Wedding sermon for Josh and April

[I gave this sermon as officiant of Josh and April's wedding, July 20^th 2012.]

Marriage, as an institution, predates any reliable recorded human history. Despite its impenetrably obscure origins, societies around the world still find meaning in believing something about where it came from. It is incontestably one of the most important features of our lives. It is far greater than any event, as it's not merely an event it's a stage of life—a condition of life, the means by which our species ensure our security and rear our young.

Obviously, this is something we worry over a lot. We must get this right! Over time, our cultures evolve mores and beliefs about the proper marriage, to help us along a well-tread, tried and true path. Therefore, it doesn't matter so much where the institution of marriage came from, so much as where we think it came from. Is it nature? Is it divinity? Where we place the cornerstone can dramatically alter the course of our marriages. Lives are long, and we agree that marriages should last for the rest of them. Our beliefs about what it is we are doing here today, right now, will shape how you go about resolving the various challenges to a successful marriage and embrace its opportunities.

We naturalists like to point out that nature selects only for the fittest, the greatest opportunist in the face of change. And change is the only constant in life. Some religious scholars contend that if we forget marriage is part of God's plan, then we become soft, and buffet along with the whims of life's ups and downs, temptations from outside, boredom, the sickness, and old age. A society that forgets this, they argue, is doomed to unravel in a libidinous tempest of sin. Oh, but we cannot forget what we have learned. Such stories may have been a persuasive, and even healthy, influence on peoples of the past. But what do we, children of the Enlightenment, we whose universes have been illuminated by the light reason and science, who have not discovered under the light any evidence of God, or a plan? It's just us, a thin film of organic, self-reflecting life clinging to a ball of rock hurling through space. Some may disparage, and either cling with fierce and unforgiving dogmatism to the old ways, while others remain lost, libertine lives, slaves to their desires and alone in the end.

But I say do not disparage. The French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault, was once faced with the question, "what can we do in the face of this existential crisis?" To which he replied with exuberant optimism, "we may create ourselves, like art, every day." The creation of art is the creation of meaning in our lives. I say, remember these words. Make your marriage like art, every day. Every day! As I give you my closing words, I harken the first words. Marriage is not an event, it is a stage of life. In the same way, 'love' is not just an event defined by a momentary feeling, that is 'falling in love'. 'Love' is a verb. It's something you do, actively. You may 'choose' to love your partner, even when you don't particularly feel like it at that very moment. Love is not a thing, which episodically sweeps us off our feet in a fit, but the product of 'free will!". So, I say, do not forget this. Remember this, as the cornerstone of the institution you are building. Love each other, every day.

Josh, are you prepared to make this commitment? Will you vow it? April, are you prepared to make this commitment? Will you vow it?

[Congratulations, you two. And thank you for allowing me the honor of officiating this important event in your lives].

Dangerous political science

Empirical political science is an inherently status quo oriented practice. This is an inevitable consequence of attempting to treat political and social phenomena as if they were ontologically akin to the objects of the physical sciences, like chemistry or physics. A status quo orientation is a normative disposition. Rigorous application of the scientific method in the physical sciences does not result in a status quo orientation because it they have no direct political or social implication. However, this is not the case for the set of disciplines focusing on the political, social, and historical arenas. For these disciplines, to ignore the inherently status quo oriented nature of empirical research is not just bad science, it is dangerous.

People are not neurons, compounds, or particles. Unlike these things, people are cognitive beings that perceive their environment, imagine the consequences of their interaction with it, and behave flexibly. Human behavior cannot be so elegantly expressed as a maxim, as can chemical reactions or the conversion of energies. Accordingly, it is incorrect practice to merely describe social systems in terms of their elements and states, treat these observations as natural facts, and draw inferences from their covariances.

This is what empirical political science does, and has learned to do very well. This is, however, insufficient. The social sciences are not the 'soft sciences', rather a more appropriate heading is the 'gelatinous sciences'. This is because humans, unlike atoms, are equipped with cognitive faculties to flexibly respond, adapt to, and ultimately change the rules of the system within which it is embedded. Atoms are powerless to subvert the absolutist regime of the Standard Model; its laws are immutable and unbreakable, and it rules its domain with an iron fist. Humans, on the other hand, are perpetually evolving the rules of the systems to which they are a part by interacting with them. Thus, the whims of human motivations, ideas, and values, which political science as sought to extirpate or export to more disciplines more traditionally preoccupied with normative judgment, are intrinsic elements of social systems; they are not chaotic elements resulting in benign, stochastic error variance, but work to change the dynamical properties of the system itself. Consequently, whatever 'laws' underlying patterns of covariance are inherently unstable and fluctuate over time. Any inferences made from them may, at best, only be considered valid for the particular place and time data was collected. This is a known statistical problem, which can be rendered visible with the addition of a time dimension. Over time, one variable might be observed as mean-stationary and another might be a random-walk. If a variable is fully a random walk, or unit root, what more then can truly be known about it? Any contemporaneous correlation between a unit root and a covariate are meaningless statistical artifacts unique to a system at a place and time; while the correlation may yield some predictive power in the short-term, we do not learn anything about the essential nature of the element. For this reason, divorcing empirical research from normative judgment is bad science.

But it is also dangerous. To recapitulate, what we want and how we want it matters not only in terms of our comprehensive, scientific understanding of what is the case, the realm normative judgment is a social mechanism by which human societies change the rules of the system to which they are apart. Societies necessarily adapt to their environments when they no longer provide social benefits to their constituent members. In this regard, there must be someone to take our rigorously organized descriptions of the political and social world, look at them thoughtfully and declare: "This is not how it is supposed to be! These particular discrepancies, contradictions, or other states of affairs are bad, and should not be the case! On the contrary, some alternative state of affairs should be the case!" With such normative concerns in mind, human societies intelligently alter the rules governing the dynamical system to which they are themselves a part. If something impedes or inhibits this process, it is inevitable that societies will become ill-fit to their environments and ultimately succumb to chaos and strife.

By ignoring the normative implications of our empirical findings, we treat 'how things are' with 'how things work'. When we create policies based on these conceptions, we risk deepening the particular chain of structures, or relationships, in society that are the responsible for 'things being the way they are'. This is why pure, empirical science is inherently status quo oriented. To put it simply, it inhibits questioning of a particular politico-economic order by conferring upon its various ramifications and structures the permanence of the Standard Model of the atom, and disposing us to look for all solutions to our problem within that framework.