Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Perhaps the best and only thing that the old can bequeath to the young is a good fight, a truly good struggle in something that matters, a fight that carries a person beyond the confines of a little, self-serving life into something deeper and more lovely.
Fr. Bob Sprott, God, Country, Notre Dame.
[Here’s a little light (1,900 words) reading for the weekend. I banged it out rather quickly so I apologize for any typos, misspellings or poor grammar. I’ll monitor this thread over the weekend so I don’t end up posting a hot-button topic and then ignoring it like I did last time.]
Robert Wright has a new book out “The Evolution of God“. [h/t Instapundit] The Amazon description says:
In this sweeping narrative that takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright’s findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains why spirituality has a role today, and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest. And this previously unrecognized evolutionary logic points not toward continued religious extremism, but future harmony.
I haven’t read the book yet, but based on his previous works I can guess where he is going with this. I’ve been thinking about this subject as well for some time, and I ‘ve been writing up my thoughts on the matter in detail, but since Wright may have beaten me to the punch I thought I would try to get my tiny bit of priority in. (Besides, I owe him for that bar fight in Tucson.)
I believe that religions and all other facets of human culture are subject to and created by natural selection. Even though I am a philosophical agnostic and a functional atheist, I have come to a science-based understanding that religions serve an evolutionary purpose, and that they provide a vital mechanism for enhancing and maintaining cooperation that no secular mechanism can duplicate.
Traditionally atheists have argued that religions cannot have any functional foundations because there are many different religions with so many different stories about how the universe works. They commonly point out that since most religions contradict each other, the vast majority of religions have to be wrong even if we were to assume that one is right. Science produces just one best explanation for each phenomenon. We don’t have hundreds of different, equally valid models of the solar system. How could religion be any different? Therefore, the existence of many different religions proves that religions are arbitrary, fictional, fabrications like novels. It follows that religion has little to teach us about life and cannot serve as any kind of rational guide for humanity.
This seems like a plausible argument. I used to believe it myself but in the last 15 years my ongoing study of evolutionary theory convinced me that atheists have missed one crucial piece of evidence: We don’t have a vast variety of contradictory religions, we have a vast variety religions that all teach the same thing.
In one critical functional area, all religions are identical.
[Warning: This post uses sexual imagery and a satirical tone to make a serious point.]
The authors of the disgusted conservatives study I discussed earlier reveal their ivory-tower bias when they sniff at the way real people make real decisions.
Disgust seems to be particularly implicated in many of our moral judgements (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999b). But should disgust play any role in these judgements? According to many liberal, educated Westerners, the answer is no. Whether a practice or behaviour is considered morally palatable or reprehensible should depend on whether that behaviour harms or infringes on the rights of another individual; disgusting but harmless behaviours do not deserve moral condemnation (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993). According to this view, consuming faecal matter, engaging in sexual intercourse with animals, or masturbating to pornography is not immoral, as long as no other people are harmed by one’s behaviour (Bloom, 2004b).35
Up until a few years ago, I would have agreed with that reasoning. (Except for the sex with animals part. Animals have a right not to be raped. Moo means moo.) I would have agreed with it for the same reasons that most “liberal, educated Westerners” would: (1) I would have evaluated moral dilemmas using highly abstract models which ignored critical real-world information, (2) I would have assumed that if I personally could not see any harm in a practice then it automatically followed that no such harm existed, (3) I would have assumed that if a behavior did not cause a significant problem if one person did something then it would not cause significant problems if half of the entire population did it, and (4) I had no understanding that unarticulated, evolved, information encoded into cultures even existed.
Let’s just talk about number (1) right now.
ABC has a new animated comedy by “King of the Hill” creator Mike Judge that takes a satirical look at faddish leftism. Even if you don’t usually watch these kinds of shows you should watch this one. It’s a riot. This trailer doesn’t begin to do it justice.
My son and I watched the first episode and we had to pause the DVR every couple of minutes so we could stop laughing so hard we couldn’t hear the dialog. The show starts with a shot of a bumper sticker on the back of a Prius that reads, “We support our troops… and their opponents” and just gets more and more humorous from there out.
Judge does a good job of gently poking fun at his subjects without dehumanizing them. Yes, the characters and their views are exaggerated but only compared to real life. They’re not exaggerated compared to most characters on TV. They’re certainly not more exaggerated than the bizarre depictions of social conservatives that one routinely sees on TV, especially on animated shows.
You should watch “The Goode Family” and let ABC know you appreciate some balance in TV’s depiction of various parts of the social spectrum. You can watch the first episode online at ABC’s website.
[source]
It’s a sad fact of life that if you don’t drink much you end up as the designated driver for those who do. On the plus side, as the cartoon elucidates with the traditional logic puzzle, taking care of the inebriated presents some interesting intellectual challenges.
I worked all through college and on weekends during my sophomore year. I had to get up at 6:00 AM to go to work bussing tables at a restaurant. This meant I didn’t party on weekends. This also meant that only the Mormon guy, the Southern Baptist residential assistant and myself were sober at 2:00 AM on a Saturday, so we got stuck hauling the drunks in off the lawn and tucking them into bed in such a way as they wouldn’t aspirate their own vomit. (This was in addition to the joys of being awakened by a never ending series of boisterous but still ambulatory revelers.)
I can’t help but feel that the teetotalers’ taking care of the drunks extends to most areas of life.
