This is beautiful. My only problem with it is that I can't show it to anyone who'd be able to directly benefit from the cognitive dissonance, because they would be too offended about being compared to Nazis to glean anything useful.
I think you, perhaps, miss the ideal target audience of this post. What Yvain presents here is in effect a counterargument against people who argue that religion isn't all that bad, even if it's false, because of the other benefits it gives people. Anyone who is reduced to defending religion on these grounds is likely not a typical theist.
This isn't an argument against theism, it's "opiate of the masses" vs. "just say no to drugs".
I think it's bad to punish people for their tolerance, but it has to be OK to try to change their mind?
As someone who grew up hearing countless sermons comparing the conquest of Canaan and other Old Testament battles to the spiritual victories we should have in our lives, I can really appreciate this. For example, when the walls of Jericho fall down, this means that the "walls" that keep us from spiritual blessings need to fall down. Of course, the actual writers meant the destruction of real, stone-and-mortar walls and the death of real, flesh-and-blood people. (1)
As a child the true implications of killing every man, woman, and child in a city were lost on me. Rethinking the Bible stories as an adult, especially after seeing real footage of the aftermath of war, has a very different effect. It is interesting to note the rationalizations people use to try to reconcile the cognitive dissonance: http://epsociety.org/library/articles.asp?pid=63&ap=1
(1) I think this is what the writers of the Old Testament had in mind, regardless of whether or not the specific battles actually took place.
This reminds me of a rather interesting argument I foolishly got into on an internet forum that had no connection to religion. First mistake.
Anyhow, it involved someone saying Christianity was a religion of peace, and I couldn't help but quote:
"Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father..." (full quote here)
His response, with what I assume was a completely straight face, was, "I'm glad you quoted that. Christ is just encouraging spirited debate within the household."
This would be hilarious if it weren't so terrifying.
My own view of that and similar statements is that Jesus was clearly expecting world-changing divine intervention to occur during his lifetime - he was basically the leader of a "the end is near" cult, waiting for God to go all Old Testament on the Roman Empire, much like he did to the Egyptians in the book of Exodus. The "Kingdom of Heaven" was to be a Jewish nation-state on Earth, which would be established after Rome was defeated by the hand of God. (Yes, indeed, embrace pacifism and endure your suffering, because God is coming to smite the wicked. And he's coming any day now!)
The religion that we now know as Christianity owes at least as much to Paul of Tarsus than to a certain wandering preacher that pissed off the local authorities and ended up nailed to a piece of wood.
There is no meaningful historical evidence that "Jesus" ever existed.
Not even a rather bland carpenter who got slightly popular, enough for folks like Paul to make stuff up?
No, just as there is no evidence for Russell's teapot.
There is only one historical document from the time of Jesus' supposed life which even resembles evidence of a teacher called Jesus (or Yeshua or whatever), and that is just a reference to a rabbi with the right name who had one brother with the right name. Given that Jesus supposedly had four named brothers and multiple sisters, at least one of whom is also named, there's plenty of scope for that to be a false positive. Taking it as strong evidence would be like taking the discovery of a journalist named Clark who worked with a journalist named James in the 1920s as strong evidence that those two were the historical basis for the story of Superman.
There could have been a historical Yeshua so boring that none of his contemporaries, including the Romans, wrote anything about him during his life or for decades after he died. Or the character could have been entirely made up. Evidence to differentiate these two possible universes does not currently exist.
I think I might have to write something specifically addressing this misconception because a few people seem to have picked it up.
It's only evidence for the existence of Russell's teapot if more people say they have seen it than you would expect in a universe where Russell's teapot does not exist.
(That's ignoring the fact that Russell's teapot is by stipulation non-observable and hence in that artificial situation we can skip Bayesian updating and just go straight to p=1 that anyone claiming to have observed it is lying or deluded).
Truth can be as strange as fiction. From Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture, Rose 1998:
...What explains the strange violation of common sense so often encountered in the postwar recollections and excuses offered by major cultural figures of the Nazi period? To any Western European or American viewer, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will is a blatantly political film, both for its choice of a Nazi Nuremberg Rally as subject matter and for its treatment of the subject in a style glorifying Nazism, Hitler, and the German race. Yet Riefenstahl herself has always claimed that Triumph of the Will was an apolitical work of art, not propaganda but merely the artistic documentary filming of an event: "Work and peace are the only messages of Triumph of the Will ," she recently declared — not the glorification of Hitler.[4] Few Western critics — including modern German critics — have been convinced by these almost pro forma justifications, since the Western mind finds it hard to comprehend how politics and art can be separated in such a self-contradictory and indeed absurd way.
The same may be said of the notorious case of Heidegger. The philosoph
It's a fine parable but if I might request - give the Colonels different names, albeit perhaps names beginning with 'F' and 'Y'? I do generally prefer to have only me speaking for myself, and Frank may well feel the same way. That's why while I sometimes use similar names in my dialogues, I don't go so far as to use directly identical names.
Your point feels right, but situations close to Colonel F's approach actually happened in history, so we should probably look at such evidence. For example, it isn't a million miles away from the approach taken in postwar Japan, which actually involved a religion.
But Shinto was repurposed to be about worshiping the emperor just a short time before the war - it had a long history and didn't have any bad ideology really tied up with it.
Hm? The central role of the Emperor in Shintoism goes back at least to the Heian era, and Shintoism was a critical tool of state power (witness the appointment of royalty to the most influential position in Shintoism, running the Ise Shrine). Or do you mean something else?
Excellent. You might also look at the historical discussion over what to do with the Japanese emperor after WW2.
Shouldn't we, of all people, be most respectful of Godwin's Law, knowing as we do the dangers of affective analogy in human argument? I know you're trying to shock people out of their Cached Deep Thoughts, but that doesn't justify Dark Side Epistemology.
Generalized Godwin's Law: You should not score points simply by drawing analogies between the topic under consideration and a topic that everyone present feels morally obligated to applaud/boo when mentioned.
ETA: I understand that the point is a reductio ad absurdam of Frank's argument, but placing it in this context has a side effect of affective analogy which we ought to strongly avoid.
In our reality Americans built military bases in Germany to prevent Soviets from taking over. As of 2009 those bases are still there and operational. A lot of American personnel live there: varying accounts say from 50000 to 100000 doing duty, and their families. Germany pays America about 1 billion dollars each year for base maintenance.
If you think Germans today are strongly patriotic and have invented new symbols, I encourage you to go to Berlin and try finding indications of that.
strongly patriotic and have invented new symbols
Being 'patriotic' (or nationalistic) is arguably what started the world wars. Germany definitely has a strong cultural identity and fortunately has stayed away from the horrors of nationalism. Places where people wave flags are scary.
I think that nationalism, religion, and global ideology are different aspects of the same problem, that they create an in group and an out group which can have conflicts.
And these aspects feed on each other. The Cold War era global ideology that is referred to as "democracy" seems to really be a sort of reversed communism (for example, the Russian government suppressed religion, so the American government violates its founding democratic principals to promote religion) that gained enthusiasm from American nationalism.
Similarly, in the so called "War on Terror", the conflict is portrayed as between Christianity and Islam, to feed the nationalism of those who believe "America is a Christian nation".
Original Naziism was very tied to a historical milieu. The conditions of Weimar Germany won't exactly recur. But by interpreting it as a suite of metaphors, it becomes somewhat immune to context, more able to bridge the centuries - while continually enticing its adherents to drag the world back to 1935, which is the era in which the metaphors make sense.
I realize that you're not very concerned with the details of the situation here and that this is a metaphor and whatnot, but I'm a stickler for factual accuracy.
"You are General Eisenhower. It is 1945. You have just triumphantly liberated Berlin. As the remaining leaders of the old regime are tried and executed,"
General Eisenhower did not liberate Berlin; it was liberated by the Russians per inter-Allied agreement, as it was east of the Elbe River and thus fell into the Soviet zone of occupation. The Nuremberg defendants were not executed until l...
Germany didn't even have a national anthem until 1952
Yet, when they finally got around to choosing an anthem, they went with one that had been banned as Nazi-tainted.
To promote rational rather than emotional discussion, one should avoid argumentum ad Hitlerum. The general point seems to be unrelated to Nazism, so I propose rewriting the post using a more neutral background story. Something like
“You are General Grant. It is 1865. Colonel Y proposes to outlaw Democratic Party for its support of slavery...”
I would normally agree, but I don't see a good solution in this instance.
The example must be relatively uncontentious which I don't think this one is, and the symbols and such have got to be well known, which isn't true of Pol Pot. I do appreciate the problem you're talking about, but sadly I can't see a good substitute.
The Wikiquote link should point to a specific revision, in case the page layout there is changed.
An excellent parable! The argument against the Nazism meme is quite well laid out, though Colonel Frank comes off a bit like a straw man.
Unfortunately, I think this argument misses the main difficulty the General faces. It's easy to see that it would be better to replace the movement with something more sound. But policy makers cannot simply decide whether to preserve the Nazism meme. Actually changing dominant cultural ideas is a tremendously difficult problem, especially when the belief framework includes a sense of persecution. You cannot simply ...
He is referring to the link to Godwin's Law in the post. From the wiki.
For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically "lost" whatever debate was in progress.
On the other hand, Christianity was quite successful at eliminating some competing religions, by utilizing the direct approach: physically eliminating all of their adherents.
Oh - this is a veiled critique of conciliatory attitudes toward religion? I though it was a direct critique of conciliatory attitudes toward political ideologies - and I was going to disagree with it. I think I detect a dark side to lumping all political ideologies together under the category of "poltitical ideology" and ignoring the specific reasons why political ideologies can become harmful or anti-rational.
Now that I see that this was a veiled critique of religion (or a specific religious grouping?) I think my reservations still stand.
What ...
"Germany should completely lose all the baggage of Nazism and replace it with a completely democratic society that has no causal linkage whatsoever to its bloody past."
General Y is advocating for an absolute bastardization of history as much as General F. You cannot deny the past, because the past shaped your country and what your country did. There is a difference between interpreting the "real" meaning of Nazism, and actually erasing Nazism from history, as General Y wants.
General Y also want to place all blame on the the Nazi regime,...
So, General, what is your decision?
My decision is, do not mess with a Planeswalker unless you are, at the very minimum, a Planeswalker yourself, and probably not even then. Heh.
Anyway, Colonel Y's policies are far less harmful, but still suboptimal (assuming I understand him correctly). Suppressing ideas by force -- even harmful ideas -- never works out well in the wrong run. It is far better (though, admittedly, harder) to discredit them.
Replies to the comment you are now reading accurately describe my ideas so the original post has been replaced by this disclaimer to spare your time :)
You have noticed, he says, that the new German society also has a lot of normal, "full-strength" Nazis around. The "reformed" Nazis occasionally denounce these people, and accuse them of misinterpreting Hitler's words, but they don't seem nearly as offended by the "full-strength" Nazis as they are by the idea of people who reject Nazism completely.
This part of the metaphor doesn't work.
Religious people generally condemn heretics even more strongly than nonbelievers. Liberal Christians, specifically, are generally more oppos...
Colonel F suggests the worst kind of compromise between the optimal and the real. Political actors must not overlook reality, as many of the great revolutionaries of history did, but neither should they bend their agendas to it, as Chamberlain, Kerensky, and so many tepid liberals and social democrats did. To do so is to surrender without even fighting. This is especially true for political actors with a true upper hand, like Eisenhower or MacArthur after World War II. They must control the conversation, they must push the Overton window away from compe...
Because of whatever parts I have read of an English translation of the Islamic scripture Quran, it seemed like 'Mein Kampf' means Quran and Nazi means 'Muslim'.
Certain self-consistent metaphysics and epistemologies lead you to belief in God. And a lot of human emotions do too. If you eliminated all the religions in the world, you would soon have new religions with 1) smart people accepting some form of philosophy that leads them to theism 2) lots of less smart people forming into mutually supporting congregations. Hopefully you get all the "religion of love" stuff from Christianity (historically a rarity) and the congregations produce public goods and charity.
Interesting. Part way through this switches to a narrower focus but the general concept applies to obsolete philosophy or discarded theories or anything else that has essentially been "overruled" by later works. One could even make the case that Newtonian physics is an obsolete ideology.
Philosophy in particular has great deal of old stuff that sticks around because it was first, even though large parts of it are now irrelevant. While it makes an interesting historical study, it now borders on bad philosophy. I have no specific examples to share, however, this is just an impression.
One could even make the case that Newtonian physics is an obsolete ideology.
Newtonian physics successfully makes precise predictions that approximate reality much closer than the precision of human perception for a large domain of problems that includes most of human experience, with far less computational cost than the more exact theories, and the more exact theories explain why the approximations are so good. While it is important to remember it is an approximation if you are going to investigate phenomena outside the domain that it works, the approximation is useful.
Conversely, religious morality is perceptibly wrong except in very narrow domains, and more complicated than secular morality.
There is some old stuff that sticks around because, even though it turned out to be wrong, it was worth a try; and if you didn't keep it (and its critique) around, people would just keep re-inventing it. Platonic realism, Aristotelian necessary-and-sufficient definitions of categories, Marxism, and attempts to make quantum mechanics Newtonian are examples.
Academic philosophy differs from science in that it seems to place much higher value on the personalities and the original works relative to the ideas. When I studied physics at university we didn't learn physics from the original works or papers of the pioneering scientists. Newton is rightly recognized for his huge contribution to physics but no physics course will use the Principia to teach mechanics. The core ideas have been refined and are now presented in ways that are easier for students to grasp, without extraneous or incorrect extra detail present in the original works or problems of language.
When I studied philosophy at university however, great import was placed on reading the original texts from great philosophers. In many cases reading these works I was struck by the amount of confused and wrong ideas and the lack of clarity of presentation - Descartes is a prime example. It seemed to me at the time that if philosophy was the pursuit of truth in any sense then it would be better served by a model of instruction more like science: where the key ideas are presented in a refined and clarified modern text. My experience of academic philosophy was that it couldn't quite decide if it wanted to be science or literary criticism.
I hope when you guys get done beating up on theism, you'll take on a real challenge and go up against the SWPL bloc. That religion is far more dangerous and far more powerful than poor old Judeo-Christianity, which isn't even able to order scientists around anymore. Maybe Eliezer can debate Nancy Hopkins?
Perhaps we could make some progress if we employed a divide and conquer strategy. The agendas of the SW and PL blocs are not entirely consonant. Generally speaking, the SW position is somewhat more amenable to the techniques of rationality discussed on this site. The PL worldview, however, is more deeply committed to dark side epistemology (though I imagine that that could be a controversial position even here).
Seriously, though, what is SWPL?
My decision is to invoke Godwin's law and go back to reading about the universal wave function.
that it's easy to acquire specific about an individual, which screens off any prior information based on sex and race
I think people may be overapplying the concept of "screening off", though?
If for example RACE -> INTELLIGENCE -> TEST SCORE, then knowing someone's test score does not screen off race for the purpose of predicting intelligence (unless I'm very confused). Knowing test score should still make knowing race less useful, but not because of screening off.
On the other hand, if for example GENDER -> PERSONALITY TRAITS -> RATIONALIST TENDENCIES, then knowing someone's personality traits does screen off gender for the purpose of predicting rationalist tendencies.
Followup to: Yudkowsky and Frank on Religious Experience, Yudkowksy and Frank On Religious Experience Pt 2
With sincere apologies to: Mike Godwin
You are General Eisenhower. It is 1945. The Allies have just triumphantly liberated Berlin. As the remaining leaders of the old regime are being tried and executed, it begins to become apparent just how vile and despicable the Third Reich truly was.
In the midst of the chaos, a group of German leaders come to you with a proposal. Nazism, they admit, was completely wrong. Its racist ideology was false and its consequences were horrific. However, in the bleak poverty of post-war Germany, people need to keep united somehow. They need something to believe in. And a whole generation of them have been raised on Nazi ideology and symbolism. Why not take advantage of the national unity Nazism provides while discarding all the racist baggage? "Make it so," you say.
The swastikas hanging from every boulevard stay up, but now they represent "traditional values" and even "peace". Big pictures of Hitler still hang in every government office, not because Hitler was right about racial purity, but because he represents the desire for spiritual purity inside all of us, and the desire to create a better society by any means necessary. It's still acceptable to shout "KILL ALL THE JEWS AND GYPSIES AND HOMOSEXUALS!" in public places, but only because everyone realizes that Hitler meant "Jews" as a metaphor for "greed", "gypsies" as a metaphor for "superstition", and "homosexuals" as a metaphor for "lust", and so what he really meant is that you need to kill the greed, lust, and superstition in your own heart. Good Nazis love real, physical Jews! Some Jews even choose to join the Party, inspired by their principled stand against spiritual evil.
The Hitler Youth remains, but it's become more or less a German version of the Boy Scouts. The Party infrastructure remains, but only as a group of spiritual advisors helping people fight the untermenschen in their own soul. They suggest that, during times of trouble, people look to Mein Kampf for inspiration. If they open to a sentence like "The Aryan race shall conquer all in its path", then they can interpret "the Aryan race" to mean "righteous people", and the sentence is really just saying that good people can do anything if they set their minds to it. Isn't that lovely?
Soon, "Nazi" comes to just be a synonym for "good person". If anyone's not a member of the Nazi Party, everyone immediately becomes suspicious. Why is she against exterminating greed, lust, and superstition from her soul? Does she really not believe good people can do anything if they set their minds to it? Why does he oppose caring for your aging parents? We definitely can't trust him with high political office.
It is four years later. Soon, the occupation will end, and Germany will become an independent country once again. The Soviets have already taken East Germany and turned it Communist. As the de facto ruler of West Germany, its fate is in your hands. You ask your two most trusted subordinates for advice.
First, Colonel F gives his suggestion. It is vital that you order the preservation of the Nazi ideology so that Germany remains strong. After all, the Germans will need to stay united as a people in order to survive the inevitable struggle with the Soviets. If Nazism collapsed, then people would lose everything that connects them together, and become dispirited. The beautiful poetry of Mein Kampf speaks to something deep in the soul of every German, and if the Allies try to eradicate that just because they disagree with one outdated interpretation of the text, they will have removed meaning from the lives of millions of people all in the name of some sort of misguided desire to take everything absolutely literally all the time.
Your other trusted subordinate, Colonel Y, disagrees. He thinks that Mein Kampf may have some rousing passages, but that there's no special reason it has a unique ability to impart meaning to people other than that everyone believes it does. Not only that, but the actual contents of Mein Kampf are repulsive. Sure, if you make an extraordinary effort to gloss over or reinterpret the repulsive passages, you can do it, but this is more trouble than it is worth and might very well leave some lingering mental poison behind. Germany should completely lose all the baggage of Nazism and replace it with a completely democratic society that has no causal linkage whatsoever to its bloody past.
Colonel F objects. He hopes you don't just immediately side with Colonel Y just because the question includes the word "Nazi". Condemning Nazism is an obvious applause light, but a political decision of this magnitude requires a more carefully thought-out decision. After all, Nazism has been purged of its most objectionable elements, and the Germans really do seem to like it and draw a richer life from it. Colonel Y needs to have a better reason his personal distaste for an ideology because of past history in order to take it away from them.
Colonel Y thinks for a moment, then begins speaking. You have noticed, he says, that the new German society also has a lot of normal, "full-strength" Nazis around. The "reformed" Nazis occasionally denounce these people, and accuse them of misinterpreting Hitler's words, but they don't seem nearly as offended by the "full-strength" Nazis as they are by the idea of people who reject Nazism completely.
Might the existence of "reformed" Nazis, he asks, enable "full-strength" Nazis to become more powerful and influential? He thinks it might. It becomes impossible to condemn "full-strength" Nazis for worshipping a horrible figure like Hitler, or adoring a horrible book like Mein Kampf, when they're doing the same thing themselves. At worst, they can just say the others are misinterpreting it a little. And it will be very difficult to make this argument, because all evidence suggests that in fact it's the "full-strength" Nazis who are following Hitler's original intent and the true meaning of Mein Kampf, and the "reformed" Nazis who have reinterpreted it for political reasons. Assuming the idea of not being a Nazi at all remains socially beyond the pale, intellectually honest people will feel a strong pull towards "full-strength" Nazism.
Even if the "reformed" Nazis accept all moderate liberal practices considered reasonable today, he says, their ideology might still cause trouble later. Today, in 1945, mixed race marriage is still considered taboo by most liberal societies, including the United States. The re-interpreters of Mein Kampf have decided that, although "kill all the Jews" is clearly metaphorical, "never mix races" is meant literally. If other nations began legalizing mixed race marriage in the years to come, Party members will preach to the faithful that it is an abomination, and can even point to the verse in Mein Kampf that said so. It's utterly plausible that a "reformed" Nazi Germany may go on forbidding mixed race marriage much longer than surrounding countries. Even if Party leaders eventually bow to pressure and change their interpretation, the Party will always exist as a force opposing racial equality and social justice until the last possible moment.
And, he theorizes, there could be even deeper subconscious influences. He explains that people often process ideas and morals in ways that are only tangentially linked to specific facts and decisions. Instead, we tend to conflate things into huge, fuzzy concepts and assign "good" and "bad" tags to them. Saying "Jews are bad, but this doesn't apply to actual specific Jews" is the sort of thing the brain isn't very good at. At best, it will end out with the sort of forced politeness a person who's trying very hard not be racist shows around black people. As soon as we assign a good feeling to the broad idea of "Nazism", that reflects at least a little on everything Nazism stands for, everything Nazism ever has stood for, and every person who identifies as a Nazi.
He has read other essays that discuss the ability of connotations to warp thinking. Imagine you're taught things like "untermenschen like Jews and Gypsies are people too, and should be treated equally." The content of this opinion is perfectly fine. Unfortunately, it creates a category called "untermenschen" with a bad connotation and sticks Jews and Gypsies into it. Once you have accepted that Jews and Gypsies comprise a different category, even if that category is "people who are exactly like the rest of us except for being in this category here", three-quarters of the damage is already done. Here the Colonel sighs, and reminds you of the discrimination faced by wiggins in the modern military.
And (he adds) won't someone please think of the children? They're not very good at metaphor, they trust almost anything they hear, and they form a scaffolding of belief that later life can only edit, not demolish and rebuild. If someone was scared of ghosts as a child, they may not believe in ghosts now, but they're going to have some visceral reaction to them. Imagine telling a child "We should kill everyone in the lesser races" five times a day, on the assumption that once they're a teenager they'll understand what a "figurative" means and it'll all be okay.
He closes by telling you that he's not at all convinced that whatever metaphors the Nazis reinterpret Mein Kampf to mean aren't going to be damaging in themselves. After all, these metaphors will have been invented by Nazis, who are not exactly known for choosing the best moral lessons. What if "kill all lesser races" gets reinterpreted to "have no tolerance for anything that is less than perfect"? This sounds sort of like a good moral lesson, until people start preaching that it means we should lock up gay people, because homosexuality is an "imperfection". That, he says, is the sort of thing that happens when you get your morality from cliched maxims taken by drawing vapid conclusions from despicably evil works of literature.
So, the Colonel concludes, if you really want the German people to be peaceful and moral, you really have no choice but to nip this growing "reformed Nazi" movement in the bud. Colonel F has made some good points about respecting the Germans' culture, but doing so would make it difficult to eradicate their existing racist ideas, bias their younger generation towards habits of thought that encourage future racism, create a strong regressive tendency in their society, and yoke them to poorly fashioned moral arguments.
And, he finishes, he doesn't really think Nazism is that necessary for Germany to survive. Even in some crazy alternate universe where the Allies had immediately cracked down on Nazism as soon as they captured Berlin, yea, even in the absurd case where Germany immediately switched to a completely democratic society that condemned everything remotely associated with Nazism as evil and even banned swastikas and pictures of Hitler from even being displayed - even in that universe, Germans would keep a strong cultural identity and find new symbols of their patriotism.
Ridiculous, Colonel F objects! In such a universe, the Germans would be left adrift without the anchor of tradition, and immediately be taken over by the Soviets.
Colonel Y just smiles enigmatically. You are reminded of the time he first appeared at your command tent, during the middle of an unnatural thunderstorm, with a copy of Hugh Everett's The Theory of the Universal Wave Function tucked under one arm. You shudder, shake your head, and drag yourself back to the present.
So, General, what is your decision?