"Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil" by Paul Bloom

Young children are highly aggressive; indeed, if you measure the rate of physical violence through the life span, it peaks at about the age of two. Families survive the Terrible Twos because toddlers aren't strong enough to kill them with their hands and aren't capable of using lethal weapons. A two-year-old with the physical capacities of an adult would be terrifying.

Some parents aren't so lucky as to have a two-year-old who is incapable of using a lethal weapon. But freak accidents aside, this sentiment is worth reflecting on. Young children are, after all, merely doing whatever it occurs to them to do. Their brains have simply yet to develop the inhibitory capacities that characterize human adulthood. Unfortunately for new parents, the types of behaviour that occurs to toddlers isn't always pretty or nice. The good news is that they're too tiny to do any real damage, except for maybe the odd bite or two.

Admonishing a young child for lacking in impulse control is misguided. It's not that's toddlers haven't learned right from wrong yet, that will come with time. The problem is with self-regulation. The mental machinery to resist "bad" behaviour isn't there yet. Parents should keep this in mind when dealing with youngsters. We should be no more upset with a child for failing to resist an impulse to hit or bite than with a toddler who cannot do calculus.

Parents: Be patient. Understand that part of normal brain development involves a greater ability to regulate behaviour and to consider the consequences of actions. Allow time for kids to grow into their brains. Remind yourself that humans are "born of risen apes, not fallen angels." Be mindful that we are evolved creatures and much enlightenment will follow.

Also, get your kids vaccinated you goofballs.

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series

I don't often read novels, but when I do it's usually the ones that the movies I like are based on. I consume my fiction mainly through movies and television shows, and this applies perfectly to the Millennium series. I'm just not as into fiction books as these two:

Post by The Film Stage.

The original Swedish film adaptations found their way on my To Watch list in 2009, and I thought they were terrific. When it was announced that David Fincher would direct the English adaptation, I was rightly stoked. Fincher is easily one of my favourite directors. It wasn't until after The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) was released that I finally picked up the novels. They've been sitting on my shelf ever since.

For whatever reason, I've chosen to start reading the series this week. I'm just about through with the first novel in the series, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The original Swedish title is Män som hatar kvinnor, which literally means "Men Who Hate Women." I think that's a way cooler title, but I guess it's a little less inviting than what it was ultimately changed to for the English market.

It's been a while since I've read any novels (the last was Cormac McCarthy's Child of God a few months ago), so I guess the time was right to take a break from my steady diet of non-fiction. Other novel-reading-after-movie selections include David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let The Right One In, and Christopher Priest's The Prestige. I got the jump on Paul Thomas Anderson's upcoming film adaption of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice and read that one a year or so ago. 

Off the top of my head, one of the only non-film-adapted novels I've read somewhat recently is The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. It's a great little novel, and last I checked it was optioned by John C. Reilly for the film adaptation. There's also Pynchon's Bleeding Edge and Lindqvist's Handling The Undead. And there was Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I read long before there was even news of a screen adaptation. (See also: The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories.) I've been following the non-existent progress on that one for years until it was finally produced as a television series which is set to air next year. I'm super excited about that one.

There aren't many other novels on my radar, except for maybe David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks. Non-fiction is really my thing these days, and has been ever since I devoured so much Michael Crichton and Stephen King in my early teen years. Tolkien came a little later. But dang if I ain't lucky I grew up in the days before Harry Potter and all these other "YA" blockbuster series. Yeesh. I will never understand why adults read YA stuff, either. They should be embarrassed. But I suppose it's better than reading nothing at all...

Thinking about "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

After briefly outlining the trajectory of his research with Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman drops this little nugget in the introduction to Thinking, Fast and Slow:

By and large, ...the idea that our minds are susceptible to systematic errors is now generally accepted.

The irony is that few minds ever confront themselves in the critical ways necessary to fully come to terms with this. Most of us are simply unaware of the kinds of cognitive biases and unconscious processes that shape how and what we think. What is doubly ironic is that we are overly confident in our beliefs, impressions, and preferences for no good reason. We seldom ask ourselves why we think what we do. Nor do we often consider the possibility that the conclusions we reach may be wrong and/or based on unfounded assumptions or unreliable information:

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little. We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgement is missing—what we see is all there is.

I can assert without hyperbole that the world would be a much better place if more people seriously contemplated how our thought processes are riddled with systematic errors, or that the idea of the self (that there is a coherent and essential "I" in all of us that is the conscious author of our thoughts) is an illusion. The notion that humans are fundamentally free and rational agents has been dramatically undermined by the findings of cognitive psychology. As a result, economics has undergone somewhat of a revolution in light of our new understand of human behaviour. Now, behavioural economics is all the rage!

On a more personal level, accepting that our brains come loaded with biases can lead to better and more productive relationships and interactions. One of the main reasons I seek to learn about all the ways our intuitive reasoning fails us is so that I may be better equipped when I tell someone they are wrong on the internet. I readily admit that sometimes I just cannot help myself... (Wait, who is the "I" and "myself" in this sentence? Why should they be at odds and struggling for control? Just who is in charge here, anyway?)

So after seeing many references to Kahneman's work in other books, and seeing him in an episode of BBC Horizon called "How You Really Make Decisions", I finally picked up a copy of Thinking, Fast and Slow a few weeks ago at a used book store (hardcover in great condition). Better late than never, I guess.

And if this isn't a nearly perfect description of what it's like to be a "confident idiot" in a complex world, then I don't know what is:

A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped. True, you occasionally face a question such as 17 x 24 = ? to which no answer comes immediately to mind, but these dumbfounded moments are rare. The normal state of your mind that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain or defend.

"The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History" by Elizabeth Kolbert

"Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that's been increasing by as much as six percent annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today—a little over four hundred parts per million—is higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years. If current trends continue, CO₂ concentrations will top five hundred parts per million, roughly double the levels they were in preindustrial days, by 2050. It is expected that such an increase will produce an eventual average global temperature rise of between three and a half and seven degree Fahrenheit, and this will, in turn, trigger a variety of world-altering events, including the disappearance of most remaining glaciers, the inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap. But this is only half the story."

- The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Quoted, at length, for truth. What else is there to say? We done goofed.

How Did It Come To This?: "Inferno" by Robert A. Ferguson

"Inmates have been judged to have brought whatever discomfort they suffer on themselves, and there is little desire to measure that discomfort. Hundreds will gather for candlelight services at the location of an execution. Yet few blink an eye over a sentence of life without parole. ...

"By keeping those in prison securely hidden from public view and by making sure that the criminals who perform serious crimes never reappear, society confirms that it does not want to think about whatever suffering takes place behind jailhouse walls even if it knows that humiliation, discomfort, crime, and physical abuse are prevalent there. Confusions in the relation of pain to punishment are masked by an indifference that controls communal attitudes toward the huge population in American prisons."
- Robert. A Ferguson, Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky [h/t "Con-Air" (1997)]

As I've become more interested in the How and Why of human violence and its historical trends, it was perhaps inevitable that I would seek a deeper understanding of crime and its causes and the administration of criminal justice. How the human animal (an evolved creature like any other, subject to and shaped by the pressures of natural selection) seeks to live in a civil society of its own design is about as an important area for critical examination as it gets. Nothing modest here. What constitutes a crime and why? How and why do people come to commit criminal acts in the first place? How and why do we treat criminals in the way we do? These are significant questions that should concern everyone in society.

Connected to the process of justice is how the system and its outcomes are perceived and interpreted by people in general, especially those who have little to no contact with it. One need look no further than the comments section of a news article or blog post about crime and/or the people who commit criminal acts to be confronted with an overarching and disturbing aspect of what Justice means to many people: Punishment.

Some vocal commenters, protected (and perhaps embiggened) by the distance and anonymity provided by the internet forum, are quick to revel in the need for ever harsher punishments for those who perpetrate heinous acts. Even if the idea of proportionality is brought up, that is, how long sentences should be relative to the severity of the crime, precisely what "doing time" entails is apparently seldom fully considered.

It is difficult to grasp intellectually what it truly means to be sent away to prison for a given number of years. Being denied personal freedom is seen as the just punishment for those who abuse said freedom. However, this is only part of the story. Consider the horrors prisoners must endure on a daily basis at the hands of other inmates and some prison "guards". We know the stories about rape and the terror of violent gang regimes and hierarchies. They have so permeated popular culture that they have almost become trivial, even comical. This is both ironic and tragic.

And yet, some people still feel that prisoners "deserve" to be subjected to this kind of hellish environment. They are criminals, they say, why should we care what their lives are like in prison? They should get what's coming to them. An eye for an eye, just deserts, and all that. To me, this is tantamount to sadism. Retribution is a slippery slope that makes us indifferent to or even suspect of the plight of prisoners, which invariably leads to a kind of punishment creep. They are still people after all. Even attempting to discuss the nightmare prison situation is to invite accusations of "siding" with the criminals over the victims. This is a false choice, and a lazy rhetorical tool. It is a serious impediment to peeling back the curtain on the current state of our punishment regime. We don't want to see how the sausage is being made, let alone consider that we may need to change the recipe.

A cursory examination of human nature reveals a tendency to take pleasure in inflicting punishment. This should give us pause. How could it be just for a person who possessed too much of the wrong kind of substance to be sent to a place where they are terrorized by rape, violence, and other shocking forms of abuse? Not to mention that prisons as they currently exists are effectively recidivism factories...

This is why when I stumbled upon Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment by Robert A. Ferguson on one of my daily internet wanderings, I knew it would be the book for me. I'm not even two chapters in and it is already evident that this book is dazzling in its scope with respect to legal theory, literature, history, and philosophy. As I read it, I feel as though I'm being let in on a secret. It's like I'm being presented with answers to the questions I only vaguely knew I had. But this is a retrospective conceit. Of course smart people have already been wondering and writing eruditely about these things! And this is exactly the book I've been waiting for.

Obviously, I would recommend this book to anyone involved with or interested in the criminal justice system. But since we all naturally feel as though we have an innate sense of justice and have an impulse to inflict punishment upon those who have done wrong, Inferno should be required reading for everyone. People are tried, sentenced, and punished on all of our behalf, so shouldn't we take an active and critical interest in how and why the system works the way it does?

Philosophy, What Is It Good For?: "Plato At The Googleplex" by Rebecca Goldstein

Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don't see it, because we see with it.

Plato At The Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away by Rebecca Goldstein

I can scarcely summon the superlatives to sufficiently communicate the joy that is reading this book. So I won't embarrass myself trying. Just pick up a copy and read the dang thing. SPOILER ALERT: If you mouse over the image in this post, you'll get a nice surprise about the jacket and cover design (which I thought was a really nice touch)...

I've included the quote above because it addresses the kind of "philosophy-jeering" (as Goldstein phrases it) that has become a meme among some prominent scientists. Broadly speaking, there is a popular notion that modern physics has left philosophy in its explanatory wake, accusing philosophers of lounging about in seminar rooms asking each other the same questions over and over again while never making any real progress. In effect, philosophy has been rendered obsolete by the awesome power of Physics. Goldstein devotes some time to refuting this, and offers her apology (in the true Platonic sense of the word) in defense of the contributions philosophy has made (and, more importantly, continues to make) in the realms of scientific inquiry, morality, and meaning.

I'm as big a fan of folks like Lawrence Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson as anyone, though I am dismayed when I read about their dismissive attitudes towards the value of philosophy. That's kind of a bummer, but I still think they're cool. In this interview, Goldstein briefly outlines why we still need philosophy:

What—if anything— are our lives about? Even if they’re not really about anything—goodbye to the old monotheistic usurpation of this question—can we find answers that will allow us to maximize our own flourishing and—of equal if not greater importance—reasons to care about the flourishing of others? (Caring about ourselves comes kind of naturally to us.) Philosophy has been addressing such questions and making significant, if invisible, progress with them almost ever since there’s been philosophy.

 I couldn't agree more.

What—if anything— are our lives about?  Even if they’re not really about anything—goodbye to the old monotheistic usurpation of this question—can we find answers that will allow us to maximize our own flourishing and—of equal if not greater importance—reasons to care about the flourishing of others?  (Caring about ourselves comes kind of naturally to us.) Philosophy has been addressing such questions and making significant, if invisible, progress with them almost ever since there’s been philosophy. - See more at: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2014/interview-with-rebecca-goldstein-on-plato-at-the-googleplex-philosophy-for-the-public-and-everything/#sthash.Tqx4dB6V.dpuf

What—if anything— are our lives about?  Even if they’re not really about anything—goodbye to the old monotheistic usurpation of this question—can we find answers that will allow us to maximize our own flourishing and—of equal if not greater importance—reasons to care about the flourishing of others?  (Caring about ourselves comes kind of naturally to us.) Philosophy has been addressing such questions and making significant, if invisible, progress with them almost ever since there’s been philosophy. - See more at: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2014/interview-with-rebecca-goldstein-on-plato-at-the-googleplex-philosophy-for-the-public-and-everything/#sthash.Tqx4dB6V.dpuf

What—if anything— are our lives about?  Even if they’re not really about anything—goodbye to the old monotheistic usurpation of this question—can we find answers that will allow us to maximize our own flourishing and—of equal if not greater importance—reasons to care about the flourishing of others?  (Caring about ourselves comes kind of naturally to us.) Philosophy has been addressing such questions and making significant, if invisible, progress with them almost ever since there’s been philosophy. - See more at: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2014/interview-with-rebecca-goldstein-on-plato-at-the-googleplex-philosophy-for-the-public-and-everything/#sthash.Tqx4dB6V.dpuf

What—if anything— are our lives about?  Even if they’re not really about anything—goodbye to the old monotheistic usurpation of this question—can we find answers that will allow us to maximize our own flourishing and—of equal if not greater importance—reasons to care about the flourishing of others?  (Caring about ourselves comes kind of naturally to us.) Philosophy has been addressing such questions and making significant, if invisible, progress with them almost ever since there’s been philosophy. - See more at: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2014/interview-with-rebecca-goldstein-on-plato-at-the-googleplex-philosophy-for-the-public-and-everything/#sthash.Tqx4dB6V.dpuf

"The Future Of The Mind" by Michio Kaku

This ain't your typical brain book. Writing from a physicist's perspective, Kaku focuses on the intersect between technology and neuroscience. From magnetic resonance imaging to electroencephalography, the study of the brain has undergone a revolution in recent decades as new tools have allowed scientists to probe the brain with increasing resolution and insight. Much of this technological advancement stems from our understanding of the physics of magnetic and electrical fields and applying them in novel ways to help answer the age old question of how the mind works.

But this is only the beginning of the story. When we look at the current state of art with respect to the study of the brain, a fascinating picture of the future starts to emerge. Fortunately, I possess just enough familiarity with Star Trek to get references to tricorders (cell phones with MRI capabilities) and the Borg (nanoprobe implants in the brain to enable telepathic communication). Scientists have already been able to read minds by creating a mental dictionary by matching up signals emanating from the brain when subjects focus on particular letters. This effectively allows someone to type using only the power of the mind. Needless to say, this is pretty wild. And we're just scratching the surface here...

Again taking a physicist's viewpoint, Kaku outlines a definition of consciousness that assigns "levels" which correspond to how an organism models the world according to a set of feedback loops and parameters. This is called the "space-time theory of consciousness" and it is certainly a handy way to think about the various ways in which animals are conscious. The "levels" in the theory roughly line up with stages in the evolution of the brain, from the reptilian, to the mammalian, to human. In increasing complexity, the brains of animals create models of the world in order to achieve their goals starting with simple sensory input about the environment (reptilian), then expanding their model to incorporate their relationship to others (mammalian), and ultimately including the parameter of time by evaluating the past to make predictions and plan for the future (human). Hence, the "space-time theory of consciousness".

Once thought impenetrable to scientific inquiry, the problem of consciousness is becoming less opaque by the day. With the recent news that scientists may have found the proverbial 'on/off' switch for consciousness, our lofty philosophical notions of the special place occupied by human awareness are slowly coming back down to earth. Granted, there's still a long way to go in fully comprehending how all the complexity of human mind emerges out of the traffic of the brain, but real progress is (encouragingly) being made. This is a good thing. I, for one, am perpetually enthralled and amazed by the capacity for the brain to know itself.

Currently Reading: "Ship Of Theseus" by V. M. Straka (?)

I happened upon this novel while perusing a stuffy used book store and purchased it on a whim. How can one resist such a neat old-timey cover? I had never heard of the author, nor did I bother to crack it open before deciding to buy it. Had I done so, I may have put it back on the shelf because it seems that at least two people (judging from the handwriting) have apparently been carrying on a conversation written in the margins of the book. Who does that!? And who would want to buy a book that's all marked up?

As it happens, this conversation has revealed a whole new dimension to the story beyond the novel itself. There is some dispute over the authorship of Ship Of Theseus that may or may not involve the translator F. X. Caldeira. The intrigue doesn't stop there, however, and I'm only just getting started. The mystery surrounding the amnesic character known (so far) only as "S." has certainly piqued my interest. There also seems to be some academic competition and skulduggery going on, which has yet to be fully revealed to this reader. It's all kind of 'meta' with a story taking form on top of a story, and the two are inextricably linked.

I have no idea where all of this is heading, and I will resist seeking out any answers online before I have finished examining the book and its extraneously inserted contents. Further down the Straka rabbit hole I go... 

Currently Reading: "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism" by Ha-Joon Chang

I need only spend a few short minutes on the interwebs before I find another interesting book to add to my To Read list. Some how, some time ago, I stumbled upon some article on some website expressing something about how some people have become skeptical of free market capitalism in the wake of the recent financial crisis for some reason. This article mentioned the book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. Predictably, I immediately opened up a new tab and went to Amazon to add the title to my wishlist. 

Continuing on the theme of economics, free market capitalism, and globalization, the time was right to pick up this book. So far, it has exceeded my expectations. Each myth-busting chapter is setup in such away that the assumptions and assertions of free market capitalists are succinctly (though not necessarily unfairly, in my opinion) presented, and then rather persuasively debunked using clear and engaging language and some real world examples.

The book deals with such neo-liberal ideological claims as:

• Running a company in the interest of increasing shareholder value incentivizes the company to perform well. (It doesn't, and it often results in short-term profit seeking measures that hurt a company's long term growth and lifespan.)
• Markets need to be free and they cannot be efficient and profitable where there is government interference. (There's no such thing as a 'free market', which is a primarily a political definition to begin with, and even the most liberal markets only appear that way because we take much of the 'ambient noise' of established rules for granted. This includes regulation surrounding environmental protection and child labour laws.)
• We live in a post-industrial age where manufacturing is relegated to less advanced economies such as China because there is simply less demand for manufactured goods in the West. (While jobs in manufacturing have certainly declined in places like the United States and Britain, this is mainly an artifact of greater productivity and the lower costs of manufacturing relative to the service industry, as well as outsourcing and other processes of de-industrialization.)

Perhaps my favourite example so far deals with the assumption that people are primarily motivated by self-interest and that social harmony and prosperity emerges from selfish individuals thinking only of themselves. These ideas are, at best, naive and misleading, and at worst they seek to bring out the worst in people. What motivates individuals is far more complex than objectivist Ayn Rand fanboys would care to admit, or even acknowledge. People do things for all sorts of other reasons than just money. We have a sense of duty to family, community, and country. We like to feel as though we contribute. We like to help and volunteer our time and resources. Of course, the most cynical of ideologues would say these 'reasons' ultimately boil down to self-seeking behaviour masquerading as some degree of altruism or selflessness.

Ha-Joon Chang goes on to explain how if people really were entirely self-seeking in their behaviour, the project that is human Civilization would simply grind to a halt. There would be so many cheaters out there that we'd spend all of our time trying to catch them and prevent ourselves from being cheated. Taking that old bumper sticker slogan from Adam Smith that "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest" to its next logical step would result in a world that is not only unworkable, but also downright disturbing. 

23 Things... is the perfect little book to serve as a potent antidote for those who have imbibed the poison kool-aid that is neo-liberal economic ideology. The ideas that became fashionable in the 1980s have produced legions of academic and political followers that continue to shape our economic lives. Books like Ha-Joon Chang's should help to break the fever, though it is often the case that well reasoned arguments based on evidence are scarcely effective in the face of obstinate ideology. In any case, I have another book to add to my wishlist: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by one Ha-Joon Chang.

It is also quickly becoming an inescapable fact that I will have to read Thomas Piketty's Capital In The Twenty-First Century.

Currently Reading: "The End Of The Free Market" by Ian Bremmer

Advocates of pure capitalism insist that the "invisible hand" must be allowed to work its magic - and that any effort by government to guide its actions can only burden markets and distort their natural operation. Others argue that [Adam Smith's] writings on morality and natural empathy suggest that Smith would reject much of the libertarian dogma justified in his name. In any case, pure capitalism has never existed in the real world, and only the most ideologically committed of economic anarchists believe that it should. Markets can't meet every human need, fear and greed ensure that markets will never work perfectly, and no market participant enjoys perfect information.

The End Of The Free Market by Ian Bremmer

Those last points about why pure capitalism will never be able to operate perfectly in the real world (i.e. a giant ball of dirt floating in space inhabited by psychotic apes) seems so obvious as to be scarcely worth singling out for emphasis. Ignoring seemingly basic facts about reality is typical of extreme economic ideologies, whether they be utopian visions of anarcho-capitalism or communism. But hey, a man can dream, right?

With The Collapse Of Globalism still fresh in my memory, Bremmer's book is helping me understand the mechanics and goals of the kind of state capitalism that is practiced by some nations, particularly China. After the financial crisis of 2008/2009, we saw the rise of state intervention into the more 'free' economies of the West. This prompted some who were skeptical of global free markets to further question the ability of laissez-faire capitalism to provide sustainable growth, while bolstering their own position that the state should play a role in guiding economies to meet certain public and political goals.

I likes me some Ian Bremmer, and his G-Zero book greatly influenced how I've come to view international politics and the power of nation states to act and lead on the global stage. The End Of The Free Market is proving to be an equally enjoyable and informative read.

Currently Reading: "The Collapse Of Globalism" by John Ralston Saul

Global economics came to be presented as a tool to weaken government, discourage taxes both on corporations and on the top bracket of earners, force deregulation and, curiously enough, to strengthen private sector technocracies in large corporations to the disadvantage of real capitalists and entrepreneurs. That predilection for the large over the small meant that the Globalization movement would actively and quite naturally favour the limitation of real competition.

The Collapse Of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, by John Ralston Saul

So I purchased this book probably seven or eight years ago and it has been sitting on my shelf unread ever since. That is, until I picked it up last night (after finishing that new Zodiac book). Why did I buy it? I didn't know who John Ralston Saul was then, and I sure don't know who he is now. I think I just liked the title and cover, and it looked like something a smart person should probably read. 

In all honesty, I don't feel I'm quite smart enough to be reading this now, let alone when it was first released. But I'm getting the gist here and there, about how economists and governments bought into the ideology and promise of globalized free markets and that accepting economics as the dominate force in shaping Civilization became viewed as an inevitability. 

I'm right there with you, Saul.

Apparently this book was reissued in 2009 after the financial crises with a new epilogue. I have the hardcover first edition, so I get to read it for the first time in the context of a prediction that appears to have later been vindicated.

For the record, I also have an unread copy of John Ralston Saul's "A Fair Country" -- it, too, has a rather attractive cover:

Currently Reading: "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright

Change is not in our interest. Our only rational policy is not to risk provoking it. Yet we face abundant evidence that civilization itself, through fossil-fuel emissions and other disturbances, is upsetting the long calm in which it grew. Ice sheets at both poles are breaking up. Glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas are thawing; some have disappeared in only twenty-five years. Droughts and unusually hot weather have already caused world grain output to fall or stagnate for eight years in a row. During the same eight years, the number of mouths to feed went up by 600 million.

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright (2004)

Nice civilization you got there. Would be a shame if something were to happen to it.

See also:

Currently Reading - "Touching A Nerve" by Patricia Churchland

Nothing groundbreaking to report here so far. I'm already convinced that I am my brain, and that dualism is bunk, and that we do not survive our own death. There has been some discussion of the neuroevolution of morality and mammalian caring, which is interesting to examine at the level of hormones and their receptors in the brain (specifically, oxytocin and vasopressin).

I was interested in Churchland's book (which I became aware of through here interview on The Colbert Report) because the study of neurophilosophy sounds so dang sexy. In the latter half of the book (which I have yet to read), I'm hoping for a little more in the philosophy department with regard to the broader implications of 'neuroexistentialism'.

(Still) Currently Reading: "Demonic Males" by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson

Evolutionary feminists would remove our inhibitions about examining animal behavior as a technique for thinking about human behavior. They would insist that people can think about the evolutionary pressures that elicit rape, for example, or other forms of violence, without necessitating any absurd pronouncement that because rape is "natural" it is in any way forgivable. After all, no one considers the case of the black widow spider, who kills and eats her male counterpart after mating, to mean that murder and cannibalism are okay. Any behaviors can still be studied as biological phenomena, regardless of how unpleasant they are.

Despite the admirable intentions of those who believe that patriarchy is solely a cultural invention, there is too much contrary evidence. Patriarchy is worldwide and history-wide, and its origins are detectable in the social lives of chimpanzees. It serves the reproductive purposes of the men who maintain the system. Patriarchy comes from biology in the sense that it emerges from men's temperaments, out of their evolutionarily derived efforts to control women and at the same time have solidarity with fellow men in competition against outsiders. But evolutionary forces have surely shaped women, too, in minds as in bodies, in ways that both defy and contribute to the patriarchal system. If all women followed Lysistrata's injunctions and refused their husbands, they could indeed effect change. But they don't. Patriarchy has its ultimate origins in male violence, but it doesn't come from man alone, and it has its sources in the evolutionary interests of both sexes.

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson

So. Much. Win.  

Currently Reading: "Demonic Males" by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson

Very few animals live in patrilineal, male-bonded communities wherein females routinely reduce the risks of inbreeding by moving to neighbouring groups to mate. And only two animal species are known to do so with a system of intense, male-initiated territorial aggression, including lethal raiding into neighbouring communities in search of vulnerable enemies to attack and kill. Out of four thousand mammals and ten million or more other animal species, this suite of behaviours is known only among chimpanzees and humans.

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson

Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has a passing interest in anthropology and primates, and I am not quoting this as some kind of revelation here (this particular book was published in 1996, after all). I just feel the idea of our shared common ancestry with chimps bears endless repeating. Our closest living relatives engage in some of the same types of ugly behaviour that we do, such as organized warfare and procuring sex through violence (i.e. rape). However, the significance of this basic observation is either unknown to or ignored by some social theorists and Über-liberal blank slaters, who prefer to think that the evils of war and rape are human inventions that we may rid ourselves of if they weren't simultaneously being conjured up and glorified/legitimized/perpetuated by male culture. 

I'm mainly referring to the more radical elements of feminist theory here about how male violence is purely a social construct. Such a claim seems ludicrous on its face in light of the available evidence of our biological evolutionary heritage. Males especially are apparently predisposed toward violence. Of course, this requires that something resembling a 'human nature' exists in some form, an idea that is thoroughly rejected in some academic circles. 

The knee jerk reaction to claiming that violence is part of human nature is that this is somehow meant to be taken as an endorsement for it. While it may be that rape is a natural phenomenon (chimps do it, and I'm not sure any sane person could argue they are operating within the confines of some form of "rape culture"), it does not necessarily follow that this is behaviour is desirable. It is not an appeal to nature. It is merely an attempt to explain the world using available evidence. It sucks that dudes do bad things, but that doesn't give us license to make stuff up about why it happens.

This is not to say that culture cannot exacerbate or mitigate these nasty types of behaviour. I think this is quite clearly the case. It is just that culture is not solely responsible form them, as is sometimes claimed. To illustrate this point, anyone who asks a question such as "how do children learn to aggress?" has it all backwards. The real question should be "how do children learn not to aggress?" Setting our thoughts straight about the how and why of human violence (which almost always perpetrated by males) will allow us to be more effective when it comes to creating the kinds of social conditions we desire. We didn't invent bro culture recently, we evolved it long ago.

The evolution of violence as an adaptive strategy for achieving certain goals has far more explanatory power than social constructivist theory when it comes to why people behave badly in spite of having 'learned' not to. Culture can only go so far, and some individuals will always find a way to break our hearts. Admittedly, this is a rather tragic view of human nature, but it seems the most accurate one.

Currently Reading: "Columbine"

"The media version [of Columbine] was a gross caricature of how [the students] saw it, and of what they thought they had described.

"It made it difficult for social scientists or journalists to come to Littleton later, to study the community in-depth and see what was really going on. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle had played out in full force: by observing an entity, you alter it. ... Heisenberg was a quantum physicist, observing electron behavior. But social scientists began applying his principle to humans. It was remarkable how similarly we behaved. During the third week of April, Littleton was observed beyond all recognition."

From "Columbine" by Dave Cullen 

While this book somehow manages to be meticulous in its detail while remaining engaging and accessible, I am hesitant to consume large portions of it in single sessions. This is because one is required to take frequent breaks in order to digest what one has just read. The topic is obviously horrific, and yet it is as relevant as ever. The writing is disarming. I have yet to decide if this is good or bad.

I have little memory of how the events unfolded in the media as they happened. My understanding of the shooting took shape later with the Michael Moore documentary Bowling For Columbine. I don't recall when I first watched it but the documentary wasn't released until 2002, a little over three years after the tragedy. Moore dealt mainly with the culture surrounding guns in America and how ubiquitous and easy to acquire they are. But the doc also touched on how the shooters were represented by the media and how people tried to rationalize the horror we had just collectively witnessed.

Which brings me to the quote from the book. In the race to find answers (which presumes answers exist in the first place), the media inevitably taints their own reporting by repeating unverified reports and relying on "eyewitness accounts" of the tragedy. Unfortunately in this case, as Cullen aptly points out, "witness" is conflated with "student". Not every student saw what happened, and yet their stories are both sought after and widely reported with little consideration for how this may affect the stories we are all constantly writing and revising in our own minds. This creates a kind of feedback loop of obfuscation where "more information" actually brings us further away from the truth. Thus, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

Memories are notoriously unreliable and prone to confabulation, yet we all place an undue amount of trust in our ability to accurately recollect the past. The brain rushes in to fill the gaps and reduce dissonance. There may be no intent to deceive, but an inherently faulty memory can do real damage in situations like these. Things get jumbled up in the chaos, and responders have to make decisions in real time based on unreliable information. Investigators then in turn have to deal with rumours masquerading as truth, which impairs their ability to ultimately find it.

Then there is everyone else who is struggling to make sense of it all. They latch on to misrepresentations, conjecture, and any other tidbit of  information (reliable or otherwise) which will allow them to speculate in any number of ways. This is where confirmation bias creeps in, where we seek to reaffirm our preconceived ideas about video games, androgenous rock stars, Goths, gun culture, etc. Whatever fits. Stories are built up and people become entrenched. Narratives become nearly impervious to truth, and real work must be done to change the minds that have already been made up.

I'm just starting Part Three of the book, "The Downward Spiral" which details the individual characters responsible for the attack. Further down the rabbit hole I go...