The Questioning Christian

Category: Progress

  • Robert Wright on "salvation" through the intelligent, disciplined pursuit of self-interest

    I just ran across the video of a thoughtful and funny presentation on “How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict,” by one of my favorite authors, Robert Wright, at TED 2006.  Wright begins by saying:

    I’ve got, apparently, 18 minutes to convince you that history has a direction, an arrow; that in some fundamental sense it’s good, that the arrow points to something positive ….

    He opines that the world is going to have to undergo a major upgrade in morality, because of what he identifies as:

    • the growing lethality of hatred, in that technology allows people who hate the West, and who resent their own place in the world, to inflict organized violence on American soil and elsewhere; and
    • the death spiral of negativity, in which retaliation begets retaliation, creating a destructive amplifying-feedback cycle. [DCT comment: Turn-the-other-cheek sounds pretty sensible in this context.]

    Wright finishes by offering what he calls his reason for hope, for a cheerful outlook:

    If we succeed, then once again, non-zero-sumness and a recognition of non-zero-sum dynamics [that is, recognizing that our individual welfares depend greatly on collaboration and promoting each other’s welfare] will have forced us to a higher moral level, a kind of saving higher moral level ….

    The original meaning of the word ‘salvation’ in the Bible is about saving the social system.  Yahweh is our savior means he has saved the nation of Israel, which at the time was a pretty high-level social organization.

    Now social organization has reached the global level, and I guess if there’s good news I can say I’m bringing you, it’s that all the salvation of the world requires is the intelligent pursuit of self-interest, in a disciplined and careful way ….  We’ve come too far to screw it up now.

    (Emphasis added.) It’s well worth watching it all.

  • Demand for food is rising – good news

    Good news, at least in the long term, from today’s NY Times:

    Everywhere, the cost of food is rising sharply. … Many factors are contributing to the rise, but the biggest is runaway demand. … The high growth rate means hundreds of millions of people are, for the first time, getting access to the basics of life, including a better diet. That jump in demand is helping to drive up the prices of agricultural commodities.

    Farmers the world over are producing flat-out. American agricultural exports are expected to increase 23 percent this year to $101 billion, a record. The world’s grain stockpiles have fallen to the lowest levels in decades. …

    In the long run, the food supply could grow. More land may be pulled into production, and outdated farming methods in some countries may be upgraded. …

    David Streitfeld, A Global Need for Grain That Farms Can’t Fill, NY Times, Mar. 9, 2008 (emphasis added).

    “In the long run, the food supply could grow.”  Indeed. There’s money to be made in figuring out ways to increase food production. And if there’s anything (most) humans can be counted on to do, it’s to respond to opportunities to make money.

    Thus does our pursuit of our individual desires (eventually) end up helping the human race to make progress. Whoever set this system up must have been pretty smart ….

  • Who will populate the next generation?

    David Brooks writes today of “The Odyssey Years,” which he describes as “the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood.” He notes that in both the U.S. and Europe, young people are postponing all kinds of things: Employment. Moving out. Marriage. Childbearing. Instead:

    During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.

    Brooks doesn’t mention an implication of this phenomenon, concerning which writer Mark Steyn has been sounding an alarm in the past couple of years. Steyn argues, sometimes a bit shrilly, that the liberal West is committing cultural suicide by not having children. If present demographic trends continue, he says, over time Europe and Russia will become increasingly Muslim, because Muslim immigrants are having far more children than the European- and Russian natives (who are reproducing at far below the rate needed to replace themselves). Similarly, Steyn says, Japan will become increasingly Korean and Filipino, and red-state voters will come to dominate the U.S. political scene.

    But present trends very well might not continue, for two reasons. First, the fecundity of other cultures may well be reduced by the same forces that earlier reduced Western fertility: the availability of birth control, combined with increased education and economic power for women. It seems plausible, says blogger “dave,” that over time the same thing might happen in, say, Muslim cultures.

    Second, Western fertility may be increasing. It’s been said that conservative Americans tend to have more kids than liberal ones, and that kids tend to adopt their parents’ values at least somewhat, so over time we should expect Americans to start having more babies. And even more interestingly, liberal Americans may be breeding more: NPR’s Tovia Smith noted in a Weekend Edition report last month that “in the past 10 years, the number of high-end earners [in the U.S.] who are having three or more kids has shot up nearly 30 percent. Some say the trend is driven by a generation of over-achieving career women who have quit work and transferred all of their competitive energy to baby making.” It’s even said in San Francisco, that bastion of American liberalism, that “three is the new two.”

    It all should be fascinating to watch. If past trends are any indication, somehow humanity will get through it (perhaps painfully), and those who live 100 years from now wouldn’t trade places with us even if they could.

  • Milk prices soar – because more people can afford it (great!)

    From the Progress-Happens desk (actually, the NY Times):

    But the biggest force driving up milk prices is the same one that has driven up prices for conventional commodities like iron ore and copper: a roaring global economy. Rising incomes in emerging economies from China and India to Latin America and the Middle East are lifting millions of people out of poverty and into the middle class.

    It turns out that, along with zippy cars and flat-panel TVs, milk is the mark of new money, a significant source of protein that factors into much of any affluent person’s diet. Milk goes into infant formulas, chocolate, ice cream and cheese. Most baked goods contain butter, and coffee chains like Starbucks sell more milk than coffee.

    Just meeting that demand, said Alex Duncan, an economist at Fonterra, the dominant dairy cooperative in New Zealand and one of the world’s largest dairy-exporting companies, will require the addition each year of the equivalent of New Zealand’s entire annual milk output.

    Wayne Arnold, A Thirst for Milk Bred by New Wealth Sends Prices Soaring, NY Times, Sept. 4, 2007.

    As problems go, this isn’t an entirely-bad one to have; I can imagine all sorts of good things resulting from it.

  • An unfortunate culture war: Individualists versus communitarians

    David Brooks says today that we’re in a culture war that is currently manifesting itself in the fight over the immigration bill. But it’s not a war between Republicans and Democrats, he says, nor between rich and poor: It’s a war between people whose worldview exalts individuality, versus people whose worldview gives primacy to community. 

    Brooks’s sympathies seems to lie with the individualists (as mine tend to do also). It’s an obvious mistake, however, to put too much emphasis on the importance of either worldview.

    Both individuals and communities are vital instruments of God’s continuing creation. It’s individuals, not communities, that come up with countless new ideas of how the universe could be “better,” and are driven to try to make their ideas happen. But it’s communities, not individuals —

    • that hold humanity’s “distributed memory” of what has worked and not worked in the past to make things “better”;
    • that eventually filter out really bad ideas, removing them from circulation; and
    • that imitate and propagate the really good ones.

    In automotive terms: individualism is the gas pedal, the community is the brake. If we want to get where we’re going without crashing, we need both.

  • Complexity blocks progress, says Bill Gates at Harvard

    From Bill Gates’ marvelous commencement address at Harvard:

    The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

    To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

    Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. … The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working – and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century – which is to surrender to complexity and quit.

    The Wall Street Journal reports on a milestone in Gates’ drafting of the speech. It came when, while at the State Department to meet with Condoleeza Rice, he saw a framed copy of George Marshall’s famous Harvard commencement address of exactly 60 years ago, in which the then-secretary of state proposed what is known to history as the Marshall Plan:

    The word complexity struck him, Mr. Gates said, because he had been talking with his friend the billionaire investor Warren Buffett about how the complexity of certain things in society — the tax system and the federal budget, for instance — hinders people from fully grasping them, and ultimately impedes change.

    In spreading the word about inequalities and what to do about them, Mr. Gates found that time and again among friends and in groups he found people who wanted to get more involved helping but didn’t understand how to do something about a complicated disease or poverty in distant lands.

    (Paragraphing added.)

  • God doesn’t waste any rocks

    Rock WallSeveral years ago we were driving in the New England countryside, on our way to a family wedding. It was a beautiful afternoon. I admired the many neat rock walls along the road; we don’t have such things in our part of Texas, mostly because we don’t really have rocks here.

    I noticed that the walls contained all sorts of odd-shaped stones. I had a very good idea what it took to build walls like that, because my dad did the same thing for the terraces in his yard some thirty years ago. My folks’ house is on a hillside at the edge of the Texas Hill Country. Road-construction crews working nearby were looking for places to dump enormous chunks of stone that they’d dug up. Dad had them dump the stone in the yard.

    without cement or mortor, it is held together by just the rocks that make the wallFor months, Dad and my younger brother would break big rocks into pieces with sledge hammers. They’d assemble the pieces into terrace walls, fitting them in wherever they could, wringing the maximum possible use out of the available materials.  (I was off at college and then in the Navy, but I’d help out when home on leave.)

    These New Englanders apparently had done much the same thing. It was a very pleasing effect; I was impressed with their work.

    Then a thought popped into my head: God doesn’t waste any rocks either. Whatever materials are at hand — including what we think of as “evil” — he seems to put them to use somehow in his on-going creation of the universe.

    (This is a conjecture, of course, but it seems to fit the way that the universe has evolved over billions of years.) 

    I thought of this when I read an essay in today’s New York Times, “Genius and Misfit Aren’t Synonyms, or Are They?” by technology writer G. Pascal Zachary. Mr. Zachary points out that, while successful geniuses can get a lot of media ink — he mentions Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and The Steves, Jobs and Wozniak — their successes typically rest on the unheralded work of a lot of other, more-conventional people:

    Does this mean the misfit is always worth betting on? Not really. The often-ignored side of the Kuhn theory is that for long stretches of time, the frontier of science and technology is ruled by diligent people who are quietly filling in the grand vision that spawned a new paradigm in the first place.

    These people are heroes of their own sort, keeping the home fires burning until the reigning paradigm is played out. “The celebration of misfits promotes a worrisome anti-intellectualism and presents a distorted picture of the innovation process,” says Mr. Hollinger, the historian.

    Indeed, technological innovation — not to mention new scientific knowledge — is increasingly a result of large teams, working in routine, predictable ways. Individuals matter, but their contributions often can no longer be measured, nor can credit be accurately apportioned — even by the people working closest with them.

    Perhaps the steady rise in power by faceless teams of engineers, technicians and scientists explains the persistent romantic appeal of the lone misfit.

    By any measure, successful misfits are the exception, and there is no handy tool for distinguishing the next college dropout with a bright and wealthy future from the dropout who faces a heap of woe.

    Think about it — both the geniuses and the patient plodders seem to have their work put to use in the service of the Creation. How absolutely marvelous!

    Related posts:

  • Helping the world’s poor with simple, cheap technology

    I’ve told my wife that someday I want to spend my time helping with efforts like these:

    The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. Polak … cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture and Maseratis.

    “We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,” he said.

    To that end, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum … is honoring inventors dedicated to “the other 90 percent,” particularly the billions of people living on less than $2 a day. …

    For example, one of the simplest and yet most elegant designs tackles a job that millions of women and girls spend many hours doing each year — fetching water. … The Q-Drum, a circular jerry can, holds 20 gallons, and it rolls smoothly enough for a child to tow it on a rope.

    Interestingly, most of the designers who spoke at the opening of the exhibition spurned the idea of charity.

    “The No. 1 need that poor people have is a way to make more cash,” said Martin Fisher, an engineer who founded KickStart, an organization that says it has helped 230,000 people escape poverty. It sells human-powered pumps costing $35 to $95.

    Pumping water can help a farmer grow grain in the dry season, when it fetches triple the normal price. Dr. Fisher described customers who had skipped meals for weeks to buy a pump and then earned $1,000 the next year selling vegetables.

    “Most of the world’s poor are subsistence farmers, so they need a business model that lets them make money in three to six months, which is one growing season,” he said. KickStart accepts grants to support its advertising and find networks of sellers supplied with spare parts, for example. His prospective customers, Dr. Fisher explained, “don’t do market research.”

    “Many of them have never left their villages,” he said.

    Donald G. Macneil, Jr., DesignThat Solves Problems for the World’s Poor, New York Times, Tuesday, May 29, 2007.

  • Half-full or half-empty is only half the story

    Six billion-plus glasses.  Some people see their own glasses as half-empty, others as half-full. There’s no question that some glasses really are pretty full, while others are so empty it’s a disgrace to the rest of us.

    But we risk losing hope if we focus just on the half-empty glasses. Another crucial question: What’s the overall trend?  On average, has the water level in our six billion glasses been rising, or falling?

    It’s beyond dispute that we still have a ton of work to do to get everyone’s glass up to a reasonably-acceptable level. But we can take some small satisfaction that overall, the water level has been rising, and it should continue to do so if we keep at it (assuming we don’t manage to screw things up).

    Related posts:

  • It’s time to ditch the traditional Christian narrative: A better way for followers of Jesus to look at history

    [Edited 2012-08-14]


    The infirmities of the existing Christian narrative

    According to traditional Christianity, the history of the universe supposedly boils down to this: 

    • Humans once lived in blissful union with a loving God, but then they willfully disobeyed him, imagining that they knew better than he. 
    • So the loving God cast humans into a cruel world of suffering and death.
    • One nation, Israel, accepted God's call to be his chosen people. The Israelites declared that they would worship God and follow his law no matter what. (That's what the loving God wanted all of humanity to do.) 
    • But Israel didn't do such a great job of it. The loving God therefore allowed Israel to be conquered by a series of oppressive empires. 
    • In a backwater corner of the latest of those empires, the loving God became a man, Jesus, born to a virgin of Israel.
    • This Jesus voluntarily died an agonizing death, not simply because he got cross-wise with the forces of the empire, but because such a brutal course of action was how the loving God wanted to reconcile humanity to himself.
    • Jesus' mission of reconciliation having been accomplished, he was raised from the dead, following which he ascended into heaven.  
    • Since then, humanity has basically been marking time, waiting for Jesus' triumphant return.  

    This is not a satisfying narrative, nor even a credible one.  As the courtroom lawyers say, it assumes too many facts not in evidence.  It  ignores too many observations of how the universe God wrought actually works.  It treats all other history as more or less irrelevant. (See the posts listed in the right-hand column for more analysis.)

    Small wonder that in general, the more education people have, the less likely they are to believe this traditional Christian narrative.

    A better account of the universe's history: Helping the Creator to organize a universe

    It's no sin for us to look for a better explanation of the extant evidence. When we do so, we don't claim we're smarter than our spiritual forebears, any more than today's physicians claim that they're smarter than Hippocrates or Galen; instead, we're building on the foundations that they bequeathed to us.

    So here's another version of the narrative, one that does seem to fit the available evidence:

    • It appears that for at least 13.7 billion years, a Creator has been organizing, or if you will, cultivating, what we perceive as our universe (along with who knows what else), using the laws of nature and the matter and energy resulting from the so-called Big Bang in a process of ongoing evolution.

    [In an earlier version, I referred to this as the Creator's cultivation of a vast, fertile ‘farm.'] 

    • As part of that project, the Creator appears to have been growing a series of helpers — us — to assist with his organizational work; we've also gotten to share in the enjoyment of the fruits of that work. As Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner puts it, we are "created co-creators."

    • We don't have explicit instructions from the Creator about how exactly we're supposed to help organize the universe. Various people and groups have claimed otherwise; none of them has offered a credible case. 

    • Over tens of thousands of years, though, we have developed — through trial and error and perhaps even some divine inspiration, and often at terrible cost — reasonable notions of how to make ourselves more happy and productive as 'helpers,' in ways that can be sustained over time and scaled up as our numbers increase.  

    • Our collective historical experience suggests that we do best at making ourselves more happy and productive when we follow two core practices:

    1. Facing the facts, that is, dealing with the reality that the Creator has actually wrought, instead of pretending that life is the way we think it ought to be; and
    2. Seeking long-term happiness for others as we do for ourselves.

    • These two core practices are entirely consistent with the Christianity that Jesus actually preached (as distinct from the strange doctrines his later followers came up with).  We can think of them as paraphrases of the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law — love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and your neighbor as your­self — which Jesus stressed would lead to eternal life; see, e.g., Luke 10.25-37.

    It's not unrealistic to think that when we follow these two core practices — when we face the facts, while seeking the best for others as for our­selves — we contribute an infinitesimal bit to the Creator's ongoing work of organizing his, and our, universe. 

    To what ultimate end?  It's impossible to know.

    But we're not without reason to think that life in the material universe that we perceive is not all there is. 

    In any case, if past historical trends are any indication, in the very, very long run the end result is likely to be unimaginably wonderful.