Man As Animal

 Unleashing Sin

One of the abiding lusts of Western pride is the lure of a perfect society brought into being through human ingenuity, planning, and enlightened application.  No matter what problem we face, throw enough resources at it, study it to death, put a management plan in place, and hey presto, the problem will be solved. 

Such approaches may work well when we are dealing with problems arising out of the non-human natural order.  They fail miserably when we are dealing with human beings.  Why?  Precisely because man is not a cipher.  He is not the impersonal product of impersonal natural forces.  He is altogether more wonderful and complex: he is a moral agent made in the image of God.  When sin entered the human race through Adam and spread to all mankind “descending from him by ordinary generation” the wondrous complexity and moral agency of mankind became perverted.  The sophisticated complexity of humanity became a spectacular resource for cunning, duplicity, and evil.  

But modern man has “advanced” to the point where he sees himself as a sophisticated animal, nothing more.
You can train mice to do certain things.  Similarly human beings can be conditioned to do whatever can be imagined.  If man is malfunctioning and if there are problems in society, all we need is the right plan, the application of marshalled resources, and all will be well. 

Economics has been called the “dismal science”.  For good reason.  Modern econometrics offered the prospect of unending growth and prosperity through, firstly developing a sufficiently complex model of how the modern economy works, then having applied sufficient computing and civil powers, governments could control the economic machine through adjusting inputs, prices, outputs, wages, capital availability, labour hours, and the money supply.  If we could do that well enough (that is, if the model were both accurate and comprehensive) we could have an economy which would grow at 3.256 percent real GDP endlessly.  No more crashes.  No more “Great Recessions”.  No more systemic unemployment.  No more plutocrats.  Just a well run, smooth machine-like progress to perpetual wealth and prosperity.

Go figure!  Well, the econometric modellers did.  They failed dismally.  Why?  For many reasons, but chief amongst them was this: human beings were not ciphers, and economics is always about human beings and their actions, goals, choices, preferences, fears and lusts.  Moreover, value is a subjective concept.  For one person, value lies in owning nothing.  For another, value is to own the whole world.  As soon as an econometric policy or lever were put in place, human beings (the market) cleverly adjusted to make the lever ineffectual and inoperative.  

Take for example monetary policy where a central bank (or government) manipulates the money supply, using short term interest rates.  Econometric research established that this would work.  Put up the price of short term money (the interest rate) and economic activity would slow.  It worked for a short time, until clever, resourceful human beings worked out that they too could use the same analytical tools and anticipate what the monetary authorities would do.  In gaming this system they could make money.  And they did.  As a consequence, the manipulation of the short term money supply by central banks became more and more ineffectual. 

So powerful is this phenomenon of human anticipation and adjustment it coined an economic “law”: Goodharts’s law–which reads,

“As soon as the government attempts to regulate any particular set of financial assets, these become unreliable as indicators of economic trends.” This is because investors try to anticipate what the effect of the regulation will be, and invest so as to benefit from it. 

The assumption that human beings are not moral beings but mere ciphers to be manipulated and controlled has worked through almost all societies in the West.  Take, for example, the issue of crime. 

Already at the turn of the century, Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who achieved notoriety defending Darwinism in the Scopes trial, was portraying criminals as helpless victims of their circumstances.  In 1902, in a widely published speech to the prisoners in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, he declared that “there is no such thing as a crime as the word is generally understood. . . . I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be.  They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible.” [Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), p. 181.]

The implication is that if “society” were to change the circumstances of such people, crime would disappear.  A further implication is that no-one is responsible for any actions whatsoever.  We are creatures of instinct and conditioning.  We are animals and animals only.  If we do evil it is the fault of “society”–that is, of the powers that created bad conditioning in the first place. 

These false beliefs are now so disseminated through Western culture that they crop up everywhere and govern almost all social policies.  Take the punishment of crime, for example.  The man-is-a-cipher philosophy applies here as well.  Harsher and longer punishments will condition the prisoner not to do such things again. Punishment is nothing more than a calculation of incentives. There is little consideration given to the prisoner as a moral being, responsible for every action, thought, word and deed performed, firstly to the Living God, and then to his fellow man. 

Man is a glorious being–capable of highly moral actions, and of desperately wicked depravities.  Modern society ignores the possibility and reality of depravity.  Instead, modern society conducts a never-ending symphony of exoneration.  It’s always someone else’s fault.

Preposterous examples are legion.  Like the woman who entered a hot-dog-eating contest in a Houston nightclub.  In her rush to outdo the other contestants, she ate too quickly and began to choke.  Did the woman shrug off the mishap as a natural consequence of her own zany behaviour?  No, she decided she was a victim.  She sued the nightclub that sponsored the contest, arguing that the business was to blame because “they shouldn’t have contests like that.” (Ibid., p. 182).

When we deny sin as a society, when we officially regard human beings as ciphers or nothing more than animals, then we foolishly concede that all we need is more planning, more controls, more government and social programmes to resolve all human problems.  But by so doing we do not remove sin and evil, we actually unleash its destructive power on the community.  

The Humanist Millennium

Dashed Hopes and Bitterness

God does not exist.  Evil is not intrinsic to the soul of man.  The cosmos is evolving.  Man can take control of his own evolution and perfect himself.  These were the doctrinal foundations upon which the West built its Tower of Babel at the end of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth.  These same doctrines remain regnant in the West to this day.

Back in the day combating evil had two main fronts of engagement.  The first focused upon human conditions.  Improve the external conditions and mankind would be made more perfect.  The second front was an overt attempt to alter human beings themselves by means of psychology, eugenics and education.

The campaign to improve the external living conditions in order to perfect mankind had two main lines of attack.

>Without God, Without Creed, Part VI

>Christianity’s Trojan Horse

The West has experienced prodigious economic growth and increasing living standards for over six hundred years.  The two world wars of last century appear now as a mere blip in a distant horizon.  This has encouraged the secular narrative of life constantly improving and getting better.  In turn, this has supported the just-so story propounded by evolutionism that the world is progressing higher and higher.

Natural calamities, however, when they occur, teach a very important lesson: the future can be worse than the past–much worse. Because one decade succeeds another does not necessarily mean that it will be better.

In the West, Christendom has been overthrown.  It has been replaced by an atheistic materialism that purports to interpret, justify, and explain all reality.  Its hand maiden is naturalistic science.  Because it has succeeded Christendom the conclusion is facilely drawn everywhere that atheistic materialism is better than, an advance upon, the Christian faith.  It is smarter, evidentially based.  It is true and real.  Christianity is a myth, a relic of an ignorant and superstitious past.  And so on.

But the Word of God itself provides a different narrative.

>Drip, Drip, Drip

> Experts as Augurs

An old saw has it that an expert is a drip under pressure.  Nevertheless our modern world loves experts–demands them, in fact.  The modern expert has taken the place of the ancient soothsayer, or rune reader.  The most worthy and vital contribution that experts are required to make is predict the future.  This is why they function in our Unbelieving culture as the modern equivalent of augurs. 

Most of their predictions are stupid superstitions, appealing to the more base human emotions of fear and greed.  The more lurid the prophecy, the more valued.  The status of “expert” buoys up its certainty and credibility.  As G. K. Chesterton astutely observed, when men stop believing in the Living God, they do not believe in nothing;  they begin to believe in everything.  Credulity characterises an Unbelieving culture, such as now dominates the West. 

There is an irony in this.  The West prides itself on its knowledge, its scientific rigour, its evidence-based governments.  In reality it has become suborned to superstitious speculations gilded with a veneer of academic rigour and research.  The role of the expert in our world is to provide the gilding. 

In a recent article in The National, Robert Matthews takes a much needed sceptical look at experts and their auguries.  It turns out that the more famous the expert, the worse his predictive abilities. 

The more famous the expert, the worse his predictions

Robert Matthews

Last Updated: May 8, 2011

As predictions go, it was truly disturbing – made all the more so by the authority of the source.
In 1989, Dr Mustafa Tolba, the head of the UN Environment Programme (Unep), warned that over the coming years as many as 50 million refugees would be wandering the globe to escape the ravages of climate change.

By 2005, Unep felt confident enough to say the 50 million mark would be reached “by 2010”. Other experts agreed, among them the celebrated environmentalist Professor Norman Myers of Oxford University.
So where are they? In a word, nowhere. A recent study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in England found no evidence of any mass migration caused by climate change.
On the contrary, it suggested that – unsurprisingly – people prefer to stay in their own country in the face of environmental upheaval.

Unep has tried to disown the prediction, but has succeeded only in sparking a media furore after being caught removing graphics clearly stating “50 million climate refugees by 2010” from its website.

It looks like the agency is learning the truth of the ancient Chinese proverb that “prediction is very difficult – especially of the future”.

It’s unlikely to give up making predictions, though: after all, that’s what expert groups are supposed to do. But as a fascinating new survey of the prediction business shows, we should all be much more sceptical about forecasts – especially those made by experts.

As the journalist Dan Gardner points out in Futurebabble: Why Expert Predictions Fail And Why We Believe Them Anyway, experts have been getting predictions wrong for centuries, for all kinds of reasons.

In 1789, the English economist Thomas Malthus showed with almost mathematical certainty that the world was condemned to mass starvation by the obvious fact that populations increase exponentially, inevitably outstripping food supplies.

Two centuries on, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation figures show that even the least developed nations are enjoying rising food levels. Clearly, Malthus had not banked on the ingenuity of agriculturalists to feed the world.

Everyone makes mistakes, of course, but as Gardner shows, experts are quite often prone to making them.
He cites the results of a pioneering study begun in the 1980s by Professor Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California who brought together hundreds of experts in political science and economics, and asked them to predict what the future might hold.

The result was a collection of more than 27,000 forecasts whose veracity was then checked over the following years. The outcome, published in 2005, was salutary. It showed that the typical expert did not perform significantly better than random guessing.

But Prof Tetlock went further, trying to identify why some experts were so much worse than others. He found that political beliefs or levels of optimism made no difference: a cheery right-winger was just as likely to do badly as a miserable Marxist. Qualifications or access to confidential information did not matter, either.

Far more important, he found, was the mindset that the experts brought to making predictions.

Those who did badly did not like getting bogged down in complexities, or weighing up the evidence from a variety of sources. Instead, they had a habit of making predictions that complied with some grand, overarching thesis. And having made their predictions, they were – ironically enough – strikingly confident about them.

A grand thesis, simple views, confidence … as Gardner points out, that’s pretty much a thumbnail sketch of the perfect media pundit.

Yet according to Prof Tetlock’s research, those are precisely the characteristics of experts whose predictions are worse than random guessing.  And that, in turn, suggests that the very fact a pundit makes regular media appearances means we can ignore his or her predictions.

Gardner reports how Prof Tetlock put this simple rule to the test using Google hits as a simple way of measuring the “celebrity” of each of the 284 experts who took part in his study. Sure enough, the more famous the expert, the worse his performance. So if we can’t trust the pundits foisted on us by the media, whom can we trust? 

According to Gardner, we should look for experts who do not start from the assumption that some Big Idea (often their Big Idea) is correct. The future has a habit of making a mockery of grand theses. Instead, the starting point should be information gleaned from a wide variety of sources. Once some broad-brush conclusions have been made, the most reliable forecasters tend to analyse where their conclusions came from. Explaining them to others often helps to reveal assumptions and leaps of faith that just can’t be justified.

The final characteristic to look out for, says Gardner, is simple humility. Anyone with total confidence in their prediction of the future should be treated with suspicion.  Paradoxically, those who say merely that there is a “high chance” of some event happening are more likely to be right than pundits who simply declare “it will”. And those who make precise, long-term predictions – like, say, 50 million environmental refugees by 2010 – are best ignored completely. 

Yet the real problem with forecasting is not so much dodgy pundits, as those who demand to hear them. Most of us are looking for some certainty in this uncertain world, and we crave the kind of certainty touted by “experts”.  Until we wean ourselves off this irrational desire, the law of supply and demand means we will continue to get the pundits we deserve. And that’s a prediction you can totally rely on.

Robert Matthews is visiting reader in science at Aston University, Birmingham, England

>Only Fools Go Where Angels Fear to Tread

>Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

One of the seductions of “social science” has been the assumption that human life and society is as regulated and controlled as the non-human natural world. Even as we work out the “rules” that control the movement of the planets, or the mating behaviour of the fallow deer, the hope has been that similar rules-based behaviour could be discovered in the human species.

Upon discovery, these rules and relationships would enable us to make a quantum leap not just in our understanding of human history and current society, but (more importantly) would facilitate our shaping and manipulating and controlling it. Once we knew the rules about the mating habits of fallow deer, we could set things up to ensure greater fecundity–that sort of thing. The achievement of universal peace, happiness, and prosperity–that is, nirvana or salvation–lay just around the corner. Right on, you social scientists!

Now we move from the make-believe world to the real one. http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0300116209&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrHere is Francis Fukuyama, commenting on Samuel Huntingdon’s, Political Order in Changing Societies (Huntingdon, by the way, was a card-carrying member of social-science orthodoxy.)

“The aspiration of social science to replicate the predictability and formality of certain natural sciences is, in the end, a hopeless endeavor. Human societies, as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and others understood, are far too complex to model at an aggregate level. Contemporary macroeconomics, despite dealing with social phenomena that are inherently quantified, is today in crisis due to its utter failure to anticipate the recent financial crisis.

“The part of social change that is the hardest to understand in a positivistic way is the moral dimension—that is, the ideas that people carry around in their heads regarding legitimacy, justice, dignity and community. The current Arab uprising was triggered by the self-immolation of an overeducated 26-year-old Tunisian vegetable seller whose cart was repeatedly confiscated by the authorities. After Mohamed Bouazizi was slapped by a policewoman when he tried to complain, he reached the end of his tether. Bouazizi’s public suicide turned into a social movement because contemporary communications technologies facilitated the growth of a new social space where middle-class people could recognize and organize around their common interests. We will probably never understand, even in retrospect, why the dry tinder of outraged dignity suddenly ignited in this fashion in December 2010 as opposed to 2009, or ten years before that, and why the conflagration spread to some Arab countries but not to others.”

This does not mean that scholars like Huntingdon have nothing to teach us. What is does mean is that what they teach is of very limited utility in programming other states and nations. We believe that this is a very, very good thing. The more we understand that human affairs are inordinately complex and unpredictable, due to the fearfully complex nature of man himself, the less likely we will be presumptuously to interfere, as nations, in the affairs of others.