Stew of the Day

Nothing special, just the urge to scribble out something of modest interest as I sit this morning on my dharma bum.  A conversation, an article worth reading, some stereotypical liberal thoughts on recent events.  A short divertissement, half a can of diet pepsi, part of a chocolate chip cookie.

First, the conversation.  Went on a date yesterday with a fascinating gentleman (no, it’s not that kind of blog entry).  He’s from central Africa.  About fifty, NGO guy.  “When I was a little boy” he said, “my father taught me how to hunt.  It was all forest.  Now it is the Sahara.”  I have been thinking about that since.  It is of course one thing to hear something on a stage, or see pictures, or even to visit (which I have not).  It is another thing entirely to hear it as personal experience, over coffee, from someone you like.  “Now it is the Sahara.”  He thinks the estimates of a billion refugees as a result of climate change is, perhaps, low.  “Every day you got up and hunted for what you were going to eat that day.”  A great many people live that way.  When the forest is gone, there is nothing to eat, of course.   Nothing at all.  And the Sahara is bigger today than it was yesterday, or the day before.

It’s a stew here, as promised.  Just read a great article in NYT mag, courtesy a salon link.  The NYT article I just read was in some ways the syllabus of a survey class, but it was still thought provoking (if one is inclined to be provoked.)  The author takes a quick tour of moral reasoning across cultures.  One quote stuck with me…

In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01…

Makes sense…if true, it explains a bit why conservatives (and I’d count Hill, and Bill, as such) do better with triangulation.  But what I liked the article for was a throwaway paragraph on the difference between moral rationalization, and moral reasoning.  I don’t particularly like where the author went…like all things that touch on social psych, too long a consideration makes it depressingly easy to decide the house monkeys are vapid monsters, all.  And the difference between rationalization and reasoning is often a matter of reaching what is true…so it’s a hard conversation to have, for sure.  But so many things I read online (and a few I write) are based on “I feel this, therefore this must be true” — blazing moral fury, or smug assumptions, as the persuasive force.  Whether or not rationalization and reasoning can be teased out from the world, I do not know — but they are glaringly obvious in persuasive writing, as forms of appeal.  

And, eh, the last ingredient of the stew.  The lights on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem, turned off at dawn so George Bush could see sunrise properly over the battlements, from his room at the King David.  Pictures of the robe presented to him — with his name and title embroidered in real gold thread.  His visit to Bethlehem, and Ramallah.  One’s first reaction — if you’re like me — is ewwww.  Holy crap.  Mount Scopius has seen emperors, prefects, paladins and princes pass below it, and clearly people have not forgotten the necessity of flattering monsters.  But my second reaction is what a huge and terrible show of power this was.  The most hated man in the world can go to a place where people are so miserable they blow themselves up, and piously pray at the birthplace of his messiah, and have a little chat with Abbas in Ramallah, and no one touches a hair on his head.  That is power, terrifying power.  Rather like Versailles, it proclaims one thing, in this case a pageant of peace and change, but the intrinsic message is ‘Oderint dum metuant’ — let them hate, as long as they fear.  Western heads of state — hell, most Knesset members — would hesitate to casually cross the green line today.  

Anyway, thanks for reading.  You can finish the diet coke now!

23 comments

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    • jessical on January 14, 2008 at 21:14
      Author

    …at the cut-rate buffet.

  1. perhaps it would balcane out the corruption the Democrats hold so dear. On the other hand for years I’ve been told the this is a trollish position and two legs better wins.  

  2. Tell me they have made provisions for the exorcism.

    • Valtin on January 15, 2008 at 02:45

    I wish you’d gone on more to say what about the issue of morality, and what about the article intrigued or offended you.

    The author, Stephen Pinker, is a well-known evolutionary psychologist. While I, like Pinker, and others all the way back to Darwin, find that a moral sense arises out of our evolutionary past (most specifically, the social sense), Pinker and his associates go farther than most in seeing categories of morality. They then go on to reify these categories, viz. Pinker maintaining, following Haidt, that there are five such categories: harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity. Thus Pinker:

    The five spheres are good candidates for a periodic table of the moral sense not only because they are ubiquitous but also because they appear to have deep evolutionary roots.  

    Now this is taking a supposition and turning into a “truism” — a “periodic table of the moral sense” indeed.

    As a psychologist, and a historian, I’m only too aware of the social need of those in the social sciences to make their knowledge seem as concrete and hard as physical sciences like chemistry and physics.

    Among Pinker and his associates other fallacious reasonings is forgetting that traits are context-specific and nominalistic. This is the kind of thing that got the evolutionary psychologists in deep water for talking about such things as ants making “slaves” of other ants, and such nonsense. (What’s nonsense isn’t the fact, for instance, that some ant colonies capture ants from other species and integrate them into their colonies, where they do specific kinds of work, but that it is anthropomorphized into “slavery”, which is a political/historical term unique to our species.)

    I’ve gone off the deep end, I see, in this comment, which was meant only to thank you for your chocolate chip cookie and etc.

  3. One thing I enjoy about your writing, it is not predictable, ( and no I am not trying to say you are unfocused, that is my department thank you )and you make me think. Ouch. Brain hurts.

    • pfiore8 on January 16, 2008 at 20:33

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