The Blog Without A Name
I've said on more than one occasion that the UN is "venal, corrupt and incompetent" (despite the fact that I wish something like it would actually work).
Here's another view into that story from last year's
New Yorker, embedded within a larger account of the latter years of Hussein's regime in Iraq, including the Halabja massacre, the links the regime has with Ansar al-Islam, and the evidence relating to its WMD programs.
I write this next post in fear that my blog will be increasingly not nameless but more properly called
Why the Guardian
is Wrong. The
Guardian, it is clear, is full of all sorts of intelligent people, most of whom have good intentions and like all sceptical people tend to react most strongly to those things which loom largest in their respective cultures. But why can't they get their scepticism right?
Take for example
this article about the Age of Enlightenment. The first problems with this are immediate: the Enlightenment was not just an age of glorious rebels against authority (much as the current rebels in the Guardian would like to associate themselves with that 18th century period). The Enlightenment is well known among scholars of the field (e.g. Comager) to have at least three, if indeed not an uncountable multitude of, wings: conservative, moderate, and liberal.
The first wing was increasingly marginalized throughout that century, but was most famous for its advocacy of Enlightened despotism like that of Frederick the Great of Prussia or Catherine the Great of Russia. The latter two more important wings, the moderates and liberals, both agreed on the idea that the form of government must somehow reflect the will of the people, but differed fundamentally in all other respects. Moderate intellectuals, like their liberal counterparts, questioned the rights and prerogatives of traditional monarchs, but for them this scepticism grew out of a scepticism of human nature itself. They simply doubted whether any man or group of men could be trusted with absolute or even great power, even within one realm of affairs. That is to say, they held that human beings had known traits which had negative consequences, and that there was no known remedy for these traits, so men needed to be set against men. This is best known from the Checks and Balances written into the American Constitution.
The liberals came to the same general political conclusion -- absolutism is bad -- but for completely different reasons. Human nature was, for them, indefinitely malleable and basically good. (My loyal readership will immediately recognize the fact that these opinions are quite influential even today in the form of the Blank Slate and the Noble Savage.) As a result, social ills like poverty and castes could only be the result of social conditioning, and governmental reform was the most obvious answer which, crucially,
had no upward limit. The wing that the Guardian extols was precisely this latter wing -- and yet the result was to plunge Europe into a century and a half of war and revolution as these ultra-liberals gained sway across Europe. This is the Guardian's problem: they have failed to apply their ostensible scepticism they have for their opponents' positions -- which, it needs to be restated, is often the right stance -- to
their own philosophies. The moderates of the Enlightenment, whose existence this article failed to even recognize, developed far more successful systems in Great Britain and the United States because the moderates policies allowed for a
stable rate of change. This is what the Guardian has always failed to perceive, and I fear always will.
Blank Slate update: here's precisely the kind of question that Pinker looked at. The scholars in this study on the behavior of macaques were investigating whether the behavior was more likely to be inherited or learned through cultural socialization. The scholars claimed to be "surprised by what [they] found" -- but why? Pinker would say that it is only the ideology of the Blank Slate that makes such a conclusion surprising. It is only if you assume that
everything is learned that heritable traits for social behavior becomes contrary to expectations.
ON THE NIGHTSTAND
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Steven Pinker (Viking Books, 2002). Steven Pinker is known from many of his other works --
Words and Rules,
How the Mind Works, and
The Language Instinct -- as a insightful and talented scholar of the relationship between language and the mind. Thus in the current work it is not altogether surprising that he has taken upon himself an even more monumental task: defending the existence of an objective human nature.
The current work confronts three bugbears that Pinker claims have haunted the social sciences for centuries: the Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), the Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that grants us free will). These premises are so pervasive in Western society that merely articulating them can sound like an uninteresting description of the way the world works, much like saying things fall because of gravity.
Unlike Newtonian gravity, however, these premises have had far-reaching implications for Western political institutions. The Blank Slate implies that all social behavior comes about as a result of social-conditioning, and, together with the Noble Savage, suggests that crime, racism, sexism, violence and other such ills are rooted in the social order and not an individual's biopsychology. The Ghost in the Machine suggests that sharp moral boundaries exist in certain recurring dilemmas like euthanasia or abortion, where destruction of fetuses becomes tantamount to murder rather than (as he argues) more like destroying individual skin cells. (That sentence does not do Pinker justice; one should read that chapter for oneself.) This is particularly relevant in the current debate about the ethical and moral status of using stem-cells for medical research.
Much of the book ends up being not so much a treatise against the validity of these doctrines as one against the kinds of negative side-effects Pinker claims they have had, as a result both of right-wing and left-wing administrations and regimes. Everything from genocide (groups act the way they do solely because they chose to think wrongly and thus are evil) and totalitarianism (because people are born without any social tendencies at all, there is no principled limit to the kinds of social change that can be wrought by government) to gender feminism (woman and men are born absolutely equal, down to their hormones, so differences in economic treatment are
always the result of culturally-contingent abuses) are results that Pinker documents carefully and methodically. Because he is attacking so many vested interests, Pinker is careful to (1) show the true extent of the Blank-Slate ideology, and (2) allow for an interplay between nature and nurture -- it's not 100% one way or the other, even nearly. This last fact is rather important, because if he did hold to a radically innatist view he would open himself to far more criticism than he already is. His basic argument is thus that although it is a controversial claim, both nature and nurture have roles to play in human development and social interaction. As it is, Pinker's fluid and unpretensious rhetorical style makes these arguments sound largely common-sensical rather than dogmatic.
Probably the the greatest problems he has are with the mechanisms of evolution that underlie much of his argument. At times he seems to make the worst possible mistake in evolutionary biology: thinking that the genes themselves are
agents of change in biological structures -- they actually want to change in some
direction -- rather than passive determinants thereof. One could write this off as a
lapsus pennæ, or as a metaphor in a work designed for a nontechnical readership. But there are further problems. Holding on to an increasingly archaic vision of evolution in which selection occurs only at the level of individual organisms (cf. S. Gould's
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory), he misses the generalization that higher-level selection for species, genera, families, orders, etc. could potentially motivate the more collectivist worldviews that many of the right-wingers and left-wingers he decries want to maintain. The fact that most human societies generally do
not exchange goods and services in what are effectively anarcho-syndicalist communes, but rather through some kind of reciprocity, suggests either that the higher-level selection simply has not occurred in humanity as a whole, or that other more important forces are selecting for other traits in human behavior. Pinker doesn't catch on to this, despite its obvious implications for his argument.
In summary, Pinker's
The Blank Slate is a must for anyone who is willing to wrestle with great issues of the day and wants to address them head-on, if only because his is the new face of the age-old nature-nurther debate.
Now, I'm never one to actually defend the Bush Administration as such, but come on
Mr. Krugman: your paranoia and conspiracy-mongering are getting progressively less palatable. Is it so difficult for you to believe that Bush is simply incompetent? There's actual some reason to believe he is in this case. Bush came into office swearing to make the Federal Executive more business-like, by which he meant that he would take less oversight of the individual federal bureaucracies. He had planned on excluding the French, Germans, etc., long ago, but the actual diktat didn't come until very recently. In fact, Wolfowitz distributed the memorandum many days before news of the fact broke, and it was on the Defense Department's website on Dec. 5. That date is important for another reason: it also means that there was a span of some days before James Baker went abroad to gather support for eliminating Iraq's debts. Because Bush's managerial style prevented him from looking back into the status of that particular order -- especially given everything else he has to do everyday -- it is easy to imagine he simply overlooked it.
None of which is to say that power-struggles are not an everyday occurrence in the Bush Administration. But then, saying that power-struggles occur in this administration is almost a tautology, because they occur in every administration, in virtually every human institution. That is, it would not even be enough to prove that a power-struggle exists to further show that a right-wing cabal has seized power in the White House.
QUOTABLE QUOTES
So, being a cynic, I'm always tickled when I find some great expression questioning the good intentions that are sometimes held to underlie all human behavior. Lately, I've been reading Steven Pinker's
The Blank Slate (which, if ever I find the time, I'll
review here), and ran across this most quotable of quotes by Adam Smith from his
The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
"Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general.
And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened.
The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren...."
(These quotes need not prove anything, mind you -- this one certainly doesn't. It just fits the stereotype of so many people, though...)
Gotta hand it to
The Guardian: they do, at times, actually
manifest proper journalistic professionalism. It is now widely known how the EU has suppressed this report on rising antisemitism in Europe -- "suppressed", because at least some insiders of the report claim its not being published had been purely politically motivated, and this is precisely the kind of image that the EU has been combatting for years. The fact that this report specifically mentions
The Guardian, and puts it in a negative light, can only be a sign of their honesty.
Kakologists,
take note! Updates on Germany's sensational cannibalism case.
