🍾🥂 Thought bubbles: a Christmas list 🍾🥂
Features: Revd Bayes, Father Christmas, Symmachus, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Montaigne
I’m still working on the next pessimistic instalment on democracy, and having been ill this week, I’m just going to throw off a bunch of random ideas and links for now. Most are about religion in some way. Perhaps it’s the season for it.
Evidence ordering
You may think that these two posts by Robin Hanson have a subtle connection. The first one is about “evidence order bias”. A Bayesian learner comes to the same conclusions, no matter in what order the evidence is presented. So why do you continue to believe the ideas you were taught as a child? Among people who learn about Christianity as children, and then learn about Islam as adults, there are almost certainly more Christians than Muslims; among people who learn about Islam as children, there are more Muslims than Christians. Isn’t this just evidence that people cling childishly to their childhood beliefs? But on the other hand, from the second post:
I’ve recently come to estimate that the world population and economy will suffer a several centuries fall, with innovation grinding to a halt, ended by the rise of Amish-like insular fertile subcultures…. even though this hasn’t actually happened yet, my new estimate pushes me to recalibrate my respect.… I’ve been watching many documentaries about various insular fertile subcultures…. While they may not seem very impressive to my eyes according to my prior intuitive impressiveness scoring system, we all need to figure out how to change our scoring systems…. So far I can see that I haven’t gotten very far; I still have much recalibration to do.
The problem of the first post is that it conceives of human learning on the model of a Bayesian updater in a well-defined probability space. That may be a great ideal for a scientist testing a hypothesis, but it is clearly not how actual humans can or should learn stuff.
(Imagine taking a child’s education and randomizing the order… in week one you do A level physics, in week two you read The Hobbit, week three is an undergraduate course on the Enlightenment and also learning to walk. Obviously this would not be a good way to learn anything. Off-topic, I wonder if this kind of ordering matters when training large language models: if so, how and why; if not, why not and what would it take to make it matter?)
Human learning builds from foundations to the top. Without the right foundations, you can’t learn anything else. There are also critical periods: if a child doesn’t learn some things at the right time, that can’t be made up later.
The story of Father Christmas conveys a deep message: you are at home in the world and you are loved. It wouldn’t be a good way to communicate that to an 18-year-old, and an 18-year-old who doesn’t have that deep knowledge needs more serious help than a story about a man in a red coat.
Now this is obviously also related to insular subcultures, which take pains to bring up their children within the culture. The New Atheist critique was that misleading young people in this way was manipulative or abusive. I always thought this got things the wrong way round. If you are brought up in a religion as child, you can always reject it. But if you are not brought up in one, it will be much harder to come into it. Why should that be? I don’t know, but perhaps Matthew 18:3 has something to do with it: “except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
Cultural Christianity, biblical literalism
Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted to Christianity:
Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: … the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism…; and the viral spread of woke ideology…. But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”.
This caused a small furore about “cultural Christianity”. I don’t know about Ayaan Ali’s personal beliefs, but yeah I mean cultural Christianity is an obviously phony idea and the whole debate strongly reminds me of this about communitarianism from an old issue of Prospect Magazine:
A tutor turns to a graduate student “So, Simone, what is this about you being a Catholic? Do you really believe that stuff?” Before the student has time to speak, I, a new boy, eager to make an impression, jump in. “What Simone means is that her parents are Catholic, and in calling herself a Catholic, she is laying claim to a tradition that is constitutive of who she is.” “No,” said Simone, matter-of-factly, “that is not right. I believe God became Jesus Christ, who died for our sins.”
If you’re a cultural Christian, then first you’re not really a Christian, and second, you don’t understand Christian culture, not least because of the foundational texts: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” and “There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel’s, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time.” Christianity is a belief system, not a set of hand-me-down traditions, and the best way to think about Christian Europe in say the Middle Ages is not as a “culture” but as a place which is hugely influenced by an absolutely radical movement.
It does not work out well for belief systems which start to lean on traditionalism as a support. Here is Symmachus’ Third Relatio, around 400 AD, pleading for the Vestal Virgins to remain subsidised by the state:
For each one has his own custom, his own religious rites…. For when no conclusion can be reached by reason, from what better source than from the memory and evidence of prosperity does the knowledge of the gods come? If a long time gives authority to religion, its reliability should be preserved because of its antiquity, and we ought to follow our parents, who happily followed theirs.
These sacred rites drove Hannibal from our walls and the Sennones from the capitol…. change for old age is slow and full of reproaches. Therefore we ask safety for the gods of our fathers and our deified heroes.
The plea is touching. But if you are following a religion because it was that of your parents — or still more, for a weird kind of reason of state — then you are not really following it at all, and people will realize.
The opposite danger is of fundamentalism. There are two problems with being, say, a Young Earth Creationist. One possibility is just that you are dumb and do not understand the science behind the true age of the earth. The other possibility, if you have some smarts and intellectual honesty, is that you start making excuses for your “literal” belief. You end up believing the Bible literally, but using the word “belief” metaphorically.
This criticism does not just apply to the American Bible Belt. From my superficial enquiries, a lot of Church of England personnel seem to take a position where:
The Old Testament stories about Adam and Noah and so forth are spiritually true, but they aren’t literally true: there wasn’t a talking snake in the Garden of Eden. But:
The Gospel narratives and especially the story of the Resurrection are literally true.
This seems like a half-way house and not very sensible or consistent. If you don’t believe the world was literally flooded and Noah floated an ark with all the animals two by two, then you probably should be sceptical of Jesus turning water into wine or raising the dead. There ought to be a middle way between literally believing miracle stories of long ago, and treating your religion like a badge of identity or a charming olde-worlde ritual. Personally I find that middle way attractive, because I don’t believe much in the loaves and fishes or the Resurrection or heaven, but I do believe I am a sinner in need of redemption. (It helps that I find it quite easy to believe in God, mostly from fine-tuning arguments.) And on the other hand, I will give this much to tradition and upbringing: I don’t find it appealing to become a modern Stoic or found my own cult.1
Oh, in praise of the spiritual truth of the Old Testament, it seems pretty cool that the first Genesis story warns us of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and in 2023 the most intellectual modern discourse is worrying whether our advancing knowledge is going to kill us.
On Geert Wilders
Also about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, this is good from Nick Cohen:
Hirsi Ali and Markus say that they do not personally support Wilders’ calls to ban the Quran, which is jolly nice of them. But what do they and their friends want instead? Here are policy options that would match their rhetoric.
A Trump style travel ban on asylum seekers and migrants from Muslim countries
A ban on all asylum seekers
An end to freedom of movement within the EU to stop Muslims and migrants from one country moving to a far-right country.
A sustained police effort to find and deport illegal immigrants?
The deportation of all Muslim foreign nationals
…
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Markus either cannot or dare not answer the most basic question in politics: what is to be done?
But I think a reasonable retort might be “OK, Nick, you are also worried about Islam and antisemitism, what do you think should be done?”
The case for being worried about Islam and antisemitism is pretty simple: there are four million Muslims in the UK, up by a million in a decade. About 1 in 4 “dream of Britain becoming an Islamic state”. Almost half think 9/11 was an inside job. About one third think “Jews have too much power in Britain”, and about a quarter think people hate Jews because of the way Jews behave”. There is antisemitic preaching in mosques up and down the land. And Muslims vote, and political parties eventually follow their electorates.
The suggestion from the British Board of Deputies, quoted in the linked JC article, is that Jews need to “redouble our efforts in the field of interfaith work and education”. How’s that working out so far?
I myself don’t know any very good answers, but I suspect these questions are pressing British Jews more than they did three months ago. This tweet by Matt Goodwin was on the money. And I keep thinking of the David Frum quote: “If liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do.”
Switching locations but on the same topic, Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell’s Wretched Refuse? uses Israel itself — in particular the sudden arrival of ex-Soviet Jewish immigrants in the 1990s — as a test case for the fear that mass immigration can have bad political consequences. The book argues that in fact they didn’t. But if ex-Soviet immigrants were instrumental in keeping Netanyahu in power, I am not sure that argument still holds up.2
Links and quotes
Difficulties of an entrepôt. File under “problems of success”, I think.
A brief history of infanticide.
An early sceptic of world government. “If only it were possible that all the inhabitants of Asia, Europe, and Libya, Greeks and Barbarians, all to the uttermost ends of the earth, were to come under one law! but any one who thinks this possible, knows nothing.” — Celsus, quoted by Origen Contra Celsus.
Montaigne on bad arguments. “Voire mais, que fera-t-il si on le presse de la subtilité sophistique de quelque syllogisme: le jambon fait boire, le boire désaltère, par quoi le jambon désaltère? Qu’il s’en moque. Il est plus subtil de s'en moquer que d’y répondre.” “What if someone urges on you the sophistic subtlety of some syllogism like ‘meat makes you drink, drink is thirst-quenching, so meat is thirst-quenching’? Then laugh at it. Laughing at it is cleverer than answering.”
If you enjoyed this, you might like my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon, and you can read more about it here.
I also write Lapwing, a more intimate newsletter about my family history.
Crazy but interesting book. I found those guys quoted me, by the way, to my great surprise.
The book deserves a fuller treatment, which might happen next year.