Books

The Bible and the Believer: An Interview with Marc Brettler

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

The Bible can be very problematic for believers, especially those that adopt an early 20th-century fundamentalist reading that transforms it into a history and science textbook. As biblical scholarship has continued to progress, many of the assumptions held by believers have been challenged. Is there a way to read the Bible that includes both scholarship and faith?

In the Oxford-published The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously, biblical scholars Marc Zvi Brettler, Daniel J. Harrington, and Peter Enns explore ways in which historical criticism can be incorporated into various faith traditions, including Jewish (Brettler), Catholic (Harrington), and Protestant (Enns). The book serves not only as good introduction to historical criticism, but a model of how to approach one’s religion “by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118).

You can listen to an interview with Marc Brettler on BYU’s Maxwell Institute Podcast below:

Bourgeois Equality and Economic Betterment

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Two centuries ago, the average world income per human (in present-day prices) was about $3 a day. It had been so since we lived in caves. Now it is $33 a day—which is Brazil’s current level and the level of the U.S. in 1940. Over the past 200 years, the average real income per person—including even such present-day tragedies as Chad and North Korea—has grown by a factor of 10. It is stunning. In countries that adopted trade and economic betterment wholeheartedly, like Japan, Sweden and the U.S., it is more like a factor of 30—even more stunning.

And these figures don’t take into account the radical improvement since 1800 in commonly available goods and services. Today’s concerns over the stagnation of real wages in the U.S. and other developed economies are overblown if put in historical perspective. As the economists Donald Boudreaux and Mark Perry have argued in these pages, the official figures don’t take account of the real benefits of our astonishing material progress.

…Nothing like the Great Enrichment of the past two centuries had ever happened before. Doublings of income—mere 100% betterments in the human condition—had happened often, during the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, in Song China and Mughal India. But people soon fell back to the miserable routine of Afghanistan’s income nowadays, $3 or worse. A revolutionary betterment of 10,000%, taking into account everything from canned goods to antidepressants, was out of the question. Until it happened.

So argues economic historian Deirdre McCloskey in the past Saturday Essay of The Wall Street Journal. How did this Great Enrichment happen?:

The answer, in a word, is “liberty.” Liberated people, it turns out, are ingenious. Slaves, serfs, subordinated women, people frozen in a hierarchy of lords or bureaucrats are not. By certain accidents of European politics, having nothing to do with deep European virtue, more and more Europeans were liberated. From Luther’s reformation through the Dutch revolt against Spain after 1568 and England’s turmoil in the Civil War of the 1640s, down to the American and French revolutions, Europeans came to believe that common people should be liberated to have a go. You might call it: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Check out the rest of McCloskey’s piece and be sure to pick up the last in her trilogy on the Bourgeois Era: Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World.

 

Religion of a Different Color: A Lecture by W. Paul Reeve

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

As I’ve shared before, a few years ago my manager came up to me and asked, “Walker, you’re Mormon, right?” Living in Texas, this always sets off an alarm inside my head. I had never told him I was Mormon, so he had obviously heard it elsewhere. “Yes…,” I replied. Then, the sledgehammer: “Do Mormons have a problem with black people?” It’s important to note that my manager is African-American. He explained that we had gotten along so well and that he was surprised to hear some of the things said about Mormons and blacks and to learn that I was a Mormon. He couldn’t square the supposed racist ideology of Mormonism with his personal interactions with me. This led to a 15-20 minute discussion about the history of the priesthood ban. I ended with my personal view: “The priesthood ban was a mistake, the result of racist folklore, which was allowed to continue for an excruciatingly long time. Thankfully, that policy no longer exists today.” My manager enjoyed the conversation and seemed to understand the complexities surrounding the issue.

The history of Mormonism and race is both sad and fascinating. W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness is the book for understanding the history of the priesthood ban. Yet, it is much more than that. It is also an illuminating tale of race relations and the very concept of race in 19th-century America. Despite being predominantly white Yankees or Northern Europeans, Mormons were seen as racially degenerate. Not only did they supposedly associate with blacks and reds (Native Americans), but they also practiced the degrading, foreign barbarism of polygamy. The Mormon response to reclaim this seemingly withheld status of “whiteness” was to eventually distance themselves from non-whites, finally leading to the barring of blacks from both the priesthood and the temple.

An important and needed book in Mormon history. You can see a presentation by Reeve at Benchmark Books below:

The Ethics of Voting: A Lecture by Jason Brennan

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

My cynicism toward voting began a few years ago. After standing in line a mere 10 minutes at early voting back in 2012, I impatiently mentioned to my wife that we could leave and the state would still remain Red (as it has since 1980). While this Republican coloring may not always be the case due to the increasing Latino population (though they would have to increase their voter turnout), it was the case that time around. Why the sudden surge in pessimism? Boredom, for one, but also the growing realization that we do not live in a swing state (not that my vote’s instrumental value would increase much even in a swing state). The Romney/Ryan ticket was going to carry Texas despite my vote, not because of it. After teasing my mother via text about this unavoidable fact (she was a bit more zealous about her Republican vote than I was), I finally made it to the voting booth. I sat there for a minute, staring at the names of the presidential candidates. I suddenly felt the urge to vote for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, former Republican Governor of New Mexico and founder of Big J Enterprises (one of the largest construction companies in New Mexico when he sold it in 1999). This made sense considering I am more libertarian in my views than Romney and that my vote would not really change the outcome of my state (The Onion got it right). Nonetheless, having prepped myself to vote for Romney ever since he gained the Republican nomination, I followed through. However, I remained extremely skeptical of my so-called “duty to vote.”

Philosopher Jason Brennan’s Princeton-published The Ethics of Voting tackles the folk theory that says we have a duty to vote. Not only is the instrumental value of a single vote vanishingly small, but most voters are ignorant when it comes to politics: both of the candidates’ policy positions and the social science behind those policies. And this ignorance means most people should not vote. One may not have a duty to vote, but if one does vote, then that person has a duty to vote well.

You can see some of these ideas discussed in Brennan’s lecture below:

 

A Reason For Faith: A Lecture by Laura Harris Hales and Others

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

A few weeks ago, I received an unexpected but most welcome Facebook message from Laura Harris Hales asking if I still blogged at Times & Seasons. After a brief exchange, a copy of her newly published A Reason For Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History was on its way to my house for reviewing. You can read my entire review (which was quoted in The Salt Lake Tribune) at Times & Seasons, but my view of the book overall is that

it must be recognized how huge all of this truly is: a book published through a Church imprint is talking about Freemasonry, Deutero-Isaiah, etc. It should be considered a welcome addition to the growing list of Mormon pastoral works. Heavy readers of Mormon Studies may not find anything new or surprising in its pages, but they are not the book’s intended audience. It is meant as a primer; a springboard for those unacquainted with this type of information. It’s meant for the 18 or 19-year-old who just put in his/her papers. It’s meant as a tool for Family Home Evening. As Hales explains in the introduction, the purpose of the book is

to create a safe environment for exploration within a faithful framework. Even so, these discussions may generate thoughts and questions that might be surprising or even bothersome as existing beliefs are stretched. In fact, readers may grieve at the loss of perceptions held dear. Yet they can be consoled by the realization that their expanded understanding is based upon accurate teachings. The information in these essays can begin an exciting process of discovery for readers…When gospel questions arise, the antidote for uncertainty is more knowledge and more contemplation, which takes time–“even by study and also by faith.” It is the continual search for truth, both secular and spiritual, that will give us a reason for faith (pgs. xiii-xiv).

Given this mission, I think the book is a success.

You can see Laura joined by several of the book’s contributors below in their presentation at Benchmark Books:

The Darkness of Game of Thrones

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There will be Game of Thrones spoilers in this post. 

The cover of Game of Thrones, back before it went mainstream.
The cover of Game of Thrones, back before it went mainstream.

George R. R. Martin can write.[ref]Well, given how slow his progress has been recently, I suppose I should be more specific. When Mr. Martin writes, it’s very good.[/ref] I’ve known that since I read A Game of Thrones nearly 20 years ago. I was bothered by crippling a child in one of the first scenes, and by the time I got to Ned Stark’s execution at the end of the book I knew that the series wasn’t for me. I haven’t read any other books in the series, and I haven’t watched a single episode of the HBO adaptation. But, because I follow a lot of pop culture with interest, I do keep up with most of the memorable moments. From the Red Wedding to the death of Jon Snow, I keep tabs.

And it’s pretty grim stuff.

It turns out that Jon Snow’s not dead after all, by the way. This is the big reveal in the most recent episode, but it was overshadowed by, you know, brutally feeding a mother and her child to a pack of ravenous dogs. Here’s what Kelly Lawler wrote about it:

So in an episode where fans were given what might be the greatest news they could hope for, they were also treated to a mother and newborn child being eaten alive by dogs. Why? I couldn’t tell you, but I can tell you that an episode like “Home” demonstrates what is the fundamental underpinning of this show: It will do anything in its desperation to shock you. And while having actors and producers flat-out lie for a year in the press is the more innocent end of that spectrum, we certainly hope we’re not forced to listen to more infants being eaten alive. Because that’s not the shock we’re looking for.

Lawler goes on:

And so the audience was treated to the sounds and very nearly the sight of a woman and her newborn son being ripped apart by dogs. We’ve already seen countless women raped, a young girl burned alive by her own father, not to mention the weekly grind of violence and death we’ve become accustomed to. Sure, some of that is par for the course with the genre and the path this show has decided to take, but even for the most ardent fans, for the most faithful viewer, when is enough enough? Is there no line this show won’t cross?

There is something that people do not seem to understand about values, and it is this. Particular values are subjective and contingent. But having values at all is objective and universal. Where a society chooses to draw lines in what is acceptable and what is not changes with history and location and context. That societies draw lines is not.

Lawler seems to think that the important question is, how far do you go? But that doesn’t really matter, because different societies–and different individuals–have their own tolerances and their own lines in the sand. Location is largely meaningless. What matters is direction. Lawler writes that the show “will do anything in its desperation to shock you.” Why desperation? Because the more you shock the audience, the less sensitive they become.

No matter what your tolerances are, the danger–I believe–comes in crossing them habitually and for no higher purpose and in so doing desensitizing yourself. The world we live in certainly does not need less sensitivity. It certainly does not need less empathy. It does not need less light.[ref]FYI, A Game of Thrones is very, very far from the darkest stuff out there. If you really want to read a book with lots of child-torture and child-rape, then you should skip George R. R. Martin and head straight for N. K. Jemisin.[/ref]

Just something to think about.

The Happiness Hypothesis: An Interview with Jonathan Haidt

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Over the past couple years, I’ve done several conference presentations on the subject of a Mormon theology of work. Recently, I compiled much of the research from this various presentations and submitted it to BYU Studies Quarterly. I was thrilled to find out earlier this year that they will in fact be publishing it. The last section of the article looks at insights from management literature. I was fairly satisfied with it, but then I picked up Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom and began kicking myself for not reading it sooner and incorporating it into my paper. Haidt explores the divide between conscious and unconscious mental processes, the social nature of reciprocity and hypocrisy, and the benefits of love, adversity, and sacredness. But what jumped out at me was his overview of the “pursuit of happiness”: happiness rarely comes from achieving goals (that emotional high is fleeting), but from striving to achieve them. It is making progress that brings up happiness. I read Haidt’s The Righteous Mind first, but I enjoyed this one just as much.

Check out the interview with Jonathan Haidt below.

The Bonobo and the Atheist: An Interview with Frans de Waal

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

I was at the zoo recently with my wife, my sister-in-law, her husband, and their baby. As we looked at the bonobos and observed their eerily human behavior, I made the comment that I needed to read primatologist Frans de Waal’s book The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. Morality, de Waal argues, is bottom-up. Behaviors we label as “moral”–such as empathy or fairness–are grounded in our evolutionary development. Morality arises from the emotions and social rules that can be found in other primates. The book made Nathaniel’s best of 2015 list. And I happen to agree with one of his criticisms:

Merely because you can show how a thing arises through evolution doesn’t get you out of this problem. You could explain how humans came to have the ability to reason objectively, but that wouldn’t mean that logic and math were suddenly subjective. It would just prove that somehow evolution managed to get us in touch with non-contingent, objective reason. Same idea here: you can explain how humans came to behave morally or even to understand and think about morality, but it’s a colossal mistake to think that, in so doing, you have proved that morality is “constructed” or in any way subjective any more than reason or logic are. (For fun: let someone try to reason you out of the position that reason is objective. See how that works? It’s a non-starter.)

Even if the philosophy is lacking, the science is fascinating. You can see a Big Think interview with de Waal below.

Brigham Young: A Lecture by John G. Turner

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

In her review of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet by GMU historian John G. Turner, Julie Smith writes,

I suspect that John G. Turner’s Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet will be the definitive biography of Brigham Young for the next few decades.  Overall, this is a good thing.

But it may also be a troubling thing, at least for some people. I wholeheartedly recommended the recent Joseph Smith, David O. McKay, and Spencer W. Kimball biographies to all members of the Church.  Sure, they are a little less sanitized than we are used to, but the picture in each one of those works is of a prophet of God who had some flaws, with far more emphasis on the “prophet” part than on the “flawed” part.

This book?  Not so much.  I have serious reservations about recommending it to the average church member; if you need your prophet to be larger than life, or even just better than the average bear, this book is not for you.  I think there is a substantial risk that people raised on hagiographic, presentist images of prophets would have their testimonies rocked, if not shattered, by this book.

…So, here’s the Readers’ Digest version of my review:  this book is a real treat, but it might completely destroy your testimony if you can’t handle a fallible, bawdy, often mistaken, sometimes mean, and generally weird prophet.

The book truly is incredible, doing for Brigham Young what Richard Bushman did for Joseph Smith. However, I agree with Julie that “the main weakness of this book” is the fact that “you are not left with any reason as to why people would have made the enormous sacrifices that were part of believing that Brigham Young was a prophet.” To fill in these gaps, here are the reported words of Turner from my friend Carl Cranney on Young’s appeal:

Why did people follow Brigham? He admitted to me and the others in the study group a few weeks ago that he felt he could have handled this question better. He pointed out three things, specifically, that Brigham had done before he became the de facto church president, and later actual church president, that garnered him a lot of good will from the members. First, many of the church members were from the British Isles, and Brigham had led the British mission. So many members of the church had fond memories of him as the leader of the missionaries that brought them into the church. Second, he finished the Nauvoo temple and endowed thousands of Mormons before they abandoned the city. The sheer amount of man-hours this took would have staggered anybody but the firmest believer. Brigham Young was a believer, and it showed to the people that he worked tirelessly for in the temple. Third, he was the “American Moses” who dragged a despondent group of church members from their Nauvoo the Beautiful to the middle of nowheresville, Mexico, to create a civilization literally out nothing in a sparsely-populated desert wilderness. He worked hard to preserve the church and to get its members to safety. So, after doing these three things he had garnered a lot of support and a lot of good will from the members.

Despite this oversight, the book is fantastic and the go-to biography of Brigham Young.

Check out John Turner’s lecture on the bio at Benchmark Books below:

I Dissent

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Asch Experiment Cover 800x400

I just finished listening to a bunch of science fiction stories in rapid succession so that I could cast informed votes for the annual Hugo awards and post the reviews to my new blog.[ref]The Loose Canon is where I will do most of my future blogging about science fiction.[/ref] That done, I returned to some of the non-fiction audiobooks I’ve been waiting to get into, especially Redefining Reality: The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science. It’s been a fantastic spring day, and there was an exquisite, gentle evening breeze as I walked the dog. Meanwhile, Professor Steven Gimbel explained the impact of World War II on the field of social psychology:

In the first half of the 20th century, psychology had the luxury of debating whether a subconscious mind existed and whether scientific methodology required limiting the field of study to stimulus and response, but after the horrors of World War II, psychology changed… The specter of the Holocaust raised deep and troubling question about the human mind and its relation to authority… The reaction to Nazi atrocities in the scientific world is shaped by what are perhaps the three most famous psychological experiments: Stanley Milgram’s obedience study, Solomon Asch’s group think study, and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison study. [ref]The quote is my own transcription, and I added the hyperlinks.[/ref]

I think Millgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments are the most famous. At least, those are the ones that I’ve read about and seen the most. I was familiar with Asch’s study as well, but I haven’t seen it come up as often, and I was unprepared for how deeply a simple remark made by Gimbel would strike me. It hit so forcefully that I hit pause on the audiobook (to keep that thought forefront on my mind), came home, opened my laptop, and began this blog post.

In Asch’s study, participants were given a simple task. They had a reference image that showed a vertical line, and then another image that showed three vertical lines. One of the three matched the vertical line in the reference image, and all they had to do was pick out the correct match. They were asked to do this 18 times. The trick is that the participants were seated at a table with seven other people who were secretly in on the experiment. On the first two rounds, these seven individuals all gave the same answer, and it was the correct one. But on the third trial, these individuals all gave the same incorrect answer. Over the course of the next 15 trials, the seven plants gave the wrong answer 11 times, and in each case all seven of them gave the same incorrect answer.

Asch Experiment

So you’ve got eight people seated around a table answering a perfectly obvious question. Seven of them have just given the identical, incorrect answer. The point of the experiment was to find out what the eighth person–the only real subject of the study–would do. Given that this is considered one of the “three most famous psychological experiments” you can guess how it turned out even if you don’t already know: 75% of subjects went with the group consensus (even though it was obviously wrong) at least one out of the 12 times when the seven fake participants picked the wrong answer.

There are all kinds of interesting details to the study, especially when it comes to the rationales that the participants gave afterwards to explain why they had refused to go along with the group or why they had, at least some of the time, opted to go along with the group despite what was clearly true. But here’s what Gimbel said about the study that so arrested me:

Asch expanded the study to see what would happen. He showed that the bigger the majority, the stronger the pull to conform, but that if even one person dissented before the test subject, that the test subject was then more likely to voice his different view. Asch showed empirically that having someone else agree with you is a powerful tool in making people willing to take a contrary position. But, if that person [the test subject] were deserted by his fellow dissenter, conformity followed rapidly.[ref]I transcribed this quote from the audio and then added emphasis to the text version.[/ref]

Now, before I continue, I want to take a moment to explain that–contrary to popular opinion–I’m not interested in attacking conformity. Conformity gets a bad rap in movies like Dead Poet Society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnAyr0kWRGE

The sentiment in that clip is hogswash. Unfortunately, so is most anti-non-conformity sentiment. There’s an entire guide to being a non-conformist, but–like all such ironic anti-non-conformity statements–the actual point is that non-conformity is bad because it’s a kind of conformity.

howtobeanonconformist_back

So, even the anti-non-conformists are trapped in an non-conformity mindset. Conformity can’t catch a break. Which is a shame, because conformity is actually pretty important in helping to form human society and–because we are social animals–to form who we are as well.

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt introduces this concept in a chapter called “The Hive Switch.” He starts with an example of exactly the kind of military drill (e.g. marching) that Dead Poet Society maligns, citing Wiliam McNeill (a World War II veteran) describing drill this way:

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.[ref]The Righteous Mind, page 221[/ref]

After his service, McNeill studied this kind of conformity (which he called “muscular bonding”) and found that it “enabled people to forget themselves, trust each other, function as a unit.”[ref]The Righteous Mind, page 222[/ref] What works like Dead Poet Society miss[ref]And it is far from alone in this regard.[/ref] is that conformity is a path to collective consciousness. In the same chapter that begins with marches and drills, Jonathan Haidt goes on to discuss ecstatic mass dancing, awe in the presence of nature, hallucinogens, and raves. One of the roles of conformity, in other words, is to enable humans to access a “hive switch” that flips our identity from individualist to collective. The term “collective” often has negative connotations (like conformity itself), until one realizes that it also implies (as McNeill points out) selflessness and trust.

Writing in The Origins of Virtue, Matt Ridley emphasizes a similar point. One of the grand puzzles of human nature is that–alone of all animals in existence–we have the capability to come together in large groups to work for collective goals without close genetic ties.[ref]Ant colonies and bee hives work together, but they are also all (effectively) siblings, and so there is no mystery here, genetically speaking.[/ref] In his book, he surveys a lot of literature on evolutionary psychology and game theory trying to explain why it is that human beings, in practice, are able to escape the prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma is the most famous game theory scenario, and it proves that–if humans were strictly self-interested and rational–we would effectively never cooperate in large groups. And yet, we do cooperate in large groups. Is there any theoretically explanation for this? Yes, it turns out, there is. The only kind of society in which cooperative strategies can survive without being overwhelmed by cheating free-loaders is a conformist society.

There is one kind of cultural learning that makes cooperation more likely: conformism. If children learn not from their parents or by trial and error, but by copping whatever is the commonest tradition or fashion among adult role models, and if adults follow whatever happens to be the commonest pattern of behavior in the society—if in short we are cultural sheep–then cooperation can persist in very large groups.[ref]The Origins of Virtue, page 181[/ref]

So, instead of just making fun of non-conformists for also being conformists, it’s worth keeping in mind that conformity is a route to selflessness and, perhaps, the key to humanity’s unique ability to successfully cooperate in large, unrelated groups. But, if that’s not enough, keep in mind that things like language itself only work because of conformity. If we all tried to be non-conformists in our language, then communication would be literally impossible.

This was a long digression, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to get around to for a while anyway. To get things back on track: I don’t think non-conformity is a laudable goal in itself, but I do think that diversity matters a lot. I worry about echo chambers and I worry about group think and I worry about bubbles. And I worry about that eighth person, sitting at the table, staring at the line, wondering what on Earth could be happening that everyone else is reporting a reality that is the opposite to what he feels. I’m not really worried about whether or not this person gives the correct answer (more on that at the end), but I am very worried that this person feel empowered to give their honest answer.

This is what I had in mind when I recently read an older Slate Star Codex piece: All Debates Are Bravery Debates. In the piece, Scott Alexander argues for being charitable about extreme positions as follows:

Suppose there are two sides to an issue. Be more or less selfish…

There are some people who need to hear both sides of the issue. Some people really need to hear the advice “It’s okay to be selfish sometimes!” Other people really need to hear the advice “You are being way too selfish and it’s not okay.”

It’s really hard to target advice at exactly the people who need it. You can’t go around giving everyone surveys to see how selfish they are, and give half of them Atlas Shrugged and half of them the collected works of Peter Singer. You can’t even write really complicated books on how to tell whether you need more or less selfishness in your life – they’re not going to be as buyable, as readable, or as memorable as Atlas Shrugged. To a first approximation, all you can do is saturate society with pro-selfishness or anti-selfishness messages, and realize you’ll be hurting a select few people while helping the majority.

In terms of explanation, Scott Alexander is right on the money. He says, for example:

This happens a lot among, once again, atheists. One guy is like “WE NEED TO DESTROY RELIGION IT CORRUPTS EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES ANYONE WHO MAKES ANY COMPROMISES WITH IT IS A TRAITOR KILL KILL KILL.” And the other guy is like “Hello? Religion may not be literally true, but it usually just makes people feel more comfortable and inspires them to do nice things and we don’t want to look like huge jerks here.” Usually the first guy was raised Jehovah’s Witness and the second guy was raised Moralistic Therapeutic Deist.

That sounds familiar, and I think we all have friends who used to be really extreme in one direction, and now they’ve gone overboard in the other extreme.[ref]In The Bonobo and the Atheist, Frans de Waal pokes fun at New Atheists in general and Christopher Hitchens in particular: “Some people crave dogma, yet have trouble deciding on its contents. They become serial dogmatists.” (page 89)[/ref] Where I disagree with Scott Alexander, however, is in accepting that this kind of overreaction is basically acceptable. In my experience, both Ayn Rand (who says greed is good) and Peter Singer (who argued against any special concern for family members[ref]Frans de Waal, also in The Bonobo and the Atheist, points out that when Singer’s mother actually did become gravely ill he used his money to hire private care for her in direct contradiction of his own dogmatic utilitarian ideology. Singer said “perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it’s different when it’s your mother.” De Waal commented: “The world’s best-known utilitarian thus let personal loyalty trump aggregate well-being, which in my book was the right thing to do.” (page 184-185)[/ref]) are just plain bad. I don’t care how selfish you are, Peter Singer is still overkill. I don’t care how selfless[ref]In a pathological sense.[/ref] you are, Ayn Rand is still crazy.

So this is the world I find myself in. When I look around, I feel like the eighth guy at the table on several issues. To pick just one that we talk about a lot here at Difficult Run, go with minimum wage. I’m looking at the discussions around me,[ref]I don’t mean our commenters here at Difficult Run. I think you guys are pretty great. I mean the debates as I see them unfolding on my Facebook feed, etc.[/ref] and I just can’t really believe what I’m hearing.

But when I look around for people who will stand up with me and dissent, what I see is a lot of what Scott Alexander is describing. Take “socialism.” The term, in almost all debates you will see today, has no solid meaning. It’s just a flag. And on one side you’ll see these “taxation is theft” ultra-libertarians charging against the flag of socialism and on the other side you’ll see all these people who seem to have forgotten the second half of the twentieth century rallying around the flag of socialism. Maybe some of the “taxation is theft” folks escaped Soviet oppression (as Ayn Rand did, not by coincidence) and a lot of the “Mao? Stalin? Who were they?” socialists do come from elite backgrounds in the world’s leading capitalist economy, so “to a first approximation” their points are valid. That doesn’t mean they are actually helping matters when they add their extreme, absolutist viewpoints to the discussion. Technically, the “taxation is theft” guys are going to side with me to oppose minimum wage hikes, but I really wish they wouldn’t.

Too often it seems like your choices are either (1) conform to the political fad of the day or (2) engage in extreme, overreactions. Pick your poison.

But I don’t want to pick my poison.

I don’t, for example, want to have to pick and choose between conformity and diversity. I value both. Conformity is essential for language, is vital for social cohesion, and is–in short–the glue that holds the fabric of our society together. Anyone who says they are a nonconformist is lying or a sociopath, just like anyone who says that they don’t care what other people think about them is lying or a sociopath. Everyone is a social animal, everyone cares what (some) other people think, and everyone conforms (to some group). But if you overemphasize conformity, then you get group-think. You stifle creativity, restrict free inquiry, stifle scientific curiosity, and hamstring debate and compromise. We need diversity, too. We need both.

Here’s the reason I wrote this post. Here’s the thing that Gimbel said, about the Asch experiments, that really stood out. What did it take to empower that eighth person to answer honestly? They didn’t need anything extreme. They didn’t need any theatrics. They didn’t need Ayn Rand and they didn’t need Peter Singer. All it took was one person just calmly, quietly validating what they saw.

In Asch’s experiment, the truth was obvious. In the real world, on most issues where there is a lot of debate, the truth isn’t obvious. What’s more, I’m going to be publishing a post (hopefully soon) called “Nobody Gets It All Right” that will say just that: based on my understanding of history and various biographies, everybody is wrong about most of what they believe. And I take that to heart. I have a lot of opinions. Most of them are probably wrong, at least in the sens that–two decades or two centuries from now–the things I think are true will be either discredited or (more likely) irrelevant.[ref]Don’t get too excited. The same is true for you, too.[/ref]

So I do want to dissent. I do want to raise my voice–calmly, politely, modestly–and say that the emperor’s got no clothes on when it appears to me that the emperor, in fact, does not have clothes on. But the basis of my dissent is not “I am confident that I am right.” At this point in my life, that conviction alone is not enough to stir me to publish a post. Instead, my motivation is something like, “I am dedicated to living in the kind of world where people speak their minds honestly.” Because, if I have to pick just a few areas where I want to place a very high degree of confidence–like only two or three–that’s going to be one of them.

There’s a bit of conventional wisdom about Internet debating. The point of the debate is never to persuade the other guy. The debate is always for the sake of the audience. There’s truth to that, but it can be taken too far, and made into a philosophy where arguing online is a gladiatorial spectator sport with both sides essentially playing to their respective fan bases with no interest in sincere, honest interaction with each other’s points. That’s not what I want to do.

Instead, I just want to be the one guy at the table who says, “I see things differently” that thereby enables the eighth guy to have an easier time in saying the same thing.

That, in a nutshell, is one of the fundamental reasons Difficult Run exists.