Being Good

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There’s tons to blog about and now I’m a day behind. Let’s start off with a Sunday morning religion post.

There’s an outstanding column in today’s Boston Globe by Sam Harris, titled “Bad reasons to be good.” Harris argues against the common idea that religion is the best arbiter of morality. Harris is an atheist who seems to have made a project out of exposing the shams and inconsistencies of religion. This should keep him busy.

Most Americans appear to believe that without faith in God, we would have no durable reasons to treat one another well. … The problem, however, is that much of what people believe in the name of religion is intrinsically divisive, unreasonable, and incompatible with genuine morality. The truth is that the only rational basis for morality is a concern for the happiness and suffering of other conscious beings. This emphasis on the happiness and suffering of others explains why we don’t have moral obligations toward rocks. It also explains why (generally speaking) people deserve greater moral concern than animals, and why certain animals concern us more than others. If we show more sensitivity to the experience of chimpanzees than to the experience of crickets, we do so because there is a relationship between the size and complexity of a creature’s brain and its experience of the world.

I’ve long believed that good socialization, not religious belief, is the real key to moral and ethical behavior. Emotionally healthy and well-socialized people, religious or not, nearly always treat other sentient beings decently. Sociopaths can quote the Bible all day long and still get their kicks out of bashing bunnies.

The bare-assed fact is that human history and everyday life are overflowing with empirical evidence that “religion” and “morality” don’t always hang out in the same ball park. Yet unthinking people (which is most of ’em, alas) continue to believe that religion is somehow a necessary prerequisite for morality.

Unfortunately, religion tends to separate questions of morality from the living reality of human and animal suffering. Consequently, religious people often devote immense energy to so-called “moral” questions — such as gay marriage — where no real suffering is at issue, and they will inflict terrible suffering in the service of their religious beliefs.

Under some circumstances our marriage laws may inflict real suffering on gay couples, but let’s put that aside for the moment. There is no better example of what Harris talks about that the embryonic stem cell controversy. To my mind, anyone who puts a higher moral value on saving frozen blastocysts than on alleviating suffering and disease is self-evidently screwy. Yet in our current sick culture the Screwjobs are respected for their “values,” and the rest of us are told we’d better straighten out or no one will like us.

I suspect a great many people have a gut-level queasiness with this view of morality, but they haven’t found a way to drag this queasiness into their heads to think about it and explain it. Language and logic seem to fail us. If killing is “bad,” then killing a blastocyst is “bad,” we are told. Is that not logical?

The “logic” of morality fails the “values” side, too, sometimes. The famous “rape and incest” exemption to abortion bans comes to mind. Logically, if abortion is murder, then it’s murder no matter how the conception took place. Yet many who oppose abortion can’t bring themselves to take that last, logical step and extend the ban to rape and incest victims. Some twinge of sympathy for the victimized women holds them back. To anti-abortion rights purists, on the other hand, that sympathy is moral weakness; the righteous must harden their hearts and stick to logic.

Perhaps you see the problem.

The purists painted themselves into a “logical” corner with Terri Schiavo, IMO, because too many of us these days have personal experience with making end-of-life decisions for loved ones. And most of us know in our hearts and guts that, sometimes, it’s selfish to cling, and loving to let go. The Schiavo episode revealed the “values” tribe to be a small, hysterical minority.

Harris continues,

But the worst problem with religious morality is that it often causes good people to act immorally, even while they attempt to alleviate the suffering of others. In Africa, for instance, certain Christians preach against condom use in villages where AIDS is epidemic, and where the only information about condoms comes from the ministry. They also preach the necessity of believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ in places where religious conflict between Christians and Muslims has led to the deaths of millions. Secular volunteers don’t spread ignorance and death in this way. A person need not be evil to preach against condom use in a village decimated by AIDS; he or she need only believe a specific faith-based moral dogma. In such cases we can see that religion can cause good people to do fewer good deeds than they might otherwise.

Last year a “creationist” testifying in the Dover evolution trial perjured himself by lying about using church money to buy “creationist” books for the public schools. A “Christian” organization called the Alliance Defense Fund routinely fabricates lies — such as the claim a California school banned the Declaration of Independence because it mentions a “Creator” — as part of its crusade to break down the separation of church and state. ADF and the perjured creationist have, apparently, decided that lies are OK if they help spread the Gospel (and they call us “moral relativists”).

Last July I wrote a three-part series explaining why the purists are wrong on the embryonic stem cell question; here is Part I, Part II, and Part III. Parts II and III in particular focus on the disinformation about stem cell research being spread by the purists to defend their “logical” opinion. I wrote,

The fact is, opponents of stem cell research routinely lie — to themselves, to each other, to anyone who will listen — in order to defend their belief that embryonic stem cell research is immoral. This suggests to me that the real reasons people object to stem cell research have less to do with moral principle than with some deeply submerged but potent fear. And this takes us back to elective ignorance. Something about flushing all those blastocysts makes the Fetus People uncomfortable in a way that condemning Henry Strongin to death does not. The arguments they make against stem cell research, which are mostly a pile of lies and distortions, are not the reasons they are opposed to stem cell research. They are the rationalizations created to justify their opposition.

I’m hypothesizing here, but everything about the “logical” morality of the purists seems ass-backward to me. Very often their “logical” arguments seem post hoc, and assembled to provide a pretty cover for opinions that actually were dredged out of the murky depths of their ids. The fact that most of their “moral” causes involve sex and death seems to be a clue.

And the problem with their “logic” is that it is based on assumptions about matters like life, death, beingness, selfness, etc. that are rigid and narrow and make no sense to me. As I argued here, if you change the assumptions the “logic” falls apart.

Sam Harris is arguing for a secular morality — fine with me — but throughout the ages many religious people also have expressed the view that true morality — “goodness,” if you will — is based on compassion. This is central to Buddhism, which teaches that the two eyes of enlightenment are wisdom and compassion. And, ultimately, wisdom and compassion depend on each other, because true compassion (metta) arises from the wisdom that all beings are One, and true wisdom arises from the desire to realize enlightenment (bodhi) to benefit others (bodhicitta). The actions of a genuinely wise and compassionate person will always be moral.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 comes to mind also —

If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.

The word for love used in the original Greek text is agape, which I’ve been told meant something like “affection” or “concern for others” before Christian scholars got hold of it.

And, of course, several of the Heavy Hitters of Religion — Rabbi Hillel the Elder and Confucius, for example — independently came up with the Golden Rule. Although seems to me a truly compassionate person follows the Golden Rule without having to think about it as a rule.

As it says in the Tao Teh Ching —

      1. Thus, when the Way is lost there is virtue
      2. When virtue is lost there is humaneness
      3. When humaneness is lost there is rightness
      And when rightness is lost there is propriety.

    (Verse 38, Charles Miller translation)

    I guess if you’ve lost propriety, the final fallback position is “logic.”

    Update: Dinesh D’Souza is “logical.”

Why I’m Not Famous

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I’m no good at self-promotion. Truly, I am. I always feel as if I’m missing out on opportunities somewhere just because I have no clue how the self-promotion thing is done.

Anyway, the article linked shows us why politics talk shows are so stupid. You don’t have to know squat to be a pundit; you just have to be a camera hog willing to say anything to cause a stir.

Update: Speaking of punditry — this is the funniest damn thing I’ve seen in, like, forever. Hat tip to Crooks & Liars.

Bush Hides Behind China’s Skirts

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Apparently China laid down the law to Kim Jong Il:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il expressed regret about his country’s nuclear test to a Chinese delegation and said Pyongyang would return to international nuclear talks if Washington backs off a campaign to financially isolate the country, a South Korean newspaper reported Friday.

“If the U.S. makes a concession to some degree, we will also make a concession to some degree, whether it be bilateral talks or six-party talks,” Kim was quoted as telling a Chinese envoy, the mass- circulation Chosun Ilbo reported, citing a diplomatic source in China.

Kim told the Chinese delegation that “he is sorry about the nuclear test,” the newspaper reported.

The delegation led by State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan met Kim on Thursday and returned to Beijing later that day _ ahead of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s arrival in the Chinese capital Friday.

We should send China a thank-you card for pulling our ass out of the fire, I suppose. Now if Condi doesn’t blow it too badly, maybe North Korea’s Dear Leader will settle down for a spell.

Naturally, rightie bloggers are crediting our Dear Leader for the apology. This poor schmuck actually titles his blog post ” Cowboy Bush Forced Apology Out Of Kim Jong-Il, WITHOUT Bilateral Talks?”

No, dear, China forced an apology out of Kim Jong Il with bilateral talks. Bilateral talks between China and North Korea.

Please understand that it’s a relief to me that Bush is being a weenie and allowing China to take the lead in handling Kim Jung Il. I trust China more than I trust Bush not to do anything really stupid. But ultimately it’s not in China’s interest to depose Kim Jung Il or allow Korean reunification. So if we want the interests of the United States to be addressed, the United States has to be the one to bring them to the table.

But once again we see that Bush doesn’t sound so tough when the enemy might hit back. As Dan Froomkin noted yesterday, the cowboy is, um, gone.

Kim Jong Il is the only leader of a nuclear weapons state who might conceivably consider it in his interests to sell a nuclear bomb to Osama bin Laden.

So forget for a moment how we got here. Put aside partisan politics. Wouldn’t this be a good moment for the American president to draw a very distinct line in the sand?

Wouldn’t it be appropriate for him to make clear to the North Koreans that if they do any such thing, they will suffer cataclysmic consequences? Wouldn’t this be a good time for some of that famous cowboy talk?

Not this time.

Last night, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos aggressively questioned Bush on that issue. Here are some video excerpts.

Bush seemed appropriately stern, promising that North Korea would be “held to account” for any transfer of nuclear weapons, and would suffer “grave consequence[s].”

But then he seriously undermined his own rhetoric by likening those consequences to the sanctions recently imposed against North Korea — sanctions whose implementation, not to mention effectiveness, are very much in question.

Said Bush: “I want the leader to understand, the leader of North Korea to understand that he’ll be held to account. Just like he’s being held to account now for having run a test.” …

… [C]ould it be that Bush knows he’s not prepared to do what needs to be done?

Here’s part of the transcript Froomkin provided:

Stephanopoulos: “Last week, after their first test, you went into the White House and you said that any transfer of nuclear material by North Korea would be considered a grave threat to the security of the United States. I went back and checked, you’ve used that phrase once before in your presidency about Iraq. So, are you saying then if North Korea sold nukes to Iran or al Qaeda. . . . ”

Bush: “They’d be held to account.”

Stephanopoulos: “What does that mean?”

Bush: “Well, at the time they find out, George, one of the things that’s important for these world leaders is to hear is, you know, we use means necessary to hold them to account.”

Stephanopoulos: “So if you got intelligence that they were about to have that kind of a transfer. . . . ”

Bush: “Well, if they get – if we get intelligence that they’re about to transfer a nuclear weapon, we would stop the transfer and we would deal with the ships that were taking the – or the airplane that was dealing with or taking the material to somebody.”

Stephanopoulos: “And if it happened, you’d retaliate.”

Bush: “You know, I’d just say it’s a grave consequence.”

Stephanopoulos: “And that’s about as serious as it can get.”

Bush: “Well, my point is, is that I want the leader to understand, the leader of North Korea to understand that he’ll be held to account. Just like he’s being held to account now for having run a test.”

Jeebus, what a weenie.

Just as a reminder of what a real leader sounds like, here is JFK’s address to the American people regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis. Snips:

Our policy has been one of patience and restraint, as befits a peaceful and powerful nation which leads a worldwide alliance. We have been determined not to be diverted from our central concerns by mere irritants and fanatics. But now further action is required, and it is under way; and these actions may only be the beginning. We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth; but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced. …

… It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

Bush has been downright wobbly in dealing with nasty foreign people lately. You might remember the G8 Summit dinner last July in which the President was caught by an open microphone —

“See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this (expletive) and it’s over,” Bush told Blair as he chewed on a buttered roll.

He told Blair he felt like telling U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who visited the gathered leaders, to get on the phone with Syrian President Bashar Assad to “make something happen.” He suggested Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice might visit the region soon.

So his “solution” is for somebody else to talk to Syria. He goes running to others to fix his problems. Laura Rozen reported at the time:

… [R]ather than hold direct talks between Washington and Damascus, the Bush administration was leaning on Saudi Arabia to negotiate with Syria, with the aim of trying to drive a wedge between Damascus and Tehran, both supporters of Hezbollah. Rice also met with Lebanese Parliament speaker Nabih Berri, widely understood to be an unofficial liaison with Hezbollah. In both cases, the Bush team preferred proxies to direct conversation.

But Saudi Arabia and China have their own agendas. Why are we relying on Saudi Arabia and China to handle American foreign policy matters?

This is just weird.

See also: North Korea links.

Update: Is Bush having his Fisher King moment?

“We Answer to the Name of Liberals”

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This “manifesto for liberals in the waning Bush era” by Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin deserves reading and discussion. I regret I am still under the weather and not up to thoughtful commentary, but Stirling Newberry wrote some lovely thoughtful commentary, so if you want thoughtful commentary go read Stirling. And there’s more thoughtful commentary by Chicago Dyke at Corrente.

I gave the Ackerman-Gitlin piece a careful reading to see how it defined liberalism. I endorse it in its entirety, but I realize some might object to paragraph 5, which begins “Make no mistake: We believe that the use of force can, at times, be justified. We supported the use of American force, together with our allies, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.” I supported those also, although not without reservation. Reasonable people, including reasonable liberals, opposed those actions.

Then I read the discussion of the manifesto at Crooked Timber. Most of the commenters got hung up on paragraph #4, which begins “We believe that the state of Israel has the fundamental right to exist.” The “discussion” devolved into the kind of impossibly precious wankfest Monty Python skewered so beautifully in “Life of Brian.”

But, OTHER THAN paragraphs 4 and 5, what do you think? (If you want to argue about paragraph 4, go to Crooked Timber.)

Update: For another POV, see Digby.

Righties Can’t Read

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I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; righties have the reading comprehension skills of a turnip. Today’s example:

There’s a profile of Jim Webb in today’s Washington Post that plays up Webb’s southwest Virginia roots. It begins this way:

About a year ago, before he was running for the Senate, James Webb took a colleague to the mountains of southwest Virginia to do some research for a movie they were working on.

Rob Reiner , meet my cousin Jewel and her husband, Buck. Jewel made a home-cooked meal for Webb and his producer-director friend. She pointed across the way to a nearby hollow and said:

“Ah wuz bawn rat ovah theyah.” That’s Reiner on the phone from Los Angeles, doing a mountain accent.

At night, Webb took Reiner to a rustic auditorium. There was bluegrass and flatfoot dancing.

“Incredible experience,” Reiner says.

Nostalgia kicked in as soon as I read this. I had a Great-Aunt Jewel who lived with Great-Uncle Carl on a little farm in the mountains, and I recall a dance — I’m not sure of the venue, but it might have been a church basement — where there was old-time fiddlin’ and clog dancing. It was explained to me once that the “clog” style common to the Ozarks is more Celtic — think Irish dancing — and the “flatfoot” style of the eastern mountains comes from English country dancing. I’m not going to swear that’s the truth, but it could be.

There may be few places in the country more foreign to Hollywood than Gate City, Va., and much of Webb’s livelihood has been to translate one culture for another. His dad’s family came out of these hollows, though Webb grew up on military bases all over the country. Over the course of his career, in books and more recently in screenplays, Webb, 60, has been writing about the dignity of his people — the gun-loving, country-music-singing, working-class whites of Scotch-Irish descent who fight in wars, staff the nation’s factories and shop its Wal-Marts.

“This people gave our country great things, including its most definitive culture,” Webb writes in his most recent book.

He knows that some folks might call his people rednecks. We pity those folks if Jim Webb is around when they say that.

The profile, by Libby Copeland, continues to describe Webb’s career in the Marines and in the Reagan Administration, where he was Secretary of the Navy. He is also a prolific writer; among other works he has published six novels and a book of nonfiction about Scotch-Irish culture. He has done some screenwriting as well, which the Allen campaign has tried to exploit by tying Webb to the “culture of Hollywood.” (And Ronald Reagan wasn’t tied to the “culture of Hollywood”?)

The funny thing is, Webb — a Democrat who became a Republican in the ’70s and a Democrat again in recent years — has been a largely conservative force both in movies and on the printed page. At various times he has eviscerated liberals, feminists, elites, academics and those who protested the Vietnam War. He has criticized Hollywood for its treatment of his people.

“His people” being the small-town and rural folk of southwest Virginia, note.

The project that took Webb and Reiner to the hills of southwestern Virginia is a script they’d been working on for a movie about this very subject. “Whiskey River” centers on an Iraq war soldier who hails from a world much like Gate City, Va., and what Reiner calls the “culture of service” this soldier comes from. It is also, Reiner says, about the fundamental unfairness of a war in which “only certain people have to sacrifice.”

The notion of his people’s sacrifice in wartime is a theme Webb has returned to again and again in his writing. In his 2004 book, “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,” Webb writes that the Scotch-Irish “have fed dedicated soldiers to this nation far beyond their numbers in every war.” In interviews, he recalls starting law school in 1972 and discovering that others were in “ethnocentric retreat.” Everyone else knew who they were and where they came from, everyone else had ethnic pride, but the identity of Webb’s own culture had been lost. He says his peers labeled him a white man of privilege, a WASP.

This is something I relate to, big-time. First, hillbilly culture — I should say “cultures,” because as the dancing styles illustrate there are distinctions — has never been properly recognized as a culture. And now the distinctions are mostly gone, and mountain cultures have dissipated to become nearly indistinguishable from small-town and rural cultures throughout most of America. That didn’t used to be so.

And I hate being mistaken for a WASP, even though I pass for one most of the time. I function in WASP culture (I think) because over the years, by trial and error, I learned to do so. (I had the advantage of being able to speak standard English. Nothing more clearly separates hard-core hillbillies from middle-class white folks than noun-verb agreement.)

In the decades since, Webb has studied the migrations of his people, exulting in their fighting history and puzzling over their entrenched poverty.

Entrenched white poverty is mostly rural and hidden away where most folks don’t see it. There are parts of the Ozarks in which families have been on welfare since they invented welfare, and whose residents can no more function in standard middle-class white culture than they can fly.

Then the profile describes Webb’s novels. I haven’t read his work, but I take it from the description that Webb uses fiction to explore the moral ambiguities and brutality of war. Naturally the Allen campaign is combing through his work, looking for anything he’s written they can twist around to use against him.

We’re getting to the punch line.

In a recent interview in the back of his campaign RV, Webb talks about how Hollywood has lampooned the Scotch-Irish. He says he is sick of this story line. For too long, he says, poor Southern whites have been one of the few groups it’s still safe to make fun of.

We are now more than 30 paragraphs into a story whose theme, restated over and over, is Jim Webb’s quest to bring respect to the lives and culture of “his people,” a group often disparaged as “rednecks.”

“Towel-heads and rednecks — of which I am one. If you write that word, please say that. I mean, I don’t use that pejoratively, I use it defensively. Towel-heads and rednecks became the easy villains in so many movies out there.“

Obviously — obvious if you have standard reading comprehension skills and take in the context of the entire profile — he’s saying that he hates the way filmmakers sterotype Middle Easterners and the subset of white Americans identified as “rednecks,” whatever that is these days. And naturally some rightie bloggers twisted this quote into meaning something else. Here we have Idiot #1:

“Towel-heads?” It’s on Page 3 of this Post story. I think that’s what they call a buried lede. I’m eagerly waiting the 188 Post stories on this slur. You know, the one that doesn’t require knowing a foreign language or finding three anonymous witnesses from 1972 to corroborate it. Yeah, I won’t hold my breath, either. Yeesh, if you’re gonna get your ire up about these things, I demand even-handed ire.

Idiot #2:

In August, Democrats and even some Republicans called upon Senator Allen to apologize for using the term “macaca”, a word with no meaning to the majority of Virginians but one that some took offense to. Senator Allen personally took it upon himself to quickly publicly apologize for the comment and even call the gentleman he directed it towards.

James Webb has now used a well known term that derides an entire ethnic group not just in Virginia or America but the world. I am willing to grant that he mis-spoke. That deserves not excuses but an apology.

Idiot #3:

I’m the last person who wants to be the PC language police around here, but can anyone imagine the media’s reaction if George Allen said something like this? As Tim Graham points out, the number of Post articles, news stories and editorial features with the word “Macaca” in them is up to 92!

Can we take up a collection and send these people somewhere for remedial reading classes?