Believing What You Know Ain't So

I just finished reading Bruno Latour's On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Duke, 2010), and am still stirring it around in my head. Latour is (in)famous as an anthropologist of science, whose fieldwork consists of observing the savage scientist in his natural habitat, the laboratory. I haven't yet read any of that work; all I'd read before was We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard, 1993), whose title signaled to me that the author was someone whose ideas would make sense to me; and so it proved.

Here's a nice passage from the newer book, which caught my attention after I listened last night to three people on the community radio station talking about ancient astronauts and the like. None of them believed that the Great Pyramid was built by extraterrestrials, because that wouldn't be scientific; yet I got the impression that they believed that extraterrestrials had crashed at Roswell and been sequestered at Area 51.

Does the only example of naïve belief we have, then, come from a naïve belief on the part of researchers that ignorant people believe naively? Not quite, for ignorant people do exist who quite resemble the picture that researchers would like to paint of them. Photographers of flying saucers, archaeologists of cities lost in space, zoologists tracking the Yeti, people who have been contacted by little green men, creationists fighting against Darwin – all the sorts of people that Pierre Lagrange studies with a collector’s passionate interest – are all trying to pin down entities that seemingly display the same properties of existence, the same specifications as entities that, according to the epistemologists, come from laboratories. Curiously enough, these people are called “irrationalists,” whereas their greatest fault comes more from the reckless trust they display in a scientific methodology, dating to the nineteenth century, in order to explore the only mode of existence they are able to be imagine: that of the thing, already there, present, stubborn, waiting to be pinned down, known. No one is more positivistic than creationists or ufologists, since they cannot even imagine other ways of being and speaking than describing “matters of fact.” No researcher is that naïve, at least not in the laboratory. This is so much the case that, paradoxically, the only example of naïve belief we have seems to come from the irrationalists, who are always claiming that they have overthrown official science with stubborn facts that some conspiracy had hidden away [44].

The last section of the book is a sermon on the relation between science and religion, and even though I disagree rather vehemently with a lot of what he says there, he still raises valuable questions and points to important problems. And I appreciate the almost Wildean paradoxes he plays with, which (as he admits) catch him in his own contradictions.

What would happen to me if, in criticizing the critics, I was simply trying to create another scandal? What if this essay, in its pretension to re-describe iconoclasm, was nothing but another boring iconoclastic gesture, another provocation, the mere repetition of the endless gesture of the intelligentsia’s most cherished treasures? We don’t know for sure [88].

And:

… it is science that reaches the invisible world of beyond, that ... is spiritual, miraculous, soul-fulfilling, and uplifting; it is religion which should be qualified as being local, objective, visible, mundane, un-miraculous, repetitive, obstinate, and sturdy [111].

And:

What I have argued in this lecture is very different: belief is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science. Belief is patterned after a false idea of science, as if it were possible to raise the question “Do you believe in God?” in the same way as “Do you believe in global warming?” except the first question does not possess any of the instruments that would allow the reference to move on, and that the second is leading the interlocutor to a phenomenon even more invisible to the naked eye than God, since to reach it we have to travel through satellite imaging, computer simulation, theories of earth atmospheric instability, or high stratosphere chemistry [121].

I'll probably have occasion to refer to Latour again, but for now it's time to hit the sack.

Believing What You Know Ain't So

I just finished reading Bruno Latour's On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Duke, 2010), and am still stirring it around in my head. Latour is (in)famous as an anthropologist of science, whose fieldwork consists of observing the savage scientist in his natural habitat, the laboratory. I haven't yet read any of that work; all I'd read before was We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard, 1993), whose title signaled to me that the author was someone whose ideas would make sense to me; and so it proved.

Here's a nice passage from the newer book, which caught my attention after I listened last night to three people on the community radio station talking about ancient astronauts and the like. None of them believed that the Great Pyramid was built by extraterrestrials, because that wouldn't be scientific; yet I got the impression that they believed that extraterrestrials had crashed at Roswell and been sequestered at Area 51.

Does the only example of naïve belief we have, then, come from a naïve belief on the part of researchers that ignorant people believe naively? Not quite, for ignorant people do exist who quite resemble the picture that researchers would like to paint of them. Photographers of flying saucers, archaeologists of cities lost in space, zoologists tracking the Yeti, people who have been contacted by little green men, creationists fighting against Darwin – all the sorts of people that Pierre Lagrange studies with a collector’s passionate interest – are all trying to pin down entities that seemingly display the same properties of existence, the same specifications as entities that, according to the epistemologists, come from laboratories. Curiously enough, these people are called “irrationalists,” whereas their greatest fault comes more from the reckless trust they display in a scientific methodology, dating to the nineteenth century, in order to explore the only mode of existence they are able to be imagine: that of the thing, already there, present, stubborn, waiting to be pinned down, known. No one is more positivistic than creationists or ufologists, since they cannot even imagine other ways of being and speaking than describing “matters of fact.” No researcher is that naïve, at least not in the laboratory. This is so much the case that, paradoxically, the only example of naïve belief we have seems to come from the irrationalists, who are always claiming that they have overthrown official science with stubborn facts that some conspiracy had hidden away [44].

The last section of the book is a sermon on the relation between science and religion, and even though I disagree rather vehemently with a lot of what he says there, he still raises valuable questions and points to important problems. And I appreciate the almost Wildean paradoxes he plays with, which (as he admits) catch him in his own contradictions.

What would happen to me if, in criticizing the critics, I was simply trying to create another scandal? What if this essay, in its pretension to re-describe iconoclasm, was nothing but another boring iconoclastic gesture, another provocation, the mere repetition of the endless gesture of the intelligentsia’s most cherished treasures? We don’t know for sure [88].

And:

… it is science that reaches the invisible world of beyond, that ... is spiritual, miraculous, soul-fulfilling, and uplifting; it is religion which should be qualified as being local, objective, visible, mundane, un-miraculous, repetitive, obstinate, and sturdy [111].

And:

What I have argued in this lecture is very different: belief is a caricature of religion exactly as knowledge is a caricature of science. Belief is patterned after a false idea of science, as if it were possible to raise the question “Do you believe in God?” in the same way as “Do you believe in global warming?” except the first question does not possess any of the instruments that would allow the reference to move on, and that the second is leading the interlocutor to a phenomenon even more invisible to the naked eye than God, since to reach it we have to travel through satellite imaging, computer simulation, theories of earth atmospheric instability, or high stratosphere chemistry [121].

I'll probably have occasion to refer to Latour again, but for now it's time to hit the sack.

Sanity and Rationalism

Michael Moore just posted to his blog in support of the Cordoba Initiative, and has committed to match other people's donations up to $10,000. I made a donation myself.

The first comment to Moore's post, though, just boggled my mind:

Can I just point out that all religions are 'made up' - I actually believe stupidity on this scale should be made an offense and punishable by locking up in a mental hospital.
The world would be an awesome place without all these horrible religious people everywhere,
Why let these people build a mosque? They believe in some made up tooth-fairy-santa-clause-style tosh - I mean, THEY ACTUALLY BELIEVE IT!!!!!! Those are some dangerous people to have walking around the streets don't you think - all religious people I mean. I just can't fathom it!

Yup yup, I agree (and have insisted on the point) that all religions are made up by human beings. But from there the commenter goes batshit crazy, claiming "stupidity" to be a criminal "offense" that should be "punishable by locking up in a mental hospital." Well, he's honest enough on that point -- that commitment to a mental hospital too often is simply a form of incarceration -- but it gives his game away: he's just a religious nut hiding behind legalistic and medico-scientific terminology. The confusion of crime and mental illness here is very common; you can see it when someone spits out "sick" at another someone whose sexual behavior or mode of dress bothers him, or when gay people and their allies use "homophobia" as a moral judgment. "Homophobia" is theoretically an illness, and you can't judge a sick person morally -- though you can administer electroshock to them, or lobotomize them, or drug them into submission and lock them away for the rest of their lives in an institution. So much better than religious intolerance, isn't it?

How would the world be different, let alone "awesome" without all "these horrible religious people everywhere"? Religion, I repeat, is made up by human beings. If religious imagery and belief disappeared tonight, people would simply find new language to rationalize and justify their behavior. There's no need for concepts like "heretic" or "infidel" when you have "stupidity", criminal "offense", and "punishment." By using the barely secularized notion of punishment, this commenter showed how religious he still is.

Aside from that, the commenter has not given any good reason why the Cordoba Center should not be built. First, he joins the legions of frothers who forget that the Center will not only be a "mosque" but a community center open to all. If you must have a prayer room in a building dedicated primarily to other purposes, better something like the Cordoba Center than something like the Pentagon, whose primary purpose is the organization of aggression and mass murder. Second, what is wrong with "tooth-fairy-santa-clause[sic]-style tosh"? Again, better that than the Mordor-Sauron tosh of the Pentagon, but let me take the commenter literally. If someone wanted to build a multimillion-dollar community center dedicated to the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, and furnishing the same range of services proposed by the Cordoba Center, how would that be (in the commenter's word) "dangerous"? Silly, yes, but also socially useful. Would the commenter rant like this about computer nerds who study Elvish, Klingon, or Navi? Much of what human beings do is silly, fanciful, nonrational or even irrational. For example: from a "rationalist" point of view, sex without reproduction in mind, whether heterosexual or homosexual, is silly, undignified, degrading, animalistic -- which is why the medical profession and the biological sciences have mostly just carried over the worst, most irrational "religious" ideas about sex and medicalized them.

Far more dangerous is the commenter's readiness to incarcerate people for believing silly, false things. That's utterly at odds with the whole "Enlightenment" project that was supposed to put an end to the bloody-minded intolerance of Religion, but so far hasn't done so. On the contrary.

Sanity and Rationalism

Michael Moore just posted to his blog in support of the Cordoba Initiative, and has committed to match other people's donations up to $10,000. I made a donation myself.

The first comment to Moore's post, though, just boggled my mind:

Can I just point out that all religions are 'made up' - I actually believe stupidity on this scale should be made an offense and punishable by locking up in a mental hospital.
The world would be an awesome place without all these horrible religious people everywhere,
Why let these people build a mosque? They believe in some made up tooth-fairy-santa-clause-style tosh - I mean, THEY ACTUALLY BELIEVE IT!!!!!! Those are some dangerous people to have walking around the streets don't you think - all religious people I mean. I just can't fathom it!

Yup yup, I agree (and have insisted on the point) that all religions are made up by human beings. But from there the commenter goes batshit crazy, claiming "stupidity" to be a criminal "offense" that should be "punishable by locking up in a mental hospital." Well, he's honest enough on that point -- that commitment to a mental hospital too often is simply a form of incarceration -- but it gives his game away: he's just a religious nut hiding behind legalistic and medico-scientific terminology. The confusion of crime and mental illness here is very common; you can see it when someone spits out "sick" at another someone whose sexual behavior or mode of dress bothers him, or when gay people and their allies use "homophobia" as a moral judgment. "Homophobia" is theoretically an illness, and you can't judge a sick person morally -- though you can administer electroshock to them, or lobotomize them, or drug them into submission and lock them away for the rest of their lives in an institution. So much better than religious intolerance, isn't it?

How would the world be different, let alone "awesome" without all "these horrible religious people everywhere"? Religion, I repeat, is made up by human beings. If religious imagery and belief disappeared tonight, people would simply find new language to rationalize and justify their behavior. There's no need for concepts like "heretic" or "infidel" when you have "stupidity", criminal "offense", and "punishment." By using the barely secularized notion of punishment, this commenter showed how religious he still is.

Aside from that, the commenter has not given any good reason why the Cordoba Center should not be built. First, he joins the legions of frothers who forget that the Center will not only be a "mosque" but a community center open to all. If you must have a prayer room in a building dedicated primarily to other purposes, better something like the Cordoba Center than something like the Pentagon, whose primary purpose is the organization of aggression and mass murder. Second, what is wrong with "tooth-fairy-santa-clause[sic]-style tosh"? Again, better that than the Mordor-Sauron tosh of the Pentagon, but let me take the commenter literally. If someone wanted to build a multimillion-dollar community center dedicated to the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, and furnishing the same range of services proposed by the Cordoba Center, how would that be (in the commenter's word) "dangerous"? Silly, yes, but also socially useful. Would the commenter rant like this about computer nerds who study Elvish, Klingon, or Navi? Much of what human beings do is silly, fanciful, nonrational or even irrational. For example: from a "rationalist" point of view, sex without reproduction in mind, whether heterosexual or homosexual, is silly, undignified, degrading, animalistic -- which is why the medical profession and the biological sciences have mostly just carried over the worst, most irrational "religious" ideas about sex and medicalized them.

Far more dangerous is the commenter's readiness to incarcerate people for believing silly, false things. That's utterly at odds with the whole "Enlightenment" project that was supposed to put an end to the bloody-minded intolerance of Religion, but so far hasn't done so. On the contrary.