Archimedes’ Hot Tub

What if religions were like species, evolving — mutating — to best survive in their surroundings? That was that topic for a piece I wrote recently in Nautil.us, a young, science-oriented publication. The piece was titled “How the Mormons Conquered America” (if I had input on the headline, I wouldn’t have picked this, but I am not a gifted headline writer).
It wasn’t strictly about the Mormons; I chose that religion, on the advice of religious scholars, because of its growth, its prominence in popular culture, and because we have a record for pretty much the entire history of the religion. We can see the doctrinal debates play out in a way we can only infer for a religion like Christianity. (What really was going on between Peter and James and Paul?) It gives me things to think about in the way I look at the events in the New Testament.

Drafts of the piece looked more at events in Christian history, including the Protestant Reformation. Those were cut.

I had at least one scholar tell me it was a bad question, and in a sense, he’s right: religions don’t have genomes. They don’t evolve in the biological sense. They do change (that is, mutate), sometimes quite rapidly. And they do adapt based on societal mores.
I didn’t know much about Mormons when I started this piece; some readers would argue I don’t know much about them now. I talked with several Mormons for the piece, and they were unfailingly respectful and seemed genuinely decent folk. It’s a religion that has always encouraged a focus on community and family; in some ways it seems like a reaction to the intensely personal aspects of 18th and 19th century American Protestantism. Some reader comments were antagonistic towards the Mormons because of their focus on community, which leads to exclusion and even shunning of those who disagree too loudly. Lots of organizations stifle free expression, notably companies (especially media companies). Whistleblowers and dissenters are everywhere under siege.
Joe Pitt, the Mormon cum pariah in Angels in America, is portrayed as outwardly decent, but completely lacking in sympathy for those not like him. I wrote a bit about the difference between Kushner’s portrayal of Mormonism and the portrayal of Mormons as eccentrics by the Book of Mormon: The Musical. This, too, was cut, likely because it probably has more to do with differences between Tony Kushner and Trey Parker than it does with our society now versus 20 years ago.

I am now thinking about writing on apostasy. We see people shunned in many contexts. I remember a CEO who professed belief in aliens, and was forced out of his company. Recently, another CEO lost his job for being against gay marriage. Athletes can be banned for life for various acts, from gambling on sports to steroid use. Hawthorne’s Scarlet A is not just a vestige of religious stigma, but it feels to me like religious shunning drives more anger. Does shunning perhaps act as a way of driving out bad chromosomes? Oops, there I go, being all materialistic with my metaphors.

My passport hit its expiration date, so it has been replaced. I looked back at the little book with fondness, and not just because then, we were allowed to smile in our passport photos, as opposed to the mug-shot expression they want now. In 2004, I went to Zurich for The Economist to profile Gerd Binnig, Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the scanning tunneling microscope, and his clever, playful partner in building the microscope, Christof Gerber. I also got a scoop about Millipede, an IBM Research effort led by Binnig to build nanoscale computer memory. The Millipede project is dead (so is the publication I wrote about it for, Small Times). But Binnig’s startup effort to build a creative computer, Definiens, is still going, and is focused on life care and health sciences. (Definiens, a cognitive networking system that emulates the human brain, now sounds a bit like a trailblazer for IBM’s Watson, though I doubt Binnig had anything to do with Watson.)

Next trip in the book came in 2007, to Cambridge, England, home of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion.

That was an incredible two months of powerhouse intellectual stimulation and debate in daily seminars led by some of the world’s leading researchers in science and religion. We spent two weeks in Cambridge, five weeks back at home researching a project, and then a week in Cambridge to present our research. In Cambridge, we ate superbly, sumptuous dinners in swank college dining halls and terrific local restaurants.

Our time out of lectures included excellent activities: tours of the university by a medieval specialist, and of the Cambridge Botanic Garden, on the grounds where Darwin walked with his mentor and began the observations that would lead him to develop his theory of evolution. A magical Trinity College Singing on the River event on a glimmering early summer evening. Evensong at King’s College. We had a crack at punting (I went in circles). We attended Fraser Watt’s Goth Eucharist and hoisted libations at the Eagle in homage to Watson and Crick. We searched for Wittgenstein’s grave. We went to Ely Cathedral, and the tavern Oliver Cromwell ran in the period before the English Revolution. The TCJF, and some timely networking at the AAAS show in Boston later in 2007, turned into this piece in The Economist in Easter 2008. I also wrote on climate change tech in the New York Times, a Q&A for Christian Century with John Polkinghorne and a Q&A with medical ethicist William Hurlbut for Technology Review.

having a roaring good time in Cambridge, England. l to r: (seated) Julia Vitullo-Martin, Sandy Blakeslee, Ehsan Mahsood, Liz Gulliford; (kneeling) Andrew Brown, Richard Denton, Fraser Watts (Standing) Peter McKnight, Michael Fitzgerald, Paul Kvinta, Jeremy Manier. Not pictured: Juliet Eilperin, Sharon Schmickle, Brian Heap
The passport shows a detour to Frankfurt, Germany, on my way to a weekend in Weisbaden with my cousin and his wife prior to the final week of the TCJF. Weisbaden, it turns out, is home to the world’s largest cuckoo clock:

In 2010, Britain’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, said in response to Hawking and his mind of God comment that

Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean. They are different intellectual enterprises. They even occupy different hemispheres of the brain. Science – linear, atomistic, analytical – is a typical left-brain activity. Religion – integrative, holistic, relational – is supremely a work of the right-brain.

In other words, science has limits to what it can say, especially about human interaction based on human values. An earnest idea in an ironic age?

Scientists Jewish, Christian and Muslim once strived to bring greater glory to God through revealing things about His world. During the Enlightenment, the idea of natural theology developed, with God as designer of the marvelous world around us. Even after Darwin and Wallace and their theory of evolution destroyed the premise of natural theology, many scientists continued to pursue knowledge of the world and our universe to enhance the glory of God. Now most science seems to get done for the glory of science. Perhaps that’s an inevitable secular shift. Albert Schweitzer, medical missionary, gives way to secular non-profits. Mission schools and hospitals yield to professionalized institutions.

Now we can seek knowledge for the glory of ourselves, or its own sake. Both are easier to know and experience than God.

“Humans have this extraordinary capacity for propositional knowledge, objective knowledge and it’s enabled us to make huge advances,” says Fraser Watts, lecturer in theology and science at Cambridge University. “Our kind of excitement about that can distract us from knowing God.”

Is the rise of the left brain, analytic, incisive, a moral hazard for morals? Watts thinks so. He thinks the left brain “is not a good way of knowing God.”

He’s also worried that the left brain is subsuming the more expressionist right brain. He says art and religion are being distorted into left brain work. “Left-brain dominance that is a threat to our society and the human race,” he says.

Apocalyptic language, applied to religion itself. What will it mean for our morals?

Something to contemplate as we sit down to Easter supper. Perhaps at some point I’ll work on a piece that answers these questions.

Alyosha, the spiritual Karamazov brother in Dostoevsky’s 1880 novel, receives the following advice:

Remember always, young man, that science has become a great power in the last century, has analyzed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of the world have nothing left of all that was sacred. But they have only analyzed the parts and not the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvelous.

Blind or not, science offers marvelous metaphors: the Big Bang, the theories of evolution and relativity. These are also things most of us cannot know – to really see them requires significant training needed to overcome the counter-intuitiveness of science. It takes real and consistent work for a scientific education to overwhelm our sense of intuition. Yet like moral ideas, scientific memes are powerful, and can offer neutral, non-judgmental ways of looking at the world around us and the people who live in it.

Wilde said, “in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”

Victorian society disagreed about Wilde’s style; ours would shrug. Social stigma shifts. Things scandalous 50 years ago – psychotherapy, divorce, bankruptcy, having children outside of marriage, skipping worship – become unremarked, even civil rights.

 Does a loosening of Bible-driven conventions lead to a less judgmental, possibly more just world?

We’re getting pretty close to having built an omniscient mind of our own, or so we think. The attachment of sensors to all sorts of things, billions of people feeding data to Facebook and Google and Apple, even more billions using cell phones that track our location, creating a treasure trove of data. Some — a select few — integrate and algorithmically analyze that data for patterns. All that data analysis points towards a depth and breadth of knowledge about people that we’ve not had before. Predictive analytics is what the field is called, because the algorithms let institutions make predictions about behavior – who will buy something, where a crime might be committed. We’ve had the ability to use data to predict things for 200 years; we now have more data and better algorithms, and can predict more things.

It feels vaguely like the algorithm meisters will be able to read our diaries, to know things about us that no one is supposed to know. That feels like it violates a moral law of some type, the type C.S. Lewis starts off Mere Christianity with, “that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way.”
Statistics provide probabilities, not Truth. Predictive analytics is not predestination, the idea that God knows the course of our life before we are born. Every time we think we know it all, some cocky Nobel Laureate at Long Term Capital Management or a quant at Lehman Brothers threaten to send the world economy back into the Stone Age. Despite such malignant miscalculations, market values have begun to dislodge moral ones, writes Michael Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard, in his 2012 book What Money Can’t Buy. “The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed,” Sandel writes. “It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.”

“We’re a figure-it-out culture,” says David B. Burrell, a priest and theologian who in 1986 published Knowing the Unknowable God. “That becomes our paradigm for knowing: to know something is to circumscribe it, to comprehend it, to get our mind around and therefore to domesticate it.”

He pauses and chuckles. “Try to figure out your spouse. You’re in big trouble!”

People of all stripes know better than to pigeonhole their spouse. Many of those people will nonetheless prefer not to accept moral values. Market values may seem objective. But people make markets. Is it a good thing to replace morals with markets?

My friend Andrew Brown is such a good writer that he manages to turn a heart attack — his own – into a meditation on allusion, medical science and their intersection in a practical way. I can hear him swearing at the doctor and knowing that it meant he was all right.

Enjoyed this piece on Richard Dawkins, A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy, by Michael Powell. Powell’s piece reminds us that Dawkins was never much of a scientist, but was a terrific synthesizer, and that we need synthesizers like Dawkins to create the path for new, complex ideas.

It also shows how Dawkins can be an extremist in some regards, and reasonable and engaging on others. Powell even manages to get Dawkins to say something not negative about Simon Conway Morris, who believes in God perhaps as passionately as Dawkins does not.

The piece includes a useful video interview about Dawkins moving to atheism. He’s no more convincing than Francis Collins on becoming a believer. I suppose that’s just me.

As the media’s Super Bowl-like lead-up to 9/11 continues, I found myself listening to an NPR piece on al Qaeda. The broadcaster interviewed an expert at the Rand Corp. who was saying bristling things about how it had spread to many different countries and through its ‘affiliates’ was more dangerous now than ever. She made this network of networks out to be a kind of process innovation for terrorists, making it impossible to stop. I found myself thinking that I was hearing something out of Ralph Ellison or Pynchon, where paranoid people make things true by saying implying the rest of us can’t really see the truth. “It’s al Qaeda, stupid. Just because we’ve wiped out almost all of its leadership and cut off its access to funding doesn’t mean it isn’t more dangerous than ever.”

I thought of Scott Atran, who told the Beyond 9/11 conference I attended in Cambridge England two weeks ago that “never have so few people with so few actual means caused so much fear in so many.” His narrative of al Qaeda is that the story is largely over for the group. The uprisings in places like Egypt have usurped its role in the Arab world. Atran says it has less than 100 followers worldwide, not the 4,000 being bandied about on NPR. The experts on NPR said that al Qaeda was attracting better educated recruits these days; Atran’s research suggests the opposite — that more of its recruits are poorly educated now. Perhaps I trust him more because I was able to see his research, laid out in his book “Talking to the Enemy.” Maybe it was context — he was able to talk for 90 minutes and then answer questions for another 90. But I found his perspective more accurate.
I must blog about his talk. I am behind on posting things from that fascinating event.

Two of my fellow Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellows were in the New York Times. One, Juliet Eilperin, had her book “Demon Fish” reviewed by the other, Sandy Blakeslee. It’s a clever review that gets at the heart of yet another human-driven problem: sharks are disappearing at our hands. A lot of the reason is shark-fin soup, though shark fins are tasteless. There’s also the fear factor, that sharks sometimes kill swimmers, even though it happens that Christmas tree ornaments are more dangerous than sharks.

Feriha Peracha runs perhaps the world’s most unusual boarding school: it’s for 162 child warriors who fought for the Taliban in Pakistan.

More than 58 percent of the children, who range in age from 12 to 17, were abducted.  But 41 percent volunteered to join the Taliban, some to get food. The rest were given over by their families.
All attend Sabaoon, which means the first ray of light at dawn. Her school is in an undisclosed location in the Pakistani province called Swat, about 150 miles west of Islamabad. Peracha presented some of her experience with these boys at a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship seminar called Beyond 9/11.
The school began in late 2007. Peracha, a psychologist whose program is funded primarily by UNICEF and protected by the Pakistani military, attempts to deradicalize them, and reintegrate them into Pakistani society.
It’s dangerous work – she carries it out despite last year’s assassination of a colleague, Mohammad Farooq Khan.
So far 32 of the 162 boys have graduated from Sabaoon and gone on to college or back to society. She says 95 percent of them will have been reintegrated into society by May 2012. A few of them will not be reintegrated into society. Her research shows that in Swat, what drives these children into extremism is not religious faith but poverty. She says for these children, Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs  was not met, even the most basic physiological ones, food, water, warmth and rest.
Despite these life situations, about a third of the boys had complete high school. Another third had dropped out, while 35 percent took Koran lessons either at home or in mosques, where they would get a meal a day.
***
Listening to her talk about Pakistan’s poor reminds me of The Clash’s ‘public service announcement with guitars,’ Know Your Rights. The three are:

1. the right not to be killed,
2. the right to food money and
3. the right to free speech.

Though in The Clash song and apparently in Pakistan there are exceptions to these rights.