talal asad

Folowing a pointer from Musings here is an interview with Talal Asad on Modernity and Religion.

It seems that you are using the term tradition differently here than it is commonly understood in the humanities and social sciences. Even the idea of “hybrid societies/cultures,” which has gained ascendancy in certain intellectual circles, implies a coexistence of modern and traditional elements without necessarily decentering the normative meaning of these concepts.

Yes, many writers do describe certain societies as hybrids, part modern and part traditional. I don’t agree with them, however. I think that one needs to recognize that when one talks about tradition, one should be talking about, in a sense, a dimension of social life and not a stage of social development. In an important sense, tradition and modernity are not really two mutually exclusive states of a culture or society but different aspects of historicity. Many of the things that are thought of as modern belong to traditions which have their roots in Western history. A changing tradition is often developing rapidly but a tradition nevertheless. When people talk about liberalism as a tradition, they recognize that it is a tradition in which there are possibilities of argument, reformulation, and encounter with other traditions, that there is a possibility of addressing contemporary problems through the liberal tradition. So one thinks of liberalism as a tradition central to modernity. How is it that one has something that is a tradition but that is also central to modernity? Clearly, liberalism is not a mixture of the traditional and the modern. It is a tradition that defines one central aspect of Western modernity. It is no less modern by virtue of being a tradition than anything else is modern. It has its critics, both within the West and outside, but it is perhaps the dominant tradition of political and moral thought and practice. And yet this is not the way in which most social scientists have talked about so-called “traditional” societies/cultures in the non-European world generally, and in the Islamic world in particular. So this is partly what I mean when I say that we must rethink the concept of tradition. In this sense, I think, we can regard the contemporary Islamic revival as consisting of attempts at articulating Islamic traditions that are adequate to the modern condition as experienced in the Muslim world, but also as attempts at formulating encounters with Western as well as Islamic history. This doesn’t mean that they succeed. But at least they try in different ways.

being friendly to yourself

From Godwin Samararatne, Talks on Buddhist Meditation:

I think it is difficult to be friendly to others unless you are friendly to yourself.

For one, its good practice. For another, though its a state of mind, which must be acquired and its easiest to start at home.

“the evolutionary aspects of non-reproducing humans”

standing on E. O. Wilson’s broad shoulders, Brandon Keim wonders if, like the bees and the ants, humans aren’t a eusocial species, with homosexuality being the pinnacle of our other-oriented (ie non-reproducing) evolution:

So with all necessary caveats against reductionism and misappropriation, we can ask: should human societies conceive of themselves in terms of  group-level selection? Have we already developed aspects of eusociality? And — just to make matters really interesting — could non-reproducing humans, such as (most) gays and lesbians, as well as heterosexuals who choose not to have kids, actually be a manifestation of this emergent eusociality?

from wired.

books i’m reading on ethics and emotions

Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds. Looks to be an attempt to apply Chomskyan methods from language analysis to morality with an emphasis on emotions. Lots of Hume and Rawls and criticizing of Kant.

Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. A good philosophical investigation of emotions as ways of assessing the world morally. Too long, but it is easy to pick and choose your chapters once you get through the first four ones with the indispensable theoretical foundation. Proust carries through the entire text as a first-rate thinker on the emotions (he supplied Nussbaum with her book title).

Godwin Samararatne, Talks on Buddhist Meditation. Teaches us to monitor our emotions though meditation and mindfulness, not in order to repress or destroy, but to understand and embrace them. This is ethical method.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. The second half of the first part is largely devoted to a study of the relationship of self and other to expressions of pain. This is not exactly emotions, but the analyses are very easily translated, if any translation is even necessary.

Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme. A grandiose novel written by a frenchman about italians and peppered with comments about how the french and italians differ in their emotional make up. The italians apparently love the book, so Stendhal can’t be that horribly wrong/unfair in his comparisons.

Atheism _is_ a (stealth) religion, after all!

And this time it is not little me but David Sloan Wilson (of Unto Others and Darwin’s Cathedral fame) at the Beyond Belief conference. From the Atheist Ethicist (who is doing, once again, a great job blogging the conference):

In [David] Sloan Wilson’s presentation at Beyond Belief 2, he made the argument that the “new atheism” is a stealth religion. It is a stealth religion because, like all religions, its major proponents and its followers buy into a set of propositions that they hold, not on the basis of evidence, but on the basis of . . . well, something less solid than ‘good science’. Yet, they are not willing to concede the fact that they lack good evidence for their beliefs.

Once we take the concept of stealth religions seriously then we can entertain the prospect that there are belief systems that have nothing to do with God . . . not that particular departure from reality . . . but that depart from reality in other ways.

…

Wilson’s claim now is that the New Atheism, like Objectivism, is another ‘stealth religion’.

More specifically, he is concerned with four propositions that (partially) define the New Atheism.

(1) Is there any scientific evidence for the existence of supernatural agents?

(2) If not, then how can we explain the phenomenon of religion in naturalistic terms?

(3) Are the impacts of religion good or bad on human welfare?

(4) How can we use our understanding of religion to ameliorate its negative effects?

On these issues, what he says about the new atheism is, “

My complaint about the New Atheism is that, in the first place, for all of us the answer to question 1 is a no-brainer, so we don’t need to go on and on about it, and that they just get the answer wrong to the other three questions.

(The rest of the post is a good summary of Wilson’s view that religion is evolutionarily beneficial when viewed from the perspective of group selection. )

Alonzo Fyfe rightly objects in his post that Wilson’s concept of a “stealth religion” is so vague that Wilson himself probably could be accused of it. In effect Wilson is calling a set of unjustified beliefs a religion. The New Atheists (as far as i know) have no (public?) rituals, holy books or other religious paraphernalia.

However, the point of Wilson’s objection is perfectly understandable, and in my opinion, correct: he is calling the New Atheists religious so as to warn them that they are themselves doing exactly what they accuse the religious people of doing (harboring false beliefs). Moreover, what makes Wilson’s claim so egregiously laughable is precisely the same unacceptable reduction that the New Atheists are applying to the old religions: the New Atheists reduce religion to a set of false beliefs, minimizing or disregarding all the positive aspects of the rituals, communities, and even beliefs; Wilson is then simply applying their definition to themselves!

Steven Pinker on environmentalism, vegetarianism and moralizing

 In a NYT’s article about the science of morality, Steven Pinker points out that vegetarianism and environmentalism can sound very moralizing. In fact, what he is pointing out here is probably why many religious people sometimes say that vegetarianism and the ecological movement are religions. Of course, they are not, though they can take on a number of religious or moral aspects and become surrogates for religion.

We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.

towards the end:

And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

Steven Pinker on the science of morality

Steven Pinker has 8 pages of a very good, accessible and, as far as i can tell, rather comprehensive overview of the “new science of the moral sense” over at the NYT. He covers much too much ground for me to summarize here, though his final conclusion is noteworthy: we don’t need to be afraid of the new science. The best morality will only come from getting to know ourselves better as humans. As socrates was fond of saying: know thyself.

Fyfe on Dennett on Religion

Alonzo Fyfe approvingly quotes Dennett at Beyond Belief 2: Enlightenment 2.0 telling the religious how stupid they are (This is Dennett speaking to a religious person):

With all due respect, sir, have you considered the possibility that you have blighted your whole life with a fantasy and are polluting the minds of defenseless children with dangerous nonsense?

the solution Dennett and Fyfe propose is to teach children about ALL religions. Dennett hopes that the children will abandon their own after they find out that its not more likely to be true than any other (Fyfe has other reasons for liking the same solution):

Dennett['s] hope is that, when children are presented with the variety of religions and the fact that each has a set of adherents who say that theirs is true and all others is false, that they will realize there is nothing ‘special’ about any one religion. There is no reason to pick one and say, “This contains the absolute truth,” because “that religion over there” is being defended in exactly the same way.

Dennett is assuming that all religions are more or less alike, all concerned with proffering true statements about the world. Oftentimes he seems to be assuming that all religions look like Christianity and Islam. In fact it is only those two that care much about claiming their religion is absolutely true. Jews and Hindus don’t evangelize because their religions are only meant for people of their ethnic groups.  Buddhists are about as “post modern” about religious belief as you can get. They accept ALL religions as true!

For many religious people, the scientific “truth value” of their beliefs is very much secondary. The primary aspect is the social and personal benefits of their religion. They are glad to smudge their religion’s “truth claims” because they are not important. It makes no sense to say that they have “blighted their whole lives with a fantasy”. The fantasy is only a means to the end of a better life, which is, almost by definition, not “blighted”.

Dennett is making the gigantic mistake of taking the definition of religion that fundamentalist christians and muslims give of their own religions and applying it to all religions. It is no wonder that so very few people recognize themselves in his attacks.

what is left of Kant?

I have stumbled across a most interesting set of mini (blog-post-length) interviews with prominent Kant Scholars about Kant. Three questions were asked:

1. In your opinion, which of Kants ideas have universal value?

2. What, in your opinion, was Kant’s main mistake.

3. Do we understand Kant better than 100 years ago. 

(Note: i’m linking to the Google cache because the actual files are not properly formatted HTML files and don’t display.)

I’ve only made it through the first question. The very best, and at the same time most representative, answer is probably the last, that of Alan Wood:

Allen Wood: Kant’s two most valuable and enduring ideas were these: First, that rational nature in human beings is an end in itself, and the foundation of all value. Even the value of human happiness is grounded on this. Second, that it is important to understand the contribution of our free activity as theorizers to the structure of scientific knowledge. This is the basic correction to empiricism that is needed to prevent empiricist prejudices from distorting our view of science.

christians are often annoying, say some

A new study of people who do not regularly attend church by LifeWay Research, “the research arm of the Southern Baptist Convention,” shows us the following:

• 44% agree with the statement “Christians get on my nerves.”
• 72% agree that the church is “full of hypocrites.”
• 61% say the God of the Bible is “no different from the gods or spiritual beings depicted by world religions such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.,” although Buddhist philosophy has no god and Hindus worship many.
• 79% say “Christianity today is more about organized religion than loving God and loving people.”

Again, these numbers are only percentages of the “unchurched,” not the general population.

from the friendly atheist. I guess those christians need to work on their PR…