Category Archives: Psychology

Sam Harris: Why I Decided to Have Children

11 Sunday Oct 2015

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Sam Harris

Interviewer: You’ve briefly discussed the ethics of having children and the evidence that parents are less happy and less productive than their child-free counterparts. Why did you decide to have children?

Sam Harris: I guess there are two possible answers. One is it’s just a failure to be emotionally moved by the data. There are certain things you may understand to be true, but you just can’t make their being true emotionally relevant enough to have it guide your behavior. That’s one explanation.

I don’t think it’s the most likely reason in my case. I think it’s more a matter of my feeling — based on who I am and who I’m married to and what she wanted and what I wanted — that we were very likely to be exceptions to the rule. There’s no doubt a certain amount of self-deception if not delusion on offer there, when you begin looking at scientific data and imagining it doesn’t apply to you.

But in our case, I think we stood a very good chance of being happy parents, having happy kids, and being glad that we were parents — and finding the alternative, alas retrospectively, unthinkable.

And that’s sort of where we are. I’m a very happy father. I love my daughters. The idea that I might not have had them does seem unthinkable now.

But I’m also aware that having them has created forms of suffering that we wouldn’t otherwise know. And we’ve certainly given hostages to fortune, as Francis Bacon said.

You worry about the future, you worry about all sorts of things that you’d be quite insouciant about if you were just on your own, living out your adulthood.

It’s not without its downsides, but even the downsides have a silver lining. Being concerned about the future because you have kids is good ethically. And it does lead to a kind of productivity that might not otherwise be available…

To worry about the fate of civilization in the abstract is harder than worrying about what sorts of experiences your children are going to have in the future — and a future that hopefully extends beyond your own.

__________

Sam Harris, speaking with Tim Ferriss in his most recent Four Hour Workweek interview (these comments can be heard at around the nineteen minute mark).

Currently on my nightstand is Sam’s newest book, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, a short dialogue with Maajid Nawaz. Nawaz is one of the truly compelling contemporary public figures. A former Islamic extremist, he spent five years in an Egyptian prison for trying to topple the Mubarak government and establish a caliphate. Now he cuts a suave figure in London as the head of the anti-extremist think tank Quilliam. I encourage you to follow the work they do, especially his. You can watch Harris and Nawaz’s illuminating discussion at their recent book launch at the Kennedy School below:

Read on:

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How Women Civilized the West

08 Thursday Oct 2015

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Steven Pinker

“The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men. Not only are males the more competitive sex in most mammalian species, but with Homo sapiens a man’s position in the pecking order is secured by reputation, an investment with a lifelong payout that must be started early in adulthood.

The violence of men, though, is modulated by a slider: they can allocate their energy along a continuum from competing with other men for access to women to wooing the women themselves and investing in their children, a continuum that biologists sometimes call ‘cads versus dads.’ […]

The West was eventually tamed not just by flinty-eyed marshals and hanging judges but by an influx of women. The Hollywood westerns’ ‘prim pretty schoolteacher[s] arriving in Roaring Gulch’ captures a historical reality. Nature abhors a lopsided sex ratio, and women in eastern cities and farms eventually flowed westward along the sexual concentration gradient. Widows, spinsters, and young single women sought their fortunes in the marriage market, encouraged by the lonely men themselves and by municipal and commercial officials who became increasingly exasperated by the degeneracy of their western hellholes. As the women arrived, they used their bargaining position to transform the West into an environment better suited to their interests. They insisted that the men abandon their brawling and boozing for marriage and family life, encouraged the building of schools and churches, and shut down saloons, brothels, gambling dens, and other rivals for the men’s attention. Churches, with their coed membership, Sunday morning discipline, and glorification of norms on temperance, added institutional muscle to the women’s civilizing offensive. Today we guffaw at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (with its ax-wielding tavern terrorist Carrie Nation) and at the Salvation Army, whose anthem, according to the satire, includes the lines ‘We never eat cookies ‘cause cookies have yeast / And one little bite turns a man to a beast.’ But the early feminists of the temperance movement were responding to the very real catastrophe of alcohol-fueled bloodbaths in male-dominated enclaves.

The idea that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern criminology. A famous study that tracked a thousand low-income Boston teenagers for forty-five years discovered that two factors predicted whether a delinquent would go on to avoid a life of crime: getting a stable job, and marrying a woman he cared about and supporting her and her children. The effect of marriage was substantial: three-quarters of the bachelors, but only a third of the husbands, went on to commit more crimes. This difference alone cannot tell us whether marriage keeps men away from crime or career criminals are less likely to get married, but the sociologists Robert Sampson, John Laub, and Christopher Wimer have shown that marriage really does seem to be a pacifying cause. When they held constant all the factors that typically push men into marriage, they found that actually getting married made a man less likely to commit crimes immediately thereafter. The causal pathway has been pithily explained by Johnny Cash: Because you’re mine, I walk the line.”

__________

Excerpted from Steven Pinker’s monumental study of human violence The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Wrapping up this chapter, titled “Violence in These United States,” Pinker frames America’s long path to pacification within the lingering differences in how North and South, Liberals and Conservatives regard violence. He writes,

An appreciation of the Civilizing Process in the American West and rural South helps to make sense of the American political landscape today. Many northern and coastal intellectuals are puzzled by the culture of their red state compatriots, with their embrace of guns, capital punishment, small government, evangelical Christianity, ‘family values,’ and sexual propriety. Their opposite numbers are just as baffled by the blue staters’ timidity toward criminals and foreign enemies, their trust in government, their intellectualized secularism, and their tolerance of licentiousness. This so-called culture war, I suspect, is the product of a history in which white America took two different paths to civilization. The North is an extension of Europe and continued the court- and commerce-driven Civilizing Process that had been gathering momentum since the Middle Ages. The South and West preserved the culture of honor that sprang up in the anarchic parts of the growing country, balanced by their own civilizing forces of churches, families, and temperance.

Pinker runs through the well documented findings of this book — which I can recommend with a confident tilt of the head to almost anyone — in his 2013 talk at the University of Edinburgh:

And continue reading:

Leon Wieseltier: We’re Inebriated with Technology

22 Tuesday Sep 2015

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Drew Gilpin Faust: You’ve said that we’re inebriated by technology. If we weren’t inebriated, what would we be doing instead?

Leon Wieseltier: We would be living more slowly to begin with. The single most important fact about the technology is its speed, as far as I can tell.

Ten years ago, I frequently remarked to myself from my perch at The New Republic, that they finally invented a medium of communication with no limits in physical space — yet everything on it had to be 400 words.

And the reason was the speed.

The acceleration of everything is troublesome to me. I think we’re extending ourselves beyond what our hearts and our minds can actually absorb. And we’re all living checklist lives; we’re all just getting everything done.

There are bastions against this acceleration. Reading — I mean real reading. Sex. You can’t fast forward it. Music. You can walk out of a Bruckner symphony but you cannot speed it up. You are at the mercy of whatever the tempo of a piece of music is, which is why music is one of the great spiritual correctives of our era.

And if you speed things up, what you’re really doing is diminishing or impoverishing or in some ways even abolishing experience, because experience takes place in time.

There’s a tenth century Jewish philosopher who wrote a very influential book of philosophy in what is now Iraq. And in the forward to the book, he asks a perfectly sensible question: if God wanted us to know the answers, why didn’t he just tell us?

And the answer that Saadia Gaon gives is that because if He had told us, we wouldn’t in any strict sense know it. What would be absent is the dimension of time — or struggle or method, which is time.

The experience of acquiring knowledge is part of the certainty that we have it in some way.

And I’m not in any way a luddite, but the technology reduces all knowledge to the status of information.

__________

Leon Wieseltier, former editor The New Republic and current visiting professor of civics at Harvard, in conversation with the president of the school, Drew Gilpin Faust earlier this year. I encourage you to buy a copy of Wieseltier’s Kaddish, a book I plan to read early in the coming year.

Gaon may’ve been early by about a millennium, but his line of reasoning fits nicely in the “knowledge argument” that psychologists and philosophers have now been fighting over for a century. In short, the debate goes: is there such thing as knowledge that is not “physical” but exclusively “experiential”?

Fred Jackson outlined the most famous thought experiment on the subject in his 1982 paper “Epiphenomenal Qualia” (perfect the next time you need a cocktail party conversation starter!):

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. […] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

The basic point is this: if Mary knows every bit of physical knowledge about human color vision before she is realized from the monochrome room, does she “learn” anything once released into a world of tomatoes and sky? If so, what exactly does she learn in apprehending these things for the first time? Several philosophers I’ve posted about — most notably the great Thomas Nagel — have taken sides on this issue and made arguments worth exploring.

Read on:

Leon Wieseltier

Our Students Are Taught to Feel but Not Think

13 Monday Jul 2015

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Thomas Sowell

“Science is not the only field in which American students are lacking in knowledge and — more importantly — in the ability to tie what they know together to form a coherent chain of reasoning. Many American students seem unaware of even the need for such a process. Test scores are only the tip of the iceberg. Professor Diane Ravitch, a scholar specializing in the study of American education, reports that ‘professors complain about students who arrive at college with strong convictions but not enough knowledge to argue persuasively for their beliefs.’ As Professor Ravitch concludes: ‘Having opinions without knowledge is not of much value; not knowing the difference between them is a positive indicator of ignorance.’ In short, it is not that Johnny can’t read, or even that Johnny can’t think. Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools.

The phrase ‘I feel’ is so often used by American students to introduce a conclusion, rather than say ‘I think,’ or ‘I know,’ much less ‘I conclude.’ Unfortunately, ‘I feel’ is often the most accurate term — and is regarded as sufficient by many teachers, as well as students. The net result, as in mathematics, is that many students are confident incompetents, whether discussing social issues, world events, or other subjects. The emphasis is on having students express opinions on issues, and on having those opinions taken seriously (enhancing self-esteem), regardless of whether there is anything behind them…”

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Excerpted from Thomas Sowell’s 1993 book Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas.

Below, watch Sowell debating American schools in a 1981 episode from Buckley’s Firing Line.

More:

Existence for Existence’s Sake?: Dostoevsky, Sam Harris, and Others on the Surprising Reason We Want to Stay Alive

09 Thursday Apr 2015

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Dworkin-Nagel 1

Aggregated here are several attempts to address that simple question. Why do you want to stay alive?

Though they arrive there from different byways, each thinker finally rests on the same idea: the reason why we want to stay alive is, simply, to perpetuate our existence. We want to stay alive to stay alive. Sound absurd, or absurdly tautological? It’s not, at least in my view. The value we place in life has little to do with projected positive experiences — the quivering line graph that registers whether we’re ecstatic one moment, unsatisfied the next. Rather, what we want is to continue the oft-banal experience of merely existing. Read on. See if you agree.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, speaking through the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov in Part II, Chapter 6 of Crime and Punishment:

‘Where is it,’ thought Raskolnikov. ‘Where is it I’ve read that some one condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!… How true it is! Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature!… And vile is he who calls him vile for that,’ he added a moment later.

In a recent interview with Jenny Attiyeh, Jim Holt, author of the existential mystery Why Does the World Exist?, reflected on the question and offered a level-headed and explicit answer:

Interviewer: Jim, in your work there are some themes that keep reappearing, notably religion and mortality… do you think that perhaps you’re getting a little bit worried about death?

Holt: Actually I think in many ways it would be a good career move for me [laughs], and it would solve almost all of my problems.

I think that life is — and I don’t know what your life is like — but mine sort of hovers around the zero point that separates pleasure from pain and happiness from misery. And every once in a while I’ll get a little spike into the happiness region, but then I’ll immediately go back down close to the zero point, or creep below that into the misery region. Yet I fluctuate around that point. And what I really cherish about life is being conscious. And to me that’s the subjective counterpart to the question ‘Why should the universe exist?’: ‘Why should consciousness exist? Why should my self exist?’

And what interests me is the way that philosophers have tried to take the sting out of death by various arguments that go back to the Epicureans. Lucretius and Epicurus himself said, ‘Well, don’t get so worried about death because your nonexistence after you die is just the mirror image of your nonexistence before you were born.’

And you didn’t worry about not existing the centuries before you were born, so why should you worry about not existing after your death?

The great Thomas Nagel rigorously deconstructed the idea in his magisterial book The View from Nowhere:

People are attracted to the possibility of long-term suspended animation or freezing, followed by the resumption of conscious life, because they can regard it from within simply as a continuation of their present life. If these techniques are ever perfected, what from outside appeared as a dormant interval of three hundred years could be experienced by the subject as nothing more than a sharp discontinuity in the character of his experiences. I do not deny, or course, that this has its own disadvantages. Family and friends may have died in the meantime; the language may have changed; the comforts of social, geographical, and cultural familiarity would be lacking. Nevertheless those inconveniences would not obliterate the basic advantage of continued, thought discontinuous, existence.

It is being alive, doing certain things, having certain experiences, that we consider good. But if death is an evil, it is the loss of life, rather than the state of being dead, or nonexistent, or unconscious, that is objectionable. This asymmetry is important. If it is good to be alive, that advantage can be attributed to a person at each point of his life. It is good of which Bach had more than Schubert, simply because he lived longer. Death, however, is not an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust. If death is a disadvantage, it is not easy to say when a man suffers it.

If we are to make sense of the view that to die is bad, it must be on the ground that life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss, bad not because of any positive features but because of the desirability of what it removes.

Saul Frampton reflects on Montaigne and the question of existence for existence’s sake in his book When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?:

Sometime towards the end of the sixteenth century, Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, reached up to the ceiling of his library and scratched off an inscription he had placed there some years before…

The inscription Montaigne erased was a line from the Roman poet Lucretius: Nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas — There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer. It was a sentiment he had previously held dear to. Like most thinkers of his time, Montaigne followed a Christian and a Stoic philosophy, where life was seen as preparation for the afterlife and the task of philosophy was to harden oneself against the vicissitudes of fortune…

But Montaigne’s erasing of the words of Lucretius from the ceiling of his library also marks an amazing reversal in Montaigne’s outlook over the course of his writing – a shift from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life.

And Montaigne’s writing overflows with life. In over a hundred essays and around half a million words he records every thought, every taste and sensation that crosses his mind. He writes essays on sleep and on sadness, on smells and friendship, on children and sex and death. And, as a final testament, he writes an essay on experience, in which he contemplates the wonder of human existence itself.

And, to close, Sam Harris nodded at the significance of life’s most mundane pleasures in a recent online Q&A:

Questioner: Is is not objectively better never to have been? What flaw is there in the nonexistent state?

Harris: It is impossible to eat pancakes there.

__________

Have more to add? Send them my way: john[at]jrbenjamin.com.

The picture is of the headiest pancake breakfast of all time: Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel shooting the breeze at the local diner.

I’ve done this sort of agreement among geniuses thing before:

Dworkin-Nagel

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Advice for Finding the Right Girl

26 Thursday Mar 2015

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J.R.R. Tolkien 4

“In this fallen world the ‘friendship’ that should be possible between all human beings, is virtually impossible between man and woman… Later in life when sex cools down, it may be possible. It may happen between saints. To ordinary folk it can only rarely occur: two minds that have really a primarily mental and spiritual affinity may by accident reside in a male and a female body, and yet may desire and achieve a ‘friendship’ quite independent of sex. But no one can count on it. The other partner will let him (or her) down, almost certainly, by ‘falling in love’…

However, the essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called ‘self-realization’; but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify & direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him – as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state, as it provides easements. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial…

When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married, if only —. Hence divorce, to provide the ‘if only’. And of course they are as a rule quite right: they did make a mistake.

Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the ‘real soul-mate’ is the one you are actually married to. You really do very little choosing: life and circumstance do most of it… In great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an unfallen world. In this fallen world we have as our only guides, prudence, wisdom (rare in youth, too late in age), a clean heart, and fidelity of will.”

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Excerpts of a letter sent from J.R.R. Tolkien of 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford to his son Michael on the front lines. March 8th, 1941.

Tolkien addressed this one to “Mick,” his middle son Michael. You’ll find it along with a lot of other gems in the collection, compiled by his youngest son Christopher, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.

More from the Inklings:

Tolkien and wife 2

Steven Pinker: What Are Cuss Words and Why Do We Use Them?

19 Thursday Feb 2015

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Steven Pinker

Questioner: You say that most swear words are found in the following categories: sex, religion, excretion, death, infirmity, or disfavored groups. Can you give us an indication of why we find these particular things worthy of swearing about?

Steven Pinker: Each one of the categories from which we draw our taboo words involves negative emotion. In the case of sexual swearing, it’s the revulsion at sexual depravity, and just in general the high emotion that surrounds sexuality, even in the most liberated cultures. In the case of disfavored groups, say taboo terms for ethnic and racial minorities, it’s hatred and contempt for other peoples. In the case of religious swearing, it’s awe of the power of the divine. In the case of death and disease, it’s dread of infirmity and death.

So in each case, there’s a strong negative emotion. And I think the essence of swearing is the power to trigger a negative thought in the mind of your listener through the use of words. Now why would we want to do it?

There are a number of different ways in which people swear. Sometimes we do it in order to remind people how awful the objects or activities are. If we want people to not think about how terrible feces are, we use the word “feces.” If we want to remind them of how disgusting it all is, we use the word “shit.”

Likewise, if you’re talking about sex in a positive context, you’d be likely to use the phrase “make love,” but if you talk about someone who’s exploiting someone else, you might say, “Oh he’s fucking his secretary.” And the word is deliberately used to highlight that which is most offensive about the activity.

But we also use curse words cathartically. You hit your thumb with a hammer, and you start blurting out words having to do with theology (“damn”) or excretion (“shit”) or sexuality (“fuck”).

If you stub your toe and you yell out “oh shit!” it has nothing to do with feces, other than the fact that feces are unpleasant and stubbing your toe is unpleasant. […]

The swear words that you speak advertise to a real or sometimes virtual audience that you are currently in the throes of some extremely unpleasant emotion. And in that regard, swearing overlaps with other exclamations in the language, like “burrrr” if you’re cold, or “ah ha” or “mhmm” or “yuck”, which also have no syntax – you just blurt them out as individual words – but they still convey a particular emotion.

And in addition, as we’ve mentioned before, many sexual idioms have a rather unflattering image of sex as an act which damages or exploits a woman. Not only “we got screwed,” but “oh my printer is fucked up” – meaning broken, damaged.

So certainly over-use of sexual swearing can feel offensive to women. For that reason and many others, I avoid it. And as with any other aspect of language use, it’d be common sense and common courtesy to anticipate how the language will affect your audience, depending on whether it’s male or female, younger or older, in a formal setting or more casual setting. And whether it’s used with a straight face or ironically, swearing can be more or less offensive, and any careful speaker ought to anticipate these effects.

__________

From one of the best living communicators of science, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, interviewed by The Guardian about his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

More from the mind of Pinker:

The Machinery of Happiness

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

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Sam Harris

“There is nothing novel about trying to become happy. And one can become happy, within certain limits… But conventional sources of happiness are unreliable, being dependent upon changing conditions. It is difficult to raise a happy family, to keep yourself and those you love healthy, to acquire wealth and find creative and fulfilling ways to enjoy it, to form deep friendships, to contribute to society in ways that are emotionally rewarding, to perfect a wide variety of artistic, athletic, and intellectual skills—and to keep the machinery of happiness running day after day. There is nothing wrong with being fulfilled in all these ways—except for the fact that, if you pay close attention, you will see that there is still something wrong with it. These forms of happiness aren’t good enough. Our feelings of fulfillment do not last. And the stress of life continues.”

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From the opening chapter of Waking Up by Sam Harris (Read the entire first chapter at Harris’s blog).

More happy stuff:

How Society Operates

28 Friday Nov 2014

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Will Self

Laurie Taylor: One of the things people say about your books is the difficulty in feeling any empathy or sympathy for the characters… why aren’t your characters lovable?

Will Self: But people aren’t really that lovable. Again an aspect of the modern Kulturkampf is to pretend that everybody’s lovable. That’s a collective delusion. Society doesn’t operate because we love everybody; society operates through sanction, through forms of collective control, through hierarchy, through the imposition of controlled forms of mass hysteria. So the novels that persuade you of the idea that everybody’s intrinsically lovable are pulling off a confidence trick – as are the moral systems that delude people into believing it. You see it time and time again, Laurie, and you know it’s true: people’s capacity for empathy for those who are outside their immediate social matrix is remarkably small. And it doesn’t matter if you validate this through evolutionary psychology or you pull up Stanley Milgram’s experiments at Yale or the genocidal impulse that seems to exist in humanity: these are true facts. The thing is people will hear these arguments and respond, saying, ‘Yes, you’re right, but we’ve got to aim for something better than that.’

But what would that world be like in which you empathized with 7 billion people? What would the world be like if you felt the pain of the 250,000 people who were rubbed out in Haiti a few weeks ago? What a strange place it would be.

__________

Will Self offering his typically disquieting opinion in an interview with Sociologist Laurie Taylor for the BBC program In Confidence in 2010.

“Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.”  – Zadie Smith

Do Not Pursue What Is Illusionary

13 Monday Oct 2014

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I’ll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary — property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life — don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart — and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.”

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Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, writing in The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation

More out of Russia:

Does the Mind’s System Reflect a Judeo-Christian View of Human Nature?

26 Friday Sep 2014

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4-format43

“The mind is modular, with many parts cooperating to generate a train of thought or an organized action.

It has distinct information-processing systems for filtering out distractions, learning skills, controlling the body, remembering facts, holding information temporarily, and storing and executing rules. Cutting across these data-processing systems are mental faculties (sometimes called multiple intelligences) dedicated to different kinds of content, such as language, number, space, tools, and living things.[…]

More generally, the interplay of mental systems can explain how people can entertain revenge fantasies that they never act on, or can commit adultery only in their hearts. In this way the theory of human nature coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature, and with the psychoanalytic theory proposed by Sigmund Freud, than with behaviorism, social constructionism, and other versions of the Blank Slate. Behavior is not just emitted or elicited, nor does it come directly out of culture or society. It comes from an internal struggle among mental modules with differing agendas and goals.

The idea from the cognitive revolution that the mind is a system of universal, generative computational modules obliterates the way that debates on human nature have been framed for centuries. It is now simply misguided to ask whether humans are flexible or programmed, whether behavior is universal or varies across cultures, whether acts are learned or innate, whether we are essentially good or essentially evil. Humans behave flexibly because they are programmed: their minds are packed with combinatorial software that can generate an unlimited set of thoughts and behavior. Behavior may vary across cultures, but the design of the mental programs that generate it need not vary. Intelligent behavior is learned successfully because we have innate systems that do the learning. And all people may have good and evil motives, but not everyone may translate them into behavior in the same way.”

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From Steven Pinker’s epochal The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

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