I’m ashamed to be ethnically related to these people

In a recent post on cultural superstitions, I mentioned the Chinese belief in kooky ideas like feng shui, acupuncture and lucky/unlucky numbers (whose providential powers apparently derive from their homophonic resemblance to words like ‘prosper’ and ‘die’ in Chinese). Another common Chinese superstition involves the taboo against placing the living in close proximity to the dead or dying. To do so would “bring bad luck, meaning sickness and even death... The ghosts of the dead will invade and harass the living,” leading to “failure of business, the loss of money, the break [sic] of marriage and family, and the healthy growing up of children will be affected.”

This was written in a letter by the residents of an expensive University of B.C. high-rise apartment protesting the planned building of a 15-bed hospice next door.

So a bunch of well-to-do people living in an upmarket residential area are throwing a tantrum over the construction of a place to care for those who are not long for this world, who are sick, in pain, scared, lonely. And why? Because the rich Asians happen to subscribe to a premodern, irrational, unscientific worldview where ghosts exist to torment them.

For an example of how superstition can short-circuit a person’s compassionate, empathetic wiring, here’s what one resident had to say about the atrocity of having a hospice built near her home:

It’s very disturbing. […] My kids and I are going to feel so frightened and angry just to think there are dying people so close to us.

Those damned dying people! Frightening and antagonising good honest folk with their soft moans, silent tears and quiet dignity. How dare they.

I stumbled across this story on ‘Pharyngula’, the blog of the delightfully irascible, godless, liberal biologist P Z Myers. Myers writes in his post:

I'm hoping that these complaining, over-privileged superstitious nitwits remember this when they are old and dying — as they most likely will be someday — and courteously excuse themselves to go gasp out their last breaths in some place where civilized people won't be troubled.

Amen.




18.1.11

Pretty sure this wasn’t what Andrew Keen had in mind

Andrew Keen doesn’t like amateurs. You can tell from the subtitle of his anti-dilettante jeremiad The Cult of the Amateur (2008): ‘How blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the rest of today’s user-generated media are killing our culture and economy’. Doesn’t mince words, does Mr Keen. Referencing T. H. Huxley’s theory that infinite monkeys bashing away on infinite typewriters will eventually produce a literary masterpiece, Keen has this to say about blogs:

At the heart of this infinite monkey experiment in self-publishing is the Internet diary, the ubiquitous blog. Blogging has become such a mania that a new blog is being created every second of every minute of every hour of every day. We are blogging with monkeylike shamelessness about our private lives, our sex lives, our dream lives, our lack of lives, our Second Lives. At the time of writing there are fifty-three million blogs on the Internet, and this number is doubling every six months. In the time it took you to read this paragraph, ten new blogs were launched.

If we keep up this pace, there will be over five hundred million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture. Blogs have become so dizzyingly infinite that they’ve undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary. These days, kids can’t tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on joeshmoe.blogspot.com. For these Generation Y utopians, every posting is just another person’s version of the truth; every fiction is just another person’s version of the facts.

Free sex, kid porn, make money fast

My post entitled ‘Cartoon kid porn: evil pedophilia or victimless crime?’ currently sits at the number three spot on this blog’s Top Ten list of most viewed posts. Yet I doubt that the post owes its popularity to the subject matter: a criticism of the hypocrisy and irrationality of anti-cartoon kid porn crusaders, written in the form of a fictional interview. Far more likely that the Googlers were looking for more graphic fare. But since the post and its title contain the keywords kid porn, cartoon porn, pedophilia, dick, ass and the ubiquitous sex, Google’s arcane algorithmic administrations would have served it up as a search result, even if the searcher was after a more titillating link. Basically, I cheated, if unintentionally.

Critical thinking isn’t just for white folks

Is it racist to say that certain cultures display an endemic lack of critical thinking? Is it bigoted to declare that reason and the scientific method are currently the best tools we possess to discover knowledge about the world? Is it culturally insensitive to suggest that people, no matter where they’re from, can only benefit from exercising critical thinking and healthy skepticism?

Some cultures have superstitious beliefs that are an almost inextricable part of their identity. Chinese belief in feng shui, acupuncture, lucky numbers and the efficacy of traditional herbal medicine is one example. African practices of witchcraft and exorcism coupled with the use of juju (objects considered as magical fetishes) are another. It’s this latter culture that Leo Igwe criticizes in his essay ‘Critical Thinking and the African Identity’.

As an African who has chosen critical reason over superstition, Igwe has been accused by his fellow Africans of thinking ‘like a white man’. It is a common slur; if a non-white person actually prefers logic and rationality over magic and mysticism, she’s a traitor to her kind, a Westerner wannabe. Igwe writes:

Whenever I try to fault or expose the absurdity of witchcraft accusations or the persecution of alleged witches or wizards, many people often urge me to set aside this my oyibo (white man’s) mentality. As if critical thinking is the exclusive cultural preserve of white people while mystical thinking is for blacks and for Africans. Personally, I am aware that the white race and the western world have recorded significant achievements in the areas of science and technology, in rational and critical discourses. They also have their own share of dark age nonsense, dogmas and superstitions.

But that does not make the values of science, reason and critical thinking western or white. The values of science and reason constitute part of human heritage, which all human beings can lay claim to, exercise, access, express, celebrate, cultivate and nurture.

“The values of science and reason constitute part of human heritage, which all human beings can lay claim to, exercise, access, express, celebrate, cultivate and nurture.”

With this elegant sentence and the rest of his essay, Igwe provides the answers to the questions asked at the beginning of this post: no, no and no.




7.1.11

The unreason of Objectivism

There’s a joke that goes like this:
‎

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

I’ve read both books. While I may have exhibited a mild mania for both Middle-earth and Objectivism, fortunately I dodged the emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood. Many other young minds haven’t been so lucky. Some have grown up to become forty-year-old live action roleplayers.

My temporary affair with Ayn Rand’s philosophy has made me sympathetic to those who hold religious beliefs. Not because I think there is any compelling reason to cling to antiquated values derived from superstition and myth. Wishful thinking and factual error are no basis for values truly worth having. No, my sympathy comes from observing the parallels between Objectivism and religion. The moral absolutism. The ideological rigidity. The unerring spokespeople. The fantastic stories serving as allegories for ethical instruction. The contradictions. The hypocrisy.

To say that I renounced my Randian faith is an apt metaphor. For all its glorification of reason, Objectivism is ironically an unreasonable collection of beliefs with a pretense to rational certainty, more akin to the blind, unquestioning faith of God botherers than the rigorous yet humbly provisional ideas of ethical philosophers from Socrates through Spinoza to Singer.

But I’ll leave it to someone much more qualified than myself to dissect Rand’s comprehensive system of thought and put its flaws on display. Philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci has written a four-part series of articles critiquing Objectivism on his blog ‘Rationally Speaking’. He has devoted each article to one aspect of Objectivism – its metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics. Even if you’re not familiar with Ayn Rand’s ideas, Pigliucci’s articles are still an education on how not to do philosophy.

As is generally the case with blogs, the comments from readers can be just as instructive as the post itself, often expanding and improving on the arguments made by the author. In this instance, it seems that a dyed-in-the-wool Objectivist (or at least a staunch Rand supporter) has taken it upon himself to refute – and rebuke – Pigliucci and other commenters who take a less approving stance on Objectivism. I remain unpersuaded by his verbose arguments, but I’ll leave it to you to decide if this fellow has successfully defended Rand from Pigliucci and co. Warning: not for the faint-of-heart or short-of-attention-span.




5.1.11