Philosophy Lounge

December 27, 2012

We Find Discrimination Everywhere!

Filed under: ethics,humor,Irony — Tags: , — jbernal @ 8:31 am

by Juan Bernal

Before the passage of civil rights and voting rights legislation in the 1960s and 70s, many southern states required that voters answer questions meant to show their qualification for voting.  White people would get some softball question like “How many eggs in a dozen?”; whereas, blacks would be hit with questions about relativity physics or quantum physics: “Explain the Copenhagen version of quantum phenomena.”   Who do you suppose was qualified to vote?

 The Joke 

In his latest book for the non-scientific layman, Leonard Mlodinow  (See* below) recounts a joke in his discussion of the stereo-typing and categorization of people.  As Mlodinow tells it, three gentlemen (a white Catholic, a white Jew, and a poor black man) die and head for the gate of heaven where the Lord will question them to determine their qualifications for entry.

(I’m not sure why Mlodinow puts the Lord performing the function normally assigned to St. Peter; maybe it has something to do with Leonard’s Jewish background.)

What follows is paraphrase of the joke.  I have altered Mlodinow’s words slightly.

At any rate, the first man, a white Catholic, comes to the gate and stands before the Lord who asks that he state his qualifications for entry into heaven.  The Catholic answers: “Lord, I followed all the rules of the church, regularly attended mass, and was kind to my fellow humans, even if others were biased against me because of my Catholicism.”  The Lord says fine, but before I let you enter you must correctly spell a word.  “What word, Lord?” the Catholic asks.  “God”, says the Lord.  The Catholic easily spells G-O-D  and is granted entry.

Next, the Jewish gentleman comes to the gate and stands before the Lord who asks this fellow the same question: what are his qualifications for entry into heaven.  The Jewish man answers: “Lord, I followed your commandments, studied and revered the Torah, and treated all people as I wanted them to treat me, despite all the anti-Semitism directed against me.”  The Lord says fine, but before I let you enter you must correctly spell a word.  “What word, Lord?” the Jew asks.  The word is “God”, says the Lord.  The Jew easily spells G-O-D  and is granted entry.

Finally, the poor old black man, comes to the gate and stands before the Lord who asks the same question as with the other two. The black man answers: “Lord, I despite all the racist discrimination that I had to endure I never became bitter but always tried to follow your teaching, and I always tried to treat every one kindly and fairly, regardless of the color of their skin.”  The Lord smiles and says that’s good,  but before I let you enter you must correctly spell a word.  “What word, Lord?” the black man asks.  “Czechoslovokia,”  says the Lord. …

(Some things never change!)

(No people.  This is not a racist joke!)

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An Elaboration on this instructive joke.

According to an anonymous reviewer of Mlodinow’s book, the joke was read to a conference of community college philosophy instructors (Western States, including California), 650 of whom were given a questionnaire to get their interpretation of the joke.  (I have not been able to confirm that this survey really did take place, but simply describe what was reported to me.)

The respondents distributed as follows:

32% correctly read the joke as commentary on the universality of racial prejudice and hypocrisy (even the Lord..)

16% correctly noted that the joke said something about our ideas of justice and fair play

12% did not even see the point of the joke at all, asking lame questions like, “Why Czechoslovakia?”

(These are philosophy instructors, you must understand their limitations.)

8% were bothered by the story’s placing God and not St. Peter as heaven’s gate keeper, and could not get past that bit of incongruity to answer other questions.

10% were Christian theists who objected strongly to the way the joke characterized the Lord as being unjust to the black man.  Why, God would never do that!

12% did not understand why Mlodinow would include the joke in a chapter on our unconscious stereo-typing and categorization.

5% were offended by what they mistook as a racist joke.

The remaining 5% were black philosophy instructors who just laughed, asked “So what’s new?” and went about their conference business.

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* Subliminal, How your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. Mlodinow is a physicist at Caltech who co-authored The Grand Design, with Stephen Hawkin; and had an earlier, very entertaining book, The Drunkard’s Walk – How Randomness Rules our Lives

August 29, 2011

Body Snatchers; Learning outside the Field; and Big Tent.

Filed under: Critique of philosophy,humor,Irony,Personal Experiences and Reminiscence — Tags: , — jbernal @ 2:27 pm

by Juan Bernal

Invasion of the Body Snatchers:

After working hard at a recent group discussion to fend off the aggressive thrusts of some philosophical Dualists (those who believe that the body is an incomplete and inadequate reality without a dual non-material reality, e.g., soul, mental ego, or independent mind), I was struck by the similarity between such Dualist campaign to downgrade physical views of human beings and the story of aliens who snatched the bodies of human victims and replaced them with strange facsimiles. Of course, it may not appear that dualists and spiritualists are out to snatch away one’s body and replace it with an alien likeness (a strange pod which ‘hatched’ into a strange in-human likeness of the original), as were the aliens in the popular movie. But they do seem intent on reducing the human body-brain to mere matter-in-motion, a primitive form of material existence that cannot support the complex and high level of activity that we justifiably credit to our corporeal nature. If we argue that evolved human animals with their large brains are very much capable of reason, language, and culture, the Dualists reply that materialism is committed to the view that such animals are nothing but “matter-in-motion” which, of course, is far from being capable of reasoning, language use, and development of culture. So in a way, they have metaphorically “snatched away” our real bodies-brains (impressive organisms capable of great deeds) and replaced them with a strange pod of mere “matter-in-motion” capable of nothing but motion and mechanical interaction with other bits of matter-in-motion. Hence, they draw their invalid inference that a scientific materialistic philosophy either paints a frightening, alien picture of human beings or falls into obvious contradictions when applied to human, social reality. But, of course, this is definitely an invalid inference.
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Those Outside the Field Have been my Teachers:

Since my early days as a college student when I first developed an interest in philosophical thought and inquiry, after I accidentally came upon Walter Kaufmann’s Critique of Religion and Philosophy, I have gravitated to writers outside the mainstream of philosophy. It is the works of such writers such as Walter Kaufmann, Friedrich Nietzsche, Spanish writer and philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, the American-Spanish writer, George Santayana, and others who are more literary figures than academic, professional philosophers, that have given me the nourishment to sustain a life-long interest in philosophy. Although Walter Kaufmann was a philosophy professor at Princeton University, he was better known as an interpreter and commentator on Nietzsche and Existentialist thought, and as a scholar of religious history and scripture, than as an academic philosopher.

Later, while working on graduate degrees in philosophy, I developed great interest in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the author of the Philosophical Investigations. As anyone familiar with the story, Wittgenstein was an engineering student who became interested in some problems in the philosophy of mathematics being worked on by Bertrand Russell. With little or no background in philosophy, Wittgenstein became Russell’s student for a time, before breaking with him to lead not one, but two, innovative philosophies of analysis and language. But he mostly worked independently and outside the academic environment of most professional, academic philosophers; and was often very critical of the mainstream English-German analytical philosophy of the twentieth century.

After my years in philosophy graduate programs ended, I went to work in the computer field as a business applications programmer and was able to reflect on the field of philosophy from the outside. My interests then became those of the logic of computer languages, the relationship to logic, linguistic analysis and natural languages, an amateur’s interest in the new field of artificial intelligence, and some curiosity as to how all this related to the philosophy of mind.

Later as I had more leisure to pursue “philosophical issues and questions,” it was the sciences that provoked my interest more than academic philosophical topics and research. First it was the physicists, with their deep puzzles and maddening paradoxes of modern physics (Einsteinian Relativity Physics, Quantum Physics), that drew my attention. How did all this affect traditional views of physical reality? How does all this affect our traditional philosophical thought? (Taner Edis’s book, The Ghost in the Universe, was very helpful here.) I did not see much in traditional philosophy that answered or even clarified the mysteries, finding more help from scientific writers such as Taner Edis and George Johnson. Then it was evolutionary biology and Darwinian evolution by natural selection that gave me an entirely new orientation to philosophy. Here I owe an intellectual debt to an academic philosopher, namely Daniel Dennett. His book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, was as much an “eye opener” for me as the Walter Kaufmann book had been twenty five years earlier. But it was Dennett, as a scientific-oriented philosopher, not one focusing on mainstream philosophical issues, who proved to be such a great influence on my thinking. It was Dennett working outside the philosophical mainstream that I found so instructive, provocative, and inspiring.

After my initial look at the importance of Darwinian thought to many crucial issues in philosophy, I went on to read works by such neo-Darwinians as Richard Dawkins and Ernst Mayr in order to get at least a layman’s grasp of Darwin’s revolutionary insight – his theory of evolution by natural selection. This was followed by an interest in related evolutionary sciences – such as evolutionary psychology and anthropology. All this eventually led to the contemporary works on the philosophy of mind (Dennett, Doug Hofstadter), on neurological work as it relates to philosophy (Antonio Damasio), artificial intelligence and the incompleteness theorem (Doug Hofstadter) and the cognitive sciences (Steven Pinker).

Add to all this my discovery of a self-taught writer, Eric Hoffer, and his most insightful book, The True Believer, and we see that I had an uncanny tendency to seek out non-philosophers and non-academics when looking for enlightenment and intellectual stimulation.

Finally, in the past year I accidentally came upon a long book, Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff (linguist) and Mark Johnson (Philosophy Professor), in which the authors argue that a philosophy of an embodied mind which bases itself on the empirical findings from the cognitive sciences — instead of a-priori philosophical assumptions — yields a revolutionary perspective on much of philosophy. Here I found many of the ideas which I had only previously seen obscurely, ideas which the authors expressed, developed and argued impressively. Again, I am influenced by a scientist and a philosopher working outside the mainstream of philosophy.

Although I studied and earned degrees in philosophy, I am drawn to sources and teachers outside the field in my effort to reach some degree of philosophical understanding.

Go figure.(?)
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“Big Tent” Philosophy:

Sometimes I see the field of philosophy as a big tent which holds a variety of inhabitants; and sometimes I’m impressed by the strange variety of philosophical species that share this tent. The inhabitants are so strange and exotic that it is a wonder they can ever communicate at all, much less engage in meaningful discourse. Consider the variety of tent inhabitants that we find inside the tent: academic and non-academic scholars of philosophy; people interested in the history of ideas; Libertarians and those who look to Ayn Rand as a great teacher, Socialists and Marxists, those engaged in Christian Apologetics; Thomists; enthusiasts of some far eastern religion and mysticism; promoters of the Ba’hai; Phenomenologists who still value Husserl, Hegelians, Kantians, Cartesian Dualists, Empirists, Promoters and defenders of Atheism, Theistic philosophers, Naturalists or those who are scientifically oriented; mathematicians who are Platonists, Humanists, Skeptics, Logicians and Analysts, Wittgensteinians, Heideggerians, Pragmatists, Spiritualists and Idealists, Existentialists, Post-Modernists, and so on. (This does not list all the wonderful species and varieties; I just got tired of typing!) It is a wonder that those who call themselves “philosophers” or more realistically, see themselves as students of philosophy, can even talk to one another. As it happens, sometimes they really cannot; and sometimes it is a mystery why all fall under the heading “philosophy.” Besides claiming the label “philosophy,” I’m not sure they all have much in common; in fact, I’m fairly sure they do not.

July 2, 2011

“Donkeys, Angels, Jugheads, and Jerks” (Sociological Taxonomy, or just plain Name-Calling?)

Filed under: humor,Social Philosophy — Tags: , — jbernal @ 3:16 pm

Benjamin, the Donkey, in George Orwell’s, Animal Farm

When the animals were all excited about the revolution on the farm:

“Benjamin, .. seemed quite unchanged since the Rebellion. He did his work in the same slow obstinate way as he had done it in Jones’s time, never shirking and never volunteering for extra work either. About the Rebellion and its results he would express no opinion. When asked whether he was not happier now that Jones was gone, he would only say “Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey,” and the others had to be content with this cryptic answer.” (37-38)

When Snowball and Napoleon were vying for leadership of the animals:

“Benjamin was the only animal who did not side with either faction. He refused to believe either that food would become more plentiful or that the windmill would save work. Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on — that is, badly.” (55-56)

Later in the story after the revolution had been betrayed:

“…their life, so far as they knew, was as it had always been. They were generally hungry, they slept on straw, they drank from the pool, they laboured in the fields; in winter they were troubled by the cold, and in summer by the flies. Sometimes the older ones among them racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early days of the Rebellion, when Jones’s expulsion was till recent, things had been better or worse than now. They could not remember. . . they had nothing to go on except Squealer’s lists of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better. The animals found the problem insoluble; in any case, they had little time for speculating on such things now. Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse — hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.” (119-120)

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Good old Benjamin, the donkey in George Orwell’s classic social satire, Animal Farm, represents one class of people, the gentle cynic who is not much excited by those things that excite others. He is the type of person who has lived a long life, has seen too much to hope that things will change for the better, and does not jump on the latest bandwagon. Call his class the ‘donkey class’ and ask yourself, who among your acquaintances falls into this class? Working out an answer would be a useful exercise.
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Some people are incurable classifiers; they’re inclined to divide people into classes; and some people are not. I try to avoid the temptation to classify people and refuse to join those are always ready to stereo-type people into derogatory. But this implies that would I list myself outside the class of those who put people into different classes; and this, in turn, implies a distinction between those who classify others into classes and those, including myself, who don’t. So, despite my intention to avoid classifying others, I have done exactly that.
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Eric Hoffer, in his book, The True Believer, spends some time describing the personality type who is a “true believer” in a cause, whether religious, political, or any other ideology and life-style. It is interesting to note that Hoffer classifies people such as atheists and skeptics as embracing their own form of ‘true belief,’ and thus falling into the class of ‘true believers.’ Presumably, he does not see himself as a true believer; he calls himself a gentle cynic and has some of the qualities of Benjamin, the donkey.

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There are many old and contemporary ways of dividing people up into contrary classes.
Here I list a few.

Liberals, Progessives, and Political Conservatives
Democrats and Republicans
Rich and Poor
Religious and non-religious
God believers and non-believers
Europeans and Non-Europeans
Men and Women
Married and Single
Parents and Childless
City dweller and lovers of the country life
Dog lovers, and cat lovers
Lovers of pets and those who prefer to be without pets

Cowboys and Indians
Ranchers and Sheepmen
Motorists and Bicyclists

Those who love silence and sounds of nature
Those who cannot exist without electronic noise

Those who like coffee and those who prefer tea
Those who have money and those who don’t

Those who like fresh air and the windows open
Those who prefer to keep the windows closed

Those who like jazz and those who prefer the classics.

Those who love camping and those who cannot stand it

Those who like the sounds and activities of their neighbors
Those who are annoyed by the noise of their neighbors

Those who hear too much; those who don’t hear enough
Those who love spectator sports; those who consider them a waste of time
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Now for some griping: Some people are angels; some are ‘jugheads’; and others are ‘jerks.’

Angels are the kind-hearted, optimistic type who find good in everyone and everything. They are people who don’t just talk about the Golden Rule, but live their live according to that principle as much as anyone is able to do that. (Believe it or not, there are such people among us.)

Jugheads are people who are rude, inconsiderate, nuisances because they don’t know any better. Consider a common jughead act that we often experience out there in the social world: the guy who plays his auto stereo at highest volume and has never thought of the effect the sounds have on others within fifty yards.

Jerks are people who are rude, inconsiderate, nuisances because they don’t give a damn. Consider a common jerk act that we often experience out there in the social world: the guy who plays his auto stereo at highest volume, knows it bothers others within fifty yards, but could not care less.

(These three classes do not exhaust the classes of human beings.)
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Appearances are Deceiving or the Perils of Stereo-Typing:

(A few years ago an old friend told me this story, which I shall recount as he told it me: in the first person.)

My first meeting with the Department Chairman

Early in the 1970s I made first visit to the philosophy graduate program office at the University of California. This happened in late summer when I had an appointment with the Department Chairman, call him “Professor Morehead.” This was my first meeting with him. I told the secretary up front who I was and why I was there. She had me wait for a few minutes.

A skinny, raggedy, somewhat unkempt man was emptying out the trash cans at the secretary’s area in front of the faculty offices. I took him to be the janitor. Another person, well-dressed man, walked through the entry to an office. When the secretary told me that Morehead was ready to see me, I assumed that he was the stylish dresser and headed for the room that he had entered. As I started to pass by the chairman’s office, the raggedy, unkempt man stuck his head out the door and motioned me over there. “That other guy,” he told me, “was a graduate student taking a summer class,” before heartily shaking my hand and telling me with a smile, “I’m Morehead.” To my surprise, the “janitor” was Professor Morehead, Department Chair and Professor of Philosophy! He enjoyed a good laugh at my confusion.

Morehead was a great guy, very informal in attire, who later encouraged me with my dissertation project and helped me to achieve my dream, a graduate degree in philosophy!

June 26, 2011

No, We don’t attain Perfection, but what is Perfection?

Filed under: Critique of philosophy,critique of religion,humor — Tags: , — jbernal @ 2:33 pm

Years ago my high school, home town buddy, Alex, once had an error-free performance on a ninth-grade algebra test — i.e., he solved every problem correctly, no errors whatsoever — but when his test was returned by the algebra teacher, Sister Michele, a nun teaching at the Catholic high school we attended, the paper had a ‘98’ score instead of the expected ‘100.’ When he questioned Sister Michele regarding the two points deducted on his test score, she replied that only Jesus was perfect. Understandably, my friend was upset by this, but what could he do? After all, only Jesus is perfect! [In retrospect, we should have replied that Jesus did not take the exam! But in those days we did not dare question the authority and greater knowledge of the Church.]

I thought about this humorous incident as I thought about the issue of perfection and the tendency by some philosophers to evaluate facts and events in the world on the basis of a putative perfect condition. Many times this tendency comes in the context of an ideal or spiritual metaphysics in which all things that are material and corporeal are seen as second-rate when compared with the perfect realm which is seen as having a greater reality. Plato’s theory of forms comes to mind, along with the spiritual metaphysics of Christian doctrine. The things of this world are nothing but appearances and temporal phenomena; they are nothing compared to the other, greater realm. The world we experience is imperfect; the other world (the realm of forms, for Plato; or God’s spiritual realm, for the Christian) is where perfection is realized.

Before the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the democratic revolutions and the rise of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this metaphysical idea of an imperfect, less-than-desirable world of the senses and of perfection residing in a realm beyond the reach of human reason and intelligence served to preserve the privileges of the ruling classes and their priestly allies. Anything resembling perfection – such as wealth, knowledge, and material privileges – were limited to those who directly served God and represented his authority in this world and to those favored by God (monarchs, royalty, and aristocrats) for some unexplained reason.

For many philosophers, the other worldly perfection was reflected only in the disciplines of geometry and mathematics. A deductive system of logic could be perfect in the sense of being without error. My friend, Alex, would have been surprised to know that our pious high school algebra teacher either did not realize this or chose to ignore it when she deducted two points from his otherwise “perfect” test.

The other consequence for much of traditional Western philosophy was that genuine knowledge was not attainable in the sensible world of ordinary experience. As the arguments in Plato’s dialogues tell us, the most we can achieve in the world of the senses is opinion, which might have a degree of reliability but will never reach the status of genuine knowledge. The only exceptions were geometry and mathematics, both of which served as models for knowledge. For the Christian philosopher, many of whom followed Platonic thought, ultimately only God had knowledge of the world. Human ‘knowledge,’ at best, was only practical and provisional, always incomplete and subject to error. But God’s knowledge was perfect and complete.

With the advent of evolutionary philosophies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this idea that perfection marked every area of knowledge started to weaken. Or at least, the idea that God, being the perfect Being, had created a static, perfect world became questionable. Geologists, naturalists and historians began to develop theories of reality on basis of their observation that the world is subject to change, deterioration, improvement and evolution. In short, the world was revealed to be anything but a static, perfect world. But even with respect to biological evolution, the notion remained that everything changed for the better, moving toward a final and perfect harmony. So the idea of perfection was still retained in the prevalent perspectives of reality. It was only when Malthus gave a more realistic view of the struggle for survival and Darwin developed his theory of evolution by natural selection that many people began to notice that the idea of perfection really did not apply to the biological and social world. Only then did some philosophers and physicists begin to question the equation of knowledge as an absolute, perfect knowledge.

Surprisingly, some people in and out of philosophy still think in these terms. I argued recently with a retired philosophy instructor who insisted that what we take as knowledge of events, contemporary or historical events, is not genuine knowledge because one can imagine alternative scenarios being possible. In other words, unless what we affirm in our claim to knowing something is absolutely and perfectly true (no possibility of error or alternative account), we cannot claim genuine knowledge. His claim is that our ordinary, empirical knowledge (as well as much of our scientific knowledge) is always based on a specific conceptual scheme or framework and is, therefore, not a completely objective form of knowledge. In short, we cannot attain perfection in our claims to knowledge. We only have perspectives and beliefs based on those perspectives which we take as knowledge and which may be practical enough; but we never attain genuine knowledge. I’m willing to grant this may point to genuine problems in epistemology and issues of rational skepticism; but it has all the tell-tale signs of a pursuit of perfection or the rendering of philosophical judgment on the scale of perfection.

Loosely related to this tendency to aim for perfection, on the part of many philosophers, is the equally erroneous idea that genuine knowledge requires proof, as in logical or mathematical proof. Hence, we have the misguided form of skepticism which doubts everything that cannot be mathematically or deductively proven. Of course, this is an untenable form of skepticism, good only for those ‘thought experiments’ so beloved by many enthusiasts of philosophy.

Contrary to this “hunger for perfection,” I agree with the many biologists, historians, and political scientists who deny that the idea of perfection as an absolute by which we evaluate human knowledge has any place in our natural, social world and can at best serve only as a limiting concept. Granted, we often refer to something as being “perfect” and hold that this is an accepted form of expression [*] ; but we should not confuse our way of talking with affirmation of other-worldly metaphysics. We don’t dwell in an ideal world where perfection is to be found; and my friend should damn well have gotten a ‘100’ score on his algebra test.
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* Of course the terms “perfect” and “perfection” have legitimate roles in our language. We often speak of the “perfect day” or the “perfect trip” as a way of emphasizing that the day had nothing but good qualities or emphasizing that the trip to Tahiti was great without any problems or complaints. Someone may speak of the perfect match between a man and woman (match “made in heaven”) or refer to a very good applicant for a job as “perfect for the position.” These are just ways of emphasizing that Bill and Mary are not just very compatible, but compliment each other in many ways. The applicant may not simply satisfy every requirement for the position, but be such a good fit that he will perform beyond the expectations of the job function. We may say that musicians performance was perfect as a way of expressing our view that there’s no aspect that needs improvement or could be criticized. But none of these forms of expression imply anything about the type of absolute existence or absolute property so beloved by many theologians and traditional philosophers.

May 28, 2011

Theology in Retreat?

Filed under: critique of religion,humor,Irony — Tags: — jbernal @ 12:36 pm

Surely we often hear the reminder that science does not disprove God. For example, a correspondent recently wrote:

“Hawking, in his book, The Grand Design, makes it clear that his book does not show there is no God nor Heaven and Hell, it only shows such hypotheses are unnecessary.”

The implication here is that a science like scientific cosmology cannot prove that there is no God or heaven; all it can do is show that such ideas are not required in the process of developing a scientific explanation, theory or model of reality.

Whenever I hear this point raised by some theologian, or a theistic philosopher, or any apologist for the theistic line I’m reminded of an episode from “The Simpsons” in which young Bart is confronted with some mischief that points to him as the perpetrator. He makes the following exclamations of diminishing innocence:

I didn’t do it! —- a categorical denial that he is the culprit

Nobody saw me! —- a retreat to claiming that nobody witnessed his action

You can’t prove anything! —- a greater retreat to claiming that there’s no proof that he did it.

In an analogous way, there is a process of diminishing theological ‘truth.’ We can imagine the apologist for theism exclaiming at different periods of theological history:

God is real! —- a Biblical, revealed Truth that all decent people know. (Biblical certainty)

Human experience demands that God exists! —- otherwise human experience does not make sense.

God has been proven to exist! ——– We have proofs, i.e., Theologians and Philosophers have proven it. (Certainty of Philosophy) “There are proofs somewhere.”

God required to explain origins! ——- the origin of universe and the remarkable design of life forms can only be explained by invoking a creator God. The “God” of natural theology.

Nobody (scientist or anyone) can prove that God does not exist! —– God as possibility. Since there isn’t any proof of impossibility, he must be possible. (This is a fall-back position that rests on mere metaphysical possibility.)

Maybe the theist and Bart Simpson are not up to the same trick, but their diminishing claims surely seems look much the same. In Bart’s case he retreats from “I did not do it” to “You cannot prove anything!” In the theist’s case, the retreat is from “He exists” to “You cannot prove He doesn’t.”

March 18, 2011

C Rulon: By accepting God, I have everything to gain and nothing to lose…or do I?

Filed under: critique of religion,humor — Tags: — jbernal @ 10:59 am

by Charles L. Rulon
Emeritus, Life & Health Sciences
Long Beach City College (ruloncl@yahoo.com)

Pascal’s Wager: “How could I give up eternal salvation by choosing not to believe in God?” I’ve been asked. “By accepting God you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. It’s a no-brainer.” Here’s my response:

Which god? There are a great many diff­er­ent gods and religions worshiped today, each with diff­erent dog­mas and beliefs regarding just about everything. Obviously they can’t all be right. But since there’s no rational way to deter­mine which ones are wrong, if not all of them, how can I choose? What happens if I pick the wrong god? What happens if I choose a Hindu god, or Allah, or the bib­li­cal god and the real god turns out to be a jealous, vindic­tive Egypt­ian Sun God? Now I’m really dammed to hell!

Which Christian sect? So suppose I flip a coin and it comes up “Jesus is my Lord and Savior”. I still have to select from among the hundreds of different Christian sects and denomi­nations which disagree­ with each other on all sorts of trivial things…like how to get to heaven, or the time of ensoulment, or the morality of birth control, abor­tion, homosexuality, or woman’s place, and so on. Why so many differ­ent sects? Partly because our Bible is filled with scientific absur­d­ities, contradic­tions, ambi­gui­ties and incon­­­sis­t­encies, thus making it a “pick-n-choose” Bible.

Faking is out. Also, you can’t fake it. You have to really believe in this medieval nonsense. Feigning belief? Don’t even think about it. Any omniscient god would see right through the deception. So now what? How do I throw out decades of acquired knowledge that devastates god beliefs, including much of my entire scientific back­­ground and become a true believer?

Horrors! Suppose I “miraculously” do become a true believer, say in the god of the Christian Right and of the Republican Party. Suppose I spend the rest of my life worshiping this god and doing what I am told is his bidding. Then suppose I discover near the end of my life that this god was either the wrong god or never existed in the first place. Horrors!! I’ve just spent my life trashing large chunks of excellent, life-advancing science in this god’s name.

I’ve spent my life trashing rational critical thought and human­istic com­passion in favor of an intol­erant medieval theocracy! I’ve spent my one priceless life increasing the pain and suffer­ing of gays and lesbians, and people with terminal illnesses who just wanted to die in peace and dignity. I spent my life trying to force untold num­bers of desperate women with unwanted pregnancies to be unwilling embryo incubators! I’ve even fought against the survival of demo­cracy in favor of a fascist theocracy!

I’ve squandered my precious time on Earth worshiping, sacri­ficing to, and fighting for some evil deity or one that never existed in the first place! In fact I’ve actually spent my life working for the extinction of the entire human species by preaching and supporting Arma­geddon End Times beliefs! Horrors!! And Christians actually have the temerity to tell me that I have everything to gain and nothing to lose by accepting their god!!!!

Here’s what I think. If an all-good, all-wise deity really did exist—a deity respon­sible for all the laws of sci­ence, including relativity and quantum mechanics—this deity would certainly not want us to waste our time kissing His ass and sending money to charlatans with bad hair pieces. Instead, He would want us to live lives of kindness, gener­osity and humanis­tic compassion. He would certainly not want us to follow the irrational, destruc­tive, intolerant, and self-serving dogmas of the Christian Right.

Also, since this deity saw to it that we had brains which could scientifically discover and explore the work­ings of His creation, He would regard the honest seeking of truth as one of His highest virtues. He would want us to use our rational brains and the scientific method to improve life on Earth instead of wallowing in endless superstitions.

Hell: If Christian fundamentalists are right and I’m wrong, I could be going to Hell (I’ve been told) for trying to destroy the faith of good, honest, God-fearing Christians. (Mark 9:42). But consider: If the Jesus of the New Testa­ment really did exist and, despite all evidence to the con­trary, his words really were recorded accurately in the Gos­pels, then those “Christians” who have not done their best to conform to his moral dictates could also be joining me for an eternity of fire and brimstone. That could be a lot of Christians!

After all, Jesus was very clear in his explicit admonition for the wealthy to give all their money to the poor if they ever wanted to go to heaven (Matthew 19:16-26; Mark 10:17-25; Luke 18:18-26). Yet, Christian Ameri­cans remain incredibly wealthy compared to the two billion people on our planet who live on less that $2 a day. So the express train to Hell might very well be stuffed with those who spent their extra money on BMWs, Botox injections, Armani shoes and trips to Vegas instead of on poverty relief. Also in danger could be those men who committed adultery by marry­ing div­orced women, those who didn’t turn the other cheek, and those who spent their time judging and condemning homo­sexuals, secular huma­nists, Jews, and Janice Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction.

October 20, 2010

Satan to the Atheist: Go to Heaven, Please!

Filed under: critique of religion,humor,Irony — Tags: , — jbernal @ 1:35 pm

Whenever I attend a conference or small meeting of atheists and secular skeptics, I am somewhat ‘put off’ by the general attitude that all religions and religious people are fair targets of ridicule, as if to say: “There’s nothing there worthwhile studying or trying to understand; it is all ignorance and stupidity.”

Admittedly not all atheists and skeptics have this attitude; among them are some very good historians and scholars of religious history and writings. An exception to the facile dismissal of all religion by the new atheists is the atheistic philosopher, Daniel Dennett, who calls for an objective, naturalistic study of religions in order to determine what might be worthwhile and what should be abandoned. He also makes the interesting distinction between belief in God and the belief in belief in God; noting that the difference is relevant to our evaluation of the religious attitude. But in other parts of his work in which he is identified as a ‘new atheist’ alongside the evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins and the writer, Sam Harris, Dennett (much to my disappointment) tends to agree with those who hold that generally religious culture has little or nothing valuable for contemporary thought.

Walter Kaufmann, who was an effective ‘atheist’ and heretic long before our current crop of outspoken atheists, was also bothered by the general attitude among some secular-minded people that the worst aspects of religion characterized religion in general and the attitude that religious tradition offered little of value to modern thought. Kaufmann included a humorous dialogue between Satan and the Atheist in his 1960 book, Critique of Religion and Philosophy. After some humorous statement as to why more Christians and Muslims than Jews or Buddhists inhabit Hell, Satan offers some sarcastic remarks about the ‘culture’ of the atheist.

Here are excepts from the dialogue. Hopefully some readers will find it a humorous alternative to the over-simplified ‘philosophy’ that atheism represents the truth and religions represent nothing but barbaric and nonsensical ideas worth nothing but ridicule.

Dialogue between Satan and an Atheist —- borrowed from Walter Kaufmann’s Critique of Religion and Philosophy

A = Atheist (One of our current crop of ‘New Atheists’)
S = Satan

A: You look so content. Have you grilled another theologian for breakfast? Or did you heat up a Christian for your lunch?

S: Both, my friend.

A: I have often wondered how you catch Buddhists. After all, they do not believe the sort of thing Christians believe, so you can’t undermine their faith.

S: I get them to fall in love with the world.

A: By dangling beautiful women in front of ascetics?

S: Not necessarily. Their aim is to fall out of love with the world. I try to show them that suffering is worth while.

A: That’s what I said: women.

S: That works only in the least interesting cases. The others I try to interest in some cause, some task, some mission. I may even persuade them to spread their knowledge to as many men as possible. As soon as I have kindled some ambition, I generally do not find it too hard to involve them in all sorts of compromises. But there are other ways.

A: Just name one more.

S: Sometimes I try to lead them from detachment into callousness and indifference to the sufferings of others. But that works only in the early stages. Once a Buddhist has developed his peculiarly detached compassion he represents one of the hardest cases that I know. A Christian theologian is child’s play compared to that.

A: Who else gives you trouble?

S: For a long time the Jews did. I took the wrong approach. I argued about Scripture with them and got nowhere. They knew the texts just as well as I did, made connections from verse to verse across a hundred pages much more nimbly than I did, and were never, absolutely never, fazed by anything I said. I could not shock them. Usually they produced some rabbi who, more than a thousand years ago, had made my point and been given some classical answer. They considered this whole thing a game even more than I did: after all, for me it was business, too. For them, talking about Scripture was sheer delight. It was their favorite pastime which allowed them to forget their business and all their troubles. Where a Christian might have blenched they laughed, told stories to refute me or make fun of me, and I wasted my time.

A: But couldn’t you show them that their interpretations were untenable?

S: I tell you, they considered the whole thing a game, and they played it according to special rules: by their rules, their arguments were tenable. They never claimed that Moses had meant all the things they put into his mouth. Of course not. But according to the rules of the game it could be argued that an interpretation of the words of Moses was correct in spite of that —even several conflicting ones. What mattered was that you played well; and compared to some their rabbis, I didn’t.

A: So what happened?

S: I tried to get them to speak irreverently about God. Sometimes they did, but then it turned out to have been humor, and so it did not count. Threats, on the other hand, stiffened their backs, and most of them would rather be martyred than blaspheme under pressure. As long as the Christians martyred so many of them, there was a real dearth of Jews and Buddhists in hell, and the place began to fill up with Christians and Muslims. It got terribly stuffy, and there began to be talk of discrimination. I was even accused of having adopted a quota system. But now things have changed.

A: Did you change your policy of admission?

S: Not at all, But when the Christians stopped persecuting the Jews, I began to be phenomenally successful with a new approach. I told them that their way of life was dated, that their laws were not made for the modern world, that freedom was the big thing now, and that their ancient laws interfered with their freedom.

A: Do you mean to say that all Jews who eat pork go to hell?

S: Of course not. But once they give their laws, their old way of life goes by the board, and they no longer study Scripture as they used to. By now many of them know the Bible as little as Christian youths.

A: And does everyone who doesn’t know the Bible go to hell?

S: No, certainly not. But when they get to that point I ask them what right they have to call themselves Jews, religiously speaking. And that does make a dent. Then they start to worry. And whether they worry or not, their religion has become a social affair for most of them, just as for Christians.

A: I’m glad to hear that. More and more people are beginning to see the light. I have been joking with you, asking about people going to hell. I don’t really believe in hell. So far as I am concerned religion is bunk.

S: Just what do you mean by saying that? Bunk?

A: I mean, it is a lot of nonsense which isn’t worth bothering about. There are sensible things like science, especially psychology and anthropology, which are much more profitable. Religion is a stupid waste of time.

S: Oh, I don’t think so at all. There is nothing that interests me more. Religion is one of the most fascinating subjects in the world. I suppose you don’t like poetry and art either.

A: You are wrong. There are some painters and poets whom I like. Picasso, for example, and a lot of modern art. I like Tolstoy, too, before he became a Christian, or tried to become one. And Dostoevsky, in spite of his crazy religious ideas. I am interested in their psychology.

S: What about the Book of Genesis?

A: I don’t read stuff like that. Next you will ask me if I say Psalms. I must have been exposed to things like that as a child. But I have mercifully forgotten it.

S: Have you read no religious scriptures at all?

A: I have only an amateur’s interest in anthropology. I have read a bit about primitive religions. But I have never followed it up. There are all sorts of handy cheap editions now; perhaps I’ll try some of them next time I travel by train. Usually I drive.

S: But these things were not written for a quick dip on the train between a crossword puzzle and whiskey sour.

A: And why not? You would not want me to go to church to catch up with the Upanishads?

S: Of course not. You don’t go to church to catch up, as you call it, with Lear: but at least you take off an evening for it and give it your whole attention and let it do something to you.

A: And what should these scriptures do to me? At most I should want to fill a gap in my education. I don’t want to be converted.

S: Well, these are not things merely to know about or to have handy for a dinner conversation. The Bible and the Buddha, the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita, Lao-tze and the Tales of the Hassidim, these are not things about which one is informed or not informed: what matters is that they speak to you and some way change you.

A: Have you become a preacher, Satan?

S: I am merely shuddering at the prospect of having to spend an eternity with you. I should rather like to make a human being of you before you settle down in my place. I don’t agree with the people who accept these scriptures, but I can talk with them and, to be frank, I rather enjoy talking with them. But you! I wish you would go to heaven.

October 18, 2010

The Hanging Day that could not happen, but did?

Filed under: humor,Irony — Tags: — jbernal @ 12:41 pm

Here’s an interesting paradox you might not have heard before. It is called the paradox of the alleged impossibility of scheduling a surprise hanging, or fire drill, or appearance by Obama, or any such event that will be anticipated or not by people involved.

This paradox is found in William Poundstone’s book Labyrinths of Reason (Anchor books, 1988)

There are different ways of stating the paradox. Here’s one of them:

A man, call him Brad, has been convicted of murder and sentenced to hanging. The hanging must take place on the final week of the year, sometime during the final five-day work week. The judge who imposed the penalty also dictates that the convicted man will not know beforehand which day of the week he will be hanged, in short, he requires that the specific day of execution will come as a very bad surprise.

SENTENCE: Brad’s hanging will happen one day of the last week (M,T,W,Th,F) of the final week of the year. But we’re not saying which day.

Brad’s lawyer, Chris, happens also to be a logician. When he hears the judge pronounce sentence, he smiles. Brad is taken aback by this. Later, when he and Chris confer, Chris explains. “Relax, Brad,” he says, “the judge just contradicted himself. The hanging cannot take place.” “Why not?” asks Brad.

Chris explains: “The judge requires that the hanging day be a surprise, one which we cannot anticipate. But consider the possibilities. Let’s start by taking Friday as a possible hanging day. Well if we get through the first four days of the week (Mon, Tues, Wed., Thurs.) without a hanging, then we would know that the hanging would be on Friday, which denies the condition for the hanging. This implies that Friday cannot be the day; so eliminate Friday.

“Now consider Thursday as a possible day for the hanging. Well, since Friday has already been eliminated, and we get through the first three days (Mon, Tues, Wed) without a hanging, then by deductive inference we would know that Thursday was the day, since Friday has been eliminated. But we cannot anticipate the day; so Thursday cannot be the day. So eliminate Thursday, as well.

“Now let’s take Wednesday as a likely day for the hanging. Well, since Thursday and Friday have already been eliminated. Now suppose that we get through the first two days of the week (Mon, Tues) without a hanging, then by deductive inference we would know that Wednesday would be the day. But we cannot anticipate. So eliminate Wednesday, as well.

“Now consider Tuesday as a possibility. Well, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday have already been eliminated. Suppose we get through the Monday without a hanging; then by deductive inference we would know that Tuesday has to be the day. But this would anticipate Tuesday. So eliminate Tuesday as well.

So with Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday all eliminated as possible hanging days, only Monday remains. But then the possible hanging on Monday would not be a surprise, and thus cannot happen on Monday. So eliminate Monday.

Ergo, the surprise hanging cannot take place that week. Ergo, it won’t happen!

“So, chortles the triumphant Chris to the worried Brad, all five days of the week are logically eliminated! None of them can be the day of your hanging. You will not hang!”

But the final week of the year arrived and on Wednesday at 6 P.M. Brad was led to the gallows and hanged, contrary to the assurance given by defense lawyer-logician Chris that it could not occur.

What happened? Wasn’t Chris’s logic impeccable? How is it possible that the hanging took place and caught Chris and Brad by surprise, much Brad’s great disadvantage?

Can anyone give me a clear analysis of the paradox? Why the contradiction between the conclusion of a sound, deductive argument (hanging cannot happen) and the fact (hanging happened on Wednesday)?

September 22, 2010

Our Premature Jump to the New Millennium

Filed under: humor,humor and philosophy — Tags: — jbernal @ 1:05 pm

Most people took the transition from 1999 – 2000 as the transition to new millennium.
Most people took the transition from 1899 – 1900 as the transition to new century.
Most people took the transition from 2009 – 2010 as the transition to 2nd decade.
They were wrong!

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There are many topics which provoke debate and even hostility, such as politics and religion. Wise barbers and taxi drivers avoid such topics for fear annoying or disturbing their customers. Better to stay with talk about the weather or sports, but even talk about football or baseball can be sensitive subjects. In this blog I don’t avoid topics which can be minefields of controversy such as subjects of political thought, economic theory, religion and philosophy. Hopefully readers will find much to stimulate thought and even find some discussions to be educational. Readers will also find much that will disturb their ordinary ideas and even provoke angry responses. That is fine as long as we keep the discussion civil; I welcome disagreement. It challenges me to clarify and improve my philosophical expression.

The Puzzle of New Millennia, New Century, and New Decade:

Contrary to political and religious topics which are important and controversial, there are some which, although somewhat trivial, provoke much dispute. One of this was the question that some of us posed before the turn of the century: When does the new millennium really begin? As most of you recall, the world in general celebrated the start of the new millennium on January 1, 2000. But this bothered a few of us. We took on the role of spoil sports and pointed out that the world was premature in their celebration by one year. The new millennium did not start until January 1, 2001, we argued. People were annoyed, even irritated, by this reasonable dissent to the popular opinion. Personally I annoyed and irritated a few friends and colleagues by arguing that the transition to the new millennium was the transition from the year 2000 to 2001, not the transition from 1999 to year 2000, as most people thought. Along with other knit-pickers like myself, I argued that when we count decades (or ten of any countable items, e.g., coins in my pocket, beans in a bag, people in a room) we start with the first item and recite “one,” add 1 for each year, and finish with the tenth year (tenth item) and recite “ten.” In other words, the decade runs from 1 through 10, the century runs from 1 through 100, and the millennium runs from 1 through 1000. So, 10, 100, and 1000 are the numbers that indicate the end of the decade, century, and millennium respectively (not the numbers 9, 99, and 999 respectively). The logical conclusion is that years 11, 101, and 1001 mark the start of the succeeding decade, century, or millennium. From which it follows logically that year 2001, not year 2000, was the start of the new millennium ten years ago. The new millennium should have been celebrated on January 1, 2001!

But notwithstanding the logical validity of these arguments, the world celebrated the new millennium on January 1, 2000. My analytical, logical friends and I marveled at what appeared to us as a nearly universal confusion. Was this general confusion just a phenomenon connected with the excitement of the new millennium? Added to this great anticipation of the imminent new millennium was the general apprehension, even fear, about how our computer systems would handle the change of year designation from ‘1999’ to ‘2000.’ People feared that computer systems would crash and many vital functions disrupted. But, as most will recall, computer specialists prepared early for the transition and things went smoothly for most companies and government agencies. The world as we know it did not end on January 1, 2000! But getting back to the premature observance and celebration of the new millennium, let’s ask again: Was this error one that was unique to the transition to the new millennium?

After some reflection and brief study, I found that this general error and confusion was not limited to the transition to a new millennium at years 1999-2000-2001. It has occurred also with respect to transitions between centuries and decades. Newspaper and history book accounts from the year 1899 indicated that folks back then also celebrated the transition to the new century prematurely, on January 1, 1900. They did not wait for the correct start of the twentieth century, January 1, 1901. Were they simply too impatient? Likewise, most people think that this current year of 2010 marks the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century (as indicated by my informal, unscientific polling of relatives, friends and neighbors). But when we apply the logical arguments stated above, we see that the start of the second decade does not happen until the year 2011. Our high school graduating class of 1960 recently held a reunion. Most of my old classmates held that our graduating class was the first of the 1960 decade. But, again, simple logic shows that 1960 was the final year of the 1950 decade, not the start of the 1960s.

Grouping numbers with other numbers that look the same.

So what is happening here? Surely people are not that illogical. Are they simply too impatient and prematurely mark transitions from one decade, century, or millennium to the next, mistaking the transition from 1999 to 2000 for the correct transition from 2000 to 2001? My initial diagnosis relies on simple folk psychology: People tend to group numbers with sets of numbers that look the same, rather than consider what those numbers signify. For example, the year 1960 looks like the years 1961 – 1969. These are the sixties, after all! The year 2010 looks like the years 2011 – 2019, and therefore belongs with that group. And the year 1900 looks like the years 1901 through 1999, and belongs with that group. Finally, anyone can see that year 2000 resembles years 2001 through 2999, and therefore belongs with the new millennium! Most people are prone to this natural way of thinking; and are not too impressed by logical arguments that demonstrate that our natural inclination to group numbers by appearance results in error. Most of those friends and colleagues that I approached on this question of the correct transition time, either laughed at me or expressed annoyance that I spent any time on such a trivial topic. The transition to the new millennium happens when the world agrees that it happens, and we don’t have time for the technical dissent (on a triviality) of a few mathematicians and logicians!

Yes, they’re surely correct. This is surely not a crucial issue which can affect what happens in our world. People observe and celebrate transitions when they think it appropriate. “Let us move on to more interesting and important issues,” seems to be the prevailing attitude. I agree; there are more interesting and interesting issues to discuss. But before wrapping this one up, let me see whether we can find a significant philosophical point behind all this disputation about the start of the next decade, century or millennium. Hopefully the reader will exercise a little more forbearance and stay with me for a few more paragraphs.

Numbers as Labels Versus Numbers as Counting Numbers:

A curious fact about our use of numbers is that we use them in two very different ways, often without noticing this difference. A number can function as a label or name for something; and a number can function as a member of series of numbers. Examples of the use of numbers as labels or names are easy to find: the street number ‘15’ may be used to identify a particular city street; the number ‘2502’ may identify a specific property; or the number “18” a particular floor in a high-rise building. In each case, the fact that the street may not really be the fifteenth street in the city (there are only fourteen streets), or that there aren’t 2501 properties lined up prior to property 2502, or that the high-rise building omits the thirteenth floor, going from floor 12 to floor 14, does not affect the identification of 15th street, or address 2502, or the identification of floor 18 on our high-rise. Here the numbers function as labels or names; they are simply identifiers. They could just as well be names using only alphabetical characters. The number ‘15’ for our street functions the same as the name “Elm” in identifying a specific Avenue. The number ‘2501’ functions the same as a name — e.g. the James place — would work to identify a specific property. This use of numbers (as labels or identifiers only) can apply to our telephone or cell phone numbers, to our social security numbers and other numbers that are assigned to us at various stages of our lives. In earlier years of the telephone, telephone identifiers included words or letters along with numbers. The numbers were not counting numbers.

With the second use of numbers, the function of the number is not limited to identifying the item at issue. If I tell you correctly that the new Chevrolet parked outside my house is the eighth car I have owned, the number ‘8’ could identify the car as car number 8. But the number ‘8’ also tells you that if you count the number of cars I have owned starting with my first as ‘1’, the Chevrolet would be number ‘8’; in other words ‘8’ is part of a series of numbers (counting numbers) representing a series of cars that I have owned.
Along the same line, if I tell that I was the fourth child born to my parents, I not simply labeling myself as the “fourth child,” although this label would be accurate enough. I would also be telling that, counting each child from the first to me, assigning a number to each, you would arrive at the number ‘4’. Child number 4 indicates ‘4’ as a usable label, but more importantly, it indicates my birth as occurring fourth in line. In short, ‘4’ functions as a member of a counting series of numbers. Likewise, if I tell you correctly that this year marked my 41st wedding anniversary, I’m not simply naming or labeling this year as marriage number ‘41’; I’m telling you that 41 years have passed since my wife and I were wed. Count them, one by one, starting with year 1969, and you get ‘41’. The same is true for the use of numbers to indicate our age. This year I am 50 identifies this year as year ‘50’ for me; but it also tells you that if you count the years from my birth starting with ‘1’ and adding ‘1’ for each year until the current year, you will derive my age. The number ‘50’ is part of a series of counting numbers, 1 through 50.

Now let us apply this distinction between numbers as labels and as counting numbers to the question of new millennia, centuries, and decades. The number 2010 is not just a label for the current year; it also functions as a counting number (count the number of years since the start of the decade at year 2001, adding ‘1’ for each year and the total is ‘10’ and you arrive at number ‘2010.’ Hence, 2010 marks the end of the first decade. The number 1900 is not just a label assigned to a specific year. It represents a number in a counting series; in principle, were you to count years from 1 through 1900, adding ‘1’ for each year, after 1900 additions you would arrive at year 1900. But 1900 divided by 100 yields 19. So ‘1900’ marked the end of 19 centuries, with the year 1901 marking the start of the 20th century. Likewise, the year 2000 was not just a label for that year ten years ago. It also indicated that 2000 years had passed since our conventional start of the Julian calendar at year ‘1’. Now when we divide 2000 by 100 we get the answer ‘20’; so 2000 marked the end of 20 centuries, year 2001 as the start of the new twenty-first century. The case for correct identification of the new millennium is easier. Divide 2000 by 1000 and you get ‘2’ with no remainder. So the year ‘2000’ marked the end of the second millennium, with year ‘2001’ marking the start of the new millennium. Hence, when we take into account the use of the numbers ‘2000’ and ‘2001’ as counting numbers, and not simply labels, it follows that January 1, 2001 was the start of the new millennium, and the general observance of the new millennium on January 1, 2000 was an error. Observing the new millennium at the start of year 2000 betrayed a general failure to distinguish between two distinct functions of numbers. This is moderately offensive to anyone who likes to see things done rationally and cleanly.

Does this matter to anyone besides people like me who dwell on these oddities? Maybe not or maybe it could. One could imagine the confusion that might arise when a person on floor fifteen needs emergency attention and the paramedics are sent to floor fourteen instead because someone did not see the difference between ‘15’ used as name or label and its use as part of counting series, a straight count of floors from 1 to 15. Or imagine a stranded soldier who is told that the third platoon will rescue him, but counts only two platoons passing his position and fails to signal his presence and is not rescued. The second platoon passing by was really the ‘third’ platoon. Does this ever happen? I imagine that it does happen and has happened in the past.

July 22, 2010

More of the Mad Men Series: Car Culture

Filed under: humor,Social Philosophy — Tags: , — jbernal @ 3:45 pm

“I constantly think about and dream about my car! My car is an extension of me. Without my car I feel lost.”

—- any number of adolescent and young males in the USA

We’re so accustomed to the automobile in our daily existence that people who get around by walking, bicycle, or public transportation, when they could drive a car, appear odd, if not downright mentally unbalanced. In a sequel novel, Duane’s Depressed, which followed his earlier works, The Last Picture Show and Texasville, the novelist Larry McMurty, presents his protagonist, Duane Moore, as a slightly disturbed man who decides to park his pickup and walk wherever he needs to go. His family, relatives, and friends all think he has gone mad. Duane simply wants to get out of his pickup (in which he feels stagnant), walk in the open air, and think about things. McMurty presents, Duane, as undergoing a psychological crisis in his life; but the fact that McMurty portrays Duane’s “psychological crisis” by his decision to walk rather than drive and the way other characters in the novel react to Duane’s behavior shows the degree to which we think that the automobile is essential to our lives, and the degree to which we question the good sense of anyone who tries to live without the almighty automobile. McMurty uses this episode as a way of showing Duane’s mental depression; and the reader understands because he, like most of us, thinks that abandoning a perfectly good automobile to travel by foot indicates odd behavior, if not a degree neurosis. In short, we all assume the values of the car culture.

However, today more and more people are beginning to question the assumptions and values of our “car culture.” These people are not at all odd folks and people slightly mentally unbalanced. The opposite is more likely the case: They’re very sane, fine people.

Who really is the mad person? Is it the person who has come to think that a four-wheeled machine is essential to his existence or is it the person who has begun to think that this machine, useful though it might be, should not dominate our actions and thinking?

Before making a few statements as to where our real madness lies, I will admit the value of the automobile as a form of transportation (after all, who can rationally deny this?). In short, I shall credit the view that our car culture may not be indicate complete madness.

To appreciate the value of the automobile you only need to try walking distances that normally take only a few minutes on the automobile. Unless you’re a great walker, you will quickly appreciate the value of automobile travel. The automobile has allowed communities to spread out in ways impossible before the automobile. We can have more “elbow room” in our cities and towns, and more choices in where we live and work. Much of our economy depends on automobile travel and transportation, as do the greater variety and the availability of consumer goods. It is hard to argue against the proposition that our material standard of life has improved as a result of the automobile. As means of travel and transportation, the automobile is unquestionably valuable. Most people would argue that the automobile culture represents a rational life style.

Yes, automobile travel represents a rational alternative with plenty of social benefit. And the skeptic might seem as silly as Duane walking the long distances of Western Texas when he could drive his pickup. But this is not the complete story, because the social benefits of the car culture come with social and ecological cost.

First, let’s ask just how rational a life style does the automobile represent? In other words, let us ask who really is the mad man: the person who parks his car and walks and the one that cannot be removed from his beloved car? Walking is healthy; sitting behind the wheel every day makes you fat and lazy.

The car-culture life style is not very rational when you think in terms of efficiency, and conjoin this with our habit of driving alone. Many foreigners remark on our one-person , one-car pattern of travel. This means that a 3-4 thousand pound machine with 110-190 horsepower is used to transport one person, average weight 150 lbs. This is neither efficient nor rational.

As a counter-example, bicycle travel is many times more efficient and more practical than the automobile for distances in the 5-8 mile range. At such distances, when you take into account delays due to street congestion, the time needed to find parking, and the time spent moving from parked vehicle to your destination, the difference in travel time between automobile and bicycle is negligible, if not one favoring the bicycle.
[….the WorldWatch Institute published some .. figures on cycling. Comparing energy used per passenger-mile (calories), they found that a bicycle needed only 35 calories, whereas a car expended a whopping 1,860. Bus and trains fell about midway between, and walking still took 3 times as many calories as riding a bike the same distance. ]
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Who is the mad man?

Our driving habits are also not very rational when you think in terms of cost, both to the individual and to society. We use fossil fuels at an alarming rate and will eventually drain the earth of these resources.

The automobile is also not seen as a rational alternative when you take into account the negative impact on the environment: air pollution and CO2 emissions which are a major cause of the looming global climate change.

Cities, especially in western U.S., have been designed to accommodate our automobile culture. This is evident in the growth and expansion of outlying suburbs; in the continuing need for more and more freeways and the constant transformation of every available space into multi-level parking structures at business and retail locations, both in the urban centers and throughout the suburbs. In spite of all the construction and transformation to accommodate the automobile, most of us in urban and suburban areas suffer the daily affliction of traffic congestion and lack of room for parking all those vehicles.

Who is the mad man when you consider the cost of the automobile in terms of yearly deaths, maiming, and serious, debilitating injuries due to automobile accidents? Check out the statistics and weep. Moreover, have you tried driving the freeway and streets of any major city during rush hour? Welcome to the daily grid lock!

Who is the mad man?

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