Why Does Sam Harris Matter?

You know who I'm talking about. Sells a lot of books. Says things like this.

I mean, really? Why do we like him?

All he seems to have offered, aside from Letter to a Christian Nation, seems to be Islamophobia and long-since debunked philosophical arguments.

I would really like to know this, everyone. Please help me out.

Can We Define Objective Morality?

This is part of my blogathon for SSA Week. Donate, and suggest topics for me, here!

This one comes in from Mike Mei, formerly of the Secular Alliance at the University of Chicago: he asks how we can define objective morality.

I'm not really sure that we can.

See, my philosophical beginning was with Albert Camus, and to this day I still view one of my first touchstones in my worldview as being the absurdist assertion that there is no intrinsic meaning to the world, but instead we create meaning based on experience. I believe that each and every freethinking person probably views morality in very different ways, but that does not, for me, necessarily mean that one viewpoint is better than another. 

I suppose more than anything I would define myself as a consequentialist. Defined simply, this means that we evaluate how moral an action is based on whether or not it created a good outcome; I'm not a utilitarian, as that relies far too much on Enlightenment notions of ethics for my comfort. But, empirically, we know that actions considered by many to be "good" are not always so; take, for example, a person who gives food to a homeless person out of kindness, without knowing that said homeless person is allergic to an ingredient in the food they were given. And indeed morally "bad" actions can be said to have good outcomes, such as if someone managed to kill a person threatening to kill innocents before they could pull the trigger, as it were. These are basic examples, but I think illustrate the point.

Hence my dilemma. I know, for instance, Dan Fincke over at Camels With Hammers has argued in favor of there being objective morality, but I have yet to properly engage with that material. As such, my answer, for now, is that I do not personally believe it is possible for there to be a set of morals that is objectively right or wrong.

But, I will be happy to hear opposing arguments, and maybe be proven wrong.

Lunch Break!

I need noms. Back at 2:30.

I Aim to Misbehave: A Comment on Humanist Communities

Over at Almost Diamonds and Temple of the Future respectively, Stephanie Zvan and James Croft, two people whose work I think very highly of, are having a discussion on Humanist communities. James and I have previously had discussions on the language use around the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy (now Community, I see), but I have not yet really written my thoughts on the idea of such communities, as counters to the religious variety. I'll do that here, as well as in the future, I'm sure.

I'm going to start with a film reference. In Joss Whedon's Serenity, the movie made to round up some plot lines from the utterly brilliant yet cruelly canceled Firefly, main character Captain Mal Reynolds, played by Nathan Fillion, has a superb monologue. Without going into too much detail for the philistines among you who have not seen it, it comes after a revelation of a massive coverup by the Alliance, the authoritarian ruling government of the galaxy. It's a horrific tale, and Mal decides that the crew have to reveal it to the people; he says [emphasis mine]

"Sure as I know anything, I know this - they [the Alliance] will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."

The bolded segment here is the heart of my problem. It was further enforced when Crommunist posted this piece the other day in which he detailed a conversation he and James had had over ostracizing potential attendees from Humanist communities, which James apparently has no problem with doing.

I worry about this quite a bit. One of the things that I have seen over and over again as I have been a secular activist is that atheists and rationalists will use their criticisms of religion to create a new dogma on their own, another set of principles that set up an unchallengeable belief system: as I have learned previously, to criticize Richard Dawkins in this movement is akin to stealing groceries from little old ladies, in terms of the righteous backlash.

Though James will certainly argue otherwise, I worry that this kind of thing is what would happen in a Humanist community like those he wants to set up. When he says things like he did to Crommunist, about not being bothered about accepting everyone, he is inevitably setting up a binary of right and wrong. And, to borrow from Thedor Adorno, we must be wary of creating collective ethos, of setting up hierarchies of morality; collective ethos are almost always conservative ones, which Judith Butler characterizes as postulating a "false unity that attempts to suppress the difficulty and discontinuity existing within any contemporary ethos" (Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 4).

I encourage James and all other secularists to apply the same rationality and skepticism that they prize to their own views. Hierarchical divisions, based on virtue or reason or whatever, will break this movement as sure as anything.

Suggestion: The One Book High Schoolers Should Read

This is part of my blogathon for SSA Week. Donate, and suggest topics for me, here!

This suggestion comes in from Heather, who asks "If you had the opportunity to choose one book to be required reading in American high schools, which one would it be?"

This is a ridiculously hard question because I am such a book nerd, but I think my answer would ultimately be The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

I debated in my head some more typical answers, like Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby, something Shakespeare, the like, but Chana said that it needs to be something that completely changes the way that you think, and I agree.

Zinn's book is a tome, and an absolute classic. It starts with Columbus' arrival in the Caribbean and continues through to the present day, presenting a narrative of the history of America not through the old rich white men who are all anyone focuses on in high school history classes, but instead takes his readers to the plantations, coal mines, and picket lines of the working classes. For most readers, it is their country seen in an entirely new light; not the land of the free, home of the brave, democracy and apple pie national legend that we all have shoved down our throats from day one, but instead one where the haves exploit and oppress the have nots to maintain their privilege and wealth.

I think Zinn himself described his work best of all.

My history, therefore, describes the inspiring struggle of those who have fought slavery and racism (Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses), of the labor organizers who have led strikes for the rights of working people (Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, César Chavez), of the socialists and others who have protested war and militarism (Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, Cindy Sheehan). My hero is not Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and congratulated a general after a massacre of Filipino villagers at the turn of the century, but Mark Twain, who denounced the massacre and satirized imperialism... 

I want young people to understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties. Our people are basically decent and caring, and our highest ideals are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which says that all of us have an equal right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The history of our country, I point out in my book, is a striving, against corporate robber barons and war makers, to make those ideals a reality — and all of us, of whatever age, can find immense satisfaction in becoming part of that.

Schooling, particularly high school, should be about free thought and critical investigation. I think Zinn's book is one of the best catalysts for this that is available.

Habermas and Taylor, Part 1: Political Theology and the Public Sphere

This is part of my blogathon for SSA Week. Donate, and suggest topics for me, here!

As I mentioned briefly before, I am a philosophy and art history major at DePaul University in Chicago when I'm not being the president of DAFT. Thought I'm constantly questioning these two life choices in terms of future career (especially when Richard Carrier posts things like this), I think there is a lot to be gained from the perspective of a philosopher. Yes, certainly, that isn't true for all, but at least in my training thus far, I have learned an immense amount on not only how to write or argue, but on how to think; I now devour books in a completely different way than I used to. For instance, I can't read anything any more without a pen in my hand to underline and annotate. Particularly if it's something I'm going to be referring back to.

In any case, it has been my intention for a long time to write more philosophically on this blog, largely inspired by Dan Fincke of Camels With Hammers, who somehow manages to write long posts with very sophisticated but clear arguments damned near every day when he isn't grading. I don't want superpowers, I just want to be able to do that.

So, here's my first musing of the day.

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I've recently been reading quite a lot of theory on secularism and religion in preparation for writing my undergraduate thesis next year, which will be on the topic of apathy and political engagement in a contemporary context, namely in the fact that I think there is an essential dearth of action inherent in liberal secular democracies that allows those in power to continue to rule, even through the tenures of many "elected" officials; I refer to the "smoke-filled room" types, corporate bosses and bankers et al., that seem to be the ones really making the decisions.

In this paper, I want to formulate an argument towards regaining a spirit of activism in the modern world; one of the points of this will be an extended analysis of religious and secular worldviews as motivators. In this post, via Jurgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, I want to take my first step in defining the kind of secularism I think will be needed to make this happen.

The encompassing concept that seems to be defining current debates on secularism and religion in philosophical circles is that of "political theology," or the concept that postulates that religious ways of thinking are prevalent throughout political, social, and economic theories. The classic example of this is Carl Schmitt, who wrote an entire book on the topic: he argued that all political theories relate to government in the same way that theology relates to religion, and particularly used the concept of Original Sin, our old friend, to argue for authoritarianism.

The premise we have here is that politics is propped up in the same way that religion is; through dogmatic ways of thinking that exist to maintain order. Nationalism in particular comes to mind here as a notion of the political acting like the religious.

Contra this, Habermas, one of the more prominent political philosophers of the past few decades, makes the case that the revival of political theology and this notion of "the political" is to attempt to make the state out to be a totality, a historical notion of the nation-state not terribly dissimilar from a Rousseauian social contract, where all citizens of the nation buy into a narrative of power that is based on smoke and legend; such a conception, Habermas contends, has been rendered obsolete by the revelation of state power through what he terms "the public sphere."

Now, however, in a society where the capitalist economic "juggernaut" reigns more than any political philosophy, he sees the resurgence of political theology as an attempt to return the control over these forces to "human agents." This, he argues, is just more smoke and mirrors, and so a new, "postsecular" stance is required, one which has a handle on the continued vitality of religion in public life; it has not gone away, and shows little sign of doing so in a global sense. In a turn that reminds one of Quine, he says that religion is part of the bond of society, but that its language must be secularized into a "universally accessible language," understandable by all, not just the religious or the secular.

In my next post, I will turn to Charles Taylor's critique of Habermas, and offer my own analysis.

The Greatest Live Performance in History

This is part of my blogathon for SSA Week. Donate, and suggest topics for me, here!

So, while I do a bit of philosophizing, feast upon this performance by The Who, which I truly believe to be the best live rock and roll performance ever. Not only because it's awesome, but because Mick Jagger wouldn't release the footage for years, as The Who completely blew the Stones off stage. Ah, jealousy.