I never thought I’d see the day I find myself agreeing with France’s National Front, but today it happened: Jean Marie Le Pen’s daughter Marine, vice president of the FN, said Jaques Chirac’s speech today calling for the banning of “ostentatious” (ostensible) religious symbols (i.e. Muslim headscarves) from schools and workplaces was “a sort of apology for immigration.”

That’s exactly what it came across as. I am quite simply aghast at this turn of events. It’s enough to make an atheist like myself wear a headscarf out of solidarity, so imagine how reasonable French Muslims are going to react.

Why ban just religious ostentatious symbols? I can think of far more annoying ostentatious symbols that are not religious: Why not ban the ostentatious use of nationalist symbols at school or the workplace, like overlarge flags? Why not ban driving ostentatious cars to work, so as not to offend your poorer coworkers? What about ostentatious homes?

The actual speech [French] is full of paeans to France’s invention of human rights, and how freedom is a cornerstone of French society. You can just feel the “but” coming on. And here it is:

Pour autant, ce mouvement doit trouver ses limites dans le respect des valeurs communes.

But who decides what are the common values that determine what constitutes ostentatious religious speech? (And wearing a headscarf is speech, clearly.) Most Muslim women do not wear the headscarf to annoy Chirac, or at least did not do so until today. They do not consider it ostentatious; on the contrary, they consider it a sign of modesty. It might be ostentatious by Christian standards, granted, and there’s the rub. Chirac, his sober Christian sensibilities offended by the colorful enthusiasms of devout Muslim faith, has used a Christian benchmark to determine what constitutes an excessive display of religious affinity.

But didn’t Chirac just say he wanted to defend the secular character of French institutions? Doing so by favoring the norms of one religion over another is a terrible start, not just because it can be seen to be discriminatory, but because it is. It’s especially in the matter of religion that you must not limit speech according to the norms of the religious majority. This is the whole point of tolerance: you grin and bear religious behaviour you’d rather not seeIf secularism is so important, why not use a “zero-tolerance” benchmark for ostentatious religious symbolism and outlaw all kinds, including all sizes of crosses? Because too many people currently wear crosses?.

This so exasperating that you almost want to shake Chirac and ask him what part of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” he doesn’t understand, though I now know the answer.

He’s not even aware he is applying a double standard. Elsewhere, he says:

Notre objectif, c’est d’ouvrir les esprits et les c˙urs. C’est de faire comprendre aux jeunes concernés les enjeux de la situation et de les protéger contre les influences et les passions qui, loin de les libérer ou de leur permettre d’affirmer leur libre arbitre, les contraignent ou les menacent.

and

Au moment o˘ s’affaissent les grandes idéologies, l’obscurantisme et le fanatisme gagnent du terrain dans le monde.

Muslims youth now knows: As far as Chirac is concerned, wanting to wear a headscarf to school means you have succumbed to obscurantism and fanaticism, and a law will be put into place to save you from your silly self. Luckily, a law is all it takes — as soon as you are prohibited from wearing a headscarf to school or work, you will be liberated, magically, from your desire to do so.

Finally, this law is a disgrace for the way in which it will influence behavior in situations outside of work and school. For while it is still legal to wear a headscarf on the bus or while shopping, women who do so have been put on notice that they are pursuing an activity that has been officially deprecated by the state, and that it jars with the will of the moral majority. By wearing a headscarf, they are now bad Frenchwomen. Some liberté.

Civilization, I’ve decided, is the ability of a society to sustain positive-sum games. Successful positive-sum games consist of all the players choosing the cooperative option over the selfish option, in the expectation that everyone does. Sure, individuals gain even more if they defect, so although there are incentives to cheat, there is also an incentive for other players to police cheaters.

The most basic of these games are played every day, and we are compelled to play them because they are encoded in laws: We observe property rights, human rights, speed limits and tax laws. We abide by the results of democratic elections. These compulsions are virtually second nature — to most of us the concept of ownership has taken on a physical reality — but once they were not. Modern democracy is now the gold standard of civilization, but it began as an audacious experiment whose benefits were only evident with time.

The more such games a society can sustain, the more civilized it is. Civilization is not to be confused with modernity, though many of these games evolve with the advance of technology: For example, intellectual property rights have become harder to enforce in the digital domain, but after an initial run of selfishness, many of us are recognizing the need to pay for digital delivery of a song or clever software.

To me, the most interesting games are the ones we are not compelled to play by force of law. Civil society contains a whole range of these, both new and old: We turn off cell phones in cinemas, we let passengers off the subway before boarding and we give directions, because reciprocating such behaviour means everyone is better off by a margin far greater than the utility freely curtailed in the short run by the individual. Newstand owners will tell you to pay tomorrow if you don’t have the correct change, and you do pay. You pick up garbage at picturesque spots.

We’re conditioned, as social beings, to act this way, often without rationally weighing the pros and cons first. And yet it is obvious that the aim is to maximize our individual utility in the long run. Civilized societies are inhabited by those smart enough to recognize that the best way to satisfy the instincts is by choosing collaboration over instant gratification in return for a larger reward later. The more people realize this, the fewer defectors there are. The fewer defectors there are, the more such games can be played before those that do defect erode the positive effects.

Of all the societies I’ve drifted through, and there have been plenty, I must nominate the Swedes (and previously, the Norwegians) as the society where the positive-sum game is played most competently. I notice it every day: A lunch place near where I work has an unattended basket of money where you pay and whence you take your change. Recycling is an obsession. Queues are flawless; often they aren’t even needed, because a numbering system takes care of it. Women with babies in strollers are allowed free on busses. There is an extraordinarily low murder rate. Corruption is among the world’s lowest.

Why might this be? Because Sweden is such a homogeneous society, and people who look alike look after each other? But that’s simply not true: in 2002 11.8% of Sweden’s population was foreign born, compared to 11.5% for that “melting pot”, the US. Maybe the benefits of playing the positive-sum game are made clearer to recent immigrants to Sweden. Maybe the winnings from playing in Sweden are stacked in such a way that everyone feels they have a stake in society.

Is there room for improvement? Are there positive-sum games with even greater returns that we are not yet playing because the benefits of collaboration are not transparent enough, or because the incentive to defect is too tempting? Eurof and I have had this conversation intermittently for a decade, in various forms. To put it bluntly: Can something akin to communism’s “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” evolve naturally? Is such a society within the realm of possible human activity, or does it go against our very nature, our selfish instincts? Remember that we already play positive-sum games to satisfy our instincts; why not just raise the stakes and hence our winnings? Eurof contends it cannot be done, but he can elaborate in his comments if he wishes.

I am cautiously optimistic that such a society can evolve over time, but with two caveats. The first is that we might not ever get there all the way, but that society, Swedish society at least, is moving in that direction. More and more, we are capable of abstracting the process by which effort begets reward. It’s clear that the future will involve more behaviour based on this ability, not less.

Second, there is a minimum quality of life that the overwhelming majority of the population needs to have before you can play for higher stakes. Communism is not for the poor. Sweden is eradicating poverty in its midst, surely, if not evenly,A report released Friday by Rädda Barnen/Save the Children shows 262,000 Swedish children were classified poor in 2001, 34,000 fewer than in 2000. and as it does so there will be progressively fewer desperate people for whom defecting brings a disproportionately large reward increase. The eradication of poverty is a prerequisite for, not a result of communism.

This is where Charles et al will usually retort that poverty is a relative concept, that there will always be poor as long as there are rich. Charles is right. The common assumption, though, is that low wealth disparity in society, though feasible via a policy of progressive taxation, is not desirable because it saps economic incentive. In fact, if it’s not the other way round, the best we can say is that there is very little correlation between income disparity and growth. [PDF] Sweden, for example, has robust growth and low income inequality.

It’s going to take a while before we get there — quite possibly another half millenium or so. But don’t forget that 500 years ago democracy was a ludicrous notion.

Ok boys, the post is all yours. Go rip it to shreds.

Jesus was executed by Pontius Pilate because he was a rabble-rouser. This much is agreed by scholars. What kind of rabble-rouser he was is the topic of heated debate. I’ve long cherished the notion that Jesus was a political operative, a separatist agitating against collaboration with the Roman occupiers, invoking God’s authority to legitimize his cause. This is not an inherently atheistic stance—liberation theology has taken this view and run with it—but it does recast Jesus’s motives on a much more human scale.

I took this composite shot of the Temple Mount in the winter of 2000/2001. Click to enlarge.

Recently, this view has fallen into relative disfavor. The weight of scholarly opinion has shifted towards a strictly eschatological Jesus, one who went around preaching the imminent end of the world and the coming kingdom of God, not 2,000+ years hence but in a matter of weeks.

Whenever there is such controversy, The New York Review of Books—that ambulance chaser of scholarly conflict—seems hell-bent on asking the proponent of one camp to disparage review a recently published work of a professional rival. And thus we have E.P. Sanders, Art and Sciences Professor of Religion at Duke, reviewing Crossan and Reed’s Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts.It’s in the April 10 Edition of NYRB, which has just arrived in Stockholm in time for Easter. The New Yorker issues are longer in the coming—in the latest issue, I am still subject to quickly aging pre-war presaging.

Alas, the Sanders article is not available for free online. But a Sanders co-conspirator, Paula Fredrikson at Boston University, has an engaging (if oddly formatted) overview of all the Jesuses in play today:

We have one apocalyptic Jesus. He caused a scene in the Temple to symbolically enact a prophecy of impending redemption (Sanders). We have two non-apocalyptic Jesuses, a Cynic and a Jewish Cynic. The Cynic Jesus went up to Jerusalem as a normal pilgrim and was killed—no Temple tantrum (Mack, Seeley). The Jewish Cynic Jesus went up for the first time in his life that one Passover. Disgusted by what he saw (he had had no idea, remember, what Jerusalem would be like), he overturned the tables, thereby symbolically destroying the Temple’s brokerage function (Crossan). And, finally, we have one metaphorically apocalyptic anti-nationalist Jesus who went up to Jerusalem at Passover to confront the Temple system, which he symbolically challenged, indicted and condemned (Borg, Wright).

But what about Fredrikson’s Jesus?

I had an apocalyptic Jesus who went up to Jerusalem for Passover at or as the climax of his mission. He symbolically enacted the Temple’s impending destruction. The gesture implied no condemnation of his native religion but, rather, announced the imminent coming of a new Temple and, hence, as well, God’s kingdom. The act brought him to the attention of the priests, who became alarmed at the potential for mass disturbance during the holiday when Pilate was in town. They facilitated his arrest, and Pilate killed him.

Which Jesus is the most likely is beginning to depend more and more on circumstantial evidence, hence the quest for historical context. Sanders counters Crossan’s rendition of a Jesus engaging in “resistance against the distributive injustice of Roman-herodian commercialization”Life imitating the art of Monty Python? by examining precisely how much Jewish agrarian life had been altered by Roman influence. His answer: little to not at all. Eventually, it gets personal, as such matters are wont to do, and Sanders posits that Crossan’s bias in favor of a rebellious Jesus is based on Crossan being Irish, with the Romans and the British in the role of oppressor.

But what is interesting is that none of the various versions of Jesus imbue the founder of Christianity with particularly flattering attributes. Sanders calls Crossan’s Jesus “a minor social deviant and critic.” Fredrikson calls her apocalyptic Jesus “an embarrassment” to later Christian apologists, thus:

Jesus securely anchored in his first-century Jewish apocalyptic context—working miracles, driving away demons, predicting the imminent end of the world—is an embarrassment. Is it sheer serendipity that so many of our reconstructions define away the offending awkwardness? Miracles without cures, time without end, resurrections without bodies. The kingdom does not come, it is present as an experience, a kinder, gentler society, mediated, indeed created, by Jesus. Then what is this kingdom language doing here anyway?

For me, the most refreshing aspect of reading this research is the lack of any concern on the part of scholars as to whether Jesus was the son of God or not. All assume that a charlatan or a psychotic would have had as much a chance of garnering a movement as the real deal.

Regardless of which he is, Jesus can be useful, especially as a repository for parables when trying to make a point with people who belong to prayer groups. And there is clearly use for one now regarding the reconstruction of Iraq when arguing with the Presidents’ men. Contracts need to be awarded. Should they go to American companies? British companies? Certainly not French and German companies? What Would Jesus Do?

Naomi Klein sees nothing but nefariousness in US motives. She starts off well, but gets a bit shrill by the end. She loses credibility when she seriously suggests that the Iraq war was fought because “‘free trade’ by less violent means hasn’t been going that well lately.” What an unsubtle appeal to Marxian dialectics!

In the other corner sit the newly smug neocons, who feel that since they made the effort, they should reap some spoils, in the guise of a long-lasting military presence and a preeminent role in the reconstruction of Iraq.

I think both sides miss the point. What we need to do here is render unto Caesar. If the US is paying, by all means award those contracts to American companies. It’s the traditional way of dispensing aid and pleasing your constituents. If the funds are coming from Iraq’s oil revenues, or if the exploitation rights of that oil are being sold, then it should be up to an Iraqi representative government, which, if it so chooses, can hand it to the French.

The seeming lack of overwhelming gratitude on the part of Iraq’s civil society towards the US is probably borne from a suspicion of America’s intentions, a suspicion they do not seem to harbor about the British. The indigenous representative government that will form from this inchoate mess may not be as pro-American as Bush hopes. To what extent will there be pressure to ensure collaboration with the invading force? And for how long? These are all reasons to get the UN involved as soon as possible. The best way for the US to prove to its critics that it had only its own safety in mind and not its commercial interests is to not pursue those interests too ruthlessly. Do as Jesus would: Heal, but do it for free. It worked for him.

While looking at some list of words of the year one word in particular that I had not previously seen caught my attention: Apatheist, or one who couldn’t care less whether there is a god or not. Here is a subtler definition:

An apatheist is a type of atheist who, rather than not believing in any gods because the arguments for them are weak, simply doesn’t care about the existence of any gods and goes about life as if none existed.

I suspect most of my friends of being closet atheists, though they will only admit to agnosticism, either out of a misplaced sense of respect for religion or because the word ‘atheism’ is smeared in their minds with a surfeit of negative conviction. Perhaps they will consider the term ‘apatheist’ as being a more accurate descriptor of their stance on god(s)—an atheism lite; they all already act as if there are no gods, with ethics derived from empathy and socialization rather than handed from on high, so why not update one’s mental profile?

The reason I think it is accurate to describe apatheism as a kind of atheism (and not a kind of agnosticism) is that agnosticism allows for the possibility of a god that exhibits very human qualities—the personal god, the jealous god, the omnipotent, omniscient god, the god that requires prayers or which punishes evil—the kind of god that the more literal religions (all judeo-christian-muslim ones certainly) posit. If such a god were to exist, we would ignore it at our peril.

But most scientifically minded people (like yourselves) have discarded such a notion of god for one that is much more abstract, one which does not interfere with the laws of physics, one restricted to operating before the big bang, one which does not know or care about you personally (nor if you rape Bosnian refugees or discover penicillin), and who most certainly will not give you any kind of afterlife.

If that is the kind of god you are wondering exists, then you are an apatheist, because whether such a god exists or not makes no difference to the human sphere. I’ll still side with atheism, because efficient explanations are best (see Occam’s razor), but functionally were in the same boat.

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