Shunya's Notes

Breaking the Galilean Spell

The scientific mind holds it as self-evident that all natural phenomena are bound by the laws of nature. We study such laws in physics and express them in the language of mathematics. The idea that all natural phenomena are also reducible to a sum of their parts, that micro components (iteratively down to sub-atomic particles) both describe and predict macro behavior, is called reductionism. Introduced by Descartes, its current proponents include Dennett, Dawkins, and Pinker.

The idea that reductionism has limits, particularly for highly complex systems like the biosphere and human culture (a wholly natural phenomenon), has also been around since at least Aristotle ("the whole is more than a sum of its parts"). Emergentism, as this hypothesis is called (or holism), claims that the fundamental laws of nature eventually run out of descriptive and predictive steam—not due to the inadequacy of our science but due to irreducible and unpredictable properties inherent in complex systems. Both reductionism and emergentism remain epistemological (as opposed to scientific) claims, though reductionism can boast of some inductive success on the verification front.

Stuart Kauffman, a scientist at the forefront of the idea of emergence, has written a new book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion, where he fleshes out this concept in more detail. Here is a brief excerpt:

Emergence is therefore a major part of the new scientific worldview. Emergence says that, while no laws of physics are violated, life in the biosphere, the evolution of the biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday worlds are also real, are not reducible to physics nor explicable from it, and are central to our lives. Emergence, already both contentious and transformative, is but one part of the new scientific worldview I embrace.

Even deeper than emergence and its challenge to reductionism in this new scientific worldview is what I call breaking the Galilean spell. Galileo rolled balls down incline planes and showed that the distance traveled varied as the square of the time elapsed. From this he obtained a universal law of motion. Newton followed with his Principia, setting the stage for all of modern science. With these triumphs, the Western world came to the view that all that happens in the universe is governed by natural law. Indeed, this is the heart of reductionism. Another Nobel laureate physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, has defined a natural law as a compressed description, available beforehand, of the regularities of a phenomenon. The Galilean spell that has driven so much science is the faith that all aspects of the natural world can be described by such laws. Perhaps my most radical scientific claim is that we can and must break the Galilean spell. Evolution of the biosphere, human economic life, and human history are partially indescribable by natural law. This claim flies in the face of our settled convictions since Galileo, Newton, and the Enlightenment.

More here.

Is India a Science Superpower?

Not quite, says Meera Nanda, philosopher of science, in this 2005 article in Frontline, which ends with these words:

If India wants to become a genuine "science superpower", Indian scientists will have to do much more than just get integrated into the global pecking order of corporate research and development. They will have to develop a genuine culture of open, fearless questioning and experimentation within their laboratories and in the larger culture outside the walls of the laboratory.

This will require an overhaul of science education so that science is not treated as merely a matter of rote learning of technical formulas, but is integrated into a new secular understanding of nature and life. It is not enough for the institutions of higher learning in India to produce doctors and engineers who can perform well in the West, or in the IT/BT jobs imported from the West. They must produce critical thinkers who are engaged with larger issues that affect the cultural climate of their societies.

Until then, India will remain the "pseudo-science superpower" of the world.

I haven't read much by Nanda. While this article seems reasonable, other bits I've read—like the opening pages of Prophets Facing Backwards—seem to me rather shrill and simplistic, and her analysis of modern India too reliant on caricatures of both "postmodern intellectuals" (ascribing them too much influence in India) and the religious. It was no surprise when I noticed Dennett's endorsement of her book, which her publisher has paired with Dawkins' on Amazon. To her credit, she has sharply distanced herself from Harris. If I can motivate myself to read her forthcoming, God and Globalization in India, I'll attempt a proper review.

Peirce on Muslims in Britain

Gareth Peirce, a UK lawyer who has since the 1970s represented individuals accused of involvement in terrorism from both the Irish and the Muslim communities, finds instructive parallels between their situations:

The history of thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland, as it is being written today, might give the impression of a steady progression towards an inevitable and just conclusion. The new suspect community in this country, Muslims, want to know whether their experience today can be compared with that of the Irish in the last third of the 20th century. It is dangerously misleading to assert that it was the conflict in Northern Ireland which produced the many terrible wrongs in the country’s recent history: it was injustice that created and fuelled the conflict. Before Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot and killed 13 unarmed Catholic demonstrators who were marching to demand not a united Ireland but equal rights in employment, education and housing (as well as an end to internment), the IRA was a diminished organisation, unable to recruit. After Bloody Sunday volunteers from every part of Ireland and every background came forward. Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, ‘shoot to kill’, the use of torture (hooding, extreme stress positions, mock executions), brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence. This was registered by the community most affected, but the British public, in whose name these actions were taken, remained ignorant: that the state was seen to be combating terrorism sufficed. Central to the anger and despair that fuelled the conflict was the realisation that the British courts offered neither protection nor justice. The Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday, which was carried out by the lord chief justice, absolved the British army and backed its false account of 13 murders, ensuring that Irish nationalists would see the legal system as being aligned against them.

We should keep all this in mind as we look at the experiences of our new suspect community.

More here.

Hedges on the New Atheists

Chris Hedges, journalist and war correspondent, on why New Atheists like Hitchens and Harris are as dangerous as Christian fundamentalists:

I think a lot of their popularity stems from a legitimate anger on the part of a lot of Americans toward the intolerance and chauvinism of the radical religious right in this country. Unfortunately, what they've done is offer a Utopian belief system that is as self-delusional as that offered by Christian fundamentalists. They adopt many of the foundational belief systems of fundamentalists. For example, they believe that the human species is marching forward, that there is an advancement toward some kind of collective moral progress -- that we are moving towards, if not a Utopian, certainly a better, more perfected human society. That's fundamental to the Christian right, and it's also fundamental to the New Atheists.

You know, there is nothing in human nature or in human history that points to the idea that we are moving anywhere. Technology and science, though they are cumulative and have improved, in many ways, the lives of people within the industrialized nations, have also unleashed the most horrific forms of violence and death, and let's not forget, environmental degradation, in human history. So, there's nothing intrinsically moral about science. Science is morally neutral. It serves the good and the bad. I mean, industrial killing is a product of technological advance, just as is penicillin and modern medicine. So I think that I find the faith that these people place in science and reason as a route toward human salvation to be as delusional as the faith the Christian right places in miracles and angels.

In other words, material progress without moral progress—the two have no obvious correlation—only raises the stakes for humanity. The New Atheists conflate the two, thus creating a justification for a neo-con imperial agenda. Read the transcript of the full interview here.

Reza Aslan on Religion

Continuing my quest to highlight significant viewpoints on important topics, here is an Apr 2007 debate worth watching between Reza Aslan and Sam Harris. Topics include religion, Islam, terrorism, etc. Harris did little to change my view of him; Aslan is the one to watch.

How Terrorism Works

Experts on Islamic terrorism are now everywhere, spouting wisdom on countless media outlets and blogs. Most of them—including scholars, novelists, scientists—reflexively summon their gut to explain what turns Muslims into terrorists, marshaling anecdotes and selective data as evidence. The Qur'an is the underlying cause to some, sociopolitical inequities to others; virgins in paradise explain much to some, follies of US foreign policy to others; hatred of "freedom-loving" West suffices for some, dislocations of modernity to others. Rare is the attempt to understand terrorists themselves as social and moral beings (as, for instance, in the movie Paradise Now).

An insightful analyst of modern terrorism is Scott Atran (see my previous post on Sacred Conflicts). He has done pioneering field research on suicide bombers and the social dynamics of terrorist networks. Watch this remarkable lecture he gave at the Beyond Belief conference in Nov 2007 (attached below). The same material is summarized in this slideshow for the US State Department (I'm surprised they invited him and wonder how he was received). Here are ten conclusions I've selected from it:

Global Al-Qaeda is now a viral, social movement and political ideology, not a well organized operation with command and control. Young men self-radicalize in their social groups as soccer and camp buddies, neighbors and schoolmates, etc.
 

The new wave of terrorism is about "youth culture", not the Koran. It cannot be checked by military means or elders spouting niceties from the Koran, but with ideas and proposals for action that address their sense of injustice and moral outrage.
 

Prison radicalization in the USA vs. Europe differs significantly: Foreign-born Muslims, like Jews, are underrepresented in US prisons. But Muslims in European prisons are wildly over-represented (for many of the same reasons that Blacks in US prisons are over-represented). Nevertheless, prior religious education is a negative predictor of radicalization.

Sex in the Park

My previous post (From the Outside, Looking In) sparked a discussion between myself and a friend on the assumptions we make about other people. In this context, something my friend said reminded me of an amusing encounter Namit and I had in India, one which illustrated for me my own simplistic notions about Indian Muslims who wear the burkha.

We were walking along a grassy, boulder-strewn hillside overlooking the city of Bhopal. There's a tiny, rusty old amusement park at the top of this hill, with a miniature ferris wheel and a couple of other whirl-y rides, where families come for picnics. Outside this happening zone, the grounds are like a little wilderness park and there are fewer people, mostly a few adolescents trying to sneak off with their friends, newlyweds wanting to be alone, and a few random walkers like us. Suddenly, far from the small crowd of families on holiday, we heard men shouting behind a stand of trees. This being India, where everything is everybody's business, we wandered over to see what the matter was. We found a man and woman standing with their hands tightly clasped to each others', the man yelling red-faced at another man who was yelling back with equal vehemence. The woman, who stood quietly with her head bent, was covered in a full burkha—not even her eyes were visible behind her veil, which is quite unusual in India.

As soon as we approached, the single man brought Namit into the argument, making his case against the couple. His accusation was that he'd caught them in flagrante delicto out in the open. Having sex in public is illegal (public lewdness), he claimed.

The Silence of the Night

Here is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on 4 April 1967 at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in NY City. He was killed exactly a year later when he was only 39. This is how one Christian preacher bravely spoke out against the Vietnam war. A tad different, shall we say, from the Rapture-ready evangelical preachers of today.

... Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
...
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

Further down in this impassioned speech, he quotes a Buddhist leader from Vietnam:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

From the Outside, Looking In

Recently, the crew of a US naval cruiser in the Persian Gulf was alarmed by the actions of some nearby Iranian speedboats, potentially sparking a confrontation. Commenting on the almost-incident, US Presidential hopeful Fred Thompson quipped, "I think one more step and they would have been introduced to those virgins that they're looking forward to seeing."

Okay, is there anyone out there who hasn’t seen or heard the stereotype—the caricature—often enough to get his joke? I didn’t think so. In fact, in the past six years, we’ve heard some version of this joke so many times that it’s already come to feel old. There’s a whole battery of these jokes by now, with themes ranging from Islamic terrorism to… um, Islamic terrorism. And while America has a nice little collective chuckle over this, I can’t help but wonder if it would have been quite so funny if Thompson had made an equivalent joke about Jews, Mormons, or Baptists, for instance. I have to wonder why fair-minded, clear-thinking people aren’t up in arms over this.

I remember only two years ago when a politician referred to a young Indian-American as “macaca” and—though it never became entirely clear what the hell he was even talking about—his political career was effectively destroyed by a backlash against that single imprudent utterance. And last year former US President Jimmy Carter was hounded by the American press and accused of anti-Semitism for comparing the condition of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to life under South African Apartheid.

But speaking of Muslims as fanatics and terrorists is not even considered bad manners; it’s seen as a comic expression of the truth. Suggesting that it might be a bit more complicated—that it’s ridiculous and hateful to so simplify a group of people who comprise not less than 22% of the world population at last count, across nationalities, skin colors, political beliefs, socioeconomic levels, athletic abilities, educational backgrounds, language groups, intelligence levels, talents, personalities, local histories, sexual orientations, cultural backgrounds, varying degrees of faith and religiosity, and whatnot (you know, the ordinary human variety you might expect to find across nearly a quarter of humanity distributed around the globe)—gets you branded as an apologist for terrorism, if you’re not Muslim, and may well get you worse if you are.

I’m sorry, I really don’t understand the math here.

[Above: Random photos of Muslims]

It’s no wonder that the Muslims held up as media darlings in the US right  now are Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel, who (unwittingly) fuel the rhetoric of those who need to convince themselves that Muslims have a greater capacity for “evil” or are in need of saving by the West. Having listened to an interview with Ms Ali, it’s my impression that she actually intends to deliver a more nuanced message of Muslim realities. But as a hopeful newcomer to the West, she perhaps doesn’t realize how she plays into the hands of the haters, that her real contribution is finally but to put flesh on the American Nightmare. I understand that she’s a brave and intelligent woman who has surmounted unimaginable horrors in her life. But presenting herself as an expert on Muslims, when it’s not clear that she knows much about the history and culture of Muslims across the globe, and focusing exclusively on the local cultural pathologies that caused the trauma she suffered—important though it is—to the exclusion of a broader view or deeper understanding, does nothing to humanize the caricature of Muslims or advance the dialog. Few of her readers in the US will read her pronouncements with any kind of informed perspective or insight. Because most Americans frankly don’t want much perspective and insight on Muslims. It’s well known that understanding makes it much harder to vilify and kill people. So the only Muslims who get airtime in the States are the ones who say what we want to hear. It lets us feel not just vindicated but downright open-minded and receptive in our collective willful ignorance.

The Politics of God

Perhaps all that unites feminists today is their goal of making the world a better place for women. Approaches diverge from there: from hard-liners, who see all men as complicit in oppressing women, to moderates, who seek incremental changes by working with men. They rarely see eye-to-eye: the former call the latter anti-feminist sell-outs; the latter see the former as extremists damaging to the cause, etc.

The analogy is not exact but a similar dynamic exists in atheist discourse today. In response to 9/11 and the alarming role of evangelical Christianity in US politics, a host of loud atheistic voices have emerged. Most belong to concerned citizens driven by their secular ideals. But they seem united only by their goal of curbing religion in public life; in their approaches, they too range from hard-line to moderate. The former see most religion as noxious, worth getting rid of like the plague; the latter see it as a universal instance of irrational human nature, and only seek to reform and contain its moral excesses. 

Which stripe of atheists do we side with? We can evaluate them based on results (an amorphous exercise). More often, we evaluate them via their assumptions, analysis, and claims. A part of our answer, as always, comes from subjective and often sub-conscious factors: our culture, experiences, psychological makeup. Another part derives from the understanding we consciously gain about the beast -- religion in this case -- relying on a calm analysis of all relevant data available to us, from biology, history, anthropology, etc.

Understanding religion as practiced by the masses is a prerequisite for a sensible response to it. No science can yet prove that without an agreed-upon purpose or goal, secular values are objectively superior to religious ones (same can be said of the values of individualism and capitalism). With different goals, other values become superior. Secular values are a subjective choice some of us have made, a choice we need to convince others of -- others are not obligated to follow us. We need to sell our ideas, and as with all selling, it helps to understand our "target customers." Corporations do this rather well; pomposity, railing at target customers, and calling them irrational or stupid for patronizing a competing product is a sure way to go out of business!

What does religion provide some of us that is so hard to give up? Are some of us innately less predisposed to religiosity (I became an atheist at 13, without any sophisticated reasons)? What is the lure of fundamentalism? Why is it growing now, and why in the richest, most scientifically advanced nation on the planet? What is the link between fundamentalism and terrorism? What drives educated Muslims to blow themselves up, something they didn't do until a few years ago? Why is their ire directed against a nation that swears by another Abrahamic faith, rather than godless China? Is there a correlation between global capitalism and rising religiosity? What ingredients in a recipe can maximize the odds of turning children into responsible, secular adults? What kinds of reforming efforts have worked best in the history of religion? Etc.

Needless to say, people with significant insights are few and far between -- clarity of thought remains counter-cultural in every culture. It is one thing to be a fearless critic, another to be right or wise. Far easier to succumb to easy answers and to hysterically rage at all those who disappoint us so gravely (those "enemies of reason"?). Hardly the best way to show we're not like them.

One writer I've liked for years is Mark Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University. He has written a book called "The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West." Here is a teaser from a long excerpt that should be required reading for everyone interested in religion and politics:

A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference.

More here. (Read a book review here.)