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Art & Design Books Film Ideas Music & Performance TV & Radio Food & Drink Blog Return to: Home | Culture | Books The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now By George Levine Reviewed by Terry Eagleton - 22 June 2011 82 comments Print version Email a friend Listen RSS Misunderstanding what it means to be secular.

Societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it. It is when religious faith ceases to be a vital part of the public sphere

Christianity is certainly other-worldly, and so is any reasonably sensitive soul who has been reading the newspapers. The Christian gospel looks to a future transformation of the appalling mess we see around us into a community of justice and friendship, a change so deep-seated and indescribable as to make Lenin look like a Lib Dem.“This [world] is our home," Levine comments. If he really feels at home in this crucifying set-up, one might humbly suggest that he shouldn't. Christians and political radicals certainly don't.

near brush with nuclear catastrophe, brought on by a single foraging bear, is an example of what sociologist Charles Perrow calls a “normal accident.” These frightening incidents are “normal” not because they happen often, but because they are almost certain to occur in any tightly connected complex system.

Normal accidents, like these, occur because two or more independent failures happen and interact in unpredictable ways. After studying calamities such as the Three Mile Island meltdown, explosions at chemical plants, and ships colliding in the open sea, Perrow observed that safety mechanisms put in place to make the systems safer in fact frequently trigger the final failure.

errow stresses the role that human error and mismanagement play in these scenarios. The important lesson: failures in complex systems are caused not only by the hardware and software problems but by people and their motivations.

The fact that many of our self-protective delusions are built into the way the brain works is no justification for not trying to override them. Knowing how dissonance works helps us identify our own inclinations to perpetuate errors -- and protect ourselves from those who can’t. Or won’t.Related LinksWhat Historians Can Learn from the Social Sciences and Sciences /* * * CONFIGURATION VARIABLES: EDIT BEFORE PASTING INTO YOUR WEBPAGE * * */ var disqus_shortname = 'hnndev'; // required: replace example with your forum shortname /* * * DON'T EDIT BELOW THIS LINE * * */ (function() { var dsq = document.createElement('script'); dsq.type = 'text/javascript'; dsq.async = true; dsq.src = '//' + disqus_shortname + '.disqus.com/embed.js'; (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(dsq); })(); Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. News Breaking News Historians DC Breaking News Historians DC ‘Scottsboro Boys’ pardoned in Alabama ‘November 22, 1963’ U-Boat discovered off the coast of Indonesia Vatican publicly unveils bone fragments said to belong to St. Peter Pictured: the 'real site' of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Historian: Taiwan can use WWII legacy to improve standing with China 'I Take Long Walks': The Emotional Lives of Holocaust Scholars Chinese historian: Xi Jinping a master of "neo-authoritarianism" History Comes to Life With Tweets From Past Celtic Paths, Illuminated by a Sundial try{for(var lastpass_iter=0; lastpass_iter < document.forms.length; lastpass_iter++){ var lastpass_f = document.forms[lastpass_iter]; if(typeof(lastpass_f.lpsubmitorig2)=="undefined"){ lastpass_f.lpsubmitorig2 = lastpass_f.submit; lastpass_f.submit = function(){ var form=this; var customEvent = document.createEvent("Event"); customEvent.initEvent("lpCustomEvent", true, true); var d = document.getElementById("hiddenlpsubmitdiv"); for(var i = 0; i < document.forms.length; i++){ if(document.forms[i]==form){ d.innerText=i; } } d.dispatchEvent(customEvent); form.lpsubmitorig2(); } } }}catch(e){}

at last, history has gotten into bed with psychological science, and it’s a happy match. History gives us the data of, in Barbara Tuchman’s splendid words, our march of folly -- repeated examples of human beings unable and unwilling to learn from mistakes, let alone to admit them. Cognitive science shows us why

Our brains, which have allowed us to travel into outer space, have a whole bunch of design flaws, which is why we have so much breathtaking bumbling here on Earth.

people who suspect conspiracies aren’t really skeptics. Like the rest of us, they’re selective doubters. They favor a worldview, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn’t about God, values, freedom, or equality. It’s about the omnipotence of elites.

the prevalence of such belief, documented in surveys, has forced scholars to take it more seriously. Conspiracy theory psychology is becoming an empirical field with a broader mission: to understand why so many people embrace this way of interpreting history.

“People low in trust of others are likely to believe that others are colluding against them,” the authors proposed. This sort of distrust, in other words, favors a certain kind of belief. It makes you more susceptible, not less, to claims of conspiracy.

Even the most fanatical pedant must admit that usage is the ultimate arbiter of linguistic propriety. That is to say, a word means a certain thing because significant numbers of people take it to mean a certain thing. An informal process has evolved to monitor any shift in definition. At one end of the spectrum we meet words that will, from time to time, be “mistakenly” used in a way that does not conform to the dictionary definition. A chap might write “limpid” when he means “flaccid”. This still counts as an error. At the other end, we encounter words that, after decades of squabbling, have had their meaning formally transformed. Classical scholars will tell you that, derived from a term used by the Roman military, “decimate” used to mean the killing of one in 10 of any accused group. Now, we take it to mean the same as “annihilate” (which itself used to mean “make null and void”). The really interesting, contentious words can be found in the middle section of the spectrum.

peer review. The process has been blamed for everything from slowing down the communication of new discoveries to introducing woeful biases to the literature

peer review does not elevate the quality of published science and that many published research findings are later shown to be false. In response, a growing number of scientists are working to impose a new vision of the scientific process through post-publication review,

organized post-publication peer review system could help “clarify experiments, suggest avenues for follow-up work and even catch errors.” If used by a critical mass of scientists, he added, “it could strengthen the scientific process.” &nbsp;

SIX years ago I was struck down with a mystery illness.

I was offered a vast range of potential diagnoses.

Faced with all these confusing and conflicting opinions, I had to work out which expert to trust, whom to believe and whose advice to follow. As an economist specializing in the global economy, international trade and debt, I have spent most of my career helping others make big decisions

why would the senator make such a statement? The answer is that like that ice sheet, his party’s intellectual evolution (or maybe more accurately, its devolution) has reached a point of no return, in which allegiance to false doctrines has become a crucial badge of identity.

how support for a false dogma can become politically mandatory, and how overwhelming contrary evidence only makes such dogmas stronger and more extreme.

Why the bad behavior? Nobody likes admitting to mistakes, and all of us — even those of us who try not to — sometimes engage in motivated reasoning, selectively citing facts to support our preconceptions.

Our best college students are very good at being critical. In fact being smart, for many, means being critical. Having strong critical skills shows that you will not be easily fooled. It is a sign of sophistication, especially when coupled with an acknowledgment of one’s own “privilege.”

The combination of resistance to influence and deflection of responsibility by confessing to one’s advantages is a sure sign of one’s ability to negotiate the politics of learning on campus.

Taking things apart, or taking people down, can provide the satisfactions of cynicism. But this is thin gruel.

THIS fall, one in 11 kindergarten-age children in the United States will not be going to class. Parents of these children often delay school entry in an attempt to give them a leg up on peers, but this strategy is likely to be counterproductive.

Teachers may encourage redshirting because more mature children are easier to handle in the classroom and initially produce better test scores than their younger classmates.

This advantage fades by the end of elementary school, though, and disadvantages start to accumulate. In high school, redshirted children are less motivated and perform less well. By adulthood, they are no better off in wages or educational attainment — in fa

Adhering to the most extreme form of religious creationism, the exhibits&nbsp;"prove"&nbsp;that the Earth is only around 6,000 years old, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.

Unfortunately, Nernberg just dug up a 60-million-year-old fish

Local outlets report that the man is far from shaken by the bony fish, which he found while excavating a basement in Calgary.

knowledge from a scientific perspective of how human memory works can be instructive to historians.

Memory is much more than a simple retrieval system, as Dr. Schacter has demonstrated in his research. Rather, the nature of memory is constructive and influenced by a person’s current state as well as intervening emotions, beliefs, events and other factors since a recalled event.

Dr. Schacter is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His books include Searching for Memory: The Brain, The Mind, and The Past, and The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, both winners of the American Psychological Association’s William James Book Award, and Forgotten Ideas, Neglected Pioneers: Richard Semon and the Story of Memory. He also has written hundreds of articles on memory and related matters. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.

before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.

he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct.

Members of the committee agreed with their assessment. “I think this is really coming to a head,” said Dr. Roberta B. Ness, dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health. And Dr. David Korn of Harvard Medical School agreed that “there are problems all through the system.”

computer engineering, the most innovative sector of the economy, remains behind. Many women who want to be engineers encounter a field where they not only are significantly underrepresented but also feel pushed away.

Among the women who join the field, 56 percent leave by midcareer, a startling attrition rate that is double that for men, according to research from the Harvard Business School.

A culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture that can make women and other people who don’t fit the mold feel unwelcome, demeaned or even endangered.

We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?

On the evening of February 12, 2009, a Continental Connection commuter flight made its way through blustery weather between Newark, New Jersey, and Buffalo, New York.

The Q400 was well into its approach to the Buffalo airport, its landing gear down, its wing flaps out, when the pilot’s control yoke began to shudder noisily, a signal that the plane was losing lift and risked going into an aerodynamic stall. The autopilot disconnected, and the captain took over the controls. He reacted quickly, but he did precisely the wrong thing: he jerked back on the yoke, lifting the plane’s nose and reducing its airspeed, instead of pushing the yoke forward to gain velocity.

Happiness is more like knowledge than like belief. There are lots of things we believe but don’t know. Knowledge is not just up to you, it requires the cooperation of the world beyond you — you might be mistaken. Still, even if you’re mistaken, you believe what you believe. Pleasure is like belief that way. But happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. Happiness, like knowledge, and unlike belief and pleasure, is not a state of mind.

If happiness is not a state of mind, if happiness is a kind of tango between your feelings on one hand and events and things in the world around you on the other, then there’s the possibility of error about whether you’re happy. If you believe you’re experiencing pleasure or, perhaps especially, pain, then, presumably, you are. But the view of happiness here allows that “you may think you’re happy, but you’re not.”

One especially apt way of thinking about happiness — a way that’s found already in the thought of Aristotle — is in terms of “flourishing.” Take someone really flourishing in their new career, or really flourishing now that they’re off in college. The sense of the expression is not just that they feel good, but that they’re, for example, accomplishing some things and taking appropriate pleasure in those accomplishments. If they were simply sitting at home playing video games all day, even if this seemed to give them a great deal of pleasure, and even if they were not frustrated, we wouldn’t say they were flourishing. Such a life could not in the long term constitute a happy life. To live a happy life is to flourish.

From school days, we are trained to treat numbers as platonic, perfect objects. They are the closest we get to absolute truth. Two plus two always equals four. Numbers in the abstract are pure, perfect creatures. The numbers we deal with in the real world are different. They’re created by humans. And we humans are fallible. Our measurements have errors. Our research misses stuff, and we lie sometimes. The numbers we create aren’t perfect platonic ideals

We’re hard wired to reject the idea that there’s no reason for something happening. This is how Las Vegas makes its money. You’ll have people at the craps table thinking they’re set for a winning streak because they’ve been losing. And you’ll have people who have been winning so they think they’ll keep winning. Neither is true.

Randumbness is our stupidity about true randomness. We are unable to accept the fact that there’s not a pattern in certain things, so we project our own beliefs and patterns on data, which is pattern-free.

America depends upon the wisdom of crowds.

The wisdom of crowds turns out to be an incredibly fragile phenomenon. It doesn't take much for the smart group to become a dumb herd. Worse, a new study by Swiss scientists suggests that the interconnectedness of modern life might be making it even harder to benefit from our collective intelligence.

All of a sudden, the range of guesses dramatically narrowed; people were mindlessly imitating each other. Instead of canceling out their errors, they ended up magnifying their biases, which is why each round led to worse guesses. Although these subjects were far more confident that they were right—it's reassuring to know what other people think—this confidence was misplaced.

In recent decades, behavioral economics has been the economics profession’s runaway growth area. Scholars in this field work largely at the intersection of economics and psychology, and much of their attention has focused on systematic biases in people’s judgments and decisions.

Paradoxically, our prediction errors often lead us to choices that are wisest in hindsight. In such cases, evolutionary biology often provides a clearer guide than cognitive psychology for thinking about why people behave as they do.

the brain has evolved not to make us happy, but to motivate actions that help push our DNA into the next round. Much of the time, in fact, the brain accomplishes that by making us unhappy. Anxiety, hunger, fatigue, loneliness, thirst, anger and fear spur action to meet the competitive challenges we face.

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