• About
  • Photography

The Bully Pulpit

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

The Bully Pulpit

Tag Archives: Steven Pinker

How Women Civilized the West

08 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology

≈ Comments Off on How Women Civilized the West

Tags

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?

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Will Self: The Problem at the Heart of Utilitarianism

24 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on Will Self: The Problem at the Heart of Utilitarianism

Tags

A Moveable Feast, debate, IQSquared, Jeremy Bentham, Moral Philosophy, morality, Philosophy, Steven Pinker, Utilitarianism, Will Self

Will Self

“The principle ideologue of British society is Jeremy Bentham and his Utilitarianism, which puts forward the idea that the aim of society should be to achieve the greatest good/happiness for the greatest number.

But I put it to you that it is precisely this Benthamite ideology that derogates the individual and removes the individual from her immediate experience and alienates her from the social and political process. […]

Take the Utilitarian philosophy where it leads you, and it tells you that human increase can only be a good thing. After all, there’s so much more good to be had when there are more of us.

So on the Utilitarian calculus, we’ll be in really good shape when all day, everyday we’re packed in just as tightly as we are in this hall… That is indeed the underlying prolegomena of the Utilitarian position. It’s an endless yay-saying to more of everything; it’s an endless yay-saying to knowing the cost of everything, because cost can be quantified, and Bentham loved to quantify.

But you can’t cost the real value of life. Just as you cannot know what other people are thinking and feeling. And philosophies that base themselves on such specious quantification throw up specious demagogues.

It’s up to us to be individuals, to discover our own nature of the good, and to respect other people’s idea of the good as well. And not treat them as cogs on a production line or bits in a factory.”

__________

The inimitable Will Self, presenting his opener in the IQ2 debate on the motion We’ve Never Had It So Good. (He’s one of the most captivating speakers, so don’t just read the text.)

Self’s opposition to this motion is pretty creative. It centers on his claim that you can’t tally up the “good” of a human life, much less of a society; and, by extension, attempts to score and impose goodness of this kind (whether through authoritarian states or utilitarian ethics) will inevitably lead to tyranny. Jeremy Bentham, though an original and very important thinker, produced a philosophy that minimizes the human being by reducing him to easily quantified component parts. In my opinion, utilitarianism is unsatisfying, since, as in the organ donor scenario — why doesn’t one healthy person donate all her organs to save ten people waiting for lung, liver, etc. transplants? — your humanity may be sacrificed for our utility. The autonomy of an individual life can be abolished. Its sanctity and its dignity may be made violable.

This isn’t to say I nod along with Self and disagree with the motion. By a ton of metrics (life expectancy, median wealth, exposure to violence, education, equality, and on and on), we’ve really never had it so good. Pinker is good on this point. And I’m a consequentialist: I believe our moral scales should be tuned more to outcomes than intentions — so metrics really do have a story to tell. But his point is more profound than that. And the idea that “good” should be kept, in some sense, relative — out of our own modesty, our own inability to know what’s the good life for others — appeals to me.

More Self:

  • On addiction and Philip Seymour Hoffman
  • On how society operates
  • On why he doesn’t teach creative writing

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Steven Pinker: The Problem with Political Correctness

21 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on Steven Pinker: The Problem with Political Correctness

Tags

Philosophy, Political Correctness, Stereotypes, Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

Professor Steven Pinker

“Politically correct sensibilities may bridle at the suggestion that a group of people, like a variety of fruit, may have features in common, but if they didn’t, there would be no cultural diversity to celebrate and no ethnic qualities to be proud of. Groups of people cohere because they really do share traits, albeit statistically. So a mind that generalizes about people from their category membership is not ipso facto defective. African Americans today really are more likely to be on welfare than whites, Jews really do have higher average incomes than WASPs, and business students really are more politically conservative than students in the arts — on average.

The problem with categorization is that it often goes beyond the statistics. For one thing, when people are pressured, distracted, or in an emotional state, they forget that a category is an approximation and act as if a stereotype applies to every last man, woman, and child. For another, people tend to moralize their categories, assigning praiseworthy traits to their allies and condemnable ones to their enemies. During World War II, for example, Americans thought that Russians had more positive traits than Germans; during the Cold War they thought it was the other way around.”

__________

Pulled from The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

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

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Psychology, Science

≈ Comments Off on Steven Pinker: What Are Cuss Words and Why Do We Use Them?

Tags

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

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

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?

Tags

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

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Curious Case of Fruit Flies, Grizzly Bears, and Sarah Palin’s Contempt for Science

17 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

biology, C-Span, C-Span In-Depth, DNA, Down Syndrome, Endangered Species, Federal Funding for Science, Fruit Flies, genetics, Grizzly Bears, interview, John McCain, Republicans, Research, Sarah Palin, science, Steven Pinker, War on Science

Sarah Palin

Interviewer: Often, government-funded scientific research gets on the front pages of newspapers, where people see it as not being a good thing: ‘We’re spending x millions of dollars studying such-and-such behavior of chimpanzees!’ When you see something like that, what’s your response?

Steven Pinker: Oh, well, am I allowed to bring up Sarah Palin?

The most hair-raising, egregious, nauseating example of this occurred just last week, when Sarah Palin ridiculed the idea that the federal government would sponsor research on fruit flies. She followed by saying, “I kid you not,” as if this was the most absurd thing she’d ever heard — ignoring the fact that almost everything we know about genetics originally came from research on fruit flies, such as the existence and behavior of chromosomes, which is one of the things that allows us to determine the cause of Down syndrome, something that she claims to be interested in devoting more resources toward.

So genetics is something you study with fruit flies. Fruit flies are also a major economic pest: our huge citrus industry in California and Florida can be threatened by quirks of the behavior of the fruit fly. So in picking what she thought sounded like an example of government waste, she was identifying one of the most important bodies of research in the entire scientific enterprise.

And John McCain did the same thing. In two debates, he ridiculed research on the DNA of grizzly bears, not realizing that nowadays if you’re a biologist, you study DNA. Even if you’re a field biologist looking at conservation of endangered species (and grizzly bears are a threatened species, so there’s a federal mandate to keep track of their numbers). How do you know whether you’ve seen two grizzly bears or one grizzly bear twice? Well you snag bits of their hair, and you do DNA analysis, and that’s how we know how many grizzly bears are out there.

In making the cheap shot of joking, “Well I don’t know if it’s for a paternity test or a crime scene,” both he and Palin I think showed a certain contempt for science that I and many other scientists find deeply disturbing.

If you describe any scientific research out of context, you can make it sound silly. I think it’s utterly irresponsible for a politician to do that, given how much of the fate of our country — and of our species — is going to depend on basic and applied scientific research.

__________

A moment from In Depth with Steven Pinker shown on C-Span in November, 2008.

Last evening, the Senate voted 72-26 to approve our federal budget for the upcoming year. The bill now heads to the White House to receive President Obama’s signature before the deadline at midnight on Saturday.

Sarah Palin with a Bear

The above photo: a keen lesson in gun un-safety, from a recent Facebook photo-op of Palin posing with a dead (black) bear.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Steven Pinker on Feminism

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Debate, Science

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

biology, cognitive science, discrimination, Elizabeth Spelke, feminism, feminists, gender, gender discrimination, gender relations, human nature, men, Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, women

Steven Pinker

“I am a feminist. I believe that women have been oppressed, discriminated against, and harassed for thousands of years. I believe that the two waves of the feminist movement in the 20th century are among the proudest achievements of our species, and I am proud to have lived through one of them, including the effort to increase the representation of women in the sciences.

But it is crucial to distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex — which I take to be the core of feminism — and the empirical claim that males and females are biologically indistinguishable. They are not the same thing. Indeed, distinguishing them is essential to protecting the core of feminism. Anyone who takes an honest interest in science has to be prepared for the facts on a given issue to come out either way. And that makes it essential that we not hold the ideals of feminism hostage to the latest findings from the lab or field. Otherwise, if the findings come out as showing a sex difference, one would either have to say, ‘I guess sex discrimination wasn’t so bad after all,’ or else furiously suppress or distort the findings so as to preserve the ideal. The truth cannot be sexist. Whatever the facts turn out to be, they should not be taken to compromise the core of feminism.
..”

__________

From Steven Pinker, in his debate with Elizabeth Spelke on the topic of Science and Gender. You can find more of Pinker’s thoughts in his superb collection Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles.

Since his breakout book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker has outlined and continually advocated a conception of human nature which I find extremely compelling. It’s foundational claim is that we are not plastic in the way twentieth-century behaviorists would suggest. Human nature is not malleable in any robust sense of the term; but instead it is very rigidly pre-programmed by our biology, which is — perhaps not intuitively — the reason for our complex abilities and variations. The fact that, say, we are wired to acquire a rigid grammatical structure in childhood, and hence speak a language, is what allows us to communicate in such a wealth of information, emotion, and ideas to others. Of course we are plastic in the sense that we learn the language of our childhood environment (I’m not writing this in Japanese, after all), but our ability to internalize grammar emerges from our biological make-up, which we do not choose. (Pinker, who studied in the M.I.T. linguistics department under Chomsky, uses this example among others to emphasize his point.)

Pinker delineates and actively patrols the fine line separating gender distinction from gender discrimination, and for that reason, his debate with Spelke is worth reading or listening to.

More from Pinker, one of our clearest and best communicators of cognitive science:

Steven Pinker

The F Word

Steven Pinker

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin

Hitler, Stalin, and the Power of Ideology

Boston Marathon

The Psychology of Terror

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

F*ck

19 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Psychology, Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Alok Jha, biology, cognitive science, curse words, evolution, experimental psychology, fuck, history of cursing, linguistics, profanity, psychology, sex, Steven Pinker, The Guardian, The Guardian Science Extra, the origins of profanity, The Stuff of Thought

Steven Pinker

Where does the word “fuck” come from?

The problem with tracing the origin of taboo words is that people don’t write them down, precisely because they’re taboo. So you have to do a lot of detective work.

In the case of “fuck,” for example, the earliest known usage in the English language was a bit of rude graffiti carved outside a monastery in a kind of pseudo-Latin. It’s the first written inscription of the word, and it’s from the fifteenth century. So it’s an old word.

But you can trace it back even further if you look for cognates in other languages. And there are similar words in Scandinavian tongues, and in German, Dutch, and so on.

By that means you can show that “fuck” comes from Scandinavian, and it originally means “to strike” or “to beat.” And that’s a little bit like some of our rude terms for sex, like “to bang.”

These call to mind a not very pleasing image of the sexual act — that of a man doing something violent to a woman, which we also see in some of the taboo phrases around sex: “they fucked him over,” “he got screwed.” These each allude to the underlying metaphor that to have sex is to exploit a woman.

That’s a conception that we all unconsciously recognize and acknowledge whenever we use an idiom like, “we got screwed,” but it’s something that we consider not fit for polite company.

And all of the acceptable terms for sex — like have sex, make love, go to bed with — hide that conceptualization…

And there’s something that feels misogynistic about swearing in general, curiously enough. Although women are swearing a lot more than they used to, swearing is still more of a guy thing. We have old notions like language that’s “appropriate for mixed company” – mixed meaning “men and women”; and expressions like “to swear like a sailor” or “locker room language,” all alluding to the fact that swearing is considered masculine, and that there’s something offensive to women about swearing.

And indeed many guidelines to sexual harassment include the telling of sexual jokes as a kind of harassment. Even though you’d think the topic of sex should be gender neutral… since it takes two.

And I believe this fact is rooted in a basic feature of human sexuality: that indiscriminate sex biologically works to the advantage of the male. And it’s because there’s a lot more at stake for women; she can get pregnant, and then she’s stuck with the child. Whereas the male can get away with just a few minutes of copulation, and in principle that can be the end of it.

So women in their behavior, in their emotions are more discriminating when it comes to sex. The casual use of sexual language, by connoting an atmosphere of licentiousness, is felt to work to the advantage of men more than women.

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. 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, and in a formal setting or more casual setting.

__________

From the writer that I consider to be the best living communicator of science, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, as interviewed by The Guardian about his groundbreaking book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

In Our Image

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Psychology

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

biology, Communism, Hitler, Nazism, science, Stalin, Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin“Nazism and Marxism shared a desire to reshape humanity. ‘The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary,’ wrote Marx; ‘the will to create mankind anew’ is the core of National Socialism, wrote Hitler. They also shared a revolutionary idealism and a tyrannical certainty in pursuit of this dream, with no patience for incremental reform or adjustments guided by the human consequences of their policies. This alone was a recipe for disaster. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, ‘Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble — and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology’

The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful. Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in 1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ideologies would share. It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryan races or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimination. Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human. It doesn’t matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin.”

__________

From Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, one of the  most illuminating, easy-to-read books about science and philosophy out there.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Psychology of Terror

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Amos Tversky, Audrey Cronin, Boston Marathon massacre, Daniel Kahneman, Gerd Gigerenzer, Max Abrahms, Paul Slovic, Steven Pinker, Terrorism, The Chronicle of Higher Education, violence

Boston Marathon

“The discrepancy between the panic generated by terrorism and the deaths generated by terrorism is no accident. Panic is the whole point of terrorism, as the root of the word makes clear: ‘Terror’ refers to a psychological state, not an enemy or an event. The effects of terrorism depend completely on the psychology of the audience. Terrorists are communicators, seeking publicity and attention, which they manufacture through fear. They may want to extort a government into capitulating to a demand, to sap people’s confidence in their government’s ability to protect them, or to provoke repression that will turn people against their government or bring about chaos in which the terrorist faction hopes to prevail.

Cognitive psychologists such as Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Paul Slovic have shown that the perceived danger of a risk depends on two factors: fathomability and dread. People are terrified of risks that are novel, undetectable, delayed in their effects, and poorly understood. And they are terrified about worst-case scenarios, the ones that are uncontrollable, catastrophic, involuntary, and inequitable (that is, the people exposed to the risk are not the ones who benefit from it).

These psychologists suggest that cognitive illusions are a legacy of ancient brain circuitry that evolved to protect us against natural risks such as predators, poisons, storms, and especially enemies. Large-scale terrorist plots are novel, undetectable, catastrophic, and inequitable, and thus maximize both unfathomability and dread. They give the terrorists a large psychological payoff for a small investment in damage.

But the psychological payoff of terrorism is limited, and ultimately self-defeating. It’s a seldom-appreciated fact, documented by the political scientists Max Abrahms, Audrey Cronin, and others, that terrorism was far more prevalent before our so-called age of terror than during it, and that all terrorist movements die. Remember the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Front de Libération du Québec, the Symbionese Liberation Army? The 1960s and 1970s saw hundreds of bombings, hijackings, and shootings by various armies, leagues, coalitions, brigades, factions, undergrounds, and fronts. Where are they now? Over the years, terrorist groups collapse as their leaders are killed or captured, as they morph into political movements, or as they fizzle out through internal squabbling and the defection of young firebrands to the pleasures of civilian life.

Terrorist movements, moreover, almost never achieve any of their strategic goals. Think about it. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is still a part of Britain, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Chechnya, Corsica, Tamil Eelam, or the Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, and Egypt are not Islamist theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe, and Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias.

Even when they are not rooted out by states, terrorist groups carry the seeds of their own destruction. As they become frustrated by their lack of progress and as their audiences start to get bored, they escalate their tactics. They start to target victims who are more famous, more sympathetic, or simply more numerous. That certainly gets people’s attention, but not in the way the terrorists intend. Supporters are repulsed by the ‘senseless violence’ and withdraw their money, their safe havens, their reluctance to cooperate with the police, and their resistance to an all-out crackdown.

Audrey Cronin nicely captures the conflicting moral psychology that defines the arc of terrorist movements: ‘Violence has an international language, but so does decency.'”

__________

From Steven Pinker’s short article “Terrorism”, published by The Chronicle of Higher Education to commemorate the tenth anniversary of September 11th, 2001.

I’m suspicious of the idea that in the aftermaths of acts of senseless violence — such as Monday’s massacre in Boston — we should enter a sanctioned period of unquestioned collective mourning. Oftentimes, pious newscasters will utter in hushed tones statements like, “Well, now is just a time for grieving,” or “Let’s not get into the politics of this event yet.” Of course those who want to grieve should be allowed to, and comforted, for as long as they wish. Yet there should be no stigma placed on cold rationalism in moments like these.

As many cultural critics and political scientists have discussed, part of the reason for America’s folly in responding to the attacks on 9/11 stemmed from the population’s inability to coolly comprehend the nature of the event, and thus to demand a just and proportionate response. Clearly September 2001 is not April 2013, but hopefully we have learned something like our lesson. Hopefully our feelings for the victims of this terror will not cloud our judgement in pursuing and prosecuting those guilty. Hopefully the collective we can absorb the following two quotes, which were addressed to the individual,

“You must have your heart on fire and your brain on ice.” – Vladimir Lenin

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.” – Henri Bergson

And I hope this post and the one previous to it represent, in microcosm, the best of those dignified sentiments.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Better Angels of Our Nature

13 Saturday Oct 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Psychology

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

colonialism, Hinduism, morality, Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature

Steven Pinker“Charles Napier, the British army’s commander in chief in India, faced with local complaints about the abolition of suttee (the Hindu practice of a widow sacrificing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre), replied ‘You say that is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.’”

__________

From The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Today’s Top Pages

  • "Coming" by Philip Larkin
    "Coming" by Philip Larkin
  • Einstein's Daily Routine
    Einstein's Daily Routine
  • Martin Luther King: What Does the Story of the Good Samaritan Teach Us?
    Martin Luther King: What Does the Story of the Good Samaritan Teach Us?
  • "Immortality Ode" by William Wordsworth
    "Immortality Ode" by William Wordsworth
  • Dissent, Not Disloyalty: MLK's Immortal Words on Vietnam
    Dissent, Not Disloyalty: MLK's Immortal Words on Vietnam

Enter your email address to follow The Bully Pulpit - you'll receive notifications of new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Recent Posts

  • The Other Side of Feynman
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life
  • The Man Who Most Believed in Himself
  • What ’60s Colleges Did Right
  • Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

Archives

  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (3)
  • January 2018 (3)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • November 2017 (3)
  • October 2017 (2)
  • September 2017 (2)
  • August 2017 (1)
  • July 2017 (2)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (1)
  • August 2016 (4)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (4)
  • November 2015 (8)
  • October 2015 (7)
  • September 2015 (11)
  • August 2015 (10)
  • July 2015 (7)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (7)
  • April 2015 (17)
  • March 2015 (23)
  • February 2015 (17)
  • January 2015 (22)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (17)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (9)
  • August 2014 (2)
  • July 2014 (1)
  • June 2014 (20)
  • May 2014 (17)
  • April 2014 (24)
  • March 2014 (19)
  • February 2014 (12)
  • January 2014 (21)
  • December 2013 (13)
  • November 2013 (15)
  • October 2013 (9)
  • September 2013 (10)
  • August 2013 (17)
  • July 2013 (28)
  • June 2013 (28)
  • May 2013 (23)
  • April 2013 (22)
  • March 2013 (12)
  • February 2013 (21)
  • January 2013 (21)
  • December 2012 (9)
  • November 2012 (18)
  • October 2012 (22)
  • September 2012 (28)

Categories

  • Biography (51)
  • Current Events (47)
  • Debate (7)
  • Essay (10)
  • Film (10)
  • Freedom (40)
  • History (122)
  • Humor (15)
  • Interview (71)
  • Journalism (16)
  • Literature (82)
  • Music (1)
  • Original (1)
  • Personal (3)
  • Philosophy (87)
  • Photography (4)
  • Poetry (114)
  • Political Philosophy (41)
  • Politics (108)
  • Psychology (35)
  • Religion (74)
  • Science (27)
  • Speeches (52)
  • Sports (12)
  • War (57)
  • Writing (11)

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
%d bloggers like this: