Entries in Life

This past week, my status updates on IdenTwiBook were filled with references to Gdansk and WikiMania. This was my first year to attend the conference and my mother asked me: “Are you going to blog a bit for us lay folks about your trip to Poland and what you did there? (You know, plain language, no computer talk.)”

Since I was a newbie this year, perhaps I can offer a newbie's perspective that non-technical people (like my mom) will appreciate. Here's a try.

WikiMania is a conference for anyone involved in Wikipedia. Anyone includes the casual reader, the comma-splice-fixer, the extension author, Administrators, Bureaucrats, and, of course, MediaWiki developers like myself. Ultimately, though, WikiMania is a celebration of Free Culture, from the freely available knowledge and the freely licensed videos, photographs and music that Wikipedia holds to the freely available software that it runs on.

Gdansk, the birthplace of solidarity and the city for this year's conference, led to the theme “Freedom of Knowledge in the City of Freedom” — an especially apropos title for those who take such freedom seriously.

For three days, we gathered for meetings, talks and socializing at Gdansk's Polish Baltic Philharmonic. The venue (aside from the lack of air conditioning for this Baltic Sea-side city) was incredible.

Aside from the meetings, there were a couple of cultural events. The first was an impressive concert celebrating Władysław Szpilman (author of “The Pianist”) by the Baltic Philharmonic. This was particularly fascinating for me because, while laptops peppered the crowd at every other event, the concert was free of them. Listening to the music and watching the musicians just required too much of a person's attention.

The second cultural event was a premiere screening of “Truth in Numbers?” While I personally thought it was a pretty decent documentary, many people thought that the makers gave far too much screen time to Wikipedia's critics. It was yet another example of the sort of conflict we see almost every day as authoritative sources like newspapers or cultural gatekeepers like the MPAA and RIAA come head to head with amateurs who are using the Internet to freely and widly diseminate their efforts and collaborate with others.

So that's it. WikiMania is a gathering of free culture fanatics. Their mania, especially while there, is infectious.

We're pattern seekers. We want there to be order in the world. We humans want order so much that we'll see an organizing force where, in reality, there is none.

That was how I explained “Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History” to a friend of mine when I was half-way through it. But, even knowing that, I'm not immune from the seductive draw of the conspiracy.

In fact, I love a good conspiracy. Conspiracies, as David Aaronovitch points out, make it all fit. Where we're overwhelmed with sadness or loss when a president or princess is killed, we seek, perversely, some sort of comfort in the idea that they had it all planned out — that there was a bigger purpose behind it all instead of a lone gunman or a drunk driver who could cause the world so much harm.

Aaronovitch starts Voodoo Histories by explaining that the application of Occam's Razor to every conspiracy theory he writes about will show that there is some far simpler explanation for what happened than a hidden, all-powerful hand.

And he succeeds, showing us that a skeptical approach to the larger conspiracy theories, such as JFK's assassination, Dan Brown's novels, the Truthers on the left, or the Birthers on the right, reveals that a more mundane, simpler explanation of the facts is better at explaining what happened.

And just in case these conspiracy theories are too close to your heart, this British writer produces a couple of British MPs who've championed theories saying “someone” had murdered people and then covered it up. Watching his dissection of these and other conspiracy theories I hadn't heard of showed how much in common all these conspiracy theories have with each other. And, in the end, it makes it easier to accept that, maybe, just maybe, my pet conspiracy theory is just benign happenstance rather than a very successful plot.

History may be written by the winners, but in the final chapter Aaronovitch makes a good case that conspiracy theories are the attempts of the losers write history. “We didn't win,” they seem to be saying, “because the winners are so devious, conniving, and powerful. They'll do anything to win.”

So we're comforted that if we didn't persuade people that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were really nefarious individuals, at least we kept our morals, at least we were ethical. They were successful because they managed to deceive the sheeple.

Why am I cursed with a love of philosophical discussion? Or, if I were more honest, I would say I'm cursed with a love of philosophical monologue — I keep doing it even though I get little to no response.

But in any case, I once again find the 140 characters that Twitter allows too few to express my thoughts adequately. So here goes.

Over on Identi.ca (an open source, de-centralized version of Twitter), I got into a discussion with @teddks about the god that both he and I don't believe in. But don't worry, that's not the discussion I want to talk about here.

While talking to @teddks about all this I made a statement about free will that John Goerzen picked up on. After a little back-n-forth, John asked (and here I translate freely from the twitterese he used):

What you're saying has echos of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism where he said “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.” Is unhappy knowledge better than blissful ignorance?

Now, I hadn't read anything about John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism. So I did what anyone who's mildly curious would do: I read the Wikipedia article.
After that quick read, it looks like Mill's Utilitarianism is a distraction. Sure, I can see the similarities between “if free will doesn't objectively exist, it won't affect my choice to believe that it does” and “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”, but I don't really think its relevant.

Instead, my point is existentialist: who cares about theories of reality when they don't match our own experience of reality? Even if you don't believe that free will actually exists, you still make choices.

Dwelling on the proof of free will is, itself, a distraction. Don't get me wrong: acceptance of free-will is important — it affects the choices we make. But proving or dis-proving it existence is futile. We'll still end up making choices.

To me, the interesting bit is how often we've re-visited the argument for or against free will. Before classical physics, men developed systematic theologies that relied on God's omnipotence to eliminate the possibility of (at least some) choice.

The we got Newtonian physics which, taken to its natural conclusion, seems to say that everything is predictable. Take a snapshot of a system (even, say, your brain) and you can predict with precision any future state. In other words, if you know all the variables, you know the future.

Now-a-days we have quantum physics — something I don't pretend to understand at all — but it seems to allow some sort of free will.

Even without quantum, though, we can't model all the variables. The future is unknowable. The choices others will make can't be predicted. Our own choices are still, effectively, our own.

As a result, isn't it best to believe in free will and act as if it exists? Believing in our own ability to affect change in the world empowers us. Denying free will seems to lead us to nihilism — something I'm not too excited about.</div>

Since finishing up Future of Faith I've answered a couple of comments here and on Facebook that left me with the realization that I need to spill my guts one more time on the topic here.

I've spent a lot of time talking about what I think Cox gets wrong so let me start this off with what I think Cox gets right.

First, he's right that Western Christianity has neglected “orthopraxis” and over-emphasized “orthodoxy”.

That may seem like a strange statement coming from someone who has embraced Orthodox Christianity, so let me explain. Orthopraxis, of course, means “Right practice” and, at least in America, I've normally heard “orthodoxy” used to mean “right belief” or “right doctrine.” Cox (rightly) opposes this emphasis of belief over practice. And I tend to agree with him when he says that we are seeing a move to emphasize practice over belief.

Now, I said this is a strange thing for an Orthodox Christian to say, but its important to see how the word “Orthodoxy” is understood differently in the East than in the West. A slight digression into etymology is necessary.

“Orthodoxy” is the combination of two Greek root words: ortho (ὀρθός) meaning “straight” or “correct” and doxa (δόξα). The oldest meaning of doxa is “common belief” or “popular opinion”. However, when the Septuagint (a translation of the Hebrew scripture in Greek in the 3rd and 2nd century BCE) was being translated, the Hebrew word for “glory” (כבוד, kavod) was translated as doxa (δόξα). This second sense of doxa is the one used in the New Testament. And it is this second sense of doxa that the word is used in Eastern Orthodox churches. In this way, when we talk about “Orthodoxy”, we're talking about “correct glory” or “right worship” instead of “right belief”.

This sense of “Orthodoxy” is closer in meaning to “orthopraxis” than the way we normally hear the word “orthodox” used in the West. For proof, you need go no farther than the “Orthodox” Presbyterian Church's website where they have a Q&A on their use of the word “orthodoxy” in which the explicitly contrast it with the Eastern Orthodox usage of “right worship”.

Now that I've finished my etymological digression — of which I might feel guilty had Cox not made some interesting etymological choices himself – let me return to Cox.

My initial reading of Cox was frustrated by his focus on what he called the “corporate takeover of the Church”. He painted Constantine's influence on Christianity as almost completely negative even to the point where he began to make what sounded to my ears as slanderous statements. At one point he says that the post-Constantinian church was falling over itself to claim that early Christians were loyal subjects of Cesar. Which sounds strange when you're aware of the constant stream of martyrs who are celebrated as saints because they wouldn't participate in the worship of Cesar as a god.

This, and John Goerzen's approach to the book as a “history of faith” made it very difficult for me to read the first half. I was arguing with Cox too much. It wasn't until I got past the retrospective aspects of Future of Faith that I was able to see there was a lot of good in the book.

Don't get me wrong: I am well aware of the mistakes and abuses of power in the Church. However, focusing on only the failures of the early church while ignoring what it did well is the very definition of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”

But this much I hope Cox is right about: that Christians will begin to emphasize right living and right worship over right belief.

This doesn't mean (as Cox supposes) that we have to become acreedal, but it does mean we give up formulating creeds. Nor does it mean (again, as Cox seems to) viewing hierarchy as a bad thing. Forming non-hierarchical churches hasn't meant that people stopped abusing each other. In fact, an argument could be made that getting rid of hierarchy, instead of taking away the power to abuse, simply redistributes the power to abuse to everyone relatively equally.

Cox's “Future of Faith” has its failings. It's a autobiography of Cox's faith with some personal observations disguised as sweeping generalizations. But when he manages to get beyond his obsession with creeds and hierarchy he makes some really good points.

This is only a small aside from Cox's chapter on the Bible: "Meet Rocky, Maggie, and Barry".  For the most part, I find this chapter fairly un-controversial -- which is not to say that people aren't going to argue with him, just that I don't feel the need to.

But the one thing I stood out was at the bottom of page 159 where he says: But here "faith" is once again debased into accepting as true something for which you have no evidence.

The problem is that this is exactly how the word "faith" has been used for centuries -- at least since the author of Hebrews wrote: Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, proof of things not seen.

So what Hebrews calls "faith", Cox calls "debased".  No wonder I've been struggling with The Future of Faith so much: he's re-defining a clearly understood term and expecting everyone to play along.  I imagine I'm not the only one confused.