Posts Tagged ‘Steven Pinker’
on determinism and IQ, class, castes and elites
Nehru, of course, belonged to the Brahmin caste
I wrote a post recently on the stupidity of Steven Pinker’s view of determinism, his mocking of ‘the abuse excuse’ and such like, and I noted how people from elite, privileged backgrounds tend to downplay – or desperately avoid mentioning – their advantages while advocating for the ‘common sense’ compatibilism or free will positions of their class.
Something that I didn’t mention though, in that Pinker post, is a recollection that Pinker had written some kind of puff piece about the Ashkenazi Jews (‘The Lessons of the Ashkenazim’ – which I’ve not read as yet)), their high IQs and their over-representation in the fields of elite science, chess grandmastery and such. Pinker, needless to say, is Jewish. Presumably the argument will go that these Ashkenazim have higher IQs for some particular reason, be it genetic, cultural or some synergistic mixture of the two. That’s to say, a deterministic reason.
I’m not Jewish, and I certainly don’t come from an elite background. My father was an unskilled labourer, in a variety of jobs with a variety of gaps between them. My mother was the breadwinner, a nurse who managed to move up the ladder to hospital administration and then nurse education. As migrants to Australia, half the world away from my Scottish birthplace, we were cut off from the wider family, and I didn’t hear much about how any of them made their livings, and, for some reason, I wasn’t particularly curious about them, though I was curious about many other things, or, at least, a few.
Do I have an IQ? The IQ concept has of course been controversial. Is it culturally based? Can it be made less so, or more multicultural, since human culture is pretty well inescapable? Apparently the result can be reduced to a number, and based on that number you can be classed as a genius, an imbecile or anything in between. I myself have never knowingly sat for an IQ test, so I have no number to preen myself on or shake my head over. However, I have taken two tests, one at age twelve, the other at age twenty-nine, which made some difference to my life. The first test was taken at the end of my final primary school year, and had to do with students’ placement in high school the following year. The high school had introduced ‘streaming’, based, apparently on natural smarts – measured by the test I had taken, but perhaps also by other primary school results. There were eight first-year high school classes, divided in two depending on whether you wanted to take French or German as your language choice (there were only two choices, no Tamil or Pitjantjatjara). So the ‘top’ two classes were F1 and G1, going down to F4 and G4. The new students for 1969 gathered together in the grounds of the relatively new Elizabeth West High School for the name-calling. To my surprise, I was the first name called for the F1 class. I was mildly puzzled, but then, some name had to be first. But a week or so later, one of my new classmates – I still remember his name, Blair Farquar – came to me and said excitedly ‘do you know you got the top marks for the class test?’ He’d been asked by our home teacher to retrieve something from her office, and had seen and looked through the test papers, which were numbered in a pile on the desk. I was frankly shocked. I knew I wasn’t stupid, but this news really unnerved me. I felt I’d been handed a burden I didn’t really want. And looking back on it, this test, which wasn’t based on any schoolwork but on reasoning and problem solving, must have been a child of the IQ family. And also looking back, our test results weren’t based on our diligence as students. We didn’t ‘study’ for the test, it was imposed on us without notice. So I couldn’t pat myself on the back for my achievement, I’d succeeded, if that was the word, due to determining factors completely beyond my control.
In any case, I squandered my advantage over the next few years due to increasing tensions at home, and at school, to which I responded with passive resistance and a sense of anti-authoritarianism which has never since left me. As mentioned in a previous post, I dropped out of school at 15. On my last school day, I was smacked across the face by the headmaster, because I was chewing gum while he was questioning me. I’ve no idea why this bothered him so much, but I knew exactly why his behaviour bothered me, and I’d had more than enough of it. I didn’t resume any formal education until I sat for a university-entrance test, as aforementioned, in my 29th year. In the intervening years I worked in various jobs, in factories, in a hospital, and as a general dogsbody in a fancy French restaurant, and became a habitual diary writer and a mover in slightly more intellectual, but small, circles. I developed a self-mocking fantasy of myself as the smartest person without a uni degree in the known universe.
The university test was definitely not an IQ test, as it involved writing a couple of essays on a choice of topics, and as a habitual writer, this was my comfort zone. I received acceptances from the two universities in South Australia at the time, Adelaide and Flinders, which enabled me to obtain a straightforward Arts degree – certainly not a road out of poverty. Eventually, after much faffing about, including the publication of a novel, I managed to obtain enough further qualifications to score some teaching work here and there, by which time I wasn’t far off from retirement age.
I write all this, largely because I’m self-obsessed, but also to illustrate the role of determinism. If I was born to nomadic pastoralists in Somalia, or to a Dalit family in Hindu India, I wouldn’t be writing here, and I wouldn’t have scored the kind of meagre successes I might be credited with in the WEIRD world. On the other hand, had I been born to a successful and supportive Ashkenazi family, my connections and my opportunities would have been unimaginably different from what I’ve experienced. And in all this I’m as typical as most other humans on this planet.
So this is important. When you come to reflect on the free will/determinism issue, don’t be taken in by the sorts of claims I once read, I think it was on a Stanford University website, that this is a fun topic to cut your philosophical teeth on. No, it isn’t a fun topic, it cuts to the heart of who we are and what we can become. And of course it’s complex. People from impoverished backgrounds can become Nobel Prize winners, and children of the Ashkenazim can become hopeless drug addicts or career criminals. To understand why that may have happened would mean to look in detail at the determining factors, insofar as they can be uncovered. And when and if you read some of the philosophical arguments on the topic, it’s essential to note the backgrounds of the writers, insofar as they can be ascertained. It will definitely hold the key to their position on the subject – such is my determination.
References
https://newrepublic.com/article/77727/groups-and-genes
Stewart Henderson, In Elizabeth, 1997
Pinker on free will, and more about myself
I’m still feeling anger, after all these years, at the free will proponents who, I feel, have benefitted from a cushy upbringing and have no idea what it’s like to have had nothing like the opportunities they’ve had. Of course, it’s always a worry that we can just attribute our relative failure to that lack of opportunity, but facts are facts, and it’s simply a fact that our macro world is determined.
And so to Steven Pinker, who, in his 2002 book The blank slate, ventured a few remarks on free will. I’ve written about Pinker before, and I consider it amusing to compare my life with his. We were both born in the mid 1950s’ – he’s a bit older – but that’s just about where the similarities come to an end (though I, too, have quite a big personal library – just saying). On the free will issue, I’d be inclined to make the small point, and I think Sapolsky makes it too, that successful career people would be more inclined to believe in free will than more or less abject failures – which of course isn’t saying anything about me.
Chapter 10 of The blank slate is titled ‘The fear of determinism’, and in it he starts looking at determinism from what I would call the wrong end – what he calls ‘molecules in motion’. My own thinking on this always starts from ‘thrown-ness into the world’, at an unchosen time and place, and as an unchosen living specimen. From there we get to our own parentage, our genes and our pre-natal and antenatal development, and their epigenetic effects.
Pinker also jumps quickly into the confusion I always find when I speak to people about this topic – that between determinism and predeterminism/fatalism:
‘All our brooding and agonising over the right thing to do is pointless, it would seem, because everything has already been preordained by the state of our brains’.
Pinker highlights the fear of determinism for a reason, claiming that ‘it is the existential fear of determinism that is the real waste of time’, though it seems to me that few people suffer such fear – and this appears to be borne out by experimental evidence. When we’re primed by tricky lab-coated types to reflect on ‘victims of circumstance’, there is an effect, but it appears to be minimal and short-term.
Of course, it isn’t the fear of determinism that concerns me, but the lack of acknowledgment of its factual basis. Pinker goes on a long and rather facile discourse about lawyers, medicos and neurologists seeking to get wrong-doers off the hook on the basis of defective genes and/or brain processes. Note that Sapolsky admits to having offered his services in this way, generally to no avail. I would note, just in passing, that the USA has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the WEIRD world, by a huge margin. It’s the land of free will after all. No excuses.
Some of Pinker’s ‘analyses’ here really miss the mark badly. For example, he references Dennett, who…
points out that the last thing we want in a soul is freedom to do anything it desires. If behaviour were chosen by an utterly free will, then we really couldn’t hold people responsible for their actions. That entity would not be deterred by the threat of punishment, or be ashamed by the prospect of opprobrium, or even feel the twinge of guilt that might inhibit a sinful temptation in the future, because it could always choose to defy those causes of behaviour….
And so on. But this is obvious bullshit – even if you fully believed in free will, the threat of imprisonment would be a massive deterrent, especially given the horrific private prisons of the US. And so would the opprobrium directed at you for your wrong-doing, given that we’re the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet. Others’ opinions of us massively matter. Free will doesn’t preclude a sense of right and wrong. It should also be obvious that we are determined, by evolution, to survive and thrive as best we can – so in a world of severe punishments, such as exists in the USA, we’ll obviously be determined to avoid such punishments as best we can, even given a deprived background or a shrunken amygdala.
But where Pinker goes wrong in a way that is, to me, more offensive, is in his mockery of what he calls environmental determinism. It’s the typical upper middle class response, I must say:
The most risible pretexts for bad behaviour in recent decades have come not from biological determinism but from environmental determinism: the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defence, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics, and different cultural mores….
This little parade of glibness doesn’t, of course, begin to address any real issues. Firstly, there’s little real difference between biological and environmental determinism. Our biology evolves in adaptation to changing environments, as every evolutionary biologist knows, and, to be fair to Pinker, there has been a revolution in our understanding of environmentally-induced gene expression (epigenetics) in the two decades since The blank slate was published. Even so, my experience of growing up in a profoundly working-class environment, in which classroom illiteracy was commonplace, as well as vandalism, neglect and police harassment, makes me flare up when I hear the life-shattering experiences of kids in the street where I lived being dismissed in terms of ‘the abuse excuse’. I also note that in mocking these ‘excuses’ his target is invariably the lawyers (his own class) that bring these claims, rather than the accused themselves, about who’s background he appears to be indifferent. It’s the same clubbish elitism that I found in the dated Berofsky collection I re-read recently, but more focussed on law than philosophy.
Another of the irritations I found in revisiting Pinker’s determinism-free will piece, is that he focusses almost exclusively on crime, ignoring the much larger issues of lives lived in struggle because of determining forces beyond their control – a Palestinian in modern Israel, a woman in Afghanistan, a Dalit in India, an Australian Aboriginal at the time of the British colonisation of that island, a Jew growing up in Germany in the 1930s, the Tainos visited by the Spanish horror in the late 15th and 16th centuries, the Scots massacred in the reign of Edward I, the East Timorese massacred by Indonesian forces, the isolated old women burned as witches… millions of people who found themselves members of the wrong gender or ethnicity at the wrong time – murdered, raped, enslaved, or simply deprived of the means to live a life in which there’s some hope of an upward trajectory. None of us got to choose our ethnicity, our class (yes it does exist), our early upbringing, our parentage, even our level of intelligence, and this is so obvious, and so overwhelming a fact, that it seems to me almost embarrassing to have to point it out. And all of this is profoundly determining. That’s why reading history, as I often do, can be such an affecting experience. It is so full of innocent victims. And of course it continues….
So, finally, it isn’t the fear of determinism that should concern us – it’s the very fact of determinism.
I’ve been lucky, on balance. I was brought, as a five-year-old, to live in one of the richest and most peaceful nations in the world. I can’t praise or blame myself for this. Certain aspects of my treatment both at home and at school resulted in, for me, a fairly extreme anti-authoritarianism, and something of an over-self-reliance, which has its positives and negatives. But I benefitted from a world-full of books in our house, which took me to places of wonder outside myself. And I’ve benefitted from a nation with a strong social safety net, a minimum wage which is the highest of any nation outside of Luxembourg, a justice system that eliminated the death penalty nationwide almost 60 years ago, and a political system that was the first in the world to grant votes, and the right to stand for parliament, to women. It also rates as one of the least religious nations on earth – which for me is a godsend.
More on determinism from me, no doubt, as I plough into the second half of Sapolsky’s Determined.
References
Steven Pinker, The blank slate, 2002
Bernard Berofsky, Free will and determinism, 1963
Robert Sapolsky , Determined, 2023
Sean Carroll on free will – a sort of compatibilist
this comment, from a site called ‘physics of free will’, seems to miss the point completely
There are a few positions on the free will issue, and probably three principal ones. They are, compatibilism (the most common position, particularly among philosophers), incompatibilism and libertarianism. I’m not interested in discussing libertarianism, which is just too weird. Compatibilism, argued for by Daniel Dennett in Elbow Room, amongst many others I’ve read, including Steven Pinker, and most of the contributors to Free will & determinism, a mid-twentieth century collection edited by Bernard Berofsky, claims basically that though our macro world is deterministic, otherwise science would never have gotten off the ground, we as complex, thinking and deciding individuals, make life choices all the time, in large matters and small, choices which we claim as our own, with all the praise and opprobrium that comes with our decisions.
Those that argue for incompatibilism, or hard determinism as it’s sometimes called, question, among other things, this notion of the self-determining self. Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford University, has written a comprehensive defence of the incompatibilist position in Determined, which together with his earlier book Behave, and Sam Harris’ book Free Will, and reflections on the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (a 50-year-old longitudinal study of, inter alia, personality types and how they change, or not, over time), has shifted my own stance on the issue from a wobbly compatibilism to a much more firm incompatibilism.
So to Sean Carroll, eminent physicist and science communicator and author of a 2016 book which I bought the other day, The Big Picture: on the origins of life, meaning and the universe itself – obviously inspired by my own writings. He devotes six pages of his 441-page book to the free will question, so it’s probably not a big issue for him. And indeed, it’s pretty inevitable that successful and highly respected individuals, who have contributed positively to science and human understanding, as Carroll undoubtedly has, would wish to be given credit for their achievements, and to believe that their own decisions and their own hard work have brought them to the position of respected public intellectual that the likes of Carroll enjoys today.
However.
I’m not going to research Carroll’s background, any more than I’ll research the backgrounds of other compatibilists such as Dennett and Pinker, but I think I can safely assume that none of these individuals were born into dire poverty, or a toxic family situation, or a war zone, or a strongly kinship-oriented, non-English-speaking culture. When I think of free will, or the lack thereof, it’s these Big Factors that come to mind, not whether I chose to have muesli or shredded wheat for breakfast. It’s typical, for example, that Carroll uses this example in demonstrating our ability to choose:
Imagine you’re a high school student who wants to go to college, and you’ve been accepted into several universities. You look at their web pages, visit campuses, talk to students and faculty at each place. Then you say yes to one of them, no to the others. What is the best way to describe what just happened, the most useful vocabulary for talking about our human-scale world? It will inevitably involve some statements along the lines of ‘you made a choice’.
Clearly Carroll knows his readership – educated citizens of the ‘Western’ or WEIRD world – so I can hardly blame him for his choice of example. However, he doesn’t really question the essential word ‘you’ here, and seems to think it’s all about a confused use of language and categories:
… the mistake made by free-will skeptics is to carelessly switch between incompatible vocabularies.
Describing the choices we make about what to wear in the morning, he writes:
That’s a decision that you [my emphasis] have to make; you can’t just say, ‘I’ll do whatever the atoms in my body were going to deterministically do anyway’. The atoms are going to do whatever they were going to do, but you don’t know what that is, and it’s irrelevant to the question of which decision you should make. Once you frame the question in terms of you and your clear choice, you can’t also start talking about your atoms and the laws of physics. Either vocabulary is perfectly legitimate, but mixing them leads to nonsense.
Sean Carroll, The Big Picture, p 379
This is, unfortunately, a classic straw woman argument. No careful-thinking incompatibilist is going to bring up atoms or even neurons to explain this particular everyday choice. Amongst the determining factors will be: what clothes are available to the subject; the weather; what job, activities or tasks she expects to engage in; her mood; her age and gender; her culture; her taste, developed over a lifetime and influenced by family, peer group, class etc. The ‘you’, the self, is constructed of many of these elements and more, including daily effects (the weather) and lifelong ones (culture, genetics) operating very much down to the neuronal and hormonal level – but there would rarely be a need to reach down that far to explain the person’s choices.
While I recognise that Carroll has barely skated over the topic in six pages, I find it bizarre that he doesn’t touch on the Big Issues here – culture, upbringing, genetics and our arbitrary ‘thrown-ness’ into the world – and their massive determining effects. He does end on a note of compromise and uncertainty however, while still, I think, largely missing the point:
Most people do maintain a certain degree of volition and autonomy, not to mention a complexity of cognitive functioning that makes predicting their future actions infeasible in practice. There are grey areas – drug addiction is an obvious case where volition can be undermined, even before we go all the way to considering tumours and explicit brain damage. This is a subject in which the basics are far from settled, and much of the important science has yet to be established. What seems clear is that we should base our ideas about personal responsibility on the best possible understanding of how the brain works that we can possibly achieve, and be willing to update those ideas whenever the data call for it.
Ibid, p 384
To me, this feeling of volition and autonomy is simply a product of complexity, and a sense of that complexity being inside us. We feel it, especially when faced with tough choices, or regretting the road not travelled. But what is the difference here between me and my pet dog? Does she feel anger, shame, regret? The general human response would be – maybe, but not like us. And what about bonobos? Cetaceans? We recognise, with all these mammals, that they are ‘individuals’. All dogs I’ve owned, or known, had their own personalities, I recognised that they ‘thought’, and so reacted, differently from each other. There may be similarities in breeds, just as we recognise cultural similarities in humans, but there are individual differences due to being ‘the runt of the litter’, being over- or under-fed by their owner, being brought up with other dogs or not, being pampered or neglected, and so on. But do we grant them free will? Surely not. And only humans, it seems, have the power to grant beings such power! Which is why we grant it so readily to ourselves. It’s just another example of human exceptionalism, as defined by humans. Remember how we were the only tool-makers, the only language-users, the only mourners of the dead….?
In my next piece on this topic I’ll look at what Steven Pinker had to say about free will in his 2002 book The blank slate. I wonder if he’s changed his mind since….
References
Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: on the origin of life, meaning and the universe itself, 2016
Robert Sapolsky, Determined: life without free will, 2023
Robert Sapolsky, Behave, 2017
Daniel Dennett, Elbow room: the varieties of free will worth wanting, 1984
Steven Pinker, The blank slate, 2002
Bernard Berofsky ed, Free will and determinism, 1963
inspired by writers’ week, sort of – the internet, violence, testosterone and our future
Hmmm – needs further investigation. Vive les bonobos!
I spent some time at the Adelaide Writers’ Week tents yesterday, and heard a couple of remarks from speakers that exercised me in a negative way, so I thought I might air my grievances and expand on my thinking here. One was a quote taken, I think, from the historian and ‘public intellectual’ Bernard Lewis, on the influence of the internet on modern culture, and the other was a dismissal of the ‘better angels of our nature’ thesis of Steven Pinker.
I know Lewis only as a name, never having read any of his work, and I note that he died in 2018, just a few days shy of his 102nd birthday, so I can’t imagine him being an early adopter of the internet. I put his ‘public intellectual’ status in quotes largely out of jealousy, as I think I yearn to be a public intellectual myself, though I’m not sure. Anyway, from the little I heard of the quote, selected and spoken by Waleed Aly, Lewis was considering the double-edged sword of the internet in something like the manner of Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium is the Massage, only rather more negatively. I do recall dipping into McLuhan’s work decades ago, and finding it a bit over-hyped, and hyper. Anyway that’s enough of McLuhan. The concern being expressed about the internet was really mostly about social media and the ideological balkanisation it appears to foster. There’s some truth to this of course, which is why, without really thinking it through, I’ve been avoiding social media outlets more and more. Facebook lies dormant on my devices, and Twitter has come and gone.
But that is a minor part of the internet for me. Its advantages far outweigh the distractions of clickbait sites, and I personally consider it the greatest development in the dissemination of human knowledge at least since the invention of writing – and far more consequential than Gutenberg’s invention. For example, just in the past few months, without stepping outside my home, I’ve watched a lecture series from Yale University on the history of Russia, from the Kievan Rus to 1917 and the end of Tzardom; another lecture series – an Introduction to Neurology, from MIT, and a number of lengthy lectures from the Royal Institution, on palaeontology and on epigenetics, for example. I’ve subscribed to Brilliant.org and have completed 115 of their lessons on everyday science, and I’m boning up on the basics with Professor Dave’s Introduction to Mathematics series. Meanwhile, over the years I’ve observed Wikipedia growing in stature to become the first and best go-to site for learning about historical figures and events, as well as complex scientific subjects. And full scientific papers on just about every possible subject are becoming increasingly available online. I now have access to the greatest library in human history, which leaves me, at times, with a confused feeling – sometimes a dwarf, sometimes a titan. Bliss at this time it is to be alive, but to be young… I recall watching a video (online of course) about how a young African boy was able to build a wind turbine via online instructions, and so bring cheap electricity to his village. .. In short, the internet is an instrument – as is writing and the printing press. It can be used for a multiplicity of purposes, positive or negative. It’s up to us.
Second little irritant. I heard a brief segment of an onstage discussion between the philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer and a writer unknown to me, Samantha Rose Hill, author of a study on Hannah Arendt, about whether they viewed the future positively or negatively. Singer described himself as essentially an optimist, and spoke of his ‘expanding circle’ thesis. He also referred to Pinker’s The better angels of our nature, a book with which he was in broad agreement. The female writer, in her turn, said that she was definitely not in agreement with Pinker, after which I petulantly switched off.
I read The better angels of our nature, probably not long after it was published in 2011, and Pinker’s follow-up book, Enlightenment now, in 2018 or 2019. Right now I can say that I can’t recall a single sentence from either book, which is also the case for the hundreds of other books that have been consumed by the gaping maw of my mind. I might also say that I’ve written more than 800 pieces on this blog, and I’d be hard put to remember a line or two from any of them. In fact I’m sometimes moved to read an old blog piece – somebody has to – and find it amazing that I once knew so much on a topic about which I now know nothing.
But I digress. I don’t have to dig up my copy of Better angels to confirm my agreement with Pinker’s thesis. He wasn’t putting forward an argument that we’d become less violent as a species. He didn’t need to, because it was so obviously true, as anyone who reads a lot of history – as I do – knows full well. The real key to Pinker’s book lies in its sub-title, Why violence has declined. It seems to me that nobody in their right mind – or, I mean, nobody with an informed mind – would argue that the human world, a hundred years ago, 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, or, taking advantage of the knowledge provided to us from ancient DNA, 10,000 years ago, was more peaceful than it is today, on a per capita basis. The question is why.
Of course it’s impossible to keep track of the daily violent acts among a current global population of 8 billion, and to compare them to those of say, the year 1600, when the population has been estimated at about a half billion. And, yes, we’re now capable of, and have committed, acts of extreme, impersonal violence via nuclear weapons, but anybody who has read of the gruesome events of the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, the Scottish slaughters of England’s Edward I (a recent read for me), the centuries-long witch-hunts of Europe, and many other brutal engagements, as well as the public hangings, burnings, decapitations and tortures that were commonplace worldwide in earlier centuries, would surely not want to be transported back in a time machine without a cloak of invisibility or the support of a very powerful overlord – supernatural by preference.
Pinker’s book seeks to answer his own question with data and the possible/probable causal linkages, while recognising the complexity of isolating and independently weighing causes and correlations (he returns to this theme in his latest book Rationality, especially in the chapter entitled ‘Correlation and Causation’), including the spread of democracy, the growth of globalism and internationalism, the developing concepts of human rights, feminism, international monitoring agencies, and improved, less dangerous technologies re industry, medicine and transport, to name a few. Deaths can be no less violent, that’s to say violating, for being slow and accidental, after all.
Note that I snuck ‘feminism’ in there. Unsurprisingly, that’s the factor that most engages me. In the WEIRD world, thanks largely to Simone de Beauvoir (ok, a bit of flagrant heroine-worship there), feminism has been on the rise for several decades. During the same period, in the same regions of the world, male testosterone levels have been dropping. I would rest my case there, but I hear Mr Pinker tsk-tsking in the background. Seriously, the rise of feminism is surely one of a multiplicity of factors leading to a situation that medical researchers describe as ‘alarming’ – I’m not sure why.
Of course, testosterone is an important hormone, especially for men. On this medical website, Dr Kevin Pantalone, an endocrinologist, points out that, for males, testosterone helps maintain and develop:
- Sex organs, genitalia and reproductive function.
- A sense of well-being.
- Muscle mass.
- Bone health.
- Red blood cell count.
So, questions arise. Why are testosterone levels dropping (pace feminism), and is the drop significant enough to seriously compromise WEIRD men’s health? Well, according to the same website, different figures are given for what counts as a low testosterone level – 250 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dl), according to Dr Pantalone, and 300 ng/dl according to the American Urology Association. We’re not there yet, on average, but we’re inching closer, apparently.
So why the drop, apart from feminism? Some suggested factors include obesity (elevated BMI), reduced physical activity (however, endurance activities such as long-distance running and cycling have been shown to lower testosterone levels)., poor diet (but ‘several studies indicate that low-fat diets may lead to slightly lower testosterone levels‘), chronic and excessive alcohol consumption, lack of sleep (e.g. sleep apnea), and environmental toxins such as EDC (endocrine-disrupting chemicals – which sounds a bit vague).
That’s it. It all seems a bit thin to me – apart from the obesity bit. One factor they don’t mention, probably due to our overly polite society – or is it ‘wokeness?’ – is the serious drop in recent decades, and perhaps even centuries, of good old raping and pillaging. Nothing better for boosting ye olde testosterone, surely?
Seriously, would it be a terrible thing if male testosterone levels were reduced to those of females? And what about my darling bonobos?
So, human males typically have testosterone levels ranging from 265 to 923 ng/dl, while females range from 15 to 70 ng/dl. That’s a big big difference. Which raises the question – if females have such low testosterone levels, what about their bone health, muscle mass and sense of well-being? I suppose this is where we get into the finer details of endocrinology and evolution, but my uneducated guess would be that, over time, the endocrine systems of male and female humans have diverged somewhat, perhaps in response to different activities between the sexes. One way of getting more information about this – and this rather excites me, I have to say – is to look at the endocrine systems of largely female-dominated bonobos and compare them to those of chimpanzees. So that’s what I’ll be looking at in my next post. I can’t wait.
References
Stephen Pinker, The better angels of our nature, 2011
Stephen Pinker,Enlightenment now, 2018
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33741447/
me little mate Stevie Pinker and me
the famous and the nutso famous
So this piece is not in dialogue form, though I still see myself as a female-type male (rather than a male-type female), trying to transcend gender in ‘rising above myself and grasping the world’ as Archimedes putatively put it. Sometimes the dialogue form stimulates my slow-acting mind to some sort of thesis-antithesis-synthesis delusionary state that’s temporarily satisfying – like when my mind tells me she’s made of truth (I believe her though I know she lies). And I’ve always ‘liked’ Chekhov’s apparent remark that the best conversations we have are with ourselves, though again, what really best shakes us are our communications with others, in writing or, even better because always more hard-hitting, in person. I’m not sure where I’m going with this except to say that my reading is a kind of communication, if only one way. And sometimes I feel a real itch to communicate back, in spite of nobody listening…
I’ve read a number of books by Steven Pinker – let me see, I was introduced to his work by a young philosophy tutor about eighteen years ago, when, as a volunteer at my local community centre, I happily joined its philosophy group’s weekly meetings. The tutor assigned Pinker’s The blank slate as the book to be read and discussed. I found the book’s general thesis – that the idea we’re born as a blank slate is a dangerous myth, in political, educational and other contexts – to be congenial enough, and Pinker’s overall mode of thinking struck me as sensible, rational and positive, if some of the wordiness and smart-aleckiness grated a bit. But after all, wasn’t I sometimes guilty of same? At least in my head.
So later I read other Pinker books – The language instinct and The sense of style (I was an ESOL teacher for a couple of decades), as well as The better angels of our nature and Enlightenment now. And all of this stimulated me and grated with me in no doubt unequal levels. After all, I’ve continued to read him.
And so to Rationality, his most recent book. But first I’d like to look at Pinker’s academic and general background as it compares to mine, which should be amusing if nothing else.
Pinker was born in September 1954, while I was born in July 1956, so we’re pretty much contemporaries. He was born in Montreal, Canada to a ‘middle-class Jewish family’ (I quote from Wikipedia), and I was born in Dundee, Scotland, to a working-class family. His father was a lawyer. My father was an unskilled labourer and factory worker. His mother ‘eventually became a high-school vice-principal’. My mother eventually became a teacher of mental-deficiency nursing (an occupation that has since become largely obsolete due to the de-institutionalisation of the intellectually disabled, if that’s the current term). Pinker’s grandparents ’emigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania’ in the 1920s, and owned a small business in Montreal. Wikipedia doesn’t specify whether these were paternal or maternal grandparents. I know very little about my own grandparents – our family emigrated to Australia when I was five years old, so I only have vague memories of my paternal grandparents, and none of my maternal ones. There was little discussion of the extended family when I was growing up, but I believe my paternal grandfather was a shipwright in Dundee, which sounds pretty impressive, and my maternal grandfather was a coal-miner.
So, education. Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1973. So he was then nineteen. Dawson College gets its own Wikipedia article (harrumph) which tells us that it ‘became the first English-language institution in the new CEGEP network’. CEGEP comes from the French Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel, though it has become a word of its own in the Canadian lexis. So, as a Québécois Canadian, Pinker must have had early exposure to French, as did I to a much lesser degree. When I was a ten-year-old my older brother, who shared a bedroom with me and was learning the language at high school, used to teach me at night before lights out, and I absorbed these dribs of French like a sponge. But more of that later.
Nothing is mentioned of Pinker’s primary education, so I can dominate that period with my own experience. I did spend a brief time at school in Dundee, and my principal memory was of someone shouting about throwing stones at the Catholics. I rushed to the school fence with everyone else, and craned to see the kids passing by outside, trying to discern their Catholic features. On the ship coming out to Australia I joined a makeshift class of kids my age, with my mother as the teacher. On arrival in South Australia, we were housed at Smithfield Hostel, north of Adelaide, the state’s capital (where I currently live). I attended Smithfield primary school for a year, where my principal memories were of being shouted at for forgetting my books, and being sent to the headmaster for some misdemeanour (I didn’t go, being too scared, and hid in some bushes outside before returning to class).
The rest of my primary schooling was at Elizabeth Downs primary from grade 2 to grade 5, and Elizabeth Fields primary for grades 6 and 7. Elizabeth was a newly built town, named for the Queen, centred mostly around the car industry. General Motors Holden was building a factory there, and when it was finished, my father got a job on the assembly line, for a while at least. The town was built about 18 miles north of Adelaide, and has since been absorbed as a northern suburb of that city. The Elizabeth Fields primary school made headlines in the state newspaper, about a decade after my period of attendance, for being the most violent and dysfunctional primary school in the state, which came as a shock to me – my memories of the place are pretty bland. It might’ve been a hatchet job.
From the age of 12 I was sent to Elizabeth West High, which I attended until I dropped out at age 15. I have a story to tell about that. At the end of my last primary year, we all sat a test, and on the first day at the new high school – it had only been running for a couple of years – a crowd of kids my age gathered in a quadrangle to be ‘streamed’ into eight first-year classes. We all had been previously asked, probably at the time of the test, to name which language we wanted to learn, French or German, so that we’d be streamed into F1, F2, F3 or F4, or G1, 2, 3 or 4. I chose French of course, and my name was called first for the F1 class. This rather shocked me and made me wonder, but I wasn’t too surprised to be in F1, as I’d been a ‘straight A’ student (apart from Art and PhysEd) in grade 7, without putting in much effort. Then, a week or two into the year, another boy told me excitedly – ‘do you know you got the top marks? I was in teacher’s office and all the tests were on his desk, and I got to look at them – yours was at the top…’ Looking back, I suppose they were IQ tests, or something like. Anyway, I loved my first year of high school – it was a very cheeky, smart-alecky class, which brought me out of my shell a little. I even had girls flirting with me. I felt I’d really made it. I topped the year in French and English, but was well down the list in other subjects, and by second year, even my favourite subjects were suffering. At home, my parents’ relationship had become increasingly toxic, and I was becoming something of a teenage runaway. At fourteen, I was put on a fifteen-month bond, with a group of friends, for stealing. I spent a lot of time at the local library, and developed a passion for nineteenth century English lit, reading the whole of Thomas Hardy’s oeuvre, as well as Dickens, Austen, Eliot and the Brontës. My two older siblings, now at university, filled the house with books – Nietzsche, Freud, and the new feminists – Germaine Greer, Eva Figes, Betty Friedan. I began to hate school and often wagged it with friends, or just stayed home, filling my head with music and philosophy or at least the philosophy contained in fiction – I read Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy and The Outsider, The Plague, The myth of Sisyphus, and 1984. Animal Farm, one of the school’s set texts, was a particular pleasure, in a sense, as was Huxley’s Brave New World.
Meanwhile, my formal education was going down the tube. I was caned by the headmaster (a repulsive brute) for not doing some homework (or probably a lot of homework), and when on another occasion I was slapped across the face by same for chewing gum while he was chiding me, I left the building never to return.
So this was around 1972, a little before Pinker graduated from Dawson College. I got work, first on a pig farm in Nuriootpa (ok that lasted one day, but it felt like weeks), then at Wilkins Servis, a washing machine factory. Then at Atco Structures, building temporary school classrooms. In 1973, I somehow managed to land a job as an accounts clerk at Iplex Plastics, makers of PVC pipes, where I lasted nine months and became wealthy enough to to create my own record collection, becoming a lifelong fan of David Bowie and looking to get out of a house that was driving all its inhabitants crazy.
Pinker, meanwhile, had become a student of McGill University in Montreal, and was perhaps going through his own crises. Anyway, by the time he’d graduated in 1976 (with a BA in psychology) I’d spent seven memorable days in prison for ‘insufficient means of support’, in between working at another washing machine factory (Simpson-Pope), a small family foundry (Ellis wireworks) and a very depressing hospital (The Home for Incurables, later renamed the Julia Farr Centre, to the relief of all), which for all that I found to be one of the most rewarding jobs of my young career. My parents had separated by this time and in 1976-7 I lived for a few months with my father then my mother in the inner suburbs of Adelaide.
In 1977 or 1978, from memory, I was invited to moved in with a social worker I’d met at a youth camp. He’d taken a shine to me, it seems. He was about 8 years older than me, homosexual and a wee bit eccentric. He never wore clothes inside the house, sometimes answering the door naked. A more important connection for me, though was the other tenant, a visual arts student, ‘ages with me’, as the Scots say. He was smart and exploratory and through him I met a crowd of more or less interesting students, and began to feel I’d found my ‘scene’ at last.
It was while living with these two, and later with a maths and philosophy PhD student who introduced me to geeky science types who seemed even more congenial than the often anti-social arts crowd, that I started keeping a journal. That was about 1979. I kept the journal until 1995 when I bought my first computer. Or I should say journals, about 14 foolscap books covered in tiny inked print, presenting ideas, memories and tales of very varying quality no doubt. Two ‘self-obsessed’ individuals in particular influenced my turn to diary-writing, or made me feel justified in the indulgence – Michel de Montaigne and Franz Kafka.
So this takes my life to 1979-80. Pinker went to Harvard University, I believe in 1977. Wikipedia tells us that Harvard ‘is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and one of the most prestigious and highly ranked universities in the world’. So he was doing okay, and no doubt working hard. He graduated with a PhD in 1979, after engaging in ‘doctoral studies in experimental psychology’. We’re then told he ‘did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, then became a professor at Harvard and then Stanford University’.
So, presumably he was at MIT in 1980. That was an interesting year for me. The federal government had introduced CAEs (Colleges of Advanced Education) in the late sixties (they died in the nineties) as something intermediate between universities and the TAFE (Technical and Further Education) system, and for some reason I was advised or impelled to enrol in one of them. I know that during much of my early twenties I was proud of my ‘autodidact’ status as a smartarse who’d opted out of formal education at fifteen, but I was also feeling the pressure. I hadn’t worked since my last factory job, as a slinger at a metal pipe factory, in late 1977, and going to college would at least keep the government off my back, and it might even lead somewhere. So I enrolled in a course called ‘Communication Studies’ at Hartley College, which involved classes in anthropology, philosophy, mathematics and I forget what else. I recall not ‘getting’ the maths stuff, though both anthropology and philosophy piqued my interest (I’d been reading bits and pieces of philosophy for years). I recall two proud moments – when the sociology lecturer called me into his office to discuss my essay on the potlatch system – which to my amazement he’d never heard of – and when the philosophy lecturer, who was also the senior administrator of the college – also called me in to commend an essay of mine and told me he could recommend for me a transfer to the Flinders University philosophy department at the end of the year. However, when I blurted out that I was failing in all my other subjects, his interest cooled quite noticeably.
So I dropped out of Hartley College at the end of the year. But the 1980-1982 period was interesting for me housing-wise and in other ways. We’d been turfed out of our rental accommodation in early 1980, and spent a few months squatting and being moved on, until in mid-1980 I was accepted as a tenant in a very swish multi-bedroomed home set back from the road in a beautiful garden with a driveway lined with hibiscus bushes. And due to a sudden move-out of tenants after I moved in (hopefully not my fault), I soon found myself the inheritor of a huge furnished bedroom with an ensuite bathroom. The other tenants were mostly students, and the environment salubrious beyond my deserving. And as I soon became the most long-standing tenant, I was treated with unwonted deference by the others, which tickled me greatly. I also picked up a job in a nearby restaurant, my first paying job in about four years…
But, back to the other bloke, with his 1979 PhD. In 1980 he was presumably either a Harvard professor or just shy of becoming one. Not bad for someone around 26 years of age. And in 1982, while I was still working as a kitchen hand… well let me quote from the Wikipedia summary of his academic activities and movements over the next couple of decades :
From 1982 until 2003 Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science (1985–1994), and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (1994–1999), taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995–96.
Pinker was particularly interested in ‘cognitive linguistics’ at this time, methinks, which I also became somewhat interested in in the nineties. Generative grammar, and the way children pick language up so effortlessly, by and large, learning the exceptions along the way, does seem to suggest some sort of innate capacity. His first book was Language learnability and language development, published in 1984, and subsequent works promoted a ‘nativist’ view of language acquisition, no doubt influenced by Chomsky’s work, but this is all controversial and much disputed, and I don’t feel expert enough to hold a solid opinion on the matter.
Meanwhile, back in Adelaide, we were turfed out of the share-house in mid-1982, for which I blame the tenants (not including me of course!) rather than the landlord – shameful behaviour I’d rather not go into. I soon found further share accommodation though, and continued my restaurant job well into 1983. And so it went, with lots of reading and writing and amateur discussion. I should mention that my reading, in 1981-2, of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in particular a central section in which Hans Castorp reflects, with a lot of time on his hands, on the origin of life and even of matter, had a strangely exhilarating impact on me, and from that time on I became more of a non-fiction than a fiction reader, starting I think with Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, and each monthly issue of Scientific American.
My peripatetic housing situation continued through the 80s and 90s, but, feeling that time was running out, I applied in 1985 for mature age entry to university, and received offers from Flinders and then Adelaide University, where I began as an arts undergraduate in 1986, breezing through with a degree majoring in French language and literature in 1988. I did actually start a biology class in my first year – presumably dumbed down for arts students – but I found that it took up all my time, and I kept botching up the lab work, so I gave it up, a decision I’ve always regretted.
In 1989 I accepted an offer to do honours French, while realising that it was all going nowhere in terms of earning a living. There was also the obvious fact that my French writing wasn’t of high quality, and that I could only dream of visiting that country to improve my usage, if in fact it would do so. Even so, I planned to write my thesis on the work of Stendhal, a writer of romantic inclinations, come moi, though I try to hide it, and a feminist avant la lettre, and also, like me, a writer more or less completely unknown in his lifetime, though he expressed some confidence that his time would come… So the major pleasure of my honours year lay in acquainting myself with all of Stendhal’s works, major and minor.
I say my honours year – but I should say that I dropped out well before finishing (quelle surprise!), considering it all a bit pointless, again. In 1990 I began a post-graduate Diploma of Education, but my experience of ‘prac teaching’ turned me off teaching as a career – though later, when I started teaching English to adults, a much more interactive process (and not driven by a particular syllabus), I enjoyed it very much.
So we’re into the nineties now. Pinker was teaching at MIT and had written or co-written works on cognition, language and learning. Meanwhile, as mentioned, I dropped out of my one-year post-grad course near the end – in fact, this time I would’ve finished but for a very serious financial crisis which forced me to find work. So I spent the last couple of months of 1990 working at another factory, this time Griffin Press, the largest book printing and binding facility in the Southern Hemisphere, owned by one Rupert Murdoch. I worked there pretty well non-stop until mid-1993, loading bound but uncovered hardbacks onto a conveyor belt. I worked a permanent afternoon shift, from 3pm till near midnight, but sometimes, in the pre-Christmas period, I worked thirteen or fourteen hours straight, and I used some of the money to pay for undergraduate studies in English Lit, which I attended, somewhat listlessly, in the mornings. I’d discontinued English studies after the first year of my undergraduate course, considering it all too easy-breezy. Now I decided that I’d work towards an English honours degree… I mean, why not?
Some time in 1993 I was helped by a friend to jump from the then-ailing Griffin Press into a temp office job for the government’s Department of Social Security. And then, in 1994, I commenced full-time English Honours at the University of Adelaide.
Meanwhile, Steven Pinker was fully establishing himself as a writer of works for the common, albeit educated reader. The first of these was The Language Instinct published in 1994, which, inter alia, argued that language is a uniquely human trait. I (or we) may have more to say on that in another place. There’s been much controversy about the issue for decades.
I completed my honours year but not with great success. I had to support myself on my dwindling savings, and I couldn’t afford one of those new-fangled items called ‘word processors’ or ‘computers’, which most of my fellow-students had bought. Moreover, I couldn’t type to save myself, or my thesis (this was the first piece of typing I was asked, or forced, to do in my ‘academic career’).
So, I missed getting a first-class honours by a percentage or two, and I was again at a loose end as 1995 rolled around. Having kept journals for over 15 years by this time, I naturally fancied myself as a halfway talented writer, so I wrote what I deemed to be a wittily begging letter to The Adelaide Review, a local arts and politics rag, suggesting a few diverting or enlightening topics I could discourse upon. To my surprise I received a positive response, and I duly wrote a little piece on my childhood in Elizabeth, which was duly published some time in 1995 or 1996. I was now a ‘published writer’, and things started to run smoothly for a while. I added more to the piece until I had the makings of a novel, which was accepted by the only publisher I approached and in 1997, after an endless editing process, my worst-selling novel In Elizabeth was published. I thought this was a new beginning, but it turned out to be the beginning of the end.
So I’ll try to be more brief, as I’ve gone on too long. In Elizabeth received some local publicity, I had my face plastered on the cover of the weekend magazine section of the local paper, but reviews were scarce, and mixed. Our principal national paper, The Australian, carried an article which dismissed my work briefly and attacked Wakefield Press, the publisher, at some length, for promoting inferior writers. This so shocked me that I could hardly get out of bed for a few days. I was later told by the head of Wakefield Press that the reviewer was miffed because Wakefield had rejected his poetry collection. Even so, Wakefield rejected my second novel, Sextet, explaining that they’d henceforth be focussing on non-fiction. Which in fact turned out be true. Apparently the lack of sales for In Elizabeth was the deciding factor?
So I tried another publisher, Text Publishing, a rather elite Melbourne-based outfit, and to my surprise the book was accepted within weeks. I had a charming phone conversation with the senior editor who found the work witty and insightful and looked forward to working with me. But then a couple of weeks later, I received another call from her, apologising profusely. The CEO had come back from holiday and, in his wisdom, reversed the decision. I didn’t have the heart to try another publisher, and thus ended my literary career.
A few words about Sextet. It told the tale of a shy, sex-obsessed young man who had the grand idea of geeing up his life by writing letters he hoped would be found amusing, charming and enlivening, to six different young women he more or less knew, and whom, as far as he knew, didn’t know each other, in the hope of captivating at least one heart, and the delightful body that went with it. And of course it all ends in tears, as far as I can recall. And of course it wasn’t remotely autobiographical.
So that MS remains archived in a box somewhere, rendered largely obsolete by the modern social media world.
We’re now into the late 90s, when I entered into a rather stormy but more or less permanent relationship with my current partner, did some further study in TESOL, and started teaching English to immigrants and foreign students in various locations, as well as doing a seven-year stint in the 2000s as a foster carer, feeling that my unhappy childhood experiences would be of use in handling sometimes difficult kids. Not sure if that turned out to be true.
I don’t know if much more needs to be said about Pinker, who I last left in the 90s, and who has since become a high-profile public intellectual in the manner of Dennett, Dawkins, Harris et al, and has published increasingly ambitious works about the general tenor of society and where it is and should be heading. Having read his earlier Big Books, I’m currently half-way through Rationality, and have become stuck on the matter of Bayesian inference/probability/statistics, which I’ve written about before, and which always strikes me as both more simple and more complicated than my curious intellect allows. I’ll let Canto and Jacinta mull over it yet again in an upcoming post.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker
https://bonobohumanity.blog/category/gambling/
https://bonobohumanity.blog/category/bayesian-probability/
on free will and libertarianism 2: character and punishment
I hope I have dispelled two fallacies that have allowed the sciences of human nature to sow unnecessary fear. The first fallacy is that biological explanations corrode responsibility in a way that environmental explanations do not. The second fallacy is that causal explanations (both biological and environmental) corrode responsibility in a way that a belief in an uncaused will or soul does not.
Steven Pinker, ‘the fear of determinism’, from The blank slate
Canto: I’m currently reading Jane Goodall’s book Through a window, about the chimp communities in Tanzania observed and monitored by herself and her team over twenty-odd years – the hierarchies, the friendships, the brutalities, the shifting allegiances and the tragedies. It’s all very recognisable to me, a fellow primate – enough to bring tears to my eyes on occasion.
Jacinta: So we were talking about free will and all that.
Canto: Precisely. We don’t get to choose our species, or our parents, or in the case of chimps, our mothers in particular. Nor do we choose to get crippled by polio, pushed from a high tree-branch, or killed in infancy, for no apparent reason, by an enraged or jealous, or perhaps insane, adult female. Are these environmental or biological events? Does it really matter?
Jacinta: And if we survive them, they shape our character, is that your point?
Canto: Well, I’ve just reread a section of Steven Pinker’s The blank slate, which deals with what he considers our ‘unreasonable fear of determinism’, and it reminds me of what I found so unpalatable about certain academics’ disdain for the idea that determinism diminishes personal responsibility. Pinker, in this essay, reminds me of those typical sons of privilege who mock the ‘his genes/environment made him do it’ legal defence that lawyers sometimes use to get their clients off. I should remind Pinker and his ilk that most individuals who find themselves in legal trouble due to the environment they didn’t choose to grow up in can’t afford lawyers, so they usually don’t get a chance to make those arguments let alone win them. They have to throw themselves on the mercilessness of the court, whose bewigged officers make it clear which class they belong to and and are there to uphold.
Jacinta: So I take it that the above Pinker quote isn’t entirely kosher to you.
Canto: Yes, it’s bullshit. Pinker gives himself away with the examples he chooses to use. He mocks the environmental determinist ‘defence’ without coming remotely close to examining environmental determinism itself (which cannot, by the way, be disentangled from biological determinism, and I don’t find the distinction a particularly valid one). Instead he smugly recites a list of lawyerly tropes – ‘the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defence, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics’, etc, without showing a moment’s insight into the kinds of lives I saw around me while growing up, and which have been recounted by those lucky enough to survive, or by those who stood witness to the misery of others.
Jacinta: So your point is that the fallacies Pinker ‘identifies’ in the quote at the top of this post are not fallacies at all?
Canto: Well, my point is that Pinker oversimplifies the issue to a risible degree. Or rather, he doesn’t even address it. For example, he mocks ‘the abuse excuse’, as if abuse is an ‘excuse’ for something rather than a trauma with lifelong effects, depending on its intensity, its type, its duration and other variables including the enormously complex background against which it occurs. These events shape the very being of that person, pig, rat or butterfly. And yet Pinker has the chutzpah to claim that he and his white horse have ridden into view to dispel for us the ‘fallacy’ that such abuse corrodes any responsibility we have for our actions. Yeah, but… nah.
Jacinta: So what about this concept of responsibility? And how we relate it to crime and punishment. Can we really say that we’re not, or never, responsible for our actions?
Canto: I think we’re tricked into thinking we’re responsible by the felt complexity of our own thoughts. When we look at less complex animals – dogs, for example, or birds, we’re much less liable to attribute responsibility to their actions. So what’s the difference between those creatures and ourselves? Surely it’s only complexity.
Jacinta: And the fact that we can speak for ourselves – which is part of our complexity – and other creatures can’t. We can voice the claim that we were free to do otherwise, as no other creature can, as far as we know. But what does all this mean for apportioning blame and punishment? Is our court and justice system obsolete?
Canto: Well the justice system is, I suppose, designed to keep us safe from each other. You see this, again in a less complex way, with wild animals. I recall watching a video of pack animals, I can’t recall, maybe hyenas or wolves, in which the pack leader for some reason started behaving dysfunctionally – that’s to say, to the detriment of the pack. He was biting and wounding other pack members for no apparent reason. Eventually, it got too much, and the pack rose up against him, hurting him badly, and sending him to the back of the pack. From then on he behaved more like the runt of the litter, living off the scraps of the others. You see this sort of thing too, in gorilla and chimp groups. The group deals with the alpha male turned miscreant But if we can only agree on the evidence that free will is a myth, then we should be able to develop a far better justice system than the one we have.
Jacinta: How so?
Canto: Well, take one very toxic issue. Paedophilia. There’s at least one person I know well who has a kind of zero tolerance, ‘worst of the worst’ attitude to serial paedophiles, and simply doesn’t want to hear any kind of free will argument that might ‘exonerate’ them. It’s easy to understand this attitude being held by a victim whose life has been seriously damaged by a paedophile, and as we know, they’re a favourite tabloid newspaper villain. But, as has been pointed out by Sam Harris among others, arguments that paedophiles are the worst of the worst and are incorrigible, ‘never to be released’, are essentially arguments for a lack of free will. If they can never be ‘corrected’, how can they be held responsible for their ‘incorrectness’ in the first place? It follows that ‘punishment’ for such people not only doesn’t work, but is unfair. A justice system should of course be about protecting people from the malpractices of the minority, but surely it needs to be accompanied or tied up with an understanding of how these malpractices arise, and how to fix them.
Jacinta: Do you think serial paedophilia is fixable?
Canto: I have no idea, but I’m saying that should be the aim. To take a simpler example, I don’t know if a broken diff in a car is fixable (I don’t even know what that is), but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be, and if it can be fixed obviously it should be. As Robert Sapolsky points out, we’ve fixed schizophrenia largely with medications, and knowing more than one schizophrenic as I do, that has improved their lives massively.
Jacinta: Okay, so maybe that’s enough about free will for now. There’s another kind of freedom that’s been in the air for decades, and that’s political freedom – freedom from the tyranny of Big Government. It has generally gone by the name ‘libertarianism’. I suppose that if there’s no free will, that kind of freedom doesn’t even get out of the starting gate?
Canto: Well political libertarianism brings up a whole different set of issues, though clearly it’s dependent on and assumes free will. But we’ll leave all that for next time.
giving nuclear energy a chance, please
Compared with nuclear power, natural gas kills 38 times as many people per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, biomass 63 times as many, petroleum 243 times as many and coal 387 times as many – perhaps a million deaths a year.
Steven Pinker, ‘The Environment’, Chapter 10 of Enlightenment now.
an unfortunate slow-down
I’ve written about nuclear energy before, here and here. It comes to mind again due to my reading of Pinker’s new book, so I’ve decided to venture into the field again, despite not having improved my paltry readership over the years.
Clearly the spectre of radiation hangs over the nuclear industry, and many green polemicists have done their best to darken that spectre, but if facts count for what I wish they would count for, Australia could solve all its considerable energy woes with a few nuclear power plants.
Take the case of France, a nation with almost three times our population. Thanks largely to its nuclear power program, which was boosted after the seventies oil crisis in order to deliver national energy security, it’s the world’s largest net exporter of electricity, because once the plants are built and paid for, electricity generation is cheap. In fact, some 17% of this electricity comes from recycled nuclear fuel. It currently earns 3 billion euros annually from exported electricity, and that’s not factoring in its exports from reactor technology and fuel products and services.
Australia has far more land than France, and given its small population, it would stand to gain substantially from exporting nuclear-derived electricity to the world, after finally putting an end to its frankly ridiculous domestic energy woes. I recognise though, that such a far-reaching project is beyond the imaginations, let alone the negotiating skills of today’s adversarial pollies. We need more entrepreneurs and non-partisan public intellectuals to get behind such projects, accompanied by realistic schemes and hard data.
There’s also the problem of winning over the public. The facts on nuclear energy should speak for themselves, but the largely human tragedies of Fukushima and Chernobyl, together with the perceived and perhaps actual connection between nuclear energy and weapons, and also the general fear of radiation and its relation to storage, leakage and accidents, have created polarised outlooks that impede progress in the field. This is well illustrated by a three-part set of videos on the subject, including an intro and two others, ‘nuclear energy is awesome’ and ‘nuclear energy is terrible’, suggesting that its authors have found little common ground.
As the negative part of the videos points out, weapons technology has been developed in five countries – India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa and North Korea – through reactor technology. As the current debate over Iran illustrates, it’s hard to distinguish between nuclear energy technology and covert weapons technology. There’s also the waste problem. Radioactive and toxic chemical materials such as plutonium remain a problem for tens of thousands of years. A stable and remote underground environment, such as exists right here in South Australia’s north, would be one of the safest bets for burial, but beware of apoplectic rage when anyone suggests such an idea, even though, as one of the world’s largest exporters of uranium, we’re deeply involved in the industry and would likely get plenty of help from nations grateful for our raw material.
Of course, there have been accidents.
To put the nuclear energy scare in perspective, it’s worth noting that if you mention the word Tohoku outside of Japan you’re likely to get little back but an unknowing shrug. Mention Fukushima and you’ll likely get a more animated response. The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami killed approximately 16,000, with over 6,000 injured and 2,500 still missing. Almost 250,000 were left homeless. The Fukushima meltdowns resulting from this disaster killed nobody – though there are ongoing tests regarding radiation and cancer incidence, which suggest that increased risks are small.
I’ve written in one of my earlier posts about the obvious inappropriateness of building nuclear plants in earthquake-prone areas, and about the boys’ club mentality of Japan’s nuclear oversight system, but what about the accident itself and the associated radiation spill? As the most recent serious nuclear incident, and therefore the most relevant to the future of a developing industry, it’s worth taking a close look at it.
The Fukushima facility, one of the world’s largest, was made up of six boiling water reactors, of which three were in use at the time of the earthquake. The oldest of these was built in 1967, the other two in the early seventies. The seawall protecting the plant was ten metres high. The largest tsunami wave to hit the plant was 13 metres (a 2008 in-house study suggesting that the plant was unprotected from waves above 10.2 metres was dismissed, as purveying ‘unrealistic’ concerns). There were failures of the emergency cooling system, including piping and valve problems that hadn’t been monitored sufficiently. A number of hydrogen-air explosions occurred in the days after the tsunami, further damaging the plant. Clearly, there were maintenance problems in the lead-up to the failure, communication problems during the crisis, and a general culture of complacency throughout, deadly to such high-risk geographical locations. However, none of this should necessarily act as a complete brake on the industry. The lessons to learn would seem to be obvious. More openness, more active monitoring, sensible placement of nuclear plants, and ongoing research towards improved and safer facilities.
As far as I can see, there’s much more to be said about the positives of nuclear energy. In spite of the recent massive pause, or reversal, in our reliance on it, nuclear is by a huge distance the safest – and greenest – form of energy in terms of lives lost, health problems and any other indicator we can think of. There is plenty of data to back this up, but it involves far more than workplace safety. The damage from global carbon emissions is, of course difficult to calculate and the subject of endless debate, but there’s no doubt that nuclear has the smallest carbon footprint of any current energy technology. More importantly, it’s the only non-fossil fuel technology capable of providing reliable electricity on a global scale, at a time when the battle against global warming is very far from being won. The Trump debacle won’t last of course, but there is a greater threat from increased industrialisation in China, India, and the developing countries of the world – though any casting of blame would be unfair term considering the carbon being pumped out by the fully industrialised west.
The critics of nuclear point to the past, and to the radiation hazards of storage. They’re not interested in acknowledging modern developments which have made nuclear power increasingly safe and cheap, due to streamlining and standardisation of design, the plausibility of cheaper thorium reactors, and a host of innovations that have led to gen-III and gen-IV systems waiting to be brought online. Sadly, we may have to wait a while to see them. France, Germany, Japan and the USA are reducing their reliance on nuclear, and turning back to dirty energy, due only to its largely undeserved public reputation. It’s likely we’ll have to wait until the climate crisis deepens before we return to seeing the sense of nuclear energy. It will be interesting to see just how long it takes.