Promiscuous Neurotheologist: The Atheologies of Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Robert Anton Wilson

In the past few weeks I've been reading the so-called New Atheists - articles and passages in books by and about them, interviews, etc - and the more I read them the more each thinker seems slightly different than the others. The ones I'm talking about are Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, Dennett, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Victor Stenger, Michael Shermer, and Lawrence Krauss.

                                              Ayaan Hirsi Ali, moving the New Atheist
                                              debate forward, although I must wonder
                                              why she's allied with the retrograde
                                              American Enterprise Institute

I could go into why I started to see individuation with each of these thinkers, but that's for some other day; what really fascinated me was what was not said, and the idea that this sort of thinking is "new;" it is not. Atheism has a long pedigree, even in Unistat, but it's largely been marginalized. I don't recall any atheist thinker being singled out in any class I ever took in high school. When I started reading compendia of atheist thought, one thing led to another and I realized it was just another marginalized discourse in Unistat; Randall Collins would say that the social and intellectual conditions were not right for a more mainstream discussion of atheism in the culture at large. It is no accident that this "new" discourse (also a publishing phenomenon, but it wouldn't be if people weren't buying the books) exploded after 9/11.

Randall Collins's magisterial The Sociology of Philosophies has a robust theory about why ideas gain ground at certain times and not others. He seems heavily influenced by Erving Goffman in developing ideas about emotional energies gathered in groups around a seminal thinker, and how the group branches out and disseminates and develops ideas, depending on culture and history, space and political  propinquities. Cultural capital is actualized around attention spaces and I'll just quote from him to give you a feel for where Collins is coming from:

Imagine a large number of people spread out across an open plain - something like a landscape by Salvador Dali or Giorgio de Chirico. Each one is shouting "Listen to me!" This is the intellectual attention space. Why would anyone listen to anyone else? What strategy will get the most listeners? [...]
A person can pick a quarrel with someone else, contradicting what the other is saying. That will gain an audience of at least one; and if the argument is loud enough, it might attract a crowd. Now, suppose everyone is tempted to try it. Some arguments start first, or have a larger appeal because they contradict the positions held by several people; and if other persons happen to be on the same side of the argument, they gather around and provide support. There are first-mover advantages and bandwagon effects. The tribe of attention seekers, once scattered across the plain, is changed into a few knots of arguments. The law of small numbers says that the number of these successful knots is always about three to six. The attention space is limited; once a few arguments have partitioned the crowds, attention is withdrawn from those who would start another knot of argument. Much of the pathos of intellectual life is in the timing of when one advances one's own argument. (p.38)

                                         Randall Collins, sociologist extraordinaire

The so-called New Atheist's arguments seem to have reached a plenum, but quite possibly we will be surprised by some new development in their lines of argument. I do think Unistat needed an intellectual avalanche of books and articles espousing atheism for one reason or another. I find the right wing Christian ideology - which to me always seemed closer to fascism than Jesus's words from the Gospels - stultifying. And no doubt there were plenty of people who didn't believe but found themselves in pockets of Unistat in which ostracism for "coming out" was a very real threat; so they endured Sunday mornings. Possibly the New Atheists, as their ideas trickle into the capillaries of small town thought, make it just a little bit easier to realize oneself. The rise of mainstream atheism in Unistat seemed dialectically necessary. We'll see where it goes. Meanwhile, I have my fascinations with the two thinkers mentioned in my title: their quasi-atheistic ideas don't seem to have captured an attention space.

Collins's ideas are about ideas appearing at the right place, right time, under the right conditions. Nonetheless we are free-thinking agents and do not place a high value on following the main streams in order to have the correct ideas to trot out at cocktail parties.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT)
I combine two thinkers (Taleb and Wilson) of seemingly disparate personal disposition, each with seemingly quite different audiences, yet both thinkers have produced a body of work that shows a fascination with chaos, randomness, erudition and epistemological doubt. Indeed, Taleb's three major works (Fooled By Randomness;The Black Swan; Antifragile) are now being labeled "The Incerto Trilogy." A taste of Nassim's basic incertitude: "Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future. But that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo, we do not know what we will know." (p.173, The Black Swan)

Taleb - who seems a strident character who insists he has a good sense of humor, so I'll take him at his word - thinks it's a bad idea to bash religion, even though he himself seems an atheist. Why not bash like Dawkins, Harris, et.al? Because nature abhors a vacuum, and he points to the atheistic USSR under Stalin: something else takes the place of irrational religion, and it could lead to far worse outcomes. He traces the first suicide bombers. Were they actuated by fundamentalist religious fervor? No, they were not Islamic terrorists from the Middle East. Rather, they were Greek orthodox Communists in Lebanon. The vacuum left in the wake of The State's abolition or proscriptions against religion are replaced by "all kinds of crazy beliefs." NNT also would have rival religions not be in physical contact, which seems a tall order but interesting idea. Top-down attacks on religion do not work, and NNT points to the diminution of Catholicism in Southern Europe and Ireland, which saw an accompaniment of usury and debt. (Unforeseen consequences?) And here's one of my favorite passages from NNT; it gives much of the flavor of his overall philosophical caste of mind:

I am most irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst - those who exercise skepticism against religion but not against the economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquistion and various religious wars. But they will not show  you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. (p.291, The Black Swan)

Later Nassim said that if you're critical of religion but invest in the stock market you're a hypocrite, which reminded me of Dawkins saying that the postmodernists who questioned the fundamental laws of physics who then got on airplanes were hypocrites. Skepticism is "domain-dependent" and 19th century "rational" Western medicine no doubt killed more people than it saved. When you have "experts" you have the "illusion of control."

NNT thinks that if religion has survived for millennia we shouldn't uproot it unless we can be damned well sure we can replace it with something less damaging. (But we cannot be sure, right?)

Like the late Robert Bellah and Robert Anton Wilson, NNT thought religion was not about "belief" but about action, and it starts with ritual. We have ideas about "God" all mixed up. Most religions started off with rituals, then developed deities post hoc. Religion makes people do things, and then the King arrives and uses the local religion for social control.

Further, NNT sees very strong historical lessons in Christianity and Islam that support his idea that history does not crawl but "jumps" and is best not thought of as something that develops slowly and relatively predictably: in noting the paucity of extant writings by contemporary thinkers in or near Jesus's time, "Apparently, few of the big guns took the ideas of a seemingly heretical Jew seriously enough to think he would leave traces for posterity." And: "How about the competing religion that emerged seven centuries later; who forecast that a collection of horsemen would spread their empire and Islamic law from the Indian subcontinent to Spain in just a few years? Even more than the rise of Christianity, it was the spread of Islam (the third edition, so to speak) that carried full unpredictability; many historians looking at the record have been taken aback by the swiftness of the change." NNT follows up these observations by making a general note about our study of history: "These kinds of discontinuities in the chronology of events did not make the historian's profession too easy: the studious examination of the past in the greatest detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it." (p.11, op.cit)

Illusions of understanding: this is at the heart of NNT's work.

For NNT, the Economist's religion of probability is as primitive as religious fundamentalists; here NNT's deliberate provocation seems to dovetail with Robert Anton Wilson's guerrilla ontological takes on "serious" bodies of thought. NNT reminds us that Syria, Egypt and Iraq were "secular" states, that churches are standing-room-only in Russia now, and that Dennett's argument for "science" clashes with most individual scientists,who understand how very much we do not know in the scientific world. Almost every decision every day is probabilistic and faith in the stock market or communism or "capitalism" works really well...until it doesn't.

NNT has also observed something interesting about the three monotheistic religions that most people would consider "good" or "fair" and I rarely see this mentioned: Christianity's ideas about sex ended the anthropologist's "Big Man"'s monopolization of women. One man, one wife: the little guy was not left out any more. Islam came along and made a restriction to four wives. Judaism had been a polygamous religion, but in the Middle Ages is became monogamous. NNT observes that this may have been a political move that headed off potential revolutions of angry, sexually-deprived men fomenting violence from the bottom of society.

So, for Nassim Nicholas Taleb: no New Atheism for him. And yet he's not exactly a believer. With regard to the desirability of religious belief, there seemed much unsaid, much overlooked, and he tried to point some of it out.

Robert Anton Wilson (RAW)
Born poor into Catholicism on Long Island in the 1930s, RAW recalls, in a documentary about him, that he found out that Santa Claus wasn't real. He kept waiting for them to admit that God wasn't real, but they never did. RAW's atheology - I adopted the term after reading a piece in which he used the term within the context of the serious/joke religion Discordianism - seems more avant garde than NNT's. RAW began satirizing the Bible and all monotheistic religions in one of the first articles he ever published, "The Semantics of 'God'" in Paul Krassner's The Realist, in 1959. RAW's main riff was Why do we call God a "he"? If we do, we must assume He has a penis. And how large must it be? Then RAW pretended to use math in comparing King Kong and the average man's penis size, Kong's height and the relative size of a penis-per-height ration for gorillas, then speculating about the size of God's schlong. If we're not prepared to admit "God" has a penis, let's stop calling God "he" and say "It." Neurosemantically, we might derive a more sane view of "God" if we said "It."

RAW even neologized over the overwhelming male-ness in monotheistic religions - why women can't be priests, etc: "theogenderology."

After more than a decade of very intense self-experimentation with psychedelic drugs, abstruse Crowleyan magickal practices, an immersion in the most difficult High Modernist texts, and all sorts of other self-described "gimmicks" in order to see how malleable his own mind was, RAW decided he was a "model agnostic," taking Neils Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics and combining it with phenomenological sociology, a studiously ironic take on conspiracy theories, and Korzybski's General Semantics to make a heady personal philosophical brew about the "self" and the world of perception, "reality tunnels" and ideologies, and a radical doubt filled with endless wonder about the world, of which we must always be uncertain.

Some scholars of hermeticism may be able to discern a long line from 14th century thinkers to Wilson; what's interesting to me is RAW's abiding interest in popular culture, surrealistic humor, neuroscience, the quantum theory, Einstein's relativity, the main strains of 20th century philosophy (including Existentialism, Phenomenology, Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and the "Linguistic Turn"), combined with Crowley's synthesis of seemingly all the major alchemical and hermetic practices. He liked to quote Crowley's line from The Book of Lies:

I slept with Faith and found a corpse in my arms upon awakening; I drank and danced all night with Doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

Doubt keeps the mind alive and questioning. And yet doubt requires belief. Why not watch your own nervous system as you decide to "believe" in some idea for a week, and then doubt it? Believe, then doubt; believe then doubt. See what happens to your ideas about "reality." RAW seems to dare his readers to try this. (At times he explicitly advocated it.)

Here's the thing: for RAW and many other modernistic antinomians: all gods and goddesses are "real" in the sense that they are projections the human genome has made; they are externalizations of deep inner aspects emanating from the biology of humanity. And so, on that level, let us use them to gain poetic insight about ourselves. Note: he doesn't believe the gods and goddesses of history "really" exist "out there;" they exist "in here," which seems "real" enough. I think it will be quite some time before the New Atheist's ideas, working dialectically with the traditional believers of a monotheistic God, create a intellectual space in which to consider "god" in these terms.

Moreover, I have oversimplified RAW's atheology, as at times in his writing career he considered himself a sort of theologian, and near the time of his death he seemed to still agree with a boyhood influence, Ezra Pound, about "seeing" gods. Here's a passage from Pound that gives us a tinge of the flavor:

We find two forces in history: one that divides, shatters and kills, and one that contemplates the unity of the mystery. 
                         
                                    "The arrow hath not two points."

There is the force that falsifies, the force that destroys every clearly delineated symbol, dragging men into a maze of abstract arguments, destroying not one but every religion. 

But the images of the gods, or Byzantine mosaics, move the soul to contemplation and preserve the tradition of the undivided light. 
(pp.306-307, Selected Prose 1909-1965, Ezra Pound)

RAW at other times seemed to identify with William Blake in naming our creative spark as God.

[But is this not what the modern guerrilla-ontological trickster hermeticist does?]

In an article published in Oui magazine in 1977, RAW quoted a fellow counterculture-hero-writer, Kurt Vonnegut, about the clash between science and religion:

As Kurt Vonnegut says, "A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Even and Jonah and the whale." Vonnegut goes on to say there is nothing in science that contradicts the works of mercy recommended by Saint Thomas Aquinas, which include: to teach the ignorant, to console the sad, to bear with the oppressive and troublesome, to feed the hungry, to shelter the homeless, to visit prisoners and the sick, and to pray for us all. (p.57, The Illuminati Papers)

In the bulk of RAW's writings on organized religion, though, he seems much more in the line of Nietzsche and Mencken and Carlin, with surreal barbed satire about good rich vicious Christians in church enjoying hell-fire sermons that seemed like the worst S&M trip ever, while they politically advocated "more bombs for Jesus."

Finally, a little article I found a while back made me think this would make RAW smile: The Claremont College Theology School desegregated the way the religious books were categorized and shelved in their library.

Some Sources:
Robert Bellah interview: Religion isn't so much about what we believe, but what we do
Nassim Nicholas Taleb on YouTube: 9 mins: On Role of Religion (live talk from Q&A with audience)
"Why Monotheism Leads To Theocracy," by Joshua Keating
"Atheism Is Maturing and it Will Leave Richard Dawkins Behind," Martin Robbins

North Dakota's In The Stupidest State Race Now

Those of us who follow the awesome powers of idiotic backwardness in Unistat have long marveled at the doings of powerful wingnuts in places like Arizona, West Virginia, and especially those two perennial powerhouses of devolution, Mississippi and Alabama. But there's a new contender in town: North Dakota.

Right wingers in both houses of gummint there have passed a fertilized-egg-is-a-human-being bill. The Republican Governor Jack Dalrymple  hasn't said which way he swings here, but it looks like the good people of North Dakota will vote on whether a zygote is a person in November, 2014. And since I'm betting the voters will not be drawing so much on their knowledge of reproductive biology as what someone told them the Bible said, my heart goes out to the entirety of North Dakota's distaff side (minus those stalwart women who assert they should not have primary rights over what goes on in their own bodies, and that the State knows better).

I tar an entire Unistat state with the term "stupid" but of course I'm not applying this to those who agree with me: that women should have the right to choose as under the Roe decision. So please don't take this personally, North Dakotans who are progressive...all seven of you.

Oh, but let's not use such icky terms as "fertilize" and "egg" and "zygote": the North Dakotans like "personhood." It just feels right.

Doctors in North Dakota are already threatening to leave the state if the bill passes, and I can understand their trepidation: the bill - even though it violates Roe v. Wade - would make a doctor who accidentally damages an embryo or does IVF (in vitro fertilization) a murderer. Not to mention it outlaws abortion, of course.

[Prof. George Carlin on "pro-lifers": If you're a fetus you're fine, but once you're born, you're fucked: they don't give a shit about your life as a walking-around human trying to find love, shelter, clothing, food, a job, etc. Q: So what are these "pro-lifers" really about? A: controlling women. Women should function "as a brood mare for the State."]

Now: even voters in Mississippi have rejected a similar bill. Colorado voters have rejected bills like this three times. And, even though I'd say to my fellow bloggers: start your satirical engines! and begin to make fun of North Dakota!, there are signs that the extreme far, far Right is going to lose this one. For one: Republican pro-lifers in ND think this is too extreme, and will join pro-choicers in activist movements against it. One pro-lifer in ND remarked that they don't even have a mandatory seatbelt law yet, but they want to declare a zygote a human? It was too much, even for her.

Roe allows states to decide about abortions after the 22nd-24th week (roughly 154-168 days into known pregnancy). The second trimester ends at around 180 days. There's one (ONE) (1) place in the state to obtain an abortion, or even if you're having complications with your pregnancy that could kill you: the Red River Women's Clinic in Fargo, which wouldn't have much of a function if the bill passes, would it?

Many forms of birth control would be outlawed by this bill too, but what really sets me to wondering: how would these amateur theologists know when a sperm successfully ensconced itself in the egg? I think if they're really serious about zygotic personhood they need to train hundreds of thousands of microbiologists/amateur gynecologists, who can enter a dwelling without a warrant, at any time, when they suspect two people have been fucking "in there." They can also be given full State power to order to woman to strip, spread her legs, pee on a stick, and (I don't know, bite on a bullet or something?) endure some scraping or ultrasound or whatever is necessary in order to determine whether a sperm had made that treacherous, against-all-odds journey towards the Mighty Ovum, and...crashed through, blastocyst immanent. (These same Far Right wingers no doubt would also agree that "The government should get off our backs.")

I mean, put your Xtian Ideals on the line here. If you're serious about a zygote being a person, like 'Lil Wayne or Donald Trump or your mother's best friend's second cousin or Queen Noor of Jordan or Aunt Ethel, you need to do this. Don't go this far only to shut down the Red River Baby Killing Clinic; go all the way with your "convictions!"; how could a Good Christian expect anything less?

A spokesman for Personhood USA applauds the good folk of North Dakota, and hopes the bill passes. He says it's a "human rights" issue. (Did the OG make up "Personhood USA"? Gosh, I dunno...Google or Bing it?)

                              A sperm that's made it to the outside of the Ovum, image
                              electron microscope by David Phillips of Visuals Unlimited.
                              Can't you see the person here? (Or will it "be" one in 20
                              minutes from the time this pic was taken?)

Sundry Notes: No Need to Read This Crap
1.) The very idea of zygotic personhood seems a recent concept. Even Aristotle and medieval  Catholicism thought there wasn't a "person" in there until 40 days after fertilization (which explains why the Far Right in ND has been referring to St. Thomas Aquinas as "that socialist progressive"), or, because you can never tell if any of your "boys" successfully swam to the Big Prize: that night after Dad bought mom some flowers and took here out to dinner, and later, after something that passes for "passion," Dad slumped off Mom, slid over, and lit up a Kool. THAT may have been the time to start the possible personhood clock.

How did Arry and the medieval Schoolmen arrive at the nice round number of 40? There are all sorts of obscure reasonings and legitimations if you delve (Which I do not recommend at this time; not with the latest news about the Consumer Price Index. Get out and enjoy life!), but the short answer: they pulled it out of their asses. Domine adiuva me: aye. They did.

2.) The great comedian Bill Hicks once pondered the 18th century idea of preformationism and noted the corollary: that when he was masturbating and ejaculated all over his stomach and/or chest, he was, in effect, "wiping out an entire village." Akin to the My Lai Massacre. Or Newtown, CT. (Actually, a LOT of sperm get spent in one garden-variety ejaculation, so it's more like Pol Pot's "killing fields," but who's counting? Anyway, an interesting idea. Kinda makes ya think, eh? Don't answer that.)

3.) Some comedian or comedians in the late 1970s or early 80s joked about the Moral Majority's stand on abortion (they seem like liberals compared to what we have now, in pockets, all over Unistat) and, using the classic "slippery slope" avenue, wondered how far this can go: "These Moral Majoritarians are so radical that they say life begins at conception! What's next? Life begins at 'Let me slip into something a little more comfortable'?" Aye...(Bang! Zoom!)

4.) Laurence Sterne, the greatest digressionist in all of what Ezra Pound called "licherchoor," in his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), wants to tell us about his life, but he needs to begin at the beginning and he takes half of the book up before he's finally born. Sterne plays on the 18th century idea of preformationism, in which he's a little homunculi (a very very tiny version of his grow-up self, inside a sperm). Gawd! What a funny book! Joyce liked it too. Here, on topic: skip down and check out the paragraph beginning with, "The Homunculus, Sir, in however low and ludicrous a light he may appear..."

Promiscuous Neurotheologist, vol.6-ish

[Due to the concurrent State of the Union address on one side of a split-screen, and the real-life film noir shoot-out of a disgruntled ex-LAPD on the snowy mountainside 90 minutes outside Los Angeles, we join another episode of the OG already in progress.]

...about a passage from Tom Robbins's first novel, Another Roadside Attraction:

Jesus: Hey dad.

God: Yes, son?

Jesus: Western Civilization followed me home this morning. Can I keep it?

God: Certainly not boy. And put it down this minute. You don't know where it's been.

Darwin Day From Here On Out: Feb.12: Pass It On!
As I write this, it's a few minutes Pacific Standard Time after Darwin Day has passed. February 12 was Charles Darwin's 204th birthday, and it's the latest volley by those who seek to push-back against the Creationists. (Those of us persuaded by scientific thought may be aware of others who do not - 46% of Unistatians in one poll said they believed in a "Young Earth" theory of creationism: God created the Earth about 10,000 years ago. The article linked to earlier in this 'graph seems mostly about a Creationist from Australia named Ken Ham, who is largely responsible for the rather clueless folk among us seeing pictures of Adam sitting next to his vegetarian dinosaur...in case you are interested in that reality tunnel..)

Karen Armstrong Enlightens Me
As Karen Armstrong wrote in A History of God, "Science has been felt to be threatening only by those Western Christians who got into the habit of reading the scriptures literally and interpreting doctrines as though they were matters of fact." (p.379) Ms. Armstrong then goes on to cover a period of theology I hadn't known much about before: the radical theologians of the 1960s who embraced Nietzsche's "God is dead" idea. In a book I have not read, Thomas J. Altizer's 1966 The Gospel of Christian Atheism, Armstrong quotes Altizer: "Only by accepting and even willing the death of God in our experience can we be liberated from a transcendent beyond, an alien beyond which has been emptied and darkened by God's self-alienation in Christ."

This reads like mumbo-jumbo to me, but then I'm no trained theologian; the lucid thought and prose of Ms. Armstrong unpacks it for me. There had to be a silence around God before He could become meaningful again. Altizer had gone on, mystically, about the pain of suffering and the dark night of the soul. Yes, but...why again? Armstrong: "All our old conceptions of divinity had to die before theology could be reborn. We were waiting for a language and a style in which God could once more become a possibility. Altizer's theology was a passionate dialectic which attacked the dark God-less world in the hope that it would give up its secret." (p.380)

I'll note that this book came out one year before Derrida made his first big splash in Unistat. I mention Derrida here because this Altizer dude, as filtered through Armstrong to my reading eyes, seems well-fed enough of an intellectual to entertain such ideas about "god." Armstrong mentions that the 1960s "death of God theologians" were criticized for their affluent, middle-class white America perspectives.

From my perspective, the idea there were intellectuals with the theology degree who had embraced Nietzsche's "God is dead" idea is marvelous enough. Armstrong also cites Paul Van Buren's 1963 The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, which argued that we can't talk about God acting in the world anymore because science and technology had become a myth that had superseded God. The best we can do is hold on to Jesus, and forget God; Jesus at least taught us liberation, and how to be free.

                                                       Karen Armstrong

Yet another 1960s theologian who embraced God's death was William Hamilton, whose contribution to  a book of essays, Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966), co-written with the aforementioned Altizer, found no God in the world of Unistat in the Sixties. Furthermore, Unistat had never had a great theological tradition of its own, and was always more utopian. Hamilton noted that Luther abandoned his cloister and went out into the world of people, looking for... not God but the spirit of Jesus among them. Hamilton says this was the way to be a theologian in Unistat in the Sixties: find Jesus in the City, among his neighbors and among technology, power, money, and sex.

Easy Remarks: Sure, these guys were white, privileged and steeped in...I'm guessing Heidegger. But they sure make a hell of a lot more sense than whatever sort of "Hate thy neighbor and the poor/Rich Folks are where it's at and by the way science and rational thought is for godless heathens and I can't wait to see 'em fry in Hell" that I see in far too many Unistatians these days.

A Brief Word On Fred N.
Nietzsche's "God is dead" seems to have become his most popular catch-phrase, but the one that's always seemed more interesting - almost zen koan-ish - is his notion and phrase "Will to power." So far my favorite definition of it is from (surprise!), Robert Anton Wilson, who parsed it out thus:

"The spirit of abundance and creativity, which is not One, not a final principle or a God-in-disguise, but the resultant of the forces that make up the mesh of Chaos." - from "A New Writer: F.W. Nietzsche"

[We now join As The World Turns, already in progress.]

Another Promiscuous Neurotheologist Post (But This One Gets Shanked Into the Chomskyan Rough)

Go ahead and skip this video of Harvard Professor Marc Hauser, but if you do you'll miss out on a bit of Irony. It's 3 minutes, 40 seconds:

Getting back to trying to figure out how religion came about and how it related to moral thought, Hauser at Harvard and Prof Illka Pyysiainen (don't even ask about pronouncing his name) of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (and their teams) worked on this problem. The posited positions seem to have been that 1.)We can either think of religion as an adaptation that solved the problem of cooperation among non-genetically related peoples when the tribe got big enough; or 2.) Religion evolved as a by-product of pre-existing cognitive capacities.

Position #1 and its adherents seem to think that the Cooperation Model means there is no morality without religion, although there seem to be a few who like the Cooperation Model but shy away from this "hard" position about "morality" as we know it today.

Position #2 and its adherents see religion as merely one way of expressing one's own moral intuitions.

Note that both assumptions make religious experience a brain experience solely and do not address the existence of any sort of Gaseous Vertebrate of Astronomical Weight and Heft (or: gee ohh dee).

My "intuition" says that, if I'm forced to choose one of the two positions, I'd go with #2, because I grew up irreligious and yet seem to have a modern Industrialized World adult's view of morality that fits in well enough that I'm not ostracized or shunned or forced into exile. I have friends. I'm kind to strangers and my loved ones know I love them. I'm not writing this from a SuperMax prison, where I'm doing Life plus 900 years for some cartoonishly heinous act, like taking over a kindergarten and slitting the throats of all the bunny rabbits and making the kids watch it, and then raping Ms. Schoolmarm in front of little Francine and Billy and Jared and Sally. Or masterminding a secret terrorist bombing of Cambodia.

[Oh wait a minute: that second thing really was done by a guy who's not only not in prison, but he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Talk about Irony!]

Actually, I have no dog in that fight. I think all that will come of it are speculative narratives couched in as much social scientific study as the researchers can muster, the result being, depending on your proclivities, Just-So stories, or Edifying Discourse. I remain agnostic about the origin of religion but enjoy reading the attempts to travel in time to find the Origins. I take a pragmatist's view: what do I find good to think about?

A short precis of the Hauser/Pyysiainen paper appeared HERE. The paper was originally published in Trends In Cognitive Sciences on 8 February, 2010. Pyysiainen and Hauser looked at some plenitude of  studies on moral intuition and were impressed that people from many diverse religious backgrounds, and some people with no religious upbringing or affiliation? They all had no trouble in making moral judgments when faced with unfamiliar moral dilemmas. Ipso facto: people don't need a particular religious background in order to make sound moral judgments. And Hauser/Pyysiainen go to the position I'm guessing they had when they went in: religion emerged from pre-existing cognitive modules.

I thought Pyysiainen was appropriately conciliatory towards religion in his quote from the article in Science Daily: "However, although it appears as if cooperation is made possible by mental mechanisms that are not specific to religion, religion can play a role in facilitating and stabilizing cooperation between groups."

Hey, that's why these guys get the Big Bucks, eh?

The Kicker
Marc Hauser published this paper with his Finnish colleagues while, it turns out, Harvard was doing a five-year investigation on him, for charges of various academic frauds. Around six weeks ago, Harvard finally wrapped it up: Hauser - once an academic star, a favored lecturer at Harvard, prolific publisher, and one of John Brockman's Third Culturalists - was found guilty of scientific misconduct. He fabricated data, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and "conducted experiments in factually incorrect ways." He's no longer affiliated with Harvard. (See HERE for Harvard's findings, and HERE for Hauser's response to the Federal Office for Research Integrity's findings.

For a long and insider's fascinating take on this whole episode see Charles Gross's piece from The Nation from late last year. It seems a fairly rare event when the grad students helping the star Professor turn the Prof in. When they do, it often taints the grad students and makes their life as future scientific researchers very difficult, but this time it does not seem to have harmed the students.

                        Professor Chomsky, most influential linguist of the 20th century, and
                        I think, a bad influence on now-fallen Marc Hauser. Chomsky's
                        reaction to Hauser's resignation, which happened long before
                          Hauser was convicted of academic fraud, is HERE.

The Chomsky Connection
Even though I copped to picking the Hauser/Pyysiainen of the two choices (due to no formal religious upbringing), when I read the piece and saw Hauser's name attached, I had already read he was under a long investigation. And, to be honest, I had become quite biased against his stuff - which ranged over an impressively large biological/philosophical/psychological terrain - because I'd followed him initially as a Chomskyan, who believed in Cartesian rational modules in the mind that get tripped by being in this world and then Do Whatever.

(No talk about neurons or neural circuits or the embodied brain, that's for damned sure! Although, to be fair, I think Hauser would've loved to have seen Chomsky go for more neuroscience...or at least be more open-minded to primatological findings, but he simply could not. Chomsky would not. Why? Because then the syntactical walls come a' tumblin' down, the whole Idealized Universal Grammar schmeer gets canned when you must deal with The Continuum of chimps and birds and singing Neanderthals to neurons and real stuff. Not diagrams.)

Indeed, Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch appear to have talked Noam into co-publishing a paper on the origin of language when, after a lifetime of dodging the issue, Chomsky put his name to a paper on the subject, if only to stop the charges that Chomsky appeared to think that Language arose in an instant, like the Big Bang or Yahweh saying "Let there be light."

A large chunk of Hauser's now-gone academic career seems to have been to extend the Chomskyan model of thinking about linguistics to the realm of Evolutionary Psychology. Indeed, Hauser seems to have been quite gung-ho about Edward O. Wilson's "consilience" project, but claiming it for a sort of Cartesian/Chomskyan intellectual empire.

Now obviously, I've veered way off course from the topic of neurotheology and into the politics of academia, but I couldn't help it: the Irony was too much. Forgive me?

I could could on and on about Hauser and what I consider the 18th century view Chomsky has infected some of academia with (and longtime readers of the OG know I've typed a lot on Noam and I actually love the Man), but to suffice and for further delvings: see George Lakoff's talk on "Philosophy In The Flesh" and then some of his Third Culturalist's responses to Lakoff's 21st century ideas about the embodied human mind. This goes back to March of 1999. Notice Hauser's response, then skip down to see how Lakoff (Chomsky's bete noir in Linguistics; they loathe each other) responds to Chomsky acolyte Hauser's non-understandings.

[For some other blogspew: it could be argued that John Rawls has as much to do with "Nativist" ideas in academia as Chomsky does.]

One of Hauser's books was titled Moral Minds and I have not seen any data about his publisher removing the book from bookstore shelves, as was done to Jonah Lehrer when it was found he'd fabricated quotes about Bob Dylan in his book Imagine. But Hauser still plans to go on and publish in the field of evolutionary psychology/cognitive neurobiology. One article has his next book being titled Evilicious: Explaining Our Evolved Taste For Being Bad, and it should be...interesting. (NB: I refrained from using "Ironic" yet again!) In an article on the Hauser debacle in USA Today, of all places, I noted big-time primatologist Frans de Waal's worry that maybe much more of Hauser's data was cooked than what the investigators looked at. De Waal accuses Harvard of covering up too much for Hauser, possibly damaging the field of animal behavior...

A Head Test: How is Hauser different from Lehrer? And does knowing Hauser made up stuff, etc: does that change how you think of this particular paper on the origin of religion?

Going Out With Hauser
I will let Hauser's quote on morality from Science Daily carry this one out:

"It seems that in many cultures religious concepts and beliefs have become the standard way of conceptualizing moral intuitions. Although, as we discuss in our paper, this link is not a necessary one, many people have become so accustomed to using it, that criticism targeted at religion is experienced as a fundamental threat to our moral existence."

Amen, Hauser. And have a good life.