most of the people espousing the virtues of cash simultaneously enjoy the safety and cost savings of electronic money. Even those who despise credit cards usually have bank accounts, receive payments via auto deposit, use stored-value cards for public transit and more likely than not pay their rent or mortgage, utilities, medical expenses, Internet service, hotel bills and auto insurance by transferring sequences of 1s and 0s between faraway computers. Click. Sure, you may still need a bill or two now and then for Salvation Army Santas, waiters and bellhops. But for the most part, the better off you are, the less you need cash — and the easier it is to avoid it.

(MORE: How the U.S. Could Pressure North Korea Tomorrow: Quit the $100 Bill)

In contrast, the poor — tens of millions of people in the U.S. and billions of people worldwide — often have no option but cash, and pay dearly because of it. In a recent piece for Foreign Policy, Vishnu Sridharan of the New America Foundation writes that cash-based economies “harm the poor by heightening the risks they face when carrying money and fueling government corruption and inefficiency.” Imagine literally having your life savings under your mattress or folded into a coffee can, vulnerable to fire, thieves, drunken relatives or nagging neighbors. Imagine having to ride the bus for hours to settle a bill, or traveling for days to deliver funds to a relative. Your already fragile finances can also get hammered by outrageous fees charged by check-cashing services or astronomical interest rates levied by payday lenders.

Cancers are also complex diseases. Individual tumours arise because of a number of different genetic mutations that build up over the years, potentially due to different causes. You can’t take a single patient and assign them to a “radiation” or “infection” or “smoking” bucket. Those 16.1% of cancers that are linked to infections may also have other “causes”. Cancer is more like poverty (caused by a number of events throughout one’s life, some inherited and some not) rather than malaria (caused by a very specific infection delivered via mosquito).

...................

I could do two sets of calculations using exactly the same methods and tell you how many cases of cancer were attributable to radon gas, or not eating enough fruit and vegetables. A casual passer-by might compare the two, look at which number was bigger, and draw conclusions about which risk factor was more important. But this would completely obscure the fact that there is very strong evidence that radon gas causes cancer, but only tenuous evidence that a lack of fruit and vegetables does. Comparing the two numbers makes absolutely no sense.

The idea is that we should not rely too heavily on altruism, generosity, solidarity, or civic duty, because these moral sentiments are scarce resources that are depleted with use. Markets, which rely on self-interest, spare us from using up the limited supply of virtue. So, for example, if we rely on the generosity of the public for the supply of blood, there will be less generosity left over for other social or charitable purposes. If, however, we use the price system to generate the blood supply, people’s altruistic impulses will be available, undiminished, when we really need them. “Like many economists,” Arrow wrote:

I do not want to rely too heavily on substituting ethics for self-interest. I think it best on the whole that the requirement of ethical behavior be confined to those circumstances where the price system breaks down. . . . We do not wish to use up recklessly the scarce resources of altruistic motivation.

It is easy to see how this economistic conception of virtue, if true, provides yet further grounds for extending markets into every sphere of life, including those traditionally governed by non-market values. If the supply of altruism, generosity, and civic virtue is fixed, like the supply of fossil fuels, then we should try to conserve it. The more we use, the less we have. On this assumption, relying more on markets and less on morals is a way of preserving a scarce resource.

But to those not steeped in economics, this way of thinking about the generous virtues is strange, even far-fetched. It ignores the possibility that our capacity for love and benevolence is not depleted with use but enlarged with practice. Think of a loving couple. If, over a lifetime, they asked little of one another, in hopes of hoarding their love, how well would they fare? Wouldn’t their love deepen rather than diminish the more they called upon it? Would they do better to treat one another in more calculating fashion, to conserve their love for the times they really needed it?

Similar questions can be asked about social solidarity and civic virtue

There’s a feel-good myth that governs much American punditry: that good policy and good politics go hand in hand. Often, sadly, it’s not true.

One day in Hell the Devil approached a man who loved the drinking parties there. The Devil told the man that as long as he was willing to quit drinking he could immediately go to Heaven, where he would forever have a better time. The man replied that although Hell wasn’t so bad, and the parties were great, he preferred Heaven, and was willing to go there right now. The Devil told him that if he wanted he could have a great send-off party now, and go to Heaven tomorrow. The man thought it seemed a good idea to have the best of both worlds, so he accepted the deal. The next day the man was reminiscing about how great the send-off party was when the Devil approached him and said he could have another terrific party right then, and go to Heaven the next day. Of course the man accepted. Each day the Devil made the same offer, and each day the man accepted the party, replying, “I’ll quit drinking tomorrow.”

I believe that something strange is happening. Genuine literacy is seeing a precarious rebirth.

The best of today’s tweets seem to rise above the level of mere bon mots (“gamification is the high-fructose corn syrup of user engagement”) and achieve some of the cryptic depth of esoteric verse forms of earlier ages.

The recombinant madness that is the fate of a new piece of Internet content, as it travels, has some of the characteristics of the deliberate forms of recombinant recitation practiced by oral culture.

The comments section of any half-decent blog is a meaning factory.

though the Vedas were accurately preserved, the oral culture also sustained torrents of secondary expository literature that was not accurately preserved. The Mahabharata is an example. Not only was no canonical version preserved, there was no canonical version. The thing grew like a Wikipedia of mythological fan-fiction.

....................

Sites like tvtropes.org are sustaining basic literacy skills.

The best of today’s stand-up comics are preserving ancient wordplay skills.

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The cost of words is not the cost of storing them or distributing, but the cost of producing them. Words are cheap today because we put little effort into their production

Before we can “do something” for the poor, there are some things we need to stop doing to them.

An hour later, the bearded young man who had originally questioned me at the immigration hall became my guard. When I tried to go to the bathroom, he said I was not allowed. This made me nervous. I had been allowed to go before. I told him so. “Well, it’s different now,” he said.

“Different how?” I asked. “Am I under detention?”

He would not answer me. I told him that I was an American citizen and that I demanded to know whether or not I was under detention. He closed his eyes, then opened them, and said, reluctantly, “Yes.”

I lost it. I demanded to see someone from the embassy or the consulate. He ignored me. I said that he needed to take me to the bathroom. He said no. I lifted up my dress and pretended to squat, and shouted, “Fine, then I will go to the bathroom right here!”

He became angry and shouted to another guard to take me to the bathroom. When she said she couldn’t, he took me himself. He insisted on the gender-neutral handicapped toilet, and he waited outside the stall. When I was done, he checked the stall after me, to make sure that I had not concocted a bomb out of my pubic hair. I laughed at him, and he angrily took me back to the detention room.

I waited two more hours. Whenever a guard came into the room, I would ask him what was going on with my passport, and what I could expect. The guard would look down at me and sneer, “You have to wait. You have to wait.” When I told him I had been waiting for hours, he only repeated, “You have to wait.” My wait felt interminable. In his speech to the UN, Mahmoud Abbas quoted the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “State of Siege.” He read, “Standing here. Sitting here. Always here./ Eternally here,/ we have one aim and one aim only: to continue to be.” And he added, “And we shall be.” The state of sitting, of standing, of waiting, is the principal state of the Palestinian, it is the state of the refugee, of the oppressed, of the outsider, of the writer.

Eventually, two female guards came to tell me what time I would board the flight back to the U.S. When they did, I burst into tears. I had been holding out hope, right to the last.

Atoms and the World-Machine

The new conception of a nature that was ruled by externally imposed laws was necessarily accompanied by a diminution of the role played by the intrinsic qualities of matter. As I've already noted, in the medieval understanding of nature, indebted as it was to Aristotelian science, the activities of material things were governed by their internal properties, usually understood in terms of such qualities as heat, cold, moisture and dryness. Aristotle had also imagined that objects had natural tendencies, or "final causes." Nature, in this scheme of things, was self-organising and was conceptualised as analogous in many respects to a living thing.

The seventeenth century saw the revival of an alternative conception of nature - the atomic or "corpuscular" theory that had been championed by the ancient Epicureans. According to this view, matter was made of minute particles that were more or less qualitatively identical. These particles were able to combine in various ways to form macroscopic matter, and the operations of nature were explained by the interactions of the invisible particles.

Such qualities as heat and cold could thus be accounted for in terms of the motions of minute particles, rather than being considered as inherent qualities of particular kinds of substances. The base units of matter were also imagined to fall within the explanatory range of the laws of nature. In much the same way that the movements of the heavenly bodies were expressed in terms of mathematical laws, so too were the movements of the minute corpuscles of matter.

Nature was also increasingly understood as analogous to a machine, rather than a living organism. For this reason, the new science was often referred to as "the mechanical philosophy." Just as machines were built and designed by human agents, the world was believed to exhibit evidence of design by a divine agent. (Aristotle, although a theist, had thought the world eternal and hence uncreated).

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Christianity and the rise of western science
Peter Harrison ABC Religion and Ethics 8 May 2012
Those who magnify recent controversies about science and religion, projecting conflict back into historical time, perpetuate a historical myth to which no historian of science would subscribe.

Those who magnify recent controversies about science and religion, projecting conflict back into historical time, perpetuate a historical myth to which no historian of science would subscribe.
See also

Related Story: Does science make belief in God obsolete? Peter Harrison 11 Apr 2012
Related Story: Best of 2011: Does scientific inquiry preclude belief in God? Neil Ormerod 9 Jan 2012
Related Story: Behold the mighty multiverse! The deficient faith of Lawrence Krauss Neil Ormerod 11 Apr 2012
Related Story: Science or naturalism? The contradictions of Richard Dawkins Alvin Plantinga 12 Apr 2012
Related Story: When things just don't fit: Science and the Easter faith John Lennox 13 Apr 2012
Related Story: The heresy of religious opposition to global warming Michael Stafford 19 Mar 2012

Comments (52)

It is often assumed that the relationship between Christianity and science has been a long and troubled one. Such assumptions draw support from a variety of sources.

There are contemporary controversies about evolution and creation, for example, which are thought to typify past relations between science and religion. This view is reinforced by popular accounts of such historical episodes as the Condemnation of Galileo, which saw the Catholic Church censure Galileo for teaching that the earth revolved around the sun.

Adding further credence to this view of history are a few recent outspoken critics of religion who vociferously contend that religious faith is incompatible with a scientific outlook, and that this has always been the case.

In spite of this widespread view on the historical relations between science and religion, historians of science have long known that religious factors played a significantly positive role in the emergence and persistence of modern science in the West. Not only were many of the key figures in the rise of science individuals with sincere religious commitments, but the new approaches to nature that they pioneered were underpinned in various ways by religious assumptions.

The idea, first proposed in the seventeenth century, that nature was governed by mathematical laws, was directly informed by theological considerations. The move towards offering mechanical explanations in physics also owed much to a particular religious perspective.

The adoption of more literal approaches to the interpretation of the bible, usually assumed to have been an impediment to science, also had an important, in indirect, role in these deveolopments, promoting a non-symbolic and utilitarian understanding of the natural world which was conducive to the scientific approach.

Finally, religion also provided social sanctions for the pursuit of science, ensuring that it would become a permanent and central feature of the culture of the modern West.
God and the Laws of Nature

The remarkable scientific achievements of Isaac Newton (1642-1727) were neatly summarized in poet Alexander Pope's famous couplet: "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night / God said: 'Let Newton be!" and all was light." Pope's laudatory verse makes the point, known to every student of physics, that Newton discovered some of the fundamental laws of nature.

What is often less appreciated, however, is that part of the novelty of the Newton's achievment lay in his conviction that there were laws of nature there in the first place, awaiting discovery. What, then, are laws of nature, and where do come from? During the middle ages, natural laws were understood to be moral laws that had been established by God. The injunction "Thou shalt not kill" was an example of one such law, assumed to be a universal rule that all civilized societies would observe. However, there was no corresponding notion of universal laws in the natural realm.

This idea - laws of nature in the scientific sense - was an innovation of the seventeenth century and was a consequence of the extension of God's legislative moral power to the physical world. One of the pioneers of this new understanding of laws of nature was the French philosopher and scientist Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who wrote that "God alone is the author of all the motions in the world."

This was a radical claim for its time, for it challenged the prevailing view, inherited from the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC), that the behaviours and interactions of material objects were governed by their internal properties. According to the Aristotelian worldview, which had held sway throughout the Middle Ages, nature had enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy.

In the new science, however, natural objects were stripped of inherent properties and God assumed direct control of their interactions. In much the same way that the Deity had instituted moral rules, he was now thought to enact laws which governed the natural world. Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry and author of the eponymous law, observed that God's creation operates according to fixed laws "which He alone at first Establish'd." God's authorship of the laws of nature guaranteed their universality and unchanging nature. Descartes thus argued that because these laws had their source in an eternal and unchanging God, the laws of nature must themselves be eternal and unchanging.

Descartes also set out a law of the conservation of motion, again arguing for it on the basis of God's immutability. This idea that nature was governed by constant and immutable principles was an important precondition for experimental science.

The mathematician Isaac Barrow, who was Isaac Newton's predecessor in the famous Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, suggested that the only reason for having confidence that repeated experiments will yield general principles that hold true is because we can be assured that the laws of nature that God has instituted are constant. We have no reason to believe, he wrote, "that Nature is inconstant," for that would imply that "the great Author of the universe is unlike himself."
Mathematics and Cosmic Order

Closely linked to the new idea that nature was governed by universal and immutable laws was the introduction of mathematical explanation to the natural sciences. Again, this was something quite new.

While medieval thinkers had worked with mathematical equations in the spheres of optics, astronomy and kinematics, they had tended to regard these disciplines as something less than true science. The status of these "mixed mathematical sciences," as they were known, was a consequence of the Aristotelian understanding of mathematics and its relation to the other sciences.

One of the perennial questions in the philosophy of mathematics concerns the status of mathematical truths: Are they human constructions, or are they eternal truths that are embedded in reality? Plato had held the first position, Aristotle had adopted the second, and it was Aristotle's view that tended to prevail throughout the Middle Ages.

If mathematics was primarily a product of the human mind, it could be argued that mathematics did not necessarily provide true a description of reality. It might be allowed, however, that mathematical models, although not ultimately true, nonetheless provided the basis for accurate predictions.

Hence, mathematical astronomy, while regarded as falling short of offering a true account of the nature of heavenly bodies and[…]

Some people would say that our friendship is normalization.

“At least when I’m talking to [someone] like you, I become optimistic because the Israelis have people like you. I become proud. I think oh my god, there are good people, you cannot feel how comforting it is and how happy I feel to see people like you… this is the only thing that makes me feel good.

“You are my neighbor, you are my friend. Am I going to deny this? Am I going to lie? You are a part of this place; you’re a part of this land.

“[Palestinians] can judge me and say whatever they want,” Amira says, “But, from my point of view, [the nakba] happened and I don’t want a nakba to happen again.”

For Amira, who believes in a one-state solution, that means an end to the separation and an end to the checkpoints. It means getting municipal services in Shuafat Refugee Camp. It means that the state, whatever its name, would let her mother visit. It also means learning to accept and embrace a Jewish presence in the land.

“We have to love and respect each other,” she says. “This is my idea.”

Early photos of Tel Aviv's pioneers on the sand dunes are a central feature of Zionist mythology. However, the site of Tel Aviv University tells another story as it was built over the ruins of a Palestinian village that was destroyed during Nakba, Sheikh Muwannis. The current faculty lounge is located in the home of the village's mukhtar [head of the village] and it is the last original building still standing. About a decade ago a few faculty members and the Israeli organization Zochrot urged the university to place a plaque on the wall of the lounge, recognizing the history of Sheikh Muwannis. To date the administration has rebuffed their request.

Those of us who care about decency, the rule of law, constraints on corporate power, civil rights, and economic protections for the downtrodden have become complacent, and we are now reaping the bitter harvest of our neglect. Many of these protections seemed so fundamental that there has been a tremendous amount of denial over the speed at which they are being stripped from us. But these gains were not granted freely or easily by those in authority. They came about as a result of long, persistent, difficult campaigns. If we want to preserve the rights previous generations fought hard to win, we have to make this battle our own.

Citizens United is a distinctive product of the Roberts Court. The decision followed a lengthy and bitter behind-the-scenes struggle among the Justices that produced both secret unpublished opinions and a rare reargument of a case. The case, too, reflects the aggressive conservative judicial activism of the Roberts Court. It was once liberals who were associated with using the courts to overturn the work of the democratically elected branches of government, but the current Court has matched contempt for Congress with a disdain for many of the Court’s own precedents.

Since the end of the Cold War, America has been on a relentless search for enemies. I don't mean a search in the sense of ferreting them out and defeating them. I mean that America seems to have a visceral need for them.

Many in the United States have a rampant, untreated case of enemy dependency. Politicians love enemies because bashing them helps stir up public sentiment and distract attention from problems at home. The defense industry loves enemies because enemies help them make money. Pundits and their publications love enemies because enemies sell papers and lead eyeballs to cable-news food fights.

Governments have long been silent facilitators of modern banking, through a number of 19th century risk management institutions. ‘Limited liability’, which enables shareholders to capitalise a firm (including a bank) without being liable for its losses, enabled banks to extend their lending way beyond the capital invested in them. As Andy Haldane ↑ of the Bank of England explained in a speech last year, ‘Control Rights (and wrongs)’ ↑ , without this implicit state support, banks would have been incapable of taking anything like the risks that they did over the last hundred years, let alone the far higher risks taken over the last twenty.

Nationalised central banks, acting as ‘lender of last resort’, are a further way in which the safety net of state sovereignty is implicitly offered to the financial system. As with limited liability, the whole point of such a guarantee is that, in its simple existence, it then shouldn’t require implementing. As the founder of modern political theory, Thomas Hobbes ↑ , argued, so long as two individuals are both aware that an all-powerful state exists, it is reasonable for them to trust each other to behave peacefully and honestly without government having to do anything. States implicitly under-write certain forms of risk management, on the understanding that their bluff will not be called.

When financiers called the state’s bluff in the autumn of 2008, the result was that the boundary between the state and the banking system all but dissolved. The implicit under-writing has become an explicit one, thanks to government loans, guarantees, equity finance and quantitative easing, all of which offer a thoroughly Hobbesian solution to the chaos that would otherwise have engulfed the money economy. The National Audit Office calculated ↑ that, by the end of 2009, the public had already provided support to the financial sector totalling £850bn (around 60% of GDP), which was before a further £125bn of quantitative easing was introduced. One effect of this crisis is that central banks have become primary arms of economic policy-making, taking responsibility for areas of the economy (such as jobs and growth) with which many of them were never officially tasked.

Reform or Revolution?
While establishing grassroots organizations and institutions capable of challenging elites for power is of the utmost importance, we must also fight together with people in their struggles to transform the conditions of their day-to-day existence within the confines of the present system. Reformists view a change within the existing social system as an end-in-itself, while revolutionaries view reform struggles as one step towards the radical transformation of our society’s dominant values and governing institutions. A reform can be characterized as “non-reformist” if it:

• Addresses the needs that people currently experience.
• Propels the development of revolutionary consciousness.
• Empowers people to continue to seek further gains.
• Galvanizes people to win sought gains and simultaneously advance the encompassing broader program it is a component of.

the solution to the problem that there is significant anti-American animosity in Yemen is to drop even more bombs on them

Why is it that, when I accused Google of unethical behavior in digitalizing copyrighted books without permission, I was (and still am) repeatedly described as hating Google and an enemy of the Internet?

When I accuse our government of unethical behavior in keeping men against whom no charge has been preferred and who are given no chance to prove their innocence in a terrible prison in Guantánamo, there are indeed some Americans who would describe me as hating our government and being an enemy of the United States. But there are more who are capable of making the enormously important distinction between enmity towards an institution, and disapproval of some of its policies or acts.

These are the ones who actually believe in freedom of speech.

Evidently some people believe they’re defending the freedom of the Internet by opposing any criticism of anything done on the Internet (or anything Google does). They’re thinking the way the extreme right thinks: There are two sides. We are on the Good side. Our people are Good. Everything they do is Good. To criticize them is Evil! There must be no free speech about free speech! It’s dangerous!

In its defensiveness and immaturity, this is five-year-old thinking: If Daddy doesn’t like something I like to do, it means he doesn’t love me. If Mommy says I’m doing something wrong or stupid, it means she thinks I’m bad and stupid and she loathes and hates me and so I loathe and hate her too and I will now fall down screaming in the supermarket aisle and let the world know how mean she is.

The anxiety evoked by being made to eat broccoli does not come from fear of government at all, but from everyday family life. It calls to mind an overbearing mother who thinks she knows what’s best for us and can tell us what to do. As cognitive linguist George Lakoff has pointed out, conservatives often use the family as a metaphor for government. The broccoli argument expresses one kind of conservative nightmare, tinged with gender anxieties, in which Mommy is in power. Fear of the “nanny state” evokes the same sort of gendered anxiety.

Mothers and nannies tell children what to do because children cannot be trusted to care for themselves. To let Mommy tell us to eat broccoli means we are nothing but babies. It infantilizes us. It disempowers and even emasculates us. It runs counter to the conservative vision of America built upon self-reliance and individualism, John Wayne riding alone with nothing but his wits and his six-shooter. And goddammit, no one who tells John Wayne to eat his broccoli is going to get away with it.

The broccoli argument packs an emotional punch because it plays on conservative anxieties about the family and the welfare state. It warns that what lies at the bottom of the slippery slope if Obamacare is upheld is Big Mother, the liberal she-government that is a perversion of proper parenting and good government. She is overbearing toward the mature children who could decide things for themselves, forcing them to eat broccoli and get health insurance. At the same time, she is overindulgent toward the children who most need toughness. She “coddles” the poor with undeserved benefits when they should be taught self-reliance. She lets illegal aliens stay as long as they want when they should be sent home. She literally lets criminals get away with murder. If Father were in charge, he’d know to lay off the kids who can take care of themselves and instead punish and prod the more wayward children. Striking down Obamacare is a step toward restoring order by a strict father, who, after all, knows best.

The real amazing part of Brooks' column is that after ridiculing the cyclicalists for "railing" about the unnecessary suffering in the United States and Europe, he repeats trite cliches that have no basis in reality to tell us about the economy's real problems.

He begins with with the problems:

"surrounding globalization and technological change. Hyperefficient globalized companies need fewer workers. As a result, unemployment rises, superstar salaries surge while lower-skilled wages stagnate, the middle gets hollowed out and inequality grows."

Apparently Brooks doesn't know that productivity growth is the norm for an economy. It was actually more rapid in the three decades following World War II than it is now with Brooks' "hypefficient globalized companies." We do see superstar salaries at the expense of the middle, but these are more typically the result of the ability of the superstars to manipulate the political process to their advantage than any obvious superstar skills.

For example, the mutli-millionaire traders at Wall Street's too big to fail banks profit primarily by their ability to get an implicit subsidy in the form of bailout insurance from the government. The CEOs who pocket tens of millions as their companies are run into the ground benefit primarily from being able to appoint the directors who decide their salaries. The fact that doctors can often get paychecks well into the hundreds of thousands is attributable primarily to their ability to limit the number of foreign doctors who can enter the country.

There may be some exceptions, but it's generally easy to find the government policy that creates the basis for the superstar salaries that Brooks touts. Of course, it's quite advantageous to the beneficiaries of these superstar salaries to have people like Brooks saying that it's all "globalization and technological change," but those of who don't get paid to say this stuff need not take such arguments seriously.