Coyne v. Wright on the Evolution of “God”

At the New Republic, Jerry Coyne has a withering review of Robert Wright’s popular new book, The Evolution of God. In response, Wright has made a list of Coyne’s misrepresentations, which convinced me that Coyne should indeed have been more careful. But Wright’s response focuses on the “trees” (Coyne’s individual distortions) and leaves Coyne’s criticism of Wright’s “forest” intact.

To wit, Wright points out that Coyne took a quote out of context in order to attribute to Wright “the claim” that “God” is behind humanity’s moral progress. But of course Wright doesn’t “claim” any such thing; he only suggests that it is plausible, as shown by a passage quoted by Coyne that was not, it appears, taken out of context: “Maybe natural selection is an algorithm that is in some sense designed to get life to a point where it can do something — fulfill its goal, its purpose.” Wright thinks that that purpose might have been the achievement of moral order.

As Coyne says, and as I confirmed by reading Wright’s afterword (entitled “By the Way, What Is God?”), this focus on possibilities, as opposed to what we might call provabilities, is “characteristic of Wright’s intellectual style.” But talking about what is possible is almost never enlightening or fruitful. Wright admits as much when he says that a personal God “presumably” does not exist; what he means is that the possibility is not disprovable, but we can and should nevertheless discount it. But the same sort of skeptical approach to “possibilities” vitiates Wright’s own argument. Read the rest of this entry »

Iran, “People Power,” and the Ghosts of 1989

A whole host of professions devoted to the memorialization of political movements — journalists, activists, historians hungry for op-ed opportunities –  anticipated 2009 if for nothing but the fact that it marked the twentieth anniversary of two of the most consequential events in recent world history: the fall of communism in Europe and, in China, the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

But this year has  marked far more — the culmination of a decade during which the shine came off the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama blandly labeled the post-communist period. First came the wars (Iraq, Afghanistan) often irresponsibly dressed up as civilizational struggles, then a collapse of faith in capitalism so stunning that, had it happened during the Cold War, might have sparked, if not a reverse 1989, a considerable propaganda coup for the Soviet bloc. Whereas one of the cataclysmic events of 1989 — the fall of the Berlin Wall — was more widely celebrated in the soaring boom of the late 90s, 2009 seems more ripe for an exploration of the ambiguous legacy of both the popular movements that swelled, on both sides of Eurasia, twenty years before.

Enter the Iranian election imbroglio, perfectly timed to capture a zeitgeist brimming with expectation of cultural chaos and refreshed by reminders of the popular demonstrations that erupted on the streets of Berlin and Beijing. Salient memories of the former make it unsurprising to watch media figures, cheerleading what they hope is yet another replay of 1989 Berlin, lump the demonstrations against the election result with other recent “Twitter Revolutions”. While Evgeny Morozov disputed social media’s usefulness for such movements in the March/April issue of BR, he is having slightly more trouble doing so in the context of Iran, where the government — let’s all stop inconsistently plastering every momentarily disfavored system with the epithet “regime” — is either much less sophisticated at harnessing the internet for propaganda purposes, or doesn’t need to.

After all, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad counts among his supporters significant numbers of the lower classes, and, though reported on with far less zeal by the BBC or (when it finally stuck its head out of the embarrassing gutter of celebrity gossip in which it’s been increasingly entrenched) CNN, many thousands of them also managed to mobilize in Iran’s capital without the aid of an expensive iPhone. Indeed, missing from the many discussions about the protests in Iran, from technology to the flared tempers on display in the streets, are they they, like many large street demonstrations over the past decade — and unlike the uprisings of 1989 — have been taking place in an atmosphere charged with class politics.

Read the rest of this entry »