Good
morning.
Sometimes among the dreck there are
a few gems. I ran across one Internet
meme that I liked, the 5 x 5 rule: "If
it's not gonna matter in 5 years, don't spend more than 5 minutes upset by it." I'm not sure about using five years as the standard because there can
be short-term concerns that are worth being upset about, but the general advice
seems to me to be worthwhile. I need to
remember this at night in particular, those times when my brain will not let go
of what is invariably a trivial matter that shouldn't bother me at all, much
less that it will matter in five years, but that will not let me sleep.
* * *
It isn't
possible to speak apodictically about evil, but one can muse about it. My comments on the Lord's Prayer provoked a
brief exchange with a minister friend of mine (for whom I have enormous
respect) about the distinction between "lead us not into . . . " and "let
us not fall into . . . " and about the nature of evil.
My friend the minister observes that
we monotheists do
not do well with the concept of evil, and God's role in evil in our
existence. The Hebrew Bible is really
clear about Satan--even being one of God's advisors--and the book of Job really
takes this head on. Modern Jews have
adopted Rabbi Kushner's thought that Bad things Happen, and the God walks with
us as we live/transform/survive the losses. As Christians we have gotten to the
observation you have made, that a loving God wouldn't create that. . . . BUT it exists. . . . By and large, Evil is a community
characteristic, and sin is personal.
I wrote back that I was intrigued by
the comment that evil is community while sin is personal. It's individuals who commit evil acts; a
community may make them easier or more difficult to commit, but it's one or
more individuals who commit the acts.
She explained that "as a group we dislike evil--it is a mystical
entity, yet also a high-drama resource for Hollywood. As long as it is part of the 'out there' for
us each personally, it can be real . . . which is what makes it a
community-level characteristic. Second,
sin is what we each do when we 'fall out of relationship with the sacred',
whether that is Christian or the Brahma sutras, or whomever our own
spirituality defines that to be . . . and yes, thus a personal issue. . . ." She agreed, however, that "there are
people who do evil things and may even be described as 'evil'. We know them from our front pages and
penitentiaries."
Wikipedia
says there are roughly four positions when it comes to evil:
1. Moral absolutism holds that good and evil are
fixed concepts established by a deity or deities, nature, morality, common
sense, or some other source.
2. Amoralism claims that good and evil are
meaningless, that there is no moral ingredient in nature.
3. Moral relativism holds that standards of good
and evil are only products of local culture, custom, or prejudice.
4. Moral universalism is the attempt to find a
compromise between the absolutist sense of morality, and the relativist view;
universalism claims that morality is only flexible to a degree, and that what
is truly good or evil can be determined by examining what is commonly
considered to be evil amongst all humans.
I'm somewhat in camp #2, but with
enough disquiet that I'm also in #4. One
can argue that "evil" is a theological or philosophical term, as is "sin." Nature indeed does not have a moral element ("red
in tooth and claw"). It is not evil
when the lions kill their prey, it was not evil when the meteor smashed into
the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, it is not evil when a volcano erupts (or
a storm hits) and hundreds or thousands of people (and animals) are killed
(except insofar as inept, incompetent, or intentional human actions put the
people and animals in harm's way).
With respect to humans, actions can
have results I would describe as "good": promoting individual, societal, and planetary
well-being and happiness. "Bad"
actions are those which produce the opposite result. Of course there are many shades of gray
between absolute good and bad, and I'm not even sure there is an absolute in
either case.
All of us can, if we stop to think
about it, trace a causal chain of events that led up to whatever we just
did. I put ice cubes in the water
because I don't like drinking scotch and water at room temperature; I go to the
refrigerator because that's where the ice is; I am drinking the scotch and
water because that is something I do with Kathy on some days; I drink scotch
and water because I developed a taste for it decades ago; etc. You can follow the same chain of events for
someone who does "bad" things:
commits a murder (it does not promote individual well-being) or rapes
someone or steals a car. Or leads a
nation into genocide (see, e.g., Hitler):
circumstances of the country and world at the time, the history of Germany,
combined with his background and oratorical skills, led to his rise. To use the term evil in all of these
contexts, in my view, is unhelpful.
On the other hand, this line of
thinking does make me uneasy. Ron
Rosenbaum, who wrote Explaining Hitler,
talked with Alan Bullock, the first Hitler biographer (A Study in Tyranny, 1952), who exclaimed to Rosenbaum about Hitler,
"If he isn't evil, then who is? . . .
If he isn't evil the word has no meaning." I'm reluctant to refrain from characterizing
Hitler as evil. There are other figures
in history about whom I'd also use the term.
If bad actions are those that reduce
individual, societal, and planetary well-being and happiness, and if I set
aside qualms about determinism, then I can talk myself into arguing that bad
actions at the further end of the spectrum are "evil." I cannot draw a line; like Justice Stewart
and pornography, I know it when I see it even if I can't define it. One discrimination I can ponder is that an
individual action—murder, rape, theft—may not rise to the level of evil,
especially when it's possible to trace a probable causal chain of events that
led to the act. A conscious political
act, or pursuit of acts, that will lead to widespread death or poverty (thus
premature death in many cases) or debasement of human life would meet my
definition of evil. (Following that line
of reasoning, I can conclude that libertarian and many GOP political positions
on economic matters, because of the consequences that would ensue if they were
adopted, are evil. Opposition to
addressing the threat of climate change would fall in the same category.)
A topic that requires more thought
than one brief post.
* * *
Relatedly, sort of.
There are physicists who maintain
that a determinist view of the world—hard or soft—is untenable in light of
quantum physics, where matter is not matter and nothing can be measured without
affecting its state. It's not clear to
me why that uncertainty about the subatomic level has anything to do with the
atomic level at which we live. It may be
impossible to measure an electron and it is true that all matter is largely
space between the components of the atoms, but nonetheless the atoms behave in
predictable ways. If you combine two
atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, you will get a molecule of water. Chemistry works because it's predictable. So the monkey wrench the physicists want to
throw into the machinery of life doesn't seem to me to be very heavy (or
persuasive).
Maybe the physical scientists who
read this will tell me I'm full of baloney.
* * *
A question posed in human society for a long
time, and one that bears directly on my diatribe against libertarian economic
policy, is this one: "If you're
so smart, why aren't you rich?"
Some very clever people at the University of Catania in Italy have
provided an answer through research that seems well done—and that strikes me on
its face as logical and likely. You may
have seen reports about this research; their answer is "it's just plain
luck."
In
general, the distribution of wealth follows what is known as a power law: 20% of the people have 80% of the wealth. (It may be that fewer than 20% have that
much; I haven't seen the exact numbers.)
That power rule is true for many social phenomenon (80% of medical costs
are from 20% of the patients, etc.). In
many or most cases, the 80/20 rule doesn't cause much controversy, but when it
comes to the distribution of wealth, it does.
One reason is the dissimilarity in the distribution of wealth and
talent.
The
conventional answer [explaining the unequal distribution of wealth] is that we
live in a meritocracy in which people are rewarded for their talent,
intelligence, effort, and so on. Over
time, many people think, this translates into the wealth distribution that we
observe, although a healthy dose of luck can play a role.
But
there is a problem with this idea: while
wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills
generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average
value. For example, intelligence, as
measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of
1,000 or 10,000. The same is true of
effort, as measured by hours worked. Some
people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a
billion times more hours than anybody else.
[Similarly for height and weight:
none of us are as tall as a multi-story building nor as short as a soup
can.]
And yet
when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of
times more wealth than other people. What's
more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest people are generally not
the most talented by other measures.
So, the
folks at Catania asked, what determines how people become rich? They ran multiple simulations using a quite
sophisticated "computer model of human talent and the way people use it to
exploit opportunities in life."
They gave people various levels of talent and intelligence and other
human characteristics, as they are distributed in life. Plotting the working lifetimes of 40 years,
with random events (positive and negative) distributed in the lives, they
looked at what happened.
What they
found was that the 80/20 rule held, but the 20% who held 80% of the wealth were
not the most talented "(although they must have a certain level of
talent). They are the luckiest." They have to have some talent, in order to
take advantage of events to grow wealthier, but it isn't the smartest that rose
to the top in terms of wealth. Conversely,
those near the bottom of the wealth scale were also the unluckiest.
As far as
I'm concerned, this finding puts paid the idea that you can always work your
way out of poverty. Sure you can, if you
have a little luck. This research alone
suggests the importance of the social safety net: there are plenty of people who are in the economic
predicament they are through no fault of their own. Also conversely, there are plenty of people
who are far better off than their merits suggest they would be without being
lucky.
Luck
starts with choosing one's parents wisely.
Krystin and Elliott, from an
economic standpoint, were not lucky when they had Pat and me as parents
rather than Bill and Melinda Gates. (That
statement is not a comment on whether or not the Gates are good parents; I have
no idea.)
The
Catania researchers ran a simulation (albeit what appears to be a pretty good
one). The next step is to do some
real-life measuring. I wonder how many
of the top 1% would consent to an in-depth analysis of how they came to have
their wealth. I'm pretty sure quite a
few in the bottom 10-20% would agree to participate in the study.
* * *
And then there is willpower (which can
presumably get you from being poor to being rich and powerful).
There was an
interesting article by an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at
Columbia University, Carl Eric Fisher, who works in law, ethics, and psychiatry,
who essentially trashes the entire concept of "willpower." It was a long article; the gist of it is that
"willpower" is a leftover from early Christianity (willpower was a
way to reconcile sin with divine omnipotence) and Victorian England. The idea of "self control" or
delayed gratification permeates western culture, as does the idea that there's
a limit to how much self control one has (that is, you can use it up, run out
of it, and then you have problems). He
points out that while the idea that self control is in limited supply in any
one human, one supported by years of research in psychology, more careful
recent research has largely consigned the proposition to the garbage heap.
One implication of the
idea of "willpower" or self control is that if you don't exercise it,
you deserve to be poor, or a drunk, or whatever, and are worthy of
contempt. The concept has moralistic
overtones with a vengeance. Over the
course of the 20th Century, Freud recast self control or willpower as the
superego, then B. F. Skinner killed it with behaviorism, charging "that
there is no internally based freedom to control behavior." Some experimental research in psychology with
children who had delayed their own gratification led to revived interest in the
concept of self control, defined by the American Psychological Association as "the
ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals." As in the past, largely Christian perception,
it is "usually portrayed as a discrete, limited resource, one that can be
used up like a literal store of energy."
Once again, however, further careful review of the existing research
basically concluded that the idea of "self control" isn't defensible.
Professor Fisher
recounts the several lines of research into aspects of willpower over the last
20-30 years and concludes that the term has no good definition and little
meaning, so it should be discarded or "allowed to continue as an imprecise
term, standing in for an inconsistent hodgepodge of various mental functions." The concept "may simply be a
pre-scientific idea—one that was born from social attitudes and philosophical
speculation rather than research. . . .
The term has persisted into modern psychology because it has a strong
intuitive hold on our imagination:
Seeing willpower as a muscle-like force does seem to match up with some
limited examples, such as resisting cravings, and the analogy is reinforced by
social expectations stretching back to Victorian moralizing."
The effect of
the term, used so broadly, is "pernicious . . . distracting us from more
accurate ways of understanding human psychology and even detracting from our
efforts toward meaningful self-control."
The social policy implications of the concept are significant, he
argued.
Notions of willpower are easily stigmatizing: It becomes OK to dismantle social safety nets
if poverty is a problem of financial discipline, or if health is one of
personal discipline. An extreme example
is the punitive approach of our endless drug war, which dismisses substance use
problems as primarily the result of individual choices.
As someone largely a
determinist when it comes to human behavior (although, as I wrote, not happy
about that conclusion), dropping the idea of "will power" or "self
control" makes good sense. The more
logical explanation of destructive behavior is that genetics plus environment
led to it, and to assume someone can counteract those forces is not realistic
(nor supported by evidence).
* * *
A friend of mine, a
biologist who taught at the University for many years, wrote to me about sexual
harassment. I reproduce her message with
her permission.
I am
frustrated that there seems to be a serious blurring of the lines between
flirting, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. They are on such different scales and such
different intentions. We are biological
organisms with all the reproductive impulses that evolution has selected for. (Those with the strongest impulses had the
most offspring so the genes that code for those impulses are in the
majority.) And these are STRONG
impulses.
The purpose of
life is to reproduce. The attractions we may have for those around us, the
flirting that is a "testing of the waters" for reproductive activity—that
is an expected part of our biology. We
see it in all animals. And the teasing
and the joking has been accepted as part of our culture/society. The line that is stepped over is when the
recipient of the flirting/teasing/joking says "stop" and the behavior
continues or escalates.
(Sexual
assault is so far over the line it is in the next universe! But, unfortunately, there is a biological
basis for sexual assault as well. Back
to that damn reproductive success equation.)
I think we are
now seeing a "stop with the teasing/joking" coming from women . . . but I think it has be
a universal "stop" so the baiting with dress and behavior should also
stop. Maybe then we can focus on
appropriate behaviors in the workplace, on the street, everywhere.
My god, I
sound like a prude when I say that. . . .
Sex and gender, in all its rainbow colors and permutations, is an
amazing part of biology and we should celebrate and enjoy this great part of
being human (being animal, being alive).
With a very important commitment to honor and accept that each individual
gets to set their own personal limits.
Your statement
that you haven't seen sexual harassment at the U (although you know it is
there): I agree. I have not seen it either. However, I have seen people being
inconsiderate jerks but they have been equal opportunity inconsiderate jerks—being
horrible to both women and men. I know I
have been lucky to not have experienced sexual harassment but I do think it is
partly a function of the quality of men and women with whom I have had the
amazing luck to work.
For those in Minnesota
and Wisconsin, enjoy the snow! (Ugh.)
Gary
No comments:
Post a Comment