Brain: Now a threat to democracy

Joe Keohane for the Boston Globe reveals “How facts backfire: Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains” (July 11, 2010) Many politicians would agree with him, of course:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of > information. It's this: Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

Then the dull thud of pop neuroscience factiods hits the In Tray: “Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired.”

Aw come on, Joe! If that were a significant problem,
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MercatorNet: Political science: the messy room

Junk science about voting is floating around and you might bump into some this election.

by Denyse O'Leary

In "Political Science: What Being Neat or Messy Says about Political Leanings" (Scientific American, October 13, 2008) Jordan Lite tackles the "hard science" question, "Do genes determine whether you'll be liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican?"

What if they did? Then we could dispense with elections in favour of DNA tests. Anyone who doubts that many academic would prefer such measures has not noted the drift to hard core materialism, or naturalism. In a recent study, for example, 78 per cent of evolutionary biologists were pure naturalists -- that is, they maintain that there is no God and no free will. Obviously, if there is no free will, democracy is not clearly a defensible system.

Finding what you are looking for

Of course, "Neat or Messy?" research is not motivated by anything so grubby as politics, right? ... Right?

Read the rest here:

Religion and politics?: Generally, it all becomes politics

One of my Muslim friends, Mustafa Akyol, describes what happens when politicians try to start churches:

Perhaps the symbolism on the front wall of the church is meaningful. Above the small sized cross, lies a huge poster of Atatürk superimposed on the red and white Turkish flag. In the room beneath, there is another poster of Atatürk with a controversial quote: “When the homeland is in question, everything else is trivial.” This slogan, attributed to the Great Leader, has recently become the battle cry of ultra-nationalists, who say that Turkey is in danger, and thus all other values, such as democracy, human rights and freedoms are secondary. Apparently those trivialities include even the real great leader that a real church must be dedicated to — Jesus Christ.

And this politician wasn't even a Christian, but he did have a use for a church in his campaign machinery ... .

How did religious affiliation become so important in politics, columnist asks

Peggy Noonan asks, in the Wall Street Journal, what’s with all this business of wanting to know all about an American political candidate’s religious affiliation (in what church he is formally listed as a member)?

She’s a pretty experienced hand, and according to her, that’s new.

In 1968 we were, as now, a religious country. But when we walked to the polls, we thought we were about to hire a president, not a Bible study teacher.

and

You can be touched by a candidate's faith, or interested in his apparent lack of it. It's never wholly unimportant, but you should never see a politician as a leader of faith, and we should not ask a man who made his rise in the grubby world of politics to act as if he is an exemplar of his faith, or an explainer or defender of it.

We have the emphasis wrong. It's out of kilter. And the result is a Mitt Romney being harassed on radio shows about the particulars of his faith, and Hillary Clinton -- a new-class yuppie attorney and board member -- announcing how important her Methodist faith is and how much she loves wearing her diamond cross. For all I know, for all you know, it is true. But there is about it an air of patronizing the rubes and boobs.

Yes, some people are worried about the fact that Mitt Romney, a US Republican candidate, is a Mormon. Whatever happened to asking where candidates stand on political issues and - this is really important - looking at their track record for following through on what they say they believe? (If he isn’t going to do much anyway, it doesn’t matter what he says or thinks or believes.)

Religion and politics, left, right, and centre

For some odd reason, many commentators assume that religious involvement in politics means, by definition, support for conservative causes. It’s obvious that the commentators need to get out more. Here’s an overview of the increasingly active religious left. Author Horowitz is hardly a sympathetic source, but he links to some players worth knowing about. Here’s a link to Christian greens, and here and here to articles about them - and one to something I wrote recently on Christian greens.

Incidentally, I’ve never understood the view expressed by some that religion should play no role in politics. The only possible outcome would be to fill elected offices with clinical sociopaths. They are the only sort of people I can think of whose behaviour is never governed by ethical considerations - and ethical considerations necessarily arise from worldviews, usually religious in origin. Happily, most commonly held worldviews are compatible in principle with providing government in the public interest.

Thus, I would not vote for a politician who told me that his religion would play no role at all in how he governs. If he belongs to a religion that provides him with no insights at all, he is not likely to bring much social wealth to his office. The critical question is, what does he think his religion has taught him?

Commentary: Why it is hard to separate politics and religion

In “The Politics of God”, a long essay in the New York Times, Columbia Humanities prof Mark Lilla offers some thoughtful reflections on the political theology that can lead to violent extremism, starting from the premise that sixteenth-century Europe was much like the modern Middle East:

A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference.

Not a man of easy assumptions or simple answers, Lilla writes of Rousseau’s views, for example,

Religion has its roots in needs that are rational and moral, even noble; once we see that, we can start satisfying them rationally, morally and nobly. In the abstract, this thought did not contradict the principles of the Great Separation, which gave reasons for protecting the private exercise of religion. But it did raise doubts about whether the new political thinking could really do without reference to the nexus of God, man and world. If Rousseau was right about our moral needs, a rigid separation between political and theological principles might not be psychologically sustainable. When a question is important, we want an answer to it: as the Savoyard vicar remarks, “The mind decides in one way or another, despite itself, and prefers being mistaken to believing in nothing.” Rousseau had grave doubts about whether human beings could be happy or good if they did not understand how their actions related to something higher. Religion is simply too entwined with our moral experience ever to be disentangled from it, and morality is inseparable from politics.

But what happened when, sickened by the Reign of Terror sponsored by atheists during the French Revolution, German Christians decided that a reformed religion was the answer? For that, you must read the article, but here’s a hint ....

... the liberal deity turned out to be a stillborn God, unable to inspire genuine conviction among a younger generation seeking ultimate truth. For what did the new Protestantism offer the soul of one seeking union with his creator? It prescribed a catechism of moral commonplaces and historical optimism about bourgeois life, spiced with deep pessimism about the possibility of altering that life. It preached good citizenship and national pride, economic good sense and the proper length of a gentleman’s beard. But it was too ashamed to proclaim the message found on every page of the Gospels: that you must change your life. And what did the new Judaism bring to a young Jew seeking a connection with the traditional faith of his people? It taught him to appreciate the ethical message at the core of all biblical faith and passed over in genteel silence the fearsome God of the prophets, his covenant with the Jewish people and the demanding laws he gave them. Above all, it taught a young Jew that his first obligation was to seek common ground with Christianity and find acceptance in the one nation, Germany, whose highest cultural ideals matched those of Judaism, properly understood. To the decisive questions — “Why be a Christian?” and “Why be a Jew?” — liberal theology offered no answer at all.

And what rough beast, his hour come round at last, slouched in to replace it?

Lilla’s suggestions for addressing Islamic extremism and interesting and thoughtful too.

Religion: When religion and politics are one bad mix?

Deploring the American National Council of Churches, Frank Pastore notes that

Between 2001 and 2005, revenue from member denominations dropped 40%, from $2.9 million to $1.75 million. During the same period, non-denomination revenue rose from $800,000 to $2.9 million, a jump of 362%. And in June of 2005, for the first time, outside giving ($1.76) surpassed denominational giving ($1.75), officially making the National Council of Churches financed more from non-church sources than from the people in the pews they claim to represent.

The trouble was - and I watched this over the years - the group had come to represent political positions more and more, and not spiritual ones. Membership (of member denominations) has often dropped, sometimes dramatically, with the former members turning up in storefront churches or traditional basilicas, seeking - and often finding - life change.

I should make very clear at this point that I am NOT claiming that left-wing positions, typical of the National Council of Churches, are bad (and therefore right-wing positions would have been good?).

Not at all. All political positions are an effort to make other people do something. But spiritual growth means changing oneself, not others. If others like what they see and want to change, they are free to do so, but the process is not coercive. Religion should never be politics.

Once upon a time, a clergyman friend of mine was accused of "stealing sheep" (= encouraging people to leave another church and come to his church). He shrugged and replied, "Well, sheep go where they're fed." I guess they would.

Check out The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary (Harper 2007).