Pools and Editorials

Well, this last week saw my letter to the editor appear in print. My focus was on the incompatibility of various religious traditions and how strange it seems that people are willing to harm others over those incompatibilities. I addressed it as a letter to the children, suggesting that they should be skeptical of the claims of their parents about a great number of things, but that they should be especially careful about claims about the meaning of poetry.

There were several motivators in positioning it as a letter to children. First, I was able to simplify and operationalize the language in a way that points at the difficulties of treating religious texts as fact. Second, I was following Dennett's lead on the notion that young people need to be made aware that there are those who quite happily (and productively) live without religious belief and are smart, moral and interesting.

The responses in the online forum were very mixed, with the obvious "don't believe this guy" to heartfelt worries that popular culture is so negative an influence that only religion is capable of countering the impact on our children. I responded mellowly to all of the non-accusatory points and seemed to achieve the desired effect of being calm and learned at some level.

Saturday's paper contained the first in-print rebuttal, which focused on the author's own re-integration with organized theism following years of "freethinking". Yes, I avoided the A word in favor of a less-culturally charged term that is more inclusive of agnosticism, vagueness, humanism and rationalism. He was slightly antagonistic, suggesting that freethinking is the realm of liberals and people who believe we came "from pond scum." Sadly, it does reinforce the tendency for highly religious people to use debate tactics that are drawn from the shallower side of the gene pool. But I responded mostly positively in the online forum, describing the difference between "public knowledge" (observation, empiricism, experimentation) and "private knowledge" (revelation, subjective experience, prayer), and managed to avoid my own antagonism by not using the loaded phrase "magical thinking."

In fact, though, as we were heading towards Pyramid for Mother's Day lunch, I started processing the whole experience and we chewed a bit on how to escape the desconstructionist argument that there is nothing particularly favorable about private versus public, rational versus irrational, looking at the history of science. Freud, phrenology, alchemy. They all had their day in the sun as matters for learned discourse. Yet, can we still conclude that progressivism in science, history and culture is bankrupt due to classy arguments about a few failed social sciences? Thermodynamics is not nearly so porous.

I was reading Condi Rice's interview in Atlantic the other day and found myself agreeing with her on this notion of progressive, positive historical change, if not on any of the details or outcomes of our sloppy Iraq invasion and follow-up. The essential details, though, are tied to systems of governance that interfere with the urge to power on the part of individuals. Instead of a "Great Man" theory of history, I see a progressive unfolding of the assertion of individual rights and responsibilities through law that is gradually perfecting the inalienable rights of man. It is easy to be negative about this and decry income inequality or social justice, but the most effective players in government are those who find a creative dialog that is essentially positive in outlook, and who maintain a calm way forward that improves on the respect levels for the other players on the field.

I think I did that in my editorial engagement and follow-up, but time will tell.