Here is a sensible piece by George Will on why the Court should strike down the ‘Defense of Marriage Act’.
In brief: the definition and regulation of marriage is not among the Federal government’s enumerated and carefully limited powers. Students of history will recall that this actually used to mean something.
I’m working late again tonight, so all I have, I’m afraid, is this brief item from NRO, in which we learn that a Connecticut principal has canceled his school’s annual celebration of its honors students, in order not to bruise the emotions of those less successful.
Yes, readers, America is well on the way to a full recovery of its former vitality, and will soon be a strong and virile nation once again.
Should be a-a-a-a-any day now.
Today’s good news: it looks like Dianne Feinstein’s ban on so-called “assault weapons” is dying on the vine.
I was wondering when this was going to happen.
One Twitterer remarked:
If Silicon Valley is a meritocracy (or aspires to be) why not let everyone see company hiring stats for women and people of color.
Here’s a guess:
It’s because Silicon Valley (which is really just a proxy for companies that make their money on the basis of highly innovative engineering) is a meritocracy — you just can’t fake being good at writing code, solving complex engineering problems, or designing high-tech gadgetry — and to reveal their employment stats would call into question the assumption that in a genuine engineering meritocracy all of the world’s identity groups would be represented in exactly the ratios with which they exist in the general population.
To reject this assumption — which is simply a heartfelt wish — is a very serious offense these days. But as I pointed out above, technology is ruthless: your code, your smart-phone, your genome sequencer either works, or it doesn’t. If you’re developing a self-driving car, it had better stay on the road, and not crash into things.
I know some of the biggest of these companies from the inside, and let me tell you: they don’t give a damn what you look like. They want one thing, and one thing only: superior engineers. To get hired at any of these outfits you have to jump some very high hurdles. To work at Google, say, just to get a foot in the door you’ll need to know programming well enough that languages don’t even really matter. Then you’ll have to have to have elite mastery of the theoretical stuff: algorithms, data structures, and so on. Above all that, though, you have to be very, very intelligent: the kind of flexible, general intelligence that lets you take all that book-larnin’ and use it in entirely new ways, or throw it away altogether, to solve problems that nobody’s ever thought about before. You need to be able to see hidden isomorphisms between classes of problems. And that intelligence needs to be a motor that runs all the time, and that can run well even when under heavy stress for prolonged periods of time.
This happens to be the sort of intelligence that is very reliably quantifiable. You can talk all you want about cultural bias in IQ testing, but technology doesn’t care, and this sort of intelligence is what it takes.
We are not talking about intelligence at or near the mean, for any human group. We’re talking about intelligence that is way over on the right side of the bell-curve, where it starts getting a good deal closer to the x-axis, and the absolute numbers start thinning out fast. The assumption behind this political inquisition is that the intrinsic distribution of high intelligence of this kind is — no, must be — exactly equal in all human populations, and between the sexes, and so, absent some sort of malicious institutional racism or sexism, the representation of these groups in high-tech companies should match their share of the population.
“But is that actually true? What if it isn’t?”
“Sorry. It MUST be true.”
And so, you see, Silicon Valley is about to find itself in a bit of a pickle.
Think about this, too: the folks who run these companies want to win. They want brilliant engineers, period. If it were really the case that any of them were rejecting out of hand highly qualified candidates just because of their sex or race, those people would simply be snapped up elsewhere, to the competitive advantage of the second party. To imagine that the distribution of sex and race in these companies is based on pernicious bias, you’d have to assume that all of these companies value bigotry over competitive advantage. They just aren’t that stupid.
I’ve worked for some time now in the software industry, and I can tell you this: even in a place like New York City, it’s hard to find (and keep) good engineers. There just aren’t that many of them out there. Believe me, when you find ’em, you grab ’em.
This is a witch hunt, nothing more, nothing less.
Here is a very beautiful performance of Lachrimae Pavane, written by the English Renaissance composer and lutenist John Dowland. The player is the Swedish guitarist Per-Olov Kindgren.
It’s hard to describe the emotional effect of Dowland’s music; it’s terribly sad, but just to call it “melancholy” is too one-sided. There is also something deeply comforting in it.
On the elevation of the new Pope, we’ve seen a lot of sulking about the Catholic Church’s inexplicable reluctance to get itself properly aligned with the Left’s social-issues agenda.
It is, as Dennis Mangan points out here, perfectly understandable for socially ‘progressive’ sorts to consider the Church a political opponent, and to seek to reduce its influence in the nation’s affairs. But it’s a bit much to expect a 2000-year-old institution, whose mission has been for those two millennia to assist the salvation of souls by interpreting the moral will of God, suddenly to rewrite its core doctrines in order to bring itself into doxological alignment with the editorial staff of the New Yorker. (You might say it’s downright Ptolemaic; after all, we already know that the New Yorker considers itself to exist at the center of the Universe. At the very least, it’s certainly not very catholic.)
All this hoydenish self-centeredness prompted tart responses from James Taranto and Pat Buchanan (who are, respectively, lapsed and practicing Catholics). Here are some key excerpts.
Catholicism has evolved over 2,000 years and, whatever its adversities and shortcomings, has proved sustainable over that period. If you judge it by the standard of contemporary feminism and sexual liberationism, of course it will seem lacking. But these fashionable dogmas have yet to prove their worth, either for understanding human nature or sustaining a society over the long term. Their adherents fancy themselves sophisticated, but in fact they frequently are too simple-minded–or perhaps fearful–even to consider a different way of looking at the world.
To be Catholic is to be orthodox.
Indeed, let us presume the impossible ”” that the Church should suddenly allow the ordination of woman, and decree that abortions in the first month of pregnancy are now licit, and that homosexual unions, if for life, will henceforth be recognized and blessed.
This would require the Church to admit that for 2,000 years it had been in error on matters of faith and morals, and hence is not infallible. But if the Church could have been so wrong for so long, while the world was right, and many had suffered for centuries because the Church erred, what argument would be left for remaining Catholic?
If the Church were to admit it had been wrong since the time of Christ about how men must live their lives to attain eternal life, why should Catholics obey the commandments of such a fallible and erring Church? Why not follow our separated brethren of the Protestant faiths, and choose what doctrines we wish to believe and what commandments we wish to obey?
It’s disappointing that anyone has to explain all this. We’re all free, if we disagree with Catholic doctrine, not to be Catholics. But lambasting the Catholic Church for sticking to traditional principles is like criticizing the American Philatelic Society for being so preoccupied with stamps.
As usually happens, the middle of this week has meant long hours at work. So for the moment, just a few links:
— A fine rant, from across the pond, on the new subjectivity of justice, and the culture of victimhood.
— A necessary government expenditure that appears, so far, to have survived the sequester.
— Calvinism.
— A statistical resource I had hitherto been unaware of.
— Richard Dawkins on the relative value of pigs and human fetuses.
— Pop-psych.
— Zombie-fy yourself. (Haven’t tried it.)
— A layman’s overview of the Higgs particle, whose existence seems more likely confirmed.
Ah, I hear behind me the whistle and crack of the galley-master’s lash. Back to my oar for now.
I don’t drink Coke, but I certainly had a smile when I read that Michael Bloomberg’s infantilizing sugary-drink ban had been smacked down by the Supreme Court of the State of New York. (Smacked down by the very researchers he quoted in support of it, too, but that’s another story.)
From the Times:
In an unusually critical opinion, Justice Milton A. Tingling of State Supreme Court in Manhattan called the limits “arbitrary and capricious,’ echoing the complaints of city business owners and consumers who had deemed the rules unworkable and unenforceable, with confusing loopholes and voluminous exemptions.
“Arbitrary and capricious”. “Confusing loopholes and voluminous exemptions.”
These are the hallmarks of tyranny, friends, and they are all the rage these days: confining, demeaning restrictions of liberty imposed and enforced — or not enforced — at the whim of the sovereign.
“I’ve got to defend my children, and yours, and do what’s right to save lives,’ the mayor said. “Obesity kills. There’s no question it kills.’
Yes, and so does sloth, and fondness for drink, and wearing socks on the stairs. Are they next?
— But — my children!
He couldn’t make it any clearer: gazing down from Olympus, benevolent and omnisapient, Michael Bloomberg sees us all as his children, even those of us who are not children.
No, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Locking up hoodlums, plowing the streets when it snows, marching in parades, quelling riots, cutting ribbons, giving a proper New York welcome to visiting dignitaries, pushing back hard on greedy public-sector unions: these are the sort of thing we free citizens have hired a Mayor for. They should be more than enough to keep you busy.
Well, that’s a big job, but it can be done! You just have to work hard, and keep the goal in view.
As with all big jobs, the trick is to break it down into smaller parts. Here’s Victor Davis Hanson on how to take care of the economy. (Hat tip: Bill Keezer.)
Forgive me, readers, for linking two long articles in one day. There’s an even longer one on the way, I’m afraid.
Here’s an outstandingly clear and well-informed article addressing the commonest of the Left’s positions on gun-control.
It’s long, but well worth your time.
From Democracy In America, here’s Alexis de Tocqueville on the complexity of American law:
The French codes are often difficult of comprehension, but they can be read by every one; nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents. The indispensable want of legal assistance which is felt in England and in the United States, and the high opinion which is generally entertained of the ability of the legal profession, tend to separate it more and more from the people, and to place it in a distinct class. The French lawyer is simply a man extensively acquainted with the statutes of his country; but the English or American lawyer resembles the hierophants of Egypt, for, like them, he is the sole interpreter of an occult science.
This was, of course, long before the scale and opacity of federal legislation had even begun to approach the dark vastness of, say, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. What, I wonder, would Tocqueville have made of this?
There is something very wrong about our nation’s laws being of such bulk and complexity that even the legislators who enact them cannot fully understand them (if they bother to read them at all). How can anyone know if he is in compliance with a body of law that is too labyrinthine, too immense, for any human mind to encompass it? How anyone actually be in compliance with such a body of law? It’s like something out of Borges.
After a round of too-long-put-off periodontal surgery today at the hands of the gifted healer Louis Franzetti, I am in a deep post-operative torpor. Back soon.
All right, I know what you’re thinking:
“Yeah, sure, all this ‘civilization’ stuff you’re always on about is probably kind of important, I guess…
…but what about knotted vortices?”
Right you are. And here you go.
Finally.
From ‘The Diplomad’, a brief and accurate summary. Excerpt:
In short, his was a bravura performance which has left Venezuela awash in debt, crime, and poverty–the signature achievement of leftism everywhere in the world.
Thanks to Bill Keezer for the link.
And here’s another.
With a hat tip to Bill Vallicella, we urge you to read an excellent article at The Jurist, by criminologist Don Kates, on the lack of empirical evidence for the Left’s position on gun bans.
The article includes links to public recantations by many former gun-ban advocates, including a 1995 paper by noted criminologist Marvin E. Wolfgang, entitled A Tribute To A View I Have Opposed.
Wolfgang’s paper begins:
I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country. If I were Mustapha Mond of Brave New World, I would eliminate all guns from the civilian population and maybe even from the police. I hate guns–ugly, nasty instruments designed to kill people.
My reading of the articles in this Symposium has been enlightening even though I have been reading research on guns and violence for over a quarter of a century, ever since the Eisenhower Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, when I enlisted Franklin Zimring to be a Task Force director of Volume Seven, “Firearms and Violence in American Life.”
I have found Alfred Blumstein’s paper thoroughly useful in many ways. He has done us a service in bringing together the variables of youth, drugs and guns in a way no one else has provided. He deserves the applause of our community of scholars. I also commend Philip Cook, Stephanie Molliconi and Thomas Cole for a thorough study about regulating gun markets. Their policy claims are most realistic. As a gun-control advocate, I am pleased to add their research to my advocacy.
What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator. Maybe Franklin Zimring and Philip Cook can help me find fault with the Kleck and Gertz research, but for now, I have to admit my admiration for the care and caution expressed in this article and this research.
Can it be true that about two million instances occur each year in which a gun was used as a defensive measure against crime? It is hard to believe. Yet, it is hard to challenge the data collected. We do not have contrary evidence.
(Note: the reference to “Kleck and Gertz” is to this scholarly paper, which found that in 1993 there were roughly 2.5 million uses of firearms for self-defense, versus something like half a million gun crimes.)
The article at The Jurist also cites the following, from a report by professors James Wright, Peter Rossi and Kathleen Daly, of the Social and Demographic Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts:
The progressive’s indictment of American firearms policy is well known and is one that both the senior authors of this study once shared. This indictment includes the following particulars: (1) Guns are involved in an astonishing number of crimes in this country. (2) In other countries with stricter firearms laws and fewer guns in private hands, gun crime is rare … (4) Many families acquire a gun because they feel the need to protect themselves; eventually, they end up shooting one another. (5) If there were fewer guns around, there would obviously be less crime … The more deeply we explored the empirical implications of this indictment, the less plausible it has become. (emphasis, parentheses added)
Read the rest here. (See also Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?, published by The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.) And go read Bill’s original post, which discusses the mistaken idea that the role of the police is interventional and defensive.
A final point: if restricting access to the kinds of weapons (handguns, mostly) that are actually used in most gun assaults has no positive effect (and likely has a strongly negative one), then it becomes even clearer that the Left’s obsession with “assault rifles” is nothing more than hysteria and stagecraft. (After all, rifles of all types kill fewer people each year than fists and clubs.)
This is a very important battle, one we must not lose.
Here’s yet another interesting item from Edge.org, this time an interview with a young psychologist named Adam Alter, whom I hadn’t heard of before now. The article’s accompanying biographical note says this about him:
ADAM ALTER is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Stern School of Business, NYU. He is the author of Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave.
Popping over to Amazon to have a look at Professor Alter’s book, I found this description:
An illuminating look at the way the thoughts we have and the decisions we make are influenced by forces that aren’t always in our control
Why are people named Kim, Kelly, and Ken more likely to donate to Hurricane Katrina victims than to Hurricane Rita victims? Are you really more likely to solve puzzles if you watch a light bulb illuminate? How did installing blue lights along a Japanese railway line halt rising crime and suicide rates? Can decorating your walls with the right artwork make you more honest? The human brain is fantastically complex, having engineered space travel and liberated nuclear energy, so it’s no wonder that we resist the idea that we’re deeply influenced by our surroundings. As profound as they are, these effects are almost impossible to detect both as they’re occurring and in hindsight. Drunk Tank Pink is the first detailed exploration of how our environment shapes what we think, how we feel, and the ways we behave.
The world is populated with words and images that prompt unexpected, unconscious decisions. We are so deeply attracted to our own initials that we give more willingly to the victims of hurricanes that match our initials: Kims and Kens donate more generously to Hurricane Katrina victims, whereas Rons and Rachels give more openly to Hurricane Rita victims. Meanwhile, an illuminated light bulb inspires creative thinking because it symbolizes insight.
Social interactions have similar effects, as professional cyclists pedal faster when people are watching. Teachers who took tea from the break room at Newcastle University contributed 300 percent more to a cash box when a picture of two eyes hung on the wall. We’re evolutionarily sensitive to human surveillance, so we behave more virtuously even if we’re only watched by a photograph. The physical environment, from locations to colors, also guides our hand in unseen ways. Dimly lit interiors metaphorically imply no one’s watching and encourage dishonesty and theft, while blue lights discourage violent activity because they’re associated with the police. Olympic taekwondo and judo athletes are more likely to win when they wear red rather than blue, because red makes them behave aggressively and referees see them as more dominant. Drunk Tank Pink is full of revelatory facts, riveting anecdotes, and cutting-edge experiments that collectively explain how the most unexpected factors lead us to think, feel, and behave the way we do.
It sounds as if Professor Alter is in rather the same line of work as people like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely. It’s depressing to see how irrational we are so much of the time, but there it is. The world that “designed” our cognitive apparatus us is not the world we’ve been living in for the past couple of centuries, and a lot of old buttons and levers are still exposed, waiting to be pushed and yanked by those who know. It’s good for us to know about these things, even if it’s a little dispiriting. (And of course, it’s the sort of knowledge that people will pay a lot of money for.)
In the Edge interview, Alter tells us that some thoughts are simply easier to have than others, and that this can affect, in unexpected ways, what we do with them. He calls this measure of difficulty disfluency.
The basic idea here is that when you have a thought, any thought, it falls along a continuum from fluent to disfluent. A fluent thought is one that feels subjectively easy to have. When you speak English and you come across a common English name, like John, or Tom, or Ted, it’s very, very easy to process that name. There’s no difficulty in reading the name and in making sense of the name.
At the other end of the spectrum you might come across a foreign name or a novel name that you’ve never seen before or perhaps a name that you’ve seen before, but spelled very differently. In that case it’s going to be much more difficult to process the name. Then it will be disfluent or subjectively difficult to process. It will feel more difficult to process. There’s not only the content, what the name happens to be, and what it’s like to store that information, but also what it’s like to have the thoughts of processing the name, of making sense of the name.
This is a topic that I’ve been very interested in, and I’ve been interested in the concept of fluency and how that might affect a whole lot of different judgments that we make, and the way we process the world. The most basic effects in fluency research are pretty straightforward, and the idea is that when something is fluent, you feel differently about it from how you would feel if it were more difficult to process. I’ll give you a few examples from my own research.
And so he does. We learn, for example, that people who have familiar and easily pronounceable names tend to rise farther and faster than those who don’t, and that stock-market offerings that have pronounceable acronyms as ticker symbols do better in the weeks after their IPOs than those with unsayable clusters of consonants.
Professor Alter tells us also that presenting information in an intentionally disfluent way can make us examine it more carefully. He gives this example:
There’s a famous task called the Cognitive Reflection Test, and this test has three different questions, and each of the questions lures you into giving the wrong response, because the intuitive response is actually incorrect. An example of this is, “When you add the cost of a bat and a ball together the sum of those two is worth $1.10, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?’ It’s a very simple question. Anyone with basic arithmetic skills can answer it.
What happens is, for some reason the first and intuitive response is that, I guess the bat must be $1, the ball must be 10 cents. That adds to $1.10. That seems about right. But, of course, the difference between $1 and 10 cents is 90 cents, not $1. The correct answer is that the bat is worth $1.05, the ball is worth 5 cents. They add to $1.10, and the difference between them is $1. And people generally struggle with these questions. They’re lured in. They give their intuitive response, and they’re incorrect.
But if you present the questions in a font that’s a little bit more difficult to read, we found that you can increase their accuracy pretty dramatically. They make fewer of those intuitive responses. They take the time to reconsider their initial responses. They assume that the task is more difficult. They have a bit less confidence in their initial response, and so they tend to do a little bit better at the task. The same is true when you ask them to complete syllogism questions, logical syllogisms, any questions that ask you to think more deeply about a particular topic, where thinking more deeply will lead you to the right answer more often. We’ve shown that with disfluency people are more likely to do that. We have even found the same effect in a number of other domains as well.
(From a Gurdjieffian point of view, this makes perfect sense: the disfluent presentation interferes with our ability to process the information mechanically; it forces us to bypass what Gurdjieff and Ouspensky called the “formatory apparatus”, and to bring to bear our intellectual center.)
The interview rambles on a bit; clearly this is not a mature field, and whenever anyone comes up with a new idea like this the tendency is to try it on everything in the world to see if it fits. But the idea itself is a very interesting one, and Professor Alter gives us a lot of provocative speculation.
The interview and video are here.
I guess we’re all feeling pretty low, now that the Sequester has gone into effect. I haven’t been paying much attention to the news since Friday (been busy arranging the canned goods down in the shelter), but if the predictions I’d been hearing have turned out to be correct, the entire nation is now unemployed, our daughters are selling their virtue on the street, airliners are falling from the sky, and Twitter posts have been reduced to seventy characters.
Well, let not your hearts be troubled, readers! Things may be really, really bad, but all is not lost. Sure, meat inspections may be a thing of the past, and criminals will now be asked to arrest themselves — but I’ve learned that Mr. John Kerry will manage, nevertheless, to send hundreds of millions of dollars to the Muslim Brotherhood.
What’s that? You say that the Ikhwan is our mortal enemy, committed, in its own words, to destroying Western civilization, sabotaging our “miserable house”, and making “God’s religion” victorious over all others?
Come on. Seriously? What do you think we are, a bunch of chumps? Well, let me clue you in: if you want to know who’s really getting the short end of this deal, it’s Mohammed Morsi and the rest of those jihadist bozos.
That’s right: we’re giving the Brotherhood your money in exchange for future reforms.
Are those guys suckers, or what?
Yes readers, it’s gotten this bad.
Back in January the New York State legislature rammed through a major gun-control bill, in the middle of the night, as a hysterical reaction to the Newtown shootings. The legislators were given just a few minutes to read the bill before a vote was called, in violation of a law that imposes a three-day review period. It was a shameful example of everything that responsible, transparent, and deliberative lawmaking is not, and a great many New Yorkers were plenty steamed about it.
Now the state’s Supreme Court is going to review the the process by which the law was enacted. Let’s hope they strike it down.
I’m working late tonight, so here’s a strange item for you to mull over: the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Read about it on Wikipedia, here, or for a more detailed account, have a look here.
Strangest of all: the missing tongue.
Here’s Maxine Waters, who is a walking one-woman argument for limiting the power of the Federal government, “explaining” sequestration. Apparently, more jobs will be lost — 170 million — than currently exist.
As Charles Cooke said on Twitter just now, “I wouldn’t trust this woman to explain how a fork works.”
If a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a festschrift on Federal spending, from the Heritage Foundation. Browse.
And just for some perspective about the calamitous effects of the impending “sequestration” — upon which event, we are told, the sun will be folded up, the heavens flayed, the pregnant she-camels neglected, and Hell set ablaze — here’s one more picture:
I’ve written and deleted three posts already today, and am just going to lay off for a day or two. I’m cranky and fed up, and have a toothache besides, and nothing interesting, good or useful will come of writing under such circumstances. Back in a bit.
Writing at NRO, Jonah Goldberg comments on the sky-is-falling hysteria surrounding the impending “sequester” — which, were you just to listen to the news or to White House Press releases, you’d never imagine would still leave the federal government spending more money than last year.
Mr. Goldberg observes:
Obama wants more tax hikes and thinks he can convince the country to accept them if the choice is between what he calls reasonable revenue increases and catastrophic cuts that will let people die in the streets, leave children to go hungry and illiterate, and allow poisoned food to sit rancid on supermarket shelves.
And he’s not crazy for it. This strategy has worked time and time again. If an agency has a billion-dollar budget and someone proposes cutting a dollar from its scheduled increase in funding, that dollar will be the one earmarked for the screw needed to keep a bridge from collapsing on a grade school’s Thanksgiving parade.
It’s hard to capture in words the immorality of what we’ve done to generations yet unborn. Our childrens’ children will spit on our graves when they look at our criminal stewardship of the great nation they ought to have inherited, and find themselves stuck instead with the bill we’ve run up in their names to pay for our hedonism, our greed, and our selfish, childish belief that the world owes us a living. We’re no better than junkies who will do anything, no matter how fraudulent or felonious, just to keep the next fix coming.
I can’t, in general, blame our politicians for this, on either side of the aisle; they’re just doing what politicians do, and they couldn’t keep doing it in the way they are if we didn’t want them to. This lardaceous, otiose gundyguts, this indolent, Falstaffian swillbelly of a nation is simply what America has let itself become.
You can read the rest of Mr. Goldberg’s essay here.
The world’s tuna fishery is collapsing, with prime specimens selling for seven-digit prices. Yet tuna is everywhere, from supermarket shelves to delis to sushi bars, and the retail cost remains low. How is this possible?
According to this item, a majority of the “tuna” being sold in the U.S. isn’t tuna at all. A lot of it is a fish called “escolar”, the eating of which, we learn, has some seriously unpleasant side effects.
Proceed at your own risk.
Mencius Moldbug comments on the approaching death of Lawrence Auster, here.
Auster himself is puzzled, and I think his puzzlement illustrates rather well exactly the points Moldbug makes about him: Auster’s specialty is order and clarity, while Moldbug’s piece, as always, is long, discursive, and sesquipedalian.
But I thought it was quite a nice tribute, myself.
I’m really going to miss VFR.
Over at Mangan’s, our friend Dennis links to a post by Bruce Charlton about the cratering birthrates of the developed, Westernized world. That there is something maladaptive about secular modernity has been apparent for some time, and I’ve written about this myself; most of the discussion to date, however, has focused on social and cultural influences, with particular emphasis on religion.
Unsurprisingly, the penetrating intellect of Alexis de Tocqueville descried this hazard of secularism two centuries ago. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote:
Religions give men a general habit of conducting themselves with a view to futurity: in this respect they are not less useful to happiness in this life than to felicity hereafter; and this is one of their chief political characteristics.
But in proportion as the light of faith grows dim, the range of man’s sight is circumscribed, as if the end and aim of human actions appeared every day to be more within his reach. When men have once allowed themselves to think no more of what is to befall them after life, they readily lapse into that complete and brutal indifference to futurity, which is but too conformable to some propensities of mankind. As soon as they have lost the habit of placing their chief hopes upon remote events, they naturally seek to gratify without delay their smallest desires; and no sooner do they despair of living forever, than they are disposed to act as if they were to exist but for a single day. In sceptical ages it is always therefore to be feared that men may perpetually give way to their daily casual desires; and that, wholly renouncing whatever cannot be acquired without protracted effort, they may establish nothing great, permanent, and calm.
If the social condition of a people, under these circumstances, becomes democratic, the danger which I here point out is thereby increased. When everyone is constantly striving to change his position – when an immense field for competition is thrown open to all – when wealth is amassed or dissipated in the shortest possible space of time amidst the turmoil of democracy, visions of sudden and easy fortunes – of great possessions easily won and lost – of chance, under all its forms – haunt the mind. The instability of society itself fosters the natural instability of man’s desires. In the midst of these perpetual fluctuations of his lot, the present grows upon his mind, until it conceals futurity from his sight, and his looks go no further than the morrow.
What Bruce Charlton is suggesting, though, is not a social, cultural, or psychological mechanism, but a biological one. He wonders if there may be some environmental cue, or combination of cues, that is causing humans to adopt a “slow-life-history-speed” breeding strategy.
From Dr. Charlton’s post:
Life history speed refers to the reproductive strategy on a scale from FASTER – with rapid maturation, focus on mating effort, and a priority of achieving earlier and more frequent reproduction with less individual care (resources) per child; to SLOWER – with delayed sexual maturation, a long-termist socio-economic plan taking priority over reproduction, fewer offspring, and each child provided with more parental resources.
*
The decision between faster or slower life history strategy is probably ‘set’ in childhood in response to environmental stimuli which (under ancestral conditions) have signaled what was likely to be the most adaptive reproductive strategy (that which is most likely to lead to the greatest number of viable offspring).Signals of instability (perhaps experiences of starvation or disease, absent father, chaotic environment) lead to a perceived risk of earlier death; and therefore more rapid sexual maturation and early mating efforts implicitly aimed at parenting a larger number of offspring – on the expectation that not children all will survive to adulthood.
*
In contrast, signals of a stable environment trigger a slower life history, because under stable conditions a slow maturing individual with higher parental care can build the ability to exploit specialized niches in a situation of high competition.
(For example, delaying reproductive effort and instead embarking on a long apprenticeship to become a high status and economically secure specialist craftsman; or delaying sexual maturation to ‘build’ a more beautiful and long-lastingly attractive face and body.)
*
It is possible that extreme prosperity/ comfort/ lack of hunger/ lack of disease stress/ unprecedented security and stability (or some other aspect of modernity) is acting as a supernormal stimulus to the ‘mechanism’ of life history calibration in early childhood.
So that an environmental signal (of a type unprecedented in human evolutionary history) may be triggering such a slow life history that (in the real world) it is incapable of replacing the current population – and is therefore maladaptive.
Humans, and large mammals generally, are what evolutionary theorists call “K-strategists” — they breed as though the selective environment is in a stable equilibrium, in which conditions are unlikely to change, and offspring are more likely to survive. This favors having few offspring, and investing heavily in each one. A relevant factor in K strategies, however, is age-related mortality, which affects how much time prospective parents will have to bear children and raise them to self-sufficient maturity. When average age at death is lower (which correlates with, and presumably is indicated to the organism by, various types of environmental stress), this time-span is compressed, so females should space their offspring more closely together (and vice versa).
Our unprecedented control of our habitat means that we’ve now got all sorts of “supernormal stimuli” yanking the behavioral levers that selection installed in us to optimize our survival in long-gone environments. (Examples abound: sweet/fatty foods, artificial lighting, mass communication, pornography, motion pictures, video games, high-speed travel, etc.) Dr. Charlton’s idea — that collapsing birth rates in modern societies may be a biological response to some as-yet-unidentified supernormal stimulus that tricks our bodies into thinking they have forever to reproduce — is very interesting. As Dennis said in the comment thread to Dr. Charlton’s post, I wish I’d thought of it myself.
Read the original post here, and Dennis’s remarks about it, over at his own place, here.
I’m just whipped tonight, having got home from work at 5 a.m. this morning, and having to get right back up for another long day.
A miscellany for tonight, then:
— Some Forteana, here and here.
— The world’s Tweets, in real time.
— From Russia, with love (you might have missed this one).
— A fine piece on gun control and the government (with hat tip to Bill Valicella).
— Last, I doubt you’ve ever seen the like of this terrifying amphibious behemoth. Tremble!
With a hat tip to reader Bill Keezer, here’s a blunt, crepuscular rant from noted gloominary Victor Davis Hanson.
A young researcher in China has begun a project to find the genetic basis for the heritable components of human intelligence.
We shouldn’t be surprised to see that this is happening in China, and not in the West, where most of the academics I know are of the opinion that there’s no such thing as quantifiable intelligence, that intelligence-testing is rendered worthless by cultural bias, and that even to the extent that there may be a genetic component to “intelligence” (with the implication that there may be racial and sexual differences in its distribution), investigating it is research that shouldn’t even be done at all, because of the possibility of discrimination.
The Chinese are much franker and more realistic about these things than we are. They also don’t seem to share the West’s post-war horror of eugenics. Don’t be surprised if this becomes rather an important topic in the not-too-distant future.
Milton Freidman responds to President Obama’s call for a hike in the minimum wage.
Here, from beyond the grave.
Kevin Kim, whose academic specialty is the study of the world’s religions, has written a stupendous essay on the possibly-divine nature of Peter Sellers’s character Chance, from the movie Being There.
Get thee hence and read it, here.
Reader JK sends along a provocative item from ABC News. The gist: the soldiers who were shot at Fort Hood by the jihadist infiltrator Nidal Hasan have been denied various benefits, including the Purple Heart, because the Defense Department refuses to define the shooting as an attack by an enemy combatant — preferring instead to treat it as an ordinary instance of “workplace violence”.
Given that we are, and have been for years, at war with Islamic jihadists in theaters around the world, and given also that Mr. Hasan represented himself as a “Soldier of Allah”, and made perfectly clear at the time of the shooting that he was attacking in the name of holy jihad (he shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he killed our soldiers, just as the 9/11 attackers did as they flew the planes into the towers), this is absolutely indefensible.
We read:
“These guys play stupid every time they’re asked a question about it, they pretend like they have no clue,” said Shawn Manning, who was shot six times that day at Fort Hood. Two of the bullets remain in his leg and spine, he said.
“It was no different than an insurgent in Iraq or Afghanistan trying to kill us,” said Manning, who was twice deployed to Iraq and had to retire from the military because of his injuries.
An Army review board initially classified Manning’s injuries as “combat related,” but that finding was later overruled by higher-ups in the Army.
Manning says the “workplace violence” designation has cost him almost $70,000 in benefits that would have been available if his injuries were classified as “combat related.”
“Basically, they’re treating us like I was downtown and I got hit by a car,” he told ABC News.
And:
[Secretary of the Army John] McHugh says awarding Purple Hearts could adversely affect the trial of Major Hasan.
“To award a Purple Heart, it has to be done by a foreign terrorist element,” said McHugh. “So to declare that soldier a foreign terrorist, we are told, I’m not an attorney and I don’t run the Justice Department, but we’re told would have a profound effect on the ability to conduct the trial.”
If you should have any doubt that this was an act of lethal aggression specifically directed against U.S. military personnel by the enemy (if you have a better definition of “combat”, I’m all ears), note that Major Hasan deliberately spared civilians, and fired only at soldiers.
Finally, as part of our “national conversation” about gun control, I’ll remind readers also that the area that Nidal Hasan selected for his rampage was a “gun-free zone”, so nobody was able to stop him until the police arrived. (This gave the Soldier of Allah time to shoot forty-three people.) Furthermore, the weapon Hasan used was not a so-called “assault rifle”, but a single low-caliber handgun. He carried multiple magazines.
Read the article here.
I do love Wikipedia.
Here’s a page listing those parts of our bodies that are named after people.
A vexing feature of modern physicalistic non-theism is that, followed to its logical conclusion, it leads to moral nihilism. (I realize that theistic attempts to put morality on an objective basis also face serious challenges, but that’s not the point tonight.)
Moral nihilism being, to most folks, bad, there’s been a rash lately of books and essays attempting to square the circle. Generally the plan seems to be a kind of scientistic utilitarianism, based on the notion that by understanding what leads to human well-being, we can understand the Good to be whatever maximizes it.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m all for maximizing happiness, and the only reason I hold the traditional conservative views I do — about multiculturalism, big government, the welfare state, mass immigration, etc. — is because I think all of those things make for less-happy societies.
But the argument put forward by writers like Sam Harris goes further than that, and claims that Science, which concerns itself entirely with what is, can actually leap the chasm and give us objective oughts.
This is a fool’s errand, and completely unnecessary. We come wired up from the factory with moral instincts and intuitions, and cultures can, and do, build on those in all sorts of ways to get perfectly acceptable results. We should just leave it at that. The desire to ground the Good, somehow, in the indifferent material Universe of the atheist is understandable, but it is doomed to failure at the most elementary philosophical level.
The argument that science can bridge the gap from is to ought seems to be:
1) Science can tell us what things increase and decrease human suffering.
2) Therefore, science can tell us what is morally good, and what isn’t.
This is an “enthymeme”: a syllogism with a piece missing. With the missing bit put in, it looks like this:
1) Science can tell us what things increase and decrease human suffering.
2) We ought to do what decreases human suffering.
3) Therefore, science can tell us what is morally good, and what isn’t.
But science tells us nothing about the truth or falsity of 2). At best it can predict that “if you do X, you’ll get result Y.” And so the whole thing falls apart.
It may be that we all agree with 2) — but what do we consult to arrive at that conclusion? We refer to our moral instincts and moral training, which already tell us what’s right and wrong, and what we ought to do. It is only because of this that people can get away with leaving 2) out of the syllogism: it just seems obvious, so much so that we don’t even mind (or, for that matter, even notice) that it’s missing.
At Twitter, Steven Pinker just linked approvingly to a brief essay by Michael Shermer that is no better than any of the others I’ve seen, and proceeds along the same lines. Indeed, in many ways it’s worse than some, because it tries to pull in natural selection as having something (I’m not sure quite what) to do with objective Good:
Why does a higher standard of living matter morally? Because it increases the probability that an individual will survive and flourish. Why does survival and flourishing matter morally? Because it is the basis of the evolution of all life on earth through natural selection.
If this makes sense to you as an objective foundation for morality, dear reader, you see farther than I.
Take a few minutes to read Mr. Schermer’s essay, here.
The post attracted some pretty sharp commenters. Here’s a good reply, from someone calling himself Daniel, in response to Mr. Schermer’s assertion that “it is science that tells us why witchcraft and sorcery is immoral.’ (My emphasis.)
Science does no such thing, just as science can’t tell me why it’s wrong to rape, pillage and murder. Maybe science can tell me why it feels icky inside to do stuff like that, but it has nothing to say one way or another as to whether that it’s wrong.
This is exactly the right distinction. Science, and evolutionary theory, may well be able to account for why our moral intuitions are what they are — indeed, I believe that the phsyicalist position should be that a correct theory of human evolution must be able to account for this — but they cannot tell us, without reference to some moral intuitions already in place, what our moral instincts ought to be.
Commenter “Trimegistus” gets this point just right:
The trouble with any reason-based, “scientific’ attempt at morality is that it ultimately becomes a vast exercise in question-begging.
What objective, provable reason is there for a person to behave morally at all? Before we can come up with any moral calculus or universal principles, there’s that troublesome Rule Zero which all moral systems assume: “You should try to behave morally.’
But of course there’s no proof for Rule Zero. It’s an axiom. It’s “because I said so’ or just “because.’ And thus all rational, “scientific’ morality crashes straight into the obstacle that sometimes people’s self-interest is served by non-’moral’ behavior. Why should I put morality ahead of what I want? Because it’s moral? It’s an endlessly repeating loop.
Exactly.
The way to cut the Gordian knot here is simple enough: just forget about trying to put morality on an absolute, objective foundation. Just go with what you’ve got. The traditional moral frameworks that have prevailed for long ages in human societies have done so, generally, because they work. Your conscience tells you that it is good to help others, bad to behave selfishly, and really bad to rape and torture little girls? Most folks will agree, and on the basis of those intuitions and others like them (which generally coincide, as it happens, with the prescriptions arrived at by people like Sam Harris and Michael Shermer), we can build stable, happy societies. Isn’t that good enough?
As often happens to me at this point in the week, I’m up late again, working. I’ve been thinking about all sorts of postworthy topics in the past few days, but I just can’t find the time right now to write about them, so they’ll have to wait.
So for tonight, all I have to offer is a brief article from Forbes about that “overwhelming judgment of science” thingy the President mentioned on Tuesday evening.
Sad news from Lawrence Auster today: the pancreatic cancer he’s been fighting so stoically has now metastasized to his brain. It’s hard to imagine that he has much time left.
It’s also hard to imagine VFR silenced.
I haven’t got a whole lot to say about the speech. What did anyone expect? There isn’t a problem anywhere on Earth that isn’t best solved by some new Federal program, “partnership”, or “investment”. And all without adding a “single dime” to the deficit.
There was the call for higher Federal minimum wage, the argument for which seemed to be that there should be no job in America, however menial or temporary, that pays less than what it costs to support two kids. So why not just make the minimum wage $100 dollars an hour?
(Hey here’s a thought: you want a better job market for low-end workers? How about not flooding the nation with unskilled immigrants?)
For gun control, there was the expected cavalcade of victims, and ghoulish exploitation of a young murdered girl (who was shot and killed by the feral underclass of a city that already has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation).
There were reassurances that if the separation of powers should present any friction in the run-up to Mr. Obama’s Great Leap Forward, he will be able to push things along anyway by executive fiat. (I can already hear the EPA cracking its knuckles.)
And as always, we need to “ask” the rich to pay more, despite taxes having just been raised a month ago.
Most infuriating of all: mawkish pieties about our obligation to “future generations” — even as we bankrupt them.
And so on. In sum: more, more, more. Feh.
Oh well. It’s been pretty clear for years, and utterly obvious since November, that we are completely, irredeemably, fatally screwed. Enough said, I guess.
As an aside, here’s an interesting item I stumbled upon just now: a look at the literacy level of the State of the Union throughout the nation’s history, president by president. Topping the list: James Madison. Have a look.
My God, this is unbelievable. The IOC has decided that wrestling will no longer be part of the Olympics as of 2020. Wrestling.
What next, running?
Well, at least we still have synchronized swimming, ping pong, kayaking and badminton, for you traditionalists.
The End of Days, 263 ways, ancient and modern. Here.
So, it seems that North Korea has detonated another atomic weapon.
I wonder if there will be any room for this in tomorrow’s SOTU, in between calling for new “investments” and introducing all the Lenny Shotniks I’ve heard will be attending.
If you live in Santo AntÁ´nio da Platina, Brazil, you might want to buy an umbrella. Or, better yet, a new home, somewhere else.
Here’s Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick’s pre-storm presser from Thursday night. Pure gold.
Readers, as bad as things may be getting over here — and anyone with any sense can see they’re going to get a hell of a lot worse before they get better — at least we don’t have to endure some of the unspeakable horrors that afflict other, less fortunate nations.
So be of stout heart, readers, and let us carry on as best we can, knowing that even as the storm-clouds gather, the days grow dark, and the guiding light of Western civilization begins to flicker and fail, things could always be worse. There could be Japanese pop.
Attentive readers may recall that a few years ago we U.S. taxpayers lent $465 million to Tesla, a maker of electric cars. More recently we restructured the loan so that Tesla wouldn’t run out of money. (It is now, after all, a matter of vital national interest that Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial speculations actually pay off.)
Though I don’t think any of us were consulted about this, I guess we’re all Tesla investors now, so it’s only natural to ask: How’s our little business venture going?
Well, I’ll say this: I’ve seen these cars up close (Rob Nail of Singularity University had one parked out front while I was there last year), and they certainly look mighty snazzy, tooling silently around the streets of Silicon Valley. But a New York Times reporter recently tried to use one of these government-subsidized doo-hickeys for the sort of thing people actually need cars for — going from one place to another place far away — and the results were a bit of a letdown. Pit stops for recharging took an hour, and the battery, clearly better suited for the clement Bay Area than for the meteorological rigors of the Northeast, failed to hold its charge in the winter chill. All in all, our man would have been better off in a Yugo, and that’s saying something.
It’s really frustrating; electric batteries just seem to have some serious intrinsic limitations. As Joshua TreviÁ±o remarked Twitter, just imagine if instead there were some sort of energy-dense substance that was cheap to produce — maybe some sort of naturally-occurring material that concentrated eons of energy from the Sun into some convenient liquid form — that our vehicles could simply carry on-board in some sort of container?
Naah. That’s just pie in the sky, folks.
Anyway, read the story here.
I’ve mentioned the incomparable Deepak Chopra in these pages a time or two in the past. The man is of course the world’s greatest living mountebank, and has made a fabulous living hawking 24-carat flapdoodle to swooning suckers.
You have to admire talent like that. As it turns out, somebody admires it enough to have provided us with a fully operational software emulation of the glitter-templed Guru of Woo-Woo himself, for those scary moments when you really need some “Deep” thoughts, but keep getting a busy signal on the Quantum Consciousness Hotline.
Take it for a spin here. It’s as good as the real thing.
In case you haven’t heard, the chattering classes are all atwitter about a talk given at the recent National Prayer Breakfast by one Ben Carson, chief of pediatric neurosurgery at John Hopkins.
At the podium, standing just a few feet away from President Obama, Dr. Carson spoke about several matters of national policy — in particular, deficit spending, health care, and taxation — in a way that marked him as, let’s just say, less than fully supportive of Mr. Obama’s approach.
This in turn evoked a range of responses. It was catnip for mainstream “conservative” sorts — who immediately, with the hope that springs eternal, began having moist thoughts about 2016 — while for more than a few liberal observers it was shocking effrontery.
I thought it was a pretty good speech overall, though very long-winded and rather a little too attentive to the good works of Dr. Ben Carson (not to mention being awfully secular for a prayer-breakfast, I should have thought — but hey, what do I know about prayer-breakfasts). It certainly warmed me to see the president tweaked from the podium like that; it was pleasant to watch him trying to swallow some of his own medicine. (I’m guessing, here, that some difficulty with deglutition must have been why Mr. Obama kept lifting his chin in the air as Dr. Carson began to warm to his topic.)
Dr. Carson does seem to have done some good work with his charitable foundation, which encourages children to read. It’s nice also to see this sort of work done by private associations — the intermediary, self-organizing layer of civil society that the liberal urge to bring everything under the direct central supervision of the Federal sovereign continuously seeks to destroy. Perhaps that was part of the reason Dr. Carson spent so much time talking about it.
Anyway, watch the speech here, if you haven’t already seen it.
