This piece is more relevant than ever.

In United States v. Jones, which came down yesterday, Alito wrote a concurring opinion to criticize the majority for using “18th-century tort law” to decide whether “a 21st-century surveillance technique” (attaching a GPS tracking device to the underbody of a suspect’s vehicle) is a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes.

“[I]t is impossible to think of late 18th-century situations that are analogous to what took place in this case,” Alito objected. “Is it possible to imagine a case in which a constable secreted himself somewhere in a coach and remained there for a period of time in order to monitor the movements of the coach’s owner?”

Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, responds in footnote:

Justice Alito’s concurrence doubts the wisdom of our approach . . . . But in fact it posits a situation that is not far afield—a constable’s concealing himself in the target’s coach in order to track its movements. There is no doubt that the information gained by that trespassory activity would be the product of an unlawful search—whether that information consisted of the conversations occurring in the coach, or of the destinations to which the coach traveled.

But Justice Alito is ready with his own footnote:

The Court suggests that something like this might have occurred in 1791 [when the Fourth Amendment was ratified], but this would have required either a gigantic coach, a very tiny constable, or both—not to mention a constable with incredible fortitude and patience.

Oh, snap!

Anyway, somebody call the MythBusters! They need to find some coaches from 1791 and see if Tory Belleci (you know it would be him) can secrete himself in one and remain there for a period of time, undetected by owner and occupants.

Update: I decided to submit it to the MythBusters forum myself.

Not likely:

Revelation, reason, and an assurance beyond the senses tell us that the Author of our being exists, and that He is omniscient; and man and the state are creations of God’s beneficence. This Christian orthodoxy is the kernel of [Edmund] Burke’s philosophy. God’s purpose among men is revealed through the unrolling of history. How are we to know God’s mind and will? Through the prejudices and traditions which millennia of human experience with divine means and judgments have implanted in the mind of the species. And what is our purpose in this world? Not to indulge our appetites, but to render obedience to divine ordinance.

. . .

The Age of Reason, Burke protested with all his splendor of rhetoric, was in reality an Age of Ignorance. If (as most men, since the beginning of human history, have believed) the foundation of human welfare is divine providence, then the limitation of politics and ethics to a puny “reason” is an act of folly, the refuge of a ridiculous presumption.

. . .

A man always desperately busy, lacking time to chop logic, [Burke] shared Dr. [Samuel] Johnson’s exasperation at haggling over intuitive truths—the conviction of instinctive knowledge which provoked Johnson to growl, “Why, sir, we know the will is free and there’s an end of it!” Only the restless, shallow, self-intoxicated atheist, who refuses to admit the existence of anything greater than himself, really can have the impudence to deny these sources of religious insight.

(Kirk, 7th edition, pages 29–33.) All of which is to say, apparently, that the foundation of the conservative outlook rests on intuition and revelation of “divine providence,” which cannot possibly be questioned. And why not? Because “most men, since the beginning of history,” have not questioned it. Kirk’s paean to Burke and his “splendor of rhetoric” and his insistence on the disallowance of skepticism betray the shallowness of his own thought, which, if it cannot withstand the searching of a skeptic must be indefensible when held out in the daylight.

Despite the existence of a label, there has never really been an “Age of Reason” as Burke and Kirk imagine it; there has only been a flowering of doubt and skepticism, whose true character is apparently beyond the ken of of the ignorant Kirk and his credulous ilk. Doubt and skepticism—which yes, can lead to atheism—do not assert “I know” but ask “How do you?” And that question comes not from restlessness, shallowness, or self-intoxication any more than it rests on an assumption that there is nothing greater than the asker. To the contrary, it challenges the fundamental principle upon which Kirk’s entire outlook rests: the idea that knowledge can come from intuition or revelation. Thus the root of skepticism is the idea that knowledge, to be knowledge, should be explainable; or, at the very least, a person who claims know something should have a modicum of consideration for the humanity of others, whose separate minds may reasonably wonder otherwise. If Burke, Dr. Johnson, Kirk, and their modern acolytes are too enraptured with their intuitions of “divine providence” to be bothered with even trying to explain the source of their knowledge, if they are so enamored of their epistemology that they would scorn the skeptical questioner as shallow, self-absorbed, and impudent for merely bothering to ask, then calling them “hypocrites” would surely be a waste of breath; they obviously have no idea what the word might mean.

If skepticism is a “limitation of politics and ethics” to anything, it is to consciousness and legibility, something that people can actually talk about. Burke and Kirk want their politics and ethics to be rooted in unspoken, unchallengeable assumptions dressed up in the alleged beliefs of “most men, since the beginning of human history.” On that phrase, I imagine a bevy of middle-aged white men sequestered in a mahogany-paneled salon, so sure of themselves that none would even dare to point out exactly what they held in common. This is the arrogant, culturally-conditioned worldview par excellence, which remains so thoroughly unexamined because one of its fundamental precepts is that examining fundamental precepts is a cardinal sin. Everything is sublimated, locked away, veiled in mystery, and defended from skepticism with no more than self-righteous rage at the skeptic for daring to exist. The skeptic says, “If you claim to know, then explain”; the true believer replies, “If you seek explanation, you cannot possibly know.” There are no secrets; there is no moment when all is revealed to those who join the club. As Kirk admits, “[t]his view of the nature of things may appear delusory to the utilitarian and the positivist; it will seem transcendently true to the religious man.” (Page 29.) And there his explanation ends. No one knows why it seems “transcendently true to the religious man,” except that for him the gatekeeping response to the skeptic is revealed as the unitary core of the entire system: “If you seek explanation, you cannot possibly know.” There is nothing more beyond that fortified gate; that is the revelation when you join the club. The conservatism of Burke and Kirk is built on what must remain unconscious and illegible because that is its full extent. There is no object to “seem transcendently true” because the seeming is all they need. And it is all they have.

A great book of ideas throws open the doors and allows the cold wind of reality to rattle the reader. But I am barely a few tens of pages into The Conservative Mind and already the thing feels deadening and claustrophobic. It reads like a walled garden of ideological topiary, where thoughts are trimmed into neat but unnatural shapes. This hedge maze is the stuff that moves intellectual conservatives? Give me the wilderness any day.

If I manage to read more, I might post more. Maybe the later chapters are better.

Pastry chef Thomas Henzi at the Beverly Hilton Hotel spent six months designing a special dessert for the celebrities at the Golden Globes: a chocolate delice, almond crunch terrine, garnished with acacia honey, caramel and fresh berries and sprinkled with edible gold flakes at $135 a gram. Yes, you read that correctly.

“There is gold dust on there for the Golden Globes,” Henzi has explained, adding it will pair ideally with the Moët & Chandon Grand Vintage 2002 magnums created for the night. The meal will be served to 1,300 guests, including awards presenters Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman and Frieda Pinto.

Responding with sensibility,

Joel Berg, of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, has spoken of the irony of giving rich people such extravagant food for free while those in need have to jump through hoops to get help, adding: “I resent that a wealthy society allows its neighbours to face hunger.”

. . .

“I don’t want to bring the rich down, I want to bring everyone else up,” he said. “However, this is an irony that the people who need it least often get free food wherever they go, but we still make it extraordinarily difficult for people to obtain government food benefits.”

Meanwhile, everybody is gearing up for Ricky Gervais’ next attack on Hollywood, as host of the Golden Globes. Remember last time?

“There are no rules,” Dick Clark Productions’ Executive Vice President of Television Barry Adelman told us earlier today. “We know what he does, and we’re just as interested to see it as you are.”

However, there’s one Golden Globe nominee who isn’t so excited for Gervais’ personal jabs and jokes…

“I just think that we have to be mindful that we’re always talking about human beings,” The Help‘s Octavia Spencer recently [said].

Right. So celebrities are human beings—who somehow deserve to be served gold dust for dessert, but cannot handle a few insults from a comedian. Tell me again why Hollywood is not throwing overwhelming support behind Mitt Romney?

“In the middle of this luxury Dionysius ordered that a shining sword, fastened from the ceiling by a horse-hair, be let down so that it hung over the neck of that fortunate man. And so he looked neither at those handsome waiters nor the wonderful silver work, nor did he stretch his hand to the table. Now the very wreaths slipped off. Finally he begged the tyrant that he should be allowed to depart because he no longer wanted to be fortunate.”—Cicero

So what did Baggini find in his survey?

It is that whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral insight of mythos than the factual claims of logos, the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value. They believe that Jesus is divine, not simply an exceptional human being; that his resurrection was a real, bodily one; that he performed miracles no human being ever could; that he needed to die on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven; and that Jesus is the only way to eternal life. On many of these issues, a significant minority are uncertain but in all cases it is only a small minority who actively disagree, or even just tend to disagree. As for the main reason they go to church, it is not for reflection, spiritual guidance or to be part of a community, but overwhelmingly in order to worship God.

This prompted guffaws from people like P.Z. Myers (“This is just the weirdest thing: Julian Baggini discovers that believers believe“) and Jerry Coyne (“I’m surprised that Baggini is surprised“), both of whom appear to think that everything about religion is completely obvious. Which is especially odd since Myers and Coyne are both scientists but neither of them appears to be familiar with any studies of this question that are any more rigorous than the one Baggini carried out. Baggini did ask his readers to help him find “good, rigorous studies into what religious people in the UK in particular (but also Europe and America) really believe.” Maybe they dug something up and it will appear in a later column. I hope so, because this is a fascinating empirical question; and Myers and Coyne are being lazy if they just assume conclusively and without empirical data that their view is obvious. It’s certainly not obvious to me. Nor, apparently, to Baggini. (And why should people who hold themselves out as scientists ever ridicule someone for finding decent evidence that tends to confirm their hypothesis, especially when they themselves only rely on personal experience and anecdote?)

Following the trail of possibilities for research, assuming that most Christians (they’re the only ones Baggini talked to) fall into the “true religion involves belief in mythical beings” camp, one can still ask more questions about the nature of that belief. For example, where do they get those beliefs, or do they even reflect on that question? I would imagine, also from personal experience, that three sources might be alleged by more reflective believers for their “belief in mythical beings,” or the like: tradition, revelation, and investigation. That is, in reverse order, some may claim to believe in “mythical beings” because they have investigated the world and found evidence of such beings, or because such beings have been revealed to them without investigation, or because belief in such beings has been handed down to them by tradition. (And I would further speculate, also from experience, that bothering to reflect on the source is likely to damage the integrity of belief—perhaps in ways that are only perceptible in hindsight.) For Christians who say that their religion is more about practice, the next series of questions should search out why they favor this particular religion and these particular doctrines.

Coming back to the actual study, I have to wonder whether Baggini has obscured the “real” issue in how he conceived his question. Here it is again:

[Some claim that t]rue religion involves belief in mythical beings and anyone who says otherwise is no true believer. At the same time, others claim that the proper way to view religion is as practice not doctrine and that it is those who maintain otherwise who are just wrong.

That is, he sets up a “true religion involves” side against a “proper way to view religion” side. The words “involves” and “view” are important; they suggest a dispute between insiders and outsiders. On the “involves” side we are wondering about how the religious people themselves understand their beliefs, while on the “view” side we are wondering how outsiders (and self-conscious, self-reflective insiders) understand religious people and their beliefs. But just because insiders perceive it one way doesn’t mean outsiders can’t accurately perceive it differently. Are you always sure of your own motivations?

The content of Baggini’s informal survey supports my interpretation; it was directed only to religious people and only asked questions that could be answered by insiders as insiders. That is, none of the questions called for further reflection on why respondents believe (or not) as they do. If people who checked the box for “Jesus’s resurrection was a bodily one, leaving the tomb in which he was buried empty” were then asked to state the primary source of their belief (or perhaps to rank potential sources), a majority of respondents answering “tradition” would suggest something different than a majority answering “revelation.” Asking further questions about how traditions and revelations have come to these believers might yield insights, too. Respondents prioritizing “investigation” would also present an interesting case. Further questions about what motivates investigation, or whether they distrust tradition or revelation, would be in order.

Pursuing these possibilities might address the outsider perspective about the “proper way to view religion” and whether it is characterized primarily by beliefs or primarily by practice. (Such a survey would have to be carefully designed. I suspect, again based on personal experience, that many Christians, even those who feel deficient in their lack of experience with clear theophanies, would be inclined to claim revelation as the source of their beliefs anyway.) One might well argue, and even show persuasively with thorough research, that when insiders perceive their religion as being primarily about beliefs and the main reason for their church attendance being unabashedly “to worship God,” it would still be reasonable for outsiders to view their religion as “practice not doctrine.” A broader perspective that might be a good place from which to formulate such a hypothesis would be to notice that most expressions of religious belief, whether alleged to come from tradition, revelation, or investigation, are connected to a social organization in which the same or similar beliefs are shared. For example, Protestants rarely report visions of Mary.

Maybe this kind of research already exists. If so, I have not seen it and am not sure where to find it. There are plenty of surveys asking religious people what they believe, but I don’t recall seeing any that also ask why, and that seems to me like an interesting question that might even have important answers.

This is the kind of thing where I am confident that people like P.Z. Myers are missing the point. He writes, in praise of “the ‘New Atheist’ movement”:

We take religious people seriously when they tell us what they believe. We don’t indulge in our own rationalizations, trying to second guess what they say and invent a more sensible excuse for their behavior: when someone tells me that they have faith that Jesus’ second coming is nigh, I accept that they’re a deranged and demented fuckwit rather than trying to cobble together a lofty sociological story about individuals fitting into community mores and building rhetorical interfaces to meld with group dynamics. Nope, they really believe in an apocalyptic messiah and are wishing the world would end in a catastrophe before they die.

The abrasiveness is not the problem; the false dichotomy and inconsistency are. On the first, there is no good reason to assume that “a lofty sociological story about individuals fitting into community mores and building rhetorical interfaces to meld with group dynamics” is inconsistent with “really believ[ing] in an apocalyptic messiah” and “wishing the world would end in catastrophe.” To the contrary, if the world really is an open book for scientific investigation, if the universe really does have no intrinsic purpose, and if there are no indications from methodologically sound observations that any “apocalyptic messiahs” exist, then understanding why anyone would really have such beliefs ought to be a question of great interest. And especially in a world where people with those kinds of beliefs are so inclined to get involved with politics, whether peacefully or violently, coming up with a sociological (or biological, or other logical) explanation for why such weirdness occurs ought to be a problem of great concern.

On the inconsistency, denigrating attempts to come up with an explanation for religious beliefs suggests an assumption that those beliefs have no identifiable causes, which implies that religion as the bearer of a supernatural message is not such a crazy idea after all. If no one should bother trying to explain why people “really believe in an apocalyptic messiah,” or whatever other belief you’re questioning, then where exactly do those beliefs come from? They’re too organized to be pure insanity. So what is the organizing principle and why is it there? Someone like Myers is certainly not going to pin the blame on revelation. That leaves things like biology and sociology. Biology may help explain why many people are inclined to interpret the world in supernatural terms, but it offers no help on the question of specific beliefs.

Also, if you’re going to say that people with particular religious beliefs are “deranged and demented,” you might as well be calling them “mentally ill.” And if you think there is a “cure” for that “illness,” as “New Atheists” undoubtedly do, you ought to be searching for a pathology, or something akin to one—or at least not ridiculing the people who think one might be found. Moreover, if you think that so many people out and about in our complex modern society are “deranged and demented,” and if you understand the world to be characterized by (usually) identifiable causes and effects, then why would you prefer calling people “deranged and demented fuckwits” over trying to figure out why they maintain the beliefs that you find so problematic? Maybe you look down on sociology or other social sciences as not really science, but nothing stops you from trying to improve them—just the way practitioners of the “hard” sciences make careers of trying to improve each other. In this, the otherwise scientifically-oriented “New Atheists” are bizarrely unscientific. (And that suggests an interesting course of study on its own.)

I am not convinced that “the proper way to view religion is as practice not doctrine.” But people like Myers don’t convince me in the other direction. I agree with Baggini that “atheists, especially the ‘new’ variety . . . are not attacking straw men when they criticise religion for promoting superstitious and supernatural beliefs.” Religion does do that. But if you see the world as an atheist like Myers does, which (in my experience) is surprisingly easy in comparison with the religious outlook, then shouldn’t you be more interested in the problem of how easy a time religion has at promoting those superstitious and supernatural beliefs?

Christian doctrines (which are the ones I’m most familiar with) are bizarre conundrums. Ideas like the trinity, the incarnation, and transubstantiation make just enough sense to suggest that a solution may be possible, but not enough sense to actually mean anything. I have plenty of sympathy for the idea that meditating on those paradoxes may be calming or have other mental benefits. But my experience with Christianity, and with Christians, does not suggest that people are in the religion for meditative prompts. Nor do they seem particularly troubled by contradictions or incongruities in their beliefs, even as they apply completely different standards of consistency to their “secular” pursuits. That Christianity remains so prevalent and remains so successful at keeping the minds of so many people so strangely divided ought to make atheists scratch their heads a little more.

Part of the problem, I think, is that atheists, especially the “New Atheists,” tend to be a self-selected sample of former Christians who found the atheistic outlook more compelling and ultimately a relief from Christianity. This seems to make them less likely to be sympathetic to the outlook of believers, which is also somewhat ironic: one would think that if you have been a Christian, especially if you have struggled to break free from Christianity, you would be more sympathetic to people remaining within the religion.

Whatever the deeper issues, there is plenty of room for more rigorous study. Surveys that just ask people what they believe can only reveal so much, especially if you are trying to understand the nature of their religious practice. Knowing that people believe certain things does not necessarily tell you why they believe those things. And knowing why may suggest that beliefs are not entirely what they seem.

[F]or by some subtle law all tragic human experiences gain in pathos by the perspective of time. We realize this when in Naples we stand musing over the poor Pompeian mother, lost in the historic storm of volcanic ashes eighteen centuries ago, who lies with her child gripped close to her breast, trying to save it, and whose despair and grief have been preserved for us by the fiery envelop which took her life but eternalized her form and features. She moves us, haunts us, she stays in our thoughts for many days, we do not know why, for she is nothing to us, she has been nothing to any one for eighteen centuries; whereas of the like case to-day we should say “poor thing, it is pitiful,” and forget it in an hour.

(Page 144.)

“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

“Business!” cried the ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

It held up its chain at arm’s length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again.

Yes, that’s A Christmas Carol.

It seems to me that the voting citizens of this country would rather let their children suffer economic calamity than to give up one more red cent for a civilized society. (Don’t you just love us baby boomers, though?)

(Source.)