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Just read a good, solid article by Julian Baggini in the online Guardian, on freedom and the role of government (here). I think he gets to the heart of how a social democratic viewpoint maintains its liberalism precisely by allowing the state to act rather than attempting to erode its influence. A tiny selection (it’s not very long, so go read the rest)

To maximise our freedom, therefore, we should be interested in creating a society in which we have the maximum power to make choices for ourselves. That may require us to limit the extent to which influences that are corrosive to freedom are allowed to operate.

…..

Of course, governments can go too far. Mill was right that no actions that harm only ourselves should be illegal. But there is a difference between regulation and banning outright. That is why there is no mixed message in calling for a lift on absolute prohibitions on illegal drugs, while at the same time legislating to encourage responsible drinking and coming down hard on those whose intoxication risks harm to others. Nor is the proposed increase in the number and size of casinos necessarily a bad thing, if it is matched by much stricter regulation of gambling, as promised.

I like Baggini – he contributes to B&W and there is a very nice article on their front page by him, on the fissure between postmodern thinkers and other intellectuals, where he sidesteps the cheap route of playing up the differences and grasps at their commonality – a fundamental shared notion of rationality (he argues this may be a thin one, but it is shared in this form by both these groups) that pits them against fundamentalists and other fanatics. His Guardian piece made me go back to a site I’ve relegated from ‘regular read’ to ‘rarely bother with’ – and confirm my preference shift. For if there were ever a peddler of the ‘intrusive state’ thesis, Spiked is it.

Spiked (“online, off-message”) pitches itself as the web-zine for rational people who didn’t care what other people thought. It took a different view, criticised the media as well as the government, was pro-science and critical of the anti-GM lobby, and in many senses suited well someone evacuating the Usenet atheism and evolution newsgroups where argumentative beatdowns were thrown at the lazy of thought and the deliberatively illogical.

And they had a view on everything! How impressive, I thought, to have an angle on every event that happened. Given time it became apparent that the angle was more or less the same angle every time – a libertarian none-of-your-business attitude. First disappointed (it’s a less impressive output when you discover it’s based around templates), I became disillusioned when it became clear that this limited the topics to get coverage, and promoted a bias as heavy as any I’d find in any print paper. If there is any government initiative, we are going to hear about how it is a bad thing, decided a priori to its actual content and aim. The environmental only gets covered from an impossibly skeptical perspective – either focused pieces from experts downplaying the threat or using new claims about the environment as an excuse to wheel out … the same experts and their same old arguments. Just another example of an institution committing itself to a position, and as a consequence removing itself from objective evaluation of the true situation. Despite its claims, it’s less rational than a novice beginning each issue with an “I’m not sure” and taking it from their.

If there is any doubt that Baggini’s article speaks to them (intentionally or otherwise), here are a few choice quotes from a few seconds of trawling their archives – first

in danger of handing the state that very right….busy-body coppers laying down the law (link)

and here, where they do their bit to finesse the issue

Though government intervention is more coercive and intrusive than in the past, it is mediated through a range of ‘caring’ professionals and its authoritarian character is obscured. Nanny is a straw person, the counsellor is the personification of the therapeutic state.(link)

And what’s all this? On reading this scolding article about the Tory party giving in to PC, it seems like even tolerance is a bridge too far:

Meanwhile, the Tory Party has bent over backwards to show respect to those diverse lifestyles that are deemed acceptable today. The party staged a gay and lesbian summit for young people on 28 March 2003 that discussed issues such as tackling homophobic bullying and promoting health…. [Michael Howard] gave his support to ‘sensible measures to combat race, disability and sex discrimination’, which were apparently not ‘political correctness’ but ‘plain common sense, decency, humanity’ ….This reinforces today’s censorious climate.

‘deemed acceptable’? combatting discrimination “apparently not” (with sarcasm clearly on) PC? Dear or dear. My search has convinced me that they have jumped the shark into a pool of genuine unpleasantness.

A curious thing is that they seem to concede that no-one feels the same way:

The most striking contrast between today’s therapeutic state and the nanny state of the past is the absence of popular opposition. On the contrary, opinion polls reveal substantial majorities in favour of measures currently under discussion, such as bans on smoking in public places and restrictions on advertising of ‘junk food’. Where is the campaign to uphold the rights of smokers in pubs and restaurants? Have we seen demonstrations demanding the right to eat junk food or indulge in binge drinking?

One must wonder where the issue is – we live in a society where people agree that the government is right to exercise its powers to protect us from the actions of others, including regulation of unwelcome behaviour. End of story, surely? Perhaps not – perhaps there is a layer of ‘false consciousness’ occluding the poor proletariat, that only Mick Hulme and his noble band can see through. Given that their position on the state is largely predicated on the notion that people know what is good for them and should be left alone, even this flimsy defence is self-defeating.

Even now, I readily concede the readability of Spiked – its articles go down like flat Coke. But the sheer tendentiousness of its writing makes it tiresome and utterly predictable. Seems to me that Spiked are less off-message than off-base.

UPDATE: A commentator draws attention to this story revealing the colourful and somewhat worrying ideological history of the Spiked, nee Living Marxism crowd, and just how many pies their tentacles have got into. One thing that resonates strongly with me is the assertion that

the scientific establishment, always politically naive, appears unwittingly to have permitted its interests to be represented to the public by the members of a bizarre and cultish political network.

I don’t know that science (as a human body) is always naive, but it could use better, more positive PR, and must have found it reassuring to discover organisations of hardline technophiliacs saying “it’s alright Jack, I’ve got your back”. But to me, this is the worst possible outcome, simply deepening fault lines between the factions and trying to isolate science as compatible only with an atomistic, individualistic world view. It’s akin to what Pinker is achieving with The Blank Slate – to push opposition onto a fork, where either they accept ‘the scientific case’ for womens inequality or are forced to reject the scientific worldview entirely. One way or another, trying to shrink the ranks and perceived weight of the rational, systematic left. It’s as smart as it is shitty, and they need to be sorted out.

with news that Lula writes off Mozambique’s debt – reportedly

determined to help other countries, that are poorer and facing greater needs than Brazil.

Which is pretty cool.

Info via the infinitely knowledgable Jonathan Edelstein.

I’ve just discovered it’s Arrival Day today in the US, the anniversary of the formation of the American Jewish community. 350 years old today! How cool. I’m totally permeated by American culture (oh! how unusual!) but when I pause to take account, a huge swathe of it is better characterised as Jewish-American culture, through comedy, music, musicals, films, comics and novels, and so this day is definitely one to celebrate in the same vein as Christmas, as a totem of an aggregation of culturally valuable things – I thank the festive season first and foremost for Phil Spector albums, Die Hard and It’s a Wonderful Life, christmas carols (musical and dickensian) and japanese toy crazes – as well as a recognition of the passage of a people. Di-as-pora is such a cool word; I think everyone should disaporise. Anyway, I’m supposed to come up with some thoughts on “the Jewish future”, but I don’t know if I’m up to the job (especially if the future concerned is that of Jews in America – I haven’t even visited the US for three or four years). How about my jewish future? As I seem destined to have Jewish kids, already have a jewish brother related by blood, a jewish stepfamily, play in a band with a Jewish mastermind, share my office with an Isreali (though I fear not for too much longer) and love and live with a Jewish honey, it looks like this lapsed catholic has a firmly semitic future. I can deal; I like fishballs.

One of the great things about travelling for a perennial student is the excuse to fling oneself into reading, consequences be damned. Truly an idiotic attitude, as getting to grips with a solid novel should carry far less guilt then the hundreds of email-checks and news updates that permeate my working week. Regardless, I really hit my pace while I was away, filling those fleeting spare minutes in between settling into camp and the onset of heavy darkness with as many pages as I could cram in. So much so that I will make the following claim: I was reading books faster than I could eat them.

This is not hyperbole. I have considered the conditions that constitute a fair swipe at this, and I feel I have met them. Forget the really thick, coarse, sugar-paper, hardback pompous pages that a real dodger might compare to. I’m confident in taking on the eminently chewable pages of your average paperback, and coming out the winner. Lets make it a challenge: I read, you eat. I’ll front you a glass of water, and won’t even use my glasses. I’ll take on the message while you tackle the medium, Marshall McLuhan be damned. And if you whinge over the paper cuts your gums and tongue accrue, reflect first on the wounds that a clumsily constructed sentence are apt to do to me. When you gag on the quasi-papier-mâché of your bolus, streaked with printer’s ink, marvel at my capacity to consume idea after breathtaking idea. And when your stomach burns and churns as it tries to expel this foreign visitor, perhaps you will concede that my achievement of housing its cousin within my brain is fearful.

Anyway, I only read two books, due to fading light. The one I finished most recently, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, by the late Ahmadou Kourouma. It’s the first African novel I have read – perhaps novel is the wrong word, as the form is quite distinctive, being the soronama, or oral elegy summing up the life of the ruler of a West African dictatorship. It’s filled with cruelty, senselessness and waves of despair; luckily it is also very funny, a dark and bloody satire about the history and current state of the dark continent. It’s a fairly long read and at times hard work to get through, especially as the central actor, the dictator Koyaga, is a fairly characterless soul, preoccupied with hunting and stature alone. By far the best part of the book was the section (or ‘vigil’) that the storyteller relates about Macledio, Koyagas right hand man, whose search for his ‘man of destiny’ leads him across Africa in a hugely colourful and imaginative exploration of powerful princesses, desert traders, possessed souls, magic bones and more. A sympathetic and somewhat tragic character who again and again loses all he values, the vigil wrings genuine pathos out of my world-weary nodes.

Another high point is Koyagas series of visits to other dictators, each grotesque in their own distinctive way, and providing an entertaining flight through the mad and bad. Koyoga is based on Gnassingbe Eyadema, ruler of Togo, and the other leaders referenced throughout the book have their origins in genuine nasty pieces of work. I figure I learned more through reading this than I would have been prepared to wade through in a non-fiction format, not least because the humour serves to make bearable the atrocities it depicts (and I wouldn’t be satisfied with an account that excised those aspects). Not for everyone, but it was for me.

The other book I read was Paul Broks’ Into The Silent Land, which in a funny kind of way is probably more for everyone than it was for me. At least, it’s a book I think everyone has to read, except I probably didn’t need to read it. Still, I’m glad I did.

To expand: Broks is a neuropsychologist, who has been studying, diagnosing and treating individuals whose neurological defects have made their own distinctive imprints on thought, emotion, memory, and behaviour. It’s a story of what really makes us tick, and if we’ve been here before with Oliver Sacks then we haven’t quite done it the Broks way – sardonic, stumbling at times, peppered with sexual incidents and above all informed by this sense of angst, which I find preferable to the recitations about the wonder understanding the mind gives us about the material world. Not that I have any problem with scientific wonder per se, as it is a sentiment which I obviously share; I just get tired of every meditation on the subject concluding in the very same way – we should be baffled but impressed, and then get back to chewing our cornflakes. Broks has dealt with these issues first hand for many years, but it still preoccupies him, and he tries to meet it head on at times – of course we’re all just neurons, of course there is no unifying seat of consciousness, and yet, and yet, and yet – whilst at other times he kind of shifts to stances you don’t often hear scientists espousing, such as his dream sequence where he gets taken to task at the eliminative materialism court of justice, for not believing that science will ever get a hold on consciousness. Its not didactic but massively playful, without ever being less than a scientific and personal meditation (i.e., its not just screwing with your head to try to be clever).

So what’s my gripe? For me, the problem is that a lot of the book is old news; beautifully rendered old news, admittedly, but when you spend your Wednesdays at a nueropsychology clinic and other days with your head buried in Dennett, affective and cognitive neuroscience, having someone describe frontal behaviour isn’t fresh, and begins to smell suspiciously like work. An account of confabulation is never as interesting as hearing it first hand (a bed-ridden patient warning me our session would be cut short as he had a meeting with the European Parliament later, or that he knows the doctor who waved hello to him because he worked under him at the bank), and to really get into the qualia issues you need the space to do it justice, so I’d rather take myself to the authorities.

But forget my gripes, because by the time I finished it I got my time back. As I said before, it’s beautifully and involvingly written, so giving me cause to imagine certain phenomena in different ways. And the last third of the book starts to cohere its thesis (we’re neurons, and that’s it, ok, so…so…) in a quite distinctive way, pulling together meditations on dream life * that are quite astounding with evidence from Robert Louis Stevenson’s writing habits, and really making me think again about this thing that I do, and sometimes presume to take for granted. So read it, I beg of you. Chapter here.

Why, finally a long post? Well, in accordance with the book theme, I’ve being writing bits of thesis, and did a count of how much thesis-worthy material I figure I have at this stage in the game, ¾ in. Counting everything that is at or close to first draft status (admittedly higgledy-piggledy – god, what a word – and needing touching up – some of it is written as complete papers and will need to be segmented and inserted into chapters, which may take as long as the original writing), double-spaced, I’ve broken ninety pages, which is surprising and rather heartening. Of course, there’s a lot more to do – I need to do at least 3 or 4 experiments this year…..

And a final book moment: if this is to be believed, the little baby I got involved in should be out by Christmas. So you all know what to get your nearest and dearest….

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* Like, how’s this for starters: accept that there is no Cartesian theatre, no single seat of consciousness that watches everything unfold before it, a viewer, that mental events must parade before for them to really happen. This is the view that much of Neuropsychology pushes you towards – you are the sum of a large quantity of mental operations that occur, with no central locus that is you – you can lesion parts of the brain and the person is changed. Is not not-you but not the same-you as it was before. Snip other parts and information is no longer accessible – but only for certain purposes; you may be able to read but not hear words, or see but be unaware of visual stimuli. The ‘you’ you think is leading the way is a construct. If you accept this, then what reason is there to believe that in some very real sense the mental world of dreams may not continue while you wake, just in an area of your neural faculties that is not accessible to your constructed consciousness? What is there to prohibit those ‘unconscious’ processes (which undoubtedly exist; no-one doubts that procedural memory is real) from being smart, in the same way that we consider ourselves (again, that conscious front end that deals with the outside world) to be smart? After all, who the hell is running that awesomely complicated, nuanced and vivid world we call our dreams?

Yes I am tent-blogging. OK not really, but I have been spending my days waking at six to roll up my mattress and fold down my canvass dwelling. Now I sit in a Namibian bakery, which is a less unconventional locus of the blog, granted, but still fun, especially with that cinammon smell wafting by.

Smell it?

mmm.

Very cool country, and ther wildlife of the savannah has a familiar yet-alien quality – their are recognisable components of many animals – the bull in the wildebeest, the fox in the jackal, the HGV in the elephant – yet twisted in unspeakably cool ways. I’ve got to see sprinbok stotting, and plenty of exciting carcasses, along with the obligatory bestial-copro moments. Nice. Perhaps I will paraglide tomorrow.

In essence, life is swell. Catch you in blighty, most likely.

No title, as I’m wholly contrite about my lack of action. I promised you neuromarketing! Sorry, folks, but tomorrow has been a Vitalstatistix kind of phenomena recently. Hiatus will no doubt continue, as I will be going away in a week: there are reasons, namely getting involved in this unspeaking cool project, trying to mutate the thoughts on evo-psych and politics into a coherent article, and busy workness.

However, when important things rear their head, I always step up, so consider this your friendly link to an important piece of research on scary films. Needless to say, I was underimpressed:

Researchers spent two weeks watching horror films like The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs in pursuit of the formula.

Two weeks? Fuck off. Thats a couple of popcorn marathons (and I bet they weren’t watching 14 hours a day, either). I have severe suspicions about their sampling methods – not the quantity (I admit, you could watch a fair heft of films in two weeks to give a moderate sample) so much as representativeness. If they just took visible movies that made it to the mainstream, they’d certainly miss all the international horror (with very different takes on fear), low key burners like Paperhouse (I assume to god they included Jacobs Ladder, but even that ain’t guaranteed) – and what about this shocker?

Stefan.

Stefan!!!

(apologies to those whose adolescence was not incomprehensively stricken by exposure to a rubber dinosaur and a grown man acting as a child. And not in a Jack kinda way.)

…like old ragtime music, hate the Bush administration, or obey my commands you will go here and watch the precious. NB I watched the 60mb version and it did take 4-5 minutes of seemingly nothing to get going (I opened it up into a seemingly static new window) so patience. Needs sound.

A: Gives a Brain Wave!

Oh yes. You know it, I’ve hit paydirt. A web site that seems perfectly pitched at me: Neuroscience for Kids. Joy. I’ll alert you to a piece comparing Neuroscience research to “Survivor”; which gave a 2000s spin to a well-recognised fact:

To stay in the television game, survivors must avoid being voted out. One way to avoid banishment is to gain “immunity” by winning an immunity challenge… For scientists, immunity is tenure.

Quite. The similarities end at some point:

Neuroscientists are not competing for a million dollars.

No shit, sherlock. Only, if you’re a neuromarketer….

What’s a neuromarketer? I’ll tell ya tomorrow.

For the most part I have no problem with evolutionary psychology.

Sure, I’m not a believer in all the arguments it puts forward. And sure, a portion of the work has been sloppy, in the early days (the vilified Sociobiology period, as documented here), and increasingly, I feel, in the recent output. But I’m quite happy to tie myself to the position that evolutionary forces have shaped the brain and behaviour in organisms, and consequently are well worth studying. It’s natural that I would: much work in neuroscience and psychology proper is tacitly underpinned by this notion, and to fail to recognise this would hamstring a serious investigator of brain and behaviour. If a sub-discipline wants to focus on these issues a bit more closely, then that’s fine with me; get some right, get some wrong, but get it out there for us to puzzle over.

At the moment, I do have a problem with evolutionary psychology.

I have a problem with it because it has shucked its safety harness and pounced into the public arena: being an unusual beast, it attracts spotlights and attention; being trained well it captivates onlookers with its dynamic flurry. One consequence is that evolutionary psychology and its trappings have firmly re-entered the arsenal of right-wing justification, and continue to perpetuate the mindset that rationality is bequeathed solely to the modern right. The agnosticism towards politics that seemed promised in the new wave of Evolutionary Psychology has been jettisoned in favour of extensive engagement with these issues. The most visible work in which this can be seen is Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate ₁, which actually purports to excise “anxieties about human nature”(p139), but somehow manages to steamroll into every political issue it can find. Invariably, the only sector that comes out well is the secular right.

It might appear odd that a book which damns the politicisation of the scientific issue of nature-nurture, and vocally attempts to neuter it, could be so preoccupied with the social and indeed, political, implications of that same issue. But Pinker is an excellent writer, and the book is structured in such a way to allay even the critical reader’s suspicions. From the first few sections concerned with the history of ideas of human nature, and some of the science which conflicts with these ideas, he then moves to the nightmare implications that are so often thrown up by critics (won’t we all have to become racists?). He compellingly and dispassionately exposes the fallacies that plague thinking about human nature (using the Humean maxim -you can’t get ought from is- to illuminate how selfish tendencies would not undermine ethics; explicating what determinism really means, and whether genetic determinism would be any worse than environmental determinism), and shows that these issues ultimately bottom out into political and ethical arguments, rather than scientific findings. By the end of this, with any conscientious, rational reader firmly on side, the book turns from these extreme and worrying issues (determinism, eugenics, racism) onto contemporary ‘hot button’ issues; we are informed that in these cases science should be utilized, as we need a good cost-benefit analysis of what is going on.

As one of these readers, revisiting for the second time, I feel like a man beguiled, ruefully clutching his head the next day as he figures out that the other camel being lame, blind and toothless, doesn’t make this one worth the forty shekels. Hitler, Nietzsche and deep pessimism about humanity were hovering about human nature – but now, they are vanquished! And our saviour merely asks that we consider installing these new sentinels: Hobbes, Hayek, Burke. We are told accepting genes and biological bases to the mind doesn’t require accepting the bogeymen, but it is strongly implied that if we are going to be scientific about it we ought to pack up our Rousseau, Locke and Kennedy.

To me this book is disingenuous. Pinker as vigorous corrector of misunderstanding does, largely, a wonderful job. However, to sandwich in his viewpoints on hot button issues, he leaves the lab and slumps into the armchair, making arguments that where nominally solid are not reducible to science, or else not reducible to the scientific knowledge we currently have. They are at times intriguing and possibly compelling, but they are ultimately polemic and not an expression of the current scientific state of play.

I’m going to visit this book a few times over the next few weeks, try and build a concerted critique of its political aims. This is part of something I’ve been wanting to get off the ground, under the title of “Science is not a right wing tool”, or some such. Too often I see science and rationality touted as if they are the province of the right, and the left is dominated by dogma and blushing nonsense. I’d like to serve as some sort of corrective. For now, Pinker is target No 1 – not because I dislike him; I have read most of his books and enjoyed them all; I’ve paid to hear him speak and find him engaging, and he (and much of evolutionary psychology) were what drew me deeply into my studies in the first place. I’m tackling him because I’m frustrated that so much can be, as he hopes, “coolly analytical” (p xi), whilst his “positive thrust” (ibid) is so untempered and undoes, to my mind, what the real task of the book should be: to say everyone, regardless of belief, should get on board the science train.

1 Pinker, S. (2002). The blank slate. Viking Penguin, New York.

I’m rather desensitised to the horror of football (two teams I was waving for go out on penalties, the other underperforming horribly, as always) , but my senses were understandably pricked by a heartening story on that warmest of topics for any english liberal: right-on footie.

The beautiful game – real football, Brazilian style – is coming to Haiti , and a gun amnesty is being combined with ticket distribution to make “I’ll see you in the stands” shift from a dark threat into an expression of peace.

I wonder if they scale it: an Uzi for a single seat, bazooka gets a family ticket and so on; the team could take a bullet back as a grave memento. Guns are a serious problem for Haiti (I wonder, where it is in the world where guns do not constitute a problem), and it’s heartening to hear the current PM Gerard Latortue say:

“A few Brazilian soccer stars could do more to disarm warring militias than thousands of peacekeeping troops”

I’ve written before, a little, about the problems Brazil faces, especially with regard to its urban poor, a problem too long ignored – now a third of Brazilians live on less than $1 per day, and there are mixed signals about President Lula – popular with investors but criticized at home for slowing reform. My limited knowledge yields me a limited faith in him – I think a huge country with huge problems has to be treated carefully, and those who I met in Brazil who were most hopeful for the future seemed the most grounded – the middle-aged aerospace engineer I met on the plane back, the family we stayed with – so we might see slow, but real improvement on the ground (the eternal optimist in me shines bright today). Regardless, when you scout around a little more, to countries like Haiti, Honduras in the Americas, or Sierra Leone, Guinea (priority countries on the Hunger Map) you realize there’s bad, and then there’s bad. Even if it seems largely tokenistic, it’s warming when a country with plenty problems of its own puts out a hand to another.