our desire to see causes in the world or to impart personality to rocks and the sky. This is certainly an area worthy of study and I expect that archaeologists can tell us rather more about this than has percolated into evolutionary biology.
The fact that religion is preserved by evolution doesn’t tell us which religions might be true but nor does it mean that they are all false. Imagine that we lived in a world where religion really had held back progress as Hitchens and Dawkins absurdly believe. In that case, it wouldn’t exist because religious societies would have been wiped out by the non-religious way back in prehistory. So, the next question I want to ask (skipping the ultimate origins of religion) is exactly how it has improved mankind’s lot. How does religion increase our ability to survive and procreate? To answer the question, I will be linking what we’ve discussed about game theory, the decline of violence and in-groups/out-groups.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Ironically, it was Richard Dawkins who also produced the most popular exposition of what I think is the best way to study man’s religious impulse, in his book The Extended Phenotype. In that book, he explained that it was not just bodies that genes could build and evolution could act on. Things like a bird of paradise’s dance, a termite nest and a beaver’s dam are also evolutionary adaptations just as much as the peacock’s tail and gubby’s spots. That, I think, is probably also true of the religious instinct. It is a part of our extended phenotype, an adaptation that humans have evolved because it is good for us. After all we have been religious for an extremely long time if archaeological evidence of burial practices and cave paintings are anything to go by. Even if it started off as a by-product, the religious instinct has clearly been selected for in the meantime. In fact, many evolutionary adaptations start off as useless appendages or features that natural selection works into something much more productive. Perhaps the initial impetus was from our desire to see causes in the world or to impart personality to rocks and the sky. This is certainly an area worthy of study and I expect that archaeologists can tell us rather more about this than has percolated into evolutionary biology.
The fact that religion is preserved by evolution doesn’t tell us which religions might be true but nor does it mean that they are all false. Imagine that we lived in a world where religion really had held back progress as Hitchens and Dawkins absurdly believe. In that case, it wouldn’t exist because religious societies would have been wiped out by the non-religious way back in prehistory. So, the next question I want to ask (skipping the ultimate origins of religion) is exactly how it has improved mankind’s lot. How does religion increase our ability to survive and procreate? To answer the question, I will be linking what we’ve discussed about game theory, the decline of violence and in-groups/out-groups.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Steven Pinker fails to boil blood
A correspondent kindly informed me that Steven Pinker, whose work I often find very interesting, has been trying to stoke up some controversy. He has suggested some questions that he thinks so controversial they will make people’s blood boil. Well, after reading through them, I reached for a thermometer and found my body temperature had not increased by a fraction of a degree. So, I thought I might try and answer his questions as well. But before I do so, I’d like to pose one of my own that Pinker did not feel it worth asking:
“In a hundred years time, will people look upon our attitudes towards abortion with the same horrified incomprehension that we feel about nineteenth century slavery?”
I’d be interested in Pinker’s answer. Now to his questions:
1: "Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?" A: Yes, obviously.
2: "Were the events in the Bible fictitious -- not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires?" A: No. Many of them are confirmed by other sources.
3: "Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?" A: Possibly. The fall of communism led to a big improvement.
4: "Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage? A: If it is anything like as prevalent as we have been led to believe, then many people are able to make a full recovery.
5: "Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?" A: Yes, according to Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse (which I will review in a few weeks time when I’ve finished it).
6: "Do men have an innate tendency to rape?" A: Most don’t. Some do.
7: "Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?" A: Yes. But it was not a crime worth paying.
8: "Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?" A: Yes.
9: "Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?" A: I doubt it. Increasing supply tends to increase demand.
10: "Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?" A: No idea.
11: "Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?" A: Some elements of morality have evolutionary explanations. Others are much harder to explain in this way.
12: "Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?" A: No.
13: "Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?" A: Never heard of this one before.
14: "Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?" A: No.
15: "Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?" A: Obviously, yes.
16: "Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?" A: A trick question, I think. Nazism was only around for 15 years. At that tie it certainly killed more than religions.
17: "Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?" A: No. Torture is ineffective as the victim just tells the torturer what he thinks he wants to hear. Even the Inquisition realised this.
18: "Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?" A: Yes possibly. But the decision should be made by Africans, not western environmentalists or African dictators.
19: "Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?" A: It’s possible but I’ve only seen evidence that IQs are increasing.
20: "Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?" A: A well-regulated market might work and help reduce abortion. But it would be hard to avoid abuses.
21: "Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?" A: I’ve already argued in favour of this.
22: "Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?" A: I’m not convinced this would be beneficial.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
“In a hundred years time, will people look upon our attitudes towards abortion with the same horrified incomprehension that we feel about nineteenth century slavery?”
I’d be interested in Pinker’s answer. Now to his questions:
1: "Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?" A: Yes, obviously.
2: "Were the events in the Bible fictitious -- not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires?" A: No. Many of them are confirmed by other sources.
3: "Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?" A: Possibly. The fall of communism led to a big improvement.
4: "Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage? A: If it is anything like as prevalent as we have been led to believe, then many people are able to make a full recovery.
5: "Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?" A: Yes, according to Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse (which I will review in a few weeks time when I’ve finished it).
6: "Do men have an innate tendency to rape?" A: Most don’t. Some do.
7: "Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?" A: Yes. But it was not a crime worth paying.
8: "Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?" A: Yes.
9: "Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?" A: I doubt it. Increasing supply tends to increase demand.
10: "Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?" A: No idea.
11: "Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?" A: Some elements of morality have evolutionary explanations. Others are much harder to explain in this way.
12: "Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?" A: No.
13: "Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?" A: Never heard of this one before.
14: "Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?" A: No.
15: "Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?" A: Obviously, yes.
16: "Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?" A: A trick question, I think. Nazism was only around for 15 years. At that tie it certainly killed more than religions.
17: "Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?" A: No. Torture is ineffective as the victim just tells the torturer what he thinks he wants to hear. Even the Inquisition realised this.
18: "Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?" A: Yes possibly. But the decision should be made by Africans, not western environmentalists or African dictators.
19: "Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?" A: It’s possible but I’ve only seen evidence that IQs are increasing.
20: "Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?" A: A well-regulated market might work and help reduce abortion. But it would be hard to avoid abuses.
21: "Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?" A: I’ve already argued in favour of this.
22: "Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?" A: I’m not convinced this would be beneficial.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Aristotle, Gravity and Wile E. Coyote
Wile E. Coyote’s greatest enemy is gravity. He just can’t beat it. But somehow he does manage to resist it for longer than most of us. We all know the scenes where he inadvertently runs of a cliff edge but keeps going until he stops. Only then does he fall. (Many people mistakenly believe that he falls when he realises he is only supported by thin air, but this just shows the danger of equating correlation with cause. He realises he is standing on thin air when he comes to a halt, but he actually falls because he is stationary.)
There is a crazy logic to this. As a very small kid, I remember it seemed plausible that this would happen if you did run off a cliff. Luckily I never tried it. Even though I realise today that this isn’t true, the humour of the situation depends on the fact that it might have been. We can relate to a world where gravity doesn’t take hold until your previous motion has stopped.
Chuck Jones, director of the Roadrunner cartoons, probably never read Aristotle’s Physica but he did manage to model Aristotelian dynamics nevertheless. The Physica was the main source of natural science in Christian Europe's universities during the Middle Ages until the seventeenth century. According to Aristotle, there are two kinds of motion – forced and natural. Natural motion means falling under gravity. Forced motion is anything else, for instance when you throw a ball. Now Aristotle believed that the two kinds of motion could not exist in the same object at the same time. A ball cannot move under the influence of gravity and the motion you impart by throwing it simultaneously. Thus, according to Aristotle, when you throw a ball, it travels in the direction you propelled it, gradually slowing down due to air resistance. At some point the air resistance means that it will stop. Then, gravity will take hold and the ball will drop straight down to the ground. So, only when forward momentum is used up does gravity come into effect. This is exactly what happens to the unfortunate Wile E. Coyote.
This suggests to me that Aristotle’s idea isn’t as daft as we historians often assume. Firstly, it is actually true of a ball thrown straight up into the air. The ball really does stop, stationary for an instant at the apex of its trajectory, before gravity drags it back down to earth. Secondly, Aristotle idea does have a twisted logic that a small child watching a cartoon clearly comprehends. We should be slow to mock it.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
There is a crazy logic to this. As a very small kid, I remember it seemed plausible that this would happen if you did run off a cliff. Luckily I never tried it. Even though I realise today that this isn’t true, the humour of the situation depends on the fact that it might have been. We can relate to a world where gravity doesn’t take hold until your previous motion has stopped.
Chuck Jones, director of the Roadrunner cartoons, probably never read Aristotle’s Physica but he did manage to model Aristotelian dynamics nevertheless. The Physica was the main source of natural science in Christian Europe's universities during the Middle Ages until the seventeenth century. According to Aristotle, there are two kinds of motion – forced and natural. Natural motion means falling under gravity. Forced motion is anything else, for instance when you throw a ball. Now Aristotle believed that the two kinds of motion could not exist in the same object at the same time. A ball cannot move under the influence of gravity and the motion you impart by throwing it simultaneously. Thus, according to Aristotle, when you throw a ball, it travels in the direction you propelled it, gradually slowing down due to air resistance. At some point the air resistance means that it will stop. Then, gravity will take hold and the ball will drop straight down to the ground. So, only when forward momentum is used up does gravity come into effect. This is exactly what happens to the unfortunate Wile E. Coyote.
This suggests to me that Aristotle’s idea isn’t as daft as we historians often assume. Firstly, it is actually true of a ball thrown straight up into the air. The ball really does stop, stationary for an instant at the apex of its trajectory, before gravity drags it back down to earth. Secondly, Aristotle idea does have a twisted logic that a small child watching a cartoon clearly comprehends. We should be slow to mock it.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Jane Austin Rejected
From time to time, we unpublished authors like to take petty revenge on the publishing business that won’t accept our work. Usually, this involves sending them a bestselling book under an assumed name and publicising the fact they rejected this too. The implication is that most editors wouldn’t know a bestseller if it was waved under their nose.
The latest attempt to embarrass the unflappable was when frustrated writer David Lassman sent in various classic novels and got uniformly rejected. Only one of the editors and agents realised that they had just received a proposal for Pride and Prejudice. Of course, this is not strictly fair. While I have no idea if any of the other editors would have recognised classics from the nineteenth century, almost none of them would have read the material they were sent. So all this exercise proved is that editors don’t read proposals, which we already knew. The only embarrassing thing for the publishing houses is that they claim in their standard rejection letters to have carefully considered the proposal when, plainly, they haven’t. It is this dishonesty that gets me. My agent is powerful enough to expect feedback when a submission is rejected, but even then the comments by some editors reveal that they haven’t read the proposal. And if the publishing houses aren’t even reading submissions from literary agents, what hope do authors who are unrepresented have?
Newspaper columnists have been quick to come to the editors’ defence, claiming that Jane Austin is passé and so old fashioned. This rather misses the point but the attitude of these journalists is hardly surprising. They probably have books in the pipeline and don’t want to snap at the hands they hope will feed them. As for Penguin, they have responded to having with some real bile. It’s worth a read.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
The latest attempt to embarrass the unflappable was when frustrated writer David Lassman sent in various classic novels and got uniformly rejected. Only one of the editors and agents realised that they had just received a proposal for Pride and Prejudice. Of course, this is not strictly fair. While I have no idea if any of the other editors would have recognised classics from the nineteenth century, almost none of them would have read the material they were sent. So all this exercise proved is that editors don’t read proposals, which we already knew. The only embarrassing thing for the publishing houses is that they claim in their standard rejection letters to have carefully considered the proposal when, plainly, they haven’t. It is this dishonesty that gets me. My agent is powerful enough to expect feedback when a submission is rejected, but even then the comments by some editors reveal that they haven’t read the proposal. And if the publishing houses aren’t even reading submissions from literary agents, what hope do authors who are unrepresented have?
Newspaper columnists have been quick to come to the editors’ defence, claiming that Jane Austin is passé and so old fashioned. This rather misses the point but the attitude of these journalists is hardly surprising. They probably have books in the pipeline and don’t want to snap at the hands they hope will feed them. As for Penguin, they have responded to having with some real bile. It’s worth a read.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Latin Mass
The Pope has liberalised the rules under which the Latin Mass can be used. Like most Catholics, I welcome this move, although I am not expecting to see a Tridentine Mass being celebrated anywhere near me. This is a pity. When I was at Oxford, my usual Sunday service was at St Aloysius on the Woodstock Road next door to Somerville College. As this was an oratory church, it was not under the control of the local bishop and could celebrate mass in Latin as it wished. Indeed, this was what it did at the main Sunday service complete with a first rate choir and several kilos of incense. I wasn’t even a Catholic at the time but loved the show and the fact that the pews were stuffed full every week.
Needless to say, the media are portraying the Pope’s liberalising measure as a victory for conservatives. Even more oddly, the Anti-Defamation League has been trying to make a fuss over a prayer for the conversion of the Jews. This is strange for two reasons. Firstly, the Mass contains no prayer for the conversion of the Jews. The prayer in question is part of the liturgy for Good Friday (when there is no mass celebrated) and the new ruling has not the slightest effect on this. So the controversy appears to be the usual combination of journalistic laziness and mischief-making by a pressure group. The second reason the fuss is strange is that I cannot for the life of me see how anyone could object to being prayed for.
If Muslims prayed regularly for the conversion of Christians (maybe they do, I don’t know) it would not cause me even the slightest raised eyebrow of concern. I would be utterly indifferent or perhaps slightly flattered. Likewise, I have no idea why the ADF or any other Jewish person would object to a prayer asking for their conversion. From Christopher Howse in the Telegraph, here’s a translation of the prayer in question:
I might just be an insensitive bastard, but I cannot see why anyone would get their hair mussed up over this, especially as it is spoken in a language no one understands anyway.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Needless to say, the media are portraying the Pope’s liberalising measure as a victory for conservatives. Even more oddly, the Anti-Defamation League has been trying to make a fuss over a prayer for the conversion of the Jews. This is strange for two reasons. Firstly, the Mass contains no prayer for the conversion of the Jews. The prayer in question is part of the liturgy for Good Friday (when there is no mass celebrated) and the new ruling has not the slightest effect on this. So the controversy appears to be the usual combination of journalistic laziness and mischief-making by a pressure group. The second reason the fuss is strange is that I cannot for the life of me see how anyone could object to being prayed for.
If Muslims prayed regularly for the conversion of Christians (maybe they do, I don’t know) it would not cause me even the slightest raised eyebrow of concern. I would be utterly indifferent or perhaps slightly flattered. Likewise, I have no idea why the ADF or any other Jewish person would object to a prayer asking for their conversion. From Christopher Howse in the Telegraph, here’s a translation of the prayer in question:
Let us pray also for the unbelieving Jews: that our God and Lord will remove the
veil from their hearts, so that they too may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ.
I might just be an insensitive bastard, but I cannot see why anyone would get their hair mussed up over this, especially as it is spoken in a language no one understands anyway.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Memes for the Trivial
Let me continue my discussion of evolutionary ideas on religion that I don’t find convincing. Another of Dawkins's ideas was the meme. Daniel Dennett picks up this concept as his explanation for religion in Breaking the Spell. A meme is a gobbet of culture or an idea that spreads from mind to mind. The point about a meme is that its success in spreading is not a function of whether the gobbet is true, useful, beautiful or good. Instead, Dennett postulates memes spread simply because they are good at spreading. This is a tautology, of course, but it is not as uninsightful as it sounds. After all, there is a law of economics that states that the value of anything is equal to what someone is willing to pay for it. This is also a tautology but somehow socialist economics was built on the idea that it isn’t true.
The problem with memes is that almost all the evidence suggests that, in the long term, ideas spread because they benefit the group that holds them. They are, in evolution-speak, an adaptation just as much as large brains and a biped posture. No one has managed to predict what makes ideas inherently likely to spread (think of the money to be made if you could do this!). Rather, sociologists have worked on the basis that the ideas that are successful are the ones that benefit their holders. This is true even of previously popular ideas like socialist economics which have now become extinct because they doesn’t work. A society based on socialism will always fail relative to a society based on a market economy.
So there may be room for memes as a short-term explanation of how ideas are transmitted but not as part of the long-term story of the evolution of culture. Crazy Frog, the Spice Girls, the Filofax and other ephemeral trends might well be memes in the sense that there is something about them that lets them leap through our culture and briefly appear ubiquitous. But then they also quickly die away because there was so little of substance holding them up. Other ideas, like modernism in art or structuralism in history, have an appeal which is essentially aesthetic. This allows them to survive for longer but means that they cannot fall back on their own usefulness as tastes change. The really big concepts upon which the modern world is based, that is things like democracy, the market, science and individual liberty, survive and prosper because they benefit us all. Some concepts, like free trade, survive even though most people, falsely, think they are a bad idea.
Thus, for everything except perhaps the most trivial, memes do not get us very far. We need a more robust explanation.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
The problem with memes is that almost all the evidence suggests that, in the long term, ideas spread because they benefit the group that holds them. They are, in evolution-speak, an adaptation just as much as large brains and a biped posture. No one has managed to predict what makes ideas inherently likely to spread (think of the money to be made if you could do this!). Rather, sociologists have worked on the basis that the ideas that are successful are the ones that benefit their holders. This is true even of previously popular ideas like socialist economics which have now become extinct because they doesn’t work. A society based on socialism will always fail relative to a society based on a market economy.
So there may be room for memes as a short-term explanation of how ideas are transmitted but not as part of the long-term story of the evolution of culture. Crazy Frog, the Spice Girls, the Filofax and other ephemeral trends might well be memes in the sense that there is something about them that lets them leap through our culture and briefly appear ubiquitous. But then they also quickly die away because there was so little of substance holding them up. Other ideas, like modernism in art or structuralism in history, have an appeal which is essentially aesthetic. This allows them to survive for longer but means that they cannot fall back on their own usefulness as tastes change. The really big concepts upon which the modern world is based, that is things like democracy, the market, science and individual liberty, survive and prosper because they benefit us all. Some concepts, like free trade, survive even though most people, falsely, think they are a bad idea.
Thus, for everything except perhaps the most trivial, memes do not get us very far. We need a more robust explanation.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Monday, July 16, 2007
How Evolution Tells Us that Religion is Probably a Good Thing
David Sloan Wilson, author of Darwin's Cathedral, is interested in the evolution of religion. He has written a fascinating article for The Skeptic about his theories of religion and group selection. The article is couched as an attack (yet another) on Richard Dawkins. Dawkins bad tempered reply is rather odd because he admits that the parts of his book about evolution, to most readers the most interesting parts, are the least important.
I'm going to talk more about how Wilson's theories might help us understand the decline of violence and why religion is a 'good thing' in a few posts time. Firstly, though, I want to explain why two competing theories of religion - put forward by Dawkins and Dan Dennett, are non-starters.
Dawkins suggests, in The God Delusion, the religion is a harmful by-product of something useful. He uses the example of a moth's lunar navigation system causing it to circle in to a flame and incineration. Dawkins suggests that the propensity of children to believe what adults tell them is why they believe the religious ideas that they pick up from their parents. The main problem with this idea is that religion is not the result of a single factor, gullibility, but a wide complex of behaviours and beliefs. While it is possible that some of these are by products of something useful, it is vanishingly unlikely that they all are. Furthermore, because all these different religious traits gel so well together, it is likely that evolution has been selecting them as a piece to produce the human religiosity that we know today.
Besides, assuming that something is a harmful evolutionary by-product of something useful is assuming the exception before testing the rule. In general, we assume that a trait is an evolutionary adaptation that the organism has because it helps it out breed the opposition. It is premature to look for other explanations before we have done the leg work to discover whether or not a trait is adaptive and what its advantages might be. In the history of evolutionary theory there have been many cases where a trait’s advantages have initially escaped scientists’ notice. Further work has revealed how some forms of altruism, the peacock’s tail and (as Sloan Wilson explains) the gubby’s spots are all evolutionary adaptations that increase the fitness of their bearers.
This suggests to me that the starting point for many atheist analyses of religion is their own basic dislike for it. They assume the religion is a bad thing based on their own prejudices and inadequate anecdotal evidence. They then construct a theory that appeals to their instincts but has not scientific value at all. David Sloan Wilson, on the other hand, although an atheist himself, appears capable of looking at the subject objectively. As promised above, I will be returning to his work shortly.
In the meantime, two court cases were decided today in Britain. One declared that the slaughter of a Hindu sacred cow would be against the human rights of the group that looks after it. Another ruled that a teenage girl cannot wear an unobtrusive ring declaring her belief in chastity at school. If anyone doubted that Christianity is discriminated against in the UK while other religions are given a free ride, they need doubt no longer.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
I'm going to talk more about how Wilson's theories might help us understand the decline of violence and why religion is a 'good thing' in a few posts time. Firstly, though, I want to explain why two competing theories of religion - put forward by Dawkins and Dan Dennett, are non-starters.
Dawkins suggests, in The God Delusion, the religion is a harmful by-product of something useful. He uses the example of a moth's lunar navigation system causing it to circle in to a flame and incineration. Dawkins suggests that the propensity of children to believe what adults tell them is why they believe the religious ideas that they pick up from their parents. The main problem with this idea is that religion is not the result of a single factor, gullibility, but a wide complex of behaviours and beliefs. While it is possible that some of these are by products of something useful, it is vanishingly unlikely that they all are. Furthermore, because all these different religious traits gel so well together, it is likely that evolution has been selecting them as a piece to produce the human religiosity that we know today.
Besides, assuming that something is a harmful evolutionary by-product of something useful is assuming the exception before testing the rule. In general, we assume that a trait is an evolutionary adaptation that the organism has because it helps it out breed the opposition. It is premature to look for other explanations before we have done the leg work to discover whether or not a trait is adaptive and what its advantages might be. In the history of evolutionary theory there have been many cases where a trait’s advantages have initially escaped scientists’ notice. Further work has revealed how some forms of altruism, the peacock’s tail and (as Sloan Wilson explains) the gubby’s spots are all evolutionary adaptations that increase the fitness of their bearers.
This suggests to me that the starting point for many atheist analyses of religion is their own basic dislike for it. They assume the religion is a bad thing based on their own prejudices and inadequate anecdotal evidence. They then construct a theory that appeals to their instincts but has not scientific value at all. David Sloan Wilson, on the other hand, although an atheist himself, appears capable of looking at the subject objectively. As promised above, I will be returning to his work shortly.
In the meantime, two court cases were decided today in Britain. One declared that the slaughter of a Hindu sacred cow would be against the human rights of the group that looks after it. Another ruled that a teenage girl cannot wear an unobtrusive ring declaring her belief in chastity at school. If anyone doubted that Christianity is discriminated against in the UK while other religions are given a free ride, they need doubt no longer.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Alister McGrath on Calvin: It's Polemic but I Like It
Polemic appears to be the literature of choice at the moment. No one should be surprised that Christian responses to Dawkins and Hitchens have been rather polemical in themselves. Both sides use rhetorical devices that include accusing the other of being ignorant, not checking their facts and erecting straw men. These tactics all go back at least as far as Cicero and probably to Democritus.
A correspondent called Dan Bye has alerted me to some work he has done on Alister McGrath’s polemic The Twilight of Atheism. Now, less than two years after it came out, McGrath’s book looks like one of the least appropriately titled books of the decade. It’s right up there with Glassman and Hassett’s Dow 36,000 which came out in 1999, just before the tech-bubble burst.
Bye correctly shows that McGrath makes some mistakes in his comments on the fictitious quotation from Calvin referring to Copernicus. Regular readers will remember that the commonly quoted words of Calvin from his Commentary on Genesis “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus over that of the Holy Spirit?” were not written by him. Bye is not claiming that Calvin actually wrote these words. Rather, in trying to find out where the quotation came from, he shows that McGrath praises Thomas Kuhn for tracking down a source that Kuhn knows nothing about and, arguably, paraphrases Bertrand Russell unfairly. For me, the most interesting point that comes out of all this was to find that Kuhn believed Andrew Dickson White’s utterly unreliable History of the Warfare between Science and Theology to be a valid historical authority.
You might shrug. But Bye lets McGrath have it with both barrels for not having an iron grip on his facts while simultaneously accusing others (well, atheists) of being shoddy with the truth. The point is well made although we remain within the bounds of rhetoric rather than genuine argument. If Dawkins had made such a mistake, would I point it out as gleefully as Bye castigates McGrath? Of course. I’ve probably done it already. Would I rather that McGrath hadn’t made any slip ups. Absolutely, although I know how hard it is to eliminate errors completely.
Bye also discovered a possible source of the quotation in some early-modern controversial religious literature. It is ironic perhaps that this quote, so often used as an atheist weapon, should have been created for religious debate. Even three hundred years ago they didn’t check their facts when writing polemic.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
A correspondent called Dan Bye has alerted me to some work he has done on Alister McGrath’s polemic The Twilight of Atheism. Now, less than two years after it came out, McGrath’s book looks like one of the least appropriately titled books of the decade. It’s right up there with Glassman and Hassett’s Dow 36,000 which came out in 1999, just before the tech-bubble burst.
Bye correctly shows that McGrath makes some mistakes in his comments on the fictitious quotation from Calvin referring to Copernicus. Regular readers will remember that the commonly quoted words of Calvin from his Commentary on Genesis “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus over that of the Holy Spirit?” were not written by him. Bye is not claiming that Calvin actually wrote these words. Rather, in trying to find out where the quotation came from, he shows that McGrath praises Thomas Kuhn for tracking down a source that Kuhn knows nothing about and, arguably, paraphrases Bertrand Russell unfairly. For me, the most interesting point that comes out of all this was to find that Kuhn believed Andrew Dickson White’s utterly unreliable History of the Warfare between Science and Theology to be a valid historical authority.
You might shrug. But Bye lets McGrath have it with both barrels for not having an iron grip on his facts while simultaneously accusing others (well, atheists) of being shoddy with the truth. The point is well made although we remain within the bounds of rhetoric rather than genuine argument. If Dawkins had made such a mistake, would I point it out as gleefully as Bye castigates McGrath? Of course. I’ve probably done it already. Would I rather that McGrath hadn’t made any slip ups. Absolutely, although I know how hard it is to eliminate errors completely.
Bye also discovered a possible source of the quotation in some early-modern controversial religious literature. It is ironic perhaps that this quote, so often used as an atheist weapon, should have been created for religious debate. Even three hundred years ago they didn’t check their facts when writing polemic.
Comments or questions? Post them at Bede's dedicated yahoo group.
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