How are Humans Better?

A new comment thread on an old post discusses the precept that humans are somehow "better" than all other creatures. Sure, as a member of our team, I'd like to think that we are Number One. We've even written books attributed to deities that prove that we are the reason for creation, that the octillions of stars in the universe were all put there just for our amusement. Therefore, the book and its believers maintain, we must be the best thing ever. But as an educated human raised by scientists to find first sources and question suppositions, I wonder: "How are we better?" I have posted before on some of the ways in which our Creator (to use that paradigm) has short changed us. Name any characteristic of which we are proud, and it is easy to find another creature that exceeds our ability. I can only think of one exception: Communicating in persistent symbols. Unlike cetaceans, birds, fellow primates, and others who communicate fairly precisely with sounds, gestures, or chemical signals, we can detach communication from ourselves and transport or even delay it via layers of uncomprehending media (paper, wires, illiterate couriers, etc). We can create physical objects that abstract ideas from one individual and allow the idea to be absorbed by another individual at a later time. It also allows widely separated groups to share a single culture, at least in part. This learned behavior is based on our apparently unique ability to abstract in multiple layers and to abstract to a time well beyond the immediate future. We can take an idea to a series of sounds to a series of static symbols, and back again. Our relatively modern ability to reason abstractly (math, science) evolved from our ability to abstract communications. Even Einstein couldn't hold the proof of E=MC2 in his head. But is this unique ability really sufficient to declare ourselves overall inherently "better"?

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Three political axis

At the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan presents Noah Millman's 3-axis political taxonomy system:

liberal vs. conservative (attitudes toward the individual and authority) left vs. right (attitudes toward social/economic winners and losers) progressive vs. reactionary (attitude toward past and future)
My reaction? We need something like this. We need better labels (than "right" versus "left"), to enable better dialogue.

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Warning stickers for the use of the word “them”

"Language is the source of misunderstandings."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900 - 1944)

As I read the news these days, I am struck by the great power that is exercised by categorizing groups of people into “us” and “them.” The use of the word “them” so often seems like such an innocent and natural thing to do, but look what happens when we divide people into “us” and “them.” We give the benefit of the doubt to those in the “us” group. We take better care of the “us” people. We tend to trust the “us” people, even when we don’t really know who they are. We are rude to those in the “them” group. We tend to not trust those outsiders. We instinctively twist their words to mean something other than what they say, often the opposite of what they meant. We exclude “them. Many of “us” feel hostility toward the “them” people, ranging from annoyance to things much more terrible. Many of “us” feel justified treating “them” people as though they were farm animals, or worse. Maybe this tendency comes from ancient biological roots. Regardless, we need to learn to see around our own corner--we could do so much better than we tend to do these days. And perhaps some might argue that it is not the choice of a word that divides us, but that the word choice merely recognizes pre-linguistic instincts. To the extent that this is true, it is my belief that the choice of the word "them" locks in such pre-linguistic tendencies, making them seem more stark, more real. This subtle early linguistic move of categorizing people into the “them” category has great power to harm, power of which we are usually not aware when we make that quick initial decision to place people into the outgroup category. The dangers sticking someone into the “outgroup” is well known to psychologists. On the streets, though, we make “us” versus “them” categorizations without much thought, and then down the road, sometimes way down the road, many of us pay a big price for our thoughtless choices to use such a powerful word. The choice of the word “them” is often careless and even thoughtless, but great evil can result. That’s the thing about the greatest evils of the world: the greatest evils don’t usually result from conscious intent or malice. Rather, they usually result from lack of thought, lack of conscious attention. I’ve written about these concerns before—for example, I once suggested that all humans should refer to themselves as “Africans,” an scientifically-justified categorization that might avoid much of the conflict we now see between non-existent “races” of people. And see here. I suspect that much of our social distress, “racial” and cultural, is a result of failing to use the word “them” with the care it deserves. Here’s what I interpret to be another recent example. Perhaps the word “them” should always come with some sort of warning sticker (I haven’t figured out the logistics, of course). The warning would go something like this:

Careless use of the word "them" often divides humanity into ingroups and outgroups, setting the stage for highly polarized conflict, which often escalates into violence. “Them” is a powerful work that should always be used with great care.

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We need to create a new word.

I'm looking for a word, but I don't think any existing word has the meaning I'm looking to express. Hence, I believe that we need to create a new word. There isn’t any rule that we can’t create new words, of course. It's done all the time (Shakespeare did far more than his share). The way to create a neologism is simply to announce it and then hope it goes viral. The concept I would like to express is not simple—it is a compound somewhat-conflicting concept. Of course, individual words can richly express compound ideas. Take, for instance, the Chinese word for “crisis,” which is often thought to consist of two characters that stand for danger and opportunity (though I’ve recently learned that this delightful story seems to be a myth). Or consider the German word “schadenfreude,” which in pop culture means “'shameful joy', or taking pleasure in the suffering of others. But I digress. We need a new word for the following concept:

Short-sighted dangerous action motivated by instinctual kindness.

I saw this situation in action two days ago, while I was driving the green car northbound on a four-lane road (see the image below). The pink truck had come to a stop ahead of me and to my right, in front of a hotel. As I found out (suddenly) the truck had stopped to allow the yellow car make a left turn out of the hotel driveway to go southbound. well-meaning-and-dangerous The yellow car popped right out in front of me and I had to slam on my brakes (no collision resulted). This is a stunt that you see every so often—a tall stopped vehicle waving the shorter vehicle to blindly drive out into traffic on road having more than two lanes. I have worked as an attorney on a couple traffic cases like this. In one case of those cases, a well-intentioned driver slowed down on a road with two lanes in each direction (failed to take the right of way) in order to wave a child across the street in front of him. He did it out of kindness. The child was killed by a car that didn't see child until the child stepped out into the second lane of traffic. Regarding my traffic incident two days ago, the truck should have taken its right-of-way thereby allowing the yellow car to fend for itself. Doing this would have seemed less considerate, of course, but it would certainly have been a better option than the short-sighted dangerous action that the truck driver took. Therefore, if you are reading this, let me know whether you have any ideas for a new word to capture all of these ideas: Short-sighted dangerous action motivated by instinctual kindness. Or let me know if there is an existing word that has this meaning. Once we lock onto a word with this meaning, I’ll use it every day, I assure you. It would have applications in situations too numerous to fathom, most of them having nothing to do with traffic. It might become my second-favorite word of all time (the first is “paltering”).

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Reminder that “struggle for existence” is a conceptual metaphor.

In the November, 2009 edition of Nature (available only to subscribers online) Daniel Todes has written an article entitled "Global Darwin: Contempt for Competition." Todes points out that although Darwin's idea of a "struggle for existence" made sense to his English peers, other biologists from other countries rejected this metaphor. Todes focuses on the alternative viewpoint embraced by many Russian biologists. In On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin noted that "there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms." Through this quote, Darwin recognized that he was using "struggle for existence" in a metaphorical sense. Darwin had been urged to adopt this metaphor by Russel Wallace, who feared that natural selection "seemed to personify a perceptive and forward thinking selector, or god." Todes holds that Darwin's metaphor was common sense to those "who were living on a crowded island with a capitalist economy and highly individualist culture." Russian biologists lived in a very different place, however, which led them to "reject Darwin's Malthusian metaphor." Russians did not tend to explore densely populated tropical environments. Rather, they tended to investigate "a vast underpopulated continental plain . . . it was largely empty Siberian expanse in which overpopulation was rare and only the struggle of organisms against a harsh environment was dramatic." Todes points out the Russian political system also contrasted sharply with that of Darwin's England. In Russia, capitalism was only weakly developed, and the social classes stressed cooperation rather than individual struggle, one against the other. In fact, many Russian political commentators "reviled Malthus as an apologist for predatory capitalism and the soulless individualism." This context for the Russian research led to (many successful) studies in which the focus was "mutual aid" more than "struggle for existence." [more . . . ]

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