What is the Default Afterlife?

I have been reading more Islamic law and continue to find it interesting. One issue implicit but not yet explicit in what I have read is the title of this post.

Islamic law classifies actions into five categories. An obligatory action is one which God will reward you for doing and punish you for not doing. A recommended action is one which you will be rewarded for doing but not punished for failing to do. A neutral action is one for which you are neither punished or rewarded, whether or not you do it. An abhorrent action is one which you are rewarded for not doing but not punished for doing. A forbidden action is one which you are rewarded for not doing, punished for doing.

Which sounds perfectly clear, unless you are an economist. To an economist, all costs are opportunity costs—the cost of doing X is the value of whatever you have to give up in order to do it. The cost of an A on the final might be a missed party the weekend before and several Friday evenings earlier in the quarter spent studying instead of going on dates.

From that point of view not being rewarded is a form of punishment, not being punished a form of reward. To make sense of the legal categories, one needs to somehow define a neutral point, a baseline, relative to which reward and punishment are measured. If you do nothing that deserves either punishment or reward, what happens to you when you die? Oblivion? Limbo? Heaven, but a tourist class version?

The same issue is raised by a different part of the law. Adult Muslims are obligated to obey Islamic law, subject to divine punishment if they don't. But the dominant philosophical position in Islamic law holds that one cannot tell by reason alone what is good and what is evil—it requires revelation. So what happens to someone who has never received God's word, having lived in a time and place with no prophet to deliver it and no transmission of the words of any past prophet?

In medieval Catholicism, the analogous question was the status of the virtuous pagan. Christ was necessary for salvation; what happened to people who lived decent lives but had the bad luck to be born before the incarnation? Dante's answer was that almost all such people ended up in a relatively pleasant part of Hell, where the only torture was separation from God. A special few were saved, by Christ (during the time between crucifixion and resurrection) coming down to Hell to fetch them out—the "harrowing of Hell."

The Muslim answer was more tolerant than the Christian, since it did not require the pagans to be virtuous. They did not obey God's commands, not having heard them, so did not get rewarded. But they were not responsible for disobeying the commands, not having heard them, so did not get punished. Even if they sinned.

Which gets us back to the question I started with. If they were neither rewarded nor punished, what happened to them when they died? What was the default afterlife?

And I cannot resist the temptation to end with a link to Rudyard Kipling's account of  the fate of someone who did nothing good or bad. Ever.

A Gift that Keeps on Giving

There is one very important question about government surveillance that I have not yet seen discussed: What happens to the data?

To see why that matters, imagine it is 2016 or 2020 and the candidate of the incumbent party faces a serious risk of losing. Someone in the security apparatus, loyal to the candidate or believing that the election of the opposition candidate poses a serious risk to security, starts looking through a massive database containing records of all phone calls made over the previous ten years—who called whom from where—looking for calls made by or to the candidate. He finds in the pattern evidence of an extra-marital affair. He waits until the candidate has been nominated, then leaks the information to a friendly reporter. Or imagine that some important bill is up in Congress and the vote is very close. A senator opposed to the bill gets a call from someone who makes it clear that he has somehow obtained information of misdeeds by the senator, political, marital, or legal, and the information will become public if the senator shows up and votes against. 

Modern technology makes it possible to inexpensively store and access vast amounts of data. The hard drives I own have a total capacity of several terabytes; a terabyte is enough to store a significant amount of data—about six hundred words worth—on every person in the U.S. The much larger storage facilities available to the National Security Agency should have no difficulty holding the complete calling records of the entire population over a period of decades. And once the information is there, whatever the legal purpose for which it was collected, it can be used for other purposes.

Whatever else comes out of the current controversies, one thing that should come out, and probably will not, is a requirement that all data collected and not used be erased within a reasonable period, say a year, after collection.

Vinge, Heinlein the Sagas and Me

I mentioned some time back a talk I was giving at Duke on Stateless and Semi-Stateless Societies in Fiction and Semi-Fiction. It occurred to me that I should provide a link to my recording of it for readers of this blog, especially ones interested in either science fiction or anarchism.

Wael Hallaq 0/Francis Galton 2

I am currently most of the way through Shari'a, an interesting book on Islamic law by a leading scholar of the field. It's a book that should be of particular interest to libertarians, since a large part of his thesis is that traditional Islamic law was decentralized, mostly out of state control, worked very well, and was destroyed during the 19th and 20th century by the rise of the nation state.

One problem with reading such a book is that much of the argument depends on evidence I cannot readily check, since I am not a specialist in the field and do not read Arabic. But I have been trying to check it where I can, looking both at sources he cites and translations of primary source material. My conclusion is that, while his thesis may be largely true, he badly overstates the strength of the evidence for it, viewing what he approves of through rose colored glasses and what he disapproves of through whatever are the opposite of rose colored glasses.

That conclusion was reinforced when I came across the following passage in support of an argument blaming western influence for the nationalist and patriarchal nature of modern Islamic states, and did a little online research to see if it was true:

"In nineteenth century Europe, the blood of a nation was not only a matter of symbolism and semiotics, but a scientific project. Galton, Spencer, Darwin and Gardiner, among others asserted that every part of the human body and every attribute of personality contribute, through the blood, to the formation of the sperm. ... From this logic followed the conception that it was the man, not the woman, who determined national attributes, ..."

Not only is it not true, it is very nearly the opposite of true, a fact Hallaq could have easily discovered. Darwin did conjecture that every part of the human body provided particles, which he called "gemmules," that contributed to the formation of the sperm—but also of the egg. To check that, all it takes is a google search on [Darwin Sperm egg gemmules]. And when Darwin's cousin Francis Galton demonstrated that blood did not carry heredity by doing a blood transfusion exchange between rabbits of differing appearance and observing the offspring, Darwin responded that he had not claimed the particles moved through the blood, that perhaps they were transmitted in some other way.

Not only did Galton demonstrate by experiment the opposite of what Hallaq claims he believed with regard to the role of blood in heredity, he also demonstrated the falsity of the view Hallaq  attributes to him about the roles of men and women. In Hereditary Genius, Galton investigated the inheritance of intellectual characteristics by compiling lists of prominent individuals in various fields and analyzing their relationships, looking at both male and female lines. His conclusion, in the chapter on English judges:

“Consequently, though I at first suspected a large residuum against the female line, I think there is reason to believe the influence of females but little inferior to that of males, in transmitting judicial ability.”

The whole passage I quoted above from Hallaq is false, easily demonstrated to be false, and the author uses it to support one of his claims. The conclusion is that he cannot be trusted to get the facts right, at least when they are facts that he thinks support his argument.

While it is disappointing to learn that Hallaq's work, however interesting, is unreliable, I am in his debt for calling my attention to Francis Galton, who turns out to be an interesting and impressive figure.

Art and Wine Festivals and Art

My wife and I spent several hours this past weekend at a local art and wine festival. Such festivals, fairly common in this area, are the current version of what used to be called craft fairs, an institution that, as best I can tell, originated in the U.S. about forty years ago, although of course trade fairs of other sorts go back much farther. A little googling found an interview with Carol Sedstrom Ross, apparently one of the originators of the idea:

Probably 90% of the 500 people who showed in that first fair I organised at Rhinebeck in the early 1970's had some other job. When I left Rhinebeck ten years later probably 90% of the exhibitors were making their living from selling their craft.

Two things strike me about such festivals/fairs. The first, suggested by the quote, is that they represent a new way in which individual artists, broadly defined, can support themselves, an alternative to selling through art galleries and stores. It seems clear, chatting with the artists, that there is now a substantial population of people practicing quite a wide variety of arts whose life alternates between making stuff during the week and selling it on the weekend.

The other thing that strikes me is the range of quality. Much of what is sold is cheap in both senses of the term, items with little originality or artistic value produced in quantity. But many of the artists are selling art, sometimes at prices one would expect to see in an upscale store. I was shocked to discover that one pendant, containing an impressive opal, was being offered for just under nine thousand dollars. 

But perhaps I shouldn't have been, since one of the sellers we enjoy visiting at art festivals and, very rarely, buy from is Hudson River Inlay, a firm that produces marquetry, detailed paintings done in inlaid wood (and turquoise and mother of pearl and ...) and taking the form of tables, wall mirrors, and the like, much of it priced in the thousands of dollars—and worth it. What they are doing is, in my view, easily the equal of the pieces in the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, a museum in Florence exhibiting similar work done in inlaid semprecious stone (free plug for both). 

Which makes me wonder, if one could look at early 21st century art from a perspective a century or two in the future, how much of what art historians thought worthy of respect would turn out to come from work subsidized by the National Endowment for the Arts, how much from work produced to be sold in high end art galleries, and how much work sold on weekends, out of booths, by the artists and their friends and spouses. 

 

The prices people are willing to pay for art provide a very imperfect measure of its quality, but at least an objective one. My subjective opinion is that quite a lot of what I see at art festivals, including inexpensive as well as expensive work, is both good art and, in one way or another, original. What we actually ended up buying last weekend consisted mostly of  dresses for my daughter,  shirts for my wife, a dress for my granddaughter and a shirt for my grandson, as well as a few pieces of jewelry—all items more than two orders of magnitude less expensive than that opal pendant. My wife commented that she and our daughter could spend several hours in a shopping mall, try on three dresses and buy none of them, while less than half an hour at the Harmony Enterprises (another free plug) booth, including the time to take pictures with my cell phone, email them to our daughter in Chicago and get back her decision about which ones to get ("all three of them"), provided three tie dyed dresses for one, three shirts for the other, and gifts for both grandchildren.

James Hanson Gets it Partly Right

A recent piece by James Hanson proposes the formation of a centrist political party organized around the issue of global warming. The policy he proposes is a carbon tax charged to producers of fossil fuels, with the revenue returned to the population as a fixed amount per capita which he calls a dividend. Otherwise known as a demogrant.

There are several things I found interesting about the proposal. One is that, given his factual beliefs—that global warming due to the burning of fossil fuel imposes very large net costs—he has the economics right. His proposal makes much more sense than what politicians who talk about global warming have actually been pushing, which has ranged from electric auto subsidies to the mandated use of biofuels. If burning fossil fuels  produces large net externalities, the sensible way of taking account of them is to include those costs in the price of fuel and let individuals in a market society adjust to them.

Another thing I found interesting was the way in which his proposal was targeted at the political center. Conservatives and libertarians, even ones who agree with Hanson about the dangers of global warming, are unlikely to approve  either of a tax that goes to increase government spending or of extensive regulation. They might prefer that revenues from a carbon tax go to reduce other taxes or to reduce the deficit, but distributing the money to the population is at least better than sending it to Washington. 

Those left of center might prefer that the revenues from a carbon tax go to help the poor. But while a  demogrant is not a very efficient form of income redistribution, it does on net transfer from the rich to the poor, since the rich consume, on average, more fossil fuel than the poor and so pay more of the tax. The net effect of his proposal is to reduce the production of CO2 in what economists view as the least costly way of doing so without doing anything that either the left or the right would object very strongly to. The right gets the market, the left gets some mild redistribution, and earth stays cool. It is a policy that should be popular with people on both left and right who agree with Hanson about the dangers of global warming.

One other thing I liked about the Hanson essay is that he argues in favor of nuclear power. As I pointed out some time back, nuclear power is the one substitute for fossil fuel that produces no CO2 and can be expanded almost without limit. That does not prove it should be expanded—for one thing, it is currently a more expensive source of power than fossil fuel. But it does mean that people worried about global warming ought to be biased in favor of nuclear power—and Hanson is.

 

There are, however, two things wrong with his proposal. The first is that, on the historical evidence, creating a third party in the U.S. political system and making it a serious competitor to the existing parties is extremely hard, so hard that it has been more than a hundred and fifty years since the last time it happened. If global warming were really producing, here and now, the sorts of catastrophes its prophets warn of, that might be enough to make it possible, but it isn't.

The second is that Hanson, like many other people, takes it for granted that global warming will have large net negative effects. For reasons I have discussed in earlier posts, I don't. So far as I can see, global warming on the scale suggested by the IPCC reports, about three degrees Centigrade and a foot or two of sea level rise over a century, is at least as likely to produce net positive effects as net negative, probably more likely. That might not be true if the  trend was continued for several more centuries but, given how rapidly technological change is altering the world, I think any predictions more than a century out, probably any predictions even that far out, should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

My past posts on global warming.

How Strongly do Believers Believe: Historical Evidence

George Orwell, writing about religious belief in England, commented that what he wanted to know was not how many people confessed to a vague belief in a supreme being but how many believed in Heaven the way they believed in Australia. I was recently reminded of that comment reading a book on Ottoman law. Under that legal system, there were situations in which a defendant could clear himself by swearing an oath. According to the author's account, there were records in the surviving legal documents of capital cases where the defendant refused to swear and was executed as a result, as well as other cases where the defendant was convicted of a capital offense on his own voluntary confession. The obvious conclusion is that the defendant must have believed in Heaven and Hell very much as Orwell's contemporaries believed in Australia, and preferred death with a hope of Heaven to a life leading to Hell.

It is the obvious interpretation, and the one the author of the book I was reading offered. It may well be the correct interpretation. But I would want to know more about the situation to be sure.

Imagine someone a few centuries hence looking at records from the current American legal system without much knowledge of how it actually worked. Observing that a large majority of felony convictions were by confession, he might well conclude that 21st century American criminals were so honest,  perhaps so afraid of divine punishment for denying their crimes, that they preferred a certainty of prison to a chance of freedom bought at the cost of a lie. What he would be missing would be the institution of plea bargaining, under which a defendant confesses to a lesser charge in exchange for not being tried on a greater, choosing a certainty of (say) one year in prison over a gamble between going free and serving a much longer sentence. Given that institution, the fact that someone pleads guilty not only does not show that he is honest, it does not even show that he is guilty.

Which makes me wonder whether we might be missing similar features of the Ottoman case. The charges were probably for Hadd offenses, the short list of offenses deemed Koranic. Hadd offenses have fixed penalties and high standards of proof. Zina, unlawful sexual intercourse, is a capital offense if committed by someone who is or has been married and so has had the opportunity for lawful intercourse, but normally requires four witnesses to the same act for conviction. Or confession.

In some, perhaps all, cases the same act that can be prosecuted as a Hadd offense with a fixed penalty and a high standard of proof can also be prosecuted as a Tazir offense with a variable penalty, set by the judge, and a lower standard; the schools of law differ on the upper bound of the penalty. One can imagine a case where a defendant believed that if he denied the Hadd charge he would be tried instead on the Tazir charge and receive a penalty as severe or almost as severe. And one can also imagine pressures, legal or non-legal, religious or secular, that would make him prefer the former alternative. 

There is another possibility. Islamic religious law, fiqh, does not permit torture. Ottoman law, a fusion of fiqh and Sultanic pronouncements (kanun), did. So we do not know, at least I do not know, how voluntary the voluntary confessions were.

One might be able to explain away the evidence for strong religious belief along these lines, but it is entirely possible that the author I have been reading is correct in his interpretation. For those of us who do not believe in religion, it is tempting to see other people's belief as only semi-real, as more like my belief in the world of Lord of the Rings (the book, which I read early enough so I had to wait for the second volume to be published, and have reread many times since) than my belief in Australia. It is tempting to interpret our picture of how religious people were in the past as an artifact of filtered data, our sources for the relevant history largely consisting of accounts written by clerics, a point made by Georges Duby, a prominent medieval historian, in a book that used a rare secular source to provide a balancing picture. But it is hard to see how one can give a complete account of history, or even of the present world, without concluding that for  a substantial number of people Heaven really was, or is, as real as Australia.

Utilitarianism

Via xkcd.