When Washington puts policy on the auction block, bankers are consistently the highest bidders. The industry's most striking victory has been the watering down of post-financial crisis reforms, to the point that banks are now bigger than ever and the bonuses keep flowing. But Wall Street's campaign spending and lobbying power is so intimidating that banks have repeatedly stuck the public with the tab for their losses and no one in Washington stops them.
Why hasn't the government done something about outrageous ATM fees? Or credit card interest rates up to 30 percent? Bankers' clout is such that common-sense pro-consumer legislation is presumptively dead on arrival at Capitol Hill if it threatens banks' revenue streams.
One of Dan Sperber's favorite explanations belongs to Eratsthenes (276-195 BCE) who used a few local observations to calculate the circumference of the Earth to within 1% of the modern measurement. Sperber carefully walks us through Eratsthenes' calculations, then comments:
Was Eratosthenes thinking concretely about the circumference of the earth (in the way he might have been thinking concretely about the distance from the Library to the Palace in Alexandria)? I believe not. He was thinking rather about a challenge posed by the quite different estimates of the circumference of the Earth that had been offered by other scholars at the time. He was thinking about various mathematical principles and tools that could be brought to bear on the issue. He was thinking of the evidential use that could be made of sundry observations and reports. He was aiming at finding a clear and compelling solution, a convincing argument. In other terms, he was thinking about representations—theories, conjectures, reports—, and looking for a novel and insightful way to put them together. In doing so, he was inspired by others, and aiming at others. His intellectual feat only makes sense as a particularly remarkable link in a social-cultural chain of mental and public events. To me, it is a stunning illustration not just of human individual intelligence but also and above all of the powers of socially and culturally extended minds.
Alain de Botton doesn't believe in supernatural beings, but suggests that non-believers should change the way they think about religions and their followers. Through their religions, followers are seeking many of the sorts of things the secularists seek, or should seek.
Many people enjoy Christmas carols, old churches and the ritualistic and community aspects of religions, but don't believe in any sorts of fairies. Until now, they were forced to live in "a spiritual wasteland" in order to partake of the parts of religion that they enjoy.
In this TED talk, De Botton suggests that atheism should be about sorting through religion and picking up the things that are worthwhile and ignoring the rest. Secularists intend to replace scripture with culture, but higher institutes of society, including institutes of learning see humans as rational adults needing only information and data rather than guidance and didactic learning. We do need guidance, though, and this is best delivered through some sort of scheduled and somewhat repetitive sermons rather than mere lectures (which deliver merely data and information).
We all need ritual, which can be a simple as scheduling that we look at the moon on a regular basis, to remind ourselves that we are small in a vast universe. In a religion, the ideas are delivered through a particular type of rhythmic talking, and physical actions and movements. Religions also recognize the importance in art. The modern world, through our system of museums and schools, puts art in a hermetic bubble and tries to explain art rather than allowing it to become a visceral encounter. Religion allows art to be didactic. In the modern world, artists tend to be isolated individuals, not collaborating their efforts through an organization. He adds that religions are big well-monied machines that can encourage this sort of collaboration--the secular world should consider similar collaborations for spreading ideas of higher meaning. He adds that there need not be any particular leaders for this effort--he offers that perhaps it can be done though a wiki.
Religion offers powerful communal advantages, even for those who don't believe any of religious dogma. Religion offers a highly effective mechanism for spreading ideas. Atheism 2.0 can use these techniques to cultivate the idea that the world is about much more than any particular person.
I recently watched "Life in a Day," a montage consisting of video clips submitted by people from all over the world through YouTube. It's a unique and fascinating video that you can view here:
Here's a brief description from Wikipedia:
Life in a Day is a crowdsourced documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, July 24, 2010. The film is 94 minutes 57 seconds long and includes scenes selected from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 192 nations.
As I watched the many clips featuring so many people, it first occurred to me how "different" we are from each other. As the video continued, though, what became overwhelming is, despite the superficial differences, we are all substantially and deeply similar, regardless of where we live and regardless how we dress and what we eat.
In other words, the powerful undercurrent of "Life in a Day" is the lesson taught by Donald Brown, that human animals are incredibly similar to each other. And see here. Brown once asked, “The world’s cultures may be diverse, but diverse compared to what?”
On Democracy Now, Ralph Nader criticized President Obama's stark militarism:
Responding to President Obama’s State of the Union address, longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader says Obama’s criticism of income inequality and Wall Street excess fail to live up to his record in office. "[Obama] says one thing and does another," Nader says. "Where has he been for over three years? He’s had the Justice Department. There are existing laws that could prosecute and convict Wall Street crooks. He hasn’t sent more than one or two to jail." On foreign policy, Nader says, "I think his lawless militarism, that started the speech and ended the speech, was truly astonishing. [Obama] was very committed to projecting the American empire, in Obama terms."
Nader argues that Iraq was not a victory (as Obama claimed), given that we have allowed one million Iraqis to die and essentially destroyed the country. He has sent American soldiers on "lawless militarism" and then draped them as though they were Iwo Jima heroes.
Nader calls Obama a "political coward," because he was unwilling to even mention the Occupy movement, the major citizen movement of our time. Obama cannot utter the word "poverty," but refers only to the "middle class," which is shrinking into poverty. Nader asserts that Obama's claims that he will prosecute financial fraud are vapid, given that he hasn't done anything significant in this area for years, and he hasn't pushed for the necessary financing to staff a meaningful financial crimes unit.
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