Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
There’s an interesting interview with Susan Jacoby over on Fresh Air (NPR) about her new book Strange Gods: A Secular History Of Conversion. Susan looks at people in history as well as current examples, and examines reasons why people choose to exchange one god for another.
Interestingly, the answer is very rarely, as she calls it, the Road to Damascus-style epiphanies. The answer is almost always intermarriage.
She also notes, quite tellingly that rates of religious conversion also depend quite strongly on the level of religiosity within the country lived in.
This is – the rate of religious conversion here is much, much higher than it is anywhere in Europe, for example. People there tend – if they don’t practice the default religion, they often slide into secularism, but it’s not a conversion in the sense of you don’t find very many Lutherans converting to Catholicism or Judaism in Sweden, for example.
Sh also talks about “mixed” marriages in which people of differing religions or none have to decide to raise children together. It’s probably a situation that a lot of people find themselves in. How do partners come to an agreement about it? I know in my own family, my mother “won” and raised her children to be Catholics (with varying degrees of success as it turns out). But I wonder whether this very difficult question ever breaks relationships. Personally I don’t think I could raise children with someone who is deeply religious; our conflicting personal philosophies would cause too much of a divide. Jacoby appears to feel the same way.
I don’t have any children, but if I did – and I know that many people in mixed marriages have to negotiate this – but I believe that whether one believes in God or not is – it’s very central to who I am. I actually cannot imagine raising children or doing the things you do – other things you do with a partner who disagreed with me on something so fundamental. To me, it’s fundamental. I completely can’t understand people, for example, of different faiths who say that their children will choose when they grow up. I think that if you believe in a religion, most people believe that it’s right.
People also change. What happens if you are moderately religious at the start of a relationship; but non-religious ten years later?
Here’s one of the more ludicrous recent protests against “cultural appropriation”, one that actually succeeded in cowing a famous museum last year: the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was a harbinger of the “cultural appropriation wars” that are now raging on college campuses, in which, for example, improperly prepared General Tso’s chicken is deemed a cultural offense by Asian students (the dish is actually Asian-American, unknown in China).
The BMFA had scheduled what they call “Kimono Wednesdays,” in which visitors would be able to try on a kimono in front of Monet’s picture “La Japonaise,” a portrait of his wife Camille dressed in a kimono. The painting:
As the BBCand Boston Globereported in July of last year, as part of a celebration for the departing director of the Museum, visitors were encouraged to pose in front of the painting wearing a replica of the kimono worn by Camille Monet, to wit:
There was also a Museum lecture, originally called “Claude Monet: Flirting With the Exotic.” (I do think that title is patronizing!) But this ignited protests that the kimono-wearing and touting of the “exotic” constituted “cultural appropriation and racist ‘exotification’ of Asian culture”. The title of the talk was changed to “Claude Monet: ‘La Japonaise,”, and they stopped letting visitors wear the kimono, though it remained on display. But the protests continued.
The BBC:
Some [protestors] stood with signs next to visitors who tried on the kimono.
“It’s not racist if you looks cute & exotic in it besides the MFA supports this!” one sign read.
Amnes Siyuan, one of the protest’s organisers, said: “A bunch of people tried to prove that they were not racist. That was not the point. We wanted to talk about why this event is cultural appropriation.”
Christiana Wang, another protester, said Asian Americans tend to be underrepresented and are forced into certain categories, such as the geisha or the quiet student.
Wang’s notion is one I don’t understand: are Asian-American women really forced into the category of “geisha”? If so, how? As for “quiet student”, if Asian-Americans retain a cultural tradition of not being loud or brash, surely that doesn’t force them to behave that way, and plenty of them don’t.
The protests:
As the Boston Globe reported on July 19:
The furor reached new heights on Wednesday as about two dozen protesters and half as many counterprotesters filled the MFA’s Impressionist gallery.
On one side, a group of mostly young Asian-American and white women gathered to protest “Kimono Wednesdays,” demanding additional context for the event and questioning views of Asians as “the other” in American culture.
They held signs with messages like “Not your Asian fetish” and “I have been assaulted, raped, harassed + stalked, denied my humanity repeatedly & you don’t want to think about me because I am just another Japanese woman.”
. . . Displaying a sign reading “Decolonize our museums,” a woman who gave her name only as Pampi, 36, spoke about the need to trace artworks to their first acquisitions, which she said were often violent, and charged the MFA with shirking its responsibility to curate the event for a diverse American audience.
I seriously doubt that the Monet was acquired or borrowed “violently”!
But, as the Globe reported, there were Japanese who supported the exhibit as well:
Stepping into the dispute this week were several counterprotesters wearing kimonos, including some older Japanese women, who advocated for the museum to return to its initial “Kimono Wednesdays” programming. One held a sign saying “I am not offended by people wearing kimono in front of French paintings.” Another sign read, in part, “I welcome museum exhibits that share Japanese culture with the community.”
Etsuko Yashiro, 53, of Concord, who helps organize Boston’s Japan Festival, said she was there to share the beauty of kimonos with an American audience. Ikuko Burns, 79, who was born in Tokyo and has lived in Boston for 53 years, explained how she used to bring kimonos to local schools as a consultant for the Children’s Museum to teach introductory lessons on Japan.
“I’m a little bit disappointed by the other side,” she said, questioning what the protest had to do with Monet’s painting and chalking it up to the participants’ youth.
Here are some women, two in kimonos, confronting the protestors:
Matsuko Levin (center), Danyeun Kim, and Etsuko Yashiro were at odds with a group of younger women protesting at the MFA.. Photo by Kayana Szymczak for the Boston Globe
And another defender:
Even the Japanese consul in Boston was puzzled:
“We actually do not quite understand what their point of protest is,” said Jiro Usui, the Deputy Consul General of Japan in Boston. “We tried to listen to those people who are protesting, but we think together with the MFA we should encourage that Japanese culture be appreciated in a positive way.”
“We heard concerns from some members of our community, and as a result we’ve decided to change our programming,” a museum statement read. “The kimonos will now be on display in the Impressionist gallery every Wednesday evening in July for visitors to touch and engage with, but not to try on. This allows the MFA to continue to achieve the program’s goal of offering an interactive experience with the kimonos—understanding their weight and size, and appreciating the embroidery, material, and narrative composition.”
And, as a further concession to the protests, the Museum held a two-hour discussion about whether the exhibit constituted cultural appropriation. Listen to the discussion below if you must; I’ve heard only snippets. (The discussion includes both supporters and objectors to the exhibit.) Some of the participants get quite exercised.
My own opinion? This was neither racist nor cultural “appropriation” (except in the sense that non-Japanese wore a kimono), but a celebration of a beautiful garment. Now if the subjects had made their eyes slanted as a way to mock the Japanese, that would have been rank bigotry. That aside (it didn’t happen), how often does anyone get to wear a kimono?I can imagine why some women would like to try (I would were I a woman!)
I can see the point of protesting the title of the original talk, “Flirting with the exotic,” for kimonos, at least in the past, were not “exotic” in Japan. But the protests went way beyond that. It became unacceptable for Westerners to simply don a kimono. And if that’s the case, then it’s surely cultural appropriation for Japanese to wear Levis, as many do. As we know, Western dress has become the norm in Japan.
This reminds me of the protests against Halloween costumes on the same grounds. But there’s a difference between wearing costumes to mock a culture, to celebrate a culture, or simply to dress up as a character for Halloween. The BMFA display seems to me to fall on the “celebration” side, while the protestors largely fall into the class of Special Snowflakes looking for any excuse to be offended.
Certainly the U.S. has treated Asians poorly in the past: think of the Japanese first- and second-generation immigrants who, despite having become American citizens, were still put in camps in the Western U.S. during World War II under the suspicion that they might be spies. That was insupportable, for at that very same time soldiers of Japanese descent were fighting for the U.S. against Germany. But this exhibit doesn’t come close to that form of discrimination.
It’s curious that at 6 minutes into the discussion, an organizer invites the audience to a reception with “tea and other refreshments”. Isn’t tea a cultural appropriation from the Japanese (and Indians)?
I try to be sensible of real discrimination against groups of people (of course I don’t always succeed), but after long cogitation I can’t see anything in these protests beyond a desire of some young people to be offended by anything. If wearing a kimono is racist, then am I racist when I wear my Indian kurta and dhoti when I visit India? Or even in the U.S.? Is a woman who wears a sari to an Indian music concert engaging in unacceptable cultural appropriation, or even racism?
I don’t think so, nor do I think we must always cave in to those who demand that we not adopt parts of their culture that we like. Surely we can hear them out, but their demands needn’t always be met.
I can dimly discern a bit of a rationale for the protests in the title of the original lecture: Japanese-Americans are not “exotic,” but just another ethnic group that has joined and contributed to the melting pot. But people need to learn that there’s a difference between celebrating a culture and denigrating it. I really do fear what this country will look like in 50 years if the trend of decrying “cultural appropriation” continues.
This week’s Jesus and Mo, called “heart”, is based on a BBC show that, sadly, is available only in the UK (link below). Apparently (and UK readers please clarify), two of the Big Questions participants engaged in shameful religious wish-thinking. I suppose the humor in this strip comes from Jesus and Mo pretending to refute the barmaid’s claims while actually supporting them, but I have to admit that my ribs weren’t strongly tickled. Maybe you have to listen to the BBC show.
Many thanks to this week’s guest scriptwriters, Dr Elaine Starkey and Sarah de Nordwall, who provided us with such eloquent explanations of religious belief in last week’s The Big Questions (fun begins about 12.30 minute mark). Note that they are not answering the charge of wishful thinking, as the boys are in this strip – they are just confessing to it shamelessly.
Readers who have sent in photos: do not worry—the good ones will be posted. But when I’m on the road, it’s easier for me to post pictures that have just arrived than dig back to find email descriptions. Today, then, you’ll see photos that have just arrived—including d*gs!. These are from two of our regulars. First, one picture from Diana MacPherson, who always appends winsome anthropomorphic descriptions of her animals.
Here is a very dinosaur-y looking female Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinals). I like how the bits of red look like makeup over her eye and in her feathers on her head. She hangs around with a nervous male (nervous because the poor thing is bright red).
And Stephen Barnard is back in Idaho from his Pacific fishing jaunt. He sends these:
The following two photos are of a Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias). I spook this bird every morning when I take Deets [the border collie] for his morning walk.
Common Raven (Corvus corax) harassing a Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). Either Desi or Lucy — can’t tell which one. [Desi and Lucy are the pair that nests there every year.]
This coyote (Canis latrans) was very bold, hanging out just across the creek. Deets was going nuts.
Use any or all (or none) as you see fit. They’re all pretty decent if you’re into c*y*tes. Excellent morning light. [JAC: to satisfy the d*g lovers, I’ll show them all. This is a noble beast. . . ]
My talk at the Halifax Library last night seemed to go well: there was a big crowd (several hundred, I’m told) and—mirabile dictu!—all the copies of Faith Versus Fact were sold (several readers said the secret word [Lynx canadensis] and got a cat drawing as well as an autograph). The characteristically polite Canadian audience was not contetious, though there was one vaccination denialist who wanted to know what I thought of his claim that vaccines were dangerous to kids (I responded appropriately), and another who cited George Lemaître and Gregor Mendel, a Catholic priest and astronomer respectively, as evidence that science and religion were not only compatible, but that religion helped push science forward (I responded appropriately). Today is a rest and tourism day before I head to Ottawa tomorrow.
Because I’ve been busy, I haven’t had time to post much, but many kudos to Grania for keeping the site going! I have photos (including noms), but they’ll have to wait, as today I’m visiting the prime tourist attraction around Halifax: Peggy’s Cove, an old fishing village with a famous lighthouse, now a destination for visitors. It’s also geologically interesting, with Devonian rocks, and the site of a memorial to the Swissair 111 crash in 1998.
On this day in history, President Andrew Johnson became, in 1868, the first U.S. president to be impeached by Congress (he was later acquitted). In 1920 the Nazi Party was founded, and in 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini offered a $3 million reward for the death of Salman Rushdie, who wrote The Satanic Verses (as you’ll know from yesterday, this bounty was just raised.) Finally, on this day in 2008, Fidel Castro resigned as President of Cuba. Notable births on February 24 include Winslow Homer (1836) and Honus Wagner (1874; he used to throw baseballs against my great-grandmother’s outhouse). February 24 deaths include Malcolm Forbes (1990), Claude Shannon (2001), and Don “One Bullet” Knotts (2006). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Cyrus and Hili are playing Watson and Holmes in “His Final Bow”:
Cyrus: Somebody is coming.
Hili: Probably a New Era.
When Jerry sent me an article from The College Fix to read, I shouldn’t have been surprised at the story but I was – enough to do a search to see if this wasn’t a parody site in the style of The Onion and that the story had been reported elsewhere.
The story isn’t in fact unusual, it is in fact exactly what is becoming relatively commonplace news from campuses. Zach Wood, a student at liberal arts Williams College, who organises talks for a student group called Uncomfortable Learning, where members challenge themselves to hear different points of view—including ones that they disagree with—has now become the target of bullying, abuse and accusations of “promoting ‘violent ideologies'”. The reason for this is one we’ve all heard before: he invited a speaker whose opinions other students dislike.
Even worse is that Williams College President Adam Falk himself decided to cancel the invitation that had been extended, claiming these were “extreme circumstances“.
[T]he point was to have him here so we could question him and support free speech and intellectual freedom….there were even students of color on campus who said we think this is an opportunity to challenge [Derbyshire’s] views, question what he thinks, assess how he would present his arguments.
This was a great opportunity for students to do the very things that universities and colleges are there for: providing an opportunity to challenge your ideas. Now, thanks to President Falk, that won’t happen. It’s one thing to hold a particular point of view. It’s quite another thing to decide that only your point of view may be heard.
The Washington Post has an interesting quote from Falk defending his choice to de-platform Derbyshire.
To create an environment in which students learn and are challenged by challenging ideas, he said, ‘requires something more nuanced than the free-speech absolutism needed to run a country or a town. There are some things that are destructive of our community, destructive of our ability to have those kinds of complicated, nuanced conversations.’
What Falk doesn’t say is why he thinks that the views of Derbyshire who was invited by a black student for the express purpose of challenging his ideologies would damage his college’s community; but that gutting the plans and purposes of a student group would not.
If I were Falk, I would also be considerably more concerned that his students are targeting a fellow student—not for his views, which they presumably agree with—but for daring to publicly meet with someone holding different ones. That, more than anything else, could really could be destructive to his community. And how safe can any student feel if the lesson they are learning is that only certain ideas may be discussed publicly, and all dissent is to be repressed?
That is not how you build a healthy society. It’s how you build a society that fragments into groups that practice exclusion, foster a lack of understanding of other perspectives, and worst of all, eliminate the ability to reach across social and ideological divides and reach some common understanding.
[JAC: I can’t help add this to Grania’s piece, because I see it so often: college disinvite, ban, or refuse to entertain speakers, all the while insisting that they’re in favor of free speech. And their empty paeans to free discourse is always followed by “but”. . . when they explain why in this case free speech isn’t useful. They are “free speech butters” in the same way that atheists who coddle faith are “atheist butters.” And what they mean is “We are in course in favor of free speech so long as it’s the kind of speech we like.”
It’s a long review on Inference by the well known book critic George Scialabba, it’s called “Good for nothing,” and it’s generally positive. I’ll take what I can get, particularly in view of the rage of theists.
Scialabba makes one point that I hadn’t taken up, or previously encountered:
For all the vigor with which Coyne pursues his bill of indictment against organized religion, he leaves out one important charge. As he says, the conflict between religion and science is “only one battle in a wider war—a war between rationality and superstition.”There are other kinds of superstition. Coyne mentions astrology, paranormal phenomena, homeopathy, and spiritual healing, but religion “is the most widespread and harmful form.” I’m not so sure. Political forms of superstition, like patriotism, tribalism, and the belief that human nature is unalterably prone to selfishness and violence, seem to me even more destructive. Questioning authority was humankind’s original sin. It is also the first duty of a democratic citizen. It is something of an understatement to say that organized religions do not, on the whole, encourage the questioning of authority. Hence, it is probably not a coincidence that, among developed societies today, the most humane and pacific are the least religious.
I’m not so sure that tribalism is a form of superstitition so much as a spandrel of our evolved tendency to favor our ingroup: a “family” that’s an expanding circle from our family group and then our small cohesive social groups in Africa. But Scialabba’s right: it isn’t necessarily rational to favor your own country over others, and he’s also right about the negative correlation between the functionality of a society and its religiosity, something I highlight repeatedly on this site.
As for Nazism, Stalinism, and Chinese Communism, always cited as the horrible results of atheism, Scialabba says this:
At this point, believers will object strenuously: Don’t blame us! Look at the history of the twentieth century—the worst crimes were committed by unbelievers. Berlinski (a skeptic about both religion and evolution) has put this point with great force and verve. [I omit the Berlinksi quote; go see it for yourself].
. . . This is masterly rhetoric but faulty reasoning. Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism were rank superstitions, no more tolerant of doubt or committed to intellectual freedom than Counter-Reformation Catholicism or contemporary Salafism. They were secular religions.
Scialabba then mentions the useful aspects of religion in fostering solidarity, citing an fictional passage from D. H. Lawrence about a tribe that has a frenetic ritual dance as the sun sets:
Lawrence always called himself a fearfully religious man. This is as close as he ever came to describing his religion. It is indeed terrifying, as collective emotions can be. But a culture without any such instinctually-based communal rituals would probably be imaginatively and emotionally impoverished. [JAC: I disagree!]
IN SAYING THESE few words on behalf of (mostly natural) religion, I don’t mean to gainsay any of Coyne’s criticisms of supernatural religion. The dogmas Coyne derides in Faith Versus Fact are indeed, as James said of their nineteenth-century versions, “fifth wheels to the coach.”Even more valuable is Coyne’s resolute championing of critical thought and intellectual honesty. But his and others’ efforts do, I hope and believe, have dogmatic religion on the run, however long it may take to complete the rout. Meanwhile, it is important to identify and preserve whatever in religion’s vast and varied heritage may be of use to our emancipated descendants.
I appreciate Scialabba’s kind words. But about that last sentence: I wonder what the Danes, Swedes, and Dutch have preserved of “religions’s vast and varied heritage” to buttress their societies. Not much, I suspect. My view has always been that as religion dies a natural death, people will find their own ways to fill the lacuna of its missing social functions, but that those lacunae will be filled in different ways by different people. For example, we have secular churches in the U.S., but they don’t have them in Sweden. Having abandoned faith long ago, Swedes have no need of such activities. We can always find secular ways to celebrate births, marriages, and deaths (Swedes sometimes repair to churches to do this, which is fine with me); but it would be presumptuous of me to suggest how such rituals should be conducted.
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