The 100 Hours Of Democratic Superstition

HOW DO YOU spell superstition? The professional atheists have been busy spelling it out lately, especially Richard Dawkins with The God Delusion and Sam Harris with The End of Faith. There is almost certainly no God, according to Dawkins.

The atheists worship a different God. For Dawkins, it seems to be the power of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. For Sam Harris it seems to be the value of meditation and a rational ethics. And don’t think you can talk them out it.

We can thank the atheists at least for this: They are magnificently applying the principle of “motivated skepticism” to the human God project.

Motivated skepticism? That’s the concept from the paper “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs” by Charles S. Taber and Milton Lodge. Hat tip to Arnold Kling.

Taber and Lodge observe that we humans have lots of faith in our own ideas and plans but not in other peoples’ ideas.

Physicists do it...Psychologists do it...Even political scientists do it...Research findings confirming a hypothesis are accepted more or less at face value, but when confronted with contrary evidence, we become "motivated skeptics" ... picking apart possible flaws in the study, recoding variables, and only when all the counterarguing fails do we rethink our beliefs[.]

To understand the power of faith we have only to look at the 100 hour legislative marathon of the newly empowered House Democrats. They are intent upon passing an increase in the minimum wage. But the science is in on this, and it has been for over a century. The minimum wage puts low-skilled people out of work. Democrats are also intent upon adding new subsidies to college students. But the science is in on subsidies. And the science is also in on drug price controls.

Why do they do it? Faith, that’s why. Blind faith in the power of government and their own good intentions.

When a faith has been utterly exploded by science, rational folks like you and me usually call it “superstition.”

Human faith, like human science, is ethically neutral. We all agree that you can use science for good or ill. We can use the power of human faith for good and evil too.

The question of God is a mystery and according to Kant beyond proof or disproof. It’s easy for professional thinkers to cavil over ultimate questions and levels of proof, but the rest of us need to make decisions--right now--about how to give our lives meaning. That is where gods and “belief systems” come in.

During a period of crisis this need becomes more urgent.

Many people have noticed that the world entered a period of extraordinary crisis about two centuries ago when a vast human migration began from the farm to the city. This extraordinary phenomenon is probably at its peak right now as 25 million Chinese reportedly leave the country for the city every year.

Many people have not noticed that wherever the crisis of urbanization occurs the ordinary people create a movement of enthusiastic Christianity to cope with it. For the mechanics of the British Industrial Revolution it was the Methodism of the Wesley brothers and the injunction to work all you can, save all you can, and give all you can. Then, of course, the Methodist circuit-riders converted North America and the Irish Americans used Methodist revivalist techniques in building a mighty Catholic Church in the US.

That was just the warmup. A century ago, as The Economist recently discovered, African Americans got in on the action when William J. Seymour started a new church in 1906 in Los Angeles. The resulting Pentecostal community worldwide is now about 500 million souls, strongest in Latin America and Africa. Why is this? According to David Martin in Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish Pentecostalism empowers women to free themselves from the Latin machista culture of the “street, bar, brothel, football stadium, and drug culture... The restoration of the family as a viable moral, cultural, and economic household, largely through the reformation of the male and the elimination of the double standard of morality for the two sexes” is the key result of converting to Pentecostalism.

Naturally, we all respect the Darwinian faith of Richard Dawkins and value his motivated skepticism. And we are tolerant of the economic superstitions of our Democratic friends in Congress. But in judging the people who believe in God, we might follow Deng Xiaoping, who famously said:

It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.

As I have written elsewhere,

[I]t is precisely the genius of enthusiastic Christianity that it perches so precariously and so daringly on the fault line between the fatalistic, passive culture of the country, with its age-old submission to the power of nature and of the landowner, and the rational, cause-and-effect world of the middle class culture, with its reason, its purpose, its faithful performance of promises, and its society of equals.

The Democrats’ 100 hours of welfare-state ritual up on Capitol Hill isn’t really intended to catch any mice. And that’s a shame.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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