Comments on: The over-optimism of Fahrenheit 911

By: Terry Karney

Terry Karney — Thu, 30 Sep 2004 01:39:52 +0000

I can’t say for all, I can say for the studies Grossman refers to… the self reporting in after action questioning shows a higher rate of fire than was shown in WW2. Inferrentially, the amount of ammunition (even accounting for a greater rate of fire, which is not proven, esp. in light of both the Army and the Marine Corps doctrines of semi-automatic fire) also implies a higher rate of firing. What S.L.A. Marshall, and Grossman never addressed was the question of context. If I have no pressing sense of a buddy being in danger (and one can be in a firefight, and be tolerably safe) and no sense of personal danger, then one may elect to refrain from exposure. So it’s possible the 15-20 percent who were pulling the trigger changed. That a certain percentage, has no qualms, that a certain percentage has qualms which cannot be overcome, and the rest have conditional values for when they will shoot at people. As Audie Murphy said, when asked why he had been so valiant…, “they were shooting my friends.” TK

By: mark

mark — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 04:27:46 +0000

Trust in your leaders, follow the path of great Americans and PASS on Kerry as he can’t lead, or even articulate his thoughts in a capacity beyond a parrot. Living in an eminance front is no way to go through your lives this is not an endorsement for Bush but a plea not to compound the problems we have in the Middle East and Iraq, wake up, let him(Bush) finish what he started it won’t be the best way but better than Kerry can muster and faster.

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 22:02:37 +0000

‘So, on that side, we’ve got a nationally known MIT Chaired Professor of Psychology, Steven Pinker, who can actually produce at least three bibliographically citable references.’ Given that one of those references is Bourke’s ‘Intimate History of Killing’ that is hardly a strong support for the claim. Bourke’s book has a great many flaws, one of which is that its ‘methodology’, if it can be called that, is pretty much entirely anecdotal. Sifting through WW2 letters and memoirs, Bourke is able to prove to cite dozens of men saying they were rather good at killing in close combat and that some were prepared to admit enjoying it. Given that the major combatants conscripted tens of millions of men throughout the war, and sent varying but high percentages into battle, the fact that a few dozen testimonies exist saying ‘I really enjoyed killing people’ does not function as evidence that ‘all or a majority of men can enjoy killing people’. Bourke asserts that it does, but she spares herself the hard work of calculating how typical these enthusiastic killers were, and she doesn’t even bother citing any evidence indicating that a great many soldiers found killing and fighting frightening and unnatural. A few hours in the archives of the War Office Department of Tactical Investigation would have done the job, but Bourke was frankly either too lazy or too dishonest to look for evidence contrary to her thesis. Yes, I know Bourke won the Wolfson prize- Galsworthy won the Nobel prize, and I’m not about to call him a better writer than, say, Joyce. Bourke’s silly and poorly thought-out book was, as Niall Ferguson noted in the Spectator, just ‘warnography’ which titillated the reader with a poorly-based assertion that men are indeed just heart-of-darkness savages. Bourke’s stock has since fallen dramatically since she published ‘The Second World War. A people’s history’ which not even her dimmest apologists can defend. Brucer- I’d be grateful if you’d post or send me the reference for that article about Marshall.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 05:54:37 +0000

dubious: I think that the target is 100% straw. I can’t find a single straight example in Pinker (for example, Margaret Mead certainly didn’t believe the strong position that Pinker claims she did). Which particular sociologists and/or anthropologists are you thinking about?

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 02:54:22 +0000

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 02:52:12 +0000

“Extreme Nurturists need debunking, just as Extreme Naturists do” I’m happy to agree with that

By: Dubious

Dubious — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 00:37:13 +0000

John Quiggin— Yes, he’s guilty of some rhetorical sleight of hand. I don’t think I’d agree that he pretends he has proven strong-EP to be true, but I think your review makes many accurate points. But the target he’s jousting against isn’t entirely made of straw. From my experiences in academia, there really are large sub-sections (perhaps even the majority) of Sociology and Anthropology depts that think that way. Extreme Nurturists need debunking, just as Extreme Naturists do.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 00:21:25 +0000

Pinker doesn’t help dispel misunderstandings of EP by his rhetorical strategy which is to defend a very moderate version of EP against its most extreme critics, then talk as if he has proved a strong version of EP and refuted all criticism of it. This is par for the course in the nature-nurture polemical war, which is why so little progress is made.

By: Dubious

Dubious — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 23:55:04 +0000

I don’t want to come off as some sort of raving Pinker fanboy. Characterizing his book as a polemic is accurate, I think. And consequently, he often omits the many qualifiers he should have, especially given the ‘Just So Story’ nature of evolutionary explanations. That said: On feminism, Pinker is careful to differentiation between liberal/Rawlsian equality-of-rights equity feminism which he supports and radical/Marxist equivalence-of-the sexes gender feminism which he does not. If people want to argue that the latter is the One True Path of Feminism, there’s little fruitful room for discussion. If people cannot see that equity feminism is a moral position which is independent of empirical facts about possible differences in average characteristics between the sexes, I would wonder why they thought a statement of fact implies moral conclusions without further moral postulates. On violence, I think Pinker would argue that people generally have inhibitions on killing those in their in-group, but not so much on killing outsiders. He argues that the way around this is to get people to stop thinking of those of different race/ethnicity/religion as outsiders rather than denying that people think that way. To proclaim that people are naturally non-violent may be a very pleasant thing to think. But if we are really concerned reducing violence, we should entertain the idea that people aren’t that nice, and so get used to the idea that we’ll have to work that much harder (much like we have to work hard to stay on diets) to ‘swim upstream’ against potentially violent inherent tendencies. People willfully misunderstand EP as saying that if people have an inherent tendency to do A, that: A) All people do A all the time, with no possibility for doing otherwise B) Social influences play zero role in people’s likelihood of doing A C) A is ‘natural’ in the moral sense, that we should not be morally outraged when people do A. None of these follow any more than saying that if someone has a family history of (genetic predisposition for) heart disease, then he is certain to die of heart disease, that enviromental forces cannot increase or decrease the risk of heart disease, or that heart disease is ‘natural’ and shouldn’t be treated.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 23:46:53 +0000

the CT folks are as a group, and for the usual academic and cultural reasons, deeply hostile to Pinker and EP in general (emphasis added) Keith: Surely you mean that we’re hostile to Pinker because we think that being hostile to Pinker increases our chances of reproduction? :-) I’ll happily go along with a sensible “evolutionary psychology” explanation of something as long as it doesn’t a) say things about genes that aren’t true, b) posit cultural norms of the mid 20th century USA as universals of human nature, c) look like a thin rationalisation for looking away from a difficult social problem or d) bash feminism in a really mindless manner. But such things are surprisingly thin on the ground (I’m told that Matt Ridley’s latest book is pretty good). A lot of the reason why pop-EP is so bad is that it tends to stem from Richard Dawkins, and it’s now looking increasingly the case that Dawkins backed the wrong horse in the “Darwin Wars”.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 23:39:46 +0000

Alex: I think that there are a few references on Butterflies & Wheels to the Mead/Freeman controversy. Pinker simply reiterates all of Freeman’s assertions uncritically. Val Dusek’s essay on the subject says almost all of what needs to be said.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 22:32:41 +0000

Who would have thought, even in April this year, that US bombing raids on Iraqi cities would become a daily occurrence, and that any pretence of worrying about civilian casualties would have been abandoned. I have not observed even the vaguest pretense of concern about Iraqi civilian casualties from the mainstream media in the US—not before the invasion, not during it, and not since.

By: BruceR

BruceR — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 16:06:49 +0000

Lt. Col. Grossman (he was in the military when he wrote On Killing, give the guy his props) is a secondary-source popularizer. On Killing is really no more than a military college text. The real question is the veracity of Grossman’s source, historian S.L.A. Marshall, who, even if a proven serial exaggerator, cannot be dispensed with simply by saying he “made shit up.” Marshall, who everyone agrees knew soldiers, was trying to add academic rigour post facto to his own intuitive insights about combat. His World War Two work is suspect; but later Marshallite “ratio of fire” studies that followed, in Korea and Vietnam, seem to have more validity (showing American infantry ratio of fire climbing from 55 per cent to 75 per cent between the two wars). A paper title got it about right about the man: “Marshall: right for the wrong reasons.” In the end, there seems little doubt Marshall did more close-after-the-fight interviewing of groups of American soldiers before, or probably since (even his detractors concede he interviewed at least a hundred infantry companies in WW2 himself, and read many other interviews conducted by his staff). His theories were hardly half-baked. You run into the same problem looking back at Marshall as you do with Freud, or Mead, or dozens of others… how does one now weight the seminal work in any academic field, before the establishment of more rigorous standards? Throwing out anything written before 1950 (1960? 1970?) would seem unfortunate.

By: Keith Ellis

Keith Ellis — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 15:53:36 +0000

I’m committing the same error as those I’m critizing, always a bad thing, but the motivation for the pique of my comment is that I’ve noticed that it has become almost doctrine among segments of the left to characterize all of EP and everyone associated with it as an insidious, regressive, and dangerous pseudo-science. There are broad, sneering swipes at EP in posts and comments here at CT all the time. I haven’t read “The Blank Slate”, but from what I’ve heard of it, I agree with it. There’s a broad coalition of groups that have a deep, vested interest in the idea of the mind as a blank slate, programmed by culture. There’s been quite a few well-intentioned but destructive social policies that have been implemented as a result, and there’s a lot of bad science and academic reasearch being defended and conducted that takes the “blank slate” as axiomatic. As a 40-year-old lifelong American liberal “intellectual”, I held to this view for a very long time. But while I’m still hostile to social policy/moral arguments from biological determinism, I can’t deny that there’s too much scientific evidence in the last thirty years that a whole lotta stuff is hardwired into our brains. I think it’s counter-productive to achieving the goals of the left to waste energy denying this.

By: Adi

Adi — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 15:07:38 +0000

it still strikes me as very old-skool colonial when a man who is not even a citizen of a country is appointed head of a country by an invading force, and the oppressed country is supposed to sit back and take it, while the resistance is termed insurgency/terrorism. However, the military excesses of the invading forces such as falluja, city bombings, abu ghraib etc are spun as actions of freedom-loving people and/or liberators. pretty soon we will be hearing about the tight bombing patterns!! where is this going to end?