Why Sam Harris is Unlikely to Change his Mind - Jonathan Haidt

From Jonathan Haidt and the rest here from the Evolution Institute

The New Atheist Sam Harris recently offered to pay $10,000 to anyone who can disprove his arguments about morality. Jonathan Haidt analyzes the nature of reasoning, and the ease with which reason becomes a servant of the passions. He bets $10,000 that Harris will not change his mind. 

Reason has long been worshipped by philosophers and intellectuals. In Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, the gods created humankind with a soul of perfect rationality and inserted it into our spherical heads, which were “the most divine part of us and the lord of all that is in us.” (The Gods then realized that they had to create necks, to keep reason insulated from the seething passions of the rest of the body.) During the “age of reason,” the French revolutionaries pulled the Christs and crucifixes out of the cathedrals and replaced them with images of reason. And in our own time, the New Atheists have written books and started foundations urging people to fight religion with reason.

The New Atheist Sam Harris has even gone so far as to argue, in his book The Moral Landscape, that reason and science can tell us what is right and wrong. Morality is—in his definition—limited to questions about “the well-being of conscious creatures.” Well-being can be measured objectively, he says, by methods such as fMRI scans. Therefore, whatever practices, customs, and ways of living maximize those measurements are morally correct; others are morally wrong. He does not say that there is a single best society (hence the image of a landscape, with multiple peaks). But he claims that moral values are facts, no different from the kinds of facts discovered by chemists. Scientific methods give correct answer to questions in chemistry, and they can therefore do so for morality as well. Harris’s confidence in his reasoned argument is so strong that he has issued The Moral Landscape Challenge: He will personally pay $10,000 to anyone who submits an essay so logically compelling that it makes him change his mind and renounce his views. (The contest closes February 9.) 

Critics of religion are right that science has a long track record of undermining claims about God’s role in the material world. Miracles don’t seem to occur as frequently as they used to. But the funny thing is that in the last 40 years, science has also undermined claims about the role and reliability of reason in our daily lives. In the 1960s, psychologists began studying the mind as a kind of computer. But in the 1970s, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky began documenting the many bugs, or intuitive biases, in the software. For example, people are more likely to choose a surgical procedure when the outcome is framed in terms of the odds of survival, rather than the (equivalent) odds of death...

...In the 2000s, in my own area of research—moral judgment—it became clear that people make judgments of right and wrong almost instantly, and then make up supporting reasons later. The intuitive dog wags its rational tail, which explains why it is so difficult to change anyone’s mind on a moral issue by refuting every reason they offer. To sum it all up, David Hume was right in 1739 when he wrote that reason was “the slave of the passions,” rather than the divine master, or charioteer, as Plato had believed. 

I’m not saying that we can’t reason quite well about many unemotional situations where we really want to know the right answer, such as whether it is better to drive or take the train to the airport, given current traffic conditions. But when we look at conscious verbal reasoning as an evolutionary adaptation, it begins to look more like a tool for helping people argue, persuade, and guard their reputations than a tool shaped by selection pressures for finding objective truth. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber synthesized the large bodies of research on reasoning in cognitive and social psychology like this: “The function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade…. Skilled arguers are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.” When self-interest, partisan identity, or strong emotions are involved, reasoning turns into a lawyer, using all its powers to reach the desired conclusion... 

...If reasoning is so easily swayed by passions, then what kind of reasoning should we expect from people who hate religion and love reason? Open-minded, scientific thinking that tries to weigh the evidence on all sides? Or standard lawyerly reasoning that strives to reach a pre-ordained conclusion? When I was doing the research for The Righteous Mind, I read the New Atheist books carefully, and I noticed that several of them sounded angry. I also noticed that they used rhetorical structures suggesting certainty far more often than I was used to in scientific writing – words such as “always” and “never,” as well as phrases such as “there is no doubt that…” and “clearly we must…” 

To check my hunch, I took the full text of the three most important New Atheist books—Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and I ran the files through a widely used text analysis program that counts words that have been shown to indicate certainty, including “always,” “never,” “certainly,” “every,” and “undeniable.” To provide a close standard of comparison, I also analyzed three recent books by other scientists who write about religion but are not considered New Atheists: Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct, Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods, and my own book The Righteous Mind...

...Reason is indeed crucial for good public policy and a good society. But isn’t the most reasonable approach one that takes seriously the known flaws of human reasoning and tries to work around them? Individuals can’t be trusted to reason well when passions come into play, yet good reasoning can sometimes emerge from groups. This is why science works so well. Scientists suffer from the confirmation bias like everybody else, but the genius of science as an institution is that it incentivizes scientists to disconfirm each others’ ideas, and it creates a community within which a reasoned consensus eventually emerges. 

I agree with Harris that the historical shift away from revealed religion as the basis of society and toward democracy, individual rights, reason, and science as foundations of moral and political authority has been overwhelmingly good for people in Western societies. I am not anti-reason. I am also not anti-religion. I am opposed to dogmatism. I am skeptical of each person’s individual powers of reasoning, and I’m even more skeptical of the reasoning of groups of activists, hyper-partisans, and other righteous reformers who would remake society according to their own reasoned (or revealed) vision... 

...If we want to improve our politics and our society, let’s be reasonable about reason and its limitations. Of course, I have used my powers of reasoning (and intuition) to write this essay, and I have drawn on scientific studies to back up my claim that Harris is unlikely to change his mind and renounce his claims about morality. But people are complicated and it’s always hazardous to use scientific studies to predict the behavior of an individual. I could well be wrong.

Sam Harris's fair response can also be found here where he addresses the findings of "certainty" words and when he did change his mind.

A Confession of Liberal Intolerance - (from a liberal)

From the New York Times

"We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives. 

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us. 

O.K., that’s a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical. 

“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.” 

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point... 

...Jonathan Haidt, a centrist social psychologist at New York University, cites data suggesting that the share of conservatives in academia has plunged, and he has started a website, Heterodox Academy, to champion ideological diversity on campuses. 

“Universities are unlike other institutions in that they absolutely require that people challenge each other so that the truth can emerge from limited, biased, flawed individuals,” he says. “If they lose intellectual diversity, or if they develop norms of ‘safety’ that trump challenge, they die. And this is what has been happening since the 1990s.” 

Should universities offer affirmative action for conservatives and evangelicals? I don’t think so, partly because surveys find that conservative scholars themselves oppose the idea. But it’s important to have a frank discussion on campuses about ideological diversity. To me, this seems a liberal blind spot. 

Universities should be a hubbub of the full range of political perspectives from A to Z, not just from V to Z. So maybe we progressives could take a brief break from attacking the other side and more broadly incorporate values that we supposedly cherish — like diversity — in our own dominions."

The Righteous Mind - Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

NY Times Review

You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong.

This isn’t an accusation from the right. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The ­Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about ­manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them...

...The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others...

... He and his colleagues have compiled a catalog of six fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Alongside these principles, he has found related themes that carry moral weight: divinity, community, hierarchy, tradition, sin and degradation.

The worldviews Haidt discusses may differ from yours. They don’t start with the individual. They start with the group or the cosmic order. They exalt families, armies and communities. They assume that people should be treated differently according to social role or status — elders should be honored, subordinates should be protected. They suppress forms of self-expression that might weaken the social fabric. They assume interdependence, not autonomy. They prize order, not equality.

These moral systems aren’t ignorant or backward. Haidt argues that they’re common in history and across the globe because they fit human nature. He compares them to cuisines. We acquire morality the same way we acquire food preferences: we start with what we’re given. If it tastes good, we stick with it. If it doesn’t, we reject it. People accept God, authority and karma because these ideas suit their moral taste buds. Haidt points to research showing that people punish cheaters, accept many hierarchies and don’t support equal distribution of benefits when contributions are unequal.

You don’t have to go abroad to see these ideas. You can find them in the Republican Party. Social conservatives see welfare and feminism as threats to responsibility and family stability. The Tea Party hates redistribution because it interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order — these Republican themes touch all six moral foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt’s analysis, focus almost entirely on care and fighting oppression. This is Haidt’s startling message to the left: When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet...

...One of these interests is moral capital — norms, prac­tices and institutions, like religion and family values, that facilitate cooperation by constraining individualism. Toward this end, Haidt applauds the left for regulating corporate greed. But he worries that in other ways, liberals dissolve moral capital too recklessly. Welfare programs that substitute public aid for spousal and parental support undermine the ecology of the family. Education policies that let students sue teachers erode classroom authority. Multicultural education weakens the cultural glue of assimilation. Haidt agrees that old ways must sometimes be re-examined and changed. He just wants liberals to proceed with caution and protect the social pillars sustained by tradition...

...The hardest part, Haidt finds, is getting liberals to open their minds. Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia. And in a survey of 2,000 Americans, Haidt found that self-described liberals, especially those who called themselves “very liberal,” were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. Liberals don’t understand conservative values. And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.

Haidt isn’t just scolding liberals, however. He sees the left and right as yin and yang, each contributing insights to which the other should listen. In his view, for instance, liberals can teach conservatives to recognize and constrain predation by entrenched interests. Haidt believes in the power of reason, but the reasoning has to be interactive. It has to be other people’s reason engaging yours. We’re lousy at challenging our own beliefs, but we’re good at challenging each other’s. Haidt compares us to neurons in a giant brain, capable of “producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.”

The Contemprary Liberals Mindset?

"...Contemporary liberals increasingly think and talk like a class of self-satisfied commissars enforcing a comprehensive, uniformly secular vision of the human good. The idea that someone, somewhere might devote her life to an alternative vision of the good — one that clashes in some respects with liberalism's moral creed — is increasingly intolerable. 

That is a betrayal of what's best in the liberal tradition. 

Liberals should be pleased and express gratitude when people do good deeds, whether or not those deeds are motivated by faith. They should also be content to give voluntary associations (like religious colleges) wide latitude to orient themselves to visions of the human good rooted in traditions and experiences that transcend liberal modernity — provided they don't clash in a fundamental way with liberal ideals and institutions.

In the end, what we're seeing is an effort to greatly expand the list of beliefs, traditions, and ways of life that fundamentally clash with liberalism. That is an effort that no genuine liberal should want to succeed. 

What happened to a liberalism of skepticism, modesty, humility, and openness to conflicting notions of the highest good? What happened to a liberalism of pluralism that recognizes that when people are allowed to search for truth in freedom, they are liable to seek and find it in a multitude of values, beliefs, and traditions? What happened to a liberalism that sees this diversity as one of the finest flowers of a free society rather than a threat to the liberal democratic order? 

I don't have answers to these questions — and frankly, not a lot hinges on figuring out how we got here. What matters is that we acknowledge that something in the liberal mind has changed, and that we act to recover what has been lost."

The rest at theweek.com 

A New Theory of Distraction - The New York Times

"Another source of confusion is distraction’s apparent growth. There are two big theories about why it’s on the rise. The first is material: it holds that our urbanized, high-tech society is designed to distract us. In 1903, the German sociologist Georg Simmel argued, in an influential essay called “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” that in the tech-saturated city “stimulations, interests, and the taking up of time and attention” turn life into “a stream which scarcely requires any individual efforts for its ongoing.” (In the countryside, you have to entertain yourself.) One way to understand the distraction boom, therefore, is in terms of the spread of city life: not only has the world grown more urban, but digital devices let us bring citylike experiences with us wherever we go.

The second big theory is spiritual—it’s that we’re distracted because our souls are troubled. The comedian Louis C.K. may be the most famous contemporary exponent of this way of thinking. A few years ago, on “Late Night” with Conan O’Brien, he argued that people are addicted to their phones because “they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.” (David Foster Wallace also saw distraction this way.) The spiritual theory is even older than the material one: in 1874, Nietzsche wrote that “haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself”; in the seventeenth century, Pascal said that “all men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” In many ways, of the two, the material theory is more reassuring. If the rise of distraction is caused by technology, then technology might reverse it, while if the spiritual theory is true then distraction is here to stay. It’s not a competition, though; in fact, these two problems could be reinforcing each other. Stimulation could lead to ennui, and vice versa...

...The way we talk about distraction has always been a little self-serving—we say, in the passive voice, that we’re “distracted by” the Internet or our cats, and this makes us seem like the victims of our own decisions. But Crawford shows that this way of talking mischaracterizes the whole phenomenon. It’s not just that we choose our own distractions; it’s that the pleasure we get from being distracted is the pleasure of taking action and being free. There’s a glee that comes from making choices, a contentment that settles after we’ve asserted our autonomy. When you write an essay in Microsoft Word while watching, in another window, an episode of “American Ninja Warrior”—trust me, you can do this—you’re declaring your independence from the drudgery of work. When you’re waiting to cross the street and reach to check your e-mail, you’re pushing back against the indignity of being made to wait. Distraction is appealing precisely because it’s active and rebellious.

Atheism, Islam and liberalism: This is what we are really fighting about - Salon.com

From the Salon "Atheism, Islam and liberalism: This is what we are really fighting about: The debate raging in American culture boils down to an even simpler divide than you think" (quite the "motherlode", almost wanted to quote the whole very insightful article)

"Here’s a news flash: None of these heated public debates about atheism and religion, or about how Western “liberals” should think about Islam, ever reach a satisfactory conclusion. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that talk-show hosts and movie stars (just for instance) aren’t necessarily the best people to bring nuance or thoughtfulness or clarity to these conversations. An even bigger reason may be that religion in general, and fundamentalist religion in particular, is a major sore spot in Western culture, a source of tremendous vulnerability and anxiety... 

...On the other hand, Harris’ belief that reason and science can (or someday will) supply a transcendent, religion-like experience that satisfies the human yearning for spirituality, while relinquishing all claims to metaphysical truth, is almost charming. That’s an article of faith if I’ve ever heard one, and one that rests on what St. Augustine would have described as a theological heresy – a misguided faith in the perfectibility of man in this fallen world. There is something noble about Harris’ efforts to bridge the gap between science and philosophy, and also something severely naïve in his declaration that in the age of astrophysics we no longer need God. To phrase Augustine’s response in modern terms, what we know about human psychology to this point suggests that as a species we favor storytelling over facts, and that we do not draw much distinction between stories that are true, those that are metaphorically true and those that feel true but are entirely false. 

Indeed, I would argue that people who line up on opposing sides of the Harris-Aslan feud over religion and Islam represent fundamentally different worldviews, in ways they themselves may not recognize. I’m not talking about East vs. West or Muslim vs. Christian, and still less about lily-livered p.c. “progressives” vs. courageous contrarian truth-tellers, or however Bill Maher would like to phrase it. And I don’t precisely mean the difference between people of faith and the atheistic or irreligious. Those are facets of the dispute that are largely obvious. In a conversation between Richard Dawkins and Pope Francis (and I’d definitely pay to watch that), both would politely acknowledge that they hold divergent views about the fundamental nature of reality. What I really mean is the difference between humanities majors and science majors. 

That may sound like crude or facetious shorthand, but I believe it contains a genuine insight. Given that I clearly belong to one of these tribes (you get only one guess), it’s entirely likely that I will mischaracterize the other one. Such is the nature of the epistemological division. When I say that one side is primarily concerned with facts and the other with narrative, or that one side understands the world primarily in subjective, experiential and relativistic terms while the other focuses on objective and quantifiable phenomena and binary true-false questions, that may help us frame the profound mutual misunderstanding at work. Harris’ conception of religion as bad science, which seems like a ludicrous misreading to those who understand religion as a mythic force that shapes community and collective meaning, is a classic example. One side insists that the only important question is whether the truth-claims of religion are actually true; the other side says that question doesn’t even matter, and then wonders what “truth” is, anyway. It’s the overly literal-minded versus the hopelessly vague. 

What we see in discussions about religion in general and Islam in particular is a version of the same problem: People who barely speak the same language talking past each other, either making grand claims that refute themselves or raising legitimate questions that the other side ducks. I fall much closer to the Ben Affleck-Reza Aslan camp than to the tough-talkin’ pseudo-liberalism of Harris and Maher, as it slides toward a justification of permanent drone war and universal anti-Muslim profiling. But both sides engage in oversimplifications and ideological short cuts that seem like efforts to conceal what this debate is really about. Despite all its remarkable accomplishments, Western culture feels guilty and ill at ease. It traded in God for Snooki, swapped transcendent meaning and social cohesion for a vision of Enlightenment that started out bubbly and gradually went flat, like a can of week-old Mountain Dew. It’s not the kind of trade you can undo. 

At this point, Harris and Maher have become war trolls and fellow travelers of Dick Cheney, without even realizing it. It’s a sad fate for Maher, who was an acrid voice of resistance under the Bush administration. As for Harris, he has played an elaborate intellectual game of bait-and-switch since at least 9/11: He makes inflammatory comments about how we must wage war against Islam, or about the need to consider a nuclear first strike against a Muslim nation, and then backs away, protesting that he’s been taken out of context and actually thinks those things would be dreadful. He and Maher have provided covert aid and comfort to bigots who firebomb mosques or beat up “Muslim-looking” people at the mall, while officially being horrified by such hateful actions. They’re analogous to polite Southern whites of 1955, who did not personally use the N-word and found the Klan distasteful, but who never questioned the fundamental rightness of white supremacy. 

But Harris and Maher and other prominent anti-Muslim voices are right about one thing: Western leftists are often reluctant to criticize Islam, and it isn’t entirely healthy. This reluctance stems from many understandable causes: from sheer politeness, from a desire to promote harmony rather than discord, and from an eagerness not to come off as smug, xenophobic blowhards, the way Maher and Harris so often do. Of course the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world do not support terrorism; that hardly need to be said. Despite right-wing claims to the contrary, any number of imams and Islamic community leaders have spoken out against the likes of al-Qaida and ISIS and Boko Haram. As Aslan has repeatedly observed, Islam looks very different in different countries, and like any other major religion it has many competing and overlapping currents. A Muslim woman cannot drive a car or go outdoors unaccompanied in Saudi Arabia, but she can go to the beach in cutoffs in Istanbul or go dancing all night in Dubai. 

Ultimately it does not aid the cause of tolerance to deny that social practice in most majority-Muslim nations involves a lot of stuff that Western liberals rightly find appalling: the subordination of women, the suppression or persecution of LGBT people, extremely limited tolerance for those of other faiths (or none) and sharply restricted freedom of expression. One can discuss these troubling aspects of real-world Islam – as Reza Aslan and many other Western Muslims frequently do, in fairness – while also insisting that you can’t understand them independent of social and historical context. We don’t have to follow Maher and Harris down the rabbit hole of unjustified assumptions and disastrous conclusions: Illiberality and intolerance are intrinsic elements of Muslim doctrine, they argue, and Islam is a zone of monolithic groupthink unlike any other world religion (“the mother lode of bad ideas,” says Harris). Therefore Islam is a global cancer or disease, which must be killed or cut out. 

Sam Harris genuinely appears to view himself as a voice of science and reason, defending the Western intellectual tradition against its enemies. So it’s striking that he has surrendered to a seductive and paranoid narrative about Islam as a corrosive, contagious and essentially evil force, which seems so devoid of the critical thinking that represents the Western tradition at its finest. To take the most obvious example, Harris must be aware that Middle Eastern nations have repeatedly been subjected to humiliating wars of invasion, conquest and expropriation that have killed millions of people. They play no evident role in his thinking about the state of Islam, which he appears to view as an unchanging entity. 

As Aslan or any other religious scholar could tell him, fundamentalism is a historically recent invention that emerged in response to the erosion of traditional social mores by the forces of modernity. Christian fundamentalism did not become a significant force until the 20th century; although William Jennings Bryan is claimed as a grandfather by today’s Christian right, he would have found its theology baffling and retrograde. Within Islam, the Salafi and Wahhabi revivalist movements that inform the theology of al-Qaida, ISIS and other extremist groups were relatively minor currents within the faith before exploding in the 1970s and ‘80s. Many historical forces fueled that rapid growth, but as Harris should be well aware, the American-supported jihad that eventually drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan played a major role. 

In both major religions, the rise of ultra-orthodox revival movements – and within them a tendency toward apocalyptic violence – represents a rearguard action, an attempt to regain the ground lost to science, pop culture, consumerism and other irreligious influences. Viewed through the long lens of history, fundamentalism is almost certainly a sign of religion’s decline and weakness, rather than the opposite. That doesn’t mean that violent splinter groups like ISIS are not dangerous, or that Christian fundamentalism at home does not pose political problems. But the exaggerated fear response of many liberal Westerners reflects our own culture’s weakness and moral uncertainty, not the strength of its enemies."

"Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless"

We have now indicated the broad field of fact within which economic analysis functions. We have yet to define the specific task of economic analysis itself. The purpose of any analytical treatment of material is to provide a body of principles according to which facts can be selected and interpreted. The complaint is frequently heard that people want "facts", not "theories". The complaint may be justified in protest against theories which have no basis       in fact, but usually it arises from a misunderstanding of the true relationships of facts and theories. Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless. It is only "theory"- i.e., a body of principles - which enables us to approach the bewildering complexity and chaos of fact, select the facts significant for our purposes, and interpret the significance.

Indeed, it is hardly too much to claim that without a theory to interpret it there is no such thing as a "fact" at all. It is a "fact", for instance, that Oliver Cromwell had a wart on his nose. But what constitutes this supposed "fact"? To the chemist it is a certain conglomeration of atoms and molecules. To the physicist it is a dizzy mass of unpredictably excitable electrons. To the biologist it is a certain impropriety in the behavior of cells. To the psychologist it may be the key to the interpretation of Cromwell's character, and a fact of overwhelming importance. The historian may consider it an insignificant detail or an important causative factor, according to whether he follows economic or psychological interpretations of history. To the economist the wart may be of negligible importance unless Cromwell were prepared to pay a good round sum for its removal. What, then, is the "fact" about the wart? It may be any or all of the above, depending on the particular scheme of interpretation into which it is placed.

Kenneth Boulding, Economic Analysis, 1941 - "The Task of Interpretation"  

The Church of TED

A great TED talk is reminiscent of a tent revival sermon. There’s the gathering of the curious and the hungry. Then a persistent human problem is introduced, one that, as the speaker gently explains, has deeper roots and wider implications than most listeners are prepared to admit... 

...Twenty times a day you were supposed to tell yourself, as one translation put it, poetically, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” Prescriptions offered by many TED speakers are equally granular. The second most popular talk, measured by views on the TED site, is the one wherein Amy Cuddy of the Harvard Business School says that high-power poses — including standing up straighter, hands on hips — could “significantly change the way your life unfolds.”... 

...Perhaps the fact that there’s no intrusive voice from above makes this all more appealing than monotheism. Instead of sola scriptura, TED and its ilk offer more of a buffet-style approach to moral formation. I’ve talked to people who say they’ve happily dispensed with God, and don’t even find the general idea comprehensible. But a few, having announced they’re free of cant, spend many nervous hours assembling authority structures and a sense of righteousness by bricolage and Fitbit, nonfiction book clubs and Facebook likes."

The rest at the New York Times, The Church of TED 

Bach: A Passionate Life - John Eliot Gardnier

"If Monteverdi was the first composer to find musical expression for human passion, and Beethoven, what a terrible struggle it is to be human and aspire to be godlike, Mozart, the kind of music we'd hope to hear in heaven, Bach is the one who bridges the gap. He helps us to hear to voice of God but in human form, ironing out the imperfections of humanity in the perfections of his music."

- John Eliot Gardnier 

The Holy Ghost

How Cultures Around The World Make Decisions

"...After Protestant colonists brought the concept of personal autonomy to the U.S., the idea was further cemented into the national psychology with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Personal and religious freedom became irrevocably tied to economic freedom from the monarchy and early capitalism. “Americans were truly the only people that brought those ideas together,” says Sheena Iyengar, professor at Columbia Business School and author of The Art of Choosing (TED Talk: The art of choosing.) “It made the idea of personal autonomy such a dogma that it almost became a religion itself.” 

My fellow Americans and I believe that choice allows us to individuate ourselves, to prove that we are free. Our preferences, therefore, become who we are. We feel acutely the need to construct a personal narrative out of our choices and, thus, construct our own identity. 

There’s a certain degree to which this is sheer lunacy, and also fallacy. Because our cultural responsibility to revere choice has been instilled in us since before America was America. In other words, we never chose choice...

...Meanwhile, in America, a similar rhetoric rules. By not exercising your full range of choices, you are demonstrating yourself to be less than a full person — even though most people don’t exercise the choices they believe so strongly in, such as the right to vote. This is the fiction of choice in the West, says Carroll. “Individual choice is a powerful received idea, but frankly, it’s a bit of a white lie that our culture tells itself,” he says..."

From ideas.ted.com. And below are two models that were put out besides the American model.

The Amish model: Belonging, not choice, is crucial.

"“I have a very intelligent Amish friend who thinks the rest of us are crazy in how we view the professional choices we make,” says Kraybill. “We’re so anxious about our occupations that we’ll tear apart our families and move across the country for a job and end up living among strangers with no family or social support if we get ill or have an emergency. And put that way – how insane does that sound?”

Why should it be any less authentic to be a product of the family that raised you and the culture you grew up in and the religious institutions you participate in? Rather than knowing who you are by knowing your preferences, you know who you are by knowing what you belong to."

One Asian model: Focus on interdependence and harmony, not independence and self-expression.

In some Asian cultures, to fulfill your independent self is not the primary goal of an individual: The goal is to be interdependent and maintain relationships and make them harmonious. In Japan, for example, being a “going your own way” person is to be immature and not culturally sophisticated. Though people obviously have preferences, they often don’t choose what they like, because that’s not the ideal manner. “Your cultural task is harmony, not self-expression,” says Hazel Markus, social psychologist and professor of behavioral sciences at Stanford University.

Why? Partly because being part of the social organization is a core tenet of traditional Eastern religions. “All of them foster an idea that a person is not a whole, but a part, and only becomes whole in connection with others,” says Markus. “The fundamental, ontological understanding of what a person is is as a node in a network.”

Gustave from the Grand Budapest Hotel

"You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed, that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant … oh, f‑‑‑ it." 

- Monsieur Gustav

The Work of the Holy Ghost/Spirit

How to be Ultra-Spirtual

One of the suggestions:

Rebel against the dogmatic religious terminology by using dogmatic spiritual terminology...

One of the Top 5 Foreign Policy Lessons Learnt from the Past 20 Years

No. 3: The only thing worse than a bad state is no state.

U.S. foreign-policy elites routinely blame foreign-policy problems on the supposedly evil or illegitimate nature of other governments. In this view, international politics isn't a clash of competing interests; it is a morality play between good states -- America and its allies -- and bad states, or anyone who disagrees with us. During the Cold War, the problem was revolutionary communism led by the evil Soviet empire. After the Cold War, the United States blamed trouble on various "rogue" states such as Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Serbia. These states were bad because they were dictatorships and had poor human rights records, revisionist aims, and, in most cases, an appetite for weapons of mass destruction. The obvious solution to the rogue-state problem, of course, was regime change: get rid of these very bad rulers and create governments that treat their own populations better and cooperate with the United States. 

But as the sorry results of regime change in Libya and Iraq suggest, getting rid of really awful leaders isn't an improvement if the result is anarchy or a weak, corrupt, and highly divisive regime. One might add Yemen and Somalia to the list as well, and that's where Afghanistan is likely to be once the international community stops propping it up. Creating effective governments in post-totalitarian societies turns out to be very, very hard, and especially after a violent overthrow. It is even harder when the society in question is divided and relatively poor, and the lack of any legitimate or effective authority creates power vacuums in which the worst sorts of extremism can flourish. What's the lesson for all you unrepentant regime-changers out there? Be careful what you wish for.

The rest at Foreign Policy 

Irrational Atheism (from a Rational Atheist)

From the Atlantic's Irrational Atheism

"...I'm an atheist because I think of the universe as a natural, material system. I think of it, on the basis of my own extremely limited experience, as an infinitely replete but morally indifferent thing. It isn't bent on saving me, or damning me: It just is. I find comfort in that, as well as pain; wonder as well as loathing. That's my experience, and my atheism is a reflection of that experience. But it's not an argument; it's an interpretation. 

I have taken a leap of atheist faith. 

Religious people sometimes try to give proofs of the truth of their faith—Saint Thomas Aquinas famously gave five in his Summa Theologica. But for many people, belief comes before arguments, originating in family, social and institutional context, in desire and need. The arguments are post-hoc rationalizations. This can be true of atheism as well. For me, it's what I grew up with. It gets by in my social world, where professions of religious faith would be considered out of place. My non-faith is fundamentally part of how I connect with others and the world. 

The idea that the atheist comes to her view of the world through rationality and argumentation, while the believer relies on arbitrary emotional commitments, is false. This accounts for the sense that atheists such as Christopher Hitchens or Dawkins are arrogant: Their line of thinking often takes the form of disqualifying others on the grounds that they are irrational. But the atheist too, is deciding to believe in conditions of irremediable uncertainty, not merely following out a proof. 

Religious people have often offloaded the burden of their choices on institutions and relied on the Church's authorities and dogmas. But some atheists are equally willing to offload their beliefs on "reason" or "science" without acknowledging that they are making a bold intellectual commitment about the nature of the universe, and making it with utterly insufficient data. Religion at its best treats belief as a resolution in the face of doubt. I want an atheism that does the same, that displays epistemological courage... 

...William James—himself an eminent scientist—pointed out that science rests on emotional commitment. "Our belief in truth itself," wrote James, "that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other—what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. But if a … sceptic asks us how we know all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is just one volition against another—we willing to go in for life upon a trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make." 

...By not believing in God, I keep faith with the world's indifference. I love its beauty. I hate its suffering. I think both are perfectly real, because I experience them both, all the time. I do not see any reason to suspend judgment: I'm here, and I commit. I'm perfectly sincere and definite in my belief that there is no God. I can see that there could be comfort in believing otherwise, believing that all the suffering and death makes sense, that everyone gets what they deserve, and that existence works out in the end. 

But to believe that would be to betray my actual experiences, and even without the aid of reasoned arguments, that’s reason enough not to believe."

A sick man vs. a sinner - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this. In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner. The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God’s forgiveness. The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ.”

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Irreligion is the opium of the people - G.K Chesterton

"It is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish...God, and the Government becomes the God. That fact is written all across human history... the truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world."

G.K Chesterton

The Mansion: A Subprime Parable by Michael Lewis

In all the public finger-pointing about the American real estate bust, surprisingly little attention has been paid to its origin. There’s obviously a long list of people and ideas that can share in the blame: ratings agencies, mortgage brokers, big Wall Street firms, small Wall Street firms, Angelo Mozilo, Alan Greenspan. Every few weeks, the New York Times runs a piece exposing some new way in which a big Wall Street firm has exploited some poor or middle-class family. The rich people on Wall Street blame their bosses. The brokers at Merrill Lynch blame Stan O’Neal; the traders at Bear Stearns blame Jimmy Cayne. Everyone blames Countrywide. But all of this misses the point: However terrible the sins of the financial markets, they’re merely a reflection of a cultural predisposition. To blame the people who lent the money for the real estate boom is like blaming the crack dealers for creating addicts. 

Americans feel a deep urge to live in houses that are bigger than they can afford. This desire cuts so cleanly through the population that it touches just about everyone. It’s the acceptable lust.

Rest at "The Mansion: A Subprime Parable by Michael Lewis"

Why we make bad decisions

"It is also crucial to ask probing questions not only of the experts but of ourselves. This is because we bring into our decision-making process flaws and errors of our own. All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want"

- from New York Times, Noreena Hertz is a professor of economics at University College London and the authorof “Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World.”