The Altruism Paradox: The Surprising Confluence of Christian Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology

Altruism is one of the most interesting evolutionary puzzles. Mild forms of “altruistic” behavior have been observed in several distantly related taxa. Some of this has been cleverly and definitively explained on purely Darwinian principles[1] but some of it still seems a little ‘hand waving-ish’[2]…particularly when the theories are applied to humans acting altruistically towards non-relatives.[3] The problem is that pure altruism is not an “evolutionary stable strategy” (ESS).[4] But one of the solutions that evolutionary biologists and behavioral ecologists have floated sounds shockingly familiar to those of us who have spent much time in the ancient texts that compose the normative documents of Christianity.

The story goes like this. Altruism is better than pure competition on the species scale, but selection does not happen on that scale. Advantageous alleles are selected based on the survival and reproductive benefits to the individual. Therefore, in order for altruism to be selected, the bearers of altruist genes have to benefit, on the whole, more than it costs them.[5] This is evolutionarily unstable because cheaters would accept benefits of the altruists, not take the risks, and eventually ‘win’ pushing the altruistic genes from the population. Therefore, altruism requires some sort of ‘enforcement’ on the ‘population’[6] scale. There are some interesting examples of enforcement in non-human altruists, but the really interesting hypothesis is that humans use ‘guilt’ to enforce the terms of altruism on the tribal scale.

But, even with guilt enforcing altruism, it is not an ESS. Therefore, the successful altruistic strategy is that of the ‘subtle cheater.’ In each generation altruistic systems disproportionately propagate individuals that cheat just enough to have a survival or reproductive advantage but not so much that they incur the penalties of the enforcement mechanism.

This is all pretty plausible (especially for non-human species). But the really interesting insight is how ‘subtle cheating’ works out in human populations. If our enforcement mechanism is built into our psychological and sociological hardware and software (guilt[7]) what does it mean to be a subtle cheater? Who do I need to deceive?

Myself.


And that is the shocking and thrilling detail. If human altruism is self enforced through genetic and environmental imprints on our operating systems, getting away with subtle cheating REQUIRES “self deception.”[8] Human success is largely due to our altruistic tendencies…but only if those tendencies include “subtle cheating” which, given our enforcement mechanisms, require “self deception.”

Um, Really? So, let me get this straight. Humans work best in cooperative community. But there is something fundamental in each one of us that will always try to get more than we give. And in order to live with ourselves and our seemingly universal need to perceive ourselves as “a good person”[9] we all engage in self deception to convince ourselves that the real cheater is ‘the other.’ It seems like I have heard that somewhere before. Allow me to introduce: Christian anthropology.

The fundamental premise of Christian anthropology is that we are valuable beyond measure and designed to reflect the altruistic character of our maker but deeply broken and have an insurmountable entropy towards self interested behavior. We describe this causally with the narrative of the fall. Regardless of whether or not you hypothesize a historical Adam and Eve[10] the fall is the process by which we not only tarnish our immense capacity for beauty and generosity with the fundamental entropy of self interest, such that the former merely punctuates than the latter…but then we lie to ourselves about it.

All of this could lead us to argue (with a smile, and hopefully in a cheeky rather than a douchey way) that Christians are more in touch with reality, as specified by behavioral ecology. The Christian operating system which is self aware of our tendency of self deception and our tendency towards subtle cheating, makes it an evolutionary unstable strategy…but also gives it a huge epistemic advantage.[11] But, if Jesus was to talk in the language of behavioral ecology, I think the sermon on the mount might have included something like:

"Blessed are those who are aware of their self deception, it is the first step in actual self forgetfulness.”

Which is actually just my paraphrase of:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”[12]

This post was prepared while listening to The Sufferer and the Witness by Rise Against

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[1] The classic example is eusocial insects who turned out to be haplodiploid, which makes sisters more closely related than they would be to their own daughters, making celibate cooperative labor the most effective way to get genetic material into future generations.
[2] My personal favorite is the argument that we have the impulse to save a drowning unrelated child because the act of heroism may be observed by one of the victim’s hot relatives who would then have sex with the rescuer providing a mechanism where the risk is overweighed by the genetic payoff in the long term, selecting for risk taking altruists. If you think about the kind of selective pressure it would take to preference that genotype as broadly as it exists in our species…that would take a lot of extremely grateful sisters.
[3] Adoption of unrelated children cannot be seen as anything other than an ‘evolutionary trap.’
[4] An ESS is a strategy that is resistant to ‘invaders’ or ‘cheaters’. For example, it was hypothesized that the huge, seasonal gatherings of birds, like those that soil our cars at the U-mall or the Arc parking lot – were a type of self-regulating behavior. The birds were taking a ‘census’ of sorts and then would regulate the number of eggs they laid accordingly in order self-regulate and keep the population size proportional to the resources (under the carrying capacity). This has been widely discredited, however, as evolutionarily unstable…because cheaters would eventually take over. If everyone else is self regulating, a few birds that do not would compose a disproportionate portion of each successive cohort, until they quickly took over. Dawkins calls this “subversion from within.” Therefore, most ‘self regulation’ hypotheses have been jettisoned for resource or predator regulation.
[5] i.e. Alturism must be fundamentally self interested.
[6] Tribal.
[7] Note: Police do not count as enforcing altruism. They reduce the ferocity of our competition but do not require cooperation. You could make a case that liberal fiscal policy enforces altruism…but I will argue in a couple of posts that this is simply an outworking of guilt.
[8] All of the phrases I am using in quotes are not my own reading of this…they are the actual language of the theory from my coursework on behavioral ecology at UC Davis…from phenomenal Prof Sih who is one of the rare professors who is uncommonly brilliant AND a thrilling lecturer.
[9] I totally buy the idea as guilt as an altruism enforcing mechanism. There is nothing as ubiquitous as the idea that ‘I am a good person.’ After Imus was publically called out about his comments on the Rutgers woman’s basket ball team he said “I am a good person who did a bad thing.” After Jim Belushi died, someone said “He was a good man and a bad boy.” We all have this compelling need to self perceive as ‘basically a good person.’ And may be no idea that people will fight harder for despite mounting evidence to the contrary…regardless how much violence we have to do to the word ‘good’ or even ‘person.’ Before I was a Christian, there was nothing about the Christian worldview I found more repulsive than the assertion that I was not a good person. Now there is no insight I find more pragmatically helpful.
[10] I do (as the Homo Sapien ancestors that were contemporary with Australopithecine), but I don’t think you have to. And it is mostly a non-issue because it is non-falsifiable. But what is clear about the first three chapters of Genesis is that it is not the whole story. It has a fundamental pedagogical agenda. So I am more than happy to allow the scientific process to fill in the estimable gaps. Regardless of whether the fall happened in a cosmic moment (which I tend to believe) or over evolutionary time, it is the process by which humans, a special creation in the image of God, traded that image for an evolutionarily stable strategy. (Footnote to the footnote: I am working on a post about the Battle Star Galactica finale…if that seems like a non sequiter – you didn’t see it).
[11]Please note: I am not now, nor have I ever argued that Christians are, therefore, ‘better’ than those who do not go in for the Christian narrative. In fact I have argued often (here and here) that the logic of the Christian story gives the counter-intuitive result that Christians are, on the whole, less moral than their non-Christian neighbors…and that this is exactly what you would expect if it was true.
[12] Matthew 5:3

Announcement

The new Arcade Fire album is unsurprisingly good. That's not the anouncement. There is a verse in the opening track that pretty much articulates how I am feeling about what I have to share:

So can you understand?
Why I want a daughter while I'm still young
I wanna hold her hand
And show her some beauty
Before all this damage is done

But if it's too much to ask, if it's too much to ask
Then send me a son
-Arcade Fire - Suburbs


I've got several posts lined up to run after finals next week. In the mean time there are new posts and MP3’s over at my preaching site (which is where most of my creative energy has gone the last 3 weeks).

The Sufjan Concert

Sufjan Stevens played in Oakland last week. I have a few rules in life. One of them is: If Sufjan Stevens is playing within 100 miles and you have the opportunity to go with some of your best friends in the world[1]…you do that. He played for almost two hours and it was as much theatrical art as it was a concert. The show opened with Seven Swans and closed with Chicago and was nothing but new music in between. This could have been a recipe for disappointment, primarily because his new music is such a shocking departure from what we love about Sufjan.[2] But I thought it was fantastic. In a sense, the new material works better as a show than as an album…and it really did work as a show. For two hours, a series of short films played behind Sufjan and his 9 piece band as he alternated between the epic, cosmic pieces like “Age of Adz” and “Too Much”, and more familiar “Futile Divices” or “Now that I’m Older.”

If he had just gotten up there and sung the new album without regard for our passion for the old stuff, it would have struck me as self involved marketing. But it was impossible to feel that way with all that went into crafting an experience of his new music. It held together as an intentional and cohesive piece of art. As much as I would have loved to hear “The Wasps of the Palisades” or “Cashmere Pulaski Day” they would not have cohered with the show he crafted. He was not playing a set. He was telling a story.[3] In a sense, he was performing a single, two-hour, piece that he had prepared for us. It felt special.

And then, for the encore, he came up alone and banged out three of his best songs from his earlier work. I would have paid the ticket price just for the encore. Anyway, while I am on the topic, I thought I’d tack on “Four things I love about Sufjan.”

1. His song titles.

They are just way more fun than anyone else’s. Consider songs like:

The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is out to Get Us!
They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!!
Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickerel Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? ...)
Springfield, Or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in His Hair
Or the musical interlude:
Let's Hear That String Part Again, Because I Don't Think They Heard It

There was a fun Facebook group[4] dedicated to why members thought their state should get the next Sufjan album. In one discussion we took shots at what a Sufjan playlist might look like for our states. Here is what I came up with for NY[5]:

The last one out of Buffalo turn out the lights[6]
Old movies with the twin towers in them make me sad
Born During the Blizzard of '77
Stuck on 37 high peaks with deteriorating knees
A Resilient People in a Belt of Rust and Weather
Oh, Opalescent Feldspar, The Billion Year Rock Rainbow
The Silent Shafts (or Ore is More Profitable in Minnesota)
More cows than you would imagine
Purple lufstrife is Montazuma's revenge[7]
The surprisingly resurgent Rochester (or, Mr. Eastman[8], was your work really done?)[9]

2. Art with a sense of place

I have mentioned before in this blog that the art I tend to resonate with finds generality in specificity. In particular, I love art that can find something as broad as ‘human nature’ in a very particular sense of situatedness. This is why I enjoyed Garden State. This is why I loved The Wire. And this is why Illinois is one of the greatest albums of all times. Illinois generates the emotion of a Midwest upbringing that connects with our humanity in a study of similarity and contrast. Intentional spatial locatedness gives his work a surprising generality.

3. ‘Christian’ makes a great noun but a horrible adjective.'[10]

Sufjan writes about whatever he thinks or experiences. So he writes about Jesus and being a Christian and stuff. I, obviously, love this, because, well, I am also interested in Jesus and being a Christian and stuff.[11]

Near the middle of the concert he performed the sprawling “Get Real Get Right”[12], which ends with the verse:

For you will not be distracted by the signs

Do not be distracted by them

Do yourself a favor and get real

Get right with the lord

Get real, get right with the Lord

After the applause someone yelled ‘Praise Jesus’, which was quickly followed by someone else shouting ‘no.’ I loved this exchange (particularly the latter part) because it demonstrates the difference between an artist who is a Christian and a Christian artist. We do not own Sufjan. He is not ours in a way that a Christian act is.[13] We have not claim of ownership on him.[14] So he is free to do art, and not just produce a commodity for a niche community. It also demonstrates that there is not an insidious anti-Christian bias in the music industry. If Christians make great art, they get to make it about whatever they love.[15]

4. John Wayne Gacy

He closed with what I would consider his three most theological songs from Seven Swans and Illinois…culminating in his most controversial and most haunting piece: “John Wayne Gacy”. Gacy (who grew up in Illinois, hence, the tracks appearance on that album) was a famous serial killer. Known as ‘the clown killer’ he lured boys into his orbit, and then did unspeakable things…eventually collecting their bodies under his porch.



The song hauntingly describes the crimes.

Look underneath the house there
Find the few living things
Rotting fast in their sleep of the dead
Twenty-seven people, even more
They were boys with their cars, summer jobs
Oh my God

I remember clearly the first time I heard it.[16] I was driving from Jackson to Vicksburg. It was chilling. But the final verse held more in store than I could have ever imagined. The song ends, somewhat abruptly:

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid

Some have interpreted this song as excusing Gacy…as a behaviorist apologetic blaming the actions of a monster on his environment. They hear this last verse and think ‘he is not just like me, he is qualitatively different.’ But the interpretive key to this song is actually Christian anthropology. Sufjan is not saying that he is just like me except for some bad luck in his environment. He is saying[17] that except for some social coping mechanisms, I am just like him. The difference is quantitative not qualitative. My heart hides its own dark secrets. The monster is me. The remedy…well, I think you might find it amidst a septet of graceful birds:



This post was written while listening to The Age of Adz by Sufjan Stevens
______________
[1] Amanda, Tyler the winemaker and his wife Byranie.
[2] He described the mood and themes of the new work as ‘cosmic’ and ‘processed based’ which is exactly the opposite of why I love Sufjan, which is universal story telling through the vehicle of the very, very particular (see "Why I love Sufjan #2). For the record, I hope he is not done with albums like Illinoise or Seven Swans…but I think The Age of Adz is a win.
[3] Which is ironic (ITWIHACTIK) because he sees this album as a departure from his fundamental nature as a lyrical storyteller, but the reason he couldn’t sprinkle older works into the concert is because it would have destroyed the continuity of the narrative structure.
[4] Which has mostly gone defunct since Sufjan revealed that the 50 states project was either a joke or WILDLY optimistic.
[5] Mostly upstatecentric
[6] When the steal mills were shutting down in the 70’s someon actually put a sign up that said this on I5 on the way out of town.
[7] There is a wildlife refuge in Western NY called Monazuma’s wildlife refuge. I-80 passes through it. It is overrun with the invasive purple lustrife.
[8] George Eastman’s (of Eastman-Kodak) suicide note read: “To my friends: My work is done. Why wait?”
[9] Some of the other fun titles on the site included:
California: Whose Fault? The San Andreas Fault/ The Worst Day in the Happiest Place on Earth
New York: Go F**K Yourself, Or what the Passerby said to me/What is Eirer than a Canal?/ / One Thousand Islands and not a single soul/ The Longest Island, that Spit of Land
Pennsylvania: A short Reprise for Bob Saget, who went insane, but for very good reasons
[10] From Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis.
[11] I think that sentence set a record for illicit comma use…but I cannot deconvolve the good ones from the imposters.
[12] The title track and a sort of homage to a complicated man who seemed to act as his muse for this album: an isolated, poor, bipolar sign painter from Mississippi who became too enveloped by an alternate reality to be able to live in this one. Apparently most of the cover art and a lot of the art used in the video portion of the show was his.
[13] Nor would most Christian labels have him as his latest album contains a couple (gasp) F-bombs. I am not entirely sure how we got here where an artfully used explative is more offensive than derivative art.
[14] Both ideologically or financially. Sufjan has his own label…which, incidentally has the uncontested best label name on the planet: “Asthmatic Kitty.”
[15] Well, I know it is quite a bit more complex than this. But this idea plays in the discussion.
[16] A good sign of an epic song.
[17] And I think the video underscores this.

In Defense of Not Reading: My Favorite MP3 Repositories

So, it will surprise no one to learn that reading is one of my favorite activities. But the way I have ordered my life, I only read about 10 books per year.[1] This is not enough to maintain a positive flow of ideas through the control volume of my mind.[2] So I supplement with technology. I have found a discipline of listening to a broad range of quality (and often free) MP3 content while I do chores, perform laboratory experiments or exercise, has become the centerpiece of my reflective life. This week I am talking to a group of students about how I aquire, metabolize and process ideas…so I wanted to post a list of my sources of free[3] audio content.[4]

Bible and Theology:

Biblical Training: www.biblicaltraining.org

Full length and summary seminary classes by well respected professors.

Monergism: www.monergism.com/directory/link_category/MP3-Audio--Multimedia

Monergism comes from a pretty narrow theological perspective but they have compile an excellent compilation of audio resources.

Tim Keller: http://sermons2.redeemer.com/

No person that currently has a pulse has been more influential in my thought and praxis. So he gets his own link.[5]

Apologetics:

The Veritas Forum: www.veritas.org/Media

Recordings of apologetic talks given on college campuses across the country.

Be Thinking: www.bethinking.org/audio

I have not used this site. It was recomended by a friend. It looks very promising.

Classic Works:

LibraVox: www.librivox.org

Hundreds of classic, public domain, books read (mostly) by quality readers. Includes classic fiction (e.g. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, George McDonald) and non-Fiction (e.g. Justin Martyr, Chesterton, Darwin).

General Interest:

Ted: www.ted.com

TED is the periodic Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference. It started as an opportunity for nerds to get together to be nerds together…but has evolved into something much bigger. Now they get whoever they want to speak on whatever they want. Anyone who has an innovative big idea and can communicate it well gets invited to speak and you can find provocative 20 minute talks on nearly any topic. Some of these make excellent illustration material. It is also a good way to become familiar with the theses of influential contemporary thinkers without having to read their books. Yup, I really like Ted.

MIT: Open Campus - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/audio-video-courses/

MIT has made a commitment to offer most of their class materials free, online. More and more are becoming available by MP3.

The Library:

I get a lot of great free audio content from the public library. There is great fiction, non-fiction, music and, I especially like the full length classes on a variety of topics by The Teaching Company

Do you know of others? Please let us know in the comments.
___________________
[1] A pretty standard example is here.
[2] Meaning, this is faster than the rate at which I lose ideas, making me less insightful with time.
[3] Note, I also pay for audio content. Most seminaries have excellent selections of audio lectures for $40-100. The Teaching Company also has great classes for $30-100 (note: never buy from them if the class is not ‘on sale’ – all classes go on sale at least once/year and usually more often – also, check your local library first). This seems steep, but if you compare it to the cost of a university class (~$1k) or the hours it would take to do the reading to get an equal dose of insight, it turns out to be a deal.
[4] My brother also did a post like this a while ago.
[5] Another link I like is here, where a dude who has a bigger ‘brain crush’ on him than me has organized other free Keller content. This is some of his best stuff.

Lessons From a Year of Preaching Part 3: Beyond Behavior Modification

So this series has outlived its name[1] and I am going to make this the last post on this topic, for now. My preaching partner and I are teaching a preaching class this year so, if you are interested in my thoughts on this, the MP3’s and resources will be showing up at the class website. But for my final post in the series I wanted to talk about the motivating behavior change in ourselves and others, a topic that has far more nuance, complexity and peril in it than I ever imagined.

Most of us share the experience of trying to motivate behavior change in ourselves. We have a behavior or habit that we want to minimize or discontinue all together (e.g. over eating, carbon usage, prejudging people based on perceived relationships between their easily observable characteristics and behaviors we have formerly correlated with those characteristics[2]). Or there is some behavior that we would like to do more than we do (e.g. exercise, spending time with kids, or allocating resources for the poor or the environment) [3]. But one of the great shared experiences of our humanity is that most of us who have undertaken some long term project of behavior change have also failed at it. So, if at least part of the intent of preaching is to help offer cosmic resources for behavior change it would seem like understanding what motivates behavior change in ourselves and others would be fundamental.[4]

But the water is actually murkier than that. Because, from a Christian world view it is not sufficient to do the right things. Doing the right things for the wrong reasons makes them the wrong things. Behavior change with the wrong motivations is not progress. So simple behavior change is not a reliable metric of either personal growth or effective preaching. We are a very clever species. We can often find ways to ‘hotwire our hearts.’[5] That is, we can find ways to modify our behaviors or the behaviors of others[6] by appealing to fears, insecurities or appetites that are themselves unhealthy.[7] This kind of behavior change can leave someone worse off than before.[7.5] So the key to motivating behavior change both in our own spiritual journeys and in the journeys of those in our communities (through preaching or other graces/sacraments) is to reject illicit motivational strategies. But we can’t simply reject manipulation. We have to replace it with something better. So this final post will look at the two sides of the ‘motivating behavior change’ coin: a warning and a proposed way forward.

1. Beware of Moralism

Christianity is not a religion…so you can not treat it like one. The standard religious resources are not available to us. In general, religions hold out the prospect of earning divine favor and avoiding divine punishment as a cosmic ‘carrot and stick’ to motivate the behaviors the religion deems valuable and disincentivize those it considers antisocial. But the Christian story is not one of accumulating merit and avoiding guilt in the cosmic ledger…it is a story of unilateral rescue. If you try to apply the carrot/stick motivational methods to Christianity, it becomes something else.[8]

This means there are tools in the motivational tool box that are simply off limits for Christians. Guilt is very effective for short term behavior change, but it is out of bounds. And this turns out to be pragmatically helpful anyways because, as my brother likes to say, ‘the guilt button is effective but fragile.’ If you push that button too many times, it stops working. Guilt and fear are simply not long term motivators. They require an emotional intensity that we cannot sustain. Trying to earn God’s love and stay off his naughty list is not unlike trying to earn the love of a parent or avoid our daddy’s belt…it can motivate behaviors but it leaves you disappointed and bitter. It can make you do stuff but it can’t change your heart.

2. Offer a Greater Love

But it would be absurd to suggest that Christianity does not have relatively rigorous behavioral prescriptions. So those of us who are ‘all in’ on Jesus are constantly looking for licit ways to bring our behavior in line with many of these counter-cultural practices which, we believe, are fundamentally pragmatic.[9]

The reason that simply telling people to knock it off because God is gonna get em doesn’t work, is because we are fundamentally motivated by what we love. You hear people say all the time that we should all ‘follow our hearts[10].’ This is an empty cliché. But it is not absurd because it is false; it is absurd because it is trivial. We all, always ‘follow our hearts.’ We, without exception, behave in accordance with what we love. If you are going to give yourself or your community a significant chance at spiritual progress, you can’t just try to modify behavior you have to help develop better affections. You have to cultivate and offer a better love that can supplant the parasitic, destructive things that currently fill our hearts. You have to reintroduce us to a God whose beauty and worth dwarfs the paltry half loves that currently motivate us.[11]

Sin is fundamentally a worship issue. It is organ failure of our capacity for wonder. If someone is stuck in a behavior that diminishes them, strategies will help[12], but fundamentally, they need a bigger God. They need to love the good and the beautiful more intensely. And the role of the preacher is to reveal it to them. You need to exalt a beautiful God and call us to his beautiful mission…so that the bleak life of self centeredness looks as pitiful as it actually is.

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[1] I am now well into my third year of regular preaching.
[2] i.e. prejudice or the more insidious racism
[3] I recently made one of the strangest resolutions of my life. I resolved to watch more football this season. I love football (for reasons I will cover in an upcoming post) and watched less than 4 hours of it last season. This is symptomatic of self importance and an unhealthy addiction to productivity. So this year I am going to try to prioritize Sabbath and rest by watching more football. So far, so good. I am already up to 6 hours for the season.
[4] I realize that ‘preaching to cause behavior change’ sounds arrogant…almost like a violation. But in the Christian community it is consensual. We all recognize our need for help and look to each other for spiritual resources. Preaching is one of the formal methods we utilize to look together at the scriptures to find that help.
[5] Credit, Keller…I know, shocking.
[6] Way too many marriages work this way.
[7] The most glaring example of this in college ministry, where spiritual zeal is hypercharged by sexual tension, is students whose confuse their desire to impress cute Christian girls with their motivation to live the Christian life. I honestly think this is an underrated reason why so many people find the transition from Christian community in college to the Church (as a married adult) to be underwhelming…because they lose the powerful sexual components of their motivations and it feels a little flat.
[7.5] This is at least one reason why Jesus recomended that so much of Christian practice should be done 'in secret' whether acts of personal devlopment (e.g. prayer and fasting) or acts of social justice (e.g. generosity). By taking the opinions and reactions of other humans out of the equation we are freed of many (though certainly not all) of the illicit motivations for these activities. You simply cannot read the Jesus narratives without coming away with the overwhelming impression that motivation is more important to him than act. He is more interested in who we are becoming than what we are doing.
[8] I started this paragraph by stating categorically that Christianity is not a religion. But, of course, it often is. Many self identifying Christians have no idea that it was never meant to be a merit based worldview. And even those who understand the rescue narrative find themselves lapsing often into moral performance categories. So, Christianity is not a religion but it is full of religious people…like me…which is why we have our share of self righteous prudes. But the goal of spiritual formation (and, therefore, preaching) is to move from a self righteous merit based belief and praxis to a grace based self understanding and lifestyle.
[9] In that, they do not feed our physical or even social appetites, but we believe they are fundamentally for our good. This is what Piper means when he bombastically claims that Christians are just hedonists with perspective. We are looking to maximize our good on a cosmic scale. The idea has rhetorical flourish and some theological issues but is interesting.
[10] This, it seems, has become the only acceptable polemic for contemporary art to assert. Either art has to be non-polemical (as if that was possible) or it has to offer this cliché.
[11] What the Hebrew Scriptures like to call idols.
[12] Preaching has to be practical. It HAS to engage with the daily life and felt needs of a non-religious-professional. But it is an error to think that practical means non-theological. If worship is the engine of behavior…if we do what we truly love…then it is highly practical to paint a picture of God’s worthiness that creates more space for him in our hearts. But we would also error to think that this justifies turning preaching into a regular lecture in academic theology. Worship is fundamentally holistic, so preaching that generates worship has to engage the mind, emotions, volition and soul.

Cities Part 3: A Grand Experiment in Simulation - Las Vegas

Las Vegas and New Orleans are among our nation’s most unique cities.[1] In a sense, I know that they are both one of a kind. But in my mind, I have always grouped them: Places someone would go for an epic bachelor party and, if I was invited, I would have to decline.[2] So when my work travel schedule sent me to both within a couple months, I thought it might be a fun exercise in compare and contrast.

This was not my first time in either of these cities, but it might as well have been. My only other time in Vegas was for a 3 day conference. I stayed on the edge of town,[3] got sick on the flight in and stayed in my hotel bed when I wasn’t at the conference. I walked over a mile to the conference each day through low end red light districts and I could not have been less impressed. It just seemed like a ‘dirty little town.’ But I knew that I hadn’t given Vegas a fair chance and looked forward to inevitably getting back there someday.

I have flown into New Orleans a half dozen times. I go to Vicksburg, MS a lot for work[4] and after Katrina it was $1,200 cheaper to fly through New Orleans and drive to Vicksburg…so I did.[5] But these trips were immediately post-Katrina and I was mainly in the suburbs, so the city mostly made me sad, but I looked forward to getting a chance to experience the city on its own terms. It took me years to get back to either city…and this summer, I got back to both. I’ll cover Vegas in this post and a New Orleans post will follow in a couple weeks.

My trip to Vegas began with a study in contrast of its own. For convoluted reasons, I flew directly to Vegas from my childhood home in rural Northern NY. Since I have lived there the family farms have almost entirely disappeared.[6] Farms have either made the transition to industrial farms or they have gone fallow or they have gone Amish (because only a lifestyle of radical simplicity and communal labor can be make a go of the family farm any more).

So Sunday morning I went for a run and on my way home I passed 14 Amish buggies on their way to church.[7] That night, I was in Las Vegas.

The event that brought me to Vegas[8] also brought two of my closest work friends and several other people I know from across the country there. Most of what Vegas has to offer could not interest me less. But fortunately, I my friends and I have one shared interest for which this town provides unparalleled opportunities…poker. So the first two evenings revolved around poker.


The World Series of Poker was going on at the Rio while we were in town. The tournament that was going on the night we went out was a $40,000 buy in[9], short handed table tournament.[10] This was fortuitous, because this is one of the most popular events with the pros. Since the explosion of popularity of the WSOP the pros have sought out refuge in the events that emphasize skill over luck and attracts fewer internet players. So we saw ‘everyone.’ Now, I can only name 5 or 6 professionals…and saw them (Phil Ivy, Daniel Nigranue, Furgeson, Lilly…um, maybe it is not quite six) . But my friends pointed out a couple dozen more. It was fun.

The next night we played in a big tournament at the Venetian. I ended up at the same table with one of my buddies and we both played really well through the first couple hours…and then poker happened. We both got bad beat, but it we had a blast.[11]

The last night in town we ‘did the strip.’ The strip is impressive. Billion dollar casinos. Giant monuments simulating ancient Rome or modern Paris.


Roller coasters inside of buildings…

…chocolate fountains…

…and, of course, the water show (which is even more impressive to a bunch of hydraulic engineers).

It was impressive, but not really beautiful in any way I could discover. The overwhelming impression that Vegas gives you is that of simulated reality. Everywhere you look, something is trying to be something it actually isn’t. There are cheesy replicas of Ancient Rome, Venice, and Paris (complete with a scale model of the Eifel Tower).

The air is artificially oxygenated, there is conspicuous water usage for a desert community, and no list of things that aren’t what they seem would be complete without mentioning boobs. Even the buses were inexplicably decorated to look like light rail.

Come to think of it, poker is fundamentally an exercise in simulation, as you are almost always trying to represent the opposite of whatever your situation of power is.

But the ironic (aihctbk[12]) thing about all this simulacrum is that it generates an environment where people heedlessly engage in being who they actually are.[13] Somehow, being surrounded by simulated reality produces license to drop the social coping superstructure and do the sorts of things that ‘stay in Vegas.’[14]

My conclusion on Vegas is that it is more interesting than my first visit suggested, but it is still one of my least favorite cities.[15] One of the things I think I am pretty good at is enjoying cities that seem unremarkable. My method is to try to figure out “why do the people who live here love it here?” Why don’t they move somewhere else? But Las Vegas is a town that exists almost entirely for people who do not live there. It is the first town I have encountered that completely defies my method.

However, while there was no discernable local community that I could anonymously experience, I ended up enjoying Vegas because I got to experience it with an imported community of people I enjoy.

This post was written while listening to the Vast Pandora channel

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[1] This is a part of an ongoing series I am doing where I reflect on the various cities my work travel takes me to. I describe the motivation of the series here. Also, I will continue posting retro-journal entries on the Odyssey blog for another week or so. Indecently, if you are new to this blog, it is worth noting that it is not primarily a travel blog…it only seems that way because travel has supplanted philosophical and cultural reflection in my life recently.
[2] I had a group of friends that used to take an annual trip to LV. Once, they were making plans while I was hanging out and one of them told me “You know Stan, you would totally be welcome to come with us. It’s just that we gamble, golf, drink and go to strip clubs…and you kind of aren’t into any of those things.” I expressed appreciation for the invitation but affirmed their instinct to exclude me.
[3] It was just after 9/11 and I had just started at my current job. The hotel was $12 per night and the whole trip cost under $250. I didn’t feel like I could ask my work to send me because I had just started, but the conference looked incredibly helpful (and it was) so I planned to take vacation and pay for it. When my work found out why I was taking vacation, they sent me.
[4] The other main lab for my agency is there…and I did my PhD research at their facility.
[5] Once the guy in front of me was complaining about how everyone in the federal government was only self interested and could not pass up opportunities to waste money…as I stood in line, waiting to voluntarily drive 7 hours round trip, on my own time, to save my project $1200.
[6] This was going on when I was a kid, but now the process is mostly complete.
[7] There was a fun trend among the buggies. The first ones had old people in them and traveled slowly (I easily outran the first of them). As I passed the buggies, the families got younger and had more children and were traveling faster (and were, in general, friendlier). I thought it was pretty fun that even Amish families have trouble getting out of the house for church on Sunday mornings.
[8] Every three years all of the federal agencies that encounter sediment problems have a joint sediment conference. This without exception is the most helpful professional event I attend and I go every time. This year I presented two papers and was a judge for the student paper contest (which was way more interesting than it sounds…but sadly I am sworn to secrecy. Um, seriously, I’m not kidding. The deliberations of this contest are strictly confidential. Weird, right?) I know that a federal conference in Vegas sounds like an atrocious boondoggle, but one of the biggest problems I see in the engineering community is the lack of technical development. There are very few forums where we can learn from each other’s mistakes and successes. The journals have become playgrounds for academics such that most practicing engineers couldn’t read one even if, by some miracle, there was a paper that they might find helpful. Conferences are really the only place that we find out about new technology (or, in my case, get the word out on new technology), hear about catastrophic mistakes, meet the people who could solve our problems and get exposed to new ways of thinking about our field. I’m almost certain that a good conference pays for itself several times simply in increased efficiency, contacts made and mistakes avoided. If I ever have a private firm, I will consider good conferences (and, yes, there are bad ones) for self motivated employees a good investment.
[9] One friend tried to win a seat in the Main event in a tournament going on in the other room, and we went to watch. But it turned out to be a fun night to be there.
[10] 6 people per table instead of 10.
[11] The highlight of the evening involved a boisterous Drunk Canadian at our table. Now, since I was just there to have fun, I loved that our new Canadian friend who was sucking back vodkas and red bulls at the rate of about 5 per hour got the table talking…but the serious poker players hated it. They like a somber mood where they can intimidate. Several serious players were visibly flustered by the banter and my buddy and I think it worked to our advantage. Anyway, the highlight of the evening was when another inebriated gentlemen with a European accent joined our table and took the banter up a notch. So the Canadian asked “My friend, which part of Russia are you from?” To which he replied, quickly and with a smile “The German part.”
[12] I always want to use the word ironic in its contemporary vernacular even though I know that it is ‘wrong’ because I lack a really good alternate linguistic construction. In a sense, ironic has expanded its semantic range to fill a linguistic gap. So, from now on in this blog, instead of a long self justifying footnote every time I use ironic “as it has come to be known” I will simply include the abbreviation (aihctbk)
[13] This makes more sense in light of my thoughts on ‘being yourself’.
[14] Mark Driscoll has a great line about this. He likes to say, ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, unless it is itchy.’
[15] My friend asked me if I would bring my wife back. I thought about it and decided, I would spend a night on the strip with my wife if Vegas was on my way somewhere, but it is not worth its own trip.

Call me Laertes…or Tiresias (I can’t decide)

I mentioned in the last post that the blog has been a little quiet due to travel and illness. But the travel included a seven day introductory field trip across California with the incoming UCD ecology graduate students (called the Odyssey, hence the post title). I kept an old-fashioned[1] journal during the trip (we did not have internet access). So over the course of the next week or two, I am going to turn it into a retrospective travel blog at:

http://stanfordodyssey.blogspot.com/

This post was written while listening to The Mars Volta station on Pandora
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[1] Of the moleskine variety

Calling in Sick

I am calling in sick to my blog. Too much traveling and a multiple week illness have left me too spent to finish up any original content (though I got several new things started[1]). So I am phoning this one[2] in with a few links.

I preached at my brother’s church in Madison. It was a lot of fun and the mp3 is up. I wrapped up with my thoughts on what the movie Hurt Locker was actually about.

More YouTube fun at Twilight’s expense.


I have given a lot of thought to why Jon Stewart is considered the “Most Trusted Name in News” despite his propensity for unfair clips and obvious partisanship. I find this designation particularly interesting because I basically share the opinion despite the fact that I feel like he has a pretty good understanding of his rhetorical slight of hand. But I think this clip (starting at minute 7:00) gets at it:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Extremist Makeover - Homeland Edition
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Simply put…Jon is the only pundit I have heard say “You know what, I was wrong.” And I have heard him say it on multiple positions. This humanizes him and builds trust. I am more likely to trust someone who can be moved off a position by strong argument. It makes me feel like he is on a quest for understanding rather than a Beck or an Olbermann…a Rush Limbaugh or a Michael Moore…people who I seem to simply want to propogate an ideology. Now this may be a studied polemical trick like his slick cutting and his endearing self deprecation…but it almost certainly plays in why I trust him.[3]
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[1] Including some surprising insights on climate change from the Environmental and Water Resources Institute conference.
[2] Get it? That is a pun with calling in sick. Yeah, that is about as funny as I am feeling right now.
[3] The second clip in this episode is also hilarious.

Fragments and Links 8

It has been a while since I have done one of these, so it got a little longish. As usual, these are ideas, thoughts or links that I liked but did not warrant a dedicated post.

I love the new alexonfire song The Northern and the video is mildly disturbing but gorgeous.



I was obviously intrigued by the source and motivation of the track. This was what I found:

"Alexisonfire vocalist George Pettit…(said): “We stole all the lyrics from this Methodist hymn called Roll, Jordan, Roll which is believed to be the first track that inspired people to first play the blues. It’s like an acknowledgment of our musical roots. It’s very religious, but we’re by no means religious.”

A couple months ago I mentioned that several students put together a film to promote our campus ministry’s spring retreat that was remarkably executed. Well, apparently, I wasn’t excessively biased in that estimation. They actually submitted the piece to the annual UC Davis film festival and the second episode was accepted and featured with about a dozen other films.[1]

Patch Sloan Episode 2: The Fall Guy from Matthew Francis Pye on Vimeo.

Another student affiliated with our campus ministry had three films in the festival and was the big winner on the night (taking home five awards). His stuff is great.

And on the topic of short film. Ford, an occasional commenter on this blog has put together this brilliant deconstruction of campaign ads:

Last week Amanda came home with a box of velociraptor ‘bones’ and no instructions. We had a fun morning playing paleontologist.

This led us to show Charis the video by They Might be Giants[2] “I am a Paleontologist,”[3] which she loved.



One of my friends reminded me of the xkcd comic that went with this exercise:

The power of the velociraptor in the imagination of those of us who grew up with Jurrasic Park is one of my favorite xkcd themes. I even bought the t-shirt. But I find that I never wear it because I am afraid people who aren’t in on “velociraptor awareness day” will just think I am one of “those Christians” that thinks dinosaurs are a hoax.

This reminded me of a fun story from my environmental geotechnical days. Environmental geotechnics is a fancy way to say ‘landfill design.’ My advisor for my first graduate degree was one of the premier landfill design guys in the world[5]. Two of my colleagues did a lot of field work for him and found that they were having trouble picking up women in bars on the road. The seemed to think the problem was when they had to tell the ladies what they were doing in town…something like “I am studying the landfill.” So they concocted this elaborate alternate story that they were paleontologists.[6] They never did tell us if it improved their chances with the Utah bar women…but it was a fun story.

On the topic of fun videos…Dan and I have been trying to recruit an official YouTube consultant for our preaching. The idea here is that there are some people who can search, metabolize and retain an amazing number of entertaining YouTube clips and seem to find connections to one or another of these any conversation they are in. It seems to me that everyone who preaches needs an 18-22 year old who will look over the manuscript or passage and notes and do some free association with their internalized YouTube database. This seems like a great way to craft the most difficult part of any talk…the illustrations. And it might be a great ministry for someone whose talents are otherwise overlooked by the church. One student in particular has sent me this clip. I am sure it has gotten wide distribution, but it is worth looking at if you haven’t seen it yet.



I cut a bunch of stuff about The Wire from this post because it was getting long and I thought I’d give the material a post of its own. But I have found that my experience of The Wire has mirrored my experience of Mad Men. Both were difficult to get into. I quit on both multiple times and only went back to them based on critical acclaim[7] and repeated friend recommendations. Now I love both of them.

I have come to believe that the reason they were both hard to get into was precisely the reason they are both so good. They are both character driven by complex and interesting characters. But this means that the shows require time to build textured compelling characters before they begin to work from strength.

I felt like The Blind Side and Defiance were oddly similar movies for being from such distinctly different genres. They were both profound true stories, that were impossible to totally screw up…but they both suffered from choppy, heavy handed execution.



I am a Soccer guy. I actually still play. And so, it is no surprise that I love the World Cup. For the last several cups I have taken on a pretty substantial challenge, though: to design a pool that makes the event compelling to follow for other people who may not care so much. This is harder than it may seem. The two stage format makes a March Madness type pool impossible. But a ‘draft’ style pool has to be carefully crafted in order to make the early tournament rounds count for anything.[8] I have converged on the following format. Eight participants pick four unique[9] teams apiece in a ‘snake style’[10] draft. Then the accrue points as follows:

Win (outright) = 3 points
Win (in PK's) = 2 points
Tie = 1 point
+1 point for win margin of 2-3
+2 point for win margin of >3
+1 for Golden Boot (top individual goal scorer)
-0.25 for each red card
+1 for best goal differential that fails to advance out of the round robin stage
+1 for the most goalie saves after the round robin stage
-1 for the worst goal differential after the round robin stage
-10 each for most egregious dive and mullet (ok, that one's a joke, but if there was a way to quantify these I'd include them)

I found the following findings from a study on the correlation between money and happiness really interesting: “If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.”

So it turns out Jesus was right. Community is fundamental to humanness. Oh, and sex matters and commuting sucks…but we knew that.

I have heard Matt Chandler tell the story of his conversion a couple times. He usually includes his assessment that the Christian scene in the late 1980’s reminded him of a bad Saturday Night Live sketch feel to it[12]. He then quips:

“that is why I became a Calvinist…because I have no idea how anyone became a Christian in that room outside of a sovereign almighty God.”

I have decided that Calvinists sleep better than Armineans…but have a harder time getting out of bed in the morning.

I love having a three-year old in the house. She comes up with some startlingly fresh observations about life…and general hilarity. Here are a few:

She is on the tail end of toilet training which means she gets to wear ‘big girl panties.’ This has led to an unfortunate new name for my boxer shorts…which are now called ‘daddy panties’ in the Gibson house hold.

When she was 2 she also renamed buggers…to ‘nose snacks.’

And finally, there was this:

I could not be more proud. Surely the hokey pokey is not what it is all about. Much could be learned from a 3 year olds refusal to mindlessly sing false cliché.

I don’t usually recommend blogs until I have been following them for a while. As alluded to a couple posts ago, the hallmark of a helpful blog is consistency rather than virtuosity. But if Vegas offered odds on stuff like ‘will this blog be amazing’, I’d put a huge chunk of money on this one: http://askorimagine.wordpress.com/ [13]

I tried to screen capture 8/9/10 at 11:12 and 13 seconds. I missed.
“Truth must be stranger than fiction because we have crafted fiction to suit ourselves.” -GK Chesterton

Amanda asked me what I thought of the Twilight Mom’s phenomena[14] the other day, essentially asking, “Isn’t it a good thing that mom’s and daughters are spending time together and have a common interest.”[15] I responded in my standard bombastic and overstated manner. “I think it is like a father spending time with his son by introducing him to porn.”

Now that is intentionally overstated, but think about it. By introducing his son to porn a father would be celebrating and propagating a distorted image of womanhood, romance and sexuality. He would be doing a disservice to the son’s future wife by building unreasonable and unhelpful expectations of femininity and romance. Similarly, Twilight offers an impoverished vision of romance and a bankrupt view of manhood.[16] It offers a picture of romance that is narcissistic and juvenile.

Speaking of vampires…Is it more tragic when vampires die? In that scene in Two Towers[17] when the elves arrived at Helms Deep, when the elves started to die it was more tragic than the other deaths even of humans we had come to care about. Why is the death of an elf or a vampire more tragic? If a creature whose life span has no upper bound[18] by natural causes, dies it is more tragic because they are losing more by two measures. They are losing more future years[19] and they are losing more experiences and memories.

…and speaking of intentionally overstated…David over at Signs of Life started a discussion on an author’s assertion that calling a white person “racist” is the equivalent of a white person using the n-bomb. I have come to expect helpful discussions on this blog, but this one exceeded my expectations. I even got involved…as did the original author.

I was going through some old notebooks yesterday. I found my notes from my first day of graduate school. My soil mechanics class was taught by Dr Boscher, a Christian who died tragically of cancer since we left. I was thinking of him…mourning a little as I handled the notebook. Then I opened to the first page. At the very top of the first page of notes…before his name…before his office hours…well before the first equation, was a single quote:

“You are only temporarily not soil.”

This post was written while listening to Sing the Sorrow by AFI

Some stuff I am working on:

Avatar and the Clementian Super Organism Hypothesis
Photo Box Stratigraphy
Thoughts on The Wire
Cross Country with my Late Father
Cities Part 3 and 4: Las Vegas and Madison, WI
The Two Manipulations of our Political Discourse
Why don’t churches have ash trays?

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[1] We got a baby sitter and went to the festival. One of the fun parts of the evening was that only 2 of the films were what I will call functional pieces (they had informational purposes and existed, only secondarily, as art). The other was a health services condom promotion (which was a spoof of The Office and was quite good).
[2] On the whole, the TMBG science podcasts aren’t bad. But the song ‘Science its Real’ is pretty lame…it should have been called “Logical Positivism, it may be philosophically passé but that doesn’t keep the scientific community (and our band) from wielding it like a club." I think my title is more accurate and even catchier, but it is harder to remember.
[3] There is a video title (with no video) spoof of this called “I am a Palin Apologisit.” Someone needs to write that song.
[5] No one gets a graduate degree without studying with ‘one of the premier experts’ in something. Knowledge is so fragmented that if you are at a major university and have a specialty, you are probably one of the top 5 people in that field. But my advisor was really really good at landfill design.
[6] The landfills were usually hazardous waste facilities so they tended to be in the same places you might find dinosaur bones (anywhere in Utah).
[7] Bill Simmons suggested that The Wire was the best ‘film’ of the 2000’s.
[8] Or to give people with late picks a shot.
[9] Once a team is selected it is no longer available…so all 32 teams end up ‘owned’.
[10] The person with the 8th pick also get’s the 9th pick while the person with the 1st gets the 16th.
[12] He describes a weekend in which he went to a Beasty Boys concert on a Friday night and a DC Talk concert on a Saturday night and his entire commentary on the experience is something like ‘Um, what?’
[13] In a recent post she mentions a friend who bought a house without a lawn and sold his lawn mower. I think she is talking about me. I hate mowing. It reminds me of the legend of sisyphus.
[14] For a few lucid comments on what is actually wrong with this narrative shaping our culture, see my brother’s post on it. Oh, then there is also this.
[15] A powerful question from a woman who always wanted more from her relationship with her mother and, from what I can tell, did not share a single common interest.
[16] I cannot remember who to credit this to, but one of my friends said something like “my biggest problem with the Transformer sequel was not the complete lack of narrative or the insult it was to my least functional brain cells. It is that these people experienced extraordinary things and it has not appeared to build their characters in any conceivable way.” This is also my problem with Edward. He is really really old, but rather than living in the wisdom of accumulated decades, the worst distortions of adolescence are magnified in him.
[17] Which made me cry but wasn’t in the book. Enterprising Tolkien truthers did some math to demonstrate that there was no way that even elves could have arrived at Helms deep in time to assist.
[18] I suppose you could say the same thing about Highlanders but because of ‘the game’ they face constant impending doom. In a sense, each day they live is an extra day.
[19] The first of these is one of the arguments I have heard used against abortion. We mourn the death of children more than the death of the elderly because, at least in part, it extinguishes more potential. By some common societal measure, we find deaths tragic in inverse proportion to the potential life extinguished.