For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.
David Hume, Of Personal Identity, Selection from Book I, Part 4, Section 6 of A Treatise of Human Nature
I’ve been listening to the CBC series (2009) “How to Think about Science” (listen here, download here). The first episode starts with Simon Schaffer, co-author of the The Leviathan and the Air Pump. Schaffer argues that scientists are believed because they organise trust well, rather than because they organise skepticism well (which is more in line with the conventional image of science). Far from questioning everything, as we are told science teaches, scientists are successful as expects because of the extended network of organisations, techniques and individuals that allows scientists, in short, to know who to trust.
Schaffer also highlights the social context of the birth of science, focussing on the need for expertise —for something to place trust in — at a time of military, political and ideological conflict. Obviously, our need for certainty is as great in current times.
Understanding of the processes of science, Schaffer asserts, is required for a true understanding of the products of science, and public understanding of both is required for an informed and empowered citizenry.
This last point puts the debate about open access scientific journals in a larger and more urgent perspective. In this view, open access is far more than a merely internal matter to academia, or even merely a simple ethical question (the public fund scientists, the publications of scientists should be free to the public). Rather, open access is foundational to the institution of trusted knowledge that science (and academia more widely) purports to be. The success of early science was in establishing the credibility of mechanisms for ‘remote witnessing’ of phenomenon. The closed-access publishing system threatens to undermine the credibility of scientific knowledge. Once you recognise that scientific knowledge is not the inviolable product of angelic virtue on the part of science, you concede that there the truth of scientific propositions is not enough — we need to take seriously the institutions of trust that allow science to be believed. The status of expert who cannot be questioned is a flattering one, but it relies on short-term cache. If we care about science and the value of scholarship more widely then open access publishing is an urgent priority.
Update: Romanian translation of this web page (by Web Geek Science)
David Eagleman has an article in The Atlantic The Brain on Trial, in which he ‘describes how the foundations of our criminal-justice system are beginning to crumble, and proposes a new way forward for law and order.’
The ever more successful endeavours of neuroscience to link behaviour to biology, claim Eagleman, mean that we will have to acknowledge that the ‘simplistic’ categorisation of individuals into responsible and not-responsible for their actions is untenable. Instead we should admit that culpability is graded and refocus our legal system on rehabilitation and the prevention of recidivism.
In fact, rehabilitation has long been admitted as a core purpose of the justice system, though of course that’s no reason to complain about someone reiterating its importance (and obviously the call for a refocussing on rehabilitation makes most sense in a culture addicted to incarceration). What is harmful is the implication that you need neuroscience to be able to realise that circumstances and history make some people more able to make responsible choices. Neuroscience just expands our idea of what counts as ‘circumstances’, to include aspects of the internal environment – ie our biology.
However, according to Eagleman, a brave new world of evidence-based justice awaits:
As brain science improves, we will better understand that people exist along continua of capabilities, rather than in simplistic categories. And we will be better able to tailor sentencing and rehabilitation for the individual, rather than maintain the pretence that all brains respond identically to complex challenges and that all people therefore deserve the same punishments.
This is profoundly misleading, giving the impression that the justice system gives the same punishments for the same crimes (which is doesn’t) and that it was only neuroscientific ignorance that forced legal philosophers to create the category of ‘legally responsible’.
Another view is that, the simple idea of legal responsibility was adopted as a deliberate choice, a choice we make hand in hand with that of equality before the law. We do this because as the alternative to legal equality is odious, so the alternative to equality of responsibility is pernicious. The criminal justice system already de facto admits to gradations of responsibility, how exactly does Eagleman imagine that it could be improved by formalising a graded notion of responsibility? Far from crumbling, as Eagleman claims, the criminal justice system is already a compromise between the need to view people as responsible and the recognition that not all choices are equally free. The revolution heralded by Eagleman’s barrage of rhetorical questions and attacks on strawmen is a damp squib. If the neurosciences are going to make a genuine contribution to issues like this, the onus must be on us to engage with existing thought on complicated matters like criminal justice and provide detailed evidence of how neuroscience can inform these existing systems, rather than pretending that new findings in the lab can sweep away thousands of years of cultural and philosophical endeavour.
Link to The Atlantic article, The Brain on Trial
Previously on mindhacks.com, Against Neuroethics
“They’re Made Out of Meat” is a short story by Terry Bisson. It’s a great rift of the improbability of the human situation, and particularly relevant to psychologists (e.g. “So … what does the thinking?”)
The full text is here. The story has its own wikipedia page, and there’s a YouTube film here.
Now, for your listening delight Erin Revell and Geraint Edwards, at my request, have recorded the story so I can play parts of it during a lecture. The result was too good not to share, so with Terry Bisson’s permission, here’s a link for the whole thing:
(Cross-posted at mindhacks.com)
Science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks; but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house
Henri Poincare, La Science et l’Hypothèse (1901), English translation: Science and Hypothesis (1905), chapter 9 (via Jim Stone)
I want a button box I can put between the mains and electric devices in my house. Hitting the button lets the electricity flow, turning the device on, and then after a delay the device turns off, freeing me from having think about turning lights etc off all the time. Why doesn’t this exist already?
This is a plot of the number of citations turned up by a simple “Web of Knowledge” search for papers containing the words “dopamine” and “reinforcement learning”, against year of publication. The rise, dating from approximately the time of publication of the first computational theory of phasic dopamine function, is rapid. There are, as far as I know, two computational theories of phasic dopamine function. One from Schultz, Dayan and Montague (1997) and one from our team here in Sheffield (Redgrave and Gurney, 2006)
Refs
Schultz, W., Dayan, P., & Montague, P. R. (1997). A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science, 275, 1593-1599.
Redgrave, P., & Gurney, K. (2006). The short-latency dopamine signal: a role in discovering novel actions? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7(12), 967-75.
This Prospect article by the RSA’s Matthew Taylor reviews an impressive amount of socially relevant psychology research. “Human nature is back”, announces Taylor, showing how the “useful shortcut” of the rational actor is now ready to be replaced by an empircally informed model of man as a social, emoitonal, being. Conclusions include
if we want to live an ethical life we do not have to pore over self-help books, but instead choose the social context that is most likely to prompt us to automatic altruism. Blinkered by the idea of humans as entirely driven by self-interest, we believe that altruistic acts must require conscious effort, perhaps as a result of exhortation from leaders. But if we are living balanced lives and enjoy mutual trust with people, behaving well comes naturally.
and
…susceptibility to social influence is hard-wired in us and not simply a characteristic of those lacking willpower. It may not be as catchy as the original slogan, but “tough on crime, even tougher on the causes of crime”is where the evidence points.
and
social institutions and cultural taboos are ways in which “generations hand down… vital tacit knowledge about human nature.”…[they] have developed to protect us from our psychological frailties, encouraging us to act long term and be socially responsible. These devices include the family, the church and civic organisations. As we become richer, we mistakenly think we do not need them.
It’s a rich brew of research evidence and political ideas. Perhaps even enough to give us hope, as Taylor claims that “new ideas about human nature can contribute to a more substantive meeting of minds between left and right”
LA Noire is the new game from Rockstar Games, the notorious publisher of Grand Theft Auto. This guardian article describes it as “a new era for interactive entertainment.”, where the gameplay is not about is not about hand-eye coordination but about emotional perception, being able to judge body language and facial “tells”.
The thing is, what will the “true” meaning of the facial expressions in the game be based on? Will the correct judgements be based on the game-designers’ intepretation of what different facial expressions mean? If so, how can we trust that they have the correct intepretation? It isn’t straightforward to read meaning from expressions. Even people who think they are experts at it can be wrong, and many of the clues popularity associated with deception, such as gaze aversion, don’t truly help you tell truth from lies (see the work of Aldert Vrij, at Portsmouth).
It might be that we end up playing a game where you learn to intepret what Rockstar games believes about what people look like when they lie, rather than practice any real world emotional perception
The commonly held but empirically unsupported notion that some uniquely ‘‘talented’’ individuals can attain superior performance in a given domain without much practice appears to be a destructive myth that could discourage people from investing the necessary efforts to reach expert levels of performance.
From the highly readable, Ericsson, K. A., & Ward, P. (2007). Capturing the naturally occurring superior performance of experts in the laboratory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(6), 346.
Review of Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other 2011, Basic Books
(Attention conservation notice: a rambling 1800 word book review in which I am rude about Sherry Turkle and psychoanalysis, and I tell you how to think properly about the psychology of technology)
This book annoyed me so much I wasn’t sure at page 12 if I could manage the other 293. In the end I read the introduction and the conclusion, skimming the rest. Turkle’s argument is interesting and important, I just couldn’t face the supposed evidence she announced she was going to bring out in the body of the book.
Psychoanalysts are conspiracy theorists of the soul, and nowhere is that clearer than in Turkle’s reasoning about technology. Page after page of anecdotes are used to introduce the idea that communications technologies such as email, facebook and twitter offer an illusion of intimacy, but in fact drive us into a new solitude. This might be true, its an important idea to entertain, but pause for a moment to think how you would establish if it really was the case or not.
For Turkle, the evidence is all around, discerned by her keen psycholanlytically-trained psychologist’s eye. A young woman chats to her grandmother on skype for an hour a week – touching example of a relationship deepened and sustained? No! Unbeknownst to the grandmother the young woman uses that hour to catch up on her emails, leaving her unsatisfied with the skype conversation, with vague feelings of guilt and a failure to connect. Turkle combines stories like these of people she’s met with sweeping generalisations about how “we” feel – increasingly disconnected, overwhelmed and unable to tell where the boundary between work and home life is. Text messages, originally a substitute of the phone call you couldn’t make, “very quickly…became the connection of choice” she announces. Really? For everyone?
Throughout Turkle seems to assume that this new age of communications technology has accelerated us into an age of dislocation and disconnection. This may be so, but a few anecdotes about people’s unsatisfactory relationships and yearning for deeper intimacy and authenticity don’t establish this. Here is the news: it was ever so. Now people wonder if their facebook friends are true friends, previously we wondered if our friends on the team, or in the pub, were our true friends. Now we wish for romantic relationships without betrayal and inconvenience, previously this is what we wished for too. Ambiguity, failure and fear of disconnection are not a novel part of online relationships they are part of the human condition and it is mighty irksome that Turkle assumes the novelty of these things. She is seeing what she wants to see in the world around her. There is also an inherent conservatism in her assumption that things were better before this anarchy of technology was loosed upon the world, the assumption that not only were things better before, but that this was the way they were “supposed to be”. The comic thing is that her historical benchmark is just as arbitrary – as if phone calls were a good and proper means of communication, a ceremony of innocence drowned by the destructive forces of text messaging and skype. When the phone was invented there was a moral panic about the what this technology would do for relationships, the same as there was a moral panic when printed books became widespread. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t invent a new form of communication, such as the text messasge, and it come to fill a niche in the ecology of how we relate to each other. People haven’t stopped making phone calls, they have augmented the way they communicate with text messages, not substituted texting for phoning.
Reading the book it is hard to shake the impression that everything Turkle says is in a slightly dismayed and hysterical tones “Oh no! The kids are using text messaging” “Oh no! People underestimate the distracting effect of checking their email!” “Oh no! The kids find face to face conversations threatening, the little dears can’t live in the real world”
Again: it was ever so. And of course, with anything new, you can always find some genuinely mislead and bewildered people. Turkle has some striking examples of people who wish for relationships – both romantic and sexual – with robots. This shows, she says, that we are in the ‘robotic moment’. It is not that robots are ready for our desires, but that our desires are now ready for the idea for intimacy with robots. A young woman yearns for a robot lover, wanting to trade her human boyfriend for a “no risk relationship”; an elderly woman saying that her robot dog “won’t die suddenly and abandon you and make you very sad”; the genuinely astounding argument of David Levy’s “Love and Sex with Robots” which proposes that soon we’ll be fighting for the right to marry robots in the same way we fought for the right to marry people of the same sex. Are we only discussing these possibilites, asks Turkle, because we are failing each other in human relationships?
The impression I get is of a very earnest anthropologist, speaking to the young people of a alien tribe, ready to be shocked and titillated by their revelations. Do the people speaking to Turkle really believe what they say, or are they egged on by her credulity, just as the tribespeople compete to tell the anthropologist say ever more outrageous things? Yes, yes I would prefer a robot lover. Yes, yes, real men are a disappointment – irritating, changeable – and the simulation of intimacy would be better than a risk on authentic intimacy.
My problem is not that people are seeking to escape human frailty and ambiguity with robots, but that Turkle seems to assume that there was ever a time when some people didn’t try to escape human frailty and ambiguity. It isn’t that we are newly dissatisfied with our relationships, that we are newly struggling for authenticity. Rather it is that the old struggle has found a new form, that the eternal uncertainties we have of ourselves and each other are given a new light by technology.
Turkle has a important point disguised by a boring pessimism. “Relationships with robots are ramping up; relationships with people are ramping down” she says “of every technology, we must ask, Does it serve our human purposes?” This later point is vitally important. The idea that Turkle has proven that human relationships are “ramping down” due to the current communications technology is the distraction. This is just a generational cry of despair, common to every age, when one age group realise they don’t understand or don’t like how their children behave.
True, we must ask how technology can be built to enhance our relationships, and true intimacy and authenticity are endangered, but it was always so and Turkle’s speculations of doom help only to muddy the waters.
I find myself wondering why Turkle has this pervasive pessimism about our ability to sensibly navigate these new technologies. Perhaps, it is related to the stance she seems to adopt to the characters that populate her anecdotes, which is of subjects under her microscope, an amorphous mass of “them” rather than as unique individuals with stories and weaknesses just like all of us. This may just be my knee-jerk dislike of psychoanalysts but her stance towards these characters in her argument always felt condescending and arrogant, as if she alone possessed the objective stance, as if only she, with her psychoanalytic training, was expert enough to discern the loneliness and feel what they themselves didn’t know they felt. Again, the tone reminded me of the naive anthropologist – aren’t they strange?! Isn’t their confusion fascinating?!
I would have had more faith in Turkle’s reasoning if she talked more about her experience, rather than relating this anecdotes from people she met at conferences and at Parisian dinner parties.
Turke’s underlying assumption is that technology is a thing separate from, or gets in between, authentic relationships. (There’s a comparison to those who diagnose an addiction to the internet, as if the internet were a substance, when it is just a medium). In fact, technology is part of relationships because it is part of our minds (see Andy Clark’s book Natural Born Cyborgs for an exploration of this idea). Technology cannot get in the way of some kind of natural detection of reality because we never have direct contact with reality – it is always mediated by culture, history, language, expectations, and the whole architecture of our minds for understanding the world. As every psychologist should know, the idea of “virtual reality” is a misnomer because reality has always been virtual. A concrete example of this confusion is when Turkle assumes that she (alone) can tell the real (flesh and blood) encounters from the fake (technologically mediated) encounters. “The ties we form through the internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind” she says solemnly. This is a ridiculous generalisation, and must be confusing to all those who met over the internet, or have had relationships deepened because of the internet. Can you imagine how ridiculous Turkle would sound if she’d made such a generalisation about another medium. “The ties formed through writing are not the ties that bind”, “The ties formed by those speaking French are not the ties that bind”. Nonsense! Again Turkle has been distracted by her pessimism and her conservatism. The problem of human bonds is not a new one, we’ve always struggled to find rapprochement with each other, the internet doesn’t change that. It does give the problem interesting new dimensions, and I’ve no doubt that we’ll struggle collectively with these new dimensions for decades, but I don’t see Turkle doing anything to make clear the outlines of the problem or advance any solutions.
New technology is easy to think about, partly because the novel always stands out against the background of the old, and partly because it is easier to think about the material aspects of things, and the material aspects of technology can be ubiquitous (like text messages and email) or particularly entrancing (like robots). But let me give an alternative vision to Turkle’s Cassandra wail. Rather than technology, a far more real threat to intimacy and authenticity in the modern world is the continuous parade of advertising which tries to hock material goods with the promise that they can give access to transcendent values. Cars which give freedom, cameras which give friendship, diamonds that which give love and clothes that give confidence. Here is a cultural force, with a massive budget and the active intention to make us dissatisfied with our possessions, our lifestyles, our bodies and our relationships. How about we worry a bit more about that, and less about the essentially democratic technologies of communication.
A, a, a, DOMINE DEUS
I said, Ah! what shall I write?
I enquired up and down
(He’s tricked me before
with his manifold lurking-places.)
I looked for His symbol at the door.
I have looked for a long while
at the textures and contours.
I have run a hand over the trivial intersections.
I have journeyed among the dead forms
causation projects from pillar to pylon.
I have tired the eyes of the mind
regarding the colours and lights.
I have felt for His wounds
in nozzles and containers.
I have wondered for the automatic devices.
I have tested the inane patterns
without prejudice.
I have been on my guard
not to condemn the unfamiliar.
For it is easy to miss Him
at the turn of a civilisation.I have watched the wheels go round in case I might see the living crea-
tures like the appearance of lamps, in case I might see the living God
projected from the machine. I have said to the perfected steel, be my sister and for the glassy towers I thought I felt some beginnings of His creature, but A,a,a, Domine Deus, my hands found the glazed work unrefined and the terrible crystal a stage-paste…. Eia, Domine Deus.
David Jones, in The Sleeping Lord and Other Poems (1974), thank you Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country
I’ve been invited to give a talk at York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis. I’ll be speaking on the 13th of May, a friday, to the title “Infering cognitive architectures from high-resolution behavioural data”. It’ll be an overview of what it is exactly that I try to do as part of my work.
Abstract: I will give an overview of some of the work done in our lab, the Adaptive Behaviour Research Group (http://www.abrg.group.shef.ac.uk/ ) in the Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield. Across human, non-human animal, simulation and robotics platforms we investigate the neural circuits that allow intelligent behaviour, bringing to bear psychological, neuroscientific and computational perspectives. We are particularly interested in the action selection problem – that of deciding what to do next (and of doing it). This talk will focus on my own work looking at 3 paradigms where we have collected high-resolution behavioural data in humans – mistakes made by expert touch typists, eye-movements during visual search and a novel paradigm for investigating the learning of new motor skills. I will make comments on how we analyse such data in order to make inferences about the underlying architecture of human decision making.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B Yeats
There is a beauty to the arrangement whereby a cake is shared by one of us dividing it and the other choosing which part they want. The person dividing doesn’t know which part they’ll get so they have every incidentive to make fair shares. They say that John Rawls took this as inspiration for his philosophy of how a just society should be organised (but I don’t know enough about that).
But the cake cutting example only works for a world where the cake is homogeneous and the two cake-eaters have identical preferences (in this case, to have as much as possible). Imagine a world where the cake has a fruit half and a nut half, say, and I have two cake-eaters, A and B. A likes fruit and nut equally, she doesn’t care. B is allergic to nuts. Now the game of “one cuts, one chooses” doesn’t work. If A cuts she will slice the cake in half and be happy with whichever half she’s left with, but B better hope that A makes a half which is entirely fruit, otherwise she’ll be forced to make a choice between two bits of cake, some of which she can’t eat. B is at no risk of losing out, A is at substantial risk. If B cuts first, she might consider cutting the cake into a nut half and a fruit half, but then she has to hope A chooses the fruit half. And she might cut the cake into mixed halves an put up with a portion she can’t eat (but ensuring B only gets half the cake). The game-theoretic solution is probably to cut the cake into a larger, nut-plus-small-amount-of-fruit, half and a smaller, just-fruit, half. A will choose the larger half. A definitely wins, B loses out.
The solution whereby A and B both have half, and both enjoy their halves equally (ie B gets the fruit half) is simple, but enreachable via this sharing game.
I’m reminded of an experiment I think I read about in George Ainslie’s Breakdown of Will (don’t have the book to hand to check, so apologies for inaccuracies. We can pretend it is a thought experiment and I think it still makes the point). There’s a large long cage with a lever that opens a door at the other end. If you are a pig it take 15 seconds, say, to run from the lever to the door. After 20 seconds the door closes, so you get to eat your fill for 5 seconds. One pig on her own gets regular opportunities to feed, as well as plenty of exercise running backward and forth. Now imagine a big pig and a small pig. The big pig is a bully and always pushes the small pig off any food. In a cage with normal feeding arrangements the big pig gets all the food (poor small pig!). But in this bizarre long cage with the lever-for-food arrangement, a funny thing happens. The big pig ends up as a lever pressing slave for the small pig, who gets to eat all the foot.
To see why, we need a game-theory analysis like with the cake example. If the little pig pressed the lever, the big pig would start eating the food and the little pig wouldn’t be able to budge her. There’s no incentive for the little pig to press the lever, she doesn’t get any food either way! The big pig, however, has a different choice : if she presses the lever then she can charge down to the food and knock the little pig out of the way, getting 5 seconds of food. It’s worth it for big pig, but the outcome is that she does all the running and only gets a quarter of the food.
This suprising result is none the less a ‘behaviourally stable strategy’, to bastardise a phrase from evolutionary game theory.
Bottom line: minimally complex environments and heteogenities in agents’ abilities and preferences break simple fairness games. In anything like the real world, as Tom Slee so convincingly shows, choice is not preference.
I want to make a radio documentary about how science really works. The popular imagination has been captured by a model of science which is incomplete and unhelpful. Science doesn’t produce neutral facts, it is process whose very nature is contested within the institution of science as well as from outside. Science is a complex social process, and may not even be a single unified thing.
This documentary I’m imagining would start in a University bar on a friday night, were we could hear some scientists talk about work in the lab in the way scientists all over the world do, not in the language of journal papers, grant applications and popular TV features, but as the work which they know intimately, with its set-backs, rivalries and esoteric rewards. We’d then visit a few important thinkers to get some vital alternative perspectives on how science works:
Steve Fuller from Warwick could tell us about the social construction of knowledge, about how science rewrites the history of discoveries to present an ideal of its process as logical and inevitable when in fact is it accidental and contingent. Someone could outline Feyerabend’s “Against Method” and we could see some scientists get irate at his deconstruction of the sacred cows of the naive, traditional model of how science works (which, in my experience, is what tends to happen when you throw Feyerabend at them).
Terence Kealey, VC of Buckingham University and author of “Sex, science and profits” will explode the myth that publicly funded research is good for the economy and outline his idea that “there’s no such thing as science, just scientists”.
Ben Goldacre will take us into the murky world of pharmaceutical research and show us the ways industry funding can distort “pure science”.
Finally, we tackle science and politics, talking to the climate researchers at the centre of the “Climate Gate” email scandal and show how the mistaken ideal of “science as objective” gets in the way of a proper understanding of the role of science in political debate. (Basically, my argument is that an overly idealised model of science leaves open the rhetorical space for an unhelpful cultural relativism, whereby the critical theorists can claim that science is just a social construction and the political fringes feel they can contest scientific consensus with a GCSE biology and the will to believe). We’ll talk to Jim Manzi who will outline his idea of causal density, showing why applying the scientific method to problems of society will not be as straightforward as the cheerleaders of scientific rationalism assume.
Now, who would like to make this documentary with me?
(NB I have not sought the involvement/permission of the people named in this post!)
See also
– Emotional Cartography book launch talk
– The Reality of Culture
– The Choice of Facts
Defined by their lesser knowledge, students can do nothing which does not confirm the most pessimistic image that the professor, in his most professional character is willing to confess to: they understand nothing, and they reduce the most brilliant theories to logical monstrosities or picturesque oddities as if their only role in life was to illustrate the vanity of the efforts which the professor squanders on them and which he will continue to squander despite everything out of professionals conscience with a disabused lucidity which only redoubles his merit. By definition the professor teaches as he ought to teach, and the meagre results with which he is rewarded can only reinforce his certainty that the great majority of his students are unworthy of the efforts he bestows upon them. Indeed the professor is as resigned to his students and their ‘natural’ incapacities as the ‘good colonist’ is to the ‘natives’, for he has no higher expectations than they just be the way they are.
And
In secondary and higher education, it is taken for granted that the language of ideas elaborated by the academic and scientific tradition and also the second-order language of allusions and cultural complicities are second nature to intelligent and gifted individuals; or better, that the ability to understand and to manipulate these learned languages – artificial languages, par excellence – where we see the natural language of human intelligence at work immediately distinguishes intelligent students from the rest. It is thanks to this ideology of a profession that academics can vouch for professional judgements as strictly equitable. But in reality they consecrate cultural privilege. Language is the most active and elusive part of cultural heritage which each individual owes to his background. This is because language does not reduce, as we often think, to a more or less extensive collection of words. As syntax, it provides us with a system of transposable mental dispositions. These go hand in hand with values which dominate the whole of our experience and, in particular, with a vision of society and of culture. They also involve an original relationship to words, reverential or free, borrowed or familiar, sparing or intemperate
Bourdieu, P., (1994), Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power. Polity Press, Cambridge, trans. Richard Teese, p6-7 & p8.
The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes, they said, we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end. And then one of us
found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees
Miroslav Holub, Brief Thoughts on Maps,Times Literary Supplement, Feb 4, 1977
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face
Mike Tyson, attrib.
It’s been forty years since the first topless page 3 model in the Sun newspaper. There was a debate on Radio 4 between Bea Campbell and Jennie Bristow this morning, which I thought was illustrative of an important wider point.
Bea Campbell argued that the Sun’s page 3 sends the wrong message to men and women. In retort Jennie Bristow argued that if you didn’t like it you didn’t have to buy the Sun.
Now I think you can only make this argument if you don’t believe in culture.
My argument is not that “if you don’t like it don’t buy it” is an inherently ridiculous position (I don’t like aubergines, you say “don’t eat them”. Fair enough). My argument is that “if you don’t like it don’t buy it” is a ridiculous reply to arguments of the form made by Bea Campbell.
Ms Campbell offered a claim about the negative effect that the page 3 institution has on everybody, the men who see it, and the men who interact with those men, and the women who interact with those men. Now you could say “page 3 is liberating” or “page 3 celebrates women” or “page 3 is harmless” and although you would be wrong, you would at least be taking seriously the implication of Bea Campbell’s argument : that how we treat each other matters, that our idea of each other matters and that these things can be profoundly influenced by how individuals behave and what we collectively acknowledge as acceptable. In other words, it makes the assumption that beliefs and behaviours are communicable.
So it is interesting to me that Jennie Bristow sidesteps this debate and takes refuge in an argument borrowed from economic liberalism: you have a right to make free consumption choices without interference. Now this is an important position, but it does not preclude debate about the effects of individual consumption choices (nor about the systems of production and culture which determine individual consumption choices). I submit that this strategy of ignoring possible debate culture is particularly characteristic of my intellectual generation, and I think I know why.
Culture used to be a real thing, by which I mean part of the lingua franca of public discussion, but the theorisation of culture was commanded by post-modernists and critical-theorists who abdicated all responsibility for making arguments which were comprehensible to the rest of us, and who systematically degraded collective faith in truth and reality. Years of this have created a diminished intellectual public sphere, ripe for colonisation by fundamentalists (religious and economic) and scientism. Hence the current idolisation of ‘evidence-based’ policies and decisions, as if an ‘evidence-base’ will save you from the need to have ideological commitments, and the celebration of limp claims about society and human nature by those with a scientific background.
In the arena of religious debate, witness the shallowness of theology from the ongoing Dawkins vs the Fundamentalists sideshow. In my own field, Ben Goldacre wrote recently about the phenomena of adopting a posture of disbelief in psychological phenomena until neuroscientific correlates can be demonstrated (something I called elsewhere neuroessentialism). Similarly, the recent Common Cause report, while having many important things to say, displays an almost child-like awe for the “large body of evidence” supporting various claims it uses in its argument about charity campaigning.
Scientific evidence does not save you from having to think about situations for which we do not have direct evidence, nor does it save you from discussing values. Why would you act as if it did? Surely only because you thought you had nothing else to reply on. We let the post-modernists convince us that there are no forms of reasoned debate, no methods of mutual approach which are not entirely arbitrary. The scientists demonstrated that truth is not arbitrary in the realm of the measurable, and now we are inappropriately welcoming them in to fill the void left in the rest of our intellectual lives.
Culture exist, ideas exist, what we believe matters and can be discussed and changed. We have a collective responsibility to consider these things. This is not the age of “if you don’t like it, ignore it”, this is the age of “we are in this together”. All of us.
My ebook “The Narrative Escape” was published last week by 40k books. ‘The Narrative Escape’ is a long essay about morality, psychology and stories and is availble in Kindle format (this means you can get it for you iPhone, iPad or in PDF too). From the ebook blurb:
We instinctively tell stories about our experiences, and get lost in stories told by other people. This is an essay about our story-telling minds. It is about the psychological power of stories, and about what the ability to enjoy stories tells us about the fundamental nature of mind.
My argument in ‘The Narrative Escape’ begins by exploring Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments on obedience, looking at them as an example of moral decision making – particularly for that minority that choose to disobey in the experiment. A fascinating thing about these experiments is that although they tell us a lot about what makes people obey authority, they leave mysterious that quality that makes people resist tyrannical authority. I then go on to contrast this moral disobedience, with conventional psychological investigations of morality (for example the work of Lawrence Kohlberg). In using descriptions of moral dilemmas to ask people about their moral reasoning this research, I argue, misses something essential about real-world moral choices. This element is the ability to realise that you are acting according to someone else’s version of what is right and wrong, and to step outside of their definition of the situation. This is the “narrative escape” of the title. The essay also talks about dreams, stories and story-telling and other topics which I hope will be of interest.
There is also an interview with me available here, which discusses the ebook and some other more and less related topics.
The essay is available in Italian as “La Fuga Narrativa”
Amazon.com Link for the English edition.
…And coming soon in Portuguese, I’m told!
The Yellow Caribou Readers is a book group in Sheffield, England. We like literature, arts and culture in the wider sense, and the fantastic pubs of our hometown. We meet monthly and new members are always welcome. The website is sites.google.com/site/yellowcariboureaders/.
