The Best of Spengler

Recently, I discovered a treasure trove of social commentary by David R. Goldman - a former musician and financial analyst who now serves as the Associate Editor of First Things, a thoughtful (and highly-recommended) religious magazine.

Goldman (who formerly wrote under the pen name "Spengler") has a vast library of knowledge on history, geopolitics, and - as it pertains to The Mustard Seed - the influence of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam on the modern world.

I don't agree with all of his conclusions (for example, I don't share his optimism about the spread of Christianity in China), but even when I disagree with him, I remain impressed by his rational (yet passionate) arguments.

I've posted links to some of his best articles below. A full list of his writings can be found here, here, and here.


Death by Secularism: Some statistical evidence (8/2/05): "My analysis, preliminary as it is, supports the conclusion that religious belief strongly influences fertility after controlling for wealth and education... Underlying the demographic crisis of the industrial world, I believe, is a spiritual crisis."


Why Radical Islam Might Defeat the West (7/8/03): "Not a single Western strategist has proposed an ideological response to the religious challenge of Islam. On the contrary: the Vatican, the guardian-of-last-resort of the Western heritage, has placed itself squarely in the camp of appeasement. Except for a few born-again Christians in the United States, no Western voice is raised in criticism of Islam itself. The trouble is that Islam believes in its divine mission, while the United States has only a fuzzy recollection of what it once believed, and therefore has neither the aptitude nor the inclination for ideological warfare."


Christianity Finds a Fulcrum in Asia (8/7/07): "China may be for the 21st century what Europe was during the 8th-11th centuries, and America has been during the past 200 years: the natural ground for mass evangelization. If this occurs, the world will change beyond our capacity to recognize it. Islam might defeat the western Europeans, simply by replacing their diminishing numbers with immigrants, but it will crumble beneath the challenge from the East."


Mideast: Lessons from Classical Warfare (11/7/06): "Islam cannot withstand the final dissolution of traditional society that comes with the triumph of globalization. Its entire raison d'etre is a stubborn refusal to adapt, in the fashion that the Chinese have adapted, to a new world with new ground rules. To intervene in the Islamic world is to hasten the dissolution of traditional society and with it the world of Islam."


Ayatollah al-Sistani and the End of Islam (9/8/06): "Islam is the focal point of the civilizational crisis, precisely because the sudden leap into the modern world puts the severest test to Islamic faith. Christianity barely survived the end of traditional society in the industrial world, flourishing as a religion of personal conscience only in the United States. Yet Christians had half a millennium to prepare for the transition. Islam's prospects for survival outside of traditional society are poor. It is a fallacy to imagine that a deeply religious Muslim world confronts a secular West. On the contrary, Islamic radicalism is a response to a deep - I believe fatal - crisis of faith in the Muslim world."


Lessons for Islam from Quebec (8/30/05): "Should the Islamists fail in this generation as badly as the Arab nationalists failed during the generation of Gamel Abdul Nasser, it is quite possible that the Islamic world will sink into demoralization as its population growth falls...Islamist sentiment has surged in face of the threat of a sharp decline a generation hence. That is why the first half of the 21st century may be the time of maximum danger for confrontation between Islam and the West."


Harry Potter and the Decline of the West (7/20/05): "Harry (like young Skywalker) draws his superhuman powers out of the well of his 'inner feelings'...The spiritual tradition of the West, which begins with classic tragedy and continues through St Augustine's Confessions, tells us just the contrary, namely, that one's inner feelings are the problem, not the solution. The West is a construct, the result of a millennium of war against the inner feelings of the barbarian invaders whom Christianity turned into Europeans...Western tradition demands that the individual must draw upon something better than one's inner feelings. Narcissism where one's innermost feelings are concerned therefore is the supreme hallmark of decadence."


They Made a Democracy and Called it Peace (3/08/05): "For today's Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the hereafter...Europe will offer no resistance to Islam, which will triumph in that continent no later than 2100...I do not believe that the Islamic world will abandon its long-developed sense of collective identity in favor of US-style democracy without tragic consequences."

Is the Tide Turning Against Evo Psych?

Last month, Newsweek published a rare anti-materialist article, Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The Fault, Dear Darwin, Lies Not in Our ancestors, But in Ourselves. The piece is a brutal takedown of “evolutionary psychology” (or “evo psycho” for short), which, as the author explains…

"Founded in the late 1980s…[evolutionary psychology] asserts that behaviors that conferred a fitness advantage during the era when modern humans were evolving are the result of hundreds of genetically based cognitive "modules" preprogrammed in the brain. Since they are genetic, these modules and the behaviors they encode are heritable—passed down to future generations—and, together, constitute a universal human nature that describes how people think, feel and act, from the nightclubs of Manhattan to the farms of the Amish, from the huts of New Guinea aborigines to the madrassas of Karachi… We in the 21st century, asserts evo psych, are operating with Stone Age minds.”

For decades, evo psych has been the media’s favorite way to promote Darwinism (see my article, “Sex with Blondes and Darwin” here).

Although, as the article points out, “short of a time machine, the hypothesis was impossible to disprove,” it didn’t matter because no one was there to rebut its claims.

“Game, set and match to evo psych.”

Thankfully – to quote the article again – “that is changing.”

“Evo psych took its first big hit in 2005, when NIU's Buller exposed flaw after fatal flaw in key studies underlying its claims, as he laid out in his book Adapting Minds. Anthropological studies such as Hill's on the Ache, shooting down the programmed-to-rape idea, have been accumulating. And brain scientists have pointed out that there is no evidence our gray matter is organized the way evo psych claims, with hundreds of specialized, preprogrammed modules. Neuroscientist Roger Bingham of the University of California, San Diego, who describes himself as a once devout ‘member of the Church of Evolutionary Psychology’ (in 1996 he created and hosted a multimillion-dollar PBS series praising the field), has come out foursquare against it, accusing some of its adherents of an ‘evangelical" fervor.’

“Evo psych's claims that human behavior is constrained by mental modules that calcified in the Stone Age make sense ‘only if the environmental challenges remain static enough to sculpt an instinct over evolutionary time,’ Pigliucci points out. If the environment, including the social environment, is instead dynamic rather than static—which all evidence suggests—then the only kind of mind that makes humans evolutionarily fit is one that is flexible and responsive, able to figure out a way to make trade-offs, survive, thrive and reproduce in whatever social and physical environment it finds itself in. In some environments it might indeed be adaptive for women to seek sugar daddies. In some, it might be adaptive for stepfathers to kill their stepchildren. In some, it might be adaptive for men to be promiscuous. But not in all. And if that's the case, then there is no universal human nature as evo psych defines it.”

The decline of Evo Psych would be a helpful advance in restoring science to its original function - observing, collecting evidence, and analyzing that evidence in a rational way – NOT pimping for materialism.

As I wrote on May 5:

“The function of science today is to de-rationalize people and thus, to dehumanize them…Whether it’s in a college classroom or on a TV talk show, we are only provided evidence of materialism. We are only subject to evidence that negates free will; that destroys reason. We are barely aware of evidence in support of free will; in support of reason… Imagine a science that actually chose to uplift humanity… Who knows what we would learn once we treated the mind as a real thing? The possibilities are endless.”

-Todd

This Sorta, Woulda, Coulda Be an Interesting Book

In May 2009, physicist Victor Stenger released a book called Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness.

Another author, Geoff Gilpin, wrote a glowing review on Amazon.com:

“The public understanding of modern physics is seriously out of whack, thanks largely to pop junk like The Secret and What the BLEEP Do We Know?

These books and movies promote a bogus version of quantum mechanics--the belief that 'you create your own reality' by controlling the laws of physics with your mind. They offer instant wealth and happiness, but they deliver medieval superstition.”

“In Quantum Gods, Stenger confronts mainstream theologians and New Age gurus--anyone who tries to link physics to mysticism. He takes their theories seriously enough to examine them in detail and he finds that, so far, none of them live up to the standards of scientific truth.”

Another reviewer, Logan Narcomey, offered an equally positive assessment.

Stenger has “the chutzpah to challenge the ‘wavicle’ nature of photons, saying that in reality, photons are particles, not waves, and the wave-like properties they seem to have under some circumstances are the result of predictable statistical patterns of streams of particles.

"Given everything I read in this book, I still find an educated layman's logical argument against quantum idealism more effective and direct: if it is true that ‘the mind creates reality,’ than the scientific method would have been fruitless from the beginning. It is part of Chopra and Goswami's narrative that deterministic science became arrogant and was overthrown by quantum mechanics, a la Kuhn's ‘paradigm shift.’ Yet the scientific method rests on replicability and peer review. If the mind creates reality, then scientific rivals would always get different results testing the same phenomenon, no matter how well their controls are. Quantum mechanics itself has been extremely well-verified from competing groups of physicists worldwide, so ironically, if quantum idealism were true, quantum mechanics could not be.”

I think this book could be quite valuable in light of my concerns about The Secret and the popular New Age concept that a person can use positive thinking alone to manipulate Reality to his advantage. Clearly, I disagree. And if Stenger has written 292 pages on those disagreements, his book could be quite valuable and informative.

However, the final sentence in Mr. Narcomey’s review troubles me.

“Stenger's book is a needed defense of reductionism, determinism, materialism, and the piercing insight of the scientific frame of mind.”

Yikes!! Personally, I consider myself to be a strong opponent of “reductionism” and “materialism,” so any book which defends those “-isms” will NOT be appealing to me.

And it certainly doesn’t help that Victor Stenger also wrote a best-selling book called God: The Failed Hypothesis.

I will monitor this situation closely. Apparently, so will Denyse O’Leary.

-Todd

The Top 10

For those of y’all who are new to this website, I’ve created a “Top 10 Blog Entries” so you can get a quick feel for The Mustard Seed and the ideas inside it.


*The Philosophy of Heather Manning (12/02/08)

*Reason and Emotion: An Analogy (2/04/09)

*Spiritual Rationalism: The Biography of an Idea (3/17/09)

*Requiem for a Nightmare: The Rise and Fall of Reductionism (9/16/09)

*The Best Evidence for God in One Paragraph (8/13/09)

*Materialism is Dead: Now What? (3/23/09)

*Ideas Have Consequences (4/28/09)

*From Darwin to Nietzsche to Hitler (6/17/09)

*From Rorty to Obama to Beyond (6/18/09)

*Sex, Love, and Marriage in Modern Society (8/20/09)


I’ll update this list as new entries become available.

And if you’re interested in buying the book, click here or here.

-Todd

Weekly Wrap-Up

Since I'm leaving town for a brief vacation (and will have limited computer access for the next few days), I'm publishing this week's Wrap-Up a day early...


"I, Pencil:" In Chapter 9 of The Mustard Seed, Heather Manning whips out a pencil to show how "the ethic of rational self-interest can unleash powerful, creative energies." The scene is inspired by Leonard Read's 1958 essay, I, Pencil, which was published in The Freeman. The whole essay can be found here.


The Secret of Self-Control: An important study on the power of awareness. We need more studies like this one which emphasize the power of the mind (instead of denying its existence).


Benjamin Disraeli, the British Jew who became Prime Minister in the 19th century, once stated that "Christianity is Judaism for the masses." Why? Jude Wanniski explains.

Separation, Rational Self-Interest, and Love

The Mustard Seed is a novel, not a philosophical treatise – a story about people, not a tract about ideology – and therefore some of the components of “Spiritual Rationalism” were not fully explored to my satisfaction. One of those ideas is that “according to reason, ‘rational self-interest’ is the best ethical system for human beings; the best way to go live our lives on a moment-to-moment basis with all of the choices and decisions that come with it.” As I explained in a Dec. 2008 blog post…

“Why is ‘rational self-interest’ the best system? Because Reality is a condition of separation. Every human being is separate from one another. No human mind can truly connect with another mind, at least in any meaningful sense of the word. And yet, strangely, the universe seems to work quite well this way – with each individual acting, well, as an individual. Think about it: The person who knows the most about you is you. The person who knows the most about your physical and emotional needs is you. The person who is most trustworthy to handle those needs, and to take care of those needs, is you. In a very real sense, the world works best when people put themselves first and foremost – and follow the path of rational self-interest.”

Let me expand on this paragraph.

First, I assert that “the universe is truly a place of separation.” Personally, I don’t think that should be controversial – at least among people who bother to think about it for more than 15 seconds. When I touch the burning stove in my kitchen, I feel pain, but nobody else does. No one else is affected. When I feel angry about losing my car keys, that anger begins and ends with yours truly. When I learn the capital of Moldova, that knowledge doesn’t automatically get downloaded into the brains of other people. To repeat: we live in a world of separation.

The controversy lies in the idea that “the universe seems to work quite well this way” – the way of separation. For the average person, it is fine to observe that human beings are “separate” –– but it’s almost scandalous to assert that “the world works best” that way – that it is a “good thing” for us to be separated – and thus, we should be comfortable putting our own needs above the needs of others. Why do I say that? Especially when later on, I write about the importance of love…

In Chapter 9, Heather Manning says, “Love is the language of God – inspiring us to craft the highest vision of ourselves, and to shape the world in that image.”

When talking about her niece, Heather says: “As I spent more time with Elizabeth, I could see how my love enriched her life – increasing her knowledge, steering her moral compass, and nurturing her happiness. Seeing my values reflected in her – and enabling her success – increased my own happiness, as well.”

Later on, Heather summarizes her philosophy in 3 words: “Reason. Faith. Love.”

If love is so powerful – and such a strong catalyst of happiness - why do I spend so much time talking about “rational self-interest?” Why do I apparently endorse a “universe of separation?” Shouldn’t we destroy that universe? Shouldn’t we strive to overcome it?

Well, first of all, let’s back up. I do not believe that “love” is the purpose of life. Rather, I believe that happiness should be the purpose of life. Love isn’t “good” for its own sake; it’s “good” because it is a driver of happiness – the happiness of the individual. The feeling of love is a feeling of self-empowerment – the feeling of “leaving the physical limits of my body to recreate a part of me inside another person’s soul.”

Since love is an “expansion” of the individual – an expression of our values, projected outward into the world – it is an inherently selfish act (or to put it more delicately, a “self-interested” act). But yes, the product of that love (the benefit of other people – whether it’s experienced by a spouse, friend, or child, or anyone) does serve the purpose of tearing down the walls of separation in life. So there is a paradox – at least seemingly. The world “works best” when “people put themselves first” but through that very action, they also benefit the lives of others. Needless to say, however, I don’t view that as a paradox. As other people before me have pointed out, “good things tend to go together.” We shouldn’t be surprised that what is "good” for me (and I mean truly “good”) is also “good” for others.

But back to our main point…happiness (not love) is the point of life…happiness is found in the feeling of self-empowerment…a feeling that is expressed through the act of creation…the God-like act of taking a paintbrush to the world and redesigning it in the colors of our own image…that feeling is a product of the mind – the rational mind – which interprets and masters the Reality of Separation, and through that understanding, discovers who we truly are, decides who we wish to be, and judges the best path to get there. If we condemn the universe of separation, bypass it completely, and focus totally on love, love, love – we miss out on the bliss of self-ownership, the joy of being the author of our own lives, and indeed, we cripple our ability to give love and receive love.

To quote Heather Manning: “There is no ‘I love you’ without 'I.' 'I' comes first."

One final note: This is a work in progress. I may need to elaborate more on these points. And I certainly welcome the feedback of other people who think I missed a piece in the chain of logic, or used the wrong piece, or perhaps I’m just hopelessly wrong period!

-Todd

Signature in the Cell

Last week, Dr. Stephen Meyer released a new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. The book is being adverted as "the first, major scientific argument for Intelligent Design by a leading spokesperson within the scientific community." For that reason, I'm willing to wager that Signature will attract a fair amount of media coverage. Indeed the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., hosted Dr. Meyer for a major speech on the book's publication date. You can watch the speech here. And you can watch a short (but quite substantive) interview with Dr. Meyer here.

I'll be monitoring this story as it develops.

-Todd