Another Week Ends: Galli on B(h)ell, Growing Up Catholic, Secret Millionaires, Immortal Billionaires, Lillian Roth, Mixed Signals and Nicolas Cage

1. If you've been scratching your head over the whole "Rob Bell universalism" uproar this past week, conference speaker Mark Galli will set you straight with this charitable overview of how the topic of Hell has been dealt with over the centuries. Suffice it to say, there's nothing new under the sun, and the outcry says a lot less about Bell than about the folks reacting to his as-of-yet largely unread book. 

To lighten the mood, check the sort-of related and apparently very real After The Rapture Pet Care (ht CH).

2. The Guardian takes a look at the new laugh-or-cry memoir by comic Rory McGrath, The Father, The Son and the Ghostly Hole: Growing Up Catholic. Evidently it plumbs the depths of Catholic guilt - stemming in this case from an experience of religion as Judgment with a capital J (and zero Gospel) - in a particularly unflinching and let's-face-it tragic manner. Not exactly groundbreaking, but nonetheless striking, ht AOC:

"[After being disillusioned in high school, McGrath] never returned to the church, and he never quite shook it off. He was expecting to embark on a binge of guilt-free hedonism at university, but it didn't quite work out like that. He felt rootless rather than liberated. "You think, 'What do I do now, where am I supposed to go, what am I supposed to be doing?' It had an effect on my first years at university because I didn't know what to do. I don't know if this is to do with religion or just my character, but I had a total lack of self-discipline."

Nor did the sense of guilt disappear with his divorce from the church. In fact it grew, and he started to feel responsible for anything and everything. "I think guilt grows inside you. I'm still discovering it now, aged well whatever age I am. I'm over 40 and now discovering it's all guilt."

3. In an editorial that touches on some familiar themes, CNN accuses ABC's reality show Secret Millionaire of "shamelessly promoting a fantasy about the redemptive power of wealth." I haven't seen it but would love to hear others' thoughts:
[CONTINUE READING]

Mirror Neurons, the Mind-Body Problem, and The Limits of Neurology

The third of four neuroscience posts today/tomorrow, this one comes to us from the New York Review of Books, more precisely, Colin McGinn's thoughtful review of V.S. Ramachandran's new book, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human. A bit more technical than the previous two installments, this one may have you glazing over with its talk of 'mirror neurons'... But stick with it, as the questions at the bottom are the same, i.e. What makes us human? Why do we act the way we do? Do we have free will? Is there more to the mind than the brain (and vice versa)? Are we primarily rational or emotional creatures? Or is that a false dichtomy? To what extent do universal 'laws' rule our consciousness? What role does nature play vs. nurture? And where are the limits of neurology? McGinn rightly pinpoints the inflated anthropology running underneath - the word 'reductionism' is a frequent one - making it a fitting counterpoint to David Livingston Smith's point of view. Enjoy, ht MB:

The mirror neurons that have been identified in the brain serve as the mechanism of imitation, [Ramachandan] suggests, in virtue of their ability to react or “fire” sympathetically, and thus affect consciousness, when you are watching someone else do something: some of the same neurons fire both when you observe the performance of an action and when you actually perform that action. This is held to show that the brain automatically produces a representation of someone else’s “point of view”—it runs by means of mirroring neurons an internal simulation of the other’s intended action.

The mirror neurons act like sympathetic movements that can occur when watching someone else perform a difficult task—as when your arm swings slightly when you watch someone hit a ball with a bat. For Ramachandran this specific neural circuitry provides the key to understanding the growth of culture; indeed, the mirror neurons are held to permit the evolution of language, by enabling imitative utterance. According to him, we need special inhibitory mechanisms in order to keep our mirror neurons under control—or else we would be in danger of doing everything we see and losing our sense of personal identity. We are, in effect, constantly impersonating others at a subconscious level, as our hyperactive mirror neurons issue their sympathetic reactions. [CONTINUE READING]

Nymphomania and The Morally Disabled

Neuroscience Day, part two: An admittedly wild article from Slate, with the inspired title "Naughty By Nature", looking at nymphomania through the lens of neuroscience and free will (and the profound lack thereof). Specifically, the article discusses what's known as Kluever-Bucy Syndrome, which causes a neurological breakdown in the ability to control one's sexual urges... [insert joke about the average male libido here], but more generally, it asks the question of whether or not neuroscience can/should explain moral lapses as well as cognitive ones. The examples they use are, by necessity, rather salacious, so be warned - seriously, folks - but the conclusions are too priceless not to post. Perhaps "morally disabled" should be our new watchword, ht JS:

Most of us—materialist and dualist alike—have sympathy aplenty for those patients whose brain disturbances have interfered with their everyday cognitive abilities. We're perfectly willing to accommodate their intellectual disabilities by, say, helping them create a new mnemonic strategy or giving them a pat on the back or a word of encouragement when they're trying to remember someone's name. Yet when chunks of gray matter that have evolved to control and inhibit, say, our sexual appetites and other Bacchanalian drives experience a similar catastrophic blowout, are we so understanding? What if those impairments lead their victims to display … oh, I don't know, let's call them moral disabilities? Cases of libidinal brain systems going haywire have our kind-hearted, humanistic materialism rubbing elbows—or butting heads—with our belief in free will and moral culpability.
---------------

If a "good" person's brain can be rendered morally disabled by an invasive tumor or an epileptic fuse-shortage, subsequently causing them to do very bad deeds, then isn't it rather hypocritical to assume that a "bad" person without brain injury—whose brain is anatomically organized by epigenetics (the complex interplay between genes and experiences)—has any more free will than the neuroclinical case? After all, perhaps it's just a matter of timing: The "good" are born with brains that can "go bad," whereas the "bad" are hogtied by a morally disabled neural architecture from the very start. And although it may be less common, if a "bad" person behaves in an upstanding manner, could that be the result of fortuitous brain damage or epilepsy, too?

It's all brain-based in the end, including the parameters by which one can contemplate and, especially, execute their free will. Perhaps we're only as free as our genes are pliable in the slosh of our developmental milieus.

Dehumanization and the Human Mind

Kicking off a day full of neuroscience is the review in the NY Times of philosopher David Livingstone Smith's new book, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others. Those familiar with Smith's work, for example Why We Lie and The Most Dangerous Animal, will not be surprised to find his original sin obsession in full bloom. That is, he's continuing with his exploration of the underbelly of evolutionary psychology, this time describing the very uncomfortable intersection between human nature and genocide. Reviewer David Berreby's conclusions are almost equally fascinating:

Dehumanization is a mind-set, as Smith writes, that “decommissions” our “moral inhibitions” about mistreating fellow human beings. Encased in law and custom, this psychological process has often licensed slavery, genocide and countless other cruelties.

Smith reasonably argues that dehumanization is rooted in human nature, not culture... Dehumanization is possible, Smith argues, because of “our cognitive architecture — the evolved design of the human psyche.” Our innate predispositions incline us to divide living things into species, he argues, and, with the same mental equipment, to divide humans into ethnic groups. And just as we do not believe that superficial resemblance means bats and birds belong together, neither do we trust that surface appearances determine who belongs where on the ethnic map.

In other words, in Smith’s account of the research, we are — for better or more often for worse — predisposed to believe that racial or ethnic identity is immutable. That’s because our instincts tell us it is based on an unchanging “essence” at each person’s core, rather than on changeable appearances. Philosophical experiments have shown, for example, that while most people feel sure that a 98-pound weakling can become a strongman, they also intuit that a black person can’t become white, no matter what physical characteristics he changes.

Smith clearly explains why many cognitive scientists believe this tendency is innate and then links it to another predisposition that seems “built in” to the human mind: our inclination to see living things in hierarchies, as in the “great chain of being” of medieval European Christians, with God at its perfect top, human beings above “higher” animals, and so on down to worms and plants. Because we feel that living things are defined by their essence, and because we feel that each creature has its rank in the world, Smith argues, dehumanization comes easily to the human mind: we accept that someone can look human but have a sub­human essence, and we accept that what is not human must be inferior. “When we dehumanize people,” he writes, “we think of them as counterfeit human beings.”
[CONTINUE READING]

Friction and Addiction in New Social Media

A fascinating read, from beginning to end, in GQ about what's going on behind the "New Social Media" phenomenon in Silicon Valley, "The Viral Me". The answer appears to be a peculiar form of narcissism, which is as idealistic about changing the way people relate as it is cynical in its understanding of how to do so. In other words, these guys are attempting to (and succeeding in) exploit our addictive tendencies (via endlessly random incentives) and predict our self-justifying impulses for the sake of efficiency and harmony. At bottom, all this new tech is exciting, terrifying and very, very human (ht KW):

I still have an embarrassingly antiquated idea of what people mean by "privacy" when they complain about, say, Facebook. To me the danger is basically some Russian guy who steals my credit card number. Or Google knowing my porn predilections. Both of those things are certainly happening. But the "private" stuff that's most likely to get you into trouble is the information you willingly share—semipublic stuff provided by you that can become known by audiences you don't anticipate. My reflexive response to that privacy fear would be to pull all data whatsoever from the public sphere—erase my Facebook account, stop with the Twitter. People like Rahul have the opposite solution: Flood the social layer with information you want out there about yourself.

(If you're confused by the term social layer, think of the word layer as meaning "lens." The social layer is one lens you can look through to see the content of the Internet. Who you're connected to, what they're connected to, what they like and don't like.)

"More and more people are going to have careers where they move from one thing to another fairly publicly," Rahul says. "And what people are really investing in is your track record. Your brand. What you do and what you say and what you think are just as important as your skills. Specifically for me, for our company, it's very important for me to be known, to have credibility, and to have opinions."
--------------

The first thing I want to know is why, apparently, people on [DailyBooth] don't feel exposed, vulnerable, embarrassingly narcissistic. "There was a study done," Brian says. "They gave people video cameras. Everyone over the age of 25 would turn it outward, and everyone under the age of 25 would turn it inward. This is the first platform that captured this behavior of turning the camera inward. It created a platform for communication around that one behavior. Look at the iPhone 4. It has two cameras—they added one specifically to face inward. And the fact that Steve Jobs, who's sort of the person who defines what's acceptable in technology and behavior, put this here? So this behavior is becoming even more acceptable."[CONTINUE READING]

Lyre Bird Ministries

ht BM (post number 2000!)

The Science of Atonement

A revealing and undoubtedly controversial report in this week's Economist, "Purification By Pain: The Mascochism Tango," looking at the relationship between guilt and pain. Turns out there is one! Go figure:

The idea that experiencing pain reduces feelings of guilt has never been put to a proper scientific test. To try to correct that, Brock Bastian of the University of Queensland, in Australia, recruited a group of undergraduates for what he told them was a study of mental acuity.
------------------

Dr Bastian reports in Psychological Science that those who wrote about immoral behaviour exposed themselves to the ice for an average of 86.7 seconds whereas those who had written about everyday experiences exposed themselves for an average of only 64.4. The guilty, then, either sought pain out or were inured to it. That they sought it out is suggested by the pain ratings people reported. Those who had written about immoral behaviour rated the ice-bucket experience at an average of 2.8 on the pain scale. The others rated it at 1.9. (Warm water was rated 0.1 by those who experienced it.)

Furthermore, the pain was, indeed, cathartic. Those who had been primed to feel guilty and who were subjected to the ice bucket showed initial and follow-up guilt scores averaging 2.5 and 1.1 respectively. By contrast, the “non-guilty” participants who had been subjected to the ice bucket showed scores averaging 1.3 and 1.2—almost no difference, and almost identical to the post-catharsis scores of the “guilty”. The third group, the guilt-primed participants who had been exposed to the warm bucket and paper clips, showed scores averaging 2.2 and 1.5. That was a drop, but not to the guilt-free level enjoyed by those who had undergone trial by ice.

Guilt, then, seems to behave in the laboratory as theologians have long claimed it should. It has a powerful effect on willingness to tolerate pain. And it can be assuaged by such pain. Atonement hurts. But it seems to work—on Earth at least.

Can't help but remind a person of the following quote from Grace in Practice:

"Something must be done about guilt. Everyone knows this from their own experience. There has to be some relief for remorse, whether personal or collective. You have to "Get the monkey off your back,"... Atonement provides this relief... We all wish that the innocent had not had to die for the guilty. We wish that a different road, a road less traveled in scars, had been taken. But we have been told that this was the necessary way by which God's law and God's grace would be resolved. It had to be resolved through a guilt-transfer, making it "possible" - the idea is almost beyond maintaining - for God to give the full scholarship to the candidate least qualified to receive it." (p. 115-116)

Positive Thinking and Bad Medicine

An interesting editorial in Monday's NY Times by Richard Sloan, entitled A Fighting Spirit Won't Save Your Life, about the dangers of linking spirituality and physiology. Suffice it to say, the author is no homeopath. Yet as anti-religious as he comes across, there are definitely some sympathetic ideas being expressed. John 9 springs to mind:

The idea that an individual has power over his health has a long history in American popular culture. The “mind cure” movements of the 1800s were based on the premise that we can control our well-being. In the middle of that century, Phineas Quimby, a philosopher and healer, popularized the view that illness was the product of mistaken beliefs, that it was possible to cure yourself by correcting your thoughts. Fifty years later, the New Thought movement, which the psychologist and philosopher William James called “the religion of the healthy minded,” expressed a very similar view: by focusing on positive thoughts and avoiding negative ones, people could banish illness.

We want good things to happen to good people and this desire blinds us to evidence to the contrary... But such beliefs have implications for how we regard people who are ill. If people are insufficiently upbeat after a cancer diagnosis or inadequately “spiritual” after a diagnosis of AIDS, are we to assume they have willfully placed their health at risk? And if they fail to recover, is it really their fault? The incessant pressure to be positive imposes an enormous burden on patients whose course of treatment doesn’t go as planned.

It is difficult enough to be injured or gravely ill. To add to this the burden of guilt over a supposed failure to have the right attitude toward one’s illness is unconscionable. Linking health to personal virtue and vice not only is bad science, it’s bad medicine.

Irreplicability, Publication Bias, The Decline Effect and The Scientific Method

Another worthy addition to our coverage of all things human fallibility-related from Jonah Lehrer, published a few weeks ago in The New Yorker. Specifically, on the increasingly complicated nature of epistemology in the modern scientific community. It would appear that "hard" scientists run into more problems replicating significant results than they would care to admit. And the phenomenon, known as the Decline Effect, reveals some disturbing (though unsurprising) truths about the scientific method. It all adds up to a pretty serious reality check for all the empiricists out there. Read the whole thing here, or for the more relevant sections, see below. Just be sure not to glaze over before Lehrer's stunning conclusion:

Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws... But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.
---------------

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.
---------------

[Noted Australian biologist Michael] Jennions, similarly, argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for. A “significant” result is defined as any data point that would be produced by chance less than five per cent of the time. This ubiquitous test was invented in 1922 by the English mathematician Ronald Fisher, who picked five per cent as the boundary line, somewhat arbitrarily, because it made pencil and slide-rule calculations easier. Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments. In recent years, publication bias has mostly been seen as a problem for clinical trials, since pharmaceutical companies are less interested in publishing results that aren’t favorable. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that publication bias also produces major distortions in fields without large corporate incentives, such as psychology and ecology.
---------------

“Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed,” [biologist Richard] Palmer told me. “As a researcher, you’re always aware that there might be some nonrandom patterns, but I had no idea how widespread it is.” In a recent review article, Palmer summarized the impact of selective reporting on his field: “We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated.”
---------------

“A lot of scientific measurement is really hard,” [biologist Leigh] Simmons told me. “If you’re talking about fluctuating asymmetry, then it’s a matter of minuscule differences between the right and left sides of an animal. It’s millimetres of a tail feather. And so maybe a researcher knows that he’s measuring a good male”—an animal that has successfully mated—“and he knows that it’s supposed to be symmetrical. Well, that act of measurement is going to be vulnerable to all sorts of perception biases. That’s not a cynical statement. That’s just the way human beings work.” [CONTINUE READING]

Mindfulness Therapy and The Quicksand of Internal Judgment

Fantastic article in today's Wall Street Journal about the new "wave" of cognitive-behavioral therapy known as mindfulness. Its understanding of the counterproductive power of (internal) judgment is pretty darn eerie. Not only that, but as a school of thought, it appears to recognize the futility of information as a change agent, as well as the essentially passive nature of true self-improvement. In fact, if you can get beyond the slight New Age can-do bent in the language, mindfulness might well represent the next step in a Law/Gospel approach to psychotherapy. But don't take my word for it (ht WDR):

Even people who appear supremely fit, highly successful and hyper-organized are sometimes riddled with debilitating doubts, fears and self-criticisms. "Most people are struggling with difficult thoughts and feelings. But the show we put on for others says 'I've got it handled,'" says Steven C. Hayes, a professor of psychology at University of Nevada-Reno. In reality, however, "there's a big difference between what's on the outside and what's on the inside."

Cognitive-behavioral therapy aims to help patients conquer their self doubts in two ways: Either by changing the behaviors that go along with it (I'm so fat—I need to get to the gym!) or by challenging the underlying thoughts, which are often distorted. (I'm 45-years old and I'm comparing myself to anorexic models. Get serious!)

Now, a third-wave of cognitive-behavioral therapy is catching on in psychology and self-help circles. It holds that simply observing your critical thoughts without judging them is a more effective way to tame them than pressuring yourself to change or denying their validity.

This new psychology movement centers on mindfulness—the increasing popular emphasis on paying attention to the present moment. One of its key tenets is that urging people to stop thinking negative thoughts only tightens their grip—"like struggling with quicksand," Dr. Hayes says. But simply observing them like passing clouds can diffuse their emotional power, proponents say, and open up more options.

[Katherine Muller, associate director of the Center for Integrative Psychotherapy] also finds that practicing mindfulness is more effective at easing her own fear of flying than being reminded about the safety statistics. On one flight, she says, "all my cognitive skills were going right out the window." Then another psychologist suggested focusing on the tray table rather than fighting her fears. "It helped me center my head and get a grip," she says. "It gave me a chance to watch the movie and talk to the person next to me, rather than focus on how the plane might go down in a fiery ball."

"It's the nonjudgmental part that trips most people up," says Dr. Linehan. "Most of us think that if we are judgmental enough, things will change. But judgment makes it harder to change." She adds: "What happens in mindfulness over the long haul is that you finally accept that you've seen this soap opera before and you can turn off the TV."

‘Tis better to give than to receive'...or so they say!

During this time of year I am always reminded that it is better to give then to receive. Not because it’s what we’re supposed to do, but because I feel good when I give and I have a hard time receiving. For years my family and friends have thought my giving/receiving theory was neurotic, but now science has proven me right.

A recent study from Harvard University found that when one gives a gift to another, the brain releases dopamine, (the same response your body has to eating a piece of chocolate cake or being intimate), eliciting a feeling of satisfaction that would not be felt if you were the one receiving the gift. But beyond the physical response, though I am grateful science is now on my side, there is the spiritual side to giving and receiving that our lives testify to.

There is no worse feeling in the world than to be left empty handed. Have you ever received a Christmas gift from someone and not had one to give in return? Our reaction, typically, is to lie. ‘Oh, I accidentally left yours at home!’ ‘The manufacturer is late in shipping it.’ Then you hurry out and buy something for them, or you recycle a gift that someone else has given you.

At this point in your life you are prepared for most of these encounters. So, you spend your time Christmas shopping buying gifts for others who are going to get you something, not because you want to get them something, but because you don’t want to be left empty handed. You don’t want to simply be the receiver. There is no worse feeling in the world than to receive without the ability to give back; to be able to reciprocate.

If this is the case for you (as it has been for many, myself included), no longer can the thing given be called a gift, but an attempt to ‘keep things even.’

Many spend their lives keeping things even. When you go out to lunch with a friend and you pick up the check, after a lot of tug of war, there is an unwritten rule in our hearts that says, ‘They pick up the next one.’ The next lunch rolls around and the tug of war over the check ensues. Except somehow, you end up with the check again. In your mind you think, ‘Ugh, I picked it up last time,’ while you cheerfully put your credit card down to pay.

If in receiving we feel that we need to give and in giving we feel that we are entitled to receive, then there is no such thing as a ‘gift.’ In our society, there is no understanding, practically speaking, of ‘something bestowed or acquired without any particular effort by the recipient or without its being earned’ (www.dictionary.com). This is what makes Christmas feel like an obligation to some and Christianity too much to handle for many.

Most of us can make up the occasional lunch to our friends and can go out and get the gift (that is not really a gift at all) for the neighbor who gave you a garden gnome, but when it comes to God, we are incapable of giving anything to him in return for the gift he has given us in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the ultimate gift that is without equal.

It requires a great deal of humility to receive a gift and my prayer this Christmas is that we would receive into our hearts the greatest gift of all, salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. And thereby, enable our hearts to give without expecting anything in return, and receive gifts for what they are, undeserved.

Social Science Round-Up: The Chemistry of Self-Control, Giving > Receiving, Truth & Repetition, and Upperclass (non-)Empathy

A bunch of relevant recent studies:

1. David Brooks put together a fascinating little survey of recent social science findings in his column this past week, including this nugget about self-control being as much a matter of nutrition as willpower:

"Self-control consumes glucose in the brain. For an article in the journal Aggressive Behavior, Nathan DeWall, Timothy Deckman, Matthew Gaillot and Brad Bushman found that research subjects who consumed a glucose beverage behaved less aggressively than subjects who drank a placebo beverage. They found an indirect relationship between diabetes (a disorder marked by low glucose levels) and low self-control. States with high diabetes rates also had high crime rates. Countries with a different condition that leads to low glucose levels had higher killing rates, both during wartime and during peacetime."

2. Then, there's Jonah Lehrer explaining the science behind the timely saying 'tis more blessed to give than to receive' on public radio:

"There is typically more "reward-related" activity when we donate money than we receive an equivalent amount. Giving is literally better than getting, at least from the perspective of the brain. But this generosity comes with a catch. Yes, we have altruistic instincts. Still, these instincts come with some real blind spots.... our emotions can't comprehend suffering on such a massive scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a well, but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every year for lack of clean water."

To read the Mbird year-end appeal (hint hint, nudge nudge), go here.

3. Next, an in turns challenging and encouraging report on PsyBlog about truth, simplicity and repetition, esp for those of us who believe in the power of all three:

People rate statements that have been repeated just once as more valid or true than things they've heard for the first time. They even rate statements as truer when the person saying them has been repeatedly lying.

And when we think something is more true, we also tend to be more persuaded by it. Several studies have shown that people are more swayed when they hear statements of opinion and persuasive messages more than once. 

If something is hard to think about then people tend to believe it less. Naturally this is very bad news for people trying to persuade others of complicated ideas in what is a very complicated world.

4. Finally, an amusing if fairly 'duh report about the troubles the privileged have in reading other people's emotions:

"People of upper-class status aren't very good at recognizing the emotions other people are feeling. The researchers speculate that this is because they can solve their problems, like the daycare example, without relying on others -- they aren't as dependent on the people around them. A final experiment found that, when people were made to feel that they were at a lower social class than they actually were, they got better at reading emotions."

Another Week Ends: Self-Evangelism, Jay-Z, Paradoxes, Susan Boyle, NASA, Friday Night Lights

1. Another scorcher from our 2011 NYC conference speaker Mark Galli entitled "Evangelizing Ourselves", in which he unwittingly sums up much of our operating philosophy:

How do we talk about our faith without making others feel denigrated or angry? For one, we can talk about our faith so that everyone feels equally denigrated and equally inflamed!... So that everyone—even the Christian—recognizes his or her sinfulness...[and his or her] desperate need of a savior. If we can do that, a couple of remarkable things will happen. First, we will recognize afresh that we're not talking about our religion versus their religion, not about how we are right and they are wrong..., not about how we are righteous and they are not... At the same time, we will also see a merciful divine hand extended to all of us, like the hand that Jesus used to grab and raise up the lame man... When we all will hear afresh the invitation that comes to any who are weary and heavy laden, that there is a yoke that can give us rest and a peace that passes understanding.

Let me suggest, in fact, that whenever we communicate to non-Christians that we have found it and that they have not, that we have been chosen and that they have not... —whenever we assume that stance, consciously or not, we are communicating something other than the gospel, the Good News.

Should we not preach this gospel as if we also need to hear and accept it daily? And if so, can we ever preach to others a gospel that does not apply equally to us? Can we see, then, how if we preach this gospel, it will be nigh impossible for anyone to dodge the message by charging us with self-righteousness? 

p.s. We are pleased to announce that the 2011 Conference theme will be "Grace for Today: Freedom in a Culture of Control". Pre-registration begins in the new year.

2. Some illuminating and even sympathetic thoughts on hermeneutics from Jay-Z himself in the New Yorker's absorbing write-up of Decoded:

Too often, hip-hop’s embrace of crime narratives has been portrayed as a flaw or a mistake, a regrettable detour from the overtly ideological rhymes of groups like Public Enemy. But in Jay-Z’s view Public Enemy is an anomaly. “You rarely become Chuck D when you’re listening to Public Enemy,” he writes. “It’s more like watching a really, really lively speech.” By contrast, his tales of hustling were generous, because they made it easy for fans to imagine that they were part of the action. “I don’t think any listeners think I’m threatening them,” he writes. “I think they’re singing along with me, threatening someone else. They’re thinking, Yeah, I’m coming for you. And they might apply it to anything, to taking their next math test or straightening out that chick talking outta pocket in the next cubicle.” 

Speaking of hermeneutics (and communication, and evangelism, and preaching, and living, and loving, etc), if you haven't gotten your hands on Paul Zahl's preaching seminar from Pensacola yet, you are truly missing out! I may be biased, but this blogger feels it represents his most important new material since Grace in Practice. We've made it available on a Radiohead-style, donate-what-you-want/can basis.

3. A fascinating primer on paradox by Graham Priest in the NY Times, in particular how Aristotle's principle of noncontradiction is currently under attack from Dialetheism, the idea that certain paradoxes can, in fact, be true. One particularly fine paragraph for all you apologists out there:

[CONTINUE READING]

You're So Vain (You Probably Think This Post Is About You)

Big news from the world of psychology: the forthcoming edition of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is removing "Narcissism Personality Disorder" from the ledger of officially recognized personality disorders. A controversial decision, and one which is garnering a serious amount of resistance. The Mockingbird in me is tempted to view this is as both good news (in that it potentially universalizes the diagnosis) and bad (in that seems to semi-deny a real problem, as if its exasperating frequency makes it any less troublesome). In reality, it's simply further indication of the growing schism in the mental health world between scientist and practitioner. Some excerpts from the write-up in the NY Times:

Our everyday picture of a narcissist is that of someone who is very self-involved — the conversation is always about them. While this characterization does apply to people with narcissistic personality disorder, it is too broad. There are many people who are completely self-absorbed who would not qualify for a diagnosis of N.P.D.

The central requirement for N.P.D. is a special kind of self-absorption: a grandiose sense of self, a serious miscalculation of one’s abilities and potential that is often accompanied by fantasies of greatness. It is the difference between two high school baseball players of moderate ability: one is absolutely convinced he’ll be a major-league player, the other is hoping for a college scholarship.

The second requirement for N.P.D.: since the narcissist is so convinced of his high station (most are men), he automatically expects that others will recognize his superior qualities and will tell him so. This is often referred to as “mirroring.” It’s not enough that he knows he’s great. Others must confirm it as well, and they must do so in the spirit of “vote early, and vote often.”

Finally, the narcissist, who longs for the approval and admiration of others, is often clueless about how things look from someone else’s perspective. Narcissists are very sensitive to being overlooked or slighted in the smallest fashion, but they often fail to recognize when they are doing it to others. Most of us would agree that this is an easily recognizable profile, and it is a puzzle why the manual’s committee on personality disorders has decided to throw N.P.D. off the bus. Many experts in the field are not happy about it.
[CONTINUE READING]

The Kayak and the Spaceship

"...how could someone as smart as Freeman Dyson be so dumb?"

The cover story of the December Atlantic is the most fascinating essay I have read in a while -- along with being funny, touching and just a delight in terms of sheer prose style. It touches on so many things that are of interest here at MB, including fathers and sons, the need of secular man for some kind of religion, the virtually unlimited capacity of man for self-deception, spaceships, and much more.

Here are a few excerpts:

Many of Dyson’s facts on global warming are wrong, as the scientists who have done actual research on the subject point out, but more disconcerting is the selective way he gathers his information and the peculiar conceptual framework into which he inserts it.... 

“He’d just disappear,” George Dyson remembers. George was just 5 when his father moved the family west to La Jolla for the Orion work, but he was a watchful child, and it was his impression that the varied challenges of designing the spacecraft only intensified his father’s preternatural powers of concentration. Freeman’s body occupied the chair in his study, but in every other sense, he was gone....

Environmentalism does indeed make a very satisfactory kind of religion.... Freeman Dyson does not have the religion. He has another religion.

“The main point is religious rather than scientific,” he writes, yet never acknowledges that this proposition cuts both ways, never seems to recognize the extent to which his own arguments proceed from faith. Environmentalism worships the wisdom of Nature. Dysonism worships the indomitable ingenuity of Man....
[CONTINUE READING]

All Who Wander Are, um, Lost

Nothing we didn't already know about the human propensity to live anywhere other than the present, but it's quite amusing to hear it put in such scientific terms. When geared to the future, "mind wandering" is simply the mode of anxiety/fear, and when geared to the past, the mode of guilt/anger, no? Regardless, it seems to be a pretty accurate measure of faithlessness. Via Medical News Today, some real humdingers of understatement:

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science. "A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind," Killingsworth and Gilbert write. "The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost."

Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn't going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain's default mode of operation.  

"This study shows that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the non-present."

Killingsworth and Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, found that people were happiest when making love, exercising, or engaging in conversation. They were least happy when resting, working, or using a home computer.

"Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people's happiness," Killingsworth says. "In fact, how often our minds leave the present and where they tend to go is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we are engaged."

Time-lag analyses conducted by the researchers suggested that their subjects' mind-wandering was generally the cause, not the consequence, of their unhappiness. "Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and to 'be here now,'" Killingsworth and Gilbert note in Science. "These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind." This new research, the authors say, suggests that these traditions are right.

Read the NY Times write-up here (which rightly namechecks George Harrison!). 

Netflix Queues, Procrastination and Present Bias

A stellar article that's been making the rounds this past week is "On Procrastination" by David McRaney from the You Are Not So Smart blog (Tagline: "A Celebration of Self Delusion"!). We've talked about the Netflix queue phenomenon on here before as evidence of the disconnect between who we'd like to be and who we actually are, but that's just where McRaney begins. The barrage of studies is impressive, his conclusions pretty undeniable, and the whole thing very much worth your time (right NOW). Here are a few portions, written in the second person, to whet your appetite:

Many studies over the years have shown you tend to have time-inconsistent preferences. When asked if you would rather have fruit or cake one week from now, you will usually say fruit. A week later when the slice of German chocolate and the apple are offered, you are statistically more likely to go for the cake.

---------------

This is why your Netflix queue is full of great films you keep passing over for “Family Guy.” With Netflix, the choice of what to watch right now and what to watch later is like candy bars versus carrot sticks. When you are planning ahead, your better angels point to the nourishing choices, but in the moment you go for what tastes good. As behavioral economist Katherine Milkman has pointed out, this is why grocery stores put candy right next to the checkout.

This is sometimes called present bias – being unable to grasp what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them. This is why when you are a kid you wonder why adults don’t own more toys. Present bias is why you’ve made the same resolution for the tenth year in a row, but this time you mean it. You are going to lose weight and forge a six-pack of abs so ripped you could deflect arrows.[CONTINUE READING]

Two from Walker Percy's "Diagnosing the Modern Malaise"

The essay can be found in the posthumous collection Signposts in a Strange Land (ht KW):

"To the degree that a society has been overtaken by a sense of malaise rather than exuberance, by fragmentation rather than wholeness, the vocation of the artist, whether novelist, poet, playwright, filmmaker, can perhaps be said to come that much closer to that of the diagnostician rather than the artist’s celebration of life in a triumphant age. Something is indeed wrong, and one of the tasks of the serious novelist is, if not to isolate the bacullus under the microscope, at least to give the sickness a name, to render the unspeakable speakable. Not to overwork the comparison, the artist’s work in such times is assuredly not that of the pathologist whose subject matter is a corpse and whose question is not ‘What is wrong?’ but ‘What did the patient die of?" For I take it as going without saying that the entire enterprise of literature is like that of a physician undertaken in hope. Otherwise, why would be here? Why bother to read, write, teach, study, if the patient is already dead?––for, in this case, the patient is the culture itself."

"What did at last dawn on me as a medical student and intern, a practitioner, I thought, of the scientific method, was that there was a huge gap in the scientific view of the world. This sector of the world about which science could not utter a single word was nothing less than this: what it is like to be an individual living in the United States in the twentieth century."

Hieronymus Bosch, Animal Altruism and Bottom-Up Morality

A thorough, at times exasperating, at times inspiring, and at times challenging look at science, morality and religion over on The NY Times' Opinionator by Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal entitled "Morals Without God?". De Waal uses Hieronymus Bosch's painterly obsession with the pre-Fall human nature as a touchstone for his objections with what he sees as the reductionism of the Veneer Theory of human motivation ("morality is just a thin veneer over a cauldron of nasty tendencies"). Among other things, he views altruistic behavior in animals as supportive of a "bottom-up" approach to morality. But for our purposes, I felt his concluding comments on religion showed some serious insight:

According to most philosophers, we reason ourselves towards a moral position. Even if we do not invoke God, it is still a top-down process of us formulating the principles and then imposing those on human conduct. But would it be realistic to ask people to be considerate of others if we had not already a natural inclination to be so? Would it make sense to appeal to fairness and justice in the absence of powerful reactions to their absence? Imagine the cognitive burden if every decision we took needed to be vetted against handed-down principles. Instead, I am a firm believer in the Humean position that reason is the slave of the passions. We started out with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is also where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. Rather than having developed morality from scratch, we received a huge helping hand from our background as social animals.

At the same time, however, I am reluctant to call a chimpanzee a “moral being.” This is because sentiments do not suffice. We strive for a logically coherent system, and have debates about how the death penalty fits arguments for the sanctity of life, or whether an unchosen sexual orientation can be wrong. These debates are uniquely human. We have no evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not affect themselves. The great pioneer of morality research, the Finn Edward Westermarck, explained what makes the moral emotions special: “Moral emotions are disconnected from one’s immediate situation: they deal with good and bad at a more abstract, disinterested level.” This is what sets human morality apart: a move towards universal standards combined with an elaborate system of justification, monitoring and punishment.

At this point, religion comes in.
[CONTINUE READING]

Gorilla Reunion

"Love never dies."
-- 1 Corinthians 13:8