April 2004

It seems that the top-ranked site on Google if you search for “Jew” is an anti-semitic site. So this is CT doing our googlebombing best to correct this by linking to the Wikipedia entry for “Jew”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew instead. (See “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/04/joogle.html for more details).

We’re on an “Evolutionary”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001628.html “Psychology”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001629.html kick here at CT. It seems most of our commenters are more enamored of it than some of our contributors. This is maladaptive for the CT meme, because the realization that we disagree will cause traffic to our site to drop. Unless it’s actually adaptive, because the disagreement means traffic to our site will rise. While we’re on the topic, I mean meme, I want to know how my 12-week-old daughter’s emerging desire to put everything that comes her way into her mouth is either evolutionarily adaptive or individually rational. I’ve also spent the day variously exposed to something else realist-types tend to explain, according to taste, as a matter of “adaptive fitness”:http://faculty.wm.edu/lakirk/evo_rel.html or “rational choice”:http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0SOR/1_61/61908759/p1/article.jhtml, namely religion.[1]

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Following up on Henry’s post, I wanted to look slightly differently at the appeal of evolutionary psychology. As I said in Henry’s comments thread the ev psych analysis is essentially “realist”. This is the kind of style of social and political analysis that purports to strip away the illusions of idealistic rhetoric and reveal the underlying self-interest. The only question is to nominate the “self” that is interested. In Ev Psych the unit of analysis is the gene, in Chicago-school economics the individual, in Marxism the class, in public choice theory the interest group, and in the realist school of international relations the nation.

All of these realist models are opposed to any form of idealism in which people or groups act out of motives other than self-interest. But, logically speaking, different schools of realists are more opposed to each other than to any form of idealism. If we are machines for replicating our genes, we can’t also be rational maximizers of a utility function or loyal citizens of a nation. Clever and consistent realists recognise this – for example, ideologically consistent neoclassical economists are generally hostile to nationalism. But much of the time followers of these views are attracted by style rather than substance. Since all realist explanations have the same hardnosed character, they all appeal to the same kind of person. It’s not hard to find people who simultaneously believe in Ev Psych, Chicago economics and international realism. One example of this kind of confusion is found in Stephen Pinker whose Blank Slate I reviewed here, back in 2002.

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Via “Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/04/evolutionary_th.html , a rather wonderful example of the absurdities of gung-ho evolutionary psychology. Edward H. Hagen, Paul J. Watson and J. Anderson Thomson Jr. “propose”:http://itb.biologie.hu-berlin.de/~hagen/HWT.pdf that severe depression is adaptive – it serves a functional purpose. It compels others to help the victim and thus redounds to his or her long term advantage. In short, depression is “an unconsciously calculated gamble to gain greater long-term benefits.”

This is a near-perfect example of what might be dubbed (with no apologies whatsoever to “Cosmides and Tooby”:http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html) the Standard Evolutionary Psychology Model. First, take some human trait or behaviour. Bonus points if it’s something weird like “slash fiction”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000398.html that’s likely to attract the interest of the Sunday supplement editors. Second, construct an “ad hominid argument”:http://homepage.mac.com/jholbo/homepage/pages/blog/blog19.html#201 claiming that this trait or behaviour served some functional need for hunter-gatherers on the veldt. Third, use your findings to justify some right-wing shibboleth or another, showing that hunter-gatherer societies hardwire us for perfectly competitive markets or the like (in fairness, Hagen, Watson and Thomson jr. don’t do this). Fourth, write article. Repeat as often as necessary to get tenure and/or the attention of the popular press. Of course, at no stage of the process need you deign to provide convincing empirical evidence that might sully the clarity and vigour of your argument. It’s wretched stuff, that doesn’t do any favors to Darwinian theory. That our minds are undeniably the product of evolutionary forces doesn’t and shouldn’t provide a license for half-baked functionalist explanations of the psychology of everyday life.

Via scribblingwoman, who heard it from Maud, this is indeed a beguiling pastime.

Here are my hasty contributions:

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The UKs’ slowness in bringing in passports with biometric data means that Britons (along with quite a few others) will be “routinely fingerprinted and photographed on entry to the US”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3595221.stm under the “VISIT program”:http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/editorial_0333.xml . Clicking a few links got me to the “Privacy Impact Assessment: Executive Summary”:http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/VISITPIAfinalexecsum3.pdf for this (pdf file), which reveals the comforting information that

bq. If necessary, the information that is collected will be shared with other law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, local, foreign, or tribal level, who are lawfully engaged in collecting law enforcement intelligence information and who need access to the information in order to carry out their law enforcement duties.

… at tribal level?

Whilst I was in the US, people kept asking me about Tony Blair and his future. My response usually involved some speculation about Gordon Brown coupled with noticing that the bookies are still giving “long odds on the Tories”:http://www.bluesq.com/bet?action=go_events&type_id=850 (much longer than on “Kerry defeating Bush”:http://www.bluesq.com/bet?action=go_events&type_id=2670 ). The subtext here was about the war though.

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There is an interesting article in Slate today about how no one is taking acid anymore. “In both the 2000 and 2001 surveys, 6.6 percent of high-school seniors reported that they’d used LSD in the previous year. In 2002, the figure dropped to 3.5 percent. And in the most recent survey, from 2003, only 1.9 percent of high-school seniors claim to have dropped acid.” The explanation seems to be a really big bust in Kansas, where the nation’s LSD was apparently being manufactured (um, Kansas?). The entrepreneurial Kansans were sitting on 400 million 100 mike hits when busted. Dude, they could, like, turn on everyone in America! Wouldn’t it be wild if they put it in the water supply of Washington, D.C., and all the warmongers were totally tripping? Also noted in Slate: the death of Jerry Garcia and subsequent halting of Grateful Dead tours knocked the market hard. Fair enough; if the chances that you’re going to hear “Dark Star” plummet to zero, what’s the point? That must have been a sad day for acid dealers everywhere. Given the logic of supply and demand, prices are up to $20 a hit. Not noted in the article: if you have to shell out $20 you might just as well take Ecstacy and not spend 13 out of 14 hours wishing you hadn’t taken that goddamn hit of acid.

When a man writes a perfectly good Derrida parody about blogging – and when that man has but two comments to reward his clownish labors a week on – that is not justice. By the powers of Crooked Timber, I call on you to tell Adam he is a very funny fellow.

This piece in the Melbourne Age by Michael Scammell manages to hit nearly all my hot buttons at once. It includes generation-game garbage, postmodernist apologias for the advertising industry, support for exploitation of workers, and heaps of all-round stupidity. The background to the story, it appears, is that a clothing store called Westco required its female staff to wear T-shirts carrying a lame double entendre. One worker refused, and the Victorian Minister for Women’s Affairs, Mary Delahunty protested, with the result that the company abandoned the promotion. Scammell attempts to set Ms Delahunty straight on the subjects of postmodernist irony and the recent discovery of sex.

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Eugene Volokh has a post on whether pictures of naked children are regarded as per se child pornography, and what legal standards are applied to determine the status of such photos. The conclusion he draws is, be careful: “So when in doubt, you might want to cut down on the nude pictures, especially once you’re getting past the clearly socially well-accepted (e.g., the naked infant in the tub).” This is probably right (consider this case of a woman charged with child pornography for a photo of herself breastfeeding her naked one-year-old — her children were taken away by the state for a time before charges were dropped), but really very depressing. The curious thing about this attitude is that under the guise of protecting children from exploitation, it unnecessarily sexualises them. The vast majority of people are not pedophiles, and if they want to take pictures of their naked children frolicking in the sprinkler they should not have to worry that some busy-body at Rite-Aid is going to narc them out to child welfare. Children like to run around naked, and it would be wrong to give them the idea that all the adults around them regard this as titillating. It’s enough to make you get one of those home printers for your camera, though, so that you’re not haled off to jail for posing your toddler on the sheepskin rug. How are we meant to embarrass her in front of her prom date, I ask you?

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I’m back from my trip to Pasadena for the mini-conference on “Global Justice.” (It was great.) My title, however, refers not to philosophy but to the L.A. Philharmonic. I’ll post something about the conference if I find the time and can think of anything interesting to write, but I want to say something about my visit to the new Frank Gehry-designed Disney Theater.

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The newest political scientist in the blogosphere, Daniel Geffen, brings up an “important reason”:http://geffen.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_geffen_archive.html#107988195454245271 why Iraq is unlikely to become a democratic exemplar for the Middle East. Oil. Heavy oil exporters have a miserable democratic record, with the sole exception of Norway. There’s little reason to expect that Iraq will be any different.

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Reader Ted Clayton brings an interesting article to my attention from the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s about the fascist political philosopher Carl Schmitt. Just a sample:

Schmitt argued that liberals, properly speaking, can never be political. Liberals tend to be optimistic about human nature, whereas “all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.” Liberals believe in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule — even an ostensibly fair one — merely represents the victory of one political faction over another. (If that formulation sounds like Stanley Fish when he persistently argues that there is no such thing as principle, that only testifies to the ways in which Schmitt’s ideas pervade the contemporary intellectual zeitgeist.) Liberals insist that there exists something called society independent of the state, but Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest its power. Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it…

If Schmitt is right, conservatives win nearly all of their political battles with liberals because they are the only force in America that is truly political. From the 2000 presidential election to Congressional redistricting in Texas to the methods used to pass Medicare reform, conservatives like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove have indeed triumphed because they have left the impression that nothing will stop them. Liberals cannot do that. There is, for liberals, always something as important, if not more important, than victory, whether it be procedural integrity, historical precedent, or consequences for future generations.

I certainly don’t agree with this point of view; it’s a little too David Brooksish and a lot too black and white. Liberals are certainly capable of playing ugly, a good portion of movement conservatives are disgusted with naked power plays, and so on. But it’s a better whetstone for political argument than much of what I’ve read lately. Check it out.