The 475 pages are a quick read because it is so easy to agree
with the many assertions of fact and moral claims. Also, the typography - extra leading between lines - makes
reading this into a downhill jog. The author
founded Skeptic magazine and contributes
to Scientific American. And he is a
political liberal, carrying on the program of the Enlightenment. Moreover, the entire
presentation is wholly compatible with the intentions of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
That may well seem paradoxical to both conservatives and
progressives for whom reason, reality, ethics, politics, and economics are
unrelated. Religious fundamentalists and academic postmodernists both deny
the validity of science. While both camps claim the vocabulary of political
freedom for their headlines and rubrics, their narratives quickly devolve into
further controls and harsher punishments for their respective enemies. Both are
racists; they just favor different groups. Both would quickly constrain and
ultimately abolish the open global market.
 |
| The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom by Michael Shermer (Henry Holt and Company, 2015). |
“As I documented in The
Mind of the Market, trade breaks down the natural animosity between
strangers while simultaneously elevating trust between them, and as the
economist Paul Zak has demonstrated, trust is among the most powerful factors
affecting economic growth.” (page 126)
“The effects of trade have been documented in the real world
as well as in the lab. In a 2010 study published in Science titled “Markets,
Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment,” the
psychologist Joseph Henrich and his colleagues engaged more than two thousand
people in fifteen small communities around the world in two-player exchange
games in which one player is given a sum of money equivalent to a day’s pay and
is allowed to keep or share some of it, or all of it, with another person. You might think that most people would
just keep all the money, but in fact, the scientists discovered that people in
hunter-gather communities shared about 25 percent, while people in societies
who regularly engage in trade gave away about 45 percent. Although religion was a modest factor
in making people more generous, the strongest predictor was “market
integration” defined as “the percentage of a household’s total calories that
were purchased from the market, as opposed to homegrown, hunted, or
fished.” (page 127) (See "Success of the WEIRD People" on this blog for a review of the wider study.)
That is especially telling as both preppers and greens advocate
for economic and ecological self-sufficiency, living from the land and close to
the Earth.
 |
| Left: one person, one day; slow changes over 100,000 years. Right: Very many people, very many per day. Rapid changes over 20 years and still evolving. |
The economics of capitalism are inseparable from the
politics of equality, which in turn rest on the epistemology of reason. Instead, the conservatives of the 20th
century ignored or fought against every opportunity for progress. They still do
so today, echoing the protests of Dinesh D’Souza, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck,
that change is not natural.
On the other hand, Ayn Rand insisted that politics rests on
morality which depends on epistemology. For her, the significant struggles were
about the theory of knowledge.
Shermer devotes a chapter to the problem of free will, “10: Moral
Freedom and Responsibility.” I believe
that ultimately, he does not answer the question. But he does encase it in four replies: the modular mind;
free won’t; degrees of moral freedom; choice as part of the causal net. The
facts that he marshals are interesting, though no one is compelling. That, perhaps, is
his strongest implicit argument. He never says it, but his approach defeats the
attempts at reduction. You cannot have free will, the argument goes, because
each action has a cause, and so on…
Shermer cites physiological studies of brain activity to show that your
mind is more complicated than that, working deeply in parallel networks, not
sequential steps. And at several
junctions, the “you” that is “you” has the ability to say “no” to redirect your
own thoughts. Usually. He does examine several severe cases of
psychopathic behavior and shows them to be materially caused by cephalic
defect. That only raises more
questions. But to me the important
feature was recognizing that the essence of material progress is good thinking.
“Again, I am not arguing that reason alone will get us
there; we need legislation and laws to enforce civil rights, and a strong
police and military to back up the state’s claim to hold a monopoly on the
legitimate use of force to back up those laws. But those forces are themselves
premised on being grounded in reason, and the legislation is backed by rational
arguments.” (page 257)
In Chapter 12, Shermer outlines his “Protopia” not the
impossible Utopia, but the world of the actual present in which things are
getting better. Discussing income
inequality, for instance, he demonstrates via IRS statistics that in America we
still have social mobility. Some of the poorest rise and some of the richest
fall, even as most of us remain in the middle three quintiles for most of our
lives. “… 60 percent of those in the top 1 percent in the beginning year of
each person had dropped to a lower centile by the 10th year. Less than one-fourth of the individuals
in the 1/100th percent in 1996 remained in that in 2005.” (Citing a
report from the National Tax Journal.)
Shermer became a scientist late his academic career. His
doctoral dissertation (Clarmont Graduate University) was a biography of Alfred
Russell Wallace. However, Shermer
was at first a fundamentalist Christian. Not raised that way, he chose it as a
teenager. Only the strict requirements Pepperdine for studies in Greek, Hebrew,
and Aramaic kept him from pursuing a D. Th. He was interested in psychology,
but although a behaviorist, he was not interested in lab rats. He eventually
settled on studying the history of science. He later produced and hosted Exploring the Unknown for Fox TV.
That lays some foundation for Chapter 4: Why Religion is not
the Source of Moral Progress. He
joins Christopher Hitchens (cited twice in that chapter) in a complete
refutation of any claim to material or moral value in religion. Shermer presents two pages of graphs
correlating religiosity positively with divorce, homicide, abortion, and suicide. The narrative only underscores the fact
that religion has not led us to
our material comfort or self-satisfied happiness.
The essential arguments in this book that are so easily
accepted by the right wing libertarians of the 21st century condemn
the traditionalist conservatives of the 20th century. Ending racial prejudice – even the very
idea of “race” – recognizing social equality independent of sex (or gender),
and abandoning the irrationality of superstition (especially from
self-identified “fundamentalists”) should have been the agenda of the
Republican Party. But the GOP never understood individualism; and the Democrats
never perceived individuals apart from their special interest groups.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.