Category: Rants

Progressivist Asceticism

Via Arts and Letters Daily, a bemusing article about a curious reversal in the past half century: in today’s western culture, food is governed by a host of moral rules, while sex is unrestricted; exactly the opposite of 50 years ago:

Thus far, what the imaginary examples of Betty [a hypothetical 1950’s housewife] and Jennifer [a hypothetical 21st-century 30-something] have established is this: Their personal moral relationships toward food and toward sex are just about perfectly reversed. Betty does care about nutrition and food, but it doesn’t occur to her to extend her opinions to a moral judgment — i.e., to believe that other people ought to do as she does in the matter of food, and that they are wrong if they don’t. In fact, she thinks such an extension would be wrong in a different way; it would be impolite, needlessly judgmental, simply not done. Jennifer, similarly, does care to some limited degree about what other people do about sex; but it seldom occurs to her to extend her opinions to a moral judgment. In fact, she thinks such an extension would be wrong in a different way — because it would be impolite, needlessly judgmental, simply not done.

On the other hand, Jennifer is genuinely certain that her opinions about food are not only nutritionally correct, but also, in some deep, meaningful sense, morally correct — i.e., she feels that others ought to do something like what she does. And Betty, on the other hand, feels exactly the same way about what she calls sexual morality.

I don’t think that I would go as far as the author does in asserting a causal relationship between the morality of food and sex, but it does seem to me that the human desire for moral codes remains pretty much constant. It is my impression that the followers of today’s puritan religions — progressivism and environmentalism — subject themselves to a complex of rules every bit as stringent as the Victorians or the 50’s Cleaver types. People today who scorn the idea of sexual restraint practice a rigid self-discipline and ideological purity in their nutritional intake and imagined environmental impact.

And ironically, often to the same degree of self-contradiction. Most everyone today is bewildered and repulsed by the Inquisition-era idea that the suffering of the body is inconsequential in light of the fate of the soul. Yet people continue practices — recycling, for instance which consumes more energy and resources, and thus release more pollutants and carbon into the environment, than not recycling; or opposition to nuclear energy — that are objectively detrimental to the cause they claim to care about, in (as far as I can tell) an appeal to some sort of benefit to one’s individual character.

Sola Scriptura

Kevin Edgecomb reviews an article on Eastern Orthodoxy that is evidently an attempt to explain Orthodoxy to evangelical Protestants. Among several interesting things, he talks about the idea of the role of Scripture. It has long bemused me that though Protestants — especially the evangelicals of my heritage — claim to value Scripture above tradition and “organized” religion, you’ll often be hard-pressed to hear more than a couple of verses of Scripture in an evangelical service. Contrast the Orthodox liturgy:

The Gospel book, which itself is an ikon of Christ Himself, preceded and followed by candle-bearing acolytes, is held aloft by the priest in a solemn procession through the church, and in through the Royal Doors: Christ ascending His Throne. Later, at the reading of the Gospel, the choir sings an alleluia, and all the people stand as the priest proclaims the Gospel from the Royal Doors, an image of the dissemination of the Gospel from Heaven itself, again with an angelic honor guard of candle-bearing acolytes. This is the audible ikon of Christ, His image proclaimed in sound, not color. The actions of the priest and acolytes further glorify the Word, the eternal Logos, and are a lesson of God’s plan in themselves, when properly understood. The Orthodox honor shown to God’s Word can only be recognized as of an entirely higher order than something like, “Let us turn to Matthew 13…Matthew 13…verses ten…through…thirteen” to the rustle of pages, dropped notebooks, and clicking pens.

Further, it should be noted that of all churches, the Orthodox Church preserves the lengthiest pericopes in its lectionary. The readings of the the Epistle and Gospel likely comprise a lengthier reading from the New Testament than is common in any Protestant setting, and certainly do in the case of those Protestant churches using lectionaries. The setting of prayers and acclamations surrounding the Orthodox readings likewise outdistance in devotion any average introduction to the typical three-point sermon.

Apostasy

Reading sites like Climate Audit and Niche Modeling is a great eye-opener if you want to know where the data comes from that supports the current apocalyptic frenzy around the subject of global warming.

Suffice it to repeat the old saw about “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. The only overall temperature measurements we have are from satellites, and only since 1979. They show that the last ten years have actually seen a cooling trend. Land-based temperature measurements, which go back a hundred years or so, are extremely hard to interpret, due to the fact that most temperature stations are in urban areas, which tend to be hotter than rural areas. Data before a couple hundred years ago is indirect, based on things like ice cores and tree rings. In order to get a reliable picture from that kind of data, you need to make all kinds of initial assumptions about how the data should be interpreted. Then you run the data through an extremely convoluted statistical program. When the tree-ring and ice core data is run through Hanson’s famous program, you get the infamous “hockey stick” graph that shows rapidly rising temperatures for the forseeable future.

The funny thing is, you can run completely random noise through Hanson’s program and it will still output a hockey stick graph.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it:

I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

There is no doubt that some parts of the world have been warmer in recent years than in the last century or so. But there is very little reason to believe that those warm spots are part of a global trend, or that they will keep warming. Even in the past thousand years, parts of the world have been much warmer than they are now — the Arctic in the middle ages — and colder — England only 200 years ago.

Inconvenient Questions

There’s been a bit of a buzz lately over seasteading, a libertarian project to develop practical floating habitats for people who want to form their own mini-governments in international waters.

The guiding principle is “dynamic geography” — the idea that if people don’t like their government, they can move to a different one. People can try out various different kinds of governments and social systems, to see what works for them.

I think that’s a really cool idea.

But am I the only one to see the huge glaring problem with the details of this particular implementation? How are people supposed to exercise their freedom of choice of government when they’re STUCK ON A FLOATING PLATFORM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN?