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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: psychology

How Women Civilized the West

08 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology

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Carrie Nation, Christopher Wimer, John Laub, Johnny Cash, marriage, men, psychology, Robert Sampson, Salvation Army, Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, violence, women, Women’s Christian Temperance Union

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:

  • David Eagleman: About half of us have violence in our genes
  • Pinker traces the roots of the f word
  • Does our neurology reflect a Judeo-Christian view of human nature?

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Leon Wieseltier: We’re Inebriated with Technology

22 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Psychology

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Anton Bruckner, Drew Gilpin-Faust, Fred Jackson, Kaddish, Knowledge Argument, Leon Wieseltier, Philosophy, psychology, Saadia Gaon, technology, The New Republic, Thomas Nagel

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:

  • Reinhold Niebuhr speaks about the redemptive power of forgiveness
  • Will Self riffs on the problem with Utilitarianism
  • A bunch of philosophers attempt to answer: why do we want to stay alive?

Leon Wieseltier

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What the Outrage over Cecil the Lion Says about Our Warped Moral Priorities

06 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on What the Outrage over Cecil the Lion Says about Our Warped Moral Priorities

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Cecil the Lion, current events, debate, ethics, gun control, guns, hunting, interview, Just Babies, Moral Psychology, morality, Morals, Paul Bloom, Philosophy, Podcast, psychology, religion, Sam Harris, Veganism, Vegetarianism, Waking Up

Cecil the LionI imagine you have some thoughts about how well spent the moral outrage of seven billion people has been on Cecil the Lion.

“I do. Look, there’s some reason to believe the dentist did do something wrong. It’s not quite clear; he said he was hoodwinked by somebody else and he thought they had proper permits. And so, you know, if he did something wrong, broke the law, he should be punished. I don’t have any problem saying that. And also, I don’t have any particular love for big game hunting — I may be betraying my own liberal background but I find it kind of a repellant activity.

However, the lack of proportion in this case is astonishing.

I honestly think if the dentist went to Africa and shot an African, there’d be a lot less fuss. Instead he shot this beautiful lion… and the sentimentality combined with the mob attacks has been insane.

Of course, he was not hunting for food, he was hunting for trophies. Personally, I find myself totally unsympathetic to that, even though I can get right up to the door of it. I shoot guns because I’m very interested in self defense, and the truth is it’s incredibly fun to shoot guns…

So I can imagine that hunting is even more fun if you don’t have any scruple about killing the animal. And I’m under no illusions that my position as a non-vegetarian, as someone who eats meat and therefore delegates the killing of animals to others, is more ethical. I think the hunter who eats his kill is in a stronger moral position than I am. He’s owning the full process by which he’s arriving at his hamburger, or in this case, his venison steak…

What matters? What counts as a worse crime than another? What should one be allowed to do? And one can, as a reflective person, rank things. It’s worse to kill somebody than to beat them. It’s worse to steal one-hundred dollars than one dollar. It’s worse to kill an African human than an African lion…

If you feel the killing of Cecil is one of the biggest news stories of 2015, you’ve really got to reassess your values.”

__________

Remarks from two self-described liberals — Sam Harris and and Yale psychologist Paul Bloom on Harris’s Waking Up podcast last week (these remarks come at the 48 minute mark in the track below).

Bloom touches on many of these themes of moral psychology in his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil.

 

There’s more to see:

  • The curious case of fruit flies, grizzly bears, and Sarah Palin’s contempt for science
  • Will Self on the fatal flaw at the heart of Utilitarianism
  • Wittgenstein on the need to think hard about everyday problems

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

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Psychology, Science

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profanity, psychology, Steven Pinker, Swearing, The Guardian, The Stuff of Thought

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:

  • on feminism
  • on whether the mind’s system reflects Biblical morality
  • on the curious case of Sarah Palin, grizzly bears, and fruit flies
  • on the f-word
  • on Marxism and Nazism – how they’re the same
  • on the Boston bombing and the psychology of terrorism

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The Machinery of Happiness

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology

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Tags

Contentment, happiness, joy, psychology, Sam Harris, Waking Up

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.”

__________

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

More happy stuff:

  • John Updike wraps up his memoir with a totally banal moment of pure joy
  • Jerzy Kosiński: how happiness is shaped by age and experience
  • Barnes takes it from a different angle: experiences can’t add up to happiness
  • For politicos: Gore Vidal dissects what ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ means today
  • Charles Murray takes up Vidal’s argument

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

26 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology

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

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behaviorism, cognition, Freudianism, human nature, neuroscience, Psychiatry, psychology, science, Sigmund Freud, social constructionism, Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, the brain, the mind

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.”

__________

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

More from SP:

  • On Feminism
  • On the F-word
  • On Sarah Palin

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Your Mind Is All You Have

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Speeches

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Death and the Present, dreams, Fulfillment, happiness, mindfulness, neurology, neuroscience, Philosophy, psychology, Sam Harris, Speeches, thought, Waking, Your Mind Is All You Have

Sam Harris

“Whatever you can possibly notice – in your body, in your mind, in the world – has only one place to appear: in your conscious experience.

Now I’m not saying this is all just a dream, but as a neurological matter it is very much like a dream. It is a dream that is constrained by inputs from the external world. And the dreams we call dreams at night are dreams that are not constrained by the external world — and that’s why you seem to be able to get away with everything.

But your mind is all you have. It’s all you’ve ever had. It’s all you have to offer other people. And this might sound calloused to say when there are maybe many other aspects of your life that seem in need of being addressed… But it’s still true. If you are perpetually angry and depressed and confused and unloving, it doesn’t matter how much success you have or who’s in your life, you’re not going to enjoy any of it.

I suspect you could all make a list of things you want to accomplish – of things that really need to be changed about your life. What is the significance of everything on that list? Each thing on that list seems to promise that if you could only do it, you would have reason to just be happy in the present moment. We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment, and good enough reason to just be happy here…

And again, I’m not saying that everything on your list is absurd, or not worth accomplishing. But how dissatisfied with the present do you have to be in order to prepare a satisfying future? If you’re constantly ruminating on what you just did, or what you should have done, or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. You’ll fail to connect with it. You’ll fail to connect with other people.”

__________

Sam Harris, speaking in a section from his heavy and highly persuasive speech Death and the Present Moment.

I apologize for the record-breaking hiatus: I have been under-the-weather, and traveling, and just plain busy.

Read on:

  • Harris reflects on why exactly it’s so tragic that we waste our time
  • From his TED Talk: Sam argues about what societies get wrong about female sexuality
  • As a non-theist, Harris wonders about whether there is a deeper, more spiritual way to find fulfillment

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Viktor Frankl on How Love Survived the Nazi Death Camps

28 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Psychology

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Auschwitz, concentration camp, Dachau, Elie Wiesel, George Orwell, Ghetto, Holocaust, Love, Man's Search for Meaning, Martin Gilbert, Primo Levi, psychology, Schindler’s List, Survival, The Holocaust, Theresienstadt, Viktor Frankl, World War Two, Yevgenia Ginzburg

Auschwitz

“As we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an honorable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’

In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoner’s existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return, and I answered…

A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing — which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance…

Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. ‘Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.'”

Viktor Frankl

__________

From Viktor Frankl’s psychological chronicle of the Holocaust Man’s Search for Meaning.

Frankl was a successful 37-year-old neurologist and therapist on the day he was deported from his home in Vienna to the Nazi ghetto Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Two years later, in October 1944, Frankl and his wife Tilly were transported to Auschwitz, then processed as slave laborers, split up, and sent off — Victor to a worksite bordering Dachau and Tilly to Bergen Belsen in Germany, where she soon died. Frankl would not come to know of her fate until after American soldiers liberated his camp in April, 1945, nor was he aware then that his mother Elsa, father Gabriel, and only brother, Walter, had also met the same fate at Aushwitz and Theresienstadt.

Last week I began flipping through Martin Gilbert’s much acclaimed historical survey The Holocaust. I like to think I have some of what Orwell called “a power of facing” unpleasant facts, and that my stomach is tough enough to digest even gruesome or taboo truths about the world. I’ve never walked out of a movie or play, or had to shelf a book, for the sole reason that it was just too horrifying to handle. Gilbert’s text, however, broke this streak; by the time I had reached about the two-hundredth page – less than a third of the way into this oppressive text – I felt so enervated that I had to put it down. I don’t think I’ll ever read it again.

It is, nevertheless, an excellent book – rigorously sourced, clearly organized – and in my brief reading of it (I didn’t even get to the really bad stuff) I alighted on two discrete lessons about the Holocaust. Number one: the Holocaust is something we cannot discuss without euphemism. To say someone “lived” in a ghetto or “died” in a concentration camp is to wash over essentially every splinter of truth which made up those experiences. If the scenes in Gilbert’s Holocaust are rated NC-17, then Schindler’s List, in all its terror, looks naïvely PG.

Part of the reason for this discrepancy between the reality of the Holocaust and its representation stems from the fact that, by definition, those that got it the worst are not the ones who survived to tell us their stories. Moreover, as the above excerpt from Frankl attests, the lucky few who made it past the Spring of 1945 are a minority who, through some combination of fortune and resilience, came out the other side. This is a highly unrepresentative sample, given that the traits which often carried you through to that fateful spring – cunning, adaptability, inconspicuousness – also would color your witness to the events themselves. Moreover, the luminaries that possessed the fortitude to then write about this trauma are an especially tenacious and incandescently perceptive minority of that minority – a tiny sliver who defended not only their lives, but also their humanity. Just as Solzhenitsyn and Yevgenia Ginzburg are not emblematic of the faceless millions churned through the charnel pit of the Gulag, Victor Frankl (and Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, etc. etc.) are not “average” human beings in any sense of the term. They are the most exceptionally principled and shrewd of an already-exceptional group of survivors.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn gives this graphite-hard instruction for surviving in a prison camp:

So what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain, when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared? What do you need to do to make you stronger than the interrogator and the whole trap?

From the moment you go into prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At its very threshold you must say to yourself, ‘My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die — now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.’ Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble.

Only the man who had renounced everything can win that victory. But how can one turn one’s body to stone?

It’s a brutal reflection from a man who somehow managed to eventually pull his spirit of humanity back through this cold, purposely-mangled interior-of-ice. Frankl took the opposite approach – he accentuated his warmest impulses, though crucially this was only an interior process – yet he speaks about how many survivors took the Solzhenitsyn route. His prescription for surviving a concentration camp: turn to fire or ice inside. Those who went lukewarm were gone in hours.

“What is to give light must endure burning.” – Viktor Frankl, neurologist, psychologist, father of existential psychology, holocaust survivor. Frankl, who survived until 1997, was born this week in 1905 in Vienna, Austria.

Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl and Wife

Viktor Frankl and Wife

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How Wittgenstein Found God (and Wrote a Masterpiece) in the Trenches of World War One

13 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, War

≈ Comments Off on How Wittgenstein Found God (and Wrote a Masterpiece) in the Trenches of World War One

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Austria, Austro-Hungary, battle, Christianity, conversion, Descartes, Faith, Friedrich Nietzsche, Galicia, General Philosophy, Georg Henrik von Wright, Gospels in Brief, Italian front, Italy, John Maynard Keynes, Leo Tolstoy, logic, Ludwig Wittgenstein, psychology, religion, Rudolph Carnap, Sir Colin St. John Wilson, Socrates, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Vienna, W.A. Hijab, War, World War I

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Swansea, Wales, September 1947

“At the outbreak of World War I, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army. His friend Pinsent enlisted with the British army and thus was on the opposing side. Wittgenstein volunteered not because he particularly believed in the cause of the German powers but because he felt it was his duty. As a Wittgenstein he could easily have become an officer, but he chose to remain in the ranks – an extremely dangerous decision… Throughout his service Wittgenstein continued to write down his philosophical ideas in notebooks. He was doing original philosophy, but he also remained constantly on the brink of suicide. Despite these distractions, Wittgenstein was an utterly fearless soldier, and his exemplary bravery won him two medals. (Among the soldiering philosophers, his only rival was Socrates.)

Wittgenstein was a parody of the driven personality. Characteristically he saw no reason to try to alleviate this condition by searching for its cause in his own psychological makeup. On the contrary, if only everyone were true to his nature, he thought, everyone could be like this. Wittgenstein rationalized his condition to himself by claiming that life was ‘an intellectual problem and a moral duty.’ The intellectual and moral aspects of his personality had so far remained distinct entities, each spurring the other on. It was only during the war that they fused.

World War One Trenches

Under constant intellectual pressure (from himself) and the persistent threat of death (from both the enemy and himself), Wittgenstein once again found himself in familiar territory, on the brink of insanity. One day, during a lull in the fighting in Galicia, he came across a bookshop. Here he found Tolstoy’s Gospels in Brief, which he bought for the simple reason that there was no other book in the shop. Wittgenstein had been against Christianity – he associated it with Vienna, his family, lack of a logical foundation, meek and mild behavior, and other anathemas. But reading through Tolstoy’s book was to bring the light of religion into Wittgenstein’s life. Within days he had become a convinced Christian – though his conversion had a distinctly Wittgensteinian tenor. With typical rigor he set about integrating his beliefs into his intellectual life.

Religious remarks now began appearing in the pages of his notebooks, alongside those on logic. And it soon becomes clear that these two topics have more than intellectual rigor in common. The spirit of one informs the other in compelling fashion. Even Wittgenstein’s religion had to assume a logical force and clarity: ‘I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like an eye in its visual field.’ There was something problematic about the world, and this we call its meaning. But this meaning did not lie within the world, it lay outside it. ‘The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God.’ According to Wittgenstein, to pray was to think about the meaning of life. (Which meant that he had been praying all his life, even when he didn’t believe there was a God or meaning to life. Wittgenstein couldn’t bear to be wrong – ever.)…

World War: Parade through Ruins

In 1918 Wittgenstein was promoted to officer and transferred to the Italian front…

When Wittgenstein was taken prisoner by the Italians, he had in his rucksack the only manuscript of the philosophical work he had been writing throughout the war. This was eventually to be called Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and is the first great philosophical work of the modern era. Right from its opening sentences it becomes obvious that philosophy has entered a new stage.

‘1 The world is all that is the case’
‘1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’
One clear, ringing assertion follows another, linked by the absolute minimum of justification or argument:
‘1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.’
‘1.2 The world divides into facts.’
The book’s conclusion is even more memorable:
‘7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’

Few others have altered the course of philosophy in quite so striking a fashion. Such succinct perspicacity is surpassed only by Socrates (‘Know thyself’), Descartes (‘I think, therefore I am’), and Nietzsche (‘God is dead’). In those parts where it is not too technical (in the logical sense), Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is the most exciting work of philosophy ever written.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

__________

From Paul Strathern’s entertaining biographical sketch Wittgenstein: Philosophy in an Hour.

On a somewhat random recommendation, I bought this short book ($1.99 on Amazon) and read it two nights ago. I had parsed some of Wittgenstein’s nearly impenetrable philosophy before and knew he’d been a pupil of Bertrand Russell, but my knowledge of the man extended barely beyond that. Now having read Strathern’s introduction to him, I’m convinced Wittgenstein is one of the more singular and compelling people of the 20th century.

Don’t take my word for it…

Russell called Wittgenstein, “The most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating”.

John Maynard Keynes, after meeting with Wittgenstein at his arrival in Cambridge, wrote in a 1929 letter to his wife: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train. He has a plan to stay in Cambridge permanently.”

Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein’s friend and colleague, claimed that, “He was of the opinion… that his ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciples. He doubted he would be better understood in the future. He once said he felt as though he were writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men.”

Rudolph Carnap, the German-born philosopher, noted about Wittgenstein that, “The impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.”

W.A. Hijab, a former pupil of Wittgenstein’s, said, “He was like an atomic bomb, a tornado — people don’t appreciate that.”

Sir Colin St. John Wilson is quoted in Autism and Creativity as saying, “[He was] a magician and had qualities of magic in his relations with people.”

I’ve cited Wittgenstein a half dozen times on this blog, and have directly quoted a passage from his Philosophical Investigations. Find that selection below:

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein on God and Belief

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Sidney Morgenbesser’s Sense of Humor

10 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor, Philosophy, Psychology

≈ 14 Comments

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B.F. Skinner, Categorical Imperative, cleverness, Columbia University, comedic, comedy, epistemology, ethics, General Philosophy, Heidegger, humor, Immanuel Kant, irony, J.L. Austin, jokes, Kant, lecture, Moses, Noam Chomsky, philosophy of science, police, political philosophy, psychology, Robert Nozick, Sidney Morganbesser, wit

Sidney Morgenbesser

Sidney Morgenbesser was a prominent figure at Columbia University throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. As the University’s John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, he taught classes on epistemology and the philosophy of science which were consistently packed with students eager to hear him lecture — but not because of his academic prestige or reputation as a generous grader.

Morgenbesser was widely known as one of the wittiest men of his age. His caustic irreverence and razor-sharp tongue produced an unmistakable — and inimitable — sense of humor. Through freewheeling intellectual banter that could be compared to sportive Socratic dialogues, he influenced generations of students, among them the philosopher Robert Nozick, who once claimed that he “majored in Sidney Morgenbesser.”

Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton, struggled to find the words to describe Morgenbesser, resorting to an image from nature: “You don’t ask what the wind does. It’s just power and self-sustaining energy.”

Noam Chomsky called him, “One of the most knowledgeable and in many ways profound thinkers of the modern period… a philosopher in the old sense — not so much what’s on the printed page, but in debate and inspiring discussion.”

The New York Times called him, “Socrates with a Yiddish accent”; I suggest Groucho Marx with a PhD in philosophy.

Here are some of his most famous rejoinders:

  • In the early 1950′s, the esteemed Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin came to Columbia to present a paper about the structural analysis of language. He pointed out that, in English, although a double negative implies a positive meaning (i.e. “I’m not unlike my father…”), there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. “Yeah, yeah,” scoffed Morgenbesser from the back of the auditorium.
  • In the 1970′s, a student of Maoist inclination asked him if he disagreed with Chairman Mao’s saying that a proposition can be true and false at the same time. Dr. Morgenbesser replied, “I do and I don’t.”
  • Morgenbesser became something of a legend at the time of the 1968 student uprising for being beaten up when he joined a human chain protesting the police. When confronted about the incident, Morgenbesser was asked whether he had been treated unfairly or unjustly. His response: “It was unjust, but not unfair. It’s unjust to hit me over the head, but it’s not unfair because everyone else was hit over the head, too.”
  • Once during a heady philosophy lecture, Morgenbesser was asked to prove a questioner’s existence. He shot back, “Who’s asking?”
  • A colleague once challenged Morgenbesser’s tenure at Columbia, saying he had not published enough material to deserve a tenured position. Morgenbesser responded: “Moses wrote one book. Then what did he do?”
  • Morgenbesser was leaving a subway station in New York City and put his pipe in his mouth as he was ascending the steps. A police officer told him that there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser pointed out that he was leaving the subway, not entering it, and hadn’t lit up yet anyway. The cop again said that smoking was not allowed in the subway, and Morgenbesser repeated his comment. The cop said, “If I let you do it, I’d have to let everyone do it.” Morgenbesser replied, “Who do you think you are, Kant?” Due to his accent, the word “Kant” was mistaken for a vulgar epithet and Morgenbesser was hauled off to the police station. He won his freedom only after a colleague showed up and explained the Categorical Imperative to the unamused cops.
  • In response to Heidegger’s ontological query “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Morgenbesser answered “If there were nothing you’d still be complaining!”
  • A central subject of Morganbesser’s investigations was the independence of irrelevant alternatives. Once while ordering dessert, Morgenbesser was told by the waitress that he could choose between apple pie and blueberry pie. He ordered the apple pie. Shortly thereafter, the waitress came back and said that cherry pie was also an option; Morgenbesser responded: “In that case I’ll have the blueberry pie.”
  • When asked his opinion of the philosophy of pragmatism, Morgenbesser said, “It’s all very well in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.”

__________

I found several of these quips and many other gems in Jim Holt’s stunningly clever and often very funny book Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.

Sidney Morgenbesser

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The Moral Landscape

23 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Science

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Kahneman, happiness, human happiness, joy, psychology, Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

Sam Harris“One of the most interesting things to come out of the research on human happiness is the discovery that we are very bad judges of how we will feel in the future—an ability that the psychologist Daniel Gilbert has called ‘affective forecasting.’ Gilbert and others have shown that we systematically overestimate the degree to which good and bad experiences will affect us. Changes in wealth, health, age, marital status, etc., tend not to matter as much as we think they will—and yet we make our most important decisions in life based on these inaccurate assumptions. It is useful to know that what we think will matter often matters much less than we think. Conversely, things we consider trivial can actually impact our lives greatly. If you have ever been impressed by how people often rise to the occasion while experiencing great hardship but can fall to pieces over minor inconveniences, you have seen this principle at work. The general finding of this research is now uncontroversial: we are poorly placed to accurately recall the past, to perceive the present, or to anticipate the future with respect to our own happiness. It seems little wonder, therefore, that we are so often unfulfilled.

If you ask people to report on their level of well-being moment-to-moment — by giving them a beeper that sounds at random intervals, prompting them to record their mental state — you get one measure of how happy they are. If, however, you simply ask them how satisfied they are with their lives generally, you often get a very different measure. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls the first source of information ‘the experiencing self’ and the second ‘the remembering self.’ And his justification for partitioning the human mind in this way is that these two ‘selves’ often disagree. Indeed, they can be experimentally shown to disagree, even across a relatively brief span of time. We saw this earlier with respect to Kahneman’s data on colonoscopies: because ‘the remembering self’ evaluates any experience by reference to its peak intensity and its final moments (the ‘peak/end rule’), it is possible to improve its lot, at the expense of ‘the experiencing self,’ by simply prolonging an unpleasant procedure at its lowest level of intensity (and thereby reducing the negativity of future memories).

What applies to colonoscopies seems to apply elsewhere in life. Imagine, for instance, that you want to go on vacation: You are deciding between a trip to Hawaii and a trip to Rome. On Hawaii, you envision yourself swimming in the ocean, relaxing on the beach, playing tennis, and drinking mai tais. Rome will find you sitting in cafés, visiting museums and ancient ruins, and drinking an impressive amount of wine. Which vacation should you choose? It is quite possible that your ‘experiencing self’ would be much happier on Hawaii, as indicated by an hourly tally of your emotional and sensory pleasure, while your remembering self would give a much more positive account of Rome one year hence. Which self would be right? Does the question even make sense? Kahneman observes that while most of us think our ‘experiencing self’ must be more important, it has no voice in our decisions about what to do in life. After all, we can’t choose from among experiences; we must choose from among remembered (or imagined) experiences. And, according to Kahneman, we don’t tend to think about the future as a set of experiences; we think of it as a set of ‘anticipated memories.’ The problem, with regard to both doing science and living one’s life, is that the ‘remembering self’ is the only one who can think and speak about the past. It is, therefore, the only one who can consciously make decisions in light of past experience…

It seems clear, however, that the ‘remembering self’ is simply the ‘experiencing self’ in one of its modes…

If we could take the 2.5 billion seconds that make up the average human life and assess a person’s well-being at each point in time, the distinction between the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’ would disappear. Yes, the experience of recalling the past often determines what we decide to do in the future—and this greatly affects the character of one’s future experience. But it would still be true to say that in each of the 2.5 billion seconds of an average life, certain moments were pleasant, and others were painful; some were later recalled with greater or lesser fidelity, and these memories had whatever effects they had later on. Consciousness and its ever-changing contents remain the only subjective reality.

Thus, if your ‘remembering self’ claims to have had a wonderful time in Rome, while your ‘experiencing self’ felt only boredom, fatigue, and despair, then your ‘remembering self’ (i.e., your recollection of the trip) is simply wrong about what it was like to be you in Rome. This becomes increasingly obvious the more we narrow our focus: Imagine a ‘remembering self’ who thinks that you were especially happy while sitting for fifteen minutes on the Spanish Steps; while your ‘experiencing self’ was, in fact, plunged deeper into misery for every one of those minutes than at any other point on the trip. Do we need two selves to account for this disparity? No. The vagaries of memory suffice.

As Kahneman admits, the vast majority of our experiences in life never get recalled, and the time we spend actually remembering the past is comparatively brief. Thus, the quality of most of our lives can be assessed only in terms of whatever fleeting character it has as it occurs. But this includes the time we spend recalling the past. Amid this flux, the moments in which we construct a larger story about our lives appear like glints of sunlight on a dark river: they may seem special, but they are part of the current all the same.”

__________

An absolutely reorienting insight from chapter five of Sam Harris’s ambitious new book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.

I found and have read the whole book here. But buy it to support one of our best thinkers and writers about cognition and philosophy.

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