Not Too Busy for a Short(ish) Post

I haven't been posting lately, because I've been busy.  I work 5 days a week and it is now baseball season.  I think that coaching Little League is a lot more beneficial to the world than writing here.  So, it's taking up most of my time.

I'm done 1984.  I find that the Internet, is much like the telescreens in Orwell's novel.  The millions of postings by people like me are like flags to anyone who would be interested in finding out who is asking the kind of questions that they might not like.  I do not think it is too paranoid to think that governments are scanning the comments and cataloging the activities of individuals.  Partly, it should be their job to identify people who might be planning something harmful.  But, I'm sure that there are government strategists wondering how to deal with non-conforming opinion writers. 

In Canada we have hate-speach legislation.  I believe that it may be a crime, in the near future, to link to a website that contains what someone considers hate speach.  If that is so, I could post a link to OneSTDV or GLPiggy or even the NY Times where someone posts a hateful comment (I'm not sure if it happens more at OneSTDV or at the NYT) and end up contravening the law.  I don't think the lawmakers understand how the Internet works.  New York wants to ban anonymous blogging (GLP)

One more thing about the job of Winston, in 1984.  Does the Internet make his job (re-writing publications to suit The Party's motives) easier or obsolete?  Now, one person could simply re-write every article in real-time rather than having to re-print thousands of issues.  OR, would Winston just become a contract mercenary blog-poster?

I find the transient nature of Internet frustrating when I link to an article, but, then it disappears.  I have a friend who actually scrapbooks with newspaper clippings.  I've always wished I could track the shifitng of public (published) opinions, but, I'll never, ever have the time for that.  I feel like Winston when the Party announces that chocolate rations are being reduced to 20 grams per person from 30 one day and then congratulates Big Brother for raising the ration to 20 grams the next.  I've often noticed much smaller, more nuanced changes in wording and in the standard narrative from MSM that seem to erase the old narrative without so much as a peep from competing politicos or anyone.

Now, I'm reading Steven Pinker's latest book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature".  So far, it is going over much of the ideas covered in The Blank Slate, but, focusing on the violence of past cultures comparitive to ours.  I remember reading an account of an English explorer going to live with native Canadians.  Travelling to hunting grounds, they came across a group of Inuit men fishing.  All of the Inuit Men were killed.  I always think of civilization, in its ever expanding powers, as a great bringer of peace, despite all of its problems.

Other News:
Montreal Students demand free crappy government education rather than the good subsidized education they can now get.  If you really believe that arts education is worthwhile, you should pay for it.

It is still dangerous to climb the world's tallest mountain.

Pinker Raises the Hackles of Indignant Liberal Professor

 I was working on another posts, but I had to stop when the Globe published this questionable review of Pinker's latest book (which I have on hold at the Library).  Whitehead charges right at Pinker with his best shot.

Those theoretical claims are nothing new and have been extensively discredited by social scientists, although Pinker engages none of that literature.

Discredited by so called scientists are they?  Please don't be so 'flippant' about how you dismiss his theories. Don't keep us in the dark.  Please explain further. I believe they were pretty well laid out in The Blank Slate.

However, Pinker uses a very questionable definition of violence and, in dismissing our perception of violence as irrelevant, completely overlooks the fact that reporting and representations of violence are not just “about” violence but are actually part of it. He characterizes media coverage as: “If it bleeds, it leads,” but this fact actually tells us a lot about how important violence is to our society, not that it is illusory.

Perhaps violence not illusory, but the fact of the matter is, that violence is trending downward, while our perception is the opposite.  Perception is a part of violence?  So, you are arguing that I am actually assaulted when I read about an assault in the paper or see it on the news.  Interesting.

Not only are numbers notoriously difficult to establish accurately in periods before the 20th century, as Pinker quietly admits, but deaths in wars were only partly due to direct homicidal violence. In the past at least, as many died of disease and untreated wounds.

Maybe his statistics are problematic, but it's far closer to reality than the notion of the noble savage that he's combating. He merely paints a different picture than the idyllic societies championed by critics like you. Truth is, although 60-70 million people died in WWII, the ratio of deaths to the total number of people was lower than prior periods. Read the Iliad for a good idea of what ancient wars were like. Brutality is decreasing steadily.  Also, a states ability and willingness to heal wounded soldiers is yet another example of a nicer world.


Whitehead seems to think that since Pinker states that things are better than ever, that he's means that war is actually nice nowadays. He mentions PTSD as if ancient cultures didn't suffer some from post-traumatic stress after violent confrontations. The stats for deaths prior to the 20th century may be problematic but PTSD was not even invented yet.

The writer has completely made Pinker's case that the world is nicer with his explanation of torture.

Another significant example of this failure to think through what “violence” actually is becomes evident in the discussion of torture, paradoxically enjoying something of revival. While the Grand Guignol of medieval torture may no longer be with us, the use of torture has not abated. Pinker’s timeline for the abolition of judicial torture thus overlooks how extra-juridical “touchless” torture, enhanced interrogation and rendition are a persistent feature of the post-Second World Wart world. Similarly, although incarceration may have supplanted bodily mutilation and execution, it remains a violence nonetheless.

While it is true incarceration does fall in the category of violence, today's incarceration is nothing near as frightening as body mutilation, execution or the horrific forms of torture that have been used in days past. Whitehead wants to refute Pinker's assertion that the world is getting better, by saying that until it is absolutely perfect, we can't count that as progress.  Earlier he tries to call incarceration of blacks a mass atrocity.  Is it really on the scale of the holocaust or the enslavement of Jews by the Egyptians?  Can't we compare the past with the present with our judicial system, welfare and human rights and at least admit that we have it pretty good?

Now, I haven't read this book yet, but I have read and heard enough Pinker to doubt that he means that our world has no problems with violence. The Blank Slate argued that we can't change our basic natural instincts and denying our nature to try to hoist some idealistic perfect society on us will fail and leads to misery. Tackling the serious problems that Whitehead mentions, requires a real understanding of human nature which he can't seem to accept.

Pinker - The Blank Slate, Preface

I just picked up Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate The Modern Denial of Human Nature and I wonder how I managed to avoid this book for so long.  I'm sure that I've read it quoted many a time at various blogs but even the preface reads as if Pinker read my thoughts and articulated them better than I ever could (I really should have studied more in school).

My goal in this book is not to argue that genes are everything and culture is nothing - no one believes that - but to explore why the extreme position (that culture is everything) is often seen as moderate, and the moderate position is seen as extreme.

Nor does acknowledging human nature have the political implications so many fear.  It does not, for example, require one to abandon feminism, or to accept the current levels of inequality or violence, or to treat morality as a fiction.  For the most part I will try not to advocate particular policies or to advance the agenda of the political left or right. I believe that controversies about policy almost always involve tradeoffs between competing values, and that science is equipped to identify the tradeoffs but not to resolve them. Many of these tradeoffs, I will show, arise from features of human nature, and by clarifying them I hope to make our collective choices, whatever they are, better informed.

It is so sweet to read words like these.  It's like the first time I read Bertrand Russel only without the glassy eyed idealism that always left me shaking my head.  He continues.

The refusal to acknowledge human nature is like the Victorians' embarrassment about sex, only worse: it distorts our science and scholarship, our public discourse, and our day-to-day lives. 

Trying to talk to most intelligent, well-educated people about child-rearing, food or politics is always frustrating for me because someone always tries to point out that we're only conditioned to think and act the way we do... and if "we could only get past our preconceptions we can become anything we want."  [Eye-roll-to-face-palm-to-double-fist-clench-gaze-to-the-heavens-to-double-handed-forehead-slap-pull-hair-to-primal-scream].  How many times did I meet a girl who seemed reasonably intelligent and we got along so well until we hit this wall.

I blame the Bobo Experiment.  Everyone in my university took Psych 101.  One of the most prominent and easiest to remember sections was on Albert Bandura's experiment that seemed to suggest that children could be taught not to behave aggressively by being shown positive role models - and only positive role models.  I wondered, while I read about the text book, why there wasn't already a formula for world peace over 30 years after this remarkable discovery.  Whenever this came up and someone tried to argue that this proved violence/rape/theft/etc. were learned behaviours, I tried to point out that human nature has a role in such negative behaviour too.  I believe that my inability to keep my mouth shut on this subject was the main reason I didn't have many dates in University.