On being wrong.

I just heard on NPR's radio show The Moth a story by June Cross. It ends with her recounting being at a Johnny Cash show and hearing "I Walk the Line". And she hears a song about her life of being biracial, and the harsh choices of being either black or white that she was faced with. A song about how she might be able to find her way in the middle of those two choices.

Don't be too scrupulous about being right all the time, sometimes if you listen very carefully, you'll hear what you need to hear, no matter what other people think they mean.

Some questions if you have time.

I'm working on a talk that I'm giving next sunday, if you have time could you answer four questions for me (here or privately)?

What are virtues that are important to you?

What are some things that you wish you did more of?

What are some things you wish you did less of?

What, if anything, inspires you towards these virtues and actions?

"What Morally Anchors Secularists?"

"What Morally Anchors Secularists?"

I heard a similar question asked today on the radio. The commentator, Phil Zuckerman, PhD, did not have a good response queued up, at least not the way that the question was phrased and this post is my response in the vein of "should've said".

Religions, the question presupposes, are moral anchors. Rooted in a history of moral teachings, the great religions offer a center point that is removed if one no longer believes. There are a lot of responses to this about the failures of religion throughout history, and why such institutions are poor places to look for guidance in this day and age. But none of that really gets to the point: we need no such moral anchor.

There is a correlation between religion and morality, I'll grant you. But as we all know correlation does not equal causation, even if it winks and nods at it. The question implies that religion causes morality, and I think one of the things that makes secularism possible is that the opposite is true. Religion is the byproduct of human morality, not the source of it.

Homo sapiens evolved to cooperate. We evolved to tell explanatory stories. We evolved to feel empathy, moral outrage and to have a sense of fairness. Throughout our history we have tried to makes sense of the world around us and how we felt. We created stories that explained these things. Sometimes these stories became the seeds of religions. Our moral sensibilities created religions, not the other way around.

The reason we don't need religion in order to be good is the same reason horses don't need carts to move forward.

Lessons from Feminism for Atheism (A Bob's Burgers Story)

There are very few examples of young women who are clearly focused on in popular media. Teenaged sexuality is largely a taboo subject, but an unflinching view of female puberty? I've seen it twice. Both interestingly in cartoons. Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars: The Clone Wars the other, and more interesting on is Tina Belcher from Bob's Burgers. 

Tina's depiction is unflinching when it comes to the awkward mess that everyone is during puberty. She isn't the object of ridicule, her budding sexuality isn't there to serve as a moral lesson about how bad female sexuality is. She is a (for a cartoon) a very honest presentation of a character who happens to be a crushingly awkward teenager with crushes that don't make sense and feelings she doesn't know what to do with.  

Her presentation is a powerful feminist act, and the show never, ever mentions it. And that fact is the point of this essay. Bob's Burgers is one of the most feminist shows I've ever seen but all of the feminism is implicit, none of it is explicit.  Social criticism has an important place in any struggle, we need people to state the problem and to create a cohesive theory about the dynamics at work. But we need to internalize those statements and theories and act.

So much of what I see of atheism is all social critique and meta-discussion. "Why don't we have a voice?" "Why aren't we treated equally?" But I have to date seen very little action taken as atheists. What would an atheist say? What would an equally treated atheist act like? 

One of the best answers I've seen to these kinds of questions is Sunday Assembly. It is an unapologetic action without any self referential hangups. It's motto is "Live better, help often and wonder more". A perfectly secular sentiment, but without the shrill handwaving that would drive away everyone but the choir. But is an honest presentation of what a secular community would value. It humanizes it's members by engaging them at the level of what people need out of a community.

Recently the President of the Boston Chapter of Sunday Assembly asked me, as I'm on the Board of Trustee's, to think of "categories of services that a person might need (counseling, addiction recovery) etc. that could potentially come in a secular variety." And it made me think of writing this essay. It is very challenging for me to make the transition from thinking about the nature of the problem to thinking about acting past the problem. Sunday Assembly should provide the services that its congregants need in a secular way. We would do well to internalize our values and act on them, irrespective of the struggle for equal footing with religions. 

There are Two Edens

We have two Edens, neither exist.

The first Eden is the obvious one, the low hanging fruit of hedonism one. Where you only eat cake, have sex all the time and are drunk everyday. (or whatever your preferences are) Everyone can describe this place all you have to do is ask them "What would you do, if you could do anything without consequences?"

The other Eden is more complicated to describe. It is the lifestyle that would optimize your physical and psychological health. It is the world where you slept just enough, ate exactly what your body needed, spent enough time connected with loved ones. You'd wake up happy, healthy, body buzzing with natural endorphin's. A perfect balance of stress and relaxation, fulfilling activities during the day. But all the simple pleasures in the first one would be denied you.

Look at how different these two places are. One is easily described by anyone in an instant, the other would be a matter of some great debate among all kinds of health professionals. Not to mention all the spiritual and psychological opinions you could collect on the subject on the perfect life balance and proper kinds of relationships. But there is in principle an accurate description of that second Eden. Its just that we don't know what it would be like, or how to get there.

Furthermore both are impossible in their own ways. The simple Eden leads to immediate trouble. Embracing your Id's demands like that would be a disaster. You'd all but instantly have ruined health and relationships, even in a magical world where you could do anything you wanted the physical and emotional reality would crush you. And the enlightened Eden would be ruined by the constant temptation of small deviations from the ideal. Surely one drink, or beer couldn't pull you away from the idea, but that you could not longer stay up late or eat badly would drive you crazy.

But consider the purpose of each ideal, from an evolutionary perspective. The easy Eden is a collection of drives and desires that is available to introspection. This collection of instincts got us from our evolutionary home to where we are now. There is a context in which these desires mesh with our ideal state. The second Eden isn't knowable to each person, because it wouldn't have been necessary to our forebears. In a world with no technology, processed food and mass media, all those desires that we currently count as unhealthy, or prurient, or sinful, would have lead (and in fact did lead) to evolutionary success.

Your Id isn't an insane force for destruction, it is a compass on the wrong map. These two Edens were the same place in our evolutionary past, it is only the contemporary context that has split them. We still have the drives and instincts that made sense 40,000 years ago.

The story that we are fallen and sinful is a destructive and misleading myth. We are not bad, or weak or morally corrupted, we simply are no longer where we grew up. Cut yourself some slack and know that you are not mislead by some inner darkness, but guided by instincts that are out of date.

The Map is not the Land

The map is not the land.
The perception is not the object.
The belief is not the truth.
The instructions are not the actions.
The advice is not the attitude.
What could God tell you, if he could.

the difference between skills and virtues

Re: http://www.wbur.org/npr/290089998/does-teaching-kids-to-get-gritty-help-them-get-ahead

One way to encapsulate the ancient Greek idea of a virtuous man is someone who wants to do what is right. And a skill is know how, having the ability to perform a task. I've heard a lot of discussion in the last couple of years (months?) about teaching people more than just know how. "Soft skills" is one heading for these "non-cognitive" skills. And I have been thinking that at least the reporting is missing a clear distinction that would help make this new category of teaching make more sense.

The "soft skills" are things like being on time, self presentation and certain interpersonal skills. This morning we heard all about grit, and its importance. The thing that makes grit something other than a traditional skill is it contains an idea of what is right and what to expect for doing it. It is a virtue in the ancient Greek sense.

The whole idea of determination is that if you stay on a problem and don't quit then you will succeed. And a kid who has grit will not only be able to stick to a problem, they will want to. They will have the virtue of determination. But everyone knows how to be determined, you just don't quit, but how do you teach someone to want to be gritty? By teaching them that they can expect a pay off for it.

Staying with a problem can be painful, boring and embarrassing. You fail and fail and fail; there has to be at least the expectation of a light at the end of the tunnel otherwise quitting is the thing to do. And the way to build that expectation is by repeated experience. Repeated experience is how the brain builds up expectations, if you are shown a reward for persistence enough times you will find persistence rewarding.

That's not a skill, its not a know how, it's wanting to do what's right. What we are talking about with these non-cognitive skills are affective-skills. Teaching kids to enjoy the adaptive behavior so that they want to do the right thing. You can't just explain it, you have to instill it, and the method for that is operant conditioning.

Operant conditioning is changing animals behavior by controlling the outcomes of actions, rewarding or failing to reward behavior. Rewarded behavior is strengthened and unrewarded behavior is weakened. Its how you teach your dog to sit or roll over and it works with every animal on the planet. We need to reward what we value, to reward what will be valuable. And if we do then our children will become virtuous through wanting to do what they should do.

post adolescence

As one grows up and develops an identity it is frequently enough to fight against things. To define one as not like your parents, not like what the school officials want. But as one gets older more is demanded, more is required. A positive position on subjects becomes necessary to function in the world. Thirty year olds calling home to tell mom that they went out drinking and there is nothing she can do about it rather misses the point of being an adult.

This is how I feel about much of atheism at the moment. So what that religion is wrong and probably so? So what that you can not believe and still function as a real human being? What now folks; what now?

We can do and believe anything we want for any reason we want. So what are we going to do?

Lets talk about who's being responsible, not who's right

I think that talking about the value of different epistemological preferences in terms of civic responsibility is the way to go. Let us forget for the moment who is right and who is wrong about the resurrection of Christ, I frankly don't care to have that conversation ever again. Lets talk about who's a responsible voter and who isn't.

Are your methods for evaluating who you vote for any damn good? Do you know why you believe the things you do? Do you know why the authorities you trust say the things they do? These are much more actionable questions that might even be more tolerable to hear from an opponent.

An unusual valentines day gift

There are several problems the the idea of monogamy as it stands in our culture. Not least of which is the needless suffering its supremacy causes. It is widely believed (assumed?) that monogamy is a precondition of a stable long term romantic relationship. This belief stands on nothing other than tradition and traditions typical allies. To this unsupported ideal we sacrifice many things; all needlessly, passionately and wrongly.

The most obvious and damning complaint about monogamy is that it basically never happens. It doesn't happen in human marriages, it doesn't happen in animals that bond for life, it happens very rarely. And it fails to make pragmatic sense to hold people to a standard that is itself the exception. It would be like calling death before the age of 85 a moral failing and people who didn't make should be shunned. Such a move would add a layer of guilt and recrimination to funerals of people who merely succumbed to their biology.

The second issue with the universal permanent demand for monogamy is how cruel and selfish it is. We all want to sleep around to one extent or another, and done properly and responsibly the occasional dalliance is incredibly enjoyable. And to deny those pleasures to your partner purely out of a combination of ill founded insecurity and unfounded tradition seems to me to be the antithesis of caring about one's partner.

There is more to fidelity than exclusivity. Caring about and staying true to your partner includes caring about their sexual pleasure, which can not be totally satisfied by a single person for the rest of you life (or until the divorce). Both parties in a relationship are going to want to stray from time to time and forming a mutually assured destruction pact about that fact, not only causes a lot of heartache and misplaced blame; but it doesn't even get the mutual exclusivity that we are told that it will. Chances are you're either going to get dumped or cheated on anyway. So why can't we be adults about it and pull the gun away from the head of our relationships? Why can't we discuss what we want and negotiate a new solution to the problems of sex in an overcrowded culture. It can be done, it's not always fun and it's not without its risks, but we must admit that the status quo for monogamous relationships is a dreadful sham.

So on this Valentines Day, think about giving your partner an unusual gift, novelty.

Against Sin

Why are we obsessed with food?    
   Because our survival depends on it.
Why are we obsessed with violence?
   Because our survival can depend on it.
Why are we obsessed with sex?        
   Because the survival of our species depends on it.

Self Calibration

When I was a kid I had a strange temper. I would flare up in a rage quickly only to return back to normal shortly after. It would happen in the face of frustration, or when I was hungry. But the thoughts of anger would be clear, well articulated in my mind. And those angry thoughts would seem totally unbelievable in the clear light of post meal blood sugar. This can only go on so long before you start to take your own thoughts with a gain of salt. I learned early that my anger could not be trusted, which lead to an internal critical eye.

Ever since I've watched out for trends and common mistakes. I kept track of when my instincts would lead me astray and when they proved to be insights even when I had little or no support for their conclusions. I have a short list of things that I'm usually wrong about and usually right about. (all of these are subject to confirmation bias just like everything else, but there is only so much you can do)

There is an assumption in folk psychology that introspection is infallible. This isn't talked about or believed in any formal way, its just that people tend to think that when they think something about themselves they are right. While this is more or less an OK way to live out your day to day existence, it is important to remember that this is not true. You can be wrong about yourself and your feelings. If you've ever tried to quit something you know this to be true.

When I quit smoking what finally made quitting possible was when I realized that the voice in my head saying I wanted another cigarette wasn't, properly speaking, me. It was the part of me that was hooked on nicotine and needed to be refuted, ignored, and ultimately forced to shut up.

What I recommend is that you look back at your life and check for patterns of errors in judgement and keep track. If you have a list of mistakes you are likely to make that you have at hand, you are less likely to make them. A thermometer that reads 10 degrees too hot in the sun isn't useless, you just need to remember to subtract 10 when its in the sun.

What is religion and is there any part of it we still need?

When I think about the role of religion in our lives I think about three things. Our evolved cognitive abilities that are effectively static; what I will call our "intuition". Our cognitive abilities that are malleable, upgradeable and learned; or our "rationality". And lastly our environment, past and present.

When belief, argument, logic and storytelling were invented by nature they were there to support and augment instinct, emotion, and reflex. Lets call these two categories of mental tools I just mentioned "rationality" and "intuition". Our intuition was built to guide us in our original environment, not the one we has since created.

When we started to alter our environment radically, as we did with agriculture, our environment and our intuition started to fall out of synch. What we want to do at our basest level, is what would be good for us in the environment that evolved in(1). But as we got further and further away from the stimuli and behavioral choices and outcomes that we grew up with, we needed more and more cultural support to keep our behavior in line with our environment.

Eventually some of our base instincts came to be seen as evil impulses that needed to be controlled. But these instincts were just the instincts that no longer had good outcomes. Our inborn attitudes toward the four F's (food, fighting, fleeing and mating) are the most critical, the most resistant to change. But because we moved into villages, towns and finally cities, our base instincts became increasingly problematic as our environment was increasingly altered.

I don't know what exactly our unalterable instincts are, what our original evolutionary context was, but all I need to point out here is that our intuition (our original guide to successful behavior) is too slow to alter and couldn't keep up with the changes that we made to our surroundings. And so we put to use our rational capacities to figure out how to make sense of a world in which what we wanted led to disaster and what we loathed lead to success.

What we needed then was a set of cultural technologies (2) that would get us to behave in successful ways for the situation we were in. But in the same way that brains aren't truth machines, religions are not cosmology describers. Religions were a sort of instinct prosthesis, a guide to behavior that could be altered faster than the speed of evolution.

And it was the best technological solution to the problem that we had that was available. It kept our behavior adaptive in a world that had changed radically. But in this role religion must remain somehow empirical to stay useful. And for a long time what kept this more or less true was multidimensional. 1) the culture and technological innovation wasn't all that fast 2) the church used its power to actively dissuade change 3) the church used changes in interpretation to change what the religion meant to keep up with what changes did happen.

What has really damaged religion in the last ~200 years is that it wasn't agile enough to cope with the explosion of technological and cultural changes that have happened in that time. Religion really has failed us in the last couple of hundred years, but one of the roles that it was supposed to serve, that of instinctual prosthesis is still necessary. We are still apes with shoes, assault rifles and the instincts that nature imbued us with before we invented the ax.

Since religion has lost its adaptive edge (either the enlightenment or the modernist period, I'm honesty not sure which) the fight has been against the institution of religion. And not for no reason, the church has many problems and a lot of cultural power to cause those problems. But what that fight has ignored more often than not is that there is both baby and bathwater.

But the question is now posed, what can we use to help ourselves out? We are out of our element from and evopsych perspective and the tool that we built (religion) isn't up to the task anymore. God is dead, now what?

Basically what I am saying is that we needed religion to survive the agricultural revolution and we need something better to survive the industrial.

(1) I am being deliberately nondeterministic here, I don't feel like we know for sure what that environment was.
(2) technology includes techniques as well as objects

European versus American faith

It is well documented that the USA is much more religious than europe and there has been a lot of discussion about why that is. The best theory I've heard to date is that because european countries are homogeneous with state sponsored churches, there is no competition and therefore no advertising or effort to keep people interested. The churches don't need fanatic supporters, they have state backing and no competition.

But I have always thought of religions as serving as the format of the relationship between the believer and the universe he finds himself in. And perhaps the reason that the USA is more religious is because our government doesn't take as good care of us as the european countries. In scandinavia you don't need to worry about as much because there is a real social safety net supplied by the government. But here in the states if you don't have money or family with money, you are out on the street. There is real anxiety and insecurity that needs to be both emotionally and fiscally compensated for.

Maybe europe is less religious because they have less public anxiety.

Consumerism is the new religion

For most of religion's history one of its primary uses was to keep the exploited masses from rising up against their oppressors. By and large this was done by telling a story about how if you are a good little boy or girl in your oppression then you will get your reward "later". Another tact was that you had already done something that put you in the miserable exploited position you were born into.

So what's the story these days? The story is that if you aren't happy then you need more stuff, and if you can't afford more stuff then it's your fault for being lazy. People will look back at this era with the same distain that we have for the caste system. Its not as totalitarian, and it has more outs, but consumer driven capitalism has many of the same oppressive mechanisms that religion has always had.

Don't believe everything you think.

Seriously, your brain can't be trusted like that.

The brain is not an organ for discovering the truth; it is a control mechanism that should contribute to the evolutionary success of the creature of which it is a part. And what's worse is that it was designed for a very different environment. Our brain still reacts to food as if it was limited and danger as if it was deadly and close at hand.

Be careful out there, everything is super complicated.

The Myth of Freewill

One of the problems with how we imagine free will is that we see as a pure representation of our best selves. We see it as the free will that angels would have. But our sorry lot is not angels, but apes. And apes are not pure.

I don't mean this to be a moral judgment (although it might be). I mean that we are not blank slates even as newborns. And we certainly are not blank as adults.

The ultimate freedom would be omnipotence, the ability to do literally anything. And I think that if you gave that to every person on earth one at a time 90% of the first acquisitions would have to do with food, sleep, freedom from pain, or sex (my guess is in that order).

The reason that I mention this is that there is a quote, that as of printing I could not source, "freedom is not just freedom from." And this is my blank slate comment, given the change to do anything, anything at all, how many people would start with world peace and how many would start with a good meal and a nap?

We are apes, and not at our best when we can do whatever we want whenever we want. Our self restraint has real limits and our desires, well less so. Imagine what would happen if you had a magic power where you could create a limitless supply of your favorite snack when ever you wanted. Just BAMF! Double Stuf! Any time of day or night. You would be free not to eat them, not to summon them, but seriously who on earth could avoid gaining a couple of pounds?

If more power and more choice leads to a certain outcome in all people then freedom doesn't always lead to free choice. And if that's true then we need to internalize this limitation into our self understanding. Cut your neighbors and friends (and yourselves) some slack.

Step One in the grand plan to unmarginalize Atheism

Stop be dicks about everything.

Seriously, even if we were as right as some of us act being magnanimous about it would get us farther than winning the argument. And let's not fight the battles we can't win. Nobody is changing the pledge anytime soon. And the treasury isn't taking God off the money, so let drop it for now. We have important issues at hand, like climate change, sex ed., and drug policy.

What does godless mean anyway?

A candidate for a Massachusetts Senate seat recently added “godless” to the adjectives “horrific” and “cowardly” to describe the bombings of the Boston Marathon. I find it unbelievable that he used this adjective deliberately to say anything about nontheistic Americans. People don’t think like that. But I think it is important to understand why godless might seem like an appropriate word to use. Word usage and implicit meaning develop over time for reasons that are frankly very difficult to track down, but here is the history I find relevant to this word used in this way.

We as a nation added “under god” and similar phrases as an anti-Soviet propaganda move some 60 years ago. It was a toxic bit of international tribalism that was supposed to help U.S. citizens know who was on whose side. An unfortunate aspect of this kind of propaganda is that it creates a dehumanizing us-vs-them dynamic. That is bad enough in war times against the enemy, but this little Cold War gem doesn't divide so clearly.

Many of the things that the soviets were known for remain the hallmark of evil in our politics. The traumatic effects of the Cold War have left our national psyche with a handful of "triggers" that have long since disconnected from their references.

No one seems to remember why socialism is bad or, if we're honest, what it is. But it has been coded as the bad opposite of capitalism for so long that within our public discourse capitalism is in the same category as apple pie, mom, baseball and Christianity; while socialism is lumped in with dictatorship, gulags, and Atheism.

Ever since the Cold War “godlessness” has been just another word for Un-American. And because the faithless (atheists, agnostics, humanists, etc.) are not widely known or acknowledged, using this old bit of cold war tribalism still makes sense in some people’s heads. David Niose has made the point that we need to use similar identity politics to those used by the Gay Rights Movement to make the rest of the country realize that being something other than a Christian is something that a lot of good, non-cowardly non-horrific already are. And I agree with him.

Come out of the closet, mention your beliefs once in a while. Let this country know that good people like yourselves are not theists. Let them see that it is possible and indeed common that good people think differently about the world. It will do them and us a world of good.

On why we couldn't have been invited to the Boston Marathon interfaith service

This week a secular event in a very secular city was visited by a terrible human tragedy. And in response to this nationally significant event a service was coordinated; a service where the representatives of many different belief systems would be given the chance to speak to their own people and on behalf of their perspective. At this service the non-theistic perspective was not given voice. And I think it is our responsibility to fix what made this outcome inevitable.

It should be noted that the representatives of the secular perspective did every bit of outreach they could have to get us a seat at the table. I know personally several of the people who worked on this and there is no additional amount of leg work that could have made a difference. What we (as non-theists) needed was to have had different relationship with the country at large. And there are two things that I think we need in place for next time.

First we need to have a creed that outsiders can understand. I mean creed here like mission statement, not an object of faith. We need a few sentences that sound nice that can be “what we are about”. These few sentences would be public relations and not gospel. It would be important to get them right, to have them be something that we feel comfortable supporting, but not something that needed to be perfect. It would serve as the greeting card from atheism to the country; something to help us introducing ourselves to people who still just think that we are satanic communists.

Secondly we need representatives. We need people that our community has endorsed, who speak for us and to us in times of tragedy and celebration.  Again we can’t wait for the perfect person who everyone got along with about everything, but someone to say what many of us are thinking, so that we can feel that we are heard. These representatives would not be telling the world what we as individuals think, we the represented would not be obliged to agree with, believe, or follow what is said. But like having a politician you voted for speak, they would be our stand in for the public conversation.

Having such a public persona and publicly understood mission statement would have made our representation at the upcoming interfaith service possible.  Without establishing our public presence in a “day in day out” way, any time we want to be included is going to look like a shocking introduction that will make our inclusion about us “suddenly” being included. We need to be talked about as just another identity of Americans in an ongoing basis so that people get used to us being out and proud. And having a recognizable secular persona who isn’t known for confrontation would make that person’s inclusion in an interfaith service make sense. Someone needs to be out there talking about our community’s perspective in a way that gives us voice without making us look like bomb throwers. Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris are great and have done great things for the Atheist position, but I’m not sure they have done much good for the atheist community. We have enough debaters; I think we need a communicator.

So what I am suggesting here is that we start to put ourselves forward in a positive way. I am not saying that we forcibly retire Dawkins, or cease to criticize where criticism is necessary. Just that we also start to engage with the majority of our country, which is religious. Religions and religious people are here to stay, but so are we. And when tragedy strikes, it would help if we were already seen as the important part of the American fabric that we already are.

Josiah van Vliet
President Boston Atheists