(subtitle for post: why some archangels get to be the voice of god and some don’t.)

I subscribe to Powell’s Books Daily Review email, which I usually ignore– I’ve been trying to have a more balanced information diet lately, which generally means that I take a small nibble of lots of pieces of news instead of diving in deeply to any single thing. Today’s review was on Phillip Zimbardo’s new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

This is one of those books that has a stupid name but describes something really cool (other relevant example: “goldendoodle” to describe the cross of a golden retriever and a poodle.) My high school psychology teacher had a thing for Zimbardo, he showed up all over the place in our curriculum, and since I had a little bit of a thing for her, Zimbardo has stuck around in my mind. He’s most famous for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment, where ordinary people were divided up into the roles of guards and prisoners and who took to those roles in a way that became downright frightening. For more information on the Stanford Prison Experiment, you should employ one of the following information-gathering techniques:

1. Google “Stanford Prison Experiment“. Look at that, I provided the link for you. All you have to do is click on it. This blog is all about making you feel like you’re saving time as it encourages you to waste even more.
2. Read The Lucifer Effect. Probably a good idea to take the jacket cover off and replace it with a cover with a cooler title, like “The DaVinci Code”.
3. Watch the My Big Fat Greek Rush Week episode of Veronica Mars.

There are two conflicting ideas of what makes people evil– situationalism (anyone can do anything given the right circumstance) and dispositionism (some people are just evil, dammit.) The Stanford Prison Experiment seems to indicate that situationalism is largely correct, but the book (review) indicates that it’s not that simple (it never is)– even amongst the guards, there were certain guards who were more sadistic than others. It seems like the real cause is a combination of some sort of internal threshold for sadism combined with the situation at hand– there are some heroic people out there who would never torture another human being, but they are few and far between.

The book seems relevant to me in a way that it doesn’t seem to touch on explicitly– the current debate over torturing detainees in guantanamo, particularly amongst the republican presidential candidates. It’s like we get to see the large-scale distribution of people’s internal thresholds for sadism in an intense and yet distant sort of situation. One of the key themes of the book is that people aren’t good at figuring out that an authority figure has made a mistake or lost the moral compass, and so tend to follow directions from them anyway, and I wonder if that’s what we’re seeing here. All it takes is one respected figure with a low sadism threshold, and he can get the vast majority of other people to fall in line behind him.

I think a large part of the problem is that we, as a people, don’t have enough skin in the game when it comes to questions about torture and the death penalty. It’s all too easy to dehumanize someone by labeling them as ‘evil’ and then doing whatever you want to them. So I think it’s time we changed the stakes. I think every citizen should be randomly assigned to a prisoner held in guantanamo or to a convict in the prison system, and in the event that the ‘enemy combatant’ or prisoner is proven to be innocent of whatever he was charged with, everything that happened to him during his confinement is revisited on his assigned citizen. I don’t think we really do justice to these people when we, as a society, say “hey, my bad” and just let them out the door, sometimes with a little bit of money as an apology. I’d like us to make the apology much more personal. And I’d like to believe that if we knew that we or someone we loved could be sent to prison at any time, we would do a much better job of treating prisoners fairly and humanely.

Of course that’s idealistic of me– the practical effect of such a system would be to ensure that no prisoner ever had a chance of being shown to be innocent after the fact, or of ever releasing anyone from guantanamo.

(p.s.- I hope you enjoy the use of capital letters in this post, part of my newfound effort to stop torturing your eyes.)

Labels: philosophy, book reviews

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i had an especially good teacher for intro to philosophy– tom polger, who was a graduate student at the time. i’m tempted to pick up his book, natural minds– even though i’m not sympathetic to identity theory, i’d like to give tom yet another chance to change my mind.

at the time, i was starting to wrap my head around ideas like non-euclidean geometry and the axiom of choice, and i was curious about how far people had gone in terms of exploring the limits of logic and language. figuring that no one takes things father than philosophers, i asked tom if anyone had ever tried to ‘axiomatize the world’, and he took me to his office and showed me his copy of wittgenstein’s tractatus logicio-philosophicus. the title is as long as the book is short– there are seven primary propositions, most of which have numbered subpropositions that are commentary on the primary propositions (this map shows the tree structure of the book).

i was thinking about the tractatus the other day– not so much as philosophy, but as a piece of literature. google searches for various combinations of “deconstruction”, “tractatus”, and “wittgenstein” didn’t turn up anything, which may just indicate that i don’t really get what deconstruction is all about. the brevity of the tractatus makes reading it feel like going through an advanced math proof, where enormous amounts of complex context and background information is referenced in passing. and yet, one of the primary arguments of the book is that philosophy is not like science or math, but rather that philosophical problems and questions are simple misuses of language, such that after you finish the book and understand it, you should throw it away because everything it says is nonsense. it seems like such an odd way to write a philosophy text that argues that philosophy is just a silly misunderstanding– i suppose the idea is that if you’re going to spew nonsense, it’s best to spew as little as possible.

i’ve been toying with the idea of doing a cover of some piece of writing using the literary style of the tractatus. sean suggested “there’s a monster at the end of this book”. right now, i’m thinking “animal farm” would make a good candidate. i’d also like to write up a qad rails app that would facilitate the reading and writing of tractatus-esque pieces of literature. right now, this is all brain crack. it would help if the next time we talk, you ask me about how this little project is going, and then berate me when i say that i haven’t really started it yet. and don’t let me off the hook when i try to claim that i’m busy with finals, that’s total bs.

Labels: math, literature, philosophy

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i spent the summer after my sophomore year in college working on a research project at carnegie mellon in pittsburgh. it was a powerful experience for me– both in terms of my evolution from a mathematician into an engineer (thank you matlab, for being such a beautiful language) and in terms of my emotional devolution from human being to multicellular automaton.

i was coming to pittsburgh from a pretty bad breakup, and as is usually the case in these situations, i kicked off a personal renaissance– devoting alot of time to good books and good music (this is about the time i really ‘heard’ radiohead for the first time, thanks to david and matt). one great source of (free) reading material i discovered was bibliomania, where i read of human bondage by w. somerset maugham.

(aside on language: i feel like you can tell good writing because it ’sounds right’ in your head. i’m sure everyone has a different preference for what sort of writing sounds best to them, but for me, the only person who has ever sounded better than w. somerset maugham is virginia woolf. even his name rolls off your tongue like buttercream.)

the book follows the life of a guy in britain who is born with a club foot as he grows up and makes his way in the world. much of the story focuses on his relationship with mildred, this generally horrible waitress who he is hopelessly in love with and how she almost destroys his life. well, i guess not ‘almost’– she does destroy his life, he just happens to recover.

the timeframe of the story is 1800s britain, and the ideas of the enlightenment and modernity have a strong influence on the main character– as a young adult, he commits himself to living his life by reason and rationality.  he fails miserably at this, as his passion for mildred generally overrides his better judgement.  he only really gets his life together when he recognizes that all of his decisions are driven by emotion and he stops denying their primacy.

i wrote most of this post before reading that piece on spinoza i linked to below.  i had originally planned to write a paragraph here on how attempting to live your life by reason and rationality is itself an emotionally-driven decision– it’s a decision that you make when you’re terrified of your emotions.  i referred to myself above as a multicellular automaton, implying that i somehow killed off my internal emotional life over the past couple of years in order to avoid pain.  but now i’m wondering if i didn’t just prefer the emotional experience derived from abstract thought to the emotional experience of human interaction.  this makes me feel better– the idea that i might not just have been running away in a blind panic, that there was a natural place for me to go and feel at home, even if i wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time.

Labels: literature, philosophy

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i once took an iq test that told me i thought like spinoza, but i never really followed up by reading anything about him– until just now. this conversation on spinoza is fascinating.

update: this line from the piece is just too good not to include here, so that i might remember it for all time–

You want to cure yourself of being human, buddy? You must be one hell of a freaking mess inside to think you’ve got to go to that kind of length just so that you don’t have to take a good hard look at yourself.

But then, Spinoza would respond (not even deigning to address the slight to his innards): What’s the alternative, my friend? A world constantly shattered by jihads of one form or another?

Labels: philosophy

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