Taking a Moment to Survey this Project of Dangerous Intersection

I recently received an email from a new reader (“Greg”) who expressed appreciation for some of the articles he has read at Dangerous Intersection. I decided to share my response to his letter (see the bottom of this post).

This website has been important for me as a tool for me for trying to understand the world around me. It has not been entirely successful, of course, and never will be. The world is a inherently confusing moving target, making the quest to understand an ongoing project. It is also a complex adaptive system that demands multi-layer analysis. It’s a big onion that requires exploration involving constant reframings based on both reductionism and emergence. Further complicating things, the tools we can use for understanding, spoken and written language, can only scratched the surface of our world. I have been increasingly expressing my frustration with this mismatch between our language and our quest for understanding by focusing on the “meaning of meaning.” It’s not that we can’t make progress, but we often have to be satisfied (if we are honest) with what Nietzsche refers to in this “five fingers” reference:

Just beyond experience!– Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience – just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

–from Nietzsche’s Daybreak, s. 564, R.J. Hollingdale transl

Greg’s email served as another reminder to me (this has become a constant topic for me) of the intersection between group dynamics and truth. I would bet that I’ve written about this intersection on dozens of occasions here at this website, The problem being illustrated by Solomon Asch’s classic social science experiment.

Greg, thanks for your email, and welcome to this website. I look forward to your comments, especially when you disagree!

Thanks for reaching out. It delights me when I receive letters like yours. My site started off almost like a personal journal about 15 years ago and I often write about topics as my own personal effort to figure things out rather than to tell other people how to think.  It’s also been a good tool for me to help me remember and organize my thoughts. Otherwise, information pores into my head and then seems to leak right back out.
It has long been my belief that Group labels (e.g. “Christian”) disguise the fact that within each labeled group there are millions of disparate people, some of them having very little in common with the others, even though it seems like they are all homogenous when you see them together in the pews on Sunday.  In other words, I don’t think there’s any alternative – we all have to figure it out ourselves in the end.  Good luck to you in your own personal project, and good for you to recognize that there’s no substitute for hard work when it comes to figuring out anything important.  Let me know when you finish your book. And yes, that would be good to have a cup of coffee someday once the vaccine starts doing its work in a big way.
I have worked very hard to articulate my own views regarding religion and they have evolved over the years. You might find my series of articles on this topic relevant to your own endeavor. I title these articles “mending fences,” and you can find the first of the sequence (of five articles) here: https://dangerousintersection.org/2010/07/11/mending-fences-with-believers-and-moving-on-part-i/
If you choose to take the time to read through these five articles, I would very much be interested in hearing what you think about them.  I don’t often see my approach expressed by other people, although more recently I have been increasingly influenced by the writings of David Sloan Wilson, on the coupled topic of religion and evolution.
Again, thanks for reaching out!
Erich

 

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Avatar of Steve grappe
    Steve grappe January 20, 2021 Reply

    As I continue to whisper in your ear, your voice and writings are needed at this time in our society. Keep up what you are doing, we all need tools and perspective to help each of us understand truth.

  2. Avatar of Bill Heath
    Bill Heath January 20, 2021 Reply

    Thank you for a website that makes my head hurt. So many merely cause my stomach to churn. I wish your attitude of welcoming dissent were copied by others.

    You note that religion and evolution are linked, often fractiously, which confounds me. I can easily hold both simultaneously, and continue to be confused by those who seek to use science and religion as clubs to force others to conform. Wrong tool, wrong objective.

    1. Avatar of Erich Vieth
      Erich Vieth January 20, 2021

      Bill: The New Atheists claim that religion is akin to a virus, that it is not adaptive. They (in pointing especially at Richard Dawkins) say it dogmatically, without any analysis. David Sloan Wilson challenges us to put it to the test, just like we would do with any other trait in any other species. He suggests that religion (not any particular religion, but the formation of communities based on religion, among other excuses for communities) might be adaptive. I read a lot of Dawkins and I find him to be excellent on many topics, but on religion (notably, his book, The God Delusion) I think he became unhinged due to his frustration with the absurd claims by many religious Believers (I occasionally feel that way too–I do understand the frustration) and this caused him to get distracted away from the science.

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