The discussion of special powers seems to have ended, but it raised some interesting epistemic issues, at least I think so; so I’ve thought about them a little more. I think there was a basic, unresolvable problem at the center of the discussion in that JS’s experience was (naturally enough) very convincing to him, but (also naturally enough) not at all convincing to anyone else except perhaps me, and not all that convincing even to me. I think JS didn’t make enough allowance for the fact that there was simply no reason at all for B&W readers to take his account at face value – although he seemed to have made allowance for that, in that he said he’d expect readers to be skeptical; but then he also seemed not to have, in that he called readers’ replies complacent and the outcome predictable. (‘Predictable’ is a tricky word. It can be just straightforwardly descriptive – or it can be a pejorative. Perhaps it was just predictable in a factual, neutral sense that readers would ask skeptical questions about JS’ account; then again perhaps it was predictable in the sense of tediously unimaginative.) To put it another way, I think he’s making a reasonable and interesting point, but I think the account of the weird experience doesn’t have the argumentative force that he appears to think it does or should. It is, as I said, somewhat more convincing to me than it has any reason to be to other readers, merely because I know him and thus know that he’s not, for instance, some giggling hacker playing a joke. On the other hand, knowing him undercuts my willingness and ability to be convinced as well as aiding it, because he has told me of so many jokes of his that rely on sustained deception. And that’s his doing, not mine! So charges of complacency are misplaced.

So, to a couple of specific questions.

But it is a lovely example of precisely the kind of complacency about explanations that I think is a worry where you have a whole load of people who are committed to more or less the same worldview that people are so keen to explain away this stuff by invoking coincidence, when it seems perfectly possible that there might be other mechanisms at work that we either don’t yet understand, or that we understand but will always be epistemologically in the dark about in these situations (e.g., the possibility that you’ve both seen a magazine cover).

But why is that complacency rather than just good practice? Or, what is the difference? Why isn’t it reasonable, rather than complacent, to consider what seems to be the most plausible explanation first? We do that all the time (so in that sense I suppose one could say it’s complacent, but since it also gets the job done, who cares? I mean, maybe it’s complacent to brush one’s hair with a hairbrush rather than with a sock, but it does save time and effort). When we can’t find our wallets, we don’t instantly leap to the conclusion that a space alien came in and stole it to buy linoleum for the chateau in Perth Amboy, do we. We try the more likely scenarios first, and only then check out the space alien possibility. Sure, sometimes routine and habit prevent us from looking for and finding more thrilling possibilities, but the more thrilling possibility isn’t always the epistemically best one.

The thing is though that this is precisely the explaining away that I both expect, and think is undesirable. Basically, it’s a move that relies on the fact that one can never have direct access to the content of other people’s minds, in order to render said contents inadmissible as data in scientific explanation…But if one automatically retreats to those positions in order to explain away phenomena that are troubling for the naturalistic worldview, then that simply confirms the charge that motivates this posting.

Yes and no. Or yes but it can’t be helped. Because the alternative is just plain dumb credulity – for everyone except the person or people who experienced it. As I said Tuesday, I just don’t see any way around that. Since we can’t have direct access to the content of other people’s minds, and we know that, we can’t refuse to entertain the possibility that people who tell stories of Weird Experiences are wrong or joking or lying or misremembering or exaggerating or distorting or all those. If you make it a rule to refuse to entertain such possibilities, you find yourself buying all these bridges you don’t want and don’t have room for. There’s no way (that I can see) to get past that. I get that it was overwhelmingly convincing to JS, and I do find that interesting, and I don’t dismiss the idea that it was some rare natural phenomenon that hasn’t been mapped yet; but I can’t just decide to be as convinced as he is. That would be fatuous. It was his experience, it wasn’t anyone else’s. It’s just a fact of life that X’s experience is not as convincing to any not-X as it is to X. So I consider it unfair to call it explaining away, or a move, or automatically retreating. I just don’t see what else sane people can be expected to do, other than beam happily and throw their brains out the window for the squirrels to eat.

I said this on the subject in comments on Tuesday, and I still think it’s right: “There’s an interesting issue here, because the trouble is, this business of being skeptical and cautious about accepting personal testimony on blind faith is both a valid methodological rule and an evasive tactic. It can be either or both at any given time, and there doesn’t really seem to be anything that can be done about that. That’s true in courtrooms too. Evidence can be entirely true and still be ruled out as hearsay. Objections can be (and are) evasive tactics but still raise valid points. I take myself to be not automatically dismissing your account in order to avoid questioning naturalistic views, I take myself to be raising perfectly valid objections to accepting your account on faith – but of course the upshot is the same (except that in fact I do believe your account, but that’s for largely non-epistemic reasons).”

So I don’t think it’s complacent to be more skeptical of someone else’s experience than the person who had the experience is, and I don’t think it’s complacent or (reprehensibly) predictable to ask searching questions about it. I think if we did anything else we might as well forget the whole thing, re-name this site ‘The Bide-a-wee Home for New Age Woollies’, and talk nothing but nonsense from now until curtain-time.

Rhetoric. Funny how quickly people reach for it. Well, no it’s not, because it works, but you’d think people would have a little shame. But they don’t.

This ‘trustee and spokesman for the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health’ for instance. He’s not shy about it.

The row was stirred last night when the Prince of Wales made a groundbreaking speech to the World Health Assembly in Geneva, outlining his philosophy of holistic care to an audience of the world’s health ministers. He urged every country to develop a plan for integrating conventional and alternative medicine. “Many of today’s complementary therapies are rooted in ancient traditions that intuitively understood the need to maintain balance and harmony with our minds, bodies and the natural world,” he said. The prince argued that in “the ceaseless rush to modernise … many beneficial approaches, which have been tried and tested and have shown themselves to be effective, have been cast aside because they are deemed to be ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘irrelevant’ to today’s needs”.

His ‘philosophy’ of holistic care – meaning what? His woolly idea that it’s a good thing? Based on what? His training in medicine or biology or pathology or immunology or microbiology? No? His training in architecture? His training in botany? No? What, then? It’s kind of funny (I think) that no one bothers to ask! Not even the damn Guardian. If the Guardian can’t be bothered to ask, who is going to ask? The Guardian just said he made a ‘groundbreaking speech’ – there’s some rhetoric for you right there, before we even get to his spokesman fella. Why doesn’t anyone care that some guy who has no expert knowledge of a technical subject at all gets up at the World Health Assembly and tells the world’s health ministers what’s what? Why don’t they mind? Why do they think it’s okay that someone with zero training and zero expertise considers himself entitled and qualified to make a speech of that kind in that place to those people? I would really like to know.

Back to his spokesman.

If you look at them, they are surgeons, a pathologist, and none of them represent any GPs or anyone in primary care. It seems to me odd that these clinical barons should be telling those of us who have to deal with daily human suffering what to do. It is almost like some protectionist guild. They have a slightly old-fashioned view.

Well that won’t do. Old-fashioned? Away with it. Oh but wasn’t the Prince just saying…’many beneficial approaches, which have been tried and tested and have shown themselves to be effective, have been cast aside because they are deemed to be ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘irrelevant’ to today’s needs’? Yes, but never mind. Let’s not be slavish and sycophantic here. What we have to do here instead is cast these pesky interfering doctor types as ‘barons’ and a ‘protectionist guild’. They’re exclusive, that’s what it is! They’re excluding people. They’re barons, with a guild, and they’re excluding all the nice amateur doctors who want to help everyone. Terrible thing.

Dr Peter Fisher of the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital also spoke up; he ‘described the letter as an attempt to introduce a form of “medical apartheid” into the NHS.’ There you go! Barons in a guild are attempting to introduce apartheid. Those bastards! Those exclusive, excluding, border-patrolling, complacent, elitist bastards. It’s an outrage.

Hitchens doesn’t agree with that Ian Buruma piece on Hirsi Ali I commented on the other day.

Ian Buruma said that Ayaan Hirsi Ali ought to have spoken out more for those who had been denied asylum in the Netherlands…This point doesn’t seem to me to carry much weight. If she had become the spokeswoman for other refugees, her own story of making a partially false application could (and would) have been used against her even more. Instead, she pointed out that many perfectly legal immigrants to Holland were trying to import dictatorship rather than flee from it, and for this she attracted lethal hatred…Hirsi Ali calls for a pluralist democracy where all opinion is protected but where the law does not – in the name of some pseudo-tolerance – permit genital mutilation, “honor” killing, and forced marriage.

There’s one very bizarre remark in this Observer article, a remark about the tv documentary that (apparently) prompted Verdonk to revoke Hirsi Ali’s citizenship:

The fact that she had lied was well-known, retorted Hirsi Ali, making the point that was she was fleeing a forced marriage. Not so, said van Dongen, using testimony from her brother and husband to allege that the marriage was not made under compulsion.

Oh, from her brother and husband! The ‘husband’ she went to the Netherlands to avoid marrying. Oh, well then, clearly they’re telling the truth about her, because, being her brother and husband, they couldn’t possibly be doing anything else. The reporter making that remark could have interjected just a little note of caution, I’d have thought.

Homa has set up a petition. It has lots of signers one is happy to join – Homa, Maryam, Irshad Manji, June Callwood, Caroline Fourest; Anne Zelensky, Présidente de la Ligue du Droit des femmes; Mohan Ashtakala, Publisher, The Himalayan News; Michel Virard, President, Association Humaniste du Québec,Canada; and lots more. It may make Hirsi Ali feel that bit more welcome over here, if nothing else.

Let’s just look at a few comments.

From Flemming Rose:

Dictatorships in the Middle East and radical imams have adopted the jargon of the European left, calling the cartoons racist and Islamophobic. When Westerners criticize their lack of civil liberties and the oppression of women, they say we behave like imperialists. They have adopted the rhetoric and turned it against us…Yet multiculturalism that has all too often become mere cultural relativism is an indefensible proposition that often justifies reactionary and oppressive practices. Giving the same weight to the illiberal values of conservative Islam as to the liberal traditions of the European Enlightenment will, in time, destroy the very things that make Europe such a desirable target for migration.

From a review of Todd Gitlin’s new book:

Todd Gitlin, a founder in the early 1960s of the radical Students for a Democratic Society and now a professor at Columbia University, is appalled by the obscurantism of the academic left…The left, he argues, took a wrong turn when it abandoned knowledge as its guiding light on the grounds that knowledge, as argued by theorists like Michael Foucault and Edward Said, was merely a masked form of power, and illegitimate power at that…Gitlin recounts a conversation with a committed feminist who, like her fellow postmodernists, thought, as did the premodern scholastics, that there was no reality other than that constituted by “discourse.” For the postmodernists who dominate many of our humanities departments, it is as if the scientific revolution never occurred. “The category of ‘lived experience’ was, from her point of view, an atavistic concealment; what one ‘lived’ was constituted by a discourse that had no more – or less – standing than any other system of discourse.” When asked, the feminist was unable to provide a reasoned justification for her own commitments. They could only be asserted as a matter of power and will.

Well – peachy. Since feminists tend to have less power than, say, guys wielding machetes or truck-antenna whips or AK-47s, that’s not a great position to find oneself in. It’s also vacuous, and lazy.

But her problem was more than personal. If, as Michel Foucault told the Berkeley faculty in 1983, “There is no universal criterion which permits us to say, this category of power relations are bad and those are good,” then there is no way to prefer a liberal society to fascism, communism, or Islamism. What that means, by extension, is that, as in the 1930s, many leftists either sympathize with an authoritarian alternative to liberalism or have a hard time explaining why a liberal society should be defended against its enemies.

Or both.

From an article on the Euston Manifesto:

There are cracks in the façade of European leftism that should give us all some hope…Perhaps the most noticeable fissure in the masonry of group-think is a new initiative promoted by old British leftist Norman Geras, who supports the war in Iraq and democratization in the Middle East. Together with a young columnist named Nick Cohen, Geras is leading a new movement dubbed the Euston Manifesto…

That made me snort with laughter when I read it. Hang on! Norm isn’t all that old, and Nick isn’t all that young. It’s not as if Norm is ninety and Nick is seven; it’s not even as if Norm is eighty and Nick is twenty. Get a grip.

The sudden success of the British initiative suggests that there is an untapped vein of rational progressivism in Europe. It is looking for a way to throw off the stifling blanket of doctrinaire thinking that always labels Israel and America the enemy, forgives oppressive and even murderous behavior in minority communities under the relativistic guise of multiculturalism, and excuses terrorism as the only weapon of “resistance” available to the oppressed…But, with a rising generation willing to wake up and rethink some of the received rigidities, there’s reason for hope.

It’s not really a generation thing, that I can see. There are plenty of young multicultis, and plenty of ancient creaking universalists, so this isn’t yet another round of hip new cohort overthrows dreary old windbags. Oldies can be clever, yoof can be damn silly. Relevance, m’lud.

Right, this is Jerry – I’m briefly hijacking Ophelia’s space. I kind of said that I would write about my Special Powers, so here goes. (I ought to say that I don’t for a moment believe in Special Powers, but there is a point to this.)

I’ve had three bizarre “psychic” type experiences in my life; two of which I think are explicable, one of which is a lot more difficult to explain.

The first occurred when I was 11. I was in a car pulling a massive caravan; it was being driven by my father. We had just gone over one of the Alpine mountain passes, and we were driving down into Italy. What happened next was very odd. I found myself absolutely terrified for no easily discernible reason; almost crying with terror. I kept saying to my father that he had to slow down, he was going too fast. He slowed down – probably from 60 miles an hour to 50 (the speed limit, I think, for towing a caravan). But I still kept on at him, that it was too fast, that he had to go slower. By this point, he was a bit freaked out – as was my mother – so he slowed down some more (just to mollify me). But it still felt to me that the car was careering along way too fast to be towing a caravan. So I kept on at him. I can remember him getting annoyed – because by this point we were probably travelling only about 40 miles an hour – but my mother kind of said, look, just slow down until Jerry feels better (or something like that). And he did slow down, so we were probably only travelling at about 30 miles an hour when the front right tyre exploded. Caravans have a tendency to snake; I think if it had happened at 60 miles an hour, we would probably have plunged off the side of the mountain into a ravine, but as it was my father just about got the car under control, and we kind of juddered to a halt by the side of the road.

So that was quite strange, but easily explicable I think.

The second strange thing happened about fifteen years ago. I had a dream that I was playing basketball. I hadn’t played basketball for ten years (I was forced to play once or twice at school). I have no interest in basketball. I don’t know anything about it. And so on. I remembered the dream because in it I threw the ball and dislocated my shoulder (my shoulder dislocates a lot – an old soccer injury). I woke instantly and checked my shoulder. So I had committed the dream to memory. The next morning I went to teach a private student at his house. I’d never been there before. When I was teaching him, he asked whether I wanted a game of badminton after the lesson (he knew I played racket sports). I said sure, why not. But I wasn’t expecting the game. It hadn’t been planned. We went to the Sports Centre. He had got changed at his home, but he’d lent me clothes and shoes, and I got changed in the Centre changing rooms. He went on ahead. Anyway, I walked out of the changing rooms, and onto where I thought the courts were. As I came in through the door, he threw me a basketball, so there I was standing on a basketball court for the first time in twenty years, holding a basketball (the badminton courts hadn’t yet been set up), the morning after the only dream I have ever had about basketball, a dream in which I threw the ball, and dislocated my shoulder. I think I just said: “Fuck, I dreamt about this last night. I’m not throwing this ball.”

Again, I think this one is easily explicable.

But the third strange thing I don’t think is easily explicable. I was on an overnight flight back from the States, and my partner – Cheryl – and I had been messing around with that twenty questions game (yes, we’re very boring). In our version, one of us would think of a famous person, then the other one had twenty questions (Yes/No responses) to work out who the person was. Anyway, this went on for about half an hour before we began to get bored, and I said: Right, you know that I have psychic powers, we’ll play one last time, and I’ll just get the person without asking any questions. Cheryl, of course, thought this not very likely. But then, I had an incredibly strange experience; I just *knew* the answer. I get, of course, that nobody reading this will believe that I “knew” the answer, to which I can only reply – you didn’t have the experience. Anyway, I said to Cheryl something like, “I know who you’re thinking of, but I don’t know the name”. She said: “Yeah right”. And I said – “It’s that woman, in the 1920s, she was involved in partitioning up the middle east, or Iraq, or something like that”. Anyway, that was the right answer, Cheryl had been thinking of Gertrude Bell (Wikipedia has an entry on her). Cheryl pretty much looked like she’d been hit by a truck. She actually looked scared. Because: a) I have no particular interest in the Middle East; b) We’ve never discussed Middle Eastern history; c) Cheryl was not reading about Middle Eastern history (though she is interested in Iran, which it turned out is how she knew about Gertrude Bell); d) We had been on holiday, so we hadn’t been watching news stories about Iraq or anything else to do with the Middle East (and indeed, this would have been before the invasion of Iraq); e) I didn’t even know that I knew about Gertrude Bell – indeed, I’m not sure I did know about her; f) Just the weirdness of the way I’d got it right – I had told Cheryl I would get it right, I guessed the correct person, but didn’t know her name (I mean, you’d have thought I’d at least have guessed at someone whose name I did know”); and so on, and so forth.

I don’t have an explanation for this last one. The first weird experience – I think I had picked up on some imbalance in the way the car was running – because of the dodgy tyre – and my subconscious did the rest. The second weird thing – just a coincidence (though a hell of a coincidence given that the dream appeared like a warning; but nevertheless, a coincidence). The third one – no, it’s not a coincidence. The nature of the experience was such that the simple conjunction of Cheryl having chosen Gertrude Bell, and my having guessed Gertrude Bell, isn’t really what’s at stake. What’s at stake is the fact that the experience itself was verdical. In that sense, this experience had a different quality than the first two weird experiences. For the coincidence theory to work, what has to be explained is the conjunction between the already highly unlikely proposition that I would have guessed Gertrude Bell at all, the fact that my partner had chosen Gertrude Bell, and the fact that this all occurred with my having in advance said that I knew the correct answer, and with that “knowledge” having been gained in the context of a kind of experience I hadn’t had before and haven’t had since. It wasn’t a coincidence.

Ophelia and I started talking about this stuff because I was trying to illustrate the importance of dissent. I was trying to make two points: (a) Naturalistic explanations are strengthened to the extent that they are able to meet the kind of challenge that my experience throws up, but you’re much less likely to get this kind of challenge if everybody is committed, in a taken-for-granted manner, to the efficacy of naturalistic explanations (in this instance, it would mean that likely there would be no attention paid to the nature of the experience [because that allows the coincidence explanation into play; or the half-coincidence, half-knowledge of partner, explanation]); (b) Don’t underestimate the power of certain kinds of experiences; if people have “experiences” of God that are as apparently veridical as my Gertrude Bell experience, I understand why they’re not convinced by the arguments of atheists.

Correspondents in or from the Netherlands have written to me on the subject of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Views differ. I admire her in many ways, myself – but that doesn’t entail thinking she’s beyond criticism. So I was glad to see this piece by Ian Buruma; it seems fair. (I say ‘seems’ only because I don’t know nearly enough about Dutch politics to judge. I have to take his word for what he’s saying – but I see little reason not to.)

In the name of the Enlightenment, she would do battle against the new counter-Enlightenment, and she found allies among a variety of conservative intellectuals and politicians – and some former leftists, too – who were convinced that multiculturalism had failed, that the Dutch were timid, even cowardly, in the face of the Muslim challenge and that a tough line had to be taken. Rita Verdonk was only a particularly extreme and unimaginative exponent of this new mood…It was she who sent back vulnerable refugees to places like Syria and Congo. It was under her watch that asylum seekers were put in prison cells after a fire had consumed their temporary shelter and killed 11 at the Amsterdam airport. She was the one who decided to send a family back to Iraq because they had finessed their stories, even though human rights experts had warned that they would be in great danger…In this context, Ms. Hirsi Ali’s earlier remarks about the “terror” of “political correctness” have an unfortunate ring. It would have been better if she had taken this opportunity to speak up for the people who face the same problem that she did, of trying to move to a free European country, because their lives are stunted at home for social, political or economic reasons. By all means let us support Ayaan Hirsi Ali now, but spare a thought also for the nameless people sent back to terrible places in the name of a hard line to which she herself has contributed.

There’s more than one kind of tough line. Resisting cultural relativism is one thing, sending refugees back to Syria and Congo is another. So spare a thought.

Julian on the Simpsons. I’m sure he’s right, but I’ve never quite managed to get into it. I realize I ought to, and I feel as if I ought to – not in a moral sense, obviously, but in the sense that I’m sure I’m missing something worth not missing – but usually when I try, I find it irksome; I find I’m forcing myself to keep watching, as a duty, as if it were medicinal, at which I always get impatient and switch to something I like better. Though I also have an ongoing intention to do better some day.

I’m pretty sure I know why I find it irksome, too: it’s so ugly, and the animation is so bad. I’m pretty sure that’s the only thing that stands in the way. (What the hell else would it be? I’ve seen it enough to know I like the content.) I’m sorry, I can’t help it, I just get tired of looking at Homer’s face and Marge’s hair, very quickly. Almost instantly. I’m sure the ugliness is part of the joke, but the joke palls just as fast as the ugliness does, which is pretty much immediately. I can’t help it. I grew up on Warner Brothers cartoons; they’re part of my syntax, my grammar, my earliest mental furniture. Sub-Warner level animation has just never done it for me – it always has to compete with the Warner template, and it can’t do it. Rocky and Bullwinkle could be very funny (they were kind of a premonition of Jerry and Kramer, come to think of it), but man the drawing and animation were crap. Hanna-Barbera were just synoymous with bad animation. So I have this block about the Simpsons. Sad, isn’t it. (Imagine if all editions of Alice came with very ugly, crude illustrations on every page – and there were no plain editions in existence. That would be too bad. On the other hand I have a cartoon edition [yes, really] of Lear [complete text], and it’s brilliant, I love it. But I can’t learn to love Homer. I’m sorry.)

The rabbi has a point. Or part of one anyway.

…the notion that there is no higher authority than nature is precisely what enables people like Mr. Kuklinski – and the vast majority of the killers, rapists and thieves who populate the nightly news. No, no, of course that is not to say that most atheists engage in amoral or unethical behavior. What it is to say, though, is that atheism qua atheism presents no compelling objection to such behavior – nor, for that matter, any convincing defense of the very concepts of ethics and morality themselves.

Well, first of all, that’s a somewhat tricksy claim, because of course ‘atheism qua atheism’ presents no anything about behavior, since opinions on behavior are not what atheism is. Neither is theism, in and of itself; it’s the superstructure that gets built up on top of it – or, to put it another way, the nature of the deity that people decide to believe in; the way people choose to describe the deity they have decided to believe in, rather than their belief that a deity of some sort does exist, that provide the opinions on behavior and the defense of morality. So it’s no good claiming that theists get to assume that the moral views are inherent in the theism while they are not inherent in atheism; in fact they’re inherent in neither. But just for the sake of argument, let’s let him get away with that. Let’s be generous. And having given him that we might as well let him have the ‘compelling objection’ and the ‘convincing defense’ claims – even though he really chose the wrong adjectives there. He should have chosen something like irrefutable, or decisive, or absolute, or knock-down, because if he meant that atheists are unable to work up a compelling or convincing superstructure of moral ideas, as opposed to an irrefutable one, in the absence of a deity, I think that’s just a silly claim, with mountains of historical evidence (to say nothing of other kinds) to contradict it. But never mind; let him have that too. Let’s look farther.

To a true atheist, there can be no more ultimate meaning to good and bad actions than to good or bad weather; no more import to right and wrong than to right and left. To be sure, rationales might be conceived for establishing societal norms, but social contracts are practical tools, not moral imperatives; they are, in the end, artificial. Only an acknowledgement of the Creator can impart true meaning to human life, placing it on a plane above that of mosquitoes.

Of course. Of course social contracts are in the end artificial – but what the rabbi unaccountably fails to notice is that so is what he is saying. It’s exactly as artificial. He’s arguing that theism is a good thing because it compels us to be good – rather than because it’s true. He’s giving a (very old and very familiar) consequentialist argument for the social utility of religion and theist belief. And there is much truth in what he says, but that certainly doesn’t make the whole set-up any less artificial, does it. In fact what’s funny about what the rabbi says (and about these arguments in general, and the way they keep cropping up) is that it could actually undermine religious belief. People could read it and think a little bit and recognize that the rabbi is making a consequentialist argument, which could imply that he doesn’t actually believe in the moral guarantor in the sky himself – oops. Totter, shake, tremble, fall. Consequentialist arguments for actual belief in the real existence of a deity are a tad self-undermining – that’s why one is not supposed to make them in front of the servants. Cicero and Polybius both pointed that out a longish time ago. Oh well – better luck next time, rabbi.

Update: as Don pointed out, PZ has a great post on the rabbi’s thoughts at Pharyngula.

How do people manage to believe strange things? One way is simply to conclude that they have Special Powers, of course; but apart from that? Skeptical Inquirer discusses it via a review of Susan Clancy’s Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens.

…no one wakes up in the morning with a full-blown abduction experience. Sometimes, the experience is created and molded from the starting point of a dream or hypnogogic/hypnopompic hallucination experienced during sleep paralysis. Other times, it starts with just a vague feeling that something had happened that needs to be explained. According to Clancy, all of the abductees she studied “had sought out books, movies, researchers, and hypnotists in an effort to understand the things that were troubling them” (143). Since sleep paralysis and its related hallucinations are almost unknown to the general public, the real explanation is not available. Thus, when someone who has had such an experience reads one of the books touting the reality of alien abductions or hears such claims on television or elsewhere, it seems the only explanation available.

Up to a point. I always wonder why people don’t ask themselves why the aliens drop in only when the dropped in on have just woken up from sound sleep. Why don’t they knock on the door at 3 in the afternoon and ask for lemonade? Why don’t they show up at noon and help make lunch? Why don’t they show up right after dinner and pass the mints? Why don’t they show up when everyone for miles around is wide awake and alert and dressed and walking around and thinking straight? Eh? Why is it always when people are lying there in fetid heaps wondering what woke them oh it’s an alien? You would think they’d wonder. Not, maybe, if it were something only a little bit strange, something absurd but not physically impossible – (I have to say that because I once had an auditory hallucination after being woken up at 3 a.m., and I didn’t realize it was a hallucination until years later, reading about hypnogogic sleep. But what I heard wasn’t aliens, or god rehearsing a speech, or The Great Unicorn humming a tune. It was odd, even socially impossible, but not supernatural.) – but if it were aliens? Barney and Betty aliens, mashed potato aliens, sperm-head aliens? I would think that would make people look a little harder for other explanations. But then of course some do; it’s just that others don’t. That’s not all that surprising. It’s a big world.

In chapter 5, “Who gets abducted?”, she reports the results of her own research on dozens of abductees, whom she interviewed and gave psychological tests. In general, these people are quite normal. They are certainly, with an exception or two, not “crazy,” as so many first suspect upon hearing their tales. They are, however, more imaginative, creative, and fantasy-prone than the general population.

Sure. It’s not at all about being crazy, I should think, it’s about being credulous, uncritical, mentally passive. All of which are natural! Those are pretty much default mode; it takes learning to be the other thing. Skepticism and caution and logic, poking at inferences, realizing the difference between correlation and causation – all those are learned behaviour. Lots of people never do learn it. And there are masses of influences teaching the opposite.

It may surprise you to know that my co-author has Special Powers. He’s been telling me about them lately. He was considering telling you about them too, but he may have decided not to profane the mysteries. He has a faint hope that telling me about his Special Powers will convince me that he is by definition always right about everything, but I have roundly assured him that it won’t. I defeated him in argument six times earlier today; he was merely too stiff-necked to concede as much.

Did you read the excerpts from Rebecca Clarren’s article about near-slave labour in the Mariana islands and the sterling work Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff did to block all legislative attempts to reform the situation? That’s the far right for you, revealed in all its squalid glory – peel away all the heavy breathing about culture of life and family values and Christian nation, and what you find is the reality: destitute Asian women worked practically to death for execrable wages and in execrable conditions while fat prosperous happy safe white men collect huge payments to bribe each other and take each other on junkets all in aid of preventing those overworked underpaid Asian women from being paid the minimum wage. It’s bottomlessly disgusting.

30,000 “guest workers” — predominately women — from China, the Philippines and Thailand sew clothing for top-name American brands, which are then allowed to label them “Made in USA” because the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) is a U.S. territory. But workers in these factories are not covered by U.S. minimum-wage and immigration laws. Coming from rural villages and the big-city slums of poor Asian countries, these garment workers arrive in Saipan with a huge financial debt, having borrowed money (at interest rates as high as 20 percent) to pay recruiters as much as $7,000 for a one-year contract job. In a situation akin to indentured servitude, workers cannot earn back their recruitment fee and pay for housing and food without working tremendous hours of overtime…Abramoff and his team brought in nearly $11 million in fees from the Northern Marianas government and Saipan garment manufacturers to block congressional efforts to raise the minimum wage and eliminate the islands’ exemptions from U.S. immigration laws. His efforts focused on the House Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over U.S. territories. And he also cultivated powerful allies in the House leadership — notably Tom DeLay, who, as Majority Whip at the time, could keep a bill off the House floor even if the Resources Committee voted in its favor.

Could, and did. And then apparently slept well at night. A pretty picture, is it not? Powerful rich men keeping powerless poor women in wretched grinding poverty, because they’ve been paid to do so.

Update: Terri Gross interviewed Rebecca Clarren, the reporter who wrote the story, and Katherine Spillar, the editor who commissioned it, on Fresh Air last Tuesday. They say more about DeLay’s work to block legislation than appears in the extracts at Alternet and TomPaine. I’d link to the full article but it appears not to be online. The interview is pretty gripping.

Well, no, since you ask, I couldn’t resist; of course not. What do you take me for? It would take a saint, or rather a hero, to resist, and I’m not either of those things, nor a martyr neither, I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger – no, wait, that’s a song. I’m just a poor shlub at a keyboard, and I don’t resist stuff. I don’t have the grit and the fibre and the steel it would take to resist hooting with laughter at New Statesman readers voting for Thatcher as one of their top heroes. Snerk, snort, shriek. She’s in the top five.

It’s scary when they start shooting up judges. Very scary, in the same way it’s scary (terrifying, actually) when there are Congressional representatives willing to try to pass legislation as grotesquely unconstitutional as the mockingly-named Constitution Restoration Act, and when an angry (and thoroughly corrupt) senator threatens judges from the floor of the Senate. It’s scary when theocrats start to target the judiciary, because in a secular state, the judiciary is the only institution that can block majoritarian moves to establish theocracy.

And they know that in Turkey. They are scared, and they’re pissed.

Tens of thousands of people have marched through the Turkish capital, Ankara, in protest at the killing of a judge by a suspected Islamist gunman. Protesters waved Turkish flags and chanted slogans that the country must remain a secular state. A man calling himself “a soldier of Allah” shot dead Judge Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin and wounded four others at a top administrative court on Wednesday…Correspondents say the attack may have been linked to the court’s record in upholding the ban on Muslim headscarves in universities and government offices – a decision condemned as illegal by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose ruling party has Islamist roots…The gunman reportedly burst into a committee meeting of the Council of State, shouting “Allahu akbar!” (God is great) as he fired his weapon…”This massacre attempt is directed against the secular republic. We strongly denounce it,” said the statement read by Sumru Cortoglu, chairwoman of the Council of State.

Bad, bad, very bad.

The Turkish newspapers are interesting. Bekir Coskun in Hurriyet for instance:

Whether they have a gun or a bomb in their hand, their target is the same: To wipe out the secular republic, to prevent modernity and civilization and push Turkish society into a way of life from the Middle Ages, to make Sharia law dominant.

Bad.

So I suppose right now somewhere in the middle of London (where is the ICA, anyway? I forget. Piccadilly? Bedford Square? next to Hatchard’s? I have no idea) some people (how many, I wonder? fifty? a hundred? two?) are listening to three or four guys talking about truth. I wonder what they’re saying about it. That it can be hard to get at, perhaps. That it’s in a well. That Bacon named an essay after it. That it’s not a bad thing to aim at, on the whole. That people who play certain public roles have a particular obligation to aim at it, and to avoid aiming at the other thing. That it’s just a matter of common sense, when you get right down to it. No, not that last one, that one’s a joke.

Well, I hope they’re all enjoying themselves, at any rate.

Interesting. The University of Colorado has released a report on its investigation of Ward Churchill. And?

Among the violations that the committee found Churchill had committed were falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, failure to comply with established standard regarding author names on publications, and a “serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research.”

Uh – that’s bad. That’s what you don’t do. You know like when you go to the dentist? The dentist isn’t supposed to take the sharp things and jam them into the roof of your mouth on purpose. That’s contraindicated. Same thing with this. Academics aren’t supposed to falsify, fabricate, or plagiarize. It doesn’t matter whether they’re controversial or offensive or rowdy or longhaired; they don’t get to falsify and fabricate. They just don’t. Being controversial and offensive doesn’t mean they do get to, as some kind of compensation for the fatigue or risk of being controversial and offensive. It doesn’t work that way. Made-up social science just isn’t wanted, no matter how thrillingly controversial the maker-up is.

It’s like David Irving, again. Ward Churchill doesn’t have a free speech or First Amendment right to falsify and fabricate. It’s not a criminal offense and not an imprisonable one, but it’s not a protected free speech right, either. He doesn’t get to say ‘it’s my First Amendment right to fabricate and falsify my research’ and carry on doing it.

He doesn’t get to say his hand slipped, either. They thought of that, and said No.

The Committee found that Professor Churchill’s misconduct was deliberate and not a
matter of an occasional careless error. The Committee found that similar patterns recurred
throughout the essays it examined. The Committee therefore concluded that the degree of his
misconduct was serious, but differed on the sanction warranted.

The committee also pointed out that the controversy is one thing and the misconduct is another. Important point, that.

The Committee notes that the Laws of the Regents of the University of Colorado
define “academic freedom” as “the freedom to inquire, discover, publish and
teach truth as the faculty member sees it, subject to no control or authority save
the control and authority of the rational methods by which truth is established.”
We understand and were careful to distinguish “misconduct in research”…from the issue of “truth” addressed by
the Regents’ Laws’ definition of academic freedom. The Committee observes
also that the allegations we were asked to investigate were initiated in the wake of
the public outcry concerning some highly controversial essays by Professor
Churchill dealing with, among other things, the 9/11 tragedy. While not
endorsing either the tone or the contents of those essays, the Committee reaffirms,
as the University has already acknowledged, that Professor Churchill’s right to
publish his views was protected by both the First and Fourteenth Amendment
guarantees of free speech. Although those essays played no part in our
deliberations, the Committee expresses its concern regarding the timing and
perhaps the motives for the University’s decision to forward charges made in that
context.

The timing and context are highly unfortunate. Too bad Churchill provided so much ammunition for his critics.

Here’s some, shall we say, flexible thinking in action. Someone (the name sounds male so I’ll decide it is male, in order not to have to say s/he, which I do not like to say) admitting in the first words of a ‘review’ that he has not read the book he is reviewing, then blithely and absent-mindedly proceeding to discuss said book quite as if he had indeed read it and taken detailed notes. I can tell you he hadn’t and hasn’t and didn’t, though, because everything he says about it is flat wrong, and I know that on account of I co-wrote the book.

Behold his artless frankness at the beginning –

I can imagine, and i’ve heard from friends that this is a good and funny read if you’re coming from the same camp as the authors (which i guess much of the general public will), but the (apparently witty) attacks on the “fashionable lunatics” of modern philosophy and religious believers are as far is it goes.

There you go. He can imagine, and he’s heard from friends, but he doesn’t know. The ‘attacks’ are ‘apparently’ witty but he doesn’t know that from personal knowledge. Not until the next sentence, when suddenly he does know all about it.

Look at them! They’re saying things which we don’t seem like intuitive common sense! They must be idiots! Ho ho.

Right. That’s just what Why Truth Matters is like. That’s all we do: we just point and laugh. Spot on.

It’s clear neither of the authors really understand post-modern philosophy, particularly its effect on ethics, and worse the book lumps together everything from art to history that anybody might have described as post modern into a single post modern opinion, so it can ridicule them all at the same time, apparently failing to realise the extremely wide range of phenomena that it covers.

Yup, that’s right, that’s an accurate description all right, we lump together everything from art to history and then ridicule the whole stew; we have no clue about the wide range of whatnots. What we did is we found a couple of columns by George Will and just kind of riffed on them, and let it go at that.

Okay, so, speaking of the effect of ‘post-modern philosophy’ on ethics, this Mojo fella has an interesting idea of ethics. He apparently considers it ethical to tell a pack of flat, brazen lies about a book he hasn’t read in hopes of damaging its chances because he doesn’t like what he thinks he knows (but doesn’t) about the contents. Fortunately, he’s also stupid enough to say he hasn’t read it and only then set about the lying. Perhaps that’s the effect of ‘postmodern philosphy’ on the intellect.

So, where were we. Here’s one thing JS said in the discussion.

The other general point is that I think people make the best cases for
scientific method when there are genuine threats to the scientific process.
I don’t think having imaginary arguments does the job nearly as well. So,
for example, Dawkins, Dennett, Jones, etc., are all doing what they’re doing
at least in part because they think that evolution is under threat as an
accepted truth. So there’s an instrumental reason for wanting dissent.

That did make sense to me, and since that made sense to me, I was better able to see what he was getting at in the interview. (The interview, being so brief, was a little cryptic. I think the subject probably needs more room to breathe than that.) I don’t really know for sure that Dawkins, Dennett, Jones and co are doing what they’re doing better than they would be doing it if they did not think evolution was under threat as an accepted truth – but I think it’s at least possible. Because for one thing the misunderstandings that ID-defenders keep kicking up perhaps show what needs explaining. (On the other hand, I know PZ for instance thinks those misunderstandings are just repetitive and futile and a waste of time that biologists could be spending on research rather than on endlessly arguing the same points over and over again with ID-defenders who will just repeat the process tomorrow. But the two needn’t be in contradiction. It could be that people who write about the public understanding of science are in a way helped by misunderstandings while people who are doing research are not. It could be a matter of division of labour.)

There’s a lot more, but we ended up pretty much agreeing, I think, except possibly on some not particularly important details. There’s an issue about what foundational beliefs B&W takes for granted, or is committed to, and whether they are rationally grounded or not – but it probably doesn’t matter all that much, because I certainly see the point at issue even if I’m not sure I agree with him on the details. The details have to do with my view that apart from a commitment to rational inquiry, which I don’t think could be revisable even in principle, the other truth-claims B&W perhaps takes for granted are nevertheless in principle revisable, if new evidence turned up. His view is that many foundational truth claims aren’t really revisable even in principle, or (stretching) that they just barely are in principle but not psychologically. I can buy the second version, the in principle but not psychologically one; but the first one, I don’t. Maybe that’s just because I’m too ignorant! That could be. It could be that I’m so ignorant that all my foundational beliefs about how the world is are quite loosely held, simply because I don’t know enough to hold them more firmly. But I think it’s also simply because I can imagine in a thought-experiment way some sort of inside-out universe evidence that could turn up; but I can’t imagine deciding that rational inquiry is systematically wrong, because I don’t see how one could get there except with some kind of rational inquiry. If I try to imagine it I always end up with some version of rational inquiry at some stage – and some pretty early stage at that. The very idea of revising a commitment to rational inquiry involves rational inquiry – so – I can’t get my mind around it, it keeps sliding off.

But that’s a detail. (We talked about it while writing the book, too, I think. Went round and round for awhile and then gave it up and went back to work.) But I find this kind of thing inexhaustibly interesting, so I thought you might too. Anyway there’s no need to produce one of those nice Erratum slips to shove in the remaining copies of WTM saying ‘Never mind’. Amusing though that would be.

So, about those puzzling issues to do with what B&W’s basic commitments are and how one goes about figuring stuff out – I’ve had a chance to discuss them with JS now and it turns out we don’t disagree all that much and that he wasn’t saying quite what I thought he was. It all turns – as I said in a comment but didn’t make enough of – on the word ‘adopt’. I thought he meant adopt as in ‘decide to believe’, but he meant not ‘believe’ but ‘act as if I believe’ – which is a whole different thing, as we said in those comments. So that clears that up!

There are some interesting issues involved, which I want to ponder a little, but I also want some fresh air and abrupt violent movement, so I’ll ponder later. The weather forecast says it’s going to be 87 here today. ? Is that possible? In mid-May? I object. I don’t like that kind of thing in mid-July, but I realize I have to put up with it, but in mid-May? No. Weather forecast says it will be in the 80s all week. This is not right.

Okay how can I do this without being repellent and awful. I can’t. Okay I’m going to be repellent and awful. But hey, there’s such a thing as marketing and advertising, you know – don’t think of it as being repellent and awful, think of it as advertising. What am I supposed to do, co-write a book and then not say anything about it? Well then!

Right, so Johann Hari wrote this review of Why Truth Matters. It seems fair to say he thinks it’s good. Boastful and repellent, but fair.

He concludes pleasantly.

In Why Truth Matters, Benson and Stangroom answer the clotted, barely readable sentences of the postmodernists with sentences so clear you could swim in them. There should be a law demanding every purchase of a Jacques Derrida “book” be accompanied with a free copy of this shimmering, glimmering answer.

Sentences so clear you could swim in them. My goal in life, in a way. Really – I do love clarity.

The walls keep getting closer and closer and closer. Read Michelle Goldberg on the subject if you want to have nightmares for a week.

Speaking to outsiders, most Christian nationalists say they’re simply responding to anti-Christian persecution. They say that secularism is itself a religion, one unfairly imposed on them. They say they’re the victims in the culture wars. But Christian nationalist ideologues don’t want equality, they want dominance.

Yes of course they say secularism is a religion. Secularism is a religion, science is a religion, ‘evolutionism’ is a religion, ‘Darwinism’ is a religion, atheism is a religion, humanism is a religion, naturalism is a religion, rationality is a religion, everything that doesn’t bow down and grovel before their benighted impoverished world view is a religion. And if some of them get their way – we won’t just be silenced or put under house arrest for life, we’ll be executed. So let’s hope they don’t. But…listening to Goldberg on Fresh Air on Thursday I learned more about the Constitution Restoration Act and became very very afraid. If enough loonies get into Congress, which seems not nearly as impossible as I would like it to be, that thing could pass. The Supreme Court would throw it out in a heartbeat, because it’s so unconstitutional it’s a joke – but then they would just amend the Constitution. I don’t think that’s likely (she said nervously) – but – I wish I could be more confident than I am. What’s the Constitution Restoration Act, you wonder? Oh, nothing. No biggy. Just a little tweak that strips judges of the power to hear cases involving ‘any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity’s, officer’s, or agent’s acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.’ That’s all. Nothing. Just a law that would forbid the judiciary to review official moves to impose theocracy. Why would anyone object to that?

Terrifyingly, there doesn’t seem to have been much news coverage of this. Like, any. Oh well done. The major meeja ignored the little matter of Bush systematically ignoring acts of Congress that he didn’t feel like obeying by cranking out more than seven hundred fifty ‘signing statements’ in which White House lawyers say he doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to; and now we find they also slept through this little business of legislation aimed at establishing a theocracy in the US. What would be outrageous and terrifying enough to get their attention, one wonders? Does it absolutely have to emit huge clouds of black smoke and cause giant buildings to fall down to be worth noticing? Or does it have to be not Republican and not Rush Limbaugh’s greatest hero to be worth noticing? Or what? Why is this kind of thing allowed to ooze along in such soothing silence?

There is one article at Znet. Great; that’ll reach millions.

Znet wonders about the non-coverage too, not surprisingly.

The potential impact of the Constitution Restoration Act on American life, law and politics is so radical and vast that you would expect a boiling national debate. Yet just as with the crimes and questions of 9/11, everyone in the media seems terrifically busy looking the other way. If you want yet another dramatic metric of US journalistic dysfunction, try Googling “Constitution Restoration Act” in their News category and see what you get. Today, three weeks after the bill was filed, I find a grand total of three throwaway mentions in Alabama’s Shelby County Reporter, the Decatur Daily, and the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. (“Terry Schiavo” in contrast will net you over a thousand news hits, and “Michael Jackson” just passed 36,000 with a bullet.)

Just so. Googling ‘Constitution Restoration Act’ in Google News is exactly what I did – that’s how I found the Znet article – and sure enough – a year later, and the cupboard is still bare. That is pathetic. I have few illusions about the US ‘news’ media, but that is pathetic. The ‘signing statements’ were all but ignored until Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe got busy, and an attempted theocratic putsch is also ignored. It boggles the mind.

The CRA already has 28 sponsors in the House and Senate, and a March 20 call to lead sponsor Sen. Richard Shelby’s office assures us that “we have the votes for passage.” This is a highly credible projection as Bill Moyers observes in his 3/24/05 “Welcome to Doomsday” piece in the New York Review of Books: “The corporate, political, and religious right’s hammerlock… extends to the US Congress. Nearly half of its members before the election-231 legislators in all (more since the election)-are backed by the religious right… Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the most influential Christian Right advocacy groups.”

That was 2005. It hasn’t passed yet. But the bastards are still gathering.

And there arose a great noise in the land, and a whirling on the waters, and the people were sore afraid, or upset, or worried, or puzzled, or something. Why? Because of a movie, of course. What movie? you ask, all athirst to know. Well what movie do you think? The Rembrandt code, of course. No no, I know; the Renoir code. No no, I’m just playing silly buggers; the Kandinsky code. Oh all right, the Da Vinci Code. (A title which causes a faint electrical hum of irritation every time I hear or see it, because as any fule kno, Da Vinci is not Leonardo’s surname. It’s like titling a book and movie The Of Devonshire Code after the Duke of Devonshire, or the Of Arc Code after Joan of that ilk. Tsssss.) Okay so the Da Vinci Code and how people are all knotted up about the underwear. There’s this cardinal for instance.

“Christians must not just sit back and say it is enough for us to forgive and to forget,” said Arinze. “Sometimes it is our duty to do something practical…This is one of the fundamental human rights – that we should be respected, our religious beliefs respected, and our founder Jesus Christ respected,” said Cardinal Arinze.

See, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that it was a fundamental human right that we should be respected. (We who? Christians? Humans? Cardinals? People who pitch fits about movies? Zealots? Wannabe censors? Nags? Bullies? Who?) I also didn’t know it was a fundamental human right that our religious beliefs be respected and our founder Jesus Christ be respected. That is news to me. Here’s me trundling along from day to day with my human rights being violated from here to Sunday, because I can tell you for a fact that there are people in this world who don’t respect me. The ones who’ve never heard of me would be one place to start; the ones who know me well and think I’m a bore and a nuisance would be another. And yet, all the time, it is my human right to be respected (and not, apparently, everyone else’s human right to decline to respect me, however boring and useless and a complete waste of time I may be), and nothing is done about it. Comrades, what we have here is a wholesale violation of civic order, a massive breakdown in the fabric of how things are supposed to be. What we also have here is a potentially worrying state of tyranny, in which we are all required to respect more than six billion people, at least five billion of whom we wouldn’t recognize if they sat next to us at the annual Bus Spotters’ Gala and said howdy. That seems like a lot of respect-duty we’ve all been falling down on.

The cardinal goes on, in his pleasant mild humble conciliatory way.

“Those who blaspheme Christ and get away with it are exploiting the Christian readiness to forgive and to love even those who insult us. There are some other religions which if you insult their founder they will not be just talking.”

Ah! Very true! They will not be just talking, they will be shouting and threatening and torching and killing. They will be putting out bounties, they will be traveling towards Denmark, they will be taking action. How heart-warming it is to see a cardinal using their pleasant example to threaten the blasphemers. How exhilarating it is to know that religions think they have a right to veto novels and movies that tell stories about their story. How the walls do keep getting closer and closer and closer.