Religion

For a few years in graduate school I wrote a regular column for the “Daily Princetonian”:http://www.dailyprincetonian.com, Princeton’s main student newspaper. I got into a bit of trouble once or twice over it, notably for a “piece I wrote”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/columns/crusade.html out of irritation with the local chapter of the “Campus Crusade for Christ”:http://www.ccci.org/.

I was reminded of this when I learned, via “Billmon”:http://billmon.org, of the “strong Christian beliefs”:http://billmon.org/archives/001518.html of “General Counsel Mary Walker”:http://www.pwfsd.org/article.php?sid=238. She led the legal team that wrote the “recently leaked memo”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/politics/08ABUS.html?hp arguing that there were no legal considerations, domestic or foreign, that prevented the President from authorizing torture. She is also a co-founded of the “Professional Women’s Fellowship”:http://www.pwfsd.org/, an offshoot of the CCC. Philip Carter at “Intel Dump”:http://www.intel-dump.com has described the memo as “‘a cookbook approach for illegal government conduct'”:http://www.intel-dump.com/archives/archive_2004_06_07.shtml#1086610719. Here is Walker in an “interview”:http://www.pwfsd.org/article.php?sid=238 about her beliefs, followed by a snippet of her report:

bq. *Walker*: “Making moral decisions in the workplace where it is easy to go along and get along takes courage. It takes moral strength and courage to say, ‘I’m not going to do this because I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.'”
*The report*: Officials could escape torture convictions by arguing that they were following superior orders, since such orders “may be inferred to be lawful” and are “disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate.”

With just a little more effort here, we could push through to the world of “Jack Lint”:http://www.trond.com/brazil/images/brazil48.jpg, the character played by Michael Palin in “Brazil”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/.

*Update*: The Walker interview was yanked from the Professional Women’s Fellowship website, in a Christian act of covering up embarrassing stuff. But “Billmon”:http://billmon.org/archives/001524.html has a copy.

Americans are often shocked when they learn that not only does ‘public school’ mean ‘private school’ in the UK, but also in the UK the state not only funds, but collaborates with religious organisations in running, religious schools. I used to be strongly opposed to this practice, at least in principle, though I have also long thought that Muslim schools should be candidates for funding given that RC and C.of E. schools were funded. I’m still unenthusiastic about the situation, but also have a suspicion that the practice is part of the reason that religion, though powefully present in the public culture, is a less rich source of social division than it is in the US. Alan Carling has very nicely posted my idiosyncratic take on this subject on his website. The piece is written really for a UK audience, but its nice and short, and comments somewhat on the US situation. Although it is scheduled for publication as is I’m very curious about reactions to it and, as usual, take my own tentative views to be evolving objects of critique rather than anything set in stone.

We’re on an “Evolutionary”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001628.html “Psychology”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001629.html kick here at CT. It seems most of our commenters are more enamored of it than some of our contributors. This is maladaptive for the CT meme, because the realization that we disagree will cause traffic to our site to drop. Unless it’s actually adaptive, because the disagreement means traffic to our site will rise. While we’re on the topic, I mean meme, I want to know how my 12-week-old daughter’s emerging desire to put everything that comes her way into her mouth is either evolutionarily adaptive or individually rational. I’ve also spent the day variously exposed to something else realist-types tend to explain, according to taste, as a matter of “adaptive fitness”:http://faculty.wm.edu/lakirk/evo_rel.html or “rational choice”:http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0SOR/1_61/61908759/p1/article.jhtml, namely religion.[1]

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Before I argue that the Borda voting system is fatally defective, it may be worth considering what kinds of weaknesses could justify such a verdict. We know from Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem that any nontrivial voting system will encourage strategic/insincere voting in some circumstances and will not always elect the right candidate (unless ‘right’ is defined to coincide with the outcome of the voting system in question). So a fatal defect must be a lot worse than this. I claim that the Borda voting system is so vulnerable to strategic manipulation that it would be completely unworkable, provided only that there are no restrictions on candidacy.

Note: I did a Google before writing this and couldn’t find anything similar, but of course, when I checked again after doing the work, I found this almost perfect anticipation of my counter-example. But having done the work, I thought I’d post it anyway.

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The comments thread on my last post led me to this site (hat-tip: novalis), advocating Condorcet voting and presenting a critique of the instant runoff/single transferable vote , the core of which is

IRV has serious problems. It allows a sufficiently small minority of voters to safely register “protest” votes for minor-party candidates–but only as long as their candidate is sure to lose. As soon as their candidate threatens to actually win, they risk hurting their own cause by ranking their favorite first, just as they do under our current plurality system. IRV is therefore unlikely to be any more successful than plurality at solving the classic “lesser of two evils” problem.

It’s straightforward to show, however, that this problem can only arise if your preferred candidate would be the loser in a Condorcet system. Hence, voting strategically yields the preferred Condorcet outcome.

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Eric Maskin and Partha Dasgupta are smart guys, and its hard to believe they are totally ignorant of what happens in the Southern Hemisphere. So how can they justify writing a piece promoting a system of rank-order voting as superior to the existing American (plurality) and French (top-two runoff) systems, without mentioning that Australia has had this system (in a range of variants) for many decades.[1]

A minor side point is that, in addition to having the world’s most complicated voting systems, Australia also has compulsory voting.[2] Typically more than 95 per cent of votes are formal, that is, list all candidates in order of preference, with no missing numbers or repetitions. In Dennis Mueller’s generally excellent book on Public Choice, he discusses the single transferable vote and suggests that, while attractive in theory, it’s too complicated to work in practice. Either Australians are a lot smarter than everybody else, or public choice theorists aren’t as smart as they think they are.

fn1. To be precise, Maskin and Dasgupta advocate the Borda weighted vote, whereas Australia has the single transferable vote (called preferential voting in Australia), but nothing in their argument distingushes the two.

fn2. More precisely, compulsory registration and attendance at the polling station – there’s nothing to stop you casting a blank ballot.

I recently read Nietzsche’s “The Genealogy of Morality”:http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogytofc.htm with a group of colleagues. To the extent to which I understood the book (and despite the book’s brevity I’m feeling somewhat sympathetic to those snakes who have to sit around whilst they digest a large mammal), my comprehension was greatly assisted by Brian Leiter’s excellent “Nietzsche on Morality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415152852/junius-20 . Reading the reviews and commentary on Mel Gibson’s Passion, I was immediately reminded of a passage from the second essay, where Nietzsche is writing about the genesis of guilt from the sense of indebtedness (at first to ancestors) and remarks on the further excruciating twist that Christianity brings: on the pretext of having their debts forgiven, believers are put in a postition of psychological indebtedness from which they can _never_ recover (He sent his only son, and we _killed_ Him):

bq. …. we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity—God’s sacrifice of himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the creditor sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! (sec. 21)

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Valdis Krebs presents this map of purchasing habits for political books, using the techniques of cluster analysis.
Krebs’ main point is that the books divide readers into two sharply separate clusters, color-coded on the assumption that one group of readers are Democrats and the other are Republicans. The diagram also coincides with the standard left-right coding.

I have a couple of observations on this. The first is the trivial one that this color-coding is the exact opposite of the one that would naturally be used in Australia or the UK (back in my days as a folksinger, one of my more successful pieces (this is a highly relative term) was about a Labour leader who “went in [to office] Red and came out Blue”.) Without wanting to load too much on to arbitrary signifiers, this does seem to me to support my view that there’s a bigger gulf between liberals and the radical left in the US than elsewhere. Even if the mainstream left party in other countries does not adopt the red banner of Marxism there’s sufficient continuity along the political spectrum to make it’s adoption by the right unlikely.

The second thing that’s striking is that, on the left-right orientation, I come out as a centrist. I’ve read nearly all the blue books that are within one or two links of the red zone, and none of those on the far left of the diagram. On the right, I’ve read only Letters to a Young Conservative .

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The notion that Jews are collectively responsible for the death of Christ may seem too silly for words, but it is obviously still taken seriously enough to require refutation, not surprisingly in view of the immense human suffering it has caused. My question is, has anyone ever suggested that Italians[1] are collectively responsible?

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Kevin Drum “is surprised to learn”:http://www.calpundit.com/archives/003272.html that schools in Britain offer religious education classes. (Ireland is the same, by the way.) He comments that “I don’t think there’s anything unconstitutional about teaching a “History of Religion” class or something like it in an American high school, but it just wouldn’t happen. And then a proposal to add atheism as one of the highlighted religions? Kaboom!”

I’ve wondered before about this, in part because of a course in “Classical Social Theory”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kjhealy/teaching.php3 that I teach. I usually take a detour for a lecture before we read some “Max Weber”:http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/, because a chunk of the class (upper-level undergraduates) will have no clear idea what the Reformation was. This surprised me when it first happened, but now I anticipate it. Last year I got a very nice evaluation from an evangelical Protestant student saying, in part, “Thanks for respecting my views and for all the information about where Protestantism came from! I never knew that!” She would wear “Jesus Loves You” t-shirts to class and really livened up our discussions about “Durkheim”:http://durkheim.itgo.com/religion.html.

Scott Martens at a Fistful of Euros has some “useful thoughts on the passing of the anti-headscarf law”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000349.php by the French National Assembly. See also Chris Brooke on this. “Chris is pessimistic”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_02_01_archive.html#107650364893294090 about the law being struck down by the Conseil d’Etat but “its record hitherto”:http://perso.wanadoo.fr/felina/doc/laic/conseil_etat.htm on this issue has been quite liberal and tolerant — so I’m not so sure.

I’ve been following a “debate that’s been going on (and off) at Butterflies and Wheels”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=342 over the past few weeks and wondering about a move that my fellow atheist Ophelia Benson makes there. Ophelia quotes Michael Ruse thus:

bq. People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions. There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other. Science and religion, evolution and Christianity, need not conflict, but only if each knows its place in human affairs — and stays within these boundaries.

To which she replies:

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Via David Appell, I came across this marvellous quote from Freeman Dyson

In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, “How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?” I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, “Four.” He said, “I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”

It came to mind when I read this story in the NYT with the introductory claim What really stimulates economic growth is whether you believe in an afterlife — especially hell.The report is of some estimations done by Rachel M. McCleary and Robert J. Barro (the story notes that the two are married) published in American Sociological Review.

Barro is probably the biggest name in the field of cross-country growth regressions (a field in which I’ve also dabbled), and I’m sure he’s aware that thousands of these regressions have been run and that, with very limited exceptions, results that particular factors are conducive to growth have proved highly fragile. I haven’t read the paper, so for all I know, the results have been checked for robustness in every possible way. But my eyebrows went up when I saw this para

Oddly enough, the research also showed that at a certain point, increases in church, mosque and synagogue attendance tended to depress economic growth. Mr. Barro, a renowned economist, and Ms. McCleary, a lecturer in Harvard’s government department, theorized that larger attendance figures could mean that religious institutions were using up a disproportionate share of resources.

What this means is that at least two parameters have been used in fitting growth to religiosity and that the two have opposite signs – most likely it’s some sort of quadratic. In my experience, there’s always at least one arbitrary choice made in the pretesting of these models (for example once you have a quadratic, the scaling of variables becomes critical). That gives three free parameters, if not more.

I’m no John von Neumann, but with two parameters I can fit a dromedary and with three I can do a Bactrian camel.

“The BBC reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3403775.stm that the French government’s proposed ban on the Islamic headscarf and other symbols of religious adherence in schools has upset the 15,000 Sikhs who live in and around Paris. If they insist on wearing the turban they risk being denied access to education. Even with the law merely a proposal, Sikhs are already being refused admission to institutions of higher education.