Obama characterizes ISIS as “nihilistic” and “speaking for no religion”

August 21, 2014 • 6:28 am

You surely know of the brutal murder of captive American journalist James Foley by the Muslim extremist group ISIS (I’ll call them that, though it’s also known as IS as well as ISIL, as Obama calls it below).  Foley was kidnapped in November of 2012 and was held hostage until his murder a few days ago. Apparently his family received a message from ISIS that if the U.S. did not stop its recent bombing attacks on the group, they would kill Foley.  And that they did, through a brutal beheading. He was 40 years old.

Although Foley’s death got special attention, as he was an American, a reporter, and because ISIS murdered him in a particularly public way, we mustn’t forget that he’s only one of thousands of people murdered by this gang of faithful but soulless religious thugs. It’s easy to find photos of people in Iraq and Syria being led away in groups for execution: shooting or beheading.

The solution to this problem eludes me. Bombing is not a long term solution. Sending American troops to Iraq won’t work, as new militants will simply spring up to replace the ones we eliminate, and Americans will no longer tolerate a futile Middle East intervention.

Obama, after calling Foley’s family with a message of condolence, made some eloquent remarks about him that are reported in the Washington Post. The video is below. I applaud his resolve, but am concerned about how he uses this speech to avoid laying any blame on Islam.

If you parse this statement carefully, you’ll find two ways that Obama tries to exculpate religion for the brutal deeds of ISIS.  And this despite ISIS’s repeated and explicit claims that they are completely motivated by Islam—by the desire to extablish the Caliphate, impose sharia law on the lands they conquer, and to extirpate “apostates” (non-Muslims). They often offer their captives the choice to convert to Islam or die, with many choosing the latter. Despite that, Obama says both implicitly and explicitly that Islam is not to blame. This, of course, is a political statement designed to avoid offending Muslims, especially those who don’t share ISIS’s “values.”

First, Obama calls the group “nihilists”:

There has to be a clear rejection of this kind of nihilistic ideologies.

But if you know what nihilism is, you’ll know clearly that ISIS is not nihilistic, for nihilism rejects religion. Here’s the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary:

Nihlism: Total rejection of prevailing religious beliefs, moral principles, laws, etc., often from a sense of despair and the belief that life is devoid of meaning. Also more generally (merging with extended use of sense 3) [“the doctrines or principles of the Russian nihilists”]: negativity, destructivenes, hostility to accepted beliefs or established institutions.”

Now most Americans don’t know that definition, but surely the speechwriter did. And surely if ISIS is anything, it is not nihilistic, for they kill in the name of a religious ideology—an Islamist ideology.

More important, Obama takes a bit of time to argue that ISIS “speaks for no religion”:

Let’s be clear about ISIL. They have rampaged across cities and villages killing innocent, unarmed civilians in cowardly acts of violence. They abduct women and children and subject them to torture and rape and slavery. They have murdered Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, by the thousands. They target Christians and religious minorities, driving them from their homes, murdering them when they can, for no other reason than they practice a different religion.

They declared their ambition to commit genocide against an ancient people. So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just god would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day.

But surely ISIS speaks for a religion: its own interpretation of Islam.  That interpretation isn’t, of course, shared by many other Muslims, but the group is still speaking and acting on the basis of religious beliefs, and is killing and conquering in the name of Islam. What Obama is doing here is arguing that ISIS’s form of faith is not “proper” or “real” faith. It is “not Islam.”  But of course it is, just as Pentecostals are Christians. And just because ISIS kills Shiite Muslims and those of other faiths doesn’t mean that they are not motivated by Islam.  They’re simply members of an extremist Sunni group.  In fact, when Obama says they kill Christians and others because “they practice a different religion,” he’s tacitly admitting this.

Finally, when Obama asserts that “no just god would stand for what [ISIL] did,” I’m confused. One interpretation is that there is no God, just or otherwise. But that’s clearly not what Obama, who professes faith, means. If Obama believes in God, as do over 90% of Americans, then he’s implying one of two things.  Either God is not just (after all, ISIS is pretty successful), or the American people must exact God’s revenge for Him. Since Obama must maintain that God is just, we’re left with the message that America must go after ISIS on God’s behalf. And, in fact, the President’s message clearly states that we will hold the group, and Foley’s murderers, to account.

We know why Obama says these things. He’s trying to avoid blaming religion for any of the world’s malfeasance. In fact, I doubt that, as President, he’s ever blamed religion for anything bad. It’s political suicide to go after religion even when, as in the case of ISIS, religious belief is clearly behind acts of violence.  But did he have to make the claims that “ISIS stands for no religion” and is “nihilistic”? Why couldn’t he have at least remained silent about their motivations?

In effect, Obama has given religion a pass here, even in its most brutal and deadly form. Just once in my life I’d like to hear an American President tell it like it is. Ideology can be based on many things, and religion is one of them.

If we deny the true motivations of our enemies, can we really fight them effectively—even in the war of ideas?

h/t: Derek

Reader’s wildlife photos

August 21, 2014 • 4:58 am

Stephen Barnard in Idaho continues his quest for the perfect photo of the rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus). He explains:

I realize that I’m being repetitive, but I’m looking for a definitive Rufous BIF — one that could be used in a field guide or a monograph.  This is as close as I’ve come.

I’m not sure what a BIF is, but that looks pretty good to me.

RT9A1693-2And another:

The light was poor, but the drop of nectar hanging from the beak is of interest.

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And two more photos from Steve Pinker’s trip to Tasmania. First, a sugar glider (Petaurus breviceps):

face to face with a sugar glider-L

. . . a “tree filigree”, Hogarth Park Strahan:

tree filligree Hogarth Park Strahan-XL

and a “limpet valentine”:

limpet valentine-L

The whole gallery of Steve’s Tasmania photos (7 pages) is here.

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

August 21, 2014 • 2:29 am

Hili’s fur is bushed up and her back is arched, a warning pose that she does sporadically but briefly on her walks.

Hili: I’m ready for fight or for flight.
A: Do you know which you are going to choose?
Hili: I will return to my initial state of walking calmly.

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In Polish:
Hili: Jestem gotowa albo do ataku, albo do ucieczki.
Ja: Już wiesz co wybierzesz?
Hili: Powrót do stanu wyjściowego, czyli dalszy spokojny spacer.

Michael Shermer interviews the Pope

August 20, 2014 • 2:04 pm

Well, Brian Dalton playing the Pope (instead of God).  Here, as we’re starting to learn, the new Pope is simply a medieval theocrat dressed in hipster’s clothing. At the end, the faux Pope tells us the real changes he’s gonna make in the Church.

p.s. I think that’s a yarmulke that Dalton’s wearing. . .

Spot the platypus!

August 20, 2014 • 1:09 pm

JAC: Matthew left me this as his final “gift” before his Lake District “hols.” It’s a gift in the same sense that a dead rodent left by your cat on the doorstep is a “gift.”  But based on this post, I’ve removed “seeing a platypus” from my bucket list.

by Matthew Cobb

No nightjars, no crabs, no killdeer. There’s a platypus somewhere in this photo by Dave Pope (@davpope on Tw*tter), who is a political cartoonist for The Canberra Times, and kindly allowed us to use the photo.

To be honest, this isn’t hard, it’s just supposed to show quite how difficult it is to see these elusive creatures. Dave’s Tw**t that accompanied the photo read: “The thrill of spotting a platypus is about 98% the idea of a platypus and 2% what you actually see”.

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E. O. Wilson on free will

August 20, 2014 • 10:24 am

Ed Wilson has finally decided to wade into the murky hinterlands of Consciousness and Free Will, as seen in a new article in Harpers called “On free will: and how the brain is like a colony of ants.” (Sadly, you can’t read more than a paragraph without paying.)  I’ll quote from the pdf I have, but, in general, the article adds little to the debate about free will, which to me seems largely semantic. The real issue—the one that could substantially affect society—is that of determinism, which most philosophers and scientists agree on (i.e., we can’t make choices outside of those already determined by the laws of physics).

There are two problems with Wilson’s piece: it doesn’t say anything new, its main point being that consciousness and choice are physical phenomena determined by events in the brain, and it doesn’t define the subject of the piece, “free will.” How can you discuss that when you don’t tell people what it means? After all, for religious people (and most others, I suspect) it means one thing (libertarian free will), while for compatibilists like Dennett it means another (no libertarian free will, but something else we can call free will).

So here’s Wilson’s tacit admission of determinism, or at least of the physical basis of consciousness and “free will”:

If consciousness has a material basis, can the same be true for free will? Put another way: What, if anything, in the manifold activities of the brain could possibly pull away from the brain’s machinery to create scenarios and make decisions of its own? The answer is, of course, the self. And what would that be? Where is it? The self does not exist as a paranormal being living on its own within the brain. It is, instead, the central dramatic character of the confabulated scenarios. In these stories, it is always on center stage—if not as participant, then as observer and commentator— because that is where all of the sensory information arrives and is integrated. The stories that compose the conscious mind cannot be taken away from the mind’s physical neurobiological system, which serves as script writer, director, and cast combined. The self, despite the illusion of its independence created in the scenarios, is part of the anatomy and physiology of the body.

And here’s what I take to be Wilson’s tacit admission, though he’s never explicit about it, that “free will” is a mental illusion, since it reflects not conscious choice but unconscious brain processes. There’s a lot more to be said here, but Wilson doesn’t say anything beyond this one sentence:

 A choice is made in the unconscious centers of the brain, recent studies tell us, several seconds before the decision arrives in the conscious part.

But one novel part of his piece is reflected in the subtitle: an analogy between mental activity and colonies of social insects. Each insect is basically a little computer programmed to do a job, with its task sometimes changing with the environment (bee larvae destined to be workers, for instance, can become queens with some special feeding). But if you look at the whole colony, it appears as a well-oiled “superorganism” that works together to keep the colony functioning like a “designed” unit.  Wilson sees the brain in the same way: each “module” or neuron is entrained to behave in a certain way, but the disparate parts come together in a whole that is the “I,” the person who feels she’s the object and (as G.W. Bush might put it) “the decider.” But this analogy isn’t terribly enlightening, and doesn’t point the way forward to a scientific understanding of consciousness. That understanding will come through reductionist analysis, I think, but we already knew that.

Wilson is a physicalist, and says that progress in understanding consciousness and volition (I won’t call it “free will”) will come not from philosophers but from neuroscientists. In the main I agree, though I do think philosophers have a role to play, if only that of holding scientists to some kind of consistency and conceptual rigor. By and large, however, I see compatibilist philosophers as not only having contributed little to the issue, but having sometimes been obfuscatory by sweeping determinism (the truly important issue) under the rug in favor of displaying their own version of compatibilism.

At one point Wilson, though, appears to abandon determinism, but makes the mistake of conflating “chance,” which is simply determined phenomena that we can’t predict, with true unpredictability: that which we see in the realm of quantum physics. Perhaps in the statement below he’s saying that human volition isn’t repeatable or predictable because of such quantum phenomena, which could make decisions differ even if one replayed the tape of one’s life with every molecule starting in the same position. But Wilson could have been much clearer about this.

. . . Then there is the element of chance. The body and brain are made up of legions of communicating cells, which shift in discordant patterns that cannot even be imagined by the conscious minds they compose. The cells are bombarded every instant by outside stimuli unpredictable by human intelligence. Any one of these events can entrain a cascade of changes in local neural patterns, and scenarios of individual minds changed by them are all but infinite in detail. The content is dynamic, changing instant to instant in accordance with the unique history and physiology of the individual.

Well, does that give us “free will” or not? Does it give us truly unpredictable behavior, even in principle? Wilson doesn’t say.

In the end, Wilson bails, floating the common but unsatisfying conclusion that we have free will because we think we have free will, and that the illusion of (libertarian) free will is adaptive.

. . . Because the individual mind cannot be fully described by itself or by any separate researcher, the self—celebrated star player in the scenarios of consciousness—can go on passionately believing in its independence and free will. And that is a very fortunate Darwinian circumstance. Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive. Without it, the conscious mind, at best a fragile, dark window on the real world, would be cursed by fatalism. Like a prisoner serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, deprived of any freedom to explore and starving for surprise, it would deteriorate.

So, does free will exist? Yes, if not in ultimate reality, then at least in the operational sense necessary for sanity and thereby for the perpetuation of the human species.

Wilson is right in saying that we all act as if we have free will; nobody disputes that. And I’d like to think that he’s right in claiming that our illusion of libertarian free will is adaptive, though I know of no way to test that proposition. (We can, as always, concoct adaptive stories about this. One writer, whose name I can’t remember, argued that knowing whether a “choice” came from your brain versus someone else’s is an adaptive bit of information: it makes a difference if your arm is pumping up and down because you’re doing it yourself or if somebody else has hold of it and is doing it to you.)  I would have liked this conclusion better had Wilson been a bit more tentative in his adaptive storytelling.

But in the main, the piece adds little to the debates about consciousness and free will. In fact, I find that it muddles the debate. In my view, the best popular exposition of the problem of consciousness remains Steve Pinker’s article in Time Magazine in 2007. The reason the Harper’s piece got published was not because Wilson had something particularly new to say, but because the person who wanted to hold forth was E. O. Wilson. As for free will, I still like Anthony Cashmore’s piece in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.