Can you tolerate NAMBLA?

image courtesty of the Federal Art Project, via Wikimedia Commons You think you're open-minded? What if the North American Man-Boy Love Association wanted to distribute a newsletter in your town? What if they wanted to hold a local parade celebrating pederasty? I am currently studying social psychology in graduate school, and I'm particularly interested in political psychology. One of my present research interests is political tolerance. "Political tolerance" refers to individuals' willingness to extend equal civil liberties to unpopular groups. When political scientists and psychologists measure political tolerance, they often probe individuals for their ability to withstand the most offensive, outlandish groups and speech possible. For example, a liberal-minded person may be asked whether they would be willing to allow a rally for the Klu Klux Klan or some extremist, militaristic group. Paradoxically, a truly tolerant person must be willing to allow racially intolerant speech. Political tolerance plays a cornerstone role in functioning democracies (at least, we think so). If voters can strip away the civil liberties of disliked political groups, those liberties lay on precarious ground indeed. If we cannot tolerate the words of anarchists or members of the Westboro Baptist Church, then we do not really believe in the boundlessness of speech at all. Academics say as much. In reality, voters are not so tolerant.

Continue ReadingCan you tolerate NAMBLA?

Judicial Temperment

Judges are supposed to stay above the emotional fray. They are supposed to apply the law even-handedly. The attached court Order (which I recently found in some of my old paperwork) is a strikingly honest admission by one judge that he would have been unable to maintain judicial composure in a particular case.  It's an Order recusing himself from the case of a man that had been accused and convicted of murdering a police officer as that officer slept. This is not a case I handled, but it was a case of which I was aware.  I once met this judge (back in the 1980's), and he was a generally pleasant man. A clerk from the Phelps County, Missouri Court verified for me that this case was actually handled in that Court. I'm posting this Order signed by Judge John Brackman of Franklin County, Missouri, because I find it to be a stark reminder that most judges maintain their composure, despite what they might be feeling inside.  This Order is one of those glimpses inside one judge's psyche, reminding us that judges are capable feeling strong emotions, which reminds me of this earlier post on emotions and decision-making. brackman-order-1

Continue ReadingJudicial Temperment

Whence Yellow Pages?

A friend mentioned the "yellow pages" to me today, and it occurred to me that I haven't used "The Yellow Pages" for at least five years. I can't remember when I last even saw a copy of the Yellow Pages (until today when I dug out a copy from under a desk). For many years, whenever I've needed a phone number or other information regarding a business, I've used Internet tools. It didn't happen all at once that I stopped relying on Yellow Pages, so I didn't notice any particular date when when it happened. Imagine that the phone companies announced five years ago that there wouldn't be any more Yellow Pages--we might have noticed our discontinued use. But human cognition is often blind to incremental changes. I posted on this topic earlier, using the example of tigers. There are very few tigers living in the wild. Almost all of the tigers of the world are now living in captivity. Very few people were conscious of this change, because it was gradual, but it undeniably happened. If it had happened all at once (with a headline screaming "95% of the wild tigers are gone!") we would have noticed and perhaps reacted. This reminds me of a book by Howard Kurtz (Media Circus), where he suggested that the biggest story of the 20th Century was that millions of African Americans were moving from the rural South to the Urban North, but no one noticed because no one faxed a press release to the news media. In fact, studies show that we are not even able to notice relatively fast moving gradual changes. Because of this human cognitive limitation, important things constantly fall beneath our human attentional radar. Yes, we do notice when an airplane crashes and kills 100 people because headlines are blasted at us and we can perceive the crash site from a single vantage point. But we don't react to drawn out disasters of much greater magnitude. For instance, where are the headlines announcing that 40,000 Americans needlessly die of colon cancer every year because they don't get colonoscopies? That's 110 people who die every day. But they don't die at the same place and there is no crash site to provide dramatic video for news shows. How much else of importance gets entirely ignored because there aren't dramatic photos? Trends are often invisible, whether they are good trends or bad trends. Whether there is a decrease in the standard of living or whether many of us dramatically increase the amounts of corn fructose we eat, many trends are difficult to notice without mathematics and graphs. Most important trends are invisible unless we are vigilant and comfortable with mathematics. Perhaps this should be a word of caution for a society that is heavily afflicted with innumeracy; bad things can happen on our watch yet we might be oblivious. Things like the deterioration of our education system, the increase in xenophobia, the fact that many of us seem to operate burdened with attention deficits, the skyrocketing rate of diabetes, stagnation of wages for several decades, and who knows what else. We face many huge challenges as individuals and as a society. Are we trying to shake a bad personal habit such as overeating? Are we trying to lessen our dependence on oil? Being cognizant of our obliviousness to incremental change can help us by reminding us that we shouldn't be discouraged with tiny sporadic steps of progress when that is all we can muster. It doesn't necessarily take a sprinter to make significant progress. as long as we're going in the right direction. We should keep up our efforts even when it seems like we're not getting much of anywhere, because small steps in the right direction always eventually prevail, even though our progress is often invisible until we've almost arrived.

Continue ReadingWhence Yellow Pages?

Tortucans and the Problem of Truthful Perception

The actor Dan Blocker, who played Hoss on the old television show Bonanza, suffered through an incident once that is by turns charming and chilling. He was at a public event, signing autographs, when an older lady came up to him and started complaining that the cook on the Ponderosa, Hop Sing, wasn’t feeding them right. “When you get back there,” she insisted, “you tell you pa that you need to get someone who knows how to cook good American food, feed you all properly.” Blocker, who by all accounts was the epitome of a gentleman, explained to her after a couple of minutes of this that there was no Ponderosa, that Bonanza was a tv show—fiction—and that he was just an actor playing a part. “Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, “I know that. But really you must tell Ben to fire that Chinaman and get a real cook before all you boys dry up and blow away.” She was absolutely convinced of the reality of the Cartwrights, the “fact” of the Ponderosa, and the need to be concerned on their behalf, as if the events on the show were somehow as real as anything she encountered in her daily life. Charming, yes, but chilling in the respect of encountering a rock hard, immovable assertion of the reality of something fabricated. Made up. One can dance around this in a variety of ways, philosophically speaking. As a writer of fiction I object when critics assert that what I do is tell lies for a living. “What you create is not true.” In one sense, I must agree completely. The events I depict in my stories have never, nor will likely ever, “happen” in so-called “real life.” But there is another level in which the “fact” of the story is itself a reality—the story exists, the events depicted have an effect in the reader’s imagination, there is no contravention of consensual reality in the sense that the story replaces the actual world, and yet there is a substance to them (if I’ve done my job well enough) that is not so easily dismissed as a lie. On yet another level, the question of truth comes into it in regards to the felicity of the essence of the story to what we might recognize as truthful observations, mainly about the human condition. A piece of fiction can tell a truth—in fact, good fiction does exactly this by examining human nature under conditions where a revelation about how people are takes place. We find ourselves responding to characters, in the course of reading fiction, as if they were, in some sense, real. This is what Art does. It reveals truth. [more, including several videos . . . ]

Continue ReadingTortucans and the Problem of Truthful Perception