The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.
The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.
And now the transition:
The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.
And now the epiphany:
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.
Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.
Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.
This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.
It’s a little death when someone gets there first. Agnosticism or even a non-systematic Buddhism are rational. Militant atheism is as cracked as Snake-Handling-West Virginia Creationists for Clinton. If I didn’t think the Hitchens and O’Dohertys were hewing to that line for attention I’d feel sorry for them.
This morning I was meeting an ex-colleague for coffee in Richmond near the Thames. We’d agreed to meet in Starbucks. After a half-hour we started texting each other asking where the other was.
When I last spent the night in London there were a couple of Starbucks - I had to make a special trip to Holborn if I wanted the triple lowfat venti mocha no whip - no vanilla scones please, that’d be too much.
Now there are so many Starbucks in Greater London that you can be in leafy Richmond and it’s possible to say ‘meet me at Starbucks’ and end up at the wrong place, because there are more than one.
Ireland’s referendum vote over the Lisbon Treaty had been trending towards the sceptics in recent weeks, with farmers sending signals that they so hate Peter Mandelson, EU trade commissioner (and former Northern Ireland minister), that they might join a coalition of Sinn Fein nationalists and libertarian Eurosceptics in opposing the treaty, prompting outgoing Bertie Ahern to predict “disaster” if Ireland voted no (though he might have been kidding). In his maiden speech as Taoiseach, Brian Cowen said that Lisbon, in his words “critically important to our strategic interest, our national interest”, would be the “first priority” of his new administration.
A poll out today is being presented as evidence that momentum for the ‘no’ side has stalled. Support for the treaty had been in freefall, dropping from 43% in February to 35% in April. The ‘Yes’ side has gained three points, according to today’s Red C poll in the Business Post. The ‘No’ side fell three points from 31% to 28%. [Read more →]
Clinton has cancelled her public schedule for today.
Ben Smith gets to the deep logic of why the race is over. By withstanding six weeks of Freak Show politics trying to fight for its own survival, he managed to improve against Hillary with women and working class men. The last chance was for Clinton to pull off an upset in North Carolina - the “game changer” that really would have split the race back open. By losing by such a wide margin and nearly losing Indiana, the Clinton Comeback was turned back.
But the most important metric is that, even if Obama manages only to get the minimum in each remaining contest, he’s already clinched a majority of popular delegates. Smith quotes delegate nerd Matt Seyfang:
Lake is still out, but I’m assuming the 1st goes 4-2 for Obama based on surrounding counties that Clinton won. He won’t break the 70 percent he needs for a 5-1 margin. The statewide assumes a 2-point margin for Clinton, still a big question mark with Lake out.
What’s interesting if these numbers hold is that this assures that Obama will win a majority of the 3,253 pledged delegates [excluding Florida and Michigan]. He’s now at 1,494. Under this set of numbers, he picks up 101 for a total of 1,595. A majority is 1,627, so he’s 33 short. If you assume he makes threshold in each of the remaining 24 districts for one delegate and then picks up at least one PLEO and one at-large in each of the 6 remaining contests, he’s at 1,631. The battle for the majority of pledged delegates is over.
That’s why you’ll hear the drumbeat through the day. And a rush by pundits and bloggers to get in their analysis of how the race was won. Andrew Sullivan, by right, goes first, arguing that black voters, betrayed by the Clintons, did them in:
After what the Clintons did in this campaign, and what they’ve revealed about themselves, and their alliance with Fox News and Bill Kristol and Pat Buchanan, this couldn’t be more appropriate.
This will be history’s verdict: in the end, the Clintons were defeated not by Republicans, but by African-American Democrats. How wonderful. How poignant. In the end, the karma gets you. Maybe it had to be this way. But this final coup de grace against these awful, hollow, cynical people is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
first published in the 4 May 2008 Irish Mail on Sunday…
Richard Delevan
Some of us were left cheering the British election results. One result in particular. An eccentric, rumpled right-of-centre journalist openly fond of a tipple can win a big majority, high office and the power to smite the very urban annoyances that were once just so much column-fodder. Yes we can. London Mayor-elect Boris Johnson is living the dream.
Gordon Brown is living the nightmare. To lose an astounding 400-plus local council seats, to see the Labour share of the national vote shrivel to third place, to hear the whispers about your failed premiership turn into murmurs about a coup before a general election rout of epic proportions – it would be enough to dishearten even a great leader or crush one who’d earned the top job at the ballot box and not in the back room. Gordon Brown is neither. So while a comeback is certainly possible for Labour before the next Westminster election, due in two years at latest, it’s a deep hole to climb out of.
This week Brian Cowen takes the reins of government here at home. This space has noted the ominous parallels between Cowen’s own ascension to the top job and the rise of Brown. Brown has comprehensively failed to make the transition from deputy to boss. Now Britain’s voters have offered a damning initial verdict in local elections one year on. Can Brian Cowen avoid a similar fate? [Read more →]
The Irish Times published a second story today on the Estate Agent market manipulation scandal. Its story yesterday, along with a tiny item in the Indo, noted that the National Consumer Agency had demanded a meeting with the industry. Ann Fitzgerald of the NCA certainly throws some fire in the first IT article:
“is extremely serious from our perspective”, said Ms Fitzgerald. “It is the equivalent of creating a false market in the price of shares, which is illegal.”
THE NATIONAL Consumer Agency (NCA) has given estate agents just two days to provide it with undertakings that published price details of properties sold through private treaty or withdrawn from auction will be “absolutely accurate”.
A 48 hour deadline! “Absolutely accurate”! Undertakings! Yeah! Let’s git em! Who’s got a rope? Unless of course this is more heat than light…oh. [Read more →]
The Irish Times property editor, Orna Mulcahy, wrote a letter to Ireland’s estate agents, calling them out for attempting to manipulate the market by exaggerating (translation: lying) about the sale prices of houses bought by private treaty. Massive story. The Sunday Business Post — no stranger to property advertising — runs a big piece on it. It’s a major story on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.
So this morning we searched for the Irish Times‘ own version of the story. None can be found. None from two weeks ago when the Irish Times changed its disclaimer and careful readers noticed a change in language when describing prices. None when a reader made the paper aware that this was noticed as a significant, unheralded, change in reporting important financial information. None after the story was reported elsewhere.
So we now have an admission that the Irish Times, Ireland’s “paper of record”, was for years an accomplice to a conspiracy to manipulate a market so central to the Irish economy that its related industries represnt 25% of GDP. Orna Mulcahy now says it was an unwitting accomplice. When “auction figures dropped by 70%”, Mulcahy explained, it left her with a hole on the “sales” page of the Irish Times property section.
How to resolve the dread problem of filling extra space (a problem with which I’m familiar)?
“We went to the auctioneers and said, listen, we’ll take the auction results, obviously. But also if you could give us any of the private treaty results and at least then we can, you know, you know, continue to show, eh, how the market is…doing.”
“It became clear to us earlier this year that we were getting results that were higher than they should have been”.
“We decided that, look, if you can’t give us the right figure, we would rather not to publish the figure, because in the end of the day it is the Irish Times that has been left looking, you know, rather foolish if they’re not able to provide the correct information.”
Morning Ireland hit the nail on the head, methinks, with this question (phrased as a money-quote comment): “The problem for you, as a newspaper, is that we can’t believe what’s printed in your newspaper.”
But surely the problem of this scandal is even bigger and more damaging, when it comes to the credibility of the Irish Times as a “news” paper – there was no editorial take on this scandal at all from the paper.
Some things worth noting (and I’m open to correction):
1. The IT knew, but did not report, that this was going on, when the property editor knew “early this year” – so up to four months ago.
3. The IT STILL hasn’t reported its version of the story, even after it broke elsewhere
4. The Irish Times, Ireland’s paper of record, CONTINUES TO ALLOW ITS TRUSTED BRAND TO BE USED TO CLAIM HOUSE PRICES IT KNOWS TO BE (AT BEST) SUSPECT. It has a disclaimer saying it can’t be responsible for the accuracy of the prices. (A newspaper telling you in advance that you shouldn’t rely on what it’s about to tell you seems like the final capitulation of journalism, no?)
5. The Irish Times has direct knowledge of attempted market manipulation by certain estate agents, and has failed to reveal the identity of the ones it knows have been telling porkies. It may be legally safer. But it cannot be good enough for any self-respecting journalist. And that’s the real scandal.
I can understand Orna Mulcahy’s reluctance to publish the story on her own pages – perhaps her uncle John’s Phoenix magazine might give it a whirl – and thus ensure that the story can be discredited entirely by the vested interests that are right now praying to Voldemort that it will be dead and buried (with a stake in its heart at midnight in a swamp by a voodoo priestess).
Hopefully her RTÉ appearance, SBP quotes and family connections will be enough to save her from retaliation, having confirmed a story that leaves her employer “looking rather foolish” – the understatement of the day.
If not, hey. I feel your pain, Orna. Good on you for going public, however reluctantly. It’s never too late to do the right thing.
Cheers:
The Sunday Business Post - in particular Cliff Taylor and Susan Mitchell, for running it
RTÉ Morning Ireland - for following up (though, where’s the news story on their website?)
The Property Pin - for having been all over this for as long as they’ve been up; best reax quotes in the thread (which picked up the SBP story just after 8.17pm Saturday):
“jost” says: “To those who read the Pin, the above will be old news. But in spite of the media coverage given to price drops in the last 6 months, I’d imagine many Sunday paper readers will be shocked to read the above. Judging by the Price Drops forum, vendors with properties around the 1.3m mark still seem to assume that a 50k drop will be enough to sell their house.
While the editor’s honesty should be commended, the IT should really go one step further and scrap the “Sales Results” page entirely. If the information contained there is inaccurate, what purpose does it serve?”
and
CelloPoint: “The IT are codding themselves if they think they can go back to being all independent again when they have a massive VI in a property website and sponsor the IAVI website. I’m sure advertising is going very well for them at the moment — the IT’s concern is the need to strike a balance between keeping the VIs happy and middle Ireland Irish Times readers happy. Once they’re safe in the knowledge that truth and righteousness has been restored at Tara Street, all will be well.”
…moi, along with Sinead Gleeson and Catriona Crowe, who are serious critics, so I’m there to lower the tone.
Tonight at 23.15 on RTE One, discussing, amongst other things:
– Martin Scorsese’s love note to the Rolling Stones, Shine a Light: not just a concert film! And Keith Richards now officially looks like Pirate Gollum.
– The Rough Magic production of 17th Century Spanish classic drama Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, at The Project Theatre, starring amongst others the smoky-toned Barry McGovern and superb Hillary O’Shaughnessy.
We’re so fond of Slate.com’s discovery of the widget - and this particular deathwatch - that we thought we’d give it our support. Yeah, we know it’s cheesy. And the analysis could be better. But when the boat finally sinks beneath the waves, it’ll be like the credits finally rolling on that horror film with a dozen false endings. Satisfying.
