Rational Philosophy

On asking the wrong question — science, religion, and politics.

The John Templeton Foundation has given the $1.6 million Templeton Award, encouraging scientific discovery on the “big questions” in science and philosophy, to Michael Heller (pictured left) a Polish Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist, and philosopher. Heller describes his view on the interplay between science and religion as follows: “Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence.”

Rarely do we find someone working to integrate an open and inquisitive understanding of the scientific workings of the universe with a religious perspective on the meaning of existence. We tend either to find people leaning more in one direction or the other. And I’m struck by Heller’s impulse that both science and religion are prerequisites of a decent existence.

President Bush has today called for swift action on a trade pact with Columbia. Bush claims that Venezuela under Hugo Chavez has “squandered its own oil wealth in an effort to promote its hostile anti-American vision.” Bush, it seems, seeks to solidify an ally in Latin America (Columbia) at a time when Venezuela holds sway in a trend toward anti-American, left leaning sentiment in the region. But what is the truth about the use of oil wealth in Venezuela, and what does America stand to gain or lose if we follow Bush’s call for swift action unfettered by “politics”?

I take it that by saying both science and religion are required for a decent existence Heller means a fulfilling or complete sense of existence. And Heller must be referring to our experience of existence, since the judgment of decency implies awareness (existence without experience could be neither decent nor lacking decency).

Schopenhauer perceived that we have only an indirect experience of existence. We infer existence through our senses of sight, touch, smell, hearing, and through our direct awareness of our body and the impressions upon it. So, everything we know of existence is inferred through our senses. It would be quite feasible to imagine a decent life lived without any indirect knowledge of science or religion. For thousands of years human beings lived without formal, structured and conscious scientific or religious knowledge. Many people today live decent lives with only scant awareness of science or religion.

While Heller strikes me as an earnest and brilliant man courageously pursuing fascinating thoughts and ideas, I take issue with his statement about what makes a decent existence as a fundamental question. But I suspect that Heller was referring to the debate between advocates of science and religion, insisting that neither has a stronghold on the decency of existence.

In this though I think that Heller betrays a lack of objectivity. Since Heller, being both a religious and a scientific man, begins with the premise that a decent understanding of existence requires both science and religion, he will inevitably end where he began.

A more testing question would be to ask whether science in and of itself is sufficient for a decent understanding of existence, one that supports a satisfying and complete depth of feeling about life’s meaning. Or, to ask the opposite question, whether religion in and of itself is sufficient for a decent understanding of existence supporting a complete sense of the mechanics of the universe.

Back to Bush: The truth about Venezuela’s oil money seems to be that Hugo Chavez has somewhat recklessly grabbed a hold of and diverted oil profits toward social programs for two ends — to buy favor in his political war against America (and Bush), and to help lift his people out of poverty. While one can argue that his methods for raising the standard of living of poor Venezuelans are crude and short-sighted, it is difficult to argue that he has no real intent to help them. And, I would argue that if one looks at the degree of investment in each goal, his primary goal seems to be to help the Venezuelan people.

So, Bush is using emotional and misleading rhetoric to sway the US people and congress in support of a free trade pact with Columbia. His goal, as he states, is to ensure America’s national security and economic interest. But does it serve America’s national security interests to try to out-rhetoric Chavez? Bush is playing into Chavez’s hands by helping shape policy choices through defining them ideologically.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

(24 little hours…)

Kevin Rudd, just sworn in as Australia’s new prime minister, wasted no time in further isolating the United States position on global warming and the Kyoto agreement, reversing in the space of one day twelve years of steadfast opposition to Kyoto by his conservative predecessor John Howard.

Yesterday a National Intelligence Estimate (who coined that marvellous name?) tentatively declared that Iran’s nuclear weapons program (if it had one) was brought to a halt in 2003, immediately creating a new set of political parameters for the election year.  The looming hawk of military action against Iran seemed to have been suddenly caught in a downdraft.

Apart from being good news for the world in general, I’m not yet sure who this favors politically. The Democrats seem to be the winners initially, by being able to point to the administration’s overzealousness. But in the longer run, it may favor the Repulblican candidates since they won’t get drawn in to making unpopular commitments to counter the threat in Iran with force as we did in Iraq.

And the vote that upset Hugo Chavez’s plans for a socialist Venezuela led by himself for an indefinite period of time (the Castro-model) surely shifted Venezuela’s political and social course in ways almost too dramatic to imagine. The referendum was, officially at least, quite close — 49% for, 51% against. If the numbers had come out just a little more in favor, the course toward a socialist dictatorship would have been set.

With such large scale political shifts the world itself becomes a different place from one day to the next. But if we think about our own lives, we too can experience dramatic shifts from one day to the next.

My wife commented recently that the concept that everyone else has a life and experience as rich as one’s own, as important to them as our own life is to us, is a continuously amazing thought. (We were on our way for a sonogram, a check up on the progress of our baby (21 weeks). What more fitting example of a life-changing event? One day you’re not pregnant, the next day you are, and your life will never be the same again.)

Our perception of the world around us, if we choose to think of it like this, creates that world. So, as a thought or impulse becomes action, we change the world. Some actions produce unremarkable results, others have a profound and lasting impact.

There is a connection here between the personal and the public, what matters to us and what matters globally. If Rudd as a person didn’t act to sign on to the Kyoto agreement, the Australia would remain a non-signatory. If Chavez’s opposers in Venezuela didn’t personally go to the polling booths to vote, his referendum wouldn’t have been defeated.

And if the Iranian leadership had acted differently, or if the members of the 16 U.S. intelligence organizations that reviewed the intelligence had assessed it differently, the NIE issued yesterday may have been less optimistic about the past and future impact of international pressure and sanctions on Iran’s nuclear capability. The current administration and a possible future Republican administration may have been headed toward another invasion like the invasion of Iraq, an invasion orchestrated by individuals with the leverage of another NIE, and with the cummulative support of fearful and fight-happy citizens across the country.

The importance of hindsight, of course, is to use it to avoid making the same mistake again. But first one has to acknowledge that one made a mistake. And we all know who that one is…

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News of Hugo Chavez’s narrow referendum defeat brought a decidedly unexpected relief. His proposals, in line with his former policies and stated goals, would have moved the Chavez administration toward a Castro-style dictatorship. But whereas Castro possesses an enduring charm, even if warped and spoiled by time and power, Chavez has all of the charm of a pit bull. At the conclusion of CNN’s story on the referendum result, the reporter offers a fascinating financial footnote: Venezuela’s oil-fueled prosperity, which has helped enrich Chavez’s popularity and solidify his power (the country’s wealth allows him to fund his social programs) accounts for as much as 90% of the country’s export economy. Two guesses as to who buys most of venezuela’s oil… Us. Apparently, the United States is one of the few countries that can refine Venezuela’s low-grade crude and we pick up about a million barrels per day. So, America then, Chavez’s nemesis, has been funding his regime.

A so-called National Intelligence Estimate issued today — a consensus view of “all 16 American spy agencies” (but who’s counting?) — concludes that Iran quite probably stopped its weapons program (if it had one) back in 2003, and that as of the middle of this year had probably not resumed that program (if it ever existed). Although couched in all kinds of provisos and qualifications, perhaps the most striking conclusion of the NIE is the estimate that sanctions and international pressure probably caused Iran to halt its program (if it did and if it had one). Of course, the White House has been quick to point out that this makes the President right again in seeking to maintain and increase pressure on Iran, rather than being wrong to pressage military action, since military action would have been not his error but someone else’s error for issuing a National Intelligence Estimate like the one that got us into the Iraq war. (Not that that was a mistake, but if it had been a mistake it would have been someone else’s mistake, too.) In any case, money seems to have been a key factor in making bringing to a halt the Iranian weapons grade fuel enrichment centrifuges (if they weren’t just nuclear energy centrifuges).

In Malawi two seasons of good crops have helped prevent famine. After the country’s most recent miserable crop failure in 2005, the president of Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika, decided to ignore the financial strings attached to foreign subsidies and to subsidize himself the use of fertilizer and good seed. The U.S., Britain, and the World Bank have disfavored fertilizer and seed subsidies in countries such as Malawi because… wait for it… “foreign-aid fashions in Washington [and elsewhere] featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.” Let me get this straight, while the U.S. government subsidizes fertilizer purchases for our own farmers it’s been preaching and practising free-market ‘no subsidy’ religious policies overseas that have effectively been starving millions of people in Africa and elsewhere. The shamefulness of such self-righteous arrogance seems reprehenisble.

(There’s also a good op-ed piece about Goldman Sachs along similar lines, but I don’t have space to write about that.)

Money, money, money… But what about principles, what about good sense, what about logic and reason, why does money seem to lurk behind everything like a pesky accountant with an irrevocable pen poised to fall?

Allow me a quick detour into energy and matter. When Einstein equated mass with energy he unlocked a mysterious secret about the universe. The question: What is this stuff that things are made of? Einstein’s answer: Call it what you will, but you may as well call it energy.

A similar, humbler equation exists of course between money and power. Money and power are two ways of thinking about the same thing. You can convert one into the other and vice versa.

(My wife and I, for another instance, were discussing the presidential race and my wife pointed out to me the reason Mike Bloomberg could still run for president having skipped the abrasion of the primaries: He doesn’t need the money.)

Rather than just throw up my hands at this point, I’m struck by the question of what we as observers of the machinations of money and power can we do to make a difference? It seems to me that armed with the awareness that money churns away like a sump pump in the basement of every important political edifice, we’ll always be better able to judge things for what they are if we pop our head down the stairs and take a sniff. “Follow the money,” as Deep Throat apparently said, and we’ll be richer for it.

And if we doubt that paying attention to this will be enough to make a difference, we can be heartened by another discovery of science, famously encapsulated by the thought experiment of Schrodinger’s cat, that observation by itself is enough to change the outcome of a process.

I just put out a music video for My Darkest Hour, a song from my album ‘nylon.’ The song and the video aim to express in artistic terms what it’s like to grapple with compulsion — in my case a compulsion to drink. Addictions, as they’re sometimes called, can be very easy to acquire and very hard to drop. Compulsion plays a very broad role in life, appearing in many guises and to many degrees. But what is it, why do we have it?

A NY times story today reports on Korean efforts to address an issue that has hit hard in a country where almost all homes have high speed Internet connections — web addiction. Alarmingly, some young people have apparently died from exhaustion after days without a break playing on-line games, and millions more young people may be at some risk of addiction.

Also in the Times, Amy Harmon writes about the obsessiveness of having access to one’s DNA data. She found herself spending hours every day sifting through the many genetic markers (SNPs) that would tell her about her predispoition, or lack of it, for everything from a dislike to brussel sprouts to alzheimer’s.

Such introspective compulsions affect the people who have them and the people in their lives, but I was also reminded that the effects of one person’s compulsion can go much further. Take Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, for instance, who has announced deep consitutional changes and sweeping reforms that will cement his vision for a revamped Venezuela and consolidate his position long term as the overseer of that vision. His biographer, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, had this to say about the current situation: “This is not a dictatorship but something more complex: the tyranny of popularity.”

We could say that genetics and circumstance result in compulsion and leave it at that. But there must be some reason for a tendency to compulsion and perhaps some insight that can help us thwart it through understanding it better.

I remember news stories about the polar bear in Central Park zoo obsessively swimming endless little laps because he was so bored. We human beings have become hypersensitized to boredom. Living in New York City you see the highly intensified impact of this. People everywhere walking and talking on their cell phones. People wearing earphones even in the elevator on the way up into the office. People exercising on treadmills while watching TV or reading. People watching portable movie players on the subway. We cram our lives full of activity to squeeze out the threat of inactivity. But, unlike our ancestors, much modern activity is artificial and unnecessary.

There’s an intersect then between the level of compulsive activity and the degree of ease with which we can ensure our basic survival needs. (The Korean boot camps for Internet addicts get the addicts away from their computers and involved in physical activities outdoors — whether this works or not, it seems conceptually well-directed.) But what about the origin of compulsion? What is compulsion and why do we succumb to it at all?

Compulsion comes about when we return frequently and strongly to a perceived or actual need or desire. It’s a pattern of response that comes about either genetically or circumstancially. It’s also helpful to regard compulsion as existing on a spectrum, and as a response that can be harmful or helpful.

My theory is this: Compulsion is a necessary trait. Without some degree of compulsion organisms wouldn’t have a mechanism to draw them to do the things that are good for them or good for the species. Bees wouldn’t build hives, cats wouldn’t lick themselves to clean their fur, people wouldn’t have sex. But compulsion becomes problematic either when circumstance puts us into a situation we’re not genetically prepared for (drinking alcohol, shooting heroin) or when we have an imbalance between free time and purposeful time, leading to boredom.

Chavez has found himself in a circumstance with which he is unprepared to cope effectively. The compulsion to keep feeding himself a steady diet of power and control, to guarantee that he will be able to keep experiencing that power, has overcome his ability to balance his own desires with the responsibility he has assumed for his people. Unfortunately, when it gets to this point, the prognosis is not good.

On a happier note, the Central Park zookeepers devised mechanisms to relieve Gus, the depressed polar bear, from boredom. He is now a much happier bear by all accounts. What would it take to wean Chavez from his addiction to power? One thinks that it may take him going cold turkey.