Rational Philosophy

On sexism, racism and any other ism: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Gloria Steinem; the importance of drawing distinctions, and the unfortunate side-effect of bigotry.

Gloria Steinem’s Op-Ed yesterday — “Women Are Never Front-Runners” — shows that even a fervent anti-ismist can get tangled up in her own knitting. Ms. Steinem laments that Hillary Clinton faces an uphill struggle convincing voters that she’s a viable leader just because she’s a woman. Steinem contrasts Clinton’s task with Obama’s, arguing that Clinton has it harder. Although Steinem presents no evidence, I wouldn’t try to argue that she’s wrong. Unfortunately though, her thesis swells with the rhetoric of bias, ending with what’s supposed to be a rallying cry against isms ‘We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”’ And this would demonstrate lack of bias how?

Human beings have developed an extraordinary ability to draw distinctions and categorize the world around them. Consciousness requires that we do so. The first glimmer of consciousness rests on the awareness that there is a self and a non-self. From this primary and fundamental distinction we begin to separate the world into up and down, in and out, hot and cold, blue and pink, soft and hard… This ability has been honed to a fine point because it has provided an evolutionary benefit. The better able we were to draw distinctions, the more skilled we became at identifying safe foods to eat, suitable materials for clothes and tools and shelter, etc.

In another story today, brewers pursuit of ever hoppier beers and consumers pursuit of ever more gratifying flavor, gives an example of just how far we’re prepared to go along the road of differentiation and distinction. The whole enterprise of humankind rests to a large degree on the striving for new distinctions.

But the faculty to draw distinctions, while it can be trained or enhanced, is fundamentally indifferent to the nature of those distinctions. In other words, although some of us can’t distingush Bach from Hayden we can all distinguish a jackhammer from a songbird, a pen from a pencil, and our own cell-phone ring tone from everyone else’s. We draw distinctions so naturally that they become easy pegs for our murkier judgments.

This is where isms come in. When we derive arbitrary judgments from a characteristic, no matter how well distinguished that characteristic may be, we fall into the trap of the ism.

By all accounts, Hillary Clinton is a woman. Identifiying her as a woman is not an ism. Saying she’ll make a better or worse leader because she’s a woman is an ism. There’s no rational basis for making such a connection. (We can easily find many examples of both men and women leaders who are wonderful and many who are awful.)

To get to an ism from a distinction we have to apply flawed logic and reasoning, or blind ourselves to logic and reason. Racism in all its forms, for example, requires the racist to suspend his or her faculty of reason. But why do we do that?

Isms are born of ignorance or fear. Either we are too ignorant to understand that our judgments are flawed, or we are afraid of some group that’s different from us, or of losing our power over them, or of being forced to recognize their equality.

The antidote to isms is reason and logic, persistenly, patiently, blindly, and tirelessly applied.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

PS. Of the IPAs I’ve tasted, my personal favorite is Smuttynose IPA. Highly recommended.

On the purpose and principles of education, and the perils of ignoring them.

Living in New York, it’s hard to avoid the whirlpool of anxiety around schools and education. What’s the right school, what’s the best school, how are we going to get our kid in there? Even before a child turns three parents are fretting and fussing over plans for his or her education. And while the particular circumstances may vary from place to place, concern over educational standards seems global.

In Japan, parents have begun to worry about the slip in educational standards relative to India and China. Once leading the world in math skills, Japan has fallen to 10th place. In the NY Times report, Japanese parents concerned over test scores and competitive educational achievements, and envious of India’s surge, sound just like New York City parents. Another current report focuses on concerted efforts to improve the organizational skills of schoolboys, thereby improving their grades.

When we have a child in school, the emphasis on testing and grades can overwhelm us. We forget the true purpose of education. If we’ve grown up through a competitive system ourselves we may never even pause to consider whether there may be anything wrong with it. But since we submit our children typically to more than a dozen years of school with the stated goal of giving them a good start in life, it seems to make sense for us to actively question whether and why those years should be spent chasing grades.

Education should serve the fundamental purpose of teaching a body of knowledge and thinking skills; it should only secondarily serve the subordinate purpose of furnishing qualifications. In modern times these primary and secondary purposes have been flipped. But why?

Ironically perhaps, one reason may be the relative democratization of education in developed countries. When all children have access to school, the focus for many shifts from acquiring knowledge and skills to getting or giving our children the upper hand. We start to want our children to succeed in school by achieving quantifiable, bankable grades, rather than by absorbing useful, valuable brain food.

When I think about my own time in the educational system, I tend to be impressed by how much I’ve forgotten rather than by how much I learned. The process of learning remains with me, even when the product of learning fades. Put another way, I doubt I’d score very well now on high school tests, but I have a clearer sense these days of how to approach a set of educational material in order to appreciate and learn from it (I watch myself doing just that with my high school age daughter). The boy in the NY Times story improved his grade with some intense focus and help from a tutor. But did he learn more, do his improved grades equate with a person who thinks better?

This nation faces a critical time in its history. It is no coincidence that these eight years of democratic dismantling have been presided over by a man who is so famously lax in speech and thought, who brazenly values faith over reason, victory over right, ends over means. Bush and his entourage have taken us down a perilous and irrational path. Yet though the current administration has eroded the principles of freedom and democracy in insidious and worrying ways, the country as a whole hangs back and takes it on the chin. Where is the outcry? Where are the howls of protest? They are few and faint.

When we teach our children not how to think but how to achieve social and economic success we bankrupt the foundation of a democratic society. If we cannot think for ourselves, if we cannot question and criticize, we cannot participate effectively in our democracy. As parents and citizens I believe we have an obligation to encourage our children to pursue knowledge, reason, and truth, not grades.

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Putting into perspective a report that illegal drug use in the UK army is on the rise, the UK’s Ministry of Defense points out that ”Positive rates in the army over the past four years average around 0.77 percent, compared with more than 7 percent in civilian workplace drug testing programs in Britain.”

Barak Obama has admitted drug use as a young man, risking voter backlash, but doubtless winning support for his honesty — a rare thing in politics.

Then we have the baseball steroid report, and Marion Jones stripped of her Olympic medals. (As a side note, if she weren’t broke Marion Jones would be paying back her winnings — I haven’t seen anything about baseball players returning earnings…)

In making this connection between recreational drug use and the use of drugs in recreational activity, I’m not immediately sure whether a connection exists.

Still another way, of course, that we use drugs, is to help us get better or feel better when we’re sick. (Like the antibiotics I’ve been taking for my pneumonia.)

If a philosophical connection exists it must derive from the idea that an external substance taken into the body to cause some response can be deemed unnatural and therefore suspect.

To the list of cocaine, marijuana, heroin, amphetamines, LSD, ecstasy, opium, steroids, stimulants, antibiotics, antihistamine, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, etc. we would then have to add tobacco, coffee, tea, and alcohol.

Society makes a further distinction by labeling some drugs illegal, whether they be recreational drugs, or performance enhancing drugs. But if we take legality out of the equation for a moment, and think about the spectrum of drugs from first principles, how would we begin to determine whether some drugs were OK and others not OK?

Surely alcohol is to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from marijuana, heroin, amphetamines and cocaine if we consider the risks and affects of its consumption? And tobacco has a less profound effect on one’s state of mind, but really does a number on your long term health.

I’m not necessarily arguing that illegal drugs should be legalized, but instead that there’s a good deal of emotion involved in our perspective on drugs rather than sound, rational thought.

The vilification of drug-takers in sport centers on the unfair advantage that the drug-taker has over the none drug-taker. This is indeed a rational perspective. The none drug-taker presumably has chosen to avoid drugs (one imagines he can get them if he wants them). His choice is rational — the drugs he’s avoiding aren’t condoned and are perhaps illegal, and may even be detrimental to his health. His rivals achieve higher levels of performance just because they take the drugs, without declaring their advantage. He’s not a sucker; his rivals are cheats.

Nevertheless, the way society regards performance enhancing drugs depends on the rules and principles that society adopts.

But there are two things, as far as I can see, that can be intrinsically wrong with recreational drugs:

1. That they can be detrimental to a person’s health. For this reason, society should strive to educate people about the dangers of drugs and provide adequate treatment for drug users.

2. That they can cause people to harm or endanger others. The drunk driver, the cocaine-hyped killer, etc. It’s reasonable for society to protect itself from those who abuse and endanger. But the degree of protection must be weighed against the risk and against the loss of liberty for those who can behave responsibly.

(In case you can’t read the cartoon text, it says: “Jerry doesn’t do drugs anymore. He says he gets the same effect just standing up really fast these days.”)

I just put out a music video for My Darkest Hour, a song from my album ‘nylon.’ The song and the video aim to express in artistic terms what it’s like to grapple with compulsion — in my case a compulsion to drink. Addictions, as they’re sometimes called, can be very easy to acquire and very hard to drop. Compulsion plays a very broad role in life, appearing in many guises and to many degrees. But what is it, why do we have it?

A NY times story today reports on Korean efforts to address an issue that has hit hard in a country where almost all homes have high speed Internet connections — web addiction. Alarmingly, some young people have apparently died from exhaustion after days without a break playing on-line games, and millions more young people may be at some risk of addiction.

Also in the Times, Amy Harmon writes about the obsessiveness of having access to one’s DNA data. She found herself spending hours every day sifting through the many genetic markers (SNPs) that would tell her about her predispoition, or lack of it, for everything from a dislike to brussel sprouts to alzheimer’s.

Such introspective compulsions affect the people who have them and the people in their lives, but I was also reminded that the effects of one person’s compulsion can go much further. Take Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, for instance, who has announced deep consitutional changes and sweeping reforms that will cement his vision for a revamped Venezuela and consolidate his position long term as the overseer of that vision. His biographer, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, had this to say about the current situation: “This is not a dictatorship but something more complex: the tyranny of popularity.”

We could say that genetics and circumstance result in compulsion and leave it at that. But there must be some reason for a tendency to compulsion and perhaps some insight that can help us thwart it through understanding it better.

I remember news stories about the polar bear in Central Park zoo obsessively swimming endless little laps because he was so bored. We human beings have become hypersensitized to boredom. Living in New York City you see the highly intensified impact of this. People everywhere walking and talking on their cell phones. People wearing earphones even in the elevator on the way up into the office. People exercising on treadmills while watching TV or reading. People watching portable movie players on the subway. We cram our lives full of activity to squeeze out the threat of inactivity. But, unlike our ancestors, much modern activity is artificial and unnecessary.

There’s an intersect then between the level of compulsive activity and the degree of ease with which we can ensure our basic survival needs. (The Korean boot camps for Internet addicts get the addicts away from their computers and involved in physical activities outdoors — whether this works or not, it seems conceptually well-directed.) But what about the origin of compulsion? What is compulsion and why do we succumb to it at all?

Compulsion comes about when we return frequently and strongly to a perceived or actual need or desire. It’s a pattern of response that comes about either genetically or circumstancially. It’s also helpful to regard compulsion as existing on a spectrum, and as a response that can be harmful or helpful.

My theory is this: Compulsion is a necessary trait. Without some degree of compulsion organisms wouldn’t have a mechanism to draw them to do the things that are good for them or good for the species. Bees wouldn’t build hives, cats wouldn’t lick themselves to clean their fur, people wouldn’t have sex. But compulsion becomes problematic either when circumstance puts us into a situation we’re not genetically prepared for (drinking alcohol, shooting heroin) or when we have an imbalance between free time and purposeful time, leading to boredom.

Chavez has found himself in a circumstance with which he is unprepared to cope effectively. The compulsion to keep feeding himself a steady diet of power and control, to guarantee that he will be able to keep experiencing that power, has overcome his ability to balance his own desires with the responsibility he has assumed for his people. Unfortunately, when it gets to this point, the prognosis is not good.

On a happier note, the Central Park zookeepers devised mechanisms to relieve Gus, the depressed polar bear, from boredom. He is now a much happier bear by all accounts. What would it take to wean Chavez from his addiction to power? One thinks that it may take him going cold turkey.

In the wake of a hazing death, a fibbing (and possibly fight-fixing) grand master, and a what seems to have been an attempted assault on the all-male sanctity of the sumo ring (Japan Wrings Its Hands Over Sumos Latest Woes) change threatens Japan’s sumo tradition. As the NY Times piece points out, though, a little digging reveals that sumo doesn’t quite have a stronghold on tradition. Much newer than people believe, and with much more of a history of reinvention than the current purists want to acknowledge, sumo is no stranger to change.

On the global stage, the threat of climate change has caused many people to react by simply denying its possibility. It’s been interesting to see that as time has passed, more people have become prepared to accept the prospect that the world’s climate is changing. In the US this has happened more slowly than in other parts of the world.

Philosophically, the psychology of change has two primary components: Acceptance — coming to terms with the idea that change is possible, desirable, inevitable, real. And resistance — the idea that the status quo is possible, desirable, inevitable, real.

When change looms it tends to create a tension between acceptance and resistance. This tension can exist in one person, or between people. And it strikes me that such a tension is not just inevitable, but desirable. Acceptance of change not balanced by some resistance will lead to unproductive or harmful change as well as productive and beneficial change.

In society, however, people tend to polarize around positions of acceptance or resistance to particular changes. I’d go further and say that forces in society encourage people to polarize. The “you’re either for it or against it” demand.

Where did this come from? Why do certain aspects of the structure of some societies tend to divide on issues rather than encouraging reasoned debate?

A group, philosophically and logically speaking, requires that the members of the group have some common characteristic. I always remember my math friends at college discussing the question of whether the group that contains all groups contains itself. (A question I could never quite see the importance of.) In this I’m speaking of any group, not just groups in society. A group of marbles may be called a group because they’re all green, or because they’ve been put into the same bag, or because they’re all less than an inch in diameter…

For groups of people in a society, the common characteristic can be quite strong — all of the members of the group are blood relatives, for instance. Or it may be quite weak — they are all taking the same bus.

But people are extremely good at grouping themselves, at establishing groups and reinforcing those groups. It is a critical social function.

Take the example of the bus stop: All of you are waiting for the same bus. There is no particular allegiance, no great bonding force. But now if the bus is late, all of a sudden the members of this ad hoc group have something in common. They can rally around the disagreeability of the bus being late.

To take the example one step further, we can imagine what happens if, after an hour of waiting, a bus comes around the corner just as a newcomer shows up at the bus stop and sidles up to the front of the line. The “group” will be inclined to turn on the newcomer and tell him what’s what.

While philosophically speaking a group is not emotional, psychologically speaking the stronger the urge to form groups, the more likely the groups will be to defend the parameters of their existence.

This tendency to easily form strong groups has doubtless helped human beings survive and prosper. It causes us to work well together when we can establish a common goal. But it also causes us to take sides on issues, and to defend against a change to the group, just for the sake, sometimes, of defending against change.

In Japan, the people who feel most strongly about the parameters of sumo most actively resist any change to those parameters. They have associated themselves with the group that likes sumo to be traditional. Even though they don’t personally know many or perhaps any other members of this group, they wish to keep the group strong. Contrarily, those who feel that sumo should change have joined another group. They will fight just as vehemently for the idea that a change is good.

Acceptance of change and resistance to change confuse us then in part because they are the same thing behind a different mask.

Lou Dobbs’ strongly worded commentary on CNN.com today begins with the words “lunacy among our public figures.” He’s referring to the likes of Katie Couric, Barak Obama, and Bill Moyers who have all expressed discomfort with the prevailing symbolism of the American flag.

Barack Obama has stopped wearing his American flag lapel pin, for instance.

Lou’s thoughts on the subject (if you can call them that) are so coarsely grained that I would have been inclined to shake my head and move on, but his knee jerk patriotism must be widely felt, and that makes it worthy of some analysis. After all, which of us hasn’t felt the tug of a strong, arbitrary allegiance at some point in our lives?

Patriotism reflects an identification with the nation of one’s birth or adoption. The idea of patriotism expresses the impulse or feeling that our nation should prevail over or is better than others. By saying: “I am American” or “I am Iranian” or “I am [fill in the blank]” we are also saying: “I am not anything else.” It seems simple enough, but the feeling of patriotism emerges from a complex and overlapping set of responses:

Fear of other people and other cultures, fear of the unknown, fear of threats to the nation real or imagined. Pride in one’s nation, its culture, habits, principles, laws, history. Familiarity with one’s surroundings — the weather, the habitat, the geography.

If we parse out these various complexities we start to see a pattern. Some of the impulses for our sense of patriotism are completely arbitrary and subjective such that arguing about it becomes a ridiculous matter (weather or geography or success at a particular kind of sport, for instance). And some we may logically defend — the extent to which a country upholds basic human freedoms, for instance, is not a subjective matter, and has led more than one person to change his or her nationality.

So, patriotism can be divided into two distinct concepts — an identification with the idea of one’s nation, or an identification with the ideals of one’s nation.

Dobbs clearly argues for the idea of America, regardless of its record on matters of such grave importance as human rights, war-waging, and international diplomacy. Couric, Obama, and Moyers on the other hand clearly want to make a point about the ideals of the nation, and the degree to which they support the way that those ideals are being upheld by the current administration, or not.

I toyed with the idea of posting this piece under the title “Global Warming.” But I expect that it will be far from my last post related to global warming, so I ended up with a more specific subject.

The New York Times Science Section today reports on the retreat of sea ice. The link I’ve posted takes you to an interactive page with a sobering depiction of just how rapid and unprecedented the retreat has been. In 2006, for the first time since records began in 1979, Arctic sea ice coverage has shrunk so much that areas consistently iced over year-in year-out for those 28 years of measurement are now sea.

Thankfully, even though some myopic politicians and public figures still choose to ignore and even take steps to suppress or downplay the evidence of global warming, the balance of the collective consciousness seems to have tipped. We are now beginning to act. Everything these days, it seems, is a shade of green.

Ironically, and with curious appropriateness, the signs that we’ve reached a tipping point (even though maybe we’ve reached it too late) are showing themselves through the lens of consumerism. When I ride the subway in New York City, I see ConEdison ads focused on energy-saving (for an energy company to be agree or be forced into this position is wonderfully telling). And today Walmart stores, following through on a strategy committed to earlier in the years, touts the sale of 100 million energy efficient light bulbs.

Here are a couple of statistics to round out the picture: The energy contained in the sunlight that falls on the earth in one day equals the energy consumed by human beings in one year. And the energy consumed by the US is half the total energy consumed by human beings in one year.

To borrow a phrase from that esteemed philosopher Donald Rumsfeld: “It’s the things that we don’t know that we don’t know that most concern us.”

With the advent of the industrial revolution and in the decades that followed, the effects of fossil fuel consumption seemed local rather than global. We knew that burning wood and coal and oil produced smoke and smog and dirt, and consumed limited natural resources, but very little attention was paid to whether there would be long lasting adverse consequences, such as global warming. Those who tried to stem the tide of modernization or industrialization were simply swept away.

Human beings are natural innovators. Our ability to manipulate concepts means that we have the ability to reframe problems and challenges. But that skill is usually aimed at removing the immediate obstacle, without giving too much attention to future problems or challenges. We are not so far removed from the unindustrialized man felling a tree to cross a stream — the immediate goal is to cross the stream.

And, unfortunately, since society doesn’t do so well with applying reasoned analysis, even when there is hard scientific evidence that tells us we’re on a dangerous path, we tend to ignore it if we can’t see the signs for ourselves. If parts of the United States were underwater now, you can bet we would have paid attention to global warming much sooner.

The same conceptual problems exist with the use of nuclear energy. There really is no good solution to rid us of radioactive waste. What kinds of problems are we creating for ourselves there? And even looking beyond the immediate problems of global warming, how will we sustain the worlds energy needs without turning away from the use of fossil fuels?

If society is to act more rationally, it needs to create systems whereby planning and forethought can become part of our governing process, and separated from ideology and politics. Logically, it makes no sense that a political administration appointed for a term of four years should be determining policy that affects our future ten fifty or one hundred years from now. Such policy should logically be determined differently, with the much more significant involvement of the scientific community.

 

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The bra, apparently, turns 100 years old today. Apart from a few dicey years when the poor things were getting burned left and right, the bra has enjoyed a pretty robust first century. That most women now wear a bra on a day-to-day basis seems unremarkable; but that easy conclusion struck me differently when I saw the news today of its relative youthfulness as a piece of clothing. It caused me to wonder about the philosophy of our societal relationship with the bra.

I’ve been told that women wear bras for two reasons: To present their breasts in a way that enhances or optimizes their appearance, and to support their breasts so that they will not sag as much or as early in later life.

Like so many of our practices in a society, wearing bras modifies our concept of what is normal or natural by revising or reassociating our concept of what is normal or natural.

The process is something like this: People draw an association between perky breasts and youthfulness and beauty. This is a reflection of an innate conceptual process that has evolved over the development of the species: sexual desirability during the period of prime fertility. Some person devises a mechanism (the bra) to enhance, both short term and long term, the perkiness and shapeliness of a woman’s breasts. Society extends the innate concept of perky breasts being associated with desirability during peak fertility. Now perky breasts become associated with desirability, regardless of peak fertility. We have coopted the innate concept and transformed it into an explicit abstract concept.

Does this kind of transformation serve society or the species?

That’s a much more difficult philosophical question to answer. One could say that it serves neither society nor the species because the conceptual link we’ve to some extent manufactured or extended between perkiness of breast and sexual desirability clouds and inhibits the functioning of the innate concept. Crudely put, it messes with the hardwiring of sexual desirability with fertility.

I don’t want to pick on the bra. It’s the same with so many other aspects of society and in so many areas. Us men shave our beards, clip our nose hair, or wear toupes. Men and women dye their hair. We often engage in physical exercise to enhance our physical appearance. The list is practically endless.

What’s interesting is that consciousness, almost like a disease, creates a rampant, chaotic and overwhelming system of concepts that control our lives and our responses to a degree that often shrouds or obliviates our innante reactions and responses.

As an adaptive mechanism, consciousness has certainly been an enormously powerful mental function; one that has permitted humans to further the ends of the human species with incredibly effective results. We live in naturally inhospitable areas in comfort. We have removed innumerable threats from natural predators, sickness and disease. We have systems for harnessing natural resources. We organize our societies in ways that permit the vast majority to benefit from the highly specialized work of the few, each of us contributing work in our specialty.

But all of this produces layer upon layer of insulation from the innate and non-conscious operation of the species. It also allows us to wreak harm and havoc without fully understanding or while ignoring the consequences (deforestation, global warming, warfare).

In contrast, the bra perhaps seems like a relatively harmless affectation of modern society, and one which many of us, on balance, would choose to continue to live with, notwithstanding its unnatural function.

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