Incredibly, after 15 years of chasing this phantom killer, police have finally tracked her down. The suspect apparently works in a factory in Northern Germany. She is eastern-European and has no prior criminal history, having worked in the factory for many years. Amongst other things, one of the products made in the factory is cotton swabs.

Gotcha!

Yes, the same cotton swabs used by police for collecting DNA evidence.

So, several hundred officers have been chasing this woman, stretching back 15 years now – and apparently no-one thought to do a double-blind, or even a simple control sample, to figure out whether the DNA evidence (the only evidence they had) was flawed.

Unbelievable.

Postmodernism is a re-evaluation of philosophy/thought that came after the “modernism” of the 20th century.

Modernism, is loosely defined as the movement or period of the Enlightenment, or Industrial Revolution, or the “Age of Reason”. Whilst I’m no scholar on the subject, I take it mean the reliance on science, technology, combined with liberty and the rule of law as a means for progress in society. To work, Modernism relies on reason and rational thought, heirarchy and absolute laws, to bring order and meaning out of chaos.  In some respects, the Modernism is the triumph of science over religion – which, given the spectacular advances in our understanding of the natural world, and of ourselves, was inevitable. Modernism suffered though from events such as Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Whilst these events and others highlighted our abilities with science and technology, the flawed nature of humans was impossible to avoid, and shows just how cold and calculated a modernist solution could be. In rejecting God and relying on human endeavours, we lost something- although we were unsure exactly what that something was.

Post-modernism basically tweaks Modernism, as an attempt to circumvent some of these issues. The main shift is the rejection of the idea of absolute truth, which Modernism attempted to arrive at by scientific and rational methods.  Postmodernism holds that there is no truth, no basic right or wrong, nothing good or bad, nothing evil or noble, nothing moral or immoral.

Instead, Walter Truett Anderson identifies postmodernism as one of four world views, all of which effectively define themselves according to their version of “truth”. These four worldviews are:

• the postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed,
• the scientific-rational in which truth is found through methodical, disciplined inquiry,
• the social-traditional in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilisation and
• the neo-romantic in which truth is found either through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.

Beyond these simple compartmentalisations, postmodernism is a pessimistic reaction against the optimism of the modernist era. It also suggests a lack of conviction, where the population is unwilling to critique or reason with ideas (or “truths”) that suffer from a lack of linear thinking and analytical reasoning. Partly this is a result of political correctness, where openly disagreeing with someone that holds a different viewpoint might be considered rude, or confrontational – after all, who are we to hold ourselves up to the cold, harsh light of what is true – especially when it has become impossible to define what is true. What is true for person A is not necessarily true for person B, and how dare person A attempt to convince person B of the merits of their position.

Strangely though, it has become far more easy to define what is “false” – and damned be those who attempt to disagree with what “consensus” has defined as false.  Religion, especially of the organised kind, is definitely false, according to the zeitgeist. This extends to areas of taste, where we are free to express a dislike of anything, especially if it might be considered popular. Unlike in the 20th Century, there seems to be an ill-defined but definitely perceptible ceiling of popularity, above which it is considered uncool. Music is probably the best example of this, where there has been a proliferation of “Indie” labels to promote artists. Supergroups like U2, Coldplay, and the Spice Girls, are just so… nineties.

In a postmodern world, we define ourselves not by who we are, but by what we are not.

March 2008

The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.

Many who respond to something disagree with it. That’s to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there’s less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you’re entering territory he may not have explored.

The result is there’s a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn’t mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it’s not anger that’s driving the increase in disagreement, there’s a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it’s easy to say things you’d never say face to face.

If we’re all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. What does it mean to disagree well? Most readers can tell the difference between mere name-calling and a carefully reasoned refutation, but I think it would help to put names on the intermediate stages. So here’s an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy:

DH0. Name-calling.

This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. We’ve all seen comments like this:

u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!

But it’s important to realize that more articulate name-calling has just as little weight. A comment like

The author is a self-important dilettante.

is really nothing more than a pretentious version of “u r a fag.”

DH1. Ad Hominem.

An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. It might actually carry some weight. For example, if a senator wrote an article saying senators’ salaries should be increased, one could respond:

Of course he would say that. He’s a senator.

This wouldn’t refute the author’s argument, but it may at least be relevant to the case. It’s still a very weak form of disagreement, though. If there’s something wrong with the senator’s argument, you should say what it is; and if there isn’t, what difference does it make that he’s a senator?

Saying that an author lacks the authority to write about a topic is a variant of ad hominem—and a particularly useless sort, because good ideas often come from outsiders. The question is whether the author is correct or not. If his lack of authority caused him to make mistakes, point those out. And if it didn’t, it’s not a problem.

DH2. Responding to Tone.

The next level up we start to see responses to the writing, rather than the writer. The lowest form of these is to disagree with the author’s tone. E.g.

I can’t believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion.

Though better than attacking the author, this is still a weak form of disagreement. It matters much more whether the author is wrong or right than what his tone is. Especially since tone is so hard to judge. Someone who has a chip on their shoulder about some topic might be offended by a tone that to other readers seemed neutral.

So if the worst thing you can say about something is to criticize its tone, you’re not saying much. Is the author flippant, but correct? Better that than grave and wrong. And if the author is incorrect somewhere, say where.

DH3. Contradiction.

In this stage we finally get responses to what was said, rather than how or by whom. The lowest form of response to an argument is simply to state the opposing case, with little or no supporting evidence.

This is often combined with DH2 statements, as in:

I can’t believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion. Intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory.

Contradiction can sometimes have some weight. Sometimes merely seeing the opposing case stated explicitly is enough to see that it’s right. But usually evidence will help.

DH4. Counterargument.

At level 4 we reach the first form of convincing disagreement: counterargument. Forms up to this point can usually be ignored as proving nothing. Counterargument might prove something. The problem is, it’s hard to say exactly what.

Counterargument is contradiction plus reasoning and/or evidence. When aimed squarely at the original argument, it can be convincing. But unfortunately it’s common for counterarguments to be aimed at something slightly different. More often than not, two people arguing passionately about something are actually arguing about two different things. Sometimes they even agree with one another, but are so caught up in their squabble they don’t realize it.

There could be a legitimate reason for arguing against something slightly different from what the original author said: when you feel they missed the heart of the matter. But when you do that, you should say explicitly you’re doing it.

DH5. Refutation.

The most convincing form of disagreement is refutation. It’s also the rarest, because it’s the most work. Indeed, the disagreement hierarchy forms a kind of pyramid, in the sense that the higher you go the fewer instances you find.

To refute someone you probably have to quote them. You have to find a “smoking gun,” a passage in whatever you disagree with that you feel is mistaken, and then explain why it’s mistaken. If you can’t find an actual quote to disagree with, you may be arguing with a straw man.

While refutation generally entails quoting, quoting doesn’t necessarily imply refutation. Some writers quote parts of things they disagree with to give the appearance of legitimate refutation, then follow with a response as low as DH3 or even DH0.

DH6. Refuting the Central Point.

The force of a refutation depends on what you refute. The most powerful form of disagreement is to refute someone’s central point.

Even as high as DH5 we still sometimes see deliberate dishonesty, as when someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes those. Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation. For example, correcting someone’s grammar, or harping on minor mistakes in names or numbers. Unless the opposing argument actually depends on such things, the only purpose of correcting them is to discredit one’s opponent.

Truly refuting something requires one to refute its central point, or at least one of them. And that means one has to commit explicitly to what the central point is. So a truly effective refutation would look like:

The author’s main point seems to be x. As he says:

<quotation>

But this is wrong for the following reasons…

The quotation you point out as mistaken need not be the actual statement of the author’s main point. It’s enough to refute something it depends upon.

What It Means

Now we have a way of classifying forms of disagreement. What good is it? One thing the disagreement hierarchy doesn’t give us is a way of picking a winner. DH levels merely describe the form of a statement, not whether it’s correct. A DH6 response could still be completely mistaken.

But while DH levels don’t set a lower bound on the convincingness of a reply, they do set an upper bound. A DH6 response might be unconvincing, but a DH2 or lower response is always unconvincing.

The most obvious advantage of classifying the forms of disagreement is that it will help people to evaluate what they read. In particular, it will help them to see through intellectually dishonest arguments. An eloquent speaker or writer can give the impression of vanquishing an opponent merely by using forceful words. In fact that is probably the defining quality of a demagogue. By giving names to the different forms of disagreement, we give critical readers a pin for popping such balloons.

Such labels may help writers too. Most intellectual dishonesty is unintentional. Someone arguing against the tone of something he disagrees with may believe he’s really saying something. Zooming out and seeing his current position on the disagreement hierarchy may inspire him to try moving up to counterargument or refutation.

But the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it will make conversations better, but that it will make the people who have them happier. If you study conversations, you find there is a lot more meanness down in DH1 than up in DH6. You don’t have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don’t want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.

If moving up the disagreement hierarchy makes people less mean, that will make most of them happier. Most people don’t really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can’t help it.

A hazardous comparison

Feb 28th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Americans like the idea (though not always the reality) of risk more than comfortable Europeans do. To Russians, both lots seem hyper-cautious wimps

Stockbyte Silver

ANYBODY who dabbles in transatlantic affairs has come across one giant stereotype: Americans admire risk-takers, whereas Europeans (at least in the rich, stable parts of the continent) are instinctively risk-averse, expecting the state to shield them from all sorts of dangers, including their own folly. Move a bit farther east to the ex-communist world, especially Russia, and you enter a place where things seem to have gone from one extreme to another: from an all-demanding, all-protective state to a free-for-all where life is full of deadly dangers, about which even the prudent can’t do very much.

Like most windy generalisations, this transatlantic contrast has a grain of truth. Americans have embraced the fruits of biotechnology—in the form of foods based on genetically modified organisms—but Europeans see them as too dangerous for consumers and the environment. Even in the quietest American suburb, the rhetoric of the frontier is never entirely absent: people are expected to take responsibility for the security of their own homes (by shooting burglars), for their health and their financial future, in the knowledge that catastrophe looms if they make the wrong calls. A high rate of bankruptcy is seen in America as a sign of a healthy economy—and not, as Europeans often feel, as a threat to social peace. Americans are willing to invest in start-up companies or new financial products; the proverbial Belgian dentist prefers government bonds. It all flows, says Charles Kupchan, a Europe-watcher at America’s Georgetown University, from the fact that American culture is more libertarian, whereas that of Europe is more communitarian.

This contrast may have more to do with rhetoric and self-image than with real life. In the regulation of car engines, for example, America took the virtuous step of mandating catalytic converters long before the European Union did. But in the (western) European climate, officious regulators have an easier time: people are more receptive to the idea that government should care for them. In America, demands for more regulation (of the internet, or air quality, say) have often been presented as calls to protect children; it’s assumed that adults can fend for themselves.

On either side of the Atlantic, of course, the regulator’s zeal can suddenly increase after an unforeseen event. The licensing of medicine by America’s Food and Drug Administration has become slower since 2004 when a pain-killer, Vioxx, was withdrawn by its maker, Merck, because it increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes. But in America’s regulation wars, there will always be lots of people who point out that caution can also cost lives. Psychologically at least, Europe is an easier place to make the case for being careful.

In any case, by comparison with most other parts of the world, and with any other era of human history, the United States and western Europe are converging in their attitudes to danger. Most kinds of risk have been successfully removed from everyday life. Women hardly ever die in childbirth; miners generally make it back above ground; fishermen usually return to shore; and having a drink of water no longer means dicing with cholera. Of course, some people—bungee-jumpers and rock-climbers—take risks freely; but the unwanted perils that once haunted people’s lives are mostly a thing of the past.

What Americans and Europeans alike are now attempting to do is squeeze out the last few drops of risk, with results that are often counter-productive, because risk is simply transferred from one place to another. That is true in an obvious sense when, for example, companies dump toxic waste or use risky technologies in countries whose regulation is relatively lax. But there are also more subtle ways in which efforts to eliminate risk can simply move the danger along. Some good instances come from behaviour on the roads, where people may act more recklessly as safety measures (their own and other people’s) make them bolder.

In one experiment, a British psychologist, Ian Walker of Bath University, simply got on his bicycle and monitored the behaviour of 2,300 vehicles that overtook him. When he wore a helmet, drivers were much more likely to zoom past him with little room to spare; when he was bare-headed (and indeed when he wore a female wig) the amount of space that motorists left would increase. An experiment in Munich found that the drivers of taxicabs fitted with anti-lock braking systems were involved in no fewer accidents than those without. That is because the former used those superior brakes not to practise prudence but to drive more aggressively.

Such unintended effects are not confined to Europe. John Adams, a transport expert at University College London, has compiled data from all over the world to show that laws making drivers wear seatbelts do not make roads safer; they move deaths from inside cars to outside them because they encourage bad driving. The number of young children killed on the roads has fallen in recent years, he notes—but mainly because they are rarely allowed out alone, so today’s teenagers have less skill at navigating hazardous roads; and as a result, the number of teenagers killed in car accidents has jumped. He lauds the Dutch experiment in “naked streets” where most road signs and markings were removed to force travellers to keep their wits about them.

Where America and Europe may differ is in the main cause of their risk-reducing zeal. America’s proverbially litigious culture makes all players in the public arena, be they government agencies, companies or schools, intensely keen to delimit their responsibilities, and within those limits to minimise the risk of liability. To many Europeans, an “ambulance-chasing” legal environment, which sees every mishap as an opportunity for a lawsuit, is an unwelcome pathology that has spread in their direction from the United States.

But Europe has pathologies of its own, especially that of the over-ambitious bureaucracy, such as the European Union agencies that regulate food and the environment. In the wilder fringes of the EU there are citizens who understandably trust the Brussels mandarins to monitor their beaches and air more fairly than their own country’s bureaucrats ever would. So regulatory zeal becomes a source of legitimacy for EU institutions that badly need it.

Mission creep is not peculiar to Brussels. All bureaucracies are keen to survive and, if possible, grow. For survival, it is useful to estimate the level of the risks they are supposed to manage at close to, but not quite, zero. Higher and the institution may be regarded as failing; lower and it may be regarded as unnecessary. And growth can be achieved by bringing more risks within their remit. Britain’s Food Standards Agency, for example, has decided to target not only the traditional problems of contamination by microbes or poisons, but what it calls the “downstream risks” of food: what people choose to eat. The agency is now introducing a food-labelling scheme with what its chairman, Dame Deirdre Hutton, says is the “absolutely intended consequence of getting manufacturers to change their products”. This reflects a mentality that refuses to see the overweight as fallible gluttons: now they are victims facing a risk which the government has a solemn duty to abate.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the net result is the same: a huge risk-avoidance endeavour which reflects the illusion that everyday life can be made almost perfectly safe. Whenever something bad happens—a child has an accident on a school trip; a window-cleaner falls off a ladder—the immediate call is for something to be done, and if the state doesn’t oblige, lawyers will. Discontent with this state of affairs is no monopoly of the rugged American: some Europeans are worried too. Nils Brunsson, a professor of management at the Stockholm School of Economics, says muddled ideas about risk and regulation need correction by a third R: responsibility. “If you want responsibility, you take decisions,” he says. “If you don’t, you get others to make decisions, and then say you had no choice.”

Some people, of course, find cruder and less rational ways of protesting against the search for a risk-free life. All over the rich world, there are parents who leave the child-proof lids off medicines because they find them so fiddly, and office workers so irritated by self-closing fire doors that they prop them open.

But those cultural differences persist. Americans who move to western Europe are often dismayed by a mentality that seems wary of technological or social innovation: they sense a resistance to “rocking the boat” by any actions whose effects are unpredictable. Europeans who settle in the United States are at once frightened and exhilarated by a place where people may yearn for a life free of risk (inside gated communities, for example) but know in their hearts they can never get it.

At the same time, both those shocks are mild compared to the one experienced by Westerners who move to Russia—and find themselves in a place where life is so full of lethal danger that some people see little point in reducing risk at the margins: a world of gaping pot-holes, tipsy ambulance-drivers and melting icicles which hang from ledges like daggers. The idea of regulators caring for the public in an accountable way, or of courts where a humble citizen can seek redress, would sound naive to many Russians. In a land where life expectancy (at 59 for males, lower than in Guatemala or Bangladesh) is lamentably short, people apparently see little value in driving slowly, or in cutting down on alcohol or tobacco.

Raw political power and/or hard cash are assumed to trump every other kind of authority, including the courts. But that does not mean that Russians are totally irrational in their choices. Individuals or firms that openly flout the law may do so in the well-founded belief that they are too powerful for the law to touch them. If people are prudent enough to settle their debts, it is not through fear of prosecution, but because much more unpleasant forms of private revenge may be in store. And as Mark Kirsh, a British lawyer in Moscow, points out, Russians are making a logical calculation when they rely more on friends than on state agencies or courts.

Few Americans or west Europeans would trade their relatively risk-free existence for the tingling dice with death that can go with daily life in Russia. But many would endorse the insistence of the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, on the sanctity of the right to incur danger: “What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.” Being reckless from time to time preserves what is “most precious and most important—that is, our personality, our individuality.”

The reason I found this interesting has nothing to do with who said it (Barack Obama), but rather the substance of what was said. It’s a shame this viewpoint isn’t more common in politics. Bush has been a truly embarrassing President for most Americans, but particularly those who profess to share the same faith as him. The fact is, and Dubbya proves this I think, Christians are equally as fallible as non-christians. Believing in Jesus doesn’t make you perfect, or wise. It would be an oversimplification though to extend this to the point where one’s faith should be set aside in the field of politics. That would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

This is a long one, but well worth the read I think:

Barack Obama: Call to Renewal Keynote Address

| June 28, 2006

Washington, DC

Good morning. I appreciate the opportunity to speak here at the Call to Renewal’s Building a Covenant for a New America conference. I’ve had the opportunity to take a look at your Covenant for a New America. It is filled with outstanding policies and prescriptions for much of what ails this country. So I’d like to congratulate you all on the thoughtful presentations you’ve given so far about poverty and justice in America, and for putting fire under the feet of the political leadership here in Washington.

But today I’d like to talk about the connection between religion and politics and perhaps offer some thoughts about how we can sort through some of the often bitter arguments that we’ve been seeing over the last several years.

I do so because, as you all know, we can affirm the importance of poverty in the Bible; and we can raise up and pass out this Covenant for a New America. We can talk to the press, and we can discuss the religious call to address poverty and environmental stewardship all we want, but it won’t have an impact unless we tackle head-on the mutual suspicion that sometimes exists between religious America and secular America.

I want to give you an example that I think illustrates this fact. As some of you know, during the 2004 U.S. Senate General Election I ran against a gentleman named Alan Keyes. Mr. Keyes is well-versed in the Jerry Falwell-Pat Robertson style of rhetoric that often labels progressives as both immoral and godless.

Indeed, Mr. Keyes announced towards the end of the campaign that, “Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama. Christ would not vote for Barack Obama because Barack Obama has behaved in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved.”

Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama.

Now, I was urged by some of my liberal supporters not to take this statement seriously, to essentially ignore it. To them, Mr. Keyes was an extremist, and his arguments not worth entertaining. And since at the time, I was up 40 points in the polls, it probably wasn’t a bad piece of strategic advice.

But what they didn’t understand, however, was that I had to take Mr. Keyes seriously, for he claimed to speak for my religion, and my God. He claimed knowledge of certain truths.

Mr. Obama says he’s a Christian, he was saying, and yet he supports a lifestyle that the Bible calls an abomination.

Mr. Obama says he’s a Christian, but supports the destruction of innocent and sacred life.

And so what would my supporters have me say? How should I respond? Should I say that a literalist reading of the Bible was folly? Should I say that Mr. Keyes, who is a Roman Catholic, should ignore the teachings of the Pope?

Unwilling to go there, I answered with what has come to be the typically liberal response in such debates – namely, I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can’t impose my own religious views on another, that I was running to be the U.S. Senator of Illinois and not the Minister of Illinois.

But Mr. Keyes’s implicit accusation that I was not a true Christian nagged at me, and I was also aware that my answer did not adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and my own beliefs.

Now, my dilemma was by no means unique. In a way, it reflected the broader debate we’ve been having in this country for the last thirty years over the role of religion in politics.

For some time now, there has been plenty of talk among pundits and pollsters that the political divide in this country has fallen sharply along religious lines. Indeed, the single biggest “gap” in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don’t.

Conservative leaders have been all too happy to exploit this gap, consistently reminding evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage; school prayer and intelligent design.

Democrats, for the most part, have taken the bait. At best, we may try to avoid the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that – regardless of our personal beliefs – constitutional principles tie our hands. At worst, there are some liberals who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word “Christian” describes one’s political opponents, not people of faith.

Now, such strategies of avoidance may work for progressives when our opponent is Alan Keyes. But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people’s lives — in the lives of the American people — and I think it’s time that we join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.

And if we’re going to do that then we first need to understand that Americans are a religious people. 90 percent of us believe in God, 70 percent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do in evolution.

This religious tendency is not simply the result of successful marketing by skilled preachers or the draw of popular mega-churches. In fact, it speaks to a hunger that’s deeper than that – a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause.

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds – dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets – and they’re coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.

They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They’re looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them – that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.

And I speak with some experience on this matter. I was not raised in a particularly religious household, as undoubtedly many in the audience were. My father, who returned to Kenya when I was just two, was born Muslim but as an adult became an atheist. My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, was probably one of the most spiritual and kindest people I’ve ever known, but grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion herself. As a consequence, so did I.

It wasn’t until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma.

I was working with churches, and the Christians who I worked with recognized themselves in me. They saw that I knew their Book and that I shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me that remained removed, detached, that I was an observer in their midst.

And in time, I came to realize that something was missing as well — that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone.

And if it weren’t for the particular attributes of the historically black church, I may have accepted this fate. But as the months passed in Chicago, I found myself drawn – not just to work with the church, but to be in the church.

For one thing, I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change, a power made real by some of the leaders here today. Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope.

And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship — the grounding of faith in struggle — that the church offered me a second insight, one that I think is important to emphasize today.

Faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts.

You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it. You need to embrace Christ precisely because you have sins to wash away – because you are human and need an ally in this difficult journey.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street in the Southside of Chicago one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt that I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.

That’s a path that has been shared by millions upon millions of Americans – evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims alike; some since birth, others at certain turning points in their lives. It is not something they set apart from the rest of their beliefs and values. In fact, it is often what drives their beliefs and their values.

And that is why that, if we truly hope to speak to people where they’re at – to communicate our hopes and values in a way that’s relevant to their own – then as progressives, we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse.

Because when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations towards one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome – others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends.

In other words, if we don’t reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for, then the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons and Alan Keyeses will continue to hold sway.

More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical – if we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.

Imagine Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address without reference to “the judgments of the Lord.” Or King’s I Have a Dream speech without references to “all of God’s children.” Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible, and move the nation to embrace a common destiny.

Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting “preachy” may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems.

After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness – in the imperfections of man.

Solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers’ lobby – but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we’ve got a moral problem. There’s a hole in that young man’s heart – a hole that the government alone cannot fix.

I believe in vigorous enforcement of our non-discrimination laws. But I also believe that a transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of the nation’s CEOs could bring about quicker results than a battalion of lawyers. They have more lawyers than us anyway.

I think that we should put more of our tax dollars into educating poor girls and boys. I think that the work that Marian Wright Edelman has done all her life is absolutely how we should prioritize our resources in the wealthiest nation on earth. I also think that we should give them the information about contraception that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, lower abortion rates, and help assure that that every child is loved and cherished.

But, you know, my Bible tells me that if we train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it. So I think faith and guidance can help fortify a young woman’s sense of self, a young man’s sense of responsibility, and a sense of reverence that all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.

I am not suggesting that every progressive suddenly latch on to religious terminology – that can be dangerous. Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith. As Jim has mentioned, some politicians come and clap — off rhythm — to the choir. We don’t need that.

In fact, because I do not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality, I would rather have someone who is grounded in morality and ethics, and who is also secular, affirm their morality and ethics and values without pretending that they’re something they’re not. They don’t need to do that. None of us need to do that.

But what I am suggesting is this – secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Moreover, if we progressives shed some of these biases, we might recognize some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of “thou” and not just “I,” resonates in religious congregations all across the country. And we might realize that we have the ability to reach out to the evangelical community and engage millions of religious Americans in the larger project of American renewal.

Some of this is already beginning to happen. Pastors, friends of mine like Rick Warren and T.D. Jakes are wielding their enormous influences to confront AIDS, Third World debt relief, and the genocide in Darfur. Religious thinkers and activists like our good friend Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo are lifting up the Biblical injunction to help the poor as a means of mobilizing Christians against budget cuts to social programs and growing inequality.

And by the way, we need Christians on Capitol Hill, Jews on Capitol Hill and Muslims on Capitol Hill talking about the estate tax. When you’ve got an estate tax debate that proposes a trillion dollars being taken out of social programs to go to a handful of folks who don’t need and weren’t even asking for it, you know that we need an injection of morality in our political debate.

Across the country, individual churches like my own and your own are sponsoring day care programs, building senior centers, helping ex-offenders reclaim their lives, and rebuilding our gulf coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

So the question is, how do we build on these still-tentative partnerships between religious and secular people of good will? It’s going to take more work, a lot more work than we’ve done so far. The tensions and the suspicions on each side of the religious divide will have to be squarely addressed. And each side will need to accept some ground rules for collaboration.

While I’ve already laid out some of the work that progressive leaders need to do, I want to talk a little bit about what conservative leaders need to do — some truths they need to acknowledge.

For one, they need to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice. Folks tend to forget that during our founding, it wasn’t the atheists or the civil libertarians who were the most effective champions of the First Amendment. It was the persecuted minorities, it was Baptists like John Leland who didn’t want the established churches to impose their views on folks who were getting happy out in the fields and teaching the scripture to slaves. It was the forbearers of the evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they did not want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith as they understood it.

Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.

This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing. And if you doubt that, let me give you an example.

We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded.

Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God’s test of devotion.

But it’s fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham. We would do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.

Finally, any reconciliation between faith and democratic pluralism requires some sense of proportion.

This goes for both sides.

Even those who claim the Bible’s inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, sensing that some passages – the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ’s divinity – are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life.

The American people intuitively understand this, which is why the majority of Catholics practice birth control and some of those opposed to gay marriage nevertheless are opposed to a Constitutional amendment to ban it. Religious leadership need not accept such wisdom in counseling their flocks, but they should recognize this wisdom in their politics.

But a sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation – context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase “under God.” I didn’t. Having voluntary student prayer groups use school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs – targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers – that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems.

So we all have some work to do here. But I am hopeful that we can bridge the gaps that exist and overcome the prejudices each of us bring to this debate. And I have faith that millions of believing Americans want that to happen. No matter how religious they may or may not be, people are tired of seeing faith used as a tool of attack. They don’t want faith used to belittle or to divide. They’re tired of hearing folks deliver more screed than sermon. Because in the end, that’s not how they think about faith in their own lives.

So let me end with just one other interaction I had during my campaign. A few days after I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, I received an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School that said the following:

“Congratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win. I was happy to vote for you, and I will tell you that I am seriously considering voting for you in the general election. I write to express my concerns that may, in the end, prevent me from supporting you.”

The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to be “totalizing.” His faith led him to a strong opposition to abortion and gay marriage, although he said that his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free market and quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of the Republican agenda.

But the reason the doctor was considering not voting for me was not simply my position on abortion. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign had posted on my website, which suggested that I would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.” The doctor went on to write:

“I sense that you have a strong sense of justice…and I also sense that you are a fair minded person with a high regard for reason…Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded….You know that we enter times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve others…I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.”

Fair-minded words.

So I looked at my website and found the offending words. In fairness to them, my staff had written them using standard Democratic boilerplate language to summarize my pro-choice position during the Democratic primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v. Wade.

Re-reading the doctor’s letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. It is people like him who are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country. They may not change their positions, but they are willing to listen and learn from those who are willing to speak in fair-minded words. Those who know of the central and awesome place that God holds in the lives of so many, and who refuse to treat faith as simply another political issue with which to score points.

So I wrote back to the doctor, and I thanked him for his advice. The next day, I circulated the email to my staff and changed the language on my website to state in clear but simple terms my pro-choice position. And that night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own – a prayer that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me.

And that night, before I went to bed I said a prayer of my own. It’s a prayer I think I share with a lot of Americans. A hope that we can live with one another in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all. It’s a prayer worth praying, and a conversation worth having in this country in the months and years to come.

Thank you.

Gutted.

Our secret sauce

2/25/2008 08:55:00 AM

Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist

I was recently a guest columnist on the Freakonomics Blog. There were several interesting questions from the readers, but one was quite striking:

“How can we explain the fairly entrenched position of Google, even though the differences in search algorithms are now only recognizable at the margins? Is there some hidden network effect that makes it better for all of us to use the same search engine?”

It seems that a lot of people are trying to figure out why Google has done so well. The difficulty is that the typical economic forces at work in many technology businesses that lead to entrenchment don’t seem to explain our success. Let’s take a look at the usual culprits.

Supply side economies of scale. This refers to the fact that a larger business may enjoy a cost advantage. The problem is that though there probably are some scale advantages, they get played out at a reasonably small scale. There are plenty of data centers out there and plenty of people that know how to run them efficiently.

Lock-in. The idea here is that when users have a high cost of switching to an alternative provider, they can be charged high prices that reflect the fact that they are effectively locked in to a single provider. But if you look at Google’s business, the competition is only a click away. Users can trivially switch search engines. Most of our large customers also advertise on other search engines. And most publishers get their ads from a variety of providers, including their own sales force. So there are very small costs of switching to an alternative search engine for users, advertisers, and publishers.

Network effects. This refers to a phenomenon where the amount that people are willing to pay for a service depends on the number of people that have already adopted a service. The classic example is a fax machine: the amount that I am willing to pay for a fax machine depends on how many of my correspondents already have one. But this doesn’t fit the Google case either: my decision to use Google is irrelevant to other users. It’s true that advertisers want to advertise where there are lot of users but that doesn’t affect the amount that they are willing to pay on a per user basis. The value of a user to an advertiser depends on how likely he or she is to buy, not how many users there are. A small website about knitting could be a great place to advertise yarn and could charge rates far higher for such ads than a much larger site.

If it isn’t economies of scale, lock-in, or network effects, what is it that explains Google’s success?

The answer, at least in my opinion, is a much older economic concept called “learning by doing” that was first formalized by Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow back in 1962. It refers to the widely-observed phenomenon that the longer a company has been doing something, the better it gets at doing it.

Google has been searching the web for nearly 10 years, which is far longer than our major competitors. It’s not surprising that we’ve learned a lot about how to do this well. We’re constantly experimenting with new algorithms. Those that offer an improvement get rolled into the production version; the others go back to the drawing board for refinement.

So I would argue that Google really does have a better product than the competition — not because we have more or better ingredients, but because we have better recipes. And we are continuously improving those recipes precisely because we know the competition is only a click away. We can’t fall back on economies of scale, or switching costs, or network effects, to isolate us from the competition. The only thing we can do is work as hard as we can to keep our search quality better than that of the other engines.

My initial response to this would be that, much like Microsoft, it’s not necessarily the core technology that creates the lock-in; it may be that the “add-ons” are the anti-competitive wedge. Take the Windows OS as an example: it’s not the OS itself – it’s Microsoft’s leveraging of Office, the intertwined browser Internet Explorer, and proprietary file formats like .wma, .doc and .xls that are the wedge. Linux and OSX are by far better operating systems than Vista, but it’s the “add-ons” that tie computer users to Windows.

Extending this to Google – the potential that as a broker of ads through Doubleclick, or as a provider of webservices like gmail, picasa, google docs, youtube and others that make them potentially scary as a monopolist. It will be interesting to see if they try to leverage these add-ons to protect their revenues that come from search.

To date, Google have maintained their relationship with the customer, and the lock-in is very small. The potential for monopolistic behaviour is there, and growing. The test will be when shareholders demand higher profits, and whether Google can deliver without breaking their motto: Do no evil.

I need to mull this over some more, but feel free to chip in…

The Archbishop of Canterbury has questioned the story of the three wise men but, argues Christopher Howse, this does not change the message of Christmas.

What’s this? Has the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said that the Three Kings didn’t exist? Well, not quite

“St Matthew’s Gospel,” he remarked in a radio discussion, “says they’re astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire. That’s all we’re really told.”

But think how deeply these three men have entered our imagination as part of the Christmas story. “A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey, in.

The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, the very dead of winter.”

Those words, in a tremendous sermon by Lancelot Andrewes that King James I heard on Christmas Day 1622, were brilliantly stolen by TS Eliot and incorporated into his poem The Journey of the Magi.

And we can see it all: the camels’ breath steaming in the night air as the kings, in their gorgeous robes of silk and cloth-of-gold and clutching their precious gifts, kneel to adore the baby in the manger.

Yet, that is not entirely what the Gospel says. The wise men, as Dr Williams points out, figure only in the Gospel according to St Matthew. That’s no surprise, since Mark and John do not give accounts of the infancy of Jesus.

St Matthew tells of them in just 12 verses, beginning: “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.’”

It doesn’t say they were kings, or that there were three of them. We suppose they were three because they brought gold, frankincense and myrrh.

From the earliest times these gifts were accorded mystic significance: gold for kingship, incense for worship, and myrrh for anointing, just as Christ was anointed with precious spices for his tomb.

Of course, our imagination is filled by the images that artists have provided. There’s a lovely ancient mosaic in Ravenna, 1,500 years old, showing the kings, sorry, I mean, wise men, in oriental garb of trousers and Phrygian caps, carrying their gifts past palm trees towards the star that they followed.

Their names are picked out in bright tesserae above them: Balthassar, Melchior, Gaspar. Those names are not in the Bible either.

In a funny way, these three wise men, the Magi, are older than Christmas. They come at Epiphany, which we celebrate (or ignore) on January 6. That’s what Twelfth Night is all about. This day was in the earliest Christian times the great feast of the coming of Jesus.

At the Epiphany three events were marked: the birth of Jesus (called in prophecy Emmanuel, meaning “God with us”); the manifestation of this saviour to the Gentiles (us), represented by the Magi; and the baptism of Jesus, as an adult, when a voice from heaven was heard saying “Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” It’s with this baptism that St Mark chose to begin his Gospel.

Christmas, as the actual birthday of Jesus, only began to be celebrated as a separate feast on December 25 three centuries or so later by Latin-speaking Christians in north Africa. It was a different world in north Africa then.

There was no Arabic, nor were there mosques (Mohammed was not born for another couple of centuries), and small cities were run by men in togas, writing rather good Latin and debating heatedly just how much God the Father was the same as God the Son. No turkey on Christmas Day, but no snow either.

Yet old Bishop Andrewes spoke of the wise men coming in solstitio brumali, which he expected King James (who prided himself on his learning) to recognise as the winter solstice, when the days are shortest.

A lot of nonsense is talked today about Christmas “really” being the Roman festival of misrule, Saturnalia, or the feast of Natalis Soli Invicti, the birth of the invincible sun. But people then were quite capable of distinguishing one from another.

Christians cheerfully adopted artistic representations of Jesus as Apollo, for example, because he was a bit like the (fictional) sun-god.

The Christians had a prophecy to prove the point, taken from the book of Malachi in the Bible: “Unto you that fear my name,” said the Lord, “shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.”

This prophecy, by the way, explains the puzzling line in the carol Hark the Herald Angels by Charles Wesley, where it speaks of Jesus “risen with healing in his wings”. The wings are metaphorical, but they’re biblically based too.

Equally so, then, is the metaphor of Jesus as the Sun. If customs had developed slightly differently, we might be celebrating Christmas at the summer solstice in June, when the sun is brightest.

Of course, midsummer is precisely the time that Australians do open their Christmas presents. No one had planned for them in the fourth century, because, although educated people knew that the earth was spherical, they thought no one lived in the antipodes, because the burning latitudes at the equator would be too hot to get past.

I mention these details as an indication that people hundreds of years ago had thought about such questions quite as much as we do today, sometimes more. It is just that they assembled their thoughts in a different pattern from us, and we can easily mistake their drift.

So, the first time someone tells you that the ox and the ass are not mentioned in the biblical account of Jesus’s nativity, it can come as a shock. One checks the Gospels carefully, and indeed no ox nor ass appears.

But the medieval painters did not just invent them. They were familiar with the verse in Isaiah: “The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master’s crib.” The painters wanted to show the belief of Christians that Jesus Christ, even as a baby in the crib, was the owner, master and indeed creator of men and beasts.

Whether a wandering magus 20 centuries ago was called Gaspar or not matters to no one much but him. It matters a very great deal whether a child born one summer or winter day in those years was really the prophesied Emmanuel. Dr Williams declares that he was, and that this is the good news of Christmas.

Transcript: Archbishop’s interview with Simon Mayo Damian Thompson: Another of Rowan Williams’ own goals Star turn: an ancient mosaic in Ravenna showing the three wise men

“There are some aspects of quackery that are harmless – childish even – and there are some that are very serious indeed. On Tuesday, to my great delight, the author Jeanette Winterson launched a scientific defence of homeopathy in these pages. She used words such as “nano” meaninglessly, she suggested that there is a role for homeopathy in the treatment of HIV in Africa, and she said that an article in the Lancet today will call on doctors to tell their patients that homeopathic “medicines” offer no benefit.

The article does not say that, and I should know, because I wrote it. It is not an act of fusty authority, and I claim none: I look about 12, and I’m only a few years out of medical school. This is all good fun, but my adamant stance, that I absolutely lack any authority, is key: because this is not about one man’s opinion, and there is nothing even slightly technical or complicated about the evidence on homeopathy, or indeed anything, when it is clearly explained.

And there is the rub. Because Winterson tries to tell us – like every other homeopathy fan – that for some mystical reason, which is never made entirely clear, the healing powers of homeopathic pills are special, and so their benefits cannot be tested like every other pill. This has become so deeply embedded in our culture, by an industry eager to obscure our very understanding of evidence, that even some doctors now believe it.

Enough is enough. Evidence-based medicine is beautiful, elegant, clever and, most of all, important. It is how we know what will kill or cure you. These are biblical themes, and it is ridiculous that what I am going to explain to you now is not taught in schools. So let’s imagine that we are talking to a fan of homeopathy, one who is both intelligent and reflective. “Look,” they begin, “all I know is that I feel better when I take a homeopathic pill.” OK, you reply. We absolutely accept that. Nobody can take that away from the homeopathy fan.

But perhaps it’s the placebo effect? You both think you know about the placebo effect already, but you are both wrong. The mysteries of the interaction between body and mind are far more complex than can ever be permitted in the crude, mechanistic and reductionist world of the alternative therapist, where pills do all the work.

The placebo response is about far more than the pills – it is about the cultural meaning of a treatment, our expectation, and more. So we know that four sugar pills a day will clear up ulcers quicker than two sugar pills, we know that a saltwater injection is a more effective treatment for pain than a sugar pill, we know that green sugar pills are more effective for anxiety than red, and we know that brand packaging on painkillers increases pain relief.

A baby will respond to its parents’ expectations and behaviour, and the placebo effect is still perfectly valid for children and pets. Placebo pills with no active ingredient can even elicit measurable biochemical responses in humans, and in animals (when they have come to associate the pill with an active ingredient). This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting areas of medical science ever.

“Well, it could be that,” says your honest, reflective homeopathy fan. “I have no way of being certain. But I just don’t think that’s it. All I know is, I get better with homeopathy.”

Ah, now, but could that be because of “regression to the mean”? This is an even more fascinating phenomenon: all things, as the new-agers like to say, have a natural cycle. Your back pain goes up and down over a week, or a month, or a year. Your mood rises and falls. That weird lump in your wrist comes and goes. You get a cold; it gets better.

If you take an ineffective sugar pill, at your sickest, it’s odds on you’re going to get better, in exactly the same way that if you sacrifice a goat, after rolling a double six, your next roll is likely to be lower. That is regression to the mean.

“Well, it could be that,” says the homeopathy fan. “But I just don’t think so. All I know is, I get better with homeopathy.”

How can you both exclude these explanations – since you both need to – and move on from this impasse? Luckily homeopaths have made a very simple, clear claim: they say that the pill they prescribe will make you get better.

You could do a randomised, controlled trial on almost any intervention you wanted to assess: comparing two teaching methods, or two forms of psychotherapy, or two plant-growth boosters – literally anything. The first trial was in the Bible (Daniel 1: 1-16, since you asked) and compared the effect of two different diets on soldiers’ vigour. Doing a trial is not a new or complicated idea, and a pill is the easiest thing to test of all.

Here is a model trial for homeopathy. You take, say, 200 people, and divide them at random into two groups of 100. All of the patients visit their homeopath, they all get a homeopathic prescription at the end (because homeopaths love to prescribe pills even more than doctors) for whatever it is that the homeopath wants to prescribe, and all the patients take their prescription to the homeopathic pharmacy. Every patient can be prescribed something completely different, an “individualised” prescription – it doesn’t matter.

Now here is the twist: one group gets the real homeopathy pills they were prescribed (whatever they were), and the patients in the other group are given fake sugar pills. Crucially, neither the patients, nor the people who meet them in the trial, know who is getting which treatment.

This trial has been done, time and time again, with homeopathy, and when you do a trial like this, you find, overall, that the people getting the placebo sugar pills do just as well as those getting the real, posh, expensive, technical, magical homeopathy pills.

So how come you keep hearing homeopaths saying that there are trials where homeopathy does do better than placebo? This is where it gets properly interesting. This is where we start to see homeopaths, and indeed all alternative therapists more than ever, playing the same sophisticated tricks that big pharma still sometimes uses to pull the wool over the eyes of doctors.

Yes, there are some individual trials where homeopathy does better, first because there are a lot of trials that are simply not “fair tests”. For example – and I’m giving you the most basic examples here – there are many trials in alternative therapy journals where the patients were not “blinded”: that is, the patients knew whether they were getting the real treatment or the placebo. These are much more likely to be positive in favour of your therapy, for obvious reasons. There is no point in doing a trial if it is not a fair test: it ceases to be a trial, and simply becomes a marketing ritual.

There are also trials where it seems patients were not randomly allocated to the “homeopathy” or “sugar pill” groups: these are even sneakier. You should randomise patients by sealed envelopes with random numbers in them, opened only after the patient is fully registered into the trial. Let’s say that you are “randomly allocating” patients by, um, well, the first patient gets homeopathy, then the next patient gets the sugar pills, and so on. If you do that, then you already know, as the person seeing the patient, which treatment they are going to get, before you decide whether or not they are suitable to be recruited into your trial. So a homeopath sitting in a clinic would be able – let’s say unconsciously – to put more sick patients into the sugar pill group, and healthier patients into the homeopathy group, thus massaging the results. This, again, is not a fair test.

Congratulations. You now understand evidence-based medicine to degree level.

So when doctors say that a trial is weak, and poor quality, it’s not because they want to maintain the hegemony, or because they work for “the man”: it’s because a poor trial is simply not a fair test of a treatment. And it’s not cheaper to do a trial badly, it’s just stupid, or, of course, conniving, since unfair tests will give false positives in favour of homeopathy.

Now there are bad trials in medicine, of course, but here’s the difference: in medicine there is a strong culture of critical self-appraisal. Doctors are taught to spot bad research (as I am teaching you now) and bad drugs. The British Medical Journal recently published a list of the top three most highly accessed and referenced studies from the past year, and they were on, in order: the dangers of the anti-inflammatory Vioxx; the problems with the antidepressant paroxetine; and the dangers of SSRI antidepressants in general. This is as it should be.

With alternative therapists, when you point out a problem with the evidence, people don’t engage with you about it, or read and reference your work. They get into a huff. They refuse to answer calls or email queries. They wave their hands and mutter sciencey words such as “quantum” and “nano”. They accuse you of being a paid plant from some big pharma conspiracy. They threaten to sue you. They shout, “What about thalidomide, science boy?”, they cry, they call you names, they hold lectures at their trade fairs about how you are a dangerous doctor, they contact and harass your employer, they try to dig up dirt from your personal life, or they actually threaten you with violence (this has all happened to me, and I’m compiling a great collection of stories for a nice documentary, so do keep it coming).

But back to the important stuff. Why else might there be plenty of positive trials around, spuriously? Because of something called “publication bias”. In all fields of science, positive results are more likely to get published, because they are more newsworthy, there’s more mileage in publishing them for your career, and they’re more fun to write up. This is a problem for all of science. Medicine has addressed this problem, making people register their trial before they start, on a “clinical trials database”, so that you cannot hide disappointing data and pretend it never happened.

How big is the problem of publication bias in alternative medicine? Well now, in 1995, only 1% of all articles published in alternative medicine journals gave a negative result. The most recent figure is 5% negative. This is very, very low.

There is only one conclusion you can draw from this observation. Essentially, when a trial gives a negative result, alternative therapists, homeopaths or the homeopathic companies simply do not publish it. There will be desk drawers, box files, computer folders, garages, and back offices filled with untouched paperwork on homeopathy trials that did not give the result the homeopaths wanted. At least one homeopath reading this piece will have a folder just like that, containing disappointing, unpublished data that they are keeping jolly quiet about. Hello there!

Now, you could just pick out the positive trials, as homeopaths do, and quote only those. This is called “cherry picking” the literature – it is not a new trick, and it is dishonest, because it misrepresents the totality of the literature. There is a special mathematical tool called a “meta-analysis”, where you take all the results from all the studies on one subject, and put the figures into one giant spreadsheet, to get the most representative overall answer. When you do this, time and time again, and you exclude the unfair tests, and you account for publication bias, you find, in all homeopathy trials overall, that homeopathy does no better than placebos.

The preceding paragraphs took only three sentences in my brief Lancet piece, although only because that readership didn’t need to be told what a meta-analysis is. Now, here is the meat. Should we even care, I asked, if homeopathy is no better than placebo? Because the strange answer is, maybe not.

Let me tell you about a genuine medical conspiracy to suppress alternative therapies. During the 19th-century cholera epidemic, death rates at the London Homeopathic Hospital were three times lower than at the Middlesex Hospital. Homeopathic sugar pills won’t do anything against cholera, of course, but the reason for homeopathy’s success in this epidemic is even more interesting than the placebo effect: at the time, nobody could treat cholera. So, while hideous medical treatments such as blood-letting were actively harmful, the homeopaths’ treatments at least did nothing either way.

Today, similarly, there are often situations where people want treatment, but where medicine has little to offer – lots of back pain, stress at work, medically unexplained fatigue, and most common colds, to give just a few examples. Going through a theatre of medical treatment, and trying every medication in the book, will give you only side-effects. A sugar pill in these circumstances seems a very sensible option.

But just as homeopathy has unexpected benefits, so it can have unexpected side-effects. Prescribing a pill carries its own risks: it medicalises problems, it can reinforce destructive beliefs about illness, and it can promote the idea that a pill is an appropriate response to a social problem, or a modest viral illness.

But there are also ethical problems. In the old days, just 50 years ago, “communication skills” at medical school consisted of how not to tell your patient they had terminal cancer. Now doctors are very open and honest with their patients. When a healthcare practitioner of any description prescribes a pill that they know full well is no more effective than a placebo – without disclosing that fact to their patient – then they trample all over some very important modern ideas, such as getting informed consent from your patient, and respecting their autonomy.

Sure, you could argue that it might be in a patient’s interest to lie to them, and I think there is an interesting discussion to be had here, but at least be aware that this is the worst kind of old-fashioned, Victorian doctor paternalism: and ultimately, when you get into the habit of misleading people, that undermines the relationship between all doctors and patients, which is built on trust, and ultimately honesty. If, on the other hand, you prescribe homeopathy pills, but you don’t know that they perform any better than placebo in trials, then you are not familiar with the trial literature, and you are therefore incompetent to prescribe them. These are fascinating ethical problems, and yet I have never once found a single homeopath discussing them.

There are also more concrete harms. It’s routine marketing practice for homeopaths to denigrate mainstream medicine. There’s a simple commercial reason for this: survey data show that a disappointing experience with mainstream medicine is almost the only factor that regularly correlates with choosing alternative therapies. That’s an explanation, but not an excuse. And this is not just talking medicine down. One study found that more than half of all the homeopaths approached advised patients against the MMR vaccine for their children, acting irresponsibly on what will quite probably come to be known as the media’s MMR hoax. How did the alternative therapy world deal with this concerning finding, that so many among them were quietly undermining the vaccination schedule? Prince Charles’s office tried to have the lead researcher sacked. A BBC Newsnight investigation found that almost all the homeopaths approached recommended ineffective homeopathic pills to protect against malaria, and advised against medical malaria prophylactics, while not even giving basic advice on bite prevention. Very holistic. Very “complementary”. Any action against the homeopaths concerned? None.

And in the extreme, when they’re not undermining public-health campaigns and leaving their patients exposed to fatal diseases, homeopaths who are not medically qualified can miss fatal diagnoses, or actively disregard them, telling their patients grandly to stop their inhalers, and throw away their heart pills. The Society of Homeopaths is holding a symposium on the treatment of Aids, featuring the work of Peter Chappell, a man who claims to have found a homeopathic solution to the epidemic. We reinforce all of this by collectively humouring homeopaths’ healer fantasies, and by allowing them to tell porkies about evidence.

And what porkies. Somehow, inexplicably, a customer satisfaction survey from a homeopathy clinic is promoted in the media as if it trumps a string of randomised trials. No wonder the public find it hard to understand medical research. Almost every time you read about a “trial” in the media, it is some bogus fish oil “trial” that isn’t really a “trial”, or a homeopath waving their hands about, because the media finds a colourful quack claim more interesting than genuine, cautious, bland, plodding medical research.

By pushing their product relentlessly with this scientific flim-flam, homeopaths undermine the public understanding of what it means to have an evidence base for a treatment. Worst of all, they do this at the very time when academics are working harder than ever to engage the public in a genuine collective ownership and understanding of clinical research, and when most good doctors are trying to educate and involve their patients in the selection of difficult treatment options. This is not a nerdy point. This is vital.

Here is the strangest thing. Every single criticism I have made could easily be managed with clear and open discussion of the problems. But homoeopaths have walled themselves off from the routine cut-and-thrust of academic medicine, and reasoned critique is all too often met with anger, shrieks of persecution and avoidance rather than argument. The Society of Homeopaths (the largest professional body in Europe, the ones running that frightening conference on HIV) have even threatened to sue bloggers who criticise them. The university courses on homeopathy that I and others have approached have flatly refused to provide basic information, such as what they teach and how. It’s honestly hard to think of anything more unhealthy in an academic setting.

This is exactly what I said, albeit in nerdier academic language, in today’s edition of the Lancet, Britain’s biggest medical journal. These views are what homeopaths are describing as an “attack”. But I am very clear. There is no single right way to package up all of this undeniable and true information into a “view” on homeopathy. When I’m feeling generous, I think: homeopathy could have value as placebo, on the NHS even, although there are ethical considerations, and these serious cultural side-effects to be addressed. But when they’re suing people instead of arguing with them, telling people not to take their medical treatments, killing patients, running conferences on HIV fantasies, undermining the public’s understanding of evidence and, crucially, showing absolutely no sign of ever being able to engage in a sensible conversation about the perfectly simple ethical and cultural problems that their practice faces, I think: these people are just morons. I can’t help that: I’m human. The facts are sacred, but my view on them changes from day to day. And the only people who could fix me in one camp or the other, now, are the homeopaths themselves.

It doesn’t all add up …
The ‘science’ behind homeopathy

Homeopathic remedies are made by taking an ingredient, such as arsenic, and diluting it down so far that there is not a single molecule left in the dose that you get. The ingredients are selected on the basis of like cures like, so that a substance that causes sweating at normal doses, for example, would be used to treat sweating.

Many people confuse homeopathy with herbalism and do not realise just how far homeopathic remedies are diluted. The typical dilution is called “30C”: this means that the original substance has been diluted by 1 drop in 100, 30 times. On the Society of Homeopaths site, in their “What is homeopathy?” section, they say that “30C contains less than 1 part per million of the original substance.”

This is an understatement: a 30C homeopathic preparation is a dilution of 1 in 10030, or rather 1 in 1060, which means a 1 followed by 60 zeroes, or – let’s be absolutely clear – a dilution of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000.

To phrase that in the Society of Homeopaths’ terms, we should say: “30C contains less than one part per million million million million million million million million million million of the original substance.”

At a homeopathic dilution of 100C, which they sell routinely, and which homeopaths claim is even more powerful than 30C, the treating substance is diluted by more than the total number of atoms in the universe. Homeopathy was invented before we knew what atoms were, or how many there are, or how big they are. It has not changed its belief system in light of this information.

How can an almost infinitely dilute solution cure anything? Most homeopaths claim that water has “a memory”. They are unclear what this would look like, and homeopaths’ experiments claiming to demonstrate it are frequently bizarre. As a brief illustration, American magician and debunker James Randi has for many years had a $1m prize on offer for anyone who can demonstrate paranormal abilities. He has made it clear that this cheque would go to someone who can reliably distinguish a homeopathic dilution from water. His money remains unclaimed.

Many homeopaths also claim they can transmit homeopathic remedies over the internet, in CDs, down the telephone, through a computer, or in a piece of music. Peter Chappell, whose work will feature at a conference organised by the Society of Homeopaths next month, makes dramatic claims about his ability to solve the Aids epidemic using his own homeopathic pills called “PC Aids”, and his specially encoded music. “Right now,” he says, “Aids in Africa could be significantly ameliorated by a simple tune played on the radio.”

· Ben Goldacre is a doctor and writes the Bad Science column in the Guardian. His book Bad Science will be published by 4th Estate in 2008. Full references for all the research described in this article, and the text of the Lancet article, can be found at badscience.net.”

Of course, Ben has been subjected to further abuse as a result of this article…

Aside from the obvious mistakes in the application of offsetting in their examples (for instance, there is no resulting baseline improvement in their application), they attempt to apply an economic solution to a problem that is essentially defined by morals. Flying home to see your family is not the same as infidelity. I think the fallacy in their argument is called a non sequitur – it does not follow.

By way of analogy, just because a hammer is quite obviously the “wrong tool” for eating your breakfast, that doesn’t mean it’s a “wrong tool”, period.
If you want to drive a nail, a hammer is quite effective – and relatively efficient.

For a more intelligent and reasoned understanding of carbon trading and offsetting, as well as the problems that need to be addressed, I’d suggest the article below from the economist. As it says toward the end, putting a price on producing carbon that approximates to its negative external costs encourages both developed and developing countries to find cleaner and cheaper technologies. If you’ve got a robust argument against that I’d like to hear it.

“GONE are the days when hemp-shoed Greens hurled invective at besuited businessmen, while corporate leaders derided environmental types for seeking an unattainable utopia. Increasingly the rival sides agree with each other. Carbon-emissions trading schemes implemented to foster compliance with greenhouse-gas limits set by the Kyoto treaty have become the main showcase for this convergence. Just this week the New York Mercantile Exchange said that it planned to join other energy exchanges in trading carbon-dioxide emissions credits and New Zealand announced the introduction, by mid-2008, of a carbon cap-and-trade system that will cover all areas of its economy. Carbon trading is clearly gaining traction around the world

A recent World Bank report on the development of carbon markets shows just how far carbon trading has come, but also the distance it has yet to go. The idea underpinning the markets is simple. Countries cap their emissions and then allocate permits to businesses that allow the production of a certain amount of carbon dioxide (or other polluting gas). Permits are allocated by a regulatory authority, although in theory they could be sold, a solution many economists would prefer. Businesses can then trade the permits on a liquid market.

The benefit of this approach over regulation is that the businesses which can reduce their emissions at the lowest cost do the bulk of the adjustment. Perverse incentives that can often hamper environmental regulations may also be avoided.

These schemes are large, and growing. Last year, carbon-trading markets grew to $30 billion, three times bigger than the previous year. Trading was dominated by permits issued under Europe’s emissions trading scheme but a voluntary private market worth $100m has also evolved. There is good evidence that prices respond robustly to changes in market conditions, which bodes well for their potential. But problems with implementation have also come to light. It became clear last year, for example, that many European governments had issued far too many permits; as a result, little actual emissions reduction took place. European regulators are trying to fix that now.

There are other worries. Buying offsets from developing countries makes sense, in theory. Poor nations often have inefficient old infrastructure that can be replaced relatively easily with less intensive new technologies, giving would-be abaters the most bang for their buck. But, too often, there is an enormous disparity between the cost of reducing the emissions, and the amount paid for the offset in European markets. In one case an incinerator that cost $5m to build generated permits worth $500m.

There are also legitimate questions about the effectiveness of projects meant to reduce carbon output. For starters, determining what constitutes an offset abatement is hotly contested. There are scientific disputes over how much carbon is saved by, say, planting trees. Economists also quarrel over how to value something like paying landfill owners to reclaim methane from garbage and burn it for electricity. Does that power represent new consumption, in which case there is little benefit, or does it replace power that otherwise would have been generated from coal?

There is an understandable temptation to be generous in estimating carbon savings. Auditors are supposed to prevent too much fudging, but this is tough when there is little agreement. In the voluntary market, the absence of generally accepted standards caused the World Bank to worry that a lack of credibility might undercut the broader market.

More troubling still is the possibility that such enormous opportunities for profit could provide an incentive to generate more pollution in order to get paid to clean it up: why not keep operating a decrepit old steel plant or even propose a new inefficient one? This policy may transfer large sums to the developing world, but it will not do much for greenhouse gases.

Supporters of tradeable offsets respond that if the world is serious about tackling climate change, it needs a way to bring emerging markets on board. Carbon-trading schemes help in several ways. First, they give rich nations some moral authority when asking poor ones to help out with climate change. Second, those nations will have a strong incentive to replace old technologies with cleaner new ones. Third, putting a price on carbon that approximates to its negative external costs encourages rich nations to find cleaner and cheaper technologies. And best of all the idea of fusing market economics with caring for the environment may gain increasing traction in the developing world.”