Pinker and Violence, Continued

John Gray undertakes to criticize the study we discussed earlier.

The idea that a new world can be constructed through the rational application of force is peculiarly modern, animating ideas of revolutionary war and pedagogic terror that feature in an influential tradition of radical Enlightenment thinking. Downplaying this tradition is extremely important for Pinker. Along with liberal humanists everywhere, he regards the core of the Enlightenment as a commitment to rationality. The fact that prominent Enlightenment figures have favoured violence as an instrument of social transformation is—to put it mildly—inconvenient.

Say Mao, for example.  To Pinker's assertion that 'we take it for granted that war happens in backward parts of the world,' Gray notes that this requires us to think of the entirety of Asia, post 1945, as backwards.

It's a pretty humbling and intense criticism, which is exactly what the argument merits.

For the Wall Street Protestors

'Of all the trades in Ireland, the begging is the best; for when a man is tired, he can stop and take his rest.'



I learned the song from Harry O'Donoghue, native born Irishman who these last few decades has made his living around Savannah.  I can't find his version of it online, but here's an appropriate song sung by him.  Like Savannah, the song is at least as American as Irish; in fact, it's a Bing Crosby tune.

My Father Sends

What Do [Those People] Want?

I see that, while I was gone, a number of "Occupy Wall Street" protests have been going on. This morning I ran across a Daily Caller article comparing the protest unfavorably to yesteryear's Tea Party rallies. I was amused to see that some Tea Partiers are mystified by the new protesters:

The “Occupy Wall Street” protest movement . . . has been described as the left’s response to the tea party. But do the two movements share any common ground?

According to Tea Party Patriots National Chairman Mark Meckler, the answer is an emphatic “no.”

“These are law breaking people,” Meckler told The Daily Caller. “We have nothing in common with them other than we are all American citizens. My read on the news is that they do not even know what they are protesting.”

Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips agreed. “I see very little in the way of commonalities between the two groups,” Phillips told TheDC. “The Occupy Wall Street protesters act mostly as a mob, without any real coherent explanation of their grievances."

I hear more than a faint echo of the constant complaint against Tea Partiers: that they were mindlessly angry and didn't have any coherent notion what they wanted. After all, no one could seriously want smaller government, right? Because most of these people held on to their Social Security and Medicare benefits for dear life. And who doesn't want highways and firemen? So what are they doing in the street? They must simply hate black people. The National Journal sniffed, "The current movement seems more against things than for something. They seem short on data and practical recommendations and long on venting." A NY Times blogger charged that "the Tea Partiers are overwhelming Republican or right-of-Republican — they are the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within U.S. government." A LaGrange citizen asked his local newspaper editor, "The Tea Partiers say they don’t like what the progressive movement has done to our country. What are they talking about?"

For that matter, I'm reminded of the time-honored question, "What do women want?"

I suggest that that phrase normally means something like, "I have a hard time imagining how anyone could seriously propose such a program, so I'm going to affect not even to be able to identify the program proposed." It's not an approach that will help us solve disputes among ourselves. In fact, the Tea Party's Mr. Phillips immediately contradicts his inability to understand the "Occupy Wall Street" agenda by complaining that the "protesters are upset about bailouts but they want to see that money used on more social programs" -- an agenda that I join him in opposing, but that nevertheless seems comprehensible enough. Tea Party Express co-founder Sal Russo did a better job, I think, of uncritical listening. He noted that the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters, like Tea Partiers, objected to crony capitalism:

“I think you find that the left and the right come together on that, kind of for different reasons, but come to the same conclusion that government ought not to be picking winners and losers.”

The Truth of Russia

Lars Walker's co-blogger Phil provides us with a story of the true and honest Russia.

Gumilyov had—like many of his peers—become enamored with the female poet Cherubina de Gabriak, and Voloshin stood in his way. It was soon discovered, however, that de Gabriak did not actually exist in corpus, and was instead a pseudonym manufactured by Voloshin and a then-unknown schoolteacher named Elisaveta Dmitrievna. The two had concocted the exotic alias in order to get two dozen poems published. Gumilyov, publisher of some of these poems, wound up penning amorous letters to de Gabriak, and he began receiving equally amorous responses. The offense could not go unpunished. This time, both duelists survived unscathed.

There is so much right with that description of the place, and the spirit of the people who live in that place.

Memories of Summer

Another summer is gone.  I did not much enjoy this last one, but that is a failing of mine; I should have done better with what I was given.  I did my best.  A son of Georgia does not love the summer as much as those further north in any case.

Yet it is gone, and with it that part of our lives that shall never return.  The autumn lies ahead, and for Southerners that is a fine thing:  cold cider and warm fires, and the turning of the leaves.  Still, for what I should have done and have not done, should have thought and have not thought, should have felt and have not felt, I pray thee mercy, Lord.

Requiem for a Sow

The great bears are, for reasons best known to scientists, given the adult names normally used for pigs -- boars and sows -- even though their kit are known as cubs.  Tonight one was put down:

A grizzly bear that fatally mauled a hiker in Yellowstone National Park was killed after DNA evidence linked the animal to the scene of a second hiker's death a month later, a park official said Monday. 

The decision to euthanize the 250-pound female bear was meant to protect park visitors and staff, Superintendent Dan Wenk said. 

However, the investigation remains open, and officials might never know definitively whether the same bear that killed California hiker Brian Matayoshi on July 7 also took the life of John Wallace of Michigan in August. 

Evidence showed multiple bears, including the sow, were near Wallace's body but not if the sow made any contact with Wallace. The bear was allowed to remain free after Matayoshi's death because park officials said it was reacting naturally to defend its two cubs.

They did not grasp the truth behind what Edward Abbey said:  "If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.”

These are not dangers to be mitigated, but dangers to be celebrated.  What's the point of a life of easy mastery, without terror or danger?  These are our great friends and allies, who call us to be what we might be:  and if we die, what of it?  We were going to die anyway.

Firebrand on Polygamy

Elise has posted her promised piece on polygamy, which is part of a series she has kindly named after me.  At least, I hope she is intending to be kind.

She ends this way:

"I do not object to gay marriage. However, I do not consider those who do object to it to be stupid, ignorant, bigoted, shortsighted, ridiculous, not worthy of response, or crazy. Instead I respect their position, acknowledge the validity of their concerns, and couch my position in terms of my own preferences and my opinion that legalizing gay marriage will not undermine the role marriage plays - or should play - in holding society together. This leaves me free to oppose legalizing polygamy when the time comes. I realize full well that when I do argue against legalizing polygamy, I will be denounced as stupid, ignorant, bigoted, shortsighted, ridiculous, not worthy of response, or crazy. I’ll have to put up with that but I don’t plan to give anyone grounds to also denounce me as inconsistent."

I guess it's good to avoid inconsistency, exceptis excipiendis.  I do not support "gay marriage," for reasons explored in great detail in the comments here, but which largely boil down to my sense that marriage is wrongly thought of as a contract, and rightly thought of as a kinship bond.  The idea that any two people should be free to marry is part and parcel of the idea that marriage is just a contract between two individuals, which exists for their pleasure and convenience and can be dissolved for the same reasons.  Only when we see marriage as the institution that it really is -- the formation of a kinship bond that unites bloodlines across generations -- can we correctly account for the duties arising from it that are owed to both previous and subsequent generations.  These begin with not divorcing, but certainly include structuring marriage so that it has at least the theoretical potential of producing a subsequent generation.

So, I have never been a supporter of this concept called "gay marriage."  However, one argument against it that I never found convincing was the slippery slope argument that gay marriage might lead to polygamy.

The problem wasn't that the argument might not be in some sense accurate, but that the argument was unprincipled.  By this I mean that it did not have a grounding principle for marriage that could explain what the institution was, or what it was for.  All it was doing was trying to use a less-popular change to undermine support for a more-popular change.

If marriage really is -- as Elise says -- just whatever we decide to call by that name, then there is no foundation for the institution at all.  If it is, as I say it is, a kinship bond that unites bloodlines across generations, then polygamy at least preserves the core of the institution in a way that "gay marriage" does not and cannot.  The slippery slope argument doesn't work, because "gay marriage" is already the bottom of the slope.

Which, I suppose, is reason for hope in a sense; once one has reached the bottom, at least things won't get worse.

I've been reading St. Thomas Aquinas on the subject, whose arguments are sometimes very good and sometimes quite dodgy; we'll take a look at his lengthy piece on the subject in a bit.  Let's talk about Elise's ideas first.

Protest!

Goodness knows there's a lot going on in the country that merits a protest of some sort, but this ought to be embarrassing to everyone involved.  InfoWars, a site well known for conspiracy theories, is the voice of sober reflection here.

The ignorance displayed in these interviews knows no bounds. The protesters just don’t get it. They are calling for the government to use force to impose their ideas, all in the name of bringing down corporations who they don’t realize have completely bought off government regulators. Corporations and government enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship – getting one to regulate the other is asinine and only hurts smaller businesses who are legitimately trying to compete in a free market economy that barely exists.

The zeal for totalitarian government amongst some of the “protesters” is shocking. One sign being carried around read, “A government is an entity which holds the monopolistic right to initiate force,” which seems a little ironic when protesters complain about being physically assaulted by police in the same breath.

That sign represents one of the worst ideas ever to come out of the academy; the entire history of free societies speaks against it.  Every instance of liberty flowering is an instance of the exercise of that right, not by the government of the day, but in its teeth.

Fixing Memories

I'm back and (nearly) unjetlagged from my longish trip to France. I saw wonderful things but, unfortunately, learned that my sister and I are not congenial travel companions. I feel more strongly than ever that it's a mistake to take a lot of gadgets on a trip. It's too easy to get lost in the gadget instruction manual, or its malfunction, or its location, so that a convenience intended to facilitate fixing memories of striking views or events instead distracts us just when we should be looking at what's in front of us. Or a device intended to help us navigate instead monopolizes the conversation with irritable observations about its inconvenience or inadequacy. Or an invention that might keep us in touch with important news or information about travel arrangements or the history of important sites instead tempts to us stay head-down in a small screen, indoors, ignoring the actual purpose of the travel. It's possible for conversation to be entirely spoiled by topics like "Where's my camera? What happened to the memory card? Why won't it stay charged up? How do I turn off the flash function?" Within a few days I was tempted to throw all the gadgets out the window. All the pictures in this post are stock photos from the net, better than I could have snapped, anyway, and perfectly faithful images of what I saw.

My sister having managed to arrive without her driver's license or most of her credit cards, there also was far too much time given over to finding the offices of credit-card companies and attempting to obtain replacement cards from them. What's more, I would not willingly enter any tourism bureau or souvenir gift shop, but these were catnip to my companion. For ten days, I felt that anything and everything threatened to interpose itself between us and the things we had come to experience.

In spite of all this, I fulfilled my goal of soaking in very old and beautiful architecture from Paris to Bayeux to Bordeaux to Nîmes. We were typical squealing tourists at the first few beautifully preserved medieval town centers, until we realized with some shock that they were completely commonplace. Every few miles we would stumble on another chateau or fabulous old church. We saw cave paintings more than 25,000 years old. The famous Gorges du Tarn looked just like a steeply hilly drive northwest of Austin, if you added a lot more annual rainfall, except that every ten miles or so the limestone canyon walls sprouted a little cluster of Cinderella castles. We finished up with the Pont du Gard and several other Roman ruins in Nîmes before taking the train back to Paris and flying home. It's hard to overstate the impact of such antiquity on someone who grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Small street markets were everywhere. I may have eaten enough first-rate cheese, sausage, bread, chocolate, and duck to last me for a lifetime. The one thing I hadn't enough time to get jaded about was truffles: I brought home a small jarful that we're looking forward to cooking up into something soon.

And I'm sure my sister and I will begin speaking to each other again before too long.

Gnostic Heretics

While reading Medieval News today, I came across a story that will be interesting to those of you who have been following our discussion on polygamy, and particularly the sub-thread of the discussion related to interpretation of the Gospel passages related to marriage.

The story relates to a recently-discovered, second-century set of gnostic inscriptions, which may be the earliest physical-culture aspect of Christianity that we have.  They seem to be directly related the bridal-chamber imagery we've been discussing.

To my bath, the brothers of the bridal chamber carry the torches,
[here] in our halls,  they hunger for the [true] banquets,
even while praising the Father and glorifying the Son.
There [with the Father and the Son] is the only spring and source of truth.

Now, this is a gnostic site, which means that from the perspective of the modern Christian tradition the inscription relates to a suppressed heresy.  Another recent discovery is the so-called "Gospel of Philip," which contains a number of the gnostic beliefs.  Scholars seem to be unsure what to make of these.

The mysteries of truth are revealed, though in type and image. The bridal chamber, however, remains hidden. It is the Holy in the Holy. The veil at first concealed how God controlled the creation, but when the veil is rent and the things inside are revealed, this house will be left desolate, or rather will be destroyed. And the whole (inferior) godhead will flee from here, but not into the holies of the holies, for it will not be able to mix with the unmixed light and the flawless fullness, but will be under the wings of the cross and under its arms... 

(Translation by Wesley Isenberg) 

"It's not quite clear what it [the bridal chamber] is, it's explained to some degree, but explained in cryptic terms in the Gospel of Philip, it's a ritual involving freedom and purification and union with the deity," McKechnie said.

You may wonder why the Gnostics were suppressed.  Gnosticism was the doctrine of salvation by knowledge, or as the Catholic Encyclopedia goes on to call it, "the dreadful sum of all heresies... a retrogression... the last throes of expiring cults and civilizations[.]"

Why?  Well, that's kind of hard to explain.  The core doctrines were these:

"[Gnostics] held matter to be a deterioration of spirit, and the whole universe a depravation of the Deity, and taught the ultimate end of all being to be the overcoming of the grossness of matter and the return to the Parent-Spirit, which return they held to be inaugurated and facilitated by the appearance of some God-sent Saviour."

That matter is a deterioration of spirit is a neo-Platonic view, though, which was a school important to many early Christian philosophers (and, actually, the very Christian and much-later philosopher Hegel ends up arguing something quite close to this view); that the whole universe is a depravation of the Deity is very similar to the writings of the neo-Platonist Plotinus, who nevertheless wrote a treatise against Gnosticism; and the desire to leave the fallen world and return to God the Father, led by the God-sent Savior, is of course the foundation of the entire Christian church.

Two core areas of dispute are the use of magic, and the evilness of the flesh.  Christianity is opposed to both doctrines, the first more obviously than the second.  Orthodox Christianity, though, expects the resurrection of the flesh -- and therefore is opposed to the idea that flesh, or body-dependent qualities such as manhood or womanhood, are wicked or undesirable.  Rather, they are part of the creation originally blessed as good.

How many children?

According to the headline, "I'm the daddy... to 70 children!"

This is a pretty thorny ethical issue, isn't it?  Cassandra has recently made some compelling arguments about the importance of biological diversity; and we're all, I think, more or less on the same page of the importance of having involvement of both parents in the raising of children.  So:  while Elise finishes formalizing her thoughts, from your position is this better than polygamy, worse, or about the same?  Why?

Speaking of Feed and Seeds...

...you know what's a bad place to try to rob?  The Tractor Supply Company.

At the Feed and Seed

We went by the Feed and Seed today to buy wormer for the horses.  While we were there, Ms. Grim was asking them if they would get peanuts in, because she thought she might try them for her garden next year.  The shop owner avowed he thought he might have some in the spring, if she wanted to come back.

"Will they grow well?" she wanted to know.

"Oh, peanuts grow well in Georgia," he said.  "Especially down in South Georgia.  Jimmy Carter made peanut farming famous."

Now that's a perfect intro, I thought, so I said, "I hear that Herman Cain is from Georgia, too."

"Is that right?" the owner said.

"Who's Herman Cain?" the wife asked.

The owner said, "He's a presidential candidate.  You need to know his name, because he's the one you need to vote for if he gets on the ballot."

This is a farm supply shop in a rural county in North Georgia, which produces mostly timber and cattle.  If Herman Cain has won the hearts of these people, there is no reason he can't be President.

Empathy and its Discontents

"Empathy is not a major player when it comes to moral motivation," which raises some concerns about its value.  Americans are really good, these days, at feeling bad for you.  Does that mean they will help you?

As Steven Pinker writes in his mind-altering new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” we are living in the middle of an “empathy craze.” There are shelfloads of books about it: “The Age of Empathy,” “The Empathy Gap,” “The Empathic Civilization,” “Teaching Empathy.” There’s even a brain theory that we have mirror neurons in our heads that enable us to feel what’s in other people’s heads and that these neurons lead to sympathetic care and moral action.

You can read a much more in-depth account of Dr. Pinker's new work here.  What strikes me most about his assertions is how carefully he has pruned some of the graphs.

The first graph is pruned by showing a mean but not a mode; the 20th century graph is pretty much on the line with what the mode would be.  If you take "Europe and the US in the 20th century," and plot it against an average that is distorted by just a few of the graphs to the left, it looks like there has been substantial change.  If you take "the 20th century" as a whole, and plot it not against the average but the mode, it looks like there is no significant change.  The "100 Worst Wars and Atrocities" chart offers a hint as to why:  there is a strong clustering of the "worst"-ever things as you approach our present time.

Likewise, the "Deadliness of War" graph is strangely constructed by having a flat number of people killed.  The population has increased so much over the time frame, though, that the change makes a hash of the assertion.  There is a huge difference in a nation losing 10,000 people when it has a population of 30,000 versus 300,000 versus 300,000,000.  Note also that the scale on the graph is logarithmic, which makes the spike in the 20th century seem like a far smaller change than it really is:  if you drew this same thing on an normal scale, the Thirty Years War would look like a blip beside WWII.

As always, I doubt these claims of "progress" in human nature.  Cultures change over time, yes; but assuming you have an ordinary prejudice toward your own values, any period in history will be able to draw a chart showing "progress" of this type.  After all, humans learn culture from interaction with each other; and we have more interaction with those humans who are closer to us than those further away.  This is true in both space and time.  Therefore, of course it looks like periods of time further away from us are less like us than closer periods; and of course you can draw graphs that appear to show lines on scales going in a consistent direction.

That doesn't imply "progress," though.  Any age will be able to draw a graph just like this, showing movement from values alien to their own, to values closer to their own, to their own values.  That will certainly look like progress to them, but that doesn't make it progress in any real sense.

El Cumbanchero

Our brothers at the BSBFB have posted this video of children at play.



They say it is a serious matter, and indeed, once it was.  This is a most serious group, with big-band and references to President Kennedy.

Night At The Museum

A most excellent evening recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (in New York City)! Of course I thought of all of you. I think of you often, and snap pictures, and then life takes over and they remain in my phone.

It was called The Grand Tour (symbolic of how, years ago, a young person wasn't fully educated until they had taken a year or so and traveled around the world (did I ever mention the Met is snooty? You must go to the NY Historical Society to get the other-side-of-the-tracks story). 

There were some great things going on: lectures (one on Medieval beekeeping!), demonstrations, live music, and receptions throughout the museum (all my favorite spots, the American Wing (sculpture), the Petite Sculpture Hall (European sculpture, including one of Perseus, Rodin's Burghers of Calais, and some things I've seen but had not ever paid enough attention to - a later post), the Temple of Dendur (which is a great place to hear a concert), and Arms and Armor (happy sigh!)

It was fabulous being there at night. I was quite taken by the artwork and how different it looked at that time of day.

I attended a presentation of armor (photos below), and learned:

Firearms predated plate armor by 300 years and they lived together for about 300 years. The first firearm was from around 1320 and probably came from the far east. Northern Italy and Germany were the main armor makers because of ideal conditions in their region (nearby water, ability to have heat from forrest nearby, water to cool armor being made).

These replica helmets (above) were made in Philadelphia and Austria.The presenter said there is always a battle (no pun intended) in museum-world about whether to show original pieces or to show replicas, which could then show the recently restored padding and straps.

The presenter showed up how flexible this gauntlet was; unbelievable -- it can move quite fluidly.

The mail on the table was enormously flexible, and was very much like fabric.

We learned how there would be more metal in the front of the helmet, to deflect arrows, and less in the back, to save on materials. We also learned that plate armor was brought about by increased use of the crossbow. And that they would be shined up nicely not just to look good, though that was a part, but to help result in a "glancing shot," that is a shot where the arrow, which is already at a disadvantage since it must hit the steel at exactly the proper angle and at its highest velocity in order to penetrate, glides right off instead of penetrating the armor.

This picture was taken in the gift shop. I have never seen it before but it's a field trip kids from a long time ago took, to Arms and Armor.

I'll post some of the sculpture another time. I want to see if I can find some daytime shots to compare the shots I got at night.

A Wonder, Of Sorts

Thank you, Ms. Garofalo, for your kind opinion of your fellow Americans.

The thing is, I think there is a funny parallel within the GOP to Ms. Garofalo's reading.  The thing behind the "Herman Cain can't win" concept is that Republicans also assume that some racist sentiment will keep Cain from winning.  The lesson of the Florida straw poll is that, actually, once people get together they realize that he has an extraordinary amount of support.  Once people realized that their fellow Republicans weren't as racist as they expected them to be, Cain won in a walk.

The shock, apparently even to Republicans, is that there is very much less racism within the Republican party than they expected to find.  Everyone feared everyone else, but in the end, it proved that their hearts were all in the right place.

That was surely a wonder:  like the coming of dawn after a long night.

In God We Trust

Walter Russell Mead makes an interesting point.

In ancient times, the damage to two unique symbols of national identity by something as rare as an East Coast earthquake which did little or no damage to more pedestrian and less symbolic structures would have been highly noteworthy.  We would be rending our garments, consulting the Sibylline books and repenting in sackcloth and ashes after so a clear a demonstration of divine wrath.

The phrase "In God We Trust" has an 18th century ring, he says, but it's actually a 19th century creation -- as a phrase associated with the United States government it dates, in fact, to the worst days of the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln clearly thought of what he was doing as reforging a broken compact with God.  He spoke of the horrors of the war in just this way.  Just a year after adopting the phrase "In God We Trust" for Federal money, he said in his second inaugural address:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." 

It is true that the America of 2011 does not believe in anything like the fashion of the America of 1864.  The question Mead is drawing our attention to is the question of whether that is good, bad, or irrelevant.  It's an interesting question, since the powerful and wise of the hour seem to fall chiefly into either the "good" or "irrelevant" camps.

Quite Right

The worst argument against the death penalty, of course, is that it’s somehow awful for the state to kill people. Nation-states are all about killing people. They exist solely because they’re better at that, on a large scale, than any other form of human organization. Everything else is superstructure, and if they lose that edge it will fade away.

Instapundit, today.