On HU
Featured Archive Post: William Leung with the second part of his explanation of why Before Watchmen is horrible.
Chris Gavaler on Judex and a wish for weirder superhero movies.
We had a thread where folks talked about what they thought was the most underrated movie and most over-rated movie ever.
Emily Thomas on new trends in text adventure games.
Brannon Costello on fascism and Howard Chaykin’s Power & Glory.
Me on Mu’Chi’s triptych and enlightenment.
Adrielle Mitchell on time and comics for PPP.
Me on C.S. Friedman’s “In Conquest Born” and liberal fascism.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I wrote about:
— how Darwin was inspired by intelligent design
— why the accusations against Woody Allen belong in the public sphere
—why kids need to learn to quit
—Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid and the therapeutic value of infidelity
At the Center for Digtial Ethics I have a piece about twitter, feminism, and power.
At the Dissolve I reviewed The New Black, a really good doc about the campaign for marriage equality in Maryland.
At Salon
— and a list of country kiss off songs for Valentine’s Day.
At the Chicago Reader I reviewed a nifty show of Ghanian Salon advertisements.
Other Links
Darryl Ayo interview on Inkstuds.
Noah Feeney on Katy B. and how the album isn’t dead yet.
C.T. May on his favorite right-wing shill.
Bill Cosby has been accused of rape and harassment by multiple women.
Nice piece about solidarity with sex workers.
Alyssa Rosenberg on how to get into writing.
I predict there is zero benefit to other side in me making these obvious points, but still — your rhetorical enthusiasm gets the better of you here:
“And, in fact, it probably is a version of natural selection”
This is rather like saying that Copernican heliocentrism is a version of Ptolemaic geocentrism, in that there’s every reason to believe that Copernicus was informed by Ptolemy’s work, and the questions Copernicus was answering were ones that Ptolemy had posed, and the observations he was making were ones that Ptolemy had developed. Like, they were both trying to explain the retrograde motion of Mercury, right?
(NB: one standard definition of natural selection is that it’s (something like) the differential reproduction of heritable variations in fitness. Paley, I believe, does not credit the apparent adaptedness of life to this process)
Ditto, mutatis mutandis, here:
“If birds are dinosaurs, Bill Nye is an intelligent design theologian.”
I mean, I get it, these sentiments are one part #slatepitch, one part liberal empathise-with-thy-enemy wishy-washyism, so…anyway, I’ll save us both some time and skip to the end — science is responsible for Auschwitz, and Feyerabend is a cool dude. Hooray!
Oops — I got the terms mixed up in my analogy. “Copernican heliocentrism is a version of Ptolemaic geocentrism” would be a ridiculous thing to say. I should have said that Ptolemaic geocentrism is a version of Copernican heliocentrism. Duh.
Feyerabend is a cool dude. And science is responsible or Auschwitz. Or at least, you needed a certain amount of technological advancement to get the mass slaughter to work (whether by machine gun or oven.)
Darwin’s theories are in the tradition of latitudinarian theology, both in terms of his personal history (Christ’s College), in the structure of the argument, and even in the religious heterodoxy.
And sure, in terms of the formal definition, Paley did not use natural selection. However, historically, he invented a natural force that shaped living creatures to their environment. That seems like a prototype natural selection to me; without all the details worked out, but still.
Why exactly any of this should cause anyone discomfort is kind of an interesting issue. For me it’s not about empathizing with the enemy. I don’t see creationists as the enemy, and don’t really care whether folks believe in intelligent design or not, any more than I care that much whether people think Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays. I think it’s useful to remember in terms of Darwin and ID that, while these ideas can seem diametrically opposed, such opposition is really only possible because there are so many assumptions, and so much history, in common.
And…also possibly it’s worth thinking about how uncomfortable both sides seem to be with history. It’s almost like there’s a modernist consensus that exists across religion and science that the past is irrelevant, and that the only truth is now.
Re: Copernicus and Ptolemy. I don’t really know enough about the context of that argument to judge whether the analogy works. The assumption that the context can’t possibly be relevant, though, seems, as I said, to suggest a failure of historical imagination.
Oh; and re; the Holocaust. That really does seem to be a place where ideologically Christian impulses and Darwinian ones seem really difficult to separate out. I know there’s a huge argument over whether it’s all Darwin’s fault or all Christ’s, but from what I’ve read, it seems like both traditional Christian anti-semitism and more recent post-Darwin ideas about evolutionary superiority and survival of the fittest got mixed up together to weaponize anti-Semitism.
Which isn’t super-surprising, since Darwin came out of a Christian and imperialist context in the first place.
Well, yeah, if by “natural selection”, you mean neither natural selection as scientists understand it, nor how the lay public does (which surely considers it essentially connected to evolution somehow, however hazily); if by “natural”, you mean something pretty much definitionally (Spinozism notwithstanding) supernatural (viz. god), and by “selection”, you don’t mean actual selection of pre-existing variants but rather creation by whole cloth; in short, if by “natural selection”, you mean “supernatural (intelligent) design”, then, yeah, what Paley believed in was a kind of natural selection.
I should add that I disagree with your rhetorical excess, not with the substantive thrust of your piece — which I take to be that (a) Darwin emerged in a context of natural theology emphasising the apparent adaptedness of organisms to their environment (IMO, British focus on this and natural history more generally helps explain why it was Darwin and Wallace who invented the theory, rather than anyone on the Continent, which was focused more on anatomy and development); and (b) belief in intelligent design was not always the know-nothing folly that it is today.
If anything, I’d go even further. It’s not just that intelligent design was (pace Hume) an intellectually defensible position pre-Darwin. Intelligent design was the only intellectually defensible position pre-Darwin, at least if you knew anything about biology. How else to explain the undeniable appearance of adaptedness? ID was the only game in town.
Well, my point is perhaps congruent with my discussion of genre. “Natural selection” isn’t just a formal definition; it’s a history, too. One linked directly to Paley.
That’s an interesting point about Darwin and Wallace being well-positioned to develop the theory because of the particularly British intellectual tradition. That makes sense.
Jones, intelligent design isn’t all know-nothing folly now. The writings of Sir Roger Penrose, John Lennox, Michael Behe, and Michael Denton all make scientifically sound arguments for design. More specifically, they identify natural phenomena that seem to indicate design and that evolutionary theory cannot (yet?) explain. Even Sir Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins have admitted that explaining the origin of life without an outside actor is so difficult that they consider directed panspermia (seeding by intelligent aliens) a possibility. Dawkins has also admitted that intelligent design advocates have identified many genuine incongruities between evidence and current evolutionary theory. He just disapproves of their explanation. He wants them back in the lab figuring out the discrepancy.
That encapsulates many scientists’ problems with intelligent design, I think. ID is not so much a theory as it is an identification of all the things another theory doesn’t explain. And by itself, saying “God or aliens designed it” doesn’t contribute much to scientific knowledge. Newton (yet another scientific knight) never questioned that God created the universe. His objective was to figure out how, and how it all worked – to develop a greater understanding of the miracle of creation.
Noah wrote:
“It’s almost like there’s a modernist consensus that exists across religion and science that the past is irrelevant, and that the only truth is now.”
I realize this is a bit tongue in cheek, but I’m going to treat it as though it’s serious and unpack it a little.
Basically, science doesn’t consider the past irrelevant or believe the truth is now; rather, it operates according to doubt, radical doubt, even… Whatever “truth” we have in the now is subject to testing and eventual revision. Paradigm shifts and all that. I realize that there’s a tendency for the doubt part to get lost in the rhetoric (“You have to believe me, not this guy, because I’ve got science on my side), but it’s there.
With that in mind, it isn’t that science ignores the past, it just treats aspects of its past (the stuff proven false) as irrelevant to the language game that is science. If your language game is the sociology/philosophy/history of science then the past is important, but it’s not fair to ask someone playing a different game to adopt your rules.
As for religion, that’s a different language game altogether, and it operates on certainty (doubt is the enemy). Religion doesn’t reject the past for the present, the truth isn’t “now,” it’s eternal. And that’s not modern.
The real overlap is actually postmodernism, or at least certain postmodernist views on science and knowledge. Basically, if we accept that facts are socially constructed, how can we get angry at climate change deniers or frustrated with creationists who want intelligent design added to the curriculum. Bruno Latour and Michael Berube both talk about this at length. Anyway, that was a really long response to what was I suspect just an off the cuff thing, but there it is.
When you say that science is a language game that privileges the thing we know now over past blind alleys — that’s a restatement of my point about rejecting the past, it seems like, not a refutation of it.
Religion now isn’t the same as religion in the past, would be my argument. Creationism and biblical literalism in general is a relatively recent development, and one that’s radically anti-tradition in a lot of ways. That radical protestantism is where science comes from too. We’re all progressives now.
I was unclear, I wasn’t saying that science doesn’t privilege what we know now. I was saying that this tendency isn’t modernist; that is, it is not based on the modernist faith that with time comes progress. A theory isn’t good because it stands the test of time, but because it stands up to tests.
As for religion, I can see how religion now has adopted the language of modernity, and with that certain modernist discourses (hence the scientific window dressing on creationism that is intelligent design).
And as for radical protestantism and the roots of science, I’m not sure what you’re saying there… Are you talking about secularization?
Secularization more or less. Also just that modernity is kind of rooted in radical protestantism in a lot of ways.
About the Woody Allen case–I think people who don’t take a position on whether or not he did it (like me) are behaving better than most of the people who do take a strong position.
First, I think there’s evidence on both sides: very convincing account by Dylan Farrow vs. fairly convincing one by Allen, Judge’s ruling vs. Yale team’s findings, nannies vs. Moses Farrow, high prevalence of sexual abuse vs. existence of false memories. I just don’t think that either side has an airtight case.
Second, I think most people who weigh in are just going by their personal or ideological biases, which is a bad idea when you’re considering factual matters. Everyone has pointed out that the dork on “The Daily Beast” is a loathsome Woody Allen fanboy whose guiding principles are that Mia Farrow is a bitch and his idol/semi-friend can do no wrong. But then you have Jessica Valenti implying in The Nation that he must be guilty because child sexual abuse is very rampant, while Roseanne Barr tweeted that he’s guilty because his movies lack decent female characters. Even if the latter commentators are right and he is guilty, I don’t think their opinions are worthwhile at all.
And even if Allen’s defenders are mostly misogynistic pricks while his attackers have their hearts in the right place, that doesn’t mean the latter group is right. To use a pretentious metaphor: Throughout the first half of the last century, American right-wingers were complete assholes while American Communists did a lot of great work. Nonetheless, the former group was still factually correct about Stalin and the Soviet Union while the Communists, for all their brave opposition to racism and so on, were dead wrong.
Third, none of us following the case on the internet are experts. In your comments in The Atlantic, you said that the Yale team didn’t interview Dylan and that false memories are rare, and you were wrong on both counts. Once you’ve been factually wrong twice in a factual argument, isn’t it time to pack it in? Not that I know any more about this than you do, of course.
I grew up admiring the guy and still have a lot of affection for his early and middle-period movies, so I really don’t want the allegations to be true. The situation actually reminds me of a message-board political argument I once read. One left-wing guy linked to a story about U.S. soldiers massacring civilians in Iraq, and then a right-winger said something along the lines of, “Fuck you, cocksucker… When I read this story, I felt sick to my stomach and prayed it wasn’t true. But people like this guy WANT it to be true.” The second guy had a point there–since I didn’t support either of Bush’s wars and generally resent the idea that I have to be grateful to “our troops” for defending my freedom, I probably have a positive reaction on some level to any news that makes “our troops” sound bad. Similarly, I think a lot of internet feminists and people who just find Woody Allen creepy seem to want him to be guilty, while I want him to be 100% innocent.
Hey Jack. As I say in the piece, the problem with claiming the moral high ground by not taking a side is that not taking a side, or saying it shouldn’t be tried in the court of public opinion, de facto is taking Allen’s side. He’s the wealthy, powerful guy who has awards showered on him. If we all agree not to judge, that’s still where he is.
I don’t think Allen’s testimony is very convincing. I think that postulating some kind of magic brain washing by Mia is not in fact reasonable doubt. Obviously, I”m not an expert in the case, and I can be wrong. But what I’ve read doesn’t seem especially unclear.
Again, it’s fine to feel like you don’t know. And it’s fine to say that you feel like you don’t know, so Allen should get the benefit of the doubt. The claim that you can somehow not take sides though is not convincing, especially when Farrow wrote that piece demanding that you take sides. You can certainly deny her request; you should just be clear that that’s what you’re doing.
The false memory thing; false memories of all sorts of things are common. False memories where someone remembers abuse from when they were a kid seems like it may happen occasionally. False memories where someone says that they’ve been abused as a child, and continue to hold to the same account for 20 years — I don’t think that really happens. At least, I haven’t seen anyone cite another comparable case.
Regarding false memories, have you seen the documentary Capturing the Friedmans? It’s about an honest-to-God pedophile who was caught with child pornography, who admitted to having fondled multiple children in the past, and who was convicted of crimes that he does not seem to have committed. The movie features an interview with one kid who describes a scene of group abuse that does not sound the least bit credible, although the kid apparently believes what he says. Even the cops involved in the case seem to have developed false memories of what they found in the guy’s house. And I’m sure that all of these people’s memories will grow worse over time. So I think it’s undeniable that people sometimes develop and retain false memories of sexual abuse, although that says nothing about whether Dylan Farrow’s memories are accurate. Maybe he did it.
Do you think that saying you don’t know what happened, despite its favoring Allen’s position, is at least taking the moral high ground compared to the way many people are completely talking out of their asses? I guess that was my main point.
Farrow’s account is really completely credible. It’s not especially hyperbolic.
I don’t know whether I think it’s a moral high ground or not, especially. I think it’s frustrating to see people saying stupid things online. But like I said, I believe Dylan is telling the truth, and she wanted this conversation to happen. So that’s kind of where I’m at with it.
Fair enough. Maybe you’re right.