Pot Kettle Memo
I had only tangentially been paying attention to the Google Memo furore via the evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists and other researchers I follow on twitter when I saw first hand what has come to be referred to as Left-Wing science denial.
I hadn’t read the memo when I responded to what I saw as a suggestion that Damore’s firing was justified. I made the point that had he been fired for merely expressing well evidenced views then it was a worrying precedent. I asked for examples of where he had gone beyond the scientific pale, as the biologists I follow didn’t seem to think he had- I was curious. Aside from a thoroughly unpleasant couple of days chasing shifting goal posts and enjoying a SJW pile on – replete with all the usual virtue-signalling cliches- I was advised to read a Wired article
I did.
And frankly it was sort of shocking in its slipperiness. To satiate my own need to put a finger on where this article ends up betraying the Enlightenment in a haze of motivated reasoning, I thought I’d engage with the text on a point by point basis, commenting where I felt I needed to flesh out my objections. What started out as a mere exercise in my Gmail drafts grew to what you see below.
I felt it was worth sharing in case
a) I’m wrong about anything I’ve said and someone might disabuse me of my ignorance
b) it may prevent the unsuspecting falling prey to the article’s manipulations.
Here’s the infamous Google Memo itself.
Here’s the Wired article
In fairness to the article, it’s introduction to the bruhaha is pretty solid in my view so for those who aren’t so familiar with the issue, the section before the following quotation gives a pretty good breakdown.
The problem is, the science in Damore’s memo is still very much in play, and his analysis of its implications is at best politically naive and at worst dangerous. The memo is a species of discourse peculiar to politically polarized times: cherry-picking scientific evidence to support a preexisting point of view. It’s an exercise not in rational argument but in rhetorical point scoring. And a careful walk through the science proves it.
It is at this point however that the uncanny imposter of reason begins its mischief.
Without further ado, the sections in quotations are from the article, the bits beneath, unless otherwise noted, are mine.
Science is hard
Personality traits are nebulous, qualitative things, and psychologists still have a lot of different—often conflicting or contradictory—ways to measure them. In fact, the social sciences are rife with these kinds of disagreements, what sociologist Duncan Watts has called an “incoherency problem.” Very smart people studying the same things collect related, overlapping data and then say that data proves wildly different hypotheses, or fits into divergent theoretical frameworks. The incoherency problem makes it hard to know what social science is valid in a given situation.
Perfectly reasonably point this, with a myriad of interesting implications.
I suppose it is why meta-meta-analyses, like this one, are so useful.
However, I would venture that casting broad aspersions on the social sciences mentioning “[…]data proves wildly different hypotheses, or fits into divergent theoretical frameworks.” without giving an example in the Memo of where this happens to be the case is an inauspicious start. What looks like an example actually turns out not to be-
On Neuroticism-
The first-order criticism here is easy: Damore oversells the difference cited in the paper. As Schmitt tells WIRED via email, “These sex differences in neuroticism are not very large, with biological sex perhaps accounting for only 10 percent of the variance.” The other 90 percent, in other words, are the result of individual variation, environment, and upbringing.
1) I’m not convinced at all that Damore oversells the difference- he couches it in the language of plausibility, not certainty, writing “This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs”. Emphasis mine.
2) He points to the following finding “[as] society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality traits becomes wider”.
How much of this is biologically driven appears to be still uncertain but Richard Lippa’s (more from him later) meta analysis leaves us with the sense that a significant part of this population-wide difference can not be the result of just social context- referring to this increased gap in personality traits in gender egalitarian societies as “a finding that contradicts social role theory”. Schmitt’s 10% is hard to assess but even this would still lead us to expect a skewed distribution in some arenas if all else were equal (which should be the case), ie. this argument does nothing to weaken Damore’s position.
Lee Jussim, social psychologist, in criticising this article goes further:
So, yes, that’s the researcher Wired cites disagreeing with Damore, agreeing with Damore…
[Schmitt] doesn’t buy that you can predict the population-level effects of that difference. “It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),” writes Schmitt. So, yes, that’s the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore.
This is presented as a major gotchya. A few things strike me-
1) This is but one of the personality differences presented as one of many possible contributors to gender imbalance in tech. It is also the least convincing and least relevant of his claims as it seems to concern leadership representation rather than Goolgers in general.
2) Schmitt here doubts the extent to which this factor (presented as a plausible) contributes towards an imbalance. Presenting this as a major blow to Damore’s thesis is… strange.
3) Crucially, the memo’s position is not what we read Schmitt rejecting ‘in particular’- Damore says neuroticism may be one reason we don’t see as many women in those roles- this is not necessarily because they can’t handle them (Schmitt rejects this clearly), it could also be because on average they may not find them as attractive (Damore focuses on preferences in his memo)- Schmitt does not reject this in the quotes.
4) Most troublingly- Scmitt’s unedited view of the issues in the memo is not compatible with the narrative of this Wired article, particularly that we can’t predict there to be a population level effect:
“How this [negative emotionality/neuroticism] all fits into the Google workplace is unclear to me. But perhaps it does.” (Emphasis mine)
“Culturally universal sex differences in personal values and certain cognitive abilities are a bit larger in size (see here), and sex differences in occupational interests are quite large2. It seems likely these culturally universal and biologically-linked sex differences play some role in the gendered hiring patterns of Google employees.”
What features in the article is quote-mining as a fine art.
These four points together justify more than a sense of mild scepticism regarding the authors’ advertised “careful walk through the science”.
People and things
“On average—and I emphasize that, on average—men are more interested in thing-oriented occupations and fields, and that difference is actually quite large,” says Richard Lippa, a psychologist at Cal State Fullerton and another of the researchers who Damore cites.
But trying to use that data to explain gender disparities in the workplace is irrelevant at best. “I would assume that women in technical positions at Google are more thing-oriented than the average woman,” Lippa says. “But then an interesting question is, are they more thing-oriented than the average male Google employee? I don’t know the answer to that.[…] And maybe the most important question: How useful are psychological studies of the general population when you’re talking about Googlers?”
So here we come to the sleights of hand that had me no longer able to accept good faith on the part of the authors.
1) Why is this ‘irrelevant’? Why is it irrelevant ‘at best’? This is probably the core claim of the memo- if women are on average less interested in coding, we should expect fewer female coders. How this can honestly be viewed as irrelevant is utterly beyond me.
2) The Second paragraph is so alarmingly incoherent, it bespeaks either incompetence or maliciousness-
Damore makes no mention of current female Googlers, beyond the implication that there are just fewer of them and fewer in leadership roles at Google. I can’t imagine what question Lippa was asked here but he is quoted discussing the qualities of current female employees! Lippa’s comments only serve to underscore Damore’s point that Google hires individuals- these female Googlers (whether in the general workforce or in leadership roles) are there on their own merits, out of their own interests.
That the authors preface this quote about current employees with “trying to use that data to explain gender disparities in the workplace is irrelevant at best” is crude legerdemain and utterly impossible to explain without accepting that intellectual honesty is not high on the agenda here.
And maybe the most important question: How useful are psychological studies of the general population when you’re talking about Googlers?”
They would explain a lot of the gender difference in hiring. The trends of the general population can’t not influence the make-up of such a large group of people.
“Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”- Damore
If the authors want to argue that we can’t predict female employees at google exhibiting the same personality traits as the general population (and thus promotion patterns should not follow general patterns absent bias) due to some hidden variable, fair enough. It’s just that positing such an objection, without then wondering about the answer to that empirical question- the personality scores for neuroticism etc. among female Googlers and their correlations with workplace progress- is indicative of the article’s attitude towards science. It doesn’t really want to know. It’s feminism of the gaps.
Semantics aren’t helping here. Is coding a thing- or people-oriented job? What about when you do it in a corporation with 72,000 people?
It’s good to question definitions but those with leanings towards people-oriented careers probably don’t decide to spend years alone on a computer in the hope of being employed by a company with lots of people. This is not empirically tested to my knowledge, but the argument is weak.
On Origins of the Specious
Damore, though, is saying that differences in cognitive or personality traits—if they exist at all—have both social and biological origins. And those biological origins, he says, are exactly what scientists would predict from an evolutionary perspective.
Yes. The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is, to date, un-falsified. Every aspect of our natures, including our culture, must be a product of and itself a part of this process. If we could find something in our traits which didn’t fit with Natural Selection, the theory would need revision.
Evolutionary psychology and its forebear, sociobiology, are themselves problematic fields. Two decades ago evo-psych was all the rage. It’s essential argument: Males and females across species have faced different kinds of pressures on their ability to successfully reproduce—the mechanism, simplistically, through which evolution operates. Those pressures lead to different mating strategies for males and females, which in turn show up as biological and psychological differences—distinctions present in men and women today.
The problem with that set of logical inferences is that it provides a convenient excuse to paint a veneer of shaky science onto “me Tarzan, you Jane” stereotypes.
Problematic fields? Ok, if I wasn’t concerned about the integrity of this piece before, I most certainly am now. This is an attempt to smuggle in an unfair stereotype of an entire body of research. Most fields have their share of dodgy scholarship.
Science is only problematic when it is wrong.
Yes, the fields may be ‘problematic’ in another sense because evolution is a horror show and often what it has created is deeply disturbing. Given his genetic influence, it could be said that Ghengis Kahn ‘wins’ evolution, the monster that he was. And yes, it seems there are bad scientists in this field who have resorted to post hoc justifications for present wrongs. But by being a science, its self-correcting nature means these inaccurate ‘just so stories’ are eventually defeated. To tarnish and implicitly stereotype the work of entire fields with an appeal to consequences “The problem with that set of logical inferences is that it provides a convenient excuse to paint a veneer of shaky science onto “me Tarzan, you Jane” stereotypes” is alarming.
In fact, evolutionary biologists today race to point out that the nature-versus-nurture dichotomy is outdated.
Yup, it is true no individual is determined either by nature or nurture. It’s a complex interplay. Nature of course does have influence at the population level (Damore’s focus). The point is an utter non-sequitur and this whole traducement of evo psych possibly harmful.
“[W]e cannot know the influence of environmental versus biological variables, even at very young ages.”
The article quotes Diane Halpbern on discussing differences in intellectual abilities between genders. The point she is quoted here as making does not interrupt Damore’s argument. He makes no claim regarding how much biology or environment determines such qualities. But that biology does influence the differences, Halpbern is convinced-
“At the time I started writing this book it seemed clear to me that any between sex differences in thinking abilities were due to socialization practices, artifacts, and mistakes in the research. After reviewing a pile of journal articles that stood several feet high, and numerous books and book chapters that dwarfed the stack of journal articles, I changed my mind. The literature on sex differences in cognitive abilities is filled with inconsistent findings, contradictory theories, and emotional claims that are unsupported by the research. Yet despite all the noise in the data, clear and consistent messages could be heard. There are real and in some cases sizable sex differences with respect to some cognitive abilities. Socialization practices are undoubtedly important, but there is also good evidence that biological sex differences play a role in establishing and maintaining cognitive sex differences, a conclusion I wasn’t prepared to make when I began reviewing the relevant literature.” Steven Pinker quoting Sex Differences in Cognitive Ability by Diane Halpern.
So when Damore does juke from preferences to abilities, it looks a little sneaky. Here’s what he writes: “I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women may differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t have equal representation of women in tech and leadership,” he writes. Making the leap from personality differences to achievement differences would require citing at least some of the well-studied body of work we’ve mentioned here, which Damore ignored.
This is the strongest point in the article. One can only conclude that he imagined Google to recruit at the right tail of the IQ distribution which is slightly more populated by men (though the means of IQ for both groups are the same – meaning there are also more men with learning difficulties). This might be a simplistic assumption on his part, ignoring factors such as rationality, creativity etc. etc. which do not correlate with IQ .
Just ‘cos and effect
With the next pivot, the memo gets more pernicious. Damore switches—again, subtly—from effects to causes. His interpretation of the science around preference and ability is arguable; on causation, though, he’s even rockier. According to Damore (and a lot of research), the biological factor that connects sex to cognitive abilities and personality traits is prenatal exposure to testosterone.
Of all the high-stakes claims in sex-difference research, none is more important or more popular than the idea that hormones in the womb help give people stereotypically masculine or feminine interests.
Presumably referreing to this from the memo-
“These differences aren’t just socially constructed because [they] often have[…] links to prenatal testosterone.”
How is this harmful?
It is also a very plausible explanation. That it is the biological factor is probably impossible to say (I’m not convinced that Damore believes this), but that it is a plausible factor is doubtless. Also, regardless of the biological mechanism that causes the gender differences, be it testosterone or not, the authors must accept that such a difference would influence the make up of the pool of qualified applications to Google.
The most consistent findings linking prenatal testosterone to sex-linked behaviors come from about a dozen studies examining toy preferences among girls with a condition known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which causes the overproduction of sex hormones, including testosterone. CAH-affected girls tend to be less interested in dolls (substituting for people) and more interested in toys like trucks (things).
But children with CAH have other variables. They’re often born with ambiguous genitalia and other grave medical conditions, and therefore have unusual rearing experiences.
Except this objection was controlled for without having to resort to the monkeys and soft toys straw man of the subsequent paragraph-
To get around this socialization issue, researchers from Emory University gave toys to young rhesus monkeys. When they saw that females preferred plush dolls and males preferred trucks, they concluded that these tendencies must be hard-wired into each sex.
Squint hard at this result, because it presumes that juvenile rhesus monkeys see stuffed animals as monkeylike but “wheeled toys” as thinglike.
[P]renatal androgen is the most likely explanation for the results because there was a high correlation between degree of prenatal androgen exposure and occupational interest, and males with CAH did not differ from unaffected males; further, androgen effects on interests have been confirmed in typical samples (Auyeung et al., 2009). Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People
Adriene M. Beltz, Jane L. Swanson, and Sheri A. Berenbaum
It would be more convincing (to say the least) if the authors had approached the strongest version of the opposing view.
Among social psychologists there’s a consensus that prenatal testosterone does affect a lot of personality traits, in particular one’s interest in people versus things,” Damore said in an interview last week with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. He also said it to pro-Trump YouTuber Stefan Molyneux, adding that hormonal exposure “explains a lot of differences in career choice.”
Still, most hormone researchers agree that these differences are real. But that they’re directly linked to prenatal testosterone? Not so much. And to differences in career choice? “There’s 100 percent no consensus on that,” says Justin Carré, a psychologist at Nipissing University in Ontario. “The human literature on early androgen exposure is really very messy.”
1) This wasn’t in the memo. Which is fair enough- it’s just the authors do not include any of the other comments Damore made subsequently which would have rendered some of the authors’ misreadings impossible
“I ’m not saying that any of the female engineers at Google are in any way worse than the average male engineer I’m in fact I’m just saying that this may explain some of the disparity in representation in the population all right so there may not be so many over here but those that are over here are just as good so and or not even good likability wise just preference wise with the personally difference between men and women is just differing interest in people versus things and this has links to prenatal testosterone” Damore interviewed on the Stefan Molyneux show, as quoted above.
2) He didn’t say there was *consensus* on prenatal testosterone’s influence on career choice, though the authors’ wording definitely leads one to believe he did. At this point, I’m not surprised.
“…[I]n a quiet racist dog whistle—IQ, where the evidence is far, far weaker.
‘Racist’? No citation?
Nothing like a consensus?
“There is a strange disconnect between the scientific consensus and the public mind on intelligence testing…Yet the scientific evidence is clear: IQ tests are extraordinarily useful. IQ scores are related to a huge variety of important life outcomes like educational success, income, and even life expectancy, and biological studies have shown they are genetically influenced and linked to measures of the brain. Studies of intelligence and IQ are regularly published in the world’s top scientific journals.”Stuart Ritchie
‘[Google aims to create]…an environment where people feel secure, safe, and empowered to do their best work. It’s good ethics and good business. That’s what Damore seems to see as an overly politically correct culture that stifles dissent.’
[The memo] is an attempt to make permanent a power dynamic that shouldn’t exist in the first place[…it is…]coverage for answering oppression with a shrug
Yes, this is actually being said of a document which contains a whole section entitled “Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap.” It’s just outright lies now.
Climbing to an even higher altitude, though, we might ask another question about Damore’s appeal to science: So what? Which is to say, what are we to do with not just the conclusions of the memo but also its implications? Damore is hardly the first person to use science to justify social norms or political preferences. Science has, too often in human history, been a tool for literal dehumanization as a rationale for oppression. It happened to people of African descent in America; to the poor of the Victorian era; to women in the years leading up to suffrage; and to Jews, people of nonbinary gender, Roma, people with disabilities, and so on in Nazi Germany. Historians try to wall off those ideas now—eugenics, phrenology, social Darwinism—but each, in its day, was just science.
With hindsight you can see that those pursuits weren’t science, and you can aim those 20/20 lenses at Damore too.
Let me climb higher still. The atrocious ideas that the authors refer to in this first paragraph were problems of stereotyping, derived in my view from what Popper referred to as Aristotle’s contribution to ‘barren scholasticism’- Essentialism. “http://dieoff.org/page126.htm”>Two Kinds of Definition” (scroll down)
Damore is arguing for the exact opposite and, in testament to how profound the “despair in reason” goes, the authors not only refuse to recognise this but lazily lump Damore’s position in with a host of atrocities.
I could go on to criticise the naivety of his proposals- but as I said I’m more interested in the reaction to the scientific statements- not the memo per se. I have no opinion about the validity of positive discrimination programmes. I can see both sides.
(I also think the science quoted in the memo should urge employers to re-evaluate their hiring and promoting policies. If candidates (male or female) who are talented but less assertive, better communicators but more focused on a fulfilling life, more sensitive to negative emotions but with stronger personal values are pushed out by more aggressive competitors, then a smart company looks at ways of valuing those overlooked qualities and incorporating them into their assessments.)
However, the core claim here is a group of candidates, self-selected due to interests unequally shared between the sexes will result in skewed employment stats. Sexism is real due to a plethora of horrible idiocies and cruelties, but our incessant habit of conflating individuals with the stereotype of their population’s trends is core.
The memo is a species of discourse peculiar to politically polarized times: cherry-picking scientific evidence to support a preexisting point of view. It’s an exercise not in rational argument but in rhetorical point scoring. And a careful walk through the science proves it.
This Wired article is not only such an inadequate summary that’s there’s very little in it that can be said to be genuine or worthy of anyone’s curiosity, such is its irresponsibility that it’s impossible to feel merely misled. The ease with which the authors defraud their readership by substituting a careful walk through the science with a spin through a gauntlet of bait-and-switch straw men, carefully booby trapping the truth, is a sign of the times and their asymptotic relationship with honesty. Here we have a piece which while advertising the Real science and tarnishing Damore’s intentions with ‘pivoting’, ‘juking’, ‘sneaky’, ‘pernicious’ it indulges in mendacious, uncannily cynical, topsy turvy charlatanry. The nightmare of the alt-right has roots in this genre of phoney enlightenment.
Lying to yourself with common sense
Mostly wrong…
…mostly wrong…
…mostly wrong…
“[T]he Catholic Church is the world’s biggest and oldest organization. It has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the Soviets. It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every area of human endeavor. It’s given us some of the world’s greatest thinkers, from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard. When it does things, it usually has a good reason.”
…usually right?
Power might corrupt the holder, but the greatest testament to its dark capacities is the trail of crippled imaginations found in its shadow.
Only minds whose capacity for speculation has been hobbled could contrive the above argument by Catholic journalists Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry and Michael Brendan Dougherty, and in doing so fail in the following ways:
- not imagining an equally credulous Egyptian in 1050BC making a similarly useless argument for the Oracles.
- not suspecting that influence and superlative endurance throughout Western civilisation’s barbaric and ignorant adolescence might be better explained by a theory that doesn’t predict good reasoning.
It is hardly a surprise that proponents of implicitly ‘might today means right all along’ arguments for Catholicism’s numinous wisdom are often the loudest of European Monarchies’ and Nationalisms’ cheerleaders. Yet Gobry and Dougherty are not to be found amongst them – in this they are inconsistent. Arguments to enduring tradition have a habit of either highlighting hypocrisy or allying you with the ancient darknesses. It is inevitable- the sycophants of any naked emperor who claims to be dressed by that designer of great repute, tradition, daren’t refuse invitation to court by any other.
I am sure the whispers of doubt that modernity brings do not reach the ears of these three outspoken, traditionalist Catholics here. Theirs is a world sealed off from contamination by the secular truths, however well evidenced they may be.
Likewise, if empirically impoverished examples of confirmation bias are your thing, by all means click the link to Gobry and Dougherty’s article above, “Time To Admit It: The Church Has Always Been Right On Birth Control”. But be prepared for the additional morbo of sublimated psychological theatre suggested by their refusing the invitation to pay homage to the other entrenched irrationalities of Western civilisation. They eschew metaphysical argument and adduce (sloppy) observations to validate the Church’s doctrine and prestige. From this appeal to material consequence to demonstrate the righteousness of God’s transcendent will, we know the seal is incomplete. Even the ‘admit it’ of their piece’s title gives us call to suspect that between its lines you intuit an internal conflict between seductive belief and defiant intellect, a cognitive dissonance silenceable in favour of the pre-rational only by publication. Theirs is a topsy-turvy world: belief is felt to be true, the truth can have the spirit of a lie, might is right, publication is vindication.
Of course this is mere armchair psychology, I just simply can’t believe that these writers are this stupid. To offer them the benefit of such doubt we need to remember that self deception is often a work of cunning stealth, and it isn’t easy to say whose fault it is.
Atheism, Abortion, Arrogance, Authority
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inebriateme/2015/01/the-amazing-incuriosity-of-the-new-atheists/
This is how the fundamentalist mind works: the very act of thinking rigorously is dangerous, because it threatens to expose the gaping void on which the worldview rests. And so even when it would help their cause, the New Atheists are simply incapable of thinking rigorously, or critically, or rationally, because then they would no longer be New Atheists.
-Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
If one wishes to become speedily acquainted with what Jung meant by projection of the Shadow, debate with these professional Catholic apologists on the topic of Humanist ethics is well recommended.
To minds mired in dogma, if it somehow suggests itself as sassy to frame any non-divinely decreed ethical system as a ‘catechism’, I must wonder if Heliocentricity might have been described as doctrinaire solipsism by their ironic, medieval antecedents on the Monastic equivalents of social media. It’s cutely uncanny, reminiscent of Poe’s Purloined Letter, pinning its intellectual rot in plain sight in the hope its very cynicism is enough to distract from the juvenile nonsense.
While whinging at length about Gobry’s strawman-riddled traducements of ‘New Atheism’ might be satisfying and world-view reaffirming, perhaps it would be more useful to look at the substance of the dismissive posturing with a view to better understanding the cognitive flaws that generate the claims. A curious case study is at hand.
The problem of Abortion derives from how it forces into opposition the indistinct hinterlands of our comprehension and the clear centre of our moral universe; the murky questions of ‘what is human?’, ‘what is life?’ tangling with the self evident right to life and dignity of each human being. This tension between the poles of human concern and competence brings to the surface precisely those flaws which are most inherent in Theologically determined thought and character. Reproduced here are the declarations typical of a committed Catholic:
You might allow that such graceful appreciation of a multifaceted question is not unexpected from the intellectual giant who might actually believe himself when he says
[New Atheists] are people who quite clearly and nakedly want to see religious believers oppressed, and even eradicated.
from here, which in the comments section also features, for bonus Catholic argumentation points, the ‘go and read the other courtiers or you’re but a pleb’ attempt at spellbinding with the aura of publishing- he gives a reading list for admission to the adults’ table- after which he says:
You may not be convinced but at least you’ll have the intellectual scaffolding necessary to participate in this debate productively.
Most thoughtful people, even those tragically bereft of the no-doubt essential ‘intellectual scaffolding’ of Christian apologetics, probably have enough of a foundation in basic thoughtfulness to hold reservations about saying the following, or at least about saying it with an arrogance so acutely misplaced as to be almost inspired
And still, the irony doesn’t quite end there- this is the same lodestar of civilised men who wrote How Our Botched Understanding of ‘Science’ Ruins Everything without actually understanding what this, at times surprisingly insightful (despite its climate change contrarian undertones), piece on Facts -v- Truth entails for his own appeal to empiricism to settle the question of abortion. It essentially means that his obnoxious, blind insistence on a scientific answer, which Kevin Drum describes in Mother Jones as Gobry’s “tawdry rhetorical trick designed to give [his] arguments an authority they haven’t earned”, is yet more mawkish than realised. What unites these appeals to enduring might, reading lists and unqualified scientific certainty? The Catholic belief that eminence is evidence, not what one would expect from this generation’s champion of epistemic humility.
Returning to the twitter exchange, Gobry tags the aforementioned Dougherty into the ring, linking to his piece in The Week which replays the blundering with further, youtubed, sophistry
The science is pretty straightforward about when a human life begins. You can watch visualizations of it on YouTube. After the fusion of sperm and egg, the resulting zygote has unique human DNA
So much for once bemoaning a ‘basic incuriosity […the] sense of a profound lack of reflective ability’.
It’s certainly amusing to see a group which so readily employs metaphysical fudge as a way to undermine the conclusions of rational skepticism later so desperately adopt the cold glare of empiricism. Gobry himself echoes the fallacy:
Whether life begins at conception isn’t a matter of religious faith, it’s a scientific question, and the answer isn’t very hard. Of course, you can choose to disbelieve it, just like you can choose to not to [sic] believe that CO2 molecules redirect infrared variations [sic].
However, as you might have guessed, the point at which our theologians selectively embrace the edifying power of the scientific method is precisely the point at which it is incapable of giving a meaningful answer. Regardless of whether this is an achievement in irony or in self deception, it deserves pause for appreciation.
Gobry is right when he says repeating something doesn’t make it true. The science is not straightforward because the terms of the question asked of it are not clear
Biological theory demands a clear organism concept, but at present biologists cannot agree on one.
–Ellen Clarke The Multiple Realizability of Biological Individuals
But rather than continue to give the New Atheist take on Gobry’s catty schtick of bravura Catholic on ruthless ideological crusade, I’m more interested in exploring how his, and Catholicism’s, conceptual fixedness doesn’t lend itself to the subtlety required for an honest view of the universe and its workings. Insisting without suggestion of delicate reflection that “Facts are stubborn. We know exactly when human life begins” bespeaks a brittle mental schema ill-equipped for understanding the turbulent currents of nature. I hope to examine how such petrified metaphysics underwrite the workings of self deception among the modern faithful and thus let the indoctrinated somewhat off the hook. Convicting the real culprit requires us to collect evidence on his false testimony against nature, to find him we need to look deep into our intellectual history.
Life Jim…
David L. Hull in A Matter of Individuality
The distinction between an organism and a colony is not sharp. If an organism is the “total product of the development of the impregnated embryo,” then as far back as 1899, T. H. Huxley was forced to conclude that the medusa set free from a hydrozoan” are as much organs of the latter, as the multitudinous pinnules of a Comatula, with their genital glands, are organs of the Echinoderm. Morphologically, therefore, the equivalent of the individual Comatula is the Hydrozoic stock and all the Medusae which proceed from it”. […] According to evolutionists, units of selection, whether they be single genes, chromosomes, organisms, colonies or kinship groups are individuals.
We also have Wilson, Robert A. and Barker, Matthew, “The Biological Notion of Individual”
[I]t proves surprisingly difficult to specify what it is to be an organism[…]
In the early 1990s, a team of biologists reported in the journal Nature that they had found high levels of genetic identity in samples of a species of fungus (Armillaris bulbosa), which had taken over a large geographic region in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (J. Wilson 1999: 23–25). They used these data to make a case for viewing these samples as constituting parts of one gigantic fungus, with an estimated biomass of more than ten tons and an estimated age exceeding 1500 years. They concluded, “members of the fungal kingdom should now be recognized as among the oldest and largest organisms on earth” (Smith, Bruhn, and Anderson 1992: 431). A number of other scientists have questioned whether this final claim about the organismal status of the humungous fungus is warranted, and some have argued the claim is mistaken.
[…]
Consider a second example in more detail (Turner 2000: ch.2). Coral reefs, despite rapidly becoming a thing of the past due to the climate changes associated with global warming, are spectacular and beautiful parts of the living world. They consist of two chief components. The first are accretions of calcite deposits. The second are the small animals, polyps, which produce and grow on the deposits. (Coral polyps belong to the same Linnaean class as sea anemones, and to the same Linnaean phylum as jellyfish.) The polyps are indisputably organisms. But further, conservation biologists also often describe the coral reefs, consisting of the polyps and deposits, as living things that can grow and die.
[Edit: this article does a better job at making my point clear.]
If this appears obscurantist, that will be because Nature doesn’t have to play along with our notions of what is clear and satisfactory. We demand categorical answers to categorical questions yet Nature herself transcends such pigeonholing. The obscurantist tendency resides precisely in this prejudiced Procrustean bed of categorical schema on whose terms we demand explanation.
Conceptually, this question of metaphysical category appears to me a hugely interesting and relevant one regarding much debate on traditional Progressive -v- Conservative issues. A recent New Yorker article on the Churchlands, Philosophers of science at the University of California at San Diego, briefly raised this schematic problem in the context of exploring the relationship between thought and the physical brain.
How probable was it, after all, that, in probing the brain, scientists would come across little clusters of “belief” neurons? It wasn’t that beliefs didn’t exist; it was just that it seemed highly improbable that the first speakers of the English language, many hundreds of years ago, should miraculously have chanced upon the categories that, as the saying goes, carved nature at its joints. It might turn out, for instance, that it would make more sense, brain-wise, to group “beliefs about cheese” with “fear of cheese” and “craving for dairy” rather than with “beliefs about life after death.”
Mental life was something we knew very little about, and when something was imperfectly understood it was quite likely that we would define its structure imperfectly, too. It was only rarely that, in science, you started with a perfectly delimited thing and set out to investigate it; more often, your definition of what it was that you were looking at would change as you discovered more about it.
‘Carving nature at its joints’ is a very useful description of the work of pure Mathematicians. While the disjunct mathematical concepts that are the numbers can be said to come to us through the logical fabric of reality itself, insisting similar discrete, natural kinds or essential Forms inhere in the world studied by biologists is folly. The science which strives to delineate the joints in the living world is less apprehension of essence, more a compilation of methodological convenience and nominalist convention.
Stamp Collecting, Not Letter Writing
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
-Ernest Rutherford (winner of nobel prize for a science that is not stamp collecting)
A Young Dog
The father of modern philosophy of science, Karl Popper, in a 1945 essay Two Kinds of Definition addressed with great insight and clarity the Essence vs ‘Stamp Collecting’ confusion.
the scientific view of the definition ‘A puppy is a young dog’ would be that it is an answer to the question ‘What shall we call a young dog?’ rather than an answer to the question ‘What is a puppy?’
This quote goes to the very quick of the distinction between bewitchment and teaching. Scientific definitions explain the collection of terms used to prevent us repeating the likes of ‘a young dog’. Aristotelian definitions, on the other hand, were themselves considered the source of knowledge (a puppy is small, has four legs, is cute), the truth values of such, it was argued, could be obtained by comparing the definition against what is apprehended by intellectual intuition. Popper maintains Aristotle’s insistence on ‘basic premises’, these intuited essences, has polluted the intellectual ecosystem of Western Civilisation since its inception. It is the Greek giant who has preordained a millennium of Catholic distortion.
Aristotle taught that in a definition we have first pointed to the essence – perhaps by naming it – and that we then describe it with the help of the defining formula; just as in an ordinary sentence like ‘This puppy is brown’, we first point to a certain thing by saying ‘this puppy’, and then describe it as ‘brown’. And he taught that by thus describing the essence to which the term points which is to be defined, we determine or explain the meaning of the term also.
This problem, has very real repercussions for those who would look to science to augment the field of ontology. It is an absurdity to assume a discrete ‘it’, ie. intuit an essence ( the puppy, a human life, fire) and then to ask what it is scientifically ie. to delineate it in a manner matching with our intuition.
“Consider the medieval physicists who wondered what fire could be,” Pat [Churchland] says. “They identified a range of things that they thought were instances of fire: burning wood, the sun, comets, lightning, fireflies, northern lights. They couldn’t give a definition, but they could give examples that they agreed upon. Jump now to the twentieth century. The category of fire, as defined by what seemed to be intuitively obvious members of the category, has become completely unstuck. Turns out that burning wood is actually oxidation; what happens on the sun has nothing to do with that, it’s nuclear fusion; lightning is thermal emission; fireflies are biophosphorescence; northern lights are spectral emission.”
Popper continues
[E]ssentialism not only encouraged verbalism, but it also led to the disillusionment with argument, that is, with reason. Scholasticism and mysticism and despair in reason, these are the unavoidable results of the essentialism of Plato and Aristotle.
ahem.
In both Dougherty’s and Gobry’s pieces, this despair with, or perhaps even disdain for, reason is omnipresent. But, to be fair Doherty at least came close…
Biology doesn’t really give us options for when an individual life begins, at least none that we could deny without also denying our ability to know whether any individual members of a species “really exist.”
…before retreating to the ‘really exist’ essentialist fox hole.
Biology doesn’t give us options because it’s not a question of or for science, this is due to un-scientifically assuming that life, a non-scientific concept, has an essential beginning which is not also the beginning of the universe. Such a beginning is, again, not a scientific Truth but a nominalist convenience. Popper reminds us:
Questions like ‘What is life?’ or ‘What is gravity?’ do not play any role in science.
To the question of when a human life begins, we need to respond by asking what are we a priori calling ‘a’ human life, what have we named? If we begin by saying ‘that which begins at the fusion of human sperm and egg’, then we have begged the question. Yes, the concept of human individuality is certainly an intuitive necessity and a conceptual convenience, but identifying the limits of ‘being’ is not so clear cut.
With the creation of ‘unique human DNA in a zygote’ we certainly have a ‘developmental bottleneck’ in the evolutionary continuum of the species, but is this truly the only criteria for determining the origins of being? Given the other perspectives on biological individuality as discussed above, ranging from species to individual genes, some even requiring the presence of an immune system for consideration as a mulitcellular orgainsm (present after 9 weeks of foetal gestation if you are curious), we must go further.
A useful way to consider the problem is to accept there are varieties of individuality in the biological world. Austin Greeley Booth argues for the recognition of two classes: Evolutionary Individuals and Organism Individuals.
The first cateogry may be described (though there are competing descriptions)-
A Darwinian individual is, “any member of a Darwinian population” […] Darwinian individuals can be
entities at any level of the biological hierarchy, so long as they are in principle capable of reproduction. The Darwinian individual category understood in this way includes genes, organelles, cells, organisms, collectives of certain kinds, and perhaps even species.
while the second
One strategy for characterizing the nature of organismality is to suggest that organisms exhibit
special kinds of functional integration. For example, organisms may be regarded as essentially
metabolically homeostatic and autonomous entities. Organisms are entities that take in nutrients and
other sources of energy from outside themselves, that maintain their metabolic integrity in the face
of fluctuating external conditions, that have parts that work toward the operation of the whole, and
that exhibit some threshold of biotic independence […].
This framework has implications for our ‘straightforward science’. While a zygote is, notionally, a Darwinian individual, exactly like a single gene, it cannot yet be said to be an Organism Individual.
[O]rganisms differ from both complex non-living natural systems and from parts of living systems. Proximal, mechanistic biological theories and explanations make reference to various kinds of biological individuals, like organs, genes, T cells, or developmental modules. None of these individuals is capable of autonomous persistence, however. These individuals must be embedded in a larger system (an organism-like system) to perform their appropriate functional role. So though entities like organs or subsystems can be viewed as biological individuals, they can be helpfully distinguished from organism-individuals.
We are back to the question of human individuality. Human life at fertilisation stage can be described by reference to one type of Individuality, but not as an organism and certainly not as a person. So what of this individuality?
This puzzle of how to reconcile individuality with existence and its origins can be usefully explored by running the Ship of Theseus paradox both forwards and in reverse. While wondering if, having incrementally replaced each component, the ship remains ‘itself’, we can also ask at which point in its developmental history do we say it came into being?
For the first question it is interesting to observe how we allow our intuition to inform us that the individuality of the thoroughly refurbished ship remains un-ruptured yet we must also contend with the reality that it is clearly a different entity. As such, can individuality per se really be the key to unlocking the definition of being?
Running the Ship of Theseus experiment backwards we encounter a similar problem. ‘Upon completion’ feels a dogmatically rigid answer to the question of when we can first intuit the ship’s existence. If we loosen up but still insist that our answer accord with the onset of a spatial bounding we are left with a mound of building materials being referred to as a ship. If we turn then to the emergence of its constituent parts? Perhaps further back at the generation of ideas by its brainstorming naval architects? Would we need to return to the very first ship? The very first hewn timber and forged nail? The development of smithing, the first tree?
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Carl Sagan
Of course we don’t speak like this when in the kitchen and this is exactly Popper’s point re scientific definitions. They merely facilitate the understanding of the recipe; invoking the big bang each time you wish to bake is probably cumbersome. There is no argument that such convenience is a basis for ontological Truth
[L]egal personhood should have a relationship to when we know a new individual of the species comes into existence.
Individuals do not one moment ‘come suddenly into existence’. Existence reconfigures itself and we usefully call that particular, most basic permutation which can explain (via prediction) nature’s workings an ‘individual’. Levels of organisation which correspond with certain workings can be identified – if it floats and can be maneuvered, Theseus’ wood and nail structure can be called a Ship. But in the natural world there are various workings: evolutionary, organismal, psychological, and so, as we’ve seen, various individualities. Deciding that life is toggled ‘on’ with the first speaking of ‘individuality’, as if the whole origin of being is identical to the onset of ‘singularity’, as if a gamete is less not-an-organism than a zygote, as if the phrase “Theseus’s ship” can be applied to a structure with a cabin but no hull, is nonsense of the sort described by Popper 70 years ago.
The development of thought since Aristotle could, I think, be summed up by saying that every discipline, as long as it used the Aristotelian method of definition, has remained arrested in a state of empty verbiage and barren scholasticism, and that the degree to which the various sciences have been able to make any progress depended on the degree to which they have been able to get rid of this essentialist method.
Richard Dawkins sees this verbiage and scholasticism made lifeless by its insistence on discrete, essential categories, describing those whose thought is conditioned by it as suffering under ‘the tyranny of the discontinuous mind‘ (its implications for gay marriage is something I’ve also written about)
For purposes of legal clarity, just as the eighteenth birthday is defined as the moment of getting the vote, it may be necessary to draw a line at some arbitrary moment in embryonic development after which abortion is prohibited. But personhood doesn’t spring into existence at any one moment: it matures gradually, and it goes on maturing through childhood and beyond.
To the discontinuous mind, an entity either is a person or is not. The discontinuous mind cannot grasp the idea of half a person, or three quarters of a person. Some absolutists go right back to conception as the moment when the person comes into existence – the instant the soul is injected – so all abortion is murder by definition […] [a] belief that … is puerile and ignorant.
To sum up, either
1) the Ship of Theseus was spread across the forests and mines of the world and before that among the depths of the stars, an acorn is a tree, ‘a hurricane [is] the barely perceptible zephyr that seeds it’ and ‘abortions’ are occurring on the scale of billions each second by all the male masturbation ongoing and the potential sex that is not had,
or
2) magical, Nuomenal Essentialism is the fabric of being, evolution isn’t true; a non-giraffe one day gave birth to a giraffe on the plains of Africa millions of years ago and new human beings become suddenly present at conception- making all abortion murder,
or
3) our language and traditions have lead us to an essentialist metaphysics which corrupts out thinking, meaning 1) is true on a material level but not consistent with a way our language might practically frame the concepts. Thus it might most usefully be argued that personhood, while a gradual dawning, doesn’t occur at the midnight of conception but when we perceive the first rays of awareness.
I’m not sure that Gobry’s (or to a lesser extent Dougherty’s) “participation in the debate” has provided us anything that was not “aggressively, imperiously banal” (as @eliasisquith wonderfully put it). It is worthy of some amazement that clearly intelligent people, paid to think on these issues, can expend such energy shoring up trite short-circuits of reason with snorts of hostility and ignorance. However, it is worth remembering Orwell’s greatest insight: tyranny is first the control of the schema of thought: language, metaphysics. Snared in Aristotelian Essentialism, the truculent Catholic attempt to insist on the blue pill (or is that the green pill?), the One True Schema is, essentially, the policing of metaphysical thought crime with the implicit threat of excommunication from the debate.
Self deception is easy if the truth is in a language they pay you not to hear.
Now read this too
The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories
And
The Dead Hand of Plato and Anti-SSM Arguments
Is there a distasteful stridency on the Yes side of the Irish referendum to recognise same-sex marriage?
Many in the No camp would undoubtedly say that there is, but then again this group have been accused of a persistent defiance of basic reason. Boringly, I think both accusations stick. It’s not hard to utterly demolish the No side’s arguments and point out their abject dishonesty. But the self-satisfied tone of much of the pro-SSM camp (I include myself) often betrays a lack of concern for a fundamental contradiction in our enterprise: Marriage is an inherently Conservative institution. Why the contradiction? I hope to show that despite the rational ground on which the Yes side will say it has built its campaign, most are oblivious to the vestigial philosophical legacy of Essentialism haunting both sides but embraced only by one.
First, I’m going to let an inspection of a typical No argument demonstrate just how contemptuous of reason the pro ‘traditional marriage’ campaign has been. Their wonton betrayal of the Enlightenment can not be overstated. Richard Waghorne, writing in the Irish Times 20/04/2012 on the issue of Same Sex Marriage in Ireland offers us a serviceable specimen of their catastrophic attempts at reasoning.
Ironically in his opening gambit to ‘dispatch’ ‘a number of self-contradictory or inaccurate arguments’ which are ‘characteristic limitations of the case’ he opposes, we find the smuggled logical slips so symptomatic of the slop admissible in Conservative thought.
Addressing Kieran Rose’s appeal to popular support for SSM (The Irish Times 10/04/2012) Waghorne states
Public opinion is, […], no more conclusive a reason to legislate for gay marriage today than hostile opinion was good reason to delay reform concerning homosexuality.
This is immediately identifiable as a category error: marriage is inherently a social construct and access to such an institution represents a positive right.
The freedom from persecution for homosexuals who pursue romantic fulfilment is a negative liberty.
As political philosopher Isaiah Berlin argued, negative freedoms are necessary liberal bulwarks against the majoritarian bullying visible in the totalitarian projects of Theocracy, Fascism and Communism (bullying which the writers of the secular, republican US Constitution were wise enough to preempt and quench). No thinking person would agree that one’s right to life can be made dependant on a popular vote. In the same vein, widely held hostility for homosexuality was certainly never an ethically sound reason to criminalise gay acts.
Confusing such individual freedoms with the formation of our social institutions is egregious fallacy. Paper money is currency because we decide it to be. Such is the nature of convention; these are matters for which public consultation (of some sort) is required by definition.
Marriage belongs to this same class of concept: it is a bestowal of the ultimate measure of social currency on a romantic union of consenting adults. The question of which unions may qualify is necessarily a matter determined by social assent.
Waghorne’s accusation of ‘intellectual dishonesty’ is itself, therefore, rather falsely derived and, as a matter of slavish conformity with the cliche, well accampanied by fellow products of vulgar motivated reasoning.
In considering gay marriage, it is essential to see treating different situations differently in no way constitutes discrimination
This begs the question- What is essentially different between gay marriage and traditional marriage, and is such difference essential to our idea of marriage?
Our Idea of Marriage
[T]he one institution supported by society because it is the family form which on average gives a child the most advantageous upbringing.
-Waghorne
Despite the important identity fudge here (rewording this as ‘social support for the institution begotten by social support’ lays clear the tautology) the reason given for its buttressing by society is telling, as is the ‘on average’ qualifier.
Obviously, child-rearing is essential to Waghorne’s understanding. Which is strange, for there are no vows requiring it in any marriage ceremony. Nor do we admonish the childless married.
‘On average’ makes a statistical claim, the validity of which, as always, is entirely dependent on the questions being asked.
Children in set A have affluent and unmarried parents, in set B the children’s parents are poor and married. Will the set C of all well-reared children, intersect proportionally more with A or B? A familiarity with http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/4824 and http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-cyf.aspx makes clear the evidence does not flatter Waghorne’s case.
We could therefore say the family form which, on average, gives a child the most advantageous up-bringing is one which has high socioeconomic status, wedded parents or not.
Why not elevate such relationships beyond those of the poor and married?
Would treating their application for social recognition differently on this basis of inequality in child-rearing credentials be discrimination? Waghorne’s assertion would suggest variations of income bracket are not valid differences in family form. Why then are genders?
I do not subscribe to the view that gender is merely a construct. Homo Sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species. It is a fact that the males and females of our species are different because male and female are the names we give to those sets of differences. The danger, however, is to essentialise the two categories and ignore culture’s role. Richard Dawkins’ essay, ‘The Tyranny of The Discontinuous Mind’, on the problem of taxonomy in light of the theory of evolution, is worth invoking.
Essentialism—what I’ve called “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind”—stems from Plato, with his characteristically Greek geometer’s view of things. For Plato, a circle, or a right triangle, were ideal forms, definable mathematically but never realised in practice. A circle drawn in the sand was an imperfect approximation to the ideal Platonic circle hanging in some abstract space. That works for geometric shapes like circles, but essentialism has been applied to living things and Ernst Mayr blamed this for humanity’s late discovery of evolution—as late as the nineteenth century. If, like Aristotle, you treat all flesh-and-blood rabbits as imperfect approximations to an ideal Platonic rabbit, it won’t occur to you that rabbits might have evolved from a non-rabbit ancestor, and might evolve into a non-rabbit descendant. If you think, following the dictionary definition of essentialism, that the essence of rabbitness is “prior to” the existence of rabbits (whatever “prior to” might mean, and that’s a nonsense in itself) evolution is not an idea that will spring readily to your mind, and you may resist when somebody else suggests it.
Waghorne’s argument encourages a collective snaring in the gender Essentialist trap via the only way still socially acceptable: in the name of child rearing. We should not allow oppressive transcendental nonsense* to distract us from a mature, functional approach to the issue.
There is no valid data to suggest Mother and Father combined, Male and Female parenting, is an essentially advantageous category. I’m not sure common sense would even suggest that there should be.
[T]he right of a child to both a mother and a father where possible
this is indicative of Waghorne’s Platonic Idealism, ‘mother and father’ appeals to our sense of the ideal parents. “Gender complementarity” is often trotted out here as an example of nature’s holistic wisdom and it is about as canvincing as the case to allow alternative medicine take priority in hospitals. While family consisting of a child’s own biological parents may well represent the most desirable family structure, that any father and mother combination is automatically better suited to meeting the needs of a child than any father and father, or any mother and mother equivalent is simply a traditionalist fiction.
Yes, there is much to show familial stability is germane to the discussion of children’s best interests.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12090250/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9334548/
(though maybe not as germane, when we control for parental behaviours): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3171291/
and marriage can be said with confidence to bestow greater stability on families:
http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/abs/4902
So we can then say, reversing the formulation: “it is the family form which on average gives a child the most advantageous upbringing because it is the institution supported by society”.
The question in this case then becomes: why deny this to children of homosexual parents?
To recap:
- Marriage is not essentially a child rearing institution.
- Even if it were, there would be no reason to suggest married homosexual parents represent a threat to a child’s rights on the basis of her well being.
- Even if homosexual parents were hopelessly inadequate, SSM wouldn’t, per se, represent a threat to children in traditional families or those awaiting adoption when we could easily legislate for this, non existent, deficiency.
Thus the power of falsification forces one to appreciate that SSM opposition obnoxiously rests upon stratum after stratum of fallacy and ignorance.
However, I actually believe such a conclusion to be uncharitable.
Beyond Intents and Purposes
This debate serves us an interestingly tangled philosophical nexus of social and intellectual schema of which the Essentialist, discontinuous mind and value pluralism are but two.
Thinking about Same Sex Marriage, I’ve been struck by the irony of Liberals’ concern with the protocol of a traditionalist rite. It is curious to watch those whose worldview is ostensibly one of enlightened functionalism*, enter the haunted gauntlet of essence and ideal from which marriage draws its power. I can understand Conservatives’ ire at the incursion into their territory, at the corruption of their Platonist, primitive but compelling, magical thinking.
Social ordination and our happiness at its attendant recognition and status is a curious play on our propensity for communal illusion. Entering a favourable statistical bracket, as marriage no doubt represents, is rarely celebrated with the expense and glee which accompany our consecrations of the legal fiction of matrimony. We may well behave as if they did but, for better or worse, Platonic Ideals simply don’t exist**. They are a trick of language, a shadow cast by our useful ability to share abstractions. Only a top down understanding of reality, from Forms to a lapsarian, corrupt material world, explains marriage’s appeal. Mere real love is not quite complete, it must be solemnized, made whole, by a representative of the Ideal- a religion, a nation. If it were simply a matter of declaring intentions to the tribe, surely a Facebook status update followed by a party would suffice. Again, this enthralment to a figment of the dictionary is not born of the metaphysics of liberal politics, it the product of a society dazzled in the headlights of language.
Like language, marriage is basically a process of naming- which is why a detached, ‘bottom up’, ‘scientific’ view of the institution often throws up puzzlement. For nearly all intents and purposed, a cohabitating couple are ‘married’. This said, it would take deep cynicism to disavow the poetry performed in the decree which magically both “describes and produces two people as married“.
Does the rose pronounced ‘married’ smell sweeter than that named ‘life partner’? Liberal Juliet chose to see through the linguistic witchcraft of her tribe, but by wanting to get married today, Liberals are breaking from her example and are hijacking longstanding meaning. Consequently, Conservatives are left to worry, like a Shakespearean purist contemplating a Cantonese translation of Hamlet, does an idea of marriage which admits gay couples remain the same rose?
Here we must be clear: SSM will not translate the essence out of the institution because it never meant what Conservatives today argue it does. They misquoted the original and the apocryphal has remained tradition.
However, though tradition is often stupefying, it must be said, grudgingly, to carry its own numinous magic. Indeed much of the glory of marriage, even for Liberals, is derived from this spell and its corresponding ‘history as it is meant to be‘ prestige. To alter it, then, is to break with tradition, which for an institution so valued for its power to connect with precedent must be understood as fatal.
While advocating SSM from this position of appreciation for the abstract virtues of tradition appears hypocritical, anything which disabuses us of the notion that there is an ordained path through history is to be welcomed. This is as true for endorsement of romantic narratives as it is for Conservative delusion or Marxist revolutionary teleology. If society at large is going to indulge its desire to play fairytales for the prize of placebo stability, the rules need to be made consistent lest we become mired in an abyss of dangerous though consecrated misconceptions.
Among the consecrated nonsenses, Monarchy serves as testament to Prestige’s empty hold; it would be absurd to deny that it is truly felt. The primordial respect for such tribal esteem is, though far from rational, a very real aspect of the human condition. An enlightened society is one which can both appreciate the joy of the illusion and behave rationally. To deny here the possibility of a rational component exposing its intolerable inconsistencies is a fundamentalist corruption of civilisation.
It is my sincere belief that the shriller voices on my side would do well to heed what I feel are the instinctive reluctancies of undecided voters leaning towards a No vote, though I doubt concerns with tone will be decisive to the outcome. We can certainly say that if same sex marriage fails to pass in this country it will be in some large measure due to a class committed to infantilising the population by planting weasel worded appeals to the exclusively primeval.
It might help to recognise though that we have all been tilling this irrational ground.
*For an interesting discussion of the reification attendant on tyrannical essentialism, and its contrast with functionalism see http://opiniojuris.org/2012/04/23/rethinking-occupation-the-functional-approach/
**with the possible exception of mathematical concepts!
Begging the Question
Is there any anti-Same Sex Marriage argument that is not homophobic?
Admittedly, it may prove to have been a mistake. Following the ‘other side’ on twitter, while often enlightening, even titillating, too frequently proves merely soul stripping.
Watching torrents of logic break on the dark skerries of ideological entrenchment is mainlining despair. Why do it?
Well, its taught me that if you are looking for ammunition to take the other side down with, you will find it. But, more importantly, if you’re honest about trying to win them over, it can give you a much better idea about how to do so.
Here’s what the experience has helped me to see regarding the debate on SSM.
To the Left, the terrain appears familiar. Contemporary, self-identifying members of the Right are in a pickle. Their predecessors could dismiss concerns over Same Sex Marriage blithely aware that prevailing homophobia would serve as a bulwark against any agitation that might undermine sacred tradition. The present generation of heel draggers can not be seen to resort to shallow prejudice so readily, so instead, opposition to a parity of esteem for gay love is heard as a mangle of casuistry.
Quickly intuiting underlying repugnance at ‘the homosexual act’, well meaning liberals, seeking to cut through the sophist ruse, label the business ‘homophobic’ and self-evidently so.
Yet, is there a case to answer for proponents of the progressive agenda (pro-choice advocates and secularists to be included here)? How often is the opportunity to win over a conservative with argument scorned in favour of venting frustration with an intransigent and irrational status quo? Having had homophobia recognised for the filthy bigotry it is (as repugnant to the clear thinking as the prospect of being compelled by law to attend a homosexual mega-orgy is to the homophobic), does liberal hair-trigger homophobia-phobia, with its primitive trump card, opponent-discrediting ‘homophobe’ tag, ape the conservative toolbox of blacklisting to an uncomfortable extent?
Sophisticated opponents of SSM certainly reject the term as a slur and in turn vilify the Left’s efforts to demonise their project with words of intolerance.
So, to the question: is there an anti-SSM argument that is not homophobic?
Though the answer must certainly be ‘Yes’- we shall examine a union of uncomfortable bedfellows: utilitarianism and traditionalism- it is a line of reasoning which followed to its conclusion is not exactly a comfortable position from which to argue the merits of hetero-privilege.
Among the twitterati encountered, their argument has it that the heterosexual partnership is unique in its child making and child rearing qualities and is on this basis worthy of elevation. Such utility as a child rearing arrangement is understood to be indicative of the wisdom of traditions and a pillar on which rests the current magnificence of civilisation.
However, to be consistent with this and impervious to the charge of homophobia, a number of views are also to be expected by implication.
Being convinced of the essential connection between matrimony and parenting, such proponents are required, under pain of contradiction, to be equally dismissive of non child-raising heterosexual marriages, especially in the case of infertility. In fact, if consistency is to be truly observed, we should expect a demand for medical evidence of potency, or at least written intention of adoption before bestowing married status; gender being not the only inhibition to motherhood and fatherhood.
We should expect calls for healthy heterosexuals who obtain society’s matrimonial blessing but spurn having children to be stripped of the honour.
We should expect un-married, child-rearing couples and single parents to be considered sub-optimal arrangements and taken as explicit instances of parental failure and in breach of their children’s entitlements.
We should expect arguments in favour of strict gender roles, given that insistence on motherhood and fatherhood implies the existence of gender exclusive qualities.
Such arguments, lest I be proved wrong, are unmade, or if made, they are not explicit. And for instances for any such scenarios outlined above we would expect the level of censure to be laced with the language of suspicion and outrage with which the likes of Irish journalist John Waters treats ‘the gay agenda’. It is telling that this is not so.
It proves instructive to examine a specific case .
With The Iona Institute, which presents itself as leading the campaign in Ireland to defend the privilege of the traditional family on the utilitarian grounds that doing so protects a child’s rights to a mother and a father, we curiously notice little or no further work on behalf of children (religious instruction in schools does not count, to say the very least).
Credit for infographic to @pantibliss
Such defenders of children’s rights, in the case of adoption, are not advocating assessing potential parents for suitability beyond their gender specifications. IQ, income, level of education, emotional intelligence etc. etc. these are factors which have a real bearing on children’s life outcomes yet Iona is curiously quiet on the child’s right to parenting by people with, for example, IQs at least one standard deviation above the mean.
It seems Iona’s parental idealism extends merely to the dubious assertion that a representative of both genders ought to have a hand in childrearing. In short, the inconsistencies in their attempts at secular reasoning betray thinking which is plainly circumscribed by the narrow parameters of 20th Century Christianity. Their notions regarding ‘children’s rights’, constitute a transparent excuse to further a religious agenda. The tragically inept or wilful misreading of science will therefore come as no surprise.
The assumption that both mother and father together exclusively represent the most responsible arrangement in which to develop a young life is unsupported by peer-reviewed rational enquiry.
Even the secular anti-SSM argument which misreads both the science and the venn diagrams regarding matrimony and parenthood still must contend with the core contradiction of its misguided, traditionalist utilitarianism. In all its concern for children, it ensures Aristotelian Eudaimonia remain the preserve of children’s futures, never grown children’s presents. Ensuring Gay children go without the same prospects for fulfilment as their straight peers is clearly absurdly inconsistent with any claims of concern for their wellbeing.
To finish,
Admitting infertile heterosexuals within the institution of marriage yet opposing SSM on parental grounds is inconsistent. If we allow the circumstance of being merely akin in gender to those who breed to be the prime factor in determining access to higher societal esteem for a couple’s love, then we find ourselves confronted with an absurdity.
Championing children’s rights concerning parental gender, yet remaining silent on the salient factors of parental quality is an absurdity.
Implying gender specific roles within the family yet remaining silent on gender roles in a broader context, though politically well advised, is either hypocrisy or an absurdity.
Thus we may well permit ourselves to understand such inconsistencies with our ‘Yes’ answer as indicative of mere casuistry.
Misinformed by tradition, as we often are, unlucky in education, as the religious always are, a proponent of hetero-exclusive marriage is either a hypocritical buffoon or an archly deceptive homophobe, or both. Though we may plead clemency for the disadvantaged on the basis that by handing oneself whole to a church in which an individual merely becomes homophobic by proxy, we can certainly expect higher standards from those gifted with public access.
Are the Catholic Church’s teachings homophobic? That is beyond doubt. Are their believers homophobic? By definition, yes. Is secular, non-fascist opposition to SSM credible? No.
This is not to say that progressives are without blame in this debate. It is clear that the previous paragraph may prove highly insulting to a large section of Irish society. Homophobia buried in religious belief, like criminal activity among the poor is a story as much of victimhood as of moral failure. Understanding those who have not been taught to think free of bias (often the very same people busy ensuring bias is taught) might prove more effective in winning over the other side.
Dismissing them while pleading for understanding on behalf of the poor, petty thief or heroin addict is a liberal contradiction. Petty criminals rarely direct the destiny of the nation, but given the opportunity the biased will- this is all the more proof of the importance of winning them over.
A mistake following the Right on twitter it may well have been, but so far it’s been an instructive one.
Improper Order 