Don't Bother Sucking Up to Them. They've Already Checked Out...

..and many of them are convinced they're doing "God's work."



Call me less than impressed by President Obama's shift to the center-right in the wake of the November elections, as evidenced by his recent State of the Union address.

Playing to what he presumes the independent voters want to hear, he threw in a heavy dose of business-friendly rhetoric and American exceptionalism, which the Republicans and Tea Party types have heretofore accused him of not believing in sufficiently.

In calling attention to the challenge posed by Asia to our claims to supremacy, Obama called this our "Sputnik moment." Well, even though I hate to jump onto the Tiger Mom cliche bandwagon, the Tiger Mom comparison fits better than the Sputnik comparison.

We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business.

I've heard this promise to fix the education system in every SOTU speech I can remember, and it never happens... That's all very well and good Mr. President, but even if we managed to discover tomorrow the magic elixer to set education right in this country, it would take at least a generation to take effect. We don't have that kind of time. What about the people who are suffering here and now? In this globalized economy we could theoretically compete on education and skill even if we couldn't compete on costs, but the fact of the matter is, we have already gotten to the point where we can't compete on costs and can't compete on education and skill either.

In effect, we are screwed, and the only thing that can possibly save us is protectionism, but the Tom Friedmans of the world have succeeded in making protectionism a dirty word.

As he begs hat-in-hand in suck-up mode to corporate America, Obama even designated GE's Jeffrey Immelt as head of his new "Council on Jobs and Competitiveness." Talk about a fox being sent to take charge of the chicken coop... If there is any US-based company that trail-blazed the loss of our intellectual capital to foreign companies and the loss of American manufacturing jobs through offshoring, it was GE, under Imelt's predecessor, the fraudulent buffoon Jack Welch.

So, if we cannot compete under the economic globalization paradigm as it currently stands, and if protectionism is still a dirty word, we'd better start learning to speak the language of cooperation rather than competititon, especially if the threats of climate change and peak oil have any thruth to them (and they do).

This, however, will not occur. You see, it is a lie to say that the Chinese are merely the manufacturing plant to the world and have nothing to offer other countries politically or culturally. Their ideal of a Confucian meritocracy dovetails very nicely with the laissez faire, free market dogmatism to be found among the world's global elites who hobnob and schmooze together in Davos, Manhattan, London, Moscow, Shanghai and Hong Kong. These entreprenuerial, innovative, noveau riche citizens of the world are quite happy with the way things are, thank you very much, and if you haven't the gumption to climb up the way they have, well that's your tough luck. The way they see it, there was nothing stopping you. If the world goes to hell in a handbasket, they are going to make sure that they and others like them are going to be OK, regardless of nationality, because they share more in common with each other than they do with their own countrymen..

In 2007, I wrote about Peggy Noonan's op-ed piece A Separate Peace: America is in trouble --and our elites are merely resigned. She said at the time:

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us... I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours."

You're a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you're an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you're a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you're making your life a little fortress. That's what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

I think this tendency is even more pronounced today, although I don't think Ms. Noonan gives the recent phenomenon of the new, globally-oriented, capitalistic philanthropist enough recognition and credit.

The Atlantic magazine is always a great read, but last month's issue was absolutely superb. Some of the great articles included:

A reminder of Eisenhower's prescient warning about the military-industrial complex: The Tyranny of Defense Inc.

A profile of the dour and cynically obstructionist Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: Strict Obstructionist.

The effects of brutally mysogynistic internet pornography on our de riguer sexual mores: Hard Core.

...But the article I recommend most heartily is the cover story: The Rise of the New Global Elite.

Some extended excerpts below... Class warfare? You betcha. But I didn't declare it. They did.

On the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.

This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a central theme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong...

Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore this concentration of wealth among an elite few. The wondrous inventions of the modern economy—Google, Amazon, the iPhone—broadly improved the lives of middle-class consumers, even as they made a tiny subset of entrepreneurs hugely wealthy. And the less-wondrous inventions—particularly the explosion of subprime credit—helped mask the rise of income inequality for many of those whose earnings were stagnant.

But the financial crisis and its long, dismal aftermath have changed all that. A multibillion-dollar bailout and Wall Street’s swift, subsequent reinstatement of gargantuan bonuses have inspired a narrative of parasitic bankers and other elites rigging the game for their own benefit. And this, in turn, has led to wider—and not unreasonable—fears that we are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble.

The rich of today are ... different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

The Winner-Take-Most Economy

The rise of the new plutocracy is inextricably connected to two phenomena: the revolution in information technology and the liberalization of global trade. Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality—financial deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts in the United States; insider privatization in Russia; rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico. But the shared narrative is that, thanks to globalization and technological innovation, people, money, and ideas travel more freely today than ever before.

Peter Lindert is an economist at the University of California at Davis and one of the leaders of the “deep history” school of economics, a movement devoted to thinking about the world economy over the long term—that is to say, in the context of the entire sweep of human civilization. Yet he argues that the economic changes we are witnessing today are unprecedented. “Britain’s classic industrial revolution was far less impressive than what has been going on in the past 30 years,” he told me. The current productivity gains are larger, he explained, and the waves of disruptive innovation much, much faster.

From a global perspective, the impact of these developments has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly in the poorer parts of the world. Take India and China, for example: between 1820 and 1950, nearly a century and a half, per capita income in those two countries was basically flat. Between 1950 and 1973, it increased by 68 percent. Then, between 1973 and 2002, it grew by 245 percent, and continues to grow strongly despite the global financial crisis.

But within nations, the fruits of this global transformation have been shared unevenly. Though China’s middle class has grown exponentially and tens of millions have been lifted out of poverty, the super-elite in Shanghai and other east-coast cities have steadily pulled away. Income inequality has also increased in developing markets such as India and Russia, and across much of the industrialized West, from the relatively laissez-faire United States to the comfy social democracies of Canada and Scandinavia. Thomas Friedman is right that in many ways the world has become flatter; but in others it has grown spikier...

Executive pay has skyrocketed for many reasons—including the prevalence of overly cozy boards and changing cultural norms about pay—but increasing scale, competition, and innovation have all played major roles.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of U.S. workers, however devoted and skilled at their jobs, have missed out on the windfalls of this winner-take-most economy—or worse, found their savings, employers, or professions ravaged by the same forces that have enriched the plutocratic elite. The result of these divergent trends is a jaw-dropping surge in U.S. income inequality. According to the economists Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, between 2002 and 2007, 65 percent of all income growth in the United States went to the top 1 percent of the population...

Plutocracy Now

As with the aristocracies of bygone days, such vast wealth has created a gulf between the plutocrats and other people, one reinforced by their withdrawal into gated estates, exclusive academies, and private planes. We are mesmerized by such extravagances as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s 414-foot yacht, the Octopus, which is home to two helicopters, a submarine, and a swimming pool.

But while their excesses seem familiar, even archaic, today’s plutocrats represent a new phenomenon. The wealthy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s era were shaped, he wrote, by the fact that they had been “born rich.” They knew what it was to “possess and enjoy early.”

That’s not the case for much of today’s super-elite. “Fat cats who owe it to their grandfathers are not getting all of the gains,” Peter Lindert told me. “A lot of it is going to innovators this time around. There is more meritocracy in Bill Gates being at the top than the Duke of Bedford.” Even Emmanuel Saez, who is deeply worried about the social and political consequences of rising income inequality, concurs that a defining quality of the current crop of plutocrats is that they are the “working rich.” He has found that in 1916, the richest 1 percent of Americans received only one-fifth of their income from paid work; in 2004, that figure had risen threefold, to 60 percent.

A Nation Apart

Another defining characteristic of today’s plutocrats: they are forming a global community, and their ties to one another are increasingly closer than their ties to hoi polloi back home. As Glenn Hutchins, co-founder of the private-equity firm Silver Lake, puts it, “A person in Africa who runs a big African bank and went to Harvard might have more in common with me than he does with his neighbors, and I could well share more overlapping concerns and experiences with him than with my neighbors.” The circles we move in, Hutchins explains, are defined by “interests” and “activities” rather than “geography”: “Beijing has a lot in common with New York, London, or Mumbai. You see the same people, you eat in the same restaurants, you stay in the same hotels. But most important, we are engaged as global citizens in crosscutting commercial, political, and social matters of common concern. We are much less place-based than we used to be.”

America's own super-elite is rapidly adjusting to this more global perspective. The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled.

I heard a similar sentiment from the Taiwanese-born, 30-something CFO of a U.S. Internet company. A gentle, unpretentious man who went from public school to Harvard, he’s nonetheless not terribly sympathetic to the complaints of the American middle class. “We demand a higher paycheck than the rest of the world,” he told me. “So if you’re going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value. It sounds harsh, but maybe people in the middle class need to decide to take a pay cut.”

At last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival, Michael Splinter, CEO of the Silicon Valley green-tech firm Applied Materials, said that if he were starting from scratch, only 20 percent of his workforce would be domestic. “This year, almost 90 percent of our sales will be outside the U.S.,” he explained. “The pull to be close to the customers—most of them in Asia—is enormous.” Speaking at the same conference, Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, also lamented this global reality: “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business … American businesses will adapt.”

Revolt of the Elites

Wilson’s distinction helps explain why many of America’s other business elites appear so removed from the continuing travails of the U.S. workforce and economy: the global “nation” in which they increasingly live and work is doing fine—indeed, it’s thriving. As a consequence of this disconnect, when business titans talk about the economy and their role in it, the notes they strike are often discordant: for example, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein waving away public outrage in 2009 by saying he was “doing God’s work”; or the insistence by several top bankers after the immediate threat of the financial crisis receded that their institutions could have survived without TARP funding and that they had accepted it only because they had been strong-armed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Nor does this aloof disposition end at the water’s edge: think of BP CEO Tony Hayward, who complained of wanting to get his life back after the Gulf oil spill and then proceeded to do so by watching his yacht compete in a race off the Isle of Wight.

It is perhaps telling that Blankfein is the son of a Brooklyn postal worker and that Hayward—despite his U.S. caricature as an upper-class English twit—got his start at BP as a rig geologist in the North Sea. They are both, in other words, working-class boys made good. And while you might imagine that such backgrounds would make plutocrats especially sympathetic to those who are struggling, the opposite is often true. For the super-elite, a sense of meritocratic achievement can inspire high self-regard, and that self-regard—especially when compounded by their isolation among like-minded peers—can lead to obliviousness and indifference to the suffering of others.

Unsurprisingly, Russian oligarchs have been among the most fearless in expressing this attitude. A little more than a decade ago, for instance, I spoke to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at that moment the richest man in Russia. “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him,” Khodorkovsky told me. “Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it.” (Khodorkovsky’s subsequent political travails—his oil company was appropriated by the state in 2004 and he is currently in prison—have tempered this Darwinian outlook: in a jail-cell correspondence last year, he admitted that he had “treated business exclusively as a game” and “did not care much about social responsibility.”)

Though typically more guarded in their choice of words, many American plutocrats suggest, as Khodorkovsky did, that the trials faced by the working and middle classes are generally their own fault. When I asked one of Wall Street’s most successful investment-bank CEOs if he felt guilty for his firm’s role in creating the financial crisis, he told me with evident sincerity that he did not. The real culprit, he explained, was his feckless cousin, who owned three cars and a home he could not afford. One of America’s top hedge-fund managers made a near-identical case to me—though this time the offenders were his in-laws and their subprime mortgage. And a private-equity baron who divides his time between New York and Palm Beach pinned blame for the collapse on a favorite golf caddy in Arizona, who had bought three condos as investment properties at the height of the bubble.

It is this not-our-fault mentality that accounts for the plutocrats’ profound sense of victimization in the Obama era. You might expect that American elites—and particularly those in the financial sector—would be feeling pretty good, and more than a little grateful, right now. Thanks to a $700 billion TARP bailout and hundreds of billions of dollars lent nearly free of charge by the Federal Reserve (a policy Soros himself told me was a “hidden gift” to the banks), Wall Street has surged back to pre-crisis levels of compensation even as Main Street continues to struggle. Yet many of America’s financial giants consider themselves under siege from the Obama administration—in some cases almost literally. Last summer, for example, Blackstone’s Schwarzman caused an uproar when he said an Obama proposal to raise taxes on private-equity-firm compensation—by treating “carried interest” as ordinary income—was “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

However histrionic his imagery, Schwarzman (who subsequently apologized for the remark) is a Republican, so his antipathy toward the current administration is no surprise. What is more striking is the degree to which even former Obama supporters in the financial industry have turned against the president and his party. A Wall Street investor who is a passionate Democrat recounted to me his bitter exchange with a Democratic leader in Congress who is involved in the tax-reform effort. “Screw you,” he told the lawmaker. “Even if you change the legislation, the government won’t get a single penny more from me in taxes. I’ll put my money into my foundation and spend it on good causes. My money isn’t going to be wasted in your deficit sinkhole.” He is not alone in his fury. In a much-quoted newsletter to investors last summer, the hedge-fund manager—and 2008 Obama fund-raiser—Dan Loeb fumed, “So long as our leaders tell us that we must trust them to regulate and redistribute our way back to prosperity, we will not break out of this economic quagmire.” Two other former Obama backers on Wall Street—both claim to have been on Rahm Emanuel’s speed-dial list—told me that the president is “anti-business”; one went so far as to worry that Obama is “a socialist.”

Much of this pique stems from simple self-interest: in addition to the proposed tax hikes, the financial reforms that Obama signed into law last summer have made regulations on American finance more stringent. But as the Democratic investor’s angry references to his philanthropic work suggest, the rage in the C-suites is driven not merely by greed but by a perceived affront to the plutocrats’ amour propre, a wounded incredulity that anyone could think of them as villains rather than heroes. Aren’t they, after all, the ones whose financial and technological innovations represent the future of the American economy? Aren’t they “doing God’s work”?

You might say that the American plutocracy is experiencing its John Galt moment. Libertarians (and run-of-the-mill high-school nerds) will recall that Galt is the plutocratic hero of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. Tired of being dragged down by the parasitic, envious, and less talented lower classes, Galt and his fellow capitalists revolted, retreating to “Galt’s Gulch,” a refuge in the Rocky Mountains. There, they passed their days in secluded natural splendor, while the rest of the world, bereft of their genius and hard work, collapsed. (G. K. Chesterton suggested a similar idea, though more gently, in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday: “The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”)

This plutocratic fantasy is, of course, just that: no matter how smart and innovative and industrious the super-elite may be, they can’t exist without the wider community. Even setting aside the financial bailouts recently supplied by the governments of the world, the rich need the rest of us as workers, clients, and consumers. Yet, as a metaphor, Galt’s Gulch has an ominous ring at a time when the business elite view themselves increasingly as a global community, distinguished by their unique talents and above such parochial concerns as national identity, or devoting “their” taxes to paying down “our” budget deficit. They may not be isolating themselves geographically, as Rand fantasized. But they appear to be isolating themselves ideologically, which in the end may be of greater consequence...

And, ultimately, that is the dilemma: America really does need many of its plutocrats. We benefit from the goods they produce and the jobs they create. And even if a growing portion of those jobs are overseas, it is better to be the home of these innovators—native and immigrant alike—than not. In today’s hypercompetitive global environment, we need a creative, dynamic super-elite more than ever.

There is also the simple fact that someone will have to pay for the improved public education and social safety net the American middle class will need in order to navigate the wrenching transformations of the global economy. (That’s not to mention the small matter of the budget deficit.) Inevitably, a lot of that money will have to come from the wealthy—after all, as the bank robbers say, that’s where the money is...

It is not much of a surprise that the plutocrats themselves oppose such analysis and consider themselves singled out, unfairly maligned, or even punished for their success. Self-interest, after all, is the mother of rationalization, and—as we have seen—many of the plutocracy’s rationalizations have more than a bit of truth to them: as a class, they are generally more hardworking and meritocratic than their forebears; their philanthropic efforts are innovative and important; and the recent losses of the American middle class have in many cases entailed gains for the rest of the world.

But if the plutocrats’ opposition to increases in their taxes and tighter regulation of their economic activities is understandable, it is also a mistake. The real threat facing the super-elite, at home and abroad, isn’t modestly higher taxes, but rather the possibility that inchoate public rage could cohere into a more concrete populist agenda—that, for instance, middle-class Americans could conclude that the world economy isn’t working for them and decide that protectionism or truly punitive taxation is preferable to incremental measures such as the eventual repeal of the upper-bracket Bush tax cuts...

The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth. It is obvious which of these would be the better outcome for America, and the world. Let us hope the plutocrats aren’t already too isolated to recognize this. Because, in the end, there can never be a place like Galt’s Gulch.

Is the Naturalistic Fallacy Real?

If the world shouldn't be like the natural world is, why not?


Rape of Lucretia (Tarquin and Lucretia) by Titian (1568-71)

The founding fathers of the United States were an eclectic mix of deists, skeptics, enlightened free-thinkers and devout evangelicals. Despite their individual differences it was a stroke of genius on their collective part to agree to include within the Declaration of Independence the proposition that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

In spite of many false starts, trials, and missteps, the viability and the survival of this republic, and by extension, all republics, rests upon the shared idea that our unalienable rights come to us by a non-negotiable divine mandate, and are not granted to us on the basis of either mutual consent or coeercion. We can look back at the diversity of that group of men who drafted the declaration and recognize the sheer brilliance in the way in which a "creator" is referred to.

This emphasis on our rights being unalienable inheritances from a creator is crucial, because there is not much in the natural world to support the notion that there is any such thing as Truth, or liberty, or that we are all equal, or that we have any rights at all, certainly not "unalienable" ones.

In a couple of earlier posts about Frans de Waal, I was exploring the idea of whether of not a Darwinist needed to be a Social Darwinist by necessity. De Waal emphatically said no. He also said that it was a mistake to try to derive the goals of society from the goals of nature. He said that trying to do so is an error known as the naturalistic fallacy, which is the impossibility of moving from how things are to how things ought to be.

The definition is subtle. I've heard of the naturalistic fallacy being referred to in a variety of ways. Sometimes when it is used it is actually referring to the appeal to nature argument, or the is-ought problem. Basically speaking it was a term defined by the philosopher G. E. Moore in 1903, noting the error inherent in drawing values from evolution or from any aspect of observed nature.

I understand what is being stated about the fallacy and its variants, but what I have a harder time grasping is why it is actually considered a fallacy. It might be very unpleasant to contemplate that evolution's goals, "red in tooth and claw" as they are usually described, might serve as the basis for what we consider to be moral, but I'm not sure why that disqualifies them automatically, especially if there are people who want to take God honestly and completely out of the discussion. There are still nihilists around, and even sociobiologists like E.O. Wilson who are willing to face this.

If nature is indifferent at best, and pitilessly cruel at worst, can a moral system be built without a belief in God? If so, on what basis?

Last year I took a run at reading Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe, by Harvard's Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, an ordained Humanist Rabbi. I wasn't able to get all the way through it. I should have known I'd have issues with it just by the very nature of the fact that he refers to himself as a "Humanist Rabbi," a non-sequitur, or oxymoron if you will, if I've ever heard one.

Epstein's book is a spirited defense of secular humanism. I had very much looked forward to reading it. I was extremely interested in learning what the argument was for building a subjective system of morality based upon reason alone, written in a tone that was respectful of the sensibilities and opinions of theists, but I was disappointed in it. It was a work of apologetics, with more than a couple of derisive remarks of the "man in the sky" variety thrown in with the purpose of rankling people of religious belief.

I admit that I might have been hasty in this judgement, not having read the book all the way through, but the passage below reflects the sort of thing that bothered me, and it comes back around to the naturalistic fallacy, or Is-Ought Problem:

As the great eighteenth-English philosopher and skeptic David Hume pointed out, there is a huge difference between what “is” – what exists, the way the world is – and the way the world ought to be. One of the basic questions philosophers have occupied themselves with, then, is where do we get our values? Who says something that is one way ought to be another way, if not God?

This is not a mere egghead question that only professional philosophers and theologians deal with. It is the first thought that goes through the head of a young husband and father of three, sitting in an oncologist’s office, told that his pancreatic cancer has metastasized and is inoperable. “You may have about six months,” the doctor softly informs him. He understands that that’s what is. But with every fiber of his being he feels: it’s not what ought to be! And some theologians claim that the only way we can justify believing that it shouldn’t be that way is if God told us so.

In God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, Catholic theologian John F. Haught asks, “Can you rationally justify your unconditional adherence to timeless values without implicitly invoking the existence of God?”

This question – where do we get timeless values (such as the fact that it is good to heal a sick father of three so that he can live and be with his wife and kids) without God – is a variation of the is-ought problem, and it comes up not just in the doctor’s office but in most of our debates about political and social issues. Of course, when it does, we should ask our questioners what they mean by timeless values, inviolable “oughts.” They usually cite as an example that murder is wrong, which of course makes you wonder why they aren’t pacifists. Or they may say that rape is wrong, which is despicable when you realize they’re implying we need religion to figure that one out…

As for those … who would suggest that there cannot be any justice or any good without God, Plato’s dialogues Euthyphro, written in 380 BCE, provides … the “knockout punch” against them.

In the dialogue, Socrates reminds his friend Euthyphro that a crucial question is not simply whether we can know if one or another particular action is good, but on what basis we determine whether any action is good. Euthyphro answers “Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.”

But Socrates responds: “Is that which the gods love good because they love it, or do they love it because it is good?”

If the former is true, then who says the gods are not evil, unfair, or frivolous? The gods could choose to love anything they want, regardless of whether or not human beings would consider it just. Is that the kind of system we want to live by? Do the gods want us to be blindly, unquestioningly obedient to them, even if they behave like murderous scoundrels? And if the gods love the good simply because it is good, then it could damn well be good on its own. We wouldn’t need a god or gods to tell us what morality is – we’d be responsible for figuring it out just as they were.

In either case Euthyphro drives home the point that mere belief in God can’t make us good, and it can’t point the way to “timeless values” that we humans aren’t capable of arriving at on our own terms. Gods don’t – can’t – create values. Humans can, and so we must do so wisely.

I see the point he's trying to make with Euthyphro, but for me, it's a poor response towards addressing the Is-Ought problem. In particular, I have a real problem with these particular passages when he refers to the arguments made by theists:

They usually cite as an example that murder is wrong, which of course makes you wonder why they aren’t pacifists. Or they may say that rape is wrong, which is despicable when you realize they’re implying we need religion to figure that one out…

Well, the disgust over even discussing the topic of rape in a naturalistic context is a good preemptive strike by Epstein. His firm and heartfelt outrage boldy stated is a good way to close the issue without having to defend his basic premise. It's a clever debating tactic on his part, for sure. Yes, rape is despicable, but if it is despicable he needs to spend more than half a sentence explaining why it is despicable in a naturalistic universe.

What we could categorize as "rape" is commonly seen in the animal kingdom. In addition, when we look at the widespread prevalence of human sex trafficking across the globe with its victims numbering in the hundreds of thousands, it is evident that a large part of the human family, at least of the male gender (unfortunately), finds rape largely unobjectionable as well. Our natural human outrage over this is not as cut-and-dry as Epstein supposes. A number of books and articles have actually been written speculating that rape, despicable as it may be to our sensibilities, may have evolved as an evolutionary strategy. Robert Wright notes in The Moral Animal:

The rape and abduction of women was once a common feature of war in pre-literate societies...

There is an ongoing debate within evolutionary psychology over whether rape is an adaptation, a designed strategy that any boy might grow up to adopt, given sufficiently discouraging feedback from his social environment…. One (non-Darwinian) study found the typical rapist to possess “deep-seated doubts about his adequacy and competency as a person. He lacks a sense of confidence in himself as a man in both sexual and nonsexual areas.

If it seems I'm playing fast and loose with Epstein's argument, I do actually understand the point he's trying to make - that is should be intuitively obvious to us that what causes human pleasure is relatively good (as long as it does not harm anyone else) and what causes human suffering is evil.

Still, as far as I see, a problem remains... if you take God out of the mix.

If we can theorize that everyone of good will can agree that happiness (or contentment) is good, and suffering is bad, why isn't it equally valid to take an unflinching and bracing look at nature like the Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer did and follow the flow (as he saw it) instead of fighting it, and see morality couched in terms of what benefits the survival and trajectory of the species overall? If the behavior we see in a particular evolutionary adaptation benefited the survival and longevity of the human race as a whole, even if the trait seems on it's face to be obnoxious and repugnant to us, why can't it be concluded that that behavior is moral? If it can be shown that another type of behavior does not benefit the survival and longevity of the species, why can't it be categorized as immoral?

There are debates that occur right now in scientific circles about whether or not we are the product of "selfish" genes or if "group selection" was the key to our adaptation and survival as a species, but the key seems to me - if people wish to postulate the absence of a deity, that is - that morality depends upon us rejecting certain facets of the natural word. That we treat the general thrust of evolution in particular as an enemy. Robert Wright, once more in The Moral Animal:

Once Darwin fathomed natural selection, he surely saw how deeply his ethics were at odds with the values it implies. The insidious lethality of a parasitic wasp (who feeds within the living body of a caterpillar), the cruelty of a cat playing with a mouse - these are, after all, just the tip of the iceberg. To ponder natural selection is to be staggered by the price for a single, slight advance in organic design. And it is to realize, moreover, that the purpose of this "advance" - longer, sharper canine teeth in male chimpanzees, say - is often to make other animals suffer or die more surely. Organic design thrives on pain, and pain thrives on organic design...

If there's one thing natural selection "wants" us to believe, it is that our individual happiness is special; by pursuing goals that promise to make us happy, we will maximize the proliferation of our genes. Leave aside for a moment that pursuing goals which promise to make us happy, in the long run, often doesn't; leave aside that natural selction doesn't actually "care" about our happiness in the end and will readily countenance our suffering if that will get our genes into the next generation... We are designed not to worry about anyone else's happiness, except in the sort of cases where such worrying has, during evolution, benefited our genes...

There were of course, the utlilitarians like John Stuart Mill who tried to deal with the problems posed by this realization. According to the utilitarians things could be considered "good" to the extent to which they raised the amount of happiness in the world and "bad" to the extent to which they raised the amount of unhappiness and suffering. The goal was to raise the overall happiness. Darwin himself tended to agree with this, even if he preferred to stress "the general good and welfare of the community" over the notion of "general happiness." Distinctions have arisen between "act" utilitarians who focus on the pleasure principle and emphasize personal liberties and "rule" utilitarians who focus on the common good and emphasize that which most benefits the whole society.

One of the first to shift from the Spencerian view, in which ethics should imitate nature, to one in which the state of nature should be viewed as an enemy to be conquered, was "Darwin's bulldog," the biologist Thomas Huxley. I have to say, I found Huxley far more helpful in this area than Epstein. In his 1893 paper Evolution & Ethics he compared our imperative to build an ethical civilization to that of a horticulturalist's never-ceasing attempt to cultivate and rescue his garden from the state of pure nature and cosmic forces.

The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows... It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence... Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process.

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before. Some day, I doubt not, we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty; but all the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and that is ugly.

Not only is the state of nature hostile to the state of art of the garden; but the principle of the horticultural process, by which the latter is created and maintained, is antithetic to that of the cosmic process. The characteristic feature of the latter is the intense and unceasing competition of the struggle for existence. The characteristic of the former is the elimination of that struggle, by the removal of the conditions which give rise to it. The tendency of the cosmic process is to bring about the adjustment of the forms of plant life to the current conditions; the tendency of the horticultural process is the adjustment of the conditions to the needs of the forms of plant life which the gardener desires to raise.

Of course, this type of view has always been hard for theists like myself to get our heads around. In our imaginations, the naturalists have always extolled the goodness of nature, and as a result we've imagined them believing that ethics divorced from God should imitate nature. This is not necessarily so... Going even further than Huxley was the recently deceased Stony Brook biologist George Williams, who said:

Huxley viewed the cosmic process as an enemy that must be combated. I take a similar but more extreme position, based both on the more extreme contemporary view of natural selection as a process for maximizing selfishness, and on the longer list of vices now assignable to the enemy. If the enemy is worse than Huxley thought, there is a more urgent need for biological understanding.

What these philosophically-inclined biologists discovered as a truism is similar to what the great religious minds over the centuries have discovered as well. The origin of human suffering often (though not exclusively) lies in selfishness, and the origin of human happiness (both individually and for the largest number) depends upon our own individual willingness to be unselfish and to self-sacrifice for the good of others.

Closing out with Robert Wright again, who uses the issue of homosexuality as a backdrop and example:

Why should the “naturalness” of homosexuality in any way affect our moral judgement of it? It is “natural,” in the sense of being “approved” by natural selection, for a man to kill someone he finds sleeping with his wife. Rape, may, in the same sense, be “natural.” But most people rightly judge these things by their consequences, not their origins.

What is plainly true about homosexuality is the following:

1) Some people are born with a combination of genetic and environmental circumstances that impels them strongly towards a homosexual lifestyle;
2) There is no inherent contradiction between homosexuality among consenting adults and the welfare of other people. For moral purposes (I believe) that should be the end of the discussion.

In this light, the argument for a utilitarian morality can be put consicely: widely practiced utilitarianism promises to make everyone better off; and so far as we can tell, that’s what everyone wants.

Mill followed the logic of non-zero-sumness to its logical conclusion. He wanted to maximize overall happiness; and the way to maximize it is for everyone to be thoroughly self-sacrificing. You shouldn’t hold doors open for people only if you can do so quite easily and thereby save them lots of trouble. You should hold doors open whenever the amount of trouble you save them is even infinitesimally greater than the trouble you take. In short, go through life considering the welfare of everyone else as important as your own welfare.

This is a radical doctrine: People who preach it have been known to get crucified. Mill wrote: “in the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.

I Speak No Catalan...

...but I like the vibe

Corren by Gossos, with Dani Macaco


És tard, no sé quina hora és,
però és fosc fa estona.
És fàcil veure que no hi ets,
ni un paper, ja poc importa.
Poso els peus a terra, vull caminar,
necessito despertar en un dia radiant.
Encara em queda temps per descobrir
tot alló que m'he amagat i que no m'he volgut dir.

Corren, corren pels carrers, corren
paraules que no s'esborren, imatges que no se'n van.
I ploren, ploren pels carrers, ploren
com gotes d'aigua s'enyoren, aquells que ja no es veuran.

Difícil descobrir qui soc avuí.
Una gota em cau mentre un altre em treu la set.
Plou i fa sol alhora
Tomba la bala bala,
tomba la bala que m'apuntava, era la meva
i jo mateix em disparava.
Raig de llum il·lumina'm, treu-me el fum.
Una revolució dins meu, la sedueixo i es transforma
No s'esborren, en conformo en mirar-me
Mirar-me de dins cap a fora.

On puc anar-te a buscar? Nena no és broma...
Hauria d'haver estat diferent,
però en un moment s'han tancat les portes.
Poso els peus a terra, vull caminar
necessito despertar en un dia radiant.
Encara em queda temps per descobrir
tot allò que t'he amagat i que no t'he volgut dir.

Corren, corren pels carrers, corren
paraules que no s'esborren, imatges que no se'n van.
I ploren, ploren pels carrers, ploren
com gotes d'aigua s'enyoren, aquells que ja no es veuran.


Heard them on the Putomayo catalogue - The España CD.

Autumn

A Positive Reflection on Matters Both Cosmic and Quantum


Study for The Punishment of Haman (Sistine Chapel), by Michelangelo, (1508-1512)

He started to kick out with his feet to move what was under his legs. He only started because he didn't have any legs to kick with. Somewhere just below his hip joints they had cut both of his legs off.

No legs.

No more running walking crawling if you have no legs. No more working.

No legs you see.

Never again to wiggle your toes. What a hell of a thing what a wonderful beautiful thing to wiggle your toes.

No no.

-- Dalton Trumbo : Johnny Got his Gun

As we head deeper into middle-age, we become more acutely aware of the fact that our bodies are no longer automatically seeking healthy growth and vitality on their own, at least not unaided. Instead we recognize that our bodies are seeking ways to shut down. They are searching for ways quiesce, and they do it quite successfully.

Not too long ago, I read this in the introduction to Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.

Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you- indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single overarching impulse: to keep you you.

The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting-fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.

Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe it doesn't, so far as we can tell. This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements-nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary drugstore-and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life….

So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty- first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most-99.99 percent-are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself-shape, size, color, species affiliation, everything-and to do so repeatedly. That's much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from "protoplasmal primordial atomic globule" (as the Gilbert and Sullivan song put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely-make that miraculously-fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you.

You know, I never really thought of it that way... I don’t know why not. It’s so obvious… It’s fascinating as well as humorous to consider that every one of my ancestors was able to get a date, even though there were many times in my youth when I despaired that perhaps I couldn’t and never would. Besides taking a certain comfort out of that, there are other ways in which I take encouragement out of those passages as well.

I look at my hands. They are a map and a reminder of several stages of my life.

The same tributaries and intersections still remain (although in deeper relief) in the “life line” on my palm which my sister playfully used to read in order to “tell my future” when I was small.

On my left hand, there is the scar on my index finger where I cut myself with a steak knife when I was 12, trying to saw through a piece of thick rope for some foolish reason I can’t recall. I probably should have gone for stitches, but I didn’t want anyone to know about it.

On my right hand, I still see two nickel-sized scars that are there as the result of a friendly wrestling match in the driveway of my friend Freddy D’s house when I was 16.

I look at both hands and I see marks and spots that I can only assume are the result of sun damage inflicted upon them during the furnace-like summers of my youth when I played and worked outside all day long before sunblock was invented. The best I could do to protect my fair skin back then was zinc oxide, or gardening gloves in 95 degree heat.

Today, when I hold the smooth, flawless, unblemished hands of my children in mine, they remark upon how close the veins of my hands are to the surface, and I can’t help noticing as well the reduced elasticity in the skin and the ever-increasing appearance of wrinkles. Autumn is here...

Whether our deaths represent the total end of our existence, or whether our bodies are glorified in some resurrected state in an age to come, I find Bryson’s words to be comforting, reassuring, and conducive to a greater appreciation of life itself. Life is a precious gift, and the illuminating introduction by Bryson certainly puts all of our troubles into perspective when we are honest enough to look at the grand scheme of things.

When we look at the infinitesimal speck of time that our brief lives represent in the capricious and often indifferent scope of eternity, it invites contemplation upon what a miracle every moment of existence is. Echoing Dalton Trumbo in a certain way, I hold up my hand and I move the fingers about in their full range of motion, and I think to myself what an wonderful, amazing thing it is to be able to do that, for however briefly I’ll be able to do it. Mundane, yet truly miraculous.

We are going to spend an awfully lot of time dead, when our hands will be stilled and eventually will be no more. An awfully long time. To dust we will return, and our atoms will go on to form other things, as Bryson points out. What an incredible thing to watch those fingers move, and despite everything that may have gone wrong in the day, week, month, year or decade, we can say “Look at this… I am here… And I am still alive... Eventually, I will have to exit the stage with all of the grace and dignity I'll be able to muster and make way for those who come behind me, but today - I live!”

Appreciate this gift for all it’s worth.

Enough! Call in the Army Corps of Engineers

BP isn't getting it done. Call in the Army & Navy and blast



It's been... what? Thirty-four days now? Thirty-Four days and BP is still ditzing around with this oil spill... Enough. We've left it to the private sector long enough. I don't know much about this stuff, but I'm begining to suspect that BP has been more interested in preserving this exploration well as a viable production well than in stopping the leak. After all, they've a hell of a lot of costs to recoup.

It's time to call in the military with a 'Bunker Buster' and just blow the damned thing shut.

Embrace Your Inner Neanderthal

The Ascent of Man as formerly shown...
Neanderthal Man, Cro-Magnon Man, Modern Man

I remember as a kid when we had some of those Time-Life books in the house, back around the 1970's or so. One of the ones I found particularly fascinating was the one titled Early Man, which was focused on human origins. It featured a double-page chart with a fairly famous picture sequence showing what the prevailing anthropological consensus at the time considered to be the most likely progression of the ascent of man, from a gibbon-like creature all the way up through various hominds such as Australopithecus (Africanus and Robustus), Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, Rhodesian Man, Neanderthal Man, Cro-Magnon Man, and finally, modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens. I'm sure you've all seen it at one time or another. It has been copied and lampooned many times

There was a fairly detailed and lengthy section in the middle of the book dealing with Neanderthal Man, whose fossils were first discovered in Germany's Neander Valley 140 years ago, and who is thought to have arrived in Europe some 300,000 years ago before ultimately disappearing about 30,000 years ago. At the time, this information was presented as if human evolution occurred in a fairly straight line, with each species representing a link in the chain leading directly to the next. In other words, the stout, beetle-browed, short-limbed and supposedly unimaginitive Neanderthals were considered to be our direct ancestors.

That all seemed to change during the last couple of decades. Anthropologists and genetic scientists revised their estimation of Neanderthals and were claiming instead that the Neanderthals were an entirely separate hominid branch, a rival form of humans that co-existed with modern humans for a certain period of time and eventually became extinct. A dead end. Just one of several waves of hominds who came "out of Africa" before eventually being replaced by the last wave of modern humans.

This thinking stayed current until several weeks ago. In this 2007 video, it is hinted at darkly that the Neanderthal may have even been the victim of genocide at the hands of modern humans - that it is "almost certain that they were extinguished by our forebears."



If the physical descriptions of Neanderthals I've read are true, I doubt they were as lissome as the one represented in that British museum (a girl with the head of a monkey). By most accounts, the visible physical differences between Neanderthals and modern humans were quite significant. Jared Diamond asked in his 1992 book The Third Chimpanzee:

"Did some invading Cro-Magon men mate with some Neanderthal women? If Neanderthal behavior was as relatively rudimentary, and Neanderthal anatomy as distinctive as I suspect, few Cro-Magnons may have wanted to mate with Neanderthals.... the differences may still have been a major turnoff. And if Neanderthal women were geared for a twelve-month pregnancy, a hybrid fetus may not have survived. My inclination is to take the negative evidence at face-value, to accept that hybridization occurred rarely if ever, and to doubt that living people of European descent carry any Neanderthal genes.

One thing I like about Jared Diamond is that even if he has strong opinions, he's more than willing to be contradicted by evidence. I wish there were more scientists out there who were humble enough to state their opinions less definitively and with less "certainty" as they often do, because a new study comparing the Neanderthal and human genomes indicates that it does appear after all that modern humans did in fact interbreed with Neanderthals. Apparently people of European and Asian descent carry 1% to 4% of Neanderthal genes.

A new study of the Neandertal genome shows that humans and Neandertals interbred. The discovery comes as a big surprise to researchers who have been searching for genetic evidence of human-Neandertal interbreeding for years and finding none.

About 1 percent to 4 percent of DNA in modern people from Europe and Asia was inherited from Neandertals, researchers report in the May 7 Science. “It’s a small, but very real proportion of our ancestry,” says study coauthor David Reich of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. Comparisons of the human and Neandertal genomes are also revealing how humans evolved to become the sole living hominid species on the planet.

Neandertals lived in Europe, the Middle East and western Asia until they disappeared about 30,000 years ago. The new data indicate that humans may not have replaced Neandertals, but assimilated them into the human gene pool...

Researchers recreated the Neandertal’s genetic blueprints using DNA extracted from three bone fragments — each from a different Neandertal woman — found in a cave in Croatia.

Comparing the resulting blueprints of the female Neandertals, who lived about 40,000 years ago, with those of five present-day humans from China, France, Papua New Guinea and southern and western Africa, revealed that people outside of Africa carry Neandertal DNA.

Scientists were surprised to find that people from China and Papua New Guinea (places where Neandertals never lived) have just as much Neandertal ancestry as people from France. The group did not find traces of Neandertal heritage in the two African people studied. The result probably means that interbreeding between Neandertals and humans took place about 50,000 to 80,000 years ago in the Middle East as humans began migrating out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world...

Since humans and Neandertals could interbreed, some people question whether the two groups are different hominid species. The question doesn’t hold interest for John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Genealogically, he says, the new study shows that many humans had a Neandertal great-great-great-great … grandfather. “It’s impossible to talk about them as ‘them’ anymore,” he says. “Neandertals are us.”

I find this sort of thing very interesting, but on the other hand, I do worry about what this kind of information will mean to people who tend to misuse science for their own bigoted racial theories. The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote about how science and pseudo-science was often applied to The Mismeasure of Man. If non-Africans carry Neanderthal genes and Africans don't, will certain race-baiters be able to claim that Africans are a somewhat different species from everyone else after all? It's good to remember an important point shown in the video above that is still valid - "We are all Africans in disguise."

Want to check yourself out as a Neanderthal? Download a free Smithsonian app for your iPhone or Android at MEanderthal.app

In any case, when we look at cavemen, perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to underestimate the adaptability of those Neanderthals.



The Ascent and Descent of Man as more recently shown...

A Darwinist Against Social Darwinism III

Frans de Waal examines the differences between the USA and Europe, and the relative merits of each... Is competition good for us?



A Darwinist Against Social Darwinism: I

A Darwinist Against Social Darwinism: II

Looking at current events in the USA and in Europe today, we can see evidence within two huge ongoing self-inflicted crises that says something about the culture which each region has chosen to build for itself.

In the USA we see the environmental and economic disaster that has resulted from the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. As of the date of this post the massive leak has still not been contained. Despite the boorish mantra of "Drill baby, drill!" at the 2008 Republican Convention, and Obama's campaign promise not to do so, Obama relented not too long before this disaster struck in an extremely unfortunate case of poor timing and agreed to allow the resumption of some offshore drilling. Our American addiction to cheap gasoline and cheap energy in general has come back to bite us in a big way. Up until this point, our sense of American exceptionalism, our hyper-individualistic ethos and our free-market dogmatism has prevented us from being as clear-eyed about environmental sustainability as the people in other comparable countries in the world have been. There doesn't appear to be much willingness to make personal sacrifices in order to change things...

In Europe, the Greek debt crisis has sent shock waves across the continent as fear of contagion spreads. Riots have broken out in Greece as the government has called for new austerity measures. The fate of the euro, if not the entire European Union, is in doubt according to more pessimistic observers. The causes of the Greek crisis are complex, and there is no doubt that some of it can be laid at the feet of the US subprime fiasco, but part of it also lies within a culture that enjoyed an influx of new (unearned) money and was enjoying having too much of something for nothing. There doesn't appear to be much willingness to make personal sacrifices in order to change things...

I had posted twice before about what the primatologist Frans de Waal has to say about evolution, human empathy, competition, and cooperation. He's from the Netherlands, but has spent the past few decades working in the USA. In light of his ongoing thesis, I'd be interested to know if anyone has any thoughts about his observations on the relative merits and demerits of the USA and Europe.

I have received in a Manchester Newspaper a rather good squib, showing that I have proved “might is right,” & therefore that Napoleon is right & every cheating Tradesman is also right.
—Charles Darwin, 1860
Enlightened Self-Interest
(photo: Herbert Spencer) The idea of competition within the same species over the same resources appealed to Charles Darwin and helped him formulate the concept of natural selection. He had read Thomas Malthus’s influential 1798 essay on population growth, according to which populations that outgrow their food supply will automatically be cut back by hunger, disease, and mortality. Unfortunately, Herbert Spencer read the same essay and drew different conclusions. If strong varieties progress at the expense of inferior ones, this was not only how it was, Spencer felt, but how it ought to be. Competition was good, it was natural, and society as a whole benefited. He applied the naturalistic fallacy to a T.

Why did Spencer’s ideas fall on such receptive ears? It seems to me that he was offering a way out of a moral dilemma that people were only just getting used to. In earlier times, the rich didn’t need any justification to ignore the poor. With their blue blood, the nobility considered itself a different breed. They showed their contempt for manual labor by being wasp-waisted in the West or growing elongated fingernails in the East. Not that they felt absolutely no obligation toward those underneath them — hence the expression noblesse oblige — but they had no qualms living in opulence, feasting on meat, slurping fine wine, and driving around in gilded carriages, while the masses were close to starving.

All of this changed with the Industrial Revolution, which created a new upper crust, one that couldn’t overlook the plight of others so easily. Many of them had belonged to the lower class only a few generations before: They evidently were of the same blood. So, shouldn’t they share their wealth? They were reluctant to do so though, and were thrilled to hear that there was nothing wrong with ignoring those who worked for them, that it was perfectly honorable to climb the ladder of success without looking back. This is how nature works, Spencer assured them, thus removing any pangs of conscience the rich might feel…

Long ago American society embraced competition as its chief organizing principle even though everywhere one looks—at work, in the street, in people’s homes—one finds the same appreciation of family, companionship collegiality, and civic responsibility as everywhere else in the world. This tension between economic freedom and community values is fascinating to watch, which I do both as an outsider and an insider, being a European who has lived and worked in the United States for more than twenty-five years. The pendulum swings that occur at regular intervals between the main political parties of this nation show that the tension is alive and well, and that a hands-down winner shouldn’t be expected anytime soon. This bipolar state of American society isn’t hard to understand. It’s not that different from the situation in Europe, except that all political ideologies on this side of the Atlantic seem shifted to the right. What makes American politics baffling is the way it draws upon biology and religion.

Evolutionary theory is remarkably popular among those on the conservative end of the spectrum, but not in the way biologists would like it to be. The theory figures like a secret mistress. Passionately embraced in its obscure persona of “Social Darwinism,” it is rejected as soon as the daylight shines on real Darwinism. In a 2008 Republican presidential debate, no less than three candidates raised their hand in response to the question “Who doesn’t believe in evolution?” No wonder that schools are hesitant to teach evolutionary theory, and that zoos and natural history museums avoid the e-word. Its hate love relation with biology is the first great paradox of the American political landscape.
Social Darwinism is all about what Gordon Gekko called “the evolutionary spirit.” It depicts life as a struggle in which those who make it shouldn’t let themselves be dragged down by those who don’t. This ideology was unleashed by British political philosopher Herbert Spencer, who in the nineteenth century translated the laws of nature into business language, coining the phrase "survival of the fittest” (often incorrectly attributed to Darwin). Spencer decried attempts to equalize society’s playing field. It would be counterproductive, he felt, for the “fit” to feel any obligation toward the "unfit.” In dense tomes that sold hundreds of thousands of copies, he said of the poor that “the whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better. "

The United States listened attentively. The business world ate it up. Calling competition a law of biology Andrew Carnegie felt it improved the human race. John D Rockefeller even married it with religion, concluding that the growth of a large business “is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.” This religious angle — still visible in the so-called Christian Right — forms the second great paradox. Whereas the book found in most American homes and every hotel room urges us on almost every page to show compassion, Social Darwinists scoff at such feelings, which only keep nature from running its course. Poverty is dismissed as proof of laziness, and social justice as a weakness. Why not simply let the poor perish? I find it hard to see how Christians can embrace such a harsh ideology without a massive case of cognitive dissonance, but many seem to do so.

The third and final paradox is that the emphasis on economic freedom triggers both the best and worst in people. The worst is the aforementioned deficit in compassion, at least at the governmental level, but there is also a good, even excellent, side to the American character—otherwise I might have packed my bags long ago—which is a merit-based society. Silver spoons, fancy titles, family legacies, all of them are known and respected, but not nearly as much as personal initiative, creativity, and plain hard work. Americans admire success stories, and will never hold honest success against anyone. This is truly liberating for those who are up to the challenge.

Europeans are far more divided by rank and class and tend to prefer security over opportunity. Success is viewed with suspicion. It’s not for nothing that the French language offers only negative labels for people who have made it by themselves, such as nouveau riche and parvenu. The result in some nations, has been economic gridlock. When I see twenty-year-olds march in the streets of Paris to claim job protection or older people to preserve retirement at fifty-five, I feel myself all of a sudden siding with American conservatives who detest entitlement. The state is not a teat from which one can squeeze milk any time of the day, yet that’s how many Europeans seem to look at it.

And so my political philosophy sits somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic—not too comfortable a place. I appreciate the economic and creative vitality on this side but remain perplexed by the widespread hatred of taxes and government. Biology is very much part of this mix as it is for every ideology that seeks justification. Social Darwinism sought to supply a scientific endorsement craved by a nation of immigrants who had quite naturally developed a strong sense of self-reliance and individualism. The problem is that one can’t derive the goals of society from the goals of nature. Trying to do so is known as the naturalistic fallacy, which is the impossibility of moving from how things are to how things ought to be. Thus, if animals were to kill one another on a large scale, this wouldn’t mean we have to do so, too, any more than we would have an obligation to live in perfect harmony if animals were to do so. All that nature can offer is information and inspiration, not prescription.

Information is critical, though. If a zoo plans a new enclosure, it takes into account whether the species to be kept is social or solitary, a climber or a digger, nocturnal or diurnal, and so on. Why should we, in designing human society, act as if we’re oblivious to the characteristics of our species? A view of human nature as “red in tooth and claw” obviously sets different boundaries to society than a view that includes cooperation and solidarity as part of our background. Darwin himself felt uncomfortable about the “right of the strongest” lessons that others, such as Spencer, tried to extract from his theory. This is why I’m tired, as a biologist, to hear evolutionary theory being trotted out as a prescription for society by those who aren’t truly interested in the theory itself and all that it has to offer.

Does Hitchens Fight Fair?

He has no way of knowing whether or not Martin Luther King was a Christian, but he's sure that Adolf Hitler was.

I'm sure everyone has heard about how Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are urging UK human rights lawyers to have Pope Benedict arrested for "crimes against humanity" when he arrives for an official visit in September.

I remember the first time I saw Christopher Hitchens on TV several years ago. I forget what the topic of the program was but the ex-Marxist made my jaw drop when he drolly remarked that "Mother Teresa is just a mouthpiece for the Vatican."

After 9/11 Hitchens scrubbed away the last residues of his leftist ways and became an ardent neo-con supporter of George Bush's War on Terror, which for Hitchens is really a War on Islam. In fact, as a committed atheist he has extended his own personal battle to a War on Religion in general, with a special virulence in his heart reserved for Catholicism, a virulence he shares with his confrere Dawkins.

He's certainly one of the most visible of the militant "New Atheists" and is often seen on the circuit debating theists and Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza. In the UK last year, Intelligence Squared hosted a debate on the proposition "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world." Hitchens was teamed up with the actor David Fry against Anne Widdecombe MP and Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria. The Catholic side got massacred. When they polled their audience, Intelligence Squared said they had never seen such a lopsided result. If you can bear it, you can watch it here. It was a debacle.

Hitchens is a formidable and polished debater, quite capable of eviscerating his opponents with his enyclopedic knowledge of history and his sharp, keenly poisonous dry wit. My daughter T and I almost went to see him debate Rabbi David Wolpe when he was in Boston a few weeks back, but Anne had to work that night and we needed to stay home.

One thing I've noticed about Hitchens, though. When he debates someone he's not above using cheap tricks and he doesn't always fight fair. This was brought home to me quite clearly when I saw him in a Bloggingheads.TV discussion with the author Robert Wright. Wright is not a theist. He writes about evolutionary psychology and non-zero sum game theory, yet Hitchens argued with him as if he was a theist anyway. It appears to be the only thing he knows how to do. He's like an old record player that can run at only one speed.

Still, I'm amazed by his glibness and his command of the language. Despite the fact that he's clearly got a buzz on, fencing adroitly with Wright while he imbibes from a glass of red wine - his pupils dilated as large as dinner plates - he manages to talk all around Wright, even when he's on the defensive.

I'd like you to see these clips and let me know what you think. In a 2-hour discussion, Wright and Hitchens were discussing Hitchens' book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Wright was pressing him on just what he meant by everything, pointing out that religion often motivates people to do great good; people like Martin Luther King whose religion had motivated him to pursue justice in the Civil Rights struggle. Watch how Hitches responds...



Amazing. Hitchens claims that without having known the man, he has no way of knowing whether MLK was a sincere and committed believer or not. He goes on to suggest that using the pulpit in the South would have had to have been done tactically out of necessity, implying a degree of cynicism on MLK's part. I don't see why that would be so. The churches in the South were just as segregated as everything else was back then. White Southern Baptists proved they were quite capable of bombing black churches if they felt a need to.

He also claims that "Social Democrats" such as Bayard Rustin and Asa Philip Randolph, co-organizers of the 1963 March on Washington along with King, deserved at least as much credit for the success of the Civil Rights movement as MLK. That's an interesting point. It may very well be that they don't get the credit they deserve, but I'm not sure that they were as "non-godly" as Hitchens suggests. After all, Bayard Rustin went on to become the very first African-American member of the Board of Trustees of Notre Dame.



In the clip directly above, well, I'll leave it up to you as impartial observers to decide if you agree with Hitchens that "the American Communist Party's most shining record was in the Civil Rights movement" and that "heroic communists" deserve just as much credit for being willing to lay down their lives for it as Dr. King.

Things really start to get interesting, however, when Wright challenges Hitchens on how some of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century were sponsored by non-theists, such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Hitchens replies cooly "Oh, to the contrary..."



Despite the mountain of sermons written by Martin Luther King, Hitchens has no way of knowing if he was a sincere and committed Christian believer, but since Hitler signed a concordat with the Vatican and because Wehrmacht belt buckles read "Gott Mit Uns," then Hitler must have been. Where Hitchens sees cynicism on MLK's part, he sees nothing but the mark of a true believer on Hitler's part. Wright does his best to call him out on this, and rightly so.

World War I German Army belt buckle with imperial insignia and "Gott Mit Uns" inscription. Yes, World War II German army belt buckles had "Gott Mit Uns" (God is with us) embossed on them. They did in World War I too, and probably well before that. It was merely a continuation of Prussian military tradition. The Wehrmacht was as full of conscripts as any other army. The SS Divisions, however, were full of Nazi Party members. They were covered in pagan-influenced SS runes and deaths-head insignias. All SS troops were required to renounce their church memberships and affiliations. If the Nazis had a theology at all, it hearkened back to ancient Germanic myths and romantic notions of Aryan supermen.

If you look out on the web you will see all sorts of conflicting statements about whether or not Hitler was a believing Christian. You can take all that any way you like but to consider Hitler a Mass-going Catholic, or as someone who took Catholic doctrines seriously at all would be utterly absurd. All I can tell you is that I've looked up every indexed reference to the Catholic Church in Mein Kampf and the only thing Hitler was interested in as far as religion was concerned was subsuming both the Catholic and Protestant churches under an overarching Pan-Germanism. The German Volk was the only ideal that mattered to him.

Hitchens also brings up a reference to the basilica near El Escorial in Spain. He's referring to El Valle de los Caidos, General Franco's massive monument to the Nationalist Civil War dead, built primarily upon the sweat and blood of his defeated Republican prisoners. Hitchens says that if you look up at the ceiling of the basilica you will see a swastika and a steel Nazi helmet embedded in the mosaic.

I have found no independent corroboration of this, but I've never been there. I find it hard to believe that a consecrated basilica, even one as distasteful and dubious as Franco's garish monument, has a swastika on display inside of it, even if there are tapestries celebrating the victory of the Nationalist forces there. About half of the people who read this blog have lived in Spain. Maybe they can let me know, if they've been there themselves. Putting the best-face on it for Hitchens' sake, perhaps he is confused. Spanish army helmets, worn by both the Nationalist and Republican forces during the conflict, did not look entirely unlike German army helmets (see image in poster). Perhaps this is where the confusion lies.

Don't get me wrong. The last thing I'm interested in doing is defending Francisco Franco or the Catholic Church's role during the Spanish Civil War. I'm defending neither. Christopher Hitchens seems to me, however, to be a man very interested in words and in the precise use of words. Just as I'm irritated to see the word "fascist" being used today to describe President Obama, it irritates me somewhat to hear the same word used to describe General Franco (although not anywhere near as much).

Was Franco really a fascist? He certainly wasn't a National Socialist, as Hitchens claims. Despite having received help from Hitler during the Civil War, Franco resisted strong attempts to draw Spain into the Axis Powers and he never rounded up Jews for the Nazis. Yes, Franco was a bad man. Franco was an authoritarian military man, a believer in "law and order," a staunch anti-communist, a believer in traditional Catholicism and of his society's traditional class structures built upon latifundist lines. He was certainly vindictive and cruel towards his defeated adversaries. He was a military strongman much along the lines of what you would see in the recent decades past in Latin America, but I don't know if I'd call the drab, listless and colorless country he ran until the 1970's a true totalitarian state. Jose Antonio Primavera was the leader of the fascist Falange Espanola at the start of the Spanish Civil War, and he was executed by the Republicans. His replacement, the slow-witted and uncharismatic Manuel Hedilla was easily dominated by Franco. Franco co-opted the Falange and all the other right-wing groups that fought on the Nationalist side, such as the Carlists and Monarchists, under one umbrella he could control. The old joke in Spain was that the system could more rightly be called "cunadismo" (brother-in-law-ism) instead of "fascismo" because it was run by Franco's brother-in-law Ramon Serrano Suner (who died in 2003 at the ripe old age of 102) and various Opus Dei technocrats.

Hitchens insinuates that the origin of fascism can be found in Europe's southern Catholic countries, citing Franco, Salazar and Mussolini as examples, perhaps based upon the Catholic teachings on corporatism and solidarism. Now, maybe it's been a tepid defense of the Church on my part in regard to this particular point. I suppose it may be, but I think Hitchens is being a little more than imprecise in his use of terms such as fascism and National Socialism, especially in how they supposedly intersect with Catholicism.

After all, the first real fascist was Benito Mussolini, and he was an avowed atheist. In his Doctrine of Fascism he wrote this about religion:

The Fascist conception of life is a religious one, in which man is viewed in his immanent relation to a higher law, endowed with an objective will transcending the in­dividual and raising him to conscious membership of a spiritual society. Those who perceive nothing beyond opportunistic considerations in the religious policy of the Fascist regime fail to realize that Fascism is not only a system of government but also and above all a system of thought... The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative. Individuals and groups are admissible in so far as they come within the State...The Fascist State is not indifferent to religious phenomena in general nor does it maintain an attitude of indif­ference to Roman Catholicism, the special, positive religion of Italians. The State has not got a theology but it has a moral code.... The Fascist loves his neighbor, but the word neighbor “does not stand for some vague and unseizable conception. Love of one's neighbor does not exclude necessary educational severity; still less does it exclude differentiation and rank. Fascism will have nothing to do with universal embraces; as a member of the community of nations it looks other peoples straight in the eyes; it is vigilant and on its guard; it follows others in all their manifestations and notes any changes in their interests; and it does not allow itself to be deceived by mutable and fallacious appearances.

In that system, religion... Catholicism, in fact, is only useful in the way it serves the State. This is not how Catholicism or any other religion defines itself.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the exchange however, is that Hitchens actually felt personally insulted when Wright suggested that Hitler was a secularist... and presumably, like him. Wright was absolutely dumbstruck and incredulous at this.

Hitchens didn't think Wright meant to insult him, but suppose he had? Suppose Wright had wanted to link him personally to secular atrocities? Could he have done so?

By some estimates, as many as as seven million people were killed in China's Cultural Revolution in the years between 1967 and 1972. What was Hitchens doing during those years? He had recently joined a Marxist group called the Luxemburgists and he started writing for International Socialism magazine. Can we therefore say that Christopher Hitchens has some of the blood of the Cultural Revolution on his hands?

Unfair ad hominem, perhaps, but no more unfair than what he dishes out himself.

What Color is this Wrapper?

The Grape Tootsie Pop Conundrum



And now for something completely different.

I've developed a little family ritual. Every Friday evening (outside of Lent) I bring home Tootsie Pops for all the kids. Lord help me if I should ever forget.

It actually started with Starbursts a long time ago, but I started to worry about our potential dental bills (Starbursts can just about pull your fillings out). I suppose it all began as a sort of end-of-week celebration, but maybe this little indulgence is a subtle insurance policy too. Maybe it's a way to make sure that at least one of them says something nice about me at my eulogy someday. "Dad was a real bastard, but at least he thought about us enough to deliver with the Tootsies every Friday..."

Well, while handing some Tootsies out recently I referred to a grape one as "the one in the purple wrapper." My daughter T looked at me incredulousy and said, "Dad, that wrapper is blue!" And so the controversy began....

I insisted the wrapper is purple and T insisted it's blue. In between peals of laughter she explained to me that males tend to be more color-blind than females, and anyway, men at my age tend to start losing the ability to discern colors accurately.

I take umbrage to this. Just a few years ago I took a still-life drawing class with charcoal and pastels at the Danforth Museum. I don't think my instructor thought much of me as a draftsman but she did tell me that I was a superb colorist. Most of my classmates weren't envious of my drawing ability but more than a few of them were envious of my ability to blend pastels together and reproduce colors exactly.

Besides, as I explained to my daughter, still convulsed in disbelieving mirth, why would the Tootsie people wrap a GRAPE-flavored PURPLE pop in a BLUE wrapper? Couldn't she see the logic of my position? I guess not.

Am I color blind? If I ask for impartial answers on this, I know I'll probably lose the debate. Now look... I know that it clearly isn't this color. It's just as obvious, however, that it isn't this color either. It's more along the lines of this color. The thing is, what do you call it?

I'm willing to concede that one might want to call it a bluish-purple, but I'm afraid that most people will say it's a purpley-blue.

If so, I declare that purple doesn't get enough credit as a color in its own right. I remember when the LA Lakers basketball team and the LA Kings hockey team wore purple jerseys they called "royal blue." Royal blue my eye... Those shirts are purple. Of that I'm sure.




Marcel Dionne in a PURPLE royal blue uniform

The 30th Anniversary of Oscar Romero's Martyrdom

This video clip isn't a bad piece, but it was wholly inappropriate for Msgr. Fernando Saenz Lacalle to be commenting on Oscar Romero. He was like the antithesis of Romero during his tenure as archbishop.