DemocratDad

The Values Shared by Science and Democracy

Great column in the New York Times today, Evaluating Science, Evaluating Democracy.

The argument:

...not only does [science] not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.

So the story goes.

But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked...

It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.

Evolution Is Not a Bedtime Story

So Mike Huckabee, a candidate for President of the United States in the first decade of the 21st Century, does not believe in evolution.

It boggles the mind.

When you watch him dismiss the scientific consensus of our age so cheerfully, so casually, you realize that his mind was boggled long ago by the the ancient sky-god religion of his upbringing.

It makes me reflect on what boggling I am doing to my children's minds.

Last night, for example, I boggled my son's mind.

I had run the King Arthur's court story I had been telling into the ground... Something about Merlin riding a white horse, with a random Prince behind him, who had been tied up by an evil "Mordrake," who had drunk a potion which an eagle had carried for a Princess but dropped... It wasn't working. The pieces had become too unwieldy for both of us. And anyway, the Prince seemed like a bit of a dolt.

So I closed it out with a quick marriage between the Prince and Princess, and even a "happily ever after," to seal the deal.

Searching for an alternative story to tell, something with a clearer trajectory, I landed on the story of evolution.

I started by telling about "this one fish" who tried to walk on the sand... Then, after some intermediate steps, the fish, or rather, its descendents, grew arms!

They lost their scales. They grew fur all over their bodies. They became monkeys!

Then they lost their fur. Their arms grew shorter. And they became people!

"And that's how we became people! Aren't you glad that you are a person and not a monkey?"

At this point, from the look on George's face, it was clear that I had boggled his mind. And not in a good way.

He was, shall we say, concerned.

After a long pause in which he eyed me suspiciously, George lifted his head from the pillow.

"Dad, dad," he said.

"Yeah?"

"Tell me the story where the fish stays in the water."

He was basically asking me to reverse-engineer this whole evolution thing. He would rather stay a fish, thank you very much, than have to worry about slipping back to being a monkey, or looking down to find short, scaly arms, or any of the other, completely unscientific oddities I had conjured. I couldn't blame him.

"Sure," I said. "There was a fish, and he just kept swimming around in the water, and he never even tried to take any step on the sand. And he swam down to the bottom of the water with his family and they all ate some... moss off a rock."

I began to back out of the room.

"Is that what fish eat?" George asked, his curiosity back. We had taken a walk the day before and I had pointed out moss ("Look, George, grass that grows on walls -- that's called moss!"). It was all coming together.

"That's right," I said confidently. "Underwater it's called algae. They also eat little shrimp."

And with that I left the room before I did any more damage.

Next time I talk evolution with the kids, I think I'll avoid the bedtime story format. Maybe I'll even have some visual aids ready.

Much unboggling to do.

Who Gets to Ask the Big Questions?

Advances in genetics, neuroscience, brain imaging, and other areas are turning the Big Questions over to scientists.

The old Big Questions -- "What is the nature of goodness?" "What is free will?" "Who am I?" "Why does God allow catastrophes like earthquakes?" -- have the effect of that odd and slightly embarrassing statuary which you might find in the corner of a dusty antique store. Most of us just keep walking.

The new Big Questions, the ones that make us stop, are often more specific:

"How do mirror neurons in the angular gyrus allow us to empathize with other people?"

Or:

"If, as one study showed, 300 milliseconds usually elapses between a wave of brain activity and our conscious decision to take an action, does that mean that our sense of free will is just that, a mere trick of consciousness after our brain has already triggered the action?"

On the one hand, it's refreshing to dump the cant of philosophy and the filigreed talk of theology, and replace these ancient discourses with the stuff of science.

But here's the rub. Science is complicated. And its results come in bits and pieces, through experimentation, double-blind studies, the slow accumulation of data. So, by and large, we leave it to journalists to give us progress reports. And journalism is not designed to address the Big Questions.

Journalism is written to deadline. It is usually written by generalists. It relies on the memorable detail and the quick turn-of-phrase to sell copy.

In the days of the old Big Questions, journalists generally stayed away, since there wasn't much to report (except perhaps... "Bernard Williams' latest response to Parfit's thoughts on diachronic identity!" which doesn't make a very good headline).

But now, with the Big Questions migrating out of the cluttered offices of philosophers and theologians into the labs of scientists, journalists are finding that they have something to write about:

Data!

Who cares if the data is conflicted, or incomplete, or if its implications would take some seriously complicated explaining to convey properly? Data is a ripe peach hanging off a tree, an easy filler, for journalists.

And this presents a problem for us, as readers and parents.

Take, for example, two articles in yesterday's New York Times:

The first, This is Your Brain on Politics, could be found on the back page of the Week in Review. I read it and felt an immediate sense of frustration. Brandon Keim of Wired debunks it here. Thank you, Brandon Keim.

The second, from the same day, In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice, skimmed over recent findings in genetics to warn about the controversies that these findings might provoke. It linked to a blog called Half Sigma, in which there is a cursory and inconclusive discussion about the possibility of IQ differences between races. It is an example of that against which it warns.

What we have here is a trickling out (and articles about trickling out doing more trickling out) of inconclusive scientific data.

Now there's nothing wrong with the inconclusive nature of science -- indeed, that is why it is the last, best hope of humankind, in my opinion. Science is a language game which recognizes, even celebrates, the inconclusiveness of knowledge. It shows an appreciation of process, and it therefore implies a faith in the efforts of people to adjust, refine, change for the better. I'm all for that.

But the inconclusiveness of science does not match up well with our insatiatable need for certainty, stability, consistency. As animals under stress, we constantly seek a means of making decisions today, now, with what we know at the present. People don't have time for process on a daily basis.

So how will it play out? As science gives us provocative slices into the Big Questions, will we zig and zag as it tells us dubious findings as to race and IQ, the female brain, children and music? Or will we learn to rely on some other frame of reference, some new approach for this new age?

What will be our lodestar after we accept that true knowledge is not, and will never be, forthcoming?

Raising Children Right... or Left

Do we make our children liberal or conservative by the way we raise them -- even before we ever discuss politics with them expicitly?

I would argue that we do give them an outlook on the world which likely predisposes them one way or the other.

But there are too many dimensions to politics, too many values informing our positions, for our children's political views, once they emerge, to conform perfectly to our own. Thank golly.

Into this teeming mix of values and lessons and clashing political views -- familiar to parents with teenagers, I imagine -- comes a new theory. It is worth examining from a parenting perspective.

Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist, has proposed a theory of morality which involves 5 "moral axes." They are: harm, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity. His ideas were discussed in the New York Times's Science section a few weeks ago, and the article generated a storm of commentary on the internet.

Haidt claims that liberals and conservatives, answering the same questions (you can do the test yourself to see where you come down) will find that their results cluster around different axes. Liberals will, according to Haidt, put far more emphasis on avoiding harm and ensuring fairness. Conservatives will add to these concerns a strong feeling for ingroup loyalty, a respect for authority and an interest in preserving sacredness/purity.

So Haidt would suggest that we are influencing our children's politics by the values we teach them.

"Of course," I wanted to say when I first read this. "Values inform politics, what else is new?"

But something about Haidt's approach continued to nag at me in the week after I read about it. Then I finally realized why. He suggests that conservatives have more moral axes, more resources for decision-making, than liberals -- five rather than the stunted two that I favor.

Here's how I counter Haidt's theory:

A dear friend of mine had a birthday recently, and I was thinking about his great qualities. One of his qualities is his deep loyalty and steadfastness towards his close friends. Suddenly, I remembered the Haidt moral axes. And so I asked myself, "Does this loyalty that my friend shows make him more moral in my view?" My answer was no. I realized from this that I do not consider loyalty to be a moral quality, merely an admirable personality trait.

With this thought-experiment in mind, the three "conservative" axes, (loyalty, authority, and purity) seem to me more tied to personality traits than they are a sense of morality.

Haidt (and cultural conservatives) would argue of course that I am so steeped in the contractual model of morality that I simply can't see these for what they are -- axes of moral decision. But the burden is not on me. It is on Haidt to demonstrate that his "5 axes" matrix is truly an exhaustive list of moral axes. Otherwise it's just a cute exercise.

Has he done that? I don't think so.

Why not add a few more "moral" axes, such as flexibility/rigidness, or openness to difference/desire for homogeneity? These two suggestions have a bias towards recognizing culturallly "liberal" acts of generosity and kindness as opposed to the Haidt axes of purity and authority and loyalty, which are biased towards recognizing conservative virues. But aren't they just as legitimate?

I would bet that we could generate a list of some 20 or 30 axes which would be borne out in studies as distinguishing liberal vs. conservative inclinations about morality. In short, the whole thing reeks of the typical weakness of psychology: mistaking labeling for insight.

Certainly, by encouraging, say, "openness to difference" rather than "ingroup loyalty," I am predisposing my children to political views on the liberal side of the spectrum. On that we can agree. But I am not making them morally deficient. They have the two crucial "moral axes" covered: minimize harm and try to be fair. The rest are a matter of taste. And some, like the cult of sacredness/purity, are not to my taste at all.

Why Democrat Dad?

This blog will explore the intersection of politics and parenting. I invite other dads, moms, or anyone else who is interested, to contribute to the conversation. My intention is to write every day on some issue which connects politics with parenting.

Why "Democrat Dad"?

I am a citizen and a Democrat, and I believe that these are not mere labels. They are important aspects of myself.

Why is my political identity so important that I feel compelled to write a blog about it? Well, I believe that we all have a responsibility to take politics seriously.

Those of us worried or enraged or disillusioned about our country cannot simply escape, drop out, or (romantic as it sounds) "drop off the grid," without losing much of what we cherish about ourselves.

I agree with Aristotle here (see his Politics) that human beings, choosing to exist outside of their community, are abdicating part of themselves. They are living as either "god or beast" -- the lives of monks or hermits, but not something that is recognizable to me.

My values are informed by the opinions of others; and this is not a point of shame. We are social creatures. We respond to praise and blame. Our participation in society is a pre-condition of language and a basis for morality.

I am enamored of our country and its laws. When I think of it... when I picture the whole whirring, clicking machine going like crazy on any given day... I am inspired to believe the best of my fellow-citizens and our future, all over again.

Through multiple decisions at many municipal, state and federal levels, through checks and balances of the different branches of government, through experments in legislation taking place concurrently in the states and in Washington D.C., through elections for offices ranging from a seat on the local school board to the Presidency of the United States -- through all of this never-ceasing activitiy -- our system of law provides what I like to think of as a perfect fit.

Think of it as a complex, ever-adjusting, digital map of the analog curve of our collective needs. And it is all thanks to the best "software" ever designed for the organizing of human beings and their diverse interests: the Constitution.

I am a citizen of this country, and proud of it. And politically, I am a member of the Democratic Party.

Hence, Democrat Dad.

Please join me. I look forward to thinking through parenting from a political perspective -- with you as my fellow-parents and fellow-citizens. Fellow Democrats of course are invited. Republican Dads and Moms too! Let's get started!

Tom