Terrorism Close to Home

A terrorist attack may bring forth responses that are ugly, stupid, crazy, or all three, in various measures. But the most common response is just what such acts aim at: terror.

Photograph from Bloomberg via the Telegraph (UK)

Around 3:50 yesterday afternoon, I looked at my Facebook page and was puzzled to read a post by someone of my acquaintance saying simply that she was “safe.” I was tempted to ask her what she had been up to that might have put her in danger, but as I looked further down the page, it became apparent that something terrible had happened that affected quite a few people. I went to a news site and was horrified to learn of the deadly violence that had struck in Copley Square an hour previously, about three miles away from where I sat.

I am glad to be able to say that, so far as I have learned, no one of my acquaintance was among those killed or injured by the blasts. But I think all of us who live in the area feel in some obscure way wounded by it.

And then there are those who have quite different reactions. My previous entry on the Westboro Baptist Church has been made somewhat more timely by the group’s announcement on its Twitter feed that it proposes to show up at the funerals of victims of yesterday’s incident. The Phelpses close their message with the assertion that “GOD SENT THE BOMBS IN FURY OVER F*G MARRIAGE!” I once remarked in this blog that natural disasters have a tendency to bring forth self-nominated prophets, ready to invoke divine causes for natural events. But those who consider themselves privy to divine intentions are also ready to render the same public service when sorrow is brought about by human hands, as shown by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in their remarks shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001 (observed in the third indented paragraph in this blog entry).

But you don’t have to believe in supernatural causes to reject the most obvious natural causes of events: you may simply believe in vast hidden conspiracies, in the manner of apopheniac extraordinaire Alex Jones, who needed little evidence before declaring that the bombings were yet another false-flag operation by the United States government. (Added after posting: Elisabeth Parker at Addicting Info shows how Alex Jones rearranges the dots so that he can connect them.)

The Phelpses and Alex Jones are clearly extreme examples of systematic cognitive (and, at least in the case of the Phelpses, not just cognitive) distortion. But even those of us who do not go to such extremes as a rule may be blown a bit off course by the force of an extraordinary event like this. One looks about with apprehension and suspicion, on guard for signs of the “next” attack, though in fact, the time and place of one such extraordinary event are among the least likely for the occurrence of another. Terrorist acts do occur, but in these parts it stands to reason that one is in less danger of one happening now than one was before yesterday’s incident. Bruce Schneier puts the point well in a piece published on the day of the event in The Atlantic on line:

. . . Terrorism is designed precisely to scare people—far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random—in this case involving an innocent child—senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

But our brains are fooling us. Even though this will be in the news for weeks, we should recognize this for what it is: a rare event. That’s the very definition of news: something that is unusual—in this case, something that almost never happens. 

When we learn of a terrorist attack, we naturally follow what in cognitive psychology is called the availability heuristic, which is the natural human tendency to estimate the probability of an event of a certain class according to the “availability,” in our minds, of instances. The stronger the emotional charge on an instance, the more readily it comes to mind, and the more we tend to overestimate the probability of an event of that kind occurring. We do not necessarily fall into the craziness of religious maniacs and conspiracy fantasists, but our cognitive game is certainly below its best. Terrorism works by playing on this cognitive weakness, and making us feel that we are in much more danger than we actually are.

Schneier follows his observation with an instructive historical reminder:

Remember after 9/11 when people predicted we’d see these sorts of attacks every few months? That never happened, and it wasn’t because the TSA confiscated knives and snow globes at airports. Give the FBI credit for rolling up terrorist networks and interdicting terrorist funding, but we also exaggerated the threat. We get our ideas about how easy it is to blow things up from television and the movies. It turns out that terrorism is much harder than most people think. It’s hard to find willing terrorists, it’s hard to put a plot together, it’s hard to get materials, and it’s hard to execute a workable plan. As a collective group, terrorists are dumb, and they make dumb mistakes; criminal masterminds are another myth from movies and comic books.

I’m taking a plane trip soon, and I am not eager to learn what additional inconveniences I shall have to endure. That is a much more realistic worry, I think, than any suspicion of another attack.

Sane People with Insane Beliefs

People who believe crazy things are not necessarily crazy; but neither are beliefs sane just because the people who hold them are so.

Photo taken from The Lonely Conservative

In a previous post on this blog (“Lewis Black on Creationism,” April 1, 2011), I included a video of Lewis Black, in a comedy performance, saying this:

There are people who believe that dinosaurs and men lived together, that they roamed the earth at the same time. There are museums that children go to in which they build dioramas to show them this. And what this is, purely and simply, is a clinical psychotic reaction. They are crazy. They are stone-cold fuck nuts.

As much as I relish Black’s comic exaggerations, I don’t accept them as literal truth, and I suspect that he didn’t so intend them either. Present a young-earth creationist with a problem about plumbing or accounting or gardening and I am pretty sure that he or she will respond to it as rationally as anyone else. It is only when a religious question arises, or rather a question to which their religious beliefs dictate an answer, that they talk like crazy people. If religious extremism were to be regarded as a psychosis, it would have to be a localized and artificial one. And eccentric beliefs are manifestations, not causes or constituents, of any condition that would be deemed psychotic in medical practice.

Louis Theroux has made a couple of documentaries in which he visits and converses with members of the Phelps family, the people behind the notorious Westboro Baptist Church: The Most Hated Family in America (2007) and America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis (2011). I find it natural to describe these people as “loonies” or “wackos”; and to say of them, in Black’s words, that they are “stone-cold fuck nuts” is almost irresistible. But it is plain to any sort of fair scrutiny that they are not insane: it is merely their beliefs and their way of thinking that are so.

Yet that does not make them any the less disturbing. On the contrary, their demonstration that sane people can embrace an insane outlook is part of what makes them disturbing.

These people seem to have answers to any objections that one might raise against their views. I don't believe it would be possible to make any progress in argument with them (and I certainly would not care to try). What I might think of as an appeal to reason or evidence they would, I imagine, dismiss as relying on a “humanistic” perspective—as contrasted with “God’s” perspective, which is the one that they claim to take. And if I move to explain away their behavior in terms of ignorance and delusion, they will just as readily explain away my outlook as due to the influence of Satan.

Does this mean that there is no rational basis for choosing between my “humanistic” perspective and their supposedly divine one? No; it just means that neither side can persuade the other.

And yet, the matter will not rest there. For no one who accepts empirical evidence, scientific method, and logical and conceptual coherence—all of which may be gathered, very loosely, under the name of “reason”—rather than scripture, dogma, and personal influence as proper sources of authority in judgment can be content to regard such a practice as a mere private taste or predilection. The appeal to reason is an appeal that all human beings make and must make in determining what is the case. But some do so in the service of convictions that are not only implausible in themselves but that have implications that conflict with common experience, common sense, or common decency. They reason, but they are not reasonable.

The people of the Westboro Baptist Church provide one illustration of this phenomenon. Another, I think, is provided by right-winger Alan Keyes, who in an interview recently offered the following account of the movement for marriage rights for same-sex couples : “The aim is not compassion for homosexuals, respect for homosexuals, and all of this; the aim in the mind of these hard-headed, calculating, leftist, Communist totalitarians is to destroy the family and to establish the notion that once you have seized power there is no limit whatsoever to what you can do.” (Recording and transcript at Right Wing Watch.)

The Non-Consolations of Biology

A scientific theory that says nothing about the meaning, purpose, or value of human life is not for that reason a denial that there is any meaning, purpose, or value in human life.

Kenneth R. Miller reports being asked, after giving a public lecture on evolution, the following question by a member of the audience: “How can you tell me that I’m just an animal? How can you say that I’m no better than the beasts? That the only things that matter in life are to struggle, survive, and mate? There’s just got to be more to life than that” (Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 135).

It seems to me that such questions rest on the fallacy of moving from the premise “Biology says nothing about the value, meaning, or purpose of human life” to the conclusion “Biology says that there is no value, meaning, or purpose to human life.” That this inference is fallacious I take to be obvious. Biology says nothing about these things because they are outside its bailiwick. They are not scientific matters at all. (In an earlier series of posts—“Stephen Jay Gould on Science and Religion,” “More on Gould on Science and Religion,” and “A Dilemma for NOMA”—I subjected Stephen Jay Gould’s conception of “non-overlapping magisteria” to extensive criticism; but on this particular point, I have had no disagreement with him.)

Of course, people do not commit this fallacy concerning chemistry, say, or physics, which also say nothing about the value, meaning, or purpose of human life. Perhaps that is because those sciences do not concern “life,” while biology does. And perhaps this is what made Miller’s questioner feel that he was being somehow diminished by the theory of evolution. But biology concerns “life” in the sense of what distinguishes organisms from the rest of nature and makes them all akin to one another, not in the specific sense of conscious human existence, with all its attendant aspirations.

This is presumably the very feature of biology that rubbed Miller’s questioner the wrong way: that biology regards human beings as just another species of living thing. But so does physics regard human beings as just so many physical things; chemistry, as so many chemical things. These sciences treat of “actions” and “reactions,” as biology treats of “life,” but they say nothing of what makes human actions and reactions, or human life, so much different from the merely physical, chemical, or biological sort, and so interesting to us. Questions of the value, meaning, or purpose of human life simply go unanswered in science. Why should anyone take that to imply that science, or one science in particular, gives a nihilistic answer to such questions?

The Non-Consolation of Belief in an Afterlife

The original version of this entry was written ten months after the death of a close friend.

It is incomprehensible to me that anyone can find consolation in the idea of being reunited with loved ones after death. I am not even considering the question of how anyone can believe such a thing, though that to me is incomprehensible to such a degree that I seriously doubt that most people who profess such a belief actually hold it. I suspect that most of them have confused the wish that something were the case for a belief that it is the case. But that is not my concern here. What I mean is that I cannot understand how people can even find such a belief, or pretense of belief, consoling.

When I mourn my friend, it is in my life that I need him and miss him: it is his absence from my life that afflicts me. Even if I could believe that I would see him again after my death, that belief would do me no good now. Granted the assumption that I, unlike him, live a normal span of life, the prospect of being able to resume our conversation several decades from now, when in all likelihood my grief over the loss of him will have diminished almost to nothing, does nothing for me now, when I suffer the most from the loss of him.

For that matter, I find nothing consoling in the idea of my own life continuing beyond death, whether in ghostly form or resurrected—assuming, of course, contrary to my suspicion, that such suppositions are even coherent. Such an existence would have to be utterly unlike anything that we can imagine. So it would not be a restoration of what we stand to lose by dying. To me, that makes it no better than no existence at all, as far its power to make death seem less terrible is concerned.

Reviving This Blog

Announcing the renewal of posting on this blog.

It is nearly two years since I last posted anything in this blog. During that time, I have from time to time worked on drafts of posts, but have not been able to make of any of them anything that I thought worth posting. I also continued to write a lot of stuff in journals without any thought of making use of it here. However, as I read over that material, I find much now that seems to me presentable. So I shall soon be posting some pieces here.

I have decided, though, not to continue my former habit of always putting a picture of some sort at the head of each post. As much as I like having them as an aid to memory (for myself if not for my readers), they add to the burden of work, and consequently to the time, required for completing a post.

Tavris and Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Reading Notes

A book arguing for the power of the concept of cognitive dissonance to explain “why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts” lacks one thing: a defensible explanation of what cognitive dissonance is.

The following is not a review but merely a comment on one particular point in the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson,¹ namely its failure to explain the concept and the associated theory that are the central theme of its argument. I ought perhaps to mention at this point, since you might think otherwise upon reading what follows, that I found the book immensely instructive and disturbing in a potentially very salutary way. Its strength lies in its description and analysis of the various ways in which our need to feel justified in what we think, say, and do drives us to think, say, and do wrong and harmful things. Its weakness lies in its failure to explain the rubric under which it does this work of description and analysis, the concept of cognitive dissonance.

* * *

Before I read this book, I was acquainted with the term “cognitive dissonance” but had only a rather vague notion of what it means. Having read the book, I have a better idea of what it means, and of the psychological research that is associated with it; but the book contains no satisfactory explanation either of what cognitive dissonance is or what cognitive dissonance theory is. The authors repeatedly say that cognitive dissonance theory predicts this and cognitive dissonance theory predicts that, but they never tell us what the theory is—an omission that diminishes not only the usefulness of their book but also the credibility of their argument. We cannot make any informed judgment of the value of the theory if we are never told what it is, but told only of its alleged predictive successes.

Aronson and Tavris offer an explanation of the term “cognitive dissonance” at one point; but it is quite inadequate. It occurs just after an account of the researches of social psychologist Leon Festinger and his collaborators on the response of the followers of a pretended seer, one Marian Keech, to the failure of her prophecy that on a certain date a spaceship would come to rescue them before the earth would be destroyed.² One might suppose, if one has not previously observed how the adherents of such prophecies behave when confronted with the failure of them, that the followers would be disillusioned and see that their faith in Mrs. Keech was misplaced. But Festinger, the authors report, made a more nuanced, specific, and, as it transpired, more accurate prediction:

The believers who had not made a strong commitment to the prophecy—who awaited the end of the world by themselves at home, hoping they weren’t going to die at midnight—would quietly lose their faith in Mrs. Keech. But those who had given away their possessions and were waiting with the others for the spaceship would increase their belief in her mystical abilities. In fact, they would now do everything they could to get others to join them. (12)

At the end, the authors observe, “Mrs. Keech’s prediction had failed, but not Leon Festinger’s.” They then move on to the theory to which they credit this prediction—the theory of cognitive dissonance. They write:

The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions—especially the wrong ones—is an unpleasant feeling that Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day.” Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don’t rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn’t really so harmful, or that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (and after all, obesity is a health risk, too), and so on. Most smokers manage to reduce dissonance in many such ingenious, if self-deluding, ways. (13)

The authors cite the pair of thoughts “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day” as an example of “two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent.” But is there any inconsistency at all between these two thoughts? Certainly they are not logically inconsistent: it is possible for both to be true. Nor is there any kind of probabilistic conflict between the two: it does not defy probability that both should be true. The authors say, in the paragraph immediately following the one just quoted, “Dissonance is disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity . . .” But there is no contradiction between the two cognitions in the example.

The authors say that the two cognitions are psychologically inconsistent. But what is that supposed to mean? That no one can affirm both thoughts at the same time? But surely people can do so; if they could not, then this pair of cognitions could not be an example of cognitive dissonance! Wherein, then, is the “psychological inconsistency” supposed to consist? Perhaps in the fact that affirming both thoughts creates discomfort? But the discomfort was supposed to be the effect of a so-called psychological inconsistency. If the so-called inconsistency is nothing other than the discomfort itself, then the definition amounts to saying that psychological dissonance is the state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions that produce a state of tension—which tells us essentially nothing.

It is a dismal failing for a book to give no satisfactory explanation of the very concept that is at the core of its argument. We are left to figure out for ourselves what the concept is from the evidence of the use that the authors make of it.

One point about the concept that is clear is that it has an immediate bearing on the common human proclivity for self-justification. It is, in fact, supposed to provide the answer to the question implied by the book’s subtitle: “why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts.” We justify, or attempt to justify, such things because it is difficult for us to accept that our beliefs have been foolish, our decisions bad, or our acts hurtful. It is surely these negative evaluations of ourselves that are the source of the discomfort of which the authors speak. In the example quoted above, there is, as I said earlier, no inconsistency between the thoughts “Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me” and “I smoke two packs a day”; but the combination of those thoughts entails the thought “I do a dumb thing.” That implication, and not any inconsistency between the first two thoughts, is the source of our discomfort. To reduce dissonance, we must do things, or rather think things, that will allow us to avoid accepting that conclusion.

It seems to me that all of the examples discussed by the authors fit under this explanation of the concept better than they fit under the explanation that they give. Marian Keech could not give up the idea that she had visionary powers because she had built so much of her understanding and evaluation of herself upon that idea. Her most devoted followers could not give up that idea precisely because they had devoted themselves to her in quite costly ways: to admit that their faith in her was misplaced would be to admit that they had been extravagantly foolish.

Further, it is evident that many cases that fit under the authors’ definition will not illustrate what they mean by cognitive dissonance. Suppose, for instance, that I remember distinctly, or seem to remember distinctly, leaving a book in a certain place a short time ago, but that when I return to that place, I don’t find the book there (and suppose also that I am alone in my room when this has gone on). This may cause me perplexity, consternation, irritation, frustration, and other unpleasant emotions, but it will not give rise to what Aronson and Tavris seem to have in mind when they use the term “cognitive dissonance.” Certainly it will not drive me to try to explain the non-appearance of the book in self-justifying ways. Rather, my reaction will most likely be first to look around to see if the book has fallen down somewhere, and then, if that does not lead to the discovery of it, to conclude that my memory is at fault: I must have put the book somewhere else and forgotten doing so. Yet here we clearly have a case of discomfort produced by an inconsistent pair of cognitions—“I left the book right here (and no one else has been around to move it)” and “The book is not here.” There is no cognitive dissonance involved because the conflict between these two cognitions does not, or does not seriously, threaten my evaluation of myself. It does compel me to acknowledge the faultiness of my memory, but it will not be the first thing to have done that.

In sum, what the authors talk about under the heading of “cognitive dissonance” is not, as they say in their attempt at a definition of the term, an inconsistency between two cognitions, but an inconsistency between some body of cognitions and our estimation of ourselves.

17 June 2012: Correction made in penultimate paragraph: “will not give rise to” replaces “would give rise to.”

* * *

After writing the comment above, I came across the following passage in the Wikipedia article “Cognitive Dissonance”:

An overarching principle of cognitive dissonance is that it involves the formation of an idea or emotion in conflict with a fundamental element of the self-concept, such as “I am a successful/functional person,” “I am a good person,” or “I made the right decision.”

I wish that I had a better source for the attribution of this principle to the concept or the theory of cognitive dissonance than Wikipedia, but as far as it goes, it confirms the argument that I developed independently. What puzzles me is that something so obviously important would fail to make its way into the argument of Mistakes Were Made. Elliot Aronson, also according to Wikipedia (the article on him), “is listed among the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th Century,” “is the only person in the 120-year history of the American Psychological Association to have won all three of its major awards: for writing, for teaching, and for research,“ and “in 2007 . . . received the William James Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science.” Why he and Carol Tavris failed to include this essential point in their exposition—which is virtually a non-exposition—of the central concept of their book, I do not know, but the fact that they did so confirms my suspicion that sloppiness in the handling of crucial concepts is very common in the discipline of psychology.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

¹Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson,  Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Orlando, etc.: Harcourt, 2007)

²Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).

Lewis Black on Creationism

Lewis Black explains why Christians get the “Old Testament” wrong. I explain how Black gets George W. Bush wrong—to some degree.

Here is another comedy clip, from Red, White, and Screwed, a video of Lewis Black in performance in Washington, D.C., in 2006. Once again, I have provided a transcript, so that those who like to remind themselves of the best bits, as I do, can have the words in print before them. And as in my previous posting of a clip of a comic in performance, of course, I advise all readers to watch the video before reading the transcript.

This performance took place during that dark age of recent American history known as the presidency of George W. Bush. The clip begins at a somewhat awkward point, in mid-sentence, omitting context that would allow the viewer to understand immediately what Black is talking about. I have therefore supplied, in the transcript that follows, the sentence and a half preceding the words with which the clip begins. (The complete version can be heard at 3:50 in this clip.)

I should have known earlier about President Bush, but I gave him some rope—a lot of rope, and then—he hung all of us with it. I should have known it when I heard him say, “When it comes to evolution, the jury is still out.” What jury, where? The Scopes trial is over.

I never thought that during the course of my life, a president would be elected who didn’t believe in evolution, or at least kind of in the ball park of it, or thought m-m-m-maybe it’s got some MERIT! But NO! He believes that the earth was created in seven days. Whew! Takes my breath away. And why does he believe that? Because he read it in the Old Testament, which is the book of my people—the Jewish people. And that book wasn’t good enough for you Christians, was it? You went, “No, we’ve got a better book, with a better character, you’re going to LOVE him!” And you called your book NEW, and said our book was OLD!

And yet every Sunday I turn on the television set, and there’s a priest or a pastor reading from my book, and interpreting it, and their interpretations, I have to tell you, are usually wrong. It’s not their fault, because it’s not their book. You never see a rabbi on the TV interpreting the New Testament, do you? If you want to truly understand the Old Testament, if there is something you don’t quite get, there are Jews who walk among you, and THEY—I promise you this—will take TIME out of their VERY JEWY, JEWY DAY, and interpret for you anything that you’re having trouble understanding. And we will do that, if, of course, the price is right.

Was the earth created in seven days? No. For those of you who believe it was, for you Christians, let me tell you that you do not understand the Jewish people. We Jews understand that it did not take place in seven days, and that’s because we know what we’re good at; and what we’re really good at is bullshit. This is a wonderful story that was told to the people in the desert in order to distract them from the fact that they did not have air conditioning. I would LOVE to have the FAITH to believe that it took place in seven days, but—I have thoughts. And that can really fuck up the faith thing. Just ask any Catholic priest.

And then, there are fossils. Whenever anybody tries to tell me that they believe it took place in seven days, I reach for a fossil and go, “Fossil!” And if they keep talking I throw it just over their head.

There are people who believe that dinosaurs and men lived together, that they roamed the earth at the same time. There are museums that children go to in which they build dioramas to show them this. And what this is, purely and simply, is a clinical psychotic reaction. They are crazy. They are stone cold fuck nuts. I can’t be kind about this, because these people are watching The Flintstones as if it were a documentary.

For me, the last paragraph, especially its last sentence, makes the whole speech worthwhile. But if the words preceding that line contain a serious error, does the worth of the speech as humor excuse it? I think not. Lewis Black is one of those comics whose performances largely owe their power to their truth. Of course, he often employs overstatement and fantasy, as around the middle of this excerpt; but he never, so far as I know, tries to pass them off as fact. So, as much as I relish making fun of the follies of Christian Biblical literalists and of former President Bush, I feel bound to correct Black’s lumping of the latter with the former.

Let us be clear that Black’s mention of the then-president at the beginning of the excerpt is mainly a transitional device, reflecting what he was saying just beforehand. He was talking about politics; now he wants to talk about the interpretation of Jewish scriptures by Christians, especially by those Christians who are Biblical literalists. Nonetheless, the excerpt begins with a misrepresentation of what President Bush, or rather, as he was at the time of uttering the words, presidential candidate Bush, said and meant. The utterance that Lewis Black approximately quotes was reported as follows in an article in The New York Times in October of 2000:

“From Scripture you can gain a lot of strength and solace and learn life’s lessons. That’s what I believe, and I don’t necessarily believe every single word is literally true. I think that, for example, on the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the earth. . . . I don’t use the Bible as necessarily a way to predict the findings of science.” ¹

Black’s version incorporates a correction, probably made unwittingly, of the future president’s characteristic confusion of idiom. Bush seems to have conflated the idiomatic phrases “the jury is still out” and “a verdict has not yet been reached” into the mixed-up phrase “the verdict is still out.” This detail does not, however, affect the substance of the words quoted.

What does affect the substance is the remainder of the quotation, which makes Bush out to be less clearly on the side of Biblical literalism than Black would put him. In fact, it puts him on the other side entirely. Then-candidate Bush says explicitly that he does not take the Bible to be literally true in every particular, especially as an anticipation of “the findings of science.” He praises the Bible as a source of “strength and solace” and instruction in “life’s lessons,” and contrasts this with regarding it as a source of scientific knowledge.

One might go further in trying to separate Bush from Biblical literalists and creationists. For Bush does not exactly say that the jury (or the “verdict”) is still out on evolution itself but on “how God created the earth.” One might suggest that the “verdict” that he means is a theological conclusion on how God makes things happen from behind the scenes rather than a scientific one on how the earth and the living things on it came into being.

This, however, is exceedingly unlikely. Creationists have a notorious tendency to conflate questions of the origin of species with questions of the origin of the life, of the earth, and of the universe as a whole: “theory of evolution,” in their usage, often stands for all of these things. The construction of the quoted sentence shows the same confusion, or at least indicates that Bush is only concerned with the theory of evolution so far as it conflicts with the Biblical account of how the earth and what lives on it came into being. It is plainly on this conflict that he takes the jury to be “still out.” Finally, his words to a group of reporters five years later leave no room for doubt as to where he thought that there was room for doubt:

During a press conference with a group of Texas reporters on August 1, 2005, President George W. Bush responded to a question about teaching “intelligent design” in the public schools. The reporter referred to “what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus ‘intelligent design’” and asked, “What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools?” In response, Bush referred to his days as governor of Texas, when “I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about.” . . . Pressing the issue, the reporter asked, “So the answer accepts the validity of ‘intelligent design’ as an alternative to evolution?” Bush avoided a direct answer, construing the question instead as a fairness issue: “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.”²

President Bush makes clear on this occasion that in his view the supposed “debate” concerning the theory of evolution and the so-called theory of intelligent design belongs within the curricula of public schools. It has to be presumed that he means that it belongs within the curricula of science classes, and therefore that he considers it to be a debate within science rather than a debate about science.

In sum, what George W. Bush said publicly does not indicate that he believes, following the Bible, that the earth was created in six days. In fact, it indicates clearly that he is not a Biblical literalist at all, and that he does not think that the Bible should be used as a basis for drawing conclusions in matters of science. However, his utterances also make clear that he considers the theory of evolution—meaning, in this instance, the whole enterprise of explaining speciation by reference to natural causes—to be a matter on which no scientific verdict has been reached.

REFERENCES

¹ Laurie Goodman, “The 2000 Campaign: Matters of Faith; Bush Uses Religion as Personal and Political Guide,” New York Times, October 22, 2000. Bold type added. A scan of the pertinent passage as it appeared in print can be seen here.

² Glenn Branch, “President Bush Addresses ‘Intelligent Design,’” Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 25 (2005): 13–14. For equivalent reportage see Peter Baker and Peter Slevin, “Bush Remarks On ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory Fuel Debate,” Washington Post, August 3, 2005, or Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush Remarks Roil Debate on Teaching of Evolution,” New York Times, August 3, 2005.

More on That False Truism

How the saying “Everything happens for a reason” combines presumption with obtuseness.

Last week, I posted an entry examining and denigrating the saying “Everything happens for a reason” (“A False Truism,” March 13, 2011). I subsequently learned that, by a curious chance, an article appeared a few days later at Cracked.com under the title “Five Popular Phrases That Make You Look Like an Idiot,” in which the very same phrase appears at the head of the list (though at the end of the article). Reading another writer’s attempt to identify what makes this saying so irritating gives me occasion to reconsider my own analysis.

I was not surprised to find that the author, whose name is given as “Gladstone,” does not share my logical objections to the phrase. Perhaps no one without some years of study of philosophy will do so. Gladstone even gives the saying a pass as far as its literal meaning is concerned:

I suppose this cliché wouldn’t be intolerable if it were merely meant to be taken literally. Everything does happen for a reason. People die young because they get hit by trains or get cancer. People are maimed and disfigured in wars because of bombs. I mean, if that’s all this cliche were trying to convey then it would just be vaguely annoying. You’d assume the speaker were just some mental deficient who says things like “water is wet,” “ice cream is yummy,” or “Tosh is funny.”

I, of course, disagree. Gladstone in effect takes the phrase to be equivalent in literal meaning to the truism “For everything that happens, there is a reason why it happens.” But in my estimation he lets the phrase off too easily. Getting hit by a train or getting cancer may be the reason why someone dies young, but it is not a reason for which someone dies young. People do not die for a reason, as dying is not something that people do, or can do, intentionally. They can intentionally kill themselves or get themselves killed or let themselves die (i.e., refrain from taking action to prevent or delay their dying); but “dying” does not name a possible intentional action, nor even an action at all. Dying is something that befalls one; accordingly, it cannot intelligibly be said to be done “for a reason.” The same goes for any occurrence that is not an intentional action.

For the sake of simplicity, I will hereafter use the phrase “mere happening” for anything that happens that is not the intentional act of an agent. Thus, for instance, someone’s dying is a mere happening; someone’s killing himself is an action. 

I argued in my previous piece that the logical confusions in this saying contribute to its currency by allowing it to pass—in lazy, sloppy, or corrupt minds—for a truism. But even if that is so, perhaps logical confusion is not the most objectionable feature of the saying. It is happens to be the sort of feature that tends to attract my attention, because of my peculiar irritability toward logical confusion and the satisfaction that I find in exposing it. But the logical confusion is just the means by which the phrase conveys its pernicious half-hidden meaning. That meaning combines presumption and obtuseness, as Gladstone vividly points out:

But the annoying thing about this phrase is that the speaker believes he/she has some inside track to God or Fate or whatever mystic unseen hand controls the universe. As if there is a power and that power decided there was an actual reason to inflict a newborn baby with Trisomy 18 or have a woman get gang raped. And given the existence of this rational force—that operates only with justification and reason—who are you to question why someone ravaged your wife, or blew apart your son, or took your leg? This cliché insists that either happy endings always exist (“see, they never would have found that tumor, unless they were repairing that machete wound to your abdomen”) or if there is no happy ending for you then your suffering was part of some greater plan that benefited another (“don’t be sad that you were imprisoned for twenty years by a racist jury for a crime you didn’t commit, I mean, think about the valuable lesson you’ve taught us about bias in criminal juries!”)

To say “Everything happens for a reason” is in effect to deny that there are any of what I termed mere happenings, except perhaps by an arbitrary choice of phrasing. It is to hold that the occurrences that appear to us to be mere happenings, such as someone’s dying of cancer or the fall of a leaf, are actually made to happen by an agent—presumably an all-powerful one that works in ways beyond our powers of observation. That would be, in Gladstone’s words, “God or Fate or whatever mystic unseen hand controls the universe.”

This much is implied by the phrase; and by itself it is outrageous presumption enough. But, as Gladstone rightly observes, the person who says “Everything happens for a reason” typically claims even more than this. It would be compatible with this saying to believe that the universe is governed by a petty, jealous, unjust, vindictive, capricious bully of a deity—such as the YHWH of the Hebrew Bible, for instance (see the opening paragraph of chapter 2 of Richard Dawkins’s The God Illusion Delusion*). Even people who believe that collection of texts to be divinely revealed tend to have a more favorable conception of the invisible agent behind the world’s scenes. They tend to believe, in defiance of the text, that God is just, loving, forgiving, wise, and so forth. Certainly Scripture abounds with passages in which YHWH is described in just such terms; the fact remains that the deity’s record in other passages gives the lie to such white-washing. A father who brutally beats or kills his children for failing to honor him properly does not earn the epithets “just,” “loving,” etc., by behaving more generously on other occasions.

But Biblical exegesis is not the issue. The point is that those who say “Everything happens for a reason” mean more than that some intelligent power of unspecified character makes everything happen. They mean that this power does so only for ends that are of some earthly benefit, either to the victim of suffering or to others. That is why devotees of this saying are given to using it to offer consolation to the afflicted. But to do so merely crowns theological presumption with obtuseness toward human suffering. For whatever the human benefit might be for the sake of which God inflicts misfortune, in serious cases the victim would almost never accept the bargain if he or she had a choice in it. Moreover, if God, or whatever the great stage manager is supposed to be, makes everything happen for a reason, then it is difficult to forgive that party for effecting a good end by evil rather than by good means. If the invisible puppet master can, say, take away a couple’s child to teach them compassion (and if this does not seem a convincing example of this line of thought, some other equally puerile rubbish can be put in its place), surely he or she or it should be able to effect the same end without inflicting such tragedy upon people.

Gladstone concludes with these remarks:

I’m not saying all suffering is random and pointless, or that nothing good can ever come out of a bad situation, but the arrogance that comes from the belief that tragic events are always justified as part of a larger plan is just intolerable. I don’t know why bad things happen, but I do know that no one who throws this cliché around knows either. So to everyone keeping this miserable expression alive, please leave people to their misery and save your cliché for yourself the next time you’re walking in the woods and step into a bear trap after getting shot in the eye by a drunken hunter.

This paragraph might leave those who are given to saying “Everything happens for a reason” complacent in the opinion that they are doing no wrong as long as they refrain from offering that formula for the consolation of others. The declared subject of the article, after all, is “phrases that make you look [“look”? not “sound”?] like an idiot.” But the saying is to be despised on its own account, regardless of the social use to which it is put. It may be handy to have reasons for this summarized here.

(1) The saying is logically confused: it applies to mere happenings a form of expression that applies intelligibly only to intentional actions.

(2) By means of this logical confusion, it assumes the air of a truism, which it decidedly is not. To take it for a truism is foolish, and to offer it to others as a truism is chicanery.

(3) Its half-hidden meaning is that all mere happenings are effected by an inscrutable power for the sake of some benefit to those affected by those happenings. This is an extravagant presumption without foundation in any known facts. To assert it as fact is therefore a fatuous piece of self-conceit.

(4) It implies a theodicy according to which all suffering and misfortune is for the sake of a good that outweighs the evil. This trivializes all suffering and misfortune.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE

*Richard Dawkins, The God Illusion Delusion (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 51. (Thanks to Sarra for pointing out my error.)