Archive for the ‘psychology’ Category
Freudian chitchat, sex and bonobos
Sigmund and Anna Freud
As previously mentioned, the world of Freudian categories was one of my first interests as a teenager. I loved the simple division, as I imagined it, between the id (our uninhibited ‘animal’ urges and appetites), the superego (the parental leash, restraining, guiding, forcing) and the ego (some sort of more or less stable truce between these forces). It was neat, and still allowed for freedom of sorts – the leash could be stretched or even snapped depending on the nature of our parents, the weakness or strength of our bond with them, and the changing nature of our relations over time. It all sounded right somehow, or at least it opened up powerful insights.
Other Freudian categories also attracted, more or less. The Oedipus complex, which I naturally reduced to killing Dad and fucking Mum, had less appeal. I was, at the time, more interested in the idea of killing Mum, but I was smart enough to realise that this was because Mum was the Dad in our house – dominant, remote, scary. At the same time, but never at the same time, she was the nurse, the comforter, the defender. If only I could explain this to Sigmund or his analyst friends.
Being, as mentioned, a teenager, I loved the sexual undertones, overtones, and basic in-your-face tones in Freud’s treatment of – what? The unconscious? Motivation? Human life? Whatever, ‘polymorphous perversity’ meant, I presumed, that we had the tendency, or ‘ability’ to be turned on by any activity or percept, but ‘sublimation’, a product of our superego, could transform that perverse energy into something productive rather than reproductive, like art or relativity theory.
Bonobos, it seems, just stick with the polymorphous perversity. But beware of what is seeming so. All animals strive to be more than what they already are. That is, to thrive. That’s what evolution is all about.
All of this is prologue to the fact that, after many decades, I’ve been revisiting Freudian ideas through Freud’s women, a fiendishly complex book written some thirty years ago, cataloguing Freud’s life and developing ideas, but more interestingly, his impact upon the next generation of analysts, all of them former patients (or analysands), as seemed to be Freud’s rule. That’s to say, the next generation of female analysts.
The generation of women after that of Freud, the generation that came of age in the early 20th century, whether born in Vienna or attracted to it by Freud’s growing superstardom, couldn’t be said to have an easy time of it. A depressing rate of childhood (and maternal) mortality, sudden changes of fortune due to cataclysms such as the Great Depression, two horrific European wars, the Nazi anti-Semitic frenzy of the thirties, and an obsession with female ‘hysteria’ and other mystery ailments, all created complications, to put it mildly, for upwardly mobile female intellectuals. Professional careers as doctors or academics were still largely closed to them, and it’s noteworthy that many, such as Lou Andreas-Salomé, turned to writing to establish their intellectual reputations. Others, such as Anna Freud and Marie Bonaparte, had clear birthright advantages. Other important female figures for this generation of psychotherapy were Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein, Joan Riviere, Alix Strachey, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot and Ruth Mack Brunswick, to name a few, but many analysands were touched by this (occasionally vicious) circle, including the brilliant if mystifyingly mystical writer H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).
What is fascinating about this little ecosystem that had come to thrive under Freud’s benevolent paternalism is its openness to the wiles of sexuality, while always maintaining an un-bonoboesque primness. Of course, bonobos weren’t fully identified as a species until 1929, and nothing was then known of their lifestyle, and nor was evolution and our connectedness to other species fully accepted, or its consequences much explored in Freud’s lifetime. But the circle of analysts, analysands and their companions, spiced with more or less explicit notions of childhood sexuality, latent lesbianism, father fixations and the like, seems like a simmering pot under the cover of polite society. Largely all talk no action. The talking cure? The talking distraction? The talking disorder? To read some of the writings of these analysts, well they often make heavy work of everyday life, its thoughts and feelings, as they seek to frame experience within one particular theory or another. It reminds me of other forms of over-intellectualising – it’s fascinating how dated and more or less quaint seem arguments regarding the philosophy of ‘mind’ and ‘free will’ of several decades ago.
Bonobos, of course, have no language. They can’t tell us how well- or mal-adjusted they are. All we have is our own observations. Bonobos aren’t always lovey-dovey, they sometimes fight, though not as often or as viciously as chimps. They suffer more from human raids than from their own species, which has led to a lot of orphans and ‘childless mothers’. At a stretch, you could argue that these threats have something in common with those experienced by Anna Freud and the Jewish or pro-Jewish psychoanalyst community of the twenties and thirties. An article from Discover magazine describes bonobo responses after a bit of rough tangling in the treetops:
The researchers found that those young bonobos that were able to calm themselves down most quickly after altercations were also those most likely to console another individual in distress. What’s more, these socially well-adjusted bonobos were far more likely to have been raised by their mothers. Orphaned apes, on the other hand, were less likely to offer consolation. This consolation behaviour through contact, such as by touching, embracing and kissing, suggests that the young bonobos are expressing empathy.
Some researchers aren’t entirely convinced that consolatory behaviour is going on, I’m not quite sure why, but it seems to me that consolatory behaviour (and the need for it among the suffering) in these non-speaking relatives of ours has something in common with the ‘talking cure’ that became so sought-after in early twentieth century Europe. What’s also interesting is the focus on sex, albeit in very different ways, in relation to stress, and effective function, in humans and bonobos. Here are some examples of Freud’s ‘sex talk’, in written form, from Freud’s women. First, in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess in 1897:
the main distinction between the sexes emerges at the time of puberty, when girls are seized by a non-neurotic sexual repugnance and males by libido. For at that period a further sexual zone is (wholly or in part) extinguished in females which persists in males. I am thinking of the male genital zone, the region of the clitoris, in which during childhood sexual sensitivity is shown to be concentrated in girls as well. Hence the flood of shame which the female shows at that period – until the new, vaginal zone is awakened, spontaneously, or by reflex action.
Freud’s women, p 400
This is all a bit below the belt for the late 19th century, and the male/female generalisations are questionable, but the fact that such matters are being aired feels like enlightenment. The difficulty I find with Freud, from many of these writings, is that he expresses himself with an air of certitude in so many works which, as his ideas ‘evolve’, contradict previous works, no doubt influenced by the enormous variety of analysands and their neuroses, or simply their backgrounds, as presented to him. The Oedipus complex, for example, appears to be enormously flexible in this way. You could say that his theories, or theory, if there is one, is so open to be tailored to the Individual that it’s unfalsifiable. Though I’m not particularly au fait with Karl Popper’s falsifiability test, I’m betting that he would have used Freud’s theories as a perfect example of work which fails that test.
Having said that, I’m not about to give up on old Sigmund, who perhaps unwittingly inspired many feminist intellectuals in the first decades of the 20th century, if only because he genuinely admired them, took them seriously and was influenced by their experiences and critiques. Perhaps also because his focus was on the internal and domestic world, the world of repressed desires, parental struggles and the great variety of female entanglements with male power, implicit and explicit. I’ll quote another, typically convoluted excerpt (to me at least), this time from 1926, in which Freud discusses castration anxiety:
there is no danger of our regarding castration anxiety as the sole motive force of the defensive processes which lead to neurosis. I have shown elsewhere how little girls, in the course of their development, are led into making a tender object-cathexis by their castration complex. It is precisely in women that the danger-situation of loss of object seems to have remained the most effective. All we need to do is make a slight modification in our description of their determinant of anxiety, in the sense that it is no longer a matter of feeling the want of, or actually losing the object itself, but of losing the object’s love [emphasis added]
Freud’s women, p 414
WTF, think thou? Firstly, an ‘object cathexis’ is apparently an ‘investment of libido or psychic energy in objects outside the self, such as a person, goal, idea, or activity’. But what exactly is a ‘castration complex’ in little girls? Apparently it’s the discovery that they don’t have the dangly stuff of their male counterparts (if they ever discover such a thing in childhood). This makes what follows a little complicated – they (the girls) lose the object’s (the penis’s) love? And so the theory, if it can be called that, gets more ‘flexible’.
All of this of course raises the putatively vexed issue of penis envy, which surely doesn’t have to be such a serious thing. De Beauvoir describes a cute example of this in The Second Sex, quoting from Frigidity in woman, a book by the Freudian psychologist Wilhelm Stekel, published in 1926. The reminiscence is from a 21-year-old:
‘At the age of 5, I chose for my playmate Richard, a boy of 6 or 7… For a long time I had wanted to know how one can tell whether a child is a girl or a boy. I was told: by the earrings…. or by the nose. This seemed to satisfy me, though I had a feeling they were keeping something from me. Suddenly Richard expressed a desire to urinate… Then the thought came to me of lending him my chamber pot… When I saw his organ, which was something entirely new to me, I went into highest raptures: ‘What have you there? My, isn’t that nice! I’d like to have something like that, too.’ Whereupon I took hold of the membrum and held it enthusiastically… My great-aunt’s cough awoke us… and from that day on our doings and games were carefully watched.’
The second sex, p 348
I can well imagine a non-verbal experience of a similar sort among juvenile bonobos – though given that bonobos, like every other non-human mammal, never ‘cover-up’, the surprise and delight would’ve occurred at a very early stage of development, and there’d be no elder relatives keen to prevent further explorations. Which brings me to civilisation – and its discontents.
Anyway, this post has gone on long enough, but the issues raised are important to me, and I’ll pursue them further in later posts.
penis envy mushrooms – another story altogether
References
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/like-humans-young-bonobos-comfort-those-in-stress
Freud’s women, by Lisa Appignanesi & John Forrester, Virago Press 1993
The second sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, 1949: Vintage books 2011
brilliant women – Lou Andreas-Salomé, writer, psychologist, éminence grise
Je dirigerai ma vie selon ce que je suis
In my rather aimless intellectual roaming in pursuit of feminine bonobo-like power and influence in the human socio-cultural world I’ve been reading various feminist and ‘inspirational’ texts such as Dava Sobel’s The glass universe, Melvin Konner’s Women after all, and Simone de Beauvoir’s classic The second sex. I’ve also taken up a book I bought and half-read more than two decades ago, Freud’s Women, a book the title of which immediately attracted me as it combined my interest in intellectual feminism with remembrances of one of my first intellectual interests, the ideas of Sigmund Freud. I’m talking here of my teen years, when I encountered Freud’s concepts in the most rudimentary, truncated form. The id, ego and superego, and the concepts of eros, thanatos, and especially polymorphous perversity and sublimation struck me as highly diverting at least.
Another Big Name I encountered and cursorily read in those early years was Friedrich Nietzsche. I remember three of the titles – Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and The Anti-Christ, and there may have been more. I write this with a kind of amazement – how were these books in the house? My mother rarely read a book, my father never. It may have been my older siblings… anyway, I recall puzzling over Zarathustra, being thrilled at Nietzsche’s excoriation of Paul of Tarsus, and generally feeling buoyed up by his ebullient self-confidence – if that’s what it was.
So, returning to Freud’s Women, a book I started rereading recently, almost out of a sense of duty. I’m now getting into the second half of the book, and it seems to me that the writing has lifted as the women in Freud’s circle have become more multi-faceted and interesting – or more interestingly depicted. This began with Sabina Spielrein, one of the first female psychoanalysts, who had important associations with Jung, Freud and Piaget. Next was Loe Kann, a strong-willed, intellectual associate of both Freud and Ernest Jones, with whom she had a turbulent relationship. But the most fulsomely depicted character I’ve encountered so far is Lou Andreas-Salomé – a much-admired confidante and influencer of Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke and Freud, amongst others, and an important intellectual figure in her own write. She wrote a highly regarded book on Nietzsche’s philosophy, published way back in 1894 – probably the first major treatment of Nietzsche in print – as well as many other works. But the fact that she was so highly regarded by the tediously misogynistic Nietzsche as well as the faintly condescending Freud is testament, not so much to her writing as to her Dasein, if that’s the word – the effect of her character, intellect and attitude to life.
Andreas-Salomé, like many of the women described in both Freud’s Women and The Second Sex, such as Irene Reweliotty and Marie Bashkirtseff, came from a wealthy, intellectual family in a period when only the tiniest proportion of women could benefit from an academic education and a career open to talent. Writing was almost the only way to provide proof to the world of their value, as was the case years earlier for Jane Austen and the Brontës. I haven’t yet read Andreas-Salome’s work, beyond the excerpts found in Freud’s Women, and perhaps I never will, but I got a buzz of energy from the positive spirit of her influence – upon Rilke, Freud, his daughter Anna, among others. An intellectual bonobo, if you will. And that’s the highest praise!
It’s strange today to hear Freud described as a neurologist, as he’s occasionally described in Freud’s Women. It’s an indication of how far neurology has come in the 21st century. In earlier times it was all ‘mind’ and the brain was enclosed in an impenetrable ‘black box’. Everything was gleaned from behaviour, thoughts, impulses, obsessions, fantasies and the like. Fascinating stuff, but easily manipulated and exaggerated. Probably the best thing about the ‘talking cure’ was the talking itself, the sharing, the unburdening, and the warm connections so created. And in those early days it provided above all a career open to women – smart, insightful women who were keen to help. There were, of course disputes. Two of the most prominent practitioners in the thirties, Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, both of whom specialised in the treatment of children, were at loggerheads over the ‘Oedipal problem’ and how to deal with the ‘latency period’ – I’m no expert on psychoanalytic theory, but it seems that the pair were mostly in dispute over whether the analyst had a pedagogical role (Anna Freud) or not (Klein). Interestingly, and I think tellingly, Freud himself, who tended to be non-pedagogical in his own approach, generally sided with his daughter in these disputes, with the usual tangle of rationalisations and special pleading. Family is family, at the end of the day.
Anyhoo, returning to Lou Andreas-Salomé, the ‘poet of psychoanalysis’ as Freud called her, it’s clear that she knew her own worth and was never particularly intimidated by Freud’s reputation. And in the face of the whole Oedipus obsession she pushed back in underlining the value of women and mothers. Here is her response to Freud, after reading his essay ‘the taboo of virginity’, which deals with the historical and cultural obsession with female virginity and ‘defloration’:
It occurred to me that this taboo may have been intensified by the fact that at one time (in a matriarchal society) the woman may have been the dominant partner. In this way, like the defeated deities, she acquired demonic properties, and was feared as an agent of retribution. Also her defloration by deity, priests etc points back to a time when she was not the ‘private property’ of the male, and in order to achieve this she had to shake off the shackles of her impressive past – which may still play its part as the earliest positive basis for the precautionary measures of the male.
What’s interesting here is not the perhaps dubious historicity of her claim but the female valuation it implies. Andreas-Salomé was not a ‘noted feminist’ of her time, she took no active part in first-wave feminism, but her self-confident, no-nonsense dealings with the prominent intellectual males she met and clearly influenced, and her later conversion to the ‘talking cure’, so well-suited, it seems to me, to the values of partnership and collaboration and help, values that are generally more female than male, have made her a figure well worth discovering, for me at least.
References
Freud’s women, by Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, 1992
‘The taboo of viginity’, by Sigmund Freud, 1918
the evolution of reason: intellectualist v interactivist
In The Enigma of Reason, cognitive psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber ask the question – What is reason for? I won’t go deeply into their own reasoning, I’m more interested in the implications of their conclusions, if correct – which I strongly suspect they are.
They looked at two claims about reason’s development, the intellectualist claim, which I might associate with Aristotelian and symbolic logic, premises and conclusions, and logical fallacies as pointed out by various sceptical podcasts and websites (and this can also be described as an individualist model of reasoning), and the interactionist model, in which reason is most effectively developed collectively.
In effect, the interactionist view is claiming that reason evolved in an interactionist environment. This suggests that it is language-dependent, or that it obviously couldn’t have its full flowering without language. Mercier and Sperber consider the use of reason in two forms – justificatory and argumentative. Justificatory reasoning tends to be lazy and easily satisfied, whereas it is in the realm of argument that reason comes into its own. We can see the flaws in the arguments of others much more readily than we can our own. This accords with the biblical saying about seeing motes in the eyes of others while being blind to the bricks in our own – or something like that. It also accords with our well-attested over-estimation of ourselves, in terms of our looks, our generosity, our physical abilities and so on.
I’m interested in this interactionist view because it also accords with my take on collaboration, participatory democracy and the bonobo way. Bonobos of course don’t have anything like human reason, not having language, but they do work together more collectively than chimps (and chimp-like humans) and show a feeling towards each other which some researchers have described as ‘spiritual’. For me, a better word would be ‘sympathetic’. Seeing the value in others’ arguments helps to take us outside of ourselves and to recognise the contribution others make to our thinking. We may even come to realise how much we rely on others for our personal development, and that we are, for better or worse, part of a larger, enriching whole. A kind of mildly antagonistic but ultimately fulfilling experience.
An important ingredient to the success of interactionist reasoning is the recognition of and respect for difference. That lazy kind of reasoning we engage in when left to ourselves can be exacerbated when our only interactions are with like-minded people. Nowadays we recognise this as a problem with social media and their algorithms. The feelings of solidarity we get with that kind of interaction can of course be very comforting but also stultifying, and they don’t generally lead to clear reasoning. For many, though, the comfort derived from solidarity outweighs the sense of clarity you might, hopefully, get from being made to recognise the flaws in your own arguments. This ghettoisation of reason, like other forms of ghettoisation, is by and large counter-productive. The problem is to prevent this from happening while reducing the ‘culture shock’ that this might entail. Within our own WEIRD (from Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic countries) culture, where the differences aren’t so vast, being challenged by contrary arguments can be stimulating, even exhilarating. Here’s what the rich pre-industrialist Montaigne had to say on the matter:
The study of books is a languishing and feeble motion that heats not, whereas conversation teaches and exercises at once. If I converse with a strong mind and a rough disputant, he presses upon my flanks, and pricks me right and left; his imaginations stir up mine; jealousy, glory, and contention, stimulate and raise me up to something above myself; and acquiescence is a quality altogether tedious in discourse.
Nevertheless, I’ve met people who claim to hate arguments. They’re presumably not talking about philosophical discourse, but they tend to lump all forms of discord together in a negative basket. Mercier and Sperber, however, present a range of research to show that challenges to individual thinking have an improving effect – which is a good advert for diversity. But even the most basic interactions, for example between mother and child, show this effect. A young child might be asked why she took a toy from her sibling, and answer ‘because I want it’. Her mother will point out that the sibling wants it too, and/or had it first. The impact of this counter-argument may not be immediate, but given normal childhood development, it will be the beginning of the child’s road to developing more effective arguments through social interaction. In such an interactive world, reasons need to much more than purely selfish.
The authors give examples of how the the most celebrated intellects can go astray when insufficiently challenged, from dual Nobel prize-winner Linus Pauling’s overblown claims about vitamin C to Alphonse Bertillon’s ultra-convoluted testimony in favour of Albert Dreyfus’ guilt, to Thomas Jefferson’s absurdly tendentious arguments against emancipation. They also show how the standard fallacious arguments presented in logic classes can be valid under particular circumstances. Perhaps most convincingly they present evidence of how group work in which contentious topics were discussed resulted in improvements in individual essays. Those whose essay-writing was preceded by such group discussion produced more complex arguments for both sides than did those who simply read philosophical texts on the issues.
It might seem strange that a self-professed loner like me should be so drawn to an interactionist view of reason’s development. The fact is, I’ve always seen my ‘lonerdom’ as a failing, which I’ve never tried very hard to rectify. Instead, I’ve compensated by interacting with books and, more recently, podcasts, websites and videos. They’re my ‘people’, correcting and modifying my own views thorough presenting new information and perspectives (and yes, I do sometimes argue and discuss with flesh-and-blood entities). I’ve long argued that we’re the most socially constructed mammals on the planet, but Mercier and Sperber have introduced me to a new word – hypersocial – which packs more punch. This hypersocial quality of humans has undoubtedly made us, for better or worse, the dominant species on the planet. Other species can’t present us with their viewpoints, but we can at least learn from the co-operative behaviours of bonobos, cetaceans, elephants and corvids, to name a few. That’s interaction of a sort. And increased travel and globalisation of communications means we can learn about other cultures and how they manage their environments and how they have coped, or not, with the encroachments of the dominant WEIRD culture.
When I say ‘we’ I mean we, as individuals. The authors of The enigma of reason reject the idea of reason as a ‘group-level adaptation’. The benefits of interactive reason accrue to the individual, and of course this can be passed on to other receptive individuals, but the level of receptivity varies enormously. Myside bias, the default position from our solipsistic childhood, has the useful evolutionary function of self-promotion, even survival, against the world, but our hypersocial human world requires effective interaction. That’s how Australian Aboriginal culture managed to thrive in a set of sub-optimal environments for tens of thousands of years before the WEIRDs arrived, and that’s how WEIRDs have managed to transform those environments, creating a host of problems along with solutions, in a story that continues….
Reference
H Mercier & D Sperber, The enigma of reason, 2017
a bonobo world 26: boys and girls at work and play
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, brilliant women with great dress sense
In her introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir wrote this:
.. the truth is that anyone can clearly see that humanity is split into two categories of individuals with manifestly different clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, movements, interests and occupations; these differences are perhaps superficial; perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that for the moment they exist in a strikingly obvious way.
A whole book could easily be written – some already have – to expand on this apparently mundane observation. Today in the west, or the developed world, or Anglo-American or Euro-American society (I never know quite what to call it), there are no set rules, of course, about how people should dress, or behave, or work or play, gender-wise, but there are conventions and social pressures, and I’ve noted encouraging developments, as well as their opposite.
A close female friend expressed a certain despair/disdain the other day in telling me that Dr Jill Biden, aged 69, wore stilettos for her husband’s confirmation as US President. I share that friend’s conviction that stilettos should only be used as murder weapons. In any case men only wear stilettos when in drag, which is all too rare.
On clothing and accessories, while today’s variety is inspiring and liberating for both sexes, one still sees frustrating gender-based tendencies everywhere. Frills and furbelows have long been all the go for female formal attire, while tuxes or frock-coats are de rigueur for males, compleat with ties, bowed or straight. These traditions tend to emphasise gender differences you’d never notice in bonobos, though there is a welcome playfulness of gender-swapping attire among the elites, seldom replicated in your local bar or restaurant.
What has constantly surprised me, as a person who spent his youth in the sixties and seventies, when déclassé jeans and t-shirts, in colourful variety, were common and pleasantly informal, is that those decades didn’t establish a trend of ambisexual dress – just as I’ve been surprised that traditional marriage didn’t get thrown out as seemed to be on the cards in those days. Marriage today appears to represent much of human ambiguity – a commitment to monogamous ideals even while recognising their limitations, even their absurdity. Conservatives argue that loyalty is a much undervalued value, but it’s always been possible to have more than one loyal friend, with benefits. Bonobos manage to have a bunch of them. Bonobos aren’t being rad, they’re just being bonobos. Which raises the question, what is it, to be humans?
David Deutsch, in The beginning of infinity, celebrates and encourages our infinite possibilities, to find solutions, to expand our outlooks, to achieve outrageously amazing things. He writes of the value of optimism over pessimism, and progress over stasis. I’m largely in agreement, but with some reservations. He has nothing to say about community, for example. Community, it seems to me, has become ever more important as change has become more rapid. As Deutsch and others have pointed out, during the many thousands of years when humans lived the hunter-gatherer life, with no doubt many variations, life simply didn’t change from generation to generation. And as long as that life was sustainable, there was little need for new developments, new hunting or grinding implements, new forms of shelter or clothing. So, nobody was out of date or old-fashioned, there were no old fuddy-duddies you wouldn’t be seen dead with. In fact, quite the opposite – the elders would have been more expert at the latest technology, developed in the previous aeon, than the youngsters, who would marvel at how those old guys’ boomerangs always came back (okay, they were never actually intended to). Given this relatively static society, it’s hardly surprising that elders were more respected, for their skills, experience and store of communal lore, than today’s nursing home denizens. And, as always, I’m aware of the multifarious nature of modern human societies, static and otherwise, to which I have little access, beyond book-larnin. Most of these societies or cultures, though, are today forced to interact with others, creating identity confusions and divided loyalties by the brainload.
Anyway, sticking with the White Anglo-Saxon ex-Protestant culture I’m familiar with, I’m a bit shocked that, despite two or more waves of feminism in the last century or so, women are still earning less than men and paying more for what I would deem unnecessary accoutrements, including hairstyles, bling, fancy tattoos, make-up and the aforementioned frills and furbelows. I recently bought a ‘men’s’ stick deodorant, which seemed to me nothing more than an anti-perspirant, and which was identical to that of my female partner, only bigger, and cheaper! These are ‘first-world issues’, of course, but they reflect, in little, an exploitation of the feminine worldwide, which seems a hard nut to crack.
There’s of course a thing about eternal youth, in regard to women, that should be addressed. Men in their fifties don’t wear make-up, at least not the ones I know. Quite a few women I know, in their fifties, and older, also don’t wear make-up, but let’s face it, most of them do – with all the expense, as well as the time and effort, this involves. They do it, presumably, to hide the effects of gravity, though gravity always wins, as Radiohead informs us. With men, apparently, gravity lends gravitas.
I’ve often – in fact, ever since adolescence – imagined myself as female. Mostly lesbian female, though I did have an early period of male-male attraction. So, if I did turn out female, how would I behave, appearance-wise, now that I’m in my sixties? Would I wear an op-shop jacket, t-shirt (usually with some thought-bubble printing) and chino-type trousers, as I do now? I hope so. It’s a kind of unisex outfit for academic and sciencey people, the types I’ve always aspired to be. But unfortunately, feminists have recently written of the pink/blue divide in children’s clothing that’s stronger than ever, as well as the divide in toys – fighting, racing and danger versus dancing, cuddling and beauty. This appears to be driven by manufacturers and advertisers, who, like social media moguls, seem to derive a benefit from driving their customers down wormholes of like-mindedness. Not surprisingly, social psychologists find that children benefit from being more unisex in these choices – not a matter of turning them into their opposites, but seeing dolls and trucks as others see them, and generally being more colourful. And slowly, all too slowly, we’re following this advice, and seeing more male nurses and female truck-drivers than previously. Not to mention female white supremacists sporting submachine guns – but that’s only in the US, they do things differently there. And more males working in child-care? That’s another nut to crack.
References
Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), new translation 2009.
https://www.naeyc.org/resources/topics/play/gender-typed-toys
20: bonobo and human families, early childhood and free will
ye olde nuclear family, and its enclosures
The bonobo reproduction rate is low, as is ours these days, though for different reasons. Bonobos don’t tend to go all the way, while humans have contraception even for naughty catholics. Muslim scholars seem a little confused about the issue, but are generally more accepting than their catholic counterparts. As to children, humans are rather more possessive about them than bonobos. Bonobo females are largely in charges of the kids, collectively, and paternity is unknown and undisputed. Think about how that would play out in human society, which for millennia has been largely patriarchal, patrilineal and even primogenitive.
This doesn’t mean male bonobos are hostile to kids, as it’s generally a caring and sharing society, and besides, humouring the kids is a good way of winning favours from their mothers and others. Think of how that would be as a kid – you wouldn’t just be able to run to dad when mum’s mad at you, you’d have any number of adults to run to. You’d also have a range of adults to learn from, to identify with, to consider as role models, as well as to play off against each other.
Modern, supposedly advanced human society is very different. We live in separate, securitised houses, in nuclear families – ideally mum, dad and 2⅓ kids – with a garden surrounded by a high fence, if we’re ‘lucky’. The grandparents live across town, or in another country, or a nursing home. Visitors are vetted by smartphone. Of course often it’s a single-parent situation, usually mum, and the odd long- or short-lived boyfriend. She works, so the kids spend a lot of time in day-care, meeting other kids and sharing with them one or two adults, who don’t get too close, wary of being accused of funny business. Rarely are these adults male. Still it’s pretty good, lots of toys and games and things to make and do, all in primary colours, but it’s not every day because it’s too expensive, you (the kid) sometimes get shipped around to aunties or friends or assorted baby-sitters, or you get switched to a new centre, with a whole bunch of strangers, or a kid you really like just disappears. But mostly you’re at home with your stupid brother, until school days arrive and you have to wear a uniform, and mum fusses over you and makes you feel nervous and watchful about whether you look different from the other kids, in a good or bad way. And you learn stuff and you like or hate the teacher and you start competing with the other kids and start thinking about how smart or dumb you are.
Modern human life is pretty regimented. At a certain tender age you go to school where you learn first of all the basics of numeracy and literacy as the first steps toward being civilised. You also learn about rules and regulations, time management and the difference between work and play. Thrown into the school pool of humanity, you’re driven to contemplate and come to terms with variety: fat and skinny, pretty and ugly, noisy and quiet, smart and dumb, friend and enemy and all in between. You learn to make judgments, who to trust, who to avoid, and what to pay attention to. The prefrontal cortex, that amazing human asset, is continuing on its great connective journey, as you negotiate yourself between the formal and the free, between regimentation and independence.
Yet all the research tells us that most of those judgments you make at school, and which you vaguely remember having made, are actually the product of that growth period before the laying down of memories, distorted or otherwise. And that includes your ability to make effective judgments.
In the first few years of life, we form more than a million new neural connections every second. In fact, so many that after this surge of connections comes a period of pruning for order and efficiency. But this early period of development requires stimulation, which comes in infinite varieties of ways, including, of course, the bonobo way (and I don’t mean tree-climbing and chomping on insects), the chimp way (watching adult males battling it out), the Tiwi Islander way or the Netherlands royal family way or whatever. And much of this guided stimulation forms our behaviour for the rest of our lives. And the lack of it can reduce our capacities for a lifetime, in spite of subsequent kindness and care, as the notorious case of the Romanian orphans kept in horrendous states of neglect under the Ceauşescu regime has shown, though interestingly, some 20% of those adopted orphans have grown up showing little or no damage. Stimulation can come from within as well as without, and neglect has many variables.
It stands to reason that we as individuals have little or no control over our development in this crucial period. Which brings me to the issue of free will. Philosophers have traditionally argued for free will on the ‘could have done otherwise’ basis. I could have drunk tea rather than coffee with brekky this morning (though I invariably drink coffee). I could’ve chosen x from the restaurant menu instead of y. So often these trivial examples are given, when it’s screamingly obvious that you don’t get to choose your parents, your genetic inheritance, your early childhood environment, the country or period you were born into, or even the species you were born as (I could’ve snuffed out your brief candle by treading on you in this morning’s walk). Given these restraints on your freedom, restaurant choices surely pale into insignificance.
But let’s stick with humanity. I won’t go into the neurological underpinnings of the argument against free will (as if I could), but if we treat no free will as a given, then the consequences for humanity, vis-à-vis our handling of crime and punishment, are stark, as the neurologist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky points out in the penultimate chapter of his book Behave, entitled ‘Biology, the criminal justice system, and (oh, why not?) free will’. This is a vital issue for me, in terms of a more caring and sharing bonoboesque society, so I’ll reserve it for another essay, or two, or more.
References
InBrief: The Science of Early Childhood Development
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans
Robert Sapolsky, Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst. 2017
a bonobo world? 6 – cultural dynamism, females, families and inhibitions
the nuclear family – actually modern, not traditional
Most broadly, culture is defined as the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society. No culture is static, though it may seem so when looked at from the viewpoint of a more dynamic culture. But why are some cultures more dynamic than others?
The Bronowski comment on taking ‘the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge’ echoes in my head when I reflect on this question. But ‘rational knowledge’ strikes a false note, as there isn’t any knowledge that is irrational. And the most essential thing that any animal, human or otherwise, must know is what to do to survive. Every species that has survived for any length of time has obtained that knowledge, and in a dynamic culture, one faced with external threats and challenges, both cultural and environmental, that knowledge must continue to grow. That’s the key to our ever-changing culture – social evolution rather than the kind of physical adaptations described in The Origin of Species. That is why, for example, we have belatedly come to realise that women deserve as much opportunity, to be educated, to be productive, and to be leaders in any field they choose to enter. It is why Bronowski’s ‘Ascent of Man’ series, with its more or less exclusively male examples of strength and aptitude, seems cringeworthy after only a few decades.
The argument of course goes that man, like the Latin, homo, is simply a generic term for the species, and we (i.e women) should just get over it. The origins of the words woman and female are complex, but surely it’s clear that they are add-ons to the words man and male, afterthoughts like the woman in the Bible created from a man’s rib. In French, the word femme appears to be quite different from homme, but femme means wife as well as woman, the implication being that one’s wife is also one’s woman. No such implication exists for the word homme. The cultural implications of our everyday terminology continue to be impactful, and awareness of these implications is more important, I feel, than artificial changing of the language, helpful though this may be.
Of course, no environment is static either, and animals need to be quick to adapt to new environmental threats. The paleontological record is full of species that failed in this regard. Arguably, we may do so too, if the threat is too overwhelming, but surely nothing is currently in the offing, in spite of some doomsayers. The global warming we’re currently experiencing, for example, is far less threatening to our superabundant species than was the Toba eruption of 70,000 years ago, during the last ice age (though its effects, too, are disputed). Global warming is an existential threat, however, for many other species, already pushed to the brink by deforestation, overfishing and other human activities. Yet many will say that our ingenious species – by which they generally mean the dominant culture within our species – is even better at finding solutions than creating problems. And there are many good news stories, even in relation to those other species that we keep threatening. This is indeed the ray of hope, for our species and for others. It’s my view that, if we succeed in the future, it will be because we have gradually become more compassionate, more inclusive, more frugal and more collaborative, without losing the adventurous, questing, scientific spirit that has made us so successful.
In describing this possible future I’ll strive to be realistic and evidence-based, and that’s where the example of bonobos comes in, for this description of a future humanity fits loosely the bonobo society – without quite the scientific spirit of course. I will not be idealising bonobo society, but there are increasing problems in our culture (and note that I’m always talking about those of ‘western’ or westernised nations – western Europe, the USA, Australia and Canada – but also Japan, Korea and Taiwan) – problems relating to family, work, resources and government – that might benefit from our understanding of cultures, and species, we feel we have transcended, and the bonobo way of life is a prime example of this.
The modern human family is more or less nuclear, indeed like the nucleus inside a cell, though we call it a house, or a home. The walls of the house are like a semi-permeable membrane, with doors and windows through which nutrients and chemicals can be funneled, and of course information about the outside world arrives via books, magazines and, increasingly, electronic devices. Of course, some of these families are more functional and happy than others, and a child’s early fate is a matter of luck in this respect. Extended families – grandparents and cousins who live within walking distance – have become rarer, as have long-term neighbours and lifelong friends, due to the increasing mobility of modern life. In my own case, growing up under a seriously dysfunctional parental situation, and separated by migration from the extended family 15,000 kilometres away, I was grateful for a deeper connection to the outside world resulting from books, of which our home always had an abundance. One book which made a deep impression on me in my early teens was Children of the Dream, by Bruno Bettelheim. Of course, I came to the book with a particular hope that there were better ways of raising children than what I’d experienced, so I was bound to see it in a positive light. Regardless of the reality of the kibbutz experiment, what I found in the book’s descriptions opened up for me other options, including richer, more varied and positive relations with elders as well as peers, and a wider sense of belonging than I was experiencing. Trust, acceptance, and a nurturing of challenge and growth, these were the values that meant most to me, and which I found missing both at home and in the school environment I’d been thrown into. Yet it’s also true, or quite likely, that certain events and experiences in my early life, largely hidden from myself, have made it difficult for me to trust and to connect in positive ways. The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, a longitudinal study that has been carried out over 50 years now, provides solid evidence of the overwhelming influence of early childhood on subsequent personal development, noting that personality types are established early on in life. My own self-diagnosed type – and the study describes five – is ‘reserved’, bordering on ‘inhibited’. The latter can be a serious problem, which the Japanese describe as hikikimori, roughly translated as ‘acute social withdrawal’, though the problem is hardly confined to Japanese youth. I think, however, I’ve been saved from this acute state by the world of books and ideas, which I love to discuss, when I can bring myself to get out there and do so.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
Bruno Bettelheim, Children of the Dream, 1969.
interactional reasoning: modularity
Mercier and Sperber write a lot about modules and modularity in their book on interactional reasoning and its evolution. I’ve passed this over as I find the concepts difficult and I’m not sure if understanding reasoning as a module, if it fits that description, is essential to the thesis about interactional reasoning and its superiority to the intellectualist model. However, as an autodidact who hates admitting intellectual defeat, I want to use this blog to fully understand stuff for its own sake – and I generally find the reward is worth the pain.
Modules and modularity are introduced in chapter 4 of The enigma of reason. The idea is that there’s a kind of inferential mechanism that we share with other species – something noted, more or less, by David Hume centuries ago. A sort of learning instinct, as argued by bird expert Peter Marler, but taken further in our species, as suggested by Stephen Pinker in The language instinct, and by other cognitive psychologists.
This requires us to think more carefully about the term ‘instinct’. Marler saw it as ‘an evolved disposition to acquire a given type of knowledge’, such as songs for birds and language for humans. We’ve found that we have evolved predispositions to recognise faces, for example, and that there’s a small area in the inferior temporal lobes called the fusiform face area that plays a vital role in face recognition.
However reasoning is surely more conceptual than perceptual. Interestingly, though, in learning how to do things ‘the right way’, that’s to say, normative behaviour, children often rely on perceptual cues from adults. When shown the ‘right way’ to do something by a person they trust, in a teacherly sort of way (this is called ostensive demonstration), an infant will tend to do it that way all the time, even though there may be many other perfectly acceptable ways to perform that act. They then try to get others to conform to this ostensively demonstrated mode of action. This suggests, perhaps, an evolved disposition for norm identification and acquisition.
Face recognition, norm acquisition and other even more complex activities, such as reading, are gradually being hooked up to specific areas of the brain by researchers. They’re described as being on an instinct-expertise continuum, and according to Mercier and Sperber:
[they] are what in biology might typically be called modules: they are autonomous mechanisms with a history, a function, and procedures appropriate to this function. They should be viewed as components of larger systems to which they each make a distinct contribution. Conversely, the capacities of a modular system cannot be well explained without identifying its modular components and the way they work together.
A close reading of this passage should suggest to us that reasoning is one of those larger systems informed by many other mechanisms. The mind, according to the authors, is an articulated system of modules. The neuron is a module, as is the brain. The authors suggest that this is, at the very least, the most useful working hypothesis. Cognitive modules, in particular, need not be innate, but can harness biologically evolved modules for other purposes.
I’m not sure how much that clarifies, though it has helped me, for what it’s worth. And that’s all I’ll be posting on interactional reasoning, for now
interactional reasoning: some stray thoughts
I mentioned in my first post on this topic, bumble-bees have a fast-and-frugal way of obtaining the necessary from flowers while avoiding predators, such as spiders, which is essentially about ‘assessing’ the relative cost of a false negative (sensing there’s no spider when there is) and a false positive (sensing there’s a spider when there’s not). Clearly, the cost of a false negative is likely death, but a false positive also has a cost in wasting time and energy in the search for safe flowers. It’s better to be safe than sorry, up to a point. The bees still have a job to do, which is their raison d’être. So they’ve evolved to be wary of certain rough-and-ready signs of a spider’s presence. It’s not a fool-proof system, but it ensures that false positives are a little more over-determined than false negatives, enough to ensure overall survival, at least against one particular threat.
When I’m walking on the street and note that a smoker is approaching, I have an immediate impulse, more or less conscious, to give her a wide berth, and even cross the road if possible. I suffer from bronchiectasis, an airways condition, which is much exacerbated by smoke, dust and other particulates. So it’s an eminently reasonable decision, or impulse (or something between the two). I must admit, though, that this event is generally accompanied by feelings of annoyance and disgust, and thoughts such as ‘smokers are such losers’ – in spite of the fact than, in the long long ago, I was a smoker myself.
Such negative thoughts, though, are self-preservative in much the same way as my avoidance measures. However, they’re not particularly ‘rational’ from the perspective of the intellectualist view of reason. I would do better, of course, in an interactive setting, because I’ve learned – through interactions of a sort (such as my recent reading of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s brilliant cancer book, which in turn sent me to the website of the US Surgeon-General’s report on smoking, and through other readings on the nature of addiction) – to have a much more nuanced and informed view. Stiil, my ‘smokers are losers’ disgust and disdain is perfectly adequate for my own everyday purposes!
The point is, of course, that reason evolved first and foremost to promote our survival, but further evolved, in our highly social species, to enable us to impress and influence others. And others have develped their own sophisticated reasons to impress and influence us. It follows that the best and most fruitful reasoning comes via interactions – collaborative or argumentative, in the best sense – with our peers. Of course, as I’ve stated it here, this is a hypothesis, and it’s quite hard to prove definitively. We’re all familiar with the apparently solitary geniuses – the Newtons, Darwins and Einsteins – who’ve transformed our understanding, and those who’ve been exposed to it will be impressed with the rigour of Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian logic, and the concepts of validity and soundness as the sine qua non of good reasoning (not to mention those fearfully absolute terms, rational and irrational). Yet these supposedly solitary geniuses often admitted themselves that they ‘stood on the shoulders of giants’, Einstein often mentioned his indebtedness to other thinkers, and Darwin’s correspondence was voluminous. Science is more than ever today a collaborative or competitively interactive process. Think also of the mathematician Paul Erdős whose obsessive interest in this most rational of activities led to a record number of collaborations.
These are mostly my own off-the-cuff thoughts. I’ll return to Mercier and Sperber’s writings on the evolution of reasoning and its modular nature next time.
interactional reasoning: cognitive or myside bias?
In the previous post on this topic, I wrote of surprise as a motivator for questioning what we think we know about our world, a shaking of complacency. In fact we need to pay attention to the unexpected, because of its greater potential for harm (or benefit) than the expected. It follows that expecting the unexpected, or at least being on guard for it, is a reasonable approach. Something which disconfirms our expectations, can teach us a lot – it might be the ugly fact that undermines a beautiful theory. So, it’s in our interest to watch out for, and even seek out, information that undermines our current knowledge – though it might be pointed out that it’s rarely the person who puts forward a theory who discovers the inconvenient data that undermines it. The philosopher Karl Popper promoted ‘falsificationism’ as a way of testing and tightening our knowledge, and it’s interesting that the very title of his influential work Conjectures and refutations speaks to an interactive approach towards reasoning and evaluating ideas.
In The enigma of reason, Mercier and Sperber argue that confirmation bias can best be explained by the fact that, while most of our initial thinking about a topic is of the heuristic, fast-and-frugal kind, we then spend a great deal more time, when asked about our reasoning re a particular decision, developing post-hoc justifications. Psychological research has borne this out. The authors suggest that this is more a defence of the self, and of our reputation. They suggest that it’s more of a myside bias than a confirmation bias. Here’s an interesting example of the effect:
Deanna Kuhn, a pioneering scholar of argumentation and cognition, asked participants to take a stand on various social issues – unemployment, school failure and recidivism. Once the participants had given their opinion, they were asked to justify it. Nearly all participants obliged, readily producing reasons to support their point of view. But when they were asked to produce counterarguments to their own view, only 14 percent were consistently able to do so, most drawing a blank instead.
Mercier & Sperber, The enigma of reason, pp213-4
The authors give a number of other examples of research confirming this tendency, including one in which the participants were divided into two groups, one with high political knowledge and another with limited knowledge. The low-knowledge group were able to provide twice as many arguments for their view of an issue as arguments against, but the high-knowledge performed even more poorly, being unable to provide any arguments against. ‘Greater political knowledge only amplified their confirmation bias’. Again, the reason for this appears to be reputational. The more justifications you can find for your views and decisions, the more your reputation is enhanced, at least in your own mind. There seems no obvious benefit in finding arguments against yourself.
All of this seems very negative, and even disturbing. And it’s a problem that’s been known about for centuries. The authors quote a great passage from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum:
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion… draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.
Yet it isn’t all bad, as we shall see in future posts…
Reference
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, The enigma of reason, 2017
interactional reasoning and confirmation bias – introductory
I first learned about confirmation bias, and motivated reasoning, through my involvement with skeptical movements and through the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe (SGU) podcast. As has been pointed out by the SGU and elsewhere, this confirmation bias, this strong tendency to acknowledge and support views, about any topic, that confirm our own, and to dismiss or avoid listening to views from the opposite side, is a feature of liberal and conservative thought in equal measure, as well as being as much a feature of highly credentialed public intellectuals’ thought as it is for the thinking of your average unlearned sot. The problem of confirmation bias, this ‘problem in our heads’, has been blamed for the current social media maladies we supposedly suffer from, creating increasingly partisan echo-chambers in which we allow ourselves, or are ‘driven by clicks’, to be shut off from opposing views and arguments.
But is confirmation bias quite the bogey it’s generally claimed to be? Is it possibly an evolved feature of our reasoning? This raises fundamental questions about the very nature of what we call reason, and how and why it evolved in the first place. Obviously I’m not going to be able to deal with this Big Issue in the space of the short blog pieces I’ve been writing recently, so it’ll be covered by a number of posts. And, just as obviously, my questioning of confirmation bias hasn’t sprung from my own somewhat limited genius – it pains me to admit – but from some current reading material.
The enigma of reason: a new theory of human understanding, by research psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, is a roolly important and timely piece of work, IMHO. So important that I launch into any attempt to summarise it with much trepidation. Anyway, their argument is that reasoning is largely an interactive tool, and evolved as such. They contrast the interactive view of reason with the ‘intellectualist’ view, which begins with Aristotle and his monumentally influential work on logic and logical fallacies. So with that in mind, they tackle the issue of confirmation bias in chapter 11 of their book, entitled ‘Why is reason biased?’
The authors begin the chapter with a cautionary tale, of sorts. Linus Pauling, winner of two Nobel Prizes and regarded by his peers as perhaps the most brilliant biochemist of the 20th century, became notoriously obsessed with the healing powers of vitamin C, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, raising the question as to how such a brilliant mind could get it so wrong. And perhaps a more important question – if such a mind could be capable of such bias, what hope is there for the rest of us?
So the authors look more closely at why bias occurs. Often it’s a matter of ‘cutting costs’, that is, the processing costs of cognition. An example is the use of the ‘availability heuristic’, which Daniel Kahneman writes about in Thinking fast and slow, where he also describes it as WYSIWTI (what you see is what there is). If, because you work in a hospital, you see many victims of road accidents, you’re liable to over-estimate the number of road accidents that occur in general. Or, because most of your friends hold x political views, you’ll be biased towards thinking that more people hold x political views than is actually the case. It’s a kind of fast and lazy form of inferential thinking, though not always entirely unreliable. Heuristics in general are described as ‘fast and frugal’ ways of thinking, which save a lot in cognitive cost while losing a little in reliability. In fact, as research has shown (apparently) sometimes heuristics can be more reliable than pains-taking, time-consuming analysis of a problem.
One piece of research illustrative of fast-and-frugal cognitive mechanisms involves bumble-bees and their strategies to avoid predators (I won’t give the details here). Why not? Reasoning as an evolved mechanism is surely directed first and foremost at our individual survival. To be more preservative than right. It follows that some such mechanism, whether we call it reasoning or not, exists in more or less complex form in more or less complex organisms. It also follows from this reasoning-for-survival outlook, that we pay far more attention to something surprising that crops up in our environment than routine stuff. As the authors point out:
Even one-year-old babies expect others to share their surprise. When they see something surprising, they point toward it to share their surprise with nearby adults. And they keep pointing until they obtain the proper reaction or are discouraged by the adults’ lack of reactivity.
Mercier & Sperber, The enigma of reason, p210
Needless to say, the adults’ reactions in such an everyday situation are crucial for the child – she learns that what surprised her is perhaps not so surprising, or is pleasantly surprising, or is dangerous, etc. All of this helps us in fast-and-frugal thinking from the very start.
Surprises – events and information that violates our expectations – are always worth paying attention to, in everyday life, for our survival, but also in our pursuit of accurate knowledge of the world, aka science. More about that, and confirmation bias, in the next post.
Reference
The enigma of reason: a new theory of human understanding, by Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber, 2017