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Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain.
Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy…
The experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation.
— Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? - NYTimes.com (via myserendipities)(via infoneer-pulse)
Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain.
Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy…
The experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation.
— Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? - NYTimes.com (via myserendipities)(via infoneer-pulse)
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Stanley Hauerwas (via azspot)
I think Hauerwas meant to say “atheists do not need to believe in God because they too believe in belief.” Or was it “theologians can hit the broad side of barn by making an obvious point.”
If American cannot produce an interesting atheist, has it been able to produce an interesing theologian?
If the only kind of atheism that counts is calling into question the American Protestant, is the only kind of theologian the one who counts the one calling into question the American Protestant?
Theologians should not be in the business of amateur sociology. And neither should atheists. The reason we can’t produce an interesting variant of either is neither is willing to talk about God in any interesting way. While the God of most American Protestants is not interesting enough to deny, the God of most American Protestant theologians is not interesting enough to believe in.
American Protestants should surely move beyond being syncretistic and enculturated boobs. But so should American Protestant theologians. Critiquing the obvious is not theology.
Besides, the whole “American Protestant” shtick is inaccurate. They haven’t been Protestants for about a century now. Nobody is now protesting anything or knew they ever were. Just like they haven’t been a Jewish sect for about two centuries. They’re Evangelicals and that’s a different animal. The Max Weber hammer doesn’t pound this nail in quite the same way.
By and large American Evangelicals don’t “believe in belief” in today’s society. It would be more accurate to say that they believe in dis-belief, or more technically, doubt. Where the Industrial Age Puritan finds their referent in the socio-religious machine and factory mindset, the post-Modern Puritan finds their referent in the Heisenburg Principle, or more technically, the Wittgensteinian geist. The first is construction oriented, the second deconstruction oriented. Religious certainty has given place to religious doubt. The Industrial Protestants believed in God because of order, the post-Modern Puritan believes in God in spite of the lack of order.
So today’s American atheists have the problem of finding the God American theologican can’t articulate and American Evangelicals don’t believe in.
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So what do these increasing numbers of non-believers believe in, if not God? Sociologist Phil Zuckerman, who hopes to start a secular studies major at California’s Pitzer College, says that secularists tend to be more ethical than religious people. On average, they are more commonly opposed to the death penalty, war and discrimination. And they also have fewer objections to foreigners, homosexuals, oral sex and hashish.
The most surprising insight revealed by the new wave of secular research so far is that atheists know more about the God they don’t believe in than the believers themselves. This is the conclusion suggested by a 2010 Pew Research Center survey of US citizens. Even when the higher education levels of the unreligious were factored out, they proved to be better informed in matters of faith, followed by Jewish and Mormon believers.
But their knowledge doesn’t seem to do them much good, since secularists rank among the least-liked groups of people in the US, falling behind even Muslims and homosexuals. In the states of South Carolina and Arkansas, those who deny the existence of a supreme being are not even permitted to hold public office.
The secularists’ problem is that, unlike the religious believers, they do not have a strong organization backing them. There is no such thing as a “typical” non-believer and every society has its own version of secularism.
“More ethical” is a pointless distinction. They may feel more ethical, they may articulate more ethical arguments, but at the end of the being “more ethical” is an entirely different animal.
Ethics is religion, a belief system by which you filter feelings, decisions, and actions. So all religious people, secularists included, are “more ethical”.
But at the of the day, it’s 99% feelings and arguments about ethics. People aren’t doing more of the right thing, they’re just arguing for it. People who have a feeling about the death penalty or immigration aren’t “more ethical”.
Otherwise Fox News, MSNBC, and TBN are the most ethical organizations out there.
As far as secularists knowing more about God than religious people: this is also a distinction without a difference. It would be interesting to see how that metric is determined. Know what about God? Is that like arguing independents know more about George Washington, therefore they’re better than Democrats? Or maybe it’s like knowing more about football but being a Monday-morning quarterback?
Which leads to the last point. Secularists’ problem is not that they don’t have a strong organization backing them up. Secularists’ problem is they don’t have a point. What they do have is a collection of good intentions, vague platitudes, and semi-arguments. In that regard, they are just like every other organization. They just lack the courage of their convictions. This is armchair ethics. But more of it.
“Secularists: we let dumb people rule the world” isn’t a rallying slogan. That isn’t to say a better slogan is “Religious people: dumb but doing stuff”. But there is something to be said for having convictions and acting on them.
Of course, it’s only when your convictions are tried and tested that you need to re-evaluate them and re-shape them. Un-tried convictions are just feelings. More feelings about ethical matters is a religion, and the worst of religions. There’s nothing to shape your convictions other than personal whimsy. Religious people at least stand of chance of being corrected: they’ve actively signed on to something bigger than themselves. A so-called secularist is only as good as his morning mood or pressing circumstance. Anything can be justified when push comes to shove. This is technically “more ethical”.
At the end of the day “more ethical” is no different than “more religious”.
