Choosing Bits from the Bible

This post from the U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth is just distracting fluff, but it's such a curious collection that I want to give it a second look (video of him here). 

If we take "BIBLICAL" to mean "in the Bible," and "Bible" to mean specifically the Old and New Testaments, then those first three claims are accurate in that they appear in the Bible, but there's still some wiggle room around what they mean AND whether or not they're moral or reasonable. There are many, many passages of the Bible we ignore for better or worse. More on that later. And, of course, anything in the Bible is almost necessarily political. It's chock full of rules and laws that people had to follow or face the consequences, not unlike our current legislation. It's part of a long line of versions of legislation from the Code of Hammurabi to all those American Amendments. But let's look at these claims one at a time: 

Blending Psychotherapy and Spirituality

In my last post on meditation, I suggested that there's not a lot of harm that comes from meditation and mindfulness training, so maybe it doesn't need the kind of scientific scrutiny that we might expect from a clinical drug trial. However, in Toward a Psychology of Awakening (2000), Buddhist psychotherapist John Welwood documents three traps: spiritual bypass, narcissism, and desensitising, that arise in part because we've leant too far to either psychology or spirituality instead of using both. He also discusses them in brief in a paper, "Principles of inner work: Psychological and spiritual" (1984).

Both psychotherapy and spirituality are about "developing a new kind of loving relationship with one's experience," and both help us break free from our conditioned reactions. But spirituality doesn't address our early mishaps that affect our perceptions, and psychotherapy doesn't address the need to transcend our personal feelings.

When he first trained as a therapist, Welwood was concerned that psychotherapy has a narrow view of human nature, but then realized how much it can help once we no longer demand answers from it. It can help free people from negative childhood conditioning, particularly from dismissive or engulfing parenting, by working with our needs, scripts (now narratives), fears, self-respect, etc. A lot of us don't learn how to exist in the world well. Welwood claims that part of the problem is the "breakdown of extended families and tight-knit communities" so that children just get influenced by parents or just one parent instead of many people providing a variety of ideas that can help a child figure out where they fit in the group. As far as I understand this point, with only one or two major influences, children might accept lessons without question, then have to "spend a good part of their lives freeing themselves" from this singular impact in order to find their own sense of self. It's somewhat unintuitive, but a larger group influence helps a child find their individual self by differentiating from others more clearly at a younger age. But whether we find it at 5 or 50, it's necessary to have this "stable self-structure" before trying to go further.

But without a spiritual element, we have "too literal-minded and serious … too small a vision of what a human being is." Psychotherapy can focus too much on content and not enough on the human being. It's changing more recently, focusing less on content and more on how we are with our experience. Welwood wants to stop trying to overcome emotional content and instead open up to it. If we can't open up to anger, for example, we end up trying to be nicer (people pleasing) or overmonitoring our behaviour to avoid triggers, which can create more stress. Yet there's even more ground to cover than just this.

Good News: You CAN Be Saved!

The CDC put out some crappy comms with an image with a mask photoshopped upside down, with "N95" shopped onto a KN95, and only on the patient, not the doctor, which suggests that doctors don't need to wear them. I almost feel bad for how hard they failed on this except that disease prevention is THEIR ONLY JOB, and their incompetence has cost so many lives. 

And now North Carolina is banning masks during protests and adding to the punishment if a mask is worn in a crime, but they added in a health exemption - after people protested - that allows medical grade masks to prevent spreading illness. However, the law still allows law enforcement and property owners to ask anyone to remove their mask for identification despite the reality that sunglasses obscure identity more than masks and there are no laws banning sunglasses during protests. 

Christian Priorities

One for the Christian right. 

Sexual impurity was a two-fold concern in the ancient olden days. First, it was to ensure that everyone's spreading their seed in fertile ground, instructing men to stay away from lieing with other men as if they're women as well as avoiding masturbation and barren women!! Guys like Leonardo DiCaprio who trade in for a new model regularly could be argued to be following this rule of avoiding any woman who's no longer fertile. But now that we have more than enough people in the world, and we can barely afford rent and food for ourselves much less children, we intentionally prevent the seed in fertile ground thing as much as possible anyway. So maybe don't worry so much about people spilling their seed willy-nilly. 

Secondly sexual licentiousness was as much a concern in the Bible as it was for Plato because it distracts citizens from more important things going on. When people allow their passions to take hold, they stop making sure their city is functioning properly and things could fall apart. The big lesson is to measure passions carefully - with reason - so that you can continue to get to work each day and keep the house clean and have space for a bit of contemplation. 

So it's counterproductive to these aims to spend your life distracted by other people's sins! All the people gathering with their children to yell about the sinfulness of others should take the log out of their own eye first. Judge not, remember. Can you feel the love in these videos?

Endgame Vision

"Where there is no vision, the people perish." ~ Proverbs 29:18

In many versions of that passage it says with prophetic vision people cast off restraint, but I think vision works as well on its own and is more inclusive, and perish gives a clearer image of the end result. It doesn't mean we'll all be free without a vision guiding us, but that we'll all go haywire. The proverb actually goes on to say that we'll all still be happier if we follow the law - or moral restraint - despite a lack of vision, but I'm dubious about that part of it. It can be better for everyone if we're moral, but I'm not convinced it makes us all happier. All of Proverbs 29 is about turning away from evil motives and doing the right thing, but something that jumps out to me as vital is our need for a sense of where we're headed, especially during times of chaos, even while we pretend everything is normal.

This reddit post is making the rounds. It expresses the experiences many of us are having and asks some good questions about where we go from here:

Practical issue first: I'm not sure how living with minimal Covid risk is dwindling their savings away. Five N95s can last a month (rotate them, one/day of the week) for $10, and there are several organizations that provide them for free for people in need. So I wonder if they're not going in to work or quit their job or if they're taking cabs instead of the subway or something like that. If they lost their job just for wearing a mask, that's a different issue specific to a few states in the US and a few places outside there. 

The System of Ableism Can Be Weaponized Against Anyone

Imani Barbarin is a wealth of information and so funny! If you're new new to TikTok, and you think it's all just dumb trends like eating Tide pods, Crutches & Spice is a great starting place to remove that bias against the younger forms of social media. Like any social media, it's only as good as the people you choose to follow!

Recently she tweeted this t-shirt worthy quote:

"Remember kids: It's not an inspirational story; it's a systemic failure that's being talked about through the lens of an individual good."

This could be about so many things, but she's been talking about the "adoption" (conservatorship) of Michael Oher as featured in the film The Blind Side. He's currently suing this family.

First, listen here about why she centers ableism first among prejudice against any other group (2SLGBTQLIA+, women, racism...):

"If you are a marginalized person in any other way, you're the most likely to get a disability. You're the most likely to feel the impacts of systemic and structural ableism. . . . That is the entire point of ableism in this country because ableism is the greatest weapon in their arsenal. Not only is the system designed for this, but even people within these groups will agree that disabled people deserve to be discarded. That's the point of ableism."

And this bit of history:

"We can't ignore that the Great Depression in the 1930s happened because of the 1918 flu pandemic, and the economic pressures of the Great Depression LED to the rise of fascism and eugenics whose greatest indicators initially was obsession with fitness and the perfect body, which gave way to phrenology and race science. You know that canthal tilt filter? Mmm. All that culminates in genocide. We are on a fast track towards genocide because of what is currently going on with the pandemic, and disabled and immunocompromised people are the people who are going to be impacted the most, particularly those who are Black and Brown as well. But then it'll get into the people what were disabled from Covid. You know that 20% of people who are permanently disabled from Covid, whether they were symptomatic or asymptomatic? Lots of bad things are gonna happen to them very very quickly. Happening right now. But I need y'all to start asking yourselves, What happens next?"

Mixing Church and State

The religious far right is growing and getting more powerful and unnerving, and we know the fights happening in schools board meetings. This 25 min. BBC video from earlier this year is instructive. It's telling that Patriot Mobile put millions of dollars behind school board elections, taking over politics from the bottom up, and Steve Bannon was there to explain that "the school boards are the key that picks the lock," looking to restrict access to books and bring God back - first in schools, and then into the federal government. And it's working in many American schools. One of their stated longterm goals: "I want a definition of marriage to what it's always been."  

Saw that coming.

Fox News is completely out now as the messenger of the far right, for better or worse. Once they support DeSantis over Trump, the far right completely turned on them. I wonder if that's why suddenly Fox is reporting that Covid still exists - they're no longer on the payroll of these wingnuts. 

The Turning Point Action Conference was on the weekend. See Steve Bannon's rant at 6:30 here -- that's the 6.5 hours mark. Here's a little snippet: 

The Charter's not a Buffet

Trudeau spoke to parents concerned with their right to decide what their children are taught in schools. The group of Muslim parents were very worried about the "gender ideology" being forced on their children. The reporter called his answer evasive. Listen for yourself; here's what he said in full,

"I've heard this concern many, many times, and I know that it is a very real issue. First of all, there is an awful lot of misinformation and disinformation out there are people on social media, particularly fueled by the American right-wing, who are spreading a lot of untruths about what's actually in the provincial curriculums. The federal government doesn't control what's taught in the schools. That's the provincial government that controls what's taught in schools. That's not something that is directly on the federal government. But at the same time, the federal government is unequivocal about standing for everybody's rights and freedoms. And the highest expression of parental rights is, of course, the safety and well-being of the child. Your concern with the community is, broadly, safety, the well-being and strengthening the protection for your children. I entirely understand that. 

The one thing that is really, really important in Canada, is, we're a place that stands up for everybody's rights, and certainly when it comes to the Muslim community. We were the government that pushed back against the conservatives that, you know, made a political campaign against the niqab, that brought in a snitch line against Muslims. You know, the Islamophobia pushed by the previous conservative government, in a whole bunch of different ways, was something that we all have stood against. Now, this government has and will always be the strongest ally to all minority communities, including particularly Muslims who have faced terrible violence. And when you look at the black Muslim women in Edmonton who were attacked, that is the Islamophobia that we absolutely have to stand against. 

The issue though, is that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that protects your religion gives you the freedom of religion, allows you to fully participate in the society that gives you all the protections, protects all minorities as well. And it's not a buffet. You can't get the protections you want out of the charter and leave aside others. Standing up for people's rights means standing up for everybody's rights. 

In Conversation with Richard Marsh

After writing about the Klondike Papers originally, my little blog got a ridiculous number of hits very briefly but just long enough for Richard Marsh to notice and fact-check my post. He's the ex-member of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (PBCC) that "fixer" David Wallace was tasked with hunting down, creating a paper trail in the process that was given the now-iconic name. Richard and I started chatting, and here's his further explanation about the elusive documents and the nefarious nature of the Brethren. I left the 2-hour video unedited and in full in part because Richard is a very fluid speaker, so there's not a lot of pauses to delete, and in part so it's clearly authentic and untouched. I've time-stamped and summarized sections below to make it easier to jump to a specific segment. Note, once again, I'm just making this information available, and I don't have further evidence to support or disprove any claims made, but we are getting it directly from the horse's mouth, and Richard is very careful with words like allegedly, so I imagine it's pretty accurate!

ETA (March 2024) The video was taken down by YouTube for claims of defamation.

Listen to some further clarification about what's actually in the Klondike Papers, how the Brethren is a profit-making empire, ways it controls instead of ministering to members, and why Richard finally left. 

What Exponential Growth Looks Like

It's a mesmerizing 6 minute video:


It's interesting what they focus on and what they leave out.

Here's where we're headed:

Peace or Apathy

I found this piece on Medium, yet another on-line time suck! You can't read it without joining, so I copied and pasted the bits I like below. This piece says much of what I've been saying for a while now: We need to wake up and pay attention and act on what we see. But Chris Morris says it more poetically than I ever could:

The greatest sorrow I feel is when I see someone mistaking peace with apathy. I’ve dwelt in that delusion myself. Now I see it as a temporary suicide — a form of limbo that diminishes the whole world. 

Apathy is very common in spiritual circles. Often I meet people who seem wonderfully peaceful and content at first, but then I notice they change the subject a lot. Their eyes glaze over when certain topics come up — like that some people are fat while others are starving, or that children in some countries are dying right now when a $5 water filter could save them. Apathy means people don’t want to talk about the wars that are being waged in their name, or the child labourers who got sick making their iPhone. They think politics is something other people do. They prefer to focus on “positive things”. 

“Oh look, a butterfly… isn’t it pretty?” 

Genuinely peaceful people don’t withdraw from the world. Only frightened people withdraw. Many people who seem peaceful are really like swans: they glide gracefully above the surface while flapping frantically underneath. They are secretly desperate to experience true peace of mind but they don’t admit it. They feel too ashamed of not experiencing it already. False imitations of peace become their addiction — numbness, narrowness and apathy. But apathy is not peace. Apathy grows out of the absence of peace. If you feel like you have no power, apathy seems like a smart choice. But power isn’t something you have; power is channeled, and never through apathy. 

Usually I take the view that other people’s lives are their own specialty — there is no greater authority on you than you. But then I meet another swan who’s wearing apathy like a shield and I can’t deny I want to hug them and shake them at the same time. My head says I should leave them alone, but a deeper feeling calls me on. It feels like a visceral instinct to wake them up. We evolve as a collective, not individually. Letting them block me out would be my own form of apathy. 

My trepidation is because I see these people like lovers who just lie there. Waking them up requires trust, and without a framework (like a coaching relationship) I’m often too impatient. 

Waking up is about dancing to your own music.... 

I’m completely against the popular self-help metaphor of people floating in a river of well-being. I’ve been told many times that I don’t need to try; that life should be effortless; that I can simply lie back and be carried by the river of life. No, no, no! We are not only in the river; we also are the river. It’s a simple but critical distinction. Einstein said we should reduce everything to its simplest form but no further. To claim we are passive floating beings turns a useful metaphor into a ghastly deception. 

It’s equally unhelpful to think you can “go with the flow”. You are the flow. You are both the flow and the flowing; the masculine and the feminine; the yang and the yin....

My spiritual friend who inspired this article told me yesterday: “My heart goes out to the starving people. I pray life will get better for them.” 

Oh good, I said. And after you prayed, what did you do then? 

She told me she’d left it in god’s good hands — and I think that demonstrates in a nutshell why people continue to starve despite there being enough food for everyone. It’s childish to pray without also acknowledging you are god. 

Prayer either connects you to the internal clarity you need before you can manifest your will or it does nothing at all. Most people who pray don’t really pray, they simply pass the buck to an imaginary friend. And that’s nothing more than theatre. Maybe you’re so good at theatre that you can sell tickets and start your own church. But the starving people will still be starving while you float down your imaginary river, going with the flow. 

Living deliberately means you stop lying back and accepting whatever happens to you. You stop pretending the universe loves you and realise you are the universe, so it’s your job to love yourself. It’s your job to decide what your life is about. It’s also your job to make it happen. 

You can’t micromanage it all consciously, of course. You have unconscious processes for that. But you have to experience your intention. You have to accept responsibility. 

Basically, you have to give a fuck — only then can you midwife your creation into existence.

The Religious Extremism of New Atheists

I wrote a tiny blurb about this over a month ago.  This one is much longer and leans heavily on solid arguments from many critics - letting their words speak for themselves. The issue has become serious enough to warrant a lengthy rebuttal.


THE DANGERS OF SIMPLISTIC, BIGOTED IDEOLOGY: 

My concern with the New Atheists is born of classroom conversations.  In most of my classes there are a few students who are Muslim and, recently, a few who are followers of the New Atheists' leaders: particularly Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and Maher.  I've had students of different races and religions in my classes for decades without having to referee comments until the New Atheists arrived on the scene. Many of the New Atheists are openly anti-Islamic, and because they praise science, somehow student followers have gotten the impression that everything they say is factual and accurate and repeatable.

Suddenly, for the first time in decades of teaching, I'm having to shut down openly bigoted comments in class.  I even had a final exam comment that suggested that Islam as a new religion that brainwashes people and must be actively fought against. I'm not sure how a religion that's 1,400 years old is considered "new," but I'll move on to address concerns with the conflation of some harmful ideologies with atheism, in particular, in the work of Sam Harris.

Harris is pro-gun, pro-torture, pro-ethnic profiling, anti-civil liberties, and excited by militarism, who exclaims in The End of Faith (52-53): "We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas."  And he's got teenagers following him like rabid lapdogs.  His prose are easy to repeat in debates and slippery to argue with, but that doesn't make them accurate or scientific.  And it certainly doesn't make him leftist despite his claims to liberalism.


Al Mckay of International Relations, says of a defence by Harris, that it

...marks a continuation of his vindication of radical, illiberal, authoritarian, repressive and rabidly anti-Muslim political stances. Let us leave his ideas about the paranormal, reincarnation, Eastern Mysticism, the persecution of the Jews and attempts at philosophy for another day. Harris’ politics are worthy of discussion because one of the strangest things about him is that, on many occasions, he has declared himself a liberal.

I'll quote Glenn Greenwald's Guardian article at length as he explain that Harris's "...atheism invariably serves - explicitly so - as the justifying ground for a wide array of policies that attack, kill and otherwise suppress Muslims."

He and others like him spout and promote Islamophobia under the guise of rational atheism. I've long believed this to be true and am glad it is finally being dragged out into open debate. These specific atheism advocates have come to acquire significant influence, often for the good. But it is past time that the darker aspects of their worldview receive attention....Contrary to the assumptions under which some Harris defenders are laboring, the fact that someone is a scientist, an intellectual, and a convincing and valuable exponent of atheism by no means precludes irrational bigotry as a driving force in their worldview....The key point is that Harris does far, far more than voice criticisms of Islam as part of a general critique of religion. He has repeatedly made clear that he thinks Islam is uniquely threatening....In his 2005 "End of Faith", he claimed that "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death."...This is not a critique of religion generally; it is a relentless effort to depict Islam as the supreme threat. Based on that view, Harris, while depicting the Iraq war as a humanitarian endeavor, has proclaimed that "we are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam.

When criticism of religion morphs into an undue focus on Islam - particularly at the same time the western world has been engaged in a decade-long splurge of violence, aggression and human rights abuses against Muslims, justified by a sustained demonization campaign - then I find these objections to the New Atheists completely warranted....Most important of all - to me - is the fact that Harris has used his views about Islam to justify a wide range of vile policies aimed primarily if not exclusively at Muslims, from torture ("there are extreme circumstances in which I believe that practices like 'water-boarding' may not only be ethically justifiable, but ethically necessary"); to steadfast support for Israel, which he considers morally superior to its Muslim adversaries...to state violence ("On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right. This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that 'liberals are soft on terrorism.' It is, and they are").

An American Atheist, Robin Marie, says,

In a very long post on the threat the radical Islamic world poses to the the secular (mostly Western) world, Sam Harris gives no credit to any political, social or economic issue in the regions where radical Islam is a problem....he does not mention constant social strife and conflict, he does not mention economic exploitation. The radical Muslims of Sam Harris’s imagination exist in a vacuum, serving only as vectors for ideas – horrible, corrupt ideas which have filled them with pre-modern superstition and primitive ferocity. If you ask him how they got that way, he would point a finger only at the Koran, and especially particular passages in the Koran. There you go!, he says, throwing his hands up. What more do you need? Barbaric ideas lead to barbarians. D-Huh.

In CJ Werleman's article, "Atheists don't get terrorism," he says,

In dealing with ISIS, Harris says, “We won’t even honestly describe the motivations of our enemies. And in the act of lying to ourselves, we continue to pay lip service to the very delusions that empower them.” This is a breathtaking failure to understand what and who ISIS is. ISIS is the Sunni militia. Its leadership consists of former Baathist, anti-Islamist, pro-secular Saddam loyalists. When the U.S. removed Saddam and put 1 million Sunnis on the unemployment line, the 20th-century Western-manufactured country of Iraq disappeared, and Iraqis reached back for older identities: Sunni, Shiite and Kurd.

Chris Hedges gets in the fray as well with this excellent article:

The New Atheists embrace a belief system as intolerant, chauvinistic and bigoted as that of religious fundamentalists. They propose a route to collective salvation and the moral advancement of the human species through science and reason. The utopian dream of a perfect society and a perfect human being, the idea that we are moving towards collective salvation, is one of the most dangerous legacies of the Christian faith and the Enlightenment. Those who believe in the possibility of this perfection often call for the silencing or eradication of human beings who are impediments to human progress. They turn their particular good into a universal good. They are blind to their own corruption and capacity for evil. They soon commit evil, not for evil's sake but to make a better world. I started Harris' book when it was published but soon put it aside. His facile attack on a form of religious belief I detest, his childish simplicity and ignorance of world affairs, as well as his demonization of Muslims, made the book tedious, at its best, and often idiotic and racist. 

There is nothing in human nature or human history to support the idea that we are morally advancing as a species or that we will overcome the flaws of human nature. We progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally. We use the newest instruments of technological and scientific progress to create more efficient forms of killing, repression and economic exploitation, and to accelerate environmental degradation. There is a good and a bad side to human progress. We are not moving towards a glorious utopia. We are not moving anywhere.... 

Hitchens and Harris describe the Muslim world, where I spent seven years, most of them as the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times, in language that is as racist, crude and intolerant as that used by Pat Robertson or the late Jerry Falwell. They are a secular version of the religious right. They misuse Darwin and evolutionary biology, just as the Christian fundamentalists misuse the Bible, by trying to argue that we can evolve morally -- something Darwin never asserted. They are as anti-intellectual as the Christian Right.

Hedges goes on to specifically refute many of Harris' claims about Yugoslavia and Gaza.


I'll give Chomsky the last word on this.  He calls Harris and Hitchens religious fanatics, and elsewhere says,

I’ve found these “new atheist” writers to be an embarrassment;...they typically conflate atheism with stereotypical liberal or radical left-wing politics when there’s no inherent relationship whatsoever;...they come across as narrow-minded and ill-informed bigots whose only purpose is to antagonize religious people.

Major thinkers and scholars in these areas have demonstrated that Sam Harris misunderstands religion, terrorism, and geopolitics. But the biggest problem with his writing is that regardless the inaccuracies, it's in the populist genre that makes it simplistically persuasive. He sounds like he's making good arguments even when his information is inaccurate and his logic faulty.


HE'S A NEUROSCIENTIST, SO HIS CLAIMS MUST BE RIGHT 

One academic blogger did a little digging into Harris' PhD because Harris bills himself as a neuroscientist but doesn't seem to do a lot of neuroscience.  One of Harris's reviewers of his thesis, statistician William Briggs, analyzed Harris's thesis with this comment:

During the course of my investigation of scientism and bad science, I have read a great many bad, poorly reasoned papers. This one might not be the worst, but it deserves a prize for mangling the largest number of things simultaneously. What is fascinating, and what I do not here explore, is why this paper was not only published but why it is believed by others. It is sure evidence, I think, that scientists are no different than anybody else in wanting their cherished beliefs upheld such that they are willing to grasp at any confirmatory evidence, no matter how slight, blemished, or suspect that evidence might be.

Later in that link a strange coincidence is explored, and it's suggested that Harris's entire PhD is suspect.

It would seem to me that an atheist activist, being funded by the atheist’s own atheist organization that currently thinks religion deserves “special focus” when it comes to criticism, had a conflict of interest to declare....It’s bad enough that Harris is only “joint first author” on a paper publishing his thesis research and one of four people involved in conceiving and designing the experiment, but ... Sam Harris never did any of the experiments for his own PhD thesis! How many science PhD students are out there working on their own PhDs without doing a single experiment? ...Now, when you consider that Harris has a BA in Philosophy and did not do any of the experiments for this research, it makes you wonder if Sam Harris, the man who promotes himself as “a neuroscientist,” has ever performed a single experiment in his life....Of course, since publishing his thesis, then his book, Sam Harris has never once actually used science to resolve a moral dispute.

Beyond the speculation around Harris's own claims to be a neuroscientist, it is the case, of course, that scientists can be mistaken about moral and political issues.  Being a neuroscientist should never be enough to convince people of claims on religious matters, politics, or philosophy. However, the popularity of his views - and his books - shows a sort of reversal of the ad hominem circumstantial sucks in an unfortunate number of people who agree with an argument based on the circumstances of the presenter rather than the actual validity of his position.

In a formal peer-reviewed paper appearing in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, "New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn in the Atheism Movement," Massimo Pigliucci does an excellent take-down of the New Atheists in general and Harris in particular with respect to using science to further morality:

To recap, then, what is considered to be perhaps the quintessential text of the New Atheism is an odd mishmash of scientific speculation (on the origins of religion), historically badly informed polemic, and rehashing of philosophical arguments. Yet Dawkins and his followers present The God Delusion as a shining example of how science has dealt a fatal blow to the idea of gods.... 

Harris’s project is as ambitious as it is misguided:....Harris undermines his own project right off the bat, in two notes that appear in the opening pages, but are conveniently tucked in at the back of his book. In the second note to the Introduction, he acknowledges that he “do[es] not intend to make a hard distinction between ‘science’ and other intellectual contexts in which we discuss ‘facts.’ ” If that is the case, if we get to define “science” as any type of rational– empirical inquiry into “facts” (the scare quotes are his), then we are talking about something that is not at all what most readers are likely to understand when they pick up a book with a subtitle that says How Science Can Determine Human Values (my emphasis). One can reasonably smell a bait and switch here.  

Second, in the first footnote to chapter 1, Harris says: “Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy...[but] I am convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics,’ ‘deontology,’...directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.” This is so mind-boggling that I had to reread it several times: Harris is saying that the whole of the only field other than religion that has ever dealt with ethics is to be dismissed because he personally finds it boring. Is that a fact or a value judgment, I wonder?

An entertaining talk (only 7 minutes) by Raymond Tallis, a clinical neuroscientist, refers to Harris's type of claims as a brain-blamers operating under a branch of neuromythology.

As a scientist, Harris isn't doing any science. And as a philosopher, he's doing some shoddy work there too.


ARGUMENTS DENYING FREE WILL 

Harris's arguments against free will are less a concern for classroom deportment but are no less frustrating to address.  These ideas fit with the former only if a Harris follower were to take up arms against some Muslims, and then Harris could clarify why the murder was not actually the shooter's fault.

John Horgan argued against Harris's claims against free will in the Scientific American article, New Year's Resolution: I will believe in free will:

Harris argued that "no account of causality leaves room for free will." He cited experiments in which magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) "predicts" that a subject is going to do something—on the basis of activity in the subject’s brain—up to 10 seconds before the subject consciously decides to do it....But from another perspective, this rejection of free will makes no sense. Or rather, it goes much too far, because it suggests that our conscious deliberations are epiphenomenal, superfluous, with no real impact on our actions. That is reductionism ad absurdum....Such experiments merely confirm that physiological processes underpin all our perceptions, plans, choices and actions. Only a believer in dualism or an immaterial soul would expect anything else.

I personally don't think the MRI experiments (which were originally done over 30 years ago) eradicate the notion of free will. Harris argues that since some actions are enacted in our brain without a prior conscious perception of them, therefore all of our actions are enacted in our brain before we're aware of them - suggesting that all our actions are caused by the brain's mechanisms rather than by our own conscious decisions. But, first of all, that's a hasty generalization to shift from one type of behaviour to all behaviours. Secondly, the experiments being discussed have people making small binary actions, choosing to use a left or right hand or move a finger for instance, which could be argued to be more of an urge than a significant decision or intention. Finally, it could be the case that we make a decision that activates brain activity seen in a brain scan before it's clear to our conscious mind. In other words, it could still be the case that we make the decision even if the decision shows up in our brain before we're aware of it.

John Horgan wrote more about Harris in another Scientific American article. Harris suggests that since we accept that a man with a brain tumour doesn't have free will to choose to murder people, then it's clear that none of us have free will. Horgan replies,

Harris seems to be advancing a reductio ad absurdum, except that he wants us to accept the absurdum: there is no fundamental difference between me and a man compelled to kill by a brain tumor. Or between me and someone who can’t help washing his hands every 20 minutes, or someone who’s schizophrenic, or a babbling baby, or a newt, or a worm. I mean, if I’m not different from a guy who kills because a tumor provokes him into murderous rages, how am I different from anyone or anything with a brain, no matter how damaged or tiny? Here’s the difference. The man with a tumor has no choice but to do what he does. I do have choices, which I make all the time. Yes, my choices are constrained, by the laws of physics, my genetic inheritance, upbringing and education, the social, cultural, political, and intellectual context of my existence. And as Harris keeps pointing out, I didn’t choose to be born into this universe, to my parents, in this nation, at this time. I don’t choose to grow old and die. But just because my choices are limited doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Just because I don’t have absolute freedom doesn’t mean I have no freedom at all. Saying that free will doesn’t exist because it isn’t absolutely free is like saying truth doesn’t exist because we can’t achieve absolute, perfect knowledge.

Harris keeps insisting that because all our choices have prior causes, they are not free; they are determined. Of course all our choices are caused. No free-will proponent I know claims otherwise. The question is how are they caused? Harris seems to think that all causes are ultimately physical, and that to hold otherwise puts you in the company of believers in ghosts, souls, gods and other supernatural nonsense. But the strange and wonderful thing about all organisms, and especially our species, is that mechanistic physical processes somehow give rise to phenomena that are not reducible to or determined by those physical processes. Human brains, in particular, generate human minds, which while subject to physical laws are influenced by non-physical factors, including ideas produced by other minds. These ideas may cause us to change our minds and make decisions that alter the trajectory of our world. Some of us have a greater capacity to perceive and act on choices than others. The killer with a brain tumor, the schizophrenic, the sociopath, the obsessive-compulsive do not and cannot make decisions–or change their minds–in the way that I do. When I weigh the pros and cons of writing about Harris, my chain of reasoning is determined by the substance of my thoughts, not their physical instantiation....

We are physical creatures, but we are not just physical. We have free will because we are creatures of mind, meaning, ideas, not just matter. Harris perversely–willfully!–refuses to acknowledge this crushingly obvious and fundamental fact about us. He insists that because science cannot figure out the complex causality underpinning free will, it must be illusory. 

The strongest philosophical take-down of Harris's free will argument is in a review by Alvin Plantinga:

The first thing to see is that there is a serious problem, in this book, about precisely what free will is supposed to be. As we usually think of it, free will has to do with actions and decisions; it is actions and decisions that are free or unfree. You have free will on a given occasion just if you could have done otherwise.... 

How does Harris think of free will? "Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and action, and you would need to have complete control over those factors."...According to Harris, I am free in so acting only if I myself chose to have that desire and I myself brought it about that I do have that desire. If instead I just find myself with that desire (have not chosen to have it), then no action I take because of that desire is a free action.... 

Harris' notion of freedom is really an idea of what we might call maximal autonomy. It's obvious that we don't have maximal autonomy; we aren't free in that sense. Indeed, it isn't so much as possible that we be free in that sense. That is because, as he thinks of it, I act freely on a given occasion only if I myself freely choose to have the desires and affections I then act on, and furthermore I myself freely bring it about that I do have them. But note that the action by which I bring about that I have those desires and affections must itself be free. That means that I must have freely brought it about that I had the desires and affections out of which I acted in bringing it about that I have the desires and affections I presently have. You can see where this is going: for every occasion on which I act freely, there must have been an earlier occasion in which I acted freely. This clearly involves an infinite regress (to use the charming phrase philosophers like): if Harris is right, it is possible that I act freely only if it is possible that I perform an infinite number of actions, each one a matter of bringing it about that I have a certain set of desires and affections. Clearly no one has time, these busy days, for that. Harris is certainly right that we don't have that maximal autonomy; but nothing follows about our having freedom, i.e., the sort of freedom we ordinarily think we have, the sort required for moral responsibility.

What we have here looks like a classic bait and switch: announce that you will show that we don't have freedom in the ordinary sense required by moral responsibility, and then proceed to argue that we don't have freedom in the sense of maximal autonomy.... 

But he does also declare that we don't have freedom in the ordinary sense: "we know that determinism, in every sense relevant to human behavior, is true. Unconscious neural events determine our thoughts and actions—and are themselves determined by prior causes"....This argument is a complete failure.

Plantinga also comments on Harris's brain tumour analogy:

I am sorry to say that I couldn't find the argument. Harris seems to think merely pointing to this possibility is sufficient to clinch his case. But that seems preposterous. Some people under some conditions aren't free; how does it even begin to follow that no people under any conditions are free? ....Harris, on the other hand, seems to support determinism by little more than bland assertion and uncogent argument.

It's unnerving that someone who makes bigoted remarks can get so much praise for aligning with the atheists as if it's necessarily the side of all that's reasonable and good.  His use of science to develop morality is an utter failure, and I question the claim that he's a philosopher of any description.  Now to convince my students.

ETA - Here's a debate between Hedges and Harris that shows Harris' excellent command of the audience, but weakness with ideas of religion, history, and current Muslim culture.

ETA - Here's a comic strip about Harris' philosoophy.

ETA - Here's an article analyzing correspondence between Chomsky and Harris.

ETA - Another article complete with a Young Turks video.

ETA - Here's some great food for thought from a former fan.

The Danger of New Atheists

I'll be busy for the next few weeks, so this will be quick, but something I've been looking at in depth is a total take-down of the Sam Harris style of doing philosophy, firstly, but more importantly of the New Atheists' propagation of bigotry.

I've had a few incidents in my classes that have illustrated the potential of the New Atheists' message to go down a dark path.  If my students are picking up on this ideology, then others are too.

Now three young students have died at the hands of a "New Atheist."  This group (including Harris, Dawkins, Maher...) is less about being atheistic, and more about being anti-theist.  And, ironically, it's extremist in its insistence of demolishing religious groups.

Any hate-filled group, zealous in its intentions, is a concern.  This group is no different.  

On the Hidden Sickness of the Heart

Scott Long wrote an excellent article separating the act of supporting free speech from the act of supporting the words and images created by Charlie Hebdo.  But I disagree with this one bit:

"Words don't kill..."

As I said in a comment there, too many young people have lost lives as a direct results of malicious words and images.  We can't ignore that reality.  In my lifetime, I've seen a change in the way we talk that developed through punishments for transgressions of the new rules.  We use gender-inclusive language in scholarly writing, and professionals and politicians can no longer easily get away with cavalierly making racist, sexist, or homophobic slurs.  We recognize that words seep into our subconscious in a way we can't prevent when they're out there at large, repeated and bombarding us at every turn.

The subtle restrictions in our language, I believe, have played a part in changing in our attitudes and behaviours.  They're not the complete answer, of course, but they do have a significant impact.  The recent events have provoked some prejudicial words and views floating around social media.  We would be wise to remember this recent reaction:

Or check out how the Swedish "love-bombed" a mosque.

Long's article hits on something explained by Catarina Dutilh at New APPS, that,

"...at its core, the Enlightenment is not a tolerant movement: its ideals may be described as corresponding to “the ambition of shaping individual and social development on the basis of better and more reliable knowledge than the tangled, confused, half-articulate but deeply rooted conceptual systems inherited from our ancestors." 

Long's words:

"To defend satire because it’s indiscriminate is to admit that it discriminates against the defenseless....[This is] the truth about satire. It’s an exercise in power. It claims superiority, it aspires to win, and hence it always looms over the weak, in judgment. If it attacks the powerful, that’s because there is appetite underneath its asperity: it wants what they have....They know that while [Voltaire's] contempt amuses when directed at the potent and impervious Pope, it turns dark and sour when defaming a weak and despised community. Satire can sometimes liberate us, but it is not immune from our prejudices or untainted by our hatreds. It shouldn’t douse our critical capacities; calling something “satire” doesn’t exempt it from judgment. The superiority the satirist claims over the helpless can be both smug and sinister."

The movement we've celebrated that has us in this self-righteous state of knowledge is not founded on world peace or compassion or kindness, but on escaping religious ideologies.  It's a noble path if it takes us from powers that prevent us from open critical thought, but the path leads to a cliff when it continues unabated once religious ideas are no longer a threat as a forced belief system.

It's absolutely true that religious texts have portions that provoke hatred and intolerance of others:

But, the New Atheists also have their intolerant passages that can inspire their followers:  There's Richard Dawkins' famous tweet comparing Islam with Nazism: "Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur'an. You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about nazism."  And Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens are no more accepting of differences.  We can find hatred within every faction of society.

At least religious texts also have portions insisting on the tolerance of all:

There's Hillel's famous description of the main message of Judaism:  "That which is hateful to yourself, do not do unto others. That is the heart of the Torah; all the rest is commentary. Now go and study!"  And there's the Christian rule:  "'Love your neighbour as yourself.' There is no commandment greater..." (Mark 12:31).

Similarly, the Qur'an instructs followers to,

"...show kindness to parents, and to kindred, and orphans, and the needy, and to the neighbor that is a kinsman and the neighbor that is a stranger, and the companion by your side, and the wayfarer, and those whom your right hands possess. Surely, Allah loves not the proud and the boastful" (4:37). 

Religion doesn't make us hate one another; that's a red herring.  We have the capacity to choose to follow some ideas over others in any doctrine.  I respect Chomsky's views, but I differ from him on the right to free speech.  We can be followers of Plato without condoning slavery.

Basic human nature may be the real villain here.  Zimbardo's famous experiment got to the heart of this reality, and Nietzsche recognized it almost a century earlier in this passage, 

“Somebody remarked: ‘I can tell by my own reaction to it that this book is harmful.’ But let him only wait and perhaps one day he will admit to himself that this same book has done him a great service by bringing out the hidden sickness of the heart and making it visible."

Knowing that it's possible to let this cruel part of ourselves flourish means we have to, individually and personally, work at keeping the sickness in ourselves in check.  And if we have any hope of surviving the next few decades intact, we also have to help one another make choices based on compassion and tolerance, loudly clarifying our intolerance of prejudices.  And, no, that's not a hypocrisy.  It's a necessity.   

ETA - Russell Brand made a similar point that we have to check our own selves to begin to affect change on a larger scale.

On Sex Ed, Double Standards, and the Red Herring of Consent

My philosophy class discussed Erin Anderson's article from Friday's Globe and Mail, and it provoked a whole gamut of topics.  I'll try to encapsulate some of them here.  The article starts with an important question:

"The question left is whether we'll waste this moment, leaving the teenagers today to have the same conversation decades from now.  It's time to talk about solutions - in the courts, on the Internet and in our schools."

SEXUAL EDUCATION

The article calls for better sex ed in the high schools.  I agree, but what Anderson fails to realize is that, while Ontario students must take one Health and Physical Education credit to graduate, they can take it in any grade.  They don't all have to take the grade 9 health curriculum that focuses on sex ed.  And there were many stories from my class of some of the fear-inducing or just plain silly lessons from middle school health classes.  Sex ed must be improved dramatically to include "consent training" and "bystander training," as the article points out, but I think that has to happen outside of health class as well.  It must be part of mandatory courses, and I think it's particularly suited to fit randomly throughout English and civics courses.

Luckily, new curriculum documents (I believe for all courses) have or will have "front pages" - a reference to the preamble before the actual essential course learnings - that demand a focus on environmental education, healthy relationships, equity and inclusive education, and financial literacy as it applies to the subject area.  History got a curricular make-over just this past year, and the new Social Science blurb (p 41) on healthy relationships sounds pretty good:

"Healthy relationships are based on respect, caring, empathy, trust, and dignity, and thrive in an environment in which diversity is honoured and accepted.  Healthy relationships do not tolerate abusive, controlling, violent, bullying/harassing, or other inappropriate behaviours."  

This is or will be an actual part of every course now which is much more effective than forcing it into a few weeks of one course.  In teachers' college, we had a week of equity and inclusion studies that many deemed "pink week," and ridiculed it as such.  When I taught Careers, I tossed in an article about sexual harassment in the workplace in the middle of discussing employee dynamics, with no discernible backlash from students.  If we can sneak this type of education in throughout all our courses, it could actually foster a cultural shift.  I'm ever optimistic!

But, of course, we have to make sure it's addressed well.


CONSENT IS A RED HERRING

But one problem I have with Anderson's article, is the way it frames the issue of sexual assault as a matter of innocently misunderstood signals.  Yes, that happens here and there as we continue to see the rape myth perpetuated in films enough that some might still think resistance is part of the mating dance.  But I think it can often be an excuse for behaviour - "It was all just an honest mistake!" - and part of a larger issue of a lack of respect for women in general.  The fact that the article started with a discussion about Jian Ghomeshi makes it curious that it went down the "consent training" road.  From all reports, it's pretty clear that JG didn't misunderstand the signals he was getting.  He just wanted to hurt some women.

And, skirting an uncomfortable issue but no less relevant to my argument, my students got into a good analysis of the double standard.  "Men can have many partners and be cool, but women can't."  "Even if guys are okay with a girl who's slept around, girls like that have to deal with the consequences that no guy will actually date her."

Still.  In 2014.

Of course no discussion on this topic is complete without the requisite Breakfast Club double-edged sword speech:



My questions, as always, is "Why?"  Why does that happen?  What cultural forces maintain that dichotomy that hasn't budged since I was in high school in the early 80s.  I watched all sorts of gains made in racial issues and LGBTQ issues, but this one hasn't moved.  Do we want it to continue for some reason?  Who's benefitting from it?  Why won't it die??


Biology

Some said it's part of nature.  I guess since women have children, we have to protect them from being tainted with bad seed.  Many philosophers over the centuries have written about the importance of knowing for sure that a wife's children are actually her husband's, so a chaste woman is necessary to ensure proper lineage.

Almost 200 years ago, Schopenhauer said it's natural for men to be okay with multiple partners. Their will to live is satisfied by the possession of love - i.e. sex - regardless whether or not the desire is shared by the woman:

“But yet that in every case of falling in love, … the essential matter is not the reciprocation of love, but possession, i.e., the physical enjoyment. The certainty of the former can therefore by no means console us for the want of the latter; on the contrary, in such a situation many a man has shot himself. On the other hand, persons [i.e. men] who are deeply in love, and can obtain no return of it, are contented with possession, i.e., with the physical enjoyment. This is proved by all forced marriages, and also by the frequent purchase of the favor of a woman, in spite of her dislike, by large presents and other sacrifices, nay, even by cases of rape.” 

And, he continues, women are biologically determined to want love more than sex so they, and their children, can live securely.

Nowadays many of us call that essentialism and believe we are more than our biological or evolutionary mechanisms.  Our brains are more complex and efficiently designed than most of the other animals with segregated gender roles.  And, since we have birth control and DNA testing, how much does it matter if women have a variety of partners?  So why is this still maintained so vociferously?

There's another bit of biology that came up though - that the act of penetrating is different than being penetrated.  That women are a vessel that contains men's semen.  If she's been with 50 men, then she'll be "loose."  I countered that women give birth and bounce right back, but I should have argued that she could be with one man 50 times and not raise the same concerns.  It's the "kill count" that matters.  It's the image of the hot dogs down the hallway, the jizz bucket, sloppy seconds, damaged goods - as if sexually active women don't bathe and sex destroys their genitals - but only if it's with many men.  They can be tainted in a way that men can't because men leave something behind, deep inside, that seems to leave a lasting mark - forever.

But the vagina cleans itself out, kids.  Regularly.  Geez!

I can't scoff too much because I remember being in grade 12,  just when AIDS was first discussed, and, because it seemed relegated to gay men and prostitutes, my group of friends surmised that if one man's sperm touches another man's sperm it's actually fatal!   That's why sex education is so important.

But their imagery paints a picture that can be hard to shake.

ETA - And four classes later, someone raised the "vaginal looseness" argument AGAIN, so I was able to discuss the 50 times vs 50 people argument after all (and reiterate that they really need better sex ed classes).  But another argument was added to the fray:

"If a woman's vagina couldn't go back, then the tampon industry would go under because sexually active women's tampons would be falling out all over the place.  So if a woman's vagina can accommodate a tampon, it's likely small enough for your needs."

Whatever works to get the point across.


Religion

It's all because of religion.  Like the biology explanation, I think this is too simplistic. And there were myriad sexual restrictions long before the Christians ruined all the fun.

The Code of Hammurabi - written centuries before Genesis - states:

142. If a woman wishes to divorce her husband and refuses him sexual rights, an inquiry shall be held. If she has not committed adultery but her husband has, she may take her dowry and return to her father's house. 143. If she has committed adultery, then she shall be executed by being thrown into the water.....154. If a free man has sexual relations with his daughter, that man shall be exiled....159. If the first wife and a female slave of a free man both bear him sons, and the father acknowledges the sons of the female slave as his own, then the sons of the female slave shall share equally with the sons of the first wife in the paternal inheritance after the death of the father....171. If the father did not acknowledge the sons of the female slave as his own, then the sons have no right to share in the paternal inheritance; but both the female slave and her sons shall be given their freedom.

Sexual restrictions are part of society to maintain social order.  Sometimes they're officially legislated, but it's an easier time to keep order if they're part of the social fabric.  It can cause conflicts if we all sleep with anyone without respect for who's bothered by our shenanigans.  So my beginning position is that there is an order that is somewhat maintained by the sexual double standard.  Maybe if we can get to the perceived necessity for the structure, we can dismantle the attitudes.

Social Control

We ran out of time before I could postulate my own theories, but I think it's mainly about control.

If sexually confident women - or even just attractive women -  are sluts, then it reduces the competition for nice hetero girls.  So girls definitely benefit from reinforcing the dichotomy even if it's to their own detriment later.  It can be a means for girls to keep other girls from their guy by labelling them as diseased so that they become less attractive to their potential mate and even shameful to be seen with.  The solution to this dynamic is to recognize the abundance of potential mates available.  We don't need to complete with each other.  If she likes him, and he likes her back, let him go.  There are plenty to go around.

But I think for men the dynamic is perpetuated because many guys still like the upper hand in a relationship.  Not nearly all, of course.  There are confident men who can be with an experienced woman, but some really can't.  Like Silent Bob explains in Chasing Amy:



Personally, if a man has kept himself chaste and demands the same of a woman, I can respect that.  But if a man has seen some action, or tried to, and has a different standard for the women he dates, then I really can't tolerate that hypocrisy.

As I said in a previous post, saying no can precipitate retaliation of the weirdest sort.  I once turned down a guy just on a date to a movie, and he denigrated me to his friends mercilessly.  And it was just a movie, AND I was in a relationship at the time.  Some people don't take rejection well.  It's not the problem of the nay sayer, but that retaliation, unfortunately, is something women sometimes have to cope with.  So some girls say yes when they don't want to. And then they're ruined in the eyes of the Silent Bobs of the world.  But some girls want to say yes because they want to.  And that should be okay.

Here's the dynamic I think's at play:

Last summer I went on a date with a guy who I discovered, part way through the meal, loves Stephen Harper.  He challenged me to say one bad thing about him.  I listed a medley of dismantled environmental laws and regulations that are permanently destructive to Canada, not to mention the stranglehold he has on scientists.  But, I think separate from his politics, this guy's response was very interesting:

"Yes but, you can't talk about that because I don't know anything about the environment.  It's not fair because you're an environmentalist, and that's not my field."

So... let's get this straight.  I shouldn't discuss any piece of knowledge I have that a man doesn't have during a debate?   This man anyway.

But it's not just this one guy.  I've seen that same type of response here and there in other relationships over the years.  An early boyfriend whined that I'm so much more worldly than he because I lived in Ottawa for a year - Ottawa - so we just don't fit.  And a male friend insisted I didn't influence his musical tastes even though he hadn't heard of Ween or Primus before he met me and now is a rabid follower of both.  It feels to me like it couldn't be possible for him to have been influenced musically by a woman.  I could be wrong on this, of course, but it feels like a significant behaviour - a dynamic primarily between two sexes.

There's an insecurity there.  A fear.   And it hinges on what real men do and don't do.  Real men don't learn things from women, and part of that means that they should be the most experienced in the bedroom.  And the underlying current here, is that women don't have the status to teach, to know, to have seen more things - and they won't be respected if they have.  This likely ties in with the reality that smart, successful women are often single:

A study conducted with 121 British participants reported findings that females with high intelligence in male/female relationships were seen as problematic. Their intelligence were predicted to cause problems in the relationships. Whereas, high intelligence in the male partner was not seen as problematic, but desirable.

My sense is that until we can address this behaviour and belief system, we're going to be stuck with the double standard and with the sexual assaults.  It's all part and parcel of the same mentality:  This woman isn't really worth anything, so I can use her as a sex toy, as a punching bag, as a maid, as a nanny for my kids....

But then there's this guy, Terry Crews on Manhood, Feminism, and the Mindset that Leads to Rape:

"People are scared of being controlled....Feminism is not saying women are better than men....We're talking about... true gender equality.  But the problem is that men have always felt that they're more valuable....I have been that guy....Men have been manipulated to chase their win....You have to know you're already valuable."

People are getting their sense of value from their conquests, from their stuff, from their trophies, instead of from within.  Some men have a sense of entitlement over women and see women as a trophy that they deserve, whether she likes him or not.  And, I think, part of that includes wanting to be the only man the woman has ever known.  Crews says, "Never should that ever be accepted."

He suggests that men have to step up the join the battle against the patriarchal mindset that damages everyone:

"I relate it to...civil rights....Let's say the people who were silent....and the black school with two books, and the white school had everything, and you were quiet.  You were accepting it.  Same thing with men right now. You're not saying anything, you are, by your silence, accepting it.... 

The big thing for me is just that when you see another person as your equal there are things you just won't do....You would only go ahead when someone says no unless you feel you own them, you're above them....you feel they're your property.... 

We're not battling people, we're battling a mindset....It's like cutting a tree down by the leaves, it just grows back....nobody's getting at the stump.  The stump is the mindset that people feel they're more valuable than one another.....You think you're better than everybody.  The issue is every man wants intimacy....all intimacy is [that] you want to be known...and loved....Sex comes later.  The problem is people are chasing sex to chase intimacy, and you'll never be satisfied."  

Men are weaker, more fragile, more vulnerable than they feel they could ever admit. De Beauvoir discussed this at length almost 70 years ago.  Hiding that fragility is a huge burden to maintain.  Crews says, "Admit you don't have it....Keep a moment where that pride is out of here."  And maybe we can stop the competitions, and begin to see one another with respect, on an even plane, as actual equals.


BUT WOMEN LIE ABOUT RAPE A LOT

The only discussion I cut off during the class was this one.  Like the evolution vs creation debate, and the climate change vs natural fluctuations debate, saying some women lie to ruin men's lives doesn't rate an equal billing with some women get raped.  'Nough said.

Further to York University's Discrimination Issues...

If you haven't heard, a York University prof denied a student's request to work in all male groups for religious reasons.  York's Centre for Human Rights suggested the student should be granted the request to avoid being with women in public.   I commented with my views here:

I see education as a stepping stone for the working world. If he expects to work in Canada, he has to get used to working with women, so it's in the male student's best interest to find a way to cope with this expectation within a Canadian institution.

Then today I was reviewing the new Ontario Curriculum for Social Sciences and Humanities for a course I'm teaching, and I came across this bit:

"Accommodations consistent with the board’s religious accommodations guidelines must be made for students from various faith communities – for example, same-sex partnering for small-group activities may be required" (43).    

That's in the section called "Equity and Inclusive Education."  So it appears we're to be inclusive by honouring a wide variety of moral precepts even if there's an inherent sexism within.  But, of course, what if my religion sees a specific ethnicity or race as unclean and basically scum, and suggests I "smite them, and utterly destroy them" (Deuteronomy 7:2)?  It seems far less likely to see accommodations made to avoid a specific race within a Canadian governmental publication.  And that's a problem.  It's not, of course, that we should all be allowed to avoid communicating with undesirables or anyone that might awaken temptation if it's suggested by our religion, but that nobody should be able use religion to be exclusionary.  It seems to me a religious doctrine cannot be allowed to override human rights in a Canadian institution.

On Saying "Merry Christmas!"

I've come across a few recent bits of writing from people who think we should do away with "Merry Christmas."  Even though I'm an atheist, I love Christmas, and I really hope I don't offend people with the following because it is Christmas and all!

The rules around what's allowed during Christmas at my public school seem to change from year to year.  This year, there were carols and a tree without any debate, but some years we can only celebrate Christmas and put up a tree in the foyer if we have something there also commemorating Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and Ramadan, the latter two not always falling at the same time as Christmas.  It's unfortunate a Festivus pole was never a requirement.  That none of these have anything to do with Christmas beyond a semblance of timing (some years closer than others) isn't necessarily a problem, except we typically don't celebrate anything else from any other culture at any other time.  It's a grab bag of festivities that we use to permit a Christian celebration in a pubic school.

But this is an argument that suggests either we celebrate everything or nothing demanding a show of equality through equal time given.  My counterargument is that this celebration is a part of the dominant culture and, more importantly, that it's a tradition worth fostering.

Moving Beyond the Rational

Unlike everything else in the news, this isn't about Rob Ford.

I'm going to merge some Fraser Institute news with recent discussions in class, an old Munk Debate on religion, and some ideas from David Hume.   Here we go!

Kate McInturff writes at the CCPA that the Fraser Institute,

"would like to remove compassion from the policy debate about poverty in Canada....because....compassion is causing us to confuse those who have lower income with those who do not have enough income to sustain life."

The interesting bit to me is just these few words:  "compassion is causing us to confuse...."

On Russell Brand's Politics

I want to look at a few things Russell Brand has to say - in print and on video (quotations below are from both).  As Elizabeth Renzetti said in yesterday's Globe & Mail, he's resonating with people.  But, as she also suggests, he's not going far enough clearly enough for others to follow.  It reminds me of the Canadian film The Trotsky in which a young rebel tries to encourage a student protest.  (*spoiler alert*)  In the end, they all decide that he hasn't really thought it through all the way, but who cares?  It's clear we so desperately need a revolution.  We might not know exactly how our world should look, but we know it's not like this.

We need guys like this.  

Renzetti refers to Brand's rant as a generational conflict, but she seems to forget that Brand is almost 40, and he's lived a long life.  Sure Paxman is older, but many people implicit in the system Brand condemns are not.  He's not a rebellious youth; Brand is practically middle aged!  And it's dangerous to frame the argument as about age because that alienates the older supporters and dismisses some important ideas as part and parcel of a childish naivete spewed by the adolescents of the day.

Brand's not a rebel without a cause.  He is saying something important, more than just a stance on voting, and people are starting to listen:

On Finding Meaning Through Love

At the end of Luc Ferry's A Brief History of Thought or Learning to Live: A User's Manual (same thing), he suggests that we can get salvation and transcendence outside any religious belief system by being elevated through a singular love.  The rest of the book is a chronology of philosophy epochs, and I might think more on that later, but I'm mainly interested in his own ideas about love saving the day.

Luc Ferry was the Minister of Education in France for a few years, and I looked him up to see how that went.  A philosopher in government - how Platonic!  I tried to find out what policies he implemented or proposed, but could only find scandals about him working at a university but never teaching and then refusing to refund his salary when they asked.  Apparently his response to this was to sue accusers for libel.  And then, to make his case about the importance of privacy, he told TV reporters about a former minister who sexually abused some children, and he refused to tell the public his name because personal privacy is that important (or maybe because libel laws are so strong suggesting they're a bad thing, but then why would he sue for libel himself?).  Something like that.

I don't think personal privacy trumps the safety of children.  Just sayin'.  But from all the reports, I don't entirely understand his full intentions when he threw that out there on national television.