Posting elsewhere

 I'm occasionally putting some of my more polished writing at Medium.com. Here's an essay on why I don't like using education jargon.

Stillborn God: Rest of chapter 5

 He spends some time discussing various liberal theologians, particularly in 19th century Germany. They were so sure that they'd come up with rational ways to reconcile modern society and religion and steer Europe away from the passions of the religious wars.

And then World War 1 happened. Oops. Even if WW2 had never happened, the first World War is more than enough to show that Christian Europe had not really sorted out its problems.

Near the end (page 248) Lilla gets at something that had been hinted at since the start of the book: Once you have a modern system of ideas that doesn't really require God, why have God?

Once the liberal theologians had succeeded, as they did, in portraying biblical faith as the highest expression of moral consciousness and the precondition of modern life, they were unable to explain why modern men and women should still consider themselves to be Christians and Jews rather than simply modern men and women.

Indeed. Religion was measured against its ability to help people express and live by modern values, not by its access to truth that would otherwise be unavailable.

I'm coming more and more to believe that everyone needs religion. Or, at least, they need religion when locked inside and fearing death, which has been the condition of our world since March 2020. From the confessional rites of penitent white liberals during the summer of 2020 to the idiots screaming about freedom while rampaging inside the US Capitol (and nearly rampaging inside the Michigan state capitol last year) everyone is invoking the sacred. Yes, many of the right-wingers are Christians, but I think the Christian faith of the hard right is over-estimated. Whether talking about the more libertarian-leaning elements of the right, or the definitely-not-religious Steve Bannon faction, not everyone on the right is high on Christianity. But that doesn't mean they aren't religious. I mean, they brought a shaman in furs to the Senate chamber with them.

Stillborn God, Chp. 4 and start of Chp. 5

 Chp. 4 spends a lot of time on Hegel. I don't feel like I can summarize his entire summary, I'll just quote one point (regarding Hegelian thought, not necessarily Lilla's own preferences) from near the end of the chapter (pages 206-207):

Now we know what it is to live in freedom: It is to live in modern bourgeois societies where we exercise control over the machinery of political life, hardly noticing its gentle hum. These societies will be complex, comprised [sic] of organically connected social spheres, in which we play different roles: citizen, producer, consumer, newspaper reader, club member, parent, friend. Those who are educated and cultured will have no trouble reconciling themselves to such a system, since they will understand its rationality and appreciate its freedom. Those less gifted may still need religion and patriotic symbols to win their loyalty and sacrifice, but these, too, can be provide within the ambit of the bourgeois state.

One could argue that Trumpism and the sacking of the Capitol show what happens when the less cultured (at least by the measures favored by people like Hegel, and me, apparently) feel like the system is run by people who don't actually share their beliefs in religion and patriotic symbols. That's hardly a complete diagnosis of what led to the current troubles, but it's a factor, and a way of pointing to a bigger cultural divide that fuels a lot of things. Lilla has summarized so many political philosophers as conceding a need for some sort of religion to control the worst in people and/or channel the best. If religion is not heartfelt worship then it is a noble lie, and noble lies only work when delivered convincingly. If they aren't even delivered then there's no solidarity. 

Not everyone on the right (even the hard right) is as religious as people think, but if they reject revealed religion they still adhere to a "civic religion" that reveres a particular vision of the Founders and the Constitution. It isn't theology in the sense that most of the political philosophers discussed by Lilla probably thought of it, but it is religion. It is a narrative that tries to explain the origins of the setting in which people live, and offer morality tales. It's mostly BS, if for no other reason than that the Founders disagreed with each other on so many things, so one can't ascribe a consistent belief system to them.

And it's disrespected. I just called it BS. I'm part of the disrespect. And they know it. They also know that the federal government rejects this originalist religion, as it does far more than the Constitutional Convention ever contemplated. We have a priestly caste of Supreme Court Justices who interpret the original texts and proclaim that the federal government's actions are consistent with their reading of the Constitution, but it is, on some level BS. I don't offer that as a revolutionary statement or a call to an uprising. It's just a fact that basically every modern society on earth has a government that does far more than our Constitutional Convention contemplated. It's how the modern world works. Which is arguably fine, but to have a priestly caste say that the sacred text authorizes this requires mental gymnastics.

On the other side of the culture war, inclusivity is the new religion. I've said plenty about that and don't need to rehash it.

So back to Lilla. He says that the religious wars of post-Reformation Europe led to a desire to separate church from state, or at least remove church authority from any possible meddling in the state, and leave at best an "opiate of the masses" that could be used to suppress the worst and/or bring out the best in people, in accordance with some plan. He's focusing on the debate between those two sides, but I'm left wondering how you get people to buy into either form of religion if they can tell that the elite classes supervising the delivery of this religion, like shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, very obviously don't believe it.

Anyway, he is focusing a lot on Germany part-way through chapter 5, noting that many Germans believed Protestantism should be an integral part of a modern state, while England and the US believed that religion would benefit from religious freedom. (I gather that by that time the UK had largely stopped persecuting Christians who eschewed the Church of England.) He even notes that many Jews in Germany thought that their values were sufficiently similar to those of Protestantism that they could be assimilated into this new Germany. (Lilla adds that we know how that worked out, in a moment of dry understatement.)

One other thing I notice at this point is that he focuses so much on Catholic-Protestant tensions and doesn't mention the Eastern Orthodox churches. I gather it's because he's talking about debates in Christian Europe, and most Eastern Orthodox Christians either lived under Ottoman rule or Russian rule.  Russia was/is, of course, Christian, but it's also on the geopolitical edge of Europe and poorer than most European Christian countries. And Christians under Ottoman rule couldn't really have religious politics.

One other thing about chapter 4: On page 189 he notes that Hegel found Greek religion interesting because their gods were so human. While it meant it would be hard for Greek gods to have final moral authority, he saw it as a window into Greek cultural appreciation of humanity as humanity. Christianity, at least in many forms, tells us to look to the next life, not to lust for this world, while the Greeks could appreciate human life as embodied life in this world that even the gods had gusto for. Lilla notes later that, for all of Catholicism's otherworldly pretensions, it became a very worldly power. The reaction was a Reformation that focused on individual faith rather than adherence to an institution, and somehow wound up producing a Protestant work ethic that led to great worldly prosperity while focusing minds on salvation.

Stillborn God, Chapters 1 and 2

 My previous post was about the short introduction to The Stillborn God. I've since read the first two chapters.

Chapter 1, "The Crisis" is largely about Christian political theology and its origins. I cannot comment on the accuracy of the history, but the insights provide some food for thought. He gets at the core issue pretty early, noting two things I've remarked on before. Page 22:

God's intentions themselves need no justification, since he is the last court of appeal. If we could justify him, we would not need him; we would only need the arguments validating his actions.

I'm not sure I completely agree with that, but I get the argument. I think there would be ways to say something about the importance of the final authority while hiding his rationales behind a veil of mystery. But maybe that argument just reduces to what I've said before about the need for a final authority so you don't have agonize over your postulates.

On pages 22-23, he makes an interesting comment about Greek political philosophy:

In ancient Greece, some imagined a first cause or "unmoved mover" without personality who embodied divine law, which philosophers could contemplate to understand the cosmic order and man's place within it. Other Greeks entertained thoughts about a panoply of deities with conflicting personalities but whose natures were still intelligible to human reason. Such gods were never thought by the Greeks to exercise revealed political authority because they created man and the cosmos--and perhaps that is why political philosophy was first able to develop in ancient Greece.

I've made the point before that pagan pantheons provide no moral authority because there is no power monopoly and no consistent behavior between the deities. There is instead strife, and most of the point of morality in society is to avoid or resolve strife.

He goes on to talk about the challenges facing Christianity, which has a 3-fold deity with very different roles in the world, and a history that started as a minority faith and then accidentally acquired an Empire. Christ was a hippie figure but his followers were running the Roman Empire. He over-simplifies when he occasionally contrasts with Judaism and Islam, but he isn't really writing about them. He's making the point that Christianity had a dilemma in constructing a political theology, but at least had a divinity with a monopoly on moral authority that could, in principle, provide the final axiom. I'm not sure that Christianity is as unique as he claims in having dilemmas around political theology, but he never pushes hard on the claim of uniqueness, so I guess I can let it slide. I'm sure that there are differences between Christianity's problems and other religions' problems. 

Chapter 2 dissects the history and struggles around that. I like the point on page 59 about how Christian cosmology is a rather strange thing:

The Christian conception of the cosmos was always a patchwork affair. It had been cobbled together in the Middle Ages from biblical sources, the speculations in Plato's dialogue Timaeus, the systematic scientific treatises of Aristotle (filtered through Muslim commentators), and the ancient astronomical works of Ptolemy. Why it was fashioned at all is something of a puzzle. The Hebrew Bible does not engage in systematic speculation about the structure of the cosmos; it assumes that nature was created good but has nothing fundamental to teach us about how to live. The Torah is complete. The Christian New Testament takes a similar approach to nature: it is there, it is good, but it is not grace.

In The Meaning of Creation, Conrad Hyers argued that Genesis sought to demystify the world, treating it not as the playground of disparate pagan deities but a place that one God made with one purpose, and it is good. And the explanation of God's creation involves a work week ending in rest, just as a righteous adherent of the faith would work all week and devote the 7th day to worship and rest. Trying to tie this to some sort of natural science was never the goal, and if the Church had grasped that point the Galileo Affair might not have been an issue.

Much of the chapter concerns Hobbes. I am taking a big risk by offering summary of a summary of Lilla's Hobbes and his work Leviathan, but how else will I recall anything if I don't write about what I read? Hobbes argued that human existence is at perpetual risk of a state of war, and for fear of death and loss they hand power to a sovereign who can guarantee peace. This is the basic argument that an effective government basically has a monopoly on the use of force within its territory. Worse, people who look into the depths of their own souls will see dark desires, project their desires onto others, and see a need for violence because whoever moves first has the advantage. In Lilla's read, Hobbes reduces the problem of evil to game theory: Conflict is a natural state and you have to be aggressive. Forget demons and original sin and all of that, there's a much simpler explanation of the darkness of human existence.

Lilla also argues that while the task of a king is to keep peace in his territory, churchmen cheat by speaking directly to the people and offering messages that don't necessarily fit into the sovereign's plan.

Lilla summarizes Hobbes' proposal as being not to abolish the fears that drive humans, but rather:

...focus it on one figure alone, the sovereign. If an absolute sovereign could ensure that his subjects feared no other sovereigns before him, human or divine, then peace might be possible.

At the root of all power is fear and force, and the hope is that absolute power will bring absolute peace. Well, um, yeah, we know how well that works. But then again, no state has ever been truly effective, especially back then, so I guess I see the temptation.

But to Lilla, the most important thing in Hobbes is not his case for an absolute sovereign but that he turns political questions into questions about human nature and how people see the world. Everything is driven by human fears and how they project their own flaws onto others, so perception is ultimately everything.

Interestingly, Lilla claims that while Hobbes was OK with a state religion to help ensure compliance, he was not too concerned with whether people honestly believed, only with whether they demonstrated obedience. He reads Hobbes as being interested in vanquishing the interplay of church and state because it led to churchmen bypassing kings, and in this way Lilla sees some continuity between Hobbes and much more liberal thinkers that came after. If they were interested in taking away the power of churchmen and finding a better way to enforce harmony then Lilla sees them as being in some sort of continuity with Hobbes.

What I find interesting in all of this is how the problem of perception is tied in with the problem of power. It ultimately comes down to who the armed men will listen to. What they perceive and fear determines what they respond to and how they respond. In this regard there's some overlap with Plato, whose book The Republic is concerned with governance but goes deep into the allegory of the cave: How can we know if what we see is reality or something put there to fool us? We only know what we perceive, and that will affect our conduct, including the conduct of those entrusted with power. Just 9 days ago we saw how this plays out: A mob stormed the Capitol because they perceive an election as rigged, and armed men defended it because, whatever they might personally think about the particulars of whatever allegations, they were loyal to the system that certified Biden. Mind you, I have every reason to believe that Biden's win was legitimate, but the facts of legitimacy are less important than the perceived facts. How do I honestly know that it was legit? How do they honestly know it wasn't? We have our preferences that determine whom we trust, and a critical mass of people in the right places put their trust in the system and hence fought back against the mob, while a disturbing number of people put their trust elsewhere and stormed the building.

The roots of power are dark and fundamental stuff, and what I'm hoping to learn is what Lilla sees as the fallout from removing God from that equation. He says that a lot of political philosophy in Europe arose from religious wars, bloody battles between people who all believed in the God of Abraham, the Bible, and Jesus, but were loyal to different clergy. Before reading this I assumed that the problem of mixing religion and state was solely about the passions for control that come from religion, and the excesses that those passions can lead to. Most kings wind up being practical, hoping that they can get some tax revenue, keep the place running, and keep themselves running it. How a peasant prays is rarely their biggest headache. But neighbors and local clergy can be terrible. The take I'm getting here is that it's not just about them, it's about the fact that they are a separate center of power. That's interesting to me, because my liberalism leads me to believe that a society needs many centers of power. I've said much about how bad it is for economies and "the good jobs" to be monocultures. I still think that's true, but there are obviously more angles here. Take away religion and you take away its problems, but you don't take away the needs it fulfilled, and yet you do take away a center of power, with all of its advantages and drawbacks.

Food for thought.

Next Read: The Stillborn God by Mark Lilla

The next book that I'll blog is The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. Lilla is examining what he calls political theology, i.e. politics rooted in religion. He doesn't necessarily mean strict theocracy like the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Puritan settlements of New England. He just means a society where people look to religion for guidance on social structure. From page 7:

Human beings everywhere think about the basic structure of reality and the right way to live, and many are led from those questions to speculate about the divine or to believe in revelations. Psychologically speaking, it is a very short step from holding such beliefs to being convinced that they are legitimate sources of political authority.

Indeed, as much as I value religious freedom and the religious neutrality of the public square, how can we expect people to not be influenced by their religion? I believe whole-heartedly that we can and should find secular rationales for public policy, but if that public policy touches on matters of morality, how could we expect a person to NOT be influenced by their religion? You can come up with secular rationales for all sorts of things that various religious denominations might approve of, and members of those denominations should appeal to those rationales so that they can coexist in the public square with people who aren't in their religion, but let's not kid ourselves about the role of their beliefs. I say that not to dismiss their secular arguments as pretextual, but rather to make a point about coexistence. I am a state employee, but I teach in part because of things instilled in me in Catholic school. That's not a priori a church/state violation.

He also makes an important point about the role of stories in human understanding and child psychology:

We are still like children when it comes to thinking about modern political life, whose experimental nature we prefer not to contemplate. Instead, we tell ourselves stories about how our big world came to be and why it is destined to persist. These are legends about the course of history, full of grand terms to describe the process supposedly at work--modernization, secularization, democratization, the "disenchantment of the world," "history as the story of liberty," and countless others. These are the fairy tales of our time. Whether they are recounted in epic mode by those satisfied with the present, or in tragic mode by those nostalgic for Eden, they serve the same function in our intellectual culture that tales of witches and wizards do in our children's imaginations: they make the world legible, they reassure us of its irrevocability, and they relive us of responsibility for maintaining it.

He goes on to say that his book is no fairy tale, because he will discuss the fragility of the modern world. He was writing in 2008, with 9/11 on his mind, but it applies today. Indeed, just 8 days ago barbarians entered the Capitol and chased away the representatives of the people. Their rationales were more complex than a single slogan about modernity and its critics or whatever, but many were in that vein.

In the introduction he argues that we secular westerners are the unusual ones, not necessarily because we don't live in a theocracy but because we don't live in a society where appeals to divine authority are common and accepted. I think about this a lot, and not just because I am religious. If you push hard enough on a chain of "Why?" questions you eventually reach your fundamental axioms, the bare assumptions that you can't derive from other assumptions. And then you say "But why those axioms?" and people kind of stall. You can appeal to personal desires and preferences, but besides the fact that those desires are almost by definition selfish, this world has many people desiring many different things. Why should you desire what you desire instead of something else? A king could provide an answer to that, but the leaders of a democratic society cannot (unless you subscribe to a very vulgar and illiberal majoritarianism). You could appeal to consequentialist arguments, and say that without these principles guiding a society you get chaos, but we have seen more than one type of society enjoy extended eras of peace (or at least internal peace). 

You soon reach a "Well, that's my opinion" stage, and the obvious modern/postmodern response is "But that's just your opinion, man!" We have no real base if you dig deep enough. One motive for religion is not merely fear of death but fear that all we have is each other and our equally idiosyncratic and arbitrary preferences. Wouldn't it be nice to have some authority to sort it out? Not just because humans are weak and sheep and all that, but because we've built up some pretty impressive things despite our ostensible weaknesses, and it's terrifying to think that they sit on sand. Surely we must have a rock under them! Surely there must be some foundation for prosperous, liberal, tolerant civilization. 

Perhaps part of why social justice and diversity talk gets so religious is because they want to just take the tolerance and diversity that we should preserve and put that itself on God's pedestal. It's a nice idea, except it eventually results in guilty liberals confessing sin in pointless training sessions while somebody tries to remove Shakespeare from the curriculum, and none of this stops barbarians from storming the Capitol. We thus get to the true root of power, which is force, and then we have to ask about the factors that make (hopefully most of) the men with guns loyal. Those factors rarely involve training sessions on implicit bias. If there is a God in our politics, it's whatever keeps the armed men at the base of the system from turning disloyal.

Anyway, let's see what he has to say about the loss of religion and its consequences.

Latest read: Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe

 The latest read is Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe. Arguably it is pointless to read a critique of liberal guilt after watching MAGA lunatics take over the Capitol. On the other hand, 2020 saw an incredible outpouring of liberal guilt and self-flagellation, and the end result of that liberal guilt and self-flagellation is that the mob was not stopped. Mind you, I'm not placing all of the blame on any particular liberal official or faction, or denying the role of the Trump administration (far from it). Trump and his cult are indeed the bad guys here, and beating ourselves up did exactly nothing to stop them. Say everything that needs saying about the ignorance and bigotry of MAGA and I will agree with the big picture and most details. (I will always reserve the right to dissent from specifics, but I might also assign that dissent a low priority, depending on the detail.) 

But given all of that, what did liberal guilt do to stop them? Did liberal guilt get reinforcements in place sooner? Did liberal guilt erect more barricades or get more police out there? Did liberal guilt speed any evacuations? Did liberal guilt talk any Trumpanzees out of the insane notion that Democrats rigged the election for Biden but forgot to rig enough Senate seats to give themselves a majority prior to the Georgia elections? Did liberal guilt persuade anyone that the ghost of Hugo Chavez isn't dropping off faked ballots in Maine?

Liberal guilt is worth exploring precisely because it is the irrelevant distraction that liberals turn to. And, honestly, what is simultaneously heartening and disheartening about this book is just how little things have changed. All of this has happened before and will happen again. To wit, page 26 quotes a particularly woke passage from a Vogue article. I don't know exactly when it was published, but presumably in or shortly before 1970 (the year that Wolfe's Radical Chic essay was published). There are two salient points here:

1. Vogue was woke even back then. I bring this up because the anti-PC corners of the internet have, in the past few years, taken note of the extreme wokeness of Teen Vogue. They find it strange, and quote excerpts of articles with definitely woke viewpoints. Being a person who has never read fashion magazines, I likewise find it strange. Then again, since I've never read fashion magazines, how would I know what is normal for them? There's the old joke about only reading Playboy for the articles, acknowledging (and protesting!) that Playboy has articles about things other than naked women. I guess it makes sense that a fashion mag would have political articles about things besides the gender politics of skirt lengths or whatever.
2. The Vogue article capitalized Black but put white in lower-case. 2020 saw a lot of this, and a lot of carping about how it was a new and unreasonable stylistic choice. The reasonableness is very much a matter of opinion, but the newness is factually wrong, as I now know.

At this point I don't have a lot else to say about the book. But I'm glad to see that all of this has happened before and will happen again.

Hidden Figures: Excellence rather floundering

I finished the book. It's a good book. I learned a lot of history that I didn't know before, and not just about the specific women profiled in there. I learned more about the origins of NASA and some of the backstory to how decisions were made early in manned spaceflight. For instance, the process for validating space flight trajectories in an era when electronic computers were not yet considered more trustworthy than human calculations.

But it's not really a NASA history. It's a history of black women in STEM. So let's talk about diversity in STEM. What strikes me most is the contrast between the celebration of excellence in this book and the daily conversation on deficits in a modern third-tier university. There's nary a word about failure in this book, but many mentions of women who skipped grades and aced every math class in college. This is not solely a contrast of past and present: The book was written in the 2010's and published in 2016. Notably, the author is not in academia, and so she doesn't feel the same obligations that professors feel. In academia today, we have endless conversations about fail rates in core classes and the implications for diversity. The feeling is that the only way to get diversity is to somehow redeem large numbers of students who are currently floundering.

Now, if the question is whether we should give second chances as a matter of human decency, the answer is of course. If the question is whether some people might even surprise us on a third, fourth, or fifth chance, the answer is that this world is full of surprises. But if the question is whether such surprises are not only be good for the individuals involved but sufficient in number to actually transform the demographics of STEM, the answer is assuredly no.  Remember, the floundering students who might surprise us are not exclusively "diverse." I've seen plenty of white boys flounder and fumble even on fourth chances, and if there's a trove of fifth-chance redemptions in the offing then surely there will be more than a few white boys in the "Fifth Time's The Charm" club. Good for them, but it also means that fifth chances or whatever won't move the ratios in ways that people hope.

I have no easy answers for transforming ratios so we finally get enough diversity in STEM--if I did, I would be able to save the world. To the extent that I can guess at answers, they surely involve starting well before kids reach college. And they surely involve fewer desperate attempts to redeem some D students and more cultivation of actual excellence wherever we find it.

The women in this book were not floundering students. They surely had some ups and downs like anyone else, but they were successful anytime they were given a chance. And by "a chance" I don't mean somebody saying "Well, she got a D, but maybe if we offer more encouragement and follow Equitable Best Practices in the remedial algebra course..." I mean that people looked at these women and said "Wow, they do quite well in math. Maybe we should hire them to do math instead of discriminating." If that isn't the essence of much-maligned meritocracy I don't know what is. These women had been succeeding since early in their educations, when they were skipping grades in k-12. They distinguished themselves in college and grad school (if they went to grad school). They earned respect in whatever jobs they held before joining the Langley facility to work on aircraft and later spacecraft. They were meritocratic hires, and in the many cases where the system deviated from meritocracy it worked to their detriment, not to their benefit.

Outside of the highest tiers, American educators are an anti-excellence bunch. Always have been, as Hofstadter showed. We don't know how to handle students who don't need coddling, especially if they come from groups that we frame as victims. We want to be saviors to the wretched of the earth rather than launch crews supporting astronauts on their way to the farthest stars. (Unless we can get photographed alongside the astronaut, and use that photo to get our grant renewed.) We were founded by farmers, who fare best on level ground, not by city-dwellers whose greatest pride has always been towers.

A careful reader of the book might fault me for neglecting the part where the women did receive additional training to fill gaps. However, these "gaps" sprang not from weakness but specialization. They majored in math and then joined engineering teams. They worked on aircraft engineering teams before transitioning to spacecraft. Their additional training was not remediation but professional development. It's utterly normal for professionals to pursue continuing education as they specialize and move into new areas, and it's utterly different from remediation.

I don't know how to produce more Katherine Johnsons and Dorothy Vaughans. If I did I could boost our economy, solve our most pressing technological, medical, and environmental needs, and end racial inequity. Alas, I don't. But I do know that the shift in educational discourse from "Katherine meets and exceeds every challenge, hire her!" to "Well, maybe if we are more progressive and less selective we could promote success..." mirrors the collapse of Dunbar High School. No good will come of it.