Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Let us now read from the book of Holmes.
I will hazard a guess that it’s likely that many of the readers of UTI are fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Ever since I can remember, I loved the character, and suspect that his logical methods and view of the world were largely responsible for inculcating in me a desire to see things rationally, not magically. Now, I’m not a Doyle scholar, nor a member of any of the Holmes Societies, though I do own a collection of the entire series of stories and novels which I have read through several times and consider myself at least to have a passing knowledge of the character. Recently, (thanks to the miracle of Netflix) we’ve been working through the wonderful Granada Television adaptations featuring Jeremy Brett as Holmes from the 1980's. I consider his portrayal of Holmes as the best which has ever been done, and would heartily encourage anyone who isn’t familiar with the series to check it out at first opportunity.
Anyway, the character of Sherlock Holmes is one of the most familiar of all literature, known to billions around the world. And I believe that he has been a powerful ally for the forces of enlightenment, since he is widely respected as being representative of what education, observation, and logic can accomplish. As with me, he inspires people to learn more about their world and how to understand it.
Learning. One of the things which we too often take for granted. One of the most frustrating things about dealing with someone who has dementia, specifically Alzheimer’s, is that they are essentially incapable of learning. And until you are confronted with the reality of this, you will not realize just how essential a faculty the ability to learn is. Think about it for a moment: you expect that pretty much everyone in your life is capable of some degree of learning based on experience with the world around them, even if they are not able to read or write or even speak (sign) a language. Someone who tries something several times, say dropping a raw egg to see if it will bounce, will soon come to the conclusion that it will not, at least not given most floor surfaces and dropping the egg from a sufficient height. And, once learned, they will avoid dropping eggs (unintentionally), knowing that they can trust their repeated experiences to hold true thereafter. It’s almost a kind of scientific method in embryonic form. Even my dog will learn from repeated experiences how best to get a treat out of one of his toys, performing his own little experiments and drawing conclusions, and then stick with that strategy until it no longer holds true.
But for someone who is suffering from dementia, who is perhaps incapable of remembering from one experiment to the next, no such learning is possible. They will continue to perform the same experiment over and over, never learning. At best, they are caught in a web of previously learned behaviours, unable to change.
Being a care-giver for someone well into the arc of Alzheimer’s, I have to deal with this each and every day. My charge cannot understand that she can no longer stand up and walk on her own, that her balance is ruined by peripheral neuropathy, that she needs help to even move from a chair to her wheelchair. Even though her attempts to stand up and walk on her own in the recent past have lead to major injuries (broken hip, broken clavicle, stress fractures in her oseoporotic spine - all separate occasions), she has only the most vague understanding (and even this is sporadic) that she needs assistance. She only remembers the days when she could get up and walk on her own. Nothing recent impinges on that perception of the world. She no longer learns from experience. So, whenever we are not with her, we use a simple ‘seat belt’ with a plastic latch that she hasn’t figured out how to open (thereby putting her inability to learn to our benefit). And this is just one small example of dozens of such limitations with her which I confront daily.
Watching one of these behaviours play out today, it struck me that there is an insight to be gained into many aspects of human nature in this. We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, subject to our own inabilities to learn. As in The Matrix, we all suffer from certain assumptions about reality which are difficult to shrug off after a certain age. Or we have some obsessive/compulsive behaviour that makes us proceed with a specific act or action, even knowing that it is unnecessary or counterproductive.
Just one example from myself: while I know, intellectually, that my mother-in-law is incapable of learning anything new, I continue to expect her to be able to do so, since it is such a part of what I expect from even my pets. Yet my wife and I have to constantly remind one another that the disease makes it impossible for her to learn, and we’re not going to get her to change the behaviours or beliefs that she has, no matter what strategies we attempt. It is my own little blind spot.
And I think that this is a good lesson for all of us when dealing with people of faith. In many cases, we get frustrated at their seeming intractable adherence to a set of beliefs which are clearly, logically, unsupported by any evidence. No matter what we may try to do to change the mind of someone wedded to a religion, unless they are capable of learning - unless they are ready to change - our efforts are going to be fruitless.
This is a hard, and somewhat frightening, thing to accept. Hard, because we have the expectation that people can learn from experience, and experience should demonstrate to them just how false is their belief in a god or gods, even if they aren’t willing to look at the matter logically and, dare I say it, scientifically. Frightening, because it shows just how deep is the poison of magical thinking, and how difficult to change.
Sherlock Holmes was a superior investigator because he learned to really investigate the evidence, to fully observe, then to draw conclusions based on his observations logically rather than trying to fit the facts to a certain preconceived notion. He lived (well, in fiction) by the dictum that “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
Perhaps this is why some of my friends consider me to be agnostic rather than atheist - they know that I am always willing to keep an open mind about the possibilities, no matter how unlikely they may be. But as I always point out, keeping an open mind does not mean that I am willing to accept faith as a basis for understanding the universe, and that the simple term a-theistic means that I do not subscribe to theistic belief, however formulated.
I think it’s time to go read some more Sherlock...
Jim Downey
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Sherlock Holmes
Two of my favorite Doyle/Holmes sayings.
1. "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbably, must be the truth."
2. Holmes suggests to his Scotland Yard collegue that he, "consider the curious incident of the dog in the night." The official detective responds that, "the dog did nothing in the night." "That was the curious incident," replies Holmes (i.e. the dog didn't bark in the night).
I'm not a Holmesian..
but I am a fanatical fan of detective and mystery stories, for much the same reasons you give, that they taught me that problems are solved by thinking, reasoning, and, most of all evidence. I currently have over 2000 of them, and since I've lost four complete libraries in my life, I've probably read 10,000+ (Yes, I have a very high reading speed, and have been around a LOOONG time. I can even date the beginning of my interest to June 1956. I was ten years old, sick and staying home from Mass -- okay, I was a Catholic then, but it didn't last long -- and found a condensation of Rex Stout's BEFORE MIDNIGHT included in Sunday's NEWARK NEWS, which ran a condensed but about half full-length mystery in every Sunday. I was hooked.)
Wolfe has always been more attractive to me than Holmes. Almost all the classics gave me the 'mind over brawn' idea for solving the problems, and the stress on evidence. But Wolfe was both a proudly eccentric individualist -- and both he and Stout showed how this could be combined with being a Liberal Democrat because both were highly political -- and someone who had a strict code, combined of ethics, personal honor, ego, and respect for friendship, that would, as nothing else would, make him forego his eccentricities when necessary. (He would never leave his house on business, but when a close friend was killed he was willing to travel to Yugoslavia and Albania to solve the problem. He was the ultimate man of non-action, but during WWII, he started training and exercising to get himself into shape to go and kill Nazis, and Archie had to convince him he was more valuable doing what he did best.)
Besides, I shared his interest in books -- and almost every real book he is mentioned as reading is worth looking at -- and food -- though I wish he hadn't been as limited in his cuisine to French and Classic American. I would have loved to see what he and Fritz would have done if they'd met middle Eastern or Pakistani cooking, for example.
Of course the proud eccentric, the problem solver, is the model of the 'classic detective,' Poirot, Dr. Fell, Asey Mayo, Albert Campion, etc -- and it is not gone from today's field. (Andy Dalziel in Reginald Hill's series -- which are the best written and most interesting works in the field today -- certainly qualifies, and though his crudity hides his brains, he is as 'brilliant' as any classic tec.)
Interestingly...
Thanks for that perspective. Interestingly, I never really developed a taste for most traditional mystery/dective works (though a another book conservator friend turned me on to the Juohn Dunning 'Bookman' books...), and the one novel I have completed was essentially a mystery - albeit primarily set on/around Titan...
Perhaps I should revisit the genre, once I am back into a position of being able to focus attention on book-length works (the loss of that focus due to the demands of care-giving has been a surprise).
Thanks.
Jim Downey
"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Recommendation
If you're taking recommendations, look for books by George Chesbro, about a dwarf private detective named Mongo. Sounds gimmicky, but the stories are actually very good. "The Beasts of Valhalla" is one of his best, imho.
Those incapable of learning
Jim, after years of arguing with godders in Yahoo chat rooms, mainly for the practice in arguing the things I believed in, I concluded the same thing: Some people don't want even to hear anything that contradicts the stuff already in their heads, and so they CAN'T learn the reasonable, evidence-supported, scientific stuff.
I have a piece I want to write someday (but it's probably book-length and I don't know if I have it in me to get it all out on paper) that says these people are using a radically-different type of thinking than the rest of us. A type of thinking that really depends less on their individual rational capabilities and more on a sort of group-mind setup. In a way, it seems to me that there’s really no real “self” inside them – they’ve given over control of their minds to this group-think organism and are no longer capable of individual, independent thought.
One little data point for the idea is something I read just recently that during work on voting rights for the mentally ill, it was discovered that a large majority of those potential voters were staunch Bush backers. Though conservatives are not necessarily people of diminished mental capacity, it seems people with diminished capacity are natural conservatives.
Anyway, I’ve been saying for years that walking up to this line of battle and slugging it out with witless godders is not the best place to put our energies. Sure, a fight is colorful and noisy and exciting, but most times it’s not the best way to get what we want. They have more troops, more organizations, more money, more rage, more ruthlessness.
Instead, I think we should go full-bore at reaching the teachable – high school and college students. I’d like to see outreach, salesmanship, proselytizing (hell, why not tent-revival evangelizing?) toward reason, science, free-thought, and yes, atheism.
When’s the last time you saw a religious tract (or a join-the-army/navy/air force tract) sitting out where young people could come across it? Whether you noticed it or not, it was probably within the last day or so.
When’s the last time you saw a tract that overtly advocated reason? Or science? Or even (gasp!) atheism?
Never, I’ll bet.
We atheists are hamstrung by the persistent idea that “everybody has to get there on their own.” This is sheer bullshit, in my opinion, a rhetorical safety we’ve developed through millennia of fear for the power of godders to ... well, kill us.
It’s like saying you should just let a garden grow wild, and then be grateful for whatever edible plants grow there amid the noxious weeds.
But – news flash – the weeds are winning. Poisoning the garden. No kidding, they’re destroying science, and science education (AND scientific and medical research) in this country. They’re gaining ground.
I think it’s long past time to plant some seeds, kids. Long past time.
...
A little riff on that seed/garden analogy: Some seeds you plant will turn out to be weeds. Some will turn out to be marginal, neither weed nor fruit. But, if you plant seeds, fertilize and water them – and continue to wage war against the weeds – you’ll end up with a majority crop of succulent, friendly plants.
MANY MORE THAN YOU WOULD HAVE HAD than if you just cowered quietly indoors and just let the garden grow by itself.
Because to THEM, the godders throughout history, WE are the weeds.
Considering that there’s nothing in the evolution of the human brain that says we couldn’t have invented science 20,000 years ago, instead of a few hundred, I think they have been supremely efficient gardeners.
Really, isn’t it our turn?
Being "out".
Hank, I gotta agree. Only through offering the option of rational thought can we help others "to get there on their own". Just knocking heads with the already committed can be fun, but is likely not as productive as simply being "out" as an atheist to friends and family. Since I started doing that I have discovered several people who were questioning, and was able to at least let them know that they were not alone in that. Makes a world of difference.
Jim Downey
"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Coming out
My experience has been that when I've talked to young people, most of them are already about halfway there, and have an unspoken hunger to know that someone else is thinking the same kinds of thoughts, or has perfected those thoughts to their rational conclusions.
I've also gotten the feeling that even seriously goddy people get something new to think about when they talk to an actual atheist, and not the phony straw man atheist they're used to hearing about.
On a three hour flight recently, I ended up sitting with a woman who was a teacher at a Christian private school. Oh, boy, we talked! We agreed about a lot of stuff -- that Pat Robertson was an evil sonofabitch, for instance, but also that compassion was one of our greatest human traits -- and late in the flight I said "I'm a lot less evil than you'd expect, huh?" and she agreed in a surprised tone.
One of my goals as an atheist is not to get into fights, but to be vocal about atheism while serving as (hopefully) a good model for what an atheist can be. Regarding that, I like to talk about the power of reason, but also about the power of things like love and family and justice.
Re our turn to plant seeds
In an ideal world: Some nice philanthropists would fund a free thinker university or two. And private schools from preschool level thru highschool would take root and flourish in every town and city... with scientific method and free inquiry and a awareness of our connectivity with the universe/earth/plants/animals as their base.
Maybe some or these schools already exist?
they do
but they're rare, it's far too easy to make a school that treats its students as if they are all identical.
Also although I like the idea I feel it's as important (if not more so) to have such lessons in public schools, because not everybody can afford a private school.
My favorite types of mysteries are the kind I solve myself, I fell in love with Carmen Sandiego PC games early on. In school our teacher would let a bunch of us play the educational PC games, so we'd all work together on a case (one person would gather the clues in the game world while the others looked through the school's encyclopedias to figure out where Carmen had gone, it was so much fun). That school (New Horizons Montessori School) was very open-ended, you were encouraged to pursue whatever subject you were most interested in as long as you completed at least one lesson in each subject every day. Although there wasn't any particular religion we learned about Judism (one of the students was Jewish so we celebrated Hannakah with her as a class), Native American spiritualism (the teacher taught us to walk silently and to treat the planet as a second mother), and some miscillanious underrepresented religions. We were taken out on nature walks, and one time the teacher read to us from a Japanese child's autobiography of her experience living through the bombing of Hiroshima. We studied a paleontoligcal timeline of earth and put on a play of it too.
Outside the US.
I would expect that real universities outside the US are more likely to be along the lines of what you're talking about. And that may well be the reason why China will surpass us in the field of knowledge in the next generation or two.
Jim Downey
"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
not me
Never much of a fan of holms, I always found it too difficult to figure out the cases, especially where animals were involved, because Doyle's knowledge of animals is significantly outdated (if you read the Speckled Band now you'd never be able to guess the identity of the murder weapon because all of the clues point away from it). I've never really liked mystery novels so the only Holms I've read was in English.
What's really scary with creationists is I've been debating a 12 year old on another forum and he's just as intractable as an adult. With how flexible children are suppose to be that's scary. On the other hand if you challenge a child's view of the world you're insulting their parents, and children are programmed to follow their parents, so that would be kind of upsetting to one.
Is that?
Is that the discussion going on over at PZ's place? Interesting stuff. Keep fighting the good fight.
And you're right about the works being dated. But then, I have always enjoyed a bit of historical fiction, which gives the flavor of a certain time and place. That's one of the charms of the Granada TV series - they do a brilliant job of really capturing that period.
Jim Downey
"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Nope
Actually it's on an Animal Crossing related forum, so it's not a place that encourages either athiests or religious conservatives to gather (as a result I've observed a healthy mix of different religious backgrounds, some wiccans, some athiests, some radically christian and a whole bunch of moderate whatevers).
I can see why people with low IQs are more likely to be conservatives; from a practical standpoint if your adaptive ability is near zero you've got a better chance of surviving if you can keep the world from changing. Very adaptive people are more likely to be liberals just because we can see the problems with the current society and can adapt to the conditions needed to fix those problems. These conservatives may be able to percieve the problems but have too much difficulty adapting to the solutions, or they may be so use to the idea of the world as it is that they simply cannot imagine a different world as potentially better or just the same for them but better for others, they only see it as worse for them in some way.
Oh, wow
Thank you for this thought! It's going to give me something to think about for the next few days.
I've been thinking about the difference between religion and science for a long time, but particularly in the past week or so. I've been considering the difference, as it plays out in individual people's heads, as a matter of two different "styles" of thinking.
Certain religious people are lately prone to argue that science is a religion, but in fact the two fields are very different not just in the real world, but in the way the types of thought are handled in the individual human brain.
A big part of our mental activity deals in the creation and maintenance of habits, the little programs that control behavior below the conscious level.
That habit part is invaluable in day-to-day living, as we “write” and maintain the unconscious mental programs for driving a car, getting through our morning pre-work rituals, or handling the thousand necessary but repetitive tasks of our days. We develop and maintain these programs for everything from the order in which we put on our socks to the particular contents of our pockets – billfold always in one specific pocket, keys specifically and always in another, etc.
For most of history, this mental feature also allowed people to develop and maintain elaborate view-of-reality habits, played out in religion (organized view-of-reality patterns) and superstition (the exact same type of beliefs but lacking an organizational stamp).
The initial phase of a habit is conscious consideration of the process that will make up the habit, consciously practiced – “written” – but then gradually shoved down into the unconscious for permanent maintenance. Learning to drive is scarily conscious for a short while, requiring full attention and concentration, but quickly begins to be more automatic – mostly unconscious – until eventually we can drive in traffic while eating, talking on a cellphone, and tinkering with the CD player all at the same time. Even the moment-to-moment decision-making of driving in traffic, lane changing, etc., becomes a virtually subconscious process.
On the other hand from this habit maintenance function, the reasoning part of the human brain depends most basically on in-the-moment conscious observation and conceptual manipulation. Though memory and habit formation certainly plays a large part in everything we do, including science, you have to consciously THINK to do science, or to understand it.
I once watched a man sitting in his car across the street from my house reading the Koran and rocking back and forth, for about half an hour. I realized he was at that moment either actively programming something into his brain, or deliberately reinforcing something already there, so that he could shut out conscious consideration of whatever subject or verse it was he was studying. It seemed to me in that moment that he was loading Koranic ideas into his head, in order to deliberately replace what might have been his own thoughts.
Certainly we’ve all seen the results of this type of programming in religious people we’ve encountered in person or online – not only the utter unwillingness but the apparently absolute inability to consciously revisit anything already programmed on the subject in question.
This programming-into-the-subconscious is literal and DELIBERATE unreason.
In thinking all this, the big epiphany for me was that deeply religious people, relying as they do on mental programming, MUST be conservatives. They come to depend on habit-of-mind programs for all their mental activity, which makes them unwilling (and probably progressively unable) to be in-the-moment conscious of new data, or to allow the occasional necessity to revise previously-held positions. The worst cases (I’ve met a few; my own stepfather was one) literally cannot think new thoughts or entertain new ideas.
Such a person would obviously experience discomfort at any social change which altered the outside conditions under which the original habits of mind were programmed. Just as obviously, they would resist any such changes. (The “turbulence” between their inner certainties and the truth of the outside world would progressively increase during periods of social change, leading to argumentativeness, confusion, uncertainty, and an irritability that could range from constant low-level dissatisfaction to smoldering, murderous rage. The aforementioned stepfather, for instance, was not just absolutely certain about everything he knew, he was also a relentlessly abusive sumbitch.)
The habit-centered style of thought covers every aspect of the person’s life – religion, law, justice, relationships, social order, politics, etc. From outside, the certainty it engenders can even be seductively enviable: “habit-ers” seem to firmly KNOW everything they know. (The price of the more scientific mode of thought is that you have to live with a degree of uncertainty. Worse, you have to argumentatively allow for degrees and spectrums while your opponents can deal in triumphant blacks and whites.)
The mind that can do/understand science, on the other hand, is prone to be a great deal more open to conscious consideration, and reconsideration, of these various aspects of life. For one reason, they CAN.
I had thought this “CAN” was a matter of learned openness, but now I’m considering your idea that it may sometimes also be a matter of basic intelligence.
Anyway, thanks.
Perhaps.
Hank, I think that you are on to something, with *some* types of religious programming. But not all systems of religion are the same.
OK, I'm not going to defend religion. But I think that we need to be aware that we can't pigeon-hole all religion into one neat little box, the same way that not all atheists can be put into one neat little box.
And the reason I say this is that there are religious traditions which are not the sort of "Borg"-like assimilation. Some of the Eastern traditions are decidedly all about promoting full awareness of the moment, of consciously engaging the mind with reality. Buddhism is what I'm specifically thinking of, though it would not suprise me to discover that there are others.
When I was younger I was something of an accomplished martial artist. Part of that brought me into contact with Zen Buddhism, which I studied fairly intensively for years before coming to the conclusion that while it offered me a number of new "tools" for my mental development, it was basically too culturally different for me to completely adopt (and some time after I figured that out I came to understand that Jos. Campbell had already gone over all of this ground himself in his books about mythology and culture). But the whole "awakening" of awareness, of living fully in the moment, is part and parcel of what Zen is all about.
Now, it can be argued that Zen is not a religion, and I would tend to agree. It is a philosophical framework which came from a religion. But I think that it is still illustrative in this case for pointing out that we cannot draw too many simple generalizations about religion, awareness, and intelligence all intersecting in a conservative mindset. I have known too many damn smart people, with IQs significantly higher than mine, and education and accomplishments to match, who tend conservative for fairly solid philosophical (and sometimes religious) reasons. I may disagree with them, either in terms of politics or on matters of religious belief, but they are not of lower intelligence. To think that they are is dangerous - one should *never* underestimate an opponent, or fail to see where an enemy can be an ally.
Jim Downey
"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Agreed
My main point was the type of deliberate anti-conscious programming I described.
Religion is the main form in which it has appeared in my own life, although race prejudice and jingoistic patriotism might certainly be others.
It seems to me that ultraconservatives of any stripe would almost have to be deep "habit-ers."
Creationists and Learning
Bear in mind that the forbidden apple was the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Knowledge -- new learning -- was forbidden from the get-go.
But what is curious...
...is that comes from the Hebrew Bible, and there's a *huge* tradition of respect for learning in Jewish culture, going way back. It's like the Christians came along and decided to make things so bloody literal and simplistic, and that strain remains common to this day.
Jim Downey
"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Hebrew
Althoough....Orthodox Jews believe the whole creationists story, 6000 year old planet, etc, etc...
Ironically, unlike his
Ironically, unlike his character, Sir. A.C. Doyle was known to be somewhat of a credulous sort.
Very much so.
I was really confused about that when I first discovered it, back in my teen years.
Jim Downey
"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Extra points...
To whoever can identify which story the Holmes quote came from - without Googling it. Hint: it's one of the more famous ones.
Jim Downey
"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller