How long 'til we're barely surviving?

Noam Chomsky was in Chapel Hill a couple of weeks ago. I read in the October 6 Independent Weekly yesterday that Dr. Chomsky predicts, according to reporter David Fellerath, that "in 500 years, humans will be barely surviving." Fellerath writes that Chomsky cited nuclear war and global warming as the biggest threats.
    Chomsky doesn't define "barely surviving." Perhaps a precipitously declining human population? Or a much diminished quality of life for all but the remaining rich? The latter might lead to the former, in any case, as the have-nots rise up and rabble (some with those nuclear weapons Chomsky cites).
    In either case, I wouldn't have given us 500 years myself, but Chomsky is much better read than I am, so maybe he's right. Not that he or I (or you) will be around to find out.
    I suspect that "barely surviving" will come sooner, on the evidence of the sharp recent upward trending of one particular curve, the graph of human population growth (the thick red line in the chart below:

    The curve has been very steep for several decades and is accelerating; it's frankly a wonder that we're not just barely surviving already. Maybe we are but just haven't noticed it yet?

That's certainly true for other species on the planet. The effect on other species is and will continue to be catastrophic in terms of the size (or existence) of their populations. Another way of stating human population growth is in terms of humans' biomass relative to the total biomass on the planet. From the article, "Differential Reproduction - An Exponentialist View":

A sobering [Malthusian¹] thought is that as the global human population increases its percentage of the total biomass so many other species are going extinct [emphasis mine].

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1. The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), who "observed that sooner or later population gets checked by famine, disease, and widespread mortality."

Local assessment of atheism

On the off chance, I went into Fifth Street Books yesterday afternoon ("ALL BOOKS 99¢").
    Do you know whether you have any books by Christopher Hitchens?
     "What does he write about?" asked the clerk.
    (I'm thinking, What doesn't he write about?—or used to, before he got cancer.) I'm looking for his books on atheism.
    "Well," she said, "they might be here," indicating what I gathered from several copies of Gary Zukav's Seat of the Soul might be the New Age section.  "Or over here, in the Religion section."
    Okay.
    "But," she added, "if you don't find them in either of those places, try Fiction."

Oh, how I would love to have found a copy of God Is Not Great or The Portable Atheist in the Fiction section! Confirming the local assessment of atheism.
    That I'd try to share with the author. But it might hurt him to laugh that hard.

The happiness machine

The Matrix, the 1999 film by Andy and Lana Wachowski, posited a machine that was capable of producing in a person hooked up to it the same state of mind as actual experiences, without the actual experiences. It could ensure that you would feel continually happy and would be so convincing that you would not know you weren't actually having the experiences you thought you were.
    David Sosa, a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin, recently wrote¹ that The Matrix had been scooped twenty-five years earlier. A Harvard philosopher, Robert Nozick, had written in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. [p. 3]

Sound good? Instant, easy bliss. No sweat, no pain.

Sosa says wait a minute. He argues that

There’s an important difference between having a friend and having the experience of having a friend. There’s an important difference between writing a great novel and having the experience of writing a great novel...Plugged in, we would have the sorts of experience that people who actually achieve or accomplish those things have, but they would all be, in a way, false—an intellectual mirage. A drug addict is often experiencing intense pleasure. But his is not a life we admire.
    Now, of course, the difference would be lost on you if you were plugged into the machine—you wouldn’t know you weren’t really anyone’s friend. But what’s striking is that even that fact is not adequately reassuring. On the contrary it adds to the horror of the prospect. We’d be ignorant, too—duped, to boot!...

A former correspondent who went by the Last Judgment eponym "Sheepandgoats" once suggested that my rejection of theistic belief might be motivated by my wishing to avoid being duped. I failed to realize at the time how appropriate the suggestion was. I didn't want to be hooked up to his happiness machine. The Jehovah's Witness brand, in his case. (They're big on separating the sheep from the goats.)
    As Sosa explains,

In refusing to plug in to Nozick’s machine, we express our deep-seated belief that the sort of thing we can get from a machine isn’t the most valuable thing we can get; it isn’t what we most deeply want, whatever we might think if we were plugged in. Life on the machine wouldn’t constitute achieving what we’re after when we’re pursuing a happy life. There’s an important difference between having a friend and having the experience of having a friend.
    ...Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief...Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind.

    No imaginary friends on high for me, thank you very much.²
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1. Once again, I have my more timely read friend Ken to thank for bringing this item to my attention. He wrote me Friday, "Did you see the article 'The Spoils of Happiness' in the NY Times the other day? It raises some points that I think would interest you." Indeed it did.
2. Thanks to Ken for suggesting the analogy between the happiness machine and religion. I can't be certain that the article would have elicited it from me if I hadn't just read his email:
   

   How much like the "happiness machine" are the major theistic religions of the world, given their visions of a blissful afterlife? Do they make their practitioners happy?

Wassail!

Very good condition. 5-speed manual transmission. 159,000 miles. 2009 radio with AUX jack. Dog-friendly (poodle shown inside car in photo isn't included, however).

I told a friend this morning that my wife and I had had good luck selling our 1992 Volvo through Craigslist. "I posted the ad Tuesday afternoon, and we accepted a $200 deposit yesterday."
    "It wasn't luck," my friend said.
    "Oh, then what was it?"
    "The divine mercy of God."
    Thank you very much!
    She said that if I was killed in an automobile crash, that too would be the divine mercy of God.
    Thank you very much indeed!

"This fear of things invisible, is the natural seed of...religion." –Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.

Word of the Day from dictionary.com:

wassail \WAH-sul; wah-SAYL\, noun:

1. An expression of good wishes on a festive occasion, especially in drinking to someone.
2. An occasion on which such good wishes are expressed in drinking; a drinking bout; a carouse.
3. The liquor used for a wassail; especially, a beverage formerly much used in England at Christmas and other festivals, made of ale (or wine) flavored with spices, sugar, toast, roasted apples, etc.

Wassail is from the Middle English expression of festive benevolence, wæs hæil!, be well!, from Old Norse ves heill, be (ves) well (heill).

Wassail! As in "Good luck" or "May your deity richly bless you and kill you in a car crash today only if 'he' really thinks that's what you most need."
    Seriously.

Intellectual diversion

Having finished reading The Girl Who Played with Fire over the weekend and not yet having a copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (the second and third unputdownable volumes of Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy"), and finding a bit difficult for the moment the final chapters of Richard Dawkins's Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, about the bacterial life of two billion years ago from which evolved all life on Earth today, I've returned to Christopher Hitchens's Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever.
    The excerpt from Bertrand Russell's "Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (from his book, Atheism; Collected Essays, 1943-1949) was quite diverting. Here's a snippet (more text online):

Other passions besides self-esteem are common sources of error; of these perhaps the most important is fear. Fear sometimes operates directly, by inventing rumors of disaster in war-time, or by imagining objects of terror, such as ghosts; sometimes it operates indirectly, by creating belief in something comforting, such as the elixir of life, or heaven for ourselves and hell for our enemies. Fear has many forms - fear of death, fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, fear of the herd, and that vague generalized fear that comes to those who conceal from themselves their more specific terrors. Until you have admitted your own fears to yourself, and have guarded yourself by a difficult effort of will against their mythmaking power, you cannot hope to think truly about many matters of great importance, especially those with which religious beliefs are concerned. Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavor after a worthy manner of life.

Also diverting were the two poems Hitchens selected from the work of Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985). For your diversion, I've snipped from "Church Going" (complete text):

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
    ...Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
    Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
...
    ...I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
    Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell?...
    A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

I myself have been thinking about my dead of late. My father, all of his eight brothers, one of his two sisters, my mother, all of her three brothers and three sisters, two of my four sisters, five of six brothers-in-law, two of quite a few nephews, cousins, teachers, friends, former classmates and colleagues, pets.
    And me, in not very long.
    There's no solace in churches, however many dead lie round them. I can find no comfort in the thought of all the wasted effort that went into building monuments to non-existent entities. Parallel efforts went into torturing and murdering people labeled "witches," even if only to be able to confiscate their property after they were done away with. (That from The Portable Atheist's entry from Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Sagan even entertainingly characterizes the whole "go kill a witch" enterprise as an "expense-account scam," since a number of people were remunerated for various activities involved in collecting and transporting and disrobing and examining and probing and torturing and suffocating and drowning and burning the victims.)

Christians are saved!

I happened to look some more at the Pew Forum's recent "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey," and was relieved to find that one of the groups identified actually "knew less about religion" than some of the Christian groups:

The "nothings in particular" knew slightly less than the white evangelical Protestants, the white Catholics, and the white mainline Protestants. It doesn't really seem fair to say that "no one [among the groups identified by the study] is more ignorant about religion than a Christian."
    Christians, in other words, are saved not only by Jesus but also by the nothings in particular!

How much do you "know about religion"?

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which conducted the recent "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey," has posted a quiz to test how much we ourselves "know about religion."
    Take the quiz to find out how you compare with a nationally representative sample of 3,412 adults!

By the way, the opening statement of the Pew Forum's own report of its survey seems to support my friend Ken's observation that "no one [among the groups identified by the study] is more ignorant about religion than a Christian."
    Opens the Pew Forum report:

Atheists and agnostics, Jews, and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history, and leading figures of major world religions.

For those so indifferent to religion that it might be termed a miracle that they're even reading this, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, and Catholics are considered to be Christians, although that has been disputed on the basis of unfavorable comparisons of the ethics of members of these groups with the core teachings of Jesus Christ.

Evidence to support the term "bright"?

A phone survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life was released on Tuesday. Among its findings:

• Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.
• Forty-three percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the foremost rabbinical authorities and philosophers, was Jewish.

These findings were reported in The New York Times (September 28), in the article, "Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans," by Laurie Goodstein, who led off with the statement that "Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion."

I had somehow missed the news, even though the survey had apparently been very widely reported.
    My friend Ken alerted me by email:

The article contains a memorable observation from the president of American Atheists: “I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people. Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”
    Some of the stats in it are jaw-droppers. For example: "53% of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation."
    [Given the religious views that predominate in the Western world and the fact that I've met a great many ignorant Christians,] I must conclude that no one is more ignorant about religion than a Christian.

As qualified, Ken's conclusion doesn't seem to be a non sequitur (in the original, logical way that Aristotle and I use the term). Christians, among the groups identified by the study, might indeed be the most ignorant about religion. [Note that as Goodstein's article points out, "There were not enough Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu respondents to say how those groups ranked."]
    The alleged superiority of atheists' (and agnostics') knowledge of religion might have been involved in philosopher Daniel C. Dennett's suggesting the term "bright" for atheists¹, even though he claims that he didn't intend it that way, any more than "gay" for homosexuals is meant to imply that homosexuals are less morose than other people.
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1. "In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon he admits to being 'a bright,' and defends the term." –Wikipedia

Sacrifice is for the little people

"Anger is sweeping America," wrote Paul Krugman in "The Angry Rich" on September 19 in The New York Times. "I'm talking about the rich," he said.

The rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office.
    ...For one thing, craziness has gone mainstream. It’s one thing when a billionaire rants at a dinner event. It’s another when Forbes magazine runs a cover story alleging that the president of the United States is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, “anticolonialist” agenda, that “the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.” When it comes to defending the interests of the rich, it seems, the normal rules of civilized (and rational) discourse no longer apply.
    ...And among the undeniably rich, a belligerent sense of entitlement has taken hold: it’s their money, and they have the right to keep it.
    ...The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may well get their way. Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to the aid of the oppressed affluent.
    ...You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. [emphasis mine] It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes.
    ...And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.
    ...But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

Please pay Mr. Krugman and The New York Times for my long excerpt by taking the link to his article and reading it in its entirety. It provides more examples of attempted manipulation by the rich, as if they didn't practically run everything already anyway.
    And read the letters to The Times in response to the article. For example, Steven Berkowitz wrote the next day:

G. K. Chesterton identified a source deeper than the sense of entitlement to explain the anger of the rich at paying taxes: “The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

Simply let money [continue to] govern?

We know that dolphins are really smart

In her article in the Science section of today's New York Times ("Studying the Big-Brained Dolphin"), Claudia Dreyfus interviews psychologist Diana Reiss.

Q. We know that dolphins are highly trainable. But how smart are they, really?
    A. Let me tell you a story. One of the first dolphins I ever worked with was Circe. I’d bring her a fish when I wanted her to do certain things. If she didn’t do them, I did a “time-out” where I turned my back and walked away. Well, there was a certain type of fish that Circe loathed because it had a spiny tail. So I accommodated her by cutting the spines off of the tail. One day, I forgot to do that. Circe spit it out, swam to the other side of the pool and placed herself into a vertical position that mimicked my time-out. I wanted to test this. I gave her untrimmed fish on four different days. Whenever I gave her fish with spiny tails, she gave me a time-out. What that suggested was that she saw time out as a correction and used it back on me. Well, that’s how we learn to communicate.

The article reports that Dr. Reiss advised the producers of the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove, which I reviewed on June 16, recommending it as:

must-see for its exposure of the atrocity of Japan's annual deliberate slaughter of thousands of dolphins.

Dreyfus asks Reiss:

Q. How did you get involved with [The Cove]?
    A. I had learned about this fishing village in Japan, Taiji, where dolphins are herded into a small inlet and brutally slaughtered. These animals were being eviscerated and just left there to slowly die, flailing about in the sun. Well, these are the same type of dolphins I work with. I know how sensitive they are, how much pain they can feel, how a mere scratch bothers them.
    Few scientists were speaking out about this. So I got biologists and aquarium professionals together and we started Act for Dolphins. We went to the Japanese Embassy in D. C. to bring them scientific information about the animals. Their attitude basically was, “anything we do in our waters is our business.” I also began working with Louie Psihoyos, the film director, and that was the beginning of making the The Cove. It’s been shown in Japan, but that hasn’t stopped the dolphin drive.

Q. How do some of your fellow scientists feel about your activism?
    A. It used to be that you weren’t supposed to do both. But when I went to a marine-mammal conference a couple of years ago, I brought a petition against the dolphin roundup in Japan. Three hundred scientists instantly signed.
    My feeling is if we can’t stop 34 fishermen from treating these animals so miserably, then what hope is there for fixing anything in this world?

Even if the Japanese businessmen are stopped, there's so much else our hearts cry "stop" to, including acts by our own businessmen.
    But maybe it's like the starfish that the beachcomber threw back into the ocean. A passer-by said, "What difference does it make? There are so many starfish you can't save from dying in the sun."
    The beachcomber replied, "It makes a lot of difference to that one."

What do you think I'm thinking?

Siegfried after grooming

Siegfried came back from Elliotte's Pet Spa & Salon on Saturday looking pretty dapper!

No book burnin' today, but...

Pastor Jones won't be burning any books today. According to The New York Times, he said this morning, "We feel that God is telling us to stop."
    But my final sentence yesterday did set one reader to musing:

Ah, yes, book burning—it has such a distinguished pedigree in western history. I'm sure you've seen old footage showing the Nazi party doing this in Germany—on their way to taking over the country. And, then, of course we have had book burnings in America.
    And in that most Catholic of countries, Portugal, the sure way to quell dissent during hard times in the 17th century was to incite the mobs in Lisbon to look for Protestants or Jews and burn them on a stake for having brought God's anger (evidenced by the hard times) on the country. I guess we can congratulate ourselves that we're only burning books (printed heresies, rather than the heretic).

It provoked a thought in me too, the fantasy that religionists of all stripes come to realize that their only hope for reconciliation is to start from scratch on common ground. After thoughtful deliberation, to avoid the whole unseemly mess of burning each others' books, they strike an unexpected bargain.
    On a mutually agreed and appointed day, they will all burn every last copy of their own holy book. In one quick, concerted action, they will sweep away all official barriers to amity and concord.
    They expect that a good measure of peace on earth will have arrived at last.

Before Darwin, and after

Christopher Hitchens's interesting collection of "essential readings for the non-believer" (published in 2007 under the catchy title, The Portable Atheist) includes an essay by George Eliot (1819-1880) ridiculing the evangelistic career of the Reverend John Cumming (1807-1881)—originally published in 1855, in the Westminster Review.
    It is tonic to realize how energetic the criticism of religion was even before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.  Readings in Hitchens's collection include essays by Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) (from his Theologico-Political Treatise), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) ("Of Religion," from his Leviathan), David Hume (1711-1776) ("Of Miracles," from his Natural History of Religion), and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) (from his treatise, The Necessity of Atheism). Reading Shelley's poetry hadn't prepared me for his biting, self-assured prose (written at age about nineteen).

    And these critics included at least one brave woman; "George Eliot" was Mary Anne Evans's pen name:

Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and a great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety?
    ...Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood...So long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth as such is not possible.

While finding that text from George Eliot on the web (since I no longer have the library's copy of Hitchens's book), I came upon this interesting bit on ethical arguments against religion in Victorian Britain:

As David J. DeLaura and a number of other historians of Victorian intellectual life have pointed out, many Victorian atheists and agnostics abandoned Christianity for a particularly Victorian reason: They found it immoral!

The loss of religious faith in such representative early Victorian aginostics as F. W. Newman (John Henry Newman's brother), J. A. Froude (brother of Newman's close friend, Hurrell Froude), and George Eliot was not due, in the first place, to the usually suggested reasons—the rise of evolutionary theory in geology and biology and the Higher Criticism of the Bible. Indeed, in each life the dominant factor was a growing repugnance toward the ethical implications of what each had been taught to believe as essential Christianity—especially the set of interrelated doctrines: Original Sin, Reprobation, Baptismal Regeneration, Vicarious Atonement, Eternal Punishment. [p. 13 of DeLaura's Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969]

    George MacDonald, for example, left his Congregationalist pulpit because he could not accept that God would damn for all eternity babies who had not been baptised before their death, and similar repugnance proved the straw that broke the camel's back for Ruskin. In St. Paul and Protestantism, Arnold "contemptuously rejects the 'monstrous' vision of a capricious God who deals in election and predestination and cruelly emphasizes the crass commercial quality of the Puritan catchwords, 'covenant,' 'ransom,' 'redeem,' 'purchase,' 'bargain.'"

Rev. Cumming seems not to have abandoned Christianity, but rather championed it, or at least some of its parts that weren't Roman Catholic.

    Cherry picking is alive and well. In Gainesville, Florida, evangelical pastor Terry Jones is all for religion and God and holy books, just not Islam and Allah and the Koran, copies of which he might yet decide to burn tomorrow.

Political magical thinking

You may have heard talk of the possibility that the Democrats might lose control of one or both houses of Congress—as though the Democrats were in control now. An article in this morning's Durham Herald-Sun says:

Decatur embraced Obama in 2008. Voter turnout surged, and he carried some precincts by 85 percent or even 95 percent. Yet now, as in struggling cities across the country, some independents and conservative Democrats—particularly white men who supported Obama before—say they no longer believe Obama and the Democratic Congress can help them.

    Religion isn't the only magical thinking that people indulge in. They also indulge massively in political magical thinking. They believe that if something isn't going right, the thing to do is to vote out the party currently holding office. The magic they count on is that the party they vote for next time is the one that will fix things and save us.
    If the major religions of the world were bitheistic, believers would start praying to the other god after a few prayers to the first as usual failed to secure any results. Amazingly, with monotheism, they just keep praying to the One anyway.
    But of course the First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees the right of the People to believe any damn fool thing they please.