Does the Bible Say that Women are Distinctly Under the Authority of Their Fathers?

For my Christian friends, I am about to plummet into some divisive territory. I do so with caution, but I think it’s important enough to warrant the controversy. For my non Christian friends, this entire landscape of this post will seem bizarre. That’s OK–this is a church culture thing that will likely strike you as insane.

Let me start with a bit about applying uncertainty to your interpretation of Scripture. Let’s take it as a given that the Bible is the (Capital “T”) Word of God, inerrant. Let’s also assume that it is complete (that is, the Bible has everything a Christian needs for life and godliness).

What are we justified in concluding from those premises? Well, we can conclude that any argument that is based on the Bible will be true and that it will accurately describe the world. But we’re missing something massive. We don’t have access to “the Bible.” We only have access to our interpretation of the Bible. It takes the Bible plus interpretation to get to something that you and I can use.  “The Bible” has a lot to say–but it is far from an instruction manual, and it gives general principles far more than it gives specific practices (indeed, its authors are often at pains to condemn the legalistic practices that often result from misleading interpretations–see Jesus berating the Pharisees for misunderstanding the meaning of the Sabbath, or for not taking care of their aging parents by way of a loophole, for two good examples).

That means that we have some sort of Kant-esque problem, where we can’t access “The Bible in Itself” but only “The Bible as we understand it.” It certainly does not follow that we cannot access the truth in the Bible. But it does mean that we need to pay more attention to the instrument of interpretation–namely, ourselves.

As both experience in the world and the Bible testify, the instruments of interpretation (humans) are at our best bent, and at our worst self-servingly disingenuous to the facts in front of us. I think that true humility consists in an understanding of our own fallibility when it comes to matters of interpretation (that goes for all interpretation, and it gives rise to this blog’s title).

Let’s return to our assumptions. From our assumptions about the nature of the Bible, it clearly does not follow that our interpretation (even a well-meaning and thoughtful interpretation) will result in me, an individual human, actually having the view that’s contained in the Bible. The very act of interpretation, which is necessary before I can have any of the Bible’s truth and right perspective, requires that I may not be accessing the truth that I believe the Bible to have.

It would be a foolish argument to conclude that we can’t access any of the truths contained in the Bible. There’s a spectrum, leading outward from things that are clear in the Bible (let’s put “Jesus is God and saves Christians from their sins,”  and “God, and God alone, created the world” in this category). Yes, you might not be 100% certain (from a supposed “objective standpoint”), but the evidence from reading the Bible is compelling. I define “compelling” here as, “you can’t construct another plausible interpretation that uses the same texts but leads to a mutually exclusive conclusion.” There no real rival reading of Jesus coming to earth, being a man and God, and dying for the sins of his followers. That’s the plain reading of the Gospels (not to mention the rest of the New Testament). You can’t read Genesis and not get that God made the world and everything in it. Any other attempt at interpreting those texts seems silly, and rightly so.

There are also some broad areas of practice that are clear: murder is wrong. Experience in the world (I include conscience here) also bears that out, but you can’t read the Bible as not condemning murder and still provide a coherent explanation of the texts.

But with respect to other areas of practice, I argue, interpretation, rather than Scripture, plays the dominant role. Think of it like a spectrum: the closer you are to my definition of compelling, the harder it is for bent instruments (us) to misunderstand. The Bible’s truth dominates. The farther away from strictly compelling (e.g., other readings of the same texts can plausibly result in a mutually exclusive conclusion)  you go, the more the interpretation effect dominates. And when the interpretation effect dominates, all bets are (progressively more and more so) off about how closely our preferred conclusion actually matches up with the Bible’s truth.

I’ve laid the groundwork, now it’s time for controversy. Within the Christian context in which I was brought up, people believe (I would even call it an assumption) that the father of girls has a specific authority over that girl that is distinct from what he has over boys. There’s nothing “creepy” about it–the (well-meaning) idea is that the father is supposed to protect his daughter by keeping bad boys away from her (this mostly crops up during discussions of relationships). This comports with experience up to a point–most people think that young girls (like 13) do need to be protected to a degree (experience differs about whether this is distinct from the protection of, say, a 13 year-old boy, but that’s not the point of this post). But I have heard it (and seen it acted on) many times, that before a girl can date a guy (or “court” or whatever you prefer to call that), the guy has to get the approval of the girl’s father. This includes the father’s ability to say “no” when both the girl and the boy want to date. I have seen guys “date” their hopefully future girlfriend’s dad, where the dad hangs out with him, makes him read books, etc, to “vet” him. Note that there is no corresponding “vetting” of a girl from the boy’s parents, which is why I frame the question the way that I chose to (“Does the Bible say that women are distinctly under the authority of their fathers?” The “distinctly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, as it does in practice).

This leads to my question: Where does the Bible proscribe, or even describe, this practice? This practice does not pass my definition of compelling. There is no text, or stream of texts, or coherent theme throughout Scripture, that rules out a mutually exclusive conclusion (such a conclusion would be: the Bible has nothing to say about a distinct authority fathers have over their daughters, so it is up to the conscience of the individual family–I did not say “father” because that presumes that fathers have a distinct authority for such decisions–determine what that means). In other words, this idea that women are specially under their fathers’ authority (until marriage) is pretty far into the “interpretation-dominant” area of the compelling spectrum.

I’m actually not sure where you would look in the Bible to form such a conclusion. You might look to the passages by Paul on marriage, and how the husband should love his wife and lead her as Christ loved the church, but that says nothing about daughters, and the flow there is exclusively focused on the analogy between the husband to Christ and the wife to the church. Kids don’t factor into that analogy very well, so drawing much from that seems dubious. You could look to Old Testament practice, and say that fathers there determined most of their family’s choices, which would include their daughters. But as biblical intellectuals are quick to point out, one should be very careful about trying to cut strips from the OT practice and apply them to today, for about a million reasons. Polygamy is prevalent in the OT, but few would say that that was a practice that God proscribed. There’s very little that has to do with general male-female relations in the Bible, other than specific situations (husband and wife, women and the church) that clearly exclude daughters.

Let me ask it again: Does the Bible say that women are distinctly under the authority of their fathers?

Convince me.

Why I love and Hate the Tea Party

In the backdrop of the ongoing government shutdown and looming debt ceiling breach, it amazes me that a small group of elected Republicans and their associated grass roots movements and lobbyists could go this far. A small group (30-ish members in the House constitute the core) of Americans have single-handedly shut down the government and are playing with defaulting on our debt. You can assign blame any way you like (that is not what I want to discuss), my point is that this very debate was engineered by the Tea Party and their ardent supporters. They planned for this very fight, pushed for this very fight, and got this very fight (with its attendant consequences). See, for an account of this, this wonderful article over at the New York Times.

The pre-eminence of the Tea Party’s influence in American politics is almost unbelievable, mostly because the main actors are a small group of freshman representatives in the House, and they are directing the course of politics as I write this. I am best described politically as a technocrat (which means that I tend to think that smart policy can make all of our lives better, and that smart policy is possible even within our twisted politics), but on a lot of positions I side with liberals and Democrats.

With that out of the way, let me tell you why I love the Tea Party. The Tea Party is an incredible movement. I know people from rural Pennsylvania who gather at Tea Party meetings. These people are good people, and they think that the government is (and has been for some time) headed in a disastrous direction. They fret about massive government spending. They worry about the financial sustainability of our current course, and conclude that radical action is necessary.

And these people took radical action. They formed a grassroots campaign that is so effective that the threat of a radically conservative primary challenger, rather than of a more reasonable moderate, drives current politicians into the Tea Party’s platform. These people are passionate, and they took their passion and brought it to the public arena. They did not (and this is the thing I love the most) let their anger fester and let America become the “liberal” America. They didn’t resign themselves to the country getting worse, until they finally formed an active rebellion (sounds crazy, but that is how uprising begins). Political angst with no legitimate outlet could become incendiary and destructive to the country. These people hate compromise, and they won’t, because they believe that their America should be different. I hope you, the reader, realize that I am not mocking the movement; I am serious. American politics requires that people come to the table and air their grievances. It requires that they are heard by people with political power.

Yet, while I love the Tea Party as a movement, I hate its methods. The methods of the Tea Party–its take-no-prisoners approach to politics, remind me a great deal of those employed in the latter day Roman Republic (yes, I am engaging in that seductive but mostly meaningless game of comparing American and Roman politics). Senators and Tribunes like Tiberias Gracchus had a number of badly needed reforms to enact, and the political machine blocked all the legitimate avenues for chance. Tiberias resorted to creative legislative means to achieve his goals, as well as some coercion. He thought the reforms were that necessary, and they probably were. It was his method, however, not his policies, that were taken up by later generations, using even more unprecedented and violent means.

Life is not a morality play, but the lesson here applies to today. The Tea Party uses unconventional, often unprecedented (or, at least, takes its precedent from the worst of our legislative practices) to force the rest of the country to do what it wants. The shutdown is an example of that, and the debt ceiling is another. The scorched-earth policy toward Republicans who might balk at some of its preferred policies is probably the most pernicious of all these methods, even though it is less spectacular.

I hate what the Tea Party is doing to American political precedent, and to our overall system. Proponents will say that the other side does the same thing (not really true), or that this is necessary because the policies the Tea Party opposes will be utterly disastrous for our country. But that’s exactly the Tiberias Gracchus perspective. No policy is worth achieving  at any cost. None. The terrible consequences of the methods you use will be your legacy, rather than the policies you support or oppose. That’s what I fear will be the primary legacy of the Tea Party.

Love the movement, hate the method.

Gladwell and His Critics

I’ve read Blink, Malcom Gladwell’s book about rapid cognition, and some of his New Yorker articles. I have not read Gladwell’s latest book, David and Goliath, but the book has, as usual, spawned a great deal of criticism, much of it from academia. In this case, persistent Gladwell critic and noted psychologist Chris Chabris (of the famous invisible Gorilla experiment fame) reviews Gladwell’s book (hat tip goes to Andrew Gelman). Sometimes Chabris is even-handed in his review, and sometimes his review is more of a full-on assault of Gladwell’s approach. Here is his conclusion:

One thing “David and Goliath” shows is that Mr. Gladwell has not changed his own strategy, despite serious criticism of his prior work. What he presents are mostly just intriguing possibilities and musings about human behavior, but what his publisher sells them as, and what his readers may incorrectly take them for, are lawful, causal rules that explain how the world really works. Mr. Gladwell should acknowledge when he is speculating or working with thin evidentiary soup. Yet far from abandoning his hand or even standing pat, Mr. Gladwell has doubled down. This will surely bring more success to a Goliath of nonfiction writing, but not to his readers.

Chabris is concerned that people will misunderstand Gladwell’s anecdotal narratives as universal inferences. For example, in part of his review, Chabris notes:

Losing a parent at an early age is a desirable difficulty because it is common among eminent achievers in a variety of fields, argues Mr. Gladwell at one point. But in later criticizing California’s infamous three-strikes law for its devastating effects on families, he says that “for a child, losing a father to prison is an undesirable difficulty.”

In other words, Chabris thinks that Gladwell makes two contradictory inferences (or, more that readers will): 1.) losing one’s parent to death is a desirable difficulty in that it often drives one to greatness, and 2.) losing one’s parent to prison is an undesirable difficulty and does not drive one to greatness.

I think this misses the point. To illustrate, let me digress into a bit on logical deduction. To prove a statement is true, you need premises that are all true, and a logical structure that is valid (e.g. the famous: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal). To prove a claim, you need to demonstrate that it is true for all cases. The burden of proof is high (for inductive inference, a valid argument does not guarantee the conclusion, but it supports it with some level of probability).

The burden of proof is very low for disproving a claim. All you need to do is find one (one!) counterexample where the premises are true but the conclusion did not follow.

I see Gladwell’s work in particular (and most nonfiction narratives, in general) as offering potent counterexamples to our accepted ways of thinking. Think careful deliberation is the best way to make decisions? Not so! (the core argument of Blink). Then the reader might be tempted to have a new accepted universal: rapid cognition is the best way to make decisions. Not so either, says Gladwell later in the book, presenting examples of racism and other places where rapid cognition goes awry.

It seems that Chabris reads Gladwell (or, more that he fears that Gladwell’s readers will read him) as offering universal inferences, as offering proof for a variety of claims. But if you look at Gladwell’s claims (in David and Goliath, claims like: “things which you might think of as difficulties for a person’s success can actually help them to succeed”), they’re really counterexamples to pervasive ways of thinking. They’re not “just so stories” as some claim. Rather, they are a remedy for our use of conventional wisdom to make bad judgments. That’s how, in one case, losing a parent to death can be “desirable” in the (limited) sense that it can end up resulting in a more successful person, but in another, losing a parent to jail can be undesirable. Gladwell is not (in general) making statistical inferences to general principles (Chabris seems to think he is); he’s offering counterexamples to the (often faulty) inferences that we make everyday.

You might argue that Gladwell ought to be more up front about the limitations of his narrative approach. That may well be true. But by offering conflicting narratives (in Blink, the examples of rapid cognition used to save lives and used to kill and innocent boy, in David and Goliath by offering examples of the loss of parents with two very different outcomes), Gladwell alerts the reader that he is not doing something so simple and asinine as offering counter intuitive aphorisms for the reader to live by. Rather, he is using the narrative form to offer counterexamples to common (mis)inferences we all make about the world. I think people who read Gladwell (in addition to his marvelous prose) will gain something intellectually valuable from that approach.

Decentralized All the Way Down?

My brother (@brando_minich) pointed me toward the following article at the Federalist about the power of decentralized decision making. The author, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, uses an extensive historical analogy about the history of the genesis of the internet as a parable to say that we ought to decentralize healthcare. After explaining the history of the internet, which is quite fascinating, Gobry offers the following about what would have happened had the internet been developed in a centralized way:

The point here isn’t that we would miss the hundreds of billions of market capitalization that have been created by the internet, although that’s nice. The point is that we would miss the tens of trillions worldwide in consumer surplus created by all the time-saving and productivity-enhancing capacities of the internet, not to mention the sheer happiness and vibrancy of countless websites, blogs, multimedia projects, marriages and impact on the culture and so on and so on and so on.

Gobry then offers a bit on how people in this centralized internet world would think if you told them about the internet:

If you described the internet as it exists on this universe to someone from that parallel universe, they would never believe you. Imagine describing Twitter to such a person. Imagine saying, well, we should have an open internet because then people could communicate in 140-character bursts. Or Wikipedia. An open internet is a good idea because people could work on a collaborative encyclopedia that anyone could edit. Yeah, like that’ll work! Oh, and the most profitable thing on the internet would be “search” and the search company would be so profitable that it would come out with self-driving cars. People would think you were just a complete lunatic.

Gobry’s point is well taken. But, as I’ve noted previously, I’ve got to add complexity and uncertainty where I can. Gobry makes the point that decentralized decision making powers innovation. However, decentralization is a matter of degree. For example, within one frame, the centralized actor might be a large firm versus a small, nimble firm (that’s the frame Gobry uses in his discussion of the genesis of the internet, where you see the nimble internet startups vs. the behemoth cable companies). Another frame could be an individual vs. a firm making decisions (also from the article, of a health insurer making decisions about health care coverage rather than an individual). And so on.

Can you have decentralized decision making all the way down? I think that’s the wrong question. To see why, let me return to the idea of the frame, or unit, of consideration. Say the unit is a multinational company vs. large (but smaller) company. You might say: “decentralizing the decision making will result in innovation.” And you are probably right. Then take that large firm vs. a smaller firm, and ask the same question. Shrink it down until you are at the level of the individual. Would there be maximal innovation if decision making were completely decentralized–that is to say, if all transactions occurred between individuals?

Again, I think that’s the wrong question, because it leads to the absurd result I just sketched. I think a better question is: “what is the right balance between centralization and decentralization that results in the ‘best’ outcomes.” You might want to replace “best” with “most innovation,” or “most happy people,” or whatever objective you prefer. This is a tradeoff, and one that actually resembles the real world. We need lumbering companies like Verizon to invest billions of dollars in telecommunications infrastructure. Does their massive scale decrease their innovation? The answer, I think, is complicated by what the yardstick is. If the counterfactual is a world where a thousand tiny firms do exactly what Verizon does in terms of a shared nation-wide telecommunications infrastructure but without the attendant path-dependency and inefficiency that comes with a firm of that size, then yes, it does. But if the yardstick is a world without Verizons, without lumbering companies that fulfill important roles, then the answer is likely no. It’s true that Verizon is not as efficient as a tiny internet startup company, but Verizon builds the centralized infrastructure that brilliant startups, like Twitter and so many others, can use to innovate.

An important caveat is that if Verizon is allowed to squash new innovations through noncompetitive practices, then yes, that would result in a decrease in innovation relative to a Verizon-less world (rather, the answer would depend on which effect dominates).

If Gobry’s point is primarily about not letting monopolist companies (in his example, cable companies) use their market power to centralize some aspect of their business (in his example, content management), then he is completely right. But if his point is against centralization per se, then I think he isn’t thinking carefully enough about the large societal returns to centralization that we all benefit from.

The Academic’s Addiction

New to me, but a couple of years ago, Alan Jacobs wrote about the academic obsession with adding complexity to any story. You know, saying: “Yes, but…” after someone states an opinion or makes an argument. It’s a similar phenomenon to the freshly numerate person’s obsession with spotting anyone talking about the association between two variables and interjecting: “correlation is not causation!” Or a new Calvanist’s rabid assault on anyone’s whose theology smacks even a little bit of free will.

I’ve caught the complexity addiction in a big way. Every time someone offers me a simple narrative of how the world works, my mind jumps to all premises that the simple narrative contains, all the other explanations that could have caused the same result, and all the confounding factors that give the result uncertainty. Those are all good cautions to have. We should not approach the world, with its deep complexity, with a mind ready to accept simple stories. It’s a good habit to ask those questions (and, indeed, both my Honors Core classes and philosophy curriculum drilled a mindset into me that asks those questions immediately upon hearing a causal story).

Yet, it’s a habit that can become an extremely lazy way to dismiss someone, or a red herring to distract other people from the argument at hand.

From Jacobs:

Jacoby’s argument is that this “fashion elevates confusion from a transitional stage into an end goal. We celebrate the fact that everything can be ‘problematized.’ We rejoice in discarding ‘binary’ approaches. We applaud ourselves for recognizing — once again — that everything varies by circumstances.”

I plead guilty to this sort of thinking, and I think that many academically minded people would say the same.

Jacobs offers his analysis on why this addiction entices academics:

“Complicating” gets you a twofer. If you arrive on the scene telling everyone that you see complexities that others have failed to note, you show your depth of thinking and your intellectual courage. (“I can dwell in the midst of uncertainties that lesser minds feel the need to resolve.”) But you are also not making any claims that are likely to be undercut. When one academic says “Other scholars have failed to note these complexities,” it’s almost unheard-of for another to say, “No, you’re just inventing all that crap, these matters are actually pretty simple and straightforward.”

More here.

This is a great point: it’s hard to stand up to someone telling you it’s more complicated and say “no, it isn’t!” I think this is in part because it’s virtually impossible to prove that the story really is more simple. And even if you do get the complicator to admit it, he (me) would probably just tell you that these complicating factors are important in general, but may not hold in this specific case. That would make you feel like a winner in particular, and a dummy in general (or just frustrated).

Let those who’ve caught the addiction take note, and may it make us all a bit more humble when interacting with someone telling a simple story.

The Best Evidence Right Now about the Exchanges

Reports about the shaky start of the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges, which launched today (check out this site to find out about the Exchange in your state) and related breathless commentary, is filling up the internet right now. People who want the ACA to fail are seeing the disaster they always knew Obamacare to be (e.g. healthcare.gov was shut down for a large portion of the day, and many sites, including the NY Exchange, have been down all day! The sites are pitifully slow!), and people who want it to succeed are putting an optimistic spin on things (demand for the exchanges is sky high! According to that Bloomberg article Iinked to at the top, 2.8 million million people visited healthcare.gov! 10,000 people per second were viewing California’s exchange site at some points!).

Today basically won’t tell us anything about the state of U.S. healthcare. But if we must speculate, let’s at least look at the place where the blare of partisan bias is not present. Yep, you guessed it, I’m talking about the daily change in stock prices for insurance companies.

The (highly unoriginal and quite crude) hypothesis is that, if the stock prices are going down (especially relative to some benchmark, say, the S&P 500), then we can say that investors see the exchange performance as a net negative. If the stock prices are up, especially relative to a benchmark, then we can say that investors view today’s exchange performance favorably.

First, some caveats: this is a pretty bad way to evaluate any major event. Stock prices (and even indices) move for a million different reasons, and the interactions are very complicated, so my armchair observations should be taken as exactly that. However, it’s the least bad of all the grandstanding and anecdotal evidence you’re going to get today, so if you want to know today what the outlook of the ACA is, you should look here, and not at all the hooplah in the news stories. There’s way too much noise and partisan bias there to get any real signal.

So the S&P 500 closed .8% higher than its opening stock price. The healthcare sector (which includes many other types of healthcare companies, like medical device makers and pharmaceutical companies)  was up 1.17% (source for the sector calculations here). Within that, pharma companies had the best performance, at +1.49%, but insurers overall were up nearly as much, posting a 1.48% gain. Wellpoint (insurer with the Blue Cross Blue Shield licenses) was up 2.99%. United Health Group (+1.35%), Aetna (+1.37%) and Cigna (+2.2%) also contributed (these stock prices were taken from Google finance).

Also of note, from Russ Brit at Marketwatch:

Virtually all insurers, including those outside the S&P 500, were in the black as well, led by Health Net Inc. HNT , a critical player in California’s health exchange, and WellCare Health Plans Inc. WCG  Each rose more than 3.5%.

It is also significant that Wellpoint outperformed Aetna, Cigna, and UnitedHealth Group. The latter three all decided to be less involved with the ACA’s exchanges, for various reasons (see here), while Wellpoint decided to be much more involved.

As an aside, if I had the time, I would look into which companies are more heavily invested in the exchanges happening, which are not, and compare the price trajectories of the two as a kind of natural experiment. Of course, even that is limited in its inferential value, since, for example, investors could view a good start to the exchanges as evidence that all insurers will be better off in the future (since they get a bunch of new customers, some of whom are quite healthy).

Should you conclude that the exchanges will work, that millions of Americans will have a good experience purchasing health insurance? No. But there is little evidence that the exchanges will do anything less than they were supposed to do: increase the number of people who purchase insurance. The investors who buy and sell healthcare stocks in general, and insurance stocks in particular, seem to think so.

Again, I don’t place much value in such analysis. The uncertainty is just too high. But if you’re going to have an opinion today, look to the stock market.