Obama’s Q&A with House Republicans
We haven’t had a lot of posts about politics here over the past year, in part because that was always a bit more of A’s territory and he hasn’t been writing much, and in part because I feel more relaxed about things with Obama in the White House. I don’t feel like I have to hang on every shred of news out of Washington anymore because I agree with the basic principles on which Obama operates, and I feel like I can trust him to make well-considered decisions based on his own ability to reason, as well as on the information and expert advice he has available to him (a much vaster quantity than what I know). It’s obvious, when I listen to Obama speak, that he knows what his positions are and exactly why he has taken them. It sounds like such a little thing to ask from a president, but after eight years of Bush, it feels like a breath of fresh air.
A perfect example of what I’m talking about is Obama’s meeting with House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore last week. If you’re the sort of person who reads this blog regularly, you’ve probably at least heard about this if not seen it. I finally sat down and watched the video all the way through, and I’m still in awe — of Obama especially, but really of everyone. It was an awesome thing to do. Everyone was very civil — the Republicans had time to explain their questions fully and did so in a way that was earnest and not belligerent, Obama answered with real details and arguments rather than talking points and catchphrases. This is a great example what a real political dialogue can look like. Could we please have more? Lots more?
If you haven’t watched it yet, I’ll make it easy for you. Here’s the meatiest part, the Q&A session (via C-SPAN).
Don’t talk about politics or religion
It’s a rule of thumb for polite conversation that most of us had drilled into us as children, here in the US. Don’t talk about politics, and don’t talk about religion. You’ll only start an argument.
Maybe that’s true. After all, merely by saying “I am a member of such-and-such political party,” you are implying that you think its platform and philosophy are superior to the platforms and philosophies of all other political parties. If you didn’t think that was the case, you’d be a member of a different party. And by saying, “I am such-and-such religion,” you are saying that there is a certain set of statements about reality that you believe to be true. That means that other people, who don’t think that set of statements is true, are wrong in their beliefs. You don’t even have to say it outright. You just have to let it be known. Maybe someone spotted a bumper sticker on your car, a pendant on your necklace, a logo on your t-shirt. You can say that you think we should “coexist,” that we should be tolerant and all get along. Those are worthy ideals. But you have to face the fact that if you every commit to any opinion, you’re effectively telling everyone who doesn’t share it that they’re wrong, which doesn’t come across as very “tolerant.”
But that’s okay! I actually think we should be talking about politics and religion more freely. The discord is still happening, when the very existence of Democrats is an implicit affront to Republicans and vice versa, and when religious (or irreligious) groups rally support from within by directing anger at the mere presence of other groups. I think that by stifling conversation, we’re only silencing the argument, not really stopping it. No one gains anything from that.
I really wish I could remember the details of this story, because it made a real impression on me, but sadly I can only offer vagueness. At any rate: I read a news story once about an election happening in another country, quite possibly a country relatively new to the whole “election” thing. The focus of the story was on how the citizens were all eagerly arguing with each other about which candidates to support, all over the place. It was not a taboo topic in the least. And that’s an exciting thing to see, because it means that people are engaged in their democracy, they care about the outcome of the election. Most importantly (to me), they don’t see the election as rooting for their own team, but as a search for the best possible candidates. They’d prefer to get the right people into office, even if it means changing their minds.
Well, I’m sorry that anecdote came across as completely made up; I promise you it’s not. (If anyone remembers reading something like that – or experienced something like that! – and could help me figure out details, leave a comment. I’d bet there are plenty of countries this could apply to, but I only read a news story about one of them.) My point is that when we disagree and argue about it, it may feel a little uncomfortable and unpleasant at the time, but there are major benefits in the long run. After all, what’s more important: that your political party control a majority of seats in the legislature, or that the legislature is as full as possible of thoughtful people who have the best interests of the country in mind? Sure, you’d hope those things are the same, but you have to recognize the possibility that they’re not always. And what if there is one particular deity (or set of deities) who really wants you to live your life in a very specific way or else. Wouldn’t it be good to figure out which deity/deities it was, as soon as possible? (Alternatively, what if there are no deities like that? Wouldn’t you want to figure that out before spending your entire life obsessed with made-up rules and nonexistent judgment?)
“Sure, Z,” I can hear you saying. “I guess it would be great if we could all have these calm, reasoned debates. But how? I’m sure of my beliefs, and you’re sure of yours – we’ll never work it out!” It does seem daunting. What I do is, I try to keep a bit of agnosticism in my attitude. Perhaps it doesn’t come across that way… maybe it’d be better to call it best guess-ism. I feel strongly about my beliefs, having reflected on them and examined them before actively calling them my own, but I try to remember that they only reflect my current best guess. At any time, I could come into new information that might lead me to change my mind – to make a new, better guess. I welcome arguments because they’re the primary way I might get that new information.
I’d like to live in a society where more people had an attitude like that. But I’m open to debate about even that belief!
How useful is dialogue?
One of the things that’s made me too exhausted to blog lately is a real-world manifestation of some of my blogly endeavors. I’ve been having these long, philosophical conversations with some of my Christian friends about exactly what their religion means to them (I was happy to find that these friends were open to such discussions!) and I read an extremely large portion of the Bible over the course of about a week in order to be more informed. My original goal in this was to broaden my own horizons and understand how intelligent people justify unproven and unfounded beliefs to themselves, and if I was lucky, to communicate some appreciation of how atheists are capable of being thoughtful, moral people even while not believing in God and/or Jesus. I’m not sure I got anywhere.
What I’m sure I succeeded at is making myself much more angry about problems with Christianity and religion in general that I used to just chuckle at and toss aside, and much more frustrated with people who I know are smart enough to analyze complex ideas but who seem unable to escape the mental compartment they’ve built around their religious beliefs. There’s no way that people’s moral beliefs are actually formed by Christianity’s teachings, because they’re able to cast out any unsavory (to them) messages and follow only the ones they like, but they can’t see this in themselves. They construct elaborate webs of language that prevent them from noticing any contradictions in their ideas or behavior. This same web deflects any questions I might ask, turning the conversation into a meandering stream of non-answers and platitudes. Aside from this, I had just read all the nasty things that the Bible says about nonbelievers and was trying to start some dialogue about that, but they all seemed indifferent to its offensiveness.
At the same time, I’m sure they mean well. They genuinely do believe what it is they’re claiming to, and it’s difficult to question what you really do perceive to be undeniably true. Sam Harris recently published a paper on this, which I read about over at Friendly Atheist. The basic outcome of the study, which used fMRI while asking participants to respond to statements as either true or false, was that the brain responds the same way to “regular” facts as it does to religious beliefs. That is to say, a believer knows the fact of God’s existence and a nonbeliever knows the fact of God’s nonexistence in the same way, neurologically, that they both know that the sun rises in the morning and that water is wet.
So what are we supposed to do? Keep on ignoring it? I don’t feel like I can ignore it when politicians justify their laws based on their supposedly religious morality, when people proclaim their religious judgments in everyday conversation, when people come up to me as I walk around campus and shove papers about Bible study groups in my face, heck, when I have to look at people’s happy T-shirt slogans and Facebook status updates about how Jesus loves everybody and prayer will fix everything. If everybody else gets to express their side, I want to express mine. At the same time, the dialogue seems futile. Nobody’s going to change their mind, and it doesn’t even feel like we’re speaking the same language. It just makes me exhausted and depressed, and obviously that’s no good either.
What do you think?
When it’s good to argue
I wanted to post a rant about the “cars for clunkers” legislation making its way through Congress, but that will have to wait for another day. In the meantime, I just have to tell you about this amazing essay called “Teach a Kid to Argue,” by Jay Heinrichs.
Heinrichs’ basic premise is that by raising his children to be good at arguing, he’s also taught them to be good thinkers and productive problem-solvers. I couldn’t agree more. A good argument isn’t combative, but rather constructive. Disagreement is inevitable between any two people, but even more so between a parent and a child. I think Heinrichs’ distinction between an argument and a fight is very apt:
And let’s face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric doesn’t turn kids into back-sassers; it makes them think about other points of view.
I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it.
Go read the rest of the essay; I think it’s outstanding advice, particularly the five tips at the end. (I’m not a parent yet, but I do remember being parented, so I think I have some grounds to judge.)
Choosing between God and Satan
I was involved in a discussion recently in the comment thread of this post, and I found myself using an analogy that in retrospect was pretty accurate for clarifying my position. We were discussing whether atheists don’t believe in God because they want an excuse to live lives without any morals. (I’m sure there are some people who call themselves atheists for this reason. There are also some people who dress in all black and act really morbid just to spite their parents. Those people aren’t really part of the goth subculture, just as these people aren’t really atheists.)
The people arguing that atheists are just trying to skirt morality are working from the premise that morals can only come from God, and without Him and the threat of eternal damnation we’d all be terrible people. (Weren’t we just talking about that?) Someone pointed out, as evidence that atheists hate doing good, the fact that some atheists had previously stated that if God were to exist they wouldn’t worship Him. Clearly, he argued, they were just rebelling against God and his morals. I answered:
We disagree on what makes someone/something deserving of praise (or worship).
Christians: Assuming the God of the Bible exists, He ought to be obeyed and worshipped.
Atheists: [some, not all] Even if that God existed, based on what the Bible says about him I’m not sure he’s worthy of worship.The Bible says that God wants us to worship Him, and that He is omnipotent and omniscient. Omnipotence is a pretty intimidating concept, and I can see why someone would agree to submit to that unquestioningly. However, some of us find some Biblical teachings to be morally repugnant. I’m not inclined to worship anyone more powerful than I am just because of their power; instead I look at what they do with their power and how good I think it is.
The other person then asked me what I thought constituted worship-worthiness. I thought I had explained it right there, but I guess it wasn’t clear. What follows is the analogy that I used to make the the point to him. It’s written a bit better and more thoroughly than in the comment thread, of course. (Forgive me if this is a really well-known strategy already; I did a bit of searching and couldn’t find anything that was really expressing this idea, so I figured it could be potentially helpful to get out there for other people stuck in the same conversational impasse.)
I acknowledge that if there were to be some clear proof that God exists, with all the stipulations of typical Christian theology (e.g. omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence), I’d probably have no choice but to worship Him. If there were incontrovertible proof that He really does decree what’s objectively right and wrong, no matter how nonintuitive his judgments are, that’s just the way reality works… I think I’d follow those rules. Obviously, I have a hard time imagining such a scenario, because of various paradoxes required by such a being’s existence. (Can an omnipotent being make a boulder so heavy he cannot lift it? and so on.) I have less trouble imagining an extremely powerful God, one whose abilities far surpass anything a human is capable of. I can certainly understand a being like that not being worthy of worship.
I realize most theists would probably stop me right here and argue with me about the many properties of God which are infinite. Bear with me, though. All that’s necessary for the purposes of this argument is that we agree that at the very least, to humans, infinite power and extremely vast power are indistinguishable. If someone comes to you and says they’re God, and they can perform tons of apparent miracles, that’s pretty compelling, right? Even if they didn’t perform a literally infinite number of miraculous acts.
Now, consider Satan, the Devil. Satan, we’re told, is not omnipotent but is extremely powerful. In stories, he often tries to trick people into thinking that he’s looking out for their best interests. He appears in Revelations 13 pretending to be God and demanding worship. So let’s imagine that two beings manifest themselves to you, both claiming to be God, and both demonstrating extreme power, far beyond your comprehension. How do you tell them apart?
You have to look at what they do and say. How does each one use such power? Presumably they have some commandments for you. Perhaps one tells you to love your neighbors, to care for the less fortunate, to treat others how you would want to be treated. Maybe the other one tells you that if your child talks back to you, you ought to kill him, and that it’s honorable to offer your daughters up to be raped by an angry mob. So you take those commandments, and you evaluate how good they are, how morally upstanding they would make a person who followed them. You can imagine doing that, right? Even without knowing which set of commandments belonged to God, the supposed arbiter of all morality. My guess is that you’d pick the first one to worship as God, and the second one to shun as Satan. The second one sounds pretty awful.
Here’s the thing, though. All of those things are in the Bible, said by God or people speaking with his endorsement. The first set sounds familiar, I’m sure, but killing unruly children is laid out in Exodus, the story of Lot is right there in Genesis, and the apostle Peter later calls Lot just and righteous (2:7-8)… so you can’t claim that you’re just using the commandments of the God you already know to pick the hypothetical God in this example. There’s more where that came from, too, as I said in the comment thread:
I wouldn’t call a deity “benevolent” if they would think it’s good to kill everyone and start fresh every time a few people started misbehaving. I don’t approve of stoning to death as a punishment for anything. I don’t see any moral problem with homosexuality. I doubt that a benevolent God would set up a society with women inferior to men rather than equals, or that He would proclaim everyone to be tainted with original sin.
Even if you disagree with some of the particular cases, the general point is clear. We are able to look at rules and principles and judge them on criteria that are not derived from God.
The easy but weak analogy to make here is to a brutal dictator. Insert your choice of cliché example. Obviously, people condemn his regime because they look at what he did with extreme power and realize its moral repugnance. Reductio ad Hitlerium is so overused that people will overlook a situation where the analogy really is apt, so I think this sort of God vs. Satan challenge is a better trope to use. I’m not arguing that Satan might really be the good one, and God the bad one. If the Bible is entirely true, the Christian God is the one we ought to worship. However, this example makes clear the fact that moral judgments are something we are capable of, outside the scope of any deity’s commandments.
What to do with opposing views?
Two months ago Dr. Steven Novella, who writes at NeuroLogicaBlog, was invited to be an expert on an acupuncture debate, and directed readers of his blog there to see more and comment. I followed his link and found Opposing Views, a website that hosts debates between experts in the topics debated, and allows readers to comment on individual arguments as well as the broader questions.
There are quite a few debates there that I think readers of this site would be interested in. If debunking pseudoscience is your thing, check out Are Autism and Vaccines Linked? or Does Intelligent Design Have Merit? The more religiously (or irreligiously) opinionated of you might want to take part in Should Religious Symbols be Displayed on Public Property? or even the more fundamental Is There a God? There are of course the classic debates on same-sex marriage and the electoral college, and many others. What’s really nice about the format is that they have verified experts representing their respective sides. While I can’t exactly say I’d vouch for the credibility of some of them (for example, the Discovery Institute), they certainly are experts in whatever it is they’re defending. No one can pout later about how their side was unfairly represented by someone who was unprepared and ill-informed.
So, I’ve been hanging around there for a while, commenting to point out nerdy things like post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies and trying to engage people in intellectual discussion. I like it, but sometimes I wonder if I’m caught in a bit of a “someone is wrong on the internet” trap. (If these crazy people are on a debate website, I think to myself, surely they want someone to explain to them how they’re being irrational. Four hours later….) Incredibly, the site management does moderate comments. They’re successful at weeding out the YouTube sunshine, but they can’t exactly cull all the stupid ones because that would often introduce a pretty strong bias with respect to a particular debate.
Another reservation I have is that it’s tricky to pick truly debatable topics, and to phrase the questions in ways that facilitate debate with actual clash. Consequently, some of the dialogue gets more frustrating than it really needs to be. Should We Recycle? is actually about whether recycling should be government-mandated or market-driven. Both experts in Should Prayer Be Allowed in Public Schools? ended up agreeing that there’s no problem with students who choose to pray on their own in a non-disruptive way, although many of the commenters (and probably many of the users voting in the poll) didn’t get the memo.
Perhaps more important, however, is an issue about debate philosophy that I’ve struggled with for some time. Is it better to challenge ridiculous opinions out in the open, and let them either flourish or die in the marketplace of ideas, or should we instead refuse to dignify certain viewpoints with a formal recognition such as a debate? Some beliefs are so ludicrous that even agreeing to debate them gives them more credit than they’re due. On the other hand, if any meaningful number of people did hold such beliefs, it would be pretty scary — the kind of thing you might want to take action against. (Would you waste an hour trying to convince an audience not to listen to the Timecube guy? Probably not, unless there actually was an auditorium full of Timecube believers. In that case, I might be tempted to spend a lot more than an hour, if I didn’t run screaming.) A few of the questions on Opposing Views are pretty clear examples of this type of gray area. Are Generic Drugs as Effective as Name Brands? Yes. Yes, they are, because they’re chemically identical. There are also the cases where it’s not so much that one side is definitionally correct, but that anyone who’s devoted some intelligent thought to the matter reaches the same conclusion. Debates like those are harder to pinpoint, but they’re the ones I referred to before, in which eliminating the vapid comments would leave the thread sounding pretty one-sided. Is that debate really worth it, or is it making the struggle to educate and convince people even harder?
I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but I believe they’re worth thinking about and trying to answer. In the meantime, I’ll be around on Opposing Views, and for purely selfish reasons, I hope some of you will be too. There are these structural and philosophical difficulties that may or may not ever be overcome, but I still hate to see someone be both wrong and unchallenged on the internet. (More than 80% of responding users think that acupuncture works, despite the studies that have shown pretend acupuncture to be more effective than the real thing.) If some of you are there with me, we can make a dent in some of those poll results, and fill the comment threads with some higher-level critical analysis. At least for now, I’m naive enough to believe that it makes a difference.
First debate: a tie
The presidential debate this evening was interesting, but dense. A lot of important points were raised, but I’m unsure about how much the average viewer could take away from it, especially if they haven’t been following the details of the campaign in depth for as long as I have.
Of course, the big question after all debates is who won. I don’t think there was a clear winner (especially if you emphasize clarity in addition to simply having better arguments). Both candidates gave many answers in which they seemed to be listing handfuls of different ideas they wanted to cram in somewhere, rather than directly and succinctly answering the questions posed. Obama definitely came out ahead in terms of appearance and mannerisms, using the format of the debate to directly challenge McCain, while McCain looked down or away from Obama more often and seemed less comfortable. (Also, that tie… stripes were maybe not the best for TV?) It was nice to see the whole event stay civil and focused on issues (even if maybe not on one specific issue at a time).
In the end, I doubt this debate will change many people’s minds. However, both candidates have shown themselves to be skillful at speaking extemporaneously and with expertise on their policies, so I’m definitely looking forward to the next one.
Calling out contradictions
Yesterday I was skipping around on the radio when I came to a Christian station broadcasting a story. Read slowly, deliberately, and with almost comical voices for the different characters, it was the tale of a young girl who had seen a TV preacher explaining why next Saturday was the day of Christ’s Second Coming. He had an equation (?) and a book all about it, and that convinced her, so much so that she began putting up posters all around her town. Her parents, good Christians of course, saw this as crazy behavior, but they weren’t sure how to talk to her about it. After all, if they told her that Jesus wouldn’t be returning on Saturday, she’d start to question whether he’d ever return at all! They didn’t know how to get her to stop acting crazy without shaking her faith.
The real issue seemed so blatant I couldn’t believe they were just sweeping it under the rug. What are the actual reasons for believing in the deity of Jesus, and for believing in the apocalypse accompanied by his return? Why is a televangelist’s take on this not seen as credible, but a local church minister’s is? How can you challenge one irrational belief without applying the same sort of scrutiny to your other beliefs? That’s exactly what the parents were worried about — that the “good” skepticism they wanted to teach her would turn into “bad” skepticism (i.e., distrusting things she was supposed to believe blind).
It got me thinking about… well, not exactly hypocrisy, because I feel like that word should be reserved for intentional cases. I suppose I should say contradictions. We all (perhaps to differing extents) compartmentalize various controversies and rationalize beliefs we’re predisposed to, rather than making judgments from first principles. It’s very easy for this to lead to a situation in which you hold very different opinions simultaneously. The more rational you are, the more likely you are to catch these instances when they do occur, and the quicker you resolve the inconsistency. However, understanding the importance of rational thinking doesn’t mean that you never hold contradictory beliefs.
This is more than just the doctor who smokes, or the obese gym teacher. There’s the “creation scientist” who, after being presented with carefully constructed scientific theories that have withstood rigorous testing, demands proof beyond any shadow of a doubt (clearly misunderstanding the concept of science), but who would never think of turning such a critical lens on the religious beliefs that form their large set of assumptions. There’s the pro-life advocate who wants abortion to be illegal because it is murder, but who would never consider assigning sentences of the same magnitude as what murderers get. There are liberals who think of the Constitution as a set of fundamental principles, which justifies giving absolute protection to expression and religion even if that’s not how the Founding Fathers would have interpreted it — but prefer to look to 18th-century laws to justify gun control in the face of the 2nd Amendment. Alternatively, you have conservatives who would oppose the “fundamental principles” interpretation in general, deferring to the attitudes of the Founders to define Constitutional protections — except in cases about gun control where they’re happy to embrace it.
I’m not saying you can’t believe in making abortion illegal while also supporting low sentences for it. What I’m saying is that, if that’s your position, you have to have reasonably subtle logic to back it up. A good way to examine whether your opinion on a topic is rational is to look at the underlying principles and assumptions, and see if you agree with the implications of those assumptions — in all cases, not just in the limited context of the original situation.
I also think this is good to keep in mind during discussions with others. Say you present some scientific evidence to a creationist, and they respond with criticism of the study methods. It’s not worth your time to defend the study; take their point about scientific rigor and run with it. If they really believe in the scientific method, they can’t make a reasonable claim that creationism is science. Rather than just trying to refute every statement they make as though the conversation were some horrible game of Whack-a-Mole, it can be helpful to agree with them while they’re making the portion of their arguments that are better suited to your side.
This way of thinking — about basic principles that reach beyond isolated opinions — seems especially helpful in political debates. Among most intelligent people, the controversy over, say, school vouchers isn’t really about school vouchers. It’s about underlying ways of thinking about political issues, with opposing views on vouchers being obvious conclusions based on different philosophical starting points. Testing and debating those underlying beliefs is more productive (and much more interesting) than trying to deal with the specific policy issue in question.
Update: I found the radio show I mentioned at the start of this post. It’s called Adventures in Odyssey, and you can read a plot summary of the episode here.