Month: November 2009

The really cool parts begin at the 1:00 mark:

"There is a virus of disrespect and hate spreading here very rapidly. And unless one lives right here with it, day in and day out, it is unbelievable how quickly and subtly it infects reasonably intelligent persons. This is not too hard to understand only if one recognizes the unremitting, deep, bitter religious and racial prejudice existing today in this section of our land — I don’t know if any of them are similarly infected in other sections, but I know personally of what I speak as regards East Texas.

In fact, although nearly every one indignantly denies having any racial or religious prejudice to the point where he deceives even himself in this matter, after listening seriously to protestations of horror and shock one can almost hear a collective sigh in essence, "Too bad he had to die but after all a Catholic is no longer in the White House and this ought to set the 'niggers' back on their heels for awhile!" It is painful to some of us I know to give credence to such a condition so we blind ourselves and blame a mentally confused person — forgetting in our desire to remove the blame from ourselves that where religious and racial prejudice prevails, not just the killer but all are mentally confused.

When this prejudice is played upon adroitly and exploited actively (as in our locality) by such groups as The American Fact-Finding Committee and many more [of] that ilk, for instance the John Birchers, etc., it soon fans into a situation as exists here, many, many citizens ridden by a vicious hate which inevitably erupts and expresses itself in violence — as in the case of Mr. Kennedy's murder in Dallas …

I don’t know if anything can be done about the festering sore of prejudice and hatred on our social structure here, but I doubt if you can know its deadliness unless you are in constant, daily touch, and I thought it my duty to mention it, in that case, even though you may consider I am an alarmist and am exaggerating. I only wish I were," – from a letter to president Johnson, November 24, 1963.

Read Mark Warren's sobering piece here.

A reader said the current counter-recession policies felt like "Mission Accomplished" all over again. Mark Thoma explains why:

The most recent employment report shows the unemployment rate rising past 10 percent even though it appears output may have already turned the corner, while new claims for unemployment insurance are still over 500,000, a number that indicates the economy is still losing jobs overall. In fact, I am worried that the peak in unemployment could lag even further behind the recovery than it did in

the last two recessions.

It’s not just the lag between the turning points in output and employment that leads to a pessimistic outlook for labor numbers. Once unemployment does peak, output still needs to return to its normal growth level before we see a return to full employment. The San Francisco Fed doesn’t expect a return to normal growth until the middle of 2012, and this means that unemployment likely won’t fully recover until somewhere in 2013.

The reason for the slow recovery is partly due to the depth of the recession — the deeper the hole, the longer it takes to crawl out of it — but it’s also because of the large amount of structural change that the economy must go through before it can recover. Prior to the recession we had too many resources in the housing, finance, and auto industries, and it will take time to move the people and resources who used to work in these industries into areas of the economy where they can be employed productively. And as new productive activities outside these areas arise, firms will install the best technology available. This technology will, in general, be more capital-intensive than before, and so we will need to surpass the pre-recession level of output before the demand for labor will return to its previous level. In addition, firms typically reorganize their job assignments after layoffs and discover that the same work can be performed with fewer workers and this, too, can slow the recovery period for employment relative to output.

Stanislas Dehaene, chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collège de France, gives his view of the brain:

What I am proposing is that the human brain is a much more constrained organ than we think, and that it places strong limits on the range of possible cultural forms. Essentially, the brain did not evolve for culture, but culture evolved to be learnable by the brain. Through its cultural inventions, humanity constantly searched for specific niches in the brain, wherever there is a space of plasticity that can be exploited to “recycle” a brain area and put it to a novel use. Reading, mathematics, tool use, music, religious systems — all might be viewed as instances of cortical recycling.

On how the brain processes letters:

A fascinating discovery, made by the American researcher Marc Changizi, is that all of the world's writing systems use the same set of basic shapes, and that these shapes are already a part of the visual system in all primates, because they are also useful for coding natural visual scenes. The monkey brain already contains neurons that preferentially respond to an “alphabet” of shapes including T, L, Y. We merely “recycle” these shapes (and the corresponding part of cortex) and turn them into a cultural code for language.

Joe Kloc examines why we get creeped out by lifelike robots and lifeless bodies:

Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the particular occurrences of the uncanny, in which humans are bothered by interaction with human-like models, began as a psychological curiosity. But as our ability to design artificial life has increased—along with our dependence on it—getting to the heart of why people respond negatively to realistic models of themselves has taken on a new importance. Attempts to understand the origins of this reaction, known since the 1970s as the “uncanny valley response,” have drawn on everything from repressed fears of castration to an evolutionary mechanism for mate selection, but there has been little empirical evidence to assess the validity of these ideas.

Image by artist David Maisel. (Hat tip: acidolatte)

Stephen Williams reviews the latest work by Bruce Ellis Benson:

The argument in this volume is that Nietzsche retained his native Pietism. He was brought up in a Pietist home and broke away from the beliefs which it housed, but he did not thereby cease to be religious or pious. He aspired to become a disciple of Dionysus, a devotee of Life, of which Dionysus is the symbol. This determination to pursue a way of life is rightly called "piety" when we observe the continuities between Nietzsche's background Pietism and his later quest. His Pietism was a way of life rather than a set of doctrines.

The form remains where the content changes. In pursuit of what changes, Nietzsche sought out a musical ask sis. Benson explores this carefully. Ask sis is a form of spiritual exercise in self-transformation. It is not identical with asceticism, which carries connotations of bodily denial. It is affirmative of bodily life as well as negative toward spiritual sickness and the enemy of decadence, also carefully explored by the author, which Nietzsche self-consciously fought in himself.

Music was a vital and central force in Nietzsche's life, but for those Greeks whom Nietzsche so loved and to whom he was so indebted, it was a far more basic force than we tend to imagine when we hear the word "music." For Nietzsche, music forms the soul; it effects a profound spiritual formation. As far as he was concerned, once he had shrugged off the baleful influence of Wagner, music assumed its proper office of fostering spiritual health and cheerfulness, which is to say, a form of life. Pietism was a heartfelt way of life.

In sum: Nietzsche sought to know, follow, pray to Dionysus, god of Life, through a musical ask sis, and, in doing so, he transplanted a form of Pietism onto the soil of Dionysus or, better, cultivated the apparently alien form of Dionysus on the soil of native Pietism. He may not have succeeded in overcoming his childhood Pietism. But it is what Nietzsche was about, even if he did not fully know it.

Graeme Wood gets caught up in the frenzy:

After and during the Saturday victory, fans set me on fire twice. They were harmless conflagrations, but they reminded me what a blessing it is, in so many ways, not to be the type who wears polyester and flammable hairspray. A man ignited a sparkler next to me, in an area packed so tight we were pressed together, chest to back. By the time he realized his folly, sparks had sizzled through my shirt and lightly scorched my skin. At Tahrir Square, which is Cairo's Times Square, fans shut the place down to traffic and began lighting aerosol cans ablaze. One burnt off the fringe of my hair.

Carl Zimmer reports:

Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention – not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

Heather MacDonald doesn't appreciate how the faithful connect religion to ethics:

Would someone please provide an example of

a. someone actually claiming that murder, say, (or theft) is fine at all times and places, or

b. someone claiming that murder (or theft) is fine at all times and places because there is  no God, or

c. someone claiming that murder (or theft) is fine at all times and places because there is  no God, and then being recalled to sanity by an invocation of the Sixth (or Eighth) Commandment?

I have simply never witnessed the need to reference to God to establish the validity of our laws against extortion, say.  Real-world moral disputes are more complicated:  Is health care a right?  Who should pay for it and how much should one group pay for another’s health care?  Is economic regulation theft?  Is theft admissible to stave off starvation?  We answer these questions by drawing on our innate and developed moral intuitions and our society’s legal framework.

Does anyone really believe that Denmark and Copenhagen are going to stop enforcing contract law because they have “exhausted the patrimony” of Leviticus and are uncomfortable invoking God as the source of their commercial code?

Michael Fitzgerald sorts through a number of studies on the economic effects of religion:

Among the most provocative findings have come from Robert Barro, a renowned economist at Harvard, and his wife, Rachel McCleary, a researcher at Harvard’s Taubman Center. […] The two collected data from 59 countries where a majority of the population followed one of the four major religions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. They ran this data – which covered slices of years from 1981 to 2000, measuring things like levels of belief in God, afterlife beliefs, and worship attendance – through statistical models. Their results show a strong correlation between economic growth and certain shifts in beliefs, though only in developing countries.

Most strikingly, if belief in hell jumps up sharply while actual church attendance stays flat, it correlates with economic growth. Belief in heaven also has a similar effect, though less pronounced. Mere belief in God has no effect one way or the other. Meanwhile, if church attendance actually rises, it slows growth in developing economies.