Cool topic. I've proposed discussions on Intellect vs. Spirit at
OSCON, but O'Reilly has never touched them.
Danese
On Apr 4, 2007, at 11:25 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> ----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J."
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> From: "Hughes, James J." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 13:51:02 -0400
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED],
> World Transhumanist Association Discussion List <wta-
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [wta-talk] Nerds,
> religious fundamentalism & atypical personality in India
> Reply-To: World Transhumanist Association Discussion List <wta-
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>
> [1]http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/nerds-are-nuts.php
>
>
>
> Nerds are nuts
>
> Reading [2]In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern
> India, I
> stumbled upon this passage on page 151:
>
> ...Whereas the Congress Party was dominated by lawyers and
> journalists, the RSS was dominated by people from a scientific
> background. Both groups were almost exclusively Brahmin in their
> formative years...three out of four of Hedegwar's [the
> founder, who
> was a doctor -Razib] successors were also from scientific
> backgrounds: M.S. Golwalker...was a zoologist...Rajendra Singh
> was
> a physicist; and K.S. Sudarshan...is an engineer....
>
> Some quick "background." The [3]RSS is a prominent member of the
> [4]Hindutva movement, roughly, Hindu nationalism. Some people have
> termed them "Hindu fundamentalists," suggesting an equivalence with
> reactionary religious movements the world over. There is a problem
> with such a broad brush term: some proponents and adherents of
> Hindutva are not themselves particularly religious and make no
> effort
> to pretend that they are. Rather, they are individuals who are
> attracted to the movement for racial-nationalist reasons, they view
> "Hindus" as a people as much, or more than, a religion. One
> could make
> an argument that the "Christian Right" or "Islamism" are not at the
> root concerned or driven by religious motives, but, members of both
> these movements would assert at least a pretense toward religiosity
> almost universally.
> With that preamble out of the way, I was not surprised that the RSS
> had a core cadre of scientifically oriented leaders. This is a
> common
> tendency amongst faux reactionary movements with a religious
> element.
> I say faux because these movements tend to be extremely
> innovative and
> progressive in the process of attempting to recreate a mythic
> golden
> past. The militancy of some of the organizations in the Hindutva
> movement, like the VHP and RSS, has been asserted by some Hindu
> intellectuals as being...un-Hindu. Some of the early
> intellectuals in
> the movement admitted that they were attempting to fight back
> against
> Islam and Christianity by co-opting some of the modalities of these
> two religions. The question becomes at what point does pragmatic
> methodology suborn the ultimate ends? I won't offer an answer
> because
> I have little interest in that topic, at least in this post.
> Rather, I
> want to move back to the point about scientists and their
> involvement
> in "fundamentalist" religious movements. Scientifically trained
> individuals are over represented within Islam in the [5]Salafist
> Terror Network. As a child the fundamentalist engineer was a cut-
> out
> stereotype amongst the circle of graduate students in the natural
> sciences from Muslim backgrounds that my parents socialized
> amongst.
> Ethnological research confirms that Islamist movements are highly
> concentrated within departments of engineering at universities.
> Engineers are also very prominent in the Creationist movement in
> the
> United States. If civilizations can be analogized to organisms,
> then a
> particular subset of technically minded folk get very strange when
> interfacing with the world around us...and turn into
> fundamentalists.
> So why the tendency for technical people to be so prominent in
> these
> groups? First, let me clarify that just because technical folk are
> heavily over represented amongst religious radicals does not
> mean that
> religious radicals are necessarily a large demographic among
> technical
> folk. Rather, amongst the set of religious radicals the technicians
> seem to rise up to positions of power and provide excellent
> recruits.
> There is I think a socioeconomic angle on this. Years back I was
> curious as to the class origin of different scientific
> professions. I
> didn't find much, but the data I did gather implied that
> engineers are
> generally more likely to be from less affluent backgrounds than
> more
> abstract and less practical fields like botany or astronomy. This
> makes sense, engineering is one of the best tickets to a middle
> class
> livelihood, and it might necessitate fewer social graces (acquired
> through "breeding") than medicine or law. As it happens, oftentimes
> fundamentalist movements draw much of their strength from upwardly
> mobile groups who are striving to ascend up from lower to
> lower-middle-class status. Though the Hindutva movement in India is
> mostly upper caste, it is not concentrated amongst the English
> speaking super elite who are quite Westernized, but rather its
> strength lay amongst the non-Western sub-elites (e.g., merchants in
> small to mid-sized cities) or the petite bourgeois. Islamism in
> much
> of the world can be traced to the anomie generated by the
> transformation of "traditional" societies through urbanization and
> other assorted dislocations, and as peasants enter the modern world
> Islamic orthodoxy is a way to moor themselves within the new urban
> matrix and the world of wage labor. Similarly, the rise of the
> Christian Right can be tied in part to the entrance of evangelicals
> into the broad middle class as the Old South became the New
> South and
> air conditioning led to the blossoming of the Sun Belt.
> But there are likely other factors at play which are not
> sociological
> or cultural, but individual. Fundamentalists tend to be
> "literalists,"
> and have a tendency to look at their religious texts as divine
> manuals
> which describe and prescribe every aspect of the world. In some
> ways
> this is a new tendency in our species, at least as a mass movement.
> One can definitely trace scriptural fundamentalism to the
> Protestant
> Reformation with the call to sola scriptura, but in the West its
> contemporary origin can be found in the reaction in the late 19th
> century and early 20th century to textual analysis of the Bible by
> modernists. The assault on the historicity of the Bible,
> combined with
> both mass literacy and a democratic culture in the United
> States, led
> inevitably to a crass literalism that birthed the peculiarities
> which
> we see before us in the form of Creationism and its sisters. A
> literal
> reading of the Bible leads to ludicrous conclusions, but if one
> perceives that the game is all or nothing, then perhaps one must
> assert the truth value of Genesis as if it was a scientific
> treatise.
> Religious professionals have often been skeptical of literalism
> because a deep knowledge of languages and the translation process
> highlights various ambiguities and gray shades, but for those
> whom the
> text is plain and unadorned by deeper knowledge its meaning is
> "clear"
> and must be take at its word. Scientists and engineers live in a
> world
> of axioms, laws and theories, which though rough and ready, must be
> taken as truths for predictions and models to be valid. You make
> assumptions, you construct a model, and you project a range of
> values
> bounded by errors. Once science is established you take it is as a
> given and don't engage in excessive philosophical reflection.
> This is
> "[6]normal science." The axioms are validated by their utility
> in an
> instrumental fashion in engineering and model building. Obviously
> religious truths are different. Plainly, the direct material
> benefits
> of religion, magic, is easily falsifiable. The indirect
> benefits, the
> afterlife, etc., are often beyond verification. A critical
> examination
> of the Hebrew Bible shows all sorts of fallacious assumptions. For
> example, there is an implication that the world is flat and that
> the
> sun revolves around the earth. Though these contentions are not
> defensible, there are a host of other assertions which are less
> plainly incorrect, or at least seem to be refuted only by a more
> complex suite of contingent facts (e.g., the historical sciences in
> the form of geology and evolutionary biology falsify the creation
> account, but these are complex stories which require acceptance
> of a
> chain of inferences). Obviously many religious people have a deep
> emotional attachment to their faith. If one is told that one's
> religion is based on a book, and that book plainly seems to imply
> ludicrous assertions, how to square this circle? Many a scientific
> mind simply accepts the ludicrous axioms and starts to generate
> inferences. Consider the[7] Water Canopy Theory. Or, the Hindutva
> ideology that Aryans originated in India, spread to the rest of the
> world, and so brought civilization (the gift of the Indians). Or
> that
> Hindu mythology records the ancient use of nuclear weapons and
> spaceships. There are even books like [8]Human Devolution: a Vedic
> alternative to Darwin's theory. Strictly speaking much of this
> work is
> not irrational, insofar as it exhibits internal logical
> coherency. The
> axioms are simply ludicrous.
> Which gets me back to the way scientists think: though some
> scientists
> are very philosophical, the way in which science is taught is often
> not particularly focused on the nature and reasoning beyond the
> axioms
> given. PV = nRT. Why? There are quick primers in regards to the
> root
> of the Ideal Gas Law, but the key is to take this law and
> utilize it
> to solve problems. But what if PV = nRT is subjective, a
> misinterpretation. Perhaps a cultural mix-up resulted in a
> transcription error which introduced the gas constant, R. This
> is an
> idiotic question to ask in science. If you're taking a course on
> the
> kinetics of gases you don't have long discussions lingering upon
> the
> nature of motion and gas particles, those are assumed. In
> contrast in
> softer disciplines the very concept of "motion" an "particles" are
> subject to critique because the objects of study are far more
> slippery. Is it the "Red Sea" or "Sea of Reeds"? Does the Bible
> refer
> to Mary as a virgin or an unmarried woman? Does the color coding of
> the Aryans and Dasas in the Vedas refer to literal differences in
> complexion, or are they narrative conventions? Language lacks of
> the
> interpersonal precision of mathematics, and while [9]
> uniformitarianism
> has served us admirably in the natural sciences, the dynamic
> nature of
> idiom, phrase and speech within shifting context means that teasing
> apart meaning from the records of the past can be a difficult feat
> which requires care, erudition and common sense.
> Up until this point I have focused on the way scientists work,
> and the
> necessity of background assumptions, and the relative short shrift
> they often give to the "meta" analysis of background concepts.
> Though
> I don't want to push this line of thought too far, I will offer the
> following illustrations of behaviors which I think are not totally
> unlike the manner in which some fundamentalists behave. Someone
> tells
> a child to "pull the door behind" them. He proceeds to unscrew the
> hinges and drag the front door across to the street to his house.
> Siblings are told that there is life after death by their
> parent. They
> proceed to plan the death of one so that some confirmation of this
> possibility can be ascertained. These two instances are real
> examples
> of individuals who exhibit Autism/Asperger's Syndrome. Anyone who
> would behave in this way lacks common social sense. I believe
> that a
> disproportionate number of those who are attracted to
> fundamentalism
> tend to lack the same perspective and contextualizing capacity in
> regards to their religious beliefs. If they can do some matrix
> algebra
> too, they're nerds. On a mass scale, consider that both Salafis
> among
> Muslims and Puritans among Calvinists debated whether all that
> was not
> mentioned within their Holy Texts as permissible were therefore
> impermissible. I suspect that for most people common sense might
> persuade one to the conclusion that these sort of debates imply
> a lack
> of a sense of proportion, frankly, of normalcy.
> In sum:
> * Hard core religious fundamentalists are somewhat atypical
> psychologically
> * Scientists and engineers are also atypical psychologically
> * Some of the traits modal within these two sets intersect
> * Resulting in a disproportionate number of scientists amongst
> fundamentalists
> * Science converges upon rock solid truths, which become the
> axioms
> for the next set of projections and investigations.
> Fundamentalism
> presents itself as axioms and clear and distinct inferences
> from
> those axioms. Both are fundamentally elegant and simple
> cognitive
> processes, but, the content is so radically different that the
> outcomes in regards to truth value are very different
> * Mass literacy and mass society, as well as the
> decentralization of
> authority and power, likely made fundamentalism inevitable
> as the
> basal level of individuals with susceptible psychological
> profiles
> could now have direct access to the axioms in question (texts)
> * Just as some scientists tend to take ideas to their "logical
> extremes" (e.g., the "paradoxes" of physics) no matter the
> dictates of common sense, so some fundamentalists take the
> logical
> conclusion of their religious texts to extremes
> * No matter the religion it seems that modernity will produce
> faux
> reactionary fundamentalism because of the nature of normal
> human
> variation combined with universal inputs (e.g., the rise of
> normative consumerism, urbanization, etc.).
>
> References
>
> 1. http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/nerds-are-nuts.php
> 2. http://www.amazon.com/Spite-Gods-Strange-Modern-India/dp/
> 0385514743/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-9954258-8060061?
> ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175666384&sr=8-1
> 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh
> 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindutva
> 5. http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/07/profile-of-salafi-jihadists.php
> 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science
> 7. http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/canopy.html
> 8. http://www.amazon.com/Human-Devolution-alternative-Darwins-
> theory/dp/0892133341/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-9954258-8060061?
> ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175674970&sr=1-1
> 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism_%28science%29
>
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