Parable of the Drunk and Sober Drivers

"When you (or somebody else) finally has the good idea, you feel very stupid for not having seen it sooner." — H. M. Georgi, "Grand Unified Theories" in The New Physics

One evening two men went to a social club event. One of the men had quite a bit of alcohol, the other stayed entirely sober.

Each man drove home in his car in the darkness. The sober man got distracted and drove off the road and smashed his car into a tree, but he was not hurt.

The drunk man weaved around a bit on the road and almost hit a car, a dog, and a mail box, but kept it together and made it home without scratching his car. He even managed to stumble unhurt into bed before passing out.

The men at the social club analyzed the event. The concluded that in the interest of safety, every man would be required to drink a minimum of two alcoholic beverages at all future events.

Obviously this is a false parable, but it illustrates some very interesting aspects of reality and the human mind. In shows the difference between anecdotal evidence and statistics. Also that drinking is preferable to sobriety, until it isn't.

Statistically driving drunk is a bad bet. Take a sufficiently large sample and a trend will appear. Not everyone who drives sober drives safely every time. Not everyone who drives drunk gets in a wreck every time. But the frequency of accidents is quite a bit higher for drunk drivers than for sober drivers. The frequency of accidents also climbs as the amount of alcohol measured in the blood climbs.

I originally made up this parable to explain to my friends why one of my friends did not believe in global warming. Most of my believer friends have only the vaguest idea of how statistics work. That does not prevent them from sharing statistics that confirm their beliefs, even if it is easy to show the statistics are falsified. Math is just not a strong point with them. Let's call them artists, rather than math disabled.

On the other hand my global warming denier friend is a very capable guy. He is good at logical argument, at accounting, and at statistics. He knows more about the history of temperatures of the ancient earth than I do. So what are the chances that he is wrong and the artists are right?

We can know he is wrong by looking at the work of people, scientists, who know even more than he does. Those scientists have vast arrays of data available for analysis and know what can go wrong when data is collected.

We know he is wrong because we can step into a greenhouse during a sunny day in winter and notice it is warmer than outside. We can check (should we have the time and interest) the spectral characteristics of sunlight, of carbon dioxide, and of the radiation of heat from the earth, and see that carbon dioxide is indeed a greenhouse gas. And we can measure (in a home lab, if you have the money for equipment and the skill) the level of carbon dioxide in the air, and compare it to older measurements. And of course there are all those thermometers the scientists have set up around the world, starting in the 1700s.

But for a lot of stuff is even harder to distinguish between anecdotes, belief systems, and factual statistics. Recent studies showed many science experiments are difficult to reproduce, and that difficulty seems to be driven by mental (and ethical) problems of the scientists. In other words, Publish or Perish drives the survival of the best liars. In particular it seems like the entire profession of Psychology is run by nut cases. When specifically asked why their experimental techniques were so bad, most psychologists did not even seem to understand there was a problem. Yikes. [See How Scientists Fool Themselves]

Of course my global warming denier friend would take this information and say exactly: my global warming denier scientific minority has it right. Your ecology-warped green scientists are misinterpreting the data.

Even stay-at-home paranoid Internet mavens don't have time to check every fact. Politics and many other professions depend on lying as a basic tool. Yet we need truth or we will suffer bad consequences.

Fortunately most lies don't pass the basic smell test. My first order guess is that the scientists are right and the theologians are wrong. Scientists are not always right, and theologians are not always wrong. But it you drink the theological kool-aid, you are going to crash into reality at some point.

Four Pillars of Mormonism and Islam

The resemblance between the Latter Day Saints sects, or Mormonism, and Islam are not just a coincidence. Before examining the Islamic roots of Mormon in later articles, I want to illuminate the relationship by exhibiting four pillars that unite Islam and Mormonism and distinguish the these religions from orthodox Christianity.

I. The Prophets

Both Joseph Smith and Muhammad claimed the role of Prophet. Each saw themselves, and were seen by their followers, as being in the line of the great Jewish prophets like Noah, Moses, Ishmael, and Isaac. The Koran names Jesus of Nazareth as a prophet. The Mormon view of Jesus will be discussed below. It is notable that during his lifetime his followers referred to Joseph Smith, in writing, as The Prophet, which was how Muhammad has always been referred to by the Islamic faithful.

The Koran (or Quran) says at 4:163-165:

163 Lo! We inspire thee (Muhammad) as We inspired Noah and the prophets after him, as We inspired Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes, and Jesus and Job and Jonah and Aaron and Solomon, and as we imparted unto David the Psalms;
164 And messengers We have mentioned unto thee before and messengers We have not mentioned unto thee; and Allah spake directly unto Moses;
165 Messengers of good cheer and of warning, in order that mankind might have no argument against Allah after the messengers. Allah was ever Mighty, Wise.

II. Polygamy

The Koran says limits polygamous marriage to four wives [4:3]:

... marry other women of your choice: two, three, or four. But if you fear that you will not be able to maintain justice between your wives, then marry only one.

Joseph Smith endorsed unlimited polygamy. According to former church members writing in 1844 shortly before Smith died, he and other church elders recruited maidens from Europe, who arriving in the United States were deflowered and given no choice except to become one of many wives.

The two largest modern Mormon denominations now both officially rejected polygamy in order to avoid further prosecution for a practice that was unlawful in the United States. However, fundamentalist Mormon sects still practice polygamy, reports of its being practiced in secret by mainstream Mormons have been abundant, and it is hard to reconcile monogamy with Joseph Smith's status as The Prophet. In fact in the Doctrine and Covenants any man aspiring to priesthood is encouraged to take multiple wives [D&C 132:61-62]:

61. And again, as pertaining to the law of the priesthood—if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified.

The emphasis on the virginity of multiple wives is why teenage women have been the main target of Mormon missionaries from the time of Joseph Smith until the present. Joseph Smith is reputed to have had over thirty wives at the time of his death in 1844.

III. Rejection of Jesus Christ as the One True God

Muhammad lived from 570 to 632 A.D. At this time the orthodox Christian church (only later splitting into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches) had dominated the people's around the Mediterranean for over two centuries. Yet many Jewish and non-orthodox Christian communities still had not been stamped out, and in Arabia itself various forms of pagan worship survived.

While given as a revealed truth from Allah, Muhammad's belief that Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet, not a resurrected god, was supported by historical evidence. Jews in the area, of course, rejected Jesus as both God and Messiah. More important were the Christian Jews whose religion was in line with the original teachings of Jesus. Their historic memory was that Jesus did not claim to be God and was not resurrected after crucifixion. Those ideas were formed decades after Jesus's death, as is reflected in the differences between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, in which Jesus does not claim divinity, and in John, where he makes it very clear he thinks he is one with God.

Muhammad, in the Koran, quotes Jesus against the Christians, avoiding the Gospel of John and instead interpreting Jesus as having said there is only one, undivided God, Allah, and that no man could be God. Which is the position of Islam.

Despite his demotion to Prophet, Jesus (Isa) and his mother, Mary (Maryam) play a major role in the Koran, even aside from preaching against Christianity.

As with Islam, which developed over the course of the life of Muhammad, the relationship of the Latter Day Saints to Jesus of Nazareth is complicated by the temporal development of the revelations of Joseph Smith. In the Book of Mormon Jesus is pretty much the Jesus of the Christians except, unbeknownst to them, after his Ascension Jesus is said to have visited the Americas.

Later, as the power of being himself treated as a Prophet and having a lot of young wives went to his head, Joseph Smith deviated increasingly from Christian doctrine in his Doctrine and Covenants. While not explicitly rejecting the Trinity, Joseph Smith described an elaborate cosmology which would allow him and his male followers to become godlike, and Jesus-like, themselves. Even God the Father, our planetary god, was reduced to an advanced and glorified man. Quoting those who left the church just before Smith's death [Nauvoo Expositor, June 7, 1844]:

"Among the many items of false doctrine that are taught the Church, is the doctrine of many Gods, one of the most direful in its effects that has characterized the world for many centuries ... It is contended that there are innumerable Gods as much above the God that presides over this universe, as he is above us; and if he varies from the law unto which he is subjected, he, with all his creatures, will be cast down as was Lucifer."

IV. Rejection of alcohol
While it may seem to be only of practical importance, the rejection of alcohol by Islam, and later by Joseph Smith and his followers, is of the deepest symbolic and theological importance.

 
Wine plays a role in two key sacraments of Christianity, marriage and communion. Jesus is believed by Christians to have turned water into wine at the wedding feast of Cana [Bible, John 2:1-11], his first miracle in John (but missing from the three earlier gospels).

By rejecting wine both Muhammad and Joseph Smith rejected the Christian rule of monogamy. They also both recognized divorce, which Jesus outlaws for Christians in Matthew 19:3-9.

According to his followers, Jesus is not a Prophet, or the Messiah, but a true, resurrected God. Wine represented, in his times, the transubstantiation from of an ordinary food, the grape, into an intoxicant. Earlier religions in which a man-god was killed or sacrificed and then rose from the dead, showing the glory of God, were closely tied to celebrating events with wine. Notably the Greek god Dionysus and the Egyptian god Osiris had large cult followings throughout the Roman Empire that had many doctrines that were adopted by non-Jewish Christians at some point in the history of the early Church.

By rejecting the drinking of alcoholic beverages, Joseph Smith brought his church more closely to conformity with orthodox Islam and differentiated it from orthodox Christianity.

"That inasmuch as any man drinketh wine or strong drink among you, behold it is not good." [Doctrine and Covenants. 89:5 by Joseph Smith the Prophet at Kirtland, Ohio, February 27, 1833] 

"Satan desires to stir up enmity and hatred between you with intoxicants and gambling, to prevent you from the remembrance of Allah and prayers. Will you not abstain?" [Muhammad the Prophet, Koran, 5:91]

Corporations Are Alcohol, Not Persons

There is a bit of a movement about these days to abolish corporate personhood. The modern version of corporate personhood in the United States is not that old, dating just from 1886. The contemporary movement to abolish corporate personhood can be said to date from 2000. [See Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood versus Democracy, 2000]

Suppose corporate personhood is abolished. What then are corporations? I have argued in the past that they are property: "Slavery is the fiction that a person is property. Corporate Personhood is the fiction that property is a person." [quoting myself circa 2001]

But it is never that simple. What kind of property are corporations? Under the original U.S. constitution, slaves were property, but a peculiar kind of property that could be tried as criminals if they broke the law.

The Constitution does not mention corporations at all. For practical purposes business corporations (as opposed to say a city or non-business organization considered as a corporation) were left to the individual states to create and regulate.

What does the Constitution say about property? One interpretation of the creation of the Constitution is that it was all about protecting private property. Certainly that was an important consideration for the rich white men who wrote the original Constitution, but property is protected mainly by protecting the political power of the colonial elite. Looking to the Constitution itself:

The Preamble does not mention property, but then it was clearly meant as rhetoric.

Congress can give "Authors and Inventors" exclusive rights to their works for a limited period of time. We now call this intellectual property; I don't see corporations as a form of intellectual property.

So not only are corporations left out of the original Constitution; property, specifically as property, was also left out. That people have property and that laws affect property was an assumption so common that no one felt it necessary to make specific reference to property. We must look to the Amendments to see anything about property.

The original Constitution does not mention alcohol either, but it does (in Article I, Section 8) give Congress "Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises." This was soon shown to include the power to lay an excise tax on alcohol.

In the Bill of Rights, in Amendment III, the government is forbidden to house soldiers in private houses without the consent of the owners. Houses, of course, are a particular type of property, usually personal property but sometimes belonging to the government or corporations.

In Amendment IV the government is forbidden to search houses and "effects" without a search warrant, which provides a certain type of protection for property, and makes certain properties, houses, a shield for persons.

In Amendment V the government cannot "deprive" a person of "property" without due process of law. "Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." Of course, taxes (including excise taxes) are assumed to be the exception to this.

That is it. It is assumed that people, including judges and Congress, know what private property is, and what boundaries it may present to federal power.

Alcohol comes up twice in Amendments: in XVIII "intoxicating liquors" are made illegal. That's Prohibition. In Amendment XXI this prohibition is repealed, although individual states may continue with their own Prohibitions.

So why do I want Corporations to be treated as Alcohol? They have many of the attributes of alcohol. They can let people get out of control in a destructive manner, unleashing greed that is destructive to the ethics and economy of the American people. They can do some good in certain situations. I believe, for instance, that the beer (one bottle) I drank last night helped me to relax, and was good for my health. In other words, judgment is involved.

That alcohol is a form of private property that can be regulated and taxed was made really clear, really early under the new Constitution. Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, proposed the first excise tax on alcohol, which Congress passed in 1790. Western farmers (back then western Pennsylvania was the West) produced whiskey from their crops because it retained the value of the crop but was easier to transport and sell to the fun loving early Americans of the east coast. They started protesting the tax in 1791. As is typically case, protest got nothing done, so they essentially rebelled. George Washington road at the head of an army to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion.

Only a handful of rebels were killed, but the ability of the Feds to tax and regulate whiskey was firmly established.

I think that corporations need oversight. They are too important to our society to let them run around willy-nilly like a bunch of anarchists or hippies. Of course some corporations need more oversight than others. Mom & Pop corporations probably need no federal regulation except in extreme circumstance. Goldman Sacks probably needs two federal officials looking over the shoulder of every employee to keep it in line.

If you want to help abolish corporate personhood, check the MoveToAmend site to find an organization you can join. In the meantime, think about my Corporations are Alcohol idea.