Loyalty is not a virtue

What is it to be loyal? According to Merriam Webster, to be "loyal" is to be

1 : unswerving in allegiance: as a: faithful in allegiance to one's lawful sovereign or government b: faithful to a private person to whom fidelity is due c: faithful to a cause, ideal, custom, institution, or product.
I don't have a problem with this definition. I do object, however, that "loyalty" has been given a free pass in modern American culture, as though loyalty is always a good thing. In particular, the mass media has bought into this linguistic sleight-of-hand: according to the mainstream media, it is always a good thing to be "loyal." Loyalty is undoubtedly a virtue when we are dealing with pet dogs. We like our dogs to be loyal. We like our dogs to do what we tell them to do. The loyalty of a human being is not necessarily a good thing, however. Loyalty is a matter of committing oneself to a person, to a group of people or to a cause. But people and causes can be either praiseworthy or despicable (or something in between). If a social cause to which I am loyal is that all babies should have basic medical care, loyalty to such a cause would be a good thing. If my idea is that we should all give homage to Hitler, loyalty to this cause would be a horrible idea. Therefore, how can it be said that loyalty is per se a good thing unless one first examines the merit of the person(s) or clause(s) to which a person is being loyal? [More . . . ]

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Are you a rebel? What is your birth order?

Here’s an interesting example on how intuition can go awry.  What would you guess to be the primary factor for determining whether a scientist is receptive to new and innovative scientific theories?  Education? Economic resources? Gender? None of the above! 

In Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives (1996), a meticulously researched book that has now withstood a decade of criticism, Frank Sulloway concluded that those people who tend to cling to old paradigms, who are not confortable with new innovative scientific theories, have something surprising in common.  They tend to be firstborns. Sulloway based his conclusions on the analysis of the written positions of 3,890 persons, writers who have commented over the past several hundred years on controversial new scientific theories.

Firstborns are significantly more likely to “identify more closely with parents and authority,” and more “conforming, conventional and defensive—attributes that are all negative features of openness to experience.” [pp. 21-22.] 

Sulloway analyzed the attitudes of the writers of published commentary regarding the theory of Copernicus during the early stages of that controversy:

[I]ndividual laterborns were 5.4 times more likely than individual firstborns to support Copernicus’s claim that the earth revolves around the sun.  Copernicus himself was the youngest of four children.

[p. 38] There are many books written for a lay audience on the topic of birth order, but very few of them are carefully documented with statistical analyses.  Sulloway’s book is a shining exception to the rule.  It is a highly detailed work …

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Why you shouldn’t believe everything you think . . .

I'm halfway through a brand new book by psychologist Thomas Kida, titled Don't Believe Everything You Think. Kida does a good job of collecting and summarizing a huge number of cognitive traps and frailties that afflict humans. The book focuses on the following six categories of cognitive traps: We prefer…

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Working in the Real World

It’s been a long week, and it’s only Tuesday.

As my bio indicates, I work at a community college. I teach English and am a writing tutor in our campus learning center, which not only provides help with writing, but with math, science, and foreign languages. We are a multipurpose facility although the individual tutors only work within the areas of their specialization. It is a chaotic place in which to work, not only because of the multiplicity of disciplines represented, but because, while each discipline occupies a specific area of the large room that houses us, there are no walls separating us, and staff are forced to share offices rather than having private spaces to which they can retreat.

Or, at least that is the reason given by some of the staff for the pandemonium. What they say contains a grain of truth, but it is only part of the story, I believe. The real cause of the difficult working conditions, in my opinion, is the lack of respect for boundaries displayed by some of the tutors who behave as though no one else works in the center except themselves. They conduct loud conversations about personal matters wherever and whenever they want, gossip maliciously in front of students, crack jokes and laugh raucously, treat students who come to them for help with something close to contempt, and disrupt the concentration of everyone around them constantly. They seem obdurately oblivious to the needs of those with whom they work, including …

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