9/12

I didn't write anything for yesterday's commemoration.  Many others, most far better suited to memorializing the day, said a great deal.  My paltry mutterings would add little to what is, really, a personal day for most of us.  Like all the big anniversary events, the "where were you when" aspect makes it personal and maybe that's the most important part, I don't know. Instead it occurred to me to say something about the element of the disaster that puzzles most of us, even while most of us exhibit the very trait that disturbs us deeply in this context.  One of the most common questions asked at the time and still today is in the top 10 is: how could those men do that? Meaning, of course, how could they abandon what we consider personal conscience and common humanity to perpetrate horrible destruction at the cost of their own lives. The simple answer is also the most complex:  they were following a leader. I'm going to string together what may seem unrelated observations now to make a larger point and I will try to corral it all together by the end to bring it to that point. Firstly, with regards to the military, there are clear-cut lines of obligation set forth, the chief one being a soldier's oath to defend the constitution.  There is a code of conduct consistent with that and we have seen many instances where an officer has elected to disobey orders he or she deems illegal or immoral.  There is a tradition of assuming that not only does a soldier have a right to act upon conscience, but that there is an institutional duty to back that right up.  The purpose of making the oath one to the constitution (rather than to, say, the president or even to congress) first is to take the personal loyalty issue out of the equation. To underline this a bit more, a bit of history.  The German army prior to WWII was similarly obligated to the state.  German soldiers gave an oath to protect Germany and obey its laws.  Hitler changed that, making it an oath to him, personally, the Fuhrer.  (He left in place a rule explicitly obligating the German soldier to disobey illegal or immoral orders.) Unfortunately, human nature is not so geared that people find it particularly easy to dedicate themselves to an abstract without there also being a person representing it.  (We see this often in small ways, especially politically, when someone who has been advocating what is on its own a good idea suddenly comes under a cloud of suspicion.  Not only do people remove their support of that person but the idea is tainted as well.  People have difficulty separating out the idea from the person.  The reverse is less common, that a bad idea taints a popular leader.)  Dedicating yourself to supporting the constitution sounds simple in a civics class, but in real life people tend to follow people.  (Consider the case of Ollie North, whose dedication to Reagan trumped his legal responsibility to uphold the constitution and its legally binding requirement that he obey congress.) [More . . . ]

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Unhealthy remembering of 9/11.

I'm all for remembering, but only as long as remembering is emotionally healthy and oriented to an optimistic future. About 15 years ago, I met a young man in a civil war museum in Virginia. Unprovoked, he stated that he was angry at "the North" because the North had defeated the South--and his great great great [great?] grandfather had  "fought bravely for the South. He was visibly angry as he told me these things. It was pathetic to see someone so consumed and defined the American Civil War. His way of remembering had trapped him in an endless cycle of anger. In an article in Harper's Magazine (August 2011) titled "After 9/11: The Limits of Remembrance," David Rieff has expressed concern that many Americans are "remembering" 9/11 in accordance with the official George W. Bush explanation from 2001: We were attacked "because the terrorists hate our freedoms--our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." This form of "remembrance" has no room for any possibility that the attack was provoked, even in part, in response to the constant meddling in the Middle East by the United States, going back at least as far as 1953's "

Continue ReadingUnhealthy remembering of 9/11.

Will China’s moonshots rejuvenate America’s respect for science?

China has already sent two unmanned lunar probes to the moon, and China has bold plans to send several astronauts to the moon by 2017. While those Chinese astronauts are on the moon, they plan to mine helium 3, an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion.  We can assume that when Chinese astronauts step onto the moon, video cameras will be bringing beautiful images back to the world, which will then applaud China’s great technological achievement, to America’s begrudging dismay. Thus, China is about to a space exploring nation in a dramatic and visible way. This is exactly what American needs. Why? China’s highly visible lunar program comes at a time when American is dramatically cutting its space ambitions (including the Shuttle program). America is being subjected to systematic campaigns disparaging science, much of it driven by religious leaders, corporate disinformation and government attempts to manipulate data.  At the same time, anti-science religion is thriving in many American classrooms. The United States is essentially a warmongering nation; we lurch from war to war. Americans apparently need an enemy to make sense of things. For us to get our heads back into science and math, we apparently need a math and science “enemy,” someone to intellectually challenge our standing as a technologically "advanced" nation. [More . . . ]

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On celebrating the death of Osama Bin Laden

In the New York Times, Jonathan Haidt has invoked group selection theory to explain why so many people outwardly celebrated the death of Osama Bin Laden.  To understand why the reaction was natural and predictable rather than primal and boorish, Haidt pointed out that we are more than "selfish creatures, able to act altruistically only when it will benefit our kin or our future selves." We often do function like this, but we, unique among primates (and akin to bees and ants) simultaneously function intensely at a second higher level.

This [higher level] competition favors groups that can best come together and act as one. Only a few species have found a way to do this. Bees, ants and termites are the best examples. Their brains and bodies are specialized for working as a team to accomplish nearly miraculous feats of cooperation like hive construction and group defense. Early humans found ways to come together as well, but for us unity is a fragile and temporary state. We have all the old selfish programming of other primates, but we also have a more recent overlay that makes us able to become, briefly, hive creatures like bees.
As Emile Durkheim pointed out, humans don't merely act on narrowly focused selfishness; rather, they are subject to emotions that "dissolve the petty, small-minded self. They make people feel that they are a part of something larger and more important than themselves." Human beings can be knitted together through a benign "collective effervescence" that goes by the name of "patriotism," which Haidt distinguishes from "nationalism,"
[T]he view that one’s own country is superior to other countries and should therefore be dominant. Nationalism is generally found to be correlated with racism and with hostility toward other countries, but patriotism by itself is not."

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Racist Reflex or ?

A 21 year-old man was released without charges after being arrested near the Delmar Loop MetroLink in St. Louis on Saturday. The police officer who arrested the 21-year-old experienced a minor head injury. The St. Louis Dispatch and KMOV report that the officer was breaking up a fight that allegedly drew a crowd of between 50 and 100 people, including many teenagers. In response to the “incident” and complaints that teens who are “not from University City,” are “wandering,” “roaming” and “brushing up against customers,” along the Delmar Loop, a Tuesday meeting was called between Delmar Loop business owners, representatives from Mayor Slay’s office, University City officials and representatives of Washington University. (Washington University’s Office of General Counsel denied any involvement in this meeting). Several proposals emerged from the meeting. These include “lowering the city’s curfew to 6 p.m.,” rounding up teenagers to “let them sit in a paddy wagon for three hours,” adding a police substation to process them and “closing the Loop’s MetroLink station early on Fridays and Saturdays.” To curb the influx of “unruly” young adults, the University City manager promised “active enforcement of all ordinances.”

Continue ReadingRacist Reflex or ?