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Working Together to Save Youth in a Secular Age

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996 - Working Together to Save Youth

The following trio of recent posts outline various perspectives on why Mormon youth and young adults leave the Church and what can be done about it.

The discussion has already become somewhat politicized, but I think that the similarities in Bokovoy’s and Wilson’s approach outweigh the differences. In this post I’ll talk about reconciling them, and also bring in Gee’s important, data-based perspective.

Bokovoy’s primary point is that the struggles young Mormons encounter with their faith are the result of encountering real, problematic facts from Mormon history. As a result, he asserts that:

We need to alter our approach and stop giving students the impression that there is never any good reason to doubt or question their faith. Instead, we need to help students incorporate questioning as a meaningful contribution to a spiritual journey.

Wilson, as the title of his post indicates, begs to differ. His primary argument is that “It is not the facts themselves that challenge the youth, but the narratives through which the facts are presented and contextualized that challenge them.” Superficially at least, we have a contradiction between Bokovoy and Wilson.

According to Wilson there’s a deeper problem, however: “The more fundamental problem is that often our youth, not to mention many adults, lack the kind of nuanced approach to information that they require to be able to evaluate the facts in distinction to the narratives about the facts.” He later writes that “both apologetic and critical explanations… are merely provisional explanations.” It seems to me that the nuance Wilson is calling for, and the ability to separate facts from narratives, is primarily about being able to avoid taking academic or scientific claims as non-provisional and authoritative and instead “to incorporate questioning.” (Those are Bokovoy’s words.)

The chief difference, then, is that Wilson wants to prepare youth to question secular authority (“They [members] should feel free to take a cafeteria approach to the secular and scholarly information.”) and he blames Bokovoy for stating instead that they should question prophetic authority. But I’m not sure Bokovoy actually did suggest greater questioning of religious authority and, as Wilson admits, both apologetic and critical perspectives are provisional. The two views can, to a substantial degree, be reconciled.

First, however, let me point out that Wilson’s critique of the role academia and science play in society is absolutely correct. He writes that “’Science’ is functionally little more than an appeal to a culturally acceptable authority which they are expected to accept largely on blind faith.” This is true. Nibley’s words about “the black robes of a false priesthood” apply even more today[ref]Leaders and Managers[/ref], and should be expanded to include the white lab coat along with the black graduation gown. This isn’t an attack on reason or the scientific method, but rather an observation that (not necessarily due to anyone’s intentions or desires) the combination of increasingly sophisticated and specialized scientific knowledge and increasing reliance of society on the results of that knowledge have conspired to create a situation where there is a serious risk that any sentiment packaged as scientific will be accepted as authoritative. To a lesser extent, this is true not just of science, but of academia in general.

This means that secularism now functions as a de facto religious outlook without being widely recognized as one. This allows narratives, philosophical claims, and normative judgments made under the banner of secularism to pass as objective and authoritative.[ref]This goes a long way towards explaining Neil deGrasse Tyson’s popularity and the rise of the New Atheists generally.[/ref] This in turn means that secular critiques of religion have an unearned advantage (to Wilson’s point) and also that when religious people encounter troubling facts about their own history that don’t require any particular secular narrative to seem troubling (to Bokovoy’s point), secularism is always there on the fringes as the default fall-back position. In either case: the playing field is slanted towards secularism.[ref]I’ve written more on the relationship between Mormonism and secularism that you can read here, here, and here.[/ref]

Getting back to a partial reconciliation of Bokovoy and Wilson’s perspectives, Wilson’s central point is a general one about epistemology: “Few narratives can successfully assimilate all of the known data, which, as I have mentioned, is always only a subset of reality anyway.” Or, to use language I’m more comfortable with, we’re all busily engaged in the act of constructing models or narratives from the raw material of the facts and ideas we encounter in our lives. We never succeed in constructing models or narratives that successfully integrate all the facts and ideas that we’re aware of, and even if we could, we’re only personally aware of a very small number of the facts and ideas that are available to be known. Therefore, all our models and narratives are provisional.

Wilson directs this observation primarily at secularism and as a matter of practicality that makes sense. Secular authority is ascendant and its status as quasi-religious authority is largely unrecognized. It cries out for critique. But the observation that all models and narratives are provisional is not limited to secularism, and it includes not only auxiliary, apologetic arguments offered to bolster and positively contextualize prophetic and scriptural statements, but the religious conception of the prophetic and scriptural statements themselves.

Assume for a moment that prophets and scripture are infallible and sufficient. Even in that case, we would still have to go through the messy, error-prone, human process of interpreting and synthesizing their words to construct our own narrative or model. Which means that the resulting narrative or model—even in a world with prophetic and scriptural infallibility and sufficiency—would remain provisional. This means that one can affirm Wilson’s trenchant criticism of secular authority and still make room for Bokovoy’s argument that we ought to “incorporate questioning as a meaningful contribution to a spiritual journey.” Not because we ought to necessarily question prophetic or scriptural authority more than we do, but because we need to be prepared to question the provisional models and narratives we construct from those authoritative statements.

This does not, of course, reconcile every difference between Bokovoy and Wilson. The greatest difference that remains is still the question of what is actually causing youth to leave. Is it, as Bokovoy asserts, the mere existence of troubling facts? Or is it, as Wilson argues, a nefarious suite of narratives which accompany those facts? The first response is that the common thread to Bokovoy’s and Wilon’s approach–espistemic humility and questioning–works in both cases. So there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter, since the solution to both diagnoses is the same.

It’s still essential to ask the question of what is really going on, however. And what we find is that from a big picture perspective it might very well be that neither Bokovoy nor Wilson are right about the primary problem. This is where John Gee’s post comes in.  Gee’s post is based on analysis of data collected by the ongoing National Survey of Youth and Religion. The project involves tracking the religious lives of thousands of American youths and conducting in-depth interviews with them about their religious lives. As Gee notes:

Unfortunately, the data published by the NSYR does not directly address the issue of why some Latter-day Saint youth become atheist, agnostic, or apathetic. It does, however, delve into the reasons why youth in general choose that path.

Gee then outlines the main factors that (for youth as a whole) tend to lead out of religion and into secular life:

  1. Disruptions to routine
  2. Distractions
  3. Differentiation (e.g. attempt to create separate identity from parents)
  4. Postponed Family Formation and Childbearing
  5. Keeping Options Open
  6. Honoring Diversity
  7. Self-confident Self-sufficiency
  8. Self-evident morality (i.e. moral truths are so obvious that religion is superfluous)
  9. Partying

He concludes:

What is interesting about this list is that for the most part, intellectual reasons play a secondary role in conversion to secularism. This is not to say that intellectual reasons play no role, or that certain actions have no intellectual ramifications. The list is mainly behavioral or event driven rather than philosophically driven. Doubts in religiously held beliefs do not show up on the list.

It’s possible that Mormon youth are very different from the general trend, and that while youth of other traditions leave because of behavioral reasons, Mormons leave because of doubts. But that’s not a good starting point given the data, especially since advances in understanding of human behavior[ref]E.g. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind[/ref] provide us with a model where intellectual deliberation serves as an after-the-fact rationalization of decisions made non-rationally on the basis of psychological, social, and emotional factors.

Luckily, as I’ve noted previously, Mormonism stands out as a group that is able to transmit behavior and information to rising generations better than other faith traditions. Based on our existing relative strength at transmitting theology, culture, and behavior, we are in a good position to pivot and meet this challenge. So let’s get to work on teaching epistemic humility and questioning now. Let’s take Bokovoy’s critique to heart, and prepare our youth to deal with uncomfortable facts. Let’s take Wilson’s critique to hear, and prepare our youth to view secular authority with due skepticism and discernment. And let’s also keep an eye open towards the data-based approaches like Gee’s to see what other changes, especially related to behavioral considerations, we can take to meet the challenge of keeping the flame of faith burning in a secular world.

My Theory: Aptitude is Preference

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2014-11-15 Aptitude is PreferenceHere’s an article from The Atlantic debunking the myth that math is somehow about genetics. It’s not. It’s about practice. I agree with this, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. The message of this post is part of a larger  movement contrasting static vs. fixed mindsets. Static mindsets hold that our abilities are innate. Children with static mindsets are afraid of hard tasks because failure will reveal weaknesses about who the are. This leads to a lack of hard practice, and a negative feedback spiral goes downhill from there. Growth mindsets hold that our abilities can be changed with hard work. It greatly reduces the negativity associated with failure (which no longer reflects on your identity) and this–combined with a message that hard work can help you improve–lead to a positive feedback loop.

I don’t disagree with this at all. I’m just not really sure that these messages go far enough.

Let me start with two examples.

In high school, I joined the track team for one season. One of my closest friends was also on the team but, unlike me, he was insanely good. He wasn’t very competitive, so the coach never put him in individual events. But he was very loyal, so the coach often put him in relays because then he would go all-out for the sake of his team. Our team was good, and we often competed at the state championships.[ref]Not me personally. Not even close.[/ref] I remember that when the coach told the team to take a day of rest from training, he would often assign one or more of the runners to check up on my friend during the day to try and prevent him from running, because if you didn’t watch him constantly, he would run anyway. He was always in his running clothes, he ran multiple times per day, and he would routinely chalk up more than 100 miles per week.

I majored in math as an undergrad. In one of the most difficult courses in the program (abstract algebra II), the professor would call people up to work homework problems on the board. I was part of a group that spent hours working on the problems ahead of time. They were hard, and even working as a group we would often decide that a couple of them were just too much to figure out. We’d do the ones we could, and just hope we weren’t called for one of the tricky ones. But there was one kid–a perfectly humble, warm, nice guy–who didn’t do his homework with a group and often didn’t seem to do his homework at all. If he got called then–almost no mater what problem it was–he’d crack open the textbook, read the problem, stare off into space for a minute, and then get this absurdly pleased grin on his face when he figured it out. It was a totally innocent grin, a lot like my children get when they’ve figured something out, so there was nothing arrogant or showy about it. Then he’d go up and work out the problem on the board.

These guys were geniuses at two very different things, math and running. And they shaped my perceptions of effort, enjoyment, and talent.

The insight came for me when I got temporarily obsessed up with some puzzle or other that was a tangent to a mathematical concept from one of my classes. The concept wasn’t directly related to the course, wouldn’t help me in any way I could see, and I was sure that it was something any serious mathematician would be able to dispatch easily. And yet it held me captivated. I found myself thinking about it between classes, when I was eating, when I lay down to go to sleep. I didn’t just want to know the answer, I wanted to find the answer myself. Eventually it hit me: is this what the kid from abstract algebra thinks about all the time? It was totally out of character for me to think about math for fun when I didn’t have to, but if that grin of his was any indication, this was the kind of thing he did all the time just for fun. Just like my running friend in high school simply loved to be out on a run, period. It’s what he wanted to be doing.

So here’s the thing: the growth mindset philosophy is–as far as I can tell–about encouraging kids to buckle down and do their assigned work. Put in the effort, don’t be afraid to fail, and if you do you’ll get competent at things people think are hard. But this is (1) focused on visible effort (e.g. doing a homework assignment) and (2) results in competency rather than genius. My theory takes this a little bit farther. I think that genius (not just competency) is what results when people spend not just big chunks of time on visible effort, but vast swathes of their free time in invisible effort.[ref]By “invisible effort,” I just mean that you wouldn’t know just by watching these folks that they were thinking about math all the time. For my running friend you would obviously know if you followed him around, but the reality is that he did a lot of his running on his own time and didn’t talk about it. If you didn’t know him well, you wouldn’t know how intense his passion was.[/ref] My guesss–and it’s been born out by observations since then with other standouts that I’ve met–is that for most practical purposes the concept of talent just refers to people who genuinely like an activity so much that they do it incessantly. Coach had to almost literally force my friend in high school to stop running, because running is what he loved. And the mathematical geniuses I’ve met spend a lot of time just thinking about math because they like it.

The idea of enjoyment is crucial because I don’t think that it’s really possible for people to use self-control to dedicate such huge amounts of time to invisible effort. There’s just no practical way to remind yourself to think about math (or whatever) every time you’re waiting for a meeting to start, or on every drive to run an errand, etc. For me, the connection is so strong that I think in the long run aptitude really boils down to just preferences: we’re good at what we like doing.

There are limits and exceptions, of course. I am not saying that genetics pays no role, and obviously environment can be crucial. Some people also spend so much time doing something that they get very, very good at it and then lose all enjoyment of it. So it’s possible to be good at something you don’t like, but I think that’s the exception.

The plus side of that observation, however, is that preferences can change. This leads me to believe that if you want to be very, very good at something you first have to acquire the taste for doing that thing. I think one real downside of the way we do education now is that we don’t spend enough time exposing kids to the wide, wide variety of different kinds of work. And we don’t spend enough time telling kids that for almost any kind of work you can think of, there are people who really like doing it. Take accounting, for example. I never knew a single thing about accounting until I happened to cover some aspects of it that were relevant to a graduate course in international taxation. And lo and behold, it was actually fascinating to me from a philosophical standpoint. That sounds crazy to me as I type it because accountancy has such a bad rep, but it’s the truth. How do you value intangible capital, like a brand name? How do you make sure that you’re setting a good price when subsidiaries of the same parent company “sell” to each other? There are so many fields and disciplines I’ve only learned about in my late 20’s and 30’s that could have been fascinating to me when I was much younger. I want to do a better job of making sure my own kids get a chance to hear all kinds of people talk about all kinds of different work that they are passionate about, just to see what strikes their fancy.

There’s a big caveat, of course, which is that a lot of the time people are in love with the trappings of work rather than the work itself. Take writing, for example. Everyone and their dog has a novel they are working on. But amateur writers are famous for talking about their writing as opposed to, you know, actually writing. Lots of aspiring writers like the image of being a writer, or like the lifestyle that they think comes comes with writing, or just view writing as kind of a default exemption from real-life, boring jobs. Writing is, in a sense, the form of art any old idiot can do. Try to put paintbrush to canvas or chisel to wood and you’ll be able to tell in an instant the difference between someone with skill and someone who has no idea what they’re doing. But since we all learn to write English with basic competency in grade school, writing is the art form everyone is qualified to dabble in. [ref]Hence the name of John Scalzi’s enjoyable book on writing: You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop.[/ref] This is one reason I’ve started tracking my time spent writing in Toggl: I want to get an accurate picture of how much effort I’m really putting in. I want to know if I’m just another self-deluded wannabe, and I figure one aspect of that is getting an objective assessment of how much time I spend doing the actual writing.[ref]I’ve only tracked for one entire week so far, and the total was 12 hours and 59 minutes. I’m up to 5 hours and 29 minutes so far this week.)[/ref]

So you have to learn to like the actual activity that you want to excel at, not just the things that surround that activity. But I think that that is really more doable than people might suspect. Want to eat healthy? You have to invest the time to find aspects of healthy eating that you actually enjoy. One trick, of course, is to be starving right before you eat whatever you want to acquire a taste for. Do that a few times, and you’ll be surprised how much you can learn to crave a salad. Want to exercise? Take the time to try out lots of different styles and approaches to find one that appeals. If that’s not enough: get philosophical about how you approach it. I’m slowly becoming a distance runner (as an adult, I never got good at it in high school), and a large part of the reason is because I learned to approach distance running as a kind of meditation. Some of my most sincere prayers and spiritual experiences have been while I’m running. For me, running acts a lot like fasting: the physical discomfort of running (like that of hunger and thirst) can be a focal point for concentration and a steady reminder of my weakness and dependence on God. Trying to push myself to go up one more hill or put in one more mile is practice for all the other hard things I try to make myself do.

Here’s the thing: will-power is great, but research indicates it’s a finite resource. So if you want to accomplish lots of goals,  you’re going to want to be as efficient as possible. There’s a certain macho appeal of just running face first into difficult things and overcoming them, but the irony is that the same principle applies. If you like that sensation of challenging yourself then you’re actually not contradicting my strategy. You’re following it. If you don’t enjoy doing things the hard way just for the thrill of it, then you’re going to need to get sneaky and use every dirty trick in the book to fool yourself into doing what it is that you want to get yourself to do.[ref]That’s what the original tagline for Difficult Run was about. It was “Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons for the right reason.” It was a reference to tricking yourself into better behavior, even if you had to leverage lower motivations–like pride or fear–to get the job done.. But no one else liked it.[/ref]

I love the growth mindset. I’m all about it. I sincerely hope to continue to throw myself at new skills as I get older, and to never stop learning and challenging myself and improving. If it takes about 10 years to get really good at something, then I figure that’s at least 3 or 4 things I can get really good at in the time I’ve got left.[ref]On my list: learning to play the mandolin and joining a blue grass band and learning to be a competent cartoonist. But writing is my priority for now.[/ref] I think that maybe if more people believed that 90% of what looks like talent or genius was really about doing what you’ve learned to intrinsically love and therefore do again and again and again, then more people might be encouraged to think seriously about what it is they love and then invest even more passion and enthusiasm into it.

That’s my plan, anyway. I don’t see it as a way of making life easier or taking shortcuts. I just see it as a way of trying to maximize the good that you can do with the finite resources–time, energy, and will-power–that you’ve got.

Why I Like Good Guys

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2014-09-29 Michael Carpenter

That’s Michael Carpenter.[ref]Image by zmajtolovaj.[/ref] Michael Carpenter is my favorite character in the Dresden Files, which is my favorite series. He’s a Knight of the Cross, which means he’s one of three mortals chosen to wield one of the Swords of the Cross, each of which contains a nail from the Crucifixion. They oppose the Denarians–basically fallen angels–although their main job isn’t to conquer the Denarians, it’s to try and rescue humans that the Denarians trick and enslave to their will. Along the way, however, Michael can and does do battle with vampires, dragons, and any other force of darkness that threatens to harm the innocent.

All of that is pretty cool, but none of it gets to the heart of why I like Michael so much. I like him because he’s a devout Catholic. Because he’s a faithful husband. Because he’s a loving father. Because he doesn’t lie or curse, and because he is, in the end, a humble man who just wants to do the right thing because he sincerely trusts and loves his God and his neighbor. He is, in short, a goody-goody.

This type of hero is very rare. Outside of children’s literature (Narnia, or The Dark is Rising, or Harry Potter) and comic books (Superman or Captain America) this kind of hero is basically non-existent. In fact, the piece to which this post is a followup included a link to an article complaining that Captain America “is only interesting if he’s a prick.” Nice guys finish last in more ways than one, it would seem.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying every hero should be a Boy Scout. Where would the world be without scoundrels and rogues? I’m not arguing against Han Solo and Malcom Reynolds!

Walker also wrote a great followup to my initial post called “Darker, Dearie. Much Darker”: Why I Don’t Like “Nice” Heroes in which he said:

I can connect with those who have fallen. I can root for them to repent, to be reconciled with friends and family, and to be forgiven. I personally connect with those who need redemption more than those who don’t seem to need it at all.

Walker’s absolutely right: the redemption narrative is a powerful one. So this post isn’t meant to contradict Walker’s piece. It’s just an alternative or a supplement. It explains why, for all the allure of the anti-hero in need of redemption or the scoundrel with no interest in being saved, my favorite heroes are the white knights.

2014-09-29 Plot Without ConflictLet me start with a technical note, however. In Western culture, plot is conflict-driven. This is such a deep cultural assumption that it’s one of those assumptions you don’t even know is an assumption until someone comes along and shows you that there are alternative ways of doing things. Does a fish know what “wet” means? Nope, not unless it has survived a stay on dry land and learned by contrast to understand the nature of its own existence. So it is with conflict-centric plot. If you don’t see an alternative, you don’t even know it’s what you’re swimming in.

So, as a comparison, I offer up kishōtenketsu which “describes the structure and development of classic Chinese, Korean and Japanese narratives.” There’s 4-panel comic at left as an example: it has plot, but no conflict. [ref]I got that comic from this post, which is well worth the read.[/ref]

The connection between conflict-driven plot and white knights is simple: you don’t necessarily need for your hero to make mistakes, but it certainly makes creating and sustaining conflict easier when they do. This means that Western literature is structurally biased against simplistic good guys. They aren’t impossible to work with, but they are–all else equal–a bit harder to handle.

I don’t think that this fully explains the dearth of goody-goody heroes, however. The same argument that suggests we need morally deficient heroes (to make questionable decisions and fuel conflict) suggests that we need intellectually deficient heroes (to make decisions that are questionable in a different sense of the word), and yet we manage to have intelligent heroes more often than white knights.

Rather than speculate on why our society seems to discredit good guys, however, I just want to say a bit about why I like them.

First of all: I can identify with them. Stick with me for a bit, however, because this might not be going in the direction that you think it is.

I’m the kind of person that people look at and generally think of as an annoying goody-goody.[ref]People who aren’t my fellow Mormons, btw. As a Mormon, I don’t stick out.[/ref] I’m deeply religious, I’ve never had alcohol, smoked a cigarette, or done any other drug (other than for surgery). I waited until marriage for sex. I don’t watch porn. And I’m fully aware that the way people react to a list of statements like that is some combination of disgust at my self-righteousness and pity for my repressiveness. In short: I’m unpopular in the same way and for the same reasons that straight-arrow heroes are unpopular.[ref]In one memorable example a friend asked for my advice on a moral question, I gave a very mild but honest response, and his response was “You really have a way of making people feel like s**t.” Sorry, bro, what do you want me to say? I only suggested you should stop cheating on your girlfriend. I didn’t even bring up waiting until marriage…[/ref]

The important thing is that I identify with the way other people dislike the Boy Scout, but I don’t in any way identify with being morally superior, because I’m acutely aware that I’m not. Sure, I’ve never done drugs, but folks like John Scalzi rarely drink not as a matter of moral principle but because they don’t like to experience a loss of control. That’s not a moral decision one way or the other; it’s a combination of a personal preference and self-preservation. And the reality is that a lot of the vices that I avoided, I avoided for the same reason: personal preference and/or risk avoidance. Sometimes I chose not to do things not because I had such great principles, but because I was scared to do them. That’s not very heroic.

Motivations are complicated things. Sometimes I want to be moral because I want people to trust me and because I want to maintain a favorable self-image. So the moral action can be motivated by selfishness and hedonism. Sometimes I want to avoid destructive addictions because I want my children to have a happy home and stable family. So self-interest can be altruistic as well. I can’t figure out my own motives, so how could I presume to know anyone else’s?

I also realize that I’ve been very lucky. I come from a good, stable home with parents who taught me well and modeled good behavior in their own lives. I didn’t suffer any of the tragedies and hardships that so can damage innocent people and lead them to make bad decisions of their own. I know from research and second-hand experience that these kinds of tragedies are horrifically common. I was just lucky.[ref]I was primarily lucky in the sense of having great parents. They worked hard and sacrificed a lot to give me these advantages.[/ref] The safety, training, and support I received came to me through no merit or choice of my own. There’s no credit in that, either.

So when I see a good guy on screen or in a book who colors mostly inside the lines, I empathize with them. I know that they will appear boring, self-righteous, and shallow to a lot of people because that’s how I come across to a lot of people. I also assume that they have complex reasons for their behavior that are not always good reasons. And so I tend to identify with them both as someone the world often thinks is weird and as someone who has their own struggles and failings to deal with, even if they are sometimes more internal.

That’s another technical point, by the way. Characters who struggle a lot internally don’t often convey well on-screen. So the bias against goody-goodies is strongest in television and movies, and a little bit weaker in books that have a chance to get inside the character’s head.

The thing is, everyone who tries to do the right thing struggles. In the Dresden Files the main character is Harry Dresden. He’s an orphan who was abused as a kid and who–partially based on personality and partially based on his experiences–has serious authority issues, unreasonable levels of petty stubbornness, and a predilection for anger and violence. He struggles all the time with his demons, and sometime he loses and the result is kicking off a supernatural war.[ref]See? Bad decisions fuel conflict-driven plots.[/ref] If you  just glance at Michael Carpenter, he always seems to make the right call. But if you look again you can see that it’s not easy for him. He’s doesn’t mindlessly follow the rules without any quibbles. He has to make his own decision about how to interpret them, how far to bend them, and when to follow them even though it puts him or even his family at risk. He deals with ambiguity and guilt and shame and sacrifice, too.[ref]The fact that Jim Butcher created an overtly religious Boy Scout and didn’t turn him into a self-righteous jerk was one of the first things that really made me start taking the Dresden Files seriously.[/ref]

So part of what I’m getting at is simply this: white knights need redemption, too.

Back when I first started Difficult Run and ran it solo for a while in 2012, I wrote on the “About” page that “I am the prodigal son’s older brother.” He’s the one I identify with the most in that story.  Superficially he’s the good guy because he he didn’t run off and blow his inheritance on booze and hookers and end up starving and eating with the pigs, but if you look deeper he’s the same as his younger brother. The prodigal son’s primary failing was a lack of love and loyalty for his family. He wanted the money (his inheritance) more than he wanted his home, and everything else follows from that. Sure, the elder brother stayed home, but when he sees the party everyone is throwing for the young son, he starts whining and complaining. Those complaints show is that he is also pretty contemptuous of his home and his father’s love.

That’s why the father’s response to his older son is so incredibly tragic: “And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.”[ref]Luke 15:31[/ref]

In other words, he’s saying that if you really cared about me, then you would think that the last several years you spent living with me in comfort and peace while your brother was hitting rock bottom were the reward. Did the elder brother stay home because he was loyal, or because he was afraid? Did he love his dad, or did he think he was doing him a favor? Was he interested in doing the right thing for its own sake, or because he thought he’ be rewarded? In the end, the fact that he’s jealous of his younger brother shows that he is essentially the same as his younger brother. Just a little more risk-averse. Like me.

We all need heroes we can relate to. For me, that means white knights. Not because they are better, not because they think they are better, and not because maybe other people think they are better. But because they aren’t.

 

Problems in Higher Education

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Over at alternet, a liberal/progessive news source, there is an article about the demise of higher education. This author immediately set off my loony-toons indicator with her “big business is secretly subverting higher education” conspiracy, but even beyond that I think most of her points can be directly argued against.  The problems she brings up (if they are problems at all) cannot simply be fixed by 1. remembering that higher education is about expanding our minds and 2. getting more funding for our schools (but no funding from corporations!)  However, she does make a few reasonable observations.

beer-pong
We’re just here to expand our minds.

1. Defunding education:

“For example, in the University of Washington school system, state funding for schools decreased as a percentage of total public education budgets from 82% in 1989 to 51% in 2011.” That’s a loss of more than a third of its public funding.” (Lone quotation was original to text). Just because the percentage of the budget is decreased, does not mean the amount of money going to schools has decreased. For instance, if the funding for public education doubled from 1989 to 2011 (this is hypothetical), then that means funding to schools actually increased over that time period by 25%. (Statistics!!) But we should also seriously question where public education funds are going, if not to schools. I don’t believe Washington state, a known liberal state, is defunding its schools for “corporatism” if it is defunding its schools at all, it’s probably just wasting that extra money, which is on to the next point.

“Newfield explains that much of the motive behind conservative advocacy for defunding of public education is racial, pro-corporate and anti-protest in nature.” This is a huge jump to conclusions. How many elite and liberal schools have to force racial diversity on their campuses? Higher education is, in general, an elite white man’s game (or with current statistics, white woman’s) and to claim that it’s different in that regard to corporate America, or that it’s the fault of conservative forces outside the institution, is ridiculous. To immediately claim a conservative racist reason may be easy, but it has no justification.

humanities-vs-Science

Also, it’s offensive that this author tries to claim that only humanities “train[s] and expand[s] the mind”. Nothing teaches you to think like mathematics and logic, which are also practical in the job market. As nice as it is to think about art, philosophy, and gender studies, those aren’t actually useful skills to most jobs. Trumpeting liberal arts education over any practical education is basically saying “higher education isn’t for getting a job, it’s for learning about culture.” That’s all well and good unless you’re in a suffering job market at graduation time. [ref]I have only attended liberal arts universities (except one very long semester at UM) and specifically went to a Humanities specialty high school program because I knew I would major in the math in college, and I wanted to be well-rounded. I like Humanities, but for most people it can never be more than a hobby. And it’s usually a rich person’s hobby.[/ref] And to deny the important ways science and mathematics teaches you to think is hurting our students, her acclaimed era of liberal arts education in the 50s and 60s would have required much more in science and math than universities require today.

2. Deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s).

Oh, this gets me. Why are there a surplus of PhDs? Because people get PhDs in things like philosophy, art, and gender studies. Good luck finding a job in gender studies outside of lobbying. You know why there are PhDs, even in STEM, that will work for adjunct pay (and please note, adjuncts get paid less than graduate students because they have no unions)? Because people get PhDs and then refuse to work outside of academia [ref]This is my goal, so I feel for them.[/ref]  (or have degrees in subjects where they can’t possibly get a job outside of academia).There is a limit to the number of professors we can have at our universities. And at most universities with graduate programs, the professors only have to teach 1 class a semester! We could solve the problem of adjunct pay, by getting rid of adjuncts all together and making professors teach at least 2 classes a semester. But then there would be even fewer jobs in academia for all those PhDs who refuse to get other jobs. It’s not a pretty picture, but corporatism/universities aren’t doing this on their own.

3. Move in a managerial/administrative class that takes over governance of the university.

“The money wasn’t saved [by hiring adjuncts], because it was simply re-allocated to administrative salaries, coach salaries and outrageous university president salaries.” OK, I’m totally with this lady here, and may I also add outrageous housing, athletic, and dining facilities. This point is spot on. This is a huge problem not just in higher education, but also in K-12. The problem is more complex though, it seems the more we pour into schools, the more bloated our administrations get. Consider, again a hypothetical, the example of doubling our school budgets. If we have 50% to administration and the rest to teaching, and then we double our budgets, but give our administration 62.5%, we have increased our teaching budgets by 50% (even though their share now is only 37.5% of the total), but those administrators are still making out even better. I don’t know if this is exactly how it happens, but more funding can easily lead to this. Frugality whenever it comes to non-teaching school projects and administration is the solution. Conservatives believe bloated administration is a reason to cut funding, but unfortunately the administration decides where those cuts actually take place None of the funding “problems” can begin to be fixed without first substantially fixing administration internally.

4. Move in corporate culture and corporate money.

“When corporate money floods the universities, corporate values replace academic values. As we said before, humanities get defunded and the business school gets tons of money.” I do find business school to be particularly insidious, but that’s probably because I’m an introvert in computer science who doesn’t understand the need to go to school for schmoozing. I digress. I’m not really sure the problem with businesses funding business schools? Business schools cost a lot (due to supply and demand in the market) and if corporate America takes up part of the tab, doesn’t that help with funding our schools – less to take away from the Arts and Sciences? But then the author moves directly into her point that anything that is non-Humanities is not mind-expanding and not important to higher education, so businesses should only be funding humanities?

“Serious issues of ethics begin to develop when corporate money begins to make donations and form partnerships with science departments – where that money buys influence regarding not only the kinds of research being done but the outcomes of that research.” Sure, this is a problem, if you view it in the most sinister way possible. But guess what, if corporate money isn’t funding our science research, the government is. Let’s not pretend that government has no self- or political-interests.  I’m sure I could find a large swath of college-educated people across the country who would shudder at the idea of George W. Bush once upon a time being in charge of our university science research.[ref]Lots of research in the sciences continues to be funded by both the government and scary places like Google, Intel, and Microsoft. (sarcasm) [/ref] And again,this corporate money helps the funding problem. And all the research coming out of America’s universities (in the sciences) is highly peer-reviewed, even by people who are funded by other corporate or government interests.

5. Destroy the students.

graduate

“Instead, more and more universities have core curriculum which dictates a large portion of the course of study, in which the majority of classes are administrative-designed “common syllabi” courses, taught by an army of underpaid, part-time faculty in a model that more closely resembles a factory or the industrial kitchen of a fast-food restaurant than an institution of higher learning.” My liberal arts university had a lot of core curriculum. In fact, as a math major, it was because of this core curriculum that I got a “mind-expanding” experience in philosophy, literature, poetry, sociology, history, theatre, and dance. But even if we only consider big state schools, I’m really not going to cry over here about all the sociology majors who also have to take a science and calculus, or, heaven forbid, statistics. Yes, engineering departments may churn out a bunch of over-processed engineer-bots, but those kids are all getting jobs (I know, according to the author, getting a job is not the point. Unfortunately I did not, and I believe most other students did not (by the author’s next point, even), grow up in a family rich enough to allow me the freedom to not consider my job opportunities upon graduation).

“You make college so insanely unaffordable that only the wealthiest students from the wealthiest of families can afford to go to the school debt-free.” Government subsidized loans are a form of government funding. It may put most of the burden on the student, but as someone who has unsubsidized loans, those interest rates can be substantial. I read a comment on an article somewhere that “if the government was giving out $500 loans for a loaf a bread, bread would start to cost $500.” And this all hearkens back to administrations building huge housing, athletic, dining, and lounge facilities. If college was just about class and a place to study, sleep, and keep our stuff, college could be a lot cheaper. With the loans and student expectations feeding off each other, it becomes a downward cycle of unaffordability.

donations

So, yes, there are problems in bloated administration and student costs at universities. But this isn’t some kind of corporate take down of navel-gazing education. Administration is a problem with colleges, as organizations themselves, not because of conservative or corporate America. And the burden of cost is partially on all Americans – for raising kids who want the best and prettiest dorm rooms (private bathrooms, please), exercise facilities, dining experiences, and football teams to go along with expanding their minds. [ref]I’d really like to see a study of current college students ranking the importance of partying/getting drunk versus expanding their minds while at college.[/ref] However, more funding will not directly fix these problems, and may only make the problems worse. With good peer review, outside funding is not going to warp our research institutions. And telling kids that they should consider job prospects (and that PhDs in some subjects are nothing more than mind-expanding hobbies) will not pervert a good liberal arts institution.

The Primordial Origins of Marriage

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Michelangelo's Creation of Eve. Detail from the Sistine Chapel.
Michelangelo’s Creation of Eve. Detail from the Sistine Chapel.

You can find plenty of attacks on “traditional marriage” these days. These pieces generally take a historical approach, looking at how the institution of marriage has changed throughout history and how widely they differ from 1950s stereotypes. There is a legitimate point to this analysis, marriage has changed quite dramatically from time to time and from place to place, and there are certainly modern embellishments that are anachronistically applied to the tradition backwards throughout time.

Unfortunately, the political assumptions that frequently accompany such critiques distort the analysis. Closer inspection reveals that the same core aspects that defenders of traditional marriage emphasize are much, much older and more deeply embedded into the institution of marriage than critics and maybe even defenders of traditional marriage realize.

The proximate provocation for this post is a piece by Angela C. at By Common Consent: The Myth of Traditional Marriage.[ref]This piece is an extrapolation of the comment I left there.[/ref] The core assumption that leads Angela astray is that marriage is an invention. As she writes:

Depending on whom you ask, marriage was either invented by men to protect or to oppress women.  And some men would argue that marriage was invented by women to domesticate men (a pouty version of the protection argument).

Of course, Angela is also employing the highly partisan assumption that the invention of marriage had to have been sexist: either the outright misogyny of exploitation or the insidious sexism of assuming women need protection. As objectionable as this assumption might be, it’s actually far less important than the subtle assumption that marriage is an invention.[ref]Astute readers might also point out that by dismissing any explanation in which women play a proactive role rather than exist as passive subjects she risks enacting a pernicious form of sexism herself.[/ref] Which is to say that it is a social construct.

The explanation of why this idea of social constructivism is associated with socially liberal politics is an interesting one, but it is mostly also outside the scope of this post. I will just point out that it is associated with socially liberal politics. The most obvious example, of course, is the argument that gender is a social construct distinct from biological sex.

2014-09-17 Everything is ChemicalsImplicit in these theories is the peculiar notion that society is not biological. It is peculiar because it is most often embraced by those who either outright deny the role of a supernatural deity in creating humanity or at least downplay it in favor of scientific explanations. But it’s quite difficult to see how science can provide any metaphysical justification for treating humans and our society and its constructs as one class of beings and the natural world as another. It’s very much like the natural foods advocates who warn against eating anything “chemical” without realizing that everything is chemicals. Social constructivism—at least in its most extreme and naïve form—is a modern superstition.[ref]I anticipate getting some stern replies from those with expertise in this area. I welcome the contribution of experts, but the popular understanding of technical concepts is also a relevant target of analysis and critique.[/ref]

So let us set aside the assumption that marriage is an invention, a deliberate construction willfully created by humans to accomplish a consciously desired end. I don’t mean to say let’s assume that marriage is not an invention. I’m merely saying: if we don’t make that assumption do we find any more likely candidate explanations? And, as it turns out, we do.

To understand the origins of marriage we first have to understand a little bit about the differences between human beings and other animals. The answer is that humans have evolved to make a very high-risk, high-reward tradeoff. The risk is that our offspring are basically helpless for an exceptionally prolonged period of time. This requires enormous resources to feed them and keep them safe. The reward is that, in exchange for that helplessness, our offspring are incredible learners (and then, later in life, incredible teachers). Learning and teaching are what humans do better than any other species. Human babies are useless at running or fighting or hiding, but they are tremendous geniuses at things like language acquisition. We have highly plastic brains that take a long time to learn anything, but that can eventually learn just about anything. That single difference pretty much explains the difference between chimps using sticks to forage for ants and humans launching the Space Shuttle.

The reason why this change has such huge dividends is that it separated human knowledge from human genetics. Other animals are capable of some pretty amazing behaviors (like migration), but these are often instinctual. That means the information is genetic. Advantage: no one has to teach it. Disadvantage: the animals can only learn and change as the speed of genetic evolution, which takes place across hundreds or thousands of generations. If the migration pattern needs to change in an abrupt way, monarch butterflies can’t just tell the next generation to take a different route next time.

Humans, on the other hand, initially used society as a repository for knowledge. Each generation could teach the skills (from language to tool use) to the next generation. This meant that exchange of knowledge (for example when a new tool was discovered) could be exceptionally rapid both across generations and across tribes. That was the basis for creating (eventually) written language, which only further increased the pace since now our knowledge can be transmitted and reproduced even more rapidly and cheaply and widely. In short: other animals learn at the speed of genetics. Humans learn at the speed of memetics which, in the Internet Age, is the speed of light.

This is pretty cutting-edge science because it relies on concepts like group selection that—although initially proposed by Darwin—have been considered more or less impossible until recently. No one could figure out how to make it work: why would one individual sacrifice altruistically in order to benefit his tribe? In short: how do you get trust? Advances in game theory and complexity science have for the first time made it possible to illustrate how these obstacles can be overcome, and therefore how it is possible for groups to compete against each other (and therefore to have group evolution) rather than just individual organisms.

So now we’ve learned two key things. The first is that the chief difference between humans and other organisms is that we have really, really expensive but also really, really high-performing offspring. The second is that this idea carries with it the notion that groups compete and evolve, which is to say that societies can compete and evolve. Most notably, these are intrinsic to what it means to be a human being. They predate any history and go back to the origins of our species.

Which means that marriage predates our history and goes back to the origin of our species, provided we define marriage as (1) monogamous sexual pairing of males and females who (2) cooperate to feed, protect, and teach their offspring. This behavior must be as old as humanity because humanity is impossible without it. Without cooperation, human children cannot be raised by subsistence cultures. They are too expensive. But without sexual monogamy, males and females are not equally vested in the offspring. These behaviors therefore co-evolved with humanity itself.

So we’ve just bypassed all the historical, cross-cultural analysis of formal marriage institutions by a couple hundred thousand years, at least. So much for an “invention.” What does the story look like from there?

Well, all of the individual cultural variations around the kernel of marriage (monogamy and cooperative child-rearing) end up only being possible because of the integral role that the kernel of marriage played in our society. The logic can’t work any other way. Why would someone use marriage as the basis for political alliance, for example, if monogamous, child-rearing relationships weren’t already fundamental to human society? No one would think to invent marriage from scratch for the purposes of political alliance and, if someone did think of it, it would never work because there would be no foundation to build upon.

So it is absolutely true that marriage comes in a wide variety of cultural and legal and historical instantiations, but it is only the variety that is in any sense invented or constructed or arbitrary. They inventions only exist because there was a stable foundation upon which to build them.

Oral language was not invented. It evolved. Written language was not invented. It evolved. Nation-states were not invented. They evolved. Markets were not invented. They evolved. And, like these other bedrock institutions, marriage was not invented. It evolved. Just as oral and written languages vary widely, just as forms of government run the gamut from tribal chiefs to Prime Ministers, and just as the laws for doing business vary from place to place: so do does the institution of marriage alter and change from time to time and from place to place.

But there are individual characteristics that languages, governments, and markets must have in order to exist at all, and similarly there are traits that marriage—despite its many variations—must exhibit in order to exist. Those are sexual monogamy between men and women raising their biological children. Which, not at all coincidentally, are the characteristics that are of utmost importance in the minds of social conservatives defending “traditional marriage.” Whether you believe that marriage was ordained of God by divine fiat in a literal Garden of Eden, was orchestrated by God through the process of natural selection and evolution, or simply evolved spontaneously without any help from a Creator of any kind: marriage remains the fundamental institution that made the human species possible.

The key lesson to learn here is not necessarily that marriage should never change. Marriage—the entire package including the biological kernel and the social embellishments on top of it—changes all the time. Some of those innovations are bad. When society codifies marriage in a way that treats women as property to be bought or sold or gives men a legal right to rape their wives, then society is leveraging the power of the biological kernel of marriage to do great evil. But when marriage is used as a model to care for those in need—like with fostering or with adopting children—then in that case we’re building something beautiful and worthy on top of the foundation that we’ve inherited to work with.

Because this isn’t an argument that marriage should never change, this post cannot function as a direct argument against same-sex marriage, open marriages, or other currently controversial topics. It is possible to believe that the kernel of marriage has filled its evolutionary purpose. Now that we have enormously greater economic prosperity, perhaps the old rationales no longer apply.

This may be so, but at least those who advocate changes to marriage at a fundamental level ought to admit that they are tinkering with the evolutionary foundations of human society. To use a computer analogy: debates about marriage that get to its essential characteristics are not like swapping out one app for another. They are about making changes to the kernel of the operating system. It would be best to know what one is doing before one undertakes such an endeavor. Those propounding the “myth of traditional marriage” manifestly fail to apprehend its true nature and significance. Therefore, they are the last folks I want involved in the process.

Top 10 Most Influential Books: Walker Edition

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I have decided to use Nathaniel’s Top 10 post as a reason to do my own. This was a fairly difficult list to make, but it was likely easier than a list of “favorite” or “best” books. What makes this list different from those is that I don’t have to think the books are any good. They could in principle be awful. What matters is the impact they had on me. However, my life has been influenced by many articles and essays, which technically don’t count. For example, Nobel economist F.A. Hayek’s 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society” was far more influential than, say, his famous book The Road to Serfdom. Hamlet continues to enthrall me and was the main reason I came to love Shakespeare. It ignites my emotions and a need to reflect in a way few works do. I didn’t include it mainly because it is a play, but also because my initial reading of it was intertwined with a viewing of Kenneth Branagh’s film version (which I love). The FARMS Review (now the Mormon Studies Review) was a highly influential journal for me and my main introduction to biblical and Mormon scholarship. My familiarity with academic journals was largely because of it. But obviously, journals don’t count. David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech/essay “This Is Water” has influenced the way I view the mundane in everyday life. This in turn inspired numerous blog posts, a conference paper, and a new direction of research for me. But it is an essay, not a book. Of course, there are my many kind and intelligent friends that have helped shape my views through discussions, recommendations, blog posts, theses and dissertations, etc. As you can see, plenty of influential pieces and people are being left out, some of which are pretty big.

Now that that has been clarified, let’s proceed with the list (in the order I read them):

1. The LDS Standard Works

Being a devout Latter-day Saint (Mormon), it shouldn’t be any surprise that our scriptural canon shows up on the list. One could say that the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price are all separate books (and they’d be right), but as you can see in the pic, the four are often published together in a “quad.” These “standard works” are essentially the Mormon canon. Understanding the historical, cultural, textual, and theological meaning of these texts take up a considerable amount of my time and thinking. These are the foundational texts for the paradigm by which I make sense of life. And it was the desire to learn everything I could about these texts and their meaning(s) that eventually spilled over into various fields.

2. Bill Watterson, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (1995)

I often say that Calvin and Hobbes was my first introduction to philosophy. And I mean that quite seriously. I used to remove the “funnies” every Sunday morning from the paper in order to read the latest strip from Watterson. I cut out strips centered around Spaceman Spiff and kept them in a folder (I was a big Star Wars fan, therefore, anything with space was cool). Calvin & Hobbes strips are scattered with nostalgia, wisdom, practicality, and imagination. I now own five C&H volumes. The 10th anniversary book was my first and features an introduction by Watterson, which discusses the transition of comics, his influences, the constraints of Sunday strip formats, an explanation of the recurring characters, etc. But the best part is his commentary on the various strips, no matter how brief. For example, the strip where Calvin breaks his dad’s binoculars features this insert from Watterson: “I think we’ve all gone through something like this story. You die a thousand deaths before you even get in trouble.” Nice to know someone else gets the small things in life.

3. Truman G. Madsen, Joseph Smith the Prophet (1989)

I’m slightly cheating here. At the very beginning of my mission, my trainer (i.e. first missionary companion) owned Madsen’s 1978 audio lectures titled Joseph Smith the Prophet. I didn’t come into contact with the book version until I was well off my mission. But given the fact that the book is basically a word-for-word reprint of the lectures, I included it. I cannot stress enough the impact of these lectures. We listened to them in the car during our travels (when we had a car). I would lay awake late at night listening to them with my headphones. I included them as part of my personal morning studies. This was the first time that Joseph Smith, the founder of my religion, became real to me. While still a positive, faith-promoting rendition, it was the first time he was fleshed out as a living human being. More than that, it was the first time that I can remember any historical figure being fleshed out in my mind. Up to that point, history was an abstraction to me. But these lectures made me want to dive into the details and nuances of history (and eventually everything else). While scholarship over the last few decades has surpassed this, it was still monumental for me. In essence, this was the beginning of my intellectual journey.

I was lucky enough to meet Truman and Ann Madsen at a women’s conference in Las Vegas on my mission. We four missionaries (me, my companion, and another missionary companionship) were virtually the only males in attendance. I was saddened when Truman passed away a couple years later. It made me all the more grateful that I had been able to thank him personally for the impact his work had on me.

Left to right: Elder Velasco (an eventual groomsman), Ann Madsen, Truman Madsen, Me
Left to right: Elder Velasco, Ann Madsen, Truman Madsen, Me (2007)

4. Gerald L. Schroeder, The Science of God: Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (1997)

I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone frankly. It is mildly interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying when it comes to the religion vs. science debate.[ref]It might be worth noting that atheist philosopher Antony Flew was impressed by Schroeder’s arguments, which helped move him to embrace a form of deism late in life.[/ref] However, it was Schroeder that made me actually look at the debate. My interest in science and the history of science can be traced back to this book. Furthermore, it is the reason I became quite comfortable with biological evolution. Prior to my mission, I hadn’t given evolution a thought. I gave it superficial attention on my mission, drawing largely from outdated, anti-evolution quotes (still) found in the Church’s institute manuals.[ref]I remember being called a “hybrid Mormon” one time because I answered the evolution question with, “I don’t personally believe it, but if that’s how God did it, I’m fine with that.” This was my answer for some time.[/ref] But it was Schroeder’s book, which I picked up at a Barnes & Nobles (?) one P-Day,[ref]Mormon missionary lingo for “preparation day,” which was basically our day off. We were supposed to “prepare” for the rest of the week by doing our grocery shopping and the like. Most of us took it to mean “Play Day” and that’s what we did.[/ref] that made me think differently. Despite being critical of the theory (he is one of the contrarian scientists in Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed), he provided a new paradigm by drawing on ancient Jewish scholars such as Rashi, Maimonides, and Nahmanides. This helped me think about my own faith’s approach to science and I found myself defending evolution against fellow missionaries by the end of it all.

5. The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Vol. D-F: 1650 to the Present, ed. Sarah Lawall, Maynard Mack (2002)

In elementary school, I was part of a “gifted and talented” program called EXPO (EXceptional POtential). One of its perks was that I was allowed to attend an EXPO course during regular class time. Most the time, EXPO was much more fun than your everyday class. However, when I arrived in middle school, I found that EXPO was during my English class. English had been my favorite subject for years, which is why I quit going to EXPO after one class because I didn’t want to miss it. This love of English stayed with me up to my World Literature course in my early years of college. I had recently returned from my mission, during which I had been trying to understand the history, language, and culture of the scriptures as well as Christian history generally. This anthology was required for the course and it immersed me in multiple voices from a variety of times and cultures. It included works by Yeats, Proust, Lu Xun, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, and more. It reminded me that there is so much to learn and that my studies should not only be cross-cultural, but interdisciplinary. In short, reading this anthology was my first big taste of one of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism: “…receive truth, let it come from whence it may.”[ref]Unfortunately, my fiction reading basically died that same year. I was largely non-fiction until recently.[/ref]

6. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)

I had never read any C.S. Lewis prior to my mission. A ward member bought Elder Anderson and I copies of The Chronicles of Narnia for Christmas one year, but I never read any of Lewis’ philosophical/apologetic writings until my first year of marriage. I still remember quite clearly lying in bed in our first apartment reading the first chapter (letter) of The Screwtape Letters and being struck by the following (from the demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood): “Your business is to fix his attention on the stream [of immediate sense experiences]. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.” I also remember asking myself afterwards what exactly I meant by ‘real’.[ref]This portion comes from a post at The Slow Hunch.[/ref] It could be said that Lewis’ book was my first introduction to the importance of metaphysics. This led to later works on metaphysics, from Blake Ostler to David Paulsen to Edward Feser to David B. Hart to Stephen Webb. My current outlook is similar to Rosalynde Welch’s “disenchanted Mormonism,” but I imagine it will continue to change as metaphysics play an increasingly important role in my theological framework and overall worldview.

7. Thomas Sowell, Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One (2004)

I became a Sowell admirer by reading his weekly columns when I was first becoming interested in politics, but it was this book that made me fall in love economics. I ended up reading his other works soon after, including Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Intellectuals and Society, A Conflict of Visions, Economic Facts and Fallacies, etc. All of these had their own influence, but it was Applied Economics that started it all. What made this different from, say, his Basic Economics was that it looked at economic effects in the real world and explored the unintended consequences of particular choices and policies. It showed what he calls the “constrained” or “tragic vision”[ref]This is explored in his A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles.[/ref] (i.e. there are no solutions, only trade-offs) in action. It aided in my understanding of economics as not merely models and math, but behaviors, emotions, relationships, and everyday choices.

8. Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009)

I was originally an accounting major as an undergrad. However, I both hated accounting and sucked at it. Realizing I was too far into my business degree to consider a complete change, I ended up choosing Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management (mainly because it sounded better than Business – General Studies). I didn’t have much interest in management or business outside of the practicality of a business degree until I had to do a group project on organizational culture in my HR course. In my research, I came across Dan Pink’s TED talk on human motivation. The focus on autonomy, mastery, and purpose in the workplace made me look at businesses in a different light; as organizations or communities of people rather than abstract entities. Organizational theory and management literature became a way of assessing the human condition. Business can be a practice pregnant with meaning, joy, and moral significance. The reason it often isn’t is because, as Pink puts it, there is “a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” A desire to understand and possibly help repair this chasm was a major factor in my decision to pursue an MBA.

9. Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010)

In his many lectures and interviews,[ref]These influenced me far more than, say, Capitalism and Freedom, mainly because I’d watched many of them before I ever read any of his books.[/ref] famed economist Milton Friedman often encouraged his audience to have a sense of proportion. It is easy to look at anecdotal evidence or snapshot data and draw conclusions about the world. Ridley’s book provides the evidence for Friedman’s “sense of proportion.” He documents how prosperity emerged and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years via specialization and exchange. This helped me look at major problems like poverty from both a global and historical perspective. More important, it helped me take typically leftist crusades like “social justice” seriously and thus led to my embrace of a kind of bleeding-heart libertarianism. By tracing the rise of living standards over the centuries, I came to see how important trade and innovation are to the improvement of human well-being. It also left me just a tad more optimistic about the future.

10. Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010)

On a panel at Beyond Belief 2006, astrophysicist and popular science educator Neil Degrasse Tyson made an insightful comment while (kindly) rebuking the (in)famous Richard Dawkins for his rhetorical methods: “Being an educator is not only getting the truth right, but there has to be an act of persuasion in there as well. Persuasion isn’t always “here’s the facts, you’re either an idiot or you’re not.” It’s “here are the facts and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind.” And the facts plus sensitivity, when convolved together, creates impact.” Rhetoric today has a rather negative connotation, one associated with cheap emotionalism or a lack of substance. However, McCloskey’s book argues that it was rhetoric–the act of persuasion or, more to the point, the power of words–that caused and sustained the Industrial Revolution. The bourgeoisie (i.e. the professional and educated class) were praised and seen as dignified and free. This shift in opinion changed the social and political spectrums. Far more than an excellent work in economic history, this book demonstrated to me how words and ideas, along with the way they are articulated, ultimately have the ability to transform societies. Rhetoric can inspire brand new thoughts or even recast old ones in a new light. This in turn has inspired me to be careful and selective in my choice of words and phrasing when expressing my ideas.

 

Here are a few honorable mentions with very brief explanations as to why:

 

I kind of wish my list was a little different, but it is what it is. This will surely change in the future. I probably missed some too. But this is what I can come up with as of now. Hope you enjoy.

Muslims in WWII and the Holocaust

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The Washington Post has recently published an article by Michael Wolfe entitled “Meet the Muslims who sacrificed themselves to save Jews and fight Nazis in World War II.”

I’m glad that the article tries to present a forgotten side of Jewish-Muslim relations and the positive role of Muslims in Western society, but after reading it I have some concerns.

First, Wolfe somewhat blurs the distinction between rescuing Jews and being involved in the Allied war effort.

Noor Inayat Khan was certainly remarkable, and deserves her own article. Her fiancé had been Jewish, and the Nazi treatment of Jews was one of the factors leading to her involvement in the war effort. She found Nazism “fundamentally repulsive and opposed to all the principles of religious harmony that she had been brought up with by her father.” Her father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, was fond of an old Sufi proverb, “Be the follower of love, and forget all distinctions.” This is a beautiful example of how religious spirituality (in this case, Muslim), however, Noor Inayat Khan was not directly involved in the rescue of Jews, and her motivation was universalist.

It is unlikely that the majority of Senegalese Tirailleurs- conscripts- were motivated by a desire to assist Jews, let alone sacrifice themselves for that cause. There was growing resentment of France for the distinctive uniforms they wore (“slave’s clothing”), and for the insensitive treatment by their officers, so when they helped liberate French towns and discovered that not everyone was fighting in the resistance, they were understandably outraged. This is not to denigrate the Senegalese in any way. They fought bravely, loyally, and often suffered more than other troops. All it means is that they were human, and did not necessarily respond enthusiastically to sacrificing themselves for what they considered a stranger’s cause.

Second, Wolfe presents an entirely rosy view of Muslim efforts to rescue Jews.

The Iranian diplomat Abdol-Hossein Sardari comes across as genuinely good, a dedicated servant of his country. However, the claim that he issued Iranian passports to 500 French Jews is unsubstantiated, appearing only in a statement made by his nephew many years after Sardari’s death. Sardari himself never mentioned it. The actual story involves the Jugutis- a community of crypto-Jews whose ancestors had been forcibly converted to Islam in Meshed in 1839. They lived outwardly as Muslims whilst secretly adhering to Judaism. Several of them resided in France, alongside Jews from Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran. One of their leaders, Dr. Atchildi, came up with a plan to save his community by claiming that Jugutis were religiously Jewish, but ethnically Aryan. Sardari helped him achieve legal recognition exempting Jugutis from anti-Jewish laws, and then requested that he place Iranian Jews on the list of Jugutis as well. Sardari’s chief concern was to help his compatriots, which is not a bad thing at all.[ref]Sardari has often been labelled the Iranian Schindler. I don’t concur, but I personally see Sardari more positively than I do the often unsavoury and opportunistic Schindler.[/ref]

The other diplomatic examples in the article pale in comparison. Corry Guttstadt extensively researched Turkey’s role in the Holocaust, and her findings exploded the myth of Turkish rescue. Some consuls, it is true, did save Jews, but the documented cases do not reach thousands of people saved, and the motivations were rarely very noble (though on this score many diplomats of other nations also fare rather poorly). Rescue was often the result only of sexual and monetary exchanges. Lives were saved, which is a good thing, but it hardly does credit to those diplomats who primarily benefited themselves. The Neçdet Kent story of the train seems very moving and inspiring, but is pure fabrication. Kent is the only source of the story, no survivor testimony corroborates it, and it is contradicted by material evidence.

Wolfe’s other Turkish example is even uglier. Not only did Behiç Erkin not issue Turkish passports to thousands of Jews with only distant connections to Turkey, he actually stopped the one individual on his staff- a French national- who did. Beginning in 1942, the Nazis had Jewish nationals of neutral countries deported. The passage to Turkey was neither funded nor organized by Turkey. Individuals either had to pay from their own pocket, or receive funding from a Jewish relief organization. Turkey, in fact, was not only slow to save its Jewish citizens, it even rescinded the citizenship of many Turkish Jews, leaving them stranded and vulnerable.

Ahmed Somia apparently was a dedicated resistance fighter, and the hospital did rescue many parachutists and members of the resistance, although everything that I have read accords Abdelhaffid Haffa- the hospital’s guardian- with a far bigger role than Somia. Haffa led the resistance activity, working secretly with a Jewish doctor. Si Kaddour Benghabrit, a religious leader of Paris’ Algerians and rector of the Grand Mosque, played a far more ambiguous role. Benghabrit saved some Jews, washed his hands of others (even as late as 1944), and generally pursued a range of actions from collaboration to resistance. In Benghabrit’s defense, we tend to approach WWII and the Holocaust with considerable hindsight. Things were usually not as clear to participants. [ref]Avraham “Yair” Stern, leader of a militant Jewish underground in Palestine, even proposed an alliance with Hitler. He thought that although Hitler was persecuting and murdering Jews, the real existential threat came from Britain.[/ref] Benghabrit pursued what he considered the best course for preserving his community. This did not always involve rescuing Jews.

By all means, Muslim assistance to Jews in the Holocaust should be highlighted, but romanticized myth-making does not build better bridges, and might make reconciliation and cooperation even harder.

“Generally, the myths historians interrogate are those that reinforce, rather than contradict, univocal narratives of conflict. In such cases, while the more complex truth may be painful, it can offer recognition to both sides, providing a more blended version of a disputed history and paving the way for possible reconciliation. By contrast, in the case of the Grand Mosque, the more mythical story does not seem to reinforce entrenched hatreds but rather to offer promise for reconciliation. Yet in so doing, it obscures a more complicated historical reality, and… reinforces a wider series of problematic perceptions that mar Jewish-Muslim understanding.”

In other words, we cannot have a meaningful discussion about Jewish-Muslim relations, or Muslims and the Holocaust, or the modern role of Muslims in Western society if we stick to myths. Even if the myth is positive, it obscures the real history and the real problems.

Of course, I also think that history matters, whether or not it leads to meaningful dialogue.

Still, I would like to end with a very positive example from Wolfe’s list. Albanian Muslims (and Catholics, too) were dedicated in saving Jews to an extent rarely found elsewhere. They were moved not only by besa– their code of honour- but also in many cases were influenced by the teachings of the Bektashi Sufi order.

Some Thoughts on Mean Conservatives

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Conservatives have a reputation for being mean: callous, unthinking, insensitive, cruel. You get the picture.[ref]Liberals, perhaps, have a corresponding reputation for being dumb: naive, sentimental, idealistic. But let’s just stick with conservatives for today.[/ref] Part of the reason conservatives have that reputation is because it’s politically advantageous for liberals to portray them that way. But part of it comes from conservatives themselves who–to a degree that I think is more true than with liberal commentators–tend to say things that are combative, adversarial, and aggressive. The question I’ll address today is this: why?

I’d like to ask of you, the reader, to entertain the notion that it might be something other than sheer meanness that animates the way some conservatives appear to pick fights unnecessarily. And this might be tough, because I’m going to focus on Ann Coulter, who is arguably the meanest of all conservative commentators out there commentating today. I have plenty of friends who will go into paroxysms of rage at the mere mention of her name or sight of her picture, but I’ve never been one to shy away from controversial topics. Besides, I’m not going to try to convince anyone to accept her points of view or nominate her for “Most Compassionate.,” I am, however, going to speculate on what it is that makes her write the way she does, and further speculate that it is something other than a heart as tarnished and black as coal.

I discovered Ann Coulter as an undergrad and for me her books[ref]Treason and How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) are the two that I read at the time.[/ref] were a revelation. It turns out, however, that they were also not entirely accurate. The first example that comes to mind is from her book Slander where–in the first edition–she alleged that the NYT ignored Dale Earnhardt’s death as evidence of the disconnect between red and blue America. Except, of course, that the NYT did cover it:

The New York Times did, in fact, cover Earnhardt’s death the same day that he died: sportswriter Robert Lipsyte authored an article for the front page that was published on February 18, 2001. Another front page article appeared in the Times on the following day.

It was also from Coulter that I learned that all the racist white Southerners during Jim Crow were Democrats, but she left out the part where they all switched to Republican after the Democratic Party embraced civil rights.[ref]And there died the last remnants of my capacity to care about political parties in America other than tactically.[/ref] But the real end of my Ann Coulter fandom came when I went to see her speak and stayed afterwards to get my books signed. In fairness to her, I was the last person in line and she was probably really, really tired. But when I asked her about coalition-building with moderate, patriotic Muslim-Americans her response (which I cannot recall with accuracy and won’t try to reproduce) was so utterly dismissive that it left me completely disenchanted.

I know that for a lot of people admitting that you liked Ann Coulter at any time in the past is something you would confide only in embarrassed tones and with lots of assurances that you were young and stupid then. But I’m not embarrassed about it. I’m always trying to find aspects of common wisdom that everyone else accepts that are actually wrong. That’s a dangerous quest ’cause when the common wisdom is right you look doubly like a fool, but I’m not ashamed of being willing to look like a fool for the sake of bucking conventional wisdom. And this seems like a good time for some William James:

He who says ‘Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!’ merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe…. This fear he slavishly obeys. …For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world. . . .It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

Now, returning to Ann Coulter, even though I can’t consider myself a fan in an unqualified sense any more, I still do carry both respect and affection for her and her writing. I think she’s often but not always very funny and always smart even when she’s wrong. But I’ve learned a couple of other things that, naive as it might be, make me think I have some insight into her character and–along with it–the fundamental reason why conservatives come across as mean, callous, etc.

One of the big insights for me came when a couple of students threw pies at Ann Coulter during a speech in 2004. Pie-throwing, or just pieing, is one of those things that sounds funny until you think about it seriously, as this writer for the New Republic did:

As a concept, throwing pies at pompous bores is pleasing. As a reality, it’s not pleasing at all. It’s one thing to parody, to tease, to lampoon. Jon Stewart throws metaphorical pies at hypocrites and fools several days a week. It’s another thing to see a face distorted and dripping with foam or custard as the person sits blinking and trying to take stock of what happened. Just watch Anita Bryant weeping.[ref]Check out the article for videos of people being pied, including Ann Coulter.[/ref]

In addition to the initial incident, however, Coulter later claimed that the local DA dropped the charges against the students against her wishes. Media Matter blamed Coulter because she didn’t show up at the trial. Coulter, for her part, wondered what strange legal system Arizona must have such that if a victim doesn’t show up at a trial the charges are automatically dropped, and further claims that when she asked if she was required to attend and when and where the trial would be held, she got no response at all. I don’t think it’s obvious from those two posts what the truth is, but I do think that in most cases calling someone a liar because they didn’t show up at the trial of someone who physically assaulted them would be justifiably called “victim-blaming.” I’d call the whole thing–from pie-throwing to mocking–simply this: bullying.

Sure, sure: she brings it upon herself. You can say that about a lot of people who are bullied. That’s because being bullied tends to make people scared and angry. We understand that when it’s about a normal human being, but for some reason we in America don’t treat famous people like normal human beings. Although they are.[ref]This is something I think about a lot, by the way, and not just with conservative pundits. The way Big Entertainment chews up and spits out starlets and child actors like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears is, I think, a truly grim indictment of our culture. Everyone hates the paparazzi, but the mags that run the pictures don’t seem to be facing any boycotts.[/ref]

Look, as long as I’m writing a somewhat personal blog entry, I’ll go all in. First, I was bullied a lot myself in middle school. It was what I’d call pretty severe, including things like people vandalizing clothes in my locker while I was in PE, teachers leading the kids in  making fun of me, and administrators calling me a liar when my parents tried to stand up for me. Second, I have parents who are–at least in Mormon circles–moderately famous. And people treat them really poorly sometimes. I’ve seen my mother publicly lambasted and called a narcissist stooge of the patriarchy who is in it for the money by prominent individuals who should know better. It’s not just that the accusations are flagrantly false[ref]They are, and even though I’m biased let me just tell you: they really are.[/ref], it’s that they are the kind of accusations that you just wouldn’t make about a fellow human being. You make them against symbols, dehumanized enemies, or inhuman icons. Not against your brother, your sister, or your neighbor.

So how does it feel to be Ann Coulter? To have people throw pies at you and have other people treat it like a joke? To have people organize to shout you down when you are invited to speak, and to have their actions lionized and applauded as though a mob of angry people shouting at an unarmed woman in high heels is the paragon of bravery.[ref]Truth to power, indeed.[/ref]

I get it. The immediate response is: “I’m not Ann.” As in, I don’t voluntarily write a bunch of hateful stuff. So, just to recap, this woman invites criticism by having loud, offensive opinions that aren’t popular. If she didn’t want to be physically assaulted, she should just keep her mouth shut. You could even say she’s asking for it, couldn’t you?

Or maybe she deserves what’s coming ’cause she got paid. Well, I think Kirsten Dunst and Jennifer Lawrence and the other women who had their iCloud accounts hacked and personal photos stolen probably get paid a lot for their work–some of which involves looking beautiful–but call me crazy if that just doesn’t justify stealing photos, posting them online, or looking at them either. Being well-compensated for work shouldn’t be an excuse to dehumanize someone.

OK, well maybe Ann Coulter deserves it because she says mean things for money. I’m skeptical of that. First of all: nobody does anything for just one reason. I really doubt that Coulter or anyone else (say, Michael Moore) has such a pure profit-motive. Does anyone think that Ann was just going through life and then was like, “Hey, I know a great way to get rich. I’ll say really horrible things for money!” I’m sure that Coulter has some sincere principles. I’m sure Michael Moore does, too. I’m sure at least part of what she does is because she thinks it’s the right thing to do. After all, doesn’t everyone think–usually sincerely–that they are a good guy?[ref]If you imagine any other human being to be consciously operating on some nefarious motive, like pure greed, you’re probably already seriously off-track. Real life people are neither angels nor demons.[/ref] I’m sure her good intentions are also warped by the riches and adulation of the fans that love her. She wouldn’t be human if they were not. But my question, again, is does this justify how she is treated? I don’t think it does. The thing with all these rationalizations and excuses is just that: they are rationalizations and excuses. We know better.

Last personal note: Earlier this week I posted a long article about the myth that rape is exclusively about power. The immediate response from one of my more vocal critics was to call me a misogynist on his FB wall, and then there was a pile-on after that. As a general rule, I think of myself as someone who has relatively thick skin. I’ve debated on the Internet for many, many years and have been called all kinds of things. Usually, I laugh. I have also called people all kinds of things, although I regret that and have tried to reform.[ref]I know of at least two people I’ve made cry in debates. One in-person, one online. I’m not proud of that, but it shows you the kind of tactics I used to use.[/ref]

But there’s something different about being accused in abstentia. When someone is screaming at me and calling me names it might not be pleasant, but in a perverse way I know I’m important enough to warrant an excess of emotion on their part. It might be totally dysfunctional, but we’re communicating. We are in a social relationship. I am still connected. When a group of people mock you and you’re not even there, it feels different. It feels worse. It feels like being made into a non-person. As we learned from Kreacher in Harry Potter, the cruelest opposite of love is not hate. “Indifference and neglect often do more damage than outright dislike,” as J. K. Rowling put it. The reason that indifference and neglect are worse than hatred is that they amount to treating a human being like a thing instead of like a person. It is the absolute negation of our essential worth.

Just to twist the knife a bit, of course, the reason I wrote that piece is because I have known many women in my life who have suffered from sexual violence and I want to do something about it. For me, “doing something about it,” has to start with really understanding the problem. I may have been flagrantly wrong in my approach (although my critics haven’t swayed me that far yet), but whether I was right or wrong wasn’t even relevant to the attacks. The issue wasn’t how good my arguments were. The issue was what a terrible human being I am.[ref]Incidentally, someone should really warn my wife that she’s married to a misogynist.[/ref]

I think I have a pretty good handle on my own insignificance. I see the web traffic to my blog, and I know what web traffic is to some really major blogs. I am not a public figure. I don’t meet Wikipedia’s notability criteria. There are not hundreds or thousands or even millions of people out there talking about me. There’s this one rather odd individual who seems to have an unhealthy fixation and–by extension–some of his friends. I can shrug, not read his page in the future, and get on with my life. But this is true precisely to the extent that I’m inconsequential. Someone like Ann Coulter doesn’t really have that option and so when I think about how she goes about her day-to-day life, I have empathy for her and the vitriol she sometimes spews. I can see that feeling like you are living under siege would make lots of people want to lash out.

That doesn’t mean I think lashing out is OK. Understanding is not excusing. To go back to my own past again, when I was in middle school and the bullying was at its worst I didn’t really have friends.[ref]The birthday party where only one kid showed up comes to mind. But, hey: it could have been nobody.[/ref] But I did have a group of kids who hung out at school before first class purely because we were all in the same place (the library) hiding from our own bullies. We put up with a lot of weird anti-social and unpleasant behavior from each other. Partially because we had to but also, I think, because we understood each other. We knew we weren’t exactly the best versions of ourselves. We knew that all of us would be smarter, more gracious, more competent, and better if our circumstances were a little different than they were.

This post is going to be a big joke to a lot of people who believe that trying to find empathy for rich folks, or for hate-mongers is a waste of time and who find the entire idea of a vulnerable pundit to be laughable. Believe me, lots of people will take from this, “Nathaniel likes Ann Coulter, ergo he is even stupider and more hateful than I thought!” and nothing more. I’m sad about that, but unwilling to modify the post for the sake of my reputation, such as it is. The message is what it is, and the command is to “love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.” (Matthew 5:44) By golly I just don’t see an exception for income or fame or ideology any more than I do for race or gender or sexuality.

The decision I’ve made is to remain unaffected by the mockery and scorn that comes my way (to the extent that I can) and try to stay true to my Christian ideals. Frankly, there’s very little of it (see above, re: my own insignificance) and if I can’t handle this trickle then that’s just sad. I will try to love my neighbor: even the rich ones. Even the famous ones. Even the pundits. And yes: even the dogmatically liberal bullies.

As a note: I absolutely don’t think conservatives are, on an individual basis, any better at treating their opponents with dignity and compassion. I can’t help but notice that we live in a world where the journalists, writers, editors, actors, directors, script-writers and–in short–the folks with their hands on the rudder of our culture are extremely socially liberal. In that context, I think conservative commentators face more pressure, especially the kind we don’t see because it comes from their peers in the news/entertainment industry–but I don’t for a second think that Michael Moore or Rachel Maddow have it easy, either.

I haven’t figured out how to reconcile all this love-thy-enemy stuff with my belief that facts matter, that policies are worth debating, and that some ideals and principles the world thinks are dumb are worth standing up for. But I’m working on it. I have this vision in my mind of having genteel adversaries who fight tooth and nail to defeat each other, but who always play within certain rules. And who are able to engage in witty banter, tokens of respect, and maybe even admiration and friendship despite being on opposite sides. Naive and stupid, perhaps, but it’s the best I’ve got. I like the idea that I could throw a party and all my friends would show up–no matter what their politics–and everyone would know they were welcome in my home. I think it’s harder to pull off than that, but like I said: I’m working on it.

So, going back to Ann Coulter one last time, I think partly what happened is that all the crap she has to deal with made her bitter, and that comes out in her writing. I’m not saying she didn’t do anything to bring it upon herself, or that she would be writing nothing but children’s fairytales if only people would be nicer to her. I’m also not saying there isn’t room for biting satire in political discourse: differnet people have different voices and some are going to be more abrasive than others. I don’t think there’s One True Tone for Correct Political Discussion. I just hope to avoid succumbing to bitterness and anger myself, and hopefully not pushing too many people too far in that direction either.

My Top 10 Most Influential Books

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2014-09-08 Influential Books COVER
Yeah, it’s from the movie. Get over it. :-)

A friend of mine (in real life and on Facebook) issued me one of those Facebook challenges, in this case to list the top 10 books that had been most influential on me. I usually ignore those kinds of things, but I knew this one would be a ton of fun, so I decided to do it and to make a blog post out of it.

First, I have to say that as a writer there’s just no way I can limit my selection to only 10. To play within the rules, however, I picked the top 10 and then put the rest in an “honorable mention” category. Secondly, I thought it was fun to divide the books into three categories: childhood (up through the end of middle school), high school, and adulthood. I’m going to list the books in the order I read them to the best of my memory.

And yeah, I get that it’s a little unusual to claim that books I’ve read in the last few years are among the most influential in my life. How can I really be sure? Of course I can’t. There’s some guess-work involved, but the idea that I’m going to be significantly changing as a person no matter how old I am is important to me. Maybe it’s more of an aspiration than a fact, but I’d like to think I’ll never know what the most influential books will be, ’cause it could be the one I’m reading today, or even one that I’m going to read 10 or 20 or more years in the future. So, with those notes, let’s get started.

Childhood

The Old Testament (1986)

2014-09-08 HeadphonesNo, I wasn’t reading the Old Testament in 1986, which was before I started school. I couldn’t even read. But I was listening to them on audiobook. My family was very poor back in those days, and a hand-me down collection of Old Testament audio cassettes was one of the few things with which I could entertain myself. We had a pair of headphones with a really, really long extension cord so even before I could read I would just sit quietly playing with my toy cars and listening to stories about God telling Abraham to sacrifice his soon Isaac. Take that, Baby Einstein.

Truth be told, I’m sure it was probably a sanitized version of the Old Testament. I can’t remember any details. It did make enough of an impression that, one day at dinner, I solemnly told my dad not to marry any Canaanite women. Sure, I knew he wasn’t exactly in the marriage market, but it seemed really important so I thought it was better to be safe than sorry.

I can’t rightly say exactly what influence all this fire-and-brimstone had on a young and impressionable Nathaniel. I think most of the violence went right over my head. What stuck with me, more than anything else, was just this overriding sense that words matter. That the things written down in books could be a big deal. Because I had picture books and learn-to-read books and all that kind of stuff, but I also had the Old Testament. I didn’t really understand it, but I could tell this was a weighty text. So I knew, right at the start, that books could be more than cute and frivolous.

Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire by Victor Appleton (1989)

2014-09-08 Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear FireMost of the books I read as a young kid were mysteries. I read dozens and dozens of Hardy Boys and several British series like the Fabulous Five. But the books that stand out the most in my memory are from the Tom Swift, Jr. series.[ref]This series, started in the patriotic 1950’s, was a continuation of the original Tom Swift stories dating back to 1910.[/ref]  The first influence is obvious: Tom Swift, Jr. launched my life-long love of science fiction. After thousands of pages of contemporary mystery, the breathtaking scope of these novels filled me with wonder. They also had a really, really strange prose style, however, like “Tom Swifties.” This refers to the way the authors (writing under the name Victor Appleton) went to great lengths to avoid using the plain word “said” in dialogue. Either other phrases were used, or “said” was dressed up in some way: “We must hurry,” said Tom Swiftly. Get it? ‘Cause his name is “Swift”? I could get that, even when I was 8 years old. So in addition to introducing me to sci-fi, the books also taught me that writing wasn’t just a method of conveying meaning. It was itself something you could play with.

The Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher – 1992

These books blew my young mind. Post-apocalyptic, alien-resistance, teenage freedom fighters? Yes, please. Think the orignial Red Dawn meets The War of the Worlds and you’ve got a good notion of the plot and tone of these stories.

2014-09-08 The TripodsThere are still so many scenes from these books[ref]The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire[/ref] that I can vividly recall today. Here’s just one: a city that would give criminals sentenced to death a horse and set them free. If they managed to outrun the tripods (giant, three-legged robots controlled by the aliens) then good for them. But, as the young protagonists watched in horror, even the bravest and most skilled horsemen were going to be caught–impaled on one of the metal tentacles of the towering tripods–and left to die in the fields in front of the town. There were so many awesome themes in this book, and such great sci-fi world-building, but what hit hardest of all was the final sacrifice of one of the main characters in the closing pages of the last book. It was the first time I cried reading a book, and so I learned something new. I learned how deeply a book could make you feel.

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien – 1993

2014-09-08 The ArgonathI can still remember exactly where I was when I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time: in my family’s pop-up camper in a campground in north-eastern Tennessee called Warrior’s Path. And, as I’ve recently written about, the scene that stood out the most to me at the time was the relatively inconsequential passage where Frodo and The Fellowship sail past the Argonath, only scant pages before Boromir’s betrayal and the breaking of the Fellowship. I don’t know why my memory of The Two Towers is so much stronger than my memories of The Fellowship of the Ring or The Return of the King, but it is. There was the Argonath, and then of course there was the sound of Boromir’s horn, defiant to the end, as he died a hero despite his faults. I read The Lord of the Rings several more times over the years, and my dad even read the entire trilogy out loud to me when I was a teenager just because it was something fun for us to do together. So LotR influenced me in a lot of ways but, already an aspiring writer by that time, Tolkien mostly taught me about the sacred art of world-building. When a writer really pours himself into creating his world, he creates something real. I know I haven’t lived up to that in my own writing, but it’s always been my guiding star, and I still hope to be a worthy disciple of sub-creation.

Honorable Mention

I read a lot of books as a kid. Here are some others that I can’t bear to not mention at all:

  • Redwall by Brian Jacques (1991)
    I really loved this children’s classic, and I even met Brian Jacques when he came to a public library for a book signing. I still have my signed copy, even though it’s a falling-apart paperback at this point. Meeting an author in the flesh was a big moment for me, even though I failed to prevent two bullies from butting in front of my sister in the book signing line. Mr. Jacques scolded them and sent them to the back of the line and then gave me a look to let me know I’d failed as a big brother.
  • The Deptford Mice Trilogy by Robin Jarvis (1991)
    These were the darkest books I’d read to that date, but also incredibly engrossing. I’ve thought about the limits of darkness in fiction ever since then.
  • Watership Down by Richard Adams (1992)
    It’s impossible to tell someone who hasn’t read Watership Down how good a book about rabbits can be, and–I was surprised to learn–if you tell them that there’s a Simon and Garfunkel song based on the book it doesn’t help.[ref]The song is “Bright Eyes,” by the way, and it’s a Garfunkel sans Simon song. It was really written, by Mike Batt, for the animated adaptation of the book (which I haven’t seen). Listen here. Read more about it here.[/ref]
  • The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper (1993)
    Definitely one of the most immersive and defining series of my childhood. Also kicked off a Celtic-fantasy binge that lasted for a couple of years.
  • A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (1994)
    I”m only fully appreciating L’Engle’s gifts as an adult. The older I get, the more I think it is female authors–L’Engle, Bujold, Cherryh, and Le Guin–who are the truest masters of sci-fi.

High School

 Dune by Frank Herbert (1995)

2014-09-08 dune__atreides-smallI have never, ever forgotten the lesson of the Gom Jabbar: we human beings are not rational creatures. Our rational minds contend with our animal natures and, more often than not, it is the animal that wins. In recent years this has become well-known with all kind of research on cognitive biases and with Jonathan Haidt’s example of the elephant and the rider, but the truth of it hit me hardest when I read the test that young Paul Atreides faced: one hand in a box that created the sensation of unbearable pain while a needle was poised at his neck, ready to deliver a fatal toxin if he withdrew his hand from the box. Frank Herbert’s masterpiece was also the defining example of the lesson that there is a place for religion-as a personal motivation, as a social force, as a part of the setting–in fiction.

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (1996)

2014-09-08 John HarrisI’ve seen Ender’s Game make the list for a lot of people, and there is no doubt that I liked Ender’s Game more as a kid. I reread it several times, and I didn’t reread Speaker for the Dead until after I was 30. But it has always been Orson Scott Card’s horrific inversion of the crucifixion that has haunted me, delving into the most painful and the most tender aspects of Christianity in general and of Mormonism in particular. Speaker for the Dead is not a fun book, but it is a masterpiece, and it showed me another way in which religion can have a place in fiction: as spiritual meditation, as an exercise of strained faith, as worship.

The Book of Mormon (1997)

I sort of roll my eyes when people put works of scripture on these lists. Yes, we get it, you’re religious. And here I am with two. That’s ’cause I decided my reaction was just me being too cool for my own God. Which isn’t cool. And the reality is that the Book of Mormon has probably been the single most influential book of my life. I certainly hope it has, in any case. I may have read the Book of Mormon before 1997, but this is the first read-through that I can remember. It’s the read through when I actually decided that I had to know, for myself, if it was true. If I was going to be a Mormon. So I did the Mormon thing: I read the Book of Mormon and then I prayed to know if it was true. I didn’t get an immediate answer or an obvious answer. But I got something, and it was enough to keep my going. My faith has changed a lot over the years, and other things have become more important to my faith than the Book of Mormon[ref]Foremost among them: prayer and a personal relationship with God[/ref], but that was the summer where I set off on my own faith journey, trying to find spiritual independence from my parents for the first time. I’m lucky and grateful that the independence didn’t entail a separation. We don’t see eye-to-eye on every issue, but I’m proud of the work they both do, and deeply grateful that we share a common faith. It’s a faith we couldn’t share if it weren’t for the fact that each of us is willing to abandon it if we don’t believe it to be true.

Honorable Mention

  • The Kestrel by Lloyd  Alexander (1995)
    The second in Lloyd Alexander’s series that started with The Beggar Queen, this book was a stark departure from his usual light-hearted fare. The anti-hero has become trend to the point of cliche in entertainment these days, but this was my first experience with anything like it, and it made me think. It was my introduction to ethics and political philosophy in fiction, I suppose.
  • The Damned Trilogy by Alan Dean Foster (1996)
    If Tom Swift was my first experience with sci-fi, this trilogy has become my personal paragon of sci-fi. It’s fun, exciting space opera that tries to ask big questions and tell a real story about real people. I’ve read more sophisticated and better-written fiction since then, but this will always have a special place in my heart as my re-introduction to the genre and perhaps my first introduction to space opera.
  • Small Gods by Terry Pratchett (1997)
    Douglas Adams’ Hithchiker’s Guide series is funny, but the kind of hilarious writing will always be Terry Pratchett for me. Small Gods was the first book I read by him, and is still the funniest. I laughed so hard that I physically couldn’t hold the book several times. Not all of his works are that funny, and I’m not sure how the humor will hold up now that I’m older, but I’ll also mention two other greats from this time period: Soul Music and Reaper Man. I need to give them a fresh look soon.
  • Nobody’s Son by Sean Stewart (1999)
    I’ve never heard anyone else talk about this book or seen it in any list, but of all the honorable mentions, this one is the closest to making the cut. I’ve seen lots of “subverting the fairy tale” stories since, but none that impressed me the way this one did. It’s a story about what happens after the plucky farm boy slays the evil what’s-it and wins the princess’ hand. How dreams that come true stop being dreams, and what we can do in the after math. I need to re-read this one, too.

Adulthood

Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling (2007)

2014-09-08 Harry PotterDoes this one really need an explanation? My mum started reading the books to the family when I was still in high school. Then I went on a mission, came home, got married, and the last book came out. Harry Potter spans the end of my childhood and the beginning of my life as an adult. I have no idea how many times I’ve listened to Jim Dale’s rendition of the books on audio, but it’s a lot. I’ve learned an incredible amount about writing and about world-building, but more than anything else, J. K. Rowling reminded me of the visceral emotional reality of reading in a way that I hadn’t felt since I was a young child. These books are truly magical.

Changes by Jim Butcher (2010)

2014-09-08 Harry DresdenThis book represents the entire Dresden Files series. As anyone who follows me on Facebook knows, I love this series with a passion that might not be entirely healthy. I don’t think they are the best-written books. The obsession with sex and with over-explaining both grate, but despite this the books speak to me on a deep, visceral level about the things that matter most. “He died doing the right thing,” is the inscription an evil vampire puts on the protagonists tombstone, and it sort of defines the entire series. That and little old cliches like loyalty, and friendship, and forgiveness, and trust, and family. This book has, without doubt, the best battle scene I’ve ever read. It also has, without doubt, the most tragic death scene I’ve ever read. One is fun, the other left me in tears.

On Killing by Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman (2013)

2014-09-08 On KillingThis is the first non-literary book to make it on my list.[ref]Scripture counts as literature.[/ref] In reality, however, I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction in the last few years. From various Great Courses to really great non-fiction books that you’ll see in my Honorable Mention section, I have come to enjoy great non-fiction almost as much as I love great fiction. But, of all the non-fiction I’ve read, this has been the one that’s had the greatest impact on me for it’s presentation of some deep and important elements of human psychology. You can see the kinds of thoughts it inspired me in a Times And Seasons post I wrote called: Mormonism and Embodiment: Learning from Killing.

Honorable Mention

  • By the Hand of Mormon by Terryl Givens (2002)
    I read my father’s study of the Book of Mormon and its role in Mormon theology and culture while I was still on my mission. I was in the office, so I was able to set aside my real duties for a day and finish the entire book in basically one setting. My dad is my hero, and this book is one reason why.
  • The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (2003)
    I read Graham Greene’s incredible novel as required reading in an undergrad class at the University of Richmond. It had a profound impact on the way I think about theology and the Mormon Church which, in many ways, bears close resemblance to the Roman Catholic Church.
  • A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (2009)
    The ending of this book really made me think about my role as a believer and as an artist (hopefully).
  • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2011)
    This was a great example of the fusion of sci-fi and literature.
  • Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick (2014)
    I got around to Philip K. Dick a little late in life, considering how much sci-fi I read, and it blew my mind. If there was just one writer I could be like, he would be very high on the list of potential paragons.
  • The Upside of Down by Megan McArdle (in progress)
    I’ve only been listening to the audio version of Megan McArdle’s book for the last few days, but I like it that much. Seriously. It’s giving me hope after a long, long series of failures in my life that–whether or not I find success-the failures themselves don’t mean I’m a failure. And might be worth something to me in and of themselves.

So there you’ve got it: the most influential books on me thus far in my life, as best I can reckon. Feel free to share you own list in the comments!

The Myth that Rape is About Power

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Myth: Rape is caused by lust or uncontrollable sexual urges and the need for sexual gratification.
Fact: Rape is an act of physical violence and domination that is not motivated by sexual gratification.
(Counseling Center at Roger Williams University)

The idea that rape is about power, and not about sex, is one of those facts that everyone knows. Sort of like everyone knows that humans only use 10% of their brain capacity. In other words: it’s totally and completely wrong but people keep saying it anyway.

The urban legend about folks using only 10% of their brain may be annoying[ref]And it might lead to Scarlett Johansen starring in a really bad movie.[/ref], but as a general rule it doesn’t get anyone hurt. Misdiagnosing the cause of rape can lead to bad policies, confusion, and more rape, however. It’s not just an annoyance. It’s serious and worth getting right. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, politics gets in the way.

The original source of the idea that sexual assault is about violence and power instead of sex or lust doesn’t come from a scientist or an academic study.[ref]UPDATE: I am arguing against the common argument that rape is only about power. I am not arguing that it is only about sex. Rape is a coercive act, so by definition it is about power. It is not only about power, however, and role of sex/lust is important to understanding rape.[/ref] It comes from a feminist writer named Susan Brownmiller who invented the theory pretty much from scratch for her 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.

According to Brownmiller, rape is “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” There is some validity to the idea that the consequence of widespread rape and sexual assault is a ubiquitous power imbalance between men and women in society, and that in that sense even men who never sexually assault women might be said to benefit from rape, but the contention that men consciously engage in rape for the purpose of control (to the exclusion of sexual gratification) never made much sense at all.

In a sane world, Brownmiller’s theory would have been very short lived. This is because an actual scientist stepped in with a direct rebuttal just four years later, in 1979. The book was called The Evolution of Human Sexuality and it was written by the anthropologist Donald Symons. It is no coincidence that Symons wrote from a scientific rather than a political perspective, and his book was widely heralded by some of the greatest social scientists of the 20th century, including Richard Posner, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Steven Pinker.[ref]I do not mean to denigrate theoretical work as a category. Theory matters, but only to the extent that it makes use of available data, which the theory from Against Our Will does not.[/ref]Symons’ thesis was very simple and aligned with common sense: he saw rape as being primarily about the satisfaction of sexual lust.[ref]That contradicts the second half of the opening quote. The first half—that it is uncontrollable—really is bunk.[/ref] In particular, he used evidence to document that:

Victims, as a class, were most likely to be young physically attractive women (as opposed to older, more successful career women). On the other hand, convicted rapists were disproportionately young disadvantaged men whose low social status made them undesirable as dating partners, or husbands. (Summary from Psychology Today)

The nature of sex and sexual violence in society has changed significantly since the 1970s, but continuing research cements Symons’ central claim that rape is a way for men to get access to sex that they can’t get in other ways.

For example, I recently came across another stark confirmation of this in the paper Decriminalizing Indoor Prostitution: Implications for Sexual Violence and Public Health. In it, researchers Scott Cunningham and Manisha Shah found a simple and direct correlation between legalized prostitution and rape in Rhode Island. The state unintentionally legalized prostitution in 2003 an then recriminalized it in 2009.[ref]The fact that the legalization was accidental is actually quite important because it creates a natural experiment.[/ref] After prostitution was legalized, the sex market increased in size and rape (overall, across the entire state) declined by 31%. When prostitution was criminalized again in 2009, the incidence of rape went back up. As Jason Kerwin summarizes:

Cunningham and Shah are very careful to say that they cannot conclude exactly why decriminalizing prostitution reduces cases of rape. They consider a number of potential mechanisms, and conclude that the most likely one is that, for some men, rape and prostitution are substitutes. That is, men commit rape in part due to sexual desire, which can be satisfied in other ways.

Kerwin goes on to point out that:

While Cunningham and Shah’s paper cannot demonstrate this for sure, their finding is consistent with other research by Todd Kendall that finds that the rollout of the internet, and the attendant increase in the accessibility or pornography, appears to have driven a decrease in cases of rape.

I’m well aware of the difference between causation and correlation, but taken together the research of Symons, Cunningham & Shah, and Kendall paint a stark picture in which men—driven by a more powerful sex drive—see rape as one among a series of competing sources of sexual gratification, the others being consensual sex, pornography, and prostitution.

Women have always born more of the risks and costs of sexual activity because it is women who get pregnant. In the 1960s and 1970s, this created incentives for women to wait until marriage to have sex or, more realistically, to at least keep sex within the confines of social courtship rituals. Men with high social capital, because they made good potential mates, therefore had reasonably high access to sex both through marriage and through the courtship that led to marriage. Men with low social capital who had much worse prospects in courtship committed the majority of rapes for that reason: they had less access to sex through courtship and marriage.

Since that time, society has changed dramatically, and the costs of sex—in terms of risks of unwanted children or sexually transmitted infections—have gone down dramatically. However, this has primarily benefitted men rather than women. This is because the prevalence of elective abortion has changed societal attitudes about pregnancy to make it basically a woman’s problem. Since a woman can get an abortion, if she does not society is more likely to see it as her choice alone. This diminishes the social responsibility men feel towards their own offspring and means that women are guaranteed to bear the costs of unplanned pregnancy—whether it’s the aftermath of an abortion or single parenthood—alone. So the costs of sex outside of marriage or courtship rituals have gone down, but the inequality between men and women has actually increased.

For men with low social capital this means that the need to rely on rape may be somewhat diminished because casual sex might be more accessible to them then expensive courtship rituals. The old idea that a man had to have a stable job and be ready to provide for a family before marrying and having sex is dead. It’s possible that men with low social capital are still seen as less desirable mates, but even in that case the ready availability of cheap and abundant porn is a safer outlet (from their perspective) than violent rape.

Men with high social capital have the same considerations, but more so. The kind of man with high social capital is likely to be the kind of man who goes to college. Not only does this create a ready abundance of opportunities for casual sex and porn consumption, but the hookup culture also creates the perfect opportunity for date rape. Date rape is much, much lower risk (for men) than violent rape because there is often no physical evidence and so it becomes a matter of he-said, she-said that our justice system cannot hope to successfully prosecute as a general rule.

Because the political theory that rape is a systematic form of oppression completely misapprehends the actual motivating factors behind rape, it cannot offer reliable policy guidance to address rape. It persists only because the alternative, seeing rape as a about sexual gratification, requires a politically unpalatable recognition of fundamental differences between the sexes.[ref]Primarily the controversial but obvious twin assertions that men are more motivated by sex and that women pay a higher cost for sex.[/ref] Denial of these unpalatable realities blinds us to the reality that sexual liberalization is virtually always beneficial for men at the expense of women and children.

Another big blind spot that comes from the theory of rape-as-power is the tendency to underestimate the connection between rape, pornography (which often includes depictions of violence, and so is basically simulated rape) and prostitution (which often involves sex slavery and coercion of minors[ref]UPDATE: The original link here was wrong. The new link goes to a study from Shared Hope International that identifies demand for pornography as a major factor in domestic (US) trafficking of minors. This is just one example of the connection between prostitution, porn, and sexual violence.[/ref], and so is basically outsourced rape). Consequently, the idea that prostitution and pornography can ease sexual violence in society has merit only to the extent that we recognize we’re regulating sexual violence as opposed to avoiding it. Since it’s difficult to see formalized, lethal dueling being proposed as an answer to murder, it’s hard for me to see pornography and prostitution as solutions to sexual violence against women

Acknowledging the real nature of rape does not lead directly to any silver bullets that will eliminate sexual violence from our world. It is a deep and disastrous dysfunction, much like murder, that will never be entirely eliminated from society. There is hope, however, that correctly recognizing the causes can lead to better policies to make sexual violence less prevalent.

UPDATE: I knew this would be a controversial post, but some of the push back was more than I expected. This is an important issue, both to me personally and also for society at large, and so I want to say thank to the folks who contributed and brought in new perspectives and resources, especially Cynthia L. and Kevin L. I’ll be giving the issue more thought–and more research–and will probably return to it again with a follow-up post.