Dogma Aversion Syndrome

On the one hand, the higher levels of religiosity present in America (compared to Europe) are often attributed to the lack of an established state-sponsored church in the US. Religions compete in an open marketplace for followers and this competition improves the products and services available, or so the capitalist thinking goes.

However, as with my recent post on economic dynamism driving us towards cultural individualism, there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest at work here. If religions are competing for *customers* then the power of the moral injunctions (thou shall nots) religions are supposed to be instilling in believers runs counter to the customer-is-always-right ethos that pervades all other kinds of *consumer* interaction we participate in.

Burger King doesn't tell me what to do, they let me have it my way. It's hard to see the Pope embracing quite the same attitude on things. But maybe he just needs to hire some better PR staff.

From USA Today:

For the past two years, I have asked students in my introductory religion courses at Boston University to get together in groups and invent their own religions. They present their religious creations to their classmates, and then everyone votes (with fake money in a makeshift offering plate) for the new religions they like best.

This assignment encourages students to reflect on what separates "winners" and "losers" in America's freewheeling spiritual marketplace. It also yields intriguing data regarding what sort of religious beliefs and practices young people love and hate.

[snip]

What strikes me most about my students' religions, however, is how similar they are. Almost invariably, they mix fun with faith. (Facebookismianity anyone?) But they do not mix faith with dogma. My students are careful — exceedingly careful — not to tell one another what to believe, or even what to do. Above all, they want to be tolerant and non-judgmental.

[snip]

During the 1930s, the neoorthodox theologian H. Richard Niebuhr skewered liberal Protestants for preaching "a God without wrath (who) brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

But my students' "dogma aversion" (as one put it) goes liberal Protestantism one further. These young people aren't just allergic to dogma. They are allergic to divinity and even heaven. In the religions of their imagining, God is an afterthought at best. And the afterlife is, as one of my students told me, "on the back burner."

[snip]

In their final exam this past semester, I asked my students to reflect on whether young Americans are the canaries in the mines of more traditional religions. Study after study has shown that American college students are fleeing from organized religion to mix-and-match spirituality.

So what will happen to what one of my students referred to as the "religions of discipline" when this millennial generation (born in the late 1970s through the 1990s) grows up? What will today's youth do with religions whose ethical injunctions arrive as strict commandments rather than friendly suggestions? Will they be able to abide religions that divide the human family into the saved and the damned, that present as absolute truth what they suspect is mere speculation?

My students' projects suggest that traditional religions are in trouble.

[snip]

One of my students, Carrie-Anne Solana, told me that the religions her colleagues presented in class amounted to nothing more than "organized atheism." "They took normal human impulses," such as eating, drinking, sleeping, having sex and socializing, she said, "and justified them under the title of religion while not offering any form of explanation into why we are here, where we came from or where we go when we die."

I am not saying this is a good thing. Clearly any faith so thoroughly vacated of its moral strictures isn't much of one. But it seems that the cultivation of moral virtue needs to be presented as having more value to young people in the here and now. Adhering to doctrine needs to lead to a *good life* in this life.

Now *good* can be defined in many different ways, not merely as simple hedonistic happiness. But if all the benefit to following dogma accrues only in the after-life, well that's a recipe for declining market share.

And I'm not quite sure this type of thing is going to make up for that:

Secular Right vs. Jim Kalb

The blog Secular Right has the following mission statement:

We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of “Human Flourishing,” what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.

In a serve-and-volley mildly reminiscent of two recent GingerMan posts here and here, Jim Kalb takes his sword to the air-quotes of Human Flourishing in the above:

My own view, which my book goes into at length, is that by itself rational empiricism gives you desire and technique as (radically anti-conservative) guides to life. Satisfaction of desire doesn’t seem to constitute human flourishing. To get beyond it though you need a moral tradition that’s understood to connect to something that transcends desire and thus the empirical.

So far as I can tell, an adequate theory of such a thing is going to have to explain why life objectively has a purpose, and that’s going to involve attribution of purpose and intention to the world at large. In other words, the theory is going to be religious. And it’s going to say something definite, otherwise it will be useless. So it’s going to make specific religious and non-empirical (”supernatural”) claims. [em: original]

Razib Khan, a.k.a. "David Hume," responds here:

As for the idea that a transcendent reality is necessary, I will venture to offer that I have always found the models and theories posited by religious people about their gods less than awe inspiring. There certainly beauty and glory in this universe which is simply outside the purview of human animal comprehension; anyone who has grappled with the formalisms of Quantum Mechanics can claim that they seen the face of the incomprehensible & awesome abyss.

But I believe that its relation to a human political and social order are tenuous at best. Rather, the primary entity which transcends is the community and society, because I do believe a strong case can be made that individualistic hedonism which is the final form of classical liberalism offers diminishing returns precisely because of the nature of the human beast. We are a social animal, and individual happiness is contingent upon communal amity.

Note: These sorts of philosophical discussions are of course only relevant for a very small, if influential, minority. Most human animals operate in a world of custom and innate reflex, not analytic reflection.

The final note resonates, I think, with my prior post re: Scandinavia. Which is to say that even lacking a seamless philosophical consistency, so long as a society is providing an ethical framework within which human flourishing remains possible, to the extent we can measure it (i.e. life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness), then I think we have to conclude that the society is *working* successfully at some fundamental level.

People do not consult their philosophy texts in the course of their daily existence, and even if they do, we seem to be able to live quite comfortably in states of severe cognitive dissonance on many such topics through effective rationalization of our own behavior such that it aligns with our "beliefs."

In a surprising turn of events, the blog response by Khan has failed to change Jim Kalb's entire metaphysical view of the universe:

The authors at Secular Right apparently believe that their choice of godless conservatism is justified, and that they're avoiding errors made by John Rawls, radical Islamists, and Sarah Palin. For them to say their beliefs reflect their natural human desire to survive and stay on good terms with their fellows may be true, but it doesn't explain their grounds for saying they're right and others are wrong. The beliefs of those other people reflect such things as well. Also, it seems that whichever groups, arguments and goals actually win best represent the natural tendencies of man and the world. Is actual success then the standard for rationality, justification, the summum bonum and all the rest of it?

In fact, of course, the Secular Right slogan is "Reality & Reason" and not "Hail Victory." It doesn't do though for them to claim their views are better because in addition to following natural human tendencies they are in accord with reality and reason. Is the claim of truth and rational superiority just an expression of inborn drives and social conditioning, or does it have to do with reality and reason in a sense that transcends naturalistic behavioral explanations and makes their views truly the more worthy choice?

Whole lotta smiting going on

Rod Dreher, in a post that responds to Andrew Sullivan, makes a statement that I am still having trouble getting my mind around:

Andrew brings up an important point, one that serves to highlight a critical difference between the two basic strains of American conservatism -- libertarian, and traditionalist.

Libertarianism is anti-statist liberalism. It is also the dominant school of American conservatism.

[snip]


For the libertarian, human happiness is the highest goal, and that happiness is something that the individual is free, within broad limits, to decide for himself.

Traditionalism is a harder sell, obviously, as any philosophy that imposes limits on human choice and liberty will be in America. Its telos is not happiness, but virtue. In fact, the traditionalist does not recognize human happiness apart from virtue. A bad man who is content with himself cannot truly be said to be happy, in this view.

If it's a matter of agreeing with Andrew that the Sixties (which is to say, the social revolution that broke open in the Sixties, but which has been ongoing since then) made possible a greater increase in personal satisfaction, and even legitimate happiness, then I do agree with him.

Certainly there can be no greater example of the gains made in virtue via the repudiation of immoral and unjust legal barriers to full black citizenship. Similarly, women are treated more fairly now, and though some of you will doubt me, I agree that the world is a better place for gay folks than it once was. It would be foolish to view the Sixties as nothing but darkness, in the same way that it's hard to deny that many good things came out of the Enlightenment.

The question, though, is not whether the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad, but whether on balance the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad.

I answer in the negative. [em: mine]

In the above, Dreher recognizes broadly (and embraces) the benefit of the Sixties for blacks, women and gays (i.e. that is to say approx. 60+% of the US population), but concludes that on balance the total impact was negative.

Now, it would be unfair to Rod (having read him regularly) to say that this indicates that he would willingly trade those gains to restore the benefits he sees as lost. It would more likely be that he would have preferred to find a manner to achieve most of the same benefits without the associated costs that he finds objectionable. But still, even when taken at that charitable level, this is an absolutely fantastical statement from my point of view. The losses have outweighed the gains?!?!

He doesn't elucidate what exactly he judges these losses to be, but from my reading of him over time, I would conclude that they typically fall into 3 categories:

1) Decline in religiosity - resulting in unspecified, but extremely perilous, moral decay with a nihilistic emphasis on personal fulfillment
2) Family breakdown / divorce - resulting in more single-parent homes and social problems emanating from same
3) Sexual freedom / abortion - related to item #2 and the decline in traditional marriage

Now, if I were Rod, and I saw the total volume of abortions performed since Roe vs. Wade as effectively a national holocaust, then maybe this would make some sense. After all, one cannot compare the increase in freedom for many individuals to the actual loss of innocent lives for others and judge the tradeoff as worthwhile.

But, I don't get any sense that the abortion question is the singular fulcrum upon which this determination pivots. In other words, I doubt he would answer the question alternately even if Roe v. Wade had never come to pass, but all other societal changes remained the same.

So, what to make of this? When I read traditionalists such as Dreher, there is an almost unremitting sense of impending doom in their writing (he actually has a blog post category tag called "decline and fall"). But, it is never entirely clear from whence the final cataclysm is going to erupt. However, what we do absolutely know, for sure and with certainty, is that there is a Judgement Day on the very near horizon where the world gets its collective comeuppance for having strayed from the path.

Then there's this from the New York Times:

Phil Zuckerman spent 14 months in Scandinavia, talking to hundreds of Danes and Swedes about religion. It wasn’t easy.

Anyone who has paid attention knows that Denmark and Sweden are among the least religious nations in the world. Polls asking about belief in God, the importance of religion in people’s lives, belief in life after death or church attendance consistently bear this out.

It is also well known that in various rankings of nations by life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness, Denmark and Sweden stand in the first tier.

Well documented though they may be, these two sets of facts run up against the assumption of many Americans that a society where religion is minimal would be, in Mr. Zuckerman’s words, “rampant with immorality, full of evil and teeming with depravity.”

Which is why he insists at some length that what he and his wife and children experienced was quite the opposite: “a society — a markedly irreligious society — that was, above all, moral, stable, humane and deeply good.”

[snip]


At one point, he queries Jens, a 68-year-old nonbeliever, about the sources of Denmark’s very ethical culture. Jens replies: “We are Lutherans in our souls — I’m an atheist, but still have the Lutheran perceptions of many: to help your neighbor. Yeah. It’s an old, good, moral thought.”

To be clear, I myself am not anti-religious. For the most part, I was raised outside of a religious context, and so I don't really feel particularly strongly one way or the other about it. When pressed about the nature of the Almighty on one occassion, I replied, "What can I tell you? I don't have well-formed opinions on the matter."

Religious belief and community obviously has great meaning for an enormous number of people and for that I am thankful on their behalf. However, what I can never fully appreciate is the absolute certainty with which some (especially conservative religionists) claim that an unreligious environment leads, without possible exception, to complete and utter societal breakdown and chaos.

Which is just to say that it seems that there is demonstrable evidence that there are still ethics even without specific doctrinal religious belief. Even people who are full blown atheists do not intentionally raise their children to be sociopaths.

In other words, what exactly is the problem with Scandinavia? And, why isn't there more smiting in progress there anyway?

Sullivan on Gay Marriage and Prop 8

To any that did not see it at the time, I can highly recommend Andrew Sullivan's response to Rod Dreher's post on this topic as one of the best defenses of gay marriage that I have come across:

Rod longs, as many do, for a return to the days when civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women's role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life; that marriage was a central way of celebrating the primacy of male heterosexuality, in which women were deferent, non-heterosexuals rendered invisible and unmentionable, and thus the vexing questions of sexual identity and orientation banished to the catch-all category of sin and otherness, rather than universal human nature.

To tell Rod something he already knows: Modernity has ended that dream. Permanently.

[snip]

But how do those who are ready to live in this modern world coexist with those who still believe that it is not only misguided but evil? And, of course, vice-versa? There is only one way.

That way is to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature. [em: mine]

[snip]

Sorry, Rod, but you and I have to live in the disenchanted world our generation was born into. The dreams of total pre-modern coherence - whether in the malign fantasies of the Taliban or the benign aspirations of theocons longing for the 1950s in the 21st century - are dreams undone by freedom. We live in a new world, and we can and should create meaning where we can, in civil society, in private, through free expression and self-empowerment. But we cannot enforce that old meaning on others by law.

The great thing about this post is that it gets beneath the surface legalisms at issue and exposes the heart of what is really under debate, which is the philosophical conflict between traditional conservatism and modernity itself. Gay marriage is simply the battle de jour upon which "deep statements about human nature" are being argued.

As Dreher himself writes even on the heels of the Prop 8 "victory" in California:

The concept of marriage has largely been severed from established norms in the popular understanding and is now seen as a contract formalizing the love a couple (for now) has for each other. Today, marriage has no intrinsic meaning that people are meant to serve; rather, it can be shaped to support people's desires.

This is the logical next phase in the development of modernity, whose 500-year project has been the gradual emancipation of the individual will. When gay marriage proponents argue that conservatives are on the wrong side of history, they're right. [em: mine]

Moreover, the prejudice – both in the bad, bigoted sense, and the good, Burkean sense – that protected traditional marriage is evaporating. Conservatives will lose this war because they have lost the young. And they have lost the young because they have lost the culture.

And, this is the "loss" that conservatives such as Dreher are really inveighing against. It is not about marriage per se, but rather about the long, slow loss of unquestioned cultural authority that is now being realized via modifications to our formal systems of legal authority (e.g. divorce, abortion, gay marriage).

Notice Dreher's obvious lament of the "gradual emancipation of the individual will." Taken as a standalone statement, one might be tempted to label a "gradual emancipation of the individual will" as freedom, which within the secular ethos of the American polity is always categorized as an unmitigated "good."

But, within a philosophical framework of Original Sin and the inherent fallen nature of man, emancipation of the individual will, by definition, leads to evil. There can be no good outcomes for mankind or society without the constraints of religious doctrine to check our baser impulses. The apple beckons and we are futile to resist.

Or, as Wilkinson more succinctly noted in a discussion of Atheists vs. Pedophiles and which group was more despised by the American public:

Wilkinson (facetiously):

I mean it's kind of obvious. If God is dead, then everything is permitted. And if everything is permitted, the first thing you want to do is abuse children.

Oddly, I think somehow that this moment provides an opening for religious conservatives to advocate more effectively for the positions they hold dear, since (in a modern context) they will be forced to justify and argue for the utility (moral or otherwise) of the positions they espouse. There is no unified cultural North Star doing all the heavy lifting of justification for them.

And, my sense is that those elements of religious faith that serve humanity (the Golden Rule, et al) will survive unscathed from the confrontation with modernity, while those that are merely relics of a different social order will simply fall over time, since the weight of cultural inertia alone is no longer enough to sustain them.

The LizardMan Cometh

I wrote recently about Grant McCracken's new book: Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture (see my overview of the thesis if need be).

In our postmodern world, individuals are taking more and more radical steps in personal transformation (not just through participation in sub-cultures, the rejection of social conventions, or the creation of new or modified public personas), even down to almost inconceivable changes of physical appearance, such as The LizardMan, Erik Sprague.

From McCracken:

Sprague has had more than 450 hours of tattooing to give his skin the appearance of scales. He had plastic surgery to install Teflon bumps in his forehead and to bifurcate his tongue. He has had his teeth filed to make them look like fangs.

On the heels of the successful mapping of the human genome, our collective future portends potential transformative capabilities beyond that which even the Erik Spragues of the world are presently tempted to dream. The nature of the some of the points of conflict is summarized below:

Another issue is whether scientists should seek to alter genetic structures to "improve" the human race. One of those who discovered the DNA structure, James Watson, is decidedly in favor of such action, the London Times reported April 24.

Watson, currently president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state, said that spurious objections from left-wing and religious groups were slowing the pace of the medical advances that rely on genetics. "I think you should be able to do all you can to improve human life," he said.

Addressing a gala dinner at London Guildhall, Watson commented: "I don't see genetics as offending the gods, as I don't think there are any gods out there." The Times also noted that Watson recently opposed a ban on human reproductive cloning. [em: mine]

Others are pointing out the dangers of tampering with human genetic structures. In an April 14 essay for the Los Angeles Times, Bill McKibbon, author of "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age," welcomed the celebrations of the anniversary of the DNA discovery.

But he warned that "the latest plans of Watson and his followers are monstrous." Such schemes "look forward to a world of catalog children, who might spend their entire lives wondering which of their impulses are real and which the product of embryonic intervention. They replace the fate and the free will that always have been at the center of human meaning with a kind of genetic predestination that will leave our children as semi-robots."

He added: "A species smart enough to discover the double helix should be wise enough to leave it more or less alone."

Dr. Leon Kass is also wary of the trend toward genetic consumerism. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, addressed the issue in an essay in his recent book, "Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics."

Genetic technology, he observed, "comes into existence as part of the large humanitarian project to cure disease, prolong life and alleviate suffering. As such, it occupies the moral high ground of compassionate healing."

But this same technology, he noted, "also represents something radically new and disquieting." We should reject the attempts by some scientists to cast the debate about genetic technology as "a battle of beneficial and knowledgeable cleverness against ignorant and superstitious anxiety." [em: mine]

Genetic manipulation, Kass explained, is decisively different from other medical technologies. First, changes to human genetic structures will be transmissible into succeeding generations. Second, genetic engineering may be able to create or improve human capacities and therefore new norms of fitness and health.

Moreover, genetic technology and the practices it will engender are not morally and humanly neutral, Kass warned. Scientists will end up judging other beings' worthiness to live or die based on genetic information. And the temptation to produce designer babies will bring about the commodification of nascent human life. [em: mine]

We have only begun to scratch the surface of the moral conundrums that are embedded therein. And, one doesn't have to be a religious conservative to wonder about our capacity to wield such power with wisdom and care.

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

- Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834 - 1892)

Morality, like art, consists in drawing the line somewhere

Fascinating article from UVA researchers on the nature of moral reasoning:

We present theoretical and empirical reasons for believing that there are five psychological systems that provide the foundations for the world's many moralities.

The five foundations are psychological preparations for detecting and reacting emotionally to issues related to:

1) harm/care,
2) fairness/reciprocity,
3) ingroup/loyalty,
4) authority/respect, and
5) purity/sanctity.

Political liberals have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations.

The essence of the argument is that it is often hard to convince another person, via moral reasoning, what is the "right" thing to do, since there isn't always common agreement on the nature of "moral" conduct. By way of contemporary example, they basically go on to argue that much of the modern political culture war can be illustrated through the lens of differing moral philosophies.

Conservatives generally believe, as did Durkheim (1951/1897), that human beings need structure and constraint to flourish, and that social institutions provide these benefits. As Muller (1997, p. 7) explains:

For the conservative, the historical survival of an institution or practice—be it marriage, monarchy, or the market—creates a prima facie case that it has served some human need. That need may be the institution's explicit purpose, but just as often it will be a need other than that to which the institution is explicitly devoted.

Muller then quotes the modern conservative Irving Kristol:

Institutions which have existed over a long period of time have a reason and purpose inherent in them, a collective wisdom incarnate in them, and the fact that we don’t perfectly understand or cannot perfectly explain why they “work” is no defect in them but merely a limitation in us. (Muller, 1997, p.7; taken from Kristol, 1978, p.161)

These are not crazy ideas. They are practical and ultimately utilitarian justifications for some of the intuitions related to the authority/respect foundation. Traditions and institutions which have been vested with authority over the ages should be given the benefit of the doubt; they should not be torn down and rebuilt each time one group has a complaint against them. (Liberals might perhaps examine their instinctive distrust of institutions and authorities, and the ways that this distrust “motivates” their own social cognition.)

Viewed from this perspective, the conservative fear that gay marriage will “destroy marriage as we know it” is no longer incomprehensible—it is correct.

You can take your own quiz here to see where you fall on the 5 vectors (and contribute to the research at the same time!!).

Although, I have to say that the knowledge of how the questions were going to be evaluated affected the way I thought about the questions. But, so what if it's not a double-blind experiment, it is still fun (if you are similarly geek-oriented).

Here’s my results from the first test.
Green = Me
Blue = Liberal
Red = Conservative



(Harm, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Purity)


Given my antipathy to George Bush, not only at a policy-level, but even more distinctly to his political persona, these results resonate my comments in a previous post.

On the one hand, I struggle at times to condemn those who gravitate to Bush or Palin on cultural affinity issues. Since, one can dismiss the attachment to cultural signals as things that "don't matter" and should be superfluous to hard policy positions formulated by experts beavering away in political think-tanks and debated with great earnestness throughout the campaign season.

But, my own gravitation to Obama is simply the inverse of that which I might otherwise denigrate. I am simply seeking different markers of affinity of thought and perspective.

Obama appeals because he demonstrates that he thinks like me and thus I hope he will make judicious decisions about the correct course of action in my stead. Because, as we are now finding with the financial crisis and with 9/11 in the case of Bush, the actual course of a Presidency is only tangentially related to specific campaign promises or party platform statements.

I may not be from Kenya, but I am of Obama's tribe.