Archive for January 2008

‘Vancouver was a part of the United States where the people were so clever that they never paid taxes to Washington’.

-Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love (p.30)

// The same could also be said of Toronto

From the intro to Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, by Derek Nystrom and Kent Puckett, Sept 1998:

The sort of intellectual Rorty prefers, then, is one who makes herself familiar with as many vocabularies and language games as possible by acquainting herself with as many novels and ethnographies as she can get her hands on. In doing so, this intellectual becomes an “ironist” about her own vocabulary, recognizing it as a contingent product of the time and place in which she was born. Furthermore, Rorty asserts, in his desired post-metaphysical culture, “novels and ethnographies which sensitize one to the pain of those who do not speak our language must do the job which demonstrations of a common human nature were supposed to do” (94). That is, the job of building human solidarity. Hence, we might be able to characterize Rorty’s pragmatist response to the “Nazi question” as consisting of two answers. First, one doesn’t refute Nazis, or any other world-view; one offers a redescription of the world which makes their description look untenable. Second, and Rorty is clear that this consists more of a hope than a guarantee, the properly ironist intellectual, with her wide range of acquaintance, will have read too many novels and ethnographies to fall for a vocabulary which imagines itself to have some privileged relationship to Truth, and which ignores the pain of others.

Yet Rorty also hesitates to claim too much for the political uses of either redescription or ironist self- consciousness. In fact, he notes that “redescription often humiliates” (90); that is, the act of re-casting the world in the terms of a new language game can often have cruel consequences, as the one redescribing the world overwhelms and makes irrelevant the descriptions and language games upon which others had based their lives (which, as Rorty explains, is what O’Brien does to Winston Smith in 1984, and what Humbert does to Lolita in Lolita). Indeed, Rorty cautions that while the desire to craft a new final vocabulary which redescribes the world apart from the language games one inherited is a central activity of ironist self-creation, it is also one which is largely irrelevant to public life. Thus, he suggests that the ironist intellectual enact a kind of cognitive public/private split: that one’s “radical and continuing doubts about [one’s] final vocabulary” (72), and the ensuing attempt to redescribe the world as an act of self-creation, be kept private, while one’s public life remains dedicated to the liberal hope of diminishing cruelty and expanding human solidarity. In short, Rorty’s model intellectual is what he calls a liberal ironist: one who continues to defend and support principles of liberal hope, despite their lack of metaphysical guarantees, by “distinguish[ing] between redescription for private and for public purposes” (91).

MacBook Air

“I heard through the grape vines that the Macbook Air designers upon the creation of the product called Steve and asked that he returned the time of their lives they wasted creating this laptop for his indulgence.”

A comment to the interview with Steve Jobs which appeared in yesterday’s NYT

Morgan vs. Ridley

A fuller consideration of the relationship between Matt Ridley’s Nature via Nurture and Richard Morgan’s Black Man: The selection from Nature via Nurture which inspired Richard Morgan to write Black Man (as described in the novel’s acknowledgment), from pages 34-35:

[Describing the domestication of foxes (selected for tameness and essentially turned into dogs) this is mapped onto the domestication of wolves, Matt Ridley continues]:’The surprise was that merely by selecting tameness, Belyaev had accidentally achieved all the same features that the original domesticator of the wolf had gotten – and that was probably some race of the wolf itself, which had bred into itself the ability not to run away too readily from ancient humans’ rubbish dumps when disturbed. The implication is that some promoter change had occurred which affected not one but many genes. Indeed, it is fairly obvious that in both cases the timing of the development had been altered so that the adult animals retained many of the features and habits of pups: the floppy ears, they short snout, the smaller skull, and the playful behaviour.

What seems to happen in these cases is that young animals do not yet show either fear or aggression, traits that develop last during the forward growth of the limbic system at the base of the brain. So the most likely way for evolution to produce a friendly or tame animal is to stop brain development prematurely. The effect is a smaller brain and especially a smaller ‘area 13’, a late-developing part of the limbic system that seems to have the job of disinhibiting adult emotional reactions such as fear and aggression. Intriguingly, such a taming process seems to have happened naturally in bonobos since their separation from the chimpanzee more than 2 million years ago. For its size the bonobo not only has a small head but also is less aggressive and retains several juvenile features into adulthood, including a white anal tail tuft, high-pitched calls, and unusual female genitals. Bonobos have unusually small area 13s. (Footnote here: K Semendefrei, E Armstrong, A Schleicher, K Zilles, & GW Hosen: `Limbic frontal cortex in hominoids: A comparative study of area 13` American Journal of Physical Anthropology 1998 106:129-55)

So do human beings. Surprisingly, the fossil record suggests that there has been a rather steep decline in the size of the human brain during the past 15,000 years, partly but not wholly reflecting a shrinking body that seems to have accompanied the arrival of dense and ‘civilized’ human settlements. This followed several million years of more or less steady increases in brain size. In the Mesolithic (around 50,000 years ago) the human brain averaged 1468cc (in females) and 1567cc (in males). Today the numbers have fallen to 1210 cc/1248cc and even allowing for some reduction in body weight, this seems like a step decline. Perhaps there has been some recent taming of the species. If so, how? Richard Wrangham believes that once human beings became sedentary, living in permanent settlements, they could no longer tolerate antisocial behavior and they began to banish, imprison, or execute especially difficult individuals. In the past in highland New Guinea, more than one in ten of all adult deaths were by the execution of ‘witches’ (mostly men). This might have meant killing the more aggressive and impulsive – and hence more developmentally mature and bigger-brained – people. ( Footnote here: RW Wrangham, D Pilbeam, B Hare: `Convergent paedomorphism in bonobos, domesticated animals, and humans: The role of selection for reduced aggresion` (unpublished); related: page: 87, Turkheimer’s quote: ‘Criminality, for instance, is quite highly heritable: adopted children end up with a criminal record which looks a lot more like that of their biological parents than like that of their foster parents. Why? Not because there are specific genes for criminality, but because their are specific personalities that get into trouble with the law and those personalities are heritable. As Eric Turkheimer … puts it, ‘Does anyone really suppose that unintelligent, unattractive, greedy, impulsive, emotionally unstable, or alcoholic people are no more likely than anyone else to become criminals or that any of these characteristics could be completely independent of genetic endowment?’ [sourced to E Turkheimer, `Heritability and biological explanation` Psychology Review 105:782-91, 1998]).

// Comment: What I find intriguing about this is the suggestion that aggression is mature behavior. Mature biologically anyway; I have for been thinking for a couple of years that rejecting violence was mature, but this then is mature as defined by civilization: that we willingly reject violence in this regard, inasmuch the same way that we also modify our behavior to fit into society (like the use of toilets, the behaviors around sex, the manners of meal time).

But here is also the suggestion that biological expressions are connected to the experience of fear; here, civilization provides less fear, and thus aggression appears less necessary.

Contrast this with Morgan’s version, from the end of Black Man:

‘Look, the fucking cudlips, they talk such a great fight about equality, democratic accountability, freedom of expression. But what does it come down to in the end? Ortiz. Norton. Roth. Plausible, power grubbing-men and women with a smile for the electors, the common fucking touch, and the same old agenda they’ve had since they wiped us out the first time around. And every cudlip fucker just lines right up for that shit.’

[…] Carl nodded and stared at the grey matt surface of the weapon in his hands.
‘But not us, right?’
‘Fucking right, not us. […] You know how you breed contemporary humans from a thirteen? You fucking domesticate them. Same thing they did to wolves to make them into dogs. Same thing they did with fox farming in Siberia back in the 1900s. You select for fucking tameness, Marsalis. For lack of aggression, and for compliance. And you know how to get that?’
[…]
‘Tell you how to get that,’ the dying thirteen rasped. ‘How you get a modern human. You get it by taking immature individuals, individuals showing the characteristics of fucking puppies. Area thirteen, man. It’s one of the last parts of the human brain to develop, the final stages of human maturity. The part they bred out 20,000 years ago because it was too dangerous to their fucking crop-growing plans. We aren’t the variant, Marsalis – we’re the last true humans. It’s the cudlips that are the fucking twists. […] Modern humans are fucking infantilized adolescent cut-offs. Is it any wonder they do what they’re told?’
‘Yeah, so did we,’ Carl said somberly. ‘Remember.’
‘They tried to contain us.’ Onbekend shifted over onto his side […] ‘But we’ll beat that. We will, we’re fucking wired to beat it. We’re their last hope, Marsalis. We’re what’s going to resuce them from the Ortizes and the Nortons and the Roths. We’re the only thing that scares those people, because we won’t comply, we won’t stay infantile and go out and play nice in their plastic fucking world.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Yeah, I do fucking say so. […] We’re the long walk back to hunter-gatherer egalitarianism, Marsalis. We’re going to show those fuckers what freedom really means. (p543-545)

// Comment: I’m currently under the impression that Morgan wrote this first and then constructed the novel to lead up to it. But that’s just an impression. Could be wrong.

Ortiz was a VIP, set to become head of the United Nations. The head of COLIN (the Colony Initiative) he had been shot in an attempted assassination and was in a hospital when confronted by Carl, who killed him in a scene which I keep thinking about as an example of power; that level of self-justification:

‘Tom,’ Ortiz says, ‘I have a secure nomination for Secretary General. There will be no dispute, it’s decided at all the levels that matter. I will hold the post by this time next year, if you let me live.’ The pressed palms raised, almost like prayer.’Don’t you understand, either of you, that this is what I have been trying to safeguard? You think this was about me personally? It was not, please believe me. I have spent the last six years of my life trying to bend the Colony Initiative closer to a rapprochement with the UN. To reach agreements on Martian law and co-operative governance. To leash corporate greed and harness it to a European social model. To break down the barriers between us and the Chinese instead of building walls and fences. I’ve done all that in the hope that we don’t have to take our insular nation state insanities to the first new world we’ve reached and build the same stupid hate-filled structure from the ground up all over again.’Ortiz’s face was flushed and animated, passion briefly imitating health while it filled him. Carl watched the COLIN director as if he were something behind glass in an insect vivarium. See the humans. Watch the patriarchal male justify his acts to his fellows and to himself.

‘One more year,’ said Ortiz urgently. ‘That’s all I need, and I can continue the work form the other side of the fence. I can restructure the idiot posturing in the general assembly, force reforms, make promises, all built on the work I’ve already done here with COLIN. That’s what was under threat from this stupid petty blackmail out of the past – not some quick cash that I could have filtered through a COLIN account for less than the cost of a single nanorack elevator. That’s not why I did this. I did it for the future, a hope for the future. Isn’t that worth the sacrifice? It was a handful of used-up, counterfeit lives, tired, superannuated men and women of violence hiding from their own pasts, set in the balance against the hope of a better future for all of us.’

[…]
‘You’re full of shit, Ortiz. […] You didn’t have a problem with using these men and women of violence when you were running Scorpion Response.’
‘No, that’s true, Tom. But it was a different time. You have to remember that. And back then, those men and women themselves would gladly have given their lives in the causes I’m talking about, because they also believed in a better future.’
Tom Norton: A better fucking future? And what exactly was your bright new future going to be, you motherfucker? Covert ops in other people’s countries. Corrupt corporate practice? A genetic concentration camp in Wyoming?
[…]
Ortiz: I …was… young. Foolish. I have no defense. But I believed what we were doing was right, at the time. You have to understand what it was like. In the West we were losing the edge, terrified of the gene research that was needed to be done, held back by moral panic and ignorance. China was doing work that our universities and technology institutes should have been pursuing. They still are. There is a future on Mars, Mr. Marsalis, but it’s not a human future the way Jacobsen and UNGLA understood it. You’ve been there, you know what it’s like. We will need the variants, we will have to become a variant of some sort if we plan to stay. The Chinese understand this, that’s why they haven’t stopped their programs. I only sought to equalize the pressure, so when they explosion, the realization finally came, it would not rupture society apart from the differential.

[…the conversation continues until Carl Marsalis lifts Ortiz from his wheel-chair to lay him out on the floor, preparing to snap his neck. He says to him …]

Carl Marsalis: I know you Ortiz. I’ve seen your kind making your speeches from every pulpit and podium on two planets, and you never fucking change. You lie to the cudlips and you lie to yourself so they’ll believe you better, and when the dying starts, you claim regret and you offer justification. But in the end, you do it all because you think you’re right, and you do not care. If you really suspected Jeff Norton, if you knew what kind of man he was, you could have squeezed him for the names, dealt with whoever it was – ‘ (pages 501-506)

…More talk, until Carl snaps his neck. The alarms attached to Ortiz’s body go off.

Soft, chiming sirens went off everywhere in the suite, the wail of distressed cudlip society. Man of substance down. Rally, gather, form a mob.The beast is out.