Culture

The Fantasy of Injurious Words

Posted on by Caleb Wachter

Censors and others who oppose Free Speech will often declare, straight-faced and with absolute sincerity, that speaking (certain) words is analogous to perpetrating physical violence against another human being.  While I’m sympathetic to some of the concern regarding the negative impact of abusive speech on long-term cognitive development, especially during childhood, I’m rather less inclined to support the notion that the impact of Bad Words on the life of an adult can be analogous to a physical (or sexual) assault.

 

Even the NYT author’s lead-in example in the first linked article above, of a threat of violence vs. the actual violence itself, is misleading: the whole reason a person would fear, and/or be ‘traumatized’ by, a threat of violence is because the violence itself is a very real possibility.  Under these circumstances, we call such words ‘intimidation,’ and they fall outside the umbrella of protection afforded by the First Amendment.

 

So yes, intimidation is bad.  The Supreme Court agrees that it’s bad, and consistently rejects threats of violence, or intimidation, as being covered under the Free Speech clause in the USA’s Constitution.  It’s not the words themselves that are harmful, but rather the message that the words communicate (in the case of intimidation, the threat of harm).  Just like with any other form of idea.

 

And fundamentally that’s what the Free Speech argument has been, is, and will always be about: the communication of ideas.  The words used to convey  ideas are merely vehicles, but they are crucially-important vehicles because, without them, humans could not meaningfully exchange information with one another.  And this leads to an age-old dichotomy: centralization vs. de-centralization.

 

In the wonderful world of the internet, the earliest Tech Titans cut vast swaths through the data wilderness by centralizing the processing and disbursement of information at various nexus points (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc..).  These Titans understood perfectly well that we live in an Information Age, and that whoever controls the flow of information controls the economies which invariably spring up around it.  For decades now it has seemed immutable that the Big Tech companies would continue to get bigger as they metastasize and insinuate themselves into seemingly irrelevant markets, eventually consuming everything–including each other.

 

But now there seems hope that, instead of this singularity of centralization, the internet is about to take a hard turn toward decentralization.  Blockchain is just one mechanism which might provide for a greater decentralization of information dissemination and processing–and, as the Founding Fathers of the USA so epically demonstrated in accordance with Western Civilization’s long history of pursuing and promoting liberty, decentralization of government, markets, and pretty much every other human endeavor benefits more members of a society than any other framework available to us.

 

Now, naturally, the Powers That Be will not approve of such a radical decentralization.  The Powers That Be are never in favor of anything which curtails their own power and prestige, and that’s natural.  In a way, it’s even good since it forces reformers to make sure their ideas are ready for showtime before they wrest control over whatever endeavors were previously governed by the Central Authorities.

 

So, I said all of that to say… 😉

 

Each of us humans is, in essence, an information processing node.  We each encounter and digest unique buffets of experience and information, and we do our best to make use of that information in our daily lives.  None of us are perfect at this–in fact, many of us are downright terrible at it.  But when millions of us get together and collectively make decisions, using our unique experiences individually as frames of reference, we tend to do pretty great things and then build on them with even greater things.  It may sound trite, but without the decentralized nature of a free marketplace none of the advances which propelled humanity forward over the last couple centuries would have been possible.

 

Thomas Jefferson once said, “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”  He was arguing for greater dissemination of information from person-to-person, and he believed (as I believe) that the best way to disseminate information is from one person to another, not from a central apparatus.  How hard do you listen to the nightly newscast featuring a story on local crime?  And how hard do you listen to a trusted friend’s story about encountering local crime?  The difference is obvious to any reasonable person, which is why we must insist, categorically and without fail, that Freedom of Speech be upheld and defended every time it is attacked.  Words convey ideas and, in the absence of intimidation, those ideas have the potential to improve humanity’s overall enlightenment–albeit one person at a time.

 

Which leaves the ‘words as weapons’ trope firmly in the realm of fantasy–where it belongs:

Pang Tong & The Power of Humility

Posted on by Caleb Wachter

Anyone who has read my fiction knows that I have a soft spot for the literary masterpiece, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is counted as one of the Four Classics of Chinese literature.  For those unfamiliar with the novel, or with Chinese culture in general, it’s worth investigating (though there are no official subtitle tracks of acceptable quality for the latest television version, Three Kingdoms (2010), so you’ll have to watch it on YouTube where the Jiang Hu translation was hardsubbed into the video itself).

The clip I’ve linked within this article requires a little backstory to fully understand.  Pang Tong is a hideously ugly man with one of his era’s brightest minds, and is therefore highly sought after by all of the warlords of his day.  To avoid being imprisoned and compelled to work for one of the less high-minded warlords, he spends most of his life wandering under various aliases in search of a worthy lord and master.

His search first brought him to Sun Quan, the lord of the second most powerful kingdom of the day.  But Sun Quan was persuaded by his court (and his mother) to shun Pang Tong due to Pang’s obtuse, drunken belligerence at a state funeral for Sun Quan’s deceased Grand Commander, Zhou Yu.  Pang Tong’s belligerence and drunkenness were considered to be insults of such magnitude that he was rejected from a face-to-face meeting with Sun Quan, at which point Pang Tong sighed and left Sun Quan’s kingdom in search of a worthier lord.

He arrived in Liu Bei’s relatively small, but quickly-growing kingdom and presented himself as a potential clerk or low-level magistrate.  He barely managed to simultaneously avoid detection and also get a job as a magistrate of a small village/township on the outskirts of Liu Bei’s kingdom, and after he got the job he descended into drunkenness and belligerence yet again.  He also refused to do any administrative tasks for his first month (edit to correct: it was actually his first 100 days) on the job, drawing the ire of the feisty Zhang Fei–Liu Bei’s sworn brother–who paid Pang Tong a visit with every intention of cracking his skull for insubordination.

Pang Tong, still drunk and belligerent, dismissed Zhang Fei’s concerns.  He said that the work of a low-level magistrate was beneath him, so why should he bother to work every day when the job could be done much more efficiently?  Zhang Fei commands him to ‘put up or shut up,’ and over the course of the ensuing afternoon Pang Tong completes all of the unaddressed administrative tasks–all while drinking like a sailor–and, after completing these tasks, retires to his room for even more drunkenness.

Zhang Fei, who is far from the sharpest tack in the box, runs back to his brother Liu Bei and pleads with him to come see Pang Tong (who is still operating under an alias) for himself.  Liu Bei drops everything he is doing, rushes off to meet with Pang Tong, and patiently waits outside Pang Tong’s residence until the spud-faced genius finally emerges in a hangover–and naturally he demands someone refill his wine.

Liu Bei recognized the value of such a brilliant and eccentric person, and bent over backwards to try to recruit him.  He ignored his own sick child, he ignored the matter of his noble rank and Pang Tong’s commoner status, he even went so far as to try to give his horse, Hex Mark (which had saved his life) to Pang Tong as a parting gift.

Pang Tong pushed Liu Bei as far as he could in trying to determine whether or not Liu Bei’s ‘eye was on the prize,’ as it were.  A truly worthy leader needs to think of nothing but success for himself and the people who are with him.  Pang Tong’s point is simple: if a leader is willing to pass up the opportunity to pluck a diamond from a pile of manure simply because the act of doing so might somehow sully him, he is unworthy of the diamond.

Humility, as Liu Bei demonstrates time and time again throughout the Romance of the Three Kingdoms tale, is a potent weapon which can often prove decisive in crucial matters.

Cultural Plurality vs. Multiculturalism

Posted on by Caleb Wachter

The tolerance of plurality is one of the West’s greatest achievements. And, indeed, tolerance is as much as a system of law can *possibly* hope to achieve. Anything more is up to the distinct, plural groups individually (how’s ‘groups individually’ for an oxymoron?).

Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist (who many consider to be the contemporary Father of Libertarianism) has a beautifully articulate speech titled ‘The Pencil,’ which I’ll link below. Key takeaway: there is not a single human being in the world who can manufacture a common pencil. The only way to make it is by cooperating with literally THOUSANDS of other people–many of whom you might despise.

One of the most profound and horribly misunderstood features of a Free Market system is that it enables people who might *hate* each other to cooperate from opposite corners of the world–so long as they all agree on the goal of prioritizing mutual gain. That fundamental agreement forms the basis of Cultural Pluralism–which, strangely enough, stands in DIRECT OPPOSITION to what *most* of us think of as contemporary Multiculturalism.

Where legitimate Cultural Pluralism and contemporary Multiculturalism differ, in my view, is simple: one advocates the TOLERANCE of divergent cultures, while the other demands EQUAL STATUS for all cultures. It’s the old ‘Equal Opportunity vs. Equal Outcome’ argument playing out in the marketplace of ideas–for that’s really all a culture is: a constellation of ideas, manifested (generally) as a set of traditional teachings, values and practices.

Tolerating ‘The Other’ is *essential* to seeking truth and achieving harmony. If one does not assume he or she Knows What Is Best on a given subject, then he or she *must* be open to new information–including the falsification of previously-held values and ideas. Once we can *tolerate* differences, we can examine them–even at arm’s length–more clearly. That process of honest, dispassionate examination is how we learn more about The Other and, more importantly, ourselves. Comparing and contrasting isn’t just something we’re supposed to do in High School English essays–it’s one of the most proven methods by which humans can learn new information: by referring an unknown item/idea to a known one.

Demanding *equal status* for The Other, however, does the exact opposite. When one demands that all cultures be TREATED equally irrespective of the apparent (and not-so-apparent) merits and flaws of each represented culture, one is circumventing the compare-and-contrast mechanism at the outset of experience with The Other. Compare-and-contrast is, fundamentally, a scientific/logical/empirical process. Disallowing its application to *anything* is anathema to the Pursuit of Truth and enlightenment generally.

Science doesn’t operate by consensus, or by ‘proving’ claims or statements. Science is a process of systematized elimination and falsification, by which statements and claims can *only* be DISproven. Which means that enduring legitimately HELPFUL criticism will *never* be a pleasant experience. But it *is* the only method by which humans have repeatedly demonstrated an ability to revise and reform traditional ideas and practices. In order to conduct such revisions, it’s necessary to remove all possible impediments from viewing angles to better ensure a clear vision of what a given thing is or is not.

After all: monkey see, monkey do.**

 

*The author requests your tolerance of his asterisk abuse, and wants to assure you that he holds no grudge against Roger Maris.

**This post originally appeared at drdetectovision.wordpress.com as a comment in a thread discussing a recent article by Katie Hopkins.

Revision-proof Religion is Revolting

Posted on by Caleb Wachter

Revision-proof religion is revolting.

In my day job as a science fiction and fantasy writer, I get to ponder subjects for days, weeks, months and even years that most people can only processs in drive-thru fashion.  A lot of my thoughts, since a very young age, have centered on religion.  During my pontifications and perusals of historical records, I’ve encountered some thought-provoking and eye-opening examples of how humans interface with their religious institutions.  From Thomas Jefferson’s treatise on how to encourage ideological reformations within religion, to Machiavelli’s ultra-pragmatic thoughts on how a ruler and his subjects should regard their home-grown religious institutions, we find commentary from the best and brightest of our species’ history on this all-important subject.

From Ancient Egypt’s glorious polytheistic take on divinity all the way through the American Secular Reformation and its enduring imprint on Christianity; we have a record of how religious institutions impact their respective societies.  From the Cradle of Civilization with the birth of the so-called Abrahamic Religions, across the Asian continent to witness the inexorable march from Taosim, to Confucianism, to Buddhism, and back to Europe where Christianity played a pivotal role in the creation of modern Western Civilization–the far-reaching impact of religion on the way we think, speak, live, love, and learn cannot be underestimated.

I’m not a learned scholar, and I’ve never been published in the theological arena.  I’m an amateur with an inquisitive mind and an openness to new ideas.  As a young kid growing up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, my skepticism with religion was fairly obvious even at the age of nine.  Today, I would best describe my relationship with religion by borrowing a phrase from the great Freeman Dyson (of eponymous Dyson Sphere fame, which if you’re a sci-fi nut like I am you already know how bright this guy’s light bulbs are).  He said “I am a practicing Christian–I am not a believing Christian.”  I take it even more broadly and expand upon that statement: “I support religion, specifically Christianity, as an empiricist and a humanist–and I don’t need to believe any of the outlandish claims made therein in order to justify that support.”

Let me be perfectly clear: I’ve got four beautiful children, and we’ve never gone to church.  I’ve attended funerals during my time here in the Philippines, and many of those begin in churches, but I’ve never–not once–attended a church occasion in the last decade that wasn’t somehow associated with beginning- or end-of-life ritual ceremonies that are more or less social occasions conducted in a church.  Total number of these types of events I’ve attended?  Less than ten in a decade.

So don’t write me off just yet 😉  As far as my place on the atheism spectrum, I’d slot myself in shoulder-to-shoulder with Thomas Jefferson.

And so it should come as no surprise that I find Thomas Jefferson’s writings on religion to be about as dead-on as anyone’s that I’ve read.  His ultimate idea was simply to make religions stand on their own feet in the court of public opinion—and to do so without co-opting government authority or corporal power in order to move hearts and minds.  If the ideas being presented and preached by a church’s clergy were apparently sound, and the populace accepted them (along with their baggage) as superior to available alternatives, Jefferson appeared to think that was all the progress we needed to root out the stupidity and unwanted aspects of religion.  Not instantaneously, mind you, but both he and Machiavelli (who many refer to as the ‘ultimate pragmatist’) displayed marked temperance on the issue of religion.  Neither was religious by any stretch, but both of them recognized the immense culturally-stabilizing effect that religious institutions generate for their native populations.  This effect cannot be ignored in any reasoned discourse on the issue of religion and its current or future roles in human affairs.

Christianity has a violent a bloody history, and *much* of that blood was shed during Christianity’s myriad Great Reformations.  Whether it was the schism with the Eastern Orthodoxy (the Byzantine Empire, or Eastern Rome’s State Religion which departed from mainstream Christianity mostly in terms of decentralizing authority more than its Western counterpart), Martin Luther’s heresy (which allowed any who wished to do so the ability to read the Bible in their own time, in their own language, and in the privacy of their own homes), Henry VIII’s break with Holy Mother Church by founding the Church of England, or the American Secular Reformation, the history of Christianity is littered with the bones of ongoing ideological warfare within the religion itself–to say nothing of its ongoing feud with Islam for the last thirteen hundred years!

Thomas Jefferson wanted something different for our future.  He looked back and saw all of the Great Reformations and recognized the price we paid in blood and treasure to move the ball forward a few inches.  To him, as a secular humanist, that price was simply unacceptable.  And so he and his contemporaries devised an ingenious, unprecedented mechanism: the Separation of Church & State.  His hope was that the Great Reformations would be a thing of the past, and that replacing them would be an Ongoing Reformation with no battles, little bloodshed, and–most importantly of all–they would have no respite.  In Jefferson’s mind, each reformation or revision of religious practice and dogma gives a chance to take down one more piece of the ‘artificial scaffolding’ that he talked about in his February 27, 1821 letter to Timothy Pickering.  That’s primarily what the Separation of Church & State was about: the whittling away of the undesirable components to lay bare the human truths which resonate with a religion’s adherents.  Sometimes (usually?) it’s three steps forward and two steps back, but on long timescales–and when left uninterrupted–meaningful progress does indeed occur.

All religion is inherently authoritarian in nature.  “Because *I* said so” becomes “Because God said so,” and it’s pretty difficult to argue with an all-powerful deity.  But anyone versed in the scientific method knows that the whole concept of Ultimate Truth certainly breaks down in the face of empirical evidence.  Ultimate Truth was just a mechanism by which the psycho-social practices ensconced in religious dogma and tradition could be imposed more effectively than via simple suggestion and group consensus.  Humans, as animals well-versed in (and well-suited to) a hierarchical social structure, generally respond better to authority than to reason.  That dependence on authority should change over time (especially now that the sum total of human experience is now available on our smartphones), but it’s who we’ve always been as a species and it’s who we still are today.  Ignoring that reality is foolish and self-destructive (or ‘regressive’ as people like Dave Rubin refer to the phenomenon generally).

So it becomes clear that revision is essential when it comes to religion, and any religion that disallows it isn’t worth following—and humans seem to agree with this thesis, demonstrated by the many Great Reformations, followed by the early American cottage industry of dime-a-dozen tent-pole ministries, each of which bore decreasing similarity to existing churches.  And each new ‘church’ attempted to appeal to a different slice of the population pie with not only their doctrinal interpretations, but their emphasis and de-emphasis on certain passages contained within the primary doctrinal sources.  That’s what peaceful religious reformation looks like, and like any other transaction in the marketplace of ideas it was best facilitated in the early USA.

Accepting that religion requires revision to remain relevant and compatible with modernity negates the vast majority of the problems anti-religious people have with religion as a human institution (the most common and sigh-inducing refrain being: “the Bible is historically inaccurate and based on superstition, THEREFORE *none* of it is worthwhile and it should *all* be ignored.”  There’s a saying about babies and bathwater that applies here…).  Personally, I think Thomas Jefferson hit this subject right between the eyes every time he put pen to paper on it.  And a big part of why he was right has to do with his firm belief that a de-centralized decision-making apparatus, operated by everyday people living ordinary lives, is inherently superior to a centralized one with levers pulled on the highest floors of ivory towers.  Cognitive dissonance plays a key role in validating his opinion of this de-centralized process’s advantages–and cognitive dissonance is especially important when it comes to  religion.

Sam Harris, a cognitive neuro-scientist and philosopher of our time, does a good job discussing how cognitive dissonance plays a part in increasing the ‘rationality’ quotient of a population.  Basically, the more contradictions there are in a given constellation of doctrinal sources, the more opportunities an adherent has to use his or her own judgment to determine a course of action—conflicting directives give us the opportunity to *choose* which directive we would prefer to employ, and the large-scale impact of this cannot be overstated.

In general, people (even horrifyingly bad ones) want to live in a ‘good’ world where people are courteous, trusting, and compassionate toward each other.  So when we’re allowed to question a point of dogma in the manner described a few sentences up from this one, it’s an opportunity to *make* the world we want to live in without abandoning the world we were born into (a world largely defined by ensconced traditions).  And that ongoing improvement is, in the end, what most all of us want—not only for our neighbors or for ourselves, but for generations yet to come.  Breaking the decision-making down to the individual level, and functionally *empowering* people to make their own decision as to which doctrinal sources/passages should be more or less emphasized, is a *perfect* example of de-centralized (or distributed) decision-making superseding a centralized decision-making apparatus.  Some funny conclusions can be drawn from this line of reasoning, including the seemingly bizarre one that supports the *intentional* introduction of contradictions *specifically* in order to stimulate free thought.  I don’t *think* that’s what the authors and editors of the world’s holy texts were consciously trying to do when they collected the various works which comprise the world’s primary doctrinal sources, but I honestly wouldn’t put it past at least some of them.  After all, we’re no *smarter* today than we were a thousand years ago.  We’ve just got access to orders of magnitude more information, and we have significantly more time as individuals to ponder that information.

I obviously have more to say on this subject, and I might even write a whole book on the issue at some point, but for now I think I’ll close with the following axiom from Ancient China, along with what that means in the context of this essay:

“To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable–but to be certain is to be ridiculous.”

AnyTHING that is claimed to be perfect is necessarily immune to the process of revision, and anyONE who claims to have perfect knowledge is behaving ridiculously–and, more importantly, they are behaving regressively.