[SEQ RERUN] Raising the Sanity Waterline
Today’s post, Raising the Sanity Waterline was originally published on 12 March 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Behind every particular failure of social rationality is a larger and more general failure of social rationality; even if all religious content were deleted tomorrow from all human minds, the larger failures that permit religion would still be present. Religion may serve the function of an asphyxiated canary in a coal mine—getting rid of the canary doesn’t get rid of the gas. Even a complete social victory for atheism would only be the beginning of the real work of rationalists. What could you teach people without ever explicitly mentioning religion, that would raise their general epistemic waterline to the point that religion went underwater?
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Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. − 1 Thessalonians 5:21.
Confound not truth with falsehood, nor knowingly conceal the truth. - Quran 2:42.
Except “truth” in these memeplexes is regularly redefined to mean “the beliefs of our religion, which are ‘proved’ by the existence of our holy books.”
That’s not an argument that religious apologists really use, though, so much as it’s a parody of apologetics.
It’s not an argument, but it is a fact that the (observed, socially accepted) meaning of “truth” in Christianity, Islam, and possibly other religions is vastly different from the simple meaning of truth.
I’m sure actually rigorous apologetics realize this shift in the definition of truth doesn’t constitute an argument. However, “raising the sanity waterline” isn’t helped terribly much by convincing a (relative) few academics with (relatively) small readerships that defending religion isn’t a worthwhile use of their time.
This one seemed sketchy to me, until I remembered that the older meaning of “prove” was not to establish irrefutably, but to put to the test. Taken in that light, it makes a lot more sense.
How does this balance against Eliezer’s professed belief that most people don’t believe in religion, but believe in belief in religion? (Which, given that religious people live longer, tend to be happier, etc, is in fact a perfectly rational belief. You don’t win by conforming to what somebody says rationalism should be, you win by winning.)
I mean, strictly speaking, I’m not sure that a full evaluation supports antitheistic beliefs—that is, the belief that religion is a qualitative negative. Atheism hasn’t caught up to religion in terms of social support groups, structured social activities, and inclusiveness. (Not all religions are inclusive, mind, but they tend to be -more- inclusive than the atheist groups I’ve encountered. Most people belong to religions that will take anybody, even if they disapprove of them.)
Given the many advantages religion does confer, and given that atheism has done little to build parallel structures, the hostility towards religion makes no sense. No matter how ugly your house, you don’t knock it down until you’re at the very least prepared to replace it.
The post would have been considerably better without the antitheism. Making the world more rational is a useful goal in and of itself, it really shouldn’t be justified in terms of destroying something which is in fact providing useful functions to most of society.
I agree that most of the religious groups I know of won’t actually kick an atheist out of their gatherings, as long as the atheist in question is respectful of the group’s practice (e.g., doesn’t disrupt services to discuss the rational justification for religious belief).
On the other hand, most of the atheist groups I know of won’t actually kick a theist out of their gatherings, as long as the theist in question is respectful of the group’s practice (e.g., doesn’t disrupt discussion to proselytize their religious tradition).
So I’m not sure about your claim wrt inclusiveness. Can you clarify what you mean by that, and why you believe it?
Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it isn’t.
If a powerful existing group X is hostile to a less powerful emerging group Y, it’s often not viable for Y to leave X unmolested while it “builds its own house.” Sometimes that just allows X to keeps intervening in ways that significantly reduce the chance of the house being built.
For one example of non-inclusiveness, politics. Most the atheist groups I’ve encountered deliberately exclude uncloseted conservatives. Open hostility towards conservatives is pretty common, as well. Back in the Bush era, when libertarians were treated by the left as honorary liberals, this wasn’t quite as big a deal for me personally. Since Obama is in office, we’ve been lumped in with the conservatives again.
For a specific example not involving politics, the last atheist—in that case humanist—meeting I attended featured a supposed neurologist who came up to the podium and started claiming that religion was a mental disorder and started describing the similarities of the disorder to dyslexia (getting the details of dyslexia grossly wrong, to boot). My dyslexic sister, who I had narrowly convinced to attend the meeting with me, was -not- amused.
(Every organization wants to be a cult, and all that; the extreme people drive off the moderates. Religion is actually -really good- at keeping its less extreme members interested. Contrary to all expectation, my experience is that religious organizations tend to be the -least- cultlike ideological organizations.)
Religion, for all its own extremists, hasn’t actually made any effort at going around and knocking down atheist organizations. That’s a rather flimsy rationalization for why atheists have been completely incapable of replicating the good aspects of religion—we can’t build our own stuff until we’ve knocked down things that aren’t actually standing in our way?
Consider all the secular activities churches support and engage in. Hell, a church near me revised its policies a few years back—it added a second day of religion-free services. No, I have no idea how that works, and have never attended one. But as an atheist I have to acknowledge that I’ve taken advantage of a lot of the organizations, buildings, and services churches make possible. Until and unless there are secular alternatives to at least most of those offerings—supported on the same voluntary basis that churches exist upon today—atheism has absolutely no business even -thinking- about tearing religious institutions down.
If I understand correctly what kind of services you’re talking about, many social centres do a decent job, at least in Europe.
OK, fair enough. Thanks for the clarification.
It feels a bit depressing that it feels like there hasn’t been much progress toward this goal in four years.
Of course, it only feels that way, and it only feels that way because I’m a human and the vast majority of my ancestors would consider four years to be a significant chunk of their expected lifespan.
And yet.
You seem to suggest that the sanity waterline is increasing very slowly. Do you have any evidence for that? My null hypothesis would be that during the last four years the world remained the same on average, with some local increases in sanity and some local decreases. Is there an improvement which is more than a noise, on a society scale?
I am not even sure how to measure the sanity waterline. There are some obvious stupidities, having less of them would be an improvement. But if we focus on specific stupidities without really fixing what caused them, people will soon invent other stupidities to replace them. -- When a power of a specific religion is reduced, other religions may grow stronger. Even after removing all religions, people can switch to other forms of superstition. Central religious authority is not needed these days, superstitious people can easily coordinate by internet. Remove the supernatural beings, and people may start worshiping pseudo-science. Positive (as in: uncritical) thinking instead of a prayer, cosmic energy instead of fairies, holographic universe and quantum physics and multiple dimensions instead of whatever else. Remove homeopathy and people will use healing crystals.
We probably could measure the sanity waterline in short term: by making a list of specific failures (e.g. horoscopes, homeopathy, religion) and measuring how often they appear in press, how much money people spend on them, how many people use them, etc. But in a long term this metric would keep failing and need to be updated regularly, because new sanity failures would appear.
So, in the recent four years, which specific measurable sanity-related things have improved? Is it balanced by other things getting worse?
The question has nothing to do with me, but I’ll give it a whack:
Climate science has gotten a lot more scientific and open to criticism.
The public seems considerably more aware of the potential downfalls of legislation as it pertains to computing and the internet.
The increasing availability and quality of open-source software has tempered the goals of the open-source movement from destroying copyright law (a very messy issue) towards gradually making it obsolete.
I count the increasing libertarian trend among youth as a positive; YMMV
Marijuana decriminalization is finally getting some inertia behind it.
Feminism is getting some pushback (arguments shouldn’t appear one-sided and all that)
Political correctness and reactionary anti-political correctness both seem to have faded
Negative trends… I’m not sure I really see any trends I can firmly pin down as a negative, at least in terms of the sanity waterline.
ETA: And wow. Writing that list made my mood improve a lot more than I would have expected.
The European elite is pursuing increasingly bad economic policies, this is getting push back from populists suggesting other bad economic policies (similar things are playing out in other developed countries as well).
Political Islam is becoming an increasingly powerful force.
I’d add that the libertarians seem to be getting better, as well (less one-sided stuff and less blatantly elite-servicing stuff).
I’m not sure about the fight between PC and anti-PC. It seems like there’s been a big expansion in the sphere of PC and we seem to be having a worryingly huge reaction against feminism mostly, and it seems to have broad appeal.
The law you linked only applies if the people you’re studying care about that metric, which I’m not sure is the case here.
Well, I don’t intend such a reading. Is the rest of your comment still relevant?
So do you have an opinion on whether the sanity waterline is increasing or is not increasing? Either way, what is the evidence? Can we think about some way to measure that, so we could paint the waterline on nice charts?