In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
Jonah, you may want to talk to the publisher about changing the cover. Just saying.
posted by Noah at 6:07 PM

 
A follow-up to last night's post (which, by the way, reads to me as kind of rambling and incoherent in the cold light of day): I realize that I forgot to include any discussion of that paper by Robert McCauley that Derb linked to in his first post. Since I enjoyed the paper very much, and had a few thoughts about it, I want to correct that omission.

First off, I think the paper is broadly speaking correct. Science is profoundly unnatural, whereas religion is rooted deeply in human nature.

I also agree that science is, for that reason, more fragile, more vulnerable to extinction, than is religion in general or even particular religions. Science is dependent on institutional continuity in a way that religion - even organized religion - is less so, because individual believers can be effective tradents while the individual scientist cannot similarly carry his tradition on his back. The vulnerability of science is a sociological observation, but it derives from a truth about individual psychology.

I do think, however, that there is a bit of confusion in the paper as to the definition of religion. McCauley presumes that religion is, quintessentially, a set of beliefs - beliefs about supernatural agents and their impact on the natural world. Even "primitive" religion begins with theories about these supernatural agents and proceeds from there to invent rituals to influence these agents. My strong inclination, by contrast, is to understand religion as quintessentially a set of practices, and to find any architecture of belief to be belated. We have a deep-seated need to engage in ritual behaviors, and to tell stories; we come up with rituals and stories about the gods because we need the rituals and the stories, not because we've got a theory about why crops fail. But, to be fair, I am at least somewhat inclined to credit theories that find much of human reasoning about our decisionmaking to be belated - that is to say, to credit psychologies that claim we decide to do something without conscious reasoning and then, after the fact, use our reason to tell ourselves stories to explain why we did what we did. So religious behavior is just a special case of behavior in general for me. (Do not mistake me: I am in no way whatsoever a behaviorist. I don't understand how anyone could possibly deny the existence of mental states or their power to impact behavior. But it may still be the case that conscious mental states are belated with respect to any particular decision - decision #1 is made unconsciously but results in conscious mental states that "set up" the board, as it were, for decision #2, also made unconsciously but plainly affected by the conscious mental states that develop after and in response to - though we think they are prior and predicate to - decision #1. Is that clear?)

I probably being unfair in calling this a confusion, because McCauley alludes at a couple of points to the difference between religion "as actually practiced" and theology. But I'm not sure he sees the full implications of this distinction. Theology is quite as unnatural as science, and as likely to be in conflict with common sense and instinct as science is. I would make the following analogy: religion is a natural practice that rests on a foundation of instinctive predilection to ritual behavior, whereas theology is an unnatural, belated intellectual activity that is wedded to but also in perpetual conflict with "natural" religion, in the same way that tool-making in the broadest sense is a natural practice that rests on a foundation of instinctive knowledge of common-sense physics, whereas science is an unnatural, belated intellectual activity that is wedded to but also in perpetual conflict with "common-sense" reasoning about reality. Science is no more in conflict with "instinctive" religion than it is with common sense - that is to say: it's very much in conflict with both, but no one takes this to mean that common sense should be eradicated. By contrast, science and theology, inasmuch as they are competing totalizing systems, may indeed come into conflict, but if they do it seems to me that theology must, in some fashion, give way, because science as such by its nature cannot do so, whereas theology, because its ultimate object is to explain why things are, to impart meaning to reality rather than to make detailed and accurate predictions about how reality will behave, should be capable of assimilating whatever science discovers about how the universe works. My point from yesterday was that while theology as such should be able to do so, individual theologies may not be so capable, and thus science and religion as such should be able to live together in peace and harmony (for long stretches, anyway) but science and individual religions may indeed come into fatal conflict (or those individual religions may survive, but so transformed as to be unrecognizable to earlier generations of believers).

Science and theology are alike totalizing ways of apprehending reality. The kind of religious instinct that McCauley focuses on in his paper is not. McCauley quotes Dennett as saying that "until science came along, one had to settle for personifying the unpredictable--adopting the intentional stance toward it--and trying various desperate measures of control and appeasement." This is a perfect illustration of the category mistake that infects so much scientific writing about religion. The philosophical and theological tradition of arguments that any such attempt at appeasement is vain long predates the development of modern science; Job and Ecclesiastes are two early examples from the Western religious canon. And the natural impulse to want to appease the gods so they will take the cancer away has not been exorcized by modern science. Rather, those who are cowed by modern science's disapproval of cancer spirits may develop ritual behaviors that look for all the world religious but that are more solopsistic in nature, making of ourselves the gods to be appeased.

I don't want to sound negative; I thought McCauley's piece was a good one. As a corrective to the nurturist assumptions of cultural anthropologists and religious studies types, it's quite useful. Historians of popular culture and popular religiosity are frequently inclined to find suppressed "traditions" fighting against institutional religion when what they are probably observing is the effervescence of natural religion. But as an entry in the science vs. religion lists, I find the piece somewhat less useful.
posted by Noah at 9:40 AM

 
I've been following with interest Derb's debate (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here) over Leon Wieseltier's review of Daniel Dennett's latest book. (It beats reading the news from Iraq.)

I think I know what Derb is worried about. Stephen Sondheim wrote a rather underrated work about the opening of Japan, called Pacific Overtures, in the first act of which there is a scene where the Shogun, an idiot playboy, is being cajoled to pay some minimal attention to the fact that American warships are sitting in the harbor demanding to land and receive an audience (all of which Japan's laws would prohibit). Here's a bit of the libretto where the Shogun's mother suggests calling in the priests to opine on what to do:

MOTHER
It's the Day of the Ox, my Lord.
With but three days remaining
And today already waning,
I've a few further shocks, my Lord.

To begin, let me say,
At the risk of repetition,
There are ships in the bay,
And they didn't ask permission,
But they sit there all day
In contemptuous array
With a letter to convey
And they haven't gone away
And there's every indication
They they still plan to stay,
And you look a little gray, my Lord …

Have some tea, my Lord,
Some chrysanthemum tea,
While we plan, if we can,
What our answer ought to be.

If the tea the Shogun drank will
Serve to keep the Shogun tranquil,
I suggest, if I may, my Lord,
We consult the Confucians —
They have mystical solutions.
There are none wise as they, my Lord …

PRIESTS
Night waters do not break the moon.
That merely is illusion.
The moon is sacred.

No foreign ships can break our laws.
That also is illusion.
Our laws are sacred.

It follows there can be no ships.
They must be an illusion.
Japan is sacred.

Derb is surely right that if we start to reason like this, our civilization is in for a heap of trouble. And so that's not a bad thing to spend your time worrying about.

But I think I need to point out - in an entirely friendly manner - a few problems with his style of argumentation.

First, arguments exclusively from genealogy can get opponents annoyed. They got Wieseltier sufficiently annoyed to write a rather unimpressively sputtering review. Similar annoyance got people like Peter Robinson to write sympathetically about Wieseltier's effort. Is it wise - is it likely to be rhetorically successful - in such a context not merely to allude to the genealogy of Wieseltier's arguments as if that were itself an argument, but to mock said genealogy (references to Fr. Rutland and all that)? What is gained, other than self-satisfaction?

Second, Wieseltier is (attempting) to make a philosophical argument. I think it is worth the effort to tease out what that argument may be and knock the stuffing out of it on its own terms. I've got a pretty strong commitment to epistemological pragmatism, but sometimes pragmatism is the last refuge of a lazy (or, more likely, weary) rhetorical combatant. Even if you're going to argue from consequences, you're going to get a better response if you stick to consequences germane to the particular discourse, to say, "following this line isn't going to get you anywhere you want to go intellectually" when you are debating a philosophical point, rather than, "that we are even debating this question proves my point that we are falling ever further behind the Chinese in the contest for mastery of the future of the human race" - and that's true even if you believe the latter to be true.

Finally, and most troublingly (to me) on his final contribution to the debate. Derb winds up by saying, basically, that Dennett does no one any favors by playing that village atheist, and that he ought to be more respectful of the good opinion of most people - for the good of science. I seem to recall a controversy some months ago about a piece by Gertrude Himmelfarb (also a not-very-good piece, I might add - Derb seems to be making an unfortunate habit of martyring not-very-good pieces by launching wild attacks on their authors' motives) in which Derb expressed his profound distaste for "noble lie" types of compromises. It seems very much that he is urging Dennett to tell just such a lie. Dennett thinks he knows the truth, and that it will set us free. To be fair, Derb doesn't agree with Dennett on the former point - Derb is not a tub-thumping village atheist - but he is effectively advising Dennett that even if he sincerely believes what he says about atheism and materialism, he ought to keep it to himself because most people - by nature - cannot handle such a truth. I fail to see the difference between this advice and the kind of attitude that he attributed to Irving Kristol (and, by implication, his wife), who was (Derb claimed) cozying up to Intelligent Design types for the sake of social peace. The only difference I can discern is the nature of the good being protected from the unreasoning mob in each respective case. I don't like that style of argument any more than Derb does, but I do think that's the kind of argument he's making. I'll go into why I think he winds up making such arguments further on, what might be some alternative arguments, and what their big pitfalls are in turn.

I'm going to defend Derb defending Dennett, even though Derb has not read Dennett's book and, while I haven't read this one, I've read other books of Dennett's and I'm decidedly unimpressed - and not because he's a tub-thumping village atheist. Anyone who can write a book entitled Consciousness Explained has a chutzpah problem. When you write a book with that title and, in the end, do nothing whatever to explain consciousness - that is, to reduce it to understood phenomena, to explain it in a scientific sense - you have a problem bigger than chutzpah. He "explains" consciousness entirely be means of a metaphor, leaving consciousness as such just as much of a mystery as it was before the book began. But he is adamant that now the mystery is gone, and all the "mysterians" can pack up their tents. Dennett is the worst kind of science popularizer: the kind who thinks that if you admit science can't currently explain something or other and, indeed, may have a very great difficulty ever explaining something or other, then that is just giving an "opening" to the other side in some kind of conflict. He writes as if he believes precisely what religious fundamentalists believe: that anything science cannot currently account for must have been handled by God directly. No scientist should ever believe such a thing, or they'll wind up doing very bad science; no popularizer of science should ever write in such a way, or he'll only give an "opening" to the other side in a very real conflict. I'm going to defend Derb defending Dennett because I think Derb's reasons for disliking the Wieseltier review are good ones, and that those who are defending Wieseltier are a little too secure in their own intellectual redouts for my personal taste.

Now, to a substantive defense, with important qualifications.

Derb is right on the essential merits. I've never understood what humanists like Wieseltier are criticizing, precisely, when they criticize "materialism." I know what theists might be criticizing; they might believe quite literally in divine providence, for example. In their case, my question what not be what they believe but in what sense they really believe it - my inquiry would be pragmatic: how do their decisions differ because of their belief, and does this belief appear to be efficacious in their decisionmaking. But for a humanist to criticize "materialism" is perplexing. Is Wieseltier an old-fashion Cartesian dualist? Is he familiar with the litany of problems with dualism, with its internal incoherence? Or is he a panpsychist of some kind? Where does Wieseltier think the mind comes from, if not the brain? I suspect Derb is right, and that Wieseltier couldn't care less about the answers to these kinds of questions; he's committed to some notion that there is a domain of "spirit" because, say, the Nazis and Communists seemed to be against such a domain, so the good guys must be for it; or because he has a nostalgic affection for Jewish tradition that affirms the existence of such a realm; or something. Derb's got every right to be annoyed at seeing such ill-thought-out intellectual prejudices wielded like a cudgel.

And Derb's right that the faculty of reason and the religious "instinct" could be - almost certainly are - incommensurate, and that there is no teeth in the argument that if both are products of natural selection then both are equally undermined by that genealogy. To begin with, there is a cogent - though not at all proven; actually, not even evidenced, really, just hypothesized - argument that our inclination to religious belief is a "side effect" of a cognitive property of great value rather than a property selected for in its own right. That's the argument that Dennett is sketching in his book: the ability to model the intentionality of other minds is of enormous value cognitively, but the side effect is that we infer intentionality whenever we are confronted with sufficient complexity, and religion is an example of this side effect. That's not a scientific theory at this point; it's just a logical argument that fits with what minimal evidence there is on this topic at all. But it's at least as plausible that a predisposition towards religious beliefs and practices are natural in a more robust sense - that they really were selected for because they increase fitness, not because they are a sorry side-effect of some other faculty. If this is the case, though, then the religious instinct is analogous to, say, common sense, or "folk physics" that appears to be hard-wired into us. We don't have to learn, for example, about the existence of gravity, or friction, or inertia; we are born with hard-wiring about these things, and we what we learn is how to get along with these forces as we actually make our way through the world, running and jumping and throwing baseballs and the like. But we are not born knowing the actual laws of physics, and the actual laws of physics turn out to differ in far-reaching ways from the common-sense or "folk" physics we know by instinct. And it is our faculty of reason that we use to discern the differences, because it is our faculty of reason that allows us to . . . reason. Or to access Reason, if you prefer. Reason has a certain pride of place amongst our faculties when we ask questions about how things are. To repeat, then, if religious "instincts" have been selected for in their own right, it seems far more likely that they are analogous to "common sense" rather than to the faculty of reason. Which would imply that reason should, similarly, be granted the ability to overrule what religious instincts "teach" - when the question at hand is one of how things are.

I need to dispose of one important argument, however, before moving on. It is striking that we human beings have the faculties to develop natural science - that we can, actually, unravel the rules about how things are with a very high degree of precision. That is to say: it is striking that, however hard psychologically it may be for us to deploy it, we have a faculty of reason with a high correspondence to how the universe actually works - as opposed to how we experience the universe, which is what you would expect we would have and which, in fact, any animals that manifest signs of consciousness probably have to some degree. This is a sufficiently striking fact that it has inclined some scientists - physicists and mathematicians, mostly - to understand it as proof of at least the truth of Plato's religion, though not of Moses'. It suggests an intelligence behind the existence of things, a kinship between that intelligence and our own, and a disjunction between our intelligences and the other, lesser animal intelligences with which we have made contact. But a few things need to be said about this suggestion. First, it's just that: a suggestion. It's also possible that our ability to do natural science is a happy accident, the bi-product of some other trait selected for more mundane reasons. To the extent that modern civilization requires this kind of intelligence for survival, we may now be selecting for precisely that trait, but it's not obvious to me that individual survival, as opposed to collective survival, actually depends in any way on one's ability to do math or natural science, so I doubt this is the case. Second, even if one is persuaded by this suggestion, it does not imply that there is any truth whatever to the religious beliefs that we are strongly inclined to hold. Even if it could be proved that there is an intentionality behind everything, that does not imply that there is an intentionality behind any particular thing. And it is the latter that is the meat and potatoes of religion as it has actually been lived for all of human history. Third, and finally, no analogy can be made between the correspondence of the law-governed universe to law-discerning human reason and a hypothesized correspondence between a God-governed universe and a God-knowing human soul. No such analogy can be made because science justifies itself in its own terms and has earned that correspondence. It is not at all obvious what our religions - assuming they agreed with one another on some irreducible set of axioms, which they don't - could do to earn such a correspondence for themselves.

Derb is right that Wieseltier's review is (as Wieseltier himself might formulate it) "objectively" anti-Darwinist in that it gives aid and comfort to those who want to wall off certain kinds of scientific arguments as inadmissable. But I don't think that's a very telling attack, and Derb wouldn't approve of accusations in that style made in other contexts (such as, for example, when Wieseltier has called people or arguments "objectively" anti-Semitic). The more telling point is that Wieseltier refuses to engage with Darwinian logic as such. He seems to have concluded long ago that science by definition couldn't possibly impinge on his (humanist) beliefs, and so when someone comes along saying, actually, they do so impinge, he doesn't need to engage that particular argument at all. Unfortunately, and here I get to my most important disagreement with both Wieseltier and Derb, I think Darwinian logic does impinge in a very specific way on all sorts of beliefs that, I suspect, the three of us hold in common. To take this argument further, I'm going to have to wander off into theodicy. I hope at least some of you will follow me there.

David Hart wrote a piece about theodicy for First Things last year that annoyed me to no end, and as I thought about it I decided that it annoyed me not for any reason particular to it but because I find Christian theodicy uncompelling as such, and this was a perfectly orthodox example of Christian theodicy. My initial reaction to the piece was different; I thought I was annoyed because Hart was elaborating a Manichean theodicy in that he attributed natural evil to God's "enemy" rather than to God. But, in fairness, in good orthodox Christianity, natural evil is a product of Man's Original Sin. The very nature of reality itself is fallen as a consequence of humanity's free choice to rebel. I find this theodicy unpersuasive on a gut level, I will admit. But it seems to me that the Darwinian account of creation makes it - or ought to make it - very, very hard for anyone to accept such a theodicy.

The reason is simple. The biblical account of creation, in the Christian reading, has natural evil enter the world as a consequence of human sin. Without our sin, there would be no suffering and death. In the Darwinian account of evolution, suffering and death are the preconditions to our existence. Our intelligence, and hence our ability to sin, is a faculty that was selected for in a bare-handed struggle for survival. Our religious instinct, if one is to assert that it does correspond to some objective reality as our reason corresponds to the reasoned ordering of the universe, is also the fruit of a process of natural selection. We may climb a mountain and see the face of God, but the mountain we climb is a mountain of skulls.

Put simply: natural selection is not the motor one would expect the Christian God to use to make the world go 'round.

(This is not to say that orthodox Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu theodicies are satisfying to me. Personally, I don't know a theodicy more compelling than that expressed by the whirlwind to Job: behold Behemoth, whom I made with thee . . . he is the beginning of the ways of God. If Behemoth is the beginning of the ways of God, then His ways truly are not our ways. The whirlwind does not attempt to justify the ways of God to man; the whirlwind tells man to stop expecting such a justification and get on with life, a life only possible because of God, author of all, and a life filled with wonder as well as suffering. Such an attitude isn't really a theodicy at all, which is probably why I find it more persuasive than either the attempts to justify the ways of God to man that David Hart, following Ivan Karamazov, abominates, or the orthodox Christianity that he embraces instead.)

Why do I take this digression? Because Derb would like to wall religion off from science by confining them to different explanatory realms. Religion will say absolutely nothing about how things are, and science will say absolutely nothing about why things are. The trouble is that I really do think discoveries about how things are can impact the persuasiveness of certain explanations about why things are. Which means that religion, even if it abandons any attempt to joust directly with science and accepts evolution, textual criticism, and so forth, may be threatened nonetheless by the discoveries of science.

Which leaves me with the following conclusion. If I am right that a "wall of separation" between science and religion is not tenable, because science may nonetheless threaten religion by its explanations of how things are; and if I am right that reason and science are rightly privileged in our heirarchy of faculties when we investigate the world as it is, and therefore religion must rightly yield to science in that sphere; and if I am right (and I'm agreeing with Derb here as well as in the previous point) that religion is not going to go away because human beings are born with a religious instinct (and this instinct, contra Dennett, may have survival value rather than being an unfortunate bi-product); then it follows that humanity badly needs religious leaders who take the truth - the whole truth - seriously. It seems very unlikely to me indeed that Aquinas, Averroes and Maimonides, in reconciling, as they saw it, their revealed religions with the Aristotelean science that they knew, anticipated precisely every possible challenge to be raised by science for the rest of human history. To a considerable extent, the landscape of religious thinkers today presents us with three choices: those who actively war with science; those who recycle old Scholastic arguments to reconcile science and religion as if science's challenge were unchanged in 800 years; and those who have never entertained a serious thought about such questions because they - "objectively" - treat religion as a branch of politics and/or psychotherapy. These three alternatives are not good ones - not good ones for any religious tradition and not good ones for human civilization.
posted by Noah at 9:46 PM

 
Well, that meme sure died quick.
posted by Noah at 12:17 PM

 
Good column by John O'Sullivan on the cartoons, but I wish he had dwelt longer on the arguments for a law against blasphemy. The arguments are worth airing, and seeing their implications. The most important implication is not for free speech but for freedom of religion.

"Blasphemy" is not a synonym for "offense." Blasphemy is a deliberate insult to the sacred, violating the third commandment, spuriously claiming powers or attributes properly reserved for the divinity, etc. To define blasphemy, you need to define the sacred, and the divine, and the attributes thereof. And religions do not agree about these definitions. Indeed, religions can conflict radically on these central points. For this reason, an egalitarian anti-blasphemy law cannot be conceived.

Christianity is, strictly speaking, blasphemous according to Islam. A convert to Islam makes a very simple declaration of faith: there is no God but God, and Muhammad is His prophet. These two beliefs - the unity and singularity of the divine, and the truth of Muhammad's prophecy in the Quran - are all that one can say with certainty a Muslim must affirm. According to any Muslim's interpretation of the former, Christianity is blasphemous. Christianity asserts that God was incarnated as the man, Jesus of Nazareth. The Quran explicitly instructs Muslims to reject this teaching. The Quran explicitly says that the doctrine of the trinity is blasphemous. A blanket prohibition on blasphemy would necessitate the prohibition of Christian evangelization.

Islam is, as well, blasphemous according to Christianity, or at least the Quran contains material that could be considered blasphemous. I'm thinking specifically of the fact that according to the Quran, Jesus was never crucified; instead, God replaced Jesus at the last minute with a dummy. As blasphemy, that's roughly comparable to Salman Rushdie's offense in writing The Satanic Verses, part of the conceit of which was that some verses of the Quran were dictated not by the Archangel Gabriel but by Satan. A blanket prohibition on blasphemy would therefore necessitate the prohibition of public reading or dissemination of the Quran.

Obviously, once we throw other religions into the mix the situation gets even more impossible. Jewish particularism is problematic for both Islam and Christianity. Hinduism is a problem for all monotheistic faiths; it's also a problem for Buddhism because of its characterization of the Buddha as an avatar sent to promulgate false doctrine. The LDS Church is considered idolatrous and blasphemous by most Christians. And so on and so forth.

A proper blasphemy law protects the established religion of a jurisdiction. And while arguably an establishment need not be unitary in character (I suppose you could establish the Protestant religion without establishing a particular denomination), it cannot be radically internally inconsistent and even contradictory. Which is what a law prohibiting blasphemy against any religion would effectively require: the establishment of all religions, in spite of their mutual contradiction. The only way to make an egalitarian blasphemy law work, then, would be by severe curtailment of freedom of religion, as well as speech.

Of course, since freedom of religion is impossible, I suppose we don't have to worry about that.
posted by Noah at 11:06 AM

 
Dan Drezner points to an interesting little survey of various countries' attitudes towards various other countries. Some things are obvious - Iran is pretty unpopular, and so is the US, and Europe and Japan are more popular - but slicing the data various ways gives some interesting other tidbits.

Here's one: some countries just have a fairly negative view of everybody. Turkey, for example, has a net-negative view of China (marginally), Britain, Russia, France, the US, India (again marginally) and Iran. They have net-positive views only of Japan. (They also had a net-positive view of Europe - but with net-negative views of every European *country* actually mentioned this should perhaps be interpreted as positive views of the EU as an institution rather than "Europeans" as a people.) Turkey is notable for having a net-negative view of so many countries *and* for a large net-negative view of the world on average. France, Finland, Germany and Argentina also have double-digit net-negative views on average, but each is only net-negative on 5 out of 8 countries, as against Turkey's 7 out of 8 (France has positive views of Britain and of France itself, as do Finland and Germany; Argentina has positive views of China and France, but strongly negative views of Britain). But other countries are widely gloomy if not so deeply so. South Korea has net-negative views of China, Russia, the US, India, Japan and (strongly) Iran; they have extremely positive views of Britain and France, which is what drags them into net-sunny territory on the world as a whole, when they really should be counted among the gloomy gusses. Mexico has net-negative views only of Britain, Russia and (strongly) the US, but there is no country they are particularly positive on; next to Turkey, they have the lowest positive views across the board of any country polled.

The most upbeat countries, in terms of their views of the rest of the world, appear to be in Africa. Every African country polled has a positive view of the US, for instance, which would suggest the Africans are especially fond of America (the non-African countries that poll net-positive on the US are Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Poland the Philippines - the most positive country on the US of any polled, they like us more than we like ourselves). But in fact, the African countries have a positive view of everybody. The Nigerians have a net-positive view of every country on which they were polled except for Iran, and they have the 7th most positive view of Iran of any coutry polled (including Iran itself). They have as strongly a positive view of Japan, Britan and China as they do of the US. On average, the African countries polled have a marginally more positive view of Japan, China, France and Britain than they do of the US, though they have very positive views of all these countries. Of the six countries with the net-sunniest view of other countries among those polled, five - Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania - are in Africa. The sixth - actually #2 on the sunny index - is Afghanistan, which has a net-positive view of 7 of the 8 countries on which they were polled; they only country they don't trust is Russia, and they have only a 3% net negative view of them (30% positive, 33% negative). Which is kind of amazing when you consider the history. In any event, if anyone's spinning the poll as showing how much Africans love America, discount the spin. We're popular there, but not notably so.

It's also interesting to see which countries profess self-love, and which profess more ambivalence. Here's a table showing each country that was polled about itself, how positive they view their role in the world, how negative, and what the net score is, ranked by net score:

Country Positive Negative Net
China 86% 6% 80%
Russia 69% 6% 63%
France 68% 16% 52%
Iran 68% 18% 50%
India 47% 10% 37%
Britain 63% 26% 37%
US 63% 30% 33%

China exhibits the rabid nationalism of which none of us should be surprised. India is charmingly cynical about itself, but not actually worried. Among the remaining countries polled, positive views of self are relatively similar; Russia, France, Iran, Britain and the US all fall within a 6% range in terms of self-approval. But the US and Britain (and India) have significantly lower net-self-approval ratings than the other countries on the list. Is that a reflection of sharp dissension over the Iraq war? Or lack of civilizational self-confidence? Or healthy self-skepticism? I don't know the reason, but it is notable, and it would be interesting to see how these numbers have varied over time. (I also wish they had polled the Japanese.)

Cases of unreciprocated love (or hate) are fascinating. China has strongly net-positive views of Russia. Russia couldn't care less about China. China also has extremely positive views of France, even more strong than of Russia. The French have decidedly negative views of China - among the most net-negative views of any country polled. The Russo-French relationship is similar; the Russians have wildly positive views of the French, while the French have extremely negative views of the Russians. The French, though, may just be hard to please; they have net-negative views of most countries. They don't even like the Indians, who have net-positive views of every country on which they were polled, including (barely) Iran. Interestingly, the only countries the French poll positively on (apart from themselves) are the British and the Japanese. And while we can't say how the Japanese feel (they weren't polled), the British are decidedly negative on the French. Touche! Iran, meanwhile, has strongly net-positive views of China, while China has midly net-negative views of Iran. Iran has even more strongly net-positive views of India, while Indians show no discernable enthusiasm for Iran (though they are barely net-positive in their views). But, then again, no one shows really wild enthusiasm for Iran; even the Africans range from lukewarm to strongly negative. And then there's America. We are net-negative on the Chinese, the Russians (barely), the French and (of course) the Iranians; we're lukewarm towards India and very positive towards the Japanese. But we are nuts about the Brits. We are more than twice as net-positive about the Brits as we are about ourselves. But the Brits are decidedly net-negative on us. Oh, well.

(Interestingly, Americans are the only country polled about themselves as well as other countries who viewed *any* other country more positively than themselves. We think both the British and the Japanese are a stronger force for good in the world than is our own country. Even the British - who come in second to last in net-self-love - are more net-positive on their own country than they are on any other place on which they were polled.)

The most-loved country on the list, is Japan, against whom only the Chinese and South Koreans harbor net-negative views (though the French and the Mexicans are rather stingy with their love). Unfortunately, we cannot say whether this love is unrequited or not, because Japan was not polled for their views of the world.

So much for unrequited love: who does the world love to hate? Iran gets by far the worst reviews of any country of the eight on which people were polled, followed by Russia and the US. The world has strong negative views of Iran and few positive views; the world is pretty equally divided between positive and negative views of the US and Russia, with stronger positive *and* negative feelings of the US.

Comparing views of the US with views of Iran, there are seven countries that harbor stronger net-negative views of the US than of Iran, apart from Iran itself: Mexico leading the pack (45% net-negative view of the US, versus 1% net-positive for Iran), followed by China, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey and Russia (which, to be honest, hates both the US and Iran about equally, just like Argentina). This is a pretty depressing list. It doesn't take a genius to predict that Mexico is going to be an increasing headache for the United States, and an increasingly serious one. China, of course, views us as a global rival. We are still fighting in Iraq, supposedly for their benefit; the Afghans appear to be happier at the way we "abandoned" their country than the Iraqis are at the way we remain "engaged" in theirs. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is a traditional rival of Iran; their mutual loathing is legendary. That they prefer Iran to America is notable. Ditto Turkey, a long-time American ally who has also been a traditional rival of the Iranians, and one profoundly threatened (like Saudi Arabia) by Iran's nuclear ambitions. And Russia, of course, has practically gotten a blank check from the Bush Administration, and has suffered mightily from terrorist attacks. Like I said: depressing.

Comparing views of the US with views of Russia, meanwhile, is also interesting. China, Iran, Mexico, Iraq, Argentina, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Spain, Australia, Turkey and South Korea all have net-negative views of the US, and less-negative - or, in the cases of China, Iran and Iraq, actually positive - views of Russia. Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka and India also prefer Russia to America, but have net-positive views of each. There are only three countries outside of Africa that strongly prefer the US to Russia: the Philippines, Poland and Afghanistan. Italy, Indonesia and Great Britain also prefer the US to Russia, but not by large margins and they are each net-negative on both of us. This is also a depressing list. China, Iran, Mexico, Iraq, Turkey: fine, we've discussed these already. Canada prefers Russia to the US? Australia prefers Russia to the US? Germany prefers Russia to the US? (All three are net-negative on both, but much more negative about the US.) The French are at least even-handed in their hatreds.

All in all, a very interesting poll. I only wish they'd polled Japan.
posted by Noah at 2:22 PM

 
On the other hand, I will give Larry Gonick points for creativity in his treatment of Muhammad.
posted by Noah at 5:28 PM

 
I've been following Hugh Hewitt's running commentary about the Danish cartoons, and I'm getting less and less happy.

To be sure I'm not misunderstood: he's quite clear that he's not questioning the principle of freedom of the press, nor calling for censorship or hate-speech prosecutions or anything of the kind. It goes without saying that he knows the rioters are the villains here. But he does very much seem to be saying that we all - cartoonists included - should censor ourselves when it comes to anything related to Islam, for the good of the war effort. We should consider whether our speech makes life easier or harder for our allies in the Muslim world, and behave accordingly.

I can see the virtue of this kind of thinking when it comes to the State Department, and by extension the government as a whole. But it betrays a profound - and revealing - confusion of categories to suggest that the press - that cartoonists - should think this way.

Someone, I forget who, suggested that publishing those cartoons was like publishing racist cartoons about African-Americans in the wake of the Watts riots. But that's not right at all. A far better analogy would be to suggest that, in World War II, we should have refrained from publishing cartoons mocking and insulting our Japanese enemies for fear of offending Americans of Japanese descent, of whom a goodly number served their country with great honor on the field of battle. (Ditto of course for Italians and Germans.) Is that really where Hewitt wants to go?

The New York Times managed to get a variety of quotes from a variety of press notables - Nicholas Lemann, for instance - who should know better, saying, in so many words, that the cartoonists were trying to start a riot, and a riot is what they got. But the cartoons were, more than anything else, about how cartoonists fear that they'll get death threats if they draw cartoons critical of Islam. (Of the twelve cartoons, two are very explicitly about this fear - one shows the cartoonist cowering as he draws - while two are simply depictions of Muhammad without any particular point, and two are criticisms of the paper itself for going through the exercise.) If they got a riot, then all they did is make their point very vividly. And the point they were making is right at the heart of what free speech and a free society is all about.

Did they set out to offend? Maybe. Because, you know, their point was that people in Europe are terrified of offending Muslims. Is there a way to make that point . . . inoffensively?

I'm afraid Hewitt's argument boils down to saying that the cartoonists' fear is their small contribution to the War on Terrorism. That would be the first time in history that a war was won by internalizing fear of the enemy. It is particularly amusing to read Hewitt defending his position by asking, "what would Churchill do."

But it's also - and although this point may pack the least punch, I think it's actually the most important one - an absolutely mad contribution for cartoonists to make. Diplomats have many weapons at their disposal; cartoonists pretty much have to make do with ridicule. It is a strange thing indeed to tell someone that the best contribution they can make to the war effort is to unilaterally disarm. Unless that someone is, objectively speaking, on the other side.

Which, I worry, is something close to what Hewitt thinks. That is to say: he's all for a free press. But he's also all for a sensitive press - generally, and not just in regard to Islam. He's one of the new breed of politically correct conservatives, much like our President; he doesn't want cartoonists offending Catholics or Evangelical Protestants or Jews or African-Americans or whatever, anymore than he wants them to offend Muslims. This is one approach to how to make a "multi-cultural" society work: adopt a book of etiquette that anathematizes offense. But this particular slope is incredibly slippery, and at the bottom lies a society where we're no longer lying only because we no longer would recognize the truth if we saw it.
posted by Noah at 10:28 PM