Evangelical Christianity's Ugly Side Is Inseparable From Its Virtues

Nicholas Kristoff, in a column this past Saturday, summed up what liberals don't like about Evangelical Christianity, in the course of arguing that the negative stereotype isn't universal since there are nice evangelical Christians out there (like the late Reverend John Stott of Britain, and liberal evangelicals like Jim Wallis of Sojourners fame and Richard Cizik) who don't make headlines the way that the hellfire and brimstone, or prosperity gospel TV evangelists do.

This may be true, but his spot on summary of liberal distaste of the Evangelical Christian movement deserves restating for future reference:

In these polarized times, few words conjure as much distaste in liberal circles as “evangelical Christian.”

That’s partly because evangelicals came to be associated over the last 25 years with blowhard scolds. When the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson discussed on television whether the 9/11 attacks were God’s punishment on feminists, gays and secularists, God should have sued them for defamation.

Earlier, Mr. Falwell opined that AIDS was “God’s judgment on promiscuity.” That kind of religious smugness allowed the AIDS virus to spread and constituted a greater immorality than anything that occurred in gay bathhouses.

Partly because of such self-righteousness, the entire evangelical movement often has been pilloried among progressives as reactionary, myopic, anti-intellectual and, if anything, immoral. . . .

Centuries ago, serious religious study was extraordinarily demanding and rigorous; in contrast, anyone could declare himself a scientist and go in the business of, say, alchemy. These days, it’s the reverse. A Ph.D. in chemistry is a rigorous degree, while a preacher can explain the Bible on television without mastering Hebrew or Greek — or even showing interest in the nuances of the original texts.

Those self-appointed evangelical leaders come across as hypocrites, monetizing Jesus rather than emulating him. Some seem homophobic, and many who claim to be “pro-life” seem little concerned with human life post-uterus. Those are the preachers who won headlines and disdain.

While I am more than willing to acknowledge that there are social gospel preaching intellectuals like Stott, a British theological writer, who are simultaneously humanistic and Christian, it is inaccurate to call him an "evangelical Christian" in the sense of the term that describes the movement within American Christianity that took off in the American South during the Second Great Awakening, with its "distinctives" having only remote and cryptic connections to earlier movements in Christianity that has spread and mutated from there, as opposed to its generic meaning of someone who is a Christian and actively engages in the business of trying to convert others to the faith.

There is a case to be made that this narrow sense of Evangelical Christianity makes positive contributions to society and doesn't deserve the wholehearted distaste which Kristoff explains that the movement has worked hard to earn. But, attacking it from the point of figures like Stott, Wallis and Cizik, who are either not a part of that movement at all, even if religious people in that movement do read what they have to say at times, or who are on its fringes trying to reform it from its flaws from a position of underdog movement insurgents, is not a credible way to redeem this movement.

If one is to redeem (or at least understand the moral basis of) narrow sense Evangelical Christianity, one needs to look at the positive or at least culturally important contributions of core followers of the very same people, at that core of that movement, who generate such liberal outrage, not the critics at its fringe.

Evangelical Christianity does have upsides: their willingness to engage in prison ministries, their willingness to acknowledge that their communities are broken and need fixing, their willingness to include the poor and working class as a part of their community rather than objectifying them as outsiders, their commitment to trying to reform people, their ability to unify a Southern ethnic identity that doesn't show up on census forms in the face of a dominant Northern national elite culture, their ability to devote private sector charitable effort to addressing the problems of the Third World, and their commitment to the possibility of a hopeful future even in moments when individuals think that their lives have reached dead ends.

This movement is fundamentally reactionary, myopic, anti-intellectual and immoral. For this movement these are features, not flaws. This movement is also inherently and centrally willing to include and support those who are down on their luck if those people submit to their broader cultural agenda. The two sides of the movement's agenda are mutually reinforcing and inseparable parts of what it means to be an Evangelical Christian in the narrow sense of that term.

Their stubborn, fact-blind righteousness is part and parcel of their unwavering attitude of hopefulness and acceptance of the inevitability of divine providence. Their anti-intellectual orientation is part of what puts this religious movement in a comfort zone for those who are themselves ill educated. One can't unify a cohort of people who as a matter of core ethnic identity refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the North's victory in the Civil War if you are aren't reactionary.

Evangelical Christianity offers a port in the storm for losers of many shades and stripes that more mainstream Christianity does not. Mainstream Christianity is more open to letting a depressing (for the core constituency of Evangelical Christianity) reality in, mainstream Christianity accepts the authority of intellectuals who necessarily have profound cultural distance from working class flocks as their leaders, and mainstream Christianity is more insistent upon the importance of not sinning in the first place relativite to the importance of never ending forgiveness without regard to culpability than the average self-identified Evangelical Christian knows how to manage. In a world of ugly people, a taboo against mirrors can seem attractive; Evangelical Christianity offers such a world.

If liberals want to make inroads into the people who make up the core of the Evangelical Christian movement, which is closely identified with, although not 100% identical to, the core of the American political conservative movement exemplified in the Tea Party movement and core of the Republican party, it will not suffice to embrace and encourage people who self-identify as Evangelical Christians but operate from outside or at the fringes of that movement.

Instead, liberals have to offer an alternative that can provide an authentic core identity and belief system that works for people who are uneducated and regularly down on their luck who need abundant forgiveness for their psychological well being because they can't figure out how to keep from sinning on a regular basis. They need an alternative that can maintain an unrelenting campaign of calling attention to the failures in their community that need fixing without raising the hackles that outside criticism does, who keep trying even though there is no source of relief in sight. They need to provide people with a worldview that can give them hope in the face of a lack of possibility. They need to offer some filter that can allow these people to make sense of a world that confuses them because they have their feet planted firmly in the past. These people have deep spiritual needs and neither mainstream Christianity nor secular philosophy are doing a good job of serving their needs.

If liberals can solve that riddle to meet those needs, or can change the world in a way so that a critical mass of people no longer need these things, Evangelical Christianity will wither away. Until then, liberals are fighting fire with paper. Every now and then it can smoother a hot spot that is getting out of control, but their own efforts to fight it also fuel the fire.

I suspect that if an alternative is found, it is as likely as not to be something other than mainstream Christianity. For example, Americanized Islam came close to leaping into that role under the leadership of Malcolm X for African-Americans. Mormons, while in many respects a part of the Evangelical Christian movement, similarly offer a different enough community and theological model to offer a genuine alternative to the traditional Evangelical Christian model, even though they do not completely break from that mold. It would likewise be unsurprising to seem some sort of innovation along these lines emerge from the non-denominational megachurch movement. Or, it could be something entirely different. But, until an alternative comes along, Evangelical Christianity, as pernicious as it is, will have staying power because it addresses needs that other movements do not for tens of millions of Americans.

READ MORE - Evangelical Christianity's Ugly Side Is Inseparable From Its Virtues

Planet GOP

What motivates people like 11 Colorado State Senators (almost the entire GOP caucus in the State Senate): Kent Lambert, Bill Cadman, Scott Renfroe, Mark Scheffel, Keith and Steve King, Nancy Spence, Kevin Grantham, Ted Harvey, Mike Kopp, and Kevin Lundberg, to sponsor "Birther" legislation? (In fairness, the legislation proposed, which is prospective, does not itself on its face question the legitimacy of President Obama's current tenure in office.)

What makes Republicans like Scott Gessler, our Secretary of State, convinced that there are massive numbers of illegal immigrants voting our elections, in the absence of evidence that this is happening (or does he really believe it)?

What drives Republicans like Retired General William Boykin to forward an agenda arguing that Islam is Satanic and shouldn't be included in the freedom of religion?

Why do so many Republicans support succession? Why do so many think contrary to the historical fact, that the Founders were evangelical Christians trying to create a Christian nation?

Why do so many Republicans think it is O.K. to pass laws that are clearly unconstitutional either because they violate the Supremacy clause and assert a state right to disregard binding federal law, or because they violate well established precedents like Roe v. Wade?

Why do so many Republicans claim that President Obama is a Muslim? If one wanted to sully the President's religious credentials, surely the claim that he was a closet atheist, given his adult conversion to Christianity after a secular youth would have been more plausible and atheists are almost as despised by Americans as Muslims in public opinion polls.

How did the Republican party manage to secure a lock on the crazy absurd positions and ideas so fervantly opposed to our constitutional traditions, while claiming a banner of greater patriotism?

Really, factually incredible claims simply don't have the same political currency in the Democratic party that some factually incredible claims do in Republican circles. Really, the Democratic party is far more comfortable with the framework established by mainstream constitutional law than Republicans. Even when Democrats disagree with authoritative interpretations of the constitution in areas such as corporate free speech rights in political debates, they generally don't argue that their view is the absolute law which other parts of the political system are free to ignore. Republicans, in contrast, seem to delight in proclaiming a fantasy constitution to be the real one.

Democrats live with a world view that is bounded by a sense of legal and factual reality; an important subset of Republicans seem entirely divorced from both.

It is hard to hope for politics based on a reasoned search for the truth when a significant share seem to be delusional in many cases. How does one build common political ground with people who don't seem to be playing by the same rules?

Not all Republicans, especially among the rank and file in professional and managerial ranks in America fit this stereotype. But, a surprisingly large number do seem to be a fit for it.

What is going on? Is this really a stable ideology, or a case where a small, tightly disciplined cadre of of extremists have taken hold? For how many are these beliefs sincere and heartfelt, and for how many is this calculated hypocricy and stagemanship?

I know some of the outlines of where some of these ideas have roots in intellectual history, their political roots, and the origins of the political identity of people who now identify as the conservative Republican right wing. But, that doesn't make it seem any less bizzare when I encounter it. How did ideas from Glen Beck recycled from a John Bircher political philosopher gain such much currency with so many people? Why was the intellectual environment so fertile for these ideas? How did right wing media and mainstream media (there scarcely is any truly left wing media) become so disconnected from each other? Why has the outcome of the Civil War been so hard for so many to accept a century and a half later?

Europeans aren't rushing to talk radio stations proclaiming that the monarchies deposed in the 1870s are still the legitimate governments of their countries today and winning majority support in polls of members of major political parties. Why are an important subset of Americans engaged in the same exercise?

Why are Tea Party members so angry at government's existence and operations? Does it make any sense for what is at its roots, as the name suggests, an anti-tax party, to be thriving at a point when taxes are already at sixty year lows?

Why is the public so succeptible to mass political hysteria? Is there something in the political process that is encouraging this kind of sentiment? Or, is this kind of sentiment inextricably intertwined with democracy itself? What does it take to make the masses see crazy talk for what it is?

READ MORE - Planet GOP

The Intellectual History of the Court Jester Hypothesis in Evolution

Where did the term "the Court Jester Hypothesis" in evolutionary theory come from?

The "Court Jester hypothesis" terminology is a reaction and intended counterpart to the Red Queen hypothesis in evolutionary theory.

The Red Queen hypothesis is a term coined by Leigh Van Valen in 1973 in a reference to the Lewis Carroll book "Through the Looking Glass," and refers in evolution theory to the arms race of evolutionary developments and counter-developments that cause co-evolving species to mutually drive each other to adapt.  There is dispute over how strongly evolution at the scale of speciation is driven by these competition between species, and how much it is driven instead by abiotic factors like meteor strikes and climate change.  But, there has been an artful metaphor to capture this distinction until recently.  As recently as 1985, the main alternative to the Red Queen hypothesis was called the "stability hypothesis" (coined by Stenseth and Maynard Smith in 1984).

These days, however, a number of researchers in evolution (such as Anthony Barnowsky, M.J. Benton, Thomas Ezard, Sergey Gravilets, and the team of J.B.C. Jackson and Douglas Erwin) have started to advance the term "Court Jester hypothesis" to describe the view that evolution at a macro scale is driven by abiotic factors more than the biotic competition called the Red Queen hypothesis.

The first reference that I can find in the literature to the "Court Jester" hypothesis, a term specifically coined in reference to the Red Queen hypothesis is in Anthony D. Barnosky, "Does evolution dance to the Red Queen or the Court Jester?", 3 Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology USA (1999). In a 2001 paper on the subject ("Distinguishing The Effects Of The Red Queen And Court Jester On Miocene Mammal Evolution In The Northern Rocky Mountains"), Barnosky uses the term without citation, suggesting that he is the one who coined it. Westfall and Millar attribute the term to him (citing the 2001 paper) in a paper of their own from 2004.  Benton also credits Barnosky with coining the phrase in a 2010 paper on the origins of biodiversity on land.

The Court Jester hypothesis builds upon the punctuated equalibrium theory of Gould (1972) by providing a primary mechanism for it. Table 1 in the 2001 paper by Barnosky appropriates for the Court Jester side of the debate the Stability hypothesis, Vrba's Habitat Theory (1992), Vrba's Turn-over pulse hypothesis (1985), Vrba's Traffic light hypothesis and Relay Model (1995), Gould's Tiers of Time (1985), Brett and Baird's Coordinated Statis (1995), and Graham and Lundelius' Coevolutionary Disequalibrium (184) theories. Give the profoundly not catchy quality of these earlier theories, it isn't hard to understand why the term "the Court Jester hypothesis" has had more staying power in the literature.

The 2001 paper, alas, does not spell out the metaphor underlying the "Court Jester" terminology and the 1999 presentation that apparently introduced the metaphor isn't easily available on line in full text. In the 2001 paper Barnosky states that the debate is over:

[W]hether this march of morphology and species compositions through time, so well documented not only for mammals but throughout the fossil record, is more strongly influenced by interactions among species (Red Queen hypotheses), or by random perturbations to the physical environment such as climate change, tectonic events, or even bolide impacts that change the ground rules for the biota (Court Jester hypotheses). . . . A class of alternative ideas, here termed Court Jester hypotheses, share the basic tenet that changes in the physical environment rather than biotic interactions themselves are the initiators of major changes in organisms and ecosystems. Some of the more prominent ideas are listed in Table 1. Court Jester hypotheses imply that events random in respect to the biota occasionally change the rules on the biotic playing field. Accelerated biotic response (relative to background rates) is the result.

Despite the fact that the Court Jester metaphor is coined in reference to the Red Queen hypothesis, the Jester reference, metaphorically, is not a direct reference to Through The Looking Glass, the Lewis Carroll book from which the Red Queen metaphor is derived, or the other Lewis Carroll book about Alice, Alice in Wonderland. There is no Court Jester in either book.

The best metaphorical sense I can find for the term is that it plays on the notion of both a Queen and a Jester being part of a royal court, and that is uses the term, "Court Jester" in the sense of its meaning in the Tarot, where the Court Jester is the symbol of death triumphing over all:

In Tarot, "The Fool" is the first card of the Major Arcana. The tarot depiction of the Fool includes a man (or less often, a woman) juggling unconcernedly or otherwise distracted, with a dog (sometimes cat) at his heels. The fool is in the act of unknowingly walking off the edge of a cliff, precipice or other high place. Another Tarot character is Death. In the Middle Ages, Death is often shown in Jester's garb because "The last laugh is reserved for death." Also, Death humbles everyone just as jesters make fun of everyone regardless of standing.

Alternately, the Court Jester terminology may be a metaphorical reference to the Joker card in a deck of cards that can upset the settled order, or alternatively a reference to the related notion that a Court Jester is a disinterested player that has no stake or interests in the impact of his actions on any of the competing parties (since this theory posits a natural, abiotic cause). As Wikipedia explains:

The position of the Joker playing card, as a wild card which has no fixed place in the hierarchy of King, Queen, Knave, etc. might be a remnant of the position of the court jester. This lack of any place in the hierarchy meant Kings could trust the counsel of the jesters, as they had no vested interest in any region, estate or church.

Barnowsky acknowledges in the 2001 paper that the Court Jester hypothesis is not necessary inconsistent with the Red Queen hypothesis: "Indeed, as Ned Johnson remarked (after listening to a lecture expressing these ideas), ‘‘Maybe it is time for the Court Jester to marry the Red Queen.’’ That is, perhaps the dichotomy between the two hypotheses is really a dichotomy of scale, and that as we look for ways to travel across biological levels, we will find ways to resolve the dichotomies."

Footnote: Other Notable Evolutionary Theory Names

Not wanting to miss out on the fun, Bradshaw and Brook in 2009 dubbed a similar notion the "Chronus hypothesis" in opposition to the existing Gaia hypothesis, coined by James Lovelock in 1965 (personifying the collective biosphere of Earth as a single being named after the Greek "mother earth"), which more or less corresponds to the "stability hypothesis" of macroevolution, as it sees the Earth's ecosystem as fundamentally stable, while also acknowledging the similar previously advanced "Media hypothesis" of Peter Ward which argues that life itself carries a self-destructive seed within it that sooner or later manifests catastrophically. The Chronus hypothesis article lays out those metaphors:

Cronus (Κρόνος) was the patricidal (or patri-emasculating) youngest son of Gaia, the Earth mother. Cronus was also the leader of the first generation of Titans, the giant descendants of Gaia and Uranus, the sky father. Cronus was incited by his mother to kill Uranus for perceived crimes against Gaia's other descendants, and Cronus himself was overthrown by his own son, Zeus, and banished to Hades (Atsma 2009). Given the tumultuous and competitive life-and-death history of Cronus, we believe this metaphor better captures the processes of inter-species competition and mutualisms that our population analogy of speciation and extinction embodies. Under the Gaia model, self-regulation works to avoid extinction because it is akin to the loss of a body part (function is reduced), whereas under Cronus, extinction is part of the process of natural selection (providing restoration of function through subsequent diversification). . . .

[T]he sorceress Medea (Μήδεια) was the granddaughter of Helios the sun god and wife to Jason of the Argonauts who later killed her own sons as revenge for Jason's unfaithfulness (Atsma 2009). Instead of the self-regulating super-organism Gaia, Ward describes the Earth's mass extinctions as Medean events – large biodiversity loss driven by life itself (Ward 2009a). Arguing that the Gaia hypothesis cannot account for large shifts in the Earth's temperature over geological time, Medea describes how the massive flux of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane by the processes of plant, microbial and animal respiration was the very cause of such volatile conditions which lead to (at least some) mass extinctions (Ward 2009a,b). In essence, the Medean perspective describes a self-destructive, or anti-order component where life "seeks" to destroy itself, and it can do so on a massive scale due to amplifying feedbacks under certain circumstances (Ward 2009a,b). Modern human society might eventually merit the Medean soubriquet.

(This post was originally a comment at Razib's blog who alerted me to the existence of the term.)

READ MORE - The Intellectual History of the Court Jester Hypothesis in Evolution

Really Big Love and Bunhill Fields

Ziona Chana, a 66-year-old man in India's remote northeast who has 39 wives, 94 children and 33 grandchildren -- and wouldn't mind having more. They all live in a four storied building with 100 rooms in a mountainous village in Mizoram state, sharing borders with Myanmar and Bangladesh, media reports said. "I once married 10 women in one year," he was quoted as saying.

His wives share a dormitory near Ziona's private bedroom and locals said he likes to have seven or eight of them by his side at all times. The sons and their wives, and all their children, live in different rooms in the same building, but share a common kitchen.

The wives take turns cooking, while his daughters clean the house and do washing. The men do outdoor jobs like farming and taking care of livestock. . . . They are supported by their own resources and occasional donations from followers.

From here.

The man leads a Christian polygamous sect (called "Chana Pawl" after the patriarch's late father) founded in 1942 with about four hundred families as members in a single village, "this industrious group manufactures wooden furniture and aluminium utensils."

A brief historical account of the Chana puts it in the context of the "fact that it took barely 50 years for the entire Mizo community to embrace Christianity, then a totally alien religion, [which] has been attributed to the revival movements. . . . The first European missionaries arrived at Aizawl (then Aijal) in 1894, and 12 years later, revival movements effecting mass conversions started. Wave upon wave of revival swept the land until the entire Mizo community abandoned its old religion, animism, for the new religion, Christianity before the end of World War II." Mizoram State is about 95% Christian (Wikipedia puts the figure at 90.5% based on a 2001 census), and the vast majority are adherents of more traditional forms of the Christian faith, predominantly as part of Presybeterian denominations. It was granted statehood in 1986, twenty years after an armed insurgency movement began there. Another sect that arose in the same period consists of people who moved to the jungle and stopped wearing clothes. The revival movement also gave rise to a Jewish sect known as "Bnei Manashe" which has now mostly migrated to Israel.

Islam limits a man to four wives and has canons of interpretation that discourage the practice on the grounds that the fairness to all wives demanded by Islamic law is difficult to manage, although serial polygamy can circumvent this limit to some extent. The limit in Islam was a reform from prior law that permitted more spouses.

The Hebrew Bible, in contrast, has numerous examples of polygamy, some of which involve political leaders with more than four wives, and neither the Christian Old Testament nor the Christian New Testament expressly prohibit polygamy (Reformation figure Martin Luther once wrote a letter privately acknowledging this in a case involving a minor European aristocrat, which his solus scriptura stance caused him to acknowledge was permitted).

Of course, Christian tradition from early on, in part due to the preachings of early church fathers such as Saint Augustine, Basil of Caesarea, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian, has generally strongly disfavored polygamy in practice (with notable exceptions such as the early Mormons and some European Anabaptists). And, while polygamy has been banned by the main denomination of the Church of Latter Day Saints for more than a century and by Utah State law (as a condition imposed for it to receive statehood status), it has been quietly tolerated in communities like Hinsdale that are an open secret, and quietly practiced on a smaller scale in suburban Utah with only rare interruptions (usually for offenses other than polygamy itself) more of less continuously since it was legally banned.

I suspect, but do not know, that this arrangement in India is made possible legally by the facet of private law in India that assigns certain domains of the law, such as marriage, divorce and inheritance in same religion couples to religious authorities rather than secular legislatures and courts (a secular legal regime applies to mixed faith families):

Indian family law is complex, with each religion having its own specific laws which they adhere to. In most states, registering of marriages and divorces is not compulsory. There are separate laws governing Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and followers of other religions. The exception to this rule is in the state of Goa, where a Portuguese uniform civil code is in place, in which all religions have a common law regarding marriages, divorces and adoption.

The practice in India actually has roots in the laws of its British colonial rulers, and is rooted in the same freedom of religion concepts that developed into the First Amendment in the United States in a somewhat different manner at around the same time. "This system of distinct laws for each religion began during the British Raj when Warren Hastings in 1772 created provisions prescribing Hindu law for Hindus and Islamic law for Muslims, for litigation relating to personal matters." This was a natural concept for him because at that point in English history, marriage, divorce and inheritance of personal property (although not real estate) were governed by the clergy under canon law, rather than common law courts:

In the Church of England, the ecclesiastical courts that formerly decided many matters such as disputes relating to marriage, divorce, wills, and defamation, still have jurisdiction of certain church-related matters (e.g., discipline of clergy, alteration of church property, and issues related to churchyards).

Their separate status dates back to the 12th century when the Normans split them off from the mixed secular/religious county and local courts used by the Saxons. In contrast to the other courts of England the law used in ecclesiastical matters is at least partially a civil law system, not common law, although heavily governed by parliamentary statutes.

Since the Reformation, ecclesiastical courts in England have been royal courts. . . . practitioners in the ecclesiastical courts were trained in civil law, receiving a Doctor of Civil Law (D.C.L.) degree from Oxford, or an LL.D. from Cambridge. Such lawyers (called "doctors" and "civilians") were centred at "Doctors Commons", a few streets south of St Paul's Cathedral in London, where they monopolized probate, matrimonial, and admiralty cases until their jurisdiction was removed to the common law courts in the mid-19th century. (Admiralty law was also based on civil law instead of common law, thus was handled by the civilians too.)

At the time Hastings made his decree, for example, cemetaries were also segregated by faith under applicable English law, with dissenting religions tolerated, but restricted to cemetaries such as the famous Bunhill Fields that was active at the time (and was elevated to the highest level of historical preservation in England on a par with sites like Number 10 Downing Street, this week as a legacy of the path taken by the British towards religious toleration) despite the fact that it had and continues to have an established chruch, the Anglican Church (prior to the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church). Notable residents of Bunhill Fields, who would have been subject to persecution and punishment similar to that of political prisoners in authoritarian regimes today in most countries outside England included:

•William Blake (1757-1827), poet, and his wife Catherine (1762-1831)
•John Owen (1616-83), Congregational minister
•Susanna Wesley (1669-1742), mother of John and Charles Wesley
•Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), author of Robinson Crusoe
•John Bunyan (1628-1688), author of The Pilgrim's Progress - his elaborate tomb includes an effigy of Bunyan and bas-reliefs of scenes from his great allegory
•Isaac Watts (1674-1748), hymnwriter
•George Fox (1624-1691), founder of the Society of Friends (Quakers) - in the Quaker Gardens, next to the Bunhill Fields Meeting House

Of course, if you weren't a King, the scope of matrimonial law at the time was pretty meager. For the most part, it consisted of granting women "separation from bed and board" in particularly dire cases (legal separations still exist today, I've litigated them, but are now chosen by parties due primarily to religious beliefs rather than because divorce in unavailable as an option for lack of proof of fault). Divorces were about as common as death row pardons are today, they happened, but were highly exceptional. Unlike the inheritance laws for real estate, in which the most senior male heir received everything in order to prevent the fragmentation of the estate, personal property inheritance in canon law was similar to that under modern inheritance laws that divided it amongst all of a person's closest living descendants.

READ MORE - Really Big Love and Bunhill Fields

Schizophrenia genes may make you a better date

Schizophrenia is associated with lower fertility, is not associated with increased family fertility, is highly heritable, and have a stable prevalence. Normally, genes that have strong negative effects, particularly associated with low fertility rates, are selected against and disappear from the gene pool. Why doesn't that happen in schizophrenia?

The Dating Advantage Theory

A new study argues that the same genes the increase schizophrenia risk also make you a more attractive person to date and mate. For example, those genes, when expressed in the general population at levels insufficient to lead to clinically diagnosed schizophrenia may enhance courtship related traits such as "creativity, emotional sensitivity, and expressiveness."

(The study is Del Giudice M (2010) Reduced Fertility in Patients' Families Is Consistent with the Sexual Selection Model of Schizophrenia and Schizotypy. PLoS ONE 5(12): e16040. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016040).

As the article explains, one theory is that:

Schizotypy [i.e. genes that predispose a person to schizophrenia] . . . act[s] as an “amplifier” of individual differences in genetic fitness and condition: high-schizotypy individuals would be more likely to achieve outstanding mating success when they have high genetic fitness and/or grow up in good environmental conditions, but also more likely to develop schizophrenia (and to suffer reduced mating success) when they have low genetic fitness and/or grow up in poor conditions. Thus, schizotypy itself can be sexually selected, possibly more strongly so in populations characterized by high levels of mating competition and short-term mating patterns, where displays of good genetic quality are more critical to successful courtship [than traits associated with success in a long term committed couple relationship].

In other words, schizophrenia related genes may be particularly adaptive in societies with "love marriage" as opposed to arranged marriage, because traits that pre-dispose you to schizophrenia also make you someone who is fun to date. The fact that schizophrenia generally manifests clearly only towards the end of puberty or early young adulthood, also suggests that full blown schizophrenia may often be invisible until after marriage in societies that do not, as modern American societies do, favor historically late ages at first marriage. In other words, if a typical couple gets engaged in their late teens, the most negative aspects of schitzotypy are more likely to be invisible.

This analysis generalizes a similar evolutionary explanation for the persistence of bipolar disorder, which presents similar evolutionary issues to schizophrenia, and is also very common in individuals with extraordinary creative output, a trait that is considered fitness enhancing, at least in modest frequencies, in a society. There is some anecdotal evidence points out, for example, in the graphic novel history of modern mathematics found in Logicomix that there may be a similar association between schizophrenia and extraordinary output in mathematics and logic.

The Undercounted Descendants Theory

The study also hypothesizes that schizophrenics, particularly men, may be more likely to have unacknowledged children outside of marriage, artificially suppressing their measured fertility rates: "This is not an unlikely possibility, given that schizotypal personality traits specifically predict increased engagement in short-term mating and casual sex." This hypothesis, which is powerful in traditional societies, may have less force in societies where contraception is widely used and effective in these kinds of relationships.

The greater fertility impact in men than in women, however, may also be explained by the fact that schizophrenia is more likely to manifest before men have had children (because men have an earlier onset on average, and later peak reproductive years than women) than it is to manifest before women have had children.

Limits Of The Methodology

The study is primarily simply an exposition of a mathematical model that shows that the explanation proposed would be sufficient to explain the survival of genes associated with schizophrenia with mating advantage effects that are within a range that is plausible, without actually measuring if those advantages really exist. But, it has considerable force, despite its modest empirical grounding, because it is hard to find another explanation that could explain the facts that are observed. If the model proposed in this paper is wrong, one has to find some other model of how a strongly hereditary trait that is strongly selected against in many respects has remained stable in population frequency.

Persistent, fitness reducing genetic traits very frequently have an aspect that is fitness enhancing, or was at some time in the past. The sickle cell anemia gene, which is also connected to malaria resistance is the most commonly cited example of this kind of trait, but many strongly hereditary fitness reducing conditions share that feature. A more recent example (details behind pay wall) that is largely speculative at this point, is the hypothesis that a key breast cancer risk gene (BRCA1) may also enhance intelligence, and that the cancer risks and cognitive benefits may both relate to the production of connective tissue proteins. The problem with this model in the case of schizophrenia, however, is that almost all of the genetic conditions of this type known so far have simple, single gene Mendelian inheritance patterns, something that is not what is behind the strongly hereditary component of schizophrenia. Extensive research directed at the genetics of schizophrenia have pretty much ruled out such a simple cause, and it is much harder to develop a "some mutations good, many mutations bad" scenario in a more complicated genetic model. I am not aware of any hereditary condition that has been definitively established as having that kind of phenotype structure.

Breast cancer risk genes, like schizophrenia risk genes, are also notable in manifesting relatively late in life, which reduces their selective impact. "Schizophrenia occurs equally in males and females, although typically appears earlier in men—the peak ages of onset are 20–28 years for males and 26–32 years for females. Onset in childhood is much rarer, as is onset in middle- or old age."

Keep in mind that life expectancy in the Roman Empire (and much of the period before it and after it) was twenty to thirty years, and that historically people had children young, so conditions that first have negative fitness effects when you are in your later teens or early twenties, or later, have had only slight selective effects until the last dozen or so generations or less, in the West, and for half a dozen generations or so in much of the rest of the world. So both breast cancer risk genes and schizophrenia risk genes may have had far less of an impact of evolutionary fitness for 99%+ of their existence in the human genome.

Probably the weakest piece of the model is the significance attached to environmental impacts on the likelihood that schizophrenia will manifest, which seems to be quite low empirically.

A Mutation Model

Perhaps the best alternative explanation to those suggested in the study would be a model similar to that advanced for autism (where that evidence seems to suggest that a majority of all cases may be first generation mutations attributable to advanced parental age; many kinds of mental retardation are also due primarily to "first generation" mutations), which sees the condition as being a product of many different kinds of common mutations that all have the same phenotypic effect (perhaps because they all interrupt the same delicate neurological system). Thus, there may be enough "first generation" schizophrenics to make up for a deficit in schizophrenic children of schizophrenics. The main pieces of evidence supporting this as part of the explanation are the facts that schizophrenia, like autism, is associated with advanced paternal age probably due to the increased frequency of new mutations in children of older fathers, and that both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and autism seem to be associated more closely with the total number of atypical mutations (or subtypes of atypical mutations) in a person's genome than with any one mutation in a particular disease that accounts for a large share of all cases individually.

Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism may all be the "fevers" of mental health. In other words, they may be common observable symptoms because a multitude of underlying causes all disrupt the delicate system that causes each symptom (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism and fever respectively) to manifest.

As long as mutation rates among parents in the general population are high enough to make up for deficits in fertility in schizophrenics (which may be smaller than reported due to unacknowledged children of schizophrenic men who have lower fertility rates than schizophrenic women), schizophrenia can persist in the population at a steady prevalence despite being selected against.

The Theories Are Mutually Compatible And Avenues For Further Investigation

Of course, all three of these theories are compatible with each other. The larger the proportion of "first generation schizophrenics" (something that should be possible to estimate with reasonable accuracy from the strength of the paternal age-schizophrenia relationship), and the larger the number of unacknowledged children that men with schizophrenia are having (which might be best estimated as a percentage in excess of the percentage of unacknowledged children in the general population for which there is better empirical data with the percentage estimated by surveyed extramarital sex frequency of schizophrenic men relative to that of a control group), the less pressure there is on courtship trait advantages conferred by subclinical schitzotypy to have to be large and on subclinicial schitzotypy to be common in the general population (a frequency that can be estimated from the share of diagnosed schizophrenics with a family history of schizophrenia and that is, given the literature, probably quite low but non-zero) to explain the condition's evolutionary persistence.

Similarly, if it takes multiple mutations to create symptomatic schizophrenia, and a significant share of schitzotypy genes are "first generation", it is quite plausible that there is a significant rate of subclinical schitzotypy in the general population, which produces descendants who inherit a combination of schitzotypy genes that produce clinical schitzophrenia. One way to test this hypothesis would be to look not merely at advanced parental age as a risk factor, but also to examine advanced male grandparental age as a risk factor. A new mutation accumulation model with a threshold number of mutations required for an individual to be symptomatic would be supported and could be quantified at an order of magnitude level to the extent that advanced male grandparental age was a factor independent of advanced parental age. A study of advanced male grandparental age, of course, has the virtue of being something that can be cheaply, unobtrusively, and accurately determined from participants in existing studies.

Neurodiversity Implications

The "courtship advantage" model proposed in this study for schitzotypy genes, like the studies showing creativity advantages for sufferers of bipolar disorders, and analysis showing benefits in modern society from traits associated with the autism spectrum disorder all point to the importance of a neurodiversity model for thinking about human hereditiary cognitive differences.

If human hereditary cognitive differences are classified as flaws or diseases on one hand, and as enhancements on the other, there is a strong incentive for society and individual decision-makers to use eugenic approaches and gene therapy to wipe out the flaws from the human genome. But, if we recognize that some of the flaws are inseparable from cognitive traits that have value at some frequency (even if it is a low frequency) in our society, then efforts to wipe out genetic "flaws" in the population in the interest of improving mankind should be viewed with far greater skepticism.

READ MORE - Schizophrenia genes may make you a better date

Bullying and Cyber Bullying

A few notable facts about bullying and cyber bullying:

1. "[A]s few as 10 percent of bullying victims are cyber-bullied. Meanwhile, a study of fifth, eighth and 11th graders in Colorado that same year found that they were more likely to be bullied verbally or physically than online." About a quarter of all kids are bullied in the old fashioned meatspace way.

2. Most bullies learn to be bullies from experience as victims themselves: "72 percent of children who were physically abused by their parents became a bully, a victim of a bully or both." Most bullies are both victims and perpetrators, as are many victims of bullying, although generally not both in the same relationship.

3. "[N]early 50 percent of American workers have experienced or witnessed bullying in the workplace, . . . 80 percent of workplace bullying is legal - and and 72 percent of bullies outrank their targets."

4. Bullying may trigger suicide, but generally this happens in cases where the victims were already at grave risk for suicide from other factors.

5. Active efforts to control bullying can significantly reduce it, but probably not eliminate it.

Has Feminism Narrowed Our Understanding Of Bullying?

The article cited doesn't discuss it, but one way to conceptualize both domestic violence and child abuse is as a cycle of bullying behavior that encompasses all of the domains of work, home and school.

Japanese culture is quite sensitive to the existence of bullying as a problem at both work and in school, and sometimes spanning over into the home. Whether that is because it is more common there, or because it is conceptualized that way is hard to tell.

American cultural responses to bullying type behavior through sexual harassment and domestic violence lenses, a gender specific way of thinking that may go all the way back intellectually to 19th century culture of honor concepts, while effective in the domains targeted, may be preventing Americans from seeing the issue in a holistic way, or from a mental health as well as a criminal justice and private litigation perspective.

Bullying Compared To Gang Violence

Another, overlapping but not identical area, where there is a large overlap between the class of likely perpetrators and the class of likely victims is gang violence, which is probably the most variable component of the violent crime rate in the United States, rising and falling much more than other kinds of violent crime (e.g. impulsive assaults by people with drinking problems or domestic violence).

The insularity of gang violence is one of the reasons it is not addressed more assertively by the criminal justice system. Sorting out honor among thieves isn't easy for law enforcement to do.

A very large share of all murders and firearm assaults, and even even larger share of all murders and firearm assaults during periods when murder rates are high (particularly the subset of unsolved murders) appear to involve violence related to gang membership perpetrated with other gangs or member's of one's own gang as targets (and other victims being mere bystanders caught in the crossfire). The motives for gang violence include vigilante justice, establishment of territory, opportunistic raiding for loot, suppressing criminal justice system involvement, and reputation building to prevent further challenges to gang authority.

Much of this violence can be conceptualized as social, rather than psychological in origin, like the violent acts carried out by soldiers in furtherance of a sovereign's direction, although it is also true that a disproportionate share of gang violence appears to be carried out by the minority subset of gang members with mental health factors, some hereditary, that particularly predispose them to it.

Indeed, one can see gang violence as an apolitical version of terrorism. Terrorism is socially organized and motivated violence committed by non-governmental groups with political ends. Gang violence is committed by semi-sovereign non-governmental groups that don't aspire to genuine sovereignty seeing the legitimate government as too daunting to overcome outside their narrow space of organized criminal activities carried out for profit and personal safety.

Conceiving of gang violence as a fundamentally social activity provides insight into what will and will not work in the criminal justice system to reduce violent crime associated with gang violence. On one hand, a "sociopath" (i.e. someone who engages in anti-social behavior because it is acceptable or even required within the norms of his social context) may be redeemable in a way that a "psychopath" (i.e. something who is congenitally without a conscience psychologically), may not be. Governor Ritter's pardon of Reverend Kelly in December was an example of that kind of redemption being accomplished in real life. On the other hand, incarceration that is draconian relative to personal culpability (e.g. in the case of felony murder sentences) may work because they disrupt the social entities (gangs) that drive members to act in sociopathic ways.

If one is looking at social context, rather than individual culpability, as being the key to suppressing gangs, the natural next step is to consider non-traditional sentencing options and penal management methods that can disrupt gangs and put convicted gang members into a new social context with mainstream norms, without expensive overkill use of incarceration. The dynamics involved (and their intractability) are explored, for example, in "The Good Girl's Guide To Getting Kidnapped" (2010) by Yxta Maya Murray (who is also a law professor), in which a young woman with deep ties of Los Angeles gang life struggles between success in that context and success in the contexts of the middle class establishment. It is a young adult book that pulls no punches and is assiduously committed to showing rather than telling, and leaving morals open ended rather than resolving the issues.

Addressing the motivations of gang violence in sentencing in a way conscious of its social context, through the criminal justice system, which usually defines crime in the context of isolated individuals without much thought to context, may also be the key to really making progress in addressing racism in the criminal justice system, as a large share of all disproportionate involvement of racial minorities in the criminal justice system in related to gang affiliated crime. Indeed, given the ubiquity of gang related crime in high poverty minority communities, one of the big crimological and sociological question may be not "why do high poverty minority communities have so much criminal gang activity?," but "why do high poverty Anglo communities seem to lack significant criminal gang activity?" Criminal gangs, of couse, used to be common in immigrant communities in the United States, particularly those involving Catholic immigrants in the 19th century, but that American mafia is almost gone now and while there are exceptions, this does seem to be the case.

READ MORE - Bullying and Cyber Bullying

Color and Language

What could be more fundamental than primary colors? You learn them in pre-school. Almost everyone on Earth (apart from the colorblind) has three different kinds of cone cells which analyze photon wave length (it actually takes three or four photons for a cell in your eye to register) and communicates that color to your brain.

But, for all practical purposes, photon wave length is a continuous property. To communicate we must assign words to ranges of photon wave length. And, it turns out, there is not a universal way to translate the photon frequencies that our eyes see into words. One of the more notable examples is that not all languages have separate primary color words for blue and green.

Neither Basque, nor the Celtic and Scandinavian languages made that distinction until in archaic texts although it exists now, and some of those languages divide the blue-green colors at the boundary between blue and green linguistically into primary colors in a different way. Russian, Italian and Hebrew all have three primary colors in the part of the color spectrum that English allocates to blue and green. Many African languages, and archaic forms of East Asian languages do not have a single primary color word that includes blue and green in the same color.

The process of distinguishing more kinds of colors linguistically does tend to follow a common pattern in the great majority of languages, however. Languages tend to distinguish blue from green before they distinguish red from pink, for example. Also, it appears that languages tend to gravitate towards making more rather than fewer primary color distinctions over time, and that finer color distinction seems to be a frequently linguistically borrowed language feature.

The examples above are not random. One point that they illustrate is the fact that there are a wide variety of different patterns of color naming even between relatively closely related language families in the European branch of the Indo-European languages. Two of the most closely related Indo-European language families, for example, are the Celtic languages and the Italic languages, which share many isoglosses (i.e. they share the same linguistic feature in areas where related languages can be grouped into two or more categories based on their linguistic features). Yet, Celtic languages and Italic languages, which probably started to diverge from each other linguistically in the Iron Age (i.e. after 1200 BCE), have different words for describing colors.

This in notable because commonly used, simple words of the kinds one learns in pre-school tend to be the least prone to random linguistic drift or evolution. The less often a word is used, the more likely it is the evolve over time. In the Indo-European languages, for example, the root words for core simple vocabulary tend to be much more likely to match proto-Indo-European terms than advanced words that are used less frequently. Yet, primary color words are very common and used frequently.

READ MORE - Color and Language

The Next Bell Curve

New discoveries in genetics are forcing us to revisit issues of nationalism, race, cultural differences, eugenics, national genetic fitness and more that surged in the 19th century with tragic political consequences, based on weak science.

The Intellectual Repurcussions of the Bell Curve

The most prominent recent echo of this old set of debates, although more subtle versions of them persist particularly in conservative circles and in the hotbed of identity politics of the left, is the book "The Bell Curve" which argued that IQ is largely genetic, that IQs differ between nations and racial groups, and that as a result, all men are not created equal.

IQ is reasonably well defined and studies in the psychological literature and it is real. But, its place in the nature-nuture debate is unsettled. Just as the variation in height within middle class people in the developed world has a very strong genetic component, despite the fact that we have very solid evidence that differences in height from time period to time period and from society to society have a strong environmental component, there is fairly good reason to think that population differences in IQ have a strong environmental component even though individual differences in IQ within a population in a healthy enviroment are mostly genetic. "The Bell Curve" spurred a strong academic rebuttal about the limitations of the folk concept of race as an intellectual construct and about the limitations of what we know about the hereditary sources of IQ in understanding the bigger picture. Liberal academia has since devoted considerable effort to making clear the cultural dimensions of race and ethnicity, the circumstances in which there is an environmental role in IQ (e.g. the Flynn Effect and the large role of environmental factors in determining IQ in deprived environments, and the role of breastfeeding in IQ development), and the incompleteness of IQ as a measure of fitness in modern society.

But, the kind of inquiry pursued first by 19th century racist and nationalist, and latter in the Bell Curve will recur, and with more rigor than its predecessors.

IQ measures a "phenotype" (i.e. an outward symptom whatever its cause), while increasingly, the rise of inexpensive genomic testin will make it possible to measure genotypes (i.e. specific genetic patterns) in large populations. And, when measuring genotypes directly, one can describe genotype prevalence in populations without resorting to 19th century folk race classifications in circumstances where they aren't justified by genetic population clustering that isn't arbitrary or socially defined.

The Relatively Benign Issue Of Physical Traits

Some genotypes are very pertinent to fitness in modern society.

The physical differences that these genotypes code aren't all that explosive politically and socially, and indeed, may be widely useful.

For example, if we can identify the genotypes that account for most variation in height, we can tell if an individual's stature development is atypical for a person with that genotype and thus indicates a possible health problem, rather than for an average individual, which muddies the diagnostic signal.

Pinning down genotypes for lactose intolerance can allow a university or prison food service program to distinguish between people who genuinely need special diet for health reasons, from those who simply don't like their choices for less weighty reasons.

Discovering a genotype associated with ability to metabolize alcohol may allow for fairer DUI prosecutions and help people to better know how much liquor they can handle safely in social situations.

Widespread genotyping will make insurability deeply problematic for some people with physical health issues, but Health Insurance reform has brought the United States finally into the era where the market is regulated in a way that does not tie insurance rates closely to actually risk of physical illness and makes health care universal, so this may not prove to be the real battle ground of genetic privacy in the future.

The Explosive Issue of Mental Traits

But, the explosive traits will be the genotypes associated with personality, character, mental health and intelligence.

There is uncertainty here as well. Genotypes do not translate directly into phenotypes. Some interact with unknown genetic or epigenetic components. Some interact with environmental triggers. But, there will be inevitable oversimplification, and there are going to be genotypes that are simply less adaptive in almost all ordinary circumstances in modern society that matter socio-economically, even if there are niche circumstances when they confer benefits.

There are and will be more genotypes associated with crime risk, genotypes associated with bad economic decision making, genotypes associated with taking unsafe risks, genotypes associated with being paranoid or trusting, anxious or lazy, sharp or dull, genotypes associated with marital strife.

Employers, spouses, clubs and educational institutions are all going to want this scientifically and impartially determined information about individuals and are going to want to act on it and will sometimes want to give it far more weight than it actually deserves because alternative measures are more expensive to make and more subjective.

"Bad" genotypes are inevitably going to be more frequent in some nationalities or ethnicities than others. And, the nationalities and ethnicities where "bad" genotypes are common are going to become associated with those nationalities or ethnicities with scientifically unassailable certainty, even though individuals will, of course, vary. Debates about the meaning of neurodiversity aren't going to be limited to autistic young men in obscure Internet forums anymore. Stereotypes will be applied to groups without regard to individual differences and will be used to support invideous discrimination and doctrines of national and ethnicity superiority.

The philosophical underminings of political and legal equality, and of the equal dignity of every human being morally is going to have to be divorced from any concept of ability that can be inferred from genotypes.

We are going to have to decide as a society how much of this is legitimate to consider, and how much is not and when. If the history of past efforts to deal with similar issues is any guide, efforts to maintain privacy will largely be overcome by "need to know" considerations. You may be able to keep your genome secret from your neighbor, but your casualty insurer, your employer and your prospective spouse will probably all manage to secure your consent to disclose it.

There will be strong temptations to employ eugenic methods and gene therapies to extinguish "bad" genotypes in the population. Individuals with "bad" genotypes may not get the benefit of the doubt in a wide variety of life changing decisions from educational choices, to criminal justice sentencing decisions, to employment and more.

Perspective

In some ways, genotyping is simply a refinement of the process of knowing an individual and knowing that individual's family that humans have used to judge each other for millenium, which a lower margin of error that requires less effort to apply. People have always been judged by their character, sexual selection and other forms of selection have always been at work based on those traits, and stereotyping has always had an element of population genetics at work in it when employed accurately.

The Founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence didn't think that "all men were created equal" in the sense of the kind of abilities relevant to track coaches, orchestra directors, college admissions officers and hiring officers, than people today do. They were thinking of equality under the law in contrast to the system that afforded aristocrats special treatment by virtue of hereditary or arbitrary royally granted privileges that prevailed in England, their colonial ruler.

The anti-hierachical doctrines of modern democratic political theory was a rationalist Englightenment effort to replace hereditary privilege and the rule of absolute monarchs, with meritocracy and the rule of law.

One can imagine a society that, burned by the insideous wrongs of racism and nationalism for the last four hundred years, eschews stereotyping based on ethnicity and nationality that represents only average trends in favor of meritocracy in which genotyping plays one part, no larger than it deserves to be, in sorting the fit from those less able to excel in modern society, and adjusts expectations for each accordingly.

If there is a genotype that makes someone prone to airplane accidents, we really don't want that person to be a pilot, if this may be unfair to the individuals who apply for the post by not giving them a chance to prove themselves.

Nobody was very morally concerns when the Jedis in Star Wars determined Anakin Skywalker's aptitude to become a Jedi knight with a blood test, and the movie's depiction of the multi-ethnic group of people so selected reflects the belief held by many Americans that truly fair and scientific, culturally neutral meritocratic testing would produce more diversity and room for social advancement than the status quo.

Fear of this development is well founded. But, not because it is inherently wrong to make decisions based upon genotypes. Instead, it is because we don't trust politicians and demagogues in the maelstrom of politics and social conflict to use that information rationally, scientifically, and in the manner in which the inferrences that can be drawn from them actually follow in a reliable way. Also, we fear this kind of development because we doubt the moral generosity of those who are fit to take responsibility for those in society who need help, when the two can be so clearly distinguished.

Elitism can lead to undemocratic authoritarianism which can lead to abuse of authority, and the more sacrosanct the legitimacy of that authority is, the more secure it is and the more freedom it has to abuse that authority. Claims to legitimacy based upon genetic fitness may be the next divine right of kings. Our meritocratic society, in a world where we know that many of the factors that go into merit have a strong hereditary component, already has begun to approximate that model.

But, politics is about both power and choice. Meritocracy helps leaders analyze the choices, but doesn't tell you who those choices should help or harm. Who benefits is a question of power, and the fear is that the ability to make choices will become too deeply entwined with the question of who decides who benefits from those choices. We need meritocrat leaders, but we need those leaders to look out for more than their own personal interests.

READ MORE - The Next Bell Curve

How Reversible Is Progress?

Sometimes in history, mankind fails. Empires fall. Hard won knowledge is lost. Niceties of civilization disappear. Languages die. Prejudices tamed resurface. Barbarism defeats civilization. Centers of progress stagnate and ossify. Wars, pointless or not, kill millions when wiser statesmen could have secured better outcomes.

We are a fortunate people. We live in a time of technological virtuosity, global communication, remarkable tolerance, greater scientific knowledge than any generation to come before us, awareness of many of the threats to our way of life that loom ahead, economic prosperity viewed in the long term, and a point in time when many countries are liberal democracies, many countries that were once brutal tyrannies like the Soviet Union and early Communist China have changed course, and where truly abysmal countries, like North Korea, are small and isolated and perhaps even on the brink of collapse.

We are, in other words, at a point when we have a great deal to lose.

The risks are not abstract. Our era of toleration has brought out into the open the identities of people who would have been persecuted or killed in all prior eras.

Widespread gay marriage and the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" which has already been matched in much of the Western world, means that hosts of gays and lesbians who would have lived secret lives in the past are now out and public. This openness has brought with it acceptance, toleration, and access to legal recognition with all of its blessings. But, openness comes with the price of constant vigilance. Once out of the closet, a population that will always be in the minority must rely forever after on the good will of a liberal democratic society to protect it.

Gays aren't the only ones taking a risk. Many people have come out publicly as atheists, and if religion becomes established, as there has often been democratic pressure of governments to do, they risk persecution as heretics and apostates and blasphemers.

Pagans are in much the same shoes. The Denver Post on Christmas Day informed us that 45 people in Haiti had been murdered based on accusations of witchcraft connected with its recent cholera outbreak.

Anti-Islamic sentiment has swept much of Europe, and lurks ready to turn ugly in America.

It would take a greater calamity to set back human knowledge, science and technology, but would it really take an event so unthinkable. As glorious as a digitized world may seem, the collapse of the Internet remains far more possible than the sack of every decent university and public library on earth. But, if the libraries no long have independent copies of the knowledge upon which we rely, if the technologies we use to access our data cease to be supported for any myriad reasons before the data the technologies make us privy to is converted to new media, how much could we lose?

It is hard to believe that we could ever see a setback as dire as the one that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. The college textbooks lurking in the basements of hundreds of thousands of middle class families could reconstruct science, if not to the standards of 2010, at least to the start of the art from the 1980s. It might take a long time to rebuild particle accelerators necessary to prove the existence of quarks, and weak force carrier bosons and neutrinos and their properties from first principles and to return to the point where we could answer the remaining open questions of physics. But,a backpack full of graduate school textbooks (or even a binder full of relevant wikipedia printouts) would make the task far less arduous than it was the first time. Not many people know how to run an iron foundry, but again, if just once decent university library of thousands in the United States were to survive, we could learn to do so much more efficiently.

We could easily lose many of the primary documents that back up the story of history. But, there are enough histories out there that it is hard to believe that the broad outlines and even references to many of the key primary sources from which they can be reconstructed, will ever again be lost.

I'd sleep a little better if someone were consciously working out a way to insure that this knowledge survived longer -- printing out a massive library on bronze plates in a dozen different languages maybe -- but even a truly global apocalyptic event would have to be extremely thorough to set back the state of knowledge too far.

It might take a few decades to reconstruct the infrastructure necessary to manufacture decent computers, or mass produce precision stainless steel appliances, or to generate advanced medicines with high levels of purity at reasonable costs. But, there are quite a few copies of the key information available in the kind of technical detail found in patent applications, for example, out there.

More intangibly, how deeply can the modern worldview be suppressed? There have certainly been episodes of history that makes one worry. Who in late tsarist Russia on the verge of Western style liberal democracy could have foreseen Stalinist massacres? Who in the collapsing Chinese empire could have foreseen the Cultural Revolution? The example of Korea is particularly troubling because it was so recent. Dean Koh of the Harvard Law School recounts cities of people with eyes as listless of those of Orwell's 1984 in the hear and now in North Korea, which has been divided from the South for less than sixty years. The return of Albanian society to a medieval state from a similarly brief period of isolation likewise leaves one with qualms.

Yet, Cambodia, while hardly a model of national success, seems to have returned to some semblence of normalcy even after Pol Pot's massacre of the entire bourgouise class in his society. Albania is being reintegrated into Europe. The death of Soviet style communism was traumatic for a generation, but its successor regime seems to be emerging and tentatively is not a total nightmare.

If progress really is inevitable in the long run, despite dire and painful setbacks, then perhaps economic development in places that have not yet experienced its benefits, may also be more or less inevitable. Surely, results achieved from scratch in one place can be secured elsewhere, where they need only be copied, somewhat more easily than they came about in the first place. Or, can they?

Could it be that centuries of ruthless capital punishment that prevailed across Europe was necessary to build a more tame society? Could it be that modern nation states are not really stable unless they arise gradually and naturally from smaller principalities together with all the attendent wars and nationalist strife, unless they arise from a uniform orderly process of colonization? Could it be that liberal democracy has functioned well enough for the last couple of centuries (and far less in much of the world) because it has been sustained by economic growth that has actually only been a coincidental fellow traveler with it?

Historically, mankind has managed to make progress, even as one empire or another has collapsed, by passing the torch of knowledge and tolerance and innovation from one place to another. But, in an increasingly global society, we are increasingly placing all of our eggs in one basket. The collapse of China, or a subcontinental nuclear war between Pakistan and India, or the stagnation of American society, or economic collapse in the European Union due to mismanaged public finance, is no longer the kind of event that the rest of the world can ignore. A major collapse in one part of the world drags the rest of the world down with it to some extent.

In World Wars I and II, Switzerland managed to stay neutral and above the fray. In the next global calamity, there may be no Switzerlands.

The political-economies of the world evolve in very path dependent ways. When something works better than what came before it, it sweeps the "known world" at the time. The invention of farming obliterated the cultures that proceeded it for as far around of empires could spread, even though the extent to which the actual people who followed the old cultures is disputed. Rome expanded as far as the terrain would permit. Every country in the world has a basically modern military, even if its economy carries on with centuries old means of production. All but a handful of legal systems in the world are derived from those of Revolutionary France, the Kaiser's Germany, 17th century England, or 19th century Spain, and the European Civil Law systems had more similarities than differences due to their common Roman origins. There are a few not particularly promising outliers that are more home grown - China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, for example, some of which have a few followers, as do various dictatorships. But, what none of the four or five main political systems that predominate in our big blue marble are up to the next challenge our world needs to overcome.

I'm basically an optimist. I think that humanity will come up with a way to maintain modernity without oil and natural gas. I think that humanity will come up with a way to cope with global warming, although I have no confidence that we will have the will to keep it from running its course. I don't think that a global nuclear war will cause our species to go extinct. I am inclined to think that our ability to detect and deal with diseases have reached a point where we can address any new disease before it does irrepairable damage to the species. I don't think that the bulk of our knowledge scientific and otherwise will be lost.

I worry more that we may reach a point where we have a global government, initially a good one, that stagnates and stifles us. Perhaps we need one to prevent global environmental threats and nuclear war from doing us in. But, we aren't anywhere close to that point now. We may be in a single global system, but it is not a united one.

But, I am not a believer in the notion that we are at "the end of history." I fully expect to see rapid change for centuries to come. The social sciences have a moving target to chase, culture constantly evolves, and the scientific and technical advances we are experiencing now will take decades or even a century to run their course.

Yes, there surely must come a time when our constant barrage of new scientific discoveries is the physical sciences slows down and eventually reaches a trickle.

We are close to that point in physics and earth sciences and inorganic chemistry and mathematics. We are coming to that point in civil engineering, chemical engineering, materials science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and a great many other practical fields. Computers haven't been perfected to their theoretical limits, but their capabilities are continuing to grow so fast that we will surely come very close, very soon.

There is little in mathematics today that the leaning mathematicians of 1910 could not grasp with a year or so of additional study that would make heavy use of what they already knew. General Relativity has received a lot of experimental confirmation since the theory was published by Einstein in 1915, and several different mathematically equivalent expressions, but it remains state of the art physics 95 years later. Many blanks have been filled into the Periodic Table of the Elements since Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev published it in more or less its current form in 1869, and we understand in much more detail why the periodic table has the properties that it does, but it remains the point of departure for modern chemistry (and he also is the man responsible for the fact that liquor is sold primarily at 80 proof strength, a cultural impact still felt today).

The standard model of particle physics, which reached something close to its current form in 1981, and has been refined in a few minor respects since then, isn't quite so musty and will probably be refined further before it reaches its final form, but its resiliance in the face of three decades of intense efforts to find deviations and refinements suggest that whatever beyond the standard model physics are still out there to be discovered may have rather modest practical impact. The Higgs boson which the Large Hadron Collider will either discover or disprove in the next couple of years, was predicted in 1964.

We haven't discovered every species of life on Earth, but for many taxonomy categories, we are very close to having done so, and the tool of genetics has imparted considerable heft to those classifications. Most of the new discoveries have been of new species of existing taxonomic categories; we may well have discovered ever kingdom, phylum, class and order of living thing in existence already, and almost every species of vertebrates, certainly the pace of new discoveries of higher level taxons and new species of large animals and plants is slowing. There are probably undiscovered beetle species out there, and some new deep sea organisms or microbiological organism that have yet to be discovered, but our sense of the extent and shape of the biosphere and its evolutionary origins is already quite refined.

Biotechnology is still hurling forward. It will take time to truly master the genome and the epigenome, to really have a firm grasp of how the brain works, and to master the manipulation of it all. But, we are getting much closer.

The blue print in the form of the complete genome is available on computers already for a host of organisms including many people, even if we don't yet know how to read it fluently. We've identified the functions many key working parts. We know a great deal about the overall structure. We've identified a large share of the genome that is common to every human being alive today, and can even trace which parts changed from our common ancestor with chimpanzees and from our Neanderthal predecessors.

We have working models of the structure of the human brain functionally and involving its major subsystems, of the role of the major components of our brain chemistry, of the connection between the brain and the rest of our body, of the way that neurons bind themselves into networks, of the process by which memory works, of the extent to which knowledge is hardwired or learned, of the connections between our senses and our experience of them. We have some sense of how gender and age influences the brain. We have some sense of the variety of mental conditions that can arise, their usual course, and their causes. We may understand the brain far less well than we understand bacterial infections, the heart, or the liver, but for the most part, it seems as if our work is cut out for us. We don't know everything, but we have a pretty good sense of what we don't know and have to discover.

One time pipe dreams, like cures for many kinds of cancers, cures for nervous system disorders, cures for autoimmune diseases, workable treatments for many kinds of mental illnesses, treatments for hereditary blindness and more, while not yet attained, seem attainable. Science has brought us an understanding of many diseases that is exquisitely detailed. Even when we can't cure a disease yet, we often know with excruciating specificity how it works. The implications of those developments for our society may be profound.

Even if we don't learn all that science can offer us, we may reach a point where what we don't know is largely esoteric and is only of intellectual curiousity, with little practical impact, sooner. While history may not be at an end, I wouldn't be surprised if the pace of progress in the physical sciences and engineering in 2110 is much slower than it is now. By 2210, it will probably have reached a crawl indeed, simply because we will already know so much at that point. Perhaps at that point a certain amount of political stagnantion will be acceptable, because the world will stop changing so fast and our leaders can be enlightened by a large corpus of established scientific knowledge.

READ MORE - How Reversible Is Progress?

The Lost Symbol, Masons and Catholics

Dan Brown's latest novel, The Last Symbol, like its prequels, The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, is a mediocre offering when viewed as a thriller or an exposition of character. On the other hand, compared to art and architecture history lectures, they are rather compelling. And, all three books are basically art and architecture history lessons framed in treasure hunt, conspiracy theory driven thrillers.

These days, with a very small number of notable exceptions (Denver International Airport comes to mind), no one seems bothered to inject mystery or hidden meaning into anything. One needs to go back to the Beatles album covers to find that kind of mischief afoot.

At the heart of The Lost Symbol is a conflict between the Free Masons and some of the Holy Orders the Catholic Church. As it turns out, however, both sides of this conflict seem to be dying on the vine.

Free Masonry was designed to weather persecution. There was once an anti-Masonic political party, and my alma mater was active in the anti-Masonic movement. It has been condemned by the Pope. Apathy, however, proved a more challenging adversary. The Masons still own some prime real estate in Washington D.C., Denver and elsewhere, and still have some powerful members. But, service clubs of all kinds have seen their memberships age, their membership rolls shrink, and their participation decline. The Masons have not been an exception to this rule. In 1941, they had about 4.1 million members in the United States, as of 2006, the total membership was about 1.5 million. The aura of power surrounding the Masons has also faded. The Masons are enjoying a minor resurgence, but the average age of a Mason in California is still 65 years old.

The Roman Catholic religious orders of monks and nuns featured in Dan Brown's earlier two books have seen an even more stark decline. Last year, the Church announced that:

[B]etween 2005 and 2006 the number "members of the consecrated life" fell by just under 10%.

The number of members, predominantly women, some engaged only in constant prayer, others working as teachers, health workers and missionaries, fell 94,790 to 945,210. . . Of the total, 753,400 members were women, while 191,810 were men, including 136,171 priests and 532 permanent deacons.

The situation in the United States is not the exception to this trend:

When Vatican II closed, sisters numbered 180,000 in the United States. Today there are about 65,000 sisters, with an average age of 69.

There is also a shortage of priests in the Catholic Church, although a less dramatic one, even though the church's membership ranks are healthy (1.1 billion worldwide). For example:

Only 23 seminarians are expected to be ordained for New York City over the next four years. . . . Currently there are only 648 diocesan priests for the Archdiocese of New York, which has 2.5 million Catholics.

Similarly:

As the number of Catholics in the United States has risen, the number of priests has steadily dropped. According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, there are nearly 29,000 priests, about 20 percent fewer than 40 years ago.

There are more than 60 million Catholics in the United States, about 2,000 per diocesan priest, nationally. More statistics along the same lines can be found here and here.

The trends are likely to continue:

"Ninety-one percent of nuns and 75 percent of priests are 60 or older, and most of the rest are at least 50."

READ MORE - The Lost Symbol, Masons and Catholics