http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16536598
The numbered predictions below are not mine. They were on the BBC website (link above) and I felt the need to engage with them and all of the comments are my own. The 'expert' opinions are omitted but can be found on the BBC page should you wish to read them. I have no affiliation with the BBC and I'm not a futurologist, any more than most people are.
In the tradition of futurology, I will be speaking here in certainties. No hedging bets. Actually that’s not quite true. I shall throughout be wandering between faux certainty and strong hunches vaguely hinted at. The future is a wave of time collapsing into the most probable forms through some version of quantum mechanics, so at this point a fuzzy, self-contradictory stance is entirely accurate.
I disagree with most of the predictions and with the experts’ opinions on a lot of them. The predictions say a lot about individual issues and interests, current national preoccupations and fantasies, but don’t seem to engage much with actual trends in culture and scientific progress. The ubiquitous ‘cyborg brain’ predictions are on the same level as ‘personal jet-packs’ and as unlikely in 100 years as they are now, unless there is a revolution in psychology leading to unprecedented progress in understanding how the brain works. Traditionally it’s been a very slow process. Psychology became a science around 5000 years after physics did, demonstrating how bad we are at noticing our thought patterns. Emotions weren’t even recognised as a part of decision-making until 1985 (this is still not accepted by science in general). Advances in psychology take around 150 years to filter out into the world of non-psychologists due to the massive resistance to most of the ideas (unless it’s bad news that fits with our prejudices, then it takes less time but is poorly understood and usually misquoted).
Freud still comes up a lot, many years after his ideas were refuted and any sliver of accuracy gleaned from them and used by other, for the most part unknown psychologists.
Bowlby’s post-war ‘delinquent mother’ notion was mentioned in parliament a couple of years ago despite the last 30 years of research arguing against it.
Even if the mysteries of the brain are solved, the population won’t want to know. Evidence so far is that the answers won’t be well received as they are, somewhat predictably, counter-intuitive.
In practical applications the advances in cybernetic technology will first be in the use of brain signals to switch things from one state to another, becoming more refined to allow us greater control. But don’t we already have fingers for that? Brain-controlled devices will mostly benefit the disabled and won’t get much government funding or will be too expensive to roll out to everyone who needs it. The tech already exists for brain and computer assisted prosthetics (see Simon Lewis’ TED Talk “Don’t take consciousness for granted”), but you won’t see it on anyone who isn’t wealthy.
Ok, to the predictions.
1. Oceans will be extensively farmed and not just for fish (Jim 300)
I expect much more land to be turned over to food production before they farm the seas for crops. Urban developments using the sides of skyscrapers will be quicker, easier and cheaper. Before anything is farmed in the sea (assuming the salt water issue is resolved) we’d have to figure out how to harvest it cheaply and how to keep the hag fish from eating it all. Life in the sea has had longer to evolve and to come up with winning strategies, so if we think pests on land are tricky we’ll be in for a shock on the ocean floor. I predict underwater farming will become successful and widespread only after we build stable large-scale under-sea environments and I doubt we’ll do that by 2112.
2. We will have the ability to communicate through thought transmission (Dev 2)
As PT says, this will be in electronic form, so not thought transmission at all. There’s confusion between using the ‘power of the mind’, i.e. the electricity that fluctuates as we think, and actually willing something to happen remotely. We can do this now so it’s not that big a deal. Driving a vehicle by thinking ‘left’ and ‘right’ is the same principal as thinking ‘tennis’ and ‘artichokes’. As long as there is a distinct difference in how the driver feels about those things. The subtle difference between thinking left and right is actually quite tricky for the devices to pick up, so the driver may have to be trained to think about Bjorn Borg when he/she wants to go left and about a giardiniera pizza to go right. The tech will become more sophisticated and sensitive, but essentially this will just replace getting up and doing it with your hands.
If people can learn to visualise their thoughts very clearly they might tap in to similar tech used in current speech recognition, but only if the thought patterns for each word are distinct. Devices will pick up on changes in the brain, not on thoughts. And as each person’s brain is different every device will have to be calibrated to an individual, with the equivalent of several sessions of physio to bond the machine with the user. If we ever invent telepathy the first thing we’ll discover is that each person has their very own unique thought-language.
3. Thanks to DNA and robotic engineering, we will have created incredibly intelligent humans who are immortal (game_over)
No. Well, maybe some very rich people or pseudo-people who could go on for centuries as long as their bodies are maintained by mortal technicians. They won’t be incredibly intelligent though. They might have some abilities that enable them to process numbers very quickly, either through access to a device that inputs to their brain, but this isn’t much different to a person trained to manually work an abacus. If we have a calculator plugged into our brain we still need to operate it and know what data to enter. If the implants do too much of the work it’s not you doing it, it’s a machine and you just see the results, exactly like reading a screen. You can’t know that the answer is right or how it was reached, you can only observe the results shown to you.
Brains are organs for ‘knowing’ and anything that simply presents information to a brain is by definition external. Augmenting the brain so it ‘knows’ something within the internal systems of cognitive functioning is still so far beyond us that we can’t even begin to imagine how we might do it. We can’t say how knowledge is acquired so that it becomes something we ‘know’, where or how it’s stored, or how we assign priorities to it. No cybernetic advances will go beyond some variation of visual/auditory input until cognition is better understood.
4. We will be able to control the weather (mariebee_)
No. Influence in some small way maybe, but with huge consequences that will make it too problematic to bother with. The weather is made up of interconnected systems that cover the whole planet, from the mountaintops to the deepest ocean floors. It’s too erratic to predict more than three days in advance so weather control will be a small affair, no doubt causing mayhem for neighbouring regions. The people with the money for weather control will spend it on buying up land in the areas that have the weather they want.
5. Antarctica will be "open for business" (Dev 2)
Yes, totally. Resources and the fortunes tied up with them are the irresistible force of human civilisation. Nothing is sacred if it’s needed to keep the machine going.
6. One single worldwide currency (from Kennys_Heroes)
No. Too many people care about remaining separate and too many eggs in one basket. A global economic collapse would be devastating with no one to bail us out.
On the other hand, a universal ‘virtual currency’ via online markets and agencies like PayPal is possible in some form, but why not just continue providing a hidden conversion from local currency as they do now? That would remove the need to work out what the exchange rate is between, say, pounds and online credits. The software does it for you and you just decide if the cost in local cash is acceptable. This is already happening.
7. We will all be wired to computers to make our brains work faster (Dev 2)
No. See above. Brains won’t work faster for being wired to machines, anymore than watching a TV or using a computer make us quicker. Yes watching David Attenborough in the Congo is quicker than going there myself, but it’s not the same thing. It hasn’t sped anything up, it’s replaced it with a simulation by proxy.
8. Nanorobots will flow around our body fixing cells, and will be able to record our memories (Alister Brown)
Ok, what are memories made of? Where are they? Are they permanent or do they change with time, mood and situation? (Answers: unknown, unknown, no, yes, yes and yes) Memories aren’t what most people think. They’re not little reference libraries we use to look up information about the past. I know you think that’s what they are, but that’s because your brain is programmed to feel that way. The evidence shows that different memories are accessed depending on context and mood, and that memories change a lot over the years in order to reinforce feelings we have in the here and now.
We don’t, on a conscious level, doubt and question ourselves. We construct certainties. If people could use faultless recording instruments (nanobots in our eyes and ears that play back information as it was received at the time) they would be so upsetting and challenging to us they’d be almost universally rejected. Scientists and artists would love them though.
Fixing cells, maybe. Curing cancer, maybe. Memories no.
9. We will have sussed nuclear fusion (Kennys_Heroes)
And have the power of a star inside a tiny, flimsy building less than one Astronomical Unit from a major residential area. Whoopee.
10. There will only be three languages in the world - English, Spanish and Mandarin (Bill Walker)
With a million local variations of each.
11. Eighty per cent of the world will have gay marriage (Paul)
Only if the swing towards right-wing fundamentalism is reversed or we come out the other side of it. Attitudes change on a sociological pendulum, they don’t occur along a straight line of ‘progress’.
12. California will lead the break-up of the US (Dev 2)
No. Too much money tied up in it.
13. Space elevators will make space travel cheap and easy (Ahdok)
No, but they might have made enough carbon nanotubes to make it possible to build one or two for the richest space-faring nations – China and India.
14. Women will be routinely impregnated by artificial insemination rather than by a man (krozier 93)
Only if the robot-brains we’re all using have failed to successfully assimilate sexual desire.
The psychology of procreation and parenting is usually tied up with the bonding and nurturing of people in love. The processes have evolved together and it’s only our modern contraceptualised society that separates sex and pregnancy. Couples often decide to have a family together. Women aren’t baby-making robots and child-bearing isn’t a mechanical process outside the social arena of relationships.
15. There will be museums for almost every aspect of nature, as so much of the world's natural habitat will have been destroyed (LowMaintenanceLifestyles)
I don’t think so. The emotional burden will be too unpleasant. Who would want to go to a museum displaying the enormity of human-based calamity? Exhibit after exhibit screaming at you that your awful species is guilty of wholesale destruction across the planet. Not a fun day out.
16. Deserts will become tropical forests (jim300)
Reverse that and then yes. Forests will disappear, soil will erode, deserts will expand and sea-levels will rise from all the water contained within the trees.
17. Marriage will be replaced by an annual contract (holierthanthou)
No. People are still romantics who live in social groups. Marriage is a celebration of this and will always have a place in one form or another. Church weddings will be rarer. Hilariously, in the UK poverty-stricken churches will offer non-denominational marriages in an attempt to get money from the increasing number of atheists. Immigration to the UK from the US will rise dramatically as America becomes increasingly extreme in its outlook.
18. Sovereign nation states will cease to exist and there will be one world government (krozier93)
Not a chance. Too many people want a slice of the pie. This would only happen if the major corporations were running everything and decided to construct a single puppet government for them to control more easily.
19. War by the West will be fought totally be remote control (LowMaintenanceLifestyles)
There’s a Flash Gordon novel about this.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flash-Gordon-War-Cybernauts-Alex-Raymond/dp/0352301546
I read it many years ago and I think the message was that if you fight wars where no one dies it has no purpose. It’s the tragedy that gives it meaning and makes us seek an end to it. An increase in tech will cause a increase in the urge to start wars (for those that get them) and a corresponding increase in ‘collateral damage’ (i.e. civilians). Tech wars will be opposed by populations and civil unrest will be rife, as soon as the ‘wow factor’ wears off and people tire of watching foreigners die on YouTube.
See also Star Trek (the original series) episode ‘A Taste of Armageddon’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
20. Britain will have had a revolution (holierthanthou)
A war is more likely. Some sort of economy/resources driven conflict thinly veiled with rhetoric about maintaining our values against a monstrous threat. Current trends suggest we’ll be at war with someone in the east or middle east and we’ll be on the side of the US. But in 100 years the US might well be an imperialist puritan dictatorship that we and the rest of a tattered Europe oppose in a bizarre ‘what if’ replay of World War 2 that finds us allied with Germany against the Americans.
Either way I predict a lot more riots in Europe and the US before the end of this decade.
More readers' predictions
• English will be spelled phonetically (jim300)
No. Too much opposition and too much confusion between homophones. People forget the importance of etymology in text-based communication. Phonetically written homophones can be misread to give very different meanings.
More likely the far eastern influence on pronunciation will have a big effect globally and text messaging and equivalents will provoke a codified form of recognised informal English. Forms will probably have to state that they must be filled out in pen and refraining from use of ‘txt-spk’.
• Growing your own vegetables will not be allowed (holierthanthou)
How will they stop you? How will this be policed?
• The justice system will be based purely on rehabilitation (Paul)
Only if humans come to terms with the evidence that retribution is counter-productive and we let go of the desire for revenge. A tenth of the money spent on punishing crime is spent on preventing it. American prisons make vast profits from prisoner workforces so prevention is very bad for business. Expect that model to be rolled out in the UK as soon as British consumers completely boycott sweat shops and Third World slave labour.
Politicians trade on the fact that criminals are seen to be punished, and unfortunately prevented crimes are invisible. No politician will claim the glory for something not happening without being challenged; someone will have evidence it happened by chance. The stats beloved of politicians everywhere due to the revulsion they cause in the average person will always be used to maintain a ‘crime & punishment’ approach until voters learn to grasp the basics and realise they’re being duped continuously by their leaders and by their own brains. I predict it will take more than 100 years to iron out all those wrinkles.
• Instead of receiving information from the media, people will download information directly into their brains (krozier93)
Maybe, if broadcast to be ‘read’ or ‘heard’ internally, but it will interfere with normal senses far more than headphones or texting while driving and cause a lot of death (unless we all end up in chairs like in Wall-E).
If the idea here is to receive news as thoughts, then no. See above. Several times.
Apart from the major issue with understanding how thoughts work, each brain would need unique information calibrated specifically for it. Not financially viable unless some kind of thought-news-filter is invented.
• Crops will be grown in sand (jim300)
They already are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics
No mention of humanity living under the Red Star of the Solar Federation by the year 2112 or of the ruling Priests of the Temples of Syrinx? How disappointing.
Showing posts with label social psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social psychology. Show all posts
Monday, 16 January 2012
Friday, 13 January 2012
Primus inter pares (first among equals)
1. People are biased.
2. People are alike.
Out of a million high school students surveyed just 2 percent said they were below average in their leadership ability (Gilovich 1991). Similar results show up every time a study like this is done. On average people claim to be above average.
Our ‘bias blind spot’ stops us recognising our own cognitive biases, so not only is it happening around us all the time influencing how we see ourselves and everyone else, we’re also programmed to ignore it!
The ‘halo effect’ is where we confuse a pretty face for someone we might get on with. It works backwards too, and with crowds. If we’re apalled by the huge number of people surrounding us we stop seeing them as other humans and they become unattractive and less interesting. Eventually they become obstacles to what we want to do. Next it’s road rage and shinning up the nearest drainpipe with a hunting rifle.
This is also the inspiration for all zombie films.
Contrary to convention, the heroes of zombie films aren’t tenacious survivors battling mounting odds, they’re people with no empathy who have started killing random strangers. The classic movie zombie is YOU seen through the eyes of a murderous sociopath.
That thing you like? Most people like that. That thing you do when no one else is around? We all do it. That song that really speaks to you? Us too.
The way to stand out from the crowd is to never go with your first or second ideas. Abandon them and go with the third, fourth or fifth idea, because everyone else at this point in their creative journey is thinking the same thing you are. It's the things we think of as we push on that make us individuals, nurturing our idiosyncracies and using them to influence our choices. Paradoxically, these ideas often resonate more effectively with others because they still speak of human experience, yet perhaps in a less frequently or even wholly original way.
The universe is trying to return to a unified state of sameness so it can end and start again. Fighting it takes effort. Differences between people are small but they build up over time. The more stuff you do the more it will stand out, the more you or your work will become defined. Originality is shaped by hard work and experience. We’re shaped from before we’re born and right through our lives to be the simplest thing we need to be to fit our surroundings, and right now at the beginning of the 21st Century that means being one of a crowd. And we hate it.
We’re fantastic at adapting to change, but we can bring about changes too. If we change the way we look at things, how we think about things, how we respond or react to things, we can change everything we do, see and feel.
No one is special. Everyone is special. Next time you meet a zombie bear in mind they’re meeting one too.
2. People are alike.
Out of a million high school students surveyed just 2 percent said they were below average in their leadership ability (Gilovich 1991). Similar results show up every time a study like this is done. On average people claim to be above average.
Our ‘bias blind spot’ stops us recognising our own cognitive biases, so not only is it happening around us all the time influencing how we see ourselves and everyone else, we’re also programmed to ignore it!
The ‘halo effect’ is where we confuse a pretty face for someone we might get on with. It works backwards too, and with crowds. If we’re apalled by the huge number of people surrounding us we stop seeing them as other humans and they become unattractive and less interesting. Eventually they become obstacles to what we want to do. Next it’s road rage and shinning up the nearest drainpipe with a hunting rifle.
This is also the inspiration for all zombie films.
Contrary to convention, the heroes of zombie films aren’t tenacious survivors battling mounting odds, they’re people with no empathy who have started killing random strangers. The classic movie zombie is YOU seen through the eyes of a murderous sociopath.
That thing you like? Most people like that. That thing you do when no one else is around? We all do it. That song that really speaks to you? Us too.
The way to stand out from the crowd is to never go with your first or second ideas. Abandon them and go with the third, fourth or fifth idea, because everyone else at this point in their creative journey is thinking the same thing you are. It's the things we think of as we push on that make us individuals, nurturing our idiosyncracies and using them to influence our choices. Paradoxically, these ideas often resonate more effectively with others because they still speak of human experience, yet perhaps in a less frequently or even wholly original way.
The universe is trying to return to a unified state of sameness so it can end and start again. Fighting it takes effort. Differences between people are small but they build up over time. The more stuff you do the more it will stand out, the more you or your work will become defined. Originality is shaped by hard work and experience. We’re shaped from before we’re born and right through our lives to be the simplest thing we need to be to fit our surroundings, and right now at the beginning of the 21st Century that means being one of a crowd. And we hate it.
We’re fantastic at adapting to change, but we can bring about changes too. If we change the way we look at things, how we think about things, how we respond or react to things, we can change everything we do, see and feel.
No one is special. Everyone is special. Next time you meet a zombie bear in mind they’re meeting one too.
Monday, 14 February 2011
Thoughts On Legally Enshrined Human Rights
In what is evidently a continuing stream of consciousness and curiosity on the concept of 'human rights' I appear to have now written this:
Human rights are often divided into distinct categories of ‘natural’ and ‘legal’. I’ll deal with ‘natural’ or ‘inalienable’ human rights in more detail in another blog post perhaps, if the momentum for this topic stays with me, but for this post I want to look at legally enshrined human rights because this is the manifestation of such beliefs in an officially sanctioned form. This is how groups attempt to gain international acceptance of their beliefs. Drawing up a declaration of rights is a statement both of those beliefs and the conviction to uphold them. It may be a declaration to defend them with force, or of the anticipation that every right-thinking government will adopt them as of undeniable value and validity. The Declaration of Independence is a famous example, but a much more recent and secular one is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
The UDHR was drawn up in 1948 as a response to the atrocities of the Second World War. It was the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are considered inherently entitled and is made up of 30 articles reproduced in full at the end of this post).
Freedom of thought, for example, is defined under Article 18 in the UDHR as:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”
The above sentence is a good place to start demonstrating what a minefield this exercise is. One aspect of life for some Islamic people is the practice of female circumcision. Although not part of any official religious text it’s been adopted by many Muslims as a religious observance, but has been condemned as brutal and entirely unnecessary mutilation by the many who oppose its practise. This, to me, nullifies any effect Article 18 hopes to enshrine and calls into question how we should interpret freedom “to manifest … religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” The UDHR as a whole is not without its critics either. In 1982 the Iranian representative to the United Nations, Said Rajaie-Khorassani, described the UDHR as “a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition", which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing the Islamic law. The Organization of the Islamic Conference officially adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam as an alternative to the UDHR and which includes the "freedom and right to a dignified life in accordance with the Islamic Shari’ah".
In relation to Article 25 on rights to health, Andrew Bissell (a supporter of ‘objectivism’) argued:
"Health care doesn’t simply grow on trees; if it is to be made a right for some, the means to provide that right must be confiscated from others...no one will want to enter the medical profession when the reward for years of careful schooling and study is not fair remuneration, but rather, patients who feel entitled to one’s efforts, and a government that enslaves the very minds upon which patients’ lives depend."
This is a good example of how ‘freedoms’ in actuality can become enslavements. Not only can individual articles in practice remove rights, as a whole a declaration can have the opposite effect it is intended to make. To quote Philip Alston:
“If every possible human rights element is deemed to be essential or necessary, then nothing will be treated as though it is truly important.”
There are also issues with the interpretation of some of the ‘freedoms’. For instance Article 26 stipulates "...education shall be compulsory", but to make a thing compulsory is to remove freedom of choice. John Holt, in Escape From Childhood, says:
“No human right, except the right to life itself, is more fundamental than [the right of a person to peacefully follow their own interests]. A person’s freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests you and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.”
Somewhat controversially, the UDHR includes the word ‘compulsory’ once and ‘compel’ twice.
Human rights can also be split into civil/political rights, and economic/social/cultural rights. The UDHR holds the two groups to be indivisible as only in combination can the different rights successfully exist. Critics claim that the two groups require, by their nature, very different approaches and so cannot be treated as indivisible. In The No-Nonsense Guide to Human Rights, Olivia Ball and Paul Gready point out that some civil rights are reliant on progressive and vague legalities, while some social rights are precise and well-defined by the observable needs of individuals.
Further criticism asserts that the UDHR is rooted in liberal, Western and/or imperialist perspectives and so cannot be considered universal. Some Asian critics such as former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, and former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamad, claim that individual freedoms and liberties are prioritised lower in Asian values than in Western values. Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir then went on to assert that this made Asians more suitable for authoritarian regimes than for democracies, which itself was not received without criticism, including a response from Mahathir’s own deputy Anwar bin Ibrahim who accused him of offending “our traditions as well as our forefathers, who gave their lives in the struggle against tyranny and injustices”. However, there is evidence to support at least the first part of the claim, that Asian don’t tend to put themselves before their social groups. In ‘Cognitive social psychology: the Princeton Symposium on the Legacy and Future of Social Cognition’ Gordon B. Moskowitz describes the interaction of implicit self-regard and culture. He says:
‘Research on the relation between culture and self-concept suggests that the members of Eastern and Western [culture] understand and evaluate the self quite differently.’
In ‘Handbook of Child Psychology: Theoretical models of human development’, William Damon and Richard M. Lerner describe how research suggests Asians emphasise the fundamental interrelatedness of all individuals within a group and that this relationship, rather than individual freedoms, is the influencing factor to consider:
‘From an East Asian cultural perspective a … European American style – distinct positive and attribute based – is not a mature, fully civilised form of human agency. A strongly held, clear sense of self signals childishness because it entails failure to take full account of and show sufficient regard for the relationships of which the self is part.’
It’s also worth noting that when speaking Japanese there is no fixed word or meaning for ‘I’ as there is in English. In Japanese the equivalent of ‘I’ in a sentence such as “I carried the bag to the car” is changed to reflect the relationship of the carrier of the bag to the owner of the bag. If it’s his boss’s bag the social subordination is reflected in the word used. What we in Europe consider to be a concrete, unchanging self neither holds up cross-culturally nor in psychological research. Language shapes and directs thought. The labels we use in our definitions of words and concepts create models of them in our minds. What we then consider ‘reality’ is our own constructed mental model assembled from our personal, subjective experiences within the context of our own culture. If the concept of ‘me’ is dependent on where I grew up then how can the concepts of what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ not be? How can there be inalienable human rights when it appears the concept of the individual human being is not itself an inalienable thing?
This is social relativity. Each individual’s perception and interpretation being wholly and subjectively constructed according to where they are and how they got there; like photons passing a spinning black hole, in their own relative space-time they experience travel in a straight line, behaving as they always do; but to an outside observer their path is a spiral. As a culture we are beginning to accept the notions of relativity in physics, happily using satnav systems every day that incorporate Einstein’s theories to allow for the different pace of passing time on the surface and in orbit. Yet in our own individual experiences we rely on information provided by our intuition and evolved perceptions, despite scientific evidence that they can be, and regularly are, fooled. We cling to our personal narratives, confabulating our way across the gaps, assigning supernatural powers to any unexplored detail of science and wishing fervently for magic in our fiction and our festivals.
If human rights truly were inalienable I don’t believe there would be any need for documents such as the UDHR to attempt to define them. The articles would indeed be “self-evident” and would apply to any person in any culture under any circumstances. I don’t think the evidence allows for that conclusion. Humans are complex and highly flexible things so any attempt to define morals and behaviour is going to be a tough job, and in all likelihood it would need updating every few years for each cultural group. Yes it would be nice if there really was a book of rules we could all refer to and check what’s ok and what’s not, but that concept is a compromise of our personal freedoms at best, a contradiction of them at worst (see my earlier blog post for my take on the logic) and in a more tangible, less philosophical way it undermines one of the most important aspects of adult human life – taking responsibility. As an emotionally mature adult I have the responsibility and multiple occasions to make choices of what is right or wrong, what is necessary or optional, what is a good decision or a bad decision. I won’t always get it right, but I hope for a general trend in improvement. I’d even say we measure someone’s maturity and wisdom by observing their track record in decision-making and responsibility and comparing it to our expectations for someone of their age. If the basis of those decisions is already enshrined in our genes or our psyches how can any moral decision I make be said to be mine? I’m not looking for a god or a politician to tell me what’s right. I’ll read the words and take in the meanings, but in the end the decision of what is right and wrong sits with me. The combined experiences of humanity seem to back this up. Perhaps this is especially so when we consider the behaviour of victims of atrocities because it’s at the extremes or when normality breaks down that we begin to see how things really work. All the theorising and postulating amounts to little more than rhetoric until it’s put to the test in unusual circumstances. Let’s all hope we never really have to find out how our beliefs hold up under extremes.
Appendix
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.
Article 4
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11
Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 14
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 15
Everyone has the right to a nationality.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
Article 16
Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Article 17
Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 18
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20
Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21
Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Article 22
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Article 26
Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Article 27
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 28
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
Article 29
Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 30
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
Human rights are often divided into distinct categories of ‘natural’ and ‘legal’. I’ll deal with ‘natural’ or ‘inalienable’ human rights in more detail in another blog post perhaps, if the momentum for this topic stays with me, but for this post I want to look at legally enshrined human rights because this is the manifestation of such beliefs in an officially sanctioned form. This is how groups attempt to gain international acceptance of their beliefs. Drawing up a declaration of rights is a statement both of those beliefs and the conviction to uphold them. It may be a declaration to defend them with force, or of the anticipation that every right-thinking government will adopt them as of undeniable value and validity. The Declaration of Independence is a famous example, but a much more recent and secular one is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
The UDHR was drawn up in 1948 as a response to the atrocities of the Second World War. It was the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are considered inherently entitled and is made up of 30 articles reproduced in full at the end of this post).
Freedom of thought, for example, is defined under Article 18 in the UDHR as:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”
The above sentence is a good place to start demonstrating what a minefield this exercise is. One aspect of life for some Islamic people is the practice of female circumcision. Although not part of any official religious text it’s been adopted by many Muslims as a religious observance, but has been condemned as brutal and entirely unnecessary mutilation by the many who oppose its practise. This, to me, nullifies any effect Article 18 hopes to enshrine and calls into question how we should interpret freedom “to manifest … religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” The UDHR as a whole is not without its critics either. In 1982 the Iranian representative to the United Nations, Said Rajaie-Khorassani, described the UDHR as “a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition", which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing the Islamic law. The Organization of the Islamic Conference officially adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam as an alternative to the UDHR and which includes the "freedom and right to a dignified life in accordance with the Islamic Shari’ah".
In relation to Article 25 on rights to health, Andrew Bissell (a supporter of ‘objectivism’) argued:
"Health care doesn’t simply grow on trees; if it is to be made a right for some, the means to provide that right must be confiscated from others...no one will want to enter the medical profession when the reward for years of careful schooling and study is not fair remuneration, but rather, patients who feel entitled to one’s efforts, and a government that enslaves the very minds upon which patients’ lives depend."
This is a good example of how ‘freedoms’ in actuality can become enslavements. Not only can individual articles in practice remove rights, as a whole a declaration can have the opposite effect it is intended to make. To quote Philip Alston:
“If every possible human rights element is deemed to be essential or necessary, then nothing will be treated as though it is truly important.”
There are also issues with the interpretation of some of the ‘freedoms’. For instance Article 26 stipulates "...education shall be compulsory", but to make a thing compulsory is to remove freedom of choice. John Holt, in Escape From Childhood, says:
“No human right, except the right to life itself, is more fundamental than [the right of a person to peacefully follow their own interests]. A person’s freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests you and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.”
Somewhat controversially, the UDHR includes the word ‘compulsory’ once and ‘compel’ twice.
Human rights can also be split into civil/political rights, and economic/social/cultural rights. The UDHR holds the two groups to be indivisible as only in combination can the different rights successfully exist. Critics claim that the two groups require, by their nature, very different approaches and so cannot be treated as indivisible. In The No-Nonsense Guide to Human Rights, Olivia Ball and Paul Gready point out that some civil rights are reliant on progressive and vague legalities, while some social rights are precise and well-defined by the observable needs of individuals.
Further criticism asserts that the UDHR is rooted in liberal, Western and/or imperialist perspectives and so cannot be considered universal. Some Asian critics such as former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, and former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamad, claim that individual freedoms and liberties are prioritised lower in Asian values than in Western values. Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir then went on to assert that this made Asians more suitable for authoritarian regimes than for democracies, which itself was not received without criticism, including a response from Mahathir’s own deputy Anwar bin Ibrahim who accused him of offending “our traditions as well as our forefathers, who gave their lives in the struggle against tyranny and injustices”. However, there is evidence to support at least the first part of the claim, that Asian don’t tend to put themselves before their social groups. In ‘Cognitive social psychology: the Princeton Symposium on the Legacy and Future of Social Cognition’ Gordon B. Moskowitz describes the interaction of implicit self-regard and culture. He says:
‘Research on the relation between culture and self-concept suggests that the members of Eastern and Western [culture] understand and evaluate the self quite differently.’
In ‘Handbook of Child Psychology: Theoretical models of human development’, William Damon and Richard M. Lerner describe how research suggests Asians emphasise the fundamental interrelatedness of all individuals within a group and that this relationship, rather than individual freedoms, is the influencing factor to consider:
‘From an East Asian cultural perspective a … European American style – distinct positive and attribute based – is not a mature, fully civilised form of human agency. A strongly held, clear sense of self signals childishness because it entails failure to take full account of and show sufficient regard for the relationships of which the self is part.’
It’s also worth noting that when speaking Japanese there is no fixed word or meaning for ‘I’ as there is in English. In Japanese the equivalent of ‘I’ in a sentence such as “I carried the bag to the car” is changed to reflect the relationship of the carrier of the bag to the owner of the bag. If it’s his boss’s bag the social subordination is reflected in the word used. What we in Europe consider to be a concrete, unchanging self neither holds up cross-culturally nor in psychological research. Language shapes and directs thought. The labels we use in our definitions of words and concepts create models of them in our minds. What we then consider ‘reality’ is our own constructed mental model assembled from our personal, subjective experiences within the context of our own culture. If the concept of ‘me’ is dependent on where I grew up then how can the concepts of what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ not be? How can there be inalienable human rights when it appears the concept of the individual human being is not itself an inalienable thing?
This is social relativity. Each individual’s perception and interpretation being wholly and subjectively constructed according to where they are and how they got there; like photons passing a spinning black hole, in their own relative space-time they experience travel in a straight line, behaving as they always do; but to an outside observer their path is a spiral. As a culture we are beginning to accept the notions of relativity in physics, happily using satnav systems every day that incorporate Einstein’s theories to allow for the different pace of passing time on the surface and in orbit. Yet in our own individual experiences we rely on information provided by our intuition and evolved perceptions, despite scientific evidence that they can be, and regularly are, fooled. We cling to our personal narratives, confabulating our way across the gaps, assigning supernatural powers to any unexplored detail of science and wishing fervently for magic in our fiction and our festivals.
If human rights truly were inalienable I don’t believe there would be any need for documents such as the UDHR to attempt to define them. The articles would indeed be “self-evident” and would apply to any person in any culture under any circumstances. I don’t think the evidence allows for that conclusion. Humans are complex and highly flexible things so any attempt to define morals and behaviour is going to be a tough job, and in all likelihood it would need updating every few years for each cultural group. Yes it would be nice if there really was a book of rules we could all refer to and check what’s ok and what’s not, but that concept is a compromise of our personal freedoms at best, a contradiction of them at worst (see my earlier blog post for my take on the logic) and in a more tangible, less philosophical way it undermines one of the most important aspects of adult human life – taking responsibility. As an emotionally mature adult I have the responsibility and multiple occasions to make choices of what is right or wrong, what is necessary or optional, what is a good decision or a bad decision. I won’t always get it right, but I hope for a general trend in improvement. I’d even say we measure someone’s maturity and wisdom by observing their track record in decision-making and responsibility and comparing it to our expectations for someone of their age. If the basis of those decisions is already enshrined in our genes or our psyches how can any moral decision I make be said to be mine? I’m not looking for a god or a politician to tell me what’s right. I’ll read the words and take in the meanings, but in the end the decision of what is right and wrong sits with me. The combined experiences of humanity seem to back this up. Perhaps this is especially so when we consider the behaviour of victims of atrocities because it’s at the extremes or when normality breaks down that we begin to see how things really work. All the theorising and postulating amounts to little more than rhetoric until it’s put to the test in unusual circumstances. Let’s all hope we never really have to find out how our beliefs hold up under extremes.
Appendix
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.
Article 4
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11
Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 14
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 15
Everyone has the right to a nationality.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
Article 16
Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Article 17
Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 18
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20
Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21
Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Article 22
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23
Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Article 26
Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Article 27
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 28
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
Article 29
Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 30
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
Thursday, 10 February 2011
February and Other Mysteries
Yesterday I heard a DJ complaining about February, with it’s “silent r” and its fewer days. “What’s that all about, Febyoory?” he wittered.
fɛbrʊəri, or fɛbjʊəri gets its name from the Latin ‘februarius’, which in turn comes from februa, the name of a Roman purification feast held in this month. Precise speakers insist that the r should be pronounced, but it doesn’t flow easily for everyone so most people replace it with a y sound: Feb-yoo- rather than Feb-roo-. This is now becoming the accepted standard. Three seconds on AskOxford.com would have told him that, as it did me, and no doubt explanations for the fewer days could be found with a little more digging.
I have to conclude that his question was entirely rhetorical. He had no desire to find out the answers, only to find a subject which his listeners could relate to. And I suppose it’s likely that many English speakers will at some point have wondered about the seemingly redundant and obstructive first r in the word, so the DJ was sure to have connected with a lot of people on some level.
But what kind of people? With exabytes of digital information within easy and almost instant reach, in an age of smart phones, i-pads, laptops, Google, Android and Wikipedia, who is still left in the dark about such trivial things? Presumably a fairly big proportion of radio listeners tuning in to DJs that fill their air-time with inane rhetoric. They must feel the inclination to listen to these topics and even, in the case of some shows, to phone in and discuss them live on air.
So what purpose does it serve to question without seeking answers? I think the answer to that is it provides people with commonality, bonds of shared incredulity and tutting at the state of things. It allows the head-shaking grumblers countless opportunities to vent the Victor Meldrewisms that tend to bubble up in us when we feel out of our depth, like a kind of irritation version of nitrogen narcosis. I also think this, along with titillation and confirmation bias, is among the last few remaining purpose of most newspapers.
So what’s the problem? For me the problem is it’s lazy. It reinforces our existing fears and prejudices. It’s the reverse of scientific thinking because it doesn’t seek answers, it seeks only consensus of opinion. It’s a form of confirmation bias itself, on a grand scale. A mutual agreement to banish thought and reason and to lock thought patterns into disapproval. Entrenched dissatisfaction with trivial and often transient matters, such as pronunciation or fashions, provides the opportunity to conserve energy by resetting the default attitude towards any process requiring effort to condemnation. It removes the need to re-assess our model of the world to fit the new or the or to acclimatise ourselves to the unexpected.
Remember the flightless birds of New Zealand. Evolution follows the rule of ‘use it or lose it’ and it favours anything that conserves energy. If we as a species make a virtue of ignorance we make it an attractive quality, which in turn risks it becoming an adaptive trait. Our huge and costly brains came about through necessity during periods of ever-more complex problem solving, both technical and social. Now everything is done at the push of a button and we have less need to think for ourselves. Our intellectual wings have been superseded by a cultural miasma which buoys us up and along whatever path we slouch our way into early in life. As we’re less and less inclined to think for ourselves or to challenge our long-held and safe beliefs we’re more and more likely to lose our ability to discern between truth and comfort.
fɛbrʊəri, or fɛbjʊəri gets its name from the Latin ‘februarius’, which in turn comes from februa, the name of a Roman purification feast held in this month. Precise speakers insist that the r should be pronounced, but it doesn’t flow easily for everyone so most people replace it with a y sound: Feb-yoo- rather than Feb-roo-. This is now becoming the accepted standard. Three seconds on AskOxford.com would have told him that, as it did me, and no doubt explanations for the fewer days could be found with a little more digging.
I have to conclude that his question was entirely rhetorical. He had no desire to find out the answers, only to find a subject which his listeners could relate to. And I suppose it’s likely that many English speakers will at some point have wondered about the seemingly redundant and obstructive first r in the word, so the DJ was sure to have connected with a lot of people on some level.
But what kind of people? With exabytes of digital information within easy and almost instant reach, in an age of smart phones, i-pads, laptops, Google, Android and Wikipedia, who is still left in the dark about such trivial things? Presumably a fairly big proportion of radio listeners tuning in to DJs that fill their air-time with inane rhetoric. They must feel the inclination to listen to these topics and even, in the case of some shows, to phone in and discuss them live on air.
So what purpose does it serve to question without seeking answers? I think the answer to that is it provides people with commonality, bonds of shared incredulity and tutting at the state of things. It allows the head-shaking grumblers countless opportunities to vent the Victor Meldrewisms that tend to bubble up in us when we feel out of our depth, like a kind of irritation version of nitrogen narcosis. I also think this, along with titillation and confirmation bias, is among the last few remaining purpose of most newspapers.
So what’s the problem? For me the problem is it’s lazy. It reinforces our existing fears and prejudices. It’s the reverse of scientific thinking because it doesn’t seek answers, it seeks only consensus of opinion. It’s a form of confirmation bias itself, on a grand scale. A mutual agreement to banish thought and reason and to lock thought patterns into disapproval. Entrenched dissatisfaction with trivial and often transient matters, such as pronunciation or fashions, provides the opportunity to conserve energy by resetting the default attitude towards any process requiring effort to condemnation. It removes the need to re-assess our model of the world to fit the new or the or to acclimatise ourselves to the unexpected.
Remember the flightless birds of New Zealand. Evolution follows the rule of ‘use it or lose it’ and it favours anything that conserves energy. If we as a species make a virtue of ignorance we make it an attractive quality, which in turn risks it becoming an adaptive trait. Our huge and costly brains came about through necessity during periods of ever-more complex problem solving, both technical and social. Now everything is done at the push of a button and we have less need to think for ourselves. Our intellectual wings have been superseded by a cultural miasma which buoys us up and along whatever path we slouch our way into early in life. As we’re less and less inclined to think for ourselves or to challenge our long-held and safe beliefs we’re more and more likely to lose our ability to discern between truth and comfort.
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Response in Discussion on Immutable Human Rights
Part of an online discussion with Roland, this response was too long and too wide-ranging to comfortably fit on the Facebook page where the conversation began.
One of the problems with the idea of immutable human rights is that the evidence from history and cross-cultural studies doesn’t back it up.
The luxuriously comfortable world of the domesticated and educated classes of late 20th Century/early 21st Century Europe causes a skewed perspective. It’s a cognitive illusion to assume that what you know is a) correct and b) a general rule.
Secondly, for there to be immutable human rights they must be encoded in us somehow. There are 2 means by which this is generally thought to happen – evolutionary selection for a genetic predisposition (often called ‘instinct’, which means nothing), or by divine decree.
The problem with that is it’s not logical. If one follows the logic it goes round in a big circle and falls over. Lookie-see:
1) If a feeling that we have certain definite rights is genetically pre-programmed into our brains then we are not free to choose how we feel or to review and change our beliefs. We are enslaved by a perspective that dictates our feelings from within, so in this case the argument for a right to freedom is self-contradictory. If you are genetically pre-determined to feel you have a right to freedom you have no choice in this and therefore you are not free.
If you discount genetic pre-determinism (as many do, because it’s a very hard notion to live with) then perhaps a pre-disposition is a better option. But pre-dispositions are by their nature less precise and so the concept of immutable rights – perfect, unchanging, precise, inviolate doesn’t fit. Plus perfection isn’t found in a natural system. Nature is vague, imperfect and imprecise, hence bio-diversity, niche specialties and speciation. This universe does not contain anything of absolute unchanging perfection. That is fundamental to the laws of physics and a root cause of the existence of matter itself dating back to approx 380,000 years after the start of this universe. So any form of encoded and precisely defined behaviour cannot be unchanging in the natural, physical world. It can only be tied to a particular species in the form of tendencies towards certain behavioural traits. But remember that even the concept of ‘species’ is a category that collapses under scrutiny. A species is just a snapshot in a bio-diverse process that is utterly mutable and constantly subject to change, frequently radical. It’s the antithesis of immutability. If these immutable rights belong instead to all species then where is the evidence in the natural world? Are animals capable of evil?
If you’re not looking for evidence and acting purely on belief, what is it in your philosophy that makes humans so special that they have rights other animals don’t? What, must be asked, is ‘human’ anyway? Would a fully sapient, self-aware android have human rights? What if it was self-aware but shaped like a big goldfish or flower? Does a human with serious brain damage have less rights than you or I? Are human rights a virtue of our form or of our intellect? A combination? Any way you answer that it can’t explain logically how rights can be attached to an AI and simultaneously to a biological person in a vegetative state. If you remove the rights of the brain damaged aren’t you at risk of making a value-judgement on what makes a life worthwhile? The judgement seems to be made from an emotional perspective and emotions are out of our control. That brings us back to the earlier idea of being pre-determined or pre-disposed to feel that way.
Also consider the fact that there was at no point in our ancestry a ‘first human’. Any cut-off point from now going backwards to our ape-like ancestors that one may decide is where the human/non-human boundary exists has to be an arbitrary decision. There is no point genetically or palaeontologically where humans arise, just a seamless blend from one ancestor’s DNA to another’s all the way back to the first post-RNA slime. Where do you arbitrarily assign ‘human’ rights on that chain? If you do it too recently you’re saying ancestors who are a bit too hairy and hunched don’t have the same rights. If you go back too far who’s to say where you stop? Monkeys? Fish? It’s an illogical proposition and can only be explained in terms of mutability and context, like all categories and emotional responses.
2) If human rights have been enshrined in us by a benign deity then freedom is again removed from the equation. If your perceived freedom is only made sacred by virtue of a supernatural power then it’s not by choice. Even the definitions of what’s fair and just are suspect because they are not your own definitions, they’ve been presented to you by a god and you’ve been constructed to feel comfortable with them and as if they’re your own. It’s a theological cognitive illusion and the result is the same. You as an individual play no part in the process and by definition are not free to choose other than whether to obey or defy the dictum of the god. Your ‘choice’, if any, is to be ‘good’ and obey or be ‘bad’ and defy. That leads to all sorts of problems, not least that of culpability. If a god has instilled in all humans a knowledge of right and wrong then ignorance is no defence and any tribesman in Papua New Guinea can be held as a ‘sinner’ for not subscribing to the same view of right and wrong. Sound familiar? Perceived permanence of a natural form of justice, by a process of logical deduction, leads us to religious persecution and the obliteration of freedom of choice. What’s morally right and wrong in comfortable, well-nourished European suburbs is not necessarily the same as what’s right and wrong in a rapidly depleting jungle at the edge of the world. Or on the game reserves of Africa where poachers are shot dead to protect endangered species. Does a rhino on the verge of extinction have more rights than a human simply due to the numbers?
To say that human rights are immutable – i.e. established and maintained outside of human decision making processes - and to promulgate the view that human rights are inviolate, is to ignore the efforts made, the blood spilled and hardships endured, by our European ancestors in establishing what we now perceive to be our deserved rights as free and intrinsically valuable individuals. As voting, fairly emancipated people we generally think of our society and ourselves as deeply connected and that we deserve respect. That view is very ‘Western’ and very modern. Yes it’s been a feature of philosophers’ discussions for thousands of years, but when they discussed the freedoms of men in antiquity they meant men. Not women, not children, and certainly not slaves or even lower classed men. The boundaries of moral certainty move as a culture changes. They are not fixed.
These days there would probably be much agreement on feeling uncomfortable about abuse of power or strength and individuals deserving respect, not being judged purely on how useful they are to society. But that view isn’t universally held even now and historically the opposite has been held by many cultures many times, always justifying it to themselves with arguments couched in their own philosophical and sometimes theological ideals. Such views are artefacts of cultures, just as our own feelings on human rights are. But, as ever, environment and genetics co-exist and shape each other. The key issue here being that they are shaped and thus they change.
On the evidence I’ve seen, I don’t believe there are consciously ‘evil’ people doing ‘evil’ deeds in the world. I think there are very different views of what’s acceptable and what’s desirable and that ‘evil’ is open to interpretation. (For an inevitable Star Wars interlude, to me Palpatine is at his least convincing when he’s melodramatically portrayed as knowingly villainous. I don’t buy it. Dictators are usually driven by a desire to ‘better’ society by draconian means and so aren’t evil in their own eyes).
There does appear to be a genetic link with an inter-personal value system that pre-disposes one to certain feelings, including how we see society itself and our position in relation to it. I forget the details, but this TED talk is where I heard about it. If I remember correctly, whether we are left or right wing, libertarian or fascist, is merely a matter of where we are on the spectrum as defined by our individual phenotype and the culture in which it arises.
http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/17/the_real_differ/
Actually, Haidt has a few TED talks on this subject so I’m going to go listen to them all and see what he says before I write anything else.
http://www.ted.com/search?q=haidt
One of the problems with the idea of immutable human rights is that the evidence from history and cross-cultural studies doesn’t back it up.
The luxuriously comfortable world of the domesticated and educated classes of late 20th Century/early 21st Century Europe causes a skewed perspective. It’s a cognitive illusion to assume that what you know is a) correct and b) a general rule.
Secondly, for there to be immutable human rights they must be encoded in us somehow. There are 2 means by which this is generally thought to happen – evolutionary selection for a genetic predisposition (often called ‘instinct’, which means nothing), or by divine decree.
The problem with that is it’s not logical. If one follows the logic it goes round in a big circle and falls over. Lookie-see:
1) If a feeling that we have certain definite rights is genetically pre-programmed into our brains then we are not free to choose how we feel or to review and change our beliefs. We are enslaved by a perspective that dictates our feelings from within, so in this case the argument for a right to freedom is self-contradictory. If you are genetically pre-determined to feel you have a right to freedom you have no choice in this and therefore you are not free.
If you discount genetic pre-determinism (as many do, because it’s a very hard notion to live with) then perhaps a pre-disposition is a better option. But pre-dispositions are by their nature less precise and so the concept of immutable rights – perfect, unchanging, precise, inviolate doesn’t fit. Plus perfection isn’t found in a natural system. Nature is vague, imperfect and imprecise, hence bio-diversity, niche specialties and speciation. This universe does not contain anything of absolute unchanging perfection. That is fundamental to the laws of physics and a root cause of the existence of matter itself dating back to approx 380,000 years after the start of this universe. So any form of encoded and precisely defined behaviour cannot be unchanging in the natural, physical world. It can only be tied to a particular species in the form of tendencies towards certain behavioural traits. But remember that even the concept of ‘species’ is a category that collapses under scrutiny. A species is just a snapshot in a bio-diverse process that is utterly mutable and constantly subject to change, frequently radical. It’s the antithesis of immutability. If these immutable rights belong instead to all species then where is the evidence in the natural world? Are animals capable of evil?
If you’re not looking for evidence and acting purely on belief, what is it in your philosophy that makes humans so special that they have rights other animals don’t? What, must be asked, is ‘human’ anyway? Would a fully sapient, self-aware android have human rights? What if it was self-aware but shaped like a big goldfish or flower? Does a human with serious brain damage have less rights than you or I? Are human rights a virtue of our form or of our intellect? A combination? Any way you answer that it can’t explain logically how rights can be attached to an AI and simultaneously to a biological person in a vegetative state. If you remove the rights of the brain damaged aren’t you at risk of making a value-judgement on what makes a life worthwhile? The judgement seems to be made from an emotional perspective and emotions are out of our control. That brings us back to the earlier idea of being pre-determined or pre-disposed to feel that way.
Also consider the fact that there was at no point in our ancestry a ‘first human’. Any cut-off point from now going backwards to our ape-like ancestors that one may decide is where the human/non-human boundary exists has to be an arbitrary decision. There is no point genetically or palaeontologically where humans arise, just a seamless blend from one ancestor’s DNA to another’s all the way back to the first post-RNA slime. Where do you arbitrarily assign ‘human’ rights on that chain? If you do it too recently you’re saying ancestors who are a bit too hairy and hunched don’t have the same rights. If you go back too far who’s to say where you stop? Monkeys? Fish? It’s an illogical proposition and can only be explained in terms of mutability and context, like all categories and emotional responses.
2) If human rights have been enshrined in us by a benign deity then freedom is again removed from the equation. If your perceived freedom is only made sacred by virtue of a supernatural power then it’s not by choice. Even the definitions of what’s fair and just are suspect because they are not your own definitions, they’ve been presented to you by a god and you’ve been constructed to feel comfortable with them and as if they’re your own. It’s a theological cognitive illusion and the result is the same. You as an individual play no part in the process and by definition are not free to choose other than whether to obey or defy the dictum of the god. Your ‘choice’, if any, is to be ‘good’ and obey or be ‘bad’ and defy. That leads to all sorts of problems, not least that of culpability. If a god has instilled in all humans a knowledge of right and wrong then ignorance is no defence and any tribesman in Papua New Guinea can be held as a ‘sinner’ for not subscribing to the same view of right and wrong. Sound familiar? Perceived permanence of a natural form of justice, by a process of logical deduction, leads us to religious persecution and the obliteration of freedom of choice. What’s morally right and wrong in comfortable, well-nourished European suburbs is not necessarily the same as what’s right and wrong in a rapidly depleting jungle at the edge of the world. Or on the game reserves of Africa where poachers are shot dead to protect endangered species. Does a rhino on the verge of extinction have more rights than a human simply due to the numbers?
To say that human rights are immutable – i.e. established and maintained outside of human decision making processes - and to promulgate the view that human rights are inviolate, is to ignore the efforts made, the blood spilled and hardships endured, by our European ancestors in establishing what we now perceive to be our deserved rights as free and intrinsically valuable individuals. As voting, fairly emancipated people we generally think of our society and ourselves as deeply connected and that we deserve respect. That view is very ‘Western’ and very modern. Yes it’s been a feature of philosophers’ discussions for thousands of years, but when they discussed the freedoms of men in antiquity they meant men. Not women, not children, and certainly not slaves or even lower classed men. The boundaries of moral certainty move as a culture changes. They are not fixed.
These days there would probably be much agreement on feeling uncomfortable about abuse of power or strength and individuals deserving respect, not being judged purely on how useful they are to society. But that view isn’t universally held even now and historically the opposite has been held by many cultures many times, always justifying it to themselves with arguments couched in their own philosophical and sometimes theological ideals. Such views are artefacts of cultures, just as our own feelings on human rights are. But, as ever, environment and genetics co-exist and shape each other. The key issue here being that they are shaped and thus they change.
On the evidence I’ve seen, I don’t believe there are consciously ‘evil’ people doing ‘evil’ deeds in the world. I think there are very different views of what’s acceptable and what’s desirable and that ‘evil’ is open to interpretation. (For an inevitable Star Wars interlude, to me Palpatine is at his least convincing when he’s melodramatically portrayed as knowingly villainous. I don’t buy it. Dictators are usually driven by a desire to ‘better’ society by draconian means and so aren’t evil in their own eyes).
There does appear to be a genetic link with an inter-personal value system that pre-disposes one to certain feelings, including how we see society itself and our position in relation to it. I forget the details, but this TED talk is where I heard about it. If I remember correctly, whether we are left or right wing, libertarian or fascist, is merely a matter of where we are on the spectrum as defined by our individual phenotype and the culture in which it arises.
http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/17/the_real_differ/
Actually, Haidt has a few TED talks on this subject so I’m going to go listen to them all and see what he says before I write anything else.
http://www.ted.com/search?q=haidt
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
Natural Born Killers
When asked “what creature apart from humans is the most violent” on an internet Q&A site I happened upon, most people said chimpanzees, claiming chimps “wage wars” and commit sickening acts of violence and atrocity on each other. But what did the question really mean? Judging by the answers no one was sure. Like an ink-blot test, it revealed the thoughts and fears of those answering the question and nothing else.
One contributor gave first prize to termites, bizarrely equating aggression with property damage. Timbers in human houses are just lunch to them, so why not accuse zebras of committing grass-related atrocities while you’re at it? Another contributor nominated hippos, citing the often heard statistics that show they kill more people than sharks, lions or teenagers do. This reaction was different thing to that of the chimp-haters. This is violence seen as aggression against humans, not against their own species. And that’s the real giveaway, isn’t it? Chimps look like us, hippos don’t. I assume hippo violence against hippo hasn’t registered. I didn’t see anyone talking about male elephant seals. Incidentally, a quick web-search revealed that opinions are divided on actual hippo danger levels.
There’s a scene in Jurassic Park where Sam Neill tells everyone not to worry about the diplodocus munching on a nearby tree because it’s a harmless vegetarian. It’s a commonly held belief that herbivorous dinosaur were harmless. Where did this idea spring from? I’d put this in with a lot of the other old fallacies about dinosaurs because this is surely not true. I think I can refute the argument with one word – Rhinos.
You’re far better able to judge if an animal has a violent nature by checking its physiology, not its diet. High levels of testosterone makes something attack other things. Testosterone-heavy Bull sharks are highly aggressive, more so than Great Whites but have probably added to their cousins’ bad reputation by nibbling on the occasional incontinent Floridian beach-goer. If said Floridian is ignorant of the mind-boggling diversity of the natural world it’s a given that witnessing almost any kind of shark attack will be enough to pin another gruesome statistic on star of the big screen, good old Carcharodon carcharias. Meanwhile most people remain largely unaware of the other 439 known shark species, sometimes as utterly different from each other as the tiny, vicious and surreal cookie-cutter shark is from the enormous yet gentle whale shark (gentle to humans, that is. Plankton would of course see them as ruthless monsters responsible for the deaths of billions).
So what is violence? As is often the way the meaning of the word changes depending on who’s using it and what point they’re trying to make. Language is and always has been fluid, making all attempts to regulate it pointless and misguided. But for meanings to change on the whim of lazy ignorance seems a shame. Language informs how we think and even who we are. Every word we learn carries with it streams of associated meanings and connects unconsciously to innumerable thought patterns, shaping the linguistic framework we use to make sense of the world and of ourselves. When meanings are changed by ignorance and apathy we lose something that took centuries to craft.
All the contributors in the Q&A violent animals survey interpreted violence to mean physical harm that upset them personally. Examples were given of “meaningless” and “pointless” behaviour, as if animals must always act to better their lives, or as if all actions must, and in an obvious way, contribute to an evolutionary advantage within a self-sustaining eco-system. This ignores two facts:
1) Nature is a roiling mass of winners and losers fighting over limited resources, usually to the death of individuals, often of species, and extinction by competition has always been with us.
2) Humans, with all our selfish psychological imbalances and hateful, petty desires, are just as much a product of nature as any other living thing, not somehow removed from it.
The OED online defines violence as “1. behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill. 2. strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force”. So taking that onboard, most animals are violent because they purposefully hurt or kill other animals while defending themselves or others, feeding, and gaining opportunities to reproduce. A rutting stag gouging an opponent with his antlers is intending to hurt and damage his opponent. A leopard seal hunting a penguin is intending to damage and kill. A pod of orcas pursuing a whale calf, drowning it with their combined body-weight then eating just its tongue is intending to kill. We’re horrified and bewildered by that last one yet don’t think twice about the first two, but all are products of natural processes, behaviours prompted by physiological cues in environmental contexts. Orcas are highly intelligent so a seemingly cruel act perhaps comes from a natural desire to solve problems with innovation. Catching their dinner in new and exciting ways is something they must be drawn to and which leads them to come up with the amazing solutions they do when confronted with hard to catch prey. I imagine they find it very entertaining.
Claiming that an animal’s actions are meaningless seems to me to be very close to what Richard Dawkins calls an ‘argument from personal incredulity’. But rather than the premise being "I can't believe this is possible, so it can't be true" what we have here is “I can’t see any purpose behind this, so it must be without purpose.” The absence of a plan doesn’t mean absence of meaning. Stories, believe it or not, do not have to have an author. They can be created spontaneously by groups of people unknowingly acting within a simple set of rules (as in the party game ‘Psychoanalysis’ http://tap.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/17/4/587.pdf ). Animals don’t plan things out or consider the long-term ramifications of their actions, they act according to their desires and inhibitions. And regardless of what we tell ourselves, the indications are that we generally do the same. Statistically, the best indicator of future behaviour is previous behaviour. Not our promises, not our sincerely expressed desires to change. We usually do what we usually do. If you need further proof think about how people go about buying houses. Or choosing partners.
Insects can be unbelievably violent. Ants, for instance, are extremely aggressive. I met a group of ants in an Australian jungle that were just 2mm long, three of them were on a tree branch I was climbing over and when they noticed me they instantly stopped whatever it was they were doing (I’m utterly mystified by the purpose of ant processions in exactly the same way I’m utterly mystified by traffic when I look out of the window during night flights over British motorways. Where are all you people going? What was wrong with where you were? Why don’t you just decide where you want to be?!). They assumed their threatening posture, abdomens raised and jaws wide - declaring in ant-speak their intention to fight me, a creature a million times their size, to the death. Ants, enslave and kill rivals. They send their old ladies out to the furthest outposts of the nests to die fighting in defence of their younger sisters. Nature is full of this stuff! Grizzly bears tear living fish apart from the tail up. Male lions commit infanticide while the mothers watch and moments later enter into enthusiastic copulation. And none of these things make it into our nightmares. Is it because we can’t relate to them? Chimps make us question ourselves because we think they’re so much like us. Meanwhile we turn a blind eye to millions killed in African civil wars because African tribes-people seem so removed from us culturally, technologically and geographically. Our mental categories aren’t being cross-referenced. So we’re 90-something% the same as chimps, but let’s get that in context – we’re about 50% the same as cucumbers. A fair-sized portion of our genes just deal with being alive in an oxygen-rich atmosphere with a bit of CO2 in it in the ‘goldilocks’ zone of the solar system. Being impressed at how like us something non-human is apparently doesn’t mean we’re also going to care about something that is human but isn’t especially like us. Chimps do seem a lot like people so their violence worries us. It doesn’t fit with our modern, constructed view of nature as a system in balance. We’re worried that perhaps we and our hairy cousins are spoiling the party for everybody else, that the dreaded spectre of ‘determinism’ has doomed us to an eternity of bloodshed and suffering. Which, ironically, by worrying about chimps instead of people, we’re showing an amazing capacity to cope with.
But of course it isn’t about people, or nature. Or fate. Or world peace. It’s about you. It’s always been about you, it always will be about you. Violence, regardless of its dictionary or colloquial definition, means physical harm to you and yours, or that worries you due to its proximity. That’s what the Q&A survey showed anyway.
Most people said chimps. No one said cats.
One contributor gave first prize to termites, bizarrely equating aggression with property damage. Timbers in human houses are just lunch to them, so why not accuse zebras of committing grass-related atrocities while you’re at it? Another contributor nominated hippos, citing the often heard statistics that show they kill more people than sharks, lions or teenagers do. This reaction was different thing to that of the chimp-haters. This is violence seen as aggression against humans, not against their own species. And that’s the real giveaway, isn’t it? Chimps look like us, hippos don’t. I assume hippo violence against hippo hasn’t registered. I didn’t see anyone talking about male elephant seals. Incidentally, a quick web-search revealed that opinions are divided on actual hippo danger levels.
There’s a scene in Jurassic Park where Sam Neill tells everyone not to worry about the diplodocus munching on a nearby tree because it’s a harmless vegetarian. It’s a commonly held belief that herbivorous dinosaur were harmless. Where did this idea spring from? I’d put this in with a lot of the other old fallacies about dinosaurs because this is surely not true. I think I can refute the argument with one word – Rhinos.
You’re far better able to judge if an animal has a violent nature by checking its physiology, not its diet. High levels of testosterone makes something attack other things. Testosterone-heavy Bull sharks are highly aggressive, more so than Great Whites but have probably added to their cousins’ bad reputation by nibbling on the occasional incontinent Floridian beach-goer. If said Floridian is ignorant of the mind-boggling diversity of the natural world it’s a given that witnessing almost any kind of shark attack will be enough to pin another gruesome statistic on star of the big screen, good old Carcharodon carcharias. Meanwhile most people remain largely unaware of the other 439 known shark species, sometimes as utterly different from each other as the tiny, vicious and surreal cookie-cutter shark is from the enormous yet gentle whale shark (gentle to humans, that is. Plankton would of course see them as ruthless monsters responsible for the deaths of billions).
So what is violence? As is often the way the meaning of the word changes depending on who’s using it and what point they’re trying to make. Language is and always has been fluid, making all attempts to regulate it pointless and misguided. But for meanings to change on the whim of lazy ignorance seems a shame. Language informs how we think and even who we are. Every word we learn carries with it streams of associated meanings and connects unconsciously to innumerable thought patterns, shaping the linguistic framework we use to make sense of the world and of ourselves. When meanings are changed by ignorance and apathy we lose something that took centuries to craft.
All the contributors in the Q&A violent animals survey interpreted violence to mean physical harm that upset them personally. Examples were given of “meaningless” and “pointless” behaviour, as if animals must always act to better their lives, or as if all actions must, and in an obvious way, contribute to an evolutionary advantage within a self-sustaining eco-system. This ignores two facts:
1) Nature is a roiling mass of winners and losers fighting over limited resources, usually to the death of individuals, often of species, and extinction by competition has always been with us.
2) Humans, with all our selfish psychological imbalances and hateful, petty desires, are just as much a product of nature as any other living thing, not somehow removed from it.
The OED online defines violence as “1. behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill. 2. strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force”. So taking that onboard, most animals are violent because they purposefully hurt or kill other animals while defending themselves or others, feeding, and gaining opportunities to reproduce. A rutting stag gouging an opponent with his antlers is intending to hurt and damage his opponent. A leopard seal hunting a penguin is intending to damage and kill. A pod of orcas pursuing a whale calf, drowning it with their combined body-weight then eating just its tongue is intending to kill. We’re horrified and bewildered by that last one yet don’t think twice about the first two, but all are products of natural processes, behaviours prompted by physiological cues in environmental contexts. Orcas are highly intelligent so a seemingly cruel act perhaps comes from a natural desire to solve problems with innovation. Catching their dinner in new and exciting ways is something they must be drawn to and which leads them to come up with the amazing solutions they do when confronted with hard to catch prey. I imagine they find it very entertaining.
Claiming that an animal’s actions are meaningless seems to me to be very close to what Richard Dawkins calls an ‘argument from personal incredulity’. But rather than the premise being "I can't believe this is possible, so it can't be true" what we have here is “I can’t see any purpose behind this, so it must be without purpose.” The absence of a plan doesn’t mean absence of meaning. Stories, believe it or not, do not have to have an author. They can be created spontaneously by groups of people unknowingly acting within a simple set of rules (as in the party game ‘Psychoanalysis’ http://tap.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/17/4/587.pdf ). Animals don’t plan things out or consider the long-term ramifications of their actions, they act according to their desires and inhibitions. And regardless of what we tell ourselves, the indications are that we generally do the same. Statistically, the best indicator of future behaviour is previous behaviour. Not our promises, not our sincerely expressed desires to change. We usually do what we usually do. If you need further proof think about how people go about buying houses. Or choosing partners.
Insects can be unbelievably violent. Ants, for instance, are extremely aggressive. I met a group of ants in an Australian jungle that were just 2mm long, three of them were on a tree branch I was climbing over and when they noticed me they instantly stopped whatever it was they were doing (I’m utterly mystified by the purpose of ant processions in exactly the same way I’m utterly mystified by traffic when I look out of the window during night flights over British motorways. Where are all you people going? What was wrong with where you were? Why don’t you just decide where you want to be?!). They assumed their threatening posture, abdomens raised and jaws wide - declaring in ant-speak their intention to fight me, a creature a million times their size, to the death. Ants, enslave and kill rivals. They send their old ladies out to the furthest outposts of the nests to die fighting in defence of their younger sisters. Nature is full of this stuff! Grizzly bears tear living fish apart from the tail up. Male lions commit infanticide while the mothers watch and moments later enter into enthusiastic copulation. And none of these things make it into our nightmares. Is it because we can’t relate to them? Chimps make us question ourselves because we think they’re so much like us. Meanwhile we turn a blind eye to millions killed in African civil wars because African tribes-people seem so removed from us culturally, technologically and geographically. Our mental categories aren’t being cross-referenced. So we’re 90-something% the same as chimps, but let’s get that in context – we’re about 50% the same as cucumbers. A fair-sized portion of our genes just deal with being alive in an oxygen-rich atmosphere with a bit of CO2 in it in the ‘goldilocks’ zone of the solar system. Being impressed at how like us something non-human is apparently doesn’t mean we’re also going to care about something that is human but isn’t especially like us. Chimps do seem a lot like people so their violence worries us. It doesn’t fit with our modern, constructed view of nature as a system in balance. We’re worried that perhaps we and our hairy cousins are spoiling the party for everybody else, that the dreaded spectre of ‘determinism’ has doomed us to an eternity of bloodshed and suffering. Which, ironically, by worrying about chimps instead of people, we’re showing an amazing capacity to cope with.
But of course it isn’t about people, or nature. Or fate. Or world peace. It’s about you. It’s always been about you, it always will be about you. Violence, regardless of its dictionary or colloquial definition, means physical harm to you and yours, or that worries you due to its proximity. That’s what the Q&A survey showed anyway.
Most people said chimps. No one said cats.
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