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Saturday, November 24th, 2007
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3:40 pm - Excavating a path to hell...child by holy child
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I finally watched Jesus Camp yesterday, what I can only describe as a first class mental rape of children. In a summer camp in North Dakota, Pentacostal minister Becky Fisher uses the most devoutly impeccable internal logic to indoctrinate children with fundamentalist religion. The children become 9-year-old preachers, bless and converse with a cutout of George Bush, learn about the sanctity of life from a growling demagogue-like preacher, sing songs about Jesus and life in front of the Supreme Court in the middle of a freezing day in Washington D.C., and writhe on the floor and cry profusely when they pray to Christ. They induct themselves into the Army of Christ, worship the Christian Flag along with the US flag, and of course make fun of evolution. They are mentored by the growling pro-life preacher, combative overweight Becky Fisher and creepy pastor Ted Haggard (who is now "using tools to embrace his heterosexual side").
But who are the biggest culprits here? Not the children certainly. And not really Becky Fisher, kooky as she may be. The real culprits are the parents, who home-school their children and indoctrinate them with religion, rally them against science and evolution and fill their minds with intolerance against homosexuality and abortion. Richard Dawkins says that bringing up a child in a particular religion when they can't think for themselves and decide is tantamount to child abuse. This is child molestation and exploitation of the worst kind.
I would not be writing about Jesus Camp if it simply indicated a small misguided cult of people who mentally abuse kids and revel in bigotry every summer. As everyone who reads this blog knows, the opinions of this cult to a large extent reflect those of 40 million evangelicals in the United States who can swing the election and change the face of this country possibly forever. They can, and they are changing it.
What can secularists do against such indoctrination? Secularism and atheism by their very nature don't indoctrinate. I attended a megachurch last Sunday on the insistence of my friend. It was in an upper-class part of town. Almost all the cars in the parking lot were BMWs, Mercedes and Lexuses. The church must be getting millions from these wealthy patrons. I found the experience interesting, and a tad unsettling to say the least. The church essentially was a huge auditorium with a seating capacity of 3000. One could tell that the hall was overfilled, since people were standing at the back. The entire one hour service was one big rock concert. The preachers were dressed in leather jackets, the orchestration and production and choreography of the event was superb and slick. It was like attending a Broadway show for free; who wouldn't like it? The huge stage was flanked by two equally huge high-def TV screens, where images of the performers were interspersed with images of crosses, Jesus and rivers and valleys. The music was loud and the strobe lighting was unnerving and enveloped you with that kind of surreal miasma that you experience in a disco. At one point, there was a baptism in which a young starry-eyed woman was dipped into a tank of shimmering water. There were some very clever special effects, with an uncannily real-looking image of the pastor projected at one point on the stage; after a while, the real human being walked out from behind the screen and had a conversation with his virtual counterpart. I could not but help think of the mass hysterical atmosphere manufactured in public gatherings that puts the audience into a kind of stupor in which they will all believe improbable things encouraged by thousands of others believing them. As Oscar Wilde said, religion is essentially that set of opinions which survives.
Clearly, this was religious marketing at its best, designed to attract, groom and enrapture the next generation of young religious people. Religion in the US is as much a part of the free market economy as women's hair products. What can secularists do to fight such indoctrination? It's simply too overwhelming in its sights and sounds. As I mentioned before, secularists are not going to have such indoctrination of their own, where they try to preach their ideas as if they were a religion.
I don't know the answer to this question and I even doubt if anything can be done at all; this reinforces what we can all see as an increasing downward spiral of this country into ignorance fuelled by the consummate marriage of religion and politics. But one answer lurked surprisingly in that disturbing movie Jesus Camp. The movie has all these activities at the camp interspersed with a Christian radio commentator who is extremely pained and disturbed by what he sees as the corruption and radicalised politicising of religion. He implores Becky Fisher in an interview to reconsider the fundamentalist nature of her activities. Naturally, she does not back down.
But I realised that it is people like him that secularists want on their side. And this is one of the problems that I see with the kind of outspoken atheism that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens espouse. It's not a question of whether they are right or wrong. Of course they are, and it's really great that they wrote these books. The question is whether theirs is the most practical approach. If their writings serve to mobilise people who are on the fence and "almost" atheists, well and good, and I don't doubt they will. But it won't be in our best interests to alienate moderate Christians who think evangelical Christianity is corrupting their faith. We need them on our side for a very simple reason; they are the ones who can fight the extremists on their own turf. They can quote from scripture. They can lament that Jesus Christ would have sternly disapproved of the extremists' methods and scold them. The extremists are much more likely if at all to listen to these moderate Christians. We do absolutely need people like Dawkins and Hitchens. But we also need more moderate secularists who can befriend moderate Christians, even if they don't agree with their faith.
However, no matter what happens in the future, the current scenario is depressing by any standards. The fact that the kind of extremism depicted in Jesus Camp is embraced by enough religious people to be taken seriously itself says everything. I always think that two factors are going to lead to this country's downfall when it comes; the marriage of politics and fundamentalist religion, and the indifference to growing environmental problems. I only ponder which one of the two factors is more important and I have to say that these days I find the former one much more plausible, although I am sure my opinion will oscillate. We can all hope that none of these factors lead to the demise of America. But none of us currently have good reason to think otherwise. Jesus Camp simply fortifies such a belief.
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| Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
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7:27 pm - Fears and prospects at climate change dinners
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Over the last two semesters, I attended four dinners on climate change and policy organised by our university, with the last one held yesterday. The speakers were quite stimulating and focused on different aspects of the issue; beginnning with the science, the psychology of inertia against climate change, the health impacts of climate change including those on mental health, the legal issues involved in climate change legislation, the thrust by (a frustratingly low number of) corporations towards sustainable technologies, and the possible uniting of people of faith and those who do not have religious faith in fighting climate change as a common cause. There was also a session on alternative technologies. The participants were all lively, articulate and intelligent and it was fun and informative to meet such a diverse group. And of course the food was delicious, in spite of being organic...
Especially thought-provoking were the speakers who focused on health effects, analysed human psychology, and the mingling of faith and lack of faith in fighting climate change. It was argued by a psychologist that our preoccupation with "more" is more a function of a desire to boost our status and one-up our neighbor than to achieve self-satisfaction. In fact self-satisfaction never comes because there is always "more" to be had. People usually acquire more not because they want more, but because they want more than their neighbor has. After discussing this point, one interesting conclusion was that if we could make being green cool and sexy and status-building, then people could automatically strive to become green as a status symbol. Arnold Schwarznegger is right when he says that the problem with the environmental movement is that it lacks sex appeal. Instead of thinking "Having a Lexus makes me look sexy and high-status", what if people start thinking "I am green. I drive a hybrid. I use low wattage fluorescent lightbulbs. My carbon footprint is lesser than my neighbors'. Isn't that really cool and sexy?". Admittedly if such a sea change in social attitude takes place, then people could indeed become greener, if still for selfish and egocentric reasons. This certainly sounds encouraging, but first of all it should not be just another fad that dies down after a few years. Secondly, we don't have too much time to ponder the implementation of such social experiments.
The speaker who talked about health effects was Dr. Howard Frumkin. He works for the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) which is the nation's main public health organisation and action platform. One interesting thing which I was not aware of was that the CDC now has started including climate change experts among its officials. And why not. After all, if climate change can have massive and widespread health effects, it is an urgent public health matter. In fact, the public health effects of climate change are already visible as millions are affected because of droughts (Georgia: check) and food shortages, hurricanes and uneven rainfall. Probably the effects because of heat waves will be the most pernicious. But the public health effects of climate change go farther; these events can also lead to wars and conflict, mental attrition leading to huge productivity losses, and loss of goodwill everywhere. Indeed, the current conflict in Darfur has been called by some as the first climate-change induced conflict. The ethnic cleansing in Rwanda has also been cited by Jared Diamond as being partly due to scarce resource allocation. There are no easy solutions to combat these effects. But cooperation is going to be a big part of any efforts. The speaker stressed the idea of co-benefits; how having a "buddy system" during a heat wave for example enables people to help themselves by helping others, save energy, and most importantly, build social capital, a key aspect of any collective action against climate change. In the end, the idea of co-benefits was exemplified by the simple photo of a 1950s mom walking her children to school. There are so many benefits inherent in such a simple action; getting exercise, reducing carbon footprints, preventing depression, ecnouraging greenery in your neighbourhood, and building social capital by interacting with people. The talk was very inspiring, and it's pretty obvious that public health effects of climate change are going to be tremendous, and sticking together is going to be a key part of survival and progress.
The speaker who talked about how people of faith and otherwise can merge together in this common cause was also very thought-provoking. I think it makes sense; as much as I know evolution is true, I would be quite ready to shake the hand of a young earth creationist if he or she thinks that conserving our planet is dictated by his or her faith. After all the basic point is compelling; even if we differ on how we got here, as long as we can agree that saving what we have is of overarching importance, we can leave aside our differences and work together to fight this planetary crisis. As much as I dislike religious faith, nobody can disagree that even now it is one of the most potent forces for rallying people together for a common cause. Famed biologist and humanist Edward Wilson has made this point clearly in his wonderful book "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth"; saving the planet can likely be the most powerful common theme ever for bringing every kind of faithful and those without faith together. This is a clarion call to those with faith; this issue is more urgent and important than any one of those issues on the political stage which you see as being important to your faith right now. And it can very well be the only issue that will decide your very fate, but which also can unite everyone.
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7:26 pm - Dinesh D'Souza, welcome to our turf
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Religious people have always shot themselves in the foot by trying to find "scientific" justifications and explanations for their beliefs. It would seem that after so many rebuttals to creation "science", one would have seen stern rebukes being expressed by religious people themselves against their "science oriented" brethren. The best way for religion to get itself into trouble is to expose itself to scientific analysis. But no, it seems that there is no dearth of favour-seeking servile religious loons who want to keep on promoting "scientific" explanations for their beliefs. Here's the latest one, Dinesh D'Souza who says"Our mistake has always been to resort to the Bible when debating atheists...what we need to do is fight them on their own turf, by invoking science and reason" The Lord hath delivered them into our hands indeed. And for a moment, let me say this not as a scientist but by stepping into the shoes of a devout religious person; D'Souza, you are making a big and serious mistake here. Once you enter scientific territory, you are going to open up yourself to every possible broadside and blow that you had never asked for. In addition, if I were a religious person, I would be extremely insulted that religion has to use science to justify itself. Not only is this manuever a fatal one, it is also condescending to faith. For what would faith be if it takes the help of reason to justify its existence? D'Souza is putting the wrong foot forward, and we can all now watch while he is chewed up with alacrity by those who have used reason only to defend science.
How cheerfully the atheist seems to grin
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little religios in,
With gently smiling jaws...
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| Thursday, November 8th, 2007
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2:01 pm - Why I have scant patience with postmodernists
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This echoes my sentiments perfectly:"There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out."- Noam Chomsky Postmodernists positively irk me (like they did a few days ago) when they contend that science is "just another way of knowing the world" and that other ways of "knowing" the world have equal validity. For them scientific truth holds no overwhelming importance, because it is as much a product of culture as anything else.
Fine, I say. Next time you get a bacterial infection, don't take antibiotics because they constitute just one particular approach of looking at the world advocated by one particular school of thought. After all, the fact that antibiotics kill bacteria does not constitute "truth", right? Instead, just pray, or visit shamans, or rub lotion all over your body.
See you later if you stay alive.
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| Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
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5:10 pm - As bad as it gets: a debate with two surprisingly creationist gentlemen
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| Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
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1:05 pm - The Indo-US nuclear deal and India's nuclear deterrent
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Even if the Indo-US nuclear deal is failing, it should not mean India's nuclear power generation should also instantly fail. We could have a robust power generation capability for at least a few years more, but only if we don't divert uranium into weapons building. We already have a minimum credible deterrent, and any such further activity will undermine our electricity generation and possibly engender insecurity and instability in an important part of the world...
Read the rest of the entry on Desipundit...
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| Monday, November 5th, 2007
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2:01 pm - The Traffic Light
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Part of the reason I made the trip to London in September was a single goal; to stand at a particular traffic light near the British Museum and take a photo of myself standing there. Later when I told people about the reason, most thought it was silly, and perhaps it was. But all of us have a romanticised impression of certain people, places and events in our mind which other people could find silly. In this particular case, the person, place and event involved were profound even if little known to the general public. In fact this light was so important for me that I had made up my mind to visit London once in my lifetime for the sole purpose of standing at the light, if not for anything else. What was so special about this traffic light?
It was 1933. Adolf Hitler had come to power in January, The Depression was raging and the future looked bleak to many. On the morning of September 12, 1933, on a miserable, wet, quintessentially English autumn day, at the intersection where Russell Square meets Southampton Row, Leó Szilárd waited irritably at a traffic light waiting for it to change from red to green. He had just attended a lecture by the great English physicist Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford, known to many as the father of nuclear physics, was discussing the newly prophesied release of energy from atoms, most notably by science-fiction pioneer H G Wells in his book The World Set Free. In his baritone voice, Rutherford, acknowledged master of the atomic domain, dismissed this fanciful idea as nonsense. Any thought of releasing the energy locked in atoms, he said, was "moonshine".
Szilárd was irritated by this flippant repudiation. Accomplished as he was, how could even the great Lord Rutherford know what the future held in store? Szilárd, peripatetic Hungarian genius, imperious habitué of hotel lobbies, soothsayer without peer among scientists, had himself thought deeply about nuclear matters before, most often during his extended morning bathtub ablutions. Now waiting for the light to change, Szilárd pondered Rutherford's words...I will let the acclaimed nuclear historian Richard Rhodes do the talking here. It was the riveting description of this event in Rhodes's magnificent book that engraved it in my mind like nothing else:"In london, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museul in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come" Time cracked open indeed. What Szilard realised as he stepped off that curb, was that if we found an element that when bombarded by one neutron would release two neutrons, it could lead to a chain reaction that could possibly release vast amounts of energy. Leo Szilárd had discovered the nuclear chain reaction before anyone else, six years before the discovery of nuclear fission and any inkling that anyone could have had about the release of atomic energy, let alone the woeful apocalyptic future that would await the world because of its release.
I first read Rhodes's book in 2000. The book begins with this story. The description is so riveting, the tale so profound and evocative, the person so singular and the implications so prophetic, that I resolved to visit Szilárd's traffic light, my traffic light, even if I had to once make a trip to London for just that. Since then, the event has been etched in my mind like words in red hot steel. Seven years later I got a chance.
The traffic light itself is completely non-descript, standing among dozens of other non-descript lights. We almost missed it; as I mused aloud about my great disappointment to my friend in a cafe and wished I had a map, a Spanish tourist sitting at the next table saved my life and procured one. The intersection was there. We had missed it by a block. Back we went and indeed there it was, with not an indication that a famous and prophetic physicist had seen into the future at that light some 75 years ago.
As it turned out at the time, Szilárd's choice for the element he was thinking about turned out to be wrong. Nuclear fission would be discovered only six years later in Germany after a series of close misses in Italy and France. But Leo Szilárd went down in history as the man who saw death before anyone else, a glimpse into mankind's Faustian pact with fate, the shape of things to come.
Ironically, when the first atomic bomb test was conducted in the New Mexico desert in the deathly stillness of the morning, in the midst of war and hope, the flash was so bright that it would have been seen reflected off the moon. It was, literally, "moonshine". The rest was history.
But I lived one of my dreams that day at that traffic light in London. Szilárd's traffic light. My traffic light.
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| Friday, November 2nd, 2007
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2:38 pm - A chat with Nobel laureate Peter Agre
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| Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
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7:10 pm - Unclear? No, it's nuclear
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Nuclear energy promises to be the safest, most efficient and reliable source of energy in the fight against carbon-emissions and climate change. Yet there is deep-rooted opposition to it in the minds of the public and policy makers, mainly based on a dissonance between beliefs and reality. It is important for the public to transcend gut reactions, political pandering and partisanship and have balanced and sound knowledge of this very important energy source...
...Read the rest of the entry on Desipundit...
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| Monday, October 29th, 2007
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6:43 pm - Religion poisons everything
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Religion poisons everything. The Tehelka expose makes it clear. Because of course justifiably pointing the finger towards the Hindus is not going to solve the problem here, because they can point the finger at the Muslims in the 1992 Mumbai riots, and then the Muslims can point the finger….
It’s the same thing that goes on everywhere where there’s religious conflict, the most glaring example being Israel and Palestine, where each side can point to some historical wrong that the other side indulged in. Only religion can invoke a two thousand year old vendetta that justifies more killing. Even if the guilty are brought to justice, it’s not going to end because in every conflict, one religious faction always ends up causing more relative misery to the other after which that slighted faction now claims the rights to bludgeon the first faction...and so it goes on ad infinitum.
As always, religion poisons everything.
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| Sunday, October 28th, 2007
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4:14 pm - A romp through some "atheist literature"
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As I have mentioned before, I highly disapprove of the phrase "atheist literature", because it makes it sound like just another politically fashinable school of thought that advocates its own beliefs which have nothing necessarily to do with reality. In any case, I thought I would summarise some of the books from this "genre" that I have read in the past one year. I would heartily recommend every one of them, for different aspects.
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason- Sam Harris If you want to read only one book related to faith and atheism, read this one. There is no other book that I have read which so clearly and eloquently illustrates the fundamental nature and problems with faith as an instrument for enforcing ignorance, bigotry and clan mentality. Religious faith is the most pernicious kind, but Harris nails the bizarre nature of all kinds of dogmatic faith, that makes religious people believe in things they otherwise would never believe without evidence. Religious faith causes a strange and instant mental severing from reality that has been approved in society. Harris also talks about why "religious tolerance" is a utopian myth and how religion by its very nature cannot really be "tolerant" in the true sense of the word; on the other hand, Harris also makes it clear that some religions are more rigid than others and needless to say he focuses on Islam as one of the most rigid ones. In future chapters, Harris also distinguishes between religion and spirituality, the latter being open-minded while the former is essentially close-minded faith without evidence and further questioning. Harris is trained in neuroscience and explores psychological aspects of faith not found in other volumes. This is a fantastic book, one which is astonishingly insightful and revealing about the basic nature of faith.
The God Delusion- Richard Dawkins Ah, the book which everyone has been talking about. Nobody can say it as well as the British, and even among the British Richard Dawkins is a unique pugilist. All his arguments about religion are highly entertaining and spot on. Especially his point about how religious indoctrination of children is tantamount to child abuse is profoundly worth pondering. He also explores possible evolutionary bases for religion and faith. While I agreed with essentially everything he said, his style may put off some people who are on the fence. But for "closet atheists", it would be a great initiation.
God: The Failed Hypothesis- Victor Stenger This is clearly a book written by a scientist. Stenger who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii treats God as a scientific hypothesis. He then thoughtfully and carefully sifts throught the evidence and without rhetoric, comes up with the conclusion that even giving people who believe in God the benefit of doubt does not prove their basic belief in a supernatural deity. This is an important point; God enters the turf of scientists and scientific investigations only when religious people invoke him to interfere in people's daily lives, cause miracles and heal the sick and wreak destruction by way of natural disasters on people who harbour homosexuals, atheists and liberals. Stenger's book is a gentle but no-nonsense scientific exposition on God, and was written because religious people seem to invite such books by believing in an interventionist God.
God is Not Great- Christopher Hitchens Clearly the most delightful book of the lot! His words and scalding criticism are nothing less than delicious. As a reviewer once said, Hitchens is a national treasure and no atheist including Dawkins entertains us so much when debating with a bunch of daft conservatives or religious people. Hitchens does not give a whit about feelings, and his courteous insults are nothing less than hysterically laughter-provoking. Hitchens is oblivious to the expected insults hurled back at him and is always ready with a terrific rejoinder. Nobody I have seen has stood up to his gentlemen's slander, and few have the linguistic capability to do so. Hitchens also explores the social and political aspects of religious faith better than any other author. For him, Jerry Falwell was a "little toad" who would "pinch his chubby flanks everyday and chuckle at how he fooled people yet again". Simply priceless. Thank God for Christopher Hitchens.
Letter to a Christian Nation- Sam Harris Another gem from Sam Harris. In this slim volume, Harris explores the problems with the Christian religious right, and through sound and rational reasoning convinces us that all these pious individuals who for instance argue against abortion and stem-cell research, want to have nothing to do with actually alleviating suffering and misery. With their rants against stem-cell research, they actually consign the life of the countless stricken with serious diseases like Parkinson's to an early grave and much misery, while with their mindless railings against abortion, they deliver a life of suffering to millions of slighted women and their unwanted children. If there's any evidence of religion causing immense harm, it's right here in these two instances involving the Christian right. An eloquent and riveting little book.
Finding Darwin's God- Kenneth Miller This is not per se a book about atheism; in fact it is by a Christian who goes to church every Sunday. But Ken Miller is an unusual Christian who has testified against other Christians' beliefs in landmark court cases, including the famous Dover case of 2005. He is a biologist and one of the foremost opponents of intelligent design (ID) and I cite his book because it is the clearest and most devastating rebuttal of ID and defence of evolution that I have come across. The second part of the book involves Miller trying to convince us that faith and science are compatible and while he makes a few good points, he lost me there. But the book is worth reading for the first part alone, where Miller single-handedly demolishes all the pseudosceintific advocates of ID like William Dembski and- always great to hear from him- Michael Behe.
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| Friday, October 26th, 2007
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10:56 am - Is is about freedom of speech...and also kind of silly
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David Horowitz is a bonafide right-wing philosopher and political writer who is well-known for his opposition to ideas which he does not like. Who else can write a book endorsed by Pat Robertson named "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" and also "How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas", that seems to be straight from an Orwellian world to me. He was at Emory University yesterday to give a talk. Unfortunately I was not aware of this and did not go. But what happened apparently was that a group of students protested loudly even before his talk began and in fact did not allow him to speak at all. The incident was covered- surprise- by Fox News among others.
This is sort of silly, and I have reiterated this point about Ahmadinejad at Columbia too. Either you invite someone and allow them to talk, or do you don't invite them. But inviting them and then prohibiting them to speak at all is conduct unbecoming of those who epitomise themselves as the lofty upholders of democratic ideals. Just kidding. It's just plainly silly. I don't think there was anything wrong in protesting Horowitz; I dislike him as much as any of critics. But now that you have had your chance, allow the man to speak. Let freedom of speech be two way (even if perhaps 80:20...). Isn't free speech about allowing precisely those people whom we despise, to express their views? Heavens of heavens, I am with Bill O'Reilly on this one (although for very different reasons naturally)
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| Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
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7:04 pm - Please don't kill the message
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| Monday, October 22nd, 2007
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1:33 pm - Don't squelch eccentricity
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Distinguished scientists including Edward O. Wilson (who for the record despised Watson before) and Richard Dawkins are now coming to James Watson's support. I suspect that the gut reaction that surfaced right after he made his statements obscured any kind of objective reasoning and patient analysis, as often happens with such socially explosive issues. Nobody can say that he had every justification for saying what he did, but more are now rallying to his side and denouncing his dismissal from Cold Spring Harbor and the cancellation of his lecture at the Science Museum. I have already stated my opinion in the last post; while the lecture cancellation was probably more aimed by the Science Museum at avoiding bad press, his dismissal from Cold Spring was unwarranted. One interesting point of view says that he in fact should have been allowed to appear at the Museum and quizzed in detail about his statements.
Robin McKie in the Guardian reports:"In the end, Watson decided to return home, so no meetings occurred, a move that has dismayed many scientists who believed that it was vital Watson confront his critics and his public. 'What is ethically wrong is the hounding, by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant "thought police", of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe out of the laboratory that he has devoted much of his life to, building up a world-class reputation,' said Richard Dawkins, who been due to conduct a public interview with Watson this week in Oxford.
Nor is it at all clear that Watson is a racist, a point stressed last week by the Pulitzer-winning biologist E O Wilson, of Harvard University. In his autobiography, Naturalist, Wilson originally described Watson, fresh from his Nobel success, arriving at Harvard's biology department and 'radiating contempt' for the rest of the staff. He was 'the most unpleasant human being I had ever met,' Wilson recalled. 'Having risen to fame at an early age, [he] became the Caligula of biology. He was given licence to say anything that came into his mind and expected to be taken seriously. And unfortunately he did so, with casual and brutal offhandedness.'
That is a fairly grim description, to say the least. However, there is a twist. There has been a rapprochement. 'We have become firm friends,' Wilson told The Observer last week. 'Today we are the two grand old men of biology in America and get on really well. I certainly don't see him as a Caligula figure any more. I have come to see him as a very intelligent, straight, honest individual. Of course, he would never get a job as a diplomat in the State Department. He is just too outspoken. But one thing I am absolutely sure of is that he is not a racist. I am shocked at what has happened to him.' I especially find Wilson's remarks revealing, because Wilson has always been known to be a compassionate, fair and objective scientist who would be loathe to offer unabashed support for pet ideas and people. I have read several of his books and never have found him to be biased or narrow-minded. I think that him saying something like this about Watson, a man who was his bete noir for years, surely says something. And Wilson's depiction of himself and Watson as the two grand old men of American biology is quite accurate. The two grand men made a rare appearance on Charlie Rose quite recently.
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2:39 am - How rational thinking led to insanity
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Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
By Richard Rhodes
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007
Richard Rhodes is perhaps the foremost nuclear historian of our time. His past two books (among many others on extremely varied subjects) on the making of the atomic and hydrogen bombs are landmark historical studies. But as readers of those books would know, they were much more than nuclear histories. They were riveting epic chronicles of war and peace, science and politics in the twentieth century and human nature. In both books, Rhodes discussed in detail other issues, such as the Soviet bomb effort and Soviet espionage in the US.
In this book which can be considered the third installment in his nuclear histories (a fourth and final one is also due), Rhodes takes a step further and covers the arms race from the 1950s onwards. He essentially proceeds where he left off, and discusses the maddening arms buildups of the 60s, 70s and 80s. One of the questions our future generations are going to ask is; why do we have such a monstrous legacy of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the earth many times over? The answer cannot be deterrence because much fewer would have sufficed for that. How did we inherit this evil of our times?
Much of the book is devoted to answering this question, and the answer is complex. It involves a combination of paranoia generated by ignorance of what the other side was doing, but more importantly threat inflation engendered by hawks in government who used the Soviet threat as a political selling point in part to further their own aims and careers. It is also depressing to realise how in the 50s, when the Soviet atomic bomb programs were still relatively in their beginning stage and the US had already amassed an impressive fleet of weapons, opportunity was lost forever for negotiating peace and preventing the future nuclear arms debacle that we now are stuck with. Rhodes details a very interesting and disconcerting fact; every US president since Truman wanted to avoid nuclear war and was uncomfortable about nuclear weapons, yet every one of them had no qualms about increasing defense spending and encouraging the development of new and more powerful weapons. It was as if a perpetual motion wheel had been set in motion, oiled by paranoia and deep mistrust, not to mention the clever manipulation of ambitious Cold Warriors. In the 50s, hawks like Edward Teller influenced policy and exggerated the threat posed by the Soviets, when in fact Stalin never wanted any kind of war with the US.
Later, this role was taken up by people such as Paul Nitze who admittedly was the "father of threat inflation". His job and that of others was to exploit the uncertainty and fear and turn it into a potent force for justifying the arms race. Into the 60s and 70s, Nitze gathered around him a cohort of like-minded people who included today's neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. They wrote reports that tried to argue against detente, and advocated further and more powerful arms buildups. In the middle of this politicking, it seems a wonder that presidents could negotiate treaties such as the anti-ballistic missile treaty and the NPT. Reading accounts of these people and their clever spin-doctoring and manipulation of the threat, one cannot help but feel a sense of deja vu, since it's largely the same people who inflated the threat of WMDs in the Bush administration, as well as much else. What can we say but that public memory is unfortunately short-lived. Reading Rhodes's accounts gives us a glimpse of the birth of today's neocons, who have wrought so much destruction and led the country down the wrong path. Rhodes deftly recounts the workings of key officials in both governments, and how they influenced policy and reacted to that of the other side. He also has concurrent accounts of economic and military developments in the Soviet Union, and how channeling of funds towards defense spending created major problems for the country's growth and development.
However, the major focus of Rhodes's book concerns the two principal characters of the endgame of the Cold War and their lives and times; Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Rhodes paints a sensitive and insightful portrait of Gorbachev, as a man who was a reformist since the very beginning when he was a minister of agriculture. Rising to high positions from humble and trying beginnings, Gorbachev realised early on the looming menace of the arms race and its impact on his country's development. He tried sensibly to negotiate with Reagan's administration to cut back on nuclear arms. He could be compassionate and sympathetic, but also a very good politician. Rhodes's portrait of Reagan is less favourable, and Reagan appears to be a complex man who harbored complex and sometimes puzzling ambitions. On one hand, he was a man who wanted to abolish nuclear weapons and end the threat of nuclear war. On the other hand, he was a naive idealist who sometimes thought of himself in messianic terms, thinking that God had a special role for him in the Cold War. Rhodes rightly compares some of Reagan's thinking to religious thinking. Reagan quite bizarrely encouraged tremendous defense spending (more than the earlier three presidents combined) and massive and dangerous weapons developments and military exercises. Rhodes's account of the NATO military exercise named Able Archer in 1983 which almost spurred the Soviets to ready a nuclear strike speaks volumes about Reagan's belligerent policies, particularly strange given his "other side", which eschewed nuclear conflict. An intelligent but not particularly intellectually sophisticated president, Reagan liked to hear about policy more in the form of stories than reports, and because of his relatively poor and unsophisticated background in issues of national security had to depend on his advisors for insight into these issues.
These advisors, especially Richard Perle and others, persuaded Reagan to stall negotiations with the Soviets, whose main insistence was that that he give up his dreams of SDI or "Star Wars", a costly space-based weapons system that was clearly going to engender more animosity and arms buildups. This system was not just threatening and unnecessary, but would not have even been technically effective. Again, one cannot help but think of the Bush administration's flawed insistence on missile defense systems. Reagan refused to back down on this central point in negotiations with the Soviets in Geneva and Iceland, mainly advised by Perle and others. Egged on by false hopes of security through SDI, he squandered important opportunities for arms reduction. In the pantheon of presidents trying to reduce Cold War nuclear threats and curtail weapons development, Reagan is surely the biggest offender. However, it is also not fair to blame him completely; clearly his hawkish advisors played a key role in policy making, even while his more moderate advisors struggled to find a way out of the madness. Ronald Reagan was a complex character, and a comment by Gorbachev, if perhaps a little too critical, accurately captures his personality; Gorbachev once said that he would love Reagan as a dacha neighbor, but not as president of the US.
In the end, it was largely inevitability that ended the Cold War. In this context, Rhodes also dispels some myths about it. One of them, cleverly used by conservatives these days, is that it was Reagan who was the principal instrument in ending the Cold War. Rhodes makes it clear that it was Gorbachev who was instrumental. Allied with this myth is another one, that the US drove the Soviet Union into the ground essentially by bankrupting them, as if that somehow almost points to a clever strategic decision by Reagan to increase his own arms spending to induce the Soviets to increase theirs. But this myth is also not true. The Soviet Union carried the seeds of its downfall inside itself since the beginning, and the fruits of those seeds were beginning to show since the 1970s. Gorbachev recognised this, and it was largely the economic situation in his country and his own actions and realisation of the inevitability of affairs that ended the Cold War. Reagan in fact may have slightly prolonged the Cold War, and he certainly made it more dangerous towards the end with his idealistic visions of more security through wondrous weapons building. He also made negotiations much more difficult by constantly casting Soviet-US relations under the rubric of good and evil, piety and godlessness, and by smooth talking rhetoric and debate. Robert McNamara has said that our immense nuclear legacy arose from actions, every one of which seemed rational at the time, but which ultimately led to an insane result. Ronald Reagan is perhaps the epitome of a US president who had his own remarkable but largely flawed internal rational logic for justifying enormous nuclear arms accumulation.
Throughout the book, Rhodes's trademark style shines through; meticulous research that envelops the reader, remarkable attention to detail and internal logic, a novelist's sense of character development and the retelling of key events- such as his gripping account at the beginning of the book of the Chernobyl tragedy that exposed many of the Soviet Union's weaknesses and contradictions- and narration that instills in the reader a rousing sense of history and human nature. He gives sometimes minute-by-minute accounts of the deliberations and meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev. As in his other books, he liberally sprinkles all accounts with extended quotes and conversations between key participants, thus giving the reader a sense of being present at key moments in history. I have to say that this book, while very good, is not as engaging as his first two books, but it nonetheless is solid history and storytelling, and a chronicle of one of the important periods of the century, a period that influences the world to this day.
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| Sunday, October 21st, 2007
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7:04 pm - "Don't silence the scientists"
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Susan Blackmore's quips on Watson and academic freedom. Particularly sensible is this:Surely a society based on denying a possible truth is not a healthy one. If there are such differences we need to be absolutely clear that they do not mean that some groups are intrinsically inferior, superior, or more or less deserving. If it is true that children of different races, by and large and on average, differ in their abilities, then we need an education system that encourages and develops all those varied abilities rather than one narrowly and rigidly based on glorifying the particular kind of intelligence and academic achievement that comes more easily to the dominant group." I am not so sure that cancelling his lecture at the Science Museum was uncalled for; I see it more as an angry rap on the old man's hand. On the other hand, I now am agreeing that suspending him from his CSHL job does not serve much of a purpose, and reflects badly on respecting academic freedom. After all, institutions have been known to distance themselves from their employees, especially academic ones, and most people don't equate institutions' opinions with those of their employees. For example, should MIT fire Noam Chomsky because he has sometimes espoused what some have claimed as radical and bigoted views? Of course not, and here the issue clearly is about academic freedom. If Lehigh University can simply get away with putting a disclaimer on their site distancing themselves from Michael Behe (whose creationist leanings are much more crackpot than even Watson's, if not as offensive-sounding), then why can't CSHL?
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| Saturday, October 20th, 2007
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1:34 pm - Was Watson being intentionally racist?
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| Friday, October 19th, 2007
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10:48 am - More on James's games
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Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the flagship that James Watson took charge of and steered for more than 40 years, has now disowned him. I cannot but help feel sad at this development, not because it is unfair to Watson (what does he have to lose at this point really?) but simply because it had to end this way. Watson on his part has apologised and is said to be baffled at how people could react to his comments this way. Unfortunately this is not a valid apology. Again, even giving him the benefit of doubt, he of all people must have known that people most probably would take the comments the way they did. The comments would smack of racism to any reasonable thinking person.
Nigel Hawkes has a perceptive short commentary on race and intelligence. He makes the important point that while IQ differences indeed exist between people, they are first of all highly disputed and unreliable, and more importantly do not say anything about individual worth. There is a pretty big difference between simply acknowledging that differences in abilities do exist among individuals (which is a given) and attributing certain difference to entire peoples. Even scientifically proving that all Indians score less by 15 points than Japanese on some internationally accepted IQ test does not prove that I as a person won't be as "smart" in life as a Japanese person. When someone claims that all Africans have less IQ, it is as much a claim about individuals as it is about race, a contention that is totally unfounded. His last statements are especially noteworthy."All people deserve equal treatment. But that is not quite the same as saying they are all equal. The error comes in taking a group difference, which may or may not be real, and using it to judge the worth of individuals. That is racism."
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| Thursday, October 18th, 2007
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3:04 pm - When scientists get old and boring...
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| Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
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12:28 pm - D'Souza's atheist illusion
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Dinesh D'Souza is an Indian-born conservative in the US who has written best-selling books. Last night, he appeared on Fox news for an interview about his new book "What's so great about Christianity". This book promises to be entertaining as it purportedly provides "scientific" explanations for Christian theology and faith.
However, as D'Souza himself claims, the book is also supposed to be a rejoinder against what he sees as bestselling "atheist literature" by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris and most recently Christopher Hitchens.
I have not read D'Souza's book and don't think I want to read it (although I would love to read some critical reviews of it). But there is one criticism he heaped on atheists about which he is quite wrong. He quotes atheists' frequent assertions that while the worst murderers of history including Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin and Mao were atheists, they did not kill in the name of atheism, while religious bigots such as those participating in the crusades or more infamously the Inquisition killed in the name of religion. D'Souza seeks to demolish this viewpoint and calls it "ludicrous", particularly referring to Dawkins's book. He said that of course, it was the godlessness of the Communists that led them to these unspeakable crimes.
But D'Souza is clearly distorting the picture here. Consider the fact that most of the tens of millions of people killed by Stalin were simply not targeted because of their religious faith. What about the greater than one million people who Stalin's secret police (NKVD) targeted under the supervision of the human monster Lavrenti Beria? These included intellectuals such as scientists and teachers who were not religious. What about those millions whose farms were taken away and then collectivised, leaving them to starve to death? Most of these arrests and brutalities had nothing to do with religion, but were fuelled by deluded communist ideas of people working for the state. The same principle applies to the gigantic famine orchestrated by Mao.
On the other hand, while the Spanish Inquisition did not kill as many people as Hitler or Stalin (a point which D'Souza emphatically and constantly makes), there is no doubt that every single one of the Inquisition's victims was killed directly because of his differring faith, or who at least was labeled as such. The Inquisitors clearly classified their victims as Catholics and non-Catholics, just as fundamentalist Muslims classify all non-Muslims as infidels. They targeted these victims expressly because of their non-Catholicism. But Hitler and Mao, while they may have targeted some people because of their religion, did not target everybody only because of their "lack of atheism". There were myriad other factors responsible for their excesses.
Finally, and I am always amused by this, the cults of personality that these bigots established around themselves were no different from those around religious leaders, and social anthropologists may not find it too difficult to classify the two in the same tradition of blind faith. This, the "religion-like" ideology of Hitler and Mao if anything makes the case against religion even more pervasive.
D'Souza is not only on frail territory, but on non-existent one here.
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