is what i do

Our friend David Shenk has a new blog which will feed into the book he’s writing on genius. The blog is good; I think David has found a subject that engages his own genius with more immediacy than the subjects of his previous books, on chess, and Alzheimer’s Disease, and information overload. Those were good, but they were workmanlike good; I think this one is likely to turn out a little quirkier and more personal.

David’s current post is on IQ; he does a cogent and well-deserved smackdown of Charles Murray’s skanky recent WSJ op-ed, in which Murray basically suggests that we might as well write off stupid kids.

IQ is weird. There’s a lot of data, but I have the uncomfortable feeling that it may not have been collected on the right populations, and that the Intelligence Quotient, despite its obvious success at correlating whatever it is that its instruments measure with various metrics of success in life, may not, in fact, measure anything particularly significant or maybe even real.

My IQ was measured when I was a kid in grammar school; my parents were probably interested in figuring out what to do about my underachievement in school (or perhaps, as Joan points out, determining whether I was, in fact, an underachiever or just a stupid kid.) I don’t know what it was, except that it was high enough to place me solidly in the underachiever category. Joan doesn’t think her IQ was ever measured. If Alex and Kate had their IQs measured somewhere along the way, nobody told us, or we didn’t think it important enough to note or remember.

I have two problems with IQ. First, I think that most people are a lot smarter than their IQ scores would indicate; my experience with people at the Brew House, for example, convinces me that most of them are smarter than they would appear to be on an IQ test, and that they’re smarter than their teachers and parents told them they are, and they’re smarter than they think they are. I’m not sure what I mean by smart, but it has a lot to do with being articulate, imaginative, original, and more than a little clever.

My second problem with IQ is that I believe that the data on how IQ can change with time is probably a lot more suspect than other data describing the IQ story. I know that I’m a lot smarter now than I was back when I was determined to be something other than a stupid kid, and if my IQ score failed to measure that increase in smartness, then it couldn’t be measuring anything very important. And it’s not just increases in smarts. A lot of the kids I went to high school with had IQs as high or higher than mine; that’s the kind of school it was. But a striking number of them, on the evidence of our 50th reunion, have become pretty stupid in the years since then. Again, that’s based on their lack of imagination, curiosity, original thinking, and ability to penetrate the kind of vapid rhetoric they get from their political leaders.

So, I guess what I’m saying is that IQ, whatever it is, is different from smart, whatever that is. And smart is more important.

The science blog “Mixing Memory” has a story about a clever experiment designed to test the extent to which fundamentalist Christian beliefs help believers deal with angst. (Chris, the proprietor of “Mixing Memory”,is interested in Terror Management Theory, which asserts, among other things, that “in order to avoid the fear that comes with thoughts of our own mortality, we erect and cling to belief and value systems.”)

In this particular study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Mark Friedman and Steven Rholes measured a number of things about their subjects’ belief systems, and they assigned each subject to one of two categories: Low Fundamentalists and High Fundamentalists. They then divided the subjects into groups and had them read several texts, some from the Bible and some, as controls, from texts that had nothing to do with religion. The reading for two of the groups was designed specifically to demonstrate inconsistencies in the Gospels, thus challenging the subjects’ fundamentalist beliefs. Finally, all subjects were presented with a task in which they were asked to complete words for which they were just given a couple of letters (imagine Jeopardy without the clues). Some of those word stems could be completed by words that were related to death.

Those subjects who were in the High Fundamentalist category and whose faith in biblical inerrancy had been shaken by the gospel inconsistencies that were made salient for them in the readings were much more likely to complete the word stems with death-related words than subjects in other groups. Chris draws the (unsurprising) conclusion that “religious beliefs, for fundamentalists at least, serve to minimize existential anxiety”, and he goes on to point out how the study’s results indicate problems ahead for those who would teach evolutionary theory, or, indeed, any good science that threatens fundamentalist belief.

I would draw a slightly different conclusion from the study. I believe that many of us are engaging in a more directly challenging discussion with our religious colleagues than we used to engage in, back in the days before the fundamentalists themselves began to ratchet up the heat on such discussion. What studies like this one tell us is that we must make an effort, without backing down on our insistence that fundamentalist beliefs are irrational and delusional, to help those whose faith we challenge to see that it’s possible to live perfectly well without such delusional thinking - that they can, even without maintaining faith in impossible things, still be good people and lead good lives, rich in happiness and friendship; that they do not need to fear death, which comes to all; that they can, by exercising their rationality and keeping their minds open, develop the intellectual and emotional strength to face even very painful experiences and very uncertain outcomes without becoming paralyzed by terror or surrendering to morbid thinking. In other words, when we are challenging another’s deeply held faith, it is important to maintain our compassion, and to focus more on what rationality adds to ones life and not so exclusively on what it takes away.

I have been reading three books recently that take just that approach - Stephen Batchelor’s “Buddhism Without Beliefs”, Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation”, and Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”. All three are uncompromising in their rationality and direct and powerful in the challenge they present to delusional thinking. But all understand, clearly and compassionately, the emotional significance of belief to the believers, and all three authors are positive in demonstrating ways of thinking about the world that are emotionally rewarding and intellectually bracing.

I will have reviews of the three books in the coming days.

Last week’s issue of The New Yorker had a fine article on Philip Pullman, whose superb trilogy, His Dark Materials, makes Narnia and Harry Potter look like, well, kids’ books by comparison. The article calls the trilogy “the first fantasy series founded upon the ideals of the Enlightenment rather than upon tribal and mythic yearnings for kings, gods, and supermen”. A thrilling plotline, inventively developed, complex and sympathetic characters, and a prose style that refuses to condescend to its adolescent audience all combine to make Pullman’s books a rich reading experience. And it’s an experience that’s carefully tailored to improve the moral education of its readers.

The New Yorker article covered a speech that Pullman made at the University of East Anglia on the subject of “Religion and Education”. Pullman’s speech contrasted morality as it’s preached by theistic religion—morality based on fear, focussed on sexuality, obsessed by God—with the lessons in behavior that are transmitted through stories with “morals”—lessons about acting decently, thoughtfully, independently, with kindness and courage.

Consider the marks of a theocracy as Pullman identifies them. And then consider the behavior of the anointed leader of our country and the elderly men who surround and advise him. His Dark Materials ends with a difficult journey through a cold dark land, and an achingly sorrowful sacrifice. Are we prepared to make such a sacrifice to save our enlightenment values from the theocracy that threatens to destroy them?

OK, here’s what you need to do:

• First, do not click on this link to Sam Harris’s astoundingly wonderful manifesto, “Imagine There’s no Heaven“.
• Second, take a few deep breaths, compose your mind and consider how you typically deal with a long interesting article on the web.
  • If you print it out, with the intention of reading it later, DON’T DO THAT!
  • If you bookmark it, with the intention of reading it later, DON’T DO THAT!
  • If you skim the first page to pick up the high points and don’t click through to read pages 2,3, & 4, DON’T DO THAT!
• Instead, do this:
  • Clear 15 minutes of time, during which you will let nothing distract you from the task at hand.
  • Close, hide, or minimize all of your running applications except for your web browser; maximize that to fill your screen.
  • Resolve that you will read this one through to the end. If you must, pray to God for the strength to do that.
• Now, click on this link. Don’t come back here (or go anywhere else) until you’ve read Sam’s article through to the end.

Wasn’t that worth it?

The New York Times reports that Cody Young, an evangelical Christian who attends a religious high school in Southern California, has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against the University of California, charging that they practice “viewpoint discrimination” and that their admissions standards violate the free speech and religious rights of evangelical Christians because they refuse to certify some of the Christian school’s courses on literature, history, social studies and science.

The university system’s reasons for refusing to certify those particular courses is that the textbooks used in the courses and the curriculums themselves have a specifically Christian viewpoint. Here’s a sample:

What interests me most about the suit is an argument made by Robert Tyler, a lawyer for Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murrieta, CA, where Cody Young is a senior: “What really lights the fire here is when you look at courses the U.C. has approved from other schools. In the titles alone, you can see the discrimination against us.” And he pointed out that the university has approved courses on Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and gender and counterculture’s effects on literature.

I’m in favor of teaching courses on all those things, and on Christianity as well, at all levels. But I think that courses in religion must be taught in the same spirit of rationality and open inquiry as are courses in other subjects, like history, sociology, and science. Here’s an illuminating quote from John Dewey, probably the most profound thinker about education that this country has produced:

So let’s accept a course on Islam, as long as that course permits teacher and student to introduce viewpoints questioning the Prophet’s sanity or his womanizing; let the course on Christianity use materials from the Jesus Seminar, and require the students to read passages from Bertrand Russell (and from Dewey himself) that question the rationality, morality, and historical truth of Christian beliefs. Let the universities certifying those courses for their admissions policy focus, not on the subject matter, but on the pedagogy, and accept only those courses that exemplify what Dewey calls the “method of free inquiry” that must characterize all honest search for truth.

The Dalai Lama’s op-ed piece in this morning’s New York Times, “Our Faith in Science“, was truly remarkable: honest, clear-eyed, generous, and smart. It’s generated a lot of discussion.

In his blog Stranger Fruit, John M. Lynch remarks on the following quotation: “If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.” And he asks,

A number of friends, knowing my affection for the Buddha, and for the Dalai Lama, have mentioned the piece to me through this day, and they have all, to my mind, taken a subtly mistaken message from it; all of them told me that they read the piece to mean that there need be no conflict between science and religion; several went on to give it their own spin: if science could just give a little, then it could exist quite peacefully with religion.

As I read it, however, the piece says no such thing. True, His Holiness challenges scientists to widen their vision to include more of the world than their narrow speciaties, and to give more consideration than they have to the ethical implications of the science that they practice. And he does express his hope that “people from both worlds can have an intelligent discussion, one that has the power ultimately to generate a deeper understanding of challenges we face together in our interconnected world.”

But he is clearly mindful of the fact that “certain religious concepts conflict with scientific facts and principles.” What he does not say explicitly, but what is nonetheless true, is that those particular religious concepts that conflict with science are the concepts having to do with the role of God in the history of the universe and the conduct of human affairs. And while Buddhism very sensibly recognizes such concepts as “unskillful”, i.e. not worth talking about because they are unresolvable, most theistical religions (e.g. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) hold such concepts very close to the heart, and, indeed, have been known to destroy those (scientists and others) who fail to give them proper reverence and assent. The fact is that a belief in a creator God really is in conflict with science, and there’s no getting around that.

The Dalai Lama takes the same path that the Buddha took when he was confronted with such metaphysical questions as the nature of the gods; he attempts to bring the discussion back to what he calls “secular ethics”, i.e. “the principles we share as human beings: compassion, tolerance, consideration of others, the responsible use of knowledge and power. These principles transcend the barriers between religious believers and non-believers; they belong not to one faith, but to all faiths.”

Ideally, those principles do belong to all faiths. But the current state of affairs in most corners of the world—from the boulevards of Paris to the cornfields of Kansas, from the West Bank of the Jordan River to the West Wing of the White House—provide pretty unambiguous evidence that compassion and tolerance aren’t holding their own against the temper tantrums of a jealous God.

I love the Dalai Lama; I am amazed and grateful to have been alive in a time of the world when I can hear his teaching. I am glad to see that teaching appear on the pages of the New York Times; I hope that some will be touched by this wisdom who have not hitherto even been aware of such a luminous soul in our midst. But it will not do to read this piece carelessly, or to look for easy ways out of a difficult dilemma, or to conflate the Dalai Lama, because he is presented as a “religious leader”, with others who share nothing of his humanity, his breadth of learning, or his profound humility.

Bill Poser, over at Language Log, tells us that October 9 is Hangul Day (한글날) in Korea, celebrating the creation and promulgation of the Hangul alphabet by King Sejong the Great in 1446. Hangul is not an ideographic language like Chinese, in which every concept has its own ideograph, and pronounciation of a word is almost completely disassociated from the ideographs that represent the written form of the word; in Chinese, a given ideograph may have one pronounciation in Cantonese, a completely different pronounciation in Mandarin, and even be used, with the same meaning but with, again, totally different pronounciations, in classical Korean or Japanese—languages as different from Chinese as English is from Nepali.

Hangul, on the other hand, is an alphabetic writing system, in which just 28 letters represent, quite faithfully, logically and unambiguously, the spoken sounds of the Korean language. Prior to its invention by King Sejong, the very few literate Koreans—all members of the ruling elite—used Chinese ideographs to represent the written form of ideas. Hangul made it easy for any Korean to read and write the language.

Here is a translation of King Sejong’s opening paragraph of the document in which he introduced Hangul (that document, itself, was written in Chinese ideographs);

And here is Bill Poser’s comment on King Sejong’s document:

Not surprisingly, there was strong opposition from the nobles in King Sejong’s court, who presented him with a memorial of opposition to his new alphabet and who debated him about the wisdom of introducing it. Poser makes it clear that King Sejong’s accomplishment here was not simply a linguistic one:

Poser’s article is extremely well written and well organized, full of all sorts of interesting things, without every getting too detailed or too technical. Read it and enjoy.

I wish you all a belated Happy Hangul Day!

Thanks to P.Z. Myers for the link to this:

And thanks to Wiley for his consistently wonderful Non Sequitur strip.