Non-human animals

From Barbara Ehrenreich, 6th Jun 2011 Man Is Not Cat Food Los Angeles Review of Books 06/06/2011:

In the last decade, human vanity has taken a major hit. Traits once thought to be uniquely, even definingly human have turned up in the repertoire of animal behaviors: tool use, for example, is widespread among non-human primates, at least if a stick counts as a tool. We share moral qualities, such as a capacity for altruism with dolphins, elephants and others; our ability to undertake cooperative ventures, such as hunting, can also be found among lions, chimpanzees and sharks. Chimps are also capable of “culture,” in the sense of socially transmitted skills and behaviors peculiar to a particular group or band. Creatures as unrelated as sea gulls and bonobos indulge in homosexuality and other nonreproductive sexual activities. There are even animal artists: male bowerbirds, who construct complex, obsessively decorated structures to attract females; dolphins who draw dolphin audiences to their elaborately blown sequences of bubbles. Whales have been known to enact what look, to human divers, very much like rituals of gratitude.

Tags: barbara ehrenreich

Public policies and religious arguments for and against them (1 of 2)

Digby (Hullabaloo) and Sarah Posner (Religion Distpaches) had an interesting exchange about what is sometimes call the "religious left" in these posts:

Digby, Paul Ryan refuses a Bible 06/04/2011

Posner, Paul Ryan's Bible, Jim Wallis', Or None of the Above? 06/06/2011

Digby, A Justified Scold 06/06/2011

And a related post by Digby, False Idols 06/04/2011

The discussion is over Digby's Schadenfreude over Paul Ryan being embarassed at a religion-and-politics conference by a liberal activist trying to give him a Bible with passages in the Gospel of Luke highlighted relating to social concerns. Posner uses it as a taking-off point to remind us that the self-described "religious left" including leaders like Jim Wallis of Soujourners that have tried to offer a political counter to the Christian Right have been pretty disappointing to liberal activists:

As I argued last year, writing about liberal-leaning religious groups countering Glenn Beck's attack on social justice, the debate about the role of government should rooted in policy, not theology. As Peter Laarman has noted in these pages, in support of a robust defense of government, liberal and moderate Christian leaders "know in their heart of hearts that only government can take strong and decisive action to end poverty and mass suffering, but they are in some degree of denial about it, in part because. ... They, too, rather fancy the idea of an independent sphere for private faith-based charities - they mostly go along, after all, with the horrendously obfuscatory and constitutionally dubious Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Since the discussion covers both general concepts like applying the Bible and Christian theology to public issues to more concrete experiences in recent years with "common ground" efforts to reduce unplanned pregnancies running aground on the Christian Right's lack of interest and the anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-women's-rights positions of some "Christian left" figures like Jim Wallis, it's hard to say how much I'm agreeing or disagreeing with either of them.

Here is how I framed the issue in a comment to the second of Digby's posts cited above:

Sarah Posner's concluding sentence in that post is, "When you wave a Bible in someone's face, just remember that someone can wave one in yours, too."

I'm not much for literal Bible-waving, myself. But the Christian Right isn't going to stop waving their Bibles figuratively and literally in the faces of Democrats and mainstream Christians. And there has to be pushback in moral and religious terms to disrupt those messages.

What's wrong with liberals agreeing with Wallis on Medicare and disagreeing with him on women's rights? People can make moral, religious and practical arguments on the liberal side of both issues.

Honest religious arguments have their limits, because any honest believer would have a problem claiming that they knew for sure how God would want them to vote on a particular legislative bill or political candidate. But the Christian Right aren't making honest religious arguments when they lie to young women in their fake "pregnancy counseling" clinics about abortion. They're just lying to people who made the mistake of trusting them for honest medical advice. The public policy on how to deal with that kind of fraud may be complicated. But I have no trouble arguing on moral and religious grounds that that's just wrong.

And since the fundis are going to keep making their arguments in the "public square" (as they like to call it), I don't see how either secular liberals or Christians who don't support hate-mongering or torture or lying to pregnant teenagers in the name of Jesus can just avoid trying to counter the religious elements of those arguments. People can make religious arguments for or against a policy like the water torture, aka, waterboarding, without insisting on it as a purely religious policy.

Tags: christian left, digby, heather parton, sarah posner

Member of crooked family dynasty loses Peruvian election, markets there plunge

I stole the idea of the headline for this post from the headline on the Reuters story, Left-winger Humala wins Peru election, markets plunge 06/06/2011:

Left-wing former army commander Ollanta Humala won Peru's presidential election and vowed the poor will share in the country's new wealth but financial markets plummeted on fears that he will ruin the economy.

Humala claimed victory on Sunday night as results from 88.4 percent of ballot boxes gave him a narrow but growing lead of over 2.5 percentage points over right-wing lawmaker Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of jailed former President Alberto Fujimori.

I see major news organizations like CNN are indulging the same kind of self-destructive business thinking on digital video that has become so familiar. Not that blogs are the most important market driver. But YouTube videos embedded on blogs are a multiplier for their reporting and the audience and therefore their news brand. CNN has a YouTube channel but the embedding function doesn't work for blogs. CNN International blocks YouTube viewing in the US. Reuters has videos that can be embedded, but they don't make current news quickly available at their YouTube channel.

Aljazeera English, on the other hand, doesn't good professional reporting, streams their programming on their YouTube site and makes many videos on current news events quickly available for viewing. So here's their video on the Peruvian election:



Tags: peru

Parliamentary elections in Portugal, which is struggling under EU/IMF austerity policies

Portugal is facing the same Herbert Hoover austerity measures that the EU and the IMF are imposing on Greece, Ireland and Spain. Two weeks ago, Spain local and state (provincial) elections went heavily against the nationally-ruling Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE). This Sunday it was the ruling Portugese Socialist Party that faced parliamentary elections after following the same disastrous neoliberal course the PSOE followed and continues to follow, playing the role of implementing the foolish and destructive EU/IMF austerity policies.

And like in Spain, they lost big-time. The conservative party won a majority in Parliament, where they promise to act like conservatives and implement harsh austerity measures just like the Socialists were doing. Only more so. (Francesc Relea, Passos Coelho acaricia la mayoría absoluta en Portugal El País 05.05.2011;
Opposition wins Portugal election Aljazeera English 06/06/2011)

This Aljazeera English report is from Sunday before the election was known.



The terminology would give Glenn Beck fans that exploding feeling, because in Portugese politics you have to distinguish between the center-left Socialist Party Partido Socialista, PS) and the rightwing Social Democratic Party (PSD). In the terms that are familiar to countries where there are actually social-democratic parties, the main social democratic parties are affiliated with the loose international party alliance, the Socialist International, including Britain's Labour Party, Germany's Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) and France's Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste, PS). Despite the names Portugal's PS is the "real" social democratic party, i.e., the Socialist International affiliate.

Once again, it's just this phenomenon that scares me about the assurance among many Democrats that Obama will cruise the conservative PSD of the incoming Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho made it clear they would continue to pursue the EU austerity measures that are hammering the economic well-being of the country. But they got elected anyway. The Socialists under outgoing Prime Minister José Sócrates tried something like what seems to be Obama's main pitch: At least we aren't as bad as the conservatives would be!

Here's an Aljazeera English report after the results became known:



The social democratic parties in Europe don't seem at the moment to have profited greatly in an electoral sense from their adoption of neoliberal economic policies. In the middle of a prolonged slump, which in parts of the EU is worse than in the US and in parts not as bad, after Portugal's election, only four countries in the EU are now governed nationally by social democrats: Cyprus, Greece, Slovenia and Spain. And the prospects for the PSOE in Spain look dim at the moment. [Partial correction: The Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) is the senior partner in a Grand Coalition government with the conservative People's Party (ÖVP).]

Tags: neoliberalism, portugal

Discussion on Strauss-Kahn case

This Retuers video posted 05/26/2011 features Naomi Wolf and Maureen Tkacik discussing the Dominique Strauss-Kahn assualt case:



Tags: maureen tkacik, naomi wolf, strauss-kahn

Hegel on partisanship in history writing

Die Forderung scheint plausibel, daß ein Geschichtsschreiber der Philosophie kein System haben, nichts von dem Seinigen hinzutun noch mit seinem Urteile darüber herfallen soll. Die Geschichte der Philosophie soll eben diese Unparteilichkeit herbeiführen, und es scheint insofern geraten, nur Auszüge aus den Philosophen zu geben. Wer von der Sache nichts versteht, kein System, bloß historische Kenntnisse hat, wird sich freilich unparteiisch verhalten. Es ist aber zu unterscheiden zwischen politischer Geschichte und Geschichte der Philosophie. Wenn man sich nämlich bei jener auch nicht darauf beschränken darf, nur chronikenmäßig die Begebenheiten darzustellen, so kann man sie doch ganz objektiv halten wie die Homerische Epopöe; so Herodot und Thukydides. Sie lassen als freie Menschen die objektive Welt frei für sich gewähren, haben vom Ihrigen nichts hinzugetan, noch die Handlungen, die sie darstellten, vor ihren Richterstuhl gezogen und beurteilt.

Doch auch in die politische Geschichte legt sich sogleich ein Zweck hinein. So ist bei Livius die römische Herrschaft die Hauptsache. Wir sehen in seiner Geschichte Rom steigen, sich verteidigen, seine Herrschaft ausüben; der allgemeine Zweck ist Rom, die Erweiterung seiner Herrschaft, die Ausbildung seiner Verfassung usw. So macht sich von selbst in der Geschichte der Philosophie die sich entwickelnde Vernunft zum Zweck, es ist kein fremder Zweck, den wir hineintragen; es ist die Sache selbst, die hier als das Allgemeine zugrunde liegt, so als Zweck erscheint, und womit sich von selbst die einzelnen Ausbildungen und Gestalten vergleichen. Wenn daher auch die Geschichte der Philosophie Taten der Geschichte zu erzählen hat, so ist doch die erste Frage, was denn eine Tat der Philosophie, ob etwas philosophisch ist oder nicht. In der äußeren Geschichte ist alles Tat - freilich gibt es Wichtiges und Unwichtiges; die Tat ist aber der Vorstellung unmittelbar hingestellt; nicht so in der Philosophie. Deswegen kann die Geschichte der Philosophie durchaus nicht ohne Urteil des Geschichtsschreibers abgehandelt werden.

[The demand seems plausible that a writer of the history of philosophy should have no system, should inject nothing of his own nor infest it with any judgments. The history of philosophy should induce just this nonpartisanship, and it appears therefore advisable to give only excerpts from philosophy. He who understands nothing about the subject, has no system but simple historical knowledge, will obviously take a nonpartisan stance. But we must differentiate between political history and the history of philosophy. If one cannot limit oneself in the former to simply depicting the events chronologically, at the same time one can approach it completely objectively like the Homerian Epos; like Herodotus and Thucydides. As free men, they leave the objective world free to prove itself, have injected nothing of their own and have not dragged the acts they describe before their court bench and judged them.

Nevertheless, a purpose insinuates itself immediately even into political history. So with Livius, Roman rule was the most important thing. In his stories, we see Rome rise, defend itself, exercise its rule; the general point is Rome, the spread of its dominion, the formation of its constitution, etc. So in the history of philosophy, the developing Reason makes itself the aim. It is not an extraneous aim that we bring into it. It the thing itself, which here lies at the basis of the universal, and so appears as the purpose, and which the individual developments and forms compare themselves. Hence if there is also the story of philosophical deeds to tell, so certainly the first question is what an act of philosophy is then, whether it is something philosophical or not. In external history, everything is a deed. Clearly there are important and unimportant ones. But the deed is directly postulated in the concept, not so in philosophy. That is why the history of philosophy cannot be dealt with without the judgment of the historian.]

- From Hegel, Einleitung (Heidelberger Niederschrift) zur Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, 3. Abhandlungsweise. English translation is mine.

Tags: hegel

Obama, Libya and Presidential war powers

Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway write about a very serious issue in Obama's Illegal War Foreign Policy 06/01/2011. They make a persuasive case that the Obama Administration is currently waging war illegally in Libya. This is a big deal, even though Congress so far has been greeting it with a collective shrug of the shoulders.

As they explain, there is a War Powers Act that regulates the President's ability to conduct hostilities without Congressional approval. It's there for a good reason. The Act states that if 60 days passes without Congress authorizing a military campaign being conducted by the Executive, the President is obliged to terminate the hostilities within 30 days. The 60 days expired on May 20, on which date the Administration requested an authorization from Congress, which Congress has still not provided. That means President Obama is currently legally obligated to terminate all American participation in hostilities in Libya by June 29.

Since we're talking about law, one could plausibly argue that even though the war is illegal under the Constitution and the War Powers Act in that it hasn't yet been legally authorized, the Administration hasn't yet actually violated the Act because they have until June 29 to terminate hostilities or get Congressional approval.

Now, our Pod Pundits don't care about all this. With rare exceptions, they're completely on board with the notion that the US should be perpetually at war. And with the national security state and expansive Presidential war powers. We're unlikely to see any hard-hitting exposes on CBS or CNN of the Administration fighting without a legal basis in Libya.

The Beltway Village types are right to shrug it off, in one sense. Congress has to enforce the War Powers Act themselves. As Ackerman and Hathaway write, "Unlike with many other areas of law, the courts can't be counted on to translate abstract principles into concrete rules. So far as war-making is concerned, they have left it to the political branches to work the matter out -- which is precisely the purpose of the War Powers Resolution."

And Congress is not going to enforce it. They will give the President the authority to continue the Libya War. (See David Dayen, Boehner, GOP Crafts Legislation to Allow Continuation of US Mission in Libya FDL News 06/02/2011) As Glenn Greenwald (The war in Libya growing more illegal by the day Salon 06/02/2011) asks sarcastically, "Can we hear more now about how the two parties are so radically different that bipartisan cooperation is impossible? The Emperor has decreed that we will fight this war, and thus we will -- that seems to be the prevailing mindset."

It's the prevailing mindset that needs to change. US participation in this war was justified from the start on the dubious premise that a mass massacre would likely take place if we didn't enter the then-beginning civil war as a partisan of the anti-government side, even though it's far from clear even now just what kind of "free Libya" forces we are backing. US and NATO intervention virtually guaranteed a prolongation of armed hostilities in Libya, with lots of deaths involved and more to come. The fact that intervention added tremendously to pressure to prolong the conflict wouldn't necessarily be bad in itself. But it is bad that Congress has effectively buried their collective heads in the sand and refuse to exert any restraints on the Executive in this, even to demand accountability and information.

Perpetual war is bad. The President shouldn't be trying to maintain such a condition. Congress shouldn't be allowing it.

Tags: libya war, war powers, war powers act

Dynamics of Prejudice (3 of 3): no easy solutions

Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, Dynamics of Prejudice: A Psychological and Sociological Study of Veterans (1950)

Bettelheim and Janowitz acknowledge that they did not attempt to independently verify reports of their subjects about their experience of hardship in the military or their personal experiences during the prewar period. And their justification makes sense up to a point: they were focused on the perceptions of their subjects toward those experiences. And the in-depth interviews did allow them some ways to test the consistency of their stories.

Still, it's difficult for the reader to know what to make of a statement like this veteran's description of his experiences during the Depression without some verification of its plausibility. “Polack” is a disparaging term for ethnic Poles that seems to have pretty much become obsolete now:

Well, my old man worked until 1930. I was about ten or eleven when things got really bad, and the humiliations and insults are hard to take. I've seen so many of these relief workers they make you antisocial. This one bitch, a Polack, wanted to slap me on W.P.A. I got fired for nonsupport, so I got a private job at $15.00 a week and that was pretty good. My family had to send me to live with another family because they couldn't afford to have me live with them. (p. 84)

The statement as it's quoted also doesn’t make entire sense on its own terms. Did he actually take the WPA job? What does “nonsupport” mean? Maybe in 1950 when the book was published it would have been more obvious to the expected reader what it might have meant in the WPA context; but as quoted it’s not even clear if it was a WPA job being referenced. The reference to being sent to live with another family is also puzzling. How old was he? And if he were working, how was it better for the family if he lived somewhere else, where presumably he would have to pay rent or other kinds of costs that otherwise might have helped support his family.

Although the quotes from the veterans’ interviews are quite interesting, the lack of specific context and verification of factual claims makes their usefulness problematic, as in the case just quoted.

Their concluding chapter on “Reflections, and Applications for Social Action” also contains some head-scratchers. In an historical sketch about anti-Semitism in Europe, they raise some interesting questions about the degree to which concern about the fate of people’s immortal souls may have affected ego formation. But they make what seems to be a fairly superficial assumption that religious-based motivations of prejudice are far less common today. After the experience in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s of seeing Europeans have deadly conflicts among Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims, it’s a little hard to imagine why they were so quick to dismiss that as a persisting factor in 1945.

It becomes more puzzling when one sees that they took careful account of religious affiliation in their evaluation of anti-Semitism and white racism against blacks among their veterans. They found that Christian denominational affiliation had no significant correlation with either anti-Semitism or anti-black prejudice, although here the narrowness of their sample urges caution about generalizing from that. What they did find is that stability of a person’s Christian religious beliefs over time were associated with higher tolerance toward Jews. But not toward blacks. And they provide a plausible psychoanalytic explanation for that discrepancy in the case of anti-black racism. Their discussion of this was a useful application of their Freudian framework of analysis to a phenomenon they observed:

In present-day U. S. society, inacceptable id tendencies are mainly displaced onto Negroes (sex libertinism, dirtiness, laziness). Therefore, the superego can lend full support to their discrimination, since these are tendencies against which it fights continuously. Religion, the representation of superego demands, is thus much weaker as a mitigating influence on intolerance of the Negro than on intolerance of the Jew. This may explain why stability of religious convictions was so markedly associated with tolerance toward the Jew but failed to be associated with tolerance toward the Negro. [my emphasis] (p. 158)

It’s notable here, however, that such an explanation can be derived only from using knowledge about the social context of race outside the immediate empirical findings of the survey. It also is an explanation of how religion can and apparently does contribute in a significant way to social prejudices in the time period of their study.

This historical passage was particularly puzzling:

The example of the Marannos (Spanish Jews converted to Catholicism) shows that these accusations reflected a very probable origin of anti-Semitism at that time, namely the Christian's fear of being a bad Catholic (more so, at least, than modern accusations indicate the real reasons for modern anti-Semitism). These Spanish Jews were notoriously wealthy as well as culturally and politically influential, and aside from religious accusations, their wealth, too, was held against them. Still a change of religion put an end to their persecution, provided they really meant it. As soon as Spanish Jews became Catholics, they were not only permitted to retain status and wealth, but were frequently known to increase in both. ...

Religious conversion which protected Spanish Jews [in the 15th and 16th centuries] was ultimately of little help to Jews in Germany [under the Third Reich]. (pp. 165-6)

In fact, when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, the converted Jews who remained were considered Conversos (converts) for generations. And far from putting an end to persecutions, the first wave of state terrorism represented by the Spanish Inquisition was directed precisely at Conversos. The Conversos were also considered inferior in the Spanish concepts of limpieza, or purity, that began to attach a pseudo-biological justification for social hierarchies. It’s true that some Coversos prospered in the decades after 1492. Many of them continued to handle financial exchange business which had traditionally been a specialty of Jews because of Catholic strictures against Christians loaning money at interest. And the flow of gold from Spain’s New World colonies provided a substantial amount of financial business to be handled. But did it “put an end to their persecution”? Even with the dubious qualifier “provided they really meant” their conversion, that’s quite a misleading description of the position of the post-1492 Conversos in Spain.

But their concluding chapter is also notable in addressing frankly their conclusions in the same manner was their analysis in that they don’t offer simplistic solutions. They suggest that simple “tolerance propaganda” will be of limited effectiveness. And that the most fruitful period in directing the child in ways that will minimize irrational intolerance is the first six years of life, which simultaneously suggests the difficulty of reducing intolerance among those over six years of age.

They suggest that given the importance of personal fears of downward mobility in promoting intolerance according to their findings in this study, economic stability and social policies that minimize the effect of economic downturns on individuals could be useful in reducing intolerance. They discuss the problem of providing alternative avenues for discharge of aggressive impulses that are currently channeled into ethic/religious hostility. Motility – physical activity – is one particularly useful avenue. Another is satisfying sexual activity. But they also caution that the role of competition in American society is a problem when it comes to providing alternative avenues for discharge of aggression and hostility:

Present-day society, and particularly the mores of the group studied, approves in the main of only one such outlet: successful competition. The less likely the chances grow for success, the more this once possible outlet turns into a source of additional tension. ... Unfortunately, even in sports, where the only purpose should be discharge of tension through motility, competition creeps in, which brings additional tensions to all but the winners. (p. 182)

Just as they didn’t hide the contradictory and uncertainty of some of their results, so in their recommendations for actions they do not neglect the difficulties of the most promising approaches. And they make clear that a combination of personal and political/social solutions are required.

Tags: anti-semitism, bruno bettelheim, dynamics of prejudice, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, morris janowitz, radical right, white racism

Dynamics of Prejudice (2 of 3): psychoanalyzing prejudice

Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, Dynamics of Prejudice: A Psychological and Sociological Study of Veterans (1950)

Bettelheim and Janowitz use a psychoanalytical framework for their analysis, which yields some provocative observations and suggestions. They conclude that people who have a basically healthy functioning of their egos are unlikely to be especially susceptible to irrational racial and religious prejudices:

In summary, a study of attitudes toward symbols of external control supports the impression received from the earlier evaluation of individual interviews: only integrated attitudes make for true tolerance. Only a strong ego is able to synthesize the opposing tendencies of pleasure and reality in line with the pressures of the environment. Only a strong ego manages to gratify instinctual tendencies without having to resort to "persecution" and only such a strong ego is able to maintain balance without projecting or displacing those strivings which in a weak ego lead to unmanageable inner conflicts. (p. 159)

But that passage also suggests the tentative nature of their findings. That explanation basically says that people who are basically psychologically healthy have good reality-testing skills and therefore are very likely to be conned into buying into screwy and irrational prejudices. As good as that sounds, the reader has to wonder if there isn’t something of a circular definition going on. If healthy is defined as, among other things, not being a sucker for irrational prejudices, what other result could be expected?

They don’t take such a simplistic approach. But it’s a legitimate broader question about this particular study. As they explain:

In the planning and analysis of this study the authors have utilized the theory and observations of dynamic psychology [psychoanalysis] and of sociological analysis. ... It is clear enough from the findings that either system alone would have been inadequate. (p. 162)

One gets some sense from their book how the social environment interacts with individual personalities in shaping individual racial and religious prejudices. And how complex those interactions can be. As they point out, American society at the time of the survey provided a greater legitimacy for prejudice against African-Americans than for prejudice against Jews. So it wasn’t surprising that their sample expressed anti-black prejudices to a greater degree and with greater intensity than prejudice against Jews.

But this also gets to a larger problem about psychological definitions of health in the context of social dynamics like anti-Semitism or white racism. A well-adjusted white person growing up in the deep South at the time of the subjects in the survey would recognize and accept to a significant degree the structure of segregation and the social attitudes that went along with it. Would a white person who rejected those attitudes in favor of a non-racist position toward blacks be “healthy” in the context of that society? The same question would arise for “Aryan” Germans growing up at that same time and anti-Semitic prejudices.

Bettelheim and Janowitz don’t try to cover up those contradictory elements in their analysis. It's actually a strength of their approach that they allow such problems to stand out.

The limited nature of the sample involved is more problematic. Although they tried to draw a random sample, restricting the sample to Chicago only, and apparently only to white male and non-Jewish veterans, are significant limitations. Inclusion of Jewish veterans, African-American veterans or veterans from some rural area or a Southern city where legal segregation was practiced would have added important perspectives for their purposes.

Tags: anti-semitism, bruno bettelheim, dynamics of prejudice, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, morris janowitz, radical right, white racism

Fear-mongering has consequences: Israeli passport version

Gideon Levy devotes a column to a growing trend among Israeli citizens to take a second passport from a different country, including 100,000 with a German passport: (Another ) passport for every worker Haaretz 06/02/2011. Levy thinks it's an indication of a greater feeling of insecurity on the part of Israelis, spurred by government fear-mongering:

The scare campaigns have been effective, and the passport applicants are responding in an intelligent and sensible way. It turns out that they are far more rational than their leaders: If the leaders so want to scare us of the Iranian bomb, the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and the hooligans from Gaza, if everything threatens to become a "Holocaust," then it really does make sense to equip oneself with suitable means of protection. An additional passport, for example.

Tags: gideon levy, israel

Science denial by anecdote

Science denial is doing serious harm to people. And if the Republican Know-Nothings have their way, it will get worse.

Steve Silberman discusses Why the GOP Hates the National Science Foundation Neurotribes 05/27/2011. The immediate occasion for his post is the issuance of an anti-science report:

Yesterday [05/26/2011] in Washington, amid great fanfare, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, released a 73-page report called The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope. The report – deemed “scathing” in an “exclusive” by ABC News, and widely touted by other news organizations, particularly those owned by Rupert Murdoch — purported to expose a culture of waste, fraud, and mismanagement at the NSF.

The report provided examples ready-made for radio talk-show ridicule:

... the type of “studies” cited by the report sound dubious indeed, including research into “How to ride a bike; When did dogs became man’s best friend; If political views are genetically pre-determined; How to improve the quality of wine; Do boys like to play with trucks and girls like to play with dolls.”

Such anecdotes are popular and, for better or worse, effective ways of communicating ideas. It's common as dirt these days to hear anecdotes about this or that incident of incompetence or irrationality in laws.

Have you heard about the old lady who spilled hot coffee on herself and then sued McDonald's? You know old Joe Jones who lives down the street? He has a city car that he uses all the time for his private trips! And what about all the paperwork my business has to turn in to the gubment? And so on.

The problem with anecdotes, though, is that unless you have a good picture of the whole story, they usually don't actually tell us much about the larger policy picture. For instance, one of Coburn's reports criticisms was directed at at program in which a "scientist put shrimp on a tiny treadmill to determine if sickness impaired the mobility of the crustaceans." Silberman writes:

Surely there is waste and mismanagement at the NSF, as there is at any large organization staffed by human beings, though even allegedly LOL-worthy studies of ailing shrimp can yield results that inform the fate of fisheries that provide food and jobs for millions of people. Many outlets in the mainstream media and the right-wing blogosphere dutifully mocked the alleged absurdities detailed in the report, complete with the inevitable photos of sick shrimp on treadmills (also furnished by Senator Coburn's office) ...

This particular know-nothing way of trashing government expenditures was given a prominent boost by an important liberal Democratic Senator, William Proxmire, who was a major critic of the Vietnam War. Rick Perlstein sketches the history in The Saga of the Golden Fleece: Why America Needs to Learn to Love Government Spending Once Again Our Future 02/03/2009:

Proxmire, who left public service in 1989 and died in 2005, may be best remembered—it's what I remember—for a monthly publicity stunt called the "Golden Fleece Award," bestowed upon what he would claim was the month's most wasteful and ridiculous pockets of government spending. The pundits fell in love with the notion's good-government pretensions, and for all I know the stunt did the nation some good paring the federal budget of waste, fraud, and abuse.

I suspect, though, the exercise was largely a silly waste of time. One of my professors in graduate school won a Golden Fleece award. Senator Proxmire awarded it for a supposed grant to fund her "mountain climbing hobby." Actually, she's one of the nation's most distinguished anthropologists. She has never climbed a mountain in her life, but used her field work among the Sherpas of Nepal to arrive at some of the most incisive theorizing extant on how societies work. Second-guessing the peer-review process of National Science Foundation grants made for nifty headlines. But it was also numbingly reactionary. According to the Wikipedia entry on Proxmire, the prizes sometimes "went to basic science projects that led to important breakthroughs."

It savored of the Reagan aide who once, defending cuts in higher education spending, said it wasn't the business of government "subsidizing intellectual curiosity." ...

The New York Times' (Richard Severo, William Proxmire, Maverick Democratic Senator From Wisconsin, Is Dead at 90 12/16/2005) obituary for Proxmire included an example of one of his Golden Fleece awards dealing with a project at ... the National Science Foundation:

But he was best known for his Golden Fleece Awards, which he announced in monthly press releases to call attention to what he believed to be frivolous government spending. An award, for instance, went to the National Science Foundation in 1975 for spending $84,000 to learn why people fall in love.

But however much Proxmire may have contributed to the trend back in the day, today's Republican Party is giving itself over to magical thinking in the service of some very worldly ideology. Except for his perhaps overly-rosy view of the New York Times, Silberman's description is right:

Today's GOP has a visceral distrust of scientists for the same reason that it has a visceral distrust of the "lamestream media" (particularly deeply reported news organizations like The New York Times), teachers, organized labor, regulatory agencies, National Public Radio, and protest movements that are have not been astroturfed for Fox News’ cameras by Koch Industries: They’re not with the program, whatever this week’s program might be — more windfalls to Big Oil, justifying torture, or floating amendments to officially brand gay people as second-class citizens. [emphasis in original]

Fanaticism ain't pretty.

Tags: science denial, tom coburn, william proxmire

Dynamics of Prejudice (1 of 3): perceptions of downward mobility

One of the five volumes in the Studies in Prejudice series sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in the late 1940s studying authoritarianism and anti-Semitism in the United States was by Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, Dynamics of Prejudice: A Psychological and Sociological Study of Veterans (1950).

This study was based on an in-depth survey of 150 veterans of the Second World War living in the Chicago area, apparently all of them white and male. "It was about August, 1945 that mass discharges began. The sampling period was therefore limited to August through November, 1945, and the interviews were carried out six to eight months after discharge." (p. 192) The study specifically aimed at examining the presence and intensity of anti-Semitism and anti-black racism among the subjects and to identify psychological factors that correlated with those prejudices. They explain their selection of veterans as follows:

In recent times, the outstanding instance of ethnic intolerance, anti-Semitism, had its roots in Germany after the first World War. The chief promoters and followers of the anti-Semitic movement were former soldiers, unable to reintegrate themselves successfully into society. If ethnic intolerance should approach critical limits in the near future, and in this country, the reasons may well be similar to those which accounted for its development in Germany. Thus, theoretical as well as practical considerations suggested demobilized soldiers as the particular group of individuals to be studied. (p. 4)

The study found that the following factors were significantly correlated with both anti-Semitism and white racism against African-Americans: feeling of deprivation; social mobility; rejection of controlling institutions; economic apprehensions; and, general optimism. Chapter 8 contains their general conclusions.

There is a lot of interesting material in the study, including both their discussions of individual factors they isolated and their analysis of the dynamic interaction of those factors in the context of case studies. In the 1950s and 1960s, social scientists and historians in the US were particularly fond of theories that explained attraction to political extremism on the basis of group status anxieties. So it's notable here that Bettelheim and Janowitz found in their sample that the status factor most correlated with the kind of prejudice they were studying was an individual’s perception of downward social mobility for themselves compared to their own previous situation:

In conclusion, it may be said that these data support the theory that intolerance becomes a more serious problem to the degree that large groups become downwardly mobile at a rapid pace owing to changes ii the structure of society. The data also seem to indicate that to understand intolerance it is less important to concentrate on the social and economic background of the individual than to investigate the nature of his social mobility. The question which must be answered for each individual is whether or not he is being forced downwards or prevented from fulfilling his expectations of upward social mobility. [my emphasis] (p. 61)

And they write:

The highest degrees of association established in this study were those between intolerance on the one hand and feelings of deprivation and downward social mobility on the other. The deprivations so highly associated with intolerance were not by and large of a predominantly private nature, such as having fallen out with one's family or being unable to have children, but ones very closely related to adverse economic experiences, or a fear of their recurrence. (p. 174)

Tags: anti-semitism, bruno bettelheim, dynamics of prejudice, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, morris janowitz, radical right, white racism