this is what happens when you don't democratize science
Today's
Tuesday Morning Quarterback, the best football roundup on the web (or in the papers, or on TV), explains that the Chandrasekhar limit isn't actually a limit. Gregg Easterbrook (who writes TMQ) elaborates better than I could, and I urge you to read at least that bit of this week's column, because the implications are dazzling.
But you're not going to go read it, are you? No. I know at least some of you are never going to make your way over to ESPN just to read about the latest research into type Ia supernovae. But you should.
That's it. I was going to give you the rundown myself, but Easterbrook is so readable, and this is so cool, that I really mean it when I say you ought to go over there and read it yourself. I will give you the implications, though:
1. Cosmic expansion is not accelerating
2. There's no such thing as dark matter or energy (or at least, no reason why there should be, which amounts to very nearly the same thing)
Now. Today is Tuesday, day not only of ESPN.com's TMQ, but also of the New York Times's Science Times. Why is it that the latter is not telling me about Chandrasekhar? (I did a historical search. The latter
never told me about this.)
And here's an interesting story that Easterbrook doesn't tell: Chandresakhar himself was an Indian Astrophysicist. He won the Nobel Prize for his work, basically hypothesizing the existence of black holes, neutron stars, and (as yet undiscovered) quark stars. But when he presented his work to the Royal Society in the 1930s, his old Cambridge advisor Sir Arthur Eddington attacked him with what Wolfram calls "nonsensical and contradictory arguments." It was a particularly vicious move: Eddington had been inquiring into Chandra's work for months and had never commented upon it. When Chandra was finally invited to lecture to the Royal Society, Eddington had the secretary schedule himself into the following timeslot, which he used to roundly denounce what Chandrasekhar had just said. Chandra was prevented from replying, and (because of how the very influential Eddington had closed the doors to the young man) he only really had an opportunity to publicly defend his conjecture four years after the whole episode. Chandra wrote home in anger (some choice words: "Prejudices! Prejudices!" and "Eddington is simply stuck up!"). Then he packed up and moved to America.
Oh, to read the relevant TMQ bit yourself: go to
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061128, search for "Chandrasekhar," and read Easterbrook's brief, clear explanation of the whole thing. (You could also read it in
Nature, but that version is rather less comprehensible to the intelligent Average Joe like me.)
Turkey Day
I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday. I think that's because it's such a communal event. In a place with no state religion (a good thing, by all means), we don't have the equivalent of the national religious holiday the way Indonesia has Ramadan, Athens had the Dionysia, or Britain used to have Christmas. Most of our civic holidays are undercelebrated, too: we've still got the Fourth of July, to be sure, but Veterans' Day, Labor Day, and Memorial Day are no more likely to be celebrated than not to be, and anyhow, we all celebrate those days in different ways. There is no standard, shared celebration. As a nation, we might all get the day off of work (or not, given the way the service industry works these days), but we're not particularly likely to spend that day doing the same thing (much less doing it together!).
Not like Thanksgiving! Sure, we
might do different things, but there is a norm from which we will be deviating: turkeys and stuffing, football and feasting. And while there are strong religious overtones to literal thanks-giving, and strong Anglo cultural overtones when we eat meat and potatoes and gravy, fundamentally this is an inclusive and not an exclusive holiday. It is reasonable to presume that one's neighbors are celebrating--and, if they're not, obviously one should invite them over to join in the feast. There can be no offense taken: it's their holiday as much as our own. We all get to share in this day's celebration.
There are exceptions, I suppose. When I was little, we put on plays about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and religious freedom from the mean old English. Subsequent years have seen the reinterpretation of the whole Pilgrim thing, of course; a cynical reading of the first Thanksgiving says that it was just the beginning of the end for the Native Americans on this continent, and that the pilgrims were themselves Puritanical crazy-crazies who refused even to celebrate Christmas because it would be, you know, too much
fun (and we can't be having any fun around here). The great thing about Thanksgiving Day, though, is that we can grant the truth in these more cynical claims, and
we still get to celebrate the day. That's because, fundamentally, Thanksgiving is not primarily about remembering the past but rather about celebrating the present with friends and loved ones at one's side.
That's quite an interesting phenomenon. Other holidays are explicitly memorializing, and this comes back to haunt us when Revisionist historians get their hands on them (or even just, when time passes). Christmas, Easter, Sukkot, Passover: these are religious holidays by which we remember particular events. Independence Day and Veterans' Day: these are national holidays by which we do the same. The importance of each of these wanes and waxes in popular imagination as the importance of their underlying events shrink or grow. As we reinterpret the past, we lose sight of the celebrations; Easter becomes a less salient holiday as the life (or divinity) of Christ becomes a less important piece of our social and cultural fabric, and especially as we become less willing to believe in the literal ascension which is celebrated on this day. Veterans' Day suffers simply from a removal in time: there remain a huge number of veterans of foreign wars, to be sure, but the significance of the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" is quickly disappearing along with all of our World War I veterans. The day is not necessarily doomed to oblivion; we could redefine it in the same way that we've redefined Independence Day to be as much about hot dogs and fireworks and our present nationalism as about the Revolutionary War or the way we ass-whupped the British (who, I hasten to add, are our very good friends these days). But Thanksgiving is a special case, I think, precisely because it doesn't commemorate a particular event, and it never really has. Nobody celebrates Thanksgiving to remember the first Thanksgiving (though obviously the one evokes the other). The celebration has, from the beginning, been about togetherness, a shared meal, and, indeed, a sense of thanks for what we've got. It is and always was about the
present. And it is great.
my mind on my mind
Not long ago, Q introduced me to the Zuboff-Unger Brain Explosion, a thought-experiment that seems to indicate that there is a sliding scale of consciousness (as opposed to definitive 1-or-0-like states of either consciousness or not-consciousness). Between Mr. W's fantastic 11th-grade philosophy class, the cognitive neurolinguistics lab where I worked for a pittance as a college freshman, and engaging conversations with JH, Zq, and SS (among others), I've seen by now my fair share of interesting thought-experiments trying to tease out
something tangible about consciousness. Here are a few of the best:
1.
Hofstadter's Anthill, Putnam's Bees: Consider an ant colony. Each of the ants has a specific role: there are food-gatherers and soldiers, breeders and the queen. Ants are themselves unintelligent, instinct-driven, instinctual creatures that act predictably. (Indeed, we can model the behavior of a food-gathering ant almost perfectly with the following two rules: 1. if you run into something edible and you aren't holding anything, pick it up, and, 2. if you run into something edible and you are holding something, drop it. These very simple rules create ants who wander, find food, bring it back, and pile it up. Ant behavior is malleable in predictable ways, too: spread scent, and an ant will follow it.) We can feel reasonably confident that no ant consciously directs the running of an ant colony in a way that a king or CEO might consciously direct the complex interactions of a community of people. Nonetheless, however, a full ant colony seems to be an adaptive system that can defend itself, move itself, rebuild when injured, and store resources for the future. We might say that when a child stomps on an anthill, many individual ants die, but the colony itself "heals" as the anthill is rebuilt and new ants take on the function of the old ones. Roughly speaking, we might even conclude that an individual ant is to the ant colony what an individual skin cell is to a conscious person: a useful but expendible part of the whole, rather than a significant thing in itself. An ant colony may thus be seen as a system rather than as a collection of individuals.
Hilary Putnam (or possibly Barnett summarizing Putnam--I can't remember where I read it) takes this a step further with his swarm of bees idea. Imaine a swarm of bees that is organized into the shape of a giant human being. The bees perform the same functions as all of our own parts and systems: a group move together like the heart, another group relays information internally just as neurons do, etc. Nonetheless, we don't call the swarm conscious. To take Putnam's example again, if we shoot the swarm, we aren't worried about the pain that the
swarm will feel, though we might worry about the pain of individual bees (or at least we might worry about the morality of killing a bunch of bees, while we aren't worried at all about the morality of hurting the swarm, which we don't take to be any sort of morally relevant agent). Conclusion drawn from all this: organized systems can look surprisingly like conscious beings--but we nonetheless have the strong intuition that organization is not itself sufficient for consciousness.
2.
Searle's Chinese Room: Consider a person who sits in a room filled with books of Chinese characters. Let's call him Fred. Sinophones come to Fred with questions written in Chinese, and they pass them to Fred through a window in the wall. Fred's job is to take the pieces of paper that come through the window, follow a set of English-language instructions about how to use the books behind him, and write down whatever characters those books tell him to. Then he passes the paper back out of the window with his drawings on them.
Fred doesn't speak Chinese, but we can imagine that the Chinese-speaker on the other side of the window might think that he does. After all, if a person asked the sum of two and two in Chinese, and Fred's process led him to write the symbol for four, it sure would appear that he knew what he was being asked. If we gave him really good books, Fred could probably answer really complex questions. If we made Fred a computer, and made the books his database, and made the Sinophones ourselves, it would follow that, given enough speed of looking-up, we couldn't tell the difference between a computer that understood us consciously and a computer that was simply a dumb machine like poor old Fred in the Chinese room. Conclusion: the appearance of conscious thought not itself sufficient to prove that conscious thought is actually present (and, moreover, we can't ever know whether the thing on the other side of the window is conscious or not). Unlikely skeptical spin: Well, Fred doesn't understand Chinese, but Fred-plus-the-room-and-all-its-books-and-instructions
does understand the language. So we can say that the whole room, with Fred as just a predictable cog in it, understands what it is doing in a conscious way.
3.
Block's Chinese Nation: I don't know what's with philosophers of mind and the Chinese, but... imagine a person who doesn't have a brain. Every time a neuron senses something (feels, smells, tastes, etc.), the electrical impulse is conveyed not to a cranial neuron but instead via satellite to a guy in China. He looks up and sees a big sign that shows a symbol on it, and he knows that, when he gets the combination of the symbol and the incoming call, he should send an outward call back to a motor neuron. In this way, when I stub my toe, the sensory neurons in my toe wire their normal electrical impulses to the particular people in China to whom they are connected by satellite, and those people press the buttons that collectively instruct the impulses that cause my motor neurons to have me suddenly pull back my foot here in New York. If we have 100 billion neurons in the brain, then we'd need 100 billion people for this to work, of course (along with a big sign, which is just to allow for some parallel to "brain states"--so when I am excited and my brain is full of pain-inhibiting adrenaline, I might have a different reaction than when I am in a more subdued state). But pretend there were 100 billion people in China; if we had them instead of neurons, would they collectively make up my brain? Intuition, of course, says no. Conclusion: functionally brain-like conscious people can't themselves make up another conscious brain. Corollary that some folks have thrown in there: we just defined a mind to say that it interacts with the body in such a way as to cause physical reactions via neurons. But we can't really say that the Chinese nation constitutes one mind (my mind) while individual Chinese people continue to have their own minds, because then you end up with two different minds, ostensibly working off of two completely separate sets of sensory input, both affecting one Chinese person's physical actions. (Not sure why that's impossible, but so goes the claim.)
4.
The Zuboff-Unger Brain Explosion: Consider a disembodied brain sitting in a vat of whatever nutrients disembodied brains need to survive. Now cut it in half. Any neurons that originally had connections to neurons in the other half are fitted with tranceivers that send and receive electrical impulses to the neurons with which it was connected before (using electromagnetic waves, say, so as to be able to do this at the speed of light). Now the brain still works as usual, but we can move the two halves really far away from each other. Well, okay, so cut each of those in half and do the same thing. And halve those, and so on, until you have the brain's individual neurons sitting in nutrient vats spread out across the globe, all sending and receiving electrical impulses via tranceiver. Is this still a brain? Is that extended network conscious as a normal brain is conscious? Zuboff and Unger suggest that it isn't. Conclusion: proximity matters. But this leads to the further conclusion that there are
degrees of consciousness. When the brain is all put together, it's a brain. When it's all spread out, it isn't one. When it's only a little bit cut up, or if all the neurons are separated but really really close, then maybe it's mostly a brain. More spread out, less brainy. Less spread out, more brainy. Gee, that's weird.
My reaction to all of these is roughly similar, and it is roughly the following: why can't consciousness be big? It seems to me that self-awareness is an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems that hold a sufficiently large amount of information in them. I mean, the thing that makes Hofstadter, Putnam, Searle, and Block all skeptical of the consciousness of their constructs is that there is no identifiable place for knowledge to inhere. If you say that 3 billion bees together are conscious, or that a room and books and a machine-like man together are conscious, we want to say, "yeah, but it's absurd for a room to be conscious" or "lots of bees interacting don't have any more conscious knowledge of what they're doing than lots of bees NOT interacting." But by these arguments, we could as well say, "yeah, but it's absurd for a single neuron to be conscious" and "lots of neurons interacting shouldn't make anything more conscious than individual neurons NOT interacting." Clearly, the first is true but doesn't tell us a darned thing about the consciousness of a lot of neurons, while the second is just false.
The thing is, lots of
interacting parts together really are more than the sum of the parts seperately. There's an awful lot of information stored in the state of their connections to one another, and this is value far above and beyond the information and substance stored in their individual being.
An illustrative example: when talking about artificial neural networks, we consider nodes and weights. A model of natural language might include the nodes "cat," "dog", "a," "ran," "bit," "the," "brother," "my," and "spotted." Pretend that Geraldine repeatedly feeds the model the following sentences: "The dog bit the cat;" "The dog bit my brother;" "The spotted dog ran;" "The cat bit the dog;" and "My brother bit a cat." Every time the system sees that two words appear near each other, it adjusts the weights between those nodes to be a bit stronger relative to the other weights between nodes. At the end of it all, you'd see that the network had learned stronger and weaker weights for the interconnections between relevant nodes. "The" and "dog" would be very closely linked, as would "the," "dog," and "bit." "Cat" and "dog" would also be strongly linked as an effect of how other word linkages would readjust the weights across the system. "My" and "the" would be slightly connected, while "spotted" and "cat" would be quite unrelated. If Geraldine looked at the network and saw just the nodes, she'd know something about what this network "knows" and "doesn't know"--but she wouldn't know that the system understands that "My dog ran" is a better sentence than "Spotted ran my the." (Amusingly, this particular system would be absolutely fine with "My spotted brother ran," however.) Trying to look just at the specific nodes, rather than the relationships between them, dooms the observor. (I should note here that I find all this quite compelling and I have scientific studies to back up the idea that simple grammatical systems like this can work well--but Chomsky and others still want to locate grammar somewhere, and this is a creditable alternative view. They essentially want to say that there also exists a node that explains the rules of grammar in detail, and with it we no longer need to know the weights because now we know the rules of word-combination being used. I confess, I think this is naive and stupid. It is awfully like the internet, though: all the information on the internet is contained in individual servers; the connections themselves are not very dynamic but rather simply allow the nodes to share their information. There's not much further information stored in the state of this network.)
Back to consciousness. In the example above, we can see how most of the relevant grammatical information is contained not in the nodes, but in the connections between them. Similarly, I suggest, a bunch of ants reacting simply and predictably to the pheromones left by fellow ants contains a lot more than just a bunch of ants. That
colony of ants also contains an enormous amount of information about how the ants are related to one another and how the actions of one of them affects and will affect the actions of others. This complex, even intractable, set of interconnections is, to me, precisely the first building block of conscousness. Consciousness, I'd argue, isn't located in any part of the brain (and I suspect most of the above philosophers would agree with that statement, though I think doing so would be inconsistent of them); it's located in variable and varying electrical connections between neurons. Enough neurons--indeed, enough ants--and there's a mind-boggling amount of information being stored in those connections (and that, I propose to you, is where and what memory is). Consciousness is just a side effect, an emergent property of any similarly complex system (of which there are, I think, not very many of a size that we can comprehend). If the necessary billions of constantly connected, constantly re-weighted parts are spread out around the universe (a la Zuboff and Unger), I don't see any reason why it is counterintuitive that that is conscious, too. And if the ants and the bees and the guy in the room all seem intuitively unconscious, maybe that's because we aren't thinking about them on the grand scale that is required. Once we start talking about 100 billion ants all interacting together (a truly inconceivable exercise), we'll be looking at something of similar complexity to the brain. Until then, we can all agree that a bunch of ants in an anthill don't form any conscious community.
As for Block, there's no reason that conscous beings can't themselves make up some other consciousness. I just don't get it. Frankly, it seems to me that the way biology works is roughly that less complicated things join together to make more complicated things. Cells work together to make organs. Organs work together to make human bodies. Human bodies work together to make... superbodies, or something. I mean, why is that weird and unusual? Evolution starts with the simple and builds up to the complex.
More than that, though, I just don't understand the whole deal with consciousness at one level precluding the possibility of another, similar consciousness on a much greater scale. Can someone explain it to me?
Finally, I suppose I should point out that this interaction-based model of consciousness that I propose has neither an upper bound on size nor a lower bound on speed. At some point, there just aren't enough interacting parts to allow for (10^11)! connections--there is a minimum degree of complexity required. But, within the constraints of a very large universe, there's no maximum size that a conscious system could be--the elements of that system could be atoms, or neurons, or ants, or people, or even planets. Additionally, we are used to thinking of intelligence on our own time scale (and for good reason, since we live by it). I see no reason why consciousness could not be a much more lumbering thing than our own experience shows it to be, though. Our neurons take only a few miliseconds to fire, and action potentials carry electrical signals across our cells at a speed of anywhere from 10 to 100 meters per second. It seems at least conceivable to me that a system that was 1,000 times bigger and 1,000 times slower would still have as much information and as much consciousness as we do, but we might not recognize it because we simply cannot anthropomorphize things like that.
Anyway. A long post. Thanks for bearing with me. Let's talk artificial neural nets sometime, shall we?
feel like a swim?
You wouldn't think there was anywhere in New York as unpeopled as Coney Island in wintertime. Iz and I were out there (to consider the fish at the New York Aquarium) and the stark loveliness of the boardwalk was staggering in its windswept emptiness. If you've ever seen the movie Pi, you'll know the scene where Max gets off the train at the end of the line, at Coney Island at the wrong time of year, and you'll have a sense of what this place can be like.
This startled me because I've always thought I hated Coney Island. In the summer the place a horrible mess, with far more people than any beachfront can reasonably support. Trying to find a space big enough to spread a beach towel is a challenge, and the New York sun is hot and unrelenting. There's sand, and a boardwalk, but most of Coney Island is paved. Blacktop in the summer is not precisely my idea of fun (though it is something of a cherished urban experience here nonetheless).
In more autumnal or even wintry weather, though, I begin to see what made this place the entertainment hotspot of New York City. The artificial wavebreaks, piles of rocks and concrete meant to keep an undertow from sucking children out into the Atlantic, become more jagged in this weather, more reminiscent of the west coast. Empty rollercoasters and bumpercar parks seem worse for their lack of people (even though I know I hate the summertime crowds). And the beach really is lovely, a thing I never noticed in the mass of people--and their junk--in a more favorable season.
I guess I like that which is solitary (or nearly so--a friend or two is always welcome to come along on my adventures). More than anything, one forgets the perpetual noise of the City when one lives here; if I stop to think, I note that I hear now cars, karaoke, somebody playing the guitar in the apartment across the way--but these are incidental, just background noises to which I pay no attention. Coney Island has in the past magnified the noise and made it noticeable again: the people screaming on the Cyclone roller coaster, the shrieks of thousands of children when the waves roll in, boom boxes and break dancers and people hawking T-shirts, batting cages and bumper cars and thrill rides. This time round, too, Coney Island again made me notice sound--but this time, it was primarily in its absence.
it's easy to be disenchanted at home, but i can't help wanting to defend my siblings while abroad
I've been doing lots lately.
1. Went to the Whitney with Zq.
2. Halloween Party! Lots of fun. Sadly, I subsequently found myself quite low because of how uncommunal, uninspiring, un-autumnal, and generally un-unusual Halloween is for the kids of this city. (I mean, what's the point, anyhow, if not to have a special day for dressing up, meeting one's neighbors, and carving large garden vegetables, the last two of which, at least, no Manhattan child does?)
3. Listened to The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4.
The Moral Maze is a program in which various smart people talk to various interested or well-informed parties about some issue, and try to tease out the moral implications thereof. This week's topic: is America a force for good in the world, or is it a force for bad?
The perspective that one gets hearing intelligent, well-informed foreigners analyzing one's country is shocking. I was extremely taken aback by the misrepresentations of my country that I was hearing on the radio. These were not born of malice, by any means; in fact, people were speaking from both sides of the debate (some suggesting that America has largely gotten things right and that our sense of American exceptionalism and strong moral and religious sentiments are admirable and noble, others suggesting that they are frightening and hubristic and that our actions in the world and even our motivations for actions are deeply immoral or at best are amoral). But despite, I think, a genuine interest in the question and real knowledge about the world (as well as a very commanding grasp of statistics about the US), these panellists seemed to me to miss something deeply essential about the relationships between religion, popular culture, and government in this country. Consider the following well-intioned, real, and to me ludicrous suggestions from the program:
1. Americans don't care about global warming because 59% of us believe that we are in the End Times, so why would we be worrying about anything of this world?
2. Songs like our national anthem and "America the Beautiful" are indicative of the deep and alarming faith of Americans, and just go to show how we constitutionally can't have patriotism without irrational religious fervor (that is, it's not in our constitution, not, it's not in our Constitution, if you see what I mean).
3. Evangelical Christianity directly and
predictably drives foreign policy, and those who disagree with it are a strongly persecuted minority.
Here's what I have to say about all that.
1. We've argued that global warming is not real. We've argued that addressing it through state regulation is unlikely to be effective and may hurt businesses. We've argued that signing the Kyoto Protocol in some ways compromises our sovereignty. As a nation, we've argued a lot of ridiculous and not-so-ridiculous things about global warming, but never once in my life--about this or, indeed, about
any issue--have I heard the argument that we can let the world go down the toilet because Armageddon is upon us. I don't doubt the statistic, and indeed I think it is reasonable to find it alarming. But surely,
surely we don't think that Christianity in America is this crazy? Because, well, it isn't. Americans, Evangelical and not, care deeply about our country and our world. Indeed, it makes sense to argue that those who are religious believers care
more about the world and doing good in it than those who do not, though I don't particularly know that that's so. I just think it's worth pointing out that one can come with a seemingly reasonable bias from either side of this equation.
2. What? Surely you jest. This from citizens of a country whose national anthem is "
God save the Queen," and whose fellow countrymen sing "Jerusalem" at every sporting event ever conceived? A country with an established Church? Look, turn the mirror inward for a moment. If you're not crazy and frightening in your religion or nationalism, perhaps the existence of similarly anthemic patriotic songs in our part of the world, sung in similarly patriotic and not-so-patriotic contexts, is equally non-indicative of any scariness on our part. Yes, we're more religious than you. But again, we're not crazy. And more than that--and here's the fundamental disconnect, I think--these are
patriotic songs for us. Do they mention God? Yes. Is that important to some of us? Absolutely. But singing them expresses primarily a certain patriotic fervor, and certainly cannot be taken as indicative as any sort of religious belief. People who don't believe in God sing them. Jews sing them, Christians sing them, Hindus sing them. It's okay, because what you're saying just doesn't have much religious significance for us. Not singing can be reasonably presumed to be a protest against government, not a call for further separation of church and state.
3. Finally, this is just clearly ridiculous--not in its soft form (Evangelical Christianity certainly does
inform many people's judgments of our foreign policy), but rather ridiculous in the very strong form taken for granted by the panellists on this radio program. Did my Evangelical friends in school genuinely want to bring me to faith? Yes. Did they think less of me for my apostacy? Perhaps, but if so, it was a private thought. They were, genuinely, my friends. I don't think I was a social outcast, by any means, for my broad disbelief.
Of course, it is not false that religion pervades much of the public sphere in America--indeed, far more than I would like--but you can't quote a statistic that says that more than 80% of Americans are actively religious and then say that our shared religion drives our foreign and domestic policy. Surely if that were true, 80% of the population would be voting in the same way in most elections. Guess what? It isn't. The missing link is a fact that we take for granted on this side of the Atlantic: the religious lobby is clearly an interest group here in America, and it represents many but not nearly all people of faith. Whether we agree with the Moral Majority or not, we know that an affiliation with it is a political one, very like an affiliation with the ACLU or National Right to Life or any of a million other interest groups. The role of religion in our government is extremely complicated, and, I think, is
not engrained in our national psyche in the way that The Moral Maze presumes.
Perhaps this is the main point I want to make, actually. Religion is deeply engrained in the personal and communal lives of many Americans, but as a
people I do not think we are religious to nearly the extent that the panellists in this radio program took for granted. That is to say, Americans do not share explicitly religious ideals as national values, and indeed we all value freedom of religion. You can be a full and good American without being Christian, but it's harder, at least, to say that you're a full American if you don't believe in liberty and democracy. It's nowhere near a legitimate talking point for Bush to say we're going into Iraq because God told us to. We'll tolerate the statement happily, it's true, but nobody would accept it as justification.
We
do share strong national ideals here, though. Liberty may well be the most fundamental of them all, in fact; if you suggest that we should be going into Iraq because we have an obligation to spread freedom and democracy, you certainly will get people thinking.
That seems at plausible, even if we're given pause by other issues ("but Iraq is a democracy!" and "are we more right to go in to better the lives of Iraqis (pretending for a moment that we might have been remotely successful) or staying out to allow a certain amount of national self-determination?" and "but isn't this moralistic stuff just a ruse when it's really about oil?"). Freedom and democracy are elements of some shared national character, and whether you're a unilateralist (a Bush "liberating" Iraq) or a multilateralist (a Wilson trying to build self-determinitive nations), a protectionist (Washington fostering his new democracy) or an interventionist (George H. W. Bush overthrowing the military
junta in Panama), these tropes inform your decisions and rouse the masses. That is not, of course, to say that all American foreign and domestic policy holds true to these ideals--after all, one can believe lying is wrong and still lie occasionally (and that does not make one's belief wrong, either), just as one can espouse the virtues of democracy while sometimes propping up undemocratic regimes. But it is to say that maybe it's a little more compelling to think that our national fervors are born of a real and, indeed, moralistic belief in certain secular ideals than in religious absolutism. To be sure, some of us may think these ideals are grounded in religion--but this is a bit circular; after all, our religion is
predicated upon our sense of our (God-given? smirk. circularity.) religious freedom. And we tell that story--the story of America, the land of freedom where the pilgrims could come practice their religion without the hand of the government upon them--much more often than we tell the story of America, the land of institutionalized Christianity.
I don't mean any of this as a judgment on any of these perspectives. We have legitimate (and not-so-legitimate) arguments in this country about the role of religion among our Founding Fathers, the appropriate place of religion in civil society, and moral questions which necessarily touch on religious belief. All I mean, here, is to suggest that these are real points of debate in our public sphere, rather than internalized and agreed-upon parts of our national psyche. It bothers me that the program made someone with my own perspective, doubts, and centricism seem as if I was on the political fringe in this country. Frankly, I just don't think that's true--and moreover, I don't think others make me feel that way, either. I have big problems with prayer in schools and religious opposition to stem cell research, among other things. But this doesn't mean my fellow Americans who are religious think of me as a lesser American or a crazy liberal or something; I mean, these are the difficult issues of our day, and everybody grants that the country is in debate about them, with mainstream, respectable, and competitive political parties coming out on opposite sides of these issues.
I don't know how one goes about making one's culture transparent to the rest of the world, but I do wish we could be more successful about it. I mean, the British share our language and our news sources; we vacation in each others' backyards; we share a basis for Common Law and are clear political allies with close historical ties that go back at least to the Magna Carta. If
they seem to have such a skewed sense of the role that religion plays in our society--an important role, to be sure, but completely unlike the role they seem to suggest--then what of the rest of the world?
And, as Zq pointed out to me over the phone, the excercise should suggest to me that we must be missing an enormous amount about
everywhere else. Cultural tropes are impossibly hard for foreigners to pick up on. But we must try, if only because I feel right now that my own country is so gravely misunderstood, and that it would serve the world better were it not so.
