Classic Record-Eaglism

Complaining about the newspaper can get kind of tiresome, but I couldn't resist commenting on this editorial:

After all, they'll reason, a Meijer attorney has already said the firm committed possible criminal violations of state law and a host of people may have perjured themselves; but if the secretary of state doesn't seem to think that's a big deal, why should we? Incredibly, that's also the attitude of state Sen. Michelle McManus, R-Lake Leelanau, who uttered one of those totally inane assertions that serve only to change the subject: "Campaign finance laws are about transparency, they are not about criminal action," she said. Right. Except when they are about criminal actions, of course.

That's why state law, as weak as it is, allows the secretary of state to ask the attorney general to conduct criminal probes of suspected campaign law violations. Her stance is pure nonsense. But it's the kind of nonsense that ensures continued good relations with Meijer and state Republican leaders. McManus is believed to be positioning herself for a run for Land's job two years from now.

And then, immediately following this . . .

Current law actually reflects McManus' elitist "no harm is too big" attitude. The law -- which appears to have been written by campaign fundraisers -- instructs the secretary of state to pursue "soft action" to resolve violations through informal agreements. Once such an agreement is made, further prosecution is impossible.

As much as I don't like Senator McManus, and as much as I respect he as a regualr source of "nonsense," I have to say I find it amusing that the writer of this editorial didn't perceive the irony in telling us in one paragraph that McManus's comments were "nonsense" and then telling us in the very next paragraph that they actually reflect the spirit of the law.

The fact is McManus is right: the law was not written to encourage criminal prosecutions, it was written to make investigations (and subpoenas) possible and to lead ultimately to slaps on the wrist.

The Record-Eagle may not like it--it may mean that the paper won't be able to tiresomely drive this story into the ground for the next 2 years--but I'm afraid the editorial board of the paper has been thoroughly outclassed here by Senator McManus as far as grasp of the facts and reasoning power go.

Can we imagine a more powerful indictment of this group of people? The different brands of stupid on offer in RE editorials make me think they are written by a committee of eight people with maybe half a brain amongst them.

Just to fill you in on the background, this potential prosecution has to do with the supermarket company Meijer and their long-sought second outlet in the Traverse City area (in Acme township, to be particular).

This new Meijer outlet has been bitterly and closely contended before the zoning boards, the courts, and the electorate. Meijer has had limited success so far in getting shepherding their plans toward fruition.

A few months ago Meijer had to concede a legal harassment lawsuit against one of the anti-Meijer Acme trustees AND was outed for having funded a recall effort against said trustee and his allies.

This last is a crime in Michigan, but not a particularly serious one, much to the Record-Eagle's chagrin.

The newspaper has been persistently anti-Meijer throughout the struggle. A couple of years ago they ran a story of the proposed Meijer building site at Lautner Rd. & M-72, and they ran a picture of the site. Understand that this site is a few hundred yards up the road from one of the busiest and (in Summer) most congested intersections in the region.

The Record-Eagle ran a picture pointing the other direction (toward the several disused farms/future construction sites to the East) calling it "a rural area." The "rural area" of Acme is served by its own sewage treatment plant, a rarity around here. And there are three more shopping centers planned within or bordering on Acme. (Admittedly, the capacity of the sewer plant would have to be considerably enlarged to accommodate all the planned development.)

The newspaper has spent most of its time cheerleading for anyone who is against the evils of development, even if they are--as is the case with some of these Acme folks--duplicitous, unreasonable, delusional, and selfish.

For years, these same folks dragged their feet on encouraging residential development (unless it was at the near-seven-figure mark) and then when the school district axed their school because of the low potential enrollment in their area, they--lo, and behold--suddenly became interested in housing development.

And now they tell us that they must stop the Meijer development because they have all these great plans for a real downtown (just like the 100+ year old towns of Suttons Bay and Elk Rapids) that will be ruined by a modern shopping development.

Only, there's no way in hell any such "real downtown" is ever going to get built. And, in all likelihood the best they can hope for is another project they've been obstructing for years that Meijer used to be involved with.

The fact is that the anti-Meijer forces in Acme have a (not so well-kept) secret agenda: to obstruct any and all commercial development in their area. It is essentially a not-in-my-backyard movement: eventually all the developers will get frustrated and move on and build in the next township over--Williamsburg.

In short, some folks would rather see regional sprawl than see Acme become more developed.

The newspaper has done a very poor job of reporting on what motivates the anti-Meijer folks in Acme, and has done a very poor job of questioning their tactics. What they've mostly done is gladly accept selective leaks from one of the commissioner's lawyers.

They haven't had much time to ask questions like: Is the Acme board of trustees and zoning board enforcing existing zoning law or enforcing their personal preferences? Or, have the Acme trustees ever violated the open-meetings act by, say, discussing active matters outside of board meetings? And just what has the role of outside advocacy groups been in making zoning decisions for the township? What will ultimately be the effect of Acme fighting to keep it's idle or barely utilized farms undeveloped?

But how much can you expect from a half-wit paper?

My Newspaper

Editorial: There's a silver lining in Federated's rain cloud

Federated Properties told city officials last week it wouldn't pursue an extension to a special land-use permit at 145 W. Front St. in Traverse City, effectively penning the obituary for a project borne of backroom deals designed to enrich a few while leaving taxpayers in the dark and potentially holding the tab.

This always was a grand scheme packaged as a dream, a 100-foot tall, nearly block-long monolith featuring pricey condos with a view of the bay. Just the tonic Traverse City needed during wobbly economic times, the developers and local pols cooed.

But all the would-be prosperity came with a slight caveat. Taxpayers were expected to ante up to $16 million in bond guarantees to build a 500-space-plus public parking deck and related improvements -- in truth Federated's get-it-off-the-ground foundation, both literally and financially.

When first pitched, the Federated deal seemed to demand extraordinary, sheep-like conformity and generosity from taxpayers. Local public officials, with the exception of city Commissioner Deni Scrudato, asked virtually no probing questions of a developer with exactly zero similar projects under its belt. Most city honchos, in fact, acted more like Federated's cheerleaders and apologists than hawkeyed guardians of the public good.

The Federated project in early 2006 appeared inevitable, a slick, done-deal product waiting for city commissioners' rubber stamp.

Then along came state Sen. Jason Allen, who unwittingly, spectacularly changed everything.

When local developer Gerald Snowden in January 2006 decided to make a run at some of the parking deck loot the city dangled at Federated, Allen, a Traverse City Republican, quietly stepped in and short-circuited Snowden. Behind closed doors, far from the public's prying eyes.

And Allen did so at Federated's bidding. Its CEO, Louis P. Ferris Jr., had pumped $20,000 into Allen's campaign coffers, and an eyes-on-the-prize politician like Allen wasn't about to ruffle a golden goose's feathers.

But word of Allen's shenanigans leaked, the Record-Eagle broke the story in February 2006, and brick-by-brick, buck-by-buck the Federated dream turned nightmarish, leading to a crushing August 2006 election defeat for a parking deck bond and ultimately voters' November 2007 sacking of pro-deck city commission incumbents.

It's an astounding story, one in which city voters and taxpayers raised a collective voice against ham-handed politicians, cronyism and the attempted pillage of public dollars.

In doing so, newly empowered city residents acted akin to a controlled forest fire, ridding themselves of dead wood in order to engender new growth.

Federated's sister project at 124 W. Front St., meanwhile, clings to life, but likely only until someone else takes over payments. And as Federated itself may always symbolize bad government and questionable deals, its ultimate, ironic legacy may be that it spurred the public to stand tall and retake its local government.

I recently expressed my growing impatience with our local paper at scienceblogs. The above editorial pretty much sums up what is good and what is bad about our paper.

Good:

1. They are skeptical of local officials
2. They aren't afraid to ruffle feathers
3. They stick with a story

Bad:

1. They don't cover central questions (such as: did these guys have financing lined up for this project or not? You won't find out from reading the newspaper--more on this below)
2. They love a good story WAY more than they love the truth
3. They love the opportunity to tear someone down and/or pat themselves on the back.

Bad 1 is, I suspect, an effect of Bad 2 and 3: they don't report on a lot of details BECAUSE it would rob them of the opportunity to tear down the established powers and praise their own all-seeing wisdom.

My bet is that this project, which wasn't all that big--It would have been bigger than several similar projects already built or underway but would only merit the word behemoth in the mind of an editor with no discernment and a well-thumbed thesaurus--probably did have financing.

Part of the real story of Federated is the fact that credit conditions have changed so much since they proposed this big project: they may well have had credit lined up for the project as initially envisioned, but it expired in the time elapsed since revisions were made necessary to the plan. Now, with billions soaked up by the sub-prime mortgage mess and subsequent retrenchment, creditors aren't so anxious to fund real-estate speculation as they once were.

But telling this part of the story makes Federated seem less villainous, so let's not, shall we?

And this: "When first pitched, the Federated deal seemed to demand extraordinary, sheep-like conformity and generosity from taxpayers," is frankly just stupid. The deal was a deal. The taxpayers would have had to support a bond issue, but the revenue generated by the development was supposed to cover that, and the city would have gotten the parking lot--there are many, many details to this deal, but it was a proposed business deal, like it or not. The suggestion by the paper that this was some sort of giveaway is plain bullshit. And I write this as someone who absolutely HATES the way this town does business. (see here and here)

But what I hate even more is the way the paper has gotten into the habit of slinging half-truths, innuendo and self-congratulation. (It doesn't take a genius to see the subtext of this article: congratulations to us for leading this town on the path of righteousness!)

But this newspaper is woefully understaffed, does a crappy job of covering the basic facts of stories (nearly every story they cover leaves crucial facts uncovered: how did that money-pit septage plant ever get built in the first place? We may never know . . .) and the persona of their editorial page is turning into a very unpleasant combination of self-righteous prig and surly drunk.

This is probably an effect of having more people in editorial board meetings than they have covering the basic news: this paper is long on opinion and short on facts. Long on theatricality and short of brain power.

Unfortunately, there is little to be done: the paper exists for one reason: to deliver profits to its Alabama-based parent company. Providing decent basic news coverage is simply not part of the business plan.

Self-important, mad-at-them, grandstand rants on the editorial page are less expensive than more reporters.

And, hey, the fewer facts, the better! Who needs reporters?

Cosmic Crackpot

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

Paul Davies, the director of a something called "Beyond" (a research center?!) at Arizona State University and author of Cosmic Jackpot has written a depressingly witless editorial contribution in this morning's New York Times.

One of the things that especially irks me about the article is that it makes takes a number of propositions that I believe should be fundamental to a modern scientific understanding--for instance, that there are assumptions behind science that need consideration and examination on occasion--and puts them to wholly illegitimate (I'd say villainous) purposes: to equate science and religion.

As I read over my last blog entry, which was rather intemperate, I hesitate before writing what I really want to write next . . .

There are at least two reasons why Davies ought to be horsewhipped. First, this sort of article gives the forces of unreason comfort they in no way deserve. Religion has a very fraught relationship with reality, and no believer should for a second forget that. I know people who believe and I even respect a fair number of believers. But what I cannot respect or even tolerate is the idea that revelation can trump science when we speak of material reality. While Davies would not himself go so far as to say this, the position he stakes out is effectively a means of intellectually legitimizing the very worst forms of know-nothingism and unreason.

Second, Davies argument makes it all thee more difficult to overcome the sort of naive empiricism and plain arrogance one so often sees on the scientific side of this dispute. But when the alternative to that arrogance seems to be Davies and his cohorts, who can blame scientists for becoming even more entrenched and unyielding?

Well, I can, for one. It is NOT as Davies and Lewis Wolpert might have it. Our choices are NOT an equation between science and all other faiths on the one hand and blinkered materialistic hubris on the other.

Davies makes crucial errors here: one is the easy conflation of order--which scientists do tend to seek--and meaning, which is not necessary to the endeavor. The fact that scientists presume there is an underlying order to discover behind physical phenomena is not an act of faith--it is simply a well-reinforced presumption. In the past when order and rules were sought, they were found. This presumption by no means rules out the possibility that there may be no ultimate order (so far as we can perceive) in the universe. And that order (or lack thereof) has little to do with the sort of meaning that religion traditionally provides for people.

Boycott this Moron!

Paperwork filed in effort to recall Dean
Posted by The Grand Rapids Press October 25, 2007 16:23PM
Categories: Breaking News

GRAND RAPIDS -- The owner of a Cascade Township printing shop today filed a request to recall state Rep. Robert Dean, D-Grand Rapids, because of two tax increases Dean supported last months.

"I think there's a sentiment that the wrong votes were cast," said Brian Ebbers, a resident of the city's Northeast Side and owner of Cascade Printing Co.

Ebbers, who listed himself as a member of "Taxpayers to Recall Robert Dean," submitted a request for the recall election with Kent County Clerk Mary Hollinrake on Thursday.

In his request, Ebbers gives two reasons for recalling the first-term legislator: Dean's "yes" vote on a state income tax increase and his "yes" vote on a bill that imposes a 6 percent tax on a variety of services.

Hollinrake said she will convene a Nov. 5 meeting of the county's election commission to make sure the recall language is clear.

Dean said the recall effort will not affect his work. "To me, this is an abuse of what the recall is for," he said.

Brian Ebbers is the sort of fellow that gives the right to vote a bad name. Here we have it: the "give me everything and make me pay nothing" John Q. Public who has no business voting on anything, because he can't quite wrap his mind around an actual public issue. When Britain wanted to deny us representation, it was people like Ebbers who were their shibboleth: "you wouldn't want thoughtless, selfish idiots like this running your public affairs, would you?"

Michigan has budget problems. Big ones. And Mr. Ebbers would probably be first in line to piss & moan if a billions plus in budget cuts were taken out of the state budget "Why did I have to stand in line?!" "Why are the roads so bad?!" You can probably add to Ebbers' litany of compalints.

Well let's show him that citizen action need not be moronic (or toothless). If you live in or near Grand Rapids, take your printing business elsewhere that Cascade Printing. Mr. Ebbers would feel much better is he were out of business and not subject to this onerous new service tax. (Just look how the sales tax on goods has curtailed the traffic in stuff of all kinds!)

It's about time Michigan stood up and said, "You have every right to be willfully stupid. Just not with my money." Boycott the Recallers!

Frans de Waal

To quickly follow up on my last post: I don't want to give the impression that Frans de Waal is not an important thinker on topics like culture, society and morality. He is. I almost always take something valuable away from an encounter with de Waal. But I am also sometimes puzzled by how de Waal positions his own work.

I was reading an interesting interview with de Waal here, which is what got me thinking about him and digressing about him below. I highly recommend reading this interview and other work by de Waal, because I think he far too often gets misconstrued as some sort of sentimentalist Margaret Mead II, which he is not at all. He is hard headed about things and pretty instructive about the heavy ideological valence of a lot of recent discussion around the topic of human nature and evolution.

Also while doing some quick research on this topic I stumbled upon Letters from Le Vrai, which seems pre-occupied with many of the same topics I've been on about recently. Also well worth reading.

More on Morality

Don't want to wear this topic completely out, but there was quite an interesting piece on this in the New York Times recently.

In a series of recent articles and a book, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, has been constructing a broad evolutionary view of morality that traces its connections both to religion and to politics.

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) began his research career by probing the emotion of disgust. Testing people’s reactions to situations like that of a hungry family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it had become roadkill, he explored the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding — when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why.

Dumbfounding led him to view morality as driven by two separate mental systems, one ancient and one modern, though the mind is scarcely aware of the difference. The ancient system, which he calls moral intuition, is based on the emotion-laden moral behaviors that evolved before the development of language. The modern system — he calls it moral judgment — came after language, when people became able to articulate why something was right or wrong.

The emotional responses of moral intuition occur instantaneously — they are primitive gut reactions that evolved to generate split-second decisions and enhance survival in a dangerous world. Moral judgment, on the other hand, comes later, as the conscious mind develops a plausible rationalization for the decision already arrived at through moral intuition.

Moral dumbfounding, in Dr. Haidt’s view, occurs when moral judgment fails to come up with a convincing explanation for what moral intuition has decided.

Now, this part of the article seems to me to be pretty elemental--that there are "deep brain" elements to moralistic judgment has been observed by literature through the ages. The conflict between moral intuition and our sense of justice and or different elements of our moral intuition is basic to Greek tragedy, I'd say. So this isn't anything new. Not even the ineffability.

And, as usual with evolutionary psychology (which this is, in large part) the immediate cover sought for being accused of merely repeating commonplaces is to invent an enemy: "Psychologists and philosophers have long taken a far too narrow view of morality, [Haidt] believes, because they have focused on the rider and largely ignored the elephant."

Why Haidt's interesting re-imagining of this old idea requires strawmen, I don't know. There may be some psychologists and philosophers who have concentrated on the "rider," but I think for some very good reasons--they were interested precisely in talking about/reforming the volitional element of morality. The tendency to blame prior scholars and commentators for not having written the same book as you is both tiresome and disingenuous.

Frans de Waal does much the same when he constantly speaks as if his work is most important in that it challenges human self-importance. But who are the great apostles of human self-importance? Are they worthy opponents? Do they read Frans de Waal? Will they know they've been challenged? Is there no better way to present your work than by imagining idiots somewhere who would be absolutely opposed to its findings?

De Waal, for instance, almost always figures his work in this way:

I've argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species. In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores.

But, the point that humans and animals are not as easy to categorically/morally distinguish as was once thought is by now an old point (though still worth making). What's really new about de Waal's work is the fact that he shows that animal society and even animal culture are important, and that these overlaying systems probably considerably complicate the interpretation of animal behavior.

In other words, the research model of evolutionary psychology--to explain human behavior by arguing direct links to evolutionary forces of early human development--is probably deeply flawed. Some crucial elements in our "environment"--society and culture--predate our species' early development.

But de Waal, apparently, would rather attack faceless "humanists" than fellow scientists.

---

But, anyhow, on to what I find to be the more interesting stuff in Haidt's article:

[Haidt] identified five components of morality that were common to most cultures. Some concerned the protection of individuals, others the ties that bind a group together.

Of the moral systems that protect individuals, one is concerned with preventing harm to the person and the other with reciprocity and fairness. Less familiar are the three systems that promote behaviors developed for strengthening the group. These are loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity.

The five moral systems, in Dr. Haidt’s view, are innate psychological mechanisms that predispose children to absorb certain virtues. Because these virtues are learned, morality may vary widely from culture to culture, while maintaining its central role of restraining selfishness. In Western societies, the focus is on protecting individuals by insisting that everyone be treated fairly. Creativity is high, but society is less orderly. In many other societies, selfishness is suppressed “through practices, rituals and stories that help a person play a cooperative role in a larger social entity,” Dr. Haidt said.

I'm not altogether sure Haidt has the categories completely right--I'm not sure for instance that the sense of purity is really so basic and visceral as he seems to imply, but this is a much more interesting take-off point for discussions of the use and future of religion than, say, pointing out that a great many religious proposition are probably false.

There is a portion of Haidts's article that deals with liberal/conservative issues that I think largely recapitulates--perhaps codifies--longstanding observations about our political instincts. One flaw with the political stuff is that it is largely based on what people say they value, not what they demonstrate they value. But, again, Haidt's refiguring and reviving of the argument is worthy of some thought.

Haidt's point of view on both politics and religion takes in individual human psychology, social relations and structures and evolution.

On the other hand, I think we [and Haidt] ought to recognize that he is giving an up-to-date form to a discussion that Freud contributed pretty heavily to about 80 years ago (Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents). Haidt's point of view is less colored than Freud's by the romantic obsession with the struggle of the individual within society, but he seems to be taking up the same conversation.

A little less Oedipalism would be nice from our contemporary scientific thinkers--it tends to distract from the real contributions being made.

Biology, Morality, Religion

I have been invited to write on this topic by our kind host here. [This was written to be cross-posted at Inalienable Rights] The invitation stemmed from some discussion surrounding the “New Atheist” writings of people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris.

These are different writers who have written different books, but I feel that there is fairly good reason to speak of them as a sort of movement. But we should remember (I should remember) as we move along that these writers have written distinct books and what is attributable to one is not necessarily attributable to them all.

The focus here, as it has been in most discussions I’ve seen on the web, will be on Dawkins. Dawkins’ book The God Delusion was published in 2006 and has sold more than a million copies to date, which is remarkably successful for a book advocating atheism or for a book written by a scientist. If the goal of such a book as this is to nudge public discussion in a particular direction, then Dawkins has succeeded. It has been a long time since atheism has gotten as much sustained and serious attention in the popular media as it has over the past year or so.

Before I venture forth, I’d like also to point out that this is an essay—there are lots and lots of assertions here without real evidentiary support. But this is in keeping with the tradition of the essay. So how does one evaluate these assertions? Not by rejecting them because there is insufficient evidence provided here. In fairness, take a minute to think about a) what might have prompted me to write what I have and b) what specific arguments you may have against my assertion, and if you think you’ve got a valid criticism or something that could be interestingly hashed out: post away!

*********

The rise of the “new” atheism has a lot to do with the political changes wrought by the election of an evangelical christian as President of the United States, the attack on the US by Islamic fundamentalists on 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the general divisiveness that has arisen in US politics through all this and two very closely contested presidential elections.

And Dawkins’ book is not at all immune to this air of contention. In fact, Dawkins wrote a much-publicized (metaphorical) call to arms against religion in the immediate aftermath to 9/11. And while The God Delusion has been a great success in many regards, some have pointed out a certain contemptuous disregard—by which I mean not just a lack of respect, but also a lack of attention—for his subject in the book, religion.

And that is more or less where I come in: complaining about the fact that The God Delusion reads more like wartime propaganda than the work of a prestigious scientist helping the public delve into a difficult subject. Not to say that Dawkins ought not have an agenda, but to say he ought to pursue that agenda while upholding a certain level of scholarship.

Here is Dawkins in a atheist FAQ:

Q: There are billions of people across the world following their faiths and living their life. How do you describe them?

A: Of course, there are billions of people living their religious life and most of them are harmless people. But, they are carrying a virus of faith with them, that they transmit from generations to another, and could create a 'epidemic' of faith any time. As I said, I am a kind of person who cares about the truth and also want to see people following the truth. The truth is not a revelation, but truth that has been established though evidences and repeated experiments.

And what repeated experiments have established the existence of this “virus?” Metaphor has been a powerful force in Dawkins’ career, for both good and ill*. [note 1] And here I think we see it used decidedly for the ill. Religion is to be thought of as a force of nature, as a thought contagion colonizing human minds because otherwise we’d be forced to ask, “What good does religion do that so many people adhere to it?” And that, for very unscientific reasons, is a question Dawkins just doesn’t want asked.

One of the “goods” that religion has traditionally been thought to deliver is “morality.” Dawkins also specifically addresses this issue in the same FAQ:

Q: Religious people claim they derive their morality from religion. Where from an atheist derive his morality?

A: Religious people do not derive their morality from religion. I disagree (with the interviewer) on this point. Almost all of us do agree on moral grounds where religion had no effect. For example we all hate slavery, we want emancipation of women - they are all our moral grounds. These moral grounds started building only a few centuries ago and long after all major religions were established. We derive our morality from the environment we live in, Talk shows, Novels, Newspaper editorials and of course by the guidance of parents. Religion might only have a minor role to play in it. An atheist derives his morality from the same source as a religious people do.

This actually makes for a pretty good starting point for a discussion of biology, morality and religion.

First off, I’d agree to some extent that people do not derive their morality from religion. Religion is the invention of man, and whatever is in it, whatever it inculcates or demands of us, man put in there. And so we’d have to look elsewhere for the ultimate origins of our morality.

But this does not mean that most people have not derived their morality through religion; that religion may be an important delivery system for things like morality.
Secondly, I’d point out that this passage represents an interesting departure from some of Dawkins’ earlier assertions on this subject: there is no mention of innate empathy, which figured prominently in the last chapter of The God Delusion.

[I don’t have a copy on hand so this summary from John Hick will have to serve] :

Richard Dawkins, in his widely read book The God Delusion speaks of 'our feelings of morality, decency, empathy and pity . . the wrenching compassion we feel when we see an orphaned child weeping, an old widow in despair from loneliness, or an animal whimpering in pain' and 'the powerful urge to send an anonymous gift of money or clothes to tsunami victims on the other side of the world whom we shall never meet' (215); and he has his own biological explanation of this. He lists four Darwinian sources of morality. One depends on what he calls 'the selfish gene'. He says that 'a gene that programs individual organisms to favour their genetic kin is statistically likely to benefit copies of itself. Such a gene frequency can increase in the gene pool to the point where kin altruism becomes the norm' (216). Hence, he thinks, parents' care for their children, both in humans and other animals. This care is undoubtedly the case. But whether an individual 'selfish gene' wants to benefit itself by making unconscious statistical calculations about how best to do this, seems to me to be suspiciously like an anthropomorphic fairy tale. And indeed how does it benefit an individual gene that there exist many copies or near copies of itself? The second Darwinian source of morality, according to Dawkins, is reciprocal altruism: 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours'. This occurs not only within but between species. 'The bee needs nectar and the flower needs pollinating. Flowers can't fly so they pay bees, in the currency of nectar, for the hire of their wings' (216-7). This is the basis of all barter, and ultimately of the invention of money.

So, why doesn’t innate empathy figure in Dawkins 2007 FAQ? Dawkins certainly still believes in it, I’m sure, as do I. But I think Dawkins may have come around to my point of view as to how important it is since he wrote the last chapter of his book. What would now be considered abhorrent practices—like slavery, the mass execution of war prisoners, the suppression of women, the exposure of children, the wholesale rape and slaughter of non-combatant populations—all of these things thrived for quite a long time before the emergence of a sensibility which could effectively suppress them.

In other words, morality is historical to some extent: what we consider abhorrent was once considered acceptable or even praiseworthy. So, apparently, a fairly broad variety of human practice can be accommodated to our innate altruism. The line that Dawkins has previously taken up, that religion is the “root of all evil” so to speak in that it allows us to rationalize our behavior when it defies our altruistic instincts is only half true.

Human beings have a great many other innate drives aside from empathy. Some of them lead to behavior that we would regard as selfish, acquisitive, violent, and paranoid. So when I ask myself whether or not I should seduce my neighbor’s attractive wife, my empathy for the plights of the cuckold and the guilty wife are only part (and perhaps a small part) of what goes into the moral calculus behind the decision.

So, moral decisions often involve a conflict amongst our instincts and between our instincts and our reasoning abilities. As Dawkins would readily point out, one role that religion has undoubtedly played over the millennia is as a mechanism by which one set of instincts may be assuaged when we choose to follow another, conflicting set of instincts.

But, this critique of religion has its limits. First, religion is but one mechanism that can accomplish this task of adjudicating between our good and bad angels. When the Mongols swept over the Eurasian landmass, destroying entire cities and spreading terror over two continents, they were not driven by religion, and they did not justify themselves through religion. Religion is just one way for a people to justify the rape, murder, dispossession and even elimination of other peoples.

Also, the mechanism works both ways: I can tell myself that though burning people alive for what they believe seems brutal, when it is done for the greater glory of god it is alright. But I can also tell myself that though my selfish instincts cry out when I give my wealth to the poor, that I am paving my way to heavenly rewards by doing so. The idea, which Dawkins endorses, that “you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion,” is just plain wrong, and oversimplified wrong at that.

People commit evil acts, even atrocities, out of all kinds of motives, some evil, some mistaken. And religion, as I point out above, doesn’t just cut in one direction: toward justifying evil. It justifies all kinds of acts, kindly and self-sacrificing ones as well as vicious. The balance between the two is dictated not by religion itself, but by our nature and the nature of our social behavior.

What Dawkins and his adherents should acknowledge on the point of human morality is that all the elements at play here--empathy, altruism, reason, greed, glory-seeking, selfishness, xenophobia, brutality and rationalization—all of these things logically precede religion.

While morality can indeed be said to derive ultimately from some of our kinder social impulses, what we recognize today as our “moral consensus” does not just arise naturally from innate empathy. That moral consensus has a pretty specific and well-known history.

Religion in some sense of the word—animism, ancestor worship (?)—no doubt precedes civilization. And the impulses that drove these earlier forms of religion are doubtlessly still important in people’s personal adherence and belief, but as Dawkins has pointed out elsewhere, his real beef is with more developed forms of religion. The kind that arose with civilization.*[note 2]

The rise of the city took us out of the simple contexts (small bands of related individuals with more or less constant mutual surveillance and strong hierarchal relationships) in which our instincts—selfish, empathetic, greedy, fearful—were a reliable guide to social behavior. As cities grew, with large numbers of unrelated people performing differentiated tasks grew, something that would shape and guide those instincts had to arise with them.

The state and its organized violence (executions, seizing & destruction of property, enslavement, forced exile) were one way of accomplishing this, but attempting to avenge every crime takes up a lot of resources. It is far more efficient to have the people police themselves. Hence the rise of “The Law” (e.g. the Torah) as a set of rules that not only lay out those practices that will (if discovered) result in immediate stoning, but a set of rules you ought to follow in order to be righteous and deserving in the eyes of the gods (or god).

Religion, therefore, could be quite useful in inculcating forward-thinking behavior among those who were less inclined to it; in regularizing people’s expectations of one another; in encouraging solidarity and socially-beneficial self-sacrifice in time of war; in wealth redistribution.

Unfortunately, religion could also put at the service of all the bad motives of those in charge, as well. And it could become the vehicle through which the mania of an individual or a small group could be given the force of an entire society.

Marx famously called religion the opiate of the masses. But it is much, much more than that: it is the hallucinogen of the masses, its stimulant and sedative. Actually drugs are probably too limiting a metaphor: Religion is a mechanism through which the play of reason and instinctive impulses in a large and disparate population can be affected to create outcomes we would not otherwise expect.

Dawkins, no doubt, has plenty of reason to hate religion, but I think this is one that he hasn’t openly acknowledged. Religion is to be hated because it throws into high relief the limitations of his own field of study: biology. The virus (or meme) explanation for religion is more or less his white flag. Religion makes it obvious that culture creates forms that are too complex and distinct to explain easily in terms of biology, much as biology creates forms that are too complex and distinct to easily explain in terms of chemistry. Since he is unwilling to admit the limitations of his explanatory tools, Dawkins’ only recourse is to the mythological: memes.

But I digress.

One of the things that will no doubt be pointed out is that I have dealt with religion and morality in a very non-personal way—from the perspective of a putative social entity. I take this tack because I think that it is in its social role that I feel religion is primarily important in our world. Religion as a truly and deeply held belief system with all the attendant consolations is important, but, I would argue, for a relative few.

More important is religions role in structuring society and helping create a certain kind of social imaginary. For most people religion is important less on a personal basis but rather on a basis of the fact that it helps create predictable interactions with others. It is less important that I actually believe in a resurrected Christ than it is that I believe that others believe (or at least others will behave much as I do) and that the socially prevalent version of Christianity (which may have little to do with textual Christianity) will serve as a rough framework guiding most people’s behavior.

It is only for a select few sensitive and discerning souls that the qualities of the religion itself—its poeticism, its ability to capture and express the human situation, its plausibility, whatever—is a great matter of import. Religion is not one’s personal relationship with God. It is one’s personal relationship with the mass. Of course, religious people will vehemently deny this. But remember, these are the same people who claim to believe people like Joe Smith.

*********

Our modern sense of morality developed just as the first great challenge to religious belief arose in our civilization. The Enlightenment was inspired largely by the challenge to custom—religious and other customs—that was presented when Europeans encountered civilizations—both ancient and contemporary--that were coherent, accomplished, even noble, but which had no notion of the western god.

The Good Life apparently was not dependent upon one particular religion. And philosophers began working on ways in which morality could be thought about without recourse to revealed truth. Kant’s categorical imperative is probably the most famous of these efforts: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

The retort “Why should I?” has never been sufficiently answered.

Ultimately, as Kant intimated in his Critique of Judgment these things come down to an aesthetic judgment on the part of the agent, and that judgment probably comes down to certain inherent capacities we have as well as “talk shows, novels, newspaper editorials and of course by the guidance of parents.” But the final outcome of our individual moral judgments ends up being highly contingent, not universal. And even if they were, there is no universal police force enforcing the secular universal law, and the temptation to be a free rider on this moral system is obvious—“let everyone else embody universal law, I will look to myself” would appear to be a highly profitable strategy in a Kantian society. Thus we have the moral crisis depicted in so much literature created in the late 19^th and early twentieth centuries. Secularism brought Raskolnikov onto the readily imagined horizon of possibilities. It doesn’t matter that there will never be many Raskolnikovs in any readily conceivable society, it is the fact that such a man is easily imagined is the key factor.

Now, instead of imagining a moral order shaped by a common, sometimes deeply sincere, sometimes hypocritical belief in religion and religious morality, I imagine a world of moral free agents all susceptible to the same temptation toward low-consequence free-riding as myself. In such a situation defection—acting selfishly rather than morally—seems a more reasonable course.

I should note here that the two social imaginaries I have depicted here—one of Christian regularity; one of moral free agents—always co-existed in Western societies. The key factor is the balance, the relative strength of the two visions. And religion, so far, has been an important factor in managing that balance.

We cannot just rely on our innate empathy to see us through this one, because there are (at least equally strong) innate impulses pulling in other directions. We can’t relay on pure reason, either, because a) the moral reasoning vs. amore-propre is always a bad bet from a social perspective; and b) because reason will probably tell us to defect more often than any society can live with.

We have to create social structures and well-accepted guarantors of social reciprocity in order to encourage what we would call morally acceptable behavior and social stability. And it is only through stability that the billions of people who inhabit this earth will have any hope of the good life at all.

The question for activist atheists is what those social structures will look like in the absence of religion. Atheists have to stop thinking about religion as if it were a way of explaining the world the way science is, or as if it were a leach that must be pried from the skin of our culture. It is a social structure with functions. Functions that must operate within the moral universes of illiterate peasants as well as for clever college undergraduates.

Religion is here and has been here for reasons. Whatever its origin, religion has come to serve important functions within human societies. Otherwise it would not be as widely practiced as it is and we wouldn’t currently be arguing about whether it is time to jettison it.

I am personally all for moving forward to a post-religious future. I just think we ought to have a cold honest look at what religion is and how it works before we do that. So far, none of the new atheists has gotten very far in doing that.

* [note 1] Andrew Brown on Dawkins’ birth: The good fairy gave [Dawkins] good looks, intelligence, charm, and a chair at Oxford specially endowed for him. The bad fairy studied him for a while and said: `Give him a gift for metaphor.'

* [note 2] I’d very much like to extend the discussion of morality and religion backwards to more “primitive” religions and lifestyles, but I am not prepared to do so at present. My supposition is that early religion did much the same thing—encouraged self-surveillance—for somewhat simpler groups. I think there are more powerful influences at work in early religion, like fear of mortality. But not the subject for here and now.