book review: Roman Britain and Early England (55 B.C.-A.D. 871)

I have been terrible about posting these days, and I’ve even let a few books go by without reviewing them.  I’ll try to make up for it, but I really just don’t feel like I have the energy even to throw together a mediocre review.  but oh well, here’s a lame attempt.

I wrote elsewhere that this is history at its (almost) most boring.  not that the author falls short of covering a certain amount of information or of dissecting a few themes, but this is the kind of book — and his is the kind of narrative — that recapitulates classical historians whenever available, supplementing it with archeological data, recounting the step-by-step process of Roman invasion or the suppression of a national revolt.  my interest in history goes way beyond (and in fact cares little for) the history of military exploits.  the overall reconstruction of conquest from archeological data (from roads to forts, etc.) is very interesting and is a great achievement (the overall discovery, not necessarily is account of it), but it’s the kind of story that really needs to be supplemented with lots of interesting plates and maps (as opposed to one or two, which you constantly have to be flipping back and forth between, and even then it doesn’t really give you a real sense of the process).

I think recapitulation — in terms of the main root of the word — is the best term for his historical account.  it’s as if he, a genuine master of the available material (historical and material), has been forced, at gunpoint, to give us all his information.  it doesn’t come across as the account of someone truly fascinated by this story and inexplicably invested in our comprehension of it.  not that every history book has to play to its audience and write like a novelist, but what the publishing historian should hope to produce is something that doesn’t sound like a Ben Stein Clear Eyes commercial in your head.

OK, with that out of my system, I can still say that the book provides valuable information for anyone wanting to study such a difficult period in British history.  there are a few subject-centered themes (e.g., the conversion to Christianity, pre-Christian religion, Anglo-Saxon society), but they are not nearly as vivid and as interesting as I’d hoped.  and I would have hoped for more excerpts from original sources (in Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, etc.) in the text or in an appendix.

more treachery

as a sort of follow up to the Bertrand Russell quote and video from the other day, I thought I’d add another from Sean Carroll.  this comes in the context of the incessant debates among scientists about whether or not scientists and, more importantly, science institutes (such as the National Center for Science Education) should engage in any amount of theology — that is, whether official representatives should weigh in on science vs. religion debates, and whether they should do any more than promote scientific education and, at most, acknowledge the fact that there are scientists who are religious.  do they have any business in theology, speaking of the compatibility of various beliefs with the cores of modern science?  Carroll thinks no.  He writes,

If science and religion are truly incompatible, then it would be dishonest and irresponsible to pretend otherwise, even if doing so would soothe a few worried souls. And if you want to argue that science and religion are actually compatible (not just that there exist people who think so), by all means make that argument — it’s a worthy discussion to have. But it’s simply wrong to take the stance that it doesn’t matter whether science and religion are compatible, we still need to pretend they are so as not to hurt people’s feelings. That’s not being honest.

he is open to the possibility that the two are compatible — he’s just unpersuaded by any of the arguments made so far, and he believes that science and religion, generally defined, are not compatible approaches to understanding the world.

in any case, his point here about pretending that science and religion are completely compatible without first establishing the validity of the claim — and how this is a dishonesty — is akin to Russell’s point about “a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity, to hold a belief because you think it’s useful and not because you think it’s true.”  it is (intellectually) dishonest to believe something that isn’t true (merely useful), and it’s dishonest for anyone — especially a national institute — to make claims about the ultimate compatibility of scientific and religious claims without first bothering to establish whether it’s true or not, regardless of how many people it would please.  in my mind, those who argue for incompatibility win the day (day after day) — and those who hold up “non-overlapping magisteria” shouldn’t at all be concerned with whether they are compatible (or overlap)!  so again, silence would be golden.

an intellectual grandpappy

a few vintage thoughts on religion from a very old Bertrand Russell:

well, there can’t be a practical reason for believing what isn’t true … at least I rule it out as impossible: either the thing is true or it isn’t. if it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn’t, you shouldn’t. and if you can’t find out whether it is true or whether it isn’t, you should suspend judgment … it seems to be a fundamental dishonesty, and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful and not because you think it’s true.

biology=morality

over at the Edge, Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard psychologist, has written a short article about the evolutionary origins of morality.  not much of this is new when compared to articles he’s published elsewhere, along with the few books he’s written on the subject, but this is a very nice summary and worth mulling over.  here are a few of his key points:

• when considering moral situations for which they do not have a pre-scripted, emotionally charged response (e.g., for abortion of euthanasia), people — regardless of sex, age, race, demographic, religion, or cultural background — show remarkable similarities in moral reasoning.
• there is a universal moral grammar — an impartial, unemotional code — that “provides us with an unconscious suite of principles for judging what is morally right and wrong”
• people tend to see action as worse (or more weighted, positively or negatively) than inaction (e.g., pushing someone in front of a train vs. letting someone fall in in order to save more lives)
• what transforms (or betrays) this impartial, universal code into moral atrocities that we all repudiate are our emotions, specifically or innate tendency (so also dealing with biology) to prefer members of our “group,” whether those who resemble us or whose language or ideologies we share (there is a particularly fascinating study about the preferences of babies regarding people of same “race” or language, and combinations thereof)
• what makes a psychopath is not an inability to understand moral issues or the consequences of actions, but rather an emotional numbness to those issues or consequences: “Here lies the answer to understanding the dangers of nurture, of education and partiality. When we fuel in-group biases by elevating and praising members of the group, we often unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, denigrate the “other” by feeding the most nefarious of all emotions, the dragon of disgust.”
• this psychology of preference (and Hauser considers this “good news”) is not fixed but flexible — something that has been known and widely disgusted in fields related to race and ethnicity for decades now; it is as abstract and “content free” as universal grammar.  when it comes to matters of culture and race, then, “Exposure to diversity is perhaps our best option for reducing, if not eradicating, strong out-group biases.”

Hauser then offers a (two-point) caveat regarding whether or not this innate moral reasoning is sufficient:

For one, some of our moral instincts evolved during a period of human history that looked nothing like the situation today. In our distant past, we lived in small groups consisting of highly familiar and often familial individuals, with no formal laws. Today we live in a large and diffuse society, where our decisions have little-to-no impact on most people in our community but with laws to enforce those who deviate from expected norms. Further, we are confronted with moral decisions that are unfamiliar, including stem cells, abortion, organ transplants and life support. When we confront these novel situations, our evolved system is ill-equipped.

The second reason is that living a moral life requires us to be restless with our present moral norms, always challenging us to discover what might and ought to be. And here is where nurture can re-enter the conversation. We need education because we need a world in which people listen to the universal voice of their species, while stopping to wonder whether there are alternatives. And if there are alternatives, we need rational and reasonable people who will be vigilant of partiality and champions of plurality.

I have written on numerous occasions about how I think our discussions about ethics, morality, social policy, etc., need to be rooted in a firmer understanding of the way our mind works, along with the manifold ways in which it doesn’t work so well (see Gary Marcus’s excellent book Kluge).  an essential step in that dialogue — if we ever get there on a broader scale — is ridding ourselves of the absurd notion that appealing to our natural, biologically founded moral “code” — along with our ability (also natural) to empathize and reason — is akin to throwing all guidelines and principles out of the window.

an understanding of evolution — particularly our evolution — does not mean we live and die by “survival of the fittest,” because that same process has provided us with the ability to love and show compassion and invest in the well-being of those around us.  the problem, of course, as Hauser points out, is that our “natural” reasoning falls short in many ways.  is this were religion steps in?  maybe — but it’s quite clear that religions can and most often have failed to provide the best corrective; in fact, religions (along with many overlapping cultural features) have helped entrench a number of beliefs that violate our ability to see others as fully human and thus to show them the appropriate compassion (think race, sex, and sexuality).  we need concerted efforts to break us of our eagerness to form and feed our in-group biases and out-gr0up prejudices.  it’s not us vs. them, it’s all of us together.

yet another reason to hate the Red Sox in New England. 

divine numbers

apparently there has been a new study on that most magical of numbers, 7.  researches have long known about 7 (plus or minus 2) being the number the maximum number of things we can recall with short-term, or working, memory.  in this new study, however, researchers tried to create a model of brain activity to explain how the firing and suppressing of neurons involved in this process explains why it gets exponentially more difficult (for normal minds) to continue adding to this working memory.  it seems, as has been demonstrated repeatedly with human subjects, 7 seems to be the breaking point.  as the article states,

As a sentence or a string of numbers gets longer, it becomes exponentially harder for the excited cluster to suppress the others from firing, resulting in pathways that are weak or barely there. Recalling seven items requires about 15 times the suppression needed to recall three. Ten items requires inhibitory powers that are 50 times stronger, and 20 or more items would require suppression hundreds of times stronger still. That, Rabinovich explained, is normally not biologically feasible.

now, I’m not troubling myself with the details of the study here because it’s not what is interesting me right now.  instead, I’m thinking back to all the sermons heard and lessons learned in Sunday school about how 7 was the number of God.  7 days in creation, 7 days in the week, 7 days of Passover (ignoring that these are all pretty much the same thing…), 7 spirits of God, 7 churches in Asia,

the 10 commandments are found in the 70th chapter of the Bible (ignoring, of course, the later, sometimes arbitrary origin of those divisions), 7 loaves of bread,

7 deadly sins,

and so on.

of course, 7′s magicalness extends beyond the Bible: in addition to it simply being a lucky number, we have the 7 chakras in Hinduism, 7 heavens in Islam (as well as 7 fires of hell), Judaism’s 7-branched candelabrum (of the temple, not Hanukkah),

7 lucky Japanese gods of fortune

and, of course, the 7-layer whopper released in Japan last month.

so assuming that this new study is true — heck, let’s up the ante and say that the number 7 is not just the statistical average of things that can be held in short-term memory but in fact “written” into the brain’s hardwiring — I can’t help but think about how this story could and should be interpreted in light of the importance of the number in various cultures and their myths and religions.  one the one hand, there’s the could.  some people will surely see this as evidence that God — whose number is 7, remember? — created us in such a way that his number could be found implanted within our brains.  oh, the trickster!  glory!

on the other hand, there’s the should.  that the number 7 may be found across various cultures because of the structure of our brains.  now again, this is taking this study beyond face value and assuming way more than necessary, but it’s illustrative of a larger problem of how we interpret evidence.  for instance, you often hear about how the conditions on this planet, nay, universe, are perfect for life.  if the earth moved an inch in its orbit, we would all burn of freeze (nobody really knows the physics, they just know this).  everything we need for life and health is bountifully provided on the planet by the plants (and animals, if you’re one of those ).  and when we’re not inconsiderately interfering, the planet is fairly good at balancing itself out and maintaining homeostasis.  in short, clear evidence of design and of the hand of a beneficent creator.

the problem, of course, is that this type of thinking is backward.  it involves looking at the end product, irrespective of how it developed, concluding that things couldn’t have been any other way — that this was the intended product, or even the only imaginable one — and consequently marveling at the fact that conditions or means just happened to exactly what was necessary.  it entails looking first at the nutrients we need to develop and survive and then at what’s available in the world, which, lo and behold, match up quite nicely.  what are the odds?!  this is essentially how I learned to look at the world — excuse me, creation — growing up in church.  it is, like many other un or pseudoscientific views preferred by the church over time, alarmingly egotistic.

the correct view, of course, even crudely understood, is just the opposite.  the essential nutrients and conditions of life are not there to meet our needs as we are, but rather we are the way we are — and life is the way it is — because “we” evolved as we were able to break down those nutrients for energy and as “we” were capable of surviving — better, thriving — in those environments.  God didn’t create bluish/grayish eyes — much less give them specifically to me — so that people whom he wanted to live in cold environments with less sunlight could thrive; rather, the genetic mutation spread — and in recent evolutionary memory, at that — because of benefits for those who were already living in those environments.  I mean, that’s a pithy, pathetic explanation, but it’s immediately more reasonable that the former position, as humbling as that might be.

this doesn’t provide any really satisfying answer as to why the number 7 can be found in so many cultures, playing such an important role, but I’m not interested enough right now to sift through any explanations there might be.  plus, let’s not pretend that 7 is really that prevalent around the globe, or that it’s even all that important in the Bible.  rather, this is an instance of the human tendency to look for patterns and to bias all the instances of what we’re looking for — ignoring all the other numbers that are just as important/mundane.

book review: Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality

I am ashamed to say that after a handful of degrees (undergrad and grad), I had never heard of this book.  for shame!

Boswell has a number of goals in this book — all of which are academic and not masked political activism (in fact, he’s often quite reserved in his claims) — and he is most successful in demonstrating, first, how weak and ultimately indefensible the biblical case against homosexuality is, and second, how the origins of unprecedented hostility towards homosexuality in phases of European history (up to the high middle ages) did not grow organically out of Christianity or any specific theology/exegesis, but rather were part of larger political and cultural trends.

one particular goal of the book is to lay out the inconsistent and problematic history of the various “natural” arguments against homosexual relations and how various phases of historical Christianity were unconcerned with them.

as Boswell shows, the biblical, theological, and historical (in terms of Christian teaching) case against usury was much stronger and much more consistent throughout church history — until it became convenient and popular enough to change this view, of course. so why go on painting homosexuality and homosexuals as unnatural and particularly sinful?

the book is also very effective in demonstrating the extent to which homosexuality was part of the sexual landscape in antiquity, and even how gay subcultures and literature reemerged and flourished in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. there was even a place for more “erotic” homosexual literature, even if much of it was technically detailing non-physical love between monks or clergy.  indeed, it makes you wonder which otherwise heterosexual persons in our society — given that sexuality is more of a spectrum of sorts, and knowing how much more common it has been when it has been idealized and hasn’t had to stay underground — would give themselves (exclusively or not) over to homosexual relations.  I’m thinking the dude bros and frat boy hazers.

in the end, one puts the book down amazed at how far in the wrong direction European views strayed (and were kept astray?) until the modern period.  but it also reminds you that things have been, and can be again, different.  for the better.

from lewd idiom to lofty truth

there’s a video making the rounds on the ol’ internets of a pastor named Steven Anderson who rails against men — excuse me, males, certainly not men — who pee sitting down.  every single German, according to his authoritative three-and-a-half-month visit and handful of experiences, pees sitting down.  and that, my friends, is where this country is headed.  people are afraid to tell it like it is (like the KJV is, that is) and pee standing up!  those compromising scholars who have produced alternative, “soft” translations of the Bible, and certainly President Obama (probably) pees sitting down!

he takes this from a few old testament passages that use the fairly crude though entertaining idiom “who piss against the wall,” meaning men, and then expounds on what an essential quality of manliness is: peeing standing up.  he is a treasure.

anyway, I actually looked into it (if you can call a few minutes of internet searching “looking into” something) and found that, indeed, in Germany, as well as in Japan, it is fairly common for men to pee sitting down.  this may be a bit too much of a disclosure, but I decided sometime last spring or summer that I would start doing this in our home.  I mean, I’ve always considered myself a conscientious urinator and all, but when we went to wash our bathroom rungs once, just a few minutes in a closed, small laundry room and it became apparent that there was still a, shall we say, “unwelcome” smell to them.  why shouldn’t I save us the trouble of having to do more washing and cleaning up?  (not that we stopped washing our rugs now and then, but still.)  anyway, I’ll stop there, apart from adding that I wouldn’t do this anywhere — only for friends and family and/or in places where I can trust the overall cleanliness of the toilet.

and there’s this:

anyway, I guess I should be thankful to Pastor Anderson for making explicit what I had been suspecting all along.

homo religiosus

Karen Armstrong has a new article in Foreign Policy titled “Think Again: God”.  it is another argument for why religion is still a force in the world today, this time with more of a political twist.  oh, and of course she takes a moment to explain why the “new atheists” are wrong and bad.

at the beginning of the article, she briefly looks at the “God is dead” idea and explains how the opposite seems to be true: religion (but God?) is in full swing round the globe.  now while she may be right in a very limited sense that Nietzche and others would have been wrong in their prediction about whether people would continue to take religion, or God, seriously in the future, or that they would no longer believe in some cosmic order, she completely misses the point of the statement overall, which was that God (and religion) would cease to be a self-evident truth accepted by all and a viable means for approaching and explaining the world.  PZ Myers does a great job tearing her apart on this, as the following excerpt demonstrates:

Nietzsche, of course, wasn’t arguing for a literal death of a deity, nor was he claiming that religion had disappeared from the world. He was making a narrower argument, that in his culture (19th century Europe), the concept of god had lost its material and moral authority. There is no central defining source of absolute truth, and we human beings have to rebuild our values around something new, other than this notion of a celestial monarch (he personally thought the new value was a “will to power”, individual ambition and aspiration).

That’s still true. Fundamentalism is in many ways a desperate reaction to that loss, that deep down even they know God is a powerless answer. That was the striking thing about the “Creation” Museum: it’s a deeply fundamentalist institution, but even there in the heart of Christian literalism, they do nothing but ape the trappings of science and strive to present a “science” to support claims that were once sufficiently endorsed by simply pointing to the Bible. God is dead; he is no longer a vital element in how human beings interact in a meaningful, productive way with the universe. Modern fundamentalism is basically a series of aftershocks as cultures struggle to deal with the fall of gods.

… God is inadequate. To defend religion, people have to borrow the authority of science, and invent misbeggoten terms like Home religiosus and make grand claims about nature and natural law. This is exactly what Nietzsche meant when he said “God is dead”! Theology is flighty and transient, we have to find truth in reality, or in Armstrong’s case, a pretense of reality.

well put.

anyway, moving on.  her argument essentially hinges on the following claim:

Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere.

overall, I think she is profoundly confused on the manner.  humans may be “meaning-seeking creatures,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean homo religiosus.  what about the various arguments for science or a philosophical outlook as systems of meaning?  our brains seek out patterns and we almost automatically create narratives to explain disparate pieces of information.  but each person born doesn’t enter the world as the first human ever (as if there were such a thing), so we’re not exactly building from scratch.  is every “meaning-seeking” explanation ever offered by humans equally viable in and valuable to the world today? surely we can judge between them and figure out what’s best for the world, right?

I think it’s a significant problem to confuse the human propensity for religion with the necessity to embrace and respect not humans themselves or the process itself but the end product, the religions, despite their created nature and various faults.  this is especially true considering that fact that, while religion in general, or aspects of certain religions (e.g., supernatural beliefs), may prove to be unique combination of mental faculties and behavior, there doesn’t seem to be any unique religious faculty or part of us that is reserved for religion alone.  this is why defining “religion” can be so hairy, given the innumerable overlaps between religious belief and, say, ideologies or the scientific process or sports fans and mass-media culture or trekkies.  religion may have a special impact on parts of our brains, but those parts function (or malfunction) otherwise on a daily basis.  in fact, there’s been lots of research on the increased religiosity or susceptibility to religious visions or trances in people in whom these areas aren’t functioning fully (or may be over-functioning, in some cases).

but anyway, why is it that we should embrace and respect these end products?  because, she says, “when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults.” so what, her argument is essentially, “you wouldn’t like them when they’re angry”?  yikes.

it’s also puzzling and troubling that her final point is that we have to learn to live with God — again, not religious people, but God, somehow (though she’s never quite clear about what “god” means or if “he” actually exists) — “in a balanced, compassionate manner,” when in fact the groups she cites as pivotal in the resurgence of religion as a force in modern world, especially in politics, are groups that are completely unwilling to bend or balance in any respect!  so what do we do?  create blasphemy laws that enable more religiously conservative countries to prosecute journalists, authors, poets, dissidents, and so on?  do we curb our own media and bridle free speech in an effort to show how compassionate we are?  I sure hope not.

anyway, “Jesus and Mo” cuts right to the heart of it in the newest comic:

where’d this (vegan) apple pie come from?

a friend posted one of the various autotune renditions of a Carl Sagan clip from Cosmos in which he makes the following claim: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”  love it all over.  then I got to thinking about how representative this is of a naturalistic, scientific outlook regarding the world we live in.  and then I thought about how silly it would be (and is) to take a creationist position, looking at a delicious pie and claiming, “God did it.”

the two aren’t exactly perfect opposites, and let’s ignore some of the inadequacies of the analogy, but overall I think this demonstrates how exciting and wonderful the scientific process, as a tool box, is when compared to supernatural explanations (although those could be fun, depending on how creative we’re feeling).  I mean, sure, among the supernatural camp there’d be disagreement about exactly which steps God was involved in (sifting flour? slicing apples?), or which parts of the ingredients God actually created (grew? from scratch?), or which bakers or farmers he created or used, and so on and so forth.  insert variety from the history of religious engagements with evolution over the past 150 years.  (I recommend Darwinism and the Divine in America, by Jon Roberts.)

but this is never as much fun.  or convincing.  but lest I seem to “strident,” as they like to say, I’ll make it clear that I don’t really have a problem with someone sitting at the table, fully aware of where this pie came from, thanking God (any god, really) for it.  FSM included.

oh, I also found this recipe card, which is priceless.

oh, hell to the no

I have just read that the United States is apparently sponsoring a UN resolution to limit freedom of speech with respect to religion, in an effort to curtail anything deemed grossly insensitive to and disrespectful of religion.  over the past several years, there have been a number of cases in the western world in which people have been fined or worse prosecuted for having made jokes or drawn cartoons poking fun at a religion (or two).  worse off, some of these events (such as the publication of those infamous Dutch cartoons depicting Muhammad — now available on Wikipedia!) have ended with rioting and the deaths of a few non-Muslims.  so what is our reaction to this?  to defend free speech or to clamp down on artists or activists who dare offend radical Muslims (in some cases just not agree with entirely), whom we either fear or want so badly to befriend?

as the author of the article writes,

Thinly disguised blasphemy laws are often defended as necessary to protect the ideals of tolerance and pluralism. They ignore the fact that the laws achieve tolerance through the ultimate act of intolerance: criminalizing the ability of some individuals to denounce sacred or sensitive values. We do not need free speech to protect popular thoughts or popular people. It is designed to protect those who challenge the majority and its institutions. Criticism of religion is the very measure of the guarantee of free speech — the literal sacred institution of society.

you can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater, and you definitely shouldn’t insult the Prophet in a crowded mosque, but why in the world should the United Nations pass a resolution to defend the sanctity of religions and justify the prosecution of people who dare say things like, “Islam is bad for women,” or “Scientology is not a religion; it’s a cult”?  (news flash: they just might be.)  it’s already scary enough business protesting or speaking out against Scientology (hence the masks) — but now you have to worry about more legal actions?

this is going in the opposite direction of what is needed in certain parts of the world now, where far too many people are imprisoned for blasphemy of one sort or another.  an article on Canada.com (oh I love you, Canadians!) has the right perspective:

“It provides international cover for domestic anti-blasphemy laws, and there are a number of people who are in prison today because they have been accused of committing blasphemy,” said Bennett Graham, international program director with the Becket Fund, a think tank aimed at promoting religious liberty.

…

“From the human rights side of things, this is the opposite of what is supposed to be happening,” said Becket’s Graham. “Instead of protecting an individual, this resolution protects an idea, and relies on hurt feelings as a source of judgment. It can only lead to a jurisprudence of hurt feelings.”

Canada says governments have abused laws against defamation or contempt of religions to “prosecute and imprison journalists, bloggers, academics students and peaceful political dissidents.”

why should the freedom of speech be sacrificed out of respect to religions that, frankly, haven’t really earned that respect?  and for those religions that have evolved over time and are more respectable, well then, maybe they should work on that sense of humor.  personality counts.