The Dish

The Foundations Of Morality

Just before Christmas, Ross Douthat wrote a column (NYT) wondering how scientific materialism and its account of “a purely physical and purposeless universe” could provide the basis for liberal egalitarianism. Jerry Coyne took the bait:

I’m not sure what Douthat means when he says “cosmology does not harmonize at all” with the moral picture of secularism. Cosmology doesn’t give one iota of evidence for a purpose (it could!) or for God. Most of the universe is cold, bleak, airless, and uninhabitable. In fact, such a cosmology harmonizes far better with a secular moral picture than a religious one. Secularists see a universe without apparent purpose and realize that we must forge our own purposes and ethics, not derive them from a God for which there’s no evidence.

Yes, secularism does propose a physical and purposeless universe, and many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion. But although the universe is purposeless, our lives aren’t. This conflation of a purposeless universe (i.e., one not created by a transcendent being for a specific reason) with purposeless human lives is a trick that the faithful use to make atheism seem dark and nihilistic. But we make our own purposes, and they’re real.

Douthat counters by noting that “if the only real thing is matter in motion, and the only legitimate method of discernment the scientific method, you’ll never get to an absolute ‘thou shalt not murder’ (or “thou shalt risk your life on behalf of your Jewish neighbor”)”:

I don’t think those of us who still embrace the traditional Western idea of God are crazy to suggest that our cosmology has at least a surface compatibility with moral realism that the materialist conception of the universe’s (nonexistent) purposes seems to lack.

So if you’re going to defend both materialism and modern rights-based liberalism, you have to actually address this point head-on. Make a case for a more limited, non-metaphysical form of moral realism, make a more thoroughgoing attempt to discern some sort of moral teleology in the Darwinian story (though of course Coyne has denounced efforts along these lines as “creationism for liberals”), go full relativist and make a purely aesthetic case for cosmopolitanism, I don’t care what — but give me something that doesn’t either beg the question (“we should help people because it helps people!”) or pretend that there are actually solid selfish reasons for the most costly, heroic, and plainly self-sacrificial forms of non-self-interested behavior.

Coyne goes another round:

I’ve often said that I don’t know how much of human morality comes from natural selection’s instilling in us certain behaviors and feelings, and how much is due to reason. But I am virtually certain that none of it is due to God.

I want to live in a world where people are treated fairly and in which, were I disadvantaged, people would try to help me. For it is only an accident of biology and history that has made me better off than others. I want to live in a world where people promote the well-being of our fellows. That is what I see as “moral” behavior. This kind of morality is justified by its results, but one thing it is not is circular. (Indeed, it is Douthat’s morality that is circular, for it ultimately rests on what he thinks God wants, and unless Douthat can further justify why God wants such behavior, that’s the end of the road.) Like all nonreligious brands of morality, mine comes down to a justified preference: a judgment call.

But it’s better to make a judgment call based on science, observation, and reason than on the dictates of an imaginary being.

Millman steps in and examines Douthat’s original question:

[W]hy be moral? If the universe has no point, and human beings are not here for a reason, why not be a hedonist? Or worse – a sociopath?

I’m always mystified by this question from theists. Douthat complains that Coyne’s argument is circular: “If my question is ‘what’s the justification for your rights-based egalitarianism?’ saying, ‘because it’s egalitarian!’ is not much of an answer.” But his own argument is equally circular: secular liberalism is “unjustified” because it lacks a foundation in belief in God, but a belief in God is “justified” because without it you don’t have a foundation for morality! I don’t know about Douthat, but I suspect that, at least some of the time, what I’m really hearing with this kind of argument is a species of Straussianism. To whit: yes, I know, and you know, that there isn’t really any arguing with a cold and empty cosmos. But most people can’t handle that kind of truth; they need to believe that there’s an objective meaning to their lives. So, for the sake of the greater good, we have to affirm publicly that there is such a thing, that God is the foundation of morality. I’ve always suspected that Strauss would have got on just fine with the Grand Inquisitor; in any event I’ve never liked this line of argument.

Back To An Islamic Future? Ctd

Last month the Dish noted efforts afoot in Turkey to turn the Hagia Sophia – formerly a Christian basilica, then a mosque, and currently a museum – back into a place of Muslim worship. Kaya Genc ponders a possible third way:

Although most people take an either/or stance, some have proposed opening Hagia Sophia to both Islamic and Christian services. This is a welcome prospect to Christians, who have made a number of attempts to organize religious rituals. On one such occasion, in 2010, Turkey’s director of religious affairs said, “Turkey would not be a Christian country just because Christians performed their religious duties in a few churches.”

There’s precedent for such a hybrid, too. I came across numerous articles about the so-called church-mosques of Anatolia. Pazaryeri Camii, in the coastal city of Izmir, is one example: built for Christian service in 1874, it was repurposed as a mosque once Turkey became a republic. During the building’s renovation, the experts found Christian icons and decided to install a curtain system to cover them during Islamic prayers. Another church-mosque, in the Çardak village of Göreme, has been used by both Orthodox Christians and Muslims. Indeed, a Turkish columnist recommended a similar solution for Hagia Sophia: “We should allow Aya Sofya to become all three things at the same time!” she wrote. “Let’s keep it as a museum from Monday to Thursday, turn it into a mosque on Friday, close it for holiday on Saturday and use it as a church on Sunday. We can cover the floor with a carpet on Thursday nights and place chairs on Saturday nights.”

(Image of interior of Hagia Sophia via Flickr user MiGowa)

Rich In Meaning

Julie Beck looked at a new study on the search for meaning in life. It doesn’t come with wealth:

A recent study in Psychological Science takes a global look at the quest for meaning, analyzing data from the Gallup World Poll to determine where people feel meaning, and how they found it. The survey data comes from 132 countries in 2007—the researchers specifically looked at self-reported meaning in life, religiosity, fertility rates, GDP, and suicide rates (from the World Health Organization). …

The Gallup data showed that countries with lower GDPs ranked higher for meaning. Toward the top were Sierra Leone, Togo, Laos, and Senegal, all of which were in the bottom 50 countries in the world for gross domestic product per capita in 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund. Poorer countries also had lower suicide rates.

This looks at first like another tally in the “money can’t buy happiness” column (though in a lot of ways, it can). But the data also showed that richer countries were less religious than poorer countries. The researchers found that this factor of religiosity mediated the relationship between a country’s wealth and the perceived meaning in its citizen’s lives, meaning that it was the presence of religion that largely accounted for the gap between money and meaning. They analyzed other factors—education, fertility rates, individualism, and social support (having relatives and friends to count on in troubled times)—to see if they could explain the findings, but in the end it came down to religion.

Whipping Out Their Insecurities

The founder of Critique My Dick Pic (NSFW, duh) describes what the tumblr has taught her about male vulnerability:

All in all, Critique My Dick Pic is proving to be an extremely positive and humbling project. It’s fun and light, but it’s also confirmed to me just how fragile men are; how crumblingly insecure and self-conscious so many of them are about their bodies. That’s very human and understandable, and it’s a terrain with which most women are familiar, but men in particular are exhorted to grin and bear their body issues rather than talk about them. Perhaps that’s why they’ve responded so openly to my project; an anonymous outlet for them to share their deepest vulnerabilities (and to swing their dicks around).

Previous Dish on the brilliant tumblr here.

(Photo: Victorian-era strongman Eugen Sandow poses as The Dying Gaul in 1894. By Benjamin Falk)

Streaking At The South Pole

Presenting the 300 Club:

The objective: to endure a temperature swing of 300 degrees Fahrenheit by warming up in a sauna, heated to 200 degrees, and then running, naked, to and around the Ceremonial South Pole when the outdoor temperature is below -100 degrees. …

One of the first things people wonder about when they learn of the 300 Club is the incidence of frostbite. [Club member Kris] Perry and others who have been there confirm that this is a valid concern. Perry remembers one unlucky couple from his second winter at the South Pole: “[They] both suffered some minor frostbite—she on her nipples and he on the tip of his weenie. Fortunate for her, I had gone outside to do a weather observation and saw them heading from the pole back to the station. She was moving very slowly and had probably become mildly hypothermic. I gave her my parka and helped her get back inside. I think there might have been one or two other incidents of mild frostbite on some guys’ weenies that winter.”

Some general advice for the rest of us:

Eating provides your body with fuel that can help you tolerate cold. Also, wear a windbreaker to prevent frigid gusts from stealing your body’s heat. If you start to feel pain or numbness, or notice your skin turning paler, go inside immediately: These may be early signs of frostbite. (And whatever you do, says [physician Henderson] McGinnis, don’t rub the affected skin—that increases the damage.)

Face Of The Day

Noel Kat captions:

Flecks of vivid neon paint glow brilliantly off faces and shoulders in this series of portraits by [Brazilian] photographer Hid Saib. At times, the glowing paint seems like the scattered embers of a fire or an explosive shower of sparks racing across the cheeks of the model. In other instances, the disarray seems more serene. Constellations of the night sky softly trace their way across the planes of a face, while an ethereal aurora borealis is created by the colorful luminescence of the neon.

(Photo by Hid Saib. See more of his work here.)

How Central Is Marijuana In The Drug War? Ctd

David Usborne considers the impact of Colorado cannabis on the cartels:

A 2012 research paper by the Mexican Competitiveness Institute in Mexico called ‘If Our Neighbours Legalise’, said that the legalisation of marijuana in Colorado, Washington and California would depress cartel profits by as much as 30 per cent. A 2010 Rand Corp study of what would happen if just California legalised suggests a more modest fall-out. Using consumption in the US as the most useful measure, its authors posit that marijuana accounts for perhaps 25 per cent of the cartels’ revenues. The cartels would survive losing that, but still. “That’s enough to hurt, enough to cause massive unemployment in the illicit drugs sector,” says [fellow at the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center David] Shirk. Less money for cartels means weaker cartels and less capacity to corrupt the judiciary and the police in Mexico with crumpled bills in brown envelopes. Crimes like extortion and kidnappings are also more easily tackled. …

Mr Shirk puts it this way. If you ask enforcement folk how large a dent their interdiction efforts – seizures, arrests, helicopter raids and so on – actually have on cartel earnings, they will say between 5 and 10 per cent. But just few states embracing legal cannabis may end up robbing them of two to five times that amount.

Zack Beauchamp digs into the RAND study:

There are some questions as to whether reducing drug revenue would actually reduce terrorist violence.

The RAND researchers, for instance, suggest Mexican cartel violence might actually increase in the short term as gangs struggled over scarcer resources. However, the best historical analogy RAND could uncover — the American mafia post-prohibition — suggests the long-term reduction in violence could be enormous. Like cartels, the mafia engaged in all sorts of profitable illegal enterprises beyond the illegal intoxicant racket, the loss of alcohol revenue was seemingly devastating for the mafia. Homicides declined rapidly after the repeal of prohibition; “plausibly,” RAND’s researchers write, “a large share of that decline was accounted for by fewer killings in the bootlegging trade.”

Previous Dish on the topic here. Meanwhile, Nik Steinberg writes about the tremendous power of drug cartels in Mexico and the epidemic of people who simply “disappear”:

[T]here is no single explanation for why so many people have gone missing in Mexico’s drug war, or for what has happened to them. I have spent over three years investigating more than 300 disappearances across 11 Mexican states for Human Rights Watch. I’ve found that, if these disappearances share anything in common, it is that the government has done almost nothing to try to find the missing. And it has consistently failed to pursue the obvious lines of evidence that, in case after case — including Israel Arenas Durán’s — point to collusion between the cartels and the very soldiers and police sent to combat them.

Recent Dish on the drug war’s devastating violence here and here.

Getting Bombed On A Budget

The best places to go:

Ritchie King captions:

The cheapest pour to be had is in Guangzhou, China, followed by Manila, Philippines. It’s no surprise that two developing countries with two thriving beer economies have cities that top the list of cheapest beers worldwide. Beer consumption per capita is among the highest in the world in China, and cheap beer is especially popular. In the Philippines, the beer market is highly mature, and almost 100% of it is produced locally.

More puzzling is the high ranking of Saudi Arabia, where alcohol consumption is banned. Its placement is likely based on prices for non-alcoholic beer, which is popular in the country and cheaper to produce. It would be hard to fathom alcoholic beer being that cheap under prohibition.

Divorcing Your Family, Ctd

More readers join the thread:

I guess you could say I “divorced” my sister. My dad was a sociopath. Rage was his default emotion, and it was terrifying. There wasn’t a week from age 2 through 15 when I wasn’t threatened. He was a drunk. He’d beat me, my mom, and my brother occasionally. Real violence was less frequent, but the threat was constant. I grew up being called lazy, stupid, effeminate, abnormal, and dishonest. He was convinced I was lying and hiding things. One afternoon while reading in bed in my first-floor bedroom, I looked up to see him staring at me through the window.

His personality estranged him from friends and relatives, and caused him to lose jobs frequently. As a result we moved a lot and I went to many schools. He finally set up a business in trucking, operating on the margins of legality. He kept a gun at the office, and pulled it out more than once during disagreements. As I got older, the abuse became more subtle – snide, underhanded sleights, mocking, and so forth. That continued until he died.

As a young man, my father had fought and put people in the hospital. He and his friends used to attack gay men. As you can imagine, he wasn’t thrilled to learn I was gay. He threatened to kill me, and I was kicked out of the house.

My older sister was his biggest supporter. She was always there to tell him things were my fault, run interference, provide alibis and negative gossip, shift blame, and question me as to why I didn’t like dad. Once he was almost ready to quit drinking after another drunken car wreck. I took him to his first AA meeting. She intervened, encouraging him to drink and providing a running commentary on why he had no problem.

After he died, I disowned her.

I have misgivings. She didn’t actively abuse me, my brother, or my mom. But she took sides and facilitated a horribly painful situation. Did I do the right thing? I think so. But I wonder. My reservations are mainly cognitive. From an emotional standpoint my decision feels right. I am happy to be done with her machinations. But there are times when I wonder if I was heartless to cut her off so completely.

Another reader:

For about 13 years, when I was 25 to about 38, my brother went into a serious depression and essentially disappeared from our lives. I spent those years working very hard to maintain any kind of contact with him and to support my parents in their pain. It was exhausting. And then, suddenly, my brother decided he was cured and ready to be back in our lives. I never understood the sudden change and was always leery to let him back in too much. I felt like he would just leave at any second again.

But he didn’t leave this time. I did. From his life, anyway.

Why? Once my brother got married and had a baby, all of his memories of childhood trauma returned to him and he started treating my parents and me terribly. After 13 years of trying so hard to make sure he knew he had a sister who loved him and cared about him no matter what, I just no longer have the energy to keep running after him.

Am I sad about that? Definitely. He’s my only sibling. I have no kids myself. My family was already small and now it’s two people smaller – the brother I no longer have and the nephew I’ll never know and who will never know me. Two years since the “divorce,” I still cry frequently about it.

But I’ll also never forget the incredible relief I felt when I decided I wouldn’t be calling him back after the last phone call of abuse. To know I was no longer going to run after him, reassuring him of my love and our bond as siblings who’d suffered through a tough childhood together was like dropping the weight of a dead body I’d been carrying on my shoulders for decades. That’s really what it was. An illusion of a life and a connection and a bond that was only alive in my imagination.

Another story has a much happier ending:

You’ve probably had too many of these already, but I had to throw in my two cents. One of your readers spoke of our society’s fixation with “blood,” as in blood relations. My father left us on Christmas morning when I was seven years old and never had much to do with us after that. Worse, he believed that he was owed visits from his children because he believed that’s what children were supposed to do (never mind that he couldn’t care less about us). The following years were torturous – living with an abusive, manic and damaged mother and watching each of my siblings drift into their own protective cocoons. In short, home life with my immediate family was a disaster.

Somewhere along the line I was unofficially adopted by the family of my best friend in high school. I spent more time there than I can remember and have long considered them my “real” family. Later, I married my friend’s sister and took on her three-year-old daughter as my own. I don’t think I’ve ever loved another human being more than my girl (she’s 16 now!).

I don’t know why I was destined to become a parent in this way. Perhaps I needed to close the loop and undo the damage my father did all those years ago. In any case, the discussion of blood resonated greatly with me. Blood is nothing. Love is everything.

Mental Health Break

High-fives in their most awkward form: