Why Milan (and possibly I) is going to Washington

My friend Milan is on his way to Washington, D.C. to take part in a protest against the building of a pipeline that will facilitate the burning of the Alberta tar sands. I might be going down to join him for a bit, but I’m as yet unsure about whether that is possible given my current situation with work and finances. I will quote a limited section of his post below, which you should read in it’s completeness here, on the blog which I no longer contribute to but continue to support. Here is a snippet of his post:

I am going to Washington to help draw attention to the gap between our understanding of the world and the assumptions that underlie our behaviour. We know that continuing to burn fossil fuels puts humanity in peril, and yet we cannot imagine how to behave otherwise. We do not fully appreciate the extent of our freedom and the impact of our choices. We have the freedom to choose a high-carbon future or a low-carbon one, and the choice we make seems highly likely to impact the lives of a huge number of people worldwide, over a long span of time.

Read the rest here, if you haven’t already.

Why Phenomenology needs Science against Post-Structuralism

It is a view which has become so prevalent that one hardly needs to summon arguments: if men are more agressive than women “it’s because of discourse and socialization”, if conservatives are more industrious than liberals, “it’s discourse and socialization”, and if some people have higher measured intelligence than others, “it’s all a result of privileged upbringing and imperialist discourse which validates certain kinds of knowledge over others”. In other words, when we look to explain certain phenomena in our late-modernist, post-structuralist world, we look to discursive and socio-economic factors and those alone to account for the observed differences between people or groups.

There are good reasons why we do this. 19th century Marxist explanations of social phenomena were a bulwark against social darwinist biological reductionism which sought not just to explain social phenomena in terms of biology, but to use that explained biological origin as a justification for inequality and oppression. And 20th century discourse analysis has been a key form of social critique – it reveals to us the epistemic framework within which certain “facts” appear as normal, but which are in fact products of a language which reproduces certain power relations – and which can be changed to make the world more greatly accord with our values.

“Change” is really the key, I believe, to the dominance of economic and discursive analysis’ prevalence – because discourse and socio-economic conditions are explanations for social phenomena that do not essentialize or reify the phenomena, progressives like them. Progressives love things that can be changed because it means that suffering in the world is evil rather than tragic – and that’s a good thing because it’s empowering and it places responsibility on those studying it to do something about it. On the other hand, biological explanations for social phenomena seem to explain to us the world as we can’t change it – as it simply “is”, fixed in a genetic essence.

Such a strong duality between explanations of phenomena which are “fixed”, and which are changeable is, however, deceptive and closes us off from recognizing the particularity of bodies. Bodies are not merely the products of their socialization (which, in the larger sense, includes discourse), because the way a body copes with a situation is always in the style of its particularity. To believe otherwise would be to say babies are entirely blank slates, and that there is nothing about their bodies that is the motivating cause of their style of dealing with different situations. Of course, the style of the body is developed always within a social-discursive context, but to deny the explanatory power of the biological is to reject the idea that the style of the body in any way (or, at least, any measurable way) exceeds the disciplining and educating of that body.

The Internet and Social (Network) Conflict

The Egyptians worshiped the open eye because they knew attention was redemptive – if you pay attention to things you can understand them and make things better. This resonates with us – we generally believe that paying conscious attention to things is the best way of achieving an objective grasp, a full understanding of what a thing is from itself, rather than simply from our perspective. We improve on this by establishing perspectives which are, in principle at least, repeatable – and we call these “experiments”. This way of bringing ourselves to the world has fared us well, at least so far. We have cell phones, cars, the internet, trains, and all manner of wonderful technological innovations which would not be possible without the value of directed attention, objectivity, and work.

Sociological research which I’ve been informed of, but can’t cite at the moment, shows an interesting corollary to this: when we converse with people on the internet, we tend towards divergence. We characterize their view as an object which we pay attention to and discover its defects, and then oppose it. This makes sense – it conforms with the value of paying attention to things to make them better. The problem is, the views of others are not objects but perspectives (like our own), which are constantly shifting, and which exist in a complex network of values which, in a sense, characterize them as the people that they are.

Unsurprisingly we are much less likely to treat the views of people we speak to in person as objects. In fact, that same research I’m referring to (but not citing – if someone knows it feel free to comment below) (Also feel free to comment if you think I’m full of it and making this up – it’s the internet after all!), demonstrates that the same people who diverge on the internet are much more likely to converge when in dialogue in person. This difference is confirmed by my personal experience – discussions in person tend towards emphasizing what you hold in common with others, and also towards compromise on those issues where you differ, whereas the more objective and reasoned internet discussion tends towards endless conflict about fundamental values.

If this difference is true, and I’m not just making it up by referring to imaginary research, it reveals something essential about humans and something essentially terrifying about facebook and the blog-sphere. It is perhaps not accidental and random, and not a result of “people being jerks” (at least not in the normal way), when internet discussion tends either towards insular communities where everyone agrees, or towards trolling and nasty debates with no middle ground. We may have simply evolved (culturally and/or genetically) to treat the “absent”, i.e. a rock or a sentence in a book or on the internet, with much more distance and tendency towards rejection than the word spoken by other people.

This idea – that we treat speech from people in person fundamentally differently than writing in books or on the net, converges with a recent thesis which has become popular in Cognitive Science by people like Alva Noe and Evan Thompson, although it is also Chomsky’s recent position – that language is mostly not communication at all. Rather, most talking is something like stroking each others hair, something quite common for many mammalian species (wouldn’t it be quite strange if we hadn’t developed a replacement for this social practice?).

This idea encourages us to think about internet communication with a great degree of restraint – we perhaps have no grounds for assuming that it is anything much like debate in person. It may appear highly reasoned and objective to debate analytically and deductively on the internet, and it may in fact be highly intellectual – but – it may be that when we do this in person we are doing something much less like analytic debate than we are capable of on the internet. And, the corollary to this – we as humans may be much less capable of pure, hard-reasoning as we believe we are. In fact, when we read statements that diverge with our values and there is no human behind it to recognize as a person-like-me, I may simply be much less capable than I believe of carrying on any sort of meaningful communication at all.

Harris Vignette #1: Are Beliefs in the Head?

In Sam Harris’ attempt to dissolve the distinction between facts and values one essential move is to claim that “beliefs” about facts and values inhere in the head. He does not deny the importance of culture, but encourages us to think about culture as a cause of brain development, rather than the other way around:

The relevant neurosicence is in its infancy, but we know that our emotions, social interactions, and moral intuitions mutually influence one another. We grow attuned to our fellow human beings through these systems, creating culture in the processs. Culture becomes a mechanism for further social, emotional, and moral development. There is simply no doubt that the human brain is the nexus of these influences. Cultural norms influence our thinking and behavior by altering the structure and function of our brains. Do you feel that sons are more desirable than daughters? Is obedience to parental authority more important than honest inquiry? Would you cease to love your child if you learned that he or she were gay? The ways parents view such questions, and subsequent effects in the lives of their children, must translate into facts about their brains. (9-10)

First – there is nothing very objectionable about what Harris says here. The human brain can be described as the nexus of cultural influence, and beliefs can be translated into “facts about the brain”. However, the fact that a certain set of descriptions are possible and correct does not mean they are adequate, and does not mean they don’t conceal essential aspects of the thing described. I therefore want to suggest in two parts that (1) beliefs are not facts about the brain (or the mind for that matter), and (2) we should question the assumption that culture is a mechanism for the development of individuals rather than the other way around.

(1) What is a “fact about the brain”? Reductionists who claim we can reduce thought to physical reality speak of “brain states”, those who resist this speak of “mental states”. But beliefs can not be only a brain state or a mental state – beliefs are about things. Moreover, while some beliefs are reflexive attitudes about our own mental states, most beliefs are experienced as being about things outside the head. Therefore, most beliefs can be delusional – someone might have beliefs about “their children”, and not have any children. The fact they do not have any children is a relevant fact about the belief – we could not fully understand what it meant for them to have that belief without knowing how it fits, or does not fit, into their world of experience. For instance, if I have delusional beliefs, I am likely to subconsciously avoid situations where those beliefs would be challenged by anomalous experiences. Beliefs are therefore not in the head – they are between the head and the world, or rather, they are aspects of the perspectives we take. We can’t understand what it means to have a belief without understanding that beliefs are not simply facts about brain states or mental states – but manners that the body (which includes the brain or mind) encounters and copes with its world. Without a world in which for beliefs to function, beliefs would be useless and nonsensical.

(2) Harris encourages us to think about culture as a mechanism produced by social evolution which enables the further social, moral and emotional development of individuals. This is not surprising given his individualistic approach to neuroscience. However, it is just as descriptively correct to treat culture as that which is developing and influenced by the mechanism of individuals and their brains. We can as easily say “individuals serve culture” as we can “culture serves and influences individuals”. This becomes especially relevant in a discussion about values – do values exist in individuals for the sake of fulfilling them as individuals, or to perpetuate cultural frameworks which sustain social life? Are cultures “adaptive” if they sustain themselves, or if they permit the individuals they co-opt to flourish? The fact that we can conceptualize a culture co-opting individuals to perpetuate it at the expense of the flourishing of those individuals suggests that Harris’ general premise – that there are objectively good and bad values, and science can help somehow in determining them – might be true, and might have something to do with a culture’s adequacy to the needs of human beings. This is a project which I broadly agree with – however, I don’t think we can properly understand what a culture is without understanding the overwhelming sense in which we are not only products, but also servants of culture, and that our values are essentially (not by accident) part of a social fabric which gives them meaning and resonance.