Isaac Asimov Laments the “Cult of Ignorance” in the United States (2016)
openculture.com
openculture.com
https://www.amazon.ca/Unconscious-Civilization-John-Ralston-...
"Saul engagingly explains the current woes of democracy, especially in Canada, the U.S., and Britain. He argues from history and philosophy that the democratic meaning of individualism has been obscured and the importance of economics overemphasized throughout the twentieth century. With Socrates, he maintains that in a democracy, citizenship is the incumbent duty and government the great responsibility of the individual. Minding one's own business and getting the government off one's back are derelictions of democracy that reflect infatuation with corporatism, the brand of utopianism exemplified by Mussolini's fascism, with its melding of huge business interests and government to achieve the managed society. Privatization as a remedy for government inefficiency and the conception of individualism as the capacity to purchase consumer goods bespeak corporatism's present power, for both reduce citizenship and place control with managers accountable primarily for the bottom line, not the public good. There are many more compelling--and disquieting--ideas in this exciting, though discursive, little book." Ray Olson
V = pB − C + D
Italy and Greece don't have FPTP voting but people there feel pretty disenfranchised even if they theoretically have more representation in government than an American or Canadian would.
In the last 20-30 years there has been an attempt to move Italy to a two party system, first with an almost purely FPTP electoral law, then with a proportional system with large majority bonus and minimum thresholds.
The results have been an unmitigated disaster. Not only the two party system didn't materialize, major parties have disintegrated, and the population has felt increasingly disenfranchised and participation has been falling down election after election. The electoral law and constitution have been tweaked so many times that now, in a perfectly bicameral system, is is pretty much impossible to get the same majority on both chambers.
Among modern democracies, there is a very strong positive effect of proportionality of results produced by the electoral system and all of electoral participation, degree of satisfaction with government, and number of supported dimensions of public policy debate. It's certainly not the only factor, but it's a clear, strong factor. See, e.g., Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.
The real problem IMO is that the political parties aren't able to really influence what way the world moves anymore. It's now mostly in the hands of technology and it's tendency to force change no matter who gets exposed to it.
I wrote many years ago that technology is like a tsunami which can't be stopped. The only thing we can do is learn how to surf the wave.
My impression is that this kind of general dissatisfaction with government is more a result of the globalism brought about by technology, rather than the technology itself.
I think the reason governments end up doing things people don't want, even before you consider blatant corruption, is that global companies are too important for individual economies to ignore. So governments end up in a race to the bottom to attract global business.
Any country, company, organisation who is not using technology and trying to catch up the to progress of it is loosing. Any country, company and organization who is trying to catch up is seeing itself needing less and less to do the same things.
Technological jobs are more or less the only jobs that pays really well and have some sort of a future and anyone who want to make money in todays economy have to use technology to scale their business even if it means undermining their own value.
The companies who are really transformative today and disrupting aren't just disrupting industries they are disrupting the legal system.
Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, self driving cars, drones all push the legal boundaries politicians are represented by special interest groups, these are at odds with the advantages tech brings to consumers.
AI in pushes the need for humans to relearn at an ever increasing speed sooner or later we can't re-educate ourselves fast enough.
Globalization is a byproduct of technology, we can't not have globalization if we want progress, countries who don't want progress aren't going to be able to compete with countries who do.
There are of course many other factors than just technology but it's my belief that today technology is at the core of any human progress. Without it we can't progress and and so we have no choice other than one that ultimately leads to our extinction. Technology is natural. It's part of evolution. If we don't adapt we perish.
Well, China is doing "great" with its Great Firewall to keep citizens in check, despite the technology advance. Many more countries are following this idea and I'm sure we will see more "Great Firewalls" upcoming in few years.
Currently, attendance at most precincts/wards/etc. in both Democratic and Republican parties is fractions of a percent of eligible voters. This yields the emergent behavior you see today: the ones controlling the levers of political parties are the "true believers" who simply showed up, and as an aggregate tend towards more extreme positions. It is Yeats' "the centre cannot hold" and "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" come to life.
Not everyone who shows up even needs to spend all that much time participating at the precinct level. Just enough to send onwards to the next level of the party machinery those you trust to vote similarly-enough to your own interests. It works out to about 2-3 hours per year at most: you mount an effective DDOS upon the party establishment, then go home if you want. Say you spend about another couple day's worth of due diligence each year to suss out who you vote to send onwards to the next level of participation.
Participating at the higher levels of both parties' machinery takes more time and adds money to the requirements, but not all that much in the grand scheme. To represent a county-level/senatorial-district-level/etc. at a state convention, generally about the highest most people will get within a handful of years of starting participation, is once every two years spend 4 combined days in a couple major cities in your state, split into a one-day and a 3-day meeting spread across several months. If you pack your own meals or similar (grocery store run and cook your own), drink only water, drive to the cities, and stay with a bunch of like-minded citizens who split the tab on a house-share, usually about a day's worth of accumulated logistics organizing, about $120-200 total expenditures. If you eat out, order drinks out, stay at a hotel and do some tourist activities, about $600+. The state conventions do fall on a weekday, so you'll give up a vacation day once every other year. Say you spend another couple hours a week discussing and reading about issues of the day, so call it about 17 8-hour days every year of participation.
However, not many people really know how this all works, and give up within 2-3 years of participating. They think that showing up, organizing and kibbutzing with like-minded citizens for a year or two should yield perceivable results. It realistically takes closer to 10-20 years of sustained effort, starting only from the year where the numbers are on your side. The Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders supporters learned this lesson to their disappointment. Most who attend for the first time do not cotton on that they need to show up, find enough like-minded to effectively caucus, study how the current leadership maintains and loses their power in their internecine knife fights, devise their own strategy and tactics, then make their bid to seize power of the leadership posts, a process that takes many years, failures, and setbacks that teach along the way.
Politicians are money-driven because most voters' civic duty starts and stops at voting (when in an active civic civilization, casting a vote is actually the endpoint of an involved process), and most voters are highly susceptible to media-based messaging in such a low-information decision-making environment. Politicians pay more attention to giant majority voting blocs over money; no amount of money can win against overwhelming votes of aware citizens.
We simply don't have enough aware citizens.
It's a critique of right-wing libertarians that is common among anti-statist libertarian socialists or social anarchists. The argument is that the market is entwined with another kind of authoritarian violence and that liberatianism (and classical liberalism) are blind to (or worse, actively endorse).
Violence and coercion of the market is masked by [classical] liberal thinkers behind a veil of talk about contracts, negotiations between supposedly free parties, and natural rights. But in the end it comes from a history of enclosure, land expropriations, elimination of the commons, privatization, colonization, and is backed up by the army and the police.
Finally the corollary of this is that state (at least our kind of state) coercion is actually outcropping of market coercion. And so we have police forces, armies, schools, etc. enforcing property rights above all other things.
When a market is defined by mutually beneficial trade between consenting individuals coupled with free competition, how can exploitation arise in liquid markets? A large part of libertarian theory is that monopolies arise due to state intervention in the market (i.e. patents, regulation increasing cost-to-entry etc).
Because as soon as there is a power imbalance, such as one person owning a factory and another's primary skill being working in such a factory, the mutually beneficial arrangements will nonetheless tend to benefit the one with power more than the one without. And over time these imbalances can amplify such that the wealthy capture more and more of the wealth they create.
>A large part of libertarian theory is that monopolies arise due to state intervention in the market
Some do, but I think natural monopolies can also exist, due to inherent barriers to entry in some industries. Things like natural resources, incumbent infrastructure, and network effects.
I've seen this argued before, primarily in the Marxist analysis of the relationship between employer and employee (or capitalist and worker). I can see how this relationship could be exploitative given one employer, but in a liquid market where companies are competing for employees in the job market, the capitalist perspective would be that companies that offer a more enticing employment package (better benefits, wage etc) would naturally have an easier time hiring and would thus be able to grow faster, out-competing companies with poor offerings. I've not seen a good counter-argument to this.
Also, the idea of wealth capture going to the capitalist kind of makes sense in that part of the implicit exchange between employee and employer is one of income stability: the employer agrees to pay a set rate no matter how much value the employee is generating, and in exchange they absorb risks around market fluctuation, unemployment (which is a real risk for higher-value-capture individuals like contractors) and devaluation. At-will employment seems to mess with that arrangement in the US but here in the UK it seems like a fair trade. If one wants to capture a larger share of their value then one must go freelance/contract (or start a business) and accept the risks that come with those types of work arrangement.
> Some do, but I think natural monopolies can also exist, due to inherent barriers to entry in some industries. Things like natural resources, incumbent infrastructure, and network effects.
Natural resource monopolies don't seem to really exist (all natural resources are heavily competitive and end up being commoditised) and infrastructure such as water can be competed on (both directly as in a second water plant, and indirectly as in building home water tanks). As for network effects, there comes a point where pain from monopolistic exploitation outweighs the marginal utility of the product. If facebook started charging money, for example, people would leave in droves.
Government doesn't really solve any of these issues itself and instead acts as one big monopoly that increases prices not through profiteering but through inefficiency, politics and bureaucracy. Libertarianism certainly has its faults but when weighed up against statism it doesn't seem any worse even in its failings.
This assumes that hiring costs are significant relative to wages, which is rarely the case.
>At-will employment seems to mess with that arrangement in the US but here in the UK it seems like a fair trade.
The notable difference being the state regulation in the UK which requires employers to provide that stability. And even that is eroding with the rise of zero-hour contracts.
>infrastructure such as water can be competed on (both directly as in a second water plant, and indirectly as in building home water tanks)
A second water plant isn't competition for the infrastructure, just the purification process. The water still has to get to your house, and the company which has already built a pipe is at a huge advantage compared to one that hasn't.
>As for network effects, there comes a point where pain from monopolistic exploitation outweighs the marginal utility of the product.
It's certainly possible for monopolists to push things too far and end up vulnerable to a market entrant, but the result of this is a brief period of competition followed by the winner returning to monopolistic behaviour. And the entry cost of this kind of disruption is sufficient that it happens very infrequently.
Monopolies wouldn't exist or form with perfect competition (in theory, monopolies would be overcome by an infinite number of startups undercutting them), but there is no such thing in reality and monopolies have so much market power they can just buy out or undercut startups indefinitely. Also borne out by reality, where the vast majority of the time monopolies must be dismantled by the state. It's a little tricky in that the government also allows some companies advantages over smaller companies, but in general a government is much more dangerous to a (non-state) monopoly than it is beneficial. Anywhere you get weak governments, you immediately get markets that are entirely dominated by one company or group, who then usually manipulate prices and quash competition.
More generally the idea of laissez faire economics/libertarianism is that government actions are "unfair", and that causes the problems. In reality if there are "unfair" actions, they are far better used by the government (which normally has the interest of its citizens in mind) than they could be used by corporations (who have the interest of their shareholders in mind). NB that this is a strawman attack and that some types of libertarian philosophy knowledge some kinds of rules and government are necessary, but that kind of reasoning is not at issue.
What the quote says is that 'getting the government of your back' reflects the infatuation with 'Mussolini's fascism's corporatism'. He is not equivocating. He's just saying they reflect the same thinking.
First of all, most obviously, Mussolini's fascism is the destruction of the people's government, and its replacement with corporations. The only difference is that the corporations are constructed by the government. The reflection comes in the lack of a people's government so that corporations or market forces decide what the people do. In that way, pure libertarianism and Italian fascism are superficially the same. It's not hyperbolic, its a real parallel, similar to how you can draw a parallel between communism and dictatorships through (varying amounts of) authoritarianism. Fascism and libertarianism are parallel due to having no (or lesser) personal representation.
Unrelated, but following from that, is the idea that the government is basically a union for the people. Individually a person has no recourse against a greater power eg a company can fire me on a whim, and it may easily ruin my life but will certainly be a large upset and setback as I lose 100% of my income. Meanwhile that company operates at 99% efficiency for a few weeks or months, before returning to 100%. The company is clearly less bothered by firing people than they are. This stance rejects any idea that the government is less than (or at least, that it should be less than) operated to further the interests of its citizens. It rejects Hobbes. Under that, "getting the government off your back" is perverse- it means unloading your ability to advocate for yourself onto a despotic party who is only interested in their own goals, be it money or the "state". Fascism does this overtly- its literal intention is to remove all power from the individual, and give it to the interests of the state. Libertarianism does it obliquely, but nevertheless if you assume the government should represent the people's interests as a whole, then it can only be taking away power (power derived equally from everyone, implying democratically) and giving it to someone else. That makes it much easier for corporations to force individuals into making poor choices because again a corporation by its nature has better information and more resources than individuals, and can always get the upper hand.
Saying "fascist corporatism was to achieve organic national unity by putting both corporations and unions under control of the government" is disingenuous. Under fascism, the government IS the corporations. Unions only existed to prevent unionization; it's not a real union if it is controlled by the company. Fascism was not the ultimate control of corporations by the government (that's socialism), its the other way around.
Given that libertarianism (I have never seen a descriptive definition of the term leftist) is all about individualism, it should not be at all surprising that the two are treated as so similar. You are doing the reviewer a disservice by saying he conflated the two. He just said they reflect each other.
Finally, in a practical sense, libertarianism and fascism are deeply, deeply intertwined in America. Here's[1] a popular alt-right blogger saying as such, using essentially the same arguments as I am. There's also this guy[2]. Ayn Rand made an argument like yours, that fascism is statist[3], but it holds zero water and doesn't even bear strong resemblance to modern American libertarianism. Her argument is that without a state government, corporations become the state- and therefor the solution is to give the state more power, so it doesn't become fascist. So... the way to become less statist is to give the state more power. That contradiction underlies the cognitive dissonance of libertarianism. The "rules" of libertarian canon cannot exist without state enforcement, the minimization of which is the avowed purpose of libertarianism.
[1] http://therightstuff.biz/2013/01/23/fascist-libertarianism-f...
Free speech, as spelled out in the 1st amendment is the ability of anyone to speak freely without fear of repercussions by the State. "Congress shall make no law.."
But it has progressively help foster the idea that all speech should be respected or listened to, that all speakers are equally respectable, and as a consequence that every utterance of words is equivalent and should be given the same screen time.
This is madness.
People have an absolute right to be religious if they want to, and to worship any entity, without interference from the State. But they shouldn't expect to be respected for it, and certainly not by the common man. Indeed, they should expect the opposite: to be mocked and laughed at.
Same for "anti vaxxers" who are in fact utterly stupid, selfish freeriders and should be addressed as such (and shunned from civilized society). Etc.
Anyway, my point isn't against free speech per se; it's the observation that a certain idea of "free speech" has been intrumentalized by a lot of people to shield themselves and the absurd views they hold, from criticism, and that the non-crazies constantly fall prey to this obvious tactic.
Many people find religion for many different reasons. To categorize them all as people to be mocked is equally doltish but the opposite to religious people telling everyone they are going to hell (for whatever thing they don't like). Your statement is an equal but opposite reaction to that which you loath. No one likes a rabid conservative, no one likes a rabid liberal. Rabid is rabid regardless of what comes out of their mouth.
>idea of "free speech" has been intrumentalized by a lot of people to shield themselves and the absurd views they hold
I think you are practicing what you are preaching.
Atheists expect to be mocked and laughed at by the religious.
The point is that religious people should expect to be mocked and accept that fact. They should not argue that it is improper and that religion somehow implicitly deserves reverence.
Also, religious people have been mocked, enslaved, imprisoned, tortured and killed en masse for what? 6000 years now?
Frequently (though of course, not always) by other religious people. I don't think that argument holds a lot of weight.
Do you have any examples of genocide in the name of religion? Crusades maybe.
'freedom of speech and duty of reflection'
PS: ignorance vs intelligence tbc
Not legally, Freedom of Religion has legal restrictions just as the legal restrictions on speech you acknowledged.
SCOTUS has Entire body of case law brought by "churches" religious worship centers around cannabis and/or hallucinogens - in other words not absolute.
Regarding the absolute free speech folks you identified, I typically find they are they are unlikely to have ever read a single 1st Amendment SCOTUS opinion, generally rejecting the idea they could ever learn anything from robe wearing traditionalist. The real irony is I also find these absolutists also generally start backing down from their opinions once they understand the kind of speech cases SCOTUS hears such as child pornography.
As an example, there's a gay teacher who was fired from a Catholic school near where I live after he was outed. It was completely un-related to anything having to do with the school or his teaching responsibilities. Despite the church's insistence that it would be absurd, as you put it for "all speech [lifestyles] should be respected or listened to, that all speakers are equally respectable" there is string public sentiment that his job (economic security within a vocation he has a passion for) outweighs the moralizing from even a very powerful institution. And there are attempts to correct his dismissal through the law.
If we're trying to build a just society, there needs to be strong protection in favor of inclusion for those who think, act, and are born differently. The best way to protect your own peculiarities from the state, or a"tyranny of the majority" mob, is by actively protecting your out-group. A mutual live-live sentiment should be what we aspire to.
Yes, you're right -- however, what if the person in question was an anti-vaxxer? Shouldn't an organization have the right to fire anti-vaxxers?
How do we protect LGBT people without offering the same protections to anti-vaxxers is a difficult question. (Or, to put it another way, how do we prevent anti-vaxxers from using the just protections offered to LGBT people, to further their agenda?)
I don't know.
An even more difficult question is, if we can't resolve the previous question, should we err on the side of protecting everyone ("legitimate" minorities AND dangerous crazies) or noone?
I'm not sure of the answer to that one either.
That leads to weird collisions between "elite" and "normal people" like me being the most well earning person due to my IT master and job, but some family members wondering at Christmas when I will learn a real job (that allows me to use my hands instead of my brain).
Given how pervasive our intelligentsia-dominated media has become, low-knowledge people everywhere are now in a constant state of defensive ego-preservation. Presto, wide-spread belligerent anti-intellectualism.
What?? Where did you find such media? Please share.
In addition, I am thinking of the many television shows starring educated urban people's educated urban problems, or how often the lower classes, when they are represented at all, are treated with either some condescension (Family Guy, etc.) or are "sensitively" portrayed from a removed anthropological perspective (Friday Night Lights).
My girlfriend's family members always were judgemental assholes during family holidays and they were always passive-aggressive of course -- so when she gets angry they always make googly eyes and say "but we said nothing, why are you so angry?". Playing the Virgin Mary.
One day she firmly refused to go and proceeded to silence her phone to dodge the bullets from one of her granddads and both grandmas.
Took them half a year of shock and they suddenly started being nice and stopped judging based on their (possibly obsolete) models of thinking. Now they even try to TALK with her, to actually LISTEN! All hope is not lost for the world. :D
You might want to try the silent treatment. Family members love to judge and I feel they'll die if they don't do it but I think they love the person a bit more and can come around.
But this is a necessary consequence of the universal franchise. My ignorance has one vote. Your knowledge has one vote. In a system of rule that furnishes us each a vote and values all votes equally, my ignorance and your knowledge are worth exactly the same. In such a system of rule, how can it be otherwise?
As may seem likely from the thrust of my prior comment, I don't favor the universal franchise as a system of rule; it seems to me prone on the one hand to severe corruption as various actors seek to regather the sovereign power which this scheme so atomizes, and on the other hand to precisely the sort of popular enthusiasm which the American founders sought to render harmless, a purpose whose merit the events of the twentieth century do much to demonstrate.
Most who espouse such an opinion of universal suffrage seem to imagine it being replaced by a scheme in which they themselves still have some, indeed a much larger, measure of the power to rule. I think this is a mistake; where it isn't a deliberate satisfaction of arrogance, it seems to me prone to encourage that arrogance develop. I'd rather see a scheme in which the practice of rule is the province of those trained and skilled in that very specialized profession.
Of course, the problem of competent rule remains, and it's not a simple one - I don't think I could even produce a formal definition, although Singapore seems like a good example in a lot of ways, and perhaps Sweden, or the Nordic countries in general, in some others. In any case, recent history offers little that I can see to suggest that universal suffrage offers a uniquely, or even notably, reliable solution to this problem, either.
Great idea! We can get everybody to vote on who those people are!
If you think some people are not educated enough to vote, then persuade them that they need to be educated.
When it comes to making policies on things like tax, healthcare, government spending, military intervention, etc, there are no right and wrong answers, just opinions. And often there are equally well-founded opinions that contradict each other.
Democracy solves that conundrum by getting both sides to appeal to the 'demos', with universal suffrage defining the demos as (almost) the entire adult population. How would you solve it?
> How would you solve it?
I wouldn't! I'm not remotely competent to do so. I think few people are, just as few people are competent to administer a large datacenter - a comparison to which I keep returning, because that's also a highly technical and rather abstruse specialty whose details and nuances are largely opaque to anyone not herself closely familiar with the task. But one need not be a skilled professional administrator to recognize that critical problems exist.
To keep with your comparison, restricting the right to vote is like restricting the right to switch datacentres. Restricting the right to stand in an election is like restricting the right to run my own datacentre.
Of course, in a nation state I can't secede and run my own government and that is the intractable problem. How do you administer a country with millions of people in such a way that all of them are happy with your administration? It's impossible, whichever system you choose.
Does it? There's that appointed civil service with which to contend, as another commenter mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and like any bureaucracy, one of its primary efforts is that of ensuring its own continuity through changes in the elected administration alongside which it operates. (Perhaps "above which", depending how much credence you give the idea that it's the civil service which actually runs a country, and the electees are more or less just there to amuse the proles. I've known a few civil servants who gave this idea considerable credence, which makes it difficult for me to dismiss out of hand.)
Even leaving that aside and assuming democracy works according to the junior high social studies model, to what extent does your vote enable you to predict a given candidate's behavior once elevated to office? Is there any reason at all, in the modern era, to imagine that we ever vote for anyone based on any real knowledge of how he or she will behave once elected? Why does the phrase "campaign promise" connote as it does?
Arguably that's what happens in many places. The UK has a large, non-partisan civil service supporting whichever the government is in power.
But we don't let them decide our goals, because democracy is not primarily about choosing which way to solve widely-agreed problems. It's about deciding which things are in fact the problems that need solving. Training and skill are not critical to this.
Incompetence and inefficiency are secondary problems, and any attempt to fix them by weakening democracy itself is a dangerous project that puts the cart before the horse.
Infrastructure maintenance, for example.
Foundation Trilogy --
1) The Encyclopedia Foundation epitomizes ivory-tower (and mostly retrospective) intellectuals who find themselves outmaneuvered by a mere politician, Salvor Hardin. This same Hardin uses deceit and treachery to keep Terminus independent against menacing breakaway provinces. Hardin's successors oversee the hegemony of the Foundation, even as Terminus' government devolves into autocracy under the Indburs.
2) The savior of humanity Hari Seldon essentially keeps Terminus in the dark about crises he was able to predict decades / centuries in advance. Only the arrival of an aberration (The Mule) throws his predictive power to the wind.
3) Moreover, Seldon establishes a shadow group of telepaths, mathematicians, and psychologists, ostensibly to gaurd against aberrations such as The Mule, but whose ultimate goal is to eventually rule the galaxy on the blood and sweat of the First Foundation.
Galatic Empire novels --
1) Hyperspatial travel, once considered liberating, becomes the primary mechanism for inflicting human politics on an unsuspecting galaxy.
Robots of Dawn novels --
1) Robots initially free humanity from drudgery but eventually render the societies that use them vulnerable to a droid-phobic Earth. Earth wins the inevitable war between itself and the robot societies, but becomes uninhabitable.
Considering his background, Dr. Asimov had a certain autocratic streak.
It's not surprising that people turn to demagogic populist buffoons when "rational" managerial class tell obvious lies in order to increase their powers.
Your definition of intelligence is simply knowledge. That's a shaky foundation to build any sensible reasoning.
You make efforts not to call "American ingenuity" as intelligence. No, this ingenuity (which has nothing specificaly american about it) is just intelligence.
The actual application of 'prejudice' to the unknown is simply ideological rambling. American exceptionalism will never stop to astound me in its vacuity. Note that European are, or at least were equally guilty of it. But americans are only starting to know what it is to be an old society. To have entrenched interests furthering inequalities and hindering innovation (divide between the golden people from california and the inner-country pop). The new age of protectionism is there and America is on its forefront.
> Is it no surprise then that Americans have eschewed blind worship of an elite priesthood?
"Is it no surprise that humans applied very human behaviors to employ conceptual shortcuts in trying times?"
You reek of arrogance. This is pretty ironic, considering that the subtext of your comment is itself a critic of a supposed european smugness.
Why must you do that?
False conflations of nations and ways of thinking, and accusing people of being full of themselves while you yourself expose such a behaviour.
You need a hug, man.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. / Matthew 5:3-12 /
We think only because technology evolves humanity does it too. But we are still where we have been 2000 years ago.
And money making skills do not require being a genius or personally making key contributions to society. It is rather about hiring the right people, negotiation and selling ideas, etc...
If a person truly believes his religion, it has major implications for his/her notion of what it means for humans to thrive, what activities are moral/ethical, and the goals of human society.
It would be very strange indeed if those beliefs had no bearing on one's politics.
I don't know. I see good arguments for and against.
In Europe, your usual choices when you disagree with the dominant church are to get over it, become atheist, or - more rarely - change faith altogether (as in to Islam, Buddhism, etc.) because, more often than not, you exhaust Christian picks after going through Catholicism and the local Protestant flavor or two.
In contrast, the US offers a very wide variety of Christian flavors (and Christian-based sects). So when, like your sister and her husband, you disagree you can just pick another church flavor down the block that is mostly the same with a few twists. You're still nominally Christian though.
The difference between the two is sometimes put forward to explain the contrast between the high number of atheists in Europe and the high number of religious people in the US.
Human beings are illogical and take a lot of things on faith. People often don't have good reasons to believe things or have simplistic views of other (see religion or not-religion). They believe because that's all they know. You eliminate all religion and you'll end up with non-religious faiths and ignorance. Haven't you noticed most tech is religion?
Religion might play a factor, but only as much as class, nationality, race, culture, education, background, genetic factors, etc.
Most people whether they are religious or not aren't applying the scientific method to their daily lives. You can't blame that - biases are easy and trying to be objective is a pain in the ass.
Most of the scientific facts don't have a direct impact on your life, so you don't get rewarded for getting things right, nor you get punished for getting them wrong. Different criteria thus become more relevant. How a belief fits your image of yourself? How does it help you strengthen your ties to the groups you're in? How it positions you against the groups you dislike?
Note that in situations when getting things right has direct impact on one's life - like, when it comes to money or job - people suddenly become very rational.
The vast vast majority of the population, for example, is in no position to question the LHC result identifying the Higgs boson. Unless you have a cool billion dollars or so to build your own collider, you are essentially in the position that an expert has told you so, and some other experts said they agree with them (peer review). So therefore believe what you are told. And whenever people do question scientific results, without the expensive equipment and basing their entire career around becoming employed as a scientist, we tend to call them cranks.
With most religious positions (eg, what is the biblical view on X), you've probably got three copies of different translations lying around the house, and have every means and encouragement to do your own questioning, argument, and interpretation.
In terms of the actual practice of questioning, interpreting evidence, and weighing up a decision on an open question where there are differing views -- most people have vastly more experience and engagement of doing that with religion than with science.
AFAIK, a more orthodox understanding of faith this: It's a willingness to take the risk that a proposition is true, or that a person can be trusted, even in the absence of iron-clad proof. As one guy phrased it, it's "putting all your eggs in one basket".
And FWIW, I've encountered numerous liberals, conservatives, athiests, and theists who hold self-inconsistent sets of beliefs.
It should go without saying that religious belief (as varied as it is) has very little to do either way with sound reasoning. You can find monsters throughout history that are (edit) religious or non-religious.
Speaking of contradictory beliefs, how about Lenin? He was an atheist but also thought he was a man of destiny...and murdered a bunch of people through fanaticism. Of course nobody wants to claim him today - not a true believer. Everybody knows true believers wouldn't do that.
I'm not sure I follow what you're trying to say.
The first sentence seems to be an assertion about the relationship between reason and religious belief. But the second sentence seems to be about the non-relationship between holding a [non-]religious world-view and being a monster.
Are those two sentences were meant to work together to make a larger point? If so, would you mind restating it so I can understand?
With respect this argument (as presented) is anecdotal and subjective. There's neither data nor analysis so it's not very pursuasive.
> ...a more orthodox understanding of faith this...
Careful there, you're conflating the two meanings of the word 'faith'. One is putting trust in something, the other is to follow the doctrines of a religion (or referring to a specific religion). They're related but distinct.
The country's birth from a remote colonial revolution with a deep distrust of monarchy, tradition, and authority.
Being a destination for various people disenfranchised in their home cultures, who need a new metric of success, coalesce around money as the arbiter of success and indirectly "correctness".
Geographic isolationism from other and significantly diverse first world nations.
A lingering sense of superiority for our heroic role in WWII.
I don't know how much each of these contributes, but I think the answer to the questions Asimov raises is sooner found in, say, de Tocqueville than in Susan Jacoby.
yet another post election political slam of voters because they didn't choose "correctly" and not something that should be on this site.