A photographic moment in my moral development

When I was perhaps eleven years old or so I remember perusing a book of World War II photographs from Life magazine when I found this photograph.

margaret-curtis

The caption I remember (I cannot claim that my memory is necessarily veridical because all human memory is vague and plays) was something like this: “A little girl lies dying after the bombing of Coventry which has already killed her parents.”

That’s heavy to lay on an eleven year-old boy, at least as long as he is not a complete brute (I wasn’t, even if many are). I felt a sense of sick shock thinking this little baby girl, so gravely wounded that the whole top of her head including one of her eyes had to be covered in bandages, probably in terrible pain and lying dying surrounded by strangers in a wartime hospital, without even the mercy of a mother to comfort her. The image was nightmare fuel for me for some time thereafter, and in years subsequent it has returned to me in flashes of anger when have to listen to the blatherings of optimists and the spinners of popular theodicies. One almost wants to scream at people at times. “Look at this little girl! What could possible justify this?” The image might have also buried a nugget of antinatalism in my consciousness: if one of the possible fates a child can have in the world is this, then how can you justify having one?

Because I am afflicted with curiosity about why people turn out the way they do, I was moved recently to try to recover this little bit of my past. After some disappointments browsing among battered used books I found the image again, much as I remembered it visually but with a caption that somewhat surprised me.

“Margaret Curtis, 2” LIFE said under the picture above in its September 9, 1940, issue “is about to die.” Her mother, shielding Margaret with her own body from a German bomb had been killed, as had Margaret’s father and grandfather.

A year later a friend of the Curtises’ wrote LIFE that Margaret was alive…but was struck dumb, and that her mother was alive, too. That letter caused American neurosurgeon Dr. Henry L. Heyl in London to ask the magazine for help in locating the child for possible treatment. When she was found, it was learned that it was her brother Royston, 7, who was the speechless one. The doctor performed two delicate brain operations, and Royston talked again.1

Well, how very heartwarming. How very Life magazine.

I do not feel misled by my past, however. Even if little Margaret Curtis survived her bombing ordeal, even if she is now living a cozy existence somewhere in England as a 78 year-old grandmother, one knows perfectly well that even there have been plenty of other bombing victims in the world, many of them children just as defenseless and innocent as little Margaret. Going just by Wikipedia figures, which as far as I can tell are not wildly inaccurate (and might even be a bit low), total civilian losses from bombing on both sides in the Second World War are well north of a million dead. I submit that it is statistically improbable that all of them were competent adults who somehow deserved their fates.

I can’t help noting on the Life magazine volume in which I found again the picture of Margaret Curtis appears to contain no pictures whatever of civilian suffering on the “wrong” side of the Second World War. (There are a few pictures of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, but they show only ruined and flattened buildings, not ruined or flattened human beings.) In the interests of historical justice I propose to remedy this deficiency. Here is what is left of a mother and child after the American firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945.

Tokyo_kushu_1945-2

This photograph is also from Wikipedia (accessed July 9, 2016), where it accompanies the article Bombing of Tokyo. Here is the caption:

Koyo Ishikawa (1904-1989) took this photograph. This shows the charred body of a woman who was carrying a child on her back; her back itself was not burned. Taken on around 10 March, 1945.

Somehow I doubt that any heartwarming story about how mother or child were later found alive and well will ever turn up.

***

Notes

1David E. Scherman, ed. Life Goes to War: A Picture History of World War II. (New York: Pocket Books, 1978). p. 75. Back to main text.

Immaturing

Suppose a genie were to offer you the following choice between two possibilities for the balance of your life. You can have either…

The Marriage You Want. You can pick out any person you know and marry ver. (Minor catch: you must pick out a specific person who actually exists. You may not specify a person who fits some list of desiderata and have the genie fetch ver for you, much less create de novo such a person for you if ve does not exist in the world. The genie is not that powerful, or that generous.) Ve will fall in love you as much as it is possible for ver to be in love with anyone and will unhesitatingly consent to your proposal of marriage when you make it. At the moment of your marriage your spouse will love you as much as it is possible for very to love anyone at the start of marriage. Over time, your spouse’s love for you will follow the trajectory that is diachronically love-optimal relative to their psychology. That is, after ten years of marriage, your spouse will love you as much as it would be possible for ver to love anyone after ten years of marriage, after twenty years as much as would be possible after twenty and so on. It is important to note that whatever love your spouse will feel for you will not transcend the limits imposed by ver psychology. If it happens that ve is just not a very loving person by nature, then ve will never love you very much, notwithstanding the genie’s magic. If ve is flighty by nature, ve might be deliriously in love with you on your wedding day but bored and cold, even disgusted, after ten, to say nothing of twenty, years of marriage. What is more, other aspects of your spouse’s identity do not necessarily change. Ve might love you, but ve isn’t going to suddenly start liking your hobbies or your friends or convert to your religion, unless ve just happens to be the sort of person who can be motivated by love to do such things. Not everyone is. Indeed, many people aren’t.

…or…

Endless Hot Dates. Imagine a reference class of people you find generally appealing, which you may specify to your tastes and may make as wide or as narrow as you like: cowboys, hairy leather daddies, Asian-American cougars, current Ivy League undergraduate women of above-median physical attractiveness, the entire adult population of Ireland, you name it. (Underage persons are right out, as even genies have some principles.) Once per week, for the rest of your life or for at least as long as your health permits and your interest holds out, you will meet a random stranger drawn from the reference class for a fun afternoon or evening of some enjoyable activity followed by a night of fun, enthusiastic, and consequence-free sex. Perhaps there will also be breakfast the morning. Next week: someone else.

Which would you choose? I am quite sure that if my philosophical twin Faustus-ב* had been offered the choice when he was a young man he would have quite unhesitatingly opted for The Marriage You Want. Indeed, at the time Faustus-ב would have confidently told the genie making the offer to just buzz off. Faustus-ב already had the love of the right woman, or at least so it seemed, in his then-girlfriend (call her “Second Serious Girlfriend-ב”) Surely he didn’t need the help of some old genie. At 25 or so, Faustus-ב was a mature, upstanding adult! Committed to such upstanding, society-approved values as love and support for another human being, for life. And perhaps such sentimental slogans as “if you would be loved, be worthy of love.”

At twice the age we think of as young, I’m sure Faustus-ב would settle for Endless Hot Dates. “But wouldn’t you find that empty, Faustus-ב?” Well, yes, of course he would. But as I’ve argued before, unless someone like Faustus-ב experiences lottery-winner-like luck in picking someone out, Faustus-ב would be face a lifetime of experiencing emptiness anyway. With Endless Hot Dates, Faustus-ב might at least have a chance of enjoying himself some before his time comes to sink into the grave.

Obviously, Faustus-ב will immature over the course of his lifetime. That’s what happens as you experience more of the world.

Since I can;’t help but accumulate experiences over my lifetime, I’m afraid I’m immaturing too.

***

*Faustus-ב (“Faustus-bet”) is very similar to me but lacks certain of my specific life-commitments, hence he is free to make certain choices that might be, shall we say, more character-revealing than the ones that I might actually make. Back to main text.

I guess that’s me too.

I’ve recently been diverting myself quite enjoyably with the opening chapters of Richard Double’s Metaphilosophy and Free Will.1 By a “metaphilosophy,” Double means an interrelated set of views about what the enterprise of what philosophy is, what it can achieve, and the desires we happen to have for philosophy. He identifies a number of different possible metaphilosophies — including philosophy not a pursuit of truth by as a form of edifying literature, philosophy as an attempt to improve human well-being, or philosophy an attempt to find underpinnings for some system of belief like common sense or religion. Double’s own metaphilosophy is something he calls Philosophy as Continuous with Science, which is the attempt to have a system of beliefs that tracks truth as well as possible, whether or not it underpins our common sense, is edifying, or improves our well-being. As he describes it, Philosophy as Continuous with Science sounds a lot like what I have called The Bitter Path of Hard-Nosed Realism. Double gives a number of reasons for why one might be attracted to Philosophy as Continuous with Science, one set of which is disarmingly self-revealing:

Another part of my answer has to do with the vision of the philosopher as the courageous truth-seeker who faces the direst of facts with Stoic detachment. (For me, the persona of W.K. Clifford I derived from reading “The Ethics of Belief” was very moving, though I think Clifford’s argument is hyperbolic and philosophically weak.) Those of us who like Philosophy as Continuous with Science can build a heroic vision of that metaphilosophy which is very ego-gratifying. In addition, one must not underestimate the titillation and ego-boost we receive from shocking lay persons and other philosophers with our uncommonsensical views, especially when we can claim that whole areas of philosophy that others hold dear are based on confusions.2

And reading these words I have one of those “that’s just how I feel!” moments.

That said, there’s also a recipe for intellectual humility in Double. He accepts the Humean distinction between facts and values and, just as I do, rejects the notion that there are any objective values. But when we reject the view that there are any objective values, we must reject the claim that there is anything that we ought to all desire. There are just whatever desires actually-existing individuals happen to have as a matter of brute psychological fact. And since choice among metaphilosophies includes our desires for philosophy, no one can say that any metaphilosopohy founded on a desire that someone actually happens to have is objectively worse than one founded on someone else’s desire.

Double also plausible notes that there are high-level preferences among different possibilities in philosophy (he gives the examples the choices between skeptical and non-skeptical epistemologies, realist versus instrumentalist interpretations of theories, conservative versus liberal ontologies, strict versus liberal requirements on explanation, and whether or not we accept Hume’s principle). These also affect choices among metaphilosophies and philosophies, and it isn’t obvious that there are objective constraints on our preferences among these either.

So if Double is right, it is futile to try to seek a once-and-for-all knock-down argument against any (well, at least many) stable philosophical positions, no matter how much you might despise them, because they live at home in metaphilosophical positions other than your own, and facts and logic alone cannot force someone out of that.

A larger implication might be that your philosophy is a function of who you are, of fundamental and perhaps constitutive preferences bound up with your identity.

Double may be right. I still am what I am, though, even if I do manage to learn a little humility.

Notes

1Richard Double, Metaphilosophy and Free Will. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Back to main text.

2Double, Metaphilosophy, pp. 53.4.

Elite higher education, that’s the thing

The quote of today comes from former Yale professor of English William Deresiewicz, interviewing one of the most privileged and talented young people America now has to offer.

One young woman at Cornell summed up her life to me like this: “I hate all my activities. I hate all my classes, I hated everything I did in high school, I expect to hate my job, and this is just how it’s going to be for the rest of my life.”

From William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. (New York: Free Press, 2014), p. 11

Whatever this young woman lacks, it ain’t intellect.

Turn off your radio

A Wager and a Reformulation

Here’s a quick-and-dirty summary of a famous argument known as Pascal’s Wager:1 maybe there’s a God and maybe there isn’t, we don’t know for sure. If there is a God and you believe in Him, then you’ll be saved and whisked off (presumably post mortem) to an eternity of happiness, and if you don’t believe in Him, then when you die you really die. You get what utility you get out of life and nothing more. If there is no God then when you die you really die, whether or not you believe in Him, getting whatever utility you get out of life and nothing more. By this reasoning, you should believe in God, no matter how small a prior probability you assign to His existence, because if He exists then the expected utility of believing in him is infinite, and if He doesn’t exist, you’re no worse off than you would have been anyway. So you might as well believe.

Now obviously there are a number of problems with this argument that people have pointed out over the years. It can’t convince a strict atheist (that is, someone who thinks there is a zero probability of God’s existence). The notion of infinite upside utility might be unsound (a possible subject of a future Pyrosophy post!). What if you believe in God, but the wrong God, or the right God but in the wrong way? (Some of you might recall a televised skit in which Rowan Atkinson, playing Satan, welcomes a group of recently-deceased Christians to hell: “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid the Jews were right.”) Can you really just make yourself believe something you don’t already believe, simply by virtue of being persuaded by an argument that it would be to your advantage to believe that? And all in, God might be rather less than impressed with people who will believe in Him principally to save their sorry butts from annihilation.

Noting some of the problems, Gary Gutting, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame2 and a contributor to the generally-awful New York Times blog The Stone, proposes a revision, “Pascal’s Wager 2.0.” (cute) Gutting admits some of the defects of the previous argument but nonetheless claims that, if there were something like a God, it would be very good for us to have some sort of relationship with Him. We ought therefore to do what it would take to open our minds to the possibility of God.

The argument begins by noting that we could be much happier by making appropriate contact with such a power. The next question is whether there are paths we can take that have some prospect of achieving this contact. Many people, including some of the most upright, intelligent and informed, have claimed that there are such paths. These include not just rituals and good deeds but also private spiritual exercises of prayer, meditation and even philosophical speculation. A person’s specific choices would depend on individual inclinations and capacities.

It’s as if everyone has a radio, tuned to the spiritual ether. Some people, the religious, hear God. Other people, whom Gutting calls religious agnostics don’t hear God, but keep their radios turned on and tuned in, hoping someday to hear God.

The wager calls for some manner of spiritual commitment, but there is no demand for belief, either immediately or eventually. The commitment is, rather, to what I have called religious agnosticism: serious involvement with religious teachings and practices, in hope for a truth that I do not have and may never attain.

Gutting thinks a relationship with God would be so wonderful that it would be irrational to turn off one’s radio, on the grounds that there is nothing to hear. “Religious agnosticism demands only that I reject atheism, which excludes the hope for something beyond the natural world knowable by science.” So. for Gutting, the only sorts of people who ought to exist in the world are the religious and religious agnostics.

Should one keep the radio turned on and engage in religious practices. Well…

The Whisperer in Darkness

Gutting’s argument, to be sound, requires that we partition the possibilities for the universe roughly like this. Either there is a God, who is at least super-powerful and super-wise and super-good (which He would have to be, in order for any relationship one might have with Him to be characterized as necessarily of great benefit to oneself), or there isn’t a God, and the universe is pretty much just what we can observe with science and that we should conclude that the nature of reality is just what physics says it is. But as readers of this blog may have guessed, I think this is a false dichotomy. There is at least one more possibility, which is that the universe is the creation of an at-the-very-least super-evil, super-wise, and super-powerful being, who created the universe as a sort of giant chamber of horrors in order to dine voluptuously off the suffering the creatures trapped therein. Following that brilliant theological parodist John Zande I have hitherto called this being the Owner of All Infernal Names, but I shall henceforth call It the Artifex Atrox, that is, the horrid maker. It has a pleasing comic-book supervillain sound to my ear, and as a comics writer that makes it too hard to resist.

Now in Zande’s understanding of this Artifex Atrox, It is hidden from the view of the creatures in the universe. Can’t have them realizing the foul nature of the universe and committing mass suicide or turning antinatalist, after all.

To ensure that the stream of misery flows uninterrupted…to guarantee that Creation is free to unfold in forever more self-expressive, self-complicating, and creative ways, the Impartial Observer recognizes that existential despair and the potential for organized hostility in the form of self=annihilation must be averted or else the universe would quickly become meaningless or worse, entirely antithetical to its architect and sole reason for existence.3

Zande is probably right, but if he is the Artifex Atrox might be missing out on what is in a way an important opportunity for suffering. After all, thanks to centuries of religion and the urgings of people like Professor Gutting, there are people out there with their radios tuned in, praying, meditating, contemplating sacred texts, doing sacred drugs, fasting in the desert, dancing around naked under the full moon at the summer solstice, what have you. Their radios are on and tuned in. Would it not be fitting for the Artifex Atrox to broadcast across the ether?

Let’s imagine that there is a certain kind of Artifex Atrox, an Artifex Atrox Susurrans, that as Its name implies, whispers to us, or at least some of us. A.A.S. is of course never actually present when It would generate hard evidence of its existence; It withdraws its tentacles immediately whenever pesky scientists and their probing instruments show up, disappearing like supposed psychic phenomena whenever James Randi shows up. But at opportune moments It returns and whispers to people as they pray, meditate, dream. And what does it whisper? There are some rather obvious things: “you must extirpate the heretics by fire and sword.” (See Deuteronomy 17:2-20). “Sexual practice X is an abomination and you must suppress it, even to the point of putting its practitioners to death.” (See Leviticus 20:13.) To the Blues: “Land X is my sacred land, and you must eliminate the Greens therefrom, sparing only the virgins whom you may take as your slaves.” (See Numbers 31:7-18.) And in parallel, to the Greens “Land X is my sacred land, and you must eliminate the Blues therefrom.” You know, religion stuff. Stirring up religious conflict and egging on theocratic oppression are truly marvelous ways of engendering all sorts of suffering, and the Artifex Atrox would be missing a real trick if It failed to do these.

“Ah,” you might say, “but surely we get other things from religion which are valuable. Like hope, for instance.” Yes, hope. Whispering to people that there is hope would be perhaps on of the Artifex Atrox Susurrans very best tricks, because only if we have hope do we carry on. Hope helps us go on living. Hope encourages us to have children. And hope therefore is a remarkable way of making sure the Artifex Atrox gets Its meals in the future. This is the lesson, the real lesson underlying the myth of Pandora. I’ve tried to explicate the lesson in comics format before. In that, I was only following in the footsteps of Nietzsce, in Human, All Too Human.

Die Hoffnung. – Pandora brachte das Fass mit den Uebeln und öffnete es. Es war das Geschenk der Götter an die Menschen, von Aussen ein schönes verführerisches Geschenk und “Glücksfass” zubenannt. Da flogen all die Uebel, lebendige beschwingte Wesen heraus: von da an schweifen sie nun herum und thun den Menschen Schaden bei Tag und Nacht. Ein einziges Uebel war noch nicht aus dem Fass herausgeschlüpft: da schlug Pandora nach Zeus’ Willen den Deckel zu und so blieb es darin. Für immer hat der Mensch nun das Glücksfass im Hause und meint Wunder was für einen Schatz er in ihm habe; es steht ihm zu Diensten, er greift darnach: wenn es ihn gelüstet; denn er weiss nicht, dass jenes Fass, welches Pandora brachte, das Fass der Uebel war, und hält das zurückgebliebene Uebel für das grösste Glücksgut, – es ist die Hoffnung. – Zeus wollte nämlich, dass der Mensch, auch noch so sehr durch die anderen Uebel gequält, doch das Leben nicht wegwerfe, sondern fortfahre, sich immer von Neuem quälen zu lassen. Dazu giebt er dem Menschen die Hoffnung: sie ist in Wahrheit das übelste der Uebel, weil sie die Qual der Menschen verlängert.4 Hope.—Pandora brought the box containing evils and opened it. It was the gift of the gods to men, a gift of most enticing appearance externally and called the “box of happiness.” Thereupon all the evils, (living, moving things) flew out: from that time to the present they fly about and do ill to men by day and night. One evil only did not fly out of the box: Pandora shut the lid at the behest of Zeus and it remained inside. Now man has this box of happiness perpetually in the house and congratulates himself upon the treasure inside of it; it is at his service: he grasps it whenever he is so disposed, for he knows not that the box which Pandora brought was a box of evils. Hence he looks upon the one evil still remaining as the greatest source of happiness—it is hope.—Zeus intended that man, notwithstanding the evils oppressing him, should continue to live and not rid himself of life, but keep on making himself miserable. For this purpose he bestowed hope upon man: it is, in truth, the greatest of evils for it lengthens the ordeal of man.5

Readers are invited to imagine other things Artifex Atrox Susurrans might whisper, perhaps has whispered, to you!

Now I have asserted before and I shall assert again that it is far, far more likely that the universe comes from an Artifex Atrox than from God, based on the obvious and manifest massive misbalance of suffering over joy in the world. So now Gutting’s wager doesn’t look so good. There’s some very tiny probability that if you do the religion thing and turn on your radio, you’ll have a relationship with God which would be good for you. But there’s a much larger probability that you’ll be hearing the whisperings of a kind of Artfiex Atrox, and that’s going to be very bad for you — and for others whom you can reach. Weighing the balance of probabilities favors turning off your radio.

But perhaps the Artifex Atrox does not whisper?

The Color out of Space

Now as I’ve written Zande is probably right to characterize the Artifex Atrox as having no presence in the universe, even that only detectable in dream states. The Artifex Atrox is thus not Artifex Atrox Susurrans but Artifex Atrox Absconditus. If that’s the case, one could reasonably then ask, what’s the harm in being hopeful about God, leaving one’s radio on?

It’s this: human beings are very bad at actually perceiving noise as noise and emptiness as emptiness.6 How else to explain the persistence of religion? If you tune your radio to an empty frequency what you’ll hear in only squeals and static, but if you have the right, religious cast of mind you won’t only be hearing that for long. Thanks to wishful thinking and confirmation bias you’ll be hearing the whispering even when there is no whisperer, no less than all those people who are constantly seeing the Virgin Mary in their waterstained plaster and the face of Jesus in the grilled cheese sandwiches. And since what you’re actually hearing are just the products of your own mind, what you’ll be getting back are you, including naturally all your bigotries and greeds and lusts and power-hunger, here transfigured from the Voice of You into the Voice of God. Gutting may engage in smug praise (really self-praise) when he insists on the “upright, intelligent and informed” character of religious believers, but the fact is that all those theocrats and genocidaires of the Hebrew scriptures (see supra) seemed equally clearly to be hearing the Voice of God.

It seems, indeed, whether the Atrifex Atrox is Susurrans or Absconditus; either way, It has succeeded in arranging matters so that we are hearing the whispers whether or not there is any whispering. However clever of the the Artifex! All condemnation to It!

Turn off your radios. It’s the only path to mental hygiene.

Notes

1For a much more thorough treatment of the argument, see the article on Pascal’s Wager in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Alan Hájek. Back to main text.

2That place with football team, remember? Now go out there and win one for the Gipper.. Back to main text.

3John Zande, The Owner of All Infernal Names: An Introductory Treatise on the Existence, Nature & Government of our Omnimalevolent Creator. N.P.: John Zande, 2015, pp. 21-2 Back to main text.

4Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister, Sec. 71 (1878). Accessed from http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7207/pg7207.html on May 30, 2016. Back to main text.

5Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans Alexander Harvey. Sec. 71. Accessed from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38145/38145-h/38145-h.htm on May 30, 2016. Back to main text.

6The literature on the relevant biases and cognitive failings is vast, but a good book-length beginning would be Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Reason in Everyday Life. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008). Back to main text.

What’s more fundamental?

Perhaps my pessimism is more fundamental than my atheism, and perhaps my perversion is more fundamental than either.

I suppose that I am something of an impure atheist. To be sure, my personal distribution of probabilities over ontological possibilities would give by far the largest probability to a kind of disenchanted atheism, to the view that the nature of reality issue what physics says it is, and nothing more. But at least one other and darker possibility does lurk in my mind, which is that there is an Owner of All Infernal Names (“OAIN”), a creator of the universe for whom that universe is a gigantic theater-stage of cruelty, a generator of suffering off of which It feeds and thrives, a being that allows good in the world only either so that we might more completely experience our deprivation thereof, or to raise our hopes so as all the more completely to dash them in the end.

My subjective probability attributed to the likelihood of there being an OAIN fluctuates (to my discredit) following my mood more than anything that could be strictly characterized as evidence between one-in-a-million and one-in-twenty. As for the probability that there is a God, the benevolent, worship-worthy entity that the followers of the Abrahamic faiths believe in (or at least believe that they believe in), that stubbornly sticks right in the same place at an infinitesimal above zero. (And dear hippie mommy-goddess worshipers, I find the object your adoration no more likely than the patriarchal sky god you wish to replace, even if I do find Her even sillier.) Were I to be more scientific about matters these probabilities might change some, but given the preponderance of suffering over happiness in the world, I’m sure the OAIN would still be many, many orders of magnitude more likely than Its benevolent mirror-image.

I ought perhaps to note that every so often there are little events that take place in dreams or at the edge of consciousness, little bits of weirdness and imagined cruelty that attach themselves to sensations to which pleasure seems inadequate as a description. Here is a dream I had in the early morning hours a few months ago. I am looking through an open door into a physician’s consulting room. A pretty young woman has just disrobed and is sitting on an table, apparently waiting for an examination. A nurse enters and gives the young woman an injection. The young woman gasps as the needle slides in. “It is a paralytic,” says the nurse. “We need you conscious but incapable of motion.” There is a pause before the nurse matter-of-factly resumes her explanation. “You are material for our experiment now. We do not know what if anything will be left of you when we are done. The doctor will see you shortly.” As the drug takes its full effect the young woman can manage a last fearful vocalization, something between a whimper and a moan. With that strange half-strangled sound comes my moment of ecstasy, married as I emerge from dream into waking to the thought that if anything feels like participation in the divine, it is this.

That is one such moment. There have been a few others, not many, but they are quite vivid. And I see no reason to treat them as any less revelatory about the nature of reality than the moments of ecstatic vision religious believers claim to have for themselves.

And that fact, dear reader, is why my discussion above isn’t just a case of Iago Faustus, pessimist and pervert, offering Too Much Information about himself. It will turn out to have meaning when we discuss new versions of Pascal’s Wager.

Some more stuff to celebrate about porn

Over at that bulwark of the hopelessly middlebrow The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf earlier this month engaged in some thumb-sucking about what porn is supposedly doing to young men.

In Time’s current cover story, “Porn and the Threat to Virility,” Belinda Luscombe writes, “A growing number of young men are convinced that their sexual responses have been sabotaged because their brains were virtually marinated in porn when they were adolescents. Their generation has consumed explicit content in quantities and varieties never before possible, on devices designed to deliver content swiftly and privately, all at an age when their brains were more plastic—more prone to permanent change—than in later life. These young men feel like unwitting guinea pigs in a largely unmonitored decade-long experiment in sexual conditioning.”

Young Friedersdorf sees fit to quote further someone called Denny Burk, a professor at one of America’s all-too-many Christian madrasas, who looks out at our putative sexual culture and really, really doesn’t like what he sees.

[The sexual revolution] has not given us men who know what virtue and honor are. It doesn’t teach men to pursue their joy in self-sacrificially loving and being sexually faithful to one woman for life.

Let’s call this complaint the “Porn breaks sanctioned sexuality” hypothesis,” PBSS for short. “Sanctioned” here meaning the kind of sex that Jerry Falwell and the Pope approve of — penis-in-vagina intercourse between married (to each other, wiseguy!) people undertaken in the hope of pooping out babies that you will then rear.

Now if I were being uncharitable I suppose I could spend some time bashing this Burk fellow for certain rather-too-obvious forms of moral obtuseness. (Does he not realize that there are a lot of women who look at porn, or that women young or old might be just as interested in sexual variety as young men? Does he really think that it’s worthwhile teaching gay men to be self-sacrificially whatevered to one woman for life? I guess you never can tell with Christians, who will believe the darndest things.) But such carping would be pointless and, in any event, wasn’t where my mind was on reading those words. My focus was the welcome implications of PBSS itself. My takeaway from PBSS was to think “Great! Not only does porn benefit humanity by providing an ever-available palliative to the misery of life, but it also discourages family formation by providing a diversion for young men away from sanctioned sexuality, and thus the production of children, and thus creation of more and more loci of suffering. Perhaps it even has a role to play in guiding humanity to the noble moment when we all give up the game and walk hand in hand into extinction. Truly, pornographers are among the world’s great humanitarians.”

Of course, as a pessimist, my second thought was that PBSS is probably not true. You just can’t win in this world.

Yeah, peace would be nice

It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy. The following acts are examples of perfidy: (a) the feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender…

— Geneva Convention/Protocol I, Art. 37 (From Wikisource)

That august and self-important publication The New York Times has recently started a “philosophy” blog called “The Stone” and take it from me, it’s pretty damn awful: lots of middlebrow religious apologetics, precious little real philosophy. Still, it can at times make for interesting reading, if one reads with the eye not of a philosopher by as a connoisseur of cultural pathology. Here’s a recent item which caught my eye, written by one William Irwin, the chair of philosophy at King’s College in Pennsylvania (don’t fret, I had never heard of it either). It plays on a rather tired theme (“can’t we all just be more humble about our religions or lack thereof”) using a rhetorical mode that this non-believer can readily recognize, that is, smug condescension toward non-believers wrapped in the cloak of false humility. Irwin claims irenic intentions:

What is important is the common ground of the question [Faustus: about God, or whatever], not an answer. Surely, we can respect anyone who approaches the question honestly and with an open mind. Ecumenical and interfaith religious dialogue has increased substantially in our age. We can and should expand that dialogue to include atheists and agnostics, to recognize our common humanity and to stop seeing one another as enemy combatants in a spiritual or intellectual war. Rather than seeking the security of an answer, perhaps we should collectively celebrate the uncertainty of the question.

Why do I see it this way? Well, for one, he appears to buy into a smarmy argument by Gary Gutting (also on “The Stone,” surprise, surprise) that even if we don’t believe that there is a God, we should hope that there is one. The gutting of Gutting will be the work of another day here at Pyrosophy. Let me note for now that Irwin thinks that non-believers should at least be acting like believers, at least some of the time.

The nonbeliever might embrace the ethical teachings of Christianity, the yogic practices of Hinduism, the meditative techniques of Zen Buddhism, or any of the vast array of teachings and practices that the world’s religions have to offer. Such embrace may lead the nonbeliever to belief in God, or it may not.

Now if we’re being genuinely humble, humble on all sides, shouldn’t we be reciprocally suggesting that believers ought to at least sometimes act like nonbelievers, perhaps engaging in one of their mental exercises? It will do Irwin no good to insist there are no such exercises, because here’s an obvious one that many non-believers (myself included) do rather a lot: think really hard and for a good long time about the proposition that the nature of reality is only what physics says it is and nothing more. If this be so, should you want to to continue to live and, if you should want to continue to live, how should you live?

The unwillingness (or inability) of Irwin to specify a way for believers to reciprocate on the humility act is the tell, the giveaway that his call for disarmament in wars of religion is only superficially directed at both sides. When looked at carefully it turns out to be humility for thee, infidel, but not for me. It’s a false flag of truce.

This is not to say that religious peace is a bad idea. Pessimistic atheists like me in particular would like nothing better than to get on with their lives in peace, as long as we can enjoy our ecbasic liberties. This fact would suggest that there is an obvious path to peace, one which would begin with religious people (Christians especially) giving up on the idea that because they’re so special they have the right to police what’s in the bedrooms and on the bookcases of nonbelievers.

I won’t be holding my breath waiting for that give-up to happen.