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Why I don’t believe in God
R., a Catholic and loyal MR reader, emails me:
I would be interested in a post explaining why you *don’t* believe in (some form of) God.
Not long ago I outlined what I considered to be the best argument for God, and how origin accounts inevitably seem strange to us; I also argued against some of the presumptive force behind scientific atheism. Yet still I do not believe, so why not? I have a few reasons:
1. We can distinguish between “strange and remain truly strange” possibilities for origins, and “strange and then somewhat anthropomorphized” origin stories. Most religions fall into the latter category, all the more so for Western religions. I see plenty of evidence that human beings anthropomorphize to an excessive degree, and also place too much weight on social information (just look at how worked up they get over social media), so I stick with the “strange and remain truly strange” options. I don’t see those as ruling out theism, but at the end of the day it is more descriptively apt to say I do not believe, rather than asserting belief.
2. The true nature of reality is so strange, I’m not sure “God” or “theism” is well-defined, at least as can be discussed by human beings. That fact should not lead you to militant atheism (I also can’t define subatomic particles), but still it pushes me toward an “I don’t believe” attitude more than belief. I find it hard to say I believe in something that I feel in principle I cannot define, nor can anyone else.
2b. In general, I am opposed to the term “atheist.” It suggests a direct rejection of some specific beliefs, whereas I simply would say I do not hold those beliefs. I call myself a “non-believer,” to reference a kind of hovering, and uncertainty about what actually is being debated. Increasingly I see atheism as another form of religion.
3. Religious belief has a significant heritable aspect, as does atheism. That should make us all more skeptical about what we think we know about religious truth (the same is true for politics, by the way). I am not sure this perspective favors “atheist” over “theist,” but I do think it favors “I don’t believe” over “I believe.” At the very least, it whittles down the specificity of what I might say I believe in.
4. I am struck by the frequency with which people believe in the dominant religions of their society or the religion of their family upbringing, perhaps with some modification. (If you meet a Wiccan, don’t you jump to the conclusion that they are strange? Or how about a person who believes in an older religion that doesn’t have any modern cult presence at all? How many such people are there?)
This narrows my confidence in the judgment of those who believe, since I see them as social conformists to a considerable extent. Again, I am not sure this helps “atheism” either (contemporary atheists also slot into some pretty standard categories, and are not generally “free thinkers”), but it is yet another net nudge away from “I believe” and toward “I do not believe.” I’m just not that swayed by a phenomenon based on social conformity so strongly.
That all said I do accept that religion has net practical benefits for both individuals and societies, albeit with some variance. That is partly where the pressures for social conformity come from. I am a strong Straussian when it comes to religion, and overall wish to stick up for the presence of religion in social debate, thus some of my affinities with say Ross Douthat and David Brooks on many issues.
5. I am frustrated by the lack of Bayesianism in most of the religious belief I observe. I’ve never met a believer who asserted: “I’m really not sure here. But I think Lutheranism is true with p = .018, and the next strongest contender comes in only at .014, so call me Lutheran.” The religious people I’ve known rebel against that manner of framing, even though during times of conversion they may act on such a basis.
I don’t expect all or even most religious believers to present their views this way, but hardly any of them do. That in turn inclines me to think they are using belief for psychological, self-support, and social functions. Nothing wrong with that, says the strong Straussian! But again, it won’t get me to belief.
6. I do take the William James arguments about personal experience of God seriously, and I recommend his The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature to everybody — it’s one of the best books period. But these personal accounts contradict each other in many cases, we know at least some of them are wrong or delusional, and overall I think the capacity of human beings to believe things — some would call it self-deception but that term assumes a neutral, objective base more than is warranted here — is quite strong. Presumably a Christian believes that pagan accounts of the gods are incorrect, and vice versa; I say they are probably both right in their criticisms of the other.
7. I see the entire matter of origins as so strange that the “transcendental argument” carries little weight with me — “if there is no God, then everything is permitted!” We don’t have enough understanding of God, or the absence of God, to deal with such claims. In any case, the existence of God is no guarantee that such problems are overcome, or if it were such a guarantee, you wouldn’t be able to know that.
Add all that up and I just don’t believe. Furthermore, I find it easy not to believe. It doesn’t stress me, and I don’t feel a resulting gap or absence in my life. That I strongly suspect is for genetic reasons, not because of some intellectual argument I or others have come up with. But there you go, the deconstruction of my own belief actually pushes me somewhat further into it.
To sum it all up, agnosticism is pretty easy to argue for, and it gets you a lot closer to “not believing” than “believing.”
What I’ve been reading
1. Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution. Excellent author, the chapters on the time period before the Constitution are good enough to make the “best books of the year list,” the rest is a much above-average summary and distillation, but of more familiar material. At 880 pp. of clear, limpid, and instructive prose, it is a winner in any case.
2. W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland. More of a mutual travelogue, with alternating contributions, than a series of letters, one learns that even in 1936: “There is little stigma attached to illegitimacy. Bastards are brought up on an equal footing with legitimate children of the family.” Furthermore, “All chocolate or sweets should be bought in London.” During the trip they run into Goering, yes the Goering.
3. Richard A. Posner, The Federal Judiciary: Strengths and Weaknesses. This is a grumpy book, but I don’t mean that in a grumpy kind of way, as I like many grumpy books: “The dominant theme of this book has been judicial standpattism — more precisely, the stubborn refusal of the judiciary to adapt to modernity.” By the end, Posner gives the federal judiciary a grade between B and B+, I was surprised it was so high.
4. Duff McDonald, The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite. “In the early 1920s, HBS was still without its own buildings at Harvard, faculty were crammed together in cramped offices, and classrooms were scattered around Harvard Yard.” This is a remarkably clear and engaging survey of its subject matter, the main drawback being it never explains the rise of HBS in terms of…management, as HBS itself might do so. There is thus an odd cipher at the book’s core, plus from the discussion of Michael Jensen onward, the book descends increasingly into ad hominem attacks and unfair moralizing. This volume is an odd mix, but still worth reading for its contributions.
Stephen Ellis, This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organized Crime, is one of the better books on that country: “…there are even private colleges in Lagos offering courses in credit card fraud and advance-fee fraud.”
Hugh Nibley, Approaching Zion, is a series of essays on society and theology from one of the Mormon “grandmasters.”
After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, edited by Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, collects many essays on the Piketty book and also on the topic more generally.
Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses of Early Islam, “…the early Muslim community believed almost universally that the Satanic verses incident was a true historical fact.” Ahmed, a brilliant scholar at Harvard, passed away in 2015, here is a short appreciation. If they wrote books for me, someone would be working on “Islam and Strauss” right now.
What I’ve been reading
1. Mark Zupan, Inside Job: How Government Insiders Subvert the Public Interest. This is now the very best book on how special interest groups subvert the quality of public policy.
2. Historically Inevitable: Turning Points of the Russian Revolution, edited by Tony Brenton, contributors include Dominic Lieven, Orlando Figes, and Richard Pipes. I, for one, often find it easier to learn history through counterfactual reasoning. “What if they hadn’t put Lenin into that train?, and so on, and so this is my favorite from the recent spate of books on 1917 in Russia.
More generally, there are people who very much like counterfactual reasoning (say Derek Parfit), and people who don’t care for it much (say Jim Buchanan). The two types often don’t communicate well. The counterfactual deployer seems like a kind of smart aleck, caught up in irrelevancies and neglecting “the real issues.” In turn, the non-poser of counterfactuals seems stodgy and unable to understand the limitations of principles, how one might handle the tough cases, and what might cause one to change one’s mind. Being able to bridge this gap, and learn from both kinds of thinkers, is both difficult and yields high returns.
3. Mary Gaitskill, Somebody with a Little Hammer, Essays. Short pieces, never too long, strong throughout, mostly on literature (Nicholson Baker, Peter Pan, Norman Mailer, Bleak House) with some essays on movies too. This will make my best of the year list, and she remains an underrated author more generally.
4. Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. An original and consistently interesting extended essay on how “World Music” is evolving in digital times. A must-read for me, at least.
5. Johan Chistensen, The Power of Economists Within the State. I haven’t read this one, but it appears to be a very interesting look at the role of economists within government, for the case studies of New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, and other cases (in less detail). “Economists in government” remains an underappreciated topic, so I expect this book is a real contribution.
6. Julie Schumacher, Doodling for Academics: A Coloring and Activity Book. It’s funny, for instance one panel has the heading “Find and color the many readers who will enjoy your dissertation.” The images include a rat and a snake in the grass, but there aren’t even so many of those.
Make Northern Ireland Great Again
Northern Ireland of course is much smaller than the southern Republic:
The difference between north and south — in 1926, for example — was crucial, agricultural and manufacturing sectors of the economy playing very different roles in the two jurisdictions. Almost 35 percent of the workforce in Northern Ireland were engaged in manufacturing, while under 10 percent were engaged in the nationalist Free state; nearly two-thirds of Ireland’s manufacturing employment was in the north.
That is from Richard English, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland, pp.348-349. (By the way, this is one of the best books I’ve read in months. It is a subtle treatment of politics, history, religion, and most of all political psychology; it is especially strong on why the Unionist movement in the north never has perished and why a formal reunification of the two Irelands would be so hard to pull off.)
We also can learn that “In 1969 output per head in the [Northern] region was still around one-fifth higher than in the Republic.” And in 1984, living standards in Northern Ireland were about 25 higher than in the south.
Today “Northern Ireland’s per capita GDP is similar to that of the Border region of Ireland which is about 38 per cent lower than the national average.”
On Twitter, I suppose that would be #MNIGA.
My favorite things Ireland
The last time I was in Ireland I wasn’t blogging yet. What riches lie here, let’s give it a start:
1. Poetry: I pick Joyce’s Ulysses, then Yeats and also Seamus Heaney, especially if the word “bog” appears in the poem. A good collection is The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, edited by Patrick Crotty. Beyond the ranks of the super-famous, you might try Louis MacNeice, from the Auden Group, or perhaps Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, who writes in Gaelic but has been translated by other superb Irish poets into English..
2. Novel/literature: Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels. One of the very very best books for social science too, and one of my favorite books period. After Joyce, there is also Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Lord Dunsany, John Banville (The Untouchable), William Trevor, and Elizabeth Bowen. Iris Murdoch was born in Ireland, but does she count? More recently I have enjoyed Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Eimear McBride, Claire Louise-Bennett, with Mike McCormack in my pile to read soon. Roddy Doyle is probably good, but I don’t find him so readable. Colum McCann somehow isn’t Irish enough for me, but many enjoy his work. Can the Anglo-Irish Oliver Goldsmith count? His Citizen of the World remains a neglected work. The recently published volumes of Samuel Beckett’s correspondence have received rave reviews and I hope to read through them this summer. Whew! And for a country of such a small population.
3. Classical music: Hmm…we hit a roadblock here. I don’t love John Field, so I have to call this category a fail. I can’t offhand think of many first-rate Irish classical performers, can you? James Galway?
4. Popular music: My Bloody Valentine, Loveless. Certainly my favorite album post-1970s, and possibly my favorite of all time. When the Irish do something well, they do it really really well. Then there is Van Morrison, Them, Bono and U2, Rory Gallagher, Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats, The Pogues, The Cranberries, and Sinead O’Connor, among others. I confess to having an inordinate weakness for Gilbert O’Sullivan. Traditional Irish music would need a post of its own, but it has never commanded much of my attention.
5. Painter: Francis Bacon is the obvious and probably correct choice, but I am no longer excited to see his work. I don’t find myself seeing new things in it. Sean Scully wins runner-up. This is a slightly weak category, at least relative to some of the others.
6. Political philosopher: Edmund Burke, who looks better all the time, I am sorry to say.
7. Philosopher: Bishop Berkeley. He is also interesting on monetary theory, anticipating some later ideas of Fischer Black on money as an abstract unit of account.
8. Classical economist: Mountifort Longfield and Isaac Butt both had better understandings of supply and demand and marginalism, before the marginal revolution, than almost any other economists except for a few of the French.
9. Theologian: C.S. Lewis, you could list him under fiction as well. Here is a debate over whether he is British or Irish. Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia covers Lewis, one of my favorite books from the last decade.
10. Silicon Valley entrepreneur: Patrick Collison (duh), of Stripe and Atlas, here is his superb podcast with Ezra Klein. Here is further information on the pathbreaking Stripe Atlas project.
11. Movie: There are plenty I don’t like so much, such as My Left Foot, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Waking Ned, and The Commitments. Most people consider those pretty good. I think I’ll opt for The Crying Game and also In the Name of the Father.
12: Movie, set in: Other than the movies listed above, there is Odd Man Out (quite good), The Quiet Man, and The Secret of Roan Inish, but my clear first choice is the still-underrated masterpiece Barry Lyndon.
The bottom line: The strengths are quite amazing, and that’s without adjusting for population.
*Island People: The Caribbean and the World*
That is by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, published this November, a great book, could it be the very best book on the charm and importance of the Caribbean? Not the Caribbean of the cruise, but rather the real cultural Caribbean as found in Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and Trinidad. The Caribbean was open, globalized, multiracial, vulnerable, and deindustrialized before it was “cool” to be so, and so it stands as a warning to us all. Yet so few seem to care. The Caribbean cultural blossoming of the 20th century remains one of the most remarkable yet understudied sagas, but this book, among its other historical virtues, gives you a very good look under the hood.
Did you know that in the 1930s Cuba received more visitors from the U.S. than did Canada?
This is one of the very best non-fiction books of this year, and its depth of knowledge and understanding truly impressed me. Just to prod your memories here is the broader list.
Further Monday assorted links
Sunday assorted links
1. Are Cuba’s infant mortality statistics for real? And the paradox of Cuban gdp.
2. Mike Konczal on Trump’s messenging. And would Clinton or Trump have won under epistocracy?
3. Martha Argerich.
4. Octopuses and the puzzle of aging (NYT).
5. Vegan lobster buyer markets in everything.
6. Jacobin, Christopher Isett on Taiwan’s broader recent history.
What I’ve been reading
1. Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives, by Sunil Khilnani. A highly readable introduction to Indian history, structured around the lives of some of its major figures. I passed along my copy to Alex.
2. Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa. More for classical music and Ojawa fans than Murakami readers, this is nonetheless an easy to read and stimulating set of interviews for any serious classical music listener. They are most interesting on Mahler.
3. Elsa Morante, History. In America, this is one of the least frequently read and discussed great European novels of the 20th century.
4. Miriam J. Laugesen, Fixing Medical Prices: How Physicians are Paid. Will people still care about these issues for the next four years? I hope so, because this is the best book I know of on Medicare pricing and its influence on pricing throughout the broader U.S. health care system.
My copy of Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy has arrived. It is a very good statement of how political fragmentation and intensified intellectual competition drove modernity and the Industrial Revolution.
I have only perused John H. Kagel and Alvin E. Roth, Handbook of Experimental Economics, volume 2, but it appears to be an extremely impressive contribution.
Marc Levinson’s An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy details what made the post World War II era so special in terms of its economics and income distribution and why it will be so hard to recreate.
Chris Hayes’s A Colony in a Nation, due out in March, he argues that racial equality really hasn’t improved much since 1968.
Guillermo A. Calvo, Macroeconomics in Times of Liquidity Crises is a useful book on sudden stops and related ideas.
Arrived in my pile is Yuval Noah Harati, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
Monday assorted links
Thursday assorted links
1. Might China have its own dot.com bubble burst?
2. Package X-Ray, from Amazon.
3. Some details on the Trump infrastructure plan.
4. Bannonism. And everyone else is linking to this Scott Alexander post on crying wolf and racism, but I think it is naive, and suspect he has never really lived under deeply racist conditions. Here is perspective from Larry Summers. And Matt Yglesias is worried about the first one hundred days.
5. Data on fake news on Facebook. And Leonid Bershidsky on related matters. Are Danish people happier when they quit Facebook?
6. Spectator picks for best books of the year. And Telegraph picks.
Sunday assorted links
What should I ask Mark Miller?
I’ll be interviewing Mark soon, at a private venue, no public event, but for eventual release in the Conversations with Tyler series. Here is a short bio of Mark. He is credited as being the founder of modern Southwestern cuisine, and he was the driving force behind Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe and Red Sage in Washington, D.C. He has written numerous books on food, including the very best books on chilies. He is a supertaster, and more generally one of the world’s great food minds and a truly curious and generous soul. He also has a background in anthropology, cooked for Chez Panisse in its early days, and is one of the best-traveled people I know. Do you want to know what is/was special about chiles in Syria, or how many varieties of soy sauce you can find in one part of Hokkaido? Mark is the guy to ask.
So what should I ask him?
What I’ve been reading
1. Stephen M. Bainbridge and M. Todd Henderson. Limited Liability: A Legal and Economic Analysis. One of this year’s sleeper books, it is probably the best extant treatment of corporate limited liability and one of the best books on the corporation from a law and economics point of view. I do not understand how it ended up at $133 from Edward Elgar.
2. William F. Buckley, edited by James Rosen, A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century. Obituaries penned by WFB, fascinating throughout. One forgets what a lucid writer he was, and some of the more unsettling entries (MLK, John Lennon) are some of the most interesting.
3. Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation, by Robert D. Crews. The history of globalization in Afghanistan and of Afghanistan, highly intelligent and good material on just about every page. A model for how to take a now somewhat cliched topic and make something original out of it.
4. Morton H. Christiansen and Nick Chater, Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing. Have you ever wondered what is the actual professional status of Chomskyian linguistics and other claims you read in popular science books? This is the go-to work to address that question, it is written at the right level of serious rigor yet readability for a non-linguist such as myself.
Frank Ahrens, Seoul Man: A Memoir of Cars, Culture, Crisis, and Unexpected Hilarity Inside a Korean Corporate Titan. A fun take on exactly what the subtitle promises.
I can apply that same description to Joseph Turow, The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power.
Rabbi Mark Glickman, Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books. I found this moving and extremely well-presented.
Facts about Jane Jacobs
1. Jacobs was born in Scranton, PA, but moved to NYC in 1932 and as early as 1935 she had published some of her impressions of the city in a multi-part series in Vogue magazine. Earlier, she had written poetry for the Girl Scouts’s magazine, American Girl.
2. She published a 1941 book on the intellectual foundations of the American Constitution, with Columbia University Press under her maiden name Jane Butzner and the title Constitutional Chaff. At about the same time her manuscript was being accepted, she was kicked out of Columbia for taking too many extended studies classes, and not allowed admission to Barnard.
3. In 1940 she wrote an article based on her study of the embossed acronyms on manhole covers.
4. She then worked as writer during WWII for the Office of War Information and the State Department. Before Pearl Harbor, she had been an isolationist.
5. Henri Pirenne’s work on medieval cities was one of the biggest influences on her.
6. In the 1940s, she also worked for a metals industry magazine, and smoked a pipe in her office. They started to wonder whether she was a troublemaker.
7. She married an architect in 1944, then taking the name Jacobs. They enjoyed bicycling and sociometry together. She had sons in 1948 and 1950.
8. Alger Hiss had been her superior at the State Department, and in the late 1940s Jacobs was investigated for possible Communist ties, in part because she had tried to apply for a visa to Siberia, using Hiss as her contact. She stated in response that she abhorred communism and favored radical decentralization.
There is much more! But that is a taste from the new and excellent Becoming Jane Jacobs, a runs-up-through 1972 biography by Peter L. Laurence, definitely one of the best books of the year. This is the biography of Jacobs I have wanted to read for forty years.
Addendum: There is a new Jane Jacobs movie coming to the Toronto film festival.