18.4.03

VVV Destruction of statues has provided the two most important symbols of the American victory in Iraq. Pro-war folks got the image of the year when American soldiers helped an Iraqi crowd pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. There have been attempts to criticize this symbol, of course -- pointing out that wide-angled shots showed the crowd around the statue was fairly small, and pointing to large anti-occupation demonstrations that started almost as soon as victory was declared. Yet the Saddam statue remains a powerful symbol of Iraqis' joy at being liberated from Saddam's regime.

Several days later, anti-war folks began to play up the fact that statues (among other artifacts -- work with me here) had been destroyed and stolen from the Iraqi National Museum. There's been no shortage of commentary on the scope of the cultural tragedy wrought by the looters who cleaned out the Museum. Though it lacks the powerful visual imagery of the Saddam statue, it has become a symbol of the nihilistic chaos that has come to Iraq as Saddam was ousted, chaos the US was unable or unwilling to stop. Unfortunately, this symbol has more serious shortcomings than the Saddam statue. Foremost is that the tragedy is the loss of material objects. While I don't want to minimize the value of the items in the Museum, the fact is that people make more effective symbols. The focus on the Museum opens antiwar people to the charge of caring more about Iraq's antiquities than its people. That's not a good position to be in, considering that doves have been accused of not caring about the suffering of Iraqis under Saddam (who, nevertheless, was a good custodian of historical objects). I'm not making that criticism myself, as I know many people think this is such a tragedy because the Iraqi people are losing their history and because it's symbolic of the wider post-Saddam chaos. But it's worrying to watch this concern over the Museum snowball.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 23:43 -- link --

VVV A long chain of bloggers point to this article, in which Simon Baron-Cohen says:

Are there essential differences between the male and female brain? My theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems. I call it the empathising-systemising (E-S) theory. Empathising is the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion. The empathiser intuitively figures out how people are feeling, and how to treat people with care and sensitivity. Systemising is the drive to analyse and explore a system, to extract underlying rules that govern the behaviour of a system; and the drive to construct systems. The systemiser intuitively figures out how things work, or what the underlying rules are controlling a system. Systems can be as varied as a pond, a vehicle, a computer, a maths equation, or even an army unit. They all operate on inputs and deliver outputs, using rules.

The descriptions of empathy and systematizing strike me as nearly the same thing. Both involve "intuitively" grasping the workings of some process. At best it seems like empathy is about social processes and systematizing is about physical processes. This interpretation would accord with the (similar but different) theory that men tend toward seeing the world in a distanced and (supposedly) objective way, whereas women are subjective.

So I took the test, and got an 18 out of 80 for my EQ. The description says "most people with Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism score about 20." Now, I'd hardly rank "empathy" as one of my strongest traits, but I didn't think it was pathological. Incidentally, the test says that men score an average of 42 and women an average of 47. This seems to call into question the study's finding of a clear gender division. Unless the standard deviation on those scores is incredibly low -- meaning nearly all men hit the 40-44 or so range, and nearly all women are 45 to 49 -- the correlation is probably not statistically significant. On the SQ test I didn't hit autistic range, falling just a point above the male average of 30. The gender difference here was a bit wider, with women averaging 24.

The brain type page includes this observation:

The central claim of this new theory is only that on average, more males than females have a brain of type S, and more females than males have a brain of type E.

An "on average" isn't all that helpful. On average men are taller than women, but nobody would say that's the basis of a fundamental difference between them. Systematizing and empathizing are important aspects of psychology, and one good thing about this theory is that it considers them as separate axes, rather than opposites (so you could be both highly empathizing and highly systematizing). But aligning them fundamentally with men and women is asking for stereotypes no matter how many disclaimers about overlap in individual cases you have. If the "essential difference" between men and women is the E-S dimensions, that automatically puts empathetic men and systematic women on the defensive about their abnormality.

Here's the thing that bugs me the most about this theory: it's not new. The idea that women are empathetic and men are systematic dates back at least to Aristotle, and was a central piece of Enlightenment theories of gender. A large proportion of feminist writing has been devoted to exploring this idea. The basis of Enligtenment sexism can be summarized by the following syllogism:
1) Men are more rational (i.e., systematizing but not empathetic) than women.
2) Rationality is better than other forms of understanding.
3) Therefore men are better than women.
Feminism has taken two tacks at breaking down this logic. Liberal feminism has attacked the first premise, arguing that women can be just as rational as men. Radical feminism has tended to attack the second premise, claiming that empathetic understanding is just as valid (or even more so) than rationality, which they see as a vestige of the Enlightenment. Many radical feminists have proudly affirmed the first premise, arguing for the superiority of women's understanding on that basis. This has led them to be criticized by liberal feminists, who accuse them of essentializing.

E-S theory is simply slapping a new name on a set of ideas that have been around for a long time.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 18:43 -- link --

15.4.03

VVV Charles Murtaugh points to an interesting Science article (reprinted on a creationist website) that quotes E.O. Wilson's On Human Nature as follows:

the final decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competition, as a wholly material phenomenon. Theology is not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline.

On the other hand, creationism (at least of the hard-core kind) is quite able to explain evolution as a wholly spiritual phenomenon. It's the work of the devil, planting misleading evidence and whispering ideas in unfaithful biologists' ears.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 13:05 -- link --

VVV This quiz (via Rabi) told me I should speak German. As I went through I noticed a lot of options about alcohol, so I assumed there would be an "Irish" option based on that stereotype. So I tried picking all the alcohol ones to test, and I got ... Finnish. I guess I'm not cut out for that language after all, since I'm not so into the olut ja viini ja votka ja koskenkorva. But I can nitpick the fake Finnish that comes with the result. Finnish words never end with a double consonant.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:32 -- link --

14.4.03

VVV The cause of the budget defecit: reckless tax cuts? a stagnating economy? a Congress unable to rein in unnecessary spending? or people cheating on their taxes? The growing anti-tax mentality documented in the linked article seems to be a counterweight against the neocon ideology's undermining of the rationale for tax cuts.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 20:49 -- link --

VVV

Fewest Complaints in Four Decades That Taxes Are "Too High" A new Gallup Poll, conducted about a week before income tax returns are due, finds Americans are less likely to say that the taxes they pay are too high than they have been at any tax filing season in the past four decades. A substantial majority of Americans also say their taxes are "fair." But fair or not, more than 6 in 10 Americans say upper income people pay too little taxes, and the public estimates that more than a third of Americans cheat on their returns ... The latest Gallup Poll, conducted April 7-9, finds half of all Americans saying their taxes are too high, about the same as in January, but considerably below the 65% who expressed that view two years ago. The current reading and the January reading constitute the lowest measures of discontent about taxes in 41 years. The jump in positive feelings about taxes since April 2001 could well be part of the more general pro-government shift in public opinion that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as well as the public's "rallying around the flag" in the war against Iraq. Some evidence for this interpretation is that in 1949, in the midst of the Berlin Blockade by the Soviet Union, only 43% of Americans -- the lowest number recorded by Gallup in the past half century -- said their taxes were too high, while 53% said they were about right.

This poll points to the contradictoriness of the coalition that forms the modern American right. I'm increasingly convinced that neoconservatism -- the Rumsfeld-Perle-Wolfowitz ideology that America should project its military might around the world to fix other countries -- is better described as a form of radical nationalism than a form of conservatism. It gets its foot in the door because it appeals to the conservative desire for conformity with a particular moral code (though a more liberal moral code than absolutist [religious] conservatives often profess), and hence a desire for enforcement power. But it's compromised by that alliance, because of conservatism's small government platform. Full-blown radical nationalism, a la Fascism, involves faith in the state and a willingness to grant it power. Neocons have had to argue for a cheap war because they can't ask Americans to make sacrifices to support their American Greatness agenda (can you imagine today's Congress passing a tax hike to pay for war?).

Because of these internal conflicts, it becomes harder to translate political capital from one issue to another. The PR victory of the neocons in Iraq, coupled with the post-9/11 national security fears that helped get the neocons traction in the GOP (remember, the official Republican line as recently as the 2000 campaign was withdrawing troops from overseas commitments and quasi-isolationism) creates pro-government feelings. That's great for boosting further neocon programs, such as the Patriot II act and threats against Syria. But it's not so good for the traditional conservative small-government agenda. The impetus for tax cuts has rested on a dislike for government, a feeling that it's inefficient and oppressive and that money would be better off in the hands of the hardworking little guy. The only way that support would transfer between these two ideologies is partisanship -- when support accrues to the organization (the GOP) rather than the ideology. Partisanship is alive and well in America (as evidenced by the persistence of the one-dimensional left-right axis in political discourse), but it has been on the wane of late. The Republicans have been able to hold on better than the Democrats because of party discipline, but I wouldn't be surprised if continuing neocon ascendancy provoked a split with the small-government/social conservative base.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 20:04 -- link --

13.4.03

VVV

Paige's Values Are America's Values Today it's called conflict resolution, anger management and school discipline. Not so long ago it was called loving your enemy, turning the other cheek and respecting your elders. Whatever terms are used to describe them, Christian values -- that is, values that were born of or nurtured by the Christian faith -- form a strong basis for good citizenship in school and beyond. Public schools would do well to teach them. That is the case Paige made in a recent interview that appeared in the Baptist Press. But Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State would like to portray these basic Christian principles -- and anyone who, like Paige, publicly esteems them -- as a menace to society. So what was the education secretary's great offense? He said, "All things equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for the values of the Christian community, where a child is taught to have a strong faith. Where a child is taught that there is a great source of strength greater than themselves." Note: He did not say "teaching Christian doctrine or theology," only the values associated with the Christian community.

This article, by William J. Bennett, tries to make two contradictory points. In the bit quoted above, his argument is that "Christian values" are not exclusive to Christianity, so Paige wasn't advocating any particular doctrine. Later in the piece, he goes on to make the claim that these values were invented by Christianity, decrying the secularism that is causing people to deny that their moral system is Christian.

The first argument doesn't match what Paige's comments actually say. Paige didn't praise nonviolence and neighborly love that Christians and non-Christians alike practice. He advocated teaching children to have faith in a higher power -- i.e., to believe in God. It seems Bennett really agrees with this interpretation -- though he denies it to make his first point -- as it forms the basis of his second argument. He claims that a shared Christianity is necessary to education, blaming secularism for trying to "eliminate any vestige of religious influence in teaching reliable standards of right and wrong." And he goes on to make the tired claim that since the founders were religious, we should be too.
posted by Stentor Danielson at 01:10 -- link --