Carl Sagan and the Bible

When it came time to write my final college paper, for a class in Christian theology, I proposed to write about Carl Sagan's ideas -- particularly his views on religion -- as he layed them out in Cosmos, The Dragons of Eden, and Broca's Brain. I had recently devoured these books as well as his celebrated PBS series with great fascination, and I was eager to make an exploration of his ideas as they might impact religious truth. But my professor was not keen on the idea of any theology paper based on Carl Sagan's thought. He argued that Sagan was not a universally respected scientist (which was true enough due to Carl's reputation as a popularizer of science), and that he could even be regarded as a pseudoscientist. I quickly pointed out that an entire section of Cosmos was devoted to a critique of pseudoscience, and that I wasn't going be writing about Sagan's scientific work anyway; it was actually his views on religion and God that I found compelling. Still, my professor persuaded me to write instead about the Counter-Enlightenment views of Giambattista Vico. I did so. I gave exactly one paragraph to Vico, and devoted my paper after all to Sagan's books and to other popular discussions of science. It was one of the most wide-ranging and, perhaps, unfocused things that I ever wrote. It got a D+.

Sagan has always had my respect, and probably always will. I am reminded of him now after reading a transcript of the answers he gave in a Q&A session at the 1994 CSICOP conference in Seattle. The acronym stands for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. He delivered the keynote address, "Wonder and Skepticism," and the Q&A session was transcribed but forgotten until this summer, when the Skeptical Inquirer published it (see the July/August issue).

Sagan answered some questions about pseudo-scientific claims, like the "Face on Mars", and claims of alien abduction. The evening's final questioner asked whether religion should not receive the same kind of scrutiny. Well up to now I was not aware of any in-depth comments from Sagan about the Bible, but that is exactly what he offered, and his response was so worthwhile that I've reproduced nearly all of it:

This is a really good question, and I know that Richard Dawkins talked about this a year or so ago, and drew the conclusion that many religious beliefs were not noticeably different from any of the parasciences or pseudosciences beliefs, and why one of them is the object of our attention and the other is off-limits, and he urged that we be, if I may use the expression, more ecumenical in our hostility. I will answer in the following way: first, that there is no human culture without religion. That being the case, that immediately says that religion provides some essential meat, and if that's the case shouldn't we be a little careful about condemning something that is desperately needed? For example, if I am with someone who has just lost a loved one, I do not think it is appropriate for me to say, "You know, there's no scientific evidence for life after death." If that person is gaining some degree of support, stability, from the thought that the loved one has gone to heaven and that they will be joined after the person I'm talking to, himself or herself, dies. That would be uncompassionate and foolish. Science provides a great deal, but there are some things that it doesn't provide. Religion is an attempt to provide, whether truly or falsely, some solutions to those problems. Human mortality is one of those where there isn't a smidgeon of help from science. Yes, it's a grand and glorious universe, yes it's amazing to be part of it, yes we weren't alive before we were born (not much before we were born) so we hope we're alive after we're dead. We won't know about it. It's a big deal. But that's not too reassuring, at least to many people.

Take the issue of the Bible. The Bible is in my view a magnificent work of poetry, has some good history in it, has some good ethical and moral scriptures -- but by no means everywhere, the book of Joshua is a horror, for example -- and on those grounds is well worth our respect. But on the other hand, the Book of Genesis was written in the sixth century B.C. during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. The Babylonians were the chief scientists of the time. The Jews picked up the best science available and put it in the book of Genesis, but we have learned something in the intervening two and a half millenia, and to believe in the literal truth of the attempted science in the Bible, is to believe too much. I know there are Biblical literalists who believe that every jot and tittle in the Bible is the direct word of God, given to a scrupulous and flawless stenographer, and with no attempt to use the understanding of the time, or metaphor or allegory, but just straight-out truth. I know there are people who think that. That seems to me highly unlikely. I think the way to approach the Bible is with some critical wits about us, but not dismissing it out of hand. There's a lot of good stuff in the Bible. Case-by-case basis is what I'm saying. Where religion does not pretend to do science, I think we should be open within the boundaries of good sense. I think that you cannot extract an "ought" from an "is," and therefore science per se does not tell us how we should behave, although it can certainly shed considerable light on the consequences of alternative kinds of behavior. From that we can decide how to arrange our legal codes and what to do. So the idea of an all-out attack on religion I think on many grounds would be foolish, but the idea of treating Biblical literalism, for example, with some skeptical scrutiny is an excellent idea. But it is being done, has been done for the last century by Biblical scholars themselves. I don't think there's any particular expertise in this movement for a critical examination of the Bible. There are other people who are doing it just fine.

I hope that sort of middle ground is not too different from what you were asking about, but I certainly don't think that religion should be off-limits. I don't think anything should be off limits. We should feel free to discuss and debate everything. That's what the Bill of Rights is about. And in that sense, and many other senses, the constitution of the United States, particularly the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment, and the scientific method are very mutually supportive approaches to knowledge. Both of them recognize the extreme dangers of having to pay attention to and do whatever the authority says.

I run across contempt and dismissal of religion so often in arguments by skeptics that it's gratifying to find Sagan saying that science knows nothing about death, that there's good history in the Bible, and that the Bible deserves our respect. His way of defining the Bible by distinguishing its genres is very nearly what I would say if I had to define the Bible. His description of the creation story as attempted science, cutting edge for its time -- rather than describing it with the word that everyone uses, myth -- is a real compliment from a scientist. Overall, as a non-literalist, I can see eye-to-eye with Sagan's prescription of taking everything in the Bible case-by-case and with neither uncritical reverence nor eager dismissal.

But particularly I'm pleased to hear Sagan arguing that Biblical scholars themselves have been doing the necessary work, and that secular skeptics have no cause to think of themselves as better able to do critical studies of the Bible than those who are already doing it. All of this hits home especially when I think of Jesus mythicists, who run against the consensus of most Biblical experts and would therefore certainly agree with the general statement, taken out of context, that there is no particular expertise in critical studies of the Bible. But I think they would find themselves disagreeing with the context, namely Sagan's ensuing claim. I would paraphrase that claim as such: skeptics who lack training in the Bible and wonder how best to disprove its historicity need not look any farther than those "other people" who are fully trained in Biblical studies. Jesus mythicists usually try to account for the existence of a consensus that runs counter to their thesis by speculating that biblical scholars are too emotionally tied to the Bible, and to their careers within the church or the ivory tower, to dare shake the boat on the controversial question of whether Jesus existed -- a speculation which implies that most of these scholars secretly believe or would like to believe something else, and which imputes cowardice to them. Mythicism, per this speculation, is more courageous -- a claim that is plainly stated before long.

Of course, such claims fail to account for atheist historians and for Biblical scholars outside the chuch and the ivory tower who all disagree with mythicism. But all that aside it should still be said that Biblical scholars are no less capable of examining their subject than anyone else; their thought is not homogenous, and their ranks include many agnostics and even atheists. Jesus mythicists use the work of the latter, and even much of the work of traditionalist scholars, to ply their theory -- which they should not do if their speculation about weak-minded scholarship is correct. If Sagan is wrong, and Biblical scholars are not doing the necessary work, then Jesus mythicists should stop citing the certified scholars, and simply proceed on their own. Some of the worst mythicists, like Acharya, do exactly this, and are rejected even by a great many mythicists. Those with the best standing have earned it by basing their work to a greater degree on the Biblical text and on some of the work done by trained scholars -- but this calls into question the whole idea that Biblical scholars are muddling along in political correctness. If scholars are less than courageous, or they're lazy, or complicit, then their work cannot be trusted on any score. Yes, a mythicist may assume that it's safe to use the most skeptical layers of a scholar who believes in a historical Jesus, but that assumption is unwarranted, if that scholar is wrong about what is surely the chief underlying assumption of their work. If Jesus did not exist, that changes everything in New Testament scholarship. (Whether it discredits everything, including for instance the ethical teachings, is a distinct question and should not be confused here). All specific claims would then have to be re-evaluated. If a specific claim is made within the model of a historical Jesus, no mythicist should trust or use it -- particularly if the scholar is deemed to be less courageous than yourself. Why trust the work of someone you look upon that way? If their work is trusted as sound, then the question returns: why do these trustworthy models always point to a historical Jesus?

That's just one of the questions Sagan prompts me to ask.

Jesus denial is not a hate crime

I'm finding out that on the web, your writings will be misrepresented and misused by others. Occasionally I google my full name to see if my blog is still coming up. Perhaps because of my recent lack of posts, it stopped coming up on its own sometime in the last month. But at the same time, my blog writings have started to appear, on other websites. This past weekend I found that if you google my name, this is some of what you get:

Jesus Denial Is Hate Crime - My Christian Network's christian forum
has found inexpressible joys as an adult by practicing these things, often onunexpected paths. Peace, Kevin posted by Kevin Rosero at 8:41 PM
...www.mychristiannetwork.com/forum/ showthread.php?t= 84044 - 131k - Cached - Similar pages

Jesus Denial Is Hate Crime
posted by Kevin Rosero at 8:41 PM http://roseandrock.blogspot.com/2005/04/jesus-denial.html. Back to top. All times are GMT - 5 Hours. Page 1 of 1 ...www.newsbackup.com/about815122.html - 110k - Cached - Similar pages

What's happened here is that my blog's opening post, "Jesus Denial", has been cut and pasted into discussion boards at both of the above sites ("catapulted" is possibly the term for this). Whoever did so named their own post, "Jesus Denial Is Hate Crime," without their own personal comment, and then quoted my post in its entirety, with my blog address included. So you might think, what's the big deal, if I was cited properly? Well, a few things here are not right -- and unfortunately I'm not just speaking of the one person who threw my writing around.

First, no one at these discussion boards has any way of knowing that I'm being quoted by someone else and not merely pushing my own writings; many people have replied (nastily) to my blog writings as if I was the one who put them there; some have told me to keep my writings on my blog instead of bringing them elsewhere.

Second there is the matter of the subject. I have not and would never have said that denying the existence of Christ is a hate crime, or even akin to a hate crime. I think of hate crimes as physical attacks. The Holocaust was a hate crime in that sense. But Holocaust denial is not a crime in my book (although I'm aware that it's illegal in Germany). Mere words and arguments can never constitute a crime, much less a hate crime. Words can express hate, but that's not a crime. Someone saw my post and felt that it expressed what was probably his/her personal view about Jesus denial being a hate crime. Yet my post says nothing about the law or about crimes; it says that Holocaust denial is more extreme than Jesus denial, and that the person who first argued with me about the existence of Christ was clearly not an anti-Semite or anything like it. My post laid out the reasons that Jesus denial failed as an academic theory, without going into the subject of law or crime. Later writings on my blog explored the problems with the Holocaust analogy, and I included explicit statements about Jesus deniers (or Jesus mythicists) not being motivated by the kind of prejudice that motivates Holocaust deniers. All these writings were posted before "Jesus denial" was catapulted into these other websites on July 14. I'm fairly certain that the person who used my first post did not see anything I wrote on my site afterwards. I know because I make small edits to my posts until someone comments on them, and the version of my "Jesus denial" post that was used, is an early version that was up only for a few days around April 28. So they missed my later writings, but of course they also misused the original post.

I clicked on the second of the two Google hits displayed above and went to www.newsbackup.com. My writing got posted there without anyone responding to it, and I managed to delete it. Originally this Google hit had an indented sub-hit underneath, with my "Jesus denial" writing appearing under the title, "Muslim Monsters blow up more children" -- the title of another thread at this site. My writing got thrown into that thread on July 14, twice, without comment, again under the post-heading of "Jesus denial is hate crime." There was no logical link to the subject matter about suicide bombers. That thread no longer displays under a search for my name; I've lost the link and cannot find the thread. The thread in which my writing appears as the first and only post, without responses, is nonexistent now that I deleted it, but it still comes up on Google exactly as you see above, when I search for my name. Google's software can take weeks to detect specific changes on the web, which is also the reason I'm only discovering now that my writing was thrown out there on July 14.

(And I now know why "Mythicist" left comments on my blog on July 15; he must have been at a site where my writing got thrown into the discussion. If not for that I don't know when he would have stumbled across my blog. I do wish, though, that "Mythicist" had identified himself).

Then I went to the hit for My Christian Network and found that my writing had started a largely pointless but heated debate that went on for 53 web-pages. At Newsbackup, my writing had been posted by "Guest." Here it was posted by someone called wordsoftruth114@email.com. I tried that link and found it to be a nonexistent address. I tried posting to My Christian Network to explain all this, and my profile there says that I can post, but my posts appear for only a second before disappearing. I've tried posting on innocuous matters, and still no luck. Several emails to the administrators, and no response. I get no answer whether I ask about the flap over my writing or about my inability to post. I've even tried contacting members of the forum, and just my luck, no responses. I know my computer is okay because I just started posting to the Internet Infidels about Jesus mythicism, so I don't know what the problem could be. But obviously I do suspect that my questions are not welcome at the forum (although my blog writings seem to be perfectly welcome, under headings that are not my own). At a Christian forum -- that would be hurtful to me, if it were true.

The fact is that my experience at Internet Infidels has been better -- there they require you, before joining, to accept Terms and Agreements mandating civil and respectful discourse. (And the moderators enforce it). My first post there met with two courteous welcomes from other members. At My Christian Forum, which says that its purpose is "Bringing Christians Together" (though this Christian can't join the discussion), the debates I saw were heated and too often nasty. And I've had no response, of course, from anyone there.

I do not know who threw my writing around. At My Christian Network, one atheist who got involved in the 53-page debate complained on another thread about Christians barging into atheist discussion boards and calling people bigots for even questioning the existence of Jesus. This is what my writing seems to be used for. And I never intended it. My blog entry was deeply personal, and though I did speak in general terms of bigots, I never felt it would be right to do so when actually dialoguing with people. (See the link to the thread I started at Infidels). Someone out there thinks it's okay to do this, and to use someone else's words rather than their own, under a mispresentative title, without permission, and under an untraceable alias. That is cowardly.

There is still more to tell. By googling the phrase "jesus denial", you mostly get links to Jesus' denial of his body for our sake, wonderful things like that from normal sites. But you also get the phrase as a reference to Jesus mythicism. You get a few hits for my writings, but there are a few other interesting hits. One is about the controversy stirred up when a Holocaust denial organization, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), had an advertisement of theirs accepted and then pulled from The Nation magazine. The head of the IHR, Mark Weber, wrote a letter in protest to The Nation, and one of his arguments was this one:

As I’ve mentioned to you and others, in the very same May 3 issue of The Nation in which our ad appears, readers can find a classified ad (on page 61) offering a “scholarly booklet” that claims to provide “incontrovertible proof” that Jesus is fictional and never existed. Your policy of accepting “Jesus denial” advertising while rejecting “Holocaust denial” ads manifests a clear double standard that highlights the real icons and taboos in our society. This double standard also affirms the validity of what the author of The Founding Myths, and others, say about the clout and character of Jewish-Zionist power in America.

The report of this letter was posted to the web in April, 2004 -- many months before I started using the phrase, "Jesus denial." I thought once that the term was original to me, but obviously it isn't. I don't know who invented the term; but I can plainly see that at least one Holocaust denier likes using it. From my perspective it seems that he wishes to paint an equivalence between two denials: he wishes to say that denying the Holocaust is no worse, or no different, than denying the existence of Jesus. I know that's what he wishes to say because obviously Holocaust deniers always try to minimize what they're denying.

So I have come to regret using the term, and I will not be using it again. I might speak of someone plainly denying that Jesus existed, but I won't be using the phrase "Jesus denial". I don't want to be associated with a term that can give Holocaust deniers any support to their arguments. And the phrase, I have discovered, is too incendiary, despite my never having made an equivalence: whenever I have spoken briefly of the analogy, I have said that Holocaust denial is more extreme than Jesus denial and that the former stems from virulent, sickening ethnic prejudice; whenever I have spoken at length about the analogy, I've listed in detail what I thought the differences and similarities were between the two phenomena. But it can be counted on that some people will not use the analogy so carefully. And I myself failed to highlight one difference that was more crucial than any other: whatever close-mindedness may exist within Jesus mythicism, those who promote it are not trying to fight off the accusation that their people have murdered 6 million human beings. Holocaust deniers, indeed all who deny genocide, are desperate not to be tainted with monstrosity or demonstrable criminality, and their close-mindedness reflects that desperation. Much as I disagree with Jesus mythicists, that kind of close-mindedness does not exist among them.

A basic lesson here is that you can get the less extreme of two evils to look worse by associating them with each other, and perhaps that way you draw more attention to the thing you're attacking. Maybe that's fine as far as it goes. But of course, even if it works, you've just made the more extreme evil look like the lesser. I should have seen that, especially since I have always said that the two phenomena are unequal. Regardless, I want nothing to do with this.

And I have much to learn about blogging.

Edit (Aug. 23): I was able to bring up on google the hit, under a search for my name, for "Muslim monsters."

Muslim monsters blow up more Children
posted by Kevin Rosero at 8:41 PM http://roseandrock.blogspot.com/2005/04/jesus-denial.html ... posted by Kevin Rosero at 8:41 PM ...www.newsbackup.com/about815068.html - 182k - Cached - Similar pages

(Not that it's been an issue, but in the future I will also not be using "Muhammed denial", a phrase I probably did coin. Just seems the best way to avoid misunderstanding).

Edit (Aug. 24): On Google, the same way that you can look up web sites, you can look for discussion forums, under Google Groups. (I'm completely new to all this). My Christian Network's 53-page debate, "Jesus Denial is hate crime," comes up on Google, although there it is several pages longer, and the first seven pages or so are given over to rancorous fighting and charges of anti-Semitism. Only around page 8 do you get to some direct responses to my writing -- responses which appear immediately at My Christian Network. This suggests to me that My Christian Network deleted the nasty posts and kept the ones (some still quite nasty) dealing directly with my writing. Indeed in Google's version of the debate I've found some really disgusting insults directed at me, far from the ordinary variety.

That's my best guess so far, and I'm still guessing because I've had very little help with this (not to mention that my personal experience with these problems is negligible). No answer from My Christian Network, and few from anywhere else. Maybe the problem of cross-posting is just too common to get worked up about. Maybe this is seen as my personal problem, having chiefly to do with my image on Google and the wider web. Well, it's a certainty that I take myself too seriously; but I share that trait with many people and it says nothing about this problem. The fact is there are many serious issues here: how to use other people's writings; the responsibilities of any forum, including the obligation to respond to honest queries; the specific issues over the Holocaust and Jesus mythicism. You would think Christians and atheists alike could work up some concern.

I'll keep trying to find answers.

The Moon thru my telescope

Taken on the evening of June 16, 2005.

My debate with Noam Chomsky

Since I mentioned Noam Chomsky in my last post, I figured, why not share a brief "debate" I've had with him -- a public one, not confidential. I wrote a letter responding to an article he submitted in the literary journal The Sun, and he published a reply to my comments. This was my letter, as I submitted it:

Re: “Hidden Power: Noam Chomsky on Resurrecting the Revolutionary Spirit of America.”

Noam Chomsky is consistently interesting to read when he’s speaking about domestic politics. But his cold, intellectual response to human suffering is always infuriating. He says that “The system of governance within the corporation is as close to totalitarianism as anything humans have devised,” because orders comes from above while people “rent” themselves at the bottom. Only an intellectual enjoying physical safety could speak about totalitarianism as if all it required were hierarchy and a suffering proletariat. Chomsky says that a corporation is as close to totalitarian as anything devised in the Soviet Union or Communist China. Yet who could talk about those systems without speaking of the suffering they caused? Totalitarianism is not just verbal orders or propaganda, or even exploitation. Its central aspect, everyone now knows, is suffering. It is murder, imprisonment, and abusive power.

As the Soviet archives are opening, and even before China’s archives have opened, we are learning that these two totalitarian systems together murdered about 100 million people in the 20th century, within their own borders, and quite apart from what they did in foreign wars. That’s a number roughly equal to all the deaths in all the international wars of the last century. You couldn’t live under these systems without pervasive fear, even if you were part of the ruling elite. Yet I have worked at large corporations without fear. Chomsky thinks that if he can establish some parallels through mental tricks, the suffering can be laid by, without a human response. As someone of an intellectual temperament, I have made such mistakes, and can see them. It is self-flattering to say, for instance, that because propaganda in this country is more subtle and pervasive than anything in Hitler’s regime, then we are living under a new Hitler. It gives us a cheap way of feeling, without having to work for it, that we are smart, and that our lives and actions are important to history. If you’re an intellectual, or a member of a privileged class, and you observe that our mental lives are beset by propaganda less gross than Stalin’s, you conclude that our lives are beset by a danger more insidious than anything in communism. But what is more insidious than a form of government that treacherously promises salvation but actually liquidates a hundred million human beings?

Life is more than the verbal, mental, or even the emotional aspect. Life is experience – too much of it unimaginably painful, especially to those of us who live either in our heads or in a physically safe environment.

I realize this was too personal. Here is the edited version published by The Sun:

Noam Chomsky is interesting to read when he's speaking about politics, but his cold, intellectual response to human suffering is infuriating. He says that "the system of governance within the corporation is as close to totalitarianism as anything humans have devised," because orders come from above while people "rent" themselves at the bottom. But totalitarianism is more than hierarchy, propaganda, and a suffering proletariat. Totalitarianism is murder, imprisonment, and abusive power. In the twentieth century the Soviet Union and China together murdered about 100 million people within their own borders. You couldn't live under a totalitarian system without experiencing pervasive fear, even if you were part of the ruling elite. It is easy to say that because propaganda in this country is more subtle and pervasive than anything in Hitler's regime, we are living under a new Hitler. It makes us feel that our lives are best by a danger more insidious than Nazism or even Soviet communism. But what is more insidious than a form of government that kills millions of its own citizens?

And finally, Chomsky's reply:

Totalitarianism, democracy, dictatorship, and so on, are forms of social organization. "Murder, imprisonment, and abusive power," are hideous crimes, but a different matter. There have been relatively benevolent dictatorships -- which is no argument for dictatorship -- and the world's leading democracy tolerated literal slavery for much of its history, and tolerates to this day slavery's disgraceful residue, not to speak of the fate of what John Quincy Adams called "that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty." The world's leading democracies continue to be responsible for horrendous crimes outside their borders.

As for the 100 million deaths attributed to Soviet and Chinese communism, 25 million of them resulted from the Chinese famine of 1958-1960, which is properly regarded as a political famine by economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. But Sen and fellow economist Jean Dreze attribute 100 million more deaths to India, over China, from independence to 1979 -- also political crimes, they point out, resulting from democractic capitalist policies.

Corporations have not refrained from violence, but mostly rely on powerful states to exercise violence on their behalf, with grim consequences. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, one of the leading advocates of the dominant state-corporate system, says, "The market requires a hidden fist. McDonald's can not flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15."

It's quite appropriate to condemn the crimes of the state's official enemies, as Soviet commissars did. What we should find "infuriating" is our own "cold, intellectual response to human suffering" when that suffering is caused by systems we support.

There is much in Chomsky's reply that I disagree with. I think he's misrepresented Friedman's point, though that's the least of it. He's put democracy on par with communism in several misleading ways: by invoking the widespread deaths and murders of Native Americans, without specifying that the causes were complex and the number of killings much smaller than those under communism by many, many magnitudes (a ratio of 1,000 to 1 would not be out of place); by invoking American slavery without noting that the gulag reintroduced lifelong slavery into the West; and by charging democracies with widespread killing outside their own borders, without noting that the 100 million deaths attributed to communist nations occurred within the technical boundaries of those nations, which included conquered nations such as Tibet and Ukraine. The worst crimes of Mao and Stalin were perpetrated in these foreign nations, but technically these nations were conquered territories so we recognize them as part of the Soviet Union and part of China -- and that's an insult to them. It is particularly insulting to Tibet -- I never see a map or globe that delineates Tibet in its own color, as its own nation. As many as 1 million people have been killed there since Mao's invasion.

But what caught my interest above all was the statement about China and India, partly because it was unclear in a basic sense: I didn't know what it meant to attribute "100 million more deaths to India, over China, from independence to 1979". Did this mean 100 million more deaths in India than in communist China? That would mean something like 150 million deaths in India.

At first I thought Chomsky was referring to Amartya Sen's claim that over 100 million women, mostly Asian, were "missing". Sen meant that in China, India and other parts of Asia men far utnumbered women for unclear reasons, though he argued for misogyny as the primary cause: perhaps Asian countries were mistreating their young girls, for instance by feeding them less than their sons in times of famine (the worst of these famines being induced, as Chomsky concedes, by a Communist government in China), or failing to take sick girls to doctors as regularly as their sick sons. Sen added that there were fewer missing females when a society gave them independence and private control over their lives. He reported his work in The New York Review of Books. I learned about it in an article at Slate.com, "The Search For 100 Million Missing Women", which presents Sen's ideas along with a very different theory by another economist, Emily Oster. It seems that Asian countries with a high incidence of hepatitis B have a high ratio of infant boys over girls, perhaps because the virus causes more miscarriages of girls. A population of Alaskan natives with a high incidence of hepatitis B and a high boy-girl ratio started producing a normal ratio of infants when immunized extensively for hepatitis B. That would seem to rule out, at least in Alaska, the possibility that mistreatment of girls or even female infanticide accounted for the original gender gap. However, the hepatitis B theory accounts for about half of the missing Asian women; the rest were probably victims of sexism and perhaps other unidentified killers. Hepatitis can account for 75% of the 50 million women missing in China, and only 20% of the 37 million missing in India.

But Chomsky was probably referring instead to a 1989 paper by Sen, in which the economist estimates that India's mortality rate for both sexes was exceeding China's by as much as 4 million per year, until 1979 (the last year included in the study). Sen does not calculate how many more "unnatural" deaths in total occurred in India than in China from the time of India's birth as a democracy in 1947, but Chomsky and others have cited the total as 100 million -- and in Chomsky's reply to me, that number serves to counteract the 100 million attributed to communism. The two systems, communism and democracy, once again seem equal. But obviously not all deaths carry the same moral weight. As Chomsky himself says, 25 million of the Chinese deaths can be attributed to a state-induced famine; that leaves 75 million killings for which he does not give a mitigating description. The vast majority of these deaths were the result of imprisonment, torture, slave labor, and execution. Sen's description of Indian mortality has nothing to do with the state using its firepower to control people. What he notes is that India's government failed to distribute resources successfully or equitably, so that many of the poorest died what might be defined as unnatural deaths. China's use of force to distribute goods and to do so equally gave that country a lower mortality and higher standard of living when compared to India, but not when compared to successful democracies like the U.S., Taiwan, Japan, and of course France or Britain. Chomsky is using the example of India, a country suffering from deep poverty with complex causes, to describe capitalism in general. Yet in his work I've seen no exploration of a crucial issue: India was born as a democracy in name, but its economic policy was largely socialist. India was not communist, so its government could not resort to the level of force that, besides destroying freedom, would indeed have given even the poorest of the poor -- at least in years between massive famine -- enough to scratch by and live into "old age"; but India never freed its economy from the state, either, so poverty endured.

Comparing Indian and Chinese mortality rates ultimately fails, on the level of morality. If you give everyone crumbs, they will all live, on average, a longer life; but doing so by force means that they live as wards and slaves of the state. We can compare numbers of deaths until the sun goes down, but in the end we have to ask whether people prefer to live free lives, even if these are shorter and more beset by risk or suffering, or lives in slavery -- tens of millions of which end up being cut off prematurely by the gun, the truncheon, or permanent imprisonment anyway. We can say truly that China's system of education was better than India's, in certain respects, and still question the value of an education in which history books were edited or written by a totalitarian government. India never suffered a famine because its free press always forced the otherwise ineffective government to do something; and further in India's favor, we have to add the fact that China's famine was state-induced. India's mortality may be described, at worst, as a problem resulting from poor modernization; but communist China created its own famine, and made the hunger so destructive, by embarking on a wholesale and violent restructuring of society.

The comparison between China and India is ultimately a comparison of two socialist countries, one communist and the other not. India is a true democracy, with a free press and free elections, but that does not mean its economy is free: no one would ever say that India in its early decades was capitalist (and I'm not sure it is capitalist even today). When Chomsky says that Sen regards the premature deaths in India as political crimes resulting, in Chomsky's words, from "democractic capitalist policies", a little context is needed: Sen is referring to the fact that India was born as a democracy and tried to make a transition to capitalism. Sen is not saying that premature Indian deaths occurred because of capitalism; he calls precisely for modernization combined with greater freedoms for individuals than India currently offers. But for some reason Chomsky wishes to set India against China, as a representative of democratic capitalism. Something is amiss, and unequal, in Chomsky's comparisons of human societies.

Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom

I used to hear it said sometimes that demonstrators against the Vietnam War were provoked to such great numbers only because of the draft -- that they were motivated by personal fear of fighting or dying. I never hear that about those protesting the Iraq war. We do not have a draft, yet the numbers of people who publicly opposed the invasion of Iraq excelled those of the Vietnam era. Were a draft to be instituted, the large protests would resume, probably larger than ever. Personal fear does motivate people; I'll concede that, even as I insist that other things motivate me or you or any person who takes a stance on a war. Anyway, fear of dying in a war without purpose strikes me as a perfectly legitimate motive. I just wonder how often we think of the other side of this coin: that people can support a war too easily, in fact too vociferously, because they do not face any personal risk of dying. I'm suggesting that when you stand in no danger of being drafted or killed, you can too easily fall into nationalistic fantasies. And like any fantasy, they will be immune to reason; you will defend your position with passion and stubborness, but not with reason or with the ability to listen soberly to others.

I did not support Desert Storm. I adopted Noam Chomsky's view that it constituted U.S. aggression. In those months after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, when the U.S. was building up a force to confront Saddam Hussein, I was in my junior year at Hamilton College in Utica, New York. I took seriously the prospect of being drafted. Perhaps a draft was never a true possibility, but I was not so familiar with the details of our situation to know that. I simply regarded the U.S. as about to enter its first war since Vietnam, and I associated both that war and the other war I thought about, World War II, with a draft. So for several weeks I soberly considered the possibility that I'd be drafted, that I'd have to fight in a desert war with chemical weapons at the age of 20, and that I would die without ever having really lived.

And you know what? I decided that if I were drafted, I would not run to Canada. I would go. I viewed the war as wrong, but I did not view it as lacking just causes entirely. I knew that fighting would produce some good and right a wrong that had been done to millions of people in Kuwait -- and that U.S. military power would grow, which I did not regard as a good thing. It may be that I was splitting hairs, but I am only reporting what my reflections were at the time. I felt that if I had been drafted into a war lacking any just cause, I should avoid the draft; but that if I were called to the Persian Gulf, my serious doubts and judgments about this war against Saddam Hussein would not justify fleeing elsewhere, flouting a considerable authority which I respected, abandoning fellow citizens, and upending my life forever. That was how I worked it out. I decided to go if called, but to oppose the war if I could.

What matters to me now is that I viewed the situation soberly. Whether I viewed it accurately is something else, and could be debated forever. But I was sober. Though susceptible to nationalistic fantasies, which did indeed affect me when the U.S. began its triumphal and almost cost-free victory, no fantasy was driving me in the fall of 1990, as U.S. troops gathered in Saudi Arabia. I was scared and deeply concerned, and engaged in the situation, or at least ready to be. I'm sure that regarding myself in that way -- regarding my own possible actions and duties -- helped me to see what was wrong with the war. It helped me not to get caught up in theories or fantasies about what might be. And indeed I think the whole country was quite sober in those months -- at least as I look back in retrospect.

In 2002 it was a different story. By then it was clear that Iraq could never defeat the U.S. or even bloody our military forces seriously. There had been no talk in 1990 of a cakewalk -- but this time around we have heard, from very early on, a lot about cakewalks and triumphal processions as liberators. We heard it because Desert Storm had made it possible for us to expect another quick military victory and prompt homecoming. And we heard it, I'm sure, because no one was afraid anymore of a difficult struggle requiring a draft.

The book that affected me most in the fall of 2002 was Kenneth Pollack's The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Pollack wrote, "... through our own mistakes, the perfidy of others, and Saddam's cunning, the United States is left with few good policy options toward Iraq, and increasingly, the option that makes the most sense is for the United States to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam, eradicate his weapons of mass destruction, and rebuild Iraq as a properous and stable society for the good of the United States, Iraq's own people, and the entire region." He added that he could hardly believe he was advocating such a course, and he always consistenly called it the least bad option. Pollack indeed is one of the most sober thinkers I know when it comes to Iraq. He said that it would be long, hard work, and that trying to do it on the cheap would be a serious mistake -- words that have come true. He saw that there was no serious connection between Iraq and 9-11 or Al-Qaeda, and warned that invading Iraq before the threat from Al-Qaeda had been contained would be a serious mistake. All this has been proven true. The Bush administration, besides selling the invasion as a blow to Al-Qaeda, has tried to do its project in Iraq on the cheap, and has indulged in triumphalist thinking incapable of sober listening.

But I have to admit that when Pollack laid out the invasion of Iraq in the words quoted above, I found his words stirring. It tapped a nerve in me that was hungry for a successful crusade, in the sense that Eisenhower meant when he used that word to describe the D-Day campaign. I was not being sober enough. I am glad that it was Pollack and not someone else who stirred me to support the war, and gratified that he became an early critic of the invasion, but I'm disappointed with myself when I think of how I knew, even before the invasion, that Pollack's description of the situation was quite different from Bush's, and how I set that aside because I wanted the invasion and simply hoped that it would turn out okay. That is the classic effect of a fantasy, isn't it? Something that you want, and that causes you to set aside real-world considerations, with a kind of blind hope. You go along with the good feelings (or the hope of good feelings), and let them decide the situation for you.

Since then Iraq has brought very little but sobering pain.