Steven Pinker’s new book

Human beings are becoming less and less violent. This is the premise of renowned psychologist Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Pinker is considered to be one of the finest science writers of our time, with a gift for making complex ideas accessible to the layperson in his typically lucid yet highly informative writing style. His book on human language, The Language Instinct (1994), is a science classic. Reading The Blank Slate (2002) was a milestone in my intellectual journey. Pinker’s arguments against the tabula rasa theories of the social sciences left an indelible impression on me, and he convincingly demolished the ‘noble savage’ and ‘ghost in the machine’ ideas so widely held. I’m looking forward to reading his latest work for a similarly illuminating experience.

John Horgan has written a mostly positive review of Better Angels. Sam Harris interviewed Pinker and posted the result on his blog. I especially liked Pinker’s response when Harris raised the issue of so-called ‘atheist’ atrocities (obviously a dig at a common, and incorrect, anti-atheism argument):

When women betray their own gender

Here’s the gist of Madeleine Bunting’s Guardian article: Western imperialists cynically used the oppression of women by the Taliban as a pretext to carry out the US-led Afghan War.

Bunting isn’t anti-women’s rights; she’s anti-fighting-for-women’s-rights-while-also-shooting-and-bombing-their-oppressors. Now this may seem like a fair enough position to take. Spreading the idea of gender equality shouldn’t require the invasion of another country and subsequent mass killing of its people. Yet Bunting affects a concerned pacifism that disturbingly slips into cultural relativism.

Regarding the initial enthusiasm for the Afghan War, she writes:

Key to this largely supportive public opinion was how, over the course of a few weeks in 2001, a war of revenge was reframed as a war for human rights in Afghanistan, and in particular the rights of women. It was a narrative to justify war that proved remarkably powerful. A cause that had been dismissed and ignored for years in Washington suddenly moved centre-stage. The video of a woman being executed in Kabul stadium that the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan had offered to the BBC and CNN without success was taken up by the Pentagon and used extensively. The Taliban's brutal treatment of women, the closure of girls schools: all were used to justify military invasion and close down debate.

Fukuyama’s new book

I’ve just started reading Francis Fukuyama’s latest book The Origins of Political Order. It’s the first of two volumes, and deals with the development of political institutions across varying cultures and eras from prehistoric times to the 18th century (the second volume will pick up where the first left off and continue the analysis up to the present time). Some have called it Fukuyama’s magnum opus. The books are certainly ambitious in both scope and intended theoretical application.

Fukuyama is often associated with American neoconservatism, but apparently he no longer supports that rather bellicose ideology. A passage from chapter one of TOoPO (‘The Necessity of Politics’) shows his more centrist stance:

There is in fact a curious blindness to the importance of political institutions that has affected many people over the years, people who dream about a world in which we will somehow transcend politics. This particular fantasy is not the special province of either the Left or the Right; both have had their versions of it.

And the political scientist who signed a post-9/11 letter to President Bush urging him to remove Saddam Hussein from power by any means necessary later became a critic of the Iraq War. In TOoPO Fukuyama writes:

The degree to which people in developed countries take political institutions for granted was very much evident in the way the United States planned, or failed to plan, for the aftermath of its 2003 invasion of Iraq. The U.S. administration seemed to think that democracy and a market economy were default conditions to which the country would automatically revert once Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship was removed, and seemed genuinely surprised when the Iraqi state itself collapsed in an orgy of looting and civil conflict.

Fukuyama’s centrist, perhaps even realist, ideas appeal to me. As someone who flirted with far Leftism many years ago (I was a member of an Australian socialist group), my present self actually feels a tad embarrassed over having been seduced by romantic ideas that often took leave of the realities of society, human nature and economics. I think my acquired respect for rationality, evidence and critical thinking played a big part in my move towards the political centre (though upon a thorough accounting perhaps more of my values lie towards the liberal, progressive left). Maybe it’s an inevitable transition, as per Winston Churchill’s curt remark:

If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.

Since I’m neither twenty nor forty, it’s only fitting that I be a moderate, thus retaining both heart and brain. Which is why I also liked Joseph Heath’s Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism (2009), where a left-leaning philosophy professor debunks common economic myths believed by the Left and the Right. This sort of equal opportunity reality check isn’t so much a case of “the truth lies somewhere in the middle” (an argument prone to the false compromise fallacy), but rather a case of the facts being indifferent to ideology. Just like in science.

It’s going to take me a while to get through volume one of The Origins of Political Order, especially since my distraction by other reading material is basically guaranteed. Hopefully by the time I reach the cliffhanger chapter on the French Revolution, volume two will already be out. I swear, Fukuyama better not do a George R R Martin.




15.7.11

Apologist for religion misunderstands atheism

Philosophy professor Stephen T. Asma thinks that atheists are too easily dismissive of religion, or at least the Big Three monotheisms with which they appear to be obsessed. He chides atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett for their ‘provincialism’, reminding them that a great, if not the greatest, part of humanity follow non-monotheistic religions like Buddhism and animism.

Having lived in Cambodia and China, and travelled in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Africa, I have come to appreciate how religion functions quite differently in the developing world — where the majority of believers actually live. The Four Horsemen, their fans, and their enemies all fail to factor in their own prosperity when they think about the uses and abuses of religion.

Aussie lobbyists choose security over liberty

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

- Benjamin Franklin

With the recent Afghan War Diary leaks by Wikileaks, the Australian Defence Association (ADA) has accused Wikileaks editor and Australian citizen Julian Assange of jeopardising the safety of Aussie soldiers and possibly committing treason by aiding enemies of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). ADA executive director Neil James displays his powers of sophistry by arguing that the “[International Security Assistance Force]’s battlefield mistakes are the result of typical wartime tragedy, accidents and at times incompetence or personal failure, not deliberate or institutional policy”.

Australia tells Israel: "Mate, that shit ain't cool"

You've got to respect the Australian government's decision to expel an Israeli diplomat over the forging of Australian passports for Mossad agents to off Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. While journalists are legally obligated to qualify their statements with words like 'allegedly' and 'suspected', the rest of us are free to entertain the not-quite-preposterous belief that Israel did order the hit and did forge those multinational passports to allow the assassins unimpeded entry into Dubai.

The Opposition flings accusations of Arab-courting at PM Rudd and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, yet what did the Liberals actually expect them to do? Wag their fingers at Israel and go 'tsk tsk'? Say "Now that's not very nice" and leave it at that? We're talking about a blatant breach of trust and security between two sovereign states.

Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop allowed that "in the absence of proof, it would be appropriate to reprimand, appropriate to chastise the Israeli government." But wouldn't a reprimand in itself imply some level of guilt, of culpability, on Israel's part? Yet the Opposition shies from following this to its logical conclusion, one supported by mounting evidence that the sophistication of the passport forgery and the hit itself bears the stamp of the Mossad.

Israel pulled off an assassination that may have benefited them militarily. But dragging innocent, unsuspecting friends into your dirty fights isn't a politically savvy tactic. Because some of those friends might actually feel, y'know, betrayed.




25.5.10

A collection of rants, being the First of several

Here, dear reader, are reproduced for your amusement (and, dare I hope, your edification) a selection of mini-essays penned in my early youth upon the delightfully tactile rough cream paper of handmade notebooks. In those days my zeal burned hotter, undiluted by a cool, objective distance from my subject matter. It was a time when I mistook repetitiveness for assertiveness, hectoring for arguing, moralism for morality. The somewhat screeching tone of these essays does embarrass me now, though many of the principles held forth still retain my loyalty and devotion. Those were impetuous days when I was more likely to be scratching out early drafts with a pen rather than tapping them out straight-to-keyboard as I currently do (my romantic pretensions evaporated long ago). I would like to think that I have mellowed since then. Old age does that to you.

This first collection of essays was presumably written in early/mid 2007. I didn’t start dating my essays until late 2007, when I decided that it would be useful to have a record of the progress and evolution of both my writing style/technique and my ideas. The essays are presented in chronological order – that is, in the order of when I wrote them in my notebooks.

Ass kicks elephant: the failure of GOP ideology

Is the American Republican Party slowly sliding into political irrelevance? It’s ironic that the nation which founded the Pragmatist school of philosophy in the 19th century should have a major party that prizes evergreen theories over prosaic, practical outcomes. When it came to determining ‘truth’ values, American Pragmatists like John Dewey believed that it wasn’t an issue of theory versus practice but rather of “intelligent practice versus uninformed, stupid practice”. And to exercise the former one must be committed to facts and figures, even if - and especially when - they do not give us the news we want.