Better Angels

Have the courage of your convictions: Dare to acknowledge the downside of your philosophy

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."

-- President Obama, addressing the nation

"If you can't tell me what's wrong with your candidate or ideology, sit on some other bar stool, bub."

-- Me, bloviating on the Internets

It has struck me lately that we all too often perceive a miraculous purity in how the universe works. That is, if everyone just followed your beliefs related to politics and economics and morality, there would be no trade offs. Your beliefs result in both moral superiority and practical benefit. There would be no trade offs, say, to pick something randomly, between safety and ideals.

Well, poppycock.

If you want to live in a fantasy world in your head, fine. If you want to live in the same world as the rest of us, then there is no meaning to your ideology if you do not have to accept and acknowledge the bad that comes with the good.

Do you, like me, find the idea of the U.S. engaging in torture extremely distasteful at minimum and possibly completely unacceptable at maximum? If so, you don't get to also claim "torture doesn't work anyway". Maybe it doesn't, but it doesn't matter. If you actually believe torture is wrong in all cases (I won't go that far, but I go pretty far), then your belief is only meaningful and moral if you are willing to clearly and publicly say that you don't think we should torture even if it would help prevent terrorist attacks. If you can't say both, then you are pretending the world works exactly the way you want in all cases, not however it happens to play out in reality.

Do you believe we shouldn't profile people in airports and wire tap domestic conversations because it's an erosion of liberty? Great, but you don't get to base your argument on the idea that "it doesn't do any good anyway" and (as I've heard from colleagues) "there wouldn't have been any more terrorist attacks if we hadn't taken military action and hadn't passed the Patriot act" -- you have to stand up and say, "We should not wire tap domestic calls even if it means we suffer more deaths in this country as a result." I happen to think there are few restrictions on liberty we should accept in response to terrorism...and I think we should accept that in fact more of us will be killed as a result. But the principle of liberty is worth it.

Is it worth it to you? If not, then examine yourself and realize if you can't accept the possible consequences of your beliefs without magically wishing them away then you may not actually believe in what you think you do.

Are We Killing Ourselves To Death? A Brief History of Historical and Modern Violence as discussed by Steven Pinker

"I can't really remember when I last had any hope. And I certainly can't remember when anyone else did, either."

-- Theo Faron, protagonist of Children of Men (P.D. James)

It is a time of war and rumors of war. The 20th century was the deadliest in human history, as we converted our supposedly wonderful technology into machines of murder and slaughtered each other on a scale never before known in history. It is an era of shame. The masses of humanity call out for us to return to a simpler time where perhaps we didn't have television and computers, but at least we lived with simple peace and common humanity and brotherhood.

We are killing ourselves to death.

So it seems. So goes the zeitgeist many of us grew up with. A gnawing sense of just how evil modern society is, and how corrupted we are for being a part of it. We've become a ruthless world, barely worth living in, as perhaps best expressed in the brilliant book-turned-movie Children of Men:

This is the way we feel. This is the way we want to feel, and perhaps the way we are programmed to feel. There is a visceral pleasure in saying, "I won't bring a child into this awful world."

This may be the reality we create in our minds and our media and our fiction, but it is largely a reality of our own construction, not reflective of what is actually happening out there, especially in relation to any time in the past. In reality, so many things in the world are better than ever before for more people than ever before. It's an encouraging and, really, irrefutable message, but one that, oddly, we tend not to want to hear, and to outright reject. Yet we need to understand what is actually getting better if we are to improve those things still wrong with the world.

I've covered some of this in talking about the question of how to handle global warming. Over time I'll delve into other factors that fall into this. Today, watching a video of a talk by Steven Pinker from a few years ago, I was struck by a chart he showed which I'll get to in a bit. First, here is his overall shocking, and perhaps unacceptable, thesis:

"Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth."

-- Steven Pinker, "A History of Violence"

An insane and irresponsible statement, clearly, particularly in a time of the Iraq war and genocides like Rwanda and Darfur, and a few decades after the holocaust and the horrors of starvation in Stalin's Soviet Union. Or is it? Here is Pinker discussing the subject in a 2007 talk at TED:

To give context for the idea that violence has decreased significantly and for his assertion that primitive societies do not hold some moral high ground when it comes to man's treatment of man, Pinker created this chart based on data gathered by Lawrence Keeley, author of War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage:

The chart shows the percentage of males killed by violence in various societies around the world. This is just a partial picture and can't be trusted on its own to represent the state of the world; yet what I found striking is that the statistic for the U.S. and Europe combined includes the first and second world wars.

Consider the implications of that. As Pinker says, if men in the U.S. and Europe were killing each other at the rate seen in non-state societies, instead of 100 million people killed in recent history, we'd have something approaching two billion.

So much for the noble savage, and the peaceful harmony of a simpler time.

Perhaps technological and other forms of human progress having something going for them after all.

In his article for the New Republic, Pinker provides further detail:

Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution--all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage--the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions--pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood"). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.

...The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.

...Several historians have suggested that there has been an increase in the number of recorded wars across the centuries to the present, but, as political scientist James Payne has noted, this may show only that "the Associated Press is a more comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than were sixteenth-century monks."

...The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply--for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.

On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.

Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.

These are shocking, heartening statements and statistics. They do not deny flaws in the world or in humans, but they show that not only are we capable of making things better, we have done a remarkable job of making things better. I recommend reading the entire article for more interesting insights and a discussion of why people find these statements hard to believe.

And many do want to reject any story of good news and the improving state of mankind both because they don't believe it and because believing it might lead to complacency and a passive acceptance of man's cruelty to man.

But we cannot progress by ignoring reality. We cannot choose smartly where to apply our resources by ignoring the data.

The world has gotten better, and we can make it better still. But only if we open our eyes to reality, even the reality of good news.

Social Psychology's sacred cows: Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgrim

As a tangential point in a previous post, I mentioned some surprise at encountering, for the first time I can recall, skepticism and critical thinking about the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Well, it happened again! While listening to a Point of Inquiry podcast interviewing Barbara Oakley, author of Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend, not only did the guest express similar concerns about the Stanford experiment, she went further and gored a sacred cow I'd also always taken at fact value, the Milgram Experiment, the unforgettable one where people are induced to "shock" someone to death by an authority figure.

I love having my preconceived notions challenged, and am definitely thinking more about both of these experiments these days. Just because they are being challenged doesn't mean their results are false, but these experiments both raised very important questions and their outcomes influence policy and legal decisions. If it's possible they were poorly done experiments with flawed conclusions, then it behooves us to re-examine them when reasonable questions are raised.

Listen to the whole thing!

Two guns and three circumstances

We all like to pretend that emotion is not part of our political beliefs, and that we (but not the other guy!) are driven by nothing but the cold hard facts. In recent years, the concept has arisen that emotion is not only a big part of our decision-making process whether we like it or not, but that emotion is a necessary part of our decision-making process. I think of this as the "Spock Was Wrong" hypothesis. And that would be the title of my future bestselling book on the subject, if Antonio Damasio hadn't beaten me to the subject:

Damasio's name for the hypothesis also lacks any mention of Spock; he chooses to call it the "somatic markers hypothesis". I think it's clear science would have been better off if I had come up with and named this whole thing.

Probably the most famous finding of all this is that a person who has their emotions completely removed from the decision-making process, thanks to brain injury, becomes incapable of making a decision. They dither endlessly, unable to weigh the costs and benefits of the various options.

This all leads to very interesting questions of the nature of self and how we experience the world, and how the body and brain are inescapably intertwined such that the Futurama-style "brain in a jar" thing doesn't work out so well in reality.

But that's not what this post is about. This post is about guns.

There's something funny about guns. The topic brings out strange qualities in people. Emotional qualities. It seems very difficult for anyone to discuss guns without a strong emotional undercurrent.

So this post isn't exactly about guns. It's about the emotional underpinnings of my reaction to guns.

I've had three defining gun-related instances in my life.

#1: In which I could have been killed by my father's gun.

My father took me deer hunting once. I must have been twelve or older. This was an unusual occurrence because my father was not a hunter, knew nothing about guns, and wouldn't have known what do do with a deer if we managed to bag one. But, in the same way he pretended to want to watch football while actually falling asleep on the couch (but awake enough to yell at us each time we tried to change the channel), going hunting was some kind of way to engage his manly side in the socially acceptable manner.

On this trip he had a rifle. I don't know where he got it, or whether it was a particularly powerful rifle. That didn't matter, though, because the chance we were going to locate, shoot, and drag back a deer was exceedingly remote. It was an excuse to trudge through the forest, drop into sudden silence because maybe there was a deer over there, and use improvised hand signals. When we got tired of this, we headed back to the car, and it was time to unload the gun.

I was sitting in the passenger side seat waiting for my father to get the gun unloaded. He was having trouble getting the cartridge out. He manipulated the rifle bolt, moving it back and forth, trying to work the bullet loose. He was standing outside the driver-side door with the rifle pointing in, at me. I watched the barrel move around, rotating in an unsteady circle that had it pointing at my legs, then my chest, and my twelve or so year old mind envisioned the trajectory of the bullet in those moments and wondered if this was such a good idea. But I said nothing, because he was my father and must know what he was doing, and because, of course, things like that only happen to other people.

Then my father jammed the rifle bolt and the gun went off. The bullet trajectory at that instant turned out to be a couple of inches past the seat I was leaning against, and the bullet went through the floor of the car, behind me.

I couldn't hear. A great ringing sound filled my universe. My body, without bothering to check in with my brain, opened the car door and jumped out, hands over ears, jumping up and down. Every particle of me knew that I had just escaped death by centimeters. People from nearby rushed over to see if I was okay. I couldn't hear them. There was just ringing. I said something, but I couldn't hear myself.

The ringing and the adrenaline rush went away and things returned to normal. I don't recall if my father and I said anything to each other at the time. We certainly never talked about the incident later, and from my perspective I never particularly blamed him and I went on to forget about the whole thing.

Except, 25 or more years later, I found I haven't forgotten. This incident pops up in my mind here and there, triggered by something I'm watching, or if I happen to think of my father. There is something there. I think I've come to realize I never forgave my father for the carelessness that allowed him to almost shoot me.

#2: In which I could have killed someone with my father's gun.

A few years after the almost-shooting, my father decided to buy a hand-gun, I guess for household defense. The day he bought it I wasn't around, and he took my younger sister to a firing range where they both tried out the gun. I was jealous of this, as it sounded fun, and I had missed out on a father-bonding moment.

My father kept the gun in my parents' bedroom. Some months after he bought the gun, I was home with my best friend, studying, when we noticed a car loitering at the end of the road near the house. This house was located at the end of a road in a suburban area, with a big patch of forest behind the house. Recently we had noticed a lot of odd car activity at the end of the road -- it seemed that drug dealers or some such had discovered this nice little out-of-the-way area that was perfect for private dealings. Or maybe it was horny teenagers.

My friend and I decided to investigate. Unbeknownst to him, I went to my parents' bedroom and retrieved the hand gun. In a spurt of sort-of-maturity, I pulled out the clip and put it in one jacket pocket and the gun in the other, to ensure I couldn't fire the gun without having time to contemplate my action. At this point I don't recall if I knew to check if a bullet had already been chambered. I hope so.

As we made our way outside I ran through possible scenarios and wondered if I would actually be able to fire the gun. I kept a hand in each jacket pocket, cradling the contents.

The car was gone by the time we got there. I told my friend about the gun and he was not happy that I had kept this little fact from him. From time to time I've wondered just what would have happened if the car had still been there.

#3: In which any of us could have been killed by my father's gun.

A few months passed after my attempt to be T.J. Hooker.

The family was sitting at dinner and odd little things kept coming up in the conversation. I complained that someone had moved stuff around in my bedroom. My sister asked who had locked our little dog in her bedroom. After the third or fourth such little item came up, I got a flash of realization and excused myself to go check on something. Indeed, the $200 I had stashed in my desk was gone. We'd been robbed.

Well, not robbed, as an exasperated 911 operator complained when I called to report the situation. "How many were there?" she asked. "Did they have weapons?"

No, I explained, no one was home when the robbery occurred.

"Then it wasn't robbery," she said with contempt. "This was just a burglary."

Well, excuse me. Anyway, the burglars must have been intent on their goal, as it seems likely our feisty little dog was probably making a racket at them. We determined that they had used a pillow to push the dog into my sister's bedroom so they could lock it in.

It turned out the burglars were armed. Or, if they weren't when they arrived, they were by the time they left, because they had found my father's hand gun. So if any of us had come home while they were still there, we had just given them the means to shoot us.

Score another one for the gun. As I recall, some time later the burglars were caught, and my father's gun played a role in proving what they had done.

I know people passionately for gun ownership and people passionately against it. I've been on both sides of the issue myself. I find I lack the ability to particularly care about gun rights, though, or to romanticize gun ownership. I try to tell myself that my opinions are fact-based, and rely on statistics of how guns are likely to be used.

But whatever I tell myself, these stories provide the emotional underpinning for any opinion I have, and I cannot escape them.