ShrinkWrapped

The Sanity Squad on Blogtalkradio Tonight

Tonight's topics will include the recent murder of a teen age girl in Canada by her religious Father, who was upset because she wouldn't wear a hijab; and the reaction of Islamic groups to her killing. If there's time, we'll switch topics to the national political scene and talk about Lieberman's endorsement of McCain, Huckabee's rise, and Hillary's descent.

Join us for some psychological and political analysis that's sure to be thought provoking.

Click below to listen live at 8 PM tonight:

CALL-IN Number during show is (646) 716-9116

The Sheep Look Up

Fantasies and fears of "the end of the world" have been with us for millennia.  They have traditionally involved cyclic fantasies of destruction and redemption.  The idea of cataclysmic destruction followed by rebirth may well be ubiquitous.  It is impossible to know if the fear of death and wished for (re)union with a redemptive force is universal but the prevalence of such myths is highly suggestive.  As in so many things, the radical secularists, who pride themselves on their devotion to science and reason, are particularly prone to becoming caught up in such myths since they are so unaware of the mythic and faith-based nature of many of their most cherished fears and desires.

I recall reading John Brunner's brilliant dysptopian novels, Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and  The Sheep Look Up (1972), the moment they were available.  The late 60s and early 70s were times when the Apocalypse did not seem too far off.  The USSR and America were armed to the teeth with planet destroying weapons and many of us, having been schooled at a time when bomb drills were more common than fire drills, imagined that there were madmen on both sides just waiting for the correct stimulus, or an unfortunate accident, to unleash Armageddon.  John Brunner's books imagined a different Apocalypse, one brought about by over-populating in a Malthusian near future and the other a Rachel Carson derived eco-catastrophe.  To a certain extent the books filled the same function as a roller coaster ride, the illusion of danger without the reality of danger.  Yet we were all convinced that the collapse of the ecosystem was right around the corner.  After the assassinations of the 1960s, the endless disaster of Vietnam and the Cuyahoga River fire in 1969, it was easy to imagine "the end of the world." 

There was much that was good that came out of the environmental movement in the 60s.  For the first time large masses of people were paying attention to the quality of the environment and Congress passed legislation which began the difficult task of cleaning up our nation's air and water.  These efforts have been extraordinarily successful, but we will still need to be vigilant to protect our natural environment.

[Interestingly, John Brunner "predicted" the collapse of the eco-system for the 1980s; since then most American eco-systems have become considerably healthier while many ecosystems in poorer nations have deteriorated.  One Amazon reviewer, cine-curmudgeon, remains convinced that the end of the world is right around the corner:

On Frying Pans and Fires

The Iraq War was initiated to solve several problems. The most immediate and easily resolved was the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime and its capacity to develop and use WMD. The longer term goal was to establish an alternative form of governance in the Middle East and the Muslim world, an alternative to the traditional strong man governance (prime divider societies in Richard Landes's formulation) which has spawned and supported much of the terrorism that has emerged since the 1960s. On this second goal there can be little doubt that even if Iraq becomes a more stable country and evolves a democratic tradition, for the foreseeable future, it will not be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East and will not provide a model to which their neighbors will aspire. The NIE more than anything else has codified the limits of American military power to effect far reaching change in the Middle East.

This means that terrorism, asymmetric warfare, the demonization of Jews and Americans, hatred of the West, and ever escalating attempts at subversion of democracy in the name of Islam will continue.

Today there are two contrasting visions of these developments which are worth placing in this context.

Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek that it is America's fear of change and the changing world that has led us into reckless and self defeating behavior:

The Fearful Superpower

Then came 9/11. Ever since the attacks, the United States has felt threatened and under siege and determined to carve out maximum room to maneuver. But where Americans have seen defensive behavior, the rest of the world has looked on and seen the most powerful nation in human history acting like a caged animal, lashing out at any and every constraint on its actions.

At the heart of this behavior is fear. Americans have become scared of the new world that is emerging around them. As long as this atmosphere of fear envelops U.S. politics, it will surely produce very similar results abroad. Washington's real task, therefore, is to combat such unthinking emotion.

Zakaria eloquently makes the case that the dangers of radical Islam are minimal in the greater scheme of things:

On Compromise and Compromise Formations

There have been many questions raised about Psychoanalytic theory and Psychoanalytic efficacy.  Many of the earlier conceptions of the structure and workings of the mind have been superceded by new information and research data and our understanding of the mind is moving ahead rapidly.  Newer models of the mind conceptualize it as consisting of multiple modalities which constantly struggle for primacy; out of the competing modes of thought, our mind emerges.

This model of the mind was presaged by Freud's description of behavior emerging from the interplay of multiple determinants via compromise formation.  I briefly defined these terms in The Writing on the Wall:

In Psychoanalytic thinking, there are two crucial concepts which can offer useful ways to organize one's thinking.  They are the idea of multiple determination, and a corollary to this, compromise formation.  What these ideas encapsulate is, essentially, that any and every behavior can be best understood as the result of many different forces coming together (the multiple determinants, such as various desires, drives, and wishes, along with prohibitions, fears, and anxieties, conscious and unconscious) with the ego or executive machinery of the mind, finding a way through the maze of competing wishes and fears, internal and external, to arrive at a behavior (the compromise) which can successfully accomplish what the person desires.

It is implicit in this formulation that compromise formations are dynamic structures.  In other words, the strength of our "desires, drives, and wishes, along with prohibitions, fears, and anxieties" are constantly shifting.  In the simplest terms, when we are starving, our desire for sex will lessen.  Our ego, which includes the executive functions of the mind, must constantly balance all of the competing internal and external demands on us and arrive at behavioral outcomes that satisfy as many of the competing demands as possible in order for us to feel comfortable with our behavior.

When the balance is tilted toward one aspect or another of personality, serious problems can ensue.  For example, someone who has more powerful drives or less capable ego controls over his drives, will be more prone to impulsive behavior with all the risks that entail.  If the aggressive drives are intermittently overbalanced, the person may exhibit an Intermittent Explosive Personality.  Another person, in response to fear of their drives may develop such powerful inhibitions that they become symptomatic and can suffer from an Obsessive-Compulsive Personality.

The healthiest personality is one that can easily adapt to the changing internal and external demands and maintain their behavior within a moderate range of responses.  Adaptation and moderation are most adaptive for successful long term functioning (though there are many highly successful people, and I leave the definition of successful to the reader, who have unbalanced personalities.)   These concepts translate quite well into the cultural and political sphere.

LGBTQ: Shame and its Vicissitudes

The beginning of morality was the beginning of differentiation.  One could go further and suggest that the beginning of civilization was the beginning of differentiation.  The Old Testament begins with an enumeration and subsequent differentiation of the animals from man.

The denial of differences is the core of perversion, which is one of th reasons I have described PC thinking as a thought disorder; it denies unpleasant reality and obscures differences.  The core of perversion is the denial of the difference between male and female:

True perversions, and their allied fetishes, are based, in part, on a boy's terror at discovering the female's genitals, where her lack of a phallus indicates, to his immature mind, that a woman is a man who has been castrated.  The sight of a girl's or woman's genitalia creates so much anxiety that the little boy has to look away and learn to "not see" such a frightening sight.  Please note, this is hardly universal and the boy's vulnerability to just such an outcome depends in significant ways on his relationship to his parents, especially his mother, in his earliest years.  In a true sexual perversion, the adult man prefers non-vaginal sex  because intercourse creates too much anxiety for the now adult little boy.

Religious and moral systems have traditionally rested upon a cascading series of distinctions, between male and female, good and evil, right and wrong.  Our current culture wars, a struggle persisting from the 60s, involves a dedicated effort by those on the Left to undo the differentiations that underlie our culture.   The modern sophisticated "liberal" denies differences between populations, between the sexes, between the generations.  Part of their work involves the increasing pressure to not only destigmatize homosexuality but to elevate a homosexual lifestyle to a position of equality with the heterosexual lifestyle. 

The Gay liberation movement that began in the late 60s has had many salutary effects.  Homosexuality has been largely decriminalized and, certainly in public discourse, destigmatized.  Despite such cultural changes, homosexuals have a more difficult time in childhood and adolescence because there remains a personal and cultural stigma to homosexuality.  Children early on recognize that those who are "different" are different, and those who feel themselves to be different often feel shame because of their differences.

A Crisis for the Left

A bedrock assumption for the Left is that unequal outcomes for people reflect environmental inequalities.  This is the basic justification for affirmative action and for all the more subtle interventions introduced into our schools and throughout society which aim to minimize distinctions.  The self-esteem movement, which has so successfully separated self-esteem from any requisite accomplishment, is a pervasive and damaging system for denying differences.  There are two developments that are likely to create a crisis for the Left, and for the liberalism that has emerged from the left-wing matrix of Academia and MSM. 

In the New York Times today is a report of some recent research suggesting that the rate of human evolutionary change has been increasing:

Selection Spurred Recent Evolution, Researchers Say

Researchers analyzing variation in the human genome have concluded that human evolution accelerated enormously in the last 40,000 years under the force of natural selection.

The finding contradicts a widely held assumption that human evolution came to a halt 10,000 years ago or even 50,000 years ago.

It is implicit in the Left's conception of nature versus nurture that humans are extremely plastic and can be molded by the system.  Their failures to change human nature, from the Soviet Union to China to Cambodia's Pol Pot notwithstanding, if Nature is a most powerful determinant of various traits, the philosophical basis of Leftism is brought into question.

At the same time Leftists are nothing if not devoted to Darwinism and Natural Selection.  It is their only explanation for the appearance of intelligent homo sapiens.  This leaves them in the position of claiming that evolution essentially stopped 40,000 years ago, as noted above.

Nowhere is the problem more contentious and difficult than around the issue of IQ.

[Please note that IQ is certainly not the only factor involved in success.  However, it is one of the most important factors and across populations the mean IQ, reflecting problem solving abilities, will be highly predictive of success in the modern world.] 

The Sanity Squad on Blogtalkradio

Tonight the Sanity Squad will discuss America's incoherent and ambivalent relationship with "Guns."  We will also, time permitting, give some attention to the effects of the recent NIE on events in the Middle East.  You can listen live at 8:00 PM, or download the Podcast for future listening, by clicking the link.    Feel free to call in at (646) 716-9116 and join the conversation.

Guns in America

Every time there is a tragedy involving a gunman shooting innocent people, whether at a mall in Omaha or a Mega-church in Colorado, the ensuing commentary offers a rehashing of all the usual, tiresome debating points that we have all grown accustomed to.  The debate remains stuck.  Those who filter the tragedies through anti-gun eyes take it as evidence that we need either more, or stricter, gun laws.  The Second Amendment absolutists will brook no erosion of the Right to own a gun.  When debating positions fail to move despite evidence that might well be thought informative, deep emotions are usually involved.  At the same time, it is worth wondering if the debate has stagnated not only for emotional reasons, but for cognitive reasons.

The Cognitive Scientists define metonymy as:

"the use of a single characteristic to identify a more complex entity ... [it] is one of the basic characteristics of cognition."

For cognitive purposes our minds organize data in categories.  Words are symbols for the things they represent.  The ways in which such words are encoded and the various meanings contained in them determine how we think of the things the words signify.  For most liberal Americans, and especially for Western elites, guns have long since left the realm of  "tools" and entered a realm of signification which has overwhelmed our discussion.

For someone who grew up in a suburban Northeast population center, from the post-war years on have been a time where several ideas have been growing in strength and rarely questioned.  Throughout school, we were taught that all disputes could be mediated through words alone.  We were taught that fighting was never an acceptable response to any provocation short of an outright assault.  (More recently, the idea that an assault could be grounds for a violent response has even been brought into question; this is especially so in Europe, perhaps because they are so much more civilized than America.)  This has been codified in the liberal idealization of "gun control", something I alluded to in a post on Liberal Dis-Armament:

Facing the Psychopath

Yesterday, in response to my post on Iran's "victory" over the Bush administration, a direct outgrowth of the almost purposeful misunderstanding of the NIE that is ubiquitous in the MSM, Judge Crater offered a rather typical and banal refutation.  In part he said:

At last count the U.S. had three aircraft carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and military bases strung across the region from Diego Garcia to Uzbekistan. The "death eaters of Islam" (an ugly ethnic slur if there ever was one) have no significant offensive military capability. The are no hezbollah warships off our coast.

Your up is down, and down is up interpretation of events in the middle east is absurd. Why hasn't our impending "victory" in Iraq made us safer from these Muslim savages? Why the lament that, "[W]e are not yet ready to stand against them."? Good grief, how many more trillions of dollars and thousands of lives will it take to let you neocons feel safe in your suburban, middle class beds?

An anonymous commenter, (anonymous either by design or through the vagaries of Typepad's balky authentication process) pointed out his historical errors and Jimmy J intimated that the Judge does not understand the nature of 4GW:

The Islamists don't have a powerful military but they do have conviction and will. They are waging assymetrical war, that plans to leverage their terror tactics and the foolishness of postmodern, politically correct apologists in the West into a victory. Can they win? Until the West accepts the challenge and unites in defense against their barbarous plans, they will continue to shed innocent blood, interdict our economies, undermine our political systems, and generally cause headaches for us far beyond anything that is tolerable or acceptable. Which means more trillions of dollars and thousands of lives down the tubes.

It is a cliche that a military prepares to fight the last war; it is just as true to say that a society occasionally prepares to fight the last war but never recognizes how to fight the next war until in extremis.

Dr. Steve has just started a series of posts that may help clarify the nature of our fight and why so many have so much difficulty even understanding that we are involved in a fight.  He starts with Myth: Psychopaths are great liars. Part 1 - The lies of psychopaths:

What Iran's "Victory" Means

Despite all the uncertainties surrounding the NIE some things are clear. 

First, Old Spook comments on our Sources and Methods, and raises questions about the validity of the report's conclusions that:

with moderate confidence that Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007 ... we do not know whether it currently plans to develop nuclear weapons.

Second, the ability of the Untied States to sustain the levels of military threat and sanctions that the report admits was and is pivotal in Iran's decision to forgo the final steps required for a nuclear weapon has been severely compromised.  (The discussion of how the report is now being used to discredit the very policies that led to this desired outcome is an interesting discussion by itself, but not my intention here.)

Third, Iran believes, with very good justification, that it has won a great victory:

"This is a declaration of victory for the Iranian nation against the world powers over the nuclear issue," Ahmadinejad told thousands of people during a visit to Ilam province in western Iran.

In the wake of this victory, Judith A. Klinghoffer suggests Iran will inevitably overreach:

... “an official close to the inspection agency (IAEA) told  the Times yesterday that the new American assessment might be too generous to Iran.”

It is not only too generous but too dangerous. Iran is bound to overreach. Victors are always tempted and tyrants always do. The 2007 NIE has made military action more, rather than less, probable.

As the NYT editors note, it is “one of those ironies that would be delicious if it didn’t involve nuclear weapons” or, I would add, the continued misery of the Iranian people.

Tom Barnett is much more sanguine about Iran: