Notes

You can read a nice editorial with a summary and context, or you can read it straight from Justice Ginsburg:

From the birth of the United States as a nation, foreign and international law influenced legal reasoning and judicial decisionmaking.  Founding fathers, most notably, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, were familiar with leading international law treatises, the law merchant, and English constitutional law.  And they used that learning as advocates in legal contests.

The U. S. Constitution, in Article I, authorized Congress to define and punish “Offences against the Law of Nations,” and the very first Congress passed the Alien Tort Act, which empowers federal courts to entertain civil actions brought by an alien for a tort “committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

Any doubt about the tradition of judicial reference to foreign and international law was (or should have been) laid to rest by a comprehensive article composed by Steven G. Calabresi and Stephanie Dotson Zimdahl, published in 2005 in the William & Mary Law Review.  The survey, running over 160 pages, shows how very wrong it is to charge that citing foreign law is a recent heresy advanced by liberal activist judges in pursuit of their political preferences.

The law of nations, Chief Justice Marshall famously said in 1815, is part of the law of our land.  Decisions of the courts of other countries, Marshall explained, show how the law of nations is understood elsewhere, and will be considered in determining the rule which is to prevail here.  Those decisions, he clarified, while not binding authority for U. S. courts, merit respectful attention for their potential persuasive value.

Decades later, in 1900, the U. S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that

“[i]nternational law is part of our law and must be ascertained and administered by [our] courts of justice . . . .  [W]here there is no treaty, no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations, and, as evidence of these, to the works of jurists and commentators, who by years of labor, research and experience, have made themselves peculiarly well acquainted with the subject of which they treat.”

There is a lot more, so I recommend reading the rest of the speech.

Here is California Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown, on working with Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (stage name: “Mother Teresa”):

When I would pick up someone and help them shower or shave, I absolutely sensed that this is Jesus in my hands.

And here is local reporter Ron Orozco in response:

Brown is correct. When you look into the eyes of the destitute and dying, you sense the presence of Jesus. And it is a beautiful thing.

A non-Christian looking into the eyes of the destitute and dying is not going to “sense the presence of Jesus.” They might have a mental response to a confrontation with the edge of existence—perhaps a feeling of anxiety about the contingency of life blended with a sense of peace about the universality of unknowable nonbeing (or something like that)—but they are not going to perceive that experience as manifesting a mythic narrative about the person of Jesus.

Brown was just describing his own experience, which is fine. But Orozco grates with his matter-of-fact “Brown is correct” and universal “you”; Brown is not “correct,” and “you” may experience things differently.

Lawrence Krauss is a smart guy, but his recent column for Scientific American includes a lot of not-so-good ideas muddled with a couple good points. Here are the best parts:

I don’t know which is more dangerous, that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth or that pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo.

. . .

Last May I attended a conference on science and public policy at which a representative of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences gave a keynote address. When I questioned how he reconciled his own reasonable views about science with the sometimes absurd and unjust activities of the Church—from false claims about condoms and AIDS in Africa to pedophilia among the clergy—I was denounced by one speaker after another for my intolerance.

. . .

Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous. Unless we are willing to expose religious irrationality whenever it arises, we will encourage irrational public policy and promote ignorance over education for our children.

There is a problem when “religious beliefs” (or whatever myth-oriented behaviors you want to talk about), which produce no knowledge of the world, prevent people from learning or recognizing actual knowledge. Confront the mysteries of your existence or your personal struggles with ritual or meditative practices if you must, but don’t pretend those practices produce meaningful information about how the world works.

Unfortunately, those good points come wrapped up in stuff like this:

When presented with the statement “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,” just 45 percent of respondents [in the United States] indicated “true.” Compare this figure with the affirmative percentages in Japan (78), Europe (70), China (69) and South Korea (64). Only 33 percent of Americans agreed that “the universe began with a big explosion.”

The part about evolution is fine. It is lamentable that only 45 percent of Americans are susceptible to the massive heap of evidence that we “developed from earlier species of animals.” When he jumps to the Big Bang, however, Krauss gets sloppy: Why does it matter if Americans “agree that ‘the universe began with a big explosion.’” Science is not about agreement. Maybe he meant to say something else, that Americans are simply ignorant that “[t]he Big Bang is the prevailing cosmological theory of the early development of the universe” (according to Wikipedia), which is sort of like saying that Americans cannot identify all nine justices of the Supreme Court. Ultimately, so what? Knowing basic factual information about current events is good (as my seventh grade social studies teacher drilled into me), but not necessary, especially depending on the context. (If you’re a physicist complaining that non-physicists are ignorant of the state of your field, or a lawyer complaining that non-lawyers can’t name all nine Supreme Court justices, your perspective is obviously distorted.)

And then Krauss makes little logical gaffes like this:

Consider the results of a 2009 Pew Survey: 31 percent of U.S. adults believe “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” (So much for dogs, horses or H1N1 flu.)

Note that the survey only refers to “humans and other living things,” not “all living things.” The results are depressing, yes, but considering the wording of the question, the parenthetical remark is a non sequitur. One might believe that some living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, but that others—like dogs, horses, and the H1N1 virus—have evolved. Lots of people actually believe that way. Their views are still contrary to the current state of our knowledge, which is supported by plenty of evidence, but they are not inconsistent in the way Krauss implies.

Or this:

The survey’s most enlightening aspect was its categorization of responses by levels of religious activity, which suggests that the most devout are on average least willing to accept the evidence of reality. White evangelical Protestants have the highest denial rate (55 percent), closely followed by the group across all religions who attend services on average at least once a week (49 percent).

I think I understand what he means to say, which is similar to what I suggested in a post a couple days ago, that religious beliefs can have the troubling effect of preventing people from recognizing real knowledge, but what is “evidence of reality”?

Finally, he recounts the recent excommunication of a Catholic nun because she approved an abortion:

In my state of Arizona, Sister Margaret McBride, a senior administrator at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, recently authorized a legal abortion to save the life of a 27-year-old mother of four who was 11 weeks pregnant and suffering from severe complications of pulmonary hypertension; she made that decision after consultation with the mother’s family, her doctors and the local ethics committee. Yet the bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olmsted, immediately excommunicated Sister Mary, saying, “The mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s.” Ordinarily, a man who would callously let a woman die and orphan her children would be called a monster; this should not change just because he is a cleric.

That story has been making the rounds skeptical, atheist, and non-religious folks. I have no sympathy for the idea that “[t]he mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s,” and am glad that Olmsted is not the one making medical decisions for people. But Olmsted did not make the decision, he did not let a woman die and orphan her children, and there is a preference that  requires defense one way or the other. Krauss, like others who have recounted the story, glosses over those points. There are good arguments for preferring the mother over the unborn child, whether you find them convincing or not; but in order to trigger your outrage, Krauss assumes you know them and find them convincing, which suggests he is only writing for people who already agree with him. And why should I care if Sister McBride was excommunicated? If I have no love or sympathy for the church, why should it matter to me whether she was kicked out for doing something I agree with?

Krauss is surely smart enough to recognize all these deficiencies in his article. And I suspect that he would be reasonable enough to clarify his views if pressed. But when “pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo” and can lead to kind of public denunciation he describes, it might help to work harder at avoiding minor slip-ups that, while they will be recognized by friendly readers as peripheral and not affecting the veracity of the conclusion, invariably will be seized by unfriendly readers as an excuse to dismiss the conclusion.

But maybe Krauss wrote hastily, or maybe he wrote for people like the fellow in Australia who recently (and poignantly, in my opinion) thanked Richard Dawkins for precisely the kind of conclusory bluntness that so irritates Dawkins’ critics. So I’ll give Krauss the benefit of the doubt on that point. Still, you can be blunt with your conclusions without throwing in weird little logical flaws of the type that are easily avoided.

David Hume never gets old. Here he is on the “public hatred and resentment” of doubt and skepticism:

The Academics always talk of doubt and suspence of judgment, of danger in hasty determinations, of confining to very narrow bounds the enquiries of the understanding, and of renouncing all speculations which lie not within the limits of common life and practice. Nothing, therefore, can be more contrary than such a philosophy to the supine indolence of the mind, its rash arrogance, its lofty pretensions, and its superstitious credulity. Every passion is mortified by it, except the love of truth; and that passion never is, nor can be carried to too high a degree. It is surprizing, therefore, that this philosophy, which in almost every instance, must be harmless and innocent, should be the subject of so much groundless reproach and obloquy. But, perhaps, the very circumstance, which renders it so innocent, is what chiefly exposes it to the public hatred and resentment. By flattering no irregular passion, it gains few partizans: By opposing so many vices and follies, it raises to itself abundance of enemies, who stigmatize it as libertine, profane, and irreligious.

(An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, section 5.2.)

Daniel Dennett is brilliant. I wish I could write half as well as he does about the mind-twisting problems of understanding ourselves and our universe. Here is an excerpt from his article “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity”:

I want to imagine something some of you may think incredible: a novel-writing machine. We can suppose it is a product of artificial intelligence research, a computer that has been designed or programmed to write novels. But it has not been designed to write any particular novel. We can suppose (if it helps) that it has been given a great stock of whatever information it might need, and some partially random and hence unpredictable ways of starting the seed of a story going, and building upon it. Now imagine that the designers are sitting back, wondering what kind of novel their creation is going to write. They turn the thing on and after a while the high speed printer begins to go clickety-clack and out comes the first sentence. “Call me Gilbert,” it says. What follows is the apparent autobiography of some fictional Gilbert. Now Gilbert is a fictional, created self but its creator is no self. Of course there were human designers who designed the machine, but they didn’t design Gilbert. Gilbert is a product of a design or invention process in which there aren’t any selves at all. That is, I am stipulating that this is not a conscious machine, not a “thinker.” It is a dumb machine, but it does have the power to write a passable novel. . . .

So we are to imagine that a passable story is emitted from the machine. Notice that we can perform the same sort of literary exegesis with regard to this novel as we can with any other. In fact if you were to pick up a novel at random out of a library, you could not tell with certainty that it wasn’t written by something like this machine. (And if you’re a New Critic you shouldn’t care.) You’ve got a text and you can interpret it, and so you can learn the story, the life and adventures of Gilbert. Your expectations and predictions, as you read, and your interpretive reconstruction of what you have already read, will congeal around the central node of the fictional character, Gilbert.

But now I want to twiddle the knobs on this thought experiment. So far we’ve imagined the novel, The Life and Times of Gilbert, clanking out of a computer that is just a box, sitting in the corner of some lab. But now I want to change the story a little bit and suppose that the computer has arms and legs—or better: wheels. (I don’t want to make it too anthropomorphic.) It has a television eye, and it moves around in the world. It also begins its tale with “Call me Gilbert,” and tells a novel, but now we notice that if we do the trick that the New Critics say you should never do, and look outside the text, we discover that there’s a truth-preserving interpretation of that text in the real world. The adventures of Gilbert, the fictional character, now bear a striking and presumably non-coincidental relationship to the adventures of this robot rolling around in the world. If you hit the robot with a baseball bat, very shortly thereafter the story of Gilbert includes his being hit with a baseball bat by somebody who looks like you. Every now and then the robot gets locked in the closed and then says “Help me!” Help whom? Well, help Gilbert, presumably. But who is Gilbert? Is Gilbert the robot, or merely the fictional self created by the robot? If we go and help the robot out of the closet, it sends us a note: “Thank you. Love, Gilbert.” At this point we will be unable to ignore the fact that the fictional career of the fictional Gilbert bears an intersting resemblance to the “career” of this mere robot moving through the world. We can still maintain that the robot’s brain, the robot’s computer, really knows nothing about the world; it’s not a self. It’s just a clanky computer. It doesn’t know what it’s doing. It doesn’t even know that it’s creating a fictional character. (The same is just as true of your brain; it doesn’t know what it’s doing either.) Nevertheless, the patterns in the behavior that is being controlled by the computer are interpretable, by us, as accreting biography–telling the narrative of a self. But we are not the only interpreters. The robot novelist is also, of course, an interpreter: a self-interpreter, providing its own account of its activities in the world.

Do read the rest of the article, which is both intriguing and edifying. And it presents another mystery primed for the contemplation I suggested in my last post, but looking inward instead of outward (or is it still outward?): Where is your self, and who is asking?

(Credit to Julia Galef, who “picked” this article in her weekly list of interesting stuff on the web.)

In The Case for God (which, yes, I am still slogging through), Karen Armstrong cannot just make her “case”; she has to keep slipping in bizarre slights against critics of religion. Here is one from page 233:

In a way that would become habitual in the modern critique of faith, [Hegel] had presented a distorted picture of “religion” as a foil for his own ideas, selecting one strand of a complex tradition and arguing that it represented the whole.

Hegel did have some weird ideas, but that is otherwise a slippery depiction of what actually happens in “the modern critique of faith.” The faithful (the believers, the religious, or whatever they prefer to call themselves; I can hardly tell—just call me “human,” please) can frequently be found to complain that their critics—who denounce religion for various reasons—are “distorting” religion because they only attack “one strand of a complex tradition” as though it “represented the whole.” What is “the whole” anyway? If there can be a whole, then there must be some common characteristics shared by each of those “strands.”

Either the “religious” people who disagree with each other should not be calling themselves “religious” (or “faithful” or “believers” or whatever) in the first place, and should not be buddying up in the face of a perceived “secular” or “scientific” or “rationalist” onslaught—thus not to make a larger target of themselves by attempting to occupy the same conceptual space delineated by a general label—or they should be paying more attention to the specific characteristics of the critique and determining whether a given attack is applicable to their own practice (or worldview or faith community or whatever). Maybe both methods are appropriate.

People are obviously different, varied, unique—not all the same. But they also classify themselves and others into clubs, races, cultures, neighborhoods, congregations, nations, and so on. And sometimes people classify themselves differently than others classify them, choosing one of several possible overlapping sources of identity to dominate their own sense of self, while others recognize them within another. When people of varying types of beliefs (or faiths or practices or whatever) ally themselves, or recognize each other as different subtypes of the same classification—for example, “religious”—they don’t do it without reason. Something is shared, even if it’s just opposition to a perceived threat from secular, scientific, skeptical, atheist, rationalist, or whatever forces. And what quality or characteristic of that threat are they opposing?

Human groups are clearly complex, varied, overlapping, and so on. If you take every single person who might fairly be called “Christian,” you obviously will not have magically created a massive group of identical people. To the contrary, I would confidently assert that no two of them are alike. The same is true for every possible categorization of people. Yet the categorization continues: all of us categorize ourselves, usually flexibly, across many overlapping categories, and all of us—with what might be extraordinary audacity if it weren’t so ordinary, widespread, and pedestrian—categorize everyone else, also flexibly, across many overlapping categories. Categories are obviously inherently false just as they are obviously indispensable to our ability to get along in the world without chaos and insanity. And categorization is useful because, despite each person being unique, each person shares characteristics with many others.

When Karen Armstrong complains that “the modern critique of faith” wrongly “select[s] one strand of a complex tradition” and treats it like “the whole,” she ignores the nature of human grouping and categorization. The “modern critique of faith” is just as varied as “faith” itself, and her allusion to “the whole” of faith elides her tacit admission of the shared characteristics whose existence she apparently denies. Disagree as you will with the critics of faith (or religion or belief or whatever), but don’t pretend that those critics are making a mistake of categorization, even as you have remained immune from making the same mistake; you haven’t.

When people from different faith traditions (or religions or belief systems or whatever) get together and seek common ground or ecumenical unity, when they say, “You call it prayer, I call it meditation,” when they say “YHWH and Allah are one,” when they suggest that everyone is trying to approach the same grand mystery of existence by means that are mystical or musical or meditative but not rational or notional or logical, conceptual categories arise, and those categories are susceptible to critique, just like anything else. It is disingenuous for people to complain about being lumped into a category with others they disagree with, as though that shielded the finer points of their actual beliefs or practices or characteristics from critique—especially when they all use the same label, like “religious” or “Christian.” (Their own choice of shorthand reference betrays an identification of commonality in some respect.) Everyone categorizes everyone else, too.

Better to take a critical eye to the criticism; if Richard Dawkins rails against “religion,” then find out what he says, determine whether what he means by “religion” actually applies to you before you complain about whether he has spoken to “the whole” of a “complex tradition,” or just “one strand,” which may or may not include your own. Respond as appropriate. In the short passage above, Karen Armstrong complains about “the modern critique of faith” as one that fails to grasp the complexity of human behavior; my own critique, or most of it, I think, does not fall into that “habit”; when it does, the mistaken categorization is properly raised in response.

Ultimately, I suspect that Armstrong, by suggesting (without saying so outright) that the whole of “the modern critique of faith” can be dismissed as a foolish error of categorization by simpletons like Richard Dawkins (who is clearly an incompetent idiot), is slyly attempting to inoculate her “case for God” from criticism by casting her own views as a manifestation of that apparently unassailable “whole,” which persists beyond grasp in the transcendent Platonic beyond, even as she denies that anyone can know what, if anything, is (not?) there. She seems to think that if she can capture a singular idea that will accept the label “God” and claim that its underlying singularity of “truth” excuses a plethora of human behaviors from criticism, then anyone who claims to anchor their ideas or conduct in that “God”—that singular idea—can happily ignore the  voices of their critics.

Without a doubt, human existence arises from, revolves around, and recedes into mystery. That we are ignorant of nearly everything should be obvious; find anything we do know, examine it further by questioning, determine the answers and the new questions they prompt, and you will always come eventually to the place where the answers have diminished to nothing and the questions have expanded to include the entire field of view. And the quality of insecurity that our existence takes on when the depth of our ignorance leads to a recognition that foundations are nowhere to be seen does induce anxiety. That people have devised ways of approaching their anxiety about existence, through rituals of song, dance, recitation, meditation, sacrifice, and so on says nothing about what occupies that vast field of ignorance; it structures lives and emotions, creates a sense of direction and meaning, and sometimes just makes people “feel better,” but it provides exactly zero knowledge. If there is a fundamental principle to “the modern critique of faith”—if there is such a thing as a “modern critique of faith,” and not just the same critique that has always been there—it is, quite simply, that any claim to have obtained knowledge about existence from those ways of dealing with existential anxiety is a sham.

Even though people may glean psychological fortitude from a “religious” practice, so that they are able to go on, they still need to go on to do something: find food, water, and shelter, guard against disease and other attacks, and so on. And that requires knowledge of how the world works, which is obtainable through a scientific method, not by practiced submersion in the abyss. Moreover, there is still something to be said for setting aside the “religious” practice and facing the cold depths of human ignorance with eyes open. That is where many people take the “modern critique of faith” further than Armstrong is willing to let them go. Responding to the anxiety induced by the mystery of existence and the depth of human ignorance by seeking only what fortifies the psyche (or the “soul,” or the essence of the person, or whatever) can too easily become an excuse not to investigate and learn what might make human life more comfortable or pleasurable in the first place, inhibiting or dampening the scientific method that does yield knowledge. When faith or religion or whatever becomes an obstacle to knowledge, it works against our needs instead of for them.

Armstrong and others seem to think that recognizing the enormous power of science to obtain knowledge is somehow tantamount to the abolition of mystery, a shrinking of the universe into the grasp of the human mind, divided simply into “the known” and “the unknown,” with the belief that nothing will remain unknown forever, that everything is knowable. But we can recognize our smallness and limitations, and the mystery at the core of our existence, even as we strive to learn more. Science does not shrink the universe or dissolve mysteries; it leaves the universe as it is, but expands our knowledge, and multiplies the mysteries. And if you are going to obtain the psychological benefit of contemplating a mystery, why bother with an artificial one, like the Trinity, when you could contemplate the problem of causality, the nature of space and time, whether the universe is finite or infinite, and what any of that might mean?

Critics of faith and religion (or whatever else you want to call it) have been around for a long time. They are not going away. And pretending that they can be ignored simply because “faith” and “religion” are difficult to define only ignores the criticism, instead of defeating it. Either critics are attacking imaginary ideas that nobody has—in which case they can be safely ignored—or they are attacking specific ideas and concepts that come in many forms, under many names, but which can still be identified with a little clarification by the disputants. The “modern critique of faith” is not what Karen Armstrong imagines it to be. That critics express it poorly does not diminish its strength, but only obscures it, unfortunately.

On the opposition to the Muslim center in Manhattan:

Referring to the loved ones of Sept. 11 victims, [Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League,] said, “Their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.”

But while they are entitled to their feelings, that is precisely why we should not listen to them. (It’s also why we should stop passing laws named after kids whose parents turned their anguish into lobbying, but that’s an outrage for another day.)

Scott Hatfield has it right. After noting a headline in today’s edition of the Fresno Bee—”McClatchy profits up, but earnings fall”—he responds:

The outcome outlined in the headline was entirely predictable for anyone who has followed the Bee’s evolution to a leaner, but also less filling, product. The Bee’s decision to change formats to reduce printing costs doubtless helped raise the profit margin, but there was also a reduction in content, especially in local content. If you want to make your newspaper relevant, you need to invest more in local content by local writers, and (frankly) in content that will provoke people to respond.

. . .

You need content that others don’t have if you want your market share to grow. Otherwise, you can keep slashing the cost of production all you want, but your overall revenues will drop because your share of the market will shrink. The Internet changes the equation: if McClatchy does not invest in generating more unique, local content they should get out of the newspaper business.

Exactly. Local, unique, and interesting content is everything. But wait, haven’t I heard something kind of like that before?

David Hume: another pesky “New Atheist”?

(Credit to PZ Myers, whose post I have shamelessly stolen.)

Old news: Sam Harris says science can answer moral questions. I just got around to watching this video, which is several months old.

I’m not convinced yet. While it does seem clear that we can identify better and worse ways to obtain human well-being, once it is defined, I am still skeptical that the source of that definition is scientific in the same way that, say, the theory of evolution is scientific. A lot of what Harris says in the talk strikes me as Aristotle reconfigured for modern times. And with Aristotle, while his idea of eudaimonia (which Harris’ “human well-being” seems a lot like) is appealing, I always feel like I’ve had the wool pulled over my eyes. There are too many propositions that begin “It should be obvious that…”.

Maybe the forthcoming book by Harris will be more satisfying.