Month: July 2016

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

According to Amazon, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a best-seller. It’s not hard to see why. This deeply interesting book is also a deeply flawed book, and all of the flaws are calculated to make the book more sensationalist and provocative than the underlying research truly allows.

First of all, Harari is all-in for the hypothesis that the Agricultural Revolution was a colossal mistake. This is not a new idea. I’ve come across it several times, and when I did a quick Google search just now I found a 1987 article by Jared Diamond with the subtle title: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. Diamond’s argument then is as silly as Harari’s argument is now, and it boils down to this: life as a hunter-gatherer is easy. Farming is hard. Ergo, the Agricultural Revolution was a bad deal. If we’d all stuck around being hunter-gatherers we’d be happier.

The primary problem with this argument, philosophically, is its naked hedonism. I’m pretty sure I’d be happier if I just stayed in a perpetual, drug-induced high. And yet I don’t see Harari or Diamond (or any ostensibly sane person) standing outside of drug rehab facilities wearing a sandwich board warning heroin addicts that they’d be better off just staying high. Could it be conceivable that there’s more to life than minimizing the amount of time we spend procuring a bare minimum of resources to sustain life? The most frustrating thing about replying to this line of argument is that it’s absurd to even have to spell these things out. Isn’t the human penchant for dissatisfaction one of our noblest attributes? We’re not satisfied, and so we go out and we invent. Discover. Explore. Build. And, while we’re at it, plant and harvest.

Of course, it’s possible to take that to an extreme. Ideally, we find some way to balance the capacity to enjoy what we have–to live in the moment and to be accepting of the past–without giving up on our noble ambitions and desires to better ourselves, those around us, and the world we inhabit. The fact that this just might involve working more hours per week doesn’t automatically make it a bad idea, and the fact that I have to explain any of this to folks like Diamond or Harari is just plain silly. Their arguments are not insightful or provocative. They’re just childish.

Sadly, since this is one of the first arguments that Harari makes, he starts out by digging a deep credibility hole that he never really climbs back out of. He compounds it with other silly fad-arguments like the idea that we didn’t domesticate wheat, wheat domesticate us! Thus:

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated homo sapiens rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the standpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the Earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost 10 times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?

The biggest problem here is that the very first thing that Harari argues for in his book is the distinction between “humans” (a term that covers many species) and “homo sapiens” (a term that refers to just one particular species). He puts all kinds of emphasis on this distinction, including making it the title of his book! And yet, in the passage above, he treats “wheat” as just a plant. Yet, according to Wikipedia, wheat is a term (like human) that refers to nearly 2-dozen distinct species. Again, it’s a hit for his credibility to be so sanctimonious about a technicality in one case, and then so cavalier about it in another. More than that, however, it substantively undermines his argument. Because the reality is that in domesticating various plants and animals, humans were engaged in slow-motion genetic engineering. The result, from the various species of wheat to animals like dogs and chickens, is a species that is genetically distinct from their ancestors. This matters a lot. Because if Harari wants to define a species genetically (which he does) then the domesticated wheat species is not the same thing as the wild wheat species from which it was derived over tens of thousands of years of selective breeding.

To clarify this mistake, imagine that he tried to argue that humans were domestictaed by wolves instead of vice versa. And so now wolves live in the houses of their domesticated humans, right? Well, no. Dogs have domesticated humans, but dogs (Canis familiaris) are not the same things as wolves (Canis lupus, Canis rufus, Canis lycaon, etc). And so you can’t say “wolves domesticated humans” because man’s best friend is no longer a wolf. Similarly, the wheat that we grow for food everywhere isn’t the same creature as its wild ancestor. Once again, this isn’t just wrong, it’s silly. When you see memes on the Internet about how cats own humans, that’s funny. When you see someone trying to turn the exact same Internet joke into a serious scientific point in an ostensibly non-fiction book, it’s just sad and a little pathetic.

Harari’s book suffers a lot from this kind of sloppy sensationalism. In addition to these examples, he also spends a lot of time ironically stating that there are no objective values on the one hand and then–often within mere sentences–making sweeping claims about how modern society is better than ancient society in this or that particular respect. Better, according to which values? It’s just another example of the utter failure of ostensible relativists to actually enact the relativism they claim to believe in. If there are no objective values, then there’s no basis for making statements like that.

So, enough of the criticism. What’s good?

Well, for starters, his separation of ontological concepts into three categories: objective, subjective, and inter-subjective is actually quite useful. He is sloppy about conflating “subjective”, “myth” and “false” (these terms are not synonyms, but he think they are), but the definition of inter-subjective as distinct from mere subjectivity is really quite good:

An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth. Radioactive emissions occurred long before people discovered them, and they are dangerous even when people do not believe in them. Marie Curie, one of the discoverers of radioactivity, did not know during her long years of studying radioactive materials, that they could harm her body. While she did not believe that radioactivity could kill her, she nevertheless died of aplastic anemia, a disease caused by overexposure to radioactive materials. The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual. It disappears or changes if that particular individual changes his or her beliefs. Many a child believes in the existence of an imaginary friend who is invisible and inaudible to the rest of the world. The imaginary friend exists solely in the child’s subjective consciousness, and when the child grows up and ceases to believe in it, the imaginary friend fades away. The intersubjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. If a single individual changes his or her beliefs or even dies, it is of little importance. However, if most individuals in the network die or change their beliefs, the intersubjective phenomenon will mutate or disappear. Intersubjective phenomena are neither malevolent frauds nor insignificant charades. They exist in a different way from physical phenomena such as radioactivity but their impact on the world may still be enormous. Many of histories most important drivers are intersubjective: law, money, gods, nations.

I also liked a lot of his later theories. As much as he made a hash of the Agricultural Revolution, his argument about the interrelationship between imperialism and science, for example, was really quite fascinating.

Scientists have provided the imperial project with practical knowledge, ideological justification, and technological gadgets. Without this contribution, it is highly questionable whether Europeans could have conquered the world. The conquerers returned the favor by providing scientists with information and protection, supporting all kinds of strange and fascinating projects, and spreading the scientific way of thinking to the far corners of the Earth. Without imperial support, it is doubtful whether modern science would have progressed very far. There are very few scientific disciplines that did not begin their lives as servants to imperial growth and that do not owe a large proportion of their discoveries, collections, buildings, and scholarships to the generous help of army officers, navy captains, and imperial governors.

This is a genuinely insightful argument, and it’s one I’d never heard before. It’s not hard to see why. Our culture–especially our intellectual culture–continues to treat science with a great deal of deference and respect. The mere existence of the term “social science”–combined with the embrace of statistical and other formal mathematical techniques in economics, psychology, etc.–all show how deeply ingrained this deference is. But imperialism? That’s practically a bad word in academic settings. Imperialism is pretty close to the Original Sin, as far as anyone residing in the Ivory Tower would believe. And so obviously it’s incredibly uncomfortable to suggest that imperialism and science are linked or even, not going quite that far, that historically science got a significant boost from imperialism. This is an embarrassment to modern Western sensibilities, and so the only kind of person who will bring it up is someone like Harari who seems intent on offending every conceivable member of his audience. The only time when mockery is really called for is in response to power, and so it is deployed appropriately in this case, and that is where the same penchant for kind of immature provocation turns from an annoyance (as with his silly theories about the Agricultural Revolution or wheat domesticating humans) into something important and serious.

Along these lines, I was also really struck with his argument about the consumerist-capitalist ethic. Here goes:

How can we square the consumerist ethic with the capitalist ethic of the business person according to which profits should not be wasted and should instead by reinvested in production. It’s simple. As in previous eras, there is today a division of labor between the elite and the masses. In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally minding every penny. Today the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments while the less well-heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need. The capitalist and consumerist epics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is “invest”. The supreme commandment of the rest of us is “buy.” The capitalist-consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal: they were promised paradise, but only if they cultivate compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideas that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ. Most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha. And most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist-consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more. this is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How, though, do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.

Given his frequent borrowing of ideas I recognize from other sources, I suspect this is not original to Harari, but it is fascinating to me.

There are several more examples of these kinds of points Harari makes that are contrarian and interesting. Some I was already familiar with (such as the nonsensical notion that primitive humans lived in harmony with their environment, something that approaches farce once you actually look at the global swathes of mass extinctions that actually followed the spread of homo sapiens around the globe) and others were either new or particularly well-reasoned (such as his explanation of corporate personhood and intersubjective reality via Peugot). For those reasons: I do recommend reading this book. Just take everything in it with a grain of salt.

Free Trade Africa

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The Washington Post reported on a new African free-trade deal that would include all 54 countries. Here’s what you need to know about the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA):

  1. The CFTA would constitute the largest free-trade area in the world.
  2. It’s part of a larger global trend of mega-regional trade agreements.
  3. The CFTA would help African countries develop.
  4. The CFTA would boost African trade by more than 50 percent.
  5. The CFTA will build off the ECOWAS and TFTA agreements.
  6. The CFTA has widespread political and economic support.
  7. 2017 is the target deadline.

This is exciting news, so long as it is more successful than previous trade deals.

The Unchanging, Changing Church

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Photo of General Sherman by Jim Bahn
Photo of General Sherman, the largest living organism, by Jim Bahn.

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

The first talk in the priesthood session of the April 1973 General Conference was The Aaronic Priesthood MIA by Elder Victor L. Brown. Even after reading the talk, I really have no idea what the program was, and I couldn’t even tell you if it’s still in force. (Some parts of it seemed familiar, others less so.) It’s a very odd feeling, to read a talk given nearly a decade before I was born about a bold, new program that I’ve never heard of.

It made me think of Mosiah 26, when

there were many of the rising generation that could not understand the words of king Benjamin, being little children at the time he spake unto his people; and they did not believe the tradition of their fathers.

Even though Alma and Mosiah’s lifetimes were only separated by a couple of decades from their children, the separation of a single generation was enough to create a wide chasm in their worldview. Alma and Mosiah’s children had to rediscover their own faith.

And it’s the same for us: every generation has to rediscover many of the truths and relearn the lessons that their parents’ generation already discovered and learned. It’s so easy to think that—because we’re members of the same Church our parents were members of—we understand the things that they did. Perversely, the complacent assumption that we get it is one of the biggest stumbling blocks that holds us back from actually going out and discovering and learning what we don’t yet know.

There’s a sense in which the Church is always the same. It’s right there in our Articles of Faith: “We believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church.” But there’s also a sense in which every generation—and every single individual and family—has to recreate or rediscover the Church for themselves not just once, but again and again throughout their lives.

The Church—when you think of it as the actual members—changes when those members change. It also changes in reaction to the surrounding culture. That’s what prophets are for, after all, to warn the people of present problems. If society didn’t change—and if the Church didn’t need to change its programs and policies and emphases in reaction—then we wouldn’t need continuing revelation and an open canon.

The mission and the doctrines do not change, but the policies and the members do. The twin imperative of stasis and change may seem contradictory, but here’s how I think about it: It’s our job to sink our roots deep so that we can grow.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Desire, Ponder, Pray

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This is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I’ve missed the last couple weeks and this one will be short, but I thought Marion G. Romney’s talk in the April 1973 Priesthood session had some sound advice on magnifying our calling (and ultimately our discipleship). The three necessities he lists are:

  1. “a motivating desire to do so.”
  2. “search and ponder the words of eternal life.”
  3. “pray.”

Romney stresses the need for proper desires: “The desire these men were to have was not a desire to be called to an office. It was a desire to take upon themselves the name of Christ “with full purpose of heart.”” He expounds, “No one should seek to be appointed to any particular office in the Church. Such an aspiration is not a righteous desire; it is a self-serving ambition. We should have a motivating desire to magnify our callings in the priesthood, whatever they may be. We should demonstrate that desire by living the gospel and diligently performing whatever service we are called upon to render. Holding a particular office in the Church will never save a person. One’s salvation depends upon how well he discharges the duties of the service to which he is called.” But desire is not “a mere wish. It is not impassive; it is a motivating conviction which moves one to action.” This in turn leads one “to search and ponder the words of eternal life.” Sensibly enough, Romney finds, “Since we cannot “live by [the words which] proceedeth forth from the mouth of God” unless we know what they are, it is imperative that we study them. This the Lord has directed us to do.” He notes the difficulty of teaching the principles of the gospel (see D&C 42:12) without knowing what they actually are. This study leads to pondering, which Romney views as “a form of prayer. It has, at least, been an approach to the Spirit of the Lord on many occasions.” Finally, Romney concludes the list: “Desiring, searching, and pondering over “the words of eternal life,” all three of them together, as important as they are, would be inadequate without prayer. Prayer is the catalyst with which we open the door to the Savior.”

I find the habit of scripture reading without serious study or reflection to be odd. While habits and rituals are important, to approach the scriptures as an item on a list of things to do to reach the celestial kingdom seems to me to miss the point. The scriptures contain wisdom about the human condition, human nature, and God’s interaction with these two elements. The scriptures are both incredibly human and divinely inspired. We should wrestle with them, immerse ourselves in them, question them, challenge them, be changed by them. They are not magic incantations that will suddenly make you more spiritual. They are full of hard truths, cosmic myths, and glorious hope that must be chewed and digested if they are to be nourishing.

This trilogy seems to be a reinforcing cycle: as one’s desire increases, so will the searching, pondering, and praying, which will in turn increase desire. The last part–pray–is something I need to work on though. If one spends time reading and pondering, but fails to open up the channels of communication, one could miss out on even greater spiritual knowledge and inspiration.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t been translated yet…

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

The Economic Case for Gender Equality

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A 2015 McKinsey Global Institute report found that–surprise, surprise–gender equality is good for the economy:

A “best in region” scenario in which all countries match the rate of improvement of the fastest-improving country in their region could add as much as $12 trillion, or 11 percent, in annual 2025 GDP. In a “full potential” scenario in which women play an identical role in labor markets to that of men, as much as $28 trillion, or 26 percent, could be added to global annual GDP by 2025. MGI’s full-potential estimate is about double the average estimate of other recent studies, reflecting the fact that MGI has taken a more comprehensive view of gender inequality in work.

MGI focused on 15 gender-equality indicators, all of which fell under the categories (1) equality in work, (2) essential services and enablers of economic opportunity, (3) legal protection and political voice, and (4) physical security and autonomy. Both developing and advanced countries stand to gain from increased gender parity. “MGI’s new Gender Parity Score (GPS) measures the distance each country has traveled toward gender parity, which is set at 1.00. The regional GPS is lowest in South Asia (excluding India) at 0.44 and highest in North America and Oceania at 0.74. Using the GPS, MGI has established a strong link between gender equality in society, attitudes and beliefs about the role of women, and gender equality in work.” Furthermore, “MGI has identified ten “impact zones” (issue–region combinations) where effective action would move more than 75 percent of women affected by gender inequality globally closer to parity. The global impact zones, which are globally pervasive issues, are blocked economic potential, time spent in unpaid care work, fewer legal rights, political underrepresentation, and violence against women.”

So, if thinking of women as equals on moral and ontological grounds is just too much of a stretch for you, try indulging in a little economic self-interest and fight for gender equality.

Does Dallas prove “good guys with guns” is a lie?

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After the sniper in Dallas killed five police officers, I saw several posts like this:

GGWG pieces

The idea is that there were not only armed police officers present but also citizens with open carry licenses, and yet all these “good guys with guns” didn’t stop the bad guy with a gun from killing people. That much is true. The people pointing this out then often conclude that good guys with guns won’t protect us. That much is false.

Of course if you mean good guys with guns can’t prevent bad guys with guns from hurting anyone ever again, yes, I agree. But I doubt most gun rights advocates believe or have made such an extreme claim. It’s not that good guys with guns will always be able to keep everyone safe; it’s that good guys with guns will be able to protect people more often than good guys without guns.

I think most people on both sides of the gun control debate recognize this to some extent, because almost everyone agrees the police (“good guys with guns”) should be armed. In fact, using Dallas to claim good guys with guns don’t protect us is especially interesting because both civilians and LEOs with guns weren’t able to stop the sniper. Yet gun control advocates are pointing to Dallas as a reason to disarm civlians only, not the police.

And, I mean, I agree that we definitely shouldn’t disarm the police. It seems clear to me that (1) a military-trained sniper is not representative of the dangerous people police are more typically up against, and (2) everyone would have been worse off if the police hadn’t had guns.

It’s true that civilians and LEOs with guns were unable to stop the sniper before he hurt anyone, but it’s false to suggest the guns were irrelevant or of no benefit, and it’s nonsensical to suggest that if good guys can’t protect people from a military-trained sniper, they can’t protect people in more typical situations. For example, just yesterday (also in Dallas incidentally), a legal gun owner with a pistol stopped a robber with an AK-47.

HuffPo GGWG

There are snippet self-defense stories like that regularly, but they don’t make nearly the media ripples that shootings make. I think that’s understandable to some extent: stories about things going right generally don’t get as much attention as stories about things going wrong, especially when things go really wrong. And there’s a matter of degree here too: in terms of media exposure, a snippet about a civilian stopping a robber might be parallel to a snippet about a robber shooting and wounding a single person. They’re both relatively minor stories. But what would the “good guy” equivalent be to stories about horrific mass shootings? Because a story about preventing a mass shooting doesn’t have nearly the media impact mass shootings have. But I digress.

Gun control advocates point out that if the sniper hadn’t had a gun, he couldn’t have done the damage he did. And I think they’re right. I think it’s obvious. I don’t find compelling the gun rights arguments that imply people can be just as dangerous with knives or baseball bats or whatever as they are with guns.

But while I also wish the sniper hadn’t had a gun, it’s not clear to me what the solution is, for two main reasons. (1) Gun ownership is a Constitutional right, so, absent amending the Constitution, gun control measures can’t undermine that right. (2) The measures would have to effectively stop people from obtaining guns illegally, at least at a level that would make up for stopping “good guys with guns” from being able to protect themselves and others from “bad guys with guns.”

I’m open to the possibility that there are gun control measures that can accomplish both of these feats, it’s just not clear to me right now what those measures would be. I think I’ll save that topic for future posts.

Are Safety Standards Relative?

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Five cars for the Indian market were recently awarded a zero-star safety rating by the London-based Global New Car Assessment Program. While this low rating is gaining a bit of negative press, economist Alex Tabarrok thinks we should reconsider:

Let’s take a closer look. These cars are very inexpensive. A Renault Kwid, for example, can be had for under $4000. In the Indian market these cars are competing against motorcycles. Only 6 percent of Indian households own a car but 47% own a motorcycle. Overall, there are more than five times as many motorcycles as cars in India.

Motorcycles are also much more dangerous than cars.

…The GNCAP worries that some Indian cars don’t have airbags but forgets that no Indian motorcycles have airbags. Even a zero-star car is much safer than a motorcycle. Air bags cost about $200-$400 (somewhat older estimates here a, b, c) and are not terribly effective. (Levitt and Porter, for example, calculated that air bags saved 550 lives in 1997 compared to 15,000 lives saved by seatbelts.) At $250, airbags would increase the cost of a $5,000 car by 5%. A higher price for automobiles would reduce the number of relatively safe automobiles and increase the number of relatively dangerous motorcycles and thus an air bag requirement could result in more traffic fatalities.

A broader point is that in India today $250 is about 5% of GDP per capita ($5,700 at PPP) and that’s a high price to pay for the limited protection provided by an air bag. Lots of people in the United States wouldn’t pay $2750–5% of US GDP per capita–for an air bag. Why should Indians be any different?

Intending to save lives and actually saving lives are not the same thing.

“Don’t like X? Don’t get one.”

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I’m anti-abortion, and this meme really annoys me:

don't like abortion

This meme is addressed to pro-lifers, but it only makes sense if it completely ignores the fundamental pro-life argument: abortion kills non-aggressive, innocent humans. To a pro-lifer this meme is roughly equivalent to “Don’t like murder? Don’t commit one.” Yeah great. Solid point.

Now, an abortion rights advocate might respond that abortion isn’t murder for a variety of reasons, and then we can have that debate. That debate is worth having because it’s actually addressing what the target audience–pro-lifers, in this case–are saying. The above meme completely ignores what pro-lifers are saying. What good is a point that ignores the central premise of the group you’re addressing?

And that’s why, even though I’m a gun rights advocate, this meme annoys me too:

don't like guns

This meme is addressed to gun control advocates, but it only makes sense if it completely ignores the fundamental gun control argument: permissive access to guns results in the deaths of non-aggressive, innocent humans. I imagine to a gun control advocate this meme is roughly equivalent to “Don’t like mass shootings? Don’t commit one.” Insightful, thanks.

I know gun rights advocates, including myself, argue that access to guns can and has saved lives. And I think that’s a debate worth having because it’s addressing what the target audience–gun control advocates, in this case–are saying. But the above meme completely ignores what they’re saying, in the exact same way the abortion meme did.

I understand memes by their very nature can’t be in-depth, nuanced arguments. But they could at least be remotely relevant to the audience they’re supposed to be addressing. That’s not too high of a hurdle, right?

Income Mobility vs. Educational Mobility

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Nobel laureate James Heckman has a new paper out with exploring social mobility in the U.S. and Denmark. The abstract reads:

This paper examines the sources of differences in social mobility between the U.S. and Denmark. Measured by income mobility, Denmark is a more mobile society, but not when measured by educational mobility. There are pronounced nonlinearities in income and educational mobility in both countries. Greater Danish income mobility is largely a consequence of redistributional tax, transfer, and wage compression policies. While Danish social policies for children produce more favorable cognitive test scores for disadvantaged children, these do not translate into more favorable educational outcomes, partly because of disincentives to acquire education arising from the redistributional policies that increase income mobility.

In short, the disadvantaged in Denmark are not flourishing and moving up financially because of the labor market, educational attainment, or careers, but simply due to wealth redistribution via high taxes.

The authors conclude,

The failure to promote greater educational mobility in spite of providing generous social services is most likely rooted in the welfare state. Our findings point to wage compression and the higher levels of welfare benefits as being counterproductive in providing incentives to pursue education. The low returns to education observed in Denmark, in particular at the lower levels of education, help explain the disconnect between the egalitarian childhood policies in Denmark and the roughly equal levels of educational mobility in Denmark and the U.S. The sorting of families into neighborhoods and schools by levels of parental advantage is likely another contributing factor. While the Danish welfare state may mitigate some childhood inequalities, substantial skill gaps still remain.

…This paper sends a cautionary note to the many enthusiasts endorsing the Scandinavian welfare state. We make no statements about the optimality and fairness of the U.S. and Danish systems from a philosophical or social choice point of view. The Danish welfare state clearly boosts the cognitive test scores of disadvantaged children compared to their U.S. counterparts. But test scores are not the whole story, or even the main story of child success, despite the emphasis on them in popular discussions. Moreover, substantial gaps in test scores remain across social groups within Denmark.

…The U.S. excels in incentivizing educational attainment. The Danish welfare state promotes cognitive skills for the disadvantaged children. Policies that combine the best features of each system would appear to have the greatest benefit for promoting intergenerational mobility in terms of both income and educational attainment (pgs. 55-56).

Check it out.

The Greatest Tricks the Devil Plays

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Detail of The Temptation of Christ by Ary Scheffer. (Public Domain)
Detail of The Temptation of Christ by Ary Scheffer. (Public Domain)

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

It is not often that you hear someone share a testimony of the existence of Satan, but that’s exactly what was so striking about Elder David B. Haight’s talk on the Power of Evil. Towards the end he said plainly, “I bear witness this day that the devil is real. I have felt of his influence.”

Which raises the question: why? Why is it important to know this? Mormonism is, generally speaking, a relentlessly optimistic faith. We have very strict rules, but we don’t generally hear a lot about brimstone. The motivation is generally love rather than fear. And so it’s possible to ask—if we already have such strict standards and an emphasis on hope—does it really matter if we talk about the devil?

Well, in one sense, not that much. After all, this is the first talk that has focused on that topic that I’ve ever read. Clearly it’s not our primary emphasis and it won’t ever be.

But on the other hand, the topic was worth bringing up, and Elder Haight’s talk explains why:

Unfortunately, along with much of the world, some of our loved ones are influenced by false prophets, false Christs, and modern movements of spiritualism. Some have become victims of satanic influences because they do not understand or realize the power of the adversary who knows human weaknesses and is ever present.

The reason some are led astray is especially that “the current wave of permissiveness in many areas of our lives is being encouraged by false interpretations of our true, basic, moral principles.” I wasn’t alive in the 1970s, but I’d hazard a guess—based on what I know of the time period and what I’ve read from these talks—that the notion of agency and individual freedom was one thing that led people astray. The same kinds of mistakes are happening today.

But we have to resist the temptation to take a talk like this and morph it into something along the lines of “my political adversaries are devils; my political allies are angels.” If there’s one thing I’ve observed, from following the interplay of politics and morality, it’s the that devil knows how to play both sides of the spectrum. When anti-federalist militia members took over a federal building in eastern Oregon earlier this year, they included flags quoting the Title of Liberty and even one individual who identified himself as Captain Moroni. It’s hard to think of a clearer example of “false interpretations” of Mormonism.

What it comes down to for me is that we should apply prophetic teachings to ourselves rather than to others. Nephi said that he “did liken all scriptures unto us,” not that he related scriptures to their enemies. The same principle applies here. Elder Haight’s talk is a warning to examine our own convictions, our own beliefs, and our own actions. A reminder that the devil can lead even the righteous astray is an opportunity for humility and self-reflection. We must be discerning, and tribalism–political or otherwise–is blinding.

There’s a saying that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. Perhaps the second-greatest trick is letting the world believe that he does exist, but convincing them that he’s always on the side of their enemies.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!