Why Do We Need Meaning?

A few days ago I was listening to a podcast of a theological debate between a Calvinist and a Christian of a different persuasion which I did not catch.  In the end it was pointless so I won't harm the world by linking to it.  However, there was an interesting exchange that got me thinking about the human desire for meaning.

The two men used a theoretical event where a fictional man rapes and murders a small girl.  Both of them were explaining their view of God's nature by suggesting how God might have allowed this to happen for the greater good of the world.

Why?  Why do we suppose that God is some sort of utilitarian?  Why do we presuppose some sort of cosmic justice or karma surrounds every negative that befalls us?  As if good and evil were like double entry accounting where everything zeroes out in the end.

When I say, "we", I need to exclude myself.  For whatever reason it is a phenomenon that I do not identify with at all.  This is not to brag, but I do not ever recall having gotten angry at God.  Never have I struggled with the lack of meaning in events.  I don't know if I'm missing a gene or if I simply never began to believe that God needed to justify the world that he created and we altered.

Even the greatly reveered Christian author C.S. Lewis struggles through anger and doubt towards God upon the death of his wife.  I've been reading his "A Grief Observed".

This is not a criticism of anyone.  Where did this idea come from?  Why do we believe this?

Anyone?

Raw Political Power

Several days ago I endorsed Debra Medina for Governor of Texas.  I also exercised my enormous political clout and shot an e-mail over to Robert Wenzel, blogger of EconomicPolicyJournal extolling her virtues.  He gets about a thousand times as many hits as I do every day, and he told me he would keep an eye on her campaign.  Lo and behold, he links to an article on her today extolling her virtues.

Now that I'm drunk on power, I'll have to start ordering you little people around.  Someone get me some coffee!

Alien in the Gaps Fallacy

Those in the intelligent design camp propose there are proofs that God exists in nature. An example being the irreducible complexity in the anatomy of the eye or bacterial flagella. The common retort to these claims is to cite the God of the Gaps fallacy.
The God of the Gaps fallacy can be defined as - a tendency to postulate acts of God to explain phenomena for which science has yet to give a satisfactory account.

This intelligent design line of thinking is, of course, a rather weak position. As soon as a scientific explanation is able to find an answer, the argument dies an embarrassing death. If one’s faith is built on one of these, it could be shattered in an instant. I’m not a microbiologist, so there may yet be a reason to be confident, but from a spectator’s viewpoint it seems rather tenuous.

The age old claim against God is the lack of evidence. Most people have some sort of mystical experiences, but these aren’t reproducible as required by science.

What shocked me, though, was the end of Ben Stein’s Expelled. When questioned by Mr. Stein, noted atheist scholar, Richard Dawkins, said that he thought it was possible that life had been brought to earth from another planet. This is the same person who believes that a belief in God is completely irrational.

I am agnostic on the subject of aliens, but his line of thinking seems a bit preposterous. We have been to the moon, we have been to Mars. We thought we found life on Mars, but we didn’t. We photographed the planets and their moons, and no visible life has been found. We have sundry instruments listening for rays and waves coming from outer space in hopes that there might be life on other planets. Yet, nothing. Absolutely nothing. The universe is deafeningly silent.

There is no evidence, yet many intelligent people assert that there is a probability. Surely, in all the universe, with billions of stars and planets, life exists somewhere else. Yet we haven’t seen a thing.

Even with this utter lack of evidence, Dawkins believes that it is a possibility that a race of super intelligent aliens, that we have never seen, nor have any evidence, went flying through the universe 5 billion years ago and dropped off some bacteria that evolved into us. Really? This is rational, but a supernatural being is not? We have barely scraped the universe which is why we haven’t found alien life, but by the same limited measure we can with certainty exclude a God. Really?

I dub this the Alien in the Gaps fallacy.

Debra Medina for Governor of Texas

I have been a fan of my Texas Governor Rick Perry for a long time.  I have voted for him every time, and do not regret any of those votes.  In this coming primary election, I was planning to vote for him again, because Kay Bailey Hutchison has never impressed me beyond having a likeable personality.

However, I looked up Debra Medina, a lesser known candidate, last night after seeing a Rasmussen poll giving her 12%.  I looked at the Issues tab on her website and swooned.  She quotes Frederick Bastiat!  Beyond the self apparent awesomeness of that, it means she reads real books.

In her bio I find that she was a leader in the Ron Paul for President campaign in Texas, and she was also one of those early home school rebels.  That means she's got chutzpah (that means "cajones" to you English speakers).

I'm down with Debra Medina.

Tonight's Gonna Be a Good Night

"I got a feelin'.  That tonight's gonna be a big big night." -- Black Eyed Peas

I predicted on my facebook page Sunday that Scott Brown would win against Martha Coakley by 7 points in the Senate Race in Massachusetts.  With more polling data coming out on Monday showing Brown up by 9 or 10 points, I am pretty confident that Brown's margin of victory will be large.

As many of you are well aware this could mean the death of Obamacare.  Brown has pledged that he will join a Republican filibuster against that bill when it comes out of the reconciliation committee.

However, libertarian economist Bob Murphy had this to say in the comments at EPJ.

I don't mean to be a party pooper, but I would caution everyone about getting real excited for Republicans to step up to the plate and defend our liberties.  I still cringe when I remember staying up late election night 2000 because I was so so worried that that "socialist Al Gore" would wreck the US economy...

I respectfully disagree, but not because I have faith in Republican leaders.  The incentives for Congressmen to spend money and expand government are still there, so they won't change that much.  However, what can change is the ideological mix of the country.

History is written in simple narratives, and this election tonight will be part of that narrative.  President Obama is a symbol.  He is big government writ large.  He is Keynesianism writ large.  He is elitist arrogance.  We don't need him to be defeated and humiliated as a person, but we need it as a symbol.  We need this brand of soft-socialism to become a punchline; a mythology of errors so engrained in our collective consciousness that economic intervention will be conflated with disaster.

The White House has already decided what their strategy will be after defeat.  According to Politico:

President Barack Obama plans a combative response if, as White House aides fear, Democrats lose Tuesday’s special Senate election in Massachusetts, close advisers say.

He's doubling down.  Like Pharoah after the plagues he plans to be even more provocative.

Did the Hebrews in Egypt recognize the importance of symbolism and historical narratives?

Exodus 9:13 Then the LORD said to Moses, "Get up early in the morning, confront Pharaoh and say to him, 'This is what the LORD, the God of the Hebrews, says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me, 14 or this time I will send the full force of my plagues against you and against your officials and your people, so you may know that there is no one like me in all the earth. 15 For by now I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with a plague that would have wiped you off the earth. 16 But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.

Not to put word's in God's mouth or assume he has an opinion on this election, but if we value freedom for ourselves and for our fellow Americans, we should be giddy about a likely victory tonight.  Never in my lifetime has an opportunity for big government to be so thoroughly disgraced as it is right now.

The Mystical Mind

We all have a certain lack of self-knowledge. We experience ephemeral emotions and events that we can not repeat, can not define, and can not fully grasp. There is a hole in our minds, and we all know it. We can’t put a label on it, but it’s there. Something is missing. Something is supposed to be there.

I recently listened to a podcast entitled “What Can Science Tell Us About God”. My flippant response is “nothing”, but I don’t hold that against theism, it’s more a condemnation of science.

Apologetics315 describes the podcast as:

Lewis Wolpert (Emeritus Professor of Biology, University College London) says there is no evidence for God whatsoever and religion finds its origin in tool-making. Russell Cowburn (professor of nano-technology, Imperial College London) is a scientist defending the Christian position.

Prof. Wolpert, the atheist, makes a comment at the 13:14 mark:

I want to tell you, you all, myself included, have a mystical aspect to our minds. We all have it. All people have it.

I’ve taken this a bit out of context so don’t think that he is admitted anything supernatural (he is actually arguing the opposite; that evolution created this aspect).

This got me thinking about the human experience. The lives we live inside of our minds and body are not well defined. Slowly, over the course of our lives we come to understand how the soup of chemicals effect us. What is joy? What is angst? We struggle at times to wrap our logic around the incoherence of our emotions.

My grandma died a few months ago and it was really the first time I had ever experienced loss. I was never terribly attached to our pets or to other family members who passed away. I empathized with others experiencing loss, but I had never felt it myself. I was surprised how vivid memories would sadden me abruptly weeks afterwards (even now as I write this I feel it again). Even with this recent experience I couldn’t think of anything to write in a condolence card today for someone I used to work with. It was his grandmother too, but I didn’t know what to say, and I hate being the 9th person to write, “Sorry for your loss.”

Science can tell me nothing about this. I can not sit and experiment with my emotions until I’ve codified every nuance. I can’t apply logic to feelings that have never occurred before. The gaps in my self-knowledge are immense. Why do I chew on pens? Why am I compulsive about some things and lax about others? What is the purpose of my life?

There is a great deal that I will never know, nor can ever know about myself. There is a great gulf in my mind. A great sea of the unknown.  Something is supposed to be there.

Where is this God, you ask? He's right there.

Status and Depression

Arnold Kling at EconLog posted this article recently written by two evolutionary psychologists.  Many years ago I was really excited by evolutionary psychology, but I've slowly soured on it.  Nonetheless, the article is really interesting.  A snippet:

depression is an adaptive response to losing rank and conceiving of oneself as a loser. The adaptive function of the depression, according to rank theory, is to facilitate losing and to promote accommodation to the fact that one has lost. In other words, the depressive state evolved to promote the acceptance of the subordinate role...

and

an internal inhibitory process comes into operation which causes the individual to cease competing and reduce his level of aspiration. This inhibitory process is involuntary and results in the loss of energy, depressed mood, sleep disturbance, poor appetite, retarded movements, and loss of confidence which are typical characteristics of depression.


This linkage between low status and depression got me thinking about some of the Christian ethos of humility.  Are Christians susceptible to depression by avoiding status symbols, personal glory and power?  Or is there some other route that supplants these losses with something more?  (The last sentence not just being a rhetoric statement, it really is a question in my mind.)  When I read Paul, he seems to be overflowing with passion, which clearly does not fit under "loss of energy...loss of confidence".  There is something he has tapped in to, but explicitly grasping and defining that is eluding me at the moment

Lessons from Rome

For Christmas I received a couple books on the rise of the Roman Empire.  I wanted to make a couple notes:

The Good News: Rome's first political personality cult (Tiberius Gracchus) seems to have been in 132 BC, a full 86 years before Rome's first dictator Julius Caesar.  So all this fear mongering about Obama's power grabs may be a little premature ;)

The Bad News: In between, revolts and government overthrowing riots were pretty common.  One purportedly ending with so many bodies in the Tiber river it had to be unclogged to get them to float away.

But, history doesn't repeat does it?

A Side Note on Immigration

I got wrapped up into a lengthy debate today on immigration at the blog of my friend and illustrious economist Bob Murphy.  I thought it was a good conversation, so I'm going to post of my comments and some other responses.

Bob's post and my thoughts are in response to a Cato Institute web video that included a question answer session with famous libertarian economist and blogger Tyler Cowen.  [He notes these comments here] His comments set off a firestorm of anger amongst some of the intellectual libertarians, but I'm not concerned with those issues.  Among them were some sharp rebukes of those who are anti-immigrant.  While I have no time for xenophobic anger or violence, I am becoming increasingly aware that the nativist argument is actually fairly sound.

Def. Nativist - someone who wants to maintain the purity of ones own culture.

Def. Minarchist - referring to minimal or very small government


I am pro-immigration. I believe in open borders. The best way to ensure freedom is to allow people to choose their government. Competition will shrink the size of the state.

However, I have seen noone make a good argument against nativism. Not that I subscribe to the argument, but I don't have a slam dunk reason against it.

My basic nativist argument is this:

You have a democratic minarchist state. The country flourishes economically. Millions of people around the world want to come and enjoy the economic benefits. The minarchist state opens its borders, letting in millions of hard working people who happen to be statists. The minarchist state slowly disappears as the statist immigrants become an increasing part of the voting population.

Blackadder adds:

The issue isn't whether every immigrant will be highly statist, but whether immigrants are likely to be more statist on average. That immigrants are likely to be more statist (and that this effect can last generations) is, I think, amply demonstrated by history.

Then Taylor:

"Is it also possible that these statists, once they arrive and are saturated by a non-statist society, will begin to adopt different principles, rather than the other way around?"

Then Me Again:

Sure, that's possible, but I lean towards Tyler Cowen's comment that culture is "sticky". Voting patterns amongst certain demographics tend to change very slowly over time.

While I am still not a nativist, I can understand their viewpoint.  I won't agree with bigotry anyone who disrespects immigrants as individuals, but for now, I can't really tear down the arguments as I have presented it.

How Paul Krugman Became an Idiot

Recently, my viewpoint of human behavior has been radically expanded by seeing the ubiquitous influence of status.  This line of thinking finally lifted the vale of mystery from a question I've had for so long.  Namely, how can someone be so smart, but believe something that is so ridiculous.

Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in economics, and NY Times columnist is the patron saint of the left wing economics.  If the Obama started selling our babies to pay off debt to China, Krugman would be complaining that it wasn't toddlers too.  He's so dedicated to giving power to the state that nothing seems beyond reproach.

How did he get that way?

The problem is that we learn and believe what we are motivated to learn and believe.  The primary factor, I believe, is status.  I break down how this happens into 3 types.

First, we like to believe things about ourselves make us better than others.  You have book smarts, but I have the all important common sense.  It's standard ego defense.  If someone tells a child with red hair that red hair is the best, he's likely to believe it because it makes him feel better.  Politically this would be someone who is highly educated who thinks that only highly educated people should be allowed to vote.  Their ideas would give them more power and status.

Secondly, is indirect status.  If I come up with an argument that brown eyes are the best, and you have brown eyes you will reward me with agreement.  If people around me tell me that they agree with me, then I'm more likely to believe that I'm right.  It's not that my ideas are self-serving, they serve the status of others.  This reinforces my line of thinking.  The better my line of thinking the more my own status will be raised by those who these ideas serve.  I can whole heartedly believe that brown eyes are better, even though my own eyes are blue.  This apparent lack of self-interest gives more creedance to my ideas and all the more fuels my own status indirectly.

Politically, we see this all the time.  Paul Krugman is surely heavily influenced byt his.  He gives cover to power grabs by politicians.  His ideas are reinforced by indirect self-interest.

Thirdly, is groupthink.  If you put ten Paul Krugmans in a room they will aid and assist each other.  When one academic makes a good argument that supports the main argument he will be rewarded by his peers.  They reward him because he has assisted the cause that indirectly gives them status.

When thinking this way, this adds to my own beliefs that "scientific" inquiries into the social sciences is fraught with inevitable problems.

Great Comments at Forum on Education

I've been gone on vacation for a while, sorry for the break.

I love economists. There is no Hollywood actor, pop-star, comedian, or celebrity who so regularly blasphemes the mythologies of our times than economists.

This short forum which includes several economists and a few other "prestigious" people at the Chronicle on higher education should be read. Economist Bryan Caplan, makes a clinical, but very non-PC comment. Two excerpts:

"For whom is college attendance socially beneficial?" My answer: no more than 5 percent of high-school graduates, because college is mostly what economists call a "signaling game." Most college courses teach few useful job skills; their main function is to signal to employers that students are smart, hard-working, and conformist.

And another...

College attendance, in my view, is usually a drain on our economy and society. Encouraging talented people to spend many years in wasteful status contests deprives the economy of millions of man-years of output. If this were really an "investment," of course, it might be worth it. But I see little connection between the skills that students acquire in college and the skills they'll need later in life.

The whole article is filled with anti-college thoughts. The non-economists basically parrot myths and pablum. I generally agree that most of college is a status game where learning is secondary to "winning".

HT: Econlog

Altruism, A Few More Comments

Storm Jingram requested that I expound on my criticism of Altruism in my last post.

Inherent to calling any act an "altruistic" one, is the belief that the act has no value to the actor. It is easy to conceive that many "atruistic" acts are indirectly beneficial, such as building a good reputation or interpersonal trust, but I've helped people out before in secret and still felt a rush of joy. Our minds may simply be hardwired to enjoy simple acts of kindness.

The problem with Altruism and other forms of morality is that there is an implicit compulsion to do those acts. It's not that you simply enjoy doing them, it's that you MUST do them if you are to be a "good" person. People will cast shame on people who don't practice "altruism". Isn't it a little ironic to use manipulation to coerce acts that produce happiness? This compulsion, this guilt, drains the joy out of the act. In the end, we are left with less kindness and less joy.

Replace "You Must" with "You Can" and it will make all the difference.