CS Lewis, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Douglas Murray and the Quest for Religious Truth

I took my oldest kid to see a play about CS Lewis last week because I wanted him to get a small taste incredible intellects that have accepted and propounded upon Christianity for the last 2000 years.  A man who can read Homer in the Greek, Virgil in the Latin, the German skeptics in the German, Dante in the Italian, and Voltaire in the French (and understand them) is not a man to be scoffed at or dismissed out of hand.  Intellectuals today often dismiss Genesis as irrelevant fable and act as if Darwin put the nail in the coffin of Judaism and Christianity by proving that the Bible isn’t literally true, but everyone who knows anything about Christian history knows that great men like Augustine and Origen acknowledged the allegorical nature of Genesis 1500+ years before Darwin.  It is only straw men that Sam Harris is fighting with, but his near absolute ignorance of history and ancient cultures doesn’t allow him to see that.

And this is why I find Jordan Peterson such a frustrating intellectual adversary for Sam Harris.  He almost *never* references writings outside of the psychological literature which are older than say the mid 1850’s.  Formed in youth by fundamentalists who took Genesis literally, he knows little about the cultures into which the Bible was given.  His interpretations of Scripture are focused on the psychological and often lack any sort of depth or understanding beyond the psychological.  It’s like he’s spent his entire career studying the Great Salt Lake as a biologist and is purporting to explain what life in Oceans is like.  This is still better than Sam Harris, who pretends that seeing a few puddles in the desert gives him the knowledge necessary to dismiss the existence of oceans, but it is a far cry from a truly intellectual take on religion.

What Jordan Peterson does get, similar to Douglas Murray, is that the “moral atheism” Sam Harris propounds is impotent to stand in the way of truly murderous political ideologies like atheistic Marxism and deistic Islam.  The “moral atheism” of Sam Harris leads men to wealth through the study and application of science when instantiated in cultures such as ours, but it is inherently unstable because it relies on a moral and cultural framework inherited from his Judeo-Christian ancestors.  When that broad societal Judeo Christian moral foundation is cut off from its source, there is little to help people find meaning and the moral framework necessary to maintain an open and free society.  A few people might be able to do so, drawing on the wisdom of the past (usually their christian societal roots), but broad society can’t.  Lacking meaning and purpose, Europe can’t even reproduce enough to perpetuate their culture.  Such cultures are unfit for survival according to the 2nd of Darwin’s twin pillars: sexual selection.  And what will replace the western culture we’ve built?  I think we’re getting a taste of it now: tribal warfare.  We can try and sanitize it, but make no mistake, we are headed for a very nasty future if society doesn’t come up with a way to help people find meaning and purpose and build actual families with children.  In a world where 20% of women *never* have a child, the average woman needs to bear 2.7 children to maintain population levels.  Short of that, populations shrink and cultures wither and die.  It may take a few centuries, and it may appear to not be so bad at first due to immigration from cultures that haven’t yet succumbed to the meaningless that doesn’t even allow people to reproduce, but population decline is a geometric function just like population growth.  Once it gets going, it is very difficult to stop.  And how will countries respond to aggressive cultures which believe in polygamy and send their excess men abroad in an acknowledged bid of conquest?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/youngfogey/2018/07/sam-harris-asks-questions-jordan-peterson-cant-answer/

https://fpatheatre.com/production/the-most-reluctant-convert/

Maternal Brain Changes

I read a fascinating article the other day.  Apparently, women's brains change so much after childbirth that researchers are able to distinguish between women who had given birth and a control group of women who hadn't just by looking at brain scans, and the changes were persistent enough that they could still distinguish between mothers and non-mothers two years later, from brain scans alone. 

Also, "the more brain change the mothers experienced, the higher they scored on measures of emotional attachment to their babies, a finding that echoed past studies. And the changes in most brain regions remained two years later.

The researchers also scanned men, those who became fathers during the study period and those who did not have a child, and found no comparable change in gray matter volume. (Other studies have found that fathers, including gay fathers raising children without maternal involvement, experience significant changes in brain activity, but those changes depend on exposure to the child. The more time a man spends as primary caregiver, the more activated the parental network in his brain becomes, and researchers suspect a similar effect may be present for others in a parental role.)

The brain scans seemed to validate the rapid, pronounced, long-lasting change in mothers that a much bigger body of animal research has found. Reviewing a range of studies, Pawluski and her coauthors wrote in a 2016 paper that as a developmental period, pregnancy is as formative as puberty.  “Under healthy conditions, the female brain transforms into a motivated, maternal mechanism,” they wrote."

I'm convinced that females evolved not to optimize female performance alone but the mother-infant duality.  Connections like this pop up all the time, and we ignore them at our peril.  I'd be very curious to see the nature of the changes in gay men who are full time caregivers compared to new moms.  I'd bet $1000 that they aren't as widespread or persistent.  That's just now how primates evolved.  Mothers really are irreplaceable.

Social Progress

“There were a lot of tears when it came time to put my 3 month old daughter in daycare,” my old coworker told me.  “But I told my wife that she’s the one with the title ‘Dr.’ in front of her name.  If anyone is going to be staying home with the baby, it is me.”

I shut my mouth and tried to keep a straight face as I turned back to my monitor to check on the test data.  It was a professional environment, and I didn’t want to come off as judgmental toward people I’m working with on an important job, but my gut clenched up, and I died a little inside after hearing him say that.

Does my old coworker really think that men and women are interchangeable to the extent that it doesn’t matter who stays home with the infant?  Doesn’t he see that a woman who wants to stay home so badly that she is crying is actually more suited to do so?  Doesn’t he understand that a woman’s body is flooded with ocytocin bonding hormones as she breastfeeds that baby, creating a bond so tight that it would provoke this reaction, and that, no, it isn’t the same to just place the infant in the hands of another adult, even the father?  Doesn’t he see that the personality differences that we can measure between men and women are in large there because of the mother-infant duality, and that they are often most pronounced in such settings?  Are the cars and fabulous house really worth more than his wife’s and infant’s happiness?  Couldn’t he have suggested instead that if she really wanted to stay home with the baby, then they could think about how to reprioritize their lives?  He makes more money than me.  Together, they are a power couple.  But no, he didn’t think it was a viable option. 

In an age of modern day feminism and empowered womanhood, this is what we get.  Women doctors who return to work full-time instead of part-time or taking an extended leave of absence because the men in their lives expect them to be providers.

I can’t help but think that we are putting a woke feminist label on the age-old barbarous practice of ripping infants from the arms of their crying mothers.