Taboos and Antifragility

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As I mentioned in my initial post, this blog will be at least as much as about me being a disciple of Taleb as it is about me being a disciple of Christ. That probably overstates things a little bit, but I am a huge admirer of Taleb. And it is to his idea of antifragility that I’d like to turn now. My last post was all about the limitations of science. And as I pointed out, there are many ways in which people have placed too much faith in the power of science. True science is fantastic, but also very rare, and thus we end up with many things being labeled as science which are only partially scientific. Of course as I also pointed out much of the problem comes from using science to minimize the utility of religion. This does not merely take the form of atheists who believe that there is no God it also takes the form of people who feel that the principles of religion and more broadly traditions in general are nothing more than superstitions which have been banished by the light of progress and modernity. These people may believe that there is “more to this life” or that life has a spiritual side, or in the universal and unseen power of love. But what they don’t believe in is organized religion. In fact it seems fairly clear, that at least in the U.S., that support for organized religion is as low as it’s ever been. But I’m here to defend organized religion, and not just the Mormon version of it.

So what is the value of religion and more broadly traditions in general? In short it promotes antifragility.

Let’s examine one very common religious tradition: forbidding pre-marital sex. These days the idea of some kind of generalized taboo on sex before marriage is considered at best quaint and at worst a misogynistic relic of our inhumane and immoral past, at least in all the developed countries. As you might have guessed I’m going to take the opposite stance.  I’m going to argue that the taboo was universal for a reason, it served a purpose and that we abandon it, and other religious principles, at our peril. In this I am no different than many people, but I am going to give a different rationale. My argument will be that regardless of your opinion on the existence of a supreme being, there is significant evidence that religion and other traditions make us less fragile.

Before we get into the actual discussion of religion and antifragility there might be people who question the part of my argument where I assert that the taboo against premarital sex was universal and served a purpose. Let’s start with the first point, was the taboo against premarital sex widespread? For me, and probably most people, the existence of a broad and long-lasting taboo seems self evident, but when you get into discussions like these, there are people who will argue every point of minutia, no matter how obvious it may seem to the average person. To those people, yes there are almost certainly cultures and points in history before modern times where sex before marriage was no big deal, where in fact the concept of marriage itself might be unrecognizable to us, but examples such of these are few in number, and limited in scope. But rather than just hand waving the whole thing (which is tempting) let’s actually look at a couple of very large examples: Western Christianity (the term Judeo-Christianity would also apply) and China. Both of these cultures are successful both in longevity and influence and, as it turns out both cultures, though very different on a whole host of issues, both had taboos against premarital sex. Hopefully the Christian taboo against premarital sex is obvious to readers of this blog, but if you need more information on the Chinese taboo you can go here, here or here.

How is it then that these two cultures, so very different in other respects, both arrived at the same taboo? This takes us to our next point, whether the taboo served a purpose. A few people, somewhat mystifyingly, will claim that two cultures, widely separated in both space and time, just happened to arrive at the same terrible superstition, that it benefited no one and that it arrived and flourished independently in both cultures for thousands of years. This argument is ridiculous on it’s face, and I think we can safely dismiss it.

Other people will argue that both cultures had a reason, and they may in fact have had the same reason, but they will argue that it was a bad one. This explanation generally brings in the evils of patriarchy at some point, and the fact that it was a taboo in both cultures (actually far more than that, but we’ll just stick with those two for now) just means that male domination was widespread. Furthermore, because of our much greater understanding of biology, psychology and anthropology we can now, with the backing of science, declare that it was a bad reason. (Unless of course the science turns out to be flawed…) Furthermore we can not only do away with the taboo against premarital sex but we can also safely declare that it was evil and repressive.

The final possibility, for those who consider the taboo a quaint relic of the past, is to acknowledge it did exist, it was widespread, and there actually was a good reason for it, but that reason doesn’t exist anymore. They might go on to explain that yes, perhaps in the past, having a taboo against premarital sex did make sense, but it doesn’t make sense in 2016 or even in 1970. Historically people weren’t evil or superstitious they just didn’t know everything we know and have access to all of the technology we have access to. Things like birth control, and the social safety net, etc have done away with the need for the taboo. While this explanation sounds more reasonable than the others, at it’s core it’s very similar to those other two views. All three still eventually boil down to an assertion that we’re smarter and more advanced than people in the past. It’s just a discussion of how and by what degree that we’re smarter and more advanced.

The immediate question is how can you be so sure? What makes us better than the people that came before us? And how can you be confident that there was no reason for the taboo, or that there was a reason, but that it was bad?  The most reasonable of the explanations requires us to be confident that whatever purpose a taboo against premarital sex served, that progress and technology have eliminated that purpose. Not only does this throw us back into a discussion of the limits of science, but this also requires us to put an awful lot of weight on the last 50-60 years. By this I mean that if we have eliminated the need for the taboo we’ve done it only fairly recently. The sexual revolution is at most 60-70 years old in the US, and it’s even more recent in China (continuing to stick with two cultures we’ve already examined.) Which means that in that short time frame we would’ve had developed enough either technologically or morally to eliminate the wisdom of centuries if not millennia. And this is what I mean by putting a lot of weight on the last 60-70 years.

To review, as you might have already gathered, I have a hard time believing that there was no reason for the taboo. For that to be the case multiple cultures would have to independently arrive at the same taboo, just by chance. I also have a hard time believing that the reasons for the taboo were strictly or even mostly selfish or misogynist. That discussion is a whole rabbit hole all by itself, so let me just reframe it. If the taboo against premarital sex was bad for a civilization than other civilizations which didn’t have that taboo should have outcompeted the civilizations which did have it. In other words at best the belief had to have no negative impact on a civilization, regardless of the reasons for the taboo, and more likely in an evolutionary sense (if you want to pull in science) it had to have a positive effect. Of course this takes us down another rabbit hole of assuming that the survival of a civilization is the primary goal, as opposed to liberty or safety or happiness, etc. And we will definitely explore that in a future post, but for now, let it suffice to say that a civilization which can’t survive, can’t do much of anything else.

And then there’s possibility number three. The taboo was good and necessary up until a few decades ago when it was eliminated with the Power of Science!™ There are in fact some strong candidates for this honor, the pill being the chief among them. And if this is your answer for why pre-marital sex no longer has to be taboo, then at least you’ve done your homework. But I still think you’re being overconfident and myopic. And here, at last, is where I’d like to turn to the idea of antifragility, in particular the antifragility of religion.  Taleb arrives at his categories by placing everything into three groups:

1. Fragile: Things that are harmed by chaos. Think of your mother’s crystal, or a weak government.
2. Robust: Things that are neither harmed nor helped by chaos.
3. Antifragile: Things that are helped by chaos. Think about the prepper with a basement full of food and guns. Normally speaking he’s just wasted a lot of money, but if the zombie apocalypse comes, he’s the king of the world. It should be pointed out that often things are antifragile only relatively. In other words everyone’s life might get worse during the zombie apocalypse, but the prepper is much better positioned in the new world than he was in the old relative to all of the other survivors.

Like Taleb, we’ll largely ignore the robust category since very few things are truly robust. Though as you can see it’s a good place to be. What remains is either fragile or antifragile. For our purposes time is essentially equal to chaos, since the longer you go the more likely some random bad thing is going to happen. Thus anything that is fragile is just not going to exist after enough time has passed. A weak government will eventually be overthrown, and your mother’s crystal will eventually get dropped. Accordingly anything that has been around for long enough must be antifragile (or at least robust), particularly if it has survived catastrophes fatal to other, similar things. Religion fits into this category. Government’s may fall, languages may pass away, nations and people may be lost to history, but religion persists.

Returning to look specifically at the taboo against premarital sex, I would argue that it’s been around for so long and is so widely spread because it promotes antifragility. How? Well I think it’s longevity is a powerful argument all on it’s own, but beyond that there are dozens of potential ways a taboo against premarital sex might make a culture less fragile. It might decrease infant mortality, better establish property rights, create stronger marriages with all the attendant benefits, increase physical security for women, promote better organized communities, or create better citizens. (That’s six, I’ll leave the other six as an exercise for the reader.)

If the taboo does make the culture which adopts it less fragile, then have we really eliminated the need for that it in the last 50 years? Or to put it another way is our culture and society really that much less fragile than the society of 100 years ago or 1000 years ago? I’m sure there are people who would argue that in fact that it is, but this mostly stems from a misunderstanding of what fragility is, assuming they’ve even given much thought to the matter. As I said in the last post so much of what passes for thinking these days is just a means for people to feel justified in doing whatever they feel like, and they haven’t given any thought to the impact on society, or consequences outside of whether their beliefs allow them to do what they feel like. That said, if pressed, they would probably assert that the world is less fragile, particularly if doing so gives them more cover for ignoring things like religion and tradition. But is it true? Taleb asserts that the world isn’t less fragile, it’s less volatile. Which can be mistaken for a reduction of fragility, particularly in the short term. Allow me to give an example of what I mean, continuing with the example of premarital sex.

One of the problems of premarital sex is that it leads to out of wedlock babies and single mothers. In a time before public assistance (or what a lot of people call welfare) having a baby out of wedlock could effectively end a woman’s life, or at least her “prospects”. On the other hand it could be handled quietly and have little actual impact. The child could be adopted by a rich relative, or it could die in the street shortly after being born.

A great example of what I’m talking about is Fantine and Cosette from Les Miserables. Initially the two of them have a horrible time, Fantine has to spend all her money getting the horrible Thénardiers to take care of Cosette, and instead they mostly abuse Cosette. Fantine eventually has to prostitute herself and dies from tuberculosis, but not before Jean Valjean agrees to take responsibility for Cosette, which he does and while it’s not a perfect life, Jean Valjean treats Cosette quite well. This is volatility. You get the lowest lows one one hand or potentially a great life on the other hand. In this case the outcome for a child is all over the place, and individuals are fragile, but society is largely unaffected, in large part by having taboos and other systems in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the first place.

That was then, now we have far more single mothers and absent some angry old white men, most people think that it’s not a problem, or that if it is we’re dealing with it. Certainly very few single mothers are forced to the drastic steps Fantine had to take. While I’m sure there are single mothers who resort to prostitution I think that if you were to examine those cases there is something else going on, like drugs. There are also probably fewer children being taken in by wealthy relatives. Most single mothers do okay, not fantastic, but okay. In other words you have a decrease in volatility. As I said, many people mistake this for a decrease in fragility, and indeed the individual is less fragile, but society as a whole is more fragile, because a huge number of those single mothers rely on a single entity for support, the government.

At first glance this seems to be okay. The government isn’t going anywhere, and if EBT and other programs can prevent the abject poverty that characterized previous times, that’s great. But whether you want to admit it or not the whole setup is very fragile. If the government has to make any change to welfare then the number of people affect is astronomical. If Jean Valjean had not come along it would have continued to be horrible for Cosette, but it would only have affected Cosette. If welfare went away literally millions of mothers and children would be destitute. And of course they would overwhelm any other system that might be trying to help. Like religious welfare, or family help, etc.

There’s no reason to expect that welfare will go away suddenly, but it is a single point of failure. I’m guessing that very few people in the Soviet Union expected it to disintegrate as precipitously as it did. Of course there are people who think that welfare should go away, and it may seem like that’s what I’m advocating for, but that’s a discussion for a different time. (Spoiler alert: unwinding it now would be politically infeasible.) That said it’s indisputable that if congress decided to get rid of welfare legislatively it would be less of a shock then if one day EBT cards just stopped working. Which is possibly less far fetched than you think. The EBT system goes down all the time, and people can get pretty upset, but so far these outages have been temporary, what happens if it’s down for a month? Or what happens if it becomes the casualty of a political battle. Thus far when government shutdowns have been threatened there has been no move to mess with welfare, but that doesn’t have to be the case. The point is not to predict what will happen, even less when it might happen, but to draw your attention to the fact that as one of the prices for getting rid of this taboo we’ve created a system with a single point of failure, the very definition of fragility.

In the short term if often seems like a good idea to increase fragility, because the profits are immediate and the costs are always far in the future (until they’re not). We’ll talk in more detail about antifragility, but the point I’m trying to get at is that in the long run, which is where religion operates, antifragility will always triumph. Does the a taboo against premarital sex make society less fragile? I don’t know, but neither does anyone else.

Is our current civilization more fragile than people think? On this I can unequivocally say that it is. I know people like to think it’s not, because the volatility is lower, but that’s a major cognitive bias. The fact is, as I have pointed out from the beginning, technology and progress have not saved us. Religion and tradition have guided people through the worst the world has to offer for thousands of years, and we turn our backs on it at our peril.

For behold, at that day shall he rage in the hearts of the children of men, and stir them up to anger against that which is good.

And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well—and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell.

And behold, others he flattereth away, and telleth them there is no hell; and he saith unto them: I am no devil, for there is none—and thus he whispereth in their ears, until he grasps them with his awful chains, from whence there is no deliverance.

Yea, they are grasped with death, and hell; and death, and hell, and the devil, and all that have been seized therewith must stand before the throne of God, and bejudged according to their works, from whence they must go into the place prepared for them, even a lake of fire and brimstone, which is endless torment.

Therefore, wo be unto him that is at ease in Zion!

Wo be unto him that crieth: All is well!

Yea, wo be unto him that hearkeneth unto the precepts of men, and denieth the power of God, and the gift of the Holy Ghost!

2 Nephi 28:20-26

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On the Limitations of Science

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There are lots of people out there condemning the debauchery of our modern world, and generally with more eloquence than I can muster. Additionally there are prophets, both ancient and modern who have already offered up rousing sermons and trenchant observations (one of which I took as the theme of this blog) and I would urge you to study the writings of those prophets before reading anything I write. So, if there’s better stuff out there why do I bother to blog? I believe there is a gap in the commentary. A hole in the discourse that I can fill. It doesn’t need to be filled. What I write is not critical to anyone’s salvation. I am not uncovering any lost principles of Christ’s gospel, nor am I speaking in a more timely manner than what you hear at the semiannual General Conferences. If that’s so, what niche do I fill? What unique insights do I provide?

If you read my very first post, then you’ll remember that I already touched on this. This blog will specifically focus on comparing the LDS Religion to the Religion of Progress and examining how the Religion of Progress has failed. The sacrament of the Religion of Progress is science. And it is appropriate that it be so. I myself am a believer in science. But like all sacraments, the sacrament of science can be partaken of unworthily. It can be misunderstood, and distorted. Just as partaking of the actual sacrament every week doesn’t immediately absolve you of all your sins if you’re not also actively exercising faith, repenting of those sins and seeking forgiveness; partaking in the sacrament of science doesn’t immediately make what you do and what you believe scientific, no matter how much you proclaim your love for it. Science has serious limitations, even if one is doing everything right, which most of the time they’re not. And many of the failures of the Religion of Progress comes when it ignores those limitations (or in the case of the last post, trades science for emotion.) Consequently, this post is all about examining those limitations.

Let’s start by examining the limits of science even if everything is done correctly. To begin with it’s really hard to do it correctly, and 90% of the time what passes for quality science are efforts which leave out a lot of the rigor necessary for truly conclusive results. This was not always the case at the beginning of the scientific revolution there was a lot low hanging fruit. Scientific results of surpassing clarity and rigor that could be obtained with only moderate effort (the gentleman scientist working nearly alone was a fixture of the time.) All that low-hanging fruit is gone, but people still expect science to come up with similarly ironclad results even though the window during which that was possible is long past. Also most of the really solid science involves physics, and the farther you get away from that, the less amenable things are to experimentation in general because there are too many variables.

Thus you’re left in a situation where if you want to do solid, incontrovertible science your best bet is to do more physics, and that’s going to cost billions of dollars, or you can use pieces of the scientific method and take a stab at the questions which remain after all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. I say pieces of the scientific method because, for example, there are all manner of subjects which can’t be subjected to an experiment with a control. This is a limitation in many fields, but one of the best examples is economics, particularly macroeconomics. You can’t create a copy of the world and have one world where the global economy stays on the gold standard and the control, a world where everyone moves to floating currency. You will still have economist who will tell you that one is better than the other, but this is based off bits of data they’ve gathered from a very messy environment. Not any kind of conclusive, replicable experiment.

Related the problem of creating a control group is the difficulty of isolating the variable you hope to study. Even if we were somehow able to create two versions of Earth, and create a control, how do we know that all the differences between 2016 gold-standard Earth and 2016 floating-currency Earth are due to the different currency systems and not other random fluctuations? Obviously this is already a fairly ridiculous example, but it illustrates the impossible hurdles necessary to even approach true experimentation on something like the economy.

Now you should not assume from this that I’m anti-science, far from it. I have a deep respect for science. And I think that, if anything, the world needs more science not less, but as part of that, we need, particularly if we’re piling up more science, to recognize the limitations of science, especially as it’s actually put into practice. Science isn’t conducted by perfectly objective robots, it’s conducted by scientists who have careers to think of, biases which blind them and limitations of time and money to contend with. All of which takes us to the next way that science can go wrong.

When I say the next way, there are literally hundreds of ways that scientific efforts can go wrong, but rather than try to focus on all of them we’re just going to look at something that has been in the news a lot lately, the replication crisis.

What’s interesting about the replication crisis is that it happened even in cases where it truly appeared that people were doing everything correctly. Trained scientists were conducting ground-breaking experiments, designed according to the best thinking in their field, the results were passed through a process of peer-review and then the results were published in a respected journal. Obviously this is not to say that there weren’t papers published where everything was not being done correctly, even some examples of outright fraud, but even if we exclude those there were still a lot of results which got published which later turned out to be impossible to reproduce. The biggest contributor to this appears to have been publication bias, or what is sometimes called the file-drawer effect because people only submit positive, exciting results and the rest get put in the file-drawer with all of the other experiments that didn’t show anything. This is a problem not only with the people doing the experiments but with the publications themselves, which are far more likely to publish positive results (or to be technical, statistically significant results) than a paper which didn’t have any results (or a null result). And as you’ve probably heard, for most scientists it’s publish or perish. Another factor which almost certainly contributed to the crisis..

You may think that a positive result is a positive result regardless of whether there were 100 other, negative results which got put in the file cabinet. The problem is that it’s not. If you take 100 coins and flip each of them 7 times you’ve got better than even odds that one of them will come up 7 heads in a row. You might then decide that that coin is unfair, and publish a paper, “On the Unfairness of the 1947 Nickel”, but in reality you just started with a big sample size. Doing 100 experiments works very similarly. (For a really in depth discussion including p-values and lots of statistics go here.) The problem of course becomes that people reading or citing your paper don’t know that you have 99 failed experiments which never saw the light of day they only know about the one successful experiment that actually got published.

Thus far I haven’t mentioned how often a study fails to be replicated, and you may think that it’s no big deal. A few here and there, but nothing to worry about. Well as it turns out in general less than half of studies can be reproduced and sometimes less than 15%! This would mean that six out of every seven studies put forth conclusions which later turned out to be untrue.

Once again it’s important to recognize that there is a continuum of scientific results. There’s not a 50% chance that the theory of gravity is wrong, or that protons don’t exist. But when it comes to the softer sciences (and they’re labeled that way for a reason) there is a better than even chance that their conclusions will turn out to be untrue.

Of course when the average person talks about scientific discoveries, ignoring for the moment whether the results can be reproduced, they’re generally not talking about what the scientist actually found. To a first approximation no one reads the actual scientific paper, and probably only 1 in 10,000 people even read the abstract. If you hear about a scientific result you’re hearing about it through the media, which further undermines the utility of science by distorting results in an effort to make them appear more interesting. In short when people think of science they think of gravity, but what they're actually getting is a Buzzfeed article written based on a press release from a conversation with a scientist who shelves most of his work, is desperate for tenure, describing a conclusion that is more than likely irreproducible. That’s like five layers of spin on top of a result that’s most likely false!

If the kind of “science” I’m talking about were framed as an amusing hobby and an article about bacon prolonging life was treated in the same fashion as a movie review then it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but for many people science has taken the place of religion. And more than just religion, it has taken the place of deep thinking about the fundamental questions of life in general. People have replaced virtue with a sort of sloppy rationality which cloaks itself in science and is therefore considered progressive, but is really just the idea of doing whatever makes you feel good cloaked in a bunch of pseudo scientific babble. And decisions are being made which can cost people their lives.

As an example of this, I just finished the book Dreamland by Sam Quinones. It’s an in depth look at the opiate epidemic in America, and a stunning indictment of what passes for science these days. You’ve probably heard about the opiate epidemic, if not follow the link. The effects of the epidemic are so bad that as to be baffling and a whole host of factors combined to make the problem so terrible, but the misuse of science was one of the bigger factors, possibly the biggest. It’s not possible to go into a complete description of what happened (I highly recommend the book) but in essence using a combination of poor science and a morality devoid of any underpinning in religion or tradition, doctors decided that people could essentially have unlimited opiates, the best known of which is oxycontin. Exactly what I mean by doing whatever makes you feel good cloaked in pseudo scientific babble.

The first part, the misuse of science, hinged on placing far too much weight on a one paragraph letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980 which claimed that opiates only ended up causing addiction in 1% of people. Getting past the fact that the author never intended it to be used in the way it was, to base decades of pain management on one paragraph is staggeringly irresponsible. Even more irresponsible, when the pharmaceutical companies got around to trying to confirm the result they found the it didn’t hold up (to no one’s surprise) and they ended up burying and twisting the results they did get. The number of people that died of accidental overdoses directly or indirectly from this misuse of science is easily six figures, possibly seven, particularly since people are still dying. Of course in addition to the misuse of science there was the over reliance on science. I assume that on some level the pharmaceutical companies knew that they were not being scientific, but countless doctors, who were either naive or blinded by the gifts provided by the pharmaceutical company chose to at least to pretend that they were doing what they were doing because science backed them up.

I mentioned that one of the other factors was a morality devoid of any underpinning in religion or tradition. I’m not going to say that any religion specifically forbids overprescription of opiates, but most of them have some broad caution about drugs in general. And even if you want to set religion aside there is a strong traditional distaste for opium. And here is where the limits of science are most stark.

Frequently, people use science to declare any belief or practice or tradition or religion which is insufficiently scientific (which of course includes all religions, most traditions, and a majority of practices and beliefs over a few decades old) as nothing more than baseless superstitions. And while it was not labeled as such this is precisely what happened with opiates. All religions I’m aware of recognize that a certain amount of suffering is part of existence, but in 1980, doctors more or less decided it wasn’t. Sure they couched in the language of science with lots of caveats, but this is precisely the problem. The science turned out to be wrong and the caveats turned out to be insufficient barriers to abuse and somewhere north of 100,000 people died.

As I have repeatedly said, I’m not anti-science, but science without tradition, without morality, and without religion is prone to huge abuses. This blog will attempt to unite religion and science, but in doing so, religion is always going to hold primacy over science. And it’s not even necessarily because religion is backed by divine infallibility. Forget about that. Set that aside. While, I certainly believe that that’s the case, in these circumstances it doesn’t matter. The problem with science is that it hasn’t been around very long, and it assumes a sterile, rational world which bears no resemblance to the world we actually live in. Setting aside whether God exists, religion and tradition has been tested in the crucible of history. And have provided insights, particularly in the realm of morality that people ignore at their peril. Which will be the subject of my next blog post.

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LGBT Youth and Suicide

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This is one of those posts where I’m sure I’m walking into a minefield. Well you only live once, so lets do this…

When people want to talk about the harm caused to LGBT youth by the intolerance of the Church, the first place they go is to a discussion of suicide. This makes sense. When someone takes their own life it’s tragic. There’s no way to sugar coat a suicide. It’s obviously a bad thing.

This discussion has been going on for awhile, but it seemed to really explode earlier this year with the publication of a report which claimed that 32 young LGBT Mormons aged 14-20 have committed suicide since the Church changed its policies on same sex marriage (SSM), labeling people in a SSM as apostates and forbidding their children from being baptized.

The connection to be drawn was clear. Through their policy the Church had indirectly killed people. This shouldn’t be a surprise. I have all the sympathy in the world for the parents, family members and friends of those individuals, and if they’re mad at the Church that’s understandable. I’d be upset as well and as part of that I’d certainly want something and someone to blame. And connecting these suicides to the policies of the Church and the attitudes of its members seems obvious.

That said, the more emotional the subject, the more difficult it is too really look at things rationally. And yet in a situation as consequential as this one, understanding what is really going on becomes more important than ever. I agree that the explanation offered by the article seems the obvious one, but so many times the obvious explanation is not the correct one. And there have been thousands of times when people thought they were helping when in fact they were doing exactly the opposite. And unfortunately as much as it pains me to say this, that may in fact be what’s happening here.

I mentioned the article from the beginning of the year, and as you can probably imagine, the issue hasn’t gone away. At the first of this month a piece was published in the Salt Lake Tribune once again talking about LGBT suicide and once again pushing the Church to do more about it. It should be noted that this op-ed was written by one of leaders of the organization who supplied the data on the 32 suicides featured in the initial article. I don’t think this undermines the claims or anything of that sort, but if you’re trying to get to the truth these sorts of details are important. But at this point I’m fine granting the LGBT Mormon Youth are committing suicide and that the numbers of youth committing suicide are in fact increasing. This idea is strengthened by an article linked to from the same page as the op-ed which reported that youth suicides have tripled since 2007.

Looking at the comments on the second article it appears that most people agree with the position of the op-ed, so the overall theory that the Church is causing suicides has considerable traction. But does it make sense? Is the connection really that clear? Let’s start by looking at the time line. First let’s look at the Church’s position on LGBT issues. Here are few milestones:

1995: LDS leaders issue the Proclamation on the Family which declares that “Marriage between man and woman is essential to [God’s] eternal plan” and that “Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.”

2008: LDS Church campaigns heavily for Proposition 8. Which passes, reversing the California Supreme Court's decision to legalize SSM.

2010: In a tearful meeting in Oakland Elder Marlin K. Jensen apologized to those affected by Proposition 8 for the Church’s part in passing it.

2012: The Church creates the website www.mormonsandgays.org in an attempt to reach out to members who experience same sex attraction (SSA).

2015, November: Church labels people in an SSM as apostates and forbids children of those couples from baptism.

I’m sure I’ve left out some milestones. But I think it’s clear that since 2007 the Church’s engagement with the LGBT community has not been a series of escalations, with each step worse than the last. There have been some real attempts to reach out to the LGBT community. And while you may disagree with the effectiveness or even the sincerity of these efforts, I have a hard time seeing how the Church’s treatment of LGBT individuals is getting worse. The outreach of the website, or the Proposition 8 apology would have been unthinkable during the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. And, while I was not alive for the decades before that I am reliably informed that attitudes towards LGBT individuals were even worse before then.

Taken together, the evidence strongly suggests that the Church and its leadership are making real attempts to be more loving and understanding. I can point you towards stories of transgender Mormons showing up in dresses to Church and being treated as women and gay bishops who publically talk about their struggle with same sex attraction. Yes, there are certainly lines that the Church has decided should not be crossed, but beyond that they’ve been unusually accommodating. But let’s set that aside for the moment. Perhaps the Mormon Church has become more draconian. Maybe there are elements, perhaps individual members, who are being horribly repressive and intolerant. Even if this is the case (and I don’t think it is) they are not the only factor in play. We also have to look at what things have been like outside of the Church with respect to LGBT acceptance. Some milestones there:

1999-2000: Domestic partnerships and civil unions become legal in California and Vermont respectively.

2003: SSM legal in Massachusetts.

2009: Numerous states make SSM legal (with lots of fights back and forth at the ballot box).

2011: Obama administration declares they will no longer defend DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act

2013: SSM made legal in Utah.

2015: SSM made legal everywhere in the US.

And this list doesn’t even include the increased acceptance of LGBT’s on TV and movies and in the media. For the last decade or more LGBT people have gone from one victory to another. By any conceivable measurement things are as good as they have ever been. If that’s the case why are so many of them committing suicide? Even if you want to claim that the LDS Church has been unusually repressive. It’s not that hard to leave the Church and reject its teachings. People do it all the time, and by all accounts there’s a large community willing to embrace them and celebrate their decision. Outside of the Church the argument that intolerance and bigotry are causing suicides just doesn’t hold any water. And even if you restrict your examination to what’s happening within the church, the evidence is weak to nonexistent.

To be clear, the suicide of anyone is tragic. And I would never want people to think I am minimizing the  suffering of those involved. But given how tragic it is, isn’t it that much more important to make sure that we correctly understand the causes? It’s easy to point the finger at the Church and declare that it’s all being caused by Mormon bigotry. But being blinded by animosity towards the Church could easily lead someone to overlook other issues. Once again, Youth suicides have tripled! The consequences of incorrectly diagnosing the problem are huge. And blaming it all on the Church looks like it might just be an example of an incorrect diagnosis. Or at a minimum not the whole story.

If the LGBT community is objectively being treated with more tolerance than ever why are suicides increasing? As I have said, he conventional wisdom is that we just need to be even more tolerant. But it’s worth examining the causes of suicide, because they don’t always map to one’s expectations. Interestingly enough one of the latest episodes of the Freakonomics podcast was a rebroadcast of an episode they did on suicide from 2011. It brings up a lot of points that are worth considering.

Before I jump into the Freakonomics podcast I want to make it clear, that I’m not saying I know why the suicide rate has increased or why LGBT youth are committing suicide. It would be ridiculous of me to take a podcast and a couple of articles from the internet and use them to pass judgment about what should be done. Instead, rather than saying why it is happening, I’m

offering up the opinion that it might not be happening because of the Church and its members. I intend to offer some alternative theories, mostly to show that there are other potential explanations, not to advance any of the explanations as THE explanation.

The first thing we notice when we listen to the podcast is the title, “The Suicide Paradox.” It’s called that because a lot of things about suicide don’t make sense, and can be downright paradoxical. For example it turns out that blacks commit suicide at only half the rate of whites. If your theory is that oppression and intolerance causes suicide you would expect their rate to be higher than the white rate. Another example (not from the podcast) is Syria, which one year into its civil war was tied for the lowest national suicide rate (now there may be all kinds of problems with that number, but it’s borne out by other surveys conducted before the war.) One of the best statements about the difficulty of understanding suicide comes from David Lester who was interviewed as part of the podcast. Lester has written over 2,500 academic papers, more than half of which concern suicide. And his conclusion is:

First of all, I’m expected to know the answers to questions such as why people kill themselves. And myself and my friends, we often, when we’re relaxing, admit that we really don’t have a good idea why people kill themselves.

Despite this statement there are some general things that can be said about suicide. For instance suicide is contagious. If someone hears about a suicide or sees a suicide, say on TV, particularly if the person committing the suicide bears some resemblance to the person hearing about it, it can trigger a copycat suicide. This is called the Werther Effect after a novel by Goethe where he described someone committing suicide in a sympathetic fashion. Thus it’s possible that in the process of publicizing the suicide of LGBT Mormon youth that the people trying to prevent it are actually contributing to the problem. If so it that would be terrible, and as I said, I take no stand on what is actually happening, I’m only urging that a problem this serious deserves all the knowledge and resources at our disposal.

It’s also worth mentioning that Utah is squarely inside the suicide belt, that area of the country with the highest suicide rates. Explanations for the high suicide rates in the Mountain West have ranged from residential instability, to access to guns, to the thin air. This is a great site for comparing suicide rates among states, and it’s worth noting that the site doesn’t show a 3x increase in the number of suicides in Utah since 2007. If you follow the link and select states to compare, Utah looks very similar to Colorado and New Mexico. States which are not known for having a huge population of Mormons. Of course the original article talked about youth, and it’s not my intention to dig into the numbers (at least not now) though they could very well be suspect. The point I want to bring up is that Utah is already has an above average suicide rate and it appears to have nothing to do with the Church.

Finally you would expect that suicide to be more rare among wealthy people, and to an extent that’s true, but less than you would think. There is no strong correlation between wealth and suicide. Having more money doesn’t do much to lower your risk of suicide and may in certain cases increase it. Additionally some of the very highest rates of suicide are among older white males. Hardly the group you think of when you think of an unhappy minority. And indeed rich and famous people commit suicide all the time. The effect is even more pronounced if you look at the difference in suicide rates between rich and poor countries. Not only is this another mark against the theory that bigotry and intolerance cause suicide, but it leads us to another alternate theory for suicide.

According to this theory, people who are impoverished, discriminated against, or otherwise dealing with difficult circumstances can always point to these circumstances as the reason why they’re unhappy. When those circumstances go away, if the person is still unhappy, then it must mean that they’re broken in some fundamental way, and their unhappiness is therefore a permanent condition. If everything you think is making you unhappy goes away and you’re still unhappy what’s left?

This could be what we’re seeing with the LGBT community. In the “bad old days” the reasons for their misery were obvious, the world didn’t accept them and never would. Now they’re accepted everywhere. They can join the military, they can get married, companies come to their aid. What’s left? And yet, the suicide rate remains tragically high.

Chelsea Manning, the transgender whistleblower formerly known as Bradley Manning before transitioning, attempted to commit suicide recently. And it is among transgendered that the evidence for this effect is strongest. If on the one hand we just need more tolerance to solve the problem, than those individuals who have successfully undergone gender reassignment surgery and can pass as the opposite sex should have the lowest suicide rate. Instead individuals who’ve undergone the surgery experience a suicide mortality rate 20 times greater than a comparable non-transgender population. Even transgender individuals have taken these numbers and used them to argue vigorously against surgery.

Sticking with just transgendered individuals there are still well-respected doctors who argue that transgendered individuals suffer from a version of body dysmorphic disorder. In other words being transgendered is similar to having anorexia or bulimia. Thus we should be treating them like people with a mental illness, not as people who have a different but completely valid lifestyle. Obviously this is a very unpopular theory, but that should not be a factor in determining what’s really going on.

I know that the current orthodoxy is that we just need to allow people to do whatever they want and happiness will follow, but at some point don’t we need to look at the data? Is it in fact possible that telling people to pursue personal gratification at the expense of everything else is contributing to the problem?

I know people are convinced that the intolerance of the church and it’s members are indirectly killing people. And I can understand the reasons why they think this, but it just doesn’t add up. At some point you have to admit the possibility that some people are more interested in finding a club to beat the Church with than they are in getting to the truth, and by extension really helping these kids.

I’ll tell you what I thought when I heard the announcement that the Church would not baptize the children of same sex couples and were declaring anyone in a same sex marriage as apostate. I was relieved and excited, and I’ll tell you why. The Church had backed down on a lot of things, as I mentioned above they had apologized, they had put up websites, and all of these were probably even good things, but we can be so accommodating that we lose sight of the doctrine. And as I have attempted to point out here, we can be so accommodating that we are no longer able to think deeply about a topic. Our dialogue becomes nothing but accusations and apologies. Obviously I’m just a bit player in all of this. The leaders of the church know what they’re doing and along those linesl think Dallin H. Oaks said it best when he was speaking about this very issue of LGBT suicide:

I think part of what my responsibility extends to, is trying to teach people to be loving, and civil and sensitive to one another...beyond that, the rightness the wrongness, I will be accountable to higher authority for that...

In all of this that’s what we have to remember. We are accountable to a higher authority. As much as we might want to bring our own strong sense of right and wrong and justice to things, there is a greater hand than ours guiding the affairs of the Church. And it’s our responsibility to be obedient and accountable to that authority, even if it’s difficult.

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