Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow, a novelist who’s also a blogger. He hangs out at Boing Boing. It’s good fun. The idea of the title is that Net-oriented people orient themselves into tribes according to the time of day at which they are active. The hero is one of a team of saboteurs who’s job it is to persuade rival tribes to implement user-unfriendly and unreliable software, adopt time-wasting bureaucratic measures and so forth. So, while the first part is pretty far-fetched, the second is the most realistic explanation I’ve so far seen for Microsoft. But the big question I have is how someone can blog and write novels at the same time.

Yesterday was the Seiyushin karate grading and Christmas party. I wasn’t grading, so it was a very relaxed and pleasant occasion for me, though I did have one round as a sparring partner, which was fun (a respectable draw).

I’ve been too busy to keep up this supposedly regular feature, but I have been reading lots of interesting stuff in the last few months. Over the fold, I’ll list some of them and try to write a sentence or so about each. (I’ll probably keep updating this for a couple of days as I get time). I plan to review some of these, so your suggested priorities would be of interest.
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Commenter Brigid alerted me to this study claiming that Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide. On the other hand, Jack Strocchi points to Niall Ferguson claiming that A faith vacuum haunts Europe.

A striking feature of these completing claims is that the alleged effects are the opposite of what might be expected. According to the Journal of Religion and Society study, religion is supposed to cause things condemned by Christianity, and most other major religions. On the other hand, Ferguson appears concerned (as usual) with the decline of martial ‘virtues’ that are antithetical to Christianity as preached by Jesus. At least that’s the only sense I can make of the leap in his final sentence where he asks

how far has their own loss of religious faith turned Britain into a soft target — not so much for the superstition Chesterton feared, but for the fanaticism of others?

What’s even more striking is how little difference the presence or absence of religious belief seems to make. Americans and Europeans, not to mention Red-staters and Blue-staters, don’t seem to behave in radically different ways[1], and the differences that can be observed don’t have any obvious relationship to the inferences you might make if you supposed that one group believed in the Bible and the other did not. Neither the Ten Commandments nor the teachings of Jesus seem to command any more practical adherence in America than in Europe, while it’s hard to see how free-market economics and military unilateralism have any particular basis in Christianity.

The (apparent) unimportance of religious belief for social outcomes was one the great surprises of the 20th century, although, like most negative discoveries, its significance is not fully appreciated. In the 18th and 19th centuries, nearly everyone thought that religious belief made a big difference, for good or ill. Enlightenment figures like Diderot believed that man would never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. On the other side of the fence, Nietzsche’s philosophy was built on the observation that “God is dead” and the assumption that some transcendent replacement was required if we were not to collapse in nihilistic despair. Most in the 19th century agreed with Voltaire that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, since social order could never be maintained without the availability of Heaven and Hell to supplement earthly rewards and punishments.

So far at least, it seems that neither side is right. As Fergusson points out, the collapse of religious belief in Britain has not produced an Age of Reason – superstitions of all kinds flourish. And Parliamentary politics goes on much as it has for the past two centuries or so, despite the greatly diminished influence of kings and priests. On the other side of the coin, there is no sign of social collapse. Most obviously, crime rates are far lower than they were in the days of Victorian values, let alone in the medieval era when virtually everyone was a believer.

This is, I think a good thing. The more that religion is a purely private matter, with no particular social implications, the less likely we are to fight about it.

fn1. Ferguson briefly concedes this point in relation to sexual behaviour, but ploughs on regardless.

My draft review of Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity is below. Comments much appreciated, and thanks to commenters on an earlier post.

Update Lots of great comments here and at Crooked Timber. This will improve the final version a lot, and is one of the ways in which blogging works really well for me.

I’ve finally received my copy of Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity, which was posted to me by its American publisher six weeks ago …
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I’ve been pretty much flat out lately, not too busy to read, but to busy to post much about it. I enjoyed “The Kite Runner” (Khaled Hosseini). I’ve also been reading“The End of Oil : On the Edge of a Perilous New World” (Paul Roberts) and “The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology” (Ray Kurzweil) and plan to review both at some point.

Henry Farrell pointed me to this Financial Times report of an interview (over lunch) with Keith Windschuttle, which begins with Windschuttle saying he regrets his involvement in the dispute over Australia’s Aboriginal history, seeing as a distraction from his ambition to write a polemical defence of Western civilisation, aimed at the US market, and make heaps of money in the process.

â€?If you have a reasonably big hit in America you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars,â€? he says. “That’s my aim – to have a couple of big sellers and have a leisurely life.â€?

It is unclear how much of this is intended as tongue-in-cheek affectation, but it’s certainly consistent with notable elements of Windschuttle’s past career, which has been marked by repeated political and methodological somersaults.

Although a lot of attention has been focused on Windschuttle’s political jump from Marxist left to Christian right, I’ve always been more interested in his shift in methodological stance. Having made his name as a defender of objective truth against politicised history in both left-wing and right-wing varieties, Windschuttle has become a practitioner of an extreme form of politicised history, and now looks ready to abandon any remaining links to the world of fact.
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The Da Vinci code by Dan Brown. Long after everyone else, I’ve finally got around to this publishing phenomenon. It kept me turning the pages reasonably steadily, which I suppose is the crucial test for a best-seller. But I found the code and the hero’s efforts to solve it pretty annoying. At one moment, he’s performing incredible feats of reasoning, worthy of a Harvard professor and world-leading symbologist. The next he’s stumped by the most simple-minded of anagrams[1] and unable to recognise mirror-writing. And when the readers need information, we either get presented with slabs of facts directly from the author or, even worse, one character lecturing another about things both should know. Couldn’t we just have links to Wikipedia inserted at appropriate points.

fn1. The contorted plot machinery required to justify the whole thing being in English, despite the setter and intended solver being French, are also fairly annoying.

Over the fold, my draft review of Jeffrey Sachs The End of Poverty. Comments appreciated.
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