10 Restaurants Worth a Plane Ride

This is a NYT article - and the restaurants profiled in it are not just in foreign countries; most are on other continents. The title says it all.

Science über alles

Jonathan Gottschall has argued that the only way to rescue literary criticism from marginalization and irrelevance is to put it on a solid scientific basis - which would involve the relentless application of statistics to all sorts of problems. The tag line for his article in the "Ideas" section of Boston Globe ("Measure for Measure") reads: "Literary criticism could be one of our best tools for understanding the human condition. But first, it needs a radical change: embracing science." Hm - what would be a simple hypothesis regarding the "human condition" which Gottschall could test using his favorite tools? How about: "God is dead"?

Towards the end of his essay Gottschall says: "The great wall dividing the two cultures of the sciences and humanities has no substance. We can walk right through it." Indeed - this is how things must look if you think all reality can be reduced to mechanical interactions, and equations reflecting those interactions. In "The Matrix," Cypher watches those greenish ones and zeros flowing down the computer screen and says that he can sees human beings behind them. With nerds, it's the other way around - they look at people, and all they can see is numbers.

When C. P. Snow wrote "The Two Cultures," his analysis had a clear class angle. The literature/humanities circles he criticized for their lack of scientific understanding came mostly from Britain's top "public" (that is, private) boarding schools and old universities. Hence, they were very much part of the traditional elite. Most of the scientists, on the other hand, were of lower-middle or even working class origins and came mostly from the new polytechnics. Fast-forward half a century, and the picture is quite different - nerds have taken over most of the commanding heights in society and the economy. There are still a few minor bastions of metaphorical thinking (for example, some sectors of literary criticism and some other fuzzy areas), but their days seem numbered. I bet Gottschall could easily calculate their rate of attrition.

And the first will be last...

A NYT article says school districts in the US are scooping tens of thousands of iPads. They want to give those to to students, sometimes starting with kindergarten. What does this bold move demonstrate? Here is a suggestion: educators can now use only one last trick to attract and keep the attention of most students - put a screen under their nose. Poor communities which lack the resources to equip every child with a computer should in fact count this as a blessing. Unless the good Samaritans from One Laptop per Child Come Along. Judging from our daughter's experience, if Bulgarian education has one saving grace, it's the continuing reliance on hard copy and handwriting. There is research which suggests that printed matter evokes a stronger emotional reaction, and handwriting activates the brain in more beneficial way - as compared to reading from a screen and typing respectively. Oh, and some exciting statistics from the current issue of the Atlantic: the amount of time 15-to-19-year old in the US spent reading on a weekend day went down from 16 to 5 minutes in two years (between 2007 and 2009).

Outfoxed?

A couple of months ago, the writers behind the Simpsons tried a couple of digs at Fox News. During the opening credits of one episode, they inserted a Fox News helicopter adorned with the slogan: “Fox News: Not Racist, but No. 1 with Racists.” At the start of the next episode, the slogan was changed to “Unsuitable for Viewers under 75.” Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly fumed, and the Simpsons bunch – supported by their loyal liberal followers – probably felt a sense of warm gratification at their own boundless courage. But the Simpsons are in fact subsidizing Fox News, and Fox News anchors must be secretly grateful for such satirical pricks which can nicely illustrate the nihilistic hubris of the liberal media elite. As Marx would have put it, this is the objective truth about the relationship between the two Fox brands; and any other interpretation must be a form of false consciousness.

The truth about suicide bombers

This is the title of a recent article from the “Ideas” section of Boston Globe. It describes the work of Israeli and American researchers who have founds a simple explanation for the seemingly puzzling phenomenon: many suicide bombers are merely troubled individuals looking for an excuse to commit suicide (as an outright taking of one’s own life is forbidden by the Quran). This strikes me as a lame attempt by academics to explain away and discredit a detestable practice - one of the very few left in the age of cultural sensitivity and tolerance. But it may also reflect the genuine inability of most number-crunchers to fathom any search for self-transcendence, no matter how misguided it can be. This is a deficit which may also underlie recent attacks on religion by a dream team of beautiful minds (including Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, and the like).

Living on for the ages

This is the start of a newspaper article published back in November:

Messy Mya, burgeoning rapper and YouTube sensation, identified as 7th Ward murder victim

By Brendan McCarthy, The Times-Picayune

Moments after gunshots roared through the 7th Ward on Sunday night, a lone snapshot appeared on the Internet.

In it, a 22-year-old man is lying cheek to the ground, crimson pooling around his neck. His eyes are closed, his torso curled.

Chaos explodes around him, with the arms of others pressed to the back of his head. And someone is holding a cell phone just inches from his face.

This is how the world learned of Messy Mya's death.

The last will be first...

A couple of weeks ago, a lengthy NYT article drew attention to the pitfalls of “Growing up Digital, Wired for Distraction.” It chimed with concerns expressed in previous articles, as well as a Frontline documentary, Digital Nation, aired last February. Of course, technophiles will remain unconvinced; some will even continue to argue that “everything bad is good for you.” But I am now mulling a mischievous hypothesis: maybe some societies which find themselves on the losing side of the “digital divide” will be able to give a better neurological head start to their young.

Call to arms

For a couple of weeks now, the bestseller list in France has been topped by a 30-page pamphlet (Indignez-vous!) penned by Stéphane Hessel, a 93-year-old former resistance fighter. He appeals to readers to become outraged and express indignation at the state of modern society: the growing gap between the rich and poor under Sarkozy, France’s callous treatment of immigrants, the plight of the Palestinians, threats to France’s welfare system and the environment, etc. Essentially, Hessel calls on French society to reembrace the values of the resistance. How nice when someone who has lived a truly rich and meaningful life really cares to leave such a precious intellectual legacy behind. As another example, take Gordon Murray, the dying banker who recently published The Investment Answer, a pamphlet advising investors to relax and give up on efforts to beat the market. Or Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who, after similarly being diagnosed with terminal cancer, gave several “last lectures” (available on YouTube) – advising anyone willing to listen how to achieve their childhood dreams, and how to manage their time more efficiently (by, for example, installing extra monitors on their PCs, avoiding long phone conversations, etc.).

The crisis of values

Here is how Paul Krugman renders the last 20 years of Irish history in the NYT ("Eating the Irish"):

"The Irish story began with a genuine economic miracle. But eventually this gave way to a speculative frenzy driven by runaway banks and real estate developers, all in a cozy relationship with leading politicians. The frenzy was financed with huge borrowing on the part of Irish banks, largely from banks in other European nations.

"Then the bubble burst, and those banks faced huge losses. You might have expected those who lent money to the banks to share in the losses. After all, they were consenting adults, and if they failed to understand the risks they were taking that was nobody’s fault but their own. But, no, the Irish government stepped in to guarantee the banks’ debt, turning private losses into public obligations.

"Before the bank bust, Ireland had little public debt. But with taxpayers suddenly on the hook for gigantic bank losses, even as revenues plunged, the nation’s creditworthiness was put in doubt. So Ireland tried to reassure the markets with a harsh program of spending cuts.

"Step back for a minute and think about that. These debts were incurred, not to pay for public programs, but by private wheeler-dealers seeking nothing but their own profit. Yet ordinary Irish citizens are now bearing the burden of those debts.

"Or to be more accurate, they’re bearing a burden much larger than the debt — because those spending cuts have caused a severe recession so that in addition to taking on the banks’ debts, the Irish are suffering from plunging incomes and high unemployment."

So, private investors and bankers pocketed huge profits while the markets was on a roll (or the bubble was being inflated); but the Irish government promptly nationalized their potential losses when the chips came down. One might wonder what this scheme would do to the sense of fairness and just returns of the Irish - and others who have seen socially destructive economic practices lavishly rewarded by "the market" and subsequent losses shifted onto the gullible public. But never mind - we all know that the crisis of values in modern societies comes from post-modernist nihilism and the indoctrination of the young by a motley gang of feminists, gay rights activists, and unshaven academics in tweed jackets. Why, oh, why is it so difficult even for highly cultured and talented people like Theodore Dalrymple and Kay Hymowitz to connect the dots?

Testing the Zeitgeist

Writing for the “Language Log,” Mark Liberman deconstructs the recent NYT article on the potential perils of “Growing up Digital.” He apparently wants to send out a general warning against the recent explosion of alarmist pop neuroscience since his post is titled “Your Brain on …?” Liberman thinks one of the main studies quoted in the NYT piece has methodological flaws, therefore the article provides no sound proof regarding the effects of video games and thrilling video material on kids’ brains. He warns against alarmist stories with “a high ratio of stereotype and anecdote to fact,” as opposed to “serious large-scale studies of causes and effects.” Each impressionistic account should be seen for what it truly is – just another case of “ritual inter-generational hand-wringing.” Like, you know, Socrates’s worries about the negative effects of writing, concerns about the printing press, or the telephone (Liberman quotes a NYT article from 1924 describing the telephone as that “most persistent and … most penetrating” aspect of “the jagged city and its machines,” which “go by fits, forever speeding and slackening and speeding again, so that there is no certainty”; with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see how totally, utterly baseless all such alarmist premonitions have been). The comments below Lieberman’s post mostly support his blasé attitude. True, one reader (a self-described scientist who knows all too well “that anecdotal evidence doesn't mean squat in science”) does sound some concern. In his view, sometimes a phenomenon may become so “prevalent that you don't need science to tell you of its existence, instead perhaps only of its severity, and even then, sometimes it takes a while for scientists to come up with a good way to empirically quantify these things.” This might just be the case now, of we take his own observations seriously: “I'm young, and I have experienced for myself how constant exposure to the internet and games have severely harmed my own ability to concentrate and focus on tasks for long periods at a time (meaning, any longer than half an hour). But moreover, all my friends are having the same problem.” Another reader, though, immediately counters these worries. Citing his own superhuman powers of concentration at age 58, after decades of gaming, he concludes: “Your anecdotal narrative is no more proof of anything than mine.” A more sympathetic young reader admits: “I … use the internet many hours most days, and have serious trouble with concentration, procrastination, discipline at work, and so on, and yes, many of my friends have similar problems.” But does he see any causal link here? Not necessarily. In his universe, “without a control group of friends who don’t use the internet so much, I don’t see how we can fairly put the blame on it!” I have the following hypothesis regarding the total reliance of such superintelligent researchers (most are male, thus the ubiquitous “he” above; but women are not immune to the syndrome) on clear-cut experimental proof and their intense scorn for “anecdotal narratives” (why would some call it “evidence,” really?). If the left hemisphere of your brain is overdeveloped (a requirement for – and partly the effect of – a successful scientific career these days), it will inhibit the more inchoate impulses generated by the right hemisphere. As a result, you will tend to focus on observable causal relationships among isolated “variables”; and you won’t be able to step back and sense some overall patterns. Liberman and his fellow-travelers will, of course, dismiss such a glib explanation as a groundless overgeneralization by someone who should have never been granted a Ph.D. in a social discipline. They will continue to study language, of all things, applying the one and only scientific method that can produce true knowledge; and to throw out the CVs of job applicants who show the slightest diversion from the scientific canon. More ominously, others will continue to apply the same mindset and methodology to the study of society, politics, the economy – and even the human psyche. And their predictions will never be proven wrong, no matter how severe the next crisis they miss may turn out to be. As Iain McGilchrist notes in “The Master and His Emissary,” one of the benefits of having a hypertrophied left hemisphere is immunity from self-doubt.

Don’t daydream – ever!

A recent study has concluded that a “wandering mind may lead to unhappiness.” That is, if your mind strays too often from the task you need to perform, you are likelier to experience some depressive thoughts and feelings. Staying focused on that task, on the other hand, would make you happier. As we all know, it can even give you that elusive high referred to as “flow.” Since moments of mind-wandering tended to precede spurts of moodiness, the researchers concluded that the former were causing the latter, not the other way around. My money, though, would be on a different explanation. Could this be another spurious correlation, both variables being determined by a third, less obvious one? Maybe more impulsive (or compulsive) people would be more likely to succumb to uncontrollable ruminations. This, of course, is a classic recipe for depression. But the weaker self-control which produces impulsiveness is generally associated with negative emotionality (except for cases of hypomania, when individuals experience a chronic, invigorating high). So, people with robust self-control (those who would always wait for the second marshmallow) have no reason to fear they might experience a temporary mood disorder if they spend a bit longer ironing or self-grooming (the kind of tasks which seem to predispose us most to mind-wandering). Cutting down on such chores, though, might make everyone happier. I hope some clever research theme will think up a series of ingenious experiments to test this hypothesis.

Just focus!

A couple of weeks ago it was revealed that typesetters had accidentally opened the wrong file for the British edition of John Franzen’s thick new novel, “Freedom.” As a result, 80,000 copies of the wrong draft were printed, and needed to be pulped. These may seem unrelated, but a recent study of data compiled in Oklahoma has revealed that surgical errors may be on the increase, despite detailed protocols aimed at avoiding them (and related malpractice lawsuits). In recent years, these have included things like operating on the wrong patient, organ, side of the brain, etc. – sometimes with lethal consequences. And the BBC web site still has a “Skillwise Factsheet” posted providing instructions on how to construct a good paragraph – and it contains the following gem: “What does the topic sentence do? It introduces the main idea of the sentence.” It has been maybe two years since I first saw it, and it is still there, unchanged. I would be curious to what extent this apparent difficulty to stay focused and pay attention to detail might make engineering errors (and even friendly fire accidents ) more common than they would normally be. But there must be a away to dispel the mental fog induced by an increasingly complex, fast-paced and technologically saturated social environment – yes, you guessed it, by applying even more innovative and immersive technologies.

Don't cut off your ear!

Jonah Lehrer describes in his blog (“Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative?”) a recent study which seems to confirm “that people who are a little bit miserable” (like Van Gogh) are more creative (or innovative). He concludes that “the cliché might be true after all. Angst has creative perks.” I recall some time ago Lehrer already wrote about the upside of depression, but his focus is narrower now. When a researcher induced sad feelings and thoughts in experimental subjects, they produced collages which were judged a (statistically significant) tad more creative as compared to controls. Sadness also seemed to make subjects more attentive and detail-oriented, and to generally sharpen their “information processing strategies.” Apparently, such focus and diligence are quite helpful in performing various tasks – “writing a poem or solving a hard technical problem.” As further proof, Lehrer points to a survey which found that 80 per cent of writers who participated in one workshop “met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression.” In my naïveté, I have always thought artistic creativity is a bit different from the sparks of innovation that have given us the atomic bomb and Facebook. While the latter could easily come to people who meet the diagnostic criteria for some part of the autistic spectrum, the former would seem to hinge on intense emotional attunement and expression. In that case, heightened sensitivity could produce both depressive slumps (or even madness) and creative surges. So having raw nerves would make it likelier that you 1) cut off your ear, and 2) achieve artistic recognition, and maybe even greatness. It seems like a classic case where one independent variable (emotional sensitivity/intensity) determines two dependent variables (depressive moods and creativity); therefore the correlation between those does not signify causation. On the basis of this theory, I do have the hunch that sacrificing any body part is highly unlikely to unleash the creative potential pent up in your skull. And this would apply to geeks, too – so maybe Lehrer is right and there is no meaningful difference between the two areas of creativity or innovation.

Facebook will save the world

I knew Facebook had already done a lot to upgrade the lives of millions, but apparently its most important contribution to humanity still lies ahead ("The Age of Possibility"). In the NYT, Roger Cohen describes a momentous global transformation which will shift the center of economic and political gravity in the world from the West to the rest. He is well aware that similar transitions in the past have involved enormous bloodshed and suffering. yet, he is "not too worried." What gives him confidence that this time things will be different? The first item on his list is "the web of social networks that now span the globe." The one example Cohen gives on this account reads: "Half a billion Facebook users constitute some sort of insurance against disaggregation." In his view, "being in touch in ways that dissolve national borders makes it more difficult to be in large-scale violent conflict across fault lines." I am thinking - who else wasn't "too worrried" and thought that this time things would be different? Oh, yes - the dotcom crowd 10 years ago, and the bankers (plus the millions of small "investors" in "home equity" who took their bait). But let's stay away from such far-fetched analogies. We all know that one day things will be really, truly different. If we could only believe strongly enough.

The Harvard culinary show

Harvard has started offering a basic science course where the lab work is cooking. It employs a couple of celebrity chefs and is immensely popular. The idea is to introduce some formulas and concepts from chemistry and physics to analyze different processes students observe in the course of food preparation. A couple of years ago I read somewhere that as high school students were increasingly uninterested in basic science, they were being offered new courses in applied disciplines - like forensic science. Let me think - if Harvard is now using cooking as a way to make chemistry and physics more relevant to its students, what should Indiana University in Gary do to achieve a similar effect? Teach massage?

Just like you and me

There is a new German movie out on the life of the young Goethe. A young actress interviewed on Deutsche Welle TV described how she had been thrilled to find out that Goethe had, in fact, loved, drunk, and joked – just like her and her friends. My first reaction was: “Yeah, right…” But, on second thought, why put anyone on a pedestal, really? And why assume that 200 years ago celebrities – of any age – were any different from what they are today?

The importance of being earnest

Michael Kimmelman describes in the NYT a visit to the House of Humor and Satire in Gabrovo – a humorless, once industrial city in Bulgaria (“Take My Bulgarian Joke Book. Please.”). Most of the piece is quite condescending toward the place and the tour guide/PR officer who welcomed the author. Until at the very end he recognizes in what he sees a kind of earnestness he and his kind seem to have lost. Granted, approaching the outside world with a sense of irony and detachment is a sign of unmistakable sophistication. But being unable to leave your irony behind must be an utmost curse. Lord Chesterton once wrote: “Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.” By the way, the Don Quixote statue next to the Gabrovo satirical shrine is astounding – all made of iron scrap welded together to capture the true spirit of Cervantes’s otherworldly hero. Apparently, Mr. Kimmelman wasn’t sufficiently impressed to include it in the picture of the Gabrovo attraction accompanying his article.

The price of progress?

As the Chilean president was handing medals and flags to the 33 miners in his palace, he took time to hug each one of them. Emotions were clearly overflowing - no Pan Am smiles there. I was going to say - of course, this is the reason why even Chile, the Latin American tiger (if there is one), will never be Switzerland. But let's not stereotype.

The continuing conquest of cool

A NYT article (“Looking to a Sneaker for a Band’s Big Break”) says lifestyle brands are fast becoming the new recording labels. Converse, for example, has set up a studio in which young musicians can make new recordings for free. Companies will sponsor different aspects of the music production, marketing, and distribution process, and sometimes acquire songs to give away at the own web sites. The overall strategy is for the youth-oriented brands to become patrons of hip music stars and thus acquire “coolness by association.” In the past, such “arrangements would have carried a stigma for the artists,” being seen as a sellout to the evil empire. Now they are embraced with casual enthusiasm. A hot female musician confidently proclaims: “Music is everywhere now, and if you have it tied to a brand, there’s nothing wrong with that.” The article mentions that the new largesse Converse and others have adopted is part of a more general strategy aiming “to infiltrate the lives of their customers on an ever deeper cultural level.” But never mind, we cannot really expect young musicians to connect those dots, can we? Even if some boast college degrees.

Planet of the apes

Writing in the NYT, renowned primatologist Frans de Waal explains the utter feasibility of “Morals without God.” He bases his conviction on a theory of “continuity between human and animal,” or a denial of “human exceptionalism.” From this point of view, there is no qualitative difference between the way the human brain churns out an ethical judgment, and how a chimp’s brain motivates some altruistic behaviors. Nay, there isn’t really a meaningful quantitative difference in the structure of the human and the ape brain – “even our vaunted pre-frontal cortex turns out to be of typical size: recent neuron-counting techniques classify the human brain as …” Really? Reading Dr. de Waal’s expose, I would suspect that his and my brain click in qualitatively different rhythms, to say nothing of the brains of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Cheeky Charley.

De Waal’s focuses on the altruistic tendencies we share with our primate cousins. A chimp, you see, will sometimes help – without the promise of any reward! – an arthritic elderly female climb on a tree to hang out with her kin; or will console a male who has lost a fight. Though de Waal says we should see the whole package of human motivations and behaviors as a product of evolution and a legacy we share with the animal kingdom, it’s clear where his heart lies. He wants to revive the old tale of the “noble savage” once popularized by Rousseau – the altruistic, compassionate side of our psychological makeup is inborn or natural (and thus shared with kindly behaving animals); and the nasty aspects come from the way our natural goodness has been twisted by “civilization.” Forget about those allegedly aggressive drives Freud fretted over, ready to break through the ”veneer” of civilized “propriety.” But why forget about them? In an older article, de Waal drew a contrast between chimps and their close relatives, the bonobos. The latter have apparently invented the ape version of la dolce vita: they engage in constant mutual grooming and casual sex, and spend most of their time in leisurely companionship and relaxation. Chimps, on the other hand, live in troops with rigid hierarchies where status is won and lost by a combination of fierce fighting and Machiavellianism. Submissive families occasionally stage coups against dominant ones, and chimp platoons sometimes even wage “wars” against other colonies. In general, the lives of young males (who, after puberty, need to win acceptance in a new troop) are often nasty, brutish, and short. Females fare a bit better, but most also need to show deference for the dominant female. They can also be savagely attacked by raiding males from other troops. So, should we attribute human bestiality, not just those spurts of altruism de Waal highlights, to the natural endowment we share with chimps?

As I was reading de Waal’s incisive analysis, I repeatedly cringed at all those evocations of obvious behavioral kinship between “us” and apes. Apparently, he did not cringe while typing out the whole piece. This could be a matter of personal idiosyncracies, including presence of lack of the “left-brained” sharpness needed for a high-flying scientific career. I am trying to banish from my mind another heretical thought, though. Could de Waal’s attitudes, which betray some very peculiar patterns of brain activation, be partly attributed to his own biocultural heritage? He is Dutch, and if you look at Dutch society, it seems pervaded – even against the backdrop of rising xenophobic fears – by a kind of bonobo-style, relaxed permissiveness combined with easy-going utilitarianism. Soft drugs, harder drugs administered to addicts, prostitutes posing in display windows, euthanasia, open-minded attitudes toward teenage sex, open-air urinals events attracting large numbers of beer-gulping young men – please, help yourself, you can have it all. Could such broad-mindedness partly translate into cheerful praise for the natural goodness we ostensibly share with those good-hearted, altruistic chimps? But probably we shouldn't stereotype - neither the Dutch, nor the chimps.

The end of disgust (among other things)?

An economist recently complained in the NYT about the rise of inequality in the United States. After the furor caused by the publication of The Spirit Level, it has apparently become acceptable even for practitioners of the “dismal science” to frown at extreme inequality. If not to condemn it on the basis of a frivolous “value judgment,” at least to point to its troublesome social consequences – including its negative externalities for even some of the top dogs. Call it the “negative utility” of wealth. The NYT contributor draws a stark contrast between two ages in American history: the 1950s, when decreased income and wealth inequalities (and a marginal federal tax rate of 91 per cent for incomes over $200,000 – or two million in today’s dollars) went hand in hand with rapid economic growth; and the period since the 1980s featuring rapid economic polarization , much slower growth rates, and a series of financial hiccups. Incidentally, there are other contrasts between the two periods. In the 1960s, the majority of American Caucasians professed to feel disgust if forced to drink from a water fountain after an African-American person. Three decades later such squeamishness at even imaginary contact with in individuals belonging to a different “race,” sexual orientation, or subculture had miraculously evaporated. Could this amazing march of tolerance have also come to include tolerance of gross inequality, as a result of weakened disgust at the obscene salaries and profits reaped by the best and the brightest in some sectors of the economy? And their casual flaunting of extreme opulence?

The experimenter’s dilemma

A lengthy feature in Prospect (“Matters of Life and Death”) describes the multiple experiments carried out by experimental philosophers seeking to understand the nature of ethical judgment. Those all turn around the famous trolley/footbridge dilemma: a runaway trolley is racing down a rail track and is going to kill five people. Would you pull a lever to divert it into a different track whether it will kill only one? And if you have the same situation, but you are standing on a footbridge above the track and the only way to avert the bloodbath is to push a “large” person standing next to you in front of the trolley. Would you do it? In the first case, most experimental subjects respond “yes,” on the basis of a simple utilitarian calculation: it is well worth saving five lives at the price of one. In the second case, most participants say they will not do it. And often cannot explain why. In my naïveté, I thought these thought experiments demonstrated that ethical judgments can be influenced by our instinctive emotional reactions. This is most likely to happen in situations which feel close-up-and-personal – like pushing someone to his death (I hope the gendered language would be acceptable here). When we operate a mechanical device (like those drones hunting down those Taliban militants in Pakistan?), it’s easier to keep our emotions at bay and rely on utilitarian calculations. A new crop of experimental philosophers, though, are unsatisfied with this interpretation. They want to know on the basis of what ethical doctrine exactly most people can decide to pull the lever, but would not push a warm, breathing human body in front of the racing trolley. So they design increasingly clever experiments to tease this out – in dozens of versions. What if the person on the second track had been tied down there by bullies? What if those bullies, unknowingly, had also put themselves in harm’s way by picnicking on the first track? What if the second track looped and joied the first track – in which case you would need to wish that the single person be killed in order to save the others? One scientist (“scholar” doesn’t seem the right word to describe this academic occupation) explains the goal off her experiments (for some reason, most of these practitioners are women): “Real-life cases have a lot of factors going on, and it’s hard to test whether it’s this factor that’s crucial or that factor. You have to artificially construct cases to focus on the factors that are important. It’s like the scientist in the lab who has to figure out whether, say, the dust particle makes a difference to friction, and tries to hold everything else constant.” You know, as they do it in real science. As I was reading, I was increasingly thinking: “What is wrong with these people? Why can’t they just accept the ‘fox doctrine’ (after the fox from the Little Prince) or the ‘Pascal doctrine,’ both stating that certain things can be understood only through the heart?” One possibility is that to the uniformly cheerful researchers conducting the experiments the different scenarios don’t feel all that different. So finding some coherent doctrine seems the only possible explanation for choosing one course of action over other similarly unpalatable options. On the face of it, this seems unlikely – the article says responses among experimental subjects are uninfluenced by social status or educational level. But the article also mentions a dispute during WW II between Winston Churchill and one of his cabinet ministers on whether to try to have more V1 cruise missiles rain over south London. The minister, policeman’s son, “perhaps felt more keenly … the risk that the people in the working-class areas of south London would be running.” So maybe there are some meaningful differences in how individuals think and feel about ethical dilemmas – and the philosophers conducting the experiments (like Churchill) are overly clever and upbeat outliers.

Can we handle the truth?

Yesterday on CNN, Fareed Zakaria hosted a panel which discussed the tea party movement in the United States. On it, two liberal historians faced off a journalist from Wall Street Journal. One of the historians kept repeating that the movement had been fanned by Fox News and funded by a few angry billionaires. It’s funny how easily any trend we dislike turns into a shallow conspiracy. Milosevic once alleged that much of Albanian nationalism in Kosovo. And liberal Western intellectuals thought the same of Milosevic’s brand of Serb nationalism. Meanwhile, a New York Times article (“Voter Disgust Isn’t Only About Issues”) says independent voters participating in focus groups indicated they saw specific political and economic problems as part of a broader social malaise: “the larger breakdown of civil society – the disappearance of common courtesy, the relentless stream of data from digital devices,* the proliferation of lawsuits and the insidious influence of media on their children.” The Wall Street Journal woman retorted that the tea party in fact had a sensible economic agenda of shrinking a bloated government machine. The other historian lamented that all those stirrings around tea party populism were leaving aside a fundamental issue – the problem of social justice. Historically, governments have been charged with restraining the “innumerable vultures” John Stewart Mill thought could be found in any society. The tea party rank and file, though, feel quite happy to side with the sharks against the only force which could potentially control their predatory greed and “perpetual and restless desire of power after power.” Apparently, no amount of liberal hand-wringing can help the “government-is-the-problem” crowd start connecting the dots. Meanwhile, in Belgrade protesters tried to attack a gay rights procession and injured over 80 riot policemen. That outburst must have been another political conspiracy. You know, in the sense of politics is about “who gets what, when, how.” Except, it’s unclear what the rioters could possibly hope to “get” in this case. Such violence may raise a troubling question: can “civilized” political institutions function in a society which includes a critical mass of uncivilized young males? I guess most political scientists would answer in the affirmative. Some would discount the significance of political culture, arguing that political actors respond rationally to the incentive structures they face. Others would argue that an appropriate set of attitudes can develop as a result of learning within a democratic institutional framework. I do hope one of these theories is right.

* Ooops – the Google founders will probably be ticked that many Americans don’t seem to take their corporate slogan seriously

Wittgenstein did have a wonderful life!!!

In his book, The Temperamental Thread, Harvard developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan summarizes his findings from decades of painstaking research and hundreds of clever experiments. He describes two basic inborn temperaments: low-reactive and high-reactive. While low-reactive individuals are relaxed, high-reactives are uptight perfectionists who are easily disturbed by sights, sounds, and even minor incidents. In a couple of places Dr. Kagan expresses sympathy for the high-reactives whose lives seem to be one unending torture. “I confess to some sadness,” he says, “when I reflect on the fact that some adults, because of the temperament they inherited, find it difficult to experience on most days the relaxed feeling of happiness that a majority in our society believe is life’s primary purpose.” And since high-reactives tend to be deeply introverted, Dr. Kagan expresses sorrow that they “miss the joys that come from meeting new people and visiting new places.” Well, they do “have the advantage of living a few years longer than extroverts.” But how can this compensate for all the cheerless suffering they are destined to endure? And what if some high-reactives find their own life satisfying at some deeper level? Dr. Kagan thinks they should know better. He gives the example of Ludwig Wittgesnstein who suffered many personal misfortunes, “never put roots down in any one place,” and “was profoundly depressed and anxious his entire life.” At one low point he even confessed “that he could not imagine a future with any joy or friendship.” Yet, on his deathbed he said to an attending relative: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Dr. Kagan’s verdict? “This comment provides sufficient reason to question the meaning and accuracy of what people say about their moods and behaviors.” So, Wittgenstein wasn’t really in his right mind. I wish Dr. Kagan could fathom what it means to lead a truly intense life like Wittgenstein’s; to say nothing of the lives of all those poets, philosophers, mathematicians, etc. who have descended into madness, committed suicide, or narrowly escaped such a fate. A book with an evocative title, Living with Intensity, offers a good introduction to this tricky issue once addressed by Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski. But reading a book, or piles of psychological “findings” for that matter, won’t help you appreciate that extatic mode of “being-in-the-world” unless you can feel some of its emotional intensity in your own gut. Judging by the unfailingly reserved and even tone of Dr. Kagan’s writing, he has successfully avoided that developmental curse. He does recognize the usefulness of all those wretched high-reactives in his own work, though. He has regularly hired them as research assistants because they are oh so conscientious.