Jonathan Haidt, Commons Game

I just watched a TED talk by Jonathan Haidt titled: Five Moral Values That Guide Political Choices.

In this talk, he presented a commons game to illustrate various political motivations. It is as follows:

He presented an all-anonymous commons game, in which he gave people money, and on each round of the game they can put money into a common pot.  The experimenter doubles what’s put in there and then all gets divided among the players evenly.

The game asks people to make a sacrifice where they don’t directly benefit from their own sacrifice but they want everybody to sacrifice.  Everybody then, has a temptation to free ride. 

People start out reasonably cooperative.  On the first round they typically give about half their money but then they quickly see that other people aren’t doing so much, “I don’t want to be a sucker,” “I don’t want to cooperate,” and people give less and less, quickly decaying to close to zero.

On the 7^th round they introduced a new rule, if you want to give some of your own money to punish people who aren’t contributing then you can.  Cooperation then shoots up and keeps shooting up. 

He says, that to solve cooperative problems its not enough to appeal to peoples good motives.  It helps to have some sort of punishment, even if its just shame, gossip, or embarrassment.  You need some sort of punishment to bring people in large groups to cooperate. 

Pretty interesting especially when it comes to dealing in international law and policy; the global commons (oceans, air quality, pollution, climate change). 

Santorum's Religious Fundamentalism Part 3

Marriage and serving in the military, according to Rick, are privileges, not rights. He defends his bigotry by saying, it’s not discrimination to deny privileges; it’s discrimination to deny rights. Lets explore this just a tad in light of Mr. Santorum’s religious beliefs.

Santorum privately believes people are not born gay, they choose to live a gay lifestyle. He intends to federally ban gay marriage. But he says, “its not personal, its about policy.” Gays serving openly in the military is not an inalienable right but a privilege. As such, he will enforce a policy of rewarding privilege at the expense of human rights. When questioned about DADT, Santorum said he doesn’t believe in injecting social policy into the military. What he fails to see however is the inherent hypocrisy of the Republican Party when it comes to social issues: less government, but more regulation of private personal behavior. DADT is a social policy!

           

Santorum claims that because open gays will be in close quarters and shower together and things like this, unit cohesion is under threat because some people would feel uncomfortable and as a result, recruiting would diminish. Santorum is playing to the traditional prejudices of his literalist religious worldview. In Santorum’s worldview it is better to protect the prejudicial inheritance of the past than to protect peoples right to fight and die for their country. What is the more noble cause? However, I shouldn’t say that this is in fact Santorum’s reasoning. This is the reasoning that he has to say in public, because what he would really say would be far worse. There is no doubt that he would fall on his religion to justify his bigotry and discriminatory perspective. When asked about the statement in WW2 used to keep blacks out of the military, he responded:

“{The idea that} being black and being gay is the same is simply not true. You are not homosexual necessarily, by obviously, by the color of your skin. There are all sort of studies out there that suggest just the contrary. And there are people who were gay and lived a gay lifestyle and aren’t anymore.  I don’t know if that a similar situation I don’t think that’s the case with anybody that’s black. It is a behavioral issue and that makes all the difference when it comes to serving in the military.” Santorum’s real problem is homosexual behavior, not homophobic responses to it. Those that are uncomfortable by allowing gays to serve openly in the military are simply homophobic, reflecting a dying out religious ideology based on exclusion and the worst form of discrimination: state sanctioned discrimination.

When asked about gay marriage, his answer was simply “so anybody can marry several people?” It sure is a slippery slope. If we allow gay people to marry then what about polygamy and bestiality? Must we allow those as well. The liberal agenda knows no bounds! If we open the flood gates there is no stopping it! This reflects a typical paranoid worldview shared by his fellow religious zealots: hat there is a war on religion and on Christendom in this country, a war waged by liberals, homosexuals, environmentalists and pro-lifers alike. His policies reflect a defensive stance. What’s under attack is much larger than himself, it’s the sacred institutions of marriage, family values, an attack on religion itself.

Marriage between a man and a woman, he says, merely affirms what the laws of the states have been for 200 years. However, laws in the states have denied women the right to vote, laws in the states upheld the worst forms of discriminatory practices against people of color and women for hundreds of years. This appeal to tradition, this appeal to the status quo is simply stupid. Just because it’s the way it has been for a period of time, does not make it right. Human rights as an international institution of sorts didn’t even appear on the scene until after WW2. But for Santorum, the ideal has already been established. Any change, modification or evolution of those standards is an aberration. The truth has always been there, spelled out for us in one book.

Marriage, he says, has been in place for thousands of years. But defined by whom? Marriage has meant very wide spectrum of things to the various cultures in our world throughout history. But Marriage has been clearly defined in his tradition, his religion, for thousands of years. This is what he is referring to: marriage defined by Christianity. But what Christianity I wonder? Do all Christians condemn gays and gay marriage? Of course not! Once again, Santorum is speaking about HIS Christianity. He speaks for a very small (not small enough) constituency of people. And this constituency is hell-bent on Christianizing the nation, bringing their rigid and narrow view of values and rights and privileges into the public arena, applicable to everyone in a country that is purposefully set up to protect the small guy, to protect the minority from a tyrannical majority. This is why we have a federal bill of rights, so the states can’t do whatever they decide to when it comes to public policy. This is the reasoning for a secular state, which of course, is the devil. It’s time to realize that freedom of religion necessarily entails freedom from religion, especially when it comes to majority oppression of any other sexual orientation and flavor.

Santorum's Religious Fundamentalism Part 2

Santorum’s so-called religious values permeate all of his social policies. I’d like to focus on a few of these social policy areas: Abortion, sex and contraceptives, and the environment.

Lets start with a salacious quote: “A society that says that sex outside of marriage is something that shouldn’t be encouraged or tolerated.” This is a good one. Have you ever met anyone who thinks that sex outside of marriage should be discouraged and shouldn’t be tolerated for any other reason than religion? I haven’t. What other motivation or justification could there possible be for sex outside of marriage? This indicates a few things about Santorum. First and foremost, he is waaaay out of touch with the reality of the vast majority of human beings on this planet. People have sex before marriage. People have sex with other people while married. People have sex for pleasure. But the more important aspect of this quote is that Santorum is opposed to encouraging sex outside of marriage, through public policy, which has made him oppose contraceptives. This is not just anti-sex and anti-pleasure, but it’s anti-woman. He is completely out of touch with women’s health issues and family planning. Surprisingly, Santorum is opposed to a society that tolerates sex outside of marriage. His religious “values”, in this case, are completely motivating his positions on social policy. And these “values” just happen to be reflective of a radical, fundamentalist Christianity that is dangerous to himself and others.

Lets shift to abortion. Santorum has gone so far as to make pseudo-scientific claims condemning abortion. He said, “I don’t think you’ll find a biologist in the world that will say that that [a fetus] is not a human life.” For Santorum, life begins at the moment of conception. Where could he get this idea? It couldn’t be a religious perspective could it? Have you ever heard anyone claim that life begins at conception who wasn’t saying so because of their religious orientation? I haven’t. Santorum has even claimed that he would “advocate that any doctor who performs an abortion should be criminally charged for doing so.” People who are performing a health service are now somehow criminals, but not by civil law, by Santorum’s version of “higher law”, to which we must conform. 

This isn’t the first time the religious right has tried to use pseudo-science to back their fundamentalist viewpoints. Lets take a quick example about the environment. Santorum’s view on the environment is as such: “we were put on this earth as creatures of god to have dominion over the earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not the earths benefit.” It logically follows that Santorum doesn’t believe in global warming. But this quote illustrates a complete misunderstanding of the interconnected nature of the global system; that what it is in the earths benefit is in fact in our benefit. The healthier our environment, the healthier we will be. Environmental issues usually go in one ear and out the other for many religious fundamentalists. My own brother even said in light on environmental problems, “What does it matter anyway? Jesus is going to come down and fix everything anyway.” This abnegates all human responsibility in caring for our planet and our finite resources. I wouldn’t count on Santorum as acting in the interest of any environmental concern. And why? Because of his religious “values”. 

Santorum's Religious Fundamentalism Part 1

I would like to devote the next few posts to GOP Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum, as he is now a contender for being the GOP front-runner. There are many things that trouble me about Santorum. His social policies on homosexuality, contraceptives, abortion and sexuality should all be extremely troubling to anyone who is not a religious zealot. Speaking of religion, his views on religion are especially problematic as they infuse his positions on social policies ranging from marriage to the environment. Here are a few of his positions:

In the realm of religion and worldview, he has said that Obama’s worldview is a “phony theology,” that its “not an ideology based on the Bible.” This is very concerning statement for many reasons, the first being its arrogant exculsivist attitude. For those not familiar with the term exclusivist, allow me to briefly introduce the idea. Exclusivism is the attitude that “my community, [my nation], my tradition and set of values, are the only correct ones, excluding all others” (Grazer, 1999). This unfortunately is the most common perspective amongst fundamentalists and extremists. My way is the true way and all others are false. This attitude of course brings all sorts of other issues such as truth claims, but I’ll speak about it more in another post. For these purposes, it is sufficient to say that Santorum believes that any ideology not based on the Bible is thus somehow inferior, invalid or false, as it is not wanted in the public sphere. This naturally creates an issue, as this view is not only dangerous for other people of faith, it’s a view that is also un-American. Santorum has said,

“I’ve taken the position that the moral values reflected in the laws should be the moral values that built this country. Which is the Judeo-Christian values, and the laws should try as much as possible to comport with a higher law.”

This quote illustrates a few things. First, that there is a higher law, in this case, Judeo-Christian law, and second that those arbitrary, dangerous, and exclusivist laws should be the basis of our laws and public policy. (Also extremely un-American.)

He has also said, “No other country in the world has its rights based in god-given rights, not government given rights…if rights come from the state everything government gives you it can take away. The role of the government is to protect rights that cannot be taken away.” This is a juicy quote. First it embodies an American exceptionalism that I have little patience for. There are plenty of countries that base their laws and public policy on God and those countries tend to be Muslim.

But Santorum says there is a difference, although he doesn’t really elaborate it: “Unlike Islam where the higher law and civil law is the same. In our case we have civil laws, but our civil laws have to comport with the higher law. As long as abortion is legal, at least according to the Supreme Court, in this country, we will never have rest. Because that law does not comport with god’s law which says…that all life has value. [Because God said] ‘I knew you in the womb’”. So what’s the difference? We cannot allow abortion because it is against God’s law. First of all, it is the pure embodiment of arrogance to say that you know what God’s law is, as there are millions of religious people worldwide that have a different idea of what God’s law is. Second of all, that shows no difference whatsoever between civil law and “higher law”. Civil law, in this case, and in the cases of homosexuality, contraceptives and marriage must conform to his own fundamentalist and exclusivist interpretation of what this higher law states. Going back to the first quote of this paragraph, our rights are in fact outlined in our government. And yes, the government does not always protect these rights as exampled by cases with slavery, race, the equality of women, and state sanctioned discriminations of every kind. But these laws change and adapt, as they must to suit the ever-evolving moral zeitgeist. All rights can be taken away. The role of government is to protect its citizens, to protect the rights that protect its citizens. Never has there been a time in history when more human rights have been elucidated and protected, all due to modernism and secular ideology. Religion, which has had millennia of dominance in state affairs has never been able to come close to this record of human rights protection, in fact, the modern human rights protections come largely in spite of historical religious dominance.

Santorum says we need to understand who we are as Americans. However, once again, the religious right, championed by Santorum forget to recall the Treaty of Tripoli signed by President John Adams in 1797 that says, “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Religion Does Not Make You Behave

Anyone claiming to act ethically merely for fear of punishment or hope for reward (presumably in the afterlife) is completely bonkers. And they (or you) know it. Kant discusses this very clearly; that any sense of ethical behavior must be based on treating people as ends in themselves, and not as means to an end. Meaning that ethical acts should not have any other motivation than the ethical act itself. They do not seek reward and they are not done out of fear of punishment.

Nonetheless, faith is seen by the majority to be the source of our morality.

In his book, God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens asks, “Where would people be without faith? Would they not abandon themselves to every kind of license and selfishness? Is it not true, as G. K. Chesterton once famously said, that if people cease to believe in god, they do not believe in nothing but in anything” (184)? Hitchens answers by first speaking of a debate between Professor A. J. Ayer and Bishop Butler. In this debate, Ayer asserted that he saw no evidence whatsoever for the existence of any god. Bishop Butler broke in to say, “Then I cannot see why you do not lead a life of unbridled immorality” (185). This is an interesting claim and leads one to wonder, was Bishop Butler suggesting that if he personally did not have his beliefs that he was then choose to live a life of “unbridled immorality”? That his beliefs are somehow the cornerstone of his ethics?

“Faith”, according to Sam Harris, “drives a wedge between ethics and suffering” (168). A rational approach to ethics, he says, must come about questions about the happiness and suffering of sentient beings. With these concepts as our starting point, the vast majority of what people consider moral today is seen to have no bearing on the subject at all. For example, certain actions that cause no suffering whatsoever, religious dogmatists say, are evil and worthy of harsh punishment such as sodomy, homosexuality and smoking pot. Yet in cases of direct suffering and death, the causes of religious dogmatists are seen as being “good” such as withholding funds for family planning in the developing world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders and denying homosexuals their human rights. Even as Obama announced that religiously affiliated programs such as hospitals must provide employees with contraceptives, religious conservatives such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum claim that its an attack on the freedom of religion, an attack on Catholicism and on the first amendment itself. This inversion of priorities, as Harris says, only victimizes people and wastes valuable time and resources that could be spent trying to alleviate the suffering and increase happiness. “It is time”, he says, “we found a more reasonable approach to answering questions of right and wrong” (169). More to come...

Morality Does Not Come From Religion

How many times have you heard the argument that religion is responsible for our morality and ethics? Some people who don’t even identify as religious say that when they have children they will raise them with some aspect of religion or will take them to church in order to instill them with morality that they otherwise would never get. Perhaps in a dialogue between two religious people this is an assumption that is never directly engaged in. However, atheists, secular humanists, scientists and on occasion, non-theists, are thankfully challenging this absurd argument.

I wish to start a series of blogs to address this and tangent issues, such as absolutist truth claims, scriptural infallibility, in-group/out-group dynamics, religion as child abuse and various other human rights issues such as family planning, AIDS and homosexuality. For this blog entry I want to talk briefly about the holy trinity of atheists: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and what they have to say on this subject of religion and morality. Later on I’ll be reading Karen Armstrong and Ken Wilber among others and will be continuously adding to the debate.

We are all familiar with the “scary” parts of scripture in the Old and New Testaments and the Koran. It would be lengthy indeed to list them here. Suffice to say we are all familiar with the fact that these scriptures are full of genocide, murder, xenophobia, rape and misogyny.

Any religious moderate will simply chuckle and say that you have it all backwards. These passages aren’t meant to be taken literally! They are metaphorical, symbolic or allegories. But this statement raises an interesting point. That religious moderates simply pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories, or simply, which ones to ignore. Pick the nice bits and reject the nasty. What’s wrong with this process? Well, for one it simply shows perfectly well, that our sense of morality does not come from scripture. Just ask yourself, what criterion do you use to decide which passages are symbolic and which are literal? You will employ independent criteria divorced from scripture in which to judge which aspects of scripture to take as literal and which as symbolic. But what are these independent criteria? And where do they come from?

In Dawkins book The God Delusion he speaks about a changing or evolving moral zeitgeist or “spirit of the times”. He says, “There seems to be a steadily shifting standard of what is morally acceptable. Donald Rumsfeld, [for example] who sounds so callous and odious today, would have sounded like a bleeding-heart liberal if he had said the same things during WW2” (304). Wildlife conservation, the conservation of the environment and our many, taken for granted, human rights have become adopted values and are similar to the same moral status as was once accorded to keeping the Sabbath and shunning graven images and other various dogmatic morals of the pre-modern era. For example, in the context of first commandment against rival gods, the statement that God is a jealous god is a bit of an understatement. “God’s monumental rage whenever his chosen people flirted with a rival god resembles nothing so much as sexual jealousy of the worst kind, and again it should strike a modern moralist as far from a good role-model material” (Dawkins, 276). To our modern morality it seems to be a rather miniscule sin to have another god than to stone homosexuals, sell your daughters into slavery or offer them for a gang rape. Our attitudes towards slavery, women’s suffrage abnd race have all shifted dramatically, especially in recent times largely due to liberalism, globalization, mass communication and improved technology. Dawkins says, “Religious people don’t think in a biblical way anymore…our morals, whether we are religious or not, come from another source; and that other source, whatever it is, is available to all of us, regardless of religion or lack of it” (289).

Apologists and religious moderates simply can no longer claim that religion provides them with some sort of privileged guide to morality that is unavailable to atheists and secular humanists. Modern morality does not come from scripture. The zeitgeist progression itself is more than enough evidence to disprove the claim that we need God in order to be good, or to decide what is good and what is morally reprehensible. The shift has no connection with religion and more than likely, as history has shown, it happens in spite of religion. More to come...

Religious In-Group/Out-Group Dynamics

I’ve been reading the spectacular Richard Dawkins. Along with Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, his book The God Delusion, is a necessary contribution to the atheist discourse on religion, religious violence and the psychology and philosophy of religion itself.

In chapter 7, The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist, he summarizes a study done by Israeli psychologist George Tamarin, who presented more than a thousand Israeli school children, ages eight to fourteen, the story of the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua:

“Joshua said to the people, ‘Shout; for the LORD has given you the city. And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction…But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go in the treasury of the LORD.’ … Then the utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword…and they burned the city with fire, and all within it, only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.”

Tamarin asked the children a simple moral question: ‘Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?’ They had three choices: A (total approval), B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). Sixty six percent gave total approval and 26 percent total disapproval, with eight percent giving partial approval.

Here are three examples of a typical answer from the total approval (A) group:

1.    In my opinion Joshua and the Sons of Israel acted well, and here are the reasons: God promised them the land, and gave them permission to conquer. If they would not have acted in this manner or killed anyone, then there would be the danger that the Sons of Israel would have assimilated among the Goyim.

2.    In my opinion Joshua was right when he did it, one reason being that God commanded him to exterminate the people so that the tribes of Israel will not be able to assimilate amongst them and leanr their bad ways.

3.    Joshua did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different religion, and when Joshua killed them he wiped their religion from the earth.

The reasoning for the massacre was religious in every case. Surprisingly, some in category C (total disapproval) did so for backhanded religious reasons. For example, one girl, disapproved because in order for Joshua’s to conquer Jericho he had to enter it: “I think it is bad, since the Arabs are impure and if one enters an impure land one will also become impure and share their curse.” Two others disapproved because Joshua destroyed the animals and property rather than keeping some as spoils for the Israelites:

1.    I think Joshua did not act well, as they could have spared the animals for themselves.

2.    I think Joshua did not act well, as he could have left the property of Jericho; if he had not destroyed the property it would have belonged to the Israelites.

These children are young and innocent. These savage views must come from somewhere else such as their parents or the cultural group and context in which they’ve been brought up.

Tamarin ran a fascinating control group. A different group of 168 Israeli children were given the same scenario and text but with some key changes: Joshua’s name was changed to ‘General Lin’ and ‘Israel’ replaced by ‘a Chinese kingdom 3,000 years ago.’ This group yielded entirely opposite results. Only 7 percent approved of General Lin’s behavior, and 75 percent disapproved.

Simply put, when their loyalty to Judaism was removed, the majority of children would agree with the moral judgments of most modern humans. However, it looks drastically different from a religious point of view. Religion made the difference between children condemning genocide and condoning it. And this is its immense power: to divide people and foster historic enmities and hereditary vendettas. More to come...