The previous week's reads: The Making of the Fittest, Sean B Carroll | Save the Males, Kathleen Parker | The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
Dear readers:
This past week I read Trains and Lovers, a short novel in which four men and one woman recount stories of their lives' great loves to one another. Because of the age of the characters, the stories run from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries. The stories tend toward happy endings, and impart the general idea that love at first sight happens, it makes us do irrational things, and is worth taking chances for. The tales also incorporate travel into them, either because people leave their homes behind in pursuit of romance, or because love takes them on unexpected metaphorical journeys.
I'm currently in the middle of Radicals for Capitalism, which I bought because it seemed interesting and was something of a value: 800 pages for $20?, retail? I'd been hoping to learn more about men like F.A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard, whose names surface a lot in American libertarian writing. They appeared earlier, but Radicals for Capitalism could carry the subtitle "Ayn Rand in Context". There's a distressing amount on her. The chapter I'm on now is called "The Objectivist Crackup", so maybe she'll go away soon. At work, A People's History of the Supreme Courtis my lunch-time reading, and when my soul starts flat-lining from all of the economic policy, I'm enjoying Marlene Zuk's Paleofantasy. I have two more science books on order: Frans de Waal's Good-Natured: the Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, because it was selling $1 used on Amazon and I justified buying it on that and the fact that I have no de Waal in my personal library. I'm also expecting Two Sides of the Moon, a collaborative memoir of the Space Right penned by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, and David Scott, an astronaut who walked on the moon. A friend lent me Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, which I plan on getting into as soon as I've wrapped up with Zuk.
Comments are still pending for Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish.
Well, happy reading!
Monday, August 26, 2013
Sunday, August 25, 2013
The Righteous Mind
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
© 2013 Jonathan Haidt
528 pages
The Righteous Mind begins with a question, seriously posed: why can't we all get along? To find the answer, Jonathan Haidt delves into the nature of morality, following the pursuit of it from philosophy to evolutionary psychology. Haidt produces three core ideas: one, David Hume was correct in positing that people are more intuitive than rational; two, moral concerns don't have a singular source, but fall along six separate axes, each derived from our natural history, despite being couched in flourished religious and philosophical language; and finally, that morality is double-edged sword, binding us with one another as well as against others. Haidt's work is impressive in its breadth, drawing on sources as diverse as Plato, Emile Durkheim, and E.O. Wilson, and in its delivery. Though he covers a lot of territory in a compact book, Haidt constantly works to keep readers aware of how all of the ideas discussed connect together.
The grand idea underlying all this is that morality is neither an objective truth that can be deduced via logic by anyone old enough to reason, nor is it completely subjective, an artifact of culture that is deposited into a blank slate of our infant minds. It is instead a product of evolution. Our instincts for morality are kin to our sense of taste: there are different flavors of moral concern, and each of them played a part in our species' development. The natural basis for morality is being eagerly explored by scientists like Frans de Waal, who has demonstrated how chimpanzees can empathize with one another, and sense when others are being treated unfairly. Caring for one another is a mammalian strength, but there is more to morality than care and fairness. There are also senses of loyalty and deference to authority useful to tribes competing against other tribes, and a sense of 'sanctity' that buds off our natural feeling of disgust that keeps us away from unhealthy influences. Our instincts may be strengthened by rationalistic arguments or ritual, but neither can conceal their source, nor operate independently from it.
Haidt sees our moral-political instincts as particularly far-developed as compared to other primates, though. Although alphas in chimpanzee troops do have a political role in mediating disputes, they are not kings: they do not command the tribe to go here or there, or make plans for its future well-being. Haidt believes natural selection has favored our 'righteous' (political-religious-moral) instincts in this regard out of necessity, because for thousands of years we've had to regularly deal with so many of our own numbers: instincts which promoted order and cooperation were favored, and those populations which most exhibited them flourished, while populations that didn't disappeared. Religion, too, played a powerful part. In Haidt's view, we are not merely instinctive creatures who one day stumbled upon culture and started happily passing it down to the next generation like a good stick. We have evolved to be dependent on culture, and this is why religion is such a universal and powerful trait of human kind. Religion is first and foremost about morality and keeping the tribe together: ideological religions like Christianity and Islam are fairly novel.
These instincts are not part of the past; they are present, with us now. Haidt examines US political parties by this six-taste model and concludes what while liberals depend strongly on the Care and Fairness feelings, and Libertarians are somewhat obsessively fixated on the Liberty-Oppression axis (which is a 'new' taste that developed fully after we'd become tool-users), conservatives draw marginally from each 'taste' equally across the spectrum.Like all products of evolution, our righteous instincts are a trade-off. A dog with long legs runs fast, but loses heat more quickly than a short-legged rival -- and morality which evolved in the atmosphere of inter-population competition is all about Us vs. Them. When we rally towards an 'us', we draw away from a 'them'. In light of that, Haidt ends the book by offering ways people of varying political opinions can argue more constructively. He first asks readers to keep in mind that people who disagree with us may simply be drawing on another set of instincts and beliefs: you are not the center of the universe, and those who are different from you are not the Evil Villain set against you in some colorful psychodrama. We must labor to discern where people are coming from if we intend to communicate. Secondly, he draws on his own experience as an idealist-turned moderate to detail what liberals, conservatives, and libertarians can learn from one another: markets are magic, but not perfect -- and if something isn't good for the beehive, it can't be good for the bee.
The Righteous Mind is astonishing: the argument masterfully organized and sympathetically voiced from an author who distills a wide range of research from across the intellectual spectrum into a reflective, wise work. This is very much recommended.
Related:
© 2013 Jonathan Haidt
528 pages
The Righteous Mind begins with a question, seriously posed: why can't we all get along? To find the answer, Jonathan Haidt delves into the nature of morality, following the pursuit of it from philosophy to evolutionary psychology. Haidt produces three core ideas: one, David Hume was correct in positing that people are more intuitive than rational; two, moral concerns don't have a singular source, but fall along six separate axes, each derived from our natural history, despite being couched in flourished religious and philosophical language; and finally, that morality is double-edged sword, binding us with one another as well as against others. Haidt's work is impressive in its breadth, drawing on sources as diverse as Plato, Emile Durkheim, and E.O. Wilson, and in its delivery. Though he covers a lot of territory in a compact book, Haidt constantly works to keep readers aware of how all of the ideas discussed connect together.
The grand idea underlying all this is that morality is neither an objective truth that can be deduced via logic by anyone old enough to reason, nor is it completely subjective, an artifact of culture that is deposited into a blank slate of our infant minds. It is instead a product of evolution. Our instincts for morality are kin to our sense of taste: there are different flavors of moral concern, and each of them played a part in our species' development. The natural basis for morality is being eagerly explored by scientists like Frans de Waal, who has demonstrated how chimpanzees can empathize with one another, and sense when others are being treated unfairly. Caring for one another is a mammalian strength, but there is more to morality than care and fairness. There are also senses of loyalty and deference to authority useful to tribes competing against other tribes, and a sense of 'sanctity' that buds off our natural feeling of disgust that keeps us away from unhealthy influences. Our instincts may be strengthened by rationalistic arguments or ritual, but neither can conceal their source, nor operate independently from it.
Haidt sees our moral-political instincts as particularly far-developed as compared to other primates, though. Although alphas in chimpanzee troops do have a political role in mediating disputes, they are not kings: they do not command the tribe to go here or there, or make plans for its future well-being. Haidt believes natural selection has favored our 'righteous' (political-religious-moral) instincts in this regard out of necessity, because for thousands of years we've had to regularly deal with so many of our own numbers: instincts which promoted order and cooperation were favored, and those populations which most exhibited them flourished, while populations that didn't disappeared. Religion, too, played a powerful part. In Haidt's view, we are not merely instinctive creatures who one day stumbled upon culture and started happily passing it down to the next generation like a good stick. We have evolved to be dependent on culture, and this is why religion is such a universal and powerful trait of human kind. Religion is first and foremost about morality and keeping the tribe together: ideological religions like Christianity and Islam are fairly novel.
These instincts are not part of the past; they are present, with us now. Haidt examines US political parties by this six-taste model and concludes what while liberals depend strongly on the Care and Fairness feelings, and Libertarians are somewhat obsessively fixated on the Liberty-Oppression axis (which is a 'new' taste that developed fully after we'd become tool-users), conservatives draw marginally from each 'taste' equally across the spectrum.Like all products of evolution, our righteous instincts are a trade-off. A dog with long legs runs fast, but loses heat more quickly than a short-legged rival -- and morality which evolved in the atmosphere of inter-population competition is all about Us vs. Them. When we rally towards an 'us', we draw away from a 'them'. In light of that, Haidt ends the book by offering ways people of varying political opinions can argue more constructively. He first asks readers to keep in mind that people who disagree with us may simply be drawing on another set of instincts and beliefs: you are not the center of the universe, and those who are different from you are not the Evil Villain set against you in some colorful psychodrama. We must labor to discern where people are coming from if we intend to communicate. Secondly, he draws on his own experience as an idealist-turned moderate to detail what liberals, conservatives, and libertarians can learn from one another: markets are magic, but not perfect -- and if something isn't good for the beehive, it can't be good for the bee.
The Righteous Mind is astonishing: the argument masterfully organized and sympathetically voiced from an author who distills a wide range of research from across the intellectual spectrum into a reflective, wise work. This is very much recommended.
Related:
- The Three Languages of Politics, Arnold Kling
- The Evolution of God, Robert Wright; Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton, both of which look at religion as an evolutionary adapatation
- Virtually anything by Frans de Waal, like Good Natured: the Origins of Right and Wrong or Your Inner Ape.
- Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, Richard Wrangham (which also uses the idea that we evolved culture-dependent)
Saturday, August 24, 2013
A Quick Book Survey
From the Broke and the Bookish:
1. The Book I'm Reading:
I've just started Paleofantasy by Marlene Zuk, which casts a critical eye toward arguments that we should live more like pre-agricultural man. I've read Zuk before, in Sex on Six Legs, about insects. At lunch I'm reading from A People's History of the Supreme Court.
2. The Book I Just Finished:
I last finished Save the Males, by Kathleen Parker. I found it while looking for books on males and masculinity on Amazon, and it turned up while I was shelving recently returned books at the library. Obviously, Fate wanted me to read the book. I wasn't too much impressed by it. Better luck next time, Fate.
3: The next book I want to read:
Power, Inc -- the Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government, David Rothkopf.
4. The Last Book I Bought:
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of American Libertarianism, Brian Doherty.
5. The Last Book I Was Given:
1. The Book I'm Reading:
I've just started Paleofantasy by Marlene Zuk, which casts a critical eye toward arguments that we should live more like pre-agricultural man. I've read Zuk before, in Sex on Six Legs, about insects. At lunch I'm reading from A People's History of the Supreme Court.
2. The Book I Just Finished:
I last finished Save the Males, by Kathleen Parker. I found it while looking for books on males and masculinity on Amazon, and it turned up while I was shelving recently returned books at the library. Obviously, Fate wanted me to read the book. I wasn't too much impressed by it. Better luck next time, Fate.
3: The next book I want to read:
Power, Inc -- the Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government, David Rothkopf.
4. The Last Book I Bought:
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of American Libertarianism, Brian Doherty.
5. The Last Book I Was Given:
I haven't gotten it yet, but will receive it next week: Lost Scriptures: Books That Didn't Make It Into the New Testament, Bart Ehrman.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Save the Males
Save the Males: Why Men Matter and Why Women Should Care
© 2008 Kathleen Parker
215 pages
It's not a man's world any more. Far from it, Kathleen Parker writes: in America, men have not only been dethroned but imprisoned by a culture hostile to them. In Save the Males, Ms. Parker elaborates on the many ways in which the nature and contributions of men are scorned, abused, and discouraged by the prevailing culture, influenced as it is by 'third wave feminism'. The first wave feminism gave women the vote, second wave got them careers and divorces, and the third wave made them porn stars. Save the Males is less about men and more about the abuses of that third wave, which the author sees as not pro-women, but anti-male, and by virtue of the sexes' interrelatedness, anti-human. She raises a series of fair points, but the book's focus is wobbly.
Parker doesn't detail a campaign against men, but rather has a list of complaints about the various ways men are emasculated. Education is entirely girl-focused, she says: boys are forced to spend all day listening to soft-spoken women and denied rambunctious games of tag at recess. Women can merrily abort babies without ever consulting the fellows who contributed to the cause, divorce and child custody laws are outright malevolent to the male sex, and then there's porn! It...puts pressure on them to perform, or something. The list of attacks against men drifts into a list of ways society is degrading midway. As wretched as porn can be (and if you have doubts, read Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion), the fact that it hurts men is somewhat tangential. More thoughtful are her remarks about women in the military: despite the fact that women can push buttons as well as men, we have yet to civilize warfare, which -- after plans go to hell -- is still an area where brute strength, testosterone-fueled ax-crazy risk-taking are needed. The desperate, primal struggles which erupt in Afghanistan and Iraq need frenzied, mighty men to deal with them. Even when women are tucked away into noncombat roles on the front, the unpredictable nature of war means they'll still get caught up in it -- and that's just not right. Regardless of our well-intentioned idealism, men and women at war are still men and women. Even if women weren't so physically inferior to men, says Parker, injection of sexual tension into combat zones would suggest keeping the military from being feminized. The tribal mentality that resurrects itself so mightily in combat will derail combat units' effectiveness when the men start worrying about their ladies being shot and raped. Given that the US has recently done away with its barring women from combat roles, that tension is worth pondering.
I'm not particularly convinced by Save the Males that we of the beard are in great need of saving, though Parker does raise a lot of points worth thinking about -- divorce, military policy, and to a degree, parenting. (Parker's assertion that boys need men to teach them to be men, and girls need women to teach them to be women, and thus that test-tube babies born to single mothers are deprived of half of their necessary gender acculturation, is at first glance intriuging: I'd never considered the idea that fathers teach boys how to act appropriately around women, and vice versa, but then I realized they don't, really, at least not outside 1950s sitcoms. And besides, who says we need to be taught to be men or women? If there are authentic gender roles, shouldn't they be as natural to us as breathing?) These ideas deserve more serious consideration, however, than they find here, in a book which contains one chapter on nothing but how women worship their vaginas.
© 2008 Kathleen Parker
215 pages
It's not a man's world any more. Far from it, Kathleen Parker writes: in America, men have not only been dethroned but imprisoned by a culture hostile to them. In Save the Males, Ms. Parker elaborates on the many ways in which the nature and contributions of men are scorned, abused, and discouraged by the prevailing culture, influenced as it is by 'third wave feminism'. The first wave feminism gave women the vote, second wave got them careers and divorces, and the third wave made them porn stars. Save the Males is less about men and more about the abuses of that third wave, which the author sees as not pro-women, but anti-male, and by virtue of the sexes' interrelatedness, anti-human. She raises a series of fair points, but the book's focus is wobbly.
Parker doesn't detail a campaign against men, but rather has a list of complaints about the various ways men are emasculated. Education is entirely girl-focused, she says: boys are forced to spend all day listening to soft-spoken women and denied rambunctious games of tag at recess. Women can merrily abort babies without ever consulting the fellows who contributed to the cause, divorce and child custody laws are outright malevolent to the male sex, and then there's porn! It...puts pressure on them to perform, or something. The list of attacks against men drifts into a list of ways society is degrading midway. As wretched as porn can be (and if you have doubts, read Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion), the fact that it hurts men is somewhat tangential. More thoughtful are her remarks about women in the military: despite the fact that women can push buttons as well as men, we have yet to civilize warfare, which -- after plans go to hell -- is still an area where brute strength, testosterone-fueled ax-crazy risk-taking are needed. The desperate, primal struggles which erupt in Afghanistan and Iraq need frenzied, mighty men to deal with them. Even when women are tucked away into noncombat roles on the front, the unpredictable nature of war means they'll still get caught up in it -- and that's just not right. Regardless of our well-intentioned idealism, men and women at war are still men and women. Even if women weren't so physically inferior to men, says Parker, injection of sexual tension into combat zones would suggest keeping the military from being feminized. The tribal mentality that resurrects itself so mightily in combat will derail combat units' effectiveness when the men start worrying about their ladies being shot and raped. Given that the US has recently done away with its barring women from combat roles, that tension is worth pondering.
I'm not particularly convinced by Save the Males that we of the beard are in great need of saving, though Parker does raise a lot of points worth thinking about -- divorce, military policy, and to a degree, parenting. (Parker's assertion that boys need men to teach them to be men, and girls need women to teach them to be women, and thus that test-tube babies born to single mothers are deprived of half of their necessary gender acculturation, is at first glance intriuging: I'd never considered the idea that fathers teach boys how to act appropriately around women, and vice versa, but then I realized they don't, really, at least not outside 1950s sitcoms. And besides, who says we need to be taught to be men or women? If there are authentic gender roles, shouldn't they be as natural to us as breathing?) These ideas deserve more serious consideration, however, than they find here, in a book which contains one chapter on nothing but how women worship their vaginas.
A book dedicated to men, with a woman on the cover, and which is mostly about women.
Alrighty then.
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
The Making of the Fittest
The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution
304 pages
© 2006 Sean B. Carroll
Sean B. Carroll's The Making of the Fittest examines the genetics of evolution, relating to readers not only how changes come about and are transmitted to the next generation, but how our genes demonstrate the passing of an evolutionary river out of Eden with the same surety that the flattened plains of the midwest testify to the passing of glaciers eons ago. After detailing the myriad ways in which genetics illuminates the inner workings and history of evolution, Carroll casts a critical eye against proponents of intelligent design and creationism. In the stressful, chaotic world which all organisms inhabit, where circumstances and relations between prey and predator are in a state of constant flux, there is no room for grand designs: only on-the-hoof and on-the-fly jury-rigging to respond to a given moment's crisis will do. Making of the Fittest supplies readers with both broad principles (the evolutionary arms race, in which no species is ever the 'perfected' winner, only carrying temporary momentum in the battle for survival) and specific practices, like how complex organs are formed by cobbling together smaller ones. Though a short-enough work, it seems more technical than many other works on biology, probably because it focuses on the nitty-gritty details of genetics: one chapter is called "The Everyday Math of Evolution", and concerns mutation rates. Though of interest to general science readers, a little genetic refresher might be helpful before starting in.
304 pages
© 2006 Sean B. Carroll
Sean B. Carroll's The Making of the Fittest examines the genetics of evolution, relating to readers not only how changes come about and are transmitted to the next generation, but how our genes demonstrate the passing of an evolutionary river out of Eden with the same surety that the flattened plains of the midwest testify to the passing of glaciers eons ago. After detailing the myriad ways in which genetics illuminates the inner workings and history of evolution, Carroll casts a critical eye against proponents of intelligent design and creationism. In the stressful, chaotic world which all organisms inhabit, where circumstances and relations between prey and predator are in a state of constant flux, there is no room for grand designs: only on-the-hoof and on-the-fly jury-rigging to respond to a given moment's crisis will do. Making of the Fittest supplies readers with both broad principles (the evolutionary arms race, in which no species is ever the 'perfected' winner, only carrying temporary momentum in the battle for survival) and specific practices, like how complex organs are formed by cobbling together smaller ones. Though a short-enough work, it seems more technical than many other works on biology, probably because it focuses on the nitty-gritty details of genetics: one chapter is called "The Everyday Math of Evolution", and concerns mutation rates. Though of interest to general science readers, a little genetic refresher might be helpful before starting in.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Teaser Tuesday (20 August)
It's easy to be foolish, he thought. It's dead simple, really. All you have to be is human and to allow yourself to do the human things, like fall in love with somebody when you know there's no point and when you know, too, that it's just going to make you unhappy. It's better to be stoic -- to be one of those people who manage to keep themselves to themselves, who manage to avoid letting go and becoming entangled in something they know from experience is going to cause unhappiness. Or is it?
p. 87, Trains and Lovers, Alexander Maccoll Smith
Monday, August 19, 2013
This week at the library: genes, love on a moving train, and war
Dear readers:
This past week I finished two books on meaning and morality and a bit of natural history. I enjoyed Shubin's Your Inner Fish, but de Botton's work on religion and Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind were both extraordinary. Comments for it and Shubin will follow in the next few days. This week I'll be wrapping up The Making of the Fittest, which examines the genetic evidence of evolution, and I'm supremely proud of myself for not having run away screaming when the author introduced coefficients into the discussion. For leisure reading, I've just started a novel called Trains and Lovers, wherin four strangers on a train ride in Britain from London to Glasgow share their stories with one another. I'm also entertaining the prospect of reading Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers to scratch an itch for adventure, explosions, and excitement. I think it's been ten years since I last read Ambrose, in his Nothing Like it in the World: the Making of the Transcontinental Railroad. I also have Betrayal, on how citizens betrayed the military, or how the military betrayed the country. Someone betrayed something, that much I know. (I've only gotten to the introduction.)
I recently found out that my university library still allows me to check out books despite being a graduate. I was so giddy to realize that enormous wealth of books was still open to me that I paid my alumni pledge early. I'm planning my first visit 'home' in a couple of weeks, and already have a list of books to check out there. Turns out they have a lot of the authors whose works I've become interested in since graduating. Actually, my copy of The Making of the Fittest is from my university library, checked out via interlibrary loan. Checking them out personally will mean an excuse to revisit my old stomping grounds, harrumphing at whatever changes have transpired in my absence.
This Saturday I picked up Radicals for Capitalism: A History of American Libertarianism, the title of which caused the barista who checked me out to abruptly frown at me when she saw it. I can't blame her: it has a chapter on Ayn Rand, which makes me feel positively dirty. But it's an enormous book, and was offered at a low price, so I was seduced. I'm going to try refrain from reading it until I have something that will balance it out, like Power, Inc, or The Shock Doctrine: something to get my old progressive indignation fired up.
Happy reading!
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