Blogosaurus Vex

Anthropolgist Scott Atran’s book In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion is excellent.  From it I reproduce the following quotation, from a section titled “Relevance and Truth: Why God’s Word Cannot Be Disconfirmed.”  It’s a long section (three pages in the book), but I think it’s worth reading because the problem of the inability of religion to be factually challenges is so frustrating and incomprehensible to nonbelievers.  It’s a problem that is a brick wall that both sides smash their heads against with little to show for it and is, I think, the basis of much of the contempt on both sides.  Here is Atran’s explanation of this phenomenon.  All italics are from the text.  I have not indented to preserve what shortness of (physical) length I can.

Begin quotation:

One clear and important distinction between fantasy and religion is the knowledge of its source.  People generally attribute their personal fantasies and dreams to themselves and to events they’ve experienced.  They also know or assume that public fictions (novels, movies, cartoons, etc.) were created by specific people who had particular intentions for doing so.

A religious text is another story.  Followers believe it to be the work and word of deities themselves.  Believers assume that sacred doctrine was first heard or transcribed in some long-forgotten time by chosen prophets or sages who were faithfully repeating or imaging what the deities had directly said or shown to them.

Accepting a text on authority and faith implies that the listener or reader suspend the universal constraints on ordinary communication, that is, pragmatic considerations of relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1996).  In ordinary communication, the listener or reader “automatically” attemps to fill the gap in understanding between what is merely said or written and what the communicator intends the listener or reader to think or do as a result.

In ordinary communication, there is almost always such a gap.  For example, if someone says to you “That’s just fine,” you willimmediately try to figure out what in the previous conversation or immediate environment “that” could possibly refer to, what is “fine” about it, and why it is “just” fine.  This search, in turn, takes cues from the phonetic and syntactic structure of the utterance istself (e.g., phrasing, stress, intonation), surrounding environment (the presence of a broken wine  bottle in the dining room floor), recent memory (you had just asked to taste your dinner host’s special reserve), and background knowledge (your host tends to be ironic whan angry).

Moreover, you, the hearer, automatically assume that the speaker also shares many of these same background assumptions with you and, furthermore, that the speaker made the utterance knowing that the two of you shared enough of these background assumptions for you to readily understand what the speaker intended.  Both of you also automatically assume that you, the hearer, will make the appropriate inference to the speaker’s intentions on the basis of considerations of relevance: you will attempt, with the least cognitive effort, to infer sufficient information to understand the speaker’s intentions.  You stop cognitively processing information the moment the communication makes sense. (If there were no such stopping rule, inference and interpretations would go on forever.)

Depending on the circumstances and what you know or don’t know about the speaker’s past intentions, you may suspect that the speaker is attempting to lie or deceive.  Alternatively, you may doubt that the speaker really knows what he or she is talking about, or is adequately aware of the kind or extent of knowledge that you share, or properly assesses your readiness or willingness to make the appropriate inferences.  Finally, you may have reason to interpret the speaker’s utterances figuratively, say, as a metaphor or parable, or perhaps simply as a bit of fanciful fun.

In everyday communication, humans effortlessly, but necessarily and unmistakably, make these many assumptions and inferences.  Often, they do so very many times in a single minute of ordinary coversation.  In interpreting a religious utterance or text, however, people need to do very little of the sort.  Ordinarily, believers assume that the utterances or texts connected with religious doctrines are authorless, timeless, and true. As a result, people do not apply ordinary relevance criteria to religious communications.

Because divine statements are authorless, it makes little sense to try to infer intent from their mode of presentation.   For example, the bodily gesticulations, phrasings, and intonations in the utterance of a biblical, Quranic, or Later Vedic passage cannot be God’s, Allah’s, or Vishnu’s.  They can be only the speaker’s (unless there is cause to believe that God is directly communicationg through the deity, as in a public revelation).  Interpreting what the speaker intends by uttering the passage is one thing; interpreting what the deity intends can be indefinitely many things (expressed, in part, by indefinitely many speakers and interpreters).

Timelessness implies that cues from the surrounding environment, background knowledge, and memory are all irrelevant – or equipotentially relevant, which amounts to irrelevance.  God’s message, therefore, can apply to any and all contexts and to each context in indefinitely many and different ways.  To be sure, people interpret God’s message in particular ways for specific contexts, but they have no reason to ever stop interpreting.

Finally, the fact that God’s word is accepted as true on faith – come what may – entails that it can never be false or deceptive or merely figurative.  Ordinary preoccupation with lying and false belief in communication therefore plays no role in interpretation (or at least no consistent role).  Neither can failed attempts at verification or confirmation of this or that aspect of the information represented in a religious statment, or inferred from it, undermine the audience’s belief in the statement’s truth.

On the contrary, apparently disconfirming evidence only seems to make believers try harder to understand the deeper truth and to strangthen religious beliefs.  For example, after reading a bogus article on a new finding from the Dead Sea Scrolls that seemed to contradict Christian doctrine, religious believers who also believed the story reported their religious beliefs reinforced (Batson 1975).  For believers, then, confidence in religious doctrine and belief can increase through both confirmation and disconfirmation of any factual assumptions that may accompany interpretation of those beliefs.

Faith in religious belief is not simply another manifestation of a general psychological propensity to reduce “cognitive dissonance” by ignoring or reappraising information that is contrary to one’s views (cf. Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter 1956).  It is the direct cognitive result of suspending the relevance criteria that universally apply to ordinary communication.  If faith is, in part, willingness to suspend ordinary pragmatic constraints of relevance, then beliefs held in faith become not only immune to falsification and contradiction but become even more strongly held in the face of apparent falsification or contradiction. Apparently disconfirmed religious beliefs show only the superficialty of one’s current interpretation and point to an even deeper but more mysterious truth.

End quotation.  pp.91-93

Posted in Psychology, Reading, Religion | 2 Comments »

We’re in the middle of a deck overhaul at our apartment.  We currently have a ~450 square foot deck with a lot of built in furniture and plantboxes which we just finished tearing out due to extensive dry rot.  The new replacements boxes are being installed and this has coincided beautifully with my new passion to plant.  I talked with my landlord today and he’s agreed that, a few major plant sites aside, we are free to use the plant boxes for anything we like.  So I have the run of several spacious planter boxes – well, spacious for a city apartment anyway. I’m so excited!

As you know, I never do anything without first reading a book on it.  Yesterday I picked up this book: Fresh Food From Small Spaces: The square inch gardener’s guide to year round growing, fermenting and sprouting.  It’s intended for people in cities who live in apartments, and though I don’t know about the fermenting bit (sounds icky), the rest sounds perfect.

It’s late in the year for planting anything other than lettuces, radishes, and overwinter plants (I have no idea what that means yet) but I’m not letting that stop me.  Lettuces we shall have!  And maybe I can rustle up some mature plants to introduce to my patch now – I was thinking herbs might be good for this.  Do vegetable plants survive transplanting when they are in the middle of, er, producing?  Can you even buy such a thing?

It’s going to be a blast learning about how to make a garden.  And I am feeling very lucky that I live on the sunny side of the building with a big deck with landlord financed planter boxes.  Whee!

JBrydle asked what brought this all on.  Really it’s been a five year or so process, though the tipping point was watching the movie Food Inc. earlier this week.  When I lived in Halifax I got interested in the food industry and started reading books, particularly those by Marion Nestle, about how the food industry works.  I won’t reproduce her arguments here, but basically the idea is that “big food” acts to prevent regulatory oversight that is necessary for disease and death prevention, while unduly influencing consumers away from healthful choices. Other books I was influenced by were Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and more recently Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved.  So I already had some notion of the evils of mass food production as it is currently practiced, yet I never made a move away from that industry.  It wasn’t something I dwelled much on – I never became interested in trying to source local food or avoiding highly processed stuff.  I shopped exclusively at Safeway.  It was just easier I suppose.

And then I watched Food Inc.  As I wrote about earlier, it was hard to watch the animal scenes, and in the midst of feeling grief and anger at the thoughtless treatment of feeling creatures… the rest of the movie happened, and I realized my outrage at factory animal “processing” is no different than outrage and grief at the abuse of impoverished workers,  manipulation and exploitation of farmers at the hands of major buying cartels, and environmental devastation as a result of intensive farming practices.  If I could make a change with veganism, why not with those other things?  Most of that movie was not new information to me, but somehow I had never felt as deeply moved by those issues before.

Become a vegetarian was a huge change in my life and I think it’s made me more comfortable with change, and has also given me a sense of agency and power in the world that I didn’t have before.  I used to eat the way my parents and fellow white Canadians eat, mindlessly.  Then one day I realized I needed to opt out of a system I saw as inexcusably cruel – and while some people say my refusal to eat meat changes nothing, I don’t see it that way.  Not only is there about four hundred pounds of meat no longer being demanded in the market, and a voice spreading the message of compassion and health – but there was a big change inside me.  For the first time I realized I didn’t have to just do what everyone else does simply because it’s what everyone else does.  I can be an active moral agent and make choices, even unpopular ones, that I come to on my own, through my own process of inquiry and self exploration.  I don’t really know how to explain how empowering that has been for me.

And now that I know I can do things like that, I am much more ready to make further “radical” changes for similar reasons.  I don’t want my food to come to me after thousands of miles of fossil fuel burning transport.  I don’t want to have cheap fruit that requires abused immigrant workers to harvest.  I don’t want to encourage Monsanto to make more pesticides that require farmers to use only Monsanto patented seeds (illegal to save season to season) to survive them.   Whereas I do want to encourage small scale farming outfits that retain diversity in the crops.   I want to grow my own produce that supplements my groceries so I spend less, and connect to the earth more.

So, while I know nothing about gardening or living more sustainably, I am excited to learn how and start making changes.  I’ll never be perfect, but I could do much better than I currently do.  It feels right to me.

Posted in Domesticity, Personal, Reading, Society/Politics, Veganism, Vegetarianism | No Comments »

Another quiet night at the BV household – not much to report, though that hasn’t stopped me yet.  Points of potential interest, your mileage may vary:

1. At class tonight two other students I’ve talked to on occasion kept sidling up together to have whispered, private chats, which transported me back to that miserable prison called high school where life was one big long series of exclusions (mostly, my little circle of geeks excepted), and I asked myself, When the fuck do I stop being neurotic about this?  I am waiting to reach a point where I really and truly do not get anxious about being rejected by my peers but it has not happened yet.

2. But who cares, my god, I have HUGE BOOBS.  (Ha ha, that was a little joke for the folks who followed along for the drama about bra sizing.  Post script: I decided to avoid the issue and keep using the bras I already have.  What’s a little discomfort between friends?)

3. I have noticed a certain defiance activated in me against declaring my status.  It’s a big deal in certain circles to say what your degree is and where you got it.  It’s a pedigree system.  But the more schooling I do, the more I realize that school can be a load of crap.  It has many potential perks but it is by no means necessary to become a thoughtful, intelligent person who can contribute to…whatever.  Some of the best thinkers I know are not academics and some of the shittiest are, so right there you know school is neither necessary nor sufficient for Usefulness As A Person.  All the best learning I’ve had came from people outside the school system and the best practitioners I’ve seen in my field are not massively educated in the formal sense.

Okay.  So when people ask what I do, I say I’m in school – not grad school, not an MA – just school.  Or if someone asks if I am working, I just say no.  No explanations, no justifications.  Whenever I sense the question comes from someone trying to sort me by status rather than just expressing interest and curiosity, I absolutely – and defiantly! – provide as little information as I can, knowing it defaults me into a lower status setting than they would use if they had all the facts.  So what?  Fuck ‘em.

Anyway, I started noticing this in myself about 6 months ago and so far I’m pretty okay with it.  Ego syntonic defense: it’s what’s for dinner!

(Aside: I was going to link to the Wikipedia article on “ego syntonic” to define it for those who are curious but it is a TERRIBLE article so I won’t.  I clicked around but didn’t find any good online definitions but if anyone asks I could write something up.)

4. Finally, Jane Austen is worth reading.  I know, I am the only woman on planet earth who doesn’t looooove Pride and Prejudice, but frankly, the scheming of a bunch of immature socialites just can’t hold my interest… Unless they are under constant threat of attack by the walking dead!  In which case it becomes pure butterfat.

5. Oh bother, I could go on but Puck tells me my posts are too long anyway, and there is a nice hot tub to lounge in with my book so this is it for tonight.  Zombies here I come…

Posted in Critical Thinking, Reading, Society/Politics | 2 Comments »

I know I keep doing this to you guys and I apologize but I need your help: what should I read?

You know, it is absolutely criminal how rare a good book is.  Frankly it makes me want to tear my hair out with the sheer unbearableness of it all.  Listen, I can only read so much nonfiction before I collapse on the floor frothing and spewing, and ladies and gentlemen, we are approaching the threshhold.

So, apologies for what is sure to be a repetitive list of general criteria, but I really do read the books you recommend so there is that.

1. Nothing that sucks.  Nothing boring.  Nothing silly.  No children’s books.  No sword and sorcery.  For god’s sake no Dan Brown.

2. I like mysteries (am into Victorian mysteries these days), historical fiction (but not the chick-lit kind, you know what I’m talking about, I never fantasize that I am Guinevere or whoever she was), post-apocalyptic and other desolate/hopeless settings, high brow sci fi, anything with really compelling characters, and something I can’t demolish in two hours would be good too.

3. Or anything else that is really awesome.  Maybe… what is your favourite book?

4. Are the Gormenghast books worth reading?  The internet can’t make up its mind so I turn to you.

5. You really should read The Children of Men by P. D. James, who wrote a lot of potboiler mysteries but! This book is so effin’ good it hurts.  It is… well, I just think you should read it.  Also the movie was totally cool.  End endorsement.

Right now I have a shiny new copy of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies to tide me over, which was gifted to me by someone who may wish to remain anonymous so I won’t name names but he is clearly a person of discriminating taste and generosity in addition to being perhaps the most level headed, open minded debater I have had the pleasure to meet.

But what next?

Posted in Reading | 10 Comments »

Yesterday I was working hard on my exam papers (cough fiddling around online cough) and during the process, happened to download a bunch of Ministry. You know how that happens… being very studious… and suddenly there is a beep, and the computer says music has arrived!  Sort of an immaculate conception event, yes?

So, when I was an angry young teenager, Ministry was just the coolest, most hardcore stuff you could listen to (and enjoy – there was all that other music, grindcore and the like, that was more angry sounding but just god-awful to endure) and in addition to feeling badass it was like they really got me.  I had a lot of angst.

My friend Z introduced me to Ministry and he also introduced me to Preacher, which is a comic very decidedly Southern gothic in tone.  I had one summer that I associate very strongly with the Ministry album The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste and a Preacher panel where Jesse tells someone to go fuck themselves (he can make you do what he says with, um, the power of god?), and my mind just boggled at how that would work.  I was horrified.  And enchanted.  And then I forgot Southern gothic for many years.

Last night Husband and I were chatting, laptops back to back across each other on the dining table.  Ministry was playing from my computer, and a remix of Jesus Built my Hotrod came one.  (This is not one of my favourites but when taking a trip down memory lane it is advisable to sample widely.)  There is a sampled line in that song: “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”  And Husband jerked to attention.  He doesn’t know Ministry but he knew that line.  It was from a book he’d read, way back when he did an English degree.  He couldn’t remember the author or the title but he said, That book was like a cold wind through my mind.  And it’s Southern gothic.  I was instantly transported back to that summer in high school, and just as fast I wondered, Why did I never pursue this genre that I loved?   I became very interested.

Wikipedia solved the problem of the mysterious  book, and we discovered the title: Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor.  (The sample is from the 1979 movie adaptation, and the speaker is Brad Dourif!) Chapters said it was in – I headed to the store.  Of course Chapters lied, but they did have her other novel, The Violent Bear it Away, and I bought it.  And have been devouring it.  And it is amazing.

I haven’t been this excited about a book since I discovered Riddley Walker about two years ago.  When I read Riddley Walker, I could barely contain myself for excitement.  I’d never encountered anything like it (and still haven’t).  I couldn’t put it down.  I’ve read it about five times since, and it never fails to thrill.  The Violent Bear It Away?  It is a cold wind through my mind.  It is chilling and disturbing and glorious all at once – I feel fired up just holding it.  True story: when I read the first pages in the store waiting for the staff person to check on the location of Wise Blood, my breath caught in my chest and I had to put it down to calm myself enough to inhale again.

It is very Ministry.

And now I have to go finish it.

If you don’t know Ministry but you like a metal sound, listen to these songs: Breathe, So What, The Fall, Corrosion, Hizbollah, Reload.

Posted in Personal, Reading | 2 Comments »

Nearly done the books.  If I do say so myself it’s a pretty good outcome – I could lay my hands on any particular book in mere seconds.  Of course I did the organizing and I have that amazing visual-spatial memory thing, so perhaps my system sucks and Husband will mope around the house for the next three years bewailing his inability to find anything on the shelves – but to that I say, Reorganize it yourself!  Stick a fork in me, I am done.

Dining room portion:

Foyer portion:

And it might be a good system.  We’ll find out when Husband gets home from work to inspect the final product.  But I already know certain moves can be counted as improvements:

1. The books on child sexual abuse and trauma have been moved from the eye-height shelf in the entry foyer to the topmost shelf in the dining room, so guests entering the house are no longer inclined to wonder which one of us was molested within twelve seconds of entering the apartment (answer: neither, I did some work in play therapy last year and had to read up).

2. The cookbooks moved from the bottom most shelves to standing height, which will be a great quality of life improvement for me since I use them all the time and hate crouching.  You can tell it’s uncomfortable just by the word: crouch.  Crouch crouch crouch.  I get a cramp just reading it.

3. The fiction is alphabetized!  This required abandoning my former topic system, so there is no longer a zombie and post-apocalyptic section nor a mysteries section, BUT since I know all the authors the new system is actually better.

4. Sorting fiction from non-fiction has, incidentally, preserved my tales of hardship in nature books as a topic section because that’s the only kind of non-fiction I buy that is not better accounted for in another section (such as psychotherapy or biology).  So they are all together in one miserable section.  Yay Antarctica!

5. I am pleased that I have given the books on psychodynamics pride of place, front and centre of the entire bookshelf arrangement, which will make for easy references when I get into the inevitable discussions about whether Freud has been refuted (answer: people refute Freud constantly, but this does not been he has been definitively refuted!).

6. We culled about three linear feet of books from the stacks, yet despite this, plus adding another six foot tall shelf, and using the tops of the bookshelves as more storage, we still don’t really have any room to expand.  How did this happen?  I guess technically this isn’t an improvement but it certainly is noteworthy!

And now for images!

I love Inspector Morse.  And PKD:

And I love Neal Stephenson:

I also love Lovecraft:

And of course I love to cook.  This is about one quarter of my cookbooks:

Posted in Domesticity, Reading | No Comments »

Today our friend Puck drove us in his car (it has a back seat!  And it’s a hatchback!  Swoon!) to pick up a new bookshelf at Ikea.  Husband and I own a lot of books, mainly due to us having about a million years of school between us and my leeetle tiny book buying habit.  (Hey!  At least it’s not crack!)  And when you own a lot of books, it becomes easy to find that you can’t find what you’re looking for.  Also the shelves were full to overflowing.  So we decided, in a bold move, to add a piece of furniture and reorganize the books.

Dramatic piano chord!  While I am pretty anal about this sort of thing and enjoy a good sorting now and then, Husband hates it – and a lot of the books are his, and I wouldn’t know how to categorize them on my own.  Also I had this crazy idea that doing it together would be sort of fun, in a bonding-through-suffering sort of way.  Alas Husband sees it merely as work, tedious and unpleasant.  Imagine that: an afternoon of lugging books around and haggling over whether this book belongs here or there is not fun to him.  Pshaw, I say!

Anyway, because we’re nerds, we looked up the Dewey decimal system for guidance in the grand endeavour to Once And For All Set Up The Damn Books.  It should have been obvious that the Dewey system is based on groupings of ten, but I was surprised to learn that this is in fact how it is done.  Math was never my strong suit and apparently neither is recognizing math terms.  Anyway, under Dewey all books are organized into ten classes, which are then further divided into ten divisions, which are then further divided into ten sections.  We don’t have enough books to really full-on Dewey our library, but it did help us make some general groupings.

And now we have built furniture, moved furniture, stacked books all over the place, and stirred up a lot of dust.  After about seven hours of work, I think we’re around 60% done, though some of the harder sections are as yet untouched.  It is suprisingly difficult to organize your books by subject, as we are trying to do, when so many books seem to fit in more than one category (is Hillman’s A Terrible Love of War sociology, or psychology, or something else?), and some into none (the Edge.org collection “What do you believe but cannot prove?” is not science, nor philosophy, nor anything else we can think of.  Is there a category for wanking on about ideas at random?).

So, head scratchers aside, things are shaping up very well.  It’s going to be good.  It’s going to be useful.  It’s going to kill us with dustiness!  Dusty sneezy!

Posted in Domesticity, Reading | 2 Comments »

<whining> You guuuuuuys…… I miss caaaaaable!

It’s been… what… a long time since Husband and I got rid of satellite.  And basically it was a good thing.  I got off the TV teat and did a lot more other things.  I stopped feeling like a pimped out commercial watcher.  And most of the time I don’t miss it.  But yesterday I hung out at Mel’s house and we just loafed on the couch watching reality TV and it was AWESOME.  Of course I can’t just sign up for Mel to be streamed into my house at all times so the replication won’t be quite right but I can get satellite back.  Do you know how many cooking shows are on TV?  Also the loads of reality shows that provide endless opportunity to analyze the participants, psychology-wise?  And the crime shows, my god, the crime shows!

I am considering it.

Also, we are celebrating easter by eating milk chocolate.  I know!  It’s totally not vegan!  But do you know how disappointing vegan chocolate is when you’re after an easter bunny?  I figure one or two days a year of chocolate indulgence isn’t a big deal.  I had some Toblerone at Christmas too.  It’s not  like it undoes all the vegan eating of the last 15 months.  We do a pretty good job of staying strictly vegan, but recognize it’s not fully possible.  And everybody eats chocolate at this time of year.  (This is pathetic, who rationalizes like this?)

Anyway I am having Mr Solid for breakfast and loving it.  Huzzah!

Also our landlord was here yesterday.  He is very responsive and when I told him the grout is melting out of the shower stall in the main bathroom he got a tile guy here in short order.  Naturally I enlisted Husband’s help and we cleaned the apartment to sparkling as part of my ongoing (though probably futile) effort to convince him that we are so clean and so responsible that it is nothing short of malicious to prevent us from getting a pet.  So far he seems unmoved, but he did ask what we thought could be done to update and modernize the apartment so it doesn’t look dated when he ultimately sells.  I suggested an OVEN for crying out loud BUY US AN OVEN but he just reiterated his position about the advantages of extra storage space in the kitchen, at which point I gave my oft-rehearsed speech about how anyone who cares enough about cooking to need extra space certainly needs an oven more, and anyone who doesn’t want to use it could store things in it… but we’ll see.  I’m not hopeful.

And I finally bought new canvas runners.  And little tank tops that were on sale for five bucks each.  And one of those plastic things that holds your book up and open on the kitchen counter so you can read your recipe without having to weigh the book pages open with buckets of change and vitamin bottles, which inevitably results in the jar getting knocked over and pennies getting into the dough.  And a book about polygamists, who could resist that?  So now I am going to read.  Enjoy your easter!

Posted in Domesticity, Personal, Reading, Watching | 1 Comment »

Escape From The Zombie Food Court

Posted in Reading | No Comments »

So I just this very minute started reading The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, which is a book Husband has been nagging me to read for about… ever since we met.  And being somewhat intimidated by the size of my new psychoanalysis book (seriously, it is now the biggest book I own.  It is enormous – so enormous I struggle not to impute conscious intentions to it.), I grabbed this fellow – and not one full page into the preface got a total shock when I found myself endorsing some rather horrendous things while somewhat absently thinking I was agreeing with something else entirely.  Since I live to share, I thought I’d reproduce that first page for your reading pleasure.  Maybe you will be shocked like I was.

The selection I am reproducing has quotations of its own, so for clarity I’m not going to put the whole selection into the quotation block, just the inner quotations.  If you see what I mean.  Quotation begins now:

” ‘Not another book on nature and nurture! Are there really people out there who still believe that the mind is a blank slate? Isn’t it obvious to anyone with more than one child, to anyone who has been in a hetersexual relationship, or to anyone who has noticed that children learn language but house pets don’t, that people are born with certain talents and temperaments?  Haven’t we all moved beyond the simplistic dichotomy between heredity and environment and raelized that all behaviour comes out of an interaction between the two?”

This is the kind of reaction I got from colleagues when I explained my plans for this book.  At first glance the reaction is not unreasonable.  Maybe nature versus nurture is a dead issue.  Anyone familiar with current writings on mind and behaviour has seen claims to the middle ground like these:

If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other.  It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with this issue.  What might the mix be?  We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.

This is not going to be one of those books that says everything is genetic: it isn’t.  The enviroment is just as important as the genes.  The things children experience while they are growing up are just as important as the things they are born with.

Even when a behaviour is heritable, an individual’s behaviour is still a product of development, and thus it has a causal environmental component… The modern understanding of how phenotypes are inherited through the replication of both genetic and environmental conditions suggests that… cultural traditions – behaviours copied by children from their parents – are likely to be crucial.

If you think these are innocuous compromises that show that everyone has outgrown the nature-nurture debate, think again.  The quotations come, in fact, from three of the most incendiary books of the last decade.  The first is from The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, who argue that the difference in average IQ scores between American blacks and American whites has both genetic and environmental causes.  The second is from The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, who argues that children’s personalities are shaped by their genes as well as by their environments, so similarities between children and their parents may come from their shared genes and not just from the effects of parenting.  The third is from A Natural History of Rape by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, who argue that rape is not simply a product of culture but also has roots in the nature of men’s sexuality.  For invoking nature and nurture, not nurture alone, these authors have been picketed, shouted down, subjected to searing invective in the press, even denounced in Congress.  Others expressing such opinions have been censored, assaulted, or threatened with criminal prosecution.”

Quotation ends.

I read the selected quotations Pinker inserted and thought yes, yes, of course, isn’t that obvious as I did so – and then I read where they came from and went Holy shit, did I just endorse the idea that blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites?  Not in so many words, of course, but it seems that’s the position you take when you mindlessly endorse the willy-nilly notion of a blending of nature and nurture in the broad, unexamined way I did it.

Most intriguing is the idea that those authors were right.  I have experienced academic censorship first hand and let me tell you, it is alive and well.  Some ideas just can’t be accepted, usually out of good intentions – for example if we think blacks are less intelligent, then we will racially cleanse them! (etc.)  While the conclusions are virtually always not necessary outcomes, fear of them can motivate the censorship.  I disapprove on principle because that position is anti-learning and anti-science, but given the idiocy of the masses and their tendency to do horrific things like racial cleansing I sometimes think it’s a good safety measure – and fortunately I am not tasked with the responsibility of deciding.

In any case this single page exposure has thrown into sharp relief my ignorance of these issues.  And it has whetted my appetite.  Psychoanalysis may have to wait a week or so!

Posted in Psychology, Reading | No Comments »