Papal Bigotry

Apparently the pope showed the now blunted fangs of the other “Religion of Peace” in an address to the Queen during his visit to the UK. The BBC quotes him as follows:

Even in our own lifetimes we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus a reductive vision of a person and his destiny.

The pope would do well to reflect on the record of the church he represents before he starts inveighing against “atheist extremism.” For example, it was responsible for the expulsion of Jews from the very country he was speaking in, not to mention his home country of Germany, as well as France, Spain and Portugal.  It was responsible for countless pogroms against Jews throughout its bloody history, murdering hundreds of thousands of them in massacres in Germany and many other European countries.  Other than that, it was directly responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of women as “witches,” countless bloody acts of repression against religious minorities, and the butchery of millions more in the wars it directly inspired.

As for the Nazis, the pope would do well to read “Mein Kampf.”  After all, it was written in his mother tongue.  In it Hitler invoked God many times, claiming, for example, that in fighting the Jews, he was doing the “Lord’s work.” 

The political right has a tradition of bigotry in matters of religion, most recently revealed in the prevailing fashion of blaming atheists for Nazism and Communism.  If the Nazis were atheist, how is it that Hitler constantly invoked God in his writings and speeches?  How is it that the millions of little memorial brochures the Nazis sent to the families of fallen soldiers with a picture of the deceased on one side always had Christian symbols and verses on the other?  Why did Nazi belt buckles and medals carry the inscription “God with us?”

Both Nazism and Communism were secular religions, differing from earlier versions only because they were unwise enough to promise heaven on earth, rather than pie in the sky when you die.  They were recognized as such by numerous contemporary writers, who often spoke of Communist and Nazi leaders as so many popes, bishops and priests. 

The Nazis and Communists didn’t murder because they were atheists.  They murdered because they were Nazis and Communists.  That remains a major distinction between atheists and Christians.  Atheists have never murdered simply by virtue of the fact that they don’t believe in God.  Christians have murdered millions by virtue of the fact that they do.

Jewish Expulsions in the Name of Christianity

Team Sports as “Tribal Candy”

Great shades of Konrad Lorenz! The paradigm shift in the social sciences continues. According to an article linked on the website of “Evolutionary Psychology,”

It makes no sense from a rational economic perspective, yet millions of people passionately follow sports teams. A new study suggests that such seemingly illogical behavior can be understood as a by-product of humans’ evolved coalitional psychology. The research, conducted at Grand Valley State University, supported this hypothesis by demonstrating that individuals who strongly value the interests of their ingroup are especially likely to be sports fans.

For those living in modern societies such as the U.S., it’s not easy to appreciate that small-scale warfare, such as males raiding a neighboring group to obtain resources or mates, has been a persistent threat during most of our evolutionary history. This threat, many evolutionary psychologists believe, has selected for components of what has been termed a coalitional, tribal, or “male warrior” psychology.

As noted in earlier posts, by the time a century had elapsed since the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” it had become perfectly clear to anyone with an open mind who accepted Darwins great theory and was aware of the relevant research available at the time that a) Innate predispositons or genetic “hard-wiring” in the brain have a profound effect on human behavior, including moral behavior, and b) Our “hard-wiring” manifests itself not only in ”nice” and “kind” behavior, but in “not so nice” behavior as well, such as the complex of emotional responses responsible for hostility to outgroups.  Unfortunately, other than being obvious, these conclusions were also politically incorrect.  About that time a group of writers began insistently pointing out that they were true, and citing the data that made it obvious that they were true.  Unfortunately, in the process, they challenged the ideological narrative of the “tribe” of establishment psychologists and other behavioral scientists around at the time, who behaved precisely as anyone familiar with b) above might have predicted.  They reacted to this challenge to their ingroup with rage and hostility, vilifying and demonizing the writers who persisted in such heresies. 

In subsequent years, there was a remarkable paradigm shift.  The “experts” were forced by the accummulating weight of evidence to accept a), creating a whole new mythical narrative to explain their change of heart in the process.  However, having swallowed the camel (a), they still strain at the gnat (b), producing mountains of studies that demonstrate “kind” human behavior, and sending forth legions of ethologists to study bonobos, while studiously averting their gaze from anything that might suggest that our mental wiring can predispose us to ”unkind” behavior as well.   If the article cited above is any indication, they may, at long last, finally be starting to come around.  The article continues,

The general idea that sports are related to warfare and other evolutionary challenges is long-standing. For example, several scientists have argued that combat sports evolved, at least in some cultures, to provide training for war, whereas other scientists have suggested that sports serve as an efficient means of establishing dominance relations within a group or displaying one’s qualities for potential mates. Sport fandom, however, has received less attention from evolutionists and, prior to the new study, had never been formally described as a by-product of coalitional psychology.

As older readers may recall, back in the day, Konrad Lorenz suggested in “On Aggression” and elsewhere the hypothesis that team sports might by useful as a means of channeling hostility to outgroups towards activities less destructive than warfare. This suggestion was treated with scorn at the time. The time may be ripe to give it more serious consideration.

Lorenz, Ardrey, and their like-minded colleagues were not behavioral determinists, nor were they “reductionists.”  On the contrary, they insisted on drawing attention to (b) because they firmly believed that it was possible to rationally understand the “unkind” in human behavior, and to control it in ways that might give us a fighting chance to avoid destroying ourselves with our increasingly potent weapons.  They did not pretend to have all the answers about how this might be done, but suggested that it would strongly behoove us to begin seriously looking for those answers, assuming we placed any value on our own survival.

Let us hope that articles like the one noted above are a sign that the community of experts on human behavior is finally beginning to pull its collective head out of the sand concerning the less positive aspects of human behavior.  The complex of innate behavioral traits associated with outgroup hostility represents an existential threat to us.  Any chance of effectively controlling them must depend on the degree to which we understand them.  It is time we began serious efforts to gain that understanding.  There will be no “human flourishing” if we destroy ourselves.

Animal “Culture” and Hard-Wired Behavior

Until quite recently the scientific establishment continued to bitterly defend the notion that human behavior is entirely or almost entirely derived from learning and culture, or what Robert Ardrey used to call the “Romantic Fallacy.” Interesting (and quite recent) artifacts of this belief in the “expert” community can be found, for example, in “Man and Aggression,” edited by Ashley Montagu, copies of which are available at Amazon for just a penny. Absurd on the face of it to anyone with an open mind, this particular piece of “scientific” chicanery was required for ideological reasons, as described by Steven Pinker in “The Blank Slate.”

The weight of evidence, never really lacking for at least the last half century and more, eventually became so compelling that these old orthodoxies finally had to be abandoned, and the profound influence of innate predispositions on human behavior is now generally accepted. Books on so-called hard-wired behavior have been flooding off the presses lately, most of them with little or no mention of the bitter ideological battle that had to be fought and won before such ideas gained acceptance. Indeed, Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and others who carried the battle through the 60’s and 70’s are now passed over with abashed silence, and have become unpersons to the scientific establishment, somewhat after the fashion of Trotsky.

According to the current mythology, the idea of innate predispositions suddenly burst on the scene in 1975 with the publication of the “seminal” Sociobiology by E.O. Wilson, although there were no “seminal” ideas in the book that hadn’t been discussed at length in works such as African Genesis, The Territorial Imperative, and On Aggression a decade and more earlier. Wilson was a less bitter pill for the establishment to swallow than Ardrey and Lorenz because he didn’t insist on pointing to those aspects of innate behavior that weren’t “nice,” and he had sterling academic credentials, making him one of their “tribe.”

In the upshot, the heresy of insisting on innate human behavior has been replaced by the heresy of “reductionism,” or the supposed belief that our “instincts” determine our behavior, leaving no room for cultural or learned variations among groups. I know of no serious thinker who has ever actually been a “reductionist” in that sense, but the term is, nevertheless, current as a pejorative to attack those whose theories seem too threatening to the remaining ideological sacred cows. It is interesting to speculate, however, on whether the scientific establishment may have overshot the mark somewhat in that direction.

Consider, for example, the case of the bonobo.  Let us recall that, after assuming for decades that chimpanzees were mild, unaggressive, vegetarians based on an almost complete lack of studies of the apes in the wild, the scientific establishment suffered a rude shock when Goodall and others shattered this benign myth about one of our nearest primate relatives. In spite of their acceptance of innate behavior, including innate moral behavior, the tribe of psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists still hoped against hope that, in spite of the uncooperative chimps, human beings were still fundamentally “kind” and “nice” and that, with a few tweaks here and there, a new morality could be created, featuring them, of course, as the virtuous moral paragons and architects of the same, nobly guiding mankind into a Brave New World of “human flourishing.” Enter the bonobo, strikingly chimp-like in appearance, but a poster-ape of “niceness” and “kindness.” It all seems too good to be true, and perhaps it is.

It seems there’s a palpable danger of confirmation bias here. Perhaps bonobos really do have an innate tendency to be “nice.” If so, well and good. It won’t change anything as far as our own nature is concerned. However, the populations observed in the wild are necessarily small, many of the published studies are based on observations of behavior in small “sanctuaries,” and it may be that, having embraced innate behavior, we are now discounting the possibility that what we are seeing are cultural differences within a “parameter space” the bounds of which depend on innate mental traits, but which are otherwise more flexible than might be convenient to fit our latest ideological prejudices. Recent studies of Japanese macaques, for example, have uncovered remarkable cultural differences between groups in relatively close proximity to each other. Is it impossible, then, that cultural differences might not result in bonobo societies that are a great deal more “chimp-like,” and chimp societies that are a great deal more “bonobo-like” than current stereotypes suggest?

Our knowledge of ourselves has expanded greatly of late. For example, we now know that the qualities that distinguish us from other animals are significantly less distinct and sharp than many of us are comfortable with. Analogs of human behavior have been found in animals a great deal more distant from us genetically than the great apes. Under the circumstances, it would be well for us to keep in mind that, less than half a century ago, virtually the entire scientific establishment believed completely mythical accounts of the behavior of our nearest living animal relatives.  This time, we really need to get it right.

ITER on the Move, or White Elephants have Long Lives

ITER

The Baseline describes ITER all the way from the beginning of construction, through commissioning, and on to Deuterium-Tritium operation. The main milestones will be the achievement of First Plasma in November 2019 and the start of Deuterium-Tritium operation by March 2027 ultimately taking ITER to 500 MW of fusion power.

He adds that “The world is watching us closely.” If so, it appears we’re going to be watching closely for a very long time. Evidently the plasma physics guys are nursing this thing like an all day sucker. It sounds like the scheduled building time is already running neck and neck with the Great Pyramid, and will soon be giving some of the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages a run for their money.

With any luck, some bright physicist(s) will finesse Mother Nature out of her fusion secrets using some known (see, for example, here and here) or yet to be discovered alternative to the “traditional” brute force magnetic and inertial confinement fusion approaches well before they ever get around to feeding tritium to this white elephant. Failing that, maybe the upcoming experiments on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) will be a lot more successful than I expect. Either way, some excuse to pull the plug on ITER is sorely needed. If nothing else, it will encourage some very bright scientists to do something useful with their talents for a change. All complex cost analyses done using the most up to date methods to the contrary, ITER will never be able to compete with the available alternative energy sources in terms of cost any time in the next few centuries.

The Ground CAN TOO Cause a Fumble!

It can, that is, if you’re a Detroit Lion. Hey, I’m a Packer fan, but I have to agree with Derrick Dennis at Bleacher Report on this one. Yes, I’ve read the rule, but Calvin Johnson was clearly in possession of the ball when he hit the ground, and he maintained possession until he made a move to get up. What does the guy have to do? Take two laps around the stadium with the ball in both arms before the refs will count the score? I carry sports grudges for a long time, but this is enough to make me forget all about the Turkey Day Massacre.

Three Cheers for the Human Extinction Movement!

Human morality is a wonderful thing, dear reader. Thanks to our species’ rapid evolution of big brains, we can completely outsmart ourselves by discovering that it is “immoral” to have children. The wiring in the brain of the woman in this video (hattip Insty and Ann Althouse) responsible for the expression of morality is an evolved trait, existing solely because it enhanced the chances of successful reproduction among the individuals who were her ancestors. Now, manifesting itself in a world utterly different from the one in which it evolved, her “morality,” filtered through her “rational” thought processes, is prompting her to commit suicide. It’s a remarkable example of “instinct” inversion. The predispositions responsible for moral behavior have been completely stood on their heads, producing an outcome that is the exact opposite of the one that led to the evolution of those predispositions to begin with.

This is a good thing. There are too many humans on this fragile planet, as is evident from the increasing severity of the environmental problems we’ve been facing. It would be reasonable to reduce the human population to, say, one billion, so we can step back and assess how many of us our little spaceship can comfortably maintain. It is, after all, the only one we have at the moment. On the other hand, as individuals, we have the imperative to survive and reproduce. For reasons that readers of this blog will understand, it is not possible to do anything more immoral than failing to survive. The solution? To enthusiastically support the Human Extinction Movement, and have as many children as possible ourselves. Duplicitous? There can be nothing more duplicitous than tricking emotions that evolved because they promoted our survival into promoting our self-destruction. Immoral? The only reason morality exists to begin with is because it has enhanced our chances of doing precisely what I am suggesting. Self-defeating? Not a chance. The number of people on the planet rational enough to understand and take my advice represent a tiny minority, and won’t constitute a “population bomb” in their own right any time in the foreseeable future.

Three Cheers for the Human Extinction Movement then!  The sooner they succeed in their worthy goal of exterminating themselves, the better.  The planet will be a much better place for our children without them.

What Hath God Wrought: Slavery Beyond Political Correctness

Works of history reflect not only the times they purport to describe, but also the times in which they were written, and the nature of the people who write them. Seen in that light, the authors who wrote during the so-called “Dark Ages” were a great deal more interesting and entertaining than their counterparts today. You’ll have to look long and hard for a contemporary work that has anything to compare with Procopius‘ touching firsthand account of a boy abandoned by his mother in a country swarming with hostile invaders or his vignettes of the wild barbarians serving under his general Belisarius in the so-called “Roman” army, Bede’s wonderful story of Pope Gregory’s encounter with the Angle slave boys, or Gregory of Tours’ chatty, gossipy accounts of the doings of Queens Brunhilda and Fredegund in his “History of the Franks.”  Pick up a typical history today and what you’ll find is a morality play written by some hidebound ideologue who has never heard of confirmation bias, and whose apparent reason for writing is to make sure you can distinguish the “good guys” from the “bad guys.”  Journalists are the worst offenders.  Their shallow bowdlerizations of the lives of the people they write about to make sure they fit neatly in the “saint” or “sinner” slots are painful to read.

College professors with their relentless political correctness come in a close second.  Victor Davis Hanson just penned a vignette of the tribe that seems a tad overcritical, but probably gets their abject fear at being considered “illiberal” and politically heretical by their colleagues about right.   However, unlike journalists, most of them have a deeper knowledge of the subjects they write about than one finds in a typical newspaper article.  As a result, they can occasionally be very useful as “sources of the sources.”  Take, for example, Daniel Walker Howe’s “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.”  In it one finds the usual heroes and villains, all chosen according to the most up-to-date political standards.  However, Howe has a deep knowledge of the intellectual, literary and religious trends of the period he writes about, and mentions a great many of the people who played a significant role in shaping those trends at the time, but are mostly forgotten today.  Since most of them wrote well before the 1922 copyright threshold, it’s not necessary to rely on Howe’s ideologically filtered picture to learn who they were and what made them tick.  You can let them tell their own story, because much of what they wrote can be found among the invaluable collection at Google Books. 

Consider, for example the issue of slavery.  Opposition to the South’s “peculiar institution” was crystalizing during the period Howe describes, and he mentions a number of people, mostly forgotten today, who had witnessed the reality of slavery firsthand, and wrote about what they had seen.  They included Fanny Kemble, a British actress who married a southern gentleman while visiting the United States.  When he subsequently inherited a plantation in Georgia with many slaves, she insisted on accompanying him there, and wrote an account of her experiences.  On one occasion she asked a young woman about her reasons for running away:

She told it very simply, and it was most pathetic. She had not finished her task one day, when she said she felt ill, and unable to do so, and had been severely flogged by Driver Bran, in whose ” gang” she then was. The next day, in spite of this encouragement to labor, she had again been unable to complete her appointed work; and Bran having told her that he’d tie her up and flog her if she did not get it done, she had left the field and run into the swamp. ” Tie you up, Louisa!” said I; ” what is that ?” She then described to me that they were fastened up by their wrists to a beam or a branch of a tree, their feet barely touching the ground, so as to allow them no purchase for resistance or evasion of the lash, their clothes turned over their heads, and their backs scored with a leather thong, either by the driver himself, or, if he pleases to inflict their punishment by deputy, any of the men he may choose to summon to the office; it might be father, brother, husband, or lover, if the overseer so ordered it.

Accounts of beatings like this, a daily occurrence on large plantations, are pervasive in the source material of the time, the descriptions have much in common, and it’s clear they weren’t all made up by abolitionist demagogues.  It is unlikely the slaves could have been driven to work without them.  Kemble’s book also has several interesting descriptions of the demoralizing effect that slavery had on the white population.  For example:

On our drive we passed occasionally a tattered man or woman, whose yellow mud complexion, straight features, and singularly sinister countenance bespoke an entirely different race from the negro population in the midst of which they lived. These are the so-called pine-landers of Georgia, I suppose the most degraded race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon origin that can be found on the face of the earth—filthy, lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages, without one of the nobler attributes which have been found occasionally allied to the vices of savage nature. They own no slaves, for they are almost without exception abjectly poor; they will not work, for that, as they conceive, would reduce them to an equality with the abhorred negroes; they squat, and steal, and starve, on the outskirts of this lowest of all civilized societies, and their countenances bear witness to the squalor of their condition and the utter degradation of their natures. To the crime of slavery, though they have no profitable part or lot in itj they are fiercely accessory, because it is the barrier that divides the black and white races, at the foot of which they lie wallowing in unspeakable degradation, but immensely proud of the base freedom which still separates them from the lash-driven tillers of tho soil.

Kemble’s work was published in Great Britain in 1863, and did much to discourage British intervention on behalf of the Confederacy.  Theodore Weld was co-author of a compendium entitled, “American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses.  It includes numerous similar eyewitness accounts.  For example:

There was a slave on the plantation named Ben, a waiting man. I occupied a room in the same hut, and had frequent conversations with him. Ben was a kind-hearted man, and, I believe, a Christian ; he would always ask a blessing before he sat down to eat, and was in the constant practice of praying morning and night.— One day when I was at the hut, Ben was sent for to go to the house. Ben sighed deeply and went. He soon returned with a girl about seventeen years of age, whom one of Mr. Swan’s daughters had ordered him to flog. He brought her into the room where I was, and told her to stand there while he went into the next room : I heard him groan again as he went. While there I heard his voice, and he was engaged in prayer. After a few minutes he returned with a large cowhide, and stood before the girl, without saying a word. I concluded he wished me to leave the hut, which I did ; and immediately after I heard the girl scream. At every blow she would shriek, ” Do, Ben ! oh do, Ben!” This is a common expression of the slaves to the person whipping them : ” Do, Massa !” or, ” Do, Missus!”

After she had gone, I asked Ben what she was whipped for : he told me she had done something to displease her young missus ; and in boxing her ears, and otherwise beating her, she had scratched her finger by a pin in the girl’s dress, for which she sent her to be flogged. I asked him if he stripped her before flogging; he said, yes ; he did not like to do this, but was obliged to: he said he was once ordered to whip a woman, which he did without stripping her : on her return to the house, her mistress examined her back; and not seeing any marks, he was sent for, and asked why he had not whipped her : he replied that he had; she said she saw no marks, and asked him if he had made her pull her clothes off; he said, No. She then told him, that when he whipped any more of the women, he must make them strip off their clothes, as well as the men, and flog them on their bare backs, or he should be flogged himself.

Ben often appeared very gloomy and sad: I have frequently heard him, when in his room, mourning over his condition, and exclaim, ” Poor African slave ! Poor African slave!” Whipping was so common an occurrence on this plantation, that it would be too great a repetition to state the many and severe floggings I have seen inflicted on the slaves. They were flogged for not performing their tasks, for being careless, slow, or not in time, for going to the fire to warm, &c. &c.; and it often seemed as if occasions were sought as an excuse for punishing them.

Samuel Gridley Howe was famous as an educator of the blind and mentally disturbed. One of his letters describes slavery at its “best,” in the Charleston Slave Depository:

The only clean, well organized and thoroughly administered institutions which I have seen in the South are the Slave Depositories, if I may so call them. That in Charleston is a large, airy building, with ample court-yard and well ventilated rooms. Every part is kept scrupulously clean; everything is well adapted to its purpose; every officer is active and energetic; its tread-mill and its whipping post are the ne plus ultra of their kind. Into this place are brought for safe keeping and for board the gangs of slaves which are to be sold in the market. To it also a master may send his slaves to be boarded merely, or to be conf1ned and whipped, or punished by solitary confinement. They pay 18 cents per day for board and the privilege of the tread-mill,and 25 cents extra for each whipping. The gangs for sale and the mere boarders are not punished however, nor even confined, except at night. On the contrary, they are incited to walk about in the courtyards ; they are well fed, they lodge in large, airy, clean rooms, and are daily promenaded in clean clothes to take the air, even out into the country. ” They are happy,” says the slave-holder, and he says but the truth; they are happier, urges he, than the free blacks of the North or than the negro in Africa — and it may be too true; but in this he speaks his own condemnation and shows the brutalizing effects of a system which can make a human being content in such utter degradation.

It seems to me that firsthand accounts like this are a great deal more effective in explaining what slavery was and why a great war was fought to end it than any book of history written a century and a half later could ever be.  Of course, slavery and the fight against it wasn’t the only thing going on in the period Howe describes.  Read his book, and you will turn up any number of thinkers who can tell you a great deal more about the times they lived in and the things that mattered to them then any modern history.  Thanks to the Internet, you can find many of their works on line, and let them tell their own story.

Howard Kurtz’ Lament

Howard Kurtz just penned a rather petulant article in the WaPo with the byline, “Modern journalism’s Googlian algorithm isn’t as simple as Gaga + Palin x Tiger = Page views.”  Howard laments the fact that he has to “appease the Google gods” with keywords that will grab the attention of the soulless computer minds that now hold the future of “serious journalism” in the balance.  No doubt entirely similar pieces were penned a century and more ago by the builders of horse drawn conveyances, regretting the irrational taste of their fellow citizens for those noisy, stinking horseless carriages. 

Yearning for those golden days of yesteryear when the legacy media controlled the “news” and the narrative to go with it, Howard writes,

Most people don’t read publications online, patiently turning from national news to Metro to Style to the sports section. They hunt for subjects, and people, in which they’re interested. Our mission – and we have no choice but to accept it – is to grab some of that traffic that could otherwise end up at hundreds of other places, even blogs riffing off the reporting that your own publication has done.

That’s right, Howard, we now have the right to sass back.  The Internet is a wonderful thing.  It’s the greatest amplifier of free speech since the invention of moveable type, and it has effectively nullified the power of the media gatekeepers.  All of us now have the power to “riff off,” meaning we can answer and even contradict the “objective reporting” of sanctimonious journalists from our own little bully pulpits. 

Howard is so convinced that the ideological narrative he and his pals have been flogging all these years is “news” that he becomes a caricature of himself:

Naturally, those who grew up as analog reporters wonder: Is journalism becoming a popularity contest? Does this mean pieces about celebrity sex tapes will take precedence over corruption in Afghanistan? Why pay for expensive foreign bureaus if they’re not generating enough clicks? Doesn’t all this amount to pandering?

It’s incredible, really.  He’s been living in an echo chamber for so long that he can actually write stuff like that with a perfectly straight fact, and, I don’t doubt, actually believe it himself.  So “corruption in Afghanistan” is “news,” is it?  Anyone who takes that line seriously is:

        a.  Suffering from a prolonged case of sleeping sickness

        b.  A university professor in the humanities

        c.  A “serious reader” of the WaPo, or

        d.  On drugs

Corruption in Afghanistan “news,” after we’ve been getting a steady diet of it on the dead tree media for years, in spite of the rampant corruption in every other country in the region, in spite of the abundant corruption in every major country in Europe, and, more to the point, the rampant corruption right here at home?  “News,” Howard?  I think not.  Put it in Category a (ideological narrative), Subcategory b (antiwar propaganda).  You and your pals have a right to an opinion, and we’ve been familiar with your opinion concerning wars you don’t consider “just” ever since the Vietnam era, but the days when you could fob that narrative off as “news” are over, and we’re all the better for it.

Howard concludes his piece with some lugubrious observations to the effect that Obama is more popular overseas than he is at home, no doubt because the many alternative sources of information we now have at our command interfere with WaPo’s ability to “accurately” inform us about him. 

It’s unfortunate you have to put up with the indignity of worrying what the search engines think about you, Howard.  It’s a competitive world, and if you can’t compete you’ll have to close up shop.  I suspect you’ll be surprised at how little you’ll be missed.

Maslow, Ardrey and Lorenz: The Narrative as Science

Keith Humphreys at The Reality-Based Community just penned an article entitled, “What Abraham Maslow got Wrong about the Limits of Science and Psychological Knowledge.”  Quoting from the article,

Maslow was influential because he was very smart, wrote well, and had many good ideas. But he was also influential because his theory told many of the cultural elites of the era that they were objectively more mentally healthy and more psychologically developed than were their opponents. Flattering poppycock, and also dangerously undemocratic.

…Maslow wanted to give an objective validation that, for example, the Viet Nam war protestor was objectively superior to the Viet Nam general, the environmentalist was objectively superior to the captain of industry etc. Many cultural elites ate it up, just as Soviet elites ate it up when their psychiatrists said that anyone who didn’t love the government was mentally ill and needed electroshock treatment post-haste.

Psychologists and social scientists generally still venture repeatedly today into the territory of human values and attempt to claim the ability to make objective judgments about which are the most healthy or scientifically validated. They don’t ever seem to learn that they are often just trying to rationalize cultural fashions.

Like Freud, Maslow was a proponent of unfalsifiable hypotheses, or at least they were unfalsifiable in his day.  However one cares to characterize their theories, they weren’t science.  They might better be described as dogmas suited for true believers.  That said, it seems to me the “elite” thing has been overused of late.  “Elite” is a pejorative term, and conveys very little meaning in the sense used here.  In what sense, for example, were Vietnam war protestors “elites” and Vietnam generals “not elites.”  It would be more accurate to say that Maslow validated an ideological narrative, not the status of an elite.  Those who identified themselves with the narrative described came from all walks of life, and many of them by no means belonged to any elites. 

That hardly exculpates the psychologists.  Peddlers of narratives are no more “scientists” than flatterers of elites.  They tend to be recognizable because they always tip their hand when anyone challenges their orthodoxies.  For example, back in the heyday of Maslow the tribe of psychologists also included many behaviorist believers in milder or stronger variations of the “blank slate.” They were contradicted by thinkers like Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz, who insisted on a) the significance of innate predispositions, or “human nature” on our behavior and b) the fact that this human nature did not always prompt us to do “nice” and “kind” things. There was a large corpus of repeatable experiments available to confirm these hypotheses, even in their day, and Ardrey, in particular, did a brilliant job of drawing attention to them.   Establishment psychologists and professionals in related fields reacted, not with reasoned arguments, but with attempts to ridicule and vilify them.  For example, anthropologist Ashley Montagu, one of the foremost among them wrote,

…for man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of the environment, from other human beings. …the fact is, that with the exception of the instinctoid reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is entirely instinctless.

The field studies of Schaller on the gorilla, of Goodall on the chimpanzee, of Harrisson on the orang-utan, as well as those of others, show these creatures to be anything but irascible. All the field observers agree that these creatures are amiable and quite unaggressive.

Human nature is what man learns to become a human being.

Such books are both congenial to the temper of the times and comforting to the reader who is seeking some sort of absolution for his sins. It is gratifying to find father confessors who will relieve one of the burdensome load of guilt we bear by shifting the responsibility for it to our “natural inheritance,” our “innate aggressiveness.”

Similarly, from anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer,

(Ardrey’s) categories and preferences are bound to give comfort and provide ammunition for the radical Right, for the Birchites and Empire Loyalists and their analogues everywhere.

from social scientist Kenneth Boulding,

A line of argument like that of Ardrey’s, therefore, seems to legitimate our present morality, in regarding the threat system as dominant at all costs, by reference to our biological ancestors. If the names of both antiquity and of science can be drawn upon to legitimate our behavior, the moral uneasiness about napalm and the massacre of the innocent in Vietnam may be assuaged.

from anthropologist Ralph Holloway,

In short, this (Ardrey’s) book is an apology and rationalization for Imperialism, Pax Americana, Laissez Faire, Social Darwinism, and that greatest of all evolutionary developments, Capitalism.

and so on, from those who had elevated collaboration with Pol Pot to the noblest of virtues.  Since those days, the synod of psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have been forced by accumulating mountains of evidence to accept “a”. They have never forgiven Ardrey for being right, and he is now an unperson among them. They still manage to studiously ignore “b”, but here, too, real science, not to mention our 5000 year history of constant warfare and mayhem, is catching up to them. The problem is not confirmation bias among elites, but confirmation bias among ideologues, and, in particular, the true believers in the secular religion that’s now the fashion on the “progressive left.”  They are just as busy today trying to transmute the lead of “is” to the gold of “ought” as they were in the days of Maslow.

Bjorn Lomborg’s “Change of Heart”

Speaking of independent thinkers, the author of the Skeptical Environmentalist is one of the best around, and he has a certificate to prove it from the shameful hacks posing as scientists on Denmark’s Committee of Scientific Dishonesty.  His latest book, “Smart Solutions to Climate Change,” apparently has some new ideas for dealing with the problem of global warming.  The rigid ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum who have made rational discussion of the subject virtually impossible think in terms of orthodoxies, not new ideas.  For the orthodox, there are no “new ideas.”  There are only orthodoxy and heresy.  Therefore, Lomborg must have had a “change of heart.”

Danish Peer Review