Thomas Sowell : "with visions it is different. These are the implicit assumptions with
which you operate. You may not articulate them even to yourself, but you are assuming
certain things when you talk or when you think. Seldom are those things spelled out."
Sowell's 'visions' are basically views about two things: human nature and
social knowledge.
To take human nature first: the constrained vision has a sober and
unsentimental view about it. It holds that human nature is essentially fixed
– people are as we find them, exhibiting a mixture of motives, some social
and some anti-social. Thus, if it is to succeed, public policy has to run with
the grain of human nature as we know it and to avoid assuming that it will
change in such a way as to help policy to succeed. This means that, in
order to improve society, we must focus on institutions and try to
understand the incentives people have to behave in social or anti-social
ways.
The unconstrained vision, by contrast, is optimistic about improving human
nature. It sees people as naturally social and perfectible. Public policy is therefore not a matter of incentives but of freeing people to realise their
natural, and naturally good, selves and educating them to conform to a new
order.
A quite concise summary helpfully provided by New Zealand?
Finally, Thomas Sowell provides useful real life historical examples. The American Revolution and the French Revolution.
Well in France the idea was that if you simply put the right people in
charge and created the right institutions, then all these problems would go away. In the
United States, it was assumed from the outset that there were very limited things you
could do and what you needed to do above all was to minimize the damage done by the
flaws of human nature. This is why the United States for example has the Constitution,
so much lamented by some of those who believe in the French Revolution in which this
group is offset by that group and nobody can sort of run wild. If you believe that what
you need is to have the right leaders who love the people and so on, a Messiah as it were,
then your problems are solved. But if you do not believe there is any political Messiah,
and you believe that you have to make sure that all people are restrained in what they are
able to do, then you have the separation of power, you have elections, you have
Constitutions, you have all kinds of things hemming you in. According to Houssay who
was a great supporter of the French Revolution, could not understand why there was this
separation of powers. Not even when at the end of his life, he was arbitrarily thrown into
prison where he continued to write about why the Americans have this separation of
power. And of course if there is going to be a separation of power he would not be
rotting in prison.
In other words, in the constrained vision, human nature = good. In the unconstrained vision, human nature = bad.
"...That's exactly what Jenner is giving us — and she's doing it masterfully, playing off America's addiction to what Tocqueville called the "perpetual utterance of self-applause." We love to feel good about ourselves. Conservatives satisfy the craving with gratuitous demonstrations of military prowess and unapologetic expressions of American exceptionalism. Liberals get it from grandiloquent displays of affirmation for the outsider — an affirmation that just so happens to demonstrate the affirming liberal's own moral superiority..."
You can probably guess that environmentalists and yoga instructors are more likely to be Democrats -- and oil workers to be Republicans. But what about flight attendants, talk show hosts, and neurosurgeons?
"...What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over ... the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealthlast for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour..."
Students, Faculty Invited To Freely Express Single Viewpoint
BOSTON—Saying that such a dialogue was essential to the college’s academic mission, Trescott University president Kevin Abrams confirmed Monday that the school encourages a lively exchange of one idea. “As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion,” said Abrams, adding that no matter the subject, anyone on campus is always welcome to add their support to the accepted consensus. “Whether it’s a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.” Abrams told reporters that counseling resources were available for any student made uncomfortable by the viewpoint.
"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."
"At the end of our interview, I asked Ban if he ever thought about children in today’s Chungjus—the places in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere wracked by war, but where, unlike in his case, the United Nations has been unable to reach. Does he think they still think of the United Nations the way young Ban Ki-moon once did?
He paused. “They still believe the United Nations can save them,” he told me. “It’s only the leaders who are blocking—who are hampering their hopes.”
Then his eyes opened wide, his voice rose, and for a moment he came as close to being angry as I’d seen him. Those leaders “should look and work for their own people, not for their own self-interest—clinging to power, disregarding, you know, whatever the people’s pride may be. This—this really angers me. I don’t know how many times I have been really confronting these people directly. That’s what I have been doing! But I cannot do it alone.”"
Ban Ki Moon and the UN. The Rest at the New Republic
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"
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."
...In itself, atheism is an entirely negative position. In pagan Rome, “atheist” (from the Greek atheos) meant anyone who refused to worship the established pantheon of deities. The term was applied to Christians, who not only refused to worship the gods of the pantheon but demanded exclusive worship of their own god. Many non-western religions contain no conception of a creator-god – Buddhism and Taoism, in some of their forms, are atheist religions of this kind – and many religions have had no interest in proselytising. In modern western contexts, however, atheism and rejection of monotheism are practically interchangeable. Roughly speaking, an atheist is anyone who has no use for the concept of God – the idea of a divine mind, which has created humankind and embodies in a perfect form the values that human beings cherish and strive to realise. Many who are atheists in this sense (including myself) regard the evangelical atheism that has emerged over the past few decades with bemusement. Why make a fuss over an idea that has no sense for you? There are untold multitudes who have no interest in waging war on beliefs that mean nothing to them. Throughout history, many have been happy to live their lives without bothering about ultimate questions. This sort of atheism is one of the perennial responses to the experience of being human....
...It’s probably just as well that the current generation of atheists seems to know so little of the longer history of atheist movements. When they assert that science can bridge fact and value, they overlook the many incompatible value-systems that have been defended in this way. There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley. None of the divergent values that atheists have from time to time promoted has any essential connection with atheism, or with science. How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism.
The new atheists rarely mention Friedrich Nietzsche, and when they do it is usually to dismiss him. This can’t be because Nietzsche’s ideas are said to have inspired the Nazi cult of racial inequality – an unlikely tale, given that the Nazis claimed their racism was based in science. The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheist should serve...
...Above all, these unevangelical atheists accepted that religion is definitively human. Though not all human beings may attach great importance to them, every society contains practices that are recognisably religious. Why should religion be universal in this way? For atheist missionaries this is a decidedly awkward question. Invariably they claim to be followers of Darwin. Yet they never ask what evolutionary function this species-wide phenomenon serves. There is an irresolvable contradiction between viewing religion naturalistically – as a human adaptation to living in the world – and condemning it as a tissue of error and illusion.
John Gray (a fellow atheist/thinker commenting on atheists) The rest at here
It is these dreams that are the real subject of the strips: the city of Stupidopolis that Calvin builds out of sand castles and destroys, the Transmogrifier (actually a cardboard box) that will turn him into a tiger like Hobbes, the efforts of Stupendous Man to duck schoolwork and of Spaceman Spiff (“poised precariously over a percolating pit of putrid pasta”) to avoid the inedible meals that Calvin’s mother serves. (Calvin’s own preference is for a breakfast cereal called Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs.)
From these situations emerges a social and a philosophical vision, unsystematic but nonetheless profound. The late political scientist James Q. Wilson described “Calvin and Hobbes” as “our only popular explication of the moral philosophy of Aristotle.” Wilson meant that the social order is founded on self-control and delayed gratification—and that Calvin is hopeless at these things. Calvin thinks that “life should be more like TV” and that he is “destined for greatness” whether he does his homework or not. His favorite sport is “Calvinball,” in which he is entitled to make up the rules as he goes along.
Day-in, day-out, Calvin keeps running into evidence that the world isn’t built to his (and our) specifications. All humor is, in one way or another, about our resistance to that evidence.
