从鲍勃到巴拉克

我在美国的第一个感恩节，也是我第一次看到旧金山市区夜晚的灯光，虽然只是透过车窗的一瞥。Joan准备了一桌丰盛的晚饭，不过火鸡并不是主角——上个星期Frans de Waal在报告的结尾说"We are social eaters"——吃饭只是为了更好的交谈。我讲一讲中国以及我父辈的中国，Joan也回忆起她年轻时的美国，然后就说起了另一个Joan：Joan Baez，说起她当年站在卡车上一边演唱一边穿越Palo Alto的英姿。于是就翻出她的CD来听，再后来自然是Bob Dylan，Katelin调侃地说CD封面上那个青涩少年看上去只有十五岁。看着Joan, Katelin和David如痴如醉的神情，我可以想象那个属于Joan Baez和Bob Dylan、属于曾经的年轻人的美国，那个曾经一度消失的美国。

Joan说Folk在她们那个年代是美国音乐的主流，而今已经风光不再。这并不仅仅是简单的音乐潮流的更迭，因为Folk的兴起是与民主运动紧紧相连的。Joan Baez, Bob Dylan，包括John Lennon和Peter Seeger等等，都是那个时代民主运动的先锋人物，Joan说美国的黑人运动和越战的结束在很大程度上要归功于这些“艺人”领导的斗争，也许并非夸大其词。对比他们与近二十年的“明星”们，不难发现他们之间的巨大差别：现今的明星们大多拥有更甜美的嗓音、至少是更俏丽的形象，能够带给人更多直接的愉悦感；相比之下，Joan和Bob那一代的艺人在形象上也更加folk，甚至是貌不惊人、音色平平，不过更关键的区别在于他们有勇气自由表达自己的思想，而不仅仅是取悦于人，他们引领着和代表着那一代拥有人文关怀和政治理想的青年。

Joan和Bob早已老去，美国的新青年不再关心政治，也不再关心身边的世界，美国社会整体向右转，这一倾向在学术界这个小圈子里也很明显。无论是人权运动还是环境运动，活跃的仍旧是那些越老越顽强的斗士们，而年轻的faculty们似乎更乐意关紧自己实验室的大门。前些时候刚刚分到诺贝尔奖金的一位华裔科学家说：“我最大的理想就是让更多的年轻人来学生物。”我的一位室友对其崇拜不已，我对此可就不觉得很乐观了。科学家爱“科学”自然不错，至少远好过爱美元，但只爱“科学”似乎还是远远不够的，最近一期的Science上有一篇社论Scientists and Human Rights，呼吁科学家们关注社会，虽然是老调重弹，但有时似乎也确有重弹的必要。原因何在？也许如Robert Putnam所言，是人与人的疏离造成了社会资本的瓦解。谁来扭转这一趋势？

Bob走了，Barack来了。几十年的沉寂之后，新一代的美国青年以及40年前在广场之上高举反战旗号的曾经的美国青年终于又一次相聚在一起完成了“火炬传递”。广泛参与是民主的基础，从这一层意义上来讲，Barack的竞选过程本身就已经是具有历史意义的胜利。如Joan所言，Barack也许并不能创造奇迹，但是他的出现至少唤醒了更多人特别是更多年轻人对民主政治的希望与参与热情，几十年后再来看，这也许是比挽救经济危机更为重要的成就。

PS：加州的亚裔越来越多，但是他们几乎都是政治的绝缘体，即便旅居多年甚至揣着Phd文凭与绿卡，也仍然保守着亚洲似的犬儒理念：政治是当官的事情，与我无关。又或者偶有些微弱的声音，也多是些鼠目寸光的投机者。一百多年前我们“师夷长技以制夷”的实践以失败告终，时至今日，似乎仍然没有太多的进步。

The Tragedy of Modeling

Economics needs a scientific revolution : Article : Nature: "regulation also needs to improve."

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud

Financial engineers have put too much faith in untested axioms and faulty models, says Jean-Philippe Bouchaud. To prevent economic havoc, that needs to change.

Appearing way clearer than Greenspan's allegation, the physicist pointed out one of the key problems: The market trusts the economists who made predictions based on models that were never tested. It could be an interesting game for the kids to build a tower without a plumb, but it sounds not so funny playing with money.

Does Religion Make You Nice?

Does atheism make you mean?

The latest research on the correlation between religion and niceness. - By Paul Bloom - Slate Magazine: "Does Religion Make You Nice?"

Many Americans doubt the morality of atheists. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, a majority of Americans say that they would not vote for an otherwise qualified atheist as president, meaning a nonbeliever would have a harder time getting elected than a Muslim, a homosexual, or a Jew. Many would go further and agree with conservative commentator Laura Schlessinger that morality requires a belief in God—otherwise, all we have is our selfish desires. In The Ten Commandments, she approvingly quotes Dostoyevsky: "Where there is no God, all is permitted." The opposing view, held by a small minority of secularists, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, is that belief in God makes us worse. As Hitchens puts it, "Religion poisons everything."

Arguments about the merits of religions are often battled out with reference to history, by comparing the sins of theists and atheists. (I see your Crusades and raise you Stalin!) But a more promising approach is to look at empirical research that directly addresses the effects of religion on how people behave.

In a review published in Science last month, psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff discuss several experiments that lean pro-Schlessinger. In one of their own studies, they primed half the participants with a spirituality-themed word jumble (including the words divine and God) and gave the other half the same task with nonspiritual words. Then, they gave all the participants $10 each and told them that they could either keep it or share their cash reward with another (anonymous) subject. Ultimately, the spiritual-jumble group parted with more than twice as much money as the control. Norenzayan and Shariff suggest that this lopsided outcome is the result of an evolutionary imperative to care about one's reputation. If you think about God, you believe someone is watching. This argument is bolstered by other research that they review showing that people are more generous and less likely to cheat when others are around. More surprisingly, people also behave better when exposed to posters with eyes on them.

Maybe, then, religious people are nicer because they believe that they are never alone. If so, you would expect to find the positive influence of religion outside the laboratory. And, indeed, there is evidence within the United States for a correlation between religion and what might broadly be called "niceness." In Gross National Happiness, Arthur Brooks notes that atheists are less charitable than their God-fearing counterparts: They donate less blood, for example, and are less likely to offer change to homeless people on the street. Since giving to charity makes one happy, Brooks speculates that this could be one reason why atheists are so miserable. In a 2004 study, twice as many religious people say that they are very happy with their lives, while the secular are twice as likely to say that they feel like failures.

Since the United States is more religious than other Western countries, this research suggests that Fox talk-show host Sean Hannity was on to something when he asserted that the United States is "the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the Earth." In general, you might expect people in less God-fearing countries to be a lot less kind to one another than Americans are.

It is at this point that the "We need God to be good" case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

Denmark and Sweden aren't exceptions. A 2005 study by Gregory Paul looking at 18 democracies found that the more atheist societies tended to have relatively low murder and suicide rates and relatively low incidence of abortion and teen pregnancy.

So, this is a puzzle. If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well—better, in many ways, than devout ones.

The first step to solving this conundrum is to unpack the different components of religion. In my own work, I have argued that all humans, even young children, tacitly hold some supernatural beliefs, most notably the dualistic view that bodies and minds are distinct. (Most Americans who describe themselves as atheists, for instance, nonetheless believe that their souls will survive the death of their bodies.) Other aspects of religion vary across cultures and across individuals within cultures. There are factual beliefs, such as the idea that there exists a single god that performs miracles, and moral beliefs, like the conviction that abortion is murder. There are religious practices, such as the sacrament or the lighting of Sabbath candles. And there is the community that a religion brings with it—the people who are part of your church, synagogue, or mosque.

The positive effect of religion in the real world, to my mind, is tied to this last, community component—rather than a belief in constant surveillance by a higher power. Humans are social beings, and we are happier, and better, when connected to others. This is the moral of sociologist Robert Putnam's work on American life. In Bowling Alone, he argues that voluntary association with other people is integral to a fulfilled and productive existence—it makes us "smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy."

The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong communities. In fact, Zuckerman points out that most Danes and Swedes identify themselves as Christian. They get married in church, have their babies baptized, give some of their income to the church, and feel attached to their religious community—they just don't believe in God. Zuckerman suggests that Scandinavian Christians are a lot like American Jews, who are also highly secularized in belief and practice, have strong communal feelings, and tend to be well-behaved.

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, "[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them."

The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones like Schlessinger, find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything, but it deserves part of the blame for this one.

Say No onto Prop 8

They won the campaign for White House, but they lost the battle to deny Prop 8 in CA. As what Obama said, US is a country of "gay and straight", so no one should be discriminated as a second-class citizen because of his or her sex orientation. The failure proves that there is still a long way towards Liberté, égalité, fraternité, but fortunately, they are at the frontier of the march.

Student Protest at White Plaza, Stanford

Step towards fraternité

04/11/2008, Stanford (c) Albatross

It has taken over two hundred years for the motto Liberté, égalité, fraternité to emerge and struggle to fix into the modern civilization. And today, the history took a remarkable step towards the goal when the first colored president of US made his address before the world, in which he also explicitly mentioned "gay and straight". It remains a myth how the generally pro-social and other-regard moral and emotions evolved, but they might be the unique treasure we homo sapiens are pride of rather than any technical innovations we have created.

The Personal Is Political