Sunday, December 11, 2011

Can beggars be choosers?



Sourced From: Dan Ariely's blog


One day a few years ago I passed a street teeming with panhandlers, begging for change. And it made me wonder what causes people to stop for beggars and what causes them to walk on by. So I hung out for a while, engaging in a bit of discreet peoplewatching. Many people passed the beggars without giving anything, but there were a few who stopped. What was it that separated those who paused and gave money from those who didn’t? And what separated the more successful beggars from those who were less successful? Was it something specific about their situation, or their presentation? Was it the beggar’s strategy?

To look into this question, I called on Daniel Berger Jones, an acting student at Boston University who had just finished hiking around Europe. Not having shaved in months and already looking pretty scruffy, he was ready for the job (plus as part of his training to be an actor I figured it would be good for him to learn how to beg for money – at the time he did not see that particular benefit). So I found a street corner and placed him there to take on the panhandling trade. I asked Daniel to try a few different approaches to begging and to keep track of the approaches that made him more or less money. (Of course, after the experiment was over we donated all the money that he made to charity). The general setup was what we call a 2×2 design: When people walked by, Daniel would either be sitting down (the passive approach) or standing up (the active approach) and he would either look them in the eyes or not. So there were times when he was 1) sitting down and looking people in the eyes, 2) sitting down and not looking people in the eyes, 3) standing up and looking people in the eyes, or 4) standing up and not looking people in the eyes.

Daniel got to work, scrounging for money. He stayed on his corner for a while, trying the different approaches. And it turned out that both his position and his eye contact did, in fact, make a difference. He made more money when he was standing and when he looked people in the eyes. It seemed that the most lucrative strategy was to put in more effort, to get people to notice him, and to look them in the eyes so that they could not pretend to not see him.

Interestingly, while the eye contact approach was working in general, it was clear that some of the passersby had a counterstrategy: they were actively shifting their gaze in what seemed to be an attempt to pretend that he wasn’t there. They simply acted as if there was a dark hole in front of them rather than a person, and they were quite successful at averting their gaze.

At some point, something very interesting happened. There was another beggar on the street – a professional beggar – who approached young Daniel and said, “Look kid, you don’t know what you’re doing. Let me teach you.” And so he did. This beggar took our concept of effort and human contact to the next level, walking right up to people and offering his hand up for them to shake. With this dramatic gesture, people had a very hard time refusing him or pretending that they did not seen him. Apparently, the social forces of a handshake are simply too strong and too deeply engrained to resist – and many people gave in and shook his hand. Of course, once they shook his hand, they would also look him in the eyes; the beggar succeeded at breaking the social barrier and was able to get many people to give him money. Once he became a real flesh and blood person with eyes, a smile and needs, people gave in and opened their wallets. When the beggar left his new pupil, he felt so sorry for poor Daniel –and his panhandling ineptitude– that he actually gave him some money. Of course Daniel tried to refuse, but the beggar insisted.

I think there are two main lessons here. The first is to realize how much of our lives are structured by social norms. We do what we think is right, and if someone gives us a hand, there’s a good chance we will shake it, make eye contact, and act very differently than we would otherwise.

The second lesson is to confront the tendency to avert our eyes when we know that someone is in need. We realize that if we face the problem, we’ll feel compelled to do something about it, and so we avoid looking and thereby avoid the temptation to give in and help. We know that if we stop for a beggar on the street, we will have a very hard time refusing his plea for help, so we try hard to ignore the hardship in front of us: we want to see, hear, and speak no evil. And if we can pretend that it isn’t there, we can trick ourselves into believing –at least for that moment– that it doesn’t exist. The good news is that, while it is difficult to stop ignoring the sad things, if we actively chose to pay attention there is a good chance that we will take an action and help a person in need.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Religion in the 21st century

Note: Sourced from Philosopher’s Beard
Once upon a time religion was in the world and made the world. Religion made the messy chaotic world legible to human understanding and amenable to human purposes. It fixed things in place, like the stars in the sky and the distinction between men and women. It ordered the flux into the cycle of life: the turning of the sun, seasons, and harvests; birth and death. It explained and justified the social order: why one man is born to wealth and power and another to be a serf. It told us with all the force of a mighty and all-encompassing metaphysics what our lives really meant, and how we should act, think and feel. But no more. Religion has been brought low by its old enemies, philosophy and politics. Religion persists and is even popular. But it is now in the mind, a matter of personal belief projected outwards. In short, religion is now secular.

I focus here on the trajectory of the Abrahamic style of theological religion (other forms of religiousish behaviour require their own accounts). This kind of religion rests on a metaphysical unification of the divine, the social-order, and nature. It gives us an enchanted world and a guarantee that we know our true place in it. The enemies of theological religion have always been philosophy and politics because both present inherently secular ways of grappling with the nature of the world that bypass religion. Their rise has shattered both enchantment and Truth. Religion still creeps about the place, but in a thoroughly subordinate role.

Philosophy is always trying to see the world - natural, social, and ethical - from a non-orthodox perspective. Philosophers are those annoying people who are always saying, Yes, but..... As in Yes of course God exists, but just suppose that the heavens are like a giant clockwork mechanism that goes automatically after it's been set up? Wouldn't that be an interesting way of looking at things?

Religions can be seen as rich communal storehouses of knowledge about subjects as diverse as ethics, agriculture, hygiene, economics, etc that provide access to more wisdom about how to live than any one person could ever come to on their own. (That is a significant reason for its attractiveness even in the modern world, apart from the social club benefits.) But its metaphysical constraints (the ultimate answer is always that God did it) mean that religion can't compete with philosophy in the theoretical knowledge game.

Philosophy constantly spews out alternative approaches to understanding the world, most perniciously by creating dedicated collaborative epistemic communities interested in particular subjects - previously. (Every major academic discipline, from physics to economics to mathematics was started by philosophers.) These lovers of theoretical knowledge for its own sake leave the speculative orientation of philosophy behind as they develop specialist methodologies and employ them systematically upon different bits of the world. If they are given space and freedom (universities) they generate vast quantities of robust theoretical knowledge about how the world really works. Religion of course knows this full well, and always strove to keep the keys to knowledge to itself, for example in medieval Europe by exercising tight control over literacy, libraries, and universities.

But the Enlightenment let philosophy out of its bottle for good, and since then it has succeeded to an astonishing degree in producing much much better accounts of how the world works than any religion. It has convincingly shown that all religions make serious mistakes about matters of fact (astronomy, history, medicine, etc), and about how facts are connected (evolution, cosmology, etc). The sacred triangle between the divine, human society and nature just isn't out there, so, obviously, your prayers cannot affect the weather or your marriage prospects. It has shown that the world is actually much more complicated than religion ever claimed - exposing the limits of religious knowledge communities. But at the same time it has shown that the world doesn't need God, gods, or spirits to make it work. Even in ethics, it has shown up the inconsistencies, biases, and questionable foundations of religious teachings and identified a plethora of alternatives that beat iron age patriarchal tribal mores hands down. (How many genocides does God order in the Old Testament? Death for picking up sticks on the Sabbath?) Religion can cope with atheism since atheists at least take religion seriously enough to argue about. Naturalists though don't even find religion compelling enough to consider (any more than fairies or UFOs), except as an object of study, for example by anthropologists and sociologists.

Politics is about earthly power and has an underlying Machiavellian pragmatism that has always been in tension with religious accounts of the divine, true, social order. Politicians are the ones who have bright ideas like this. Hey, what if I stop killing and torturing the people who disagree with the official church about the Doctrine of the Trinity. Think of all the money I would save and all the extra taxes I could raise.

The pragmatism of politics is a threat to theological domination of society in more than one way. (Hence the truism that the separation of church and state actually protects religion.) On the one hand religion can easily be corrupted by politics if it is seduced by the possibility of using direct earthly power to make sure the social world follows the divine script properly. The exercise of that power can't be done without yielding to the logic of politics and becoming embroiled in the profane arts of government (like the Borgias, or Khamenei). And then people will stop taking the clerics' heavenly status claims seriously. On the other hand politics can reach out to religion as a source of legitimacy for its own Machiavellian strategies - blessing kings, wars, and taxes for example. Here the seductions themselves are earthly - access to the king's court, monetary rewards, and legal privileges for your clerics. Sooner or later you're selling indulgences to build gorgeous palaces and your clerics are raping peasant children with impunity. And then, again, the people tend to lose faith.

Despite these tensions, politics and religion can co-exist in a reasonably stable arms-length relationship since each recognises that it needs what the other does and can't replace the other (churches need funding; kings need right as well as might). So even when the relationship broke down (e.g. in the Protestant Reformation), it tended to come back. That is, until politics invented something new and enormously powerful: large nation states combined with democratic government. These replace kings, whose legitimacy as rulers was always based on a dubious metaphysics of divine social order (backed by raw ruthless power), with professional politicians. The legitimacy of political power holders now depends on their ability to appeal to the people, not the clerics; the legitimacy of their actions depends on their adherence to temporal constitutions not divine law.

Since these forces were fully unleashed religion has been forced to adapt. Out went the mighty all-encompassing metaphysics in the face of the top-down scrutiny of querulous university academics. Out went the claim to absolute truth in the face of the bottom-up revolution of peasants wanting the right to their own opinion. The new religion is individualised, marketised, and deracinated.

Individualisation
Liberal democracy is all about dealing with the fact of reasonable disagreement, that as soon as one relaxes totalitarian social control one will find that other people have completely sincere beliefs and judgements that differ from yours. Luther of course when he said 'Here I stand. I can do no other.' didn't think he was making a plea for individual freedom of conscience. He thought he was right. But when lots of people start thinking they have the right to stand up for what they believe, one has to find a modus vivendi (or face interminable civil war). One has to find a way to live in the same political society as people whom you believe are utterly - metaphysically - wrong. The trouble is that once you set up some rules for keeping the peace - state neutrality on religious matters, no religion in the public square, etc - they do much more than keep the peace. One ends up finding one's Lutheran, Catholic or Jewish neighbours actually very pleasant. It becomes harder and harder to remember that the really important thing in your relationship is that they're going to hell. Politeness comes to matter to you and you decide to keep your revelation to yourself so as not to be an ass. Instead of religious credos being too dangerous to utter in public, mentioning them becomes something of a social gaffe, like blurting out your taste in pornography.

Meanwhile the damned philosophers are busy creating a secular intellectual space open to all and independent of any religious dogma. Religion's storehouse of wisdom is bypassed and then surpassed by towering cathedrals of secular knowledge. Then it is subjected to criticism. Of its science, history, ethics; even of its literary status! If you try to talk about miracles and divine providence these people ask if you also believe in UFOs or fairies; and ethnographers ask if they can study your interesting sub-culture.

Contemporary religion takes place in the mind of the individual. Beyond this inner world you must act as if your beliefs were irrelevant. Outside, the world turns according to a godless physics, biology, economics, etc. In society your talk and actions are dominated by the fact of pluralism, so you must behave with a careful neutrality that the godless can go along with.

Marketisation
Pluralism and individualisation also brings markets. Of course, marketing is nothing new to the theological religions, but previously they were often in the comfortable state of being monopolies and being able to charge above the going rate in your attention and property for their spiritual services. That meant that they tended to set a 'price' for their services that maximised their profits, even though it left a great many people unserved or underserved (the deadweight loss of monopoly). Indeed in the heyday of religion most people probably weren't particularly religious because they weren't the core market and the core product wasn't designed or priced with them in mind.

Nevertheless there was some innovation. The invention of the afterlife for example is a brilliant way of getting even more out of your present customers. As Pascal pointed out, by extending people's utility function into eternity you alter their cost-benefit analysis in favour of greater commitment to the church in this life (however much you discount future well-being, eternity trumps present consumption). Likewise monotheism's visceral distaste for polytheism is typical monopolist protectionist behaviour (3/10 commandments are about monopoly and trademark protection). If you have a choice of gods you can play them off against each other, as the Greeks did, by switching to a different god whenever one fails to deliver. Multiple gods means market competition between divine service providers and lower prices for the ordinary consumer (and so also more freedom to think for yourself). Under monotheism when your prayers aren't answered, it's your fault and you need to pay/pray more.

Monopolist religions used their excess profits to invest in R&D (among other things) in their principal technology - theology. On the one hand they were able to train and employ the best minds of their time. On the other hand this was quite inefficient for society as a whole since all those great minds were only allowed to think about one area. And it turns out that when great minds take up the serious study of God, they raise at least as many problems as they solve (which then have to be kept quiet - Luther!).

The modern state of affairs requires religions to compete with each other like regular companies in a free market. Monopoly profits from captive consumers are a thing of the past. Since people tend to think all religion is pretty much the same thing (different paths to the same ultimate truth) all the religious denominations are desperate to avoid being fully commoditised, like pork bellies, as fully substitutable with each other and compared purely on price. So they strive to differentiate themselves, like supermarkets or airlines. They identify and target distinct types of customers like single mothers, high-flying business types, or specific ethnic groups, and then woo them with free lunches, parking, daycare, and sermons they like to hear. To increase retention rates they pay close attention to customer feedback and tweak their offerings to meet changing tastes. (Latin isn't working for us anymore.) They have to come up with competition strategies against new start-up religions and franchise operators moving into their areas.

All this marketing is of course quite profane. The success of a religion is now judged in terms of the numbers of 'bums on seats' it can corral into its services, and the amount of money those bums can be persuaded to give up. Not by the truth of its theology. The True religion is all mixed up in the marketplace with the mass of heresies and trivial spiritualisms (like horoscopes and crystal-ball gazing), which are distinguishable only by the success of their marketing. And the marketing affects the content of religions as well, turning them into a set of recognisable hack genres like self-help and personal-growth, or horror (fire and brimstone; that one with the snakes). Many of the fastest growing religions hardly bother with theology at all, because their customers don't have time for all that wordy stuff.

One of the interesting consequences of this is that modern religion has diversified its offerings to supply every consumer niche, rather than demanding that the spiritually inclined accommodate themselves to the True church. Tastes which went somewhat unrecognised and uncatered to before are now met by specialist operators. For example, fundamentalists eschew the established religious providers altogether and start their own co-operatives to meet their peculiar concerns with purity. So in some countries with a thriving free market for religion (most prominently, America) there is probably more religious activity than ever before.

Deracination
Contemporary religion has been deracinated - separated from its cultural context. In the enchanted world religion was always felt as much as thought, because it was literally embedded into the social landscape and rituals of everyday life. That gave religion a solid foundation, and helped make defection difficult to even imagine. It also protected religion from theological excesses by requiring a religion that a human society could actually live by. But now that the enchanted world has shattered, theology can no longer depend on the solid foundations of social practices. Almost the whole of Western Europe, for example, enjoys its quaint Christian culture (history, holidays, recipes, nice old buildings, church weddings) as part of its national identity, but hasn't the faintest interest in Christianity. We are basically Christian naturalists, perhaps the ultimate insult to the old-time religion. Religion for us is an ethnic identity thing, not a belief thing.

On the other hand, the falling away of the cultural roots of religion means that those people interested in personal spirituality have more freedom than ever to download and try out a new theology. That drives the thriving market for religion already discussed. But it also has implications for the kind of religion that people can have. In particular accessing the wisdom of religion about the human condition (all those brilliant minds focussed on analysis and commentary for generations) requires more than reading the sacred book by itself (or in the case of many evangelicals, the few quotations they like). The reason many fundamentalists are so unpleasantly and rigidly righteous is that they are people of the book who lack the lived culture of the book. They mistake religious knowledge of the kind one can get by reading a book like Euclid's geometry, for religious wisdom, which requires a much deeper immersion and personal subordination to the culture of that religion. Fundamentalists, and their worried observers, make an even bigger mistake in believing that religious movements based on literalist readings of sacred texts constitute a revival of old-time religion. Instead they are a fundamentally modern and secular phenomena of individuals searching for meaning in their own lives and fitting together a personal theology from bits and pieces of texts that suit them, and then joining clubs that see things the same way.

Conclusion
The secularisation thesis actually happened, though not exactly in the way 20th century sociologists predicted. They thought levels of religiousity would decline as religion lost its hegemonic dominance over society, whereas in fact it is the nature of religiousity which has changed. Contemporary religion is a thoroughly secular affair. It is matter of individual conscience, and as such hard to distinguish from secular 'religions' like veganism, environmentalism, or socialism. Religious individuals, like socialists, see the world a certain way, but they recognise that others see it differently and they understand the significance and legitimacy of religion in terms of private personal belief. The deinstitutionalisation of religion in liberal societies has led to cut-throat competition which has shifted religions from price-makers to price-takers. Religions now recognise that the customer is always right and make offerings to the customer (instead of vice versa). Religion has been cut free from its cultural base and now floats freely, as bite-size memes that anyone can download from the cloud when they feel like it and assemble for themselves.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

When coal minister meets with tiger..!

This is absolutely crazy! Indian newspapers have largely ignored this bizarre spectacle for some reason. In a country where bureaucracy has its own customs, having a mascot meet a minister is unheard of.

Greenpeace activists, some dressed as tigers, demonstrated outside the central headquarters of the Ministry of Coal in central Delhi on Wednesday, until Minister Prakash Jaiswal agreed to see them. Greenpeace has been protesting India’s coal policy, citing damage to forests in central India.

After about an hour of demonstrations outside the ministry’s headquarters, the group was invited into the minister’s office, a spokeswoman said, where they presented him with petitions signed by 112,000 people asking for changes in India’s coal policy. Minister Jaiswal has asked the group to come back for a longer meeting next week, the spokeswoman said.

In particular, Greenpeace has been investigating the impact coal mining is having on Maharashtra’s Chandrapur region, near the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve. The forests outside the reserve are shrinking because of mining and industrialization, a Greenpeace report says, which is impacting the reserve animal population, who use the forests as a corridor to travel to other reserves.

The amount of coal India produces fell far short of government plans in the last fiscal year, a fact the ministry blames in part on the difficulty of getting the necessary environmental clearances to mine.