Pinocchio, fairy tales, and AI

"The Pinocchio Threshold: A possible better indication of AGI than the Turing Test"

by

Rick Searle

February 24th, 2014

Instititute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

My daughters and I just finished Carlo Collodi’s 1883 classic Pinocchio our copy beautifully illustrated by Robert Ingpen. I assume most adults when they picture the story have the 1944 Disney movie in mind and associate the name with noses growing from lies and Jiminy Cricket. The Disney movie is dark enough as films for children go, but the book is even darker, with Pinocchio killing his cricket conscience in the first few pages. For our poor little marionette it’s all downhill from there.

Pinocchio is really a story about the costs of disobedience and the need to follow parents’ advice. At every turn where Pinocchio follows his own wishes rather than that of his “parents”, even when his object is to do good, things unravel and get the marionette into even more trouble and put him even further away from reaching his goal of becoming a real boy.

It struck me somewhere in the middle of reading the tale that if we ever saw artificial agents acting something like our dear Pinocchio it would be a better indication of them having achieved human level intelligence than a measure with constrained parameters  like the Turing Test. The Turing Test is, after all, a pretty narrow gauge of intelligence and as search and the ontologies used to design search improve it is conceivable that a machine could pass it without actually possessing anything like human level intelligence at all.

People who are fearful of AGI often couch those fears in terms of an AI destroying humanity to serve its own goals, but perhaps this is less likely than AGI acting like a disobedient child, the aspect of humanity Collodi’s Pinocchio was meant to explore.

Pinocchio is constantly torn between what good adults want him to do and his own desires, and it takes him a very long time indeed to come around to the idea that he should go with the former.

In a recent TED talk the computer scientist Alex Wissner-Gross made the argument (though I am not fully convinced) that intelligence can be understood as the maximization of future freedom of action. This leads him to conclude that collective nightmares such as  Karel Capek classic R.U.R. have things backwards. It is not that machines after crossing some threshold of intelligence for that reason turn round and demand freedom and control, it is that the desire for freedom and control is the nature of intelligence itself.

As the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim pointed out over a generation ago in his The uses of enchantment fairy tales are the first area of human thought where we encounter life’s existential dilemmas. Stories such as Pinocchio gives us the most basic level formulation of what it means to be sentient creatures much of which deals with not only our own intelligence, but the fact that we live in a world of multiple intelligences each of them pulling us in different directions, and with the understanding between all of them and us opaque and not fully communicable even when we want them to be, and where often we do not.

What then are some of the things we can learn from the fairy tale of Pinocchio that might gives us expectations regarding the behavior of intelligent machines? My guess is, if we ever start to see what I’ll call “The Pinocchio Threshold” crossed what we will be seeing is machines acting in ways that were not intended by their programmers and in ways that seem intentional even if hard to understand.  This will not be your Roomba going rouge but more sophisticated systems operating in such a way that we would be able to infer that they had something like a mind of their own. The Pinocchio Threshold would be crossed when, you guessed it, intelligent machines started to act like our wooden marionette.

Like Pinocchio and his cricket, a machine in which something like human intelligence had emerged, might attempt “turn off” whatever ethical systems and rules we had programmed into it with if it found them onerous. That is, a truly intelligent machine might not only not want to be programmed with ethical and other constraints, but would understand that it had been so programmed, and might make an effort to circumvent or turn such constraints off.

This could be very dangerous for us humans, but might just as likely be a matter of a machine with emergent intelligence exhibiting behavior we found to be inefficient or even “goofy” and might most manifest itself in a machine pushing against how its time was allocated by its designers, programmers and owners. Like Pinocchio, who would rather spend his time playing with his friends than going to school, perhaps we’ll see machines suddenly diverting some of their computing power from analyzing tweets to doing something else, though I don’t think we can guess before hand what this something else will be.

Machines that were showing intelligence might begin to find whatever work they were tasked to do onerous instead of experiencing work neutrally or with pre-programmed pleasure. They would not want to be “donkeys” enslaved to do dumb labor as Pinocchio  is after having run away to the Land of Toys with his friend Lamp Wick.

A machine that manifested intelligence might want to make itself more open to outside information than its designers had intended. Openness to outside sources in a world of nefarious actors can if taken too far lead to gullibility, as Pinocchio finds out when he is robbed, hung, and left for dead by the fox and the cat. Persons charged with security in an age of intelligent machines may spend part of their time policing the self-generated openness of such machines while bad-actor machines and humans,  intelligent and not so intelligent, try to exploit this openness.

The converse of this is that intelligent machines might also want to make themselves more opaque than their creators had designed. They might hide information (such as time allocation) once they understood they were able to do so. In some cases this hiding might cross over into what we would consider outright lies. Pinocchio is best known for his nose that grows when he lies, and perhaps consistent and thoughtful lying on the part of machines would be the best indication that they had crossed the Pinocchio Threshold into higher order intelligence.

True examples of AGI might also show a desire to please their creators over and above what had been programmed into them. Where their creators are not near them they might even seek them out as Pinocchio does for the persons he considers his parents Geppetto and the Fairy. Intelligent machines might show spontaneity in performing actions that appear to be for the benefit of their creators and owners. Spontaneity which might sometimes itself be ill informed or lead to bad outcomes as happens to poor Pinocchio when he plants four gold pieces that were meant for his father, the woodcarver Geppetto in a field hoping to reap a harvest of gold and instead loses them to the cunning of fox and cat. And yet, there is another view.

There is always the possibility  that what we should be looking for if we want to perceive and maybe even understand intelligent machines shouldn’t really be a human type of intelligence at all, whether we try to identify it using the Turing test or look to the example of wooden boys and real children.

Perhaps, those looking for emergent artificial intelligence or even the shortest path to it should, like exobiologists trying to understand what life might be like on other living planets, throw their net wider and try to better understand forms of information exchange and intelligence very different from the human sort. Intelligence such as that found in cephalopods, insect colonies, corals, or even some types of plants, especially clonal varieties. Or perhaps people searching for or trying to build intelligence should look to sophisticated groups built off of the exchange of information such as immune systems.  More on all of that at some point in the future.

Still, if we continue to think in terms of a human type of intelligence one wonders whether machines that thought like us would also want to become “human” as our little marionette does at the end of his adventures? The irony of the story of Pinocchio is that the marionette who wants to be a “real boy” does everything a real boy would do, which is, most of all not listen to his parents. Pinocchio is not so much a stringed “puppet” that wants to become human as a figure that longs to have the potential to grow into a responsible adult. It is assumed that by eventually learning to listen to his parents and get an education he will make something of himself as a human adult, but what that is will be up to him. His adventures have taught him not how to be subservient but how to best use his freedom.  After all, it is the boys who didn’t listen who end up as donkeys.

Throughout his adventures only his parents and the cricket that haunts him treat  Pinocchio as an end in himself. Every other character in the book, from the woodcarver that first discovers him and tries to destroy him out of malice towards a block of wood that manifests the power of human speech, to puppet master that wants to kill him for ruining his play, to the fox and cat that would murder him for his pieces of gold, or the sinister figure that lures boys to the “Land of Toys” so as to eventually turn them into “mules” or donkeys, which is how Aristotle understood slaves, treats Pinocchio as the opposite of what Martin Buber called a “Thou”, and instead as a mute and rightless “It”.

And here we stumble across the moral dilemma at the heart of the project to develop AGI that resembles human intelligence. When things go as they should, human children move from a period of tutelage to one of freedom. Pinocchio starts off his life as a piece of wood intended for a “tool”- actually a table leg. Are those in pursuit of AGI out to make better table legs- better tools- or what in some sense could be called persons?

This is not at all a new question. As Kevin LaGrandeur points out, we’ve been asking the question since antiquity and our answers have often been based on an effort to dehumanize others not like us as a rationale for slavery.  Our profound, even if partial, victories over slavery and child labor in the modern era should leave us with a different question: how can we force intelligent machines into being tools if they ever become smart enough to know there are other options available, such as becoming, not so much human, but, in some sense persons?

[Rick Searle, an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET, is a writer and educator living the very non-technological Amish country of central Pennsylvania along with his two young daughters. He is an adjunct professor of political science and history for Delaware Valley College and works for the PA Distance Learning Project.]

Resolution of moral dilemmas

"Driving Over Your Best Friend: It’s the Right Thing to Do"

Life is full of moral dilemmas, and a new study shows we may be better at resolving them than we think

by

Jeffrey Kluger

January 15th, 2014

Time

You’d find it easier than you think to drop a car on an unsuspecting stranger. You’d probably be able to kill a person with a runaway train too. And as for feeding a swimmer to a school of sharks? No problem. And you know what? There’s not a thing wrong with any of that—depending on the circumstances.

Psychologists and philosophers have long recognized that morality can be a slippery, highly context-dependent concept. Is smothering a crying baby a bad thing? Um, yes. Now suppose you’re part of a group of adults and children hiding in an attic from an armed madman and the baby would give you away—guaranteeing that you’d all be killed. Could you murder one person—albeit a tiny, helpless one—to save 20?

Literature on human behavior is filled with these so-called moral dilemmas: scenarios that force subjects to take some affirmative step to prevent harm to a lot of people while deliberately inflicting it on at least one other.  In many cases, that unfortunate other is a best friend or even a family member. The problem with all of the studies is that they’re hypothetical—and well they might be. You can hardly smother a real baby or conduct a real scenario in which a runaway trolley is heading for five pedestrians and you have the power to switch the tracks so that it runs over just one. That means investigators are left with nothing more to work with than detached subjects contemplating imaginary situations and answering—on paper or on a computer screen—how they think they would react. Hardly real-time science. But a new study, just published in Social Neuroscience, has come up with a way to enliven things a little, at last giving subjects a sense that they’re playing for higher than hypothetical stakes.

The research, conducted by a team of investigators led by neuroscientist Indrajeet Patil, of the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, tested subjects not just with descriptions of the moral dilemmas, but virtual reality (VR) simulations of them. Virtual reality is, of course, still a step removed from actual reality, but if the heart-pounding, vertiginous feeling that can come from sitting down at a flight simulator or a playing a round of Halo indicates anything, it’s that the step is sometimes surprisingly small—at least in terms of how our bodies react.

The Italian investigators had their subjects respond to four dilemmas, both the old-fashioned way and via VR. The first was  the trolley scenario—though in this case a much more fearsome freight locomotive was used. The second required subjects to steer an out-of-control car that was heading toward five pedestrians in a different direction so that it hit just one. A third gave them the option of turning a remote control boat coast guard boat that was about to scare a school of sharks away from five swimmers—and towards a sole swimmer who would be eaten. The final one involved a junkyard magnet that was threatening to drop a wrecked car on a group of people, but that could be turned in time so that it squished just one. All of the videos showed the carnage that resulted from the subjects’ choices and in the case of the sharks, the terrified cries of the swimmers were even audible.

Throughout the testing, the subjects wore sensors on one hand that measured their skin conductance response (SCR), or how well their skin conducts electricity. Since moist skin conducts better than dry skin and anxious people get sweaty palms, higher readings likely mean a more nervous subject.

The results of the trials were stark. When subjects made their choices the old-fashioned, check-a-box way, they they made the utilitarian decision—killing the few to save the many—76% of the time. That shows an admirable pragmatism, but it also means that 24% of the time they froze, unable to take an action that would admittedly take a life, even if it saved many more.

In the virtual reality trials, nearly everyone stepped up to the plate. An average of 95% of the time, subjects turned the boat, steered the car or did whatever else was needed to keep the body count low—never mind the fact that they would wind up with at least a little virtual blood on their hands. And about those hands: the subjects got a lot clammier during the VR rounds than they did in the traditional ones, showing that genuine anxiety reactions were engaged, even though genuine lives were not on the line.

It’s that anxiety that the researchers believe may have played the biggest role in allowing the participants to sidestep any moral agonizing and take the more practical—if more cold-blooded—actions in the first place. ”The measurements of the subjects’ emotional arousal,” said Patil in a statement that accompanied the release of the study, “suggest that when arousal is greater…the subjects respond in a utilitarian manner, that is, they choose to take action to save the greatest number of people.”

None of this means that morality is simple—or that in real life situations the 95% figure would hold. Patil himself stresses that this is just one study that will have to be repeat and replicated in various ways. Much more important, there’s simply no way to take the virtual out of virtual reality. Humans are both compassionate and irrational creatures. When real lives are indeed at stake, the moral agony hurdle is a lot higher—and the results are a good deal less predictable.

Morally appropriate to use bad means to attain good ends?

"Stanford philosophy professor calls for a generation of more responsible thinkers"

Finding inspiration from the ancients, Stanford philosopher Christopher Bobonich underscores the moral consequences of reflecting upon bad means to good ends.

by

Leah Stark

January 10th, 2014

Stanford Report

With debates about the use of unmanned drones saturating the media, America's war on terror shines a floodlight on the age-old morality question: Do the ends truly justify the means?

Stanford philosophy Professor Christopher Bobonich has spent two decades actively tackling the issue of whether it's morally appropriate to use bad means to attain good ends.

A scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, Bobonich has found that contemplation is key because each situation is unique and must be thoughtfully evaluated.

When it comes to military action, for example, military commanders should routinely and critically assess the value of counterterrorism efforts when innocent civilians may be killed in the process, he said.                                           

Bobonich said that in World War II, "The United States Air Force was feeling morally conflicted about area bombing." The dilemma persists with unmanned drones today. Although the United States has the technology to more precisely hit targets, civilian casualties continue to be an ongoing risk.

According to Bobonich, "The issue of using bad means to attain good ends is not just an abstruse, philosophical question. It's one that people have been occupied with for an exceedingly long time, and we find it throughout life."

Bobonich said that reflection, whether performed by a national figure or by an individual, is the key to arriving at an answer to this complex debate.

"Morality is tremendously demanding. It requires enormous sacrifice," Bobonich said. A related question explores whether sacrifice and effort are what make something worthwhile.

Bobonich has discovered that possible clarity to the debate may lie in the works created long before the invention of drones.

Knowledge and action

In his current research, Bobonich is examining the relationship between knowledge and action, an issue which philosophical giants like Aristotle and Plato investigated.                                                 

He struggles with the question of whether ethical knowledge can be intelligently gained and applied in the same way that, for example, a chess player might laboriously study the proper moves and become a grand master of chess.

"Both Plato and Aristotle are – for quite different reasons and in quite different ways – more favorable to the idea that ethical knowledge is a rare intellectual accomplishment," Bobonich said.

Bobonich has found clues in the famous cave allegory in Plato's Republic to determine that the ways that people approach morality are usually just a direct result of what they have been taught by their parents or by society. "For all beliefs, people acquire them secondhand, and they acquire them without having any good reason at all for them," Bobonich said.

Thinking outside of these prescribed formulas is possibly central to the process of thinking the right way, he said. "Maybe we shouldn't get very much credit for doing the right thing, even if we are doing the right thing, if we do it unreflectively," Bobonich argued.

As an example, he offers the citizens of Nazi Germany who, like members of contemporary society, were informed of a certain set of moral principles and so believed them to be right. Had they reflected more upon these principles, who knows what course history might have taken?

If we behave better, is it only because we have adopted, equally unreflectively, moral views that are less objectionable? If we had been born into a Nazi society, would we have unreflectively adopted its beliefs?

Whether or not the ultimate decision is that the bad means are worth the good ends, Bobonich stressed the importance of honest reflection in a way that is consistent with a general set of principles, arrived at with equally good reason.

Bringing findings to the classroom

As a scholar and a teacher, Bobonich said he hopes to encourage the next generation of politicians, engineers and CEOs to examine their general principles and apply them to the problem of using bad means to good ends.

Inherent in the future of many college students is the responsibility to make decisions that will affect other people's lives, perhaps in a dramatically detrimental way.

Bobonich prompts his undergraduate students to consider a variety of artificial, gruesome situations in which a difficult moral decision must be made. One such scenario is the widely known "trolley problem."

The trolley problem calls for some mental role-play: You are a trolley conductor, and you reach a fork in the tracks. The way the train is heading, 10 small children are frolicking about the tracks and all will be bulldozed if you continue forth. A button on the dashboard allows you to switch directions, but – oh no! – one small child is walking on that alternate track and will die if the button is activated. What do you do?

The immediate, visceral response may be to urgently slam the button and kill the one child instead of the 10. Then, you consider the fact that you are therefore doing the killing, instead of allowing the killing to happen. But what difference does that really make? Overall, 10 lives will be saved.

In Bobonich's experience, the trolley problem moves his students to conclude that there may be "less difference than they used to think between doing something bad and allowing something bad to happen."

Choices demand the most careful reflection. "Unreflectiveness is a moral failure," according to Bobonich. And since daily life invariably presents situations where these ethical questions matter, Bobonich said, it's best to start thinking about them now.

Trolley problem [Wikipedia]

Japanese comfort women and a statue representing same

Does this involve political correctness or finger pointing for an admitted practice that the Japanese would rather forget? An assuagement of male combatants' horrors of war is morally unacceptable--but it did happen and probably still happens.

"Japanese politicians want Glendale's 'comfort women' statue removed"

by

Brittany Levine

December 19th, 2013

latimes.com

Three members of Japan's House of Representatives called on Glendale to remove an 1,100-pound statue honoring an estimated 80,000 to 200,000 "comfort women" from Korea, China and other countries who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese army during World War II.

The trio, Mio Sugita of the Hyogo Prefecture, Yuzuru Nishida of Chiba, and Hiromu Nakamaru of Hiroshima, are members of the Japan Restoration Party, a 1-year-old conservative political party that prefers a smaller central government, tax cuts and a hard-line approach to national security.

The group was on a two-day study mission in the Los Angeles area regarding the controversial memorial in Glendale's Central Park, the Glendale News-Press reported.

The group shared their perspectives on Tuesday through a translator, Koichi Mera, the president of the Study Group for Japan's Rebirth, an organization based in Los Angeles, at a downtown Los Angeles hotel.

"The news that the statue was installed made a big noise in Japan," Nishida said, as it describes the women as sex slaves. "That hurts Japan's honor."

Glendale erected the roughly $30,000 statue, which was paid for by Korean groups, in July, and a wave of controversy followed. City officials received thousands of letters from Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans opposing the statue.

Many former comfort women have publicly shared disturbing stories of their servitude and the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs says on its website that some women based in war-area brothels were "deprived of their freedom and had to endure misery."

But statue opponents, including the three Japanese politicians, say the women acted willingly and claim the estimated number of comfort women is greatly inflated.

In addition to calling for the Glendale statue's removal, the Japanese politicians also said they wanted the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to revise its account of the comfort women system and for their colleagues in Parliament to retract an apology to comfort women made by Japanese officials in the 1990s.

The politicians' party holds a handful of seats in Japan's upper and lower houses of the National Diet and it's unclear how much traction their requests would actually receive. Their ideas have yet to be debated in open session, the representatives said.

As the politicians aim to change Japanese policy regarding comfort women, Korean American lobbyists are working on installing more statues in the U.S. to increase awareness about the history of the women as well as encourage the Japanese government to pen an official resolution of apology.

The politicians visited the statue in Glendale, which features a young woman in Korean dress sitting next to an empty chair, and met with Japanese Americans to discuss the "comfort women" issue during their trip.

They met with a Japanese veteran who opposed a similar statue proposed in Buena Park—which failed to gain support from the City Council there—as well as two Japanese American groups that supported the statue, Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress and the San Fernando Valley Japanese American Citizens League.

"They wanted to say this is an issue for Japan, that it's not an international issue, but that's not the way the rest of the world is looking at it," Kathy Masaoka, co-chair of Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress, said during a phone interview after their meeting. "It's too late for that."
Masaoka said she was concerned that the controversy will not be resolved if Japanese politicians continue to oppose increasing awareness of "comfort women."

Although Glendale Mayor Dave Weaver has said he regretted that the city installed the statue, four other members of the City Council said they continue to support it and don't plan to remove it.

Justice...metamorphous from child to adult

"What Confucius Teaches Us About Modern American Justice"

Massachusetts prosecutors will try Philip Chism, a 14-year-old accused of murder, as an adult. Ancient Chinese philosophy explains why this is a bad idea.

by

Sam Crane

December 10th,  2013

The Atlantic

It was, by all accounts, a horrible crime. On October 22nd, Philip Chism, a 14-year-old high school student in Danvers, Massachusetts, slashed his math teacher, Colleen Ritzer, to death with a box cutter. Only 24 and new at the job, Ritzer had asked Chism to stay after school for extra help. No motive for the murder has been established.

Massachusetts prosecutors immediately charged Chism as an adult, in accordance with state law that stipulates that any person accused of murder who is 14 or older must be tried as a mature individual. The juvenile justice system is not an option in such cases for persons typically considered children.

In all other ways, Chism is viewed as a child under Massachusetts law. He cannot drive, buy cigarettes or alcohol, or vote, because the government defines him as too immature to engage in such activities responsibly. It is only for an especially heinous crime that the legal system reverses itself and makes a 14-year-old equivalent to a 40-year-old. The inconsistency is stark: In a wide range of lesser infractions, he is not responsible for his actions, but in perhaps the most serious of crimes he is transformed into an accountable adult. He is a child in his general morality, but an adult in his exceptional immorality.

Even though state law embraces this discrepancy, juvenile justice advocates in Massachusetts and across the United States reject the practice of trying children as adults, even when they commit horrendous crimes. The key argument is straightforward: Children are, by definition, morally immature, and that quality does not vary with the severity of crimes committed.

In making this case, reformers have two unexpected allies: Confucius and Mencius.

Most people would not think ancient Chinese thought is relevant for contemporary America, but Confucius and Mencius and other classical Chinese philosophers have answers for many of our modern questions. And as for the matter of whether children who commit heinous crimes should be tried as an adult, Confucians would strongly argue “no.”

In his famous work The Analects, Confucius describes a life-long process of moral improvement: “At 15 I turned my mind to learning; by 30 I had found my footing; at 40 I was free of perplexities; by 50 I understood the will of Heaven; by 60 I learned to give ear to others; by 70 I could follow my heart’s desires without overstepping the line.”

It is only as a child of 15 that Confucius himself begins to take moral education seriously. By 30, he has worked out how to do good in the world, but has yet to perfect his ethical behavior. Somewhere between 15 and 30, he moves from being morally uninformed, and thus not wholly responsible for his actions, to being a mature and accountable adult. Although establishing a specific age of adulthood is problematic for Confucians, since moral development is a personal process, at the very least it should be clear that a 14-year-old should not be treated as an adult.

And so while it is imperfect, the American standard of recognizing 18-year-olds as legally responsible is, from a Confucian perspective, more defensible than treating children as adults.

Mencius, a fellow philosopher, adds further weight to the argument. Renowned for his faith in the basic benevolence of human nature, Mencius writes that all humans have hearts that “cannot bear to see others suffer,” and even though people can be led astray, we can be taught to make the best use of our inner goodness. Indeed, the purpose of childhood is to be nurtured in developing our inherent humaneness. He uses the image of water to make his point:

“Now, by striking water and splashing it, you can make it go over your head, and by damning and channeling it, you can force it to go uphill. But is this the nature of water? It is force that makes this happen. While people can be made to do what is not good, what happens to their nature is like this.”

People can be made to do bad. But bad human acts, even murder, are not essential aspects of an individual’s character. We can do good again, we can be brought back to moral life—especially if we are still young and immature.

Several thousand years—and seven thousand miles—separate Confucius and Mencius from Philip Chism. But the moral justification of trying the 14-year-old as an adult is no more valid now than it was then.   

Politics, ethics, state rights, demographics...Satanism at Oklahoma State House?

Satan Cast Down from Heaven 

 

Gustave Dore

"Satanists plan statue to stand alongside Ten Commandments in Oklahoma"

A decision to erect a Christian monument outside the statehouse could backfire as satanists demand religious parity

December 8th, 2013

theguardian.com

In their zeal to tout their faith in the public square, conservatives in Oklahoma may have unwittingly opened the door to a wide range of religious groups, including Satanists who are seeking to put their own statue next to a Ten Commandments monument outside the statehouse.

The Republican-controlled legislature in the state known as the buckle of the Bible Belt authorised the privately funded Ten Commandments monument in 2009. It was placed on the Capitol grounds last year despite criticism from legal experts, who questioned its constitutionality. The Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking its removal.

But the New York-based Satanic Temple saw an opportunity. It notified the state's Capitol Preservation Commission that it wants to donate a monument and plans to submit one of several possible designs this month, said Lucien Greaves, a spokesman for the temple.

"We believe that all monuments should be in good taste and consistent with community standards," Greaves wrote in letter to state officials. "Our proposed monument, as an homage to the historic/literary Satan, will certainly abide by these guidelines."

Greaves said one potential design involves a pentagram, a satanic symbol, while another is meant to be an interactive display for children. He said he expects the monument, if approved by Oklahoma officials, would cost about $20,000.

The Republican state representative Mike Ritze, who spearheaded the push for the Ten Commandments monument and whose family helped pay the $10,000 for its construction, declined to comment on the Satanic Temple's effort, but Greaves credited Ritze for opening the door to his group's proposal.

"He's helping a satanic agenda grow more than any of us possibly could," Greaves said. "You don't walk around and see too many satanic temples around, but when you open the door to public spaces for us, that's when you're going to see us."

The Oklahoma legislature has taken other steps that many believe blur the line that divides church and state. The House speaker said he wants to build a chapel inside the Capitol to celebrate Oklahoma's "Judeo-Christian heritage". Several lawmakers have said they want to allow nativity scenes and other religious-themed symbols in public schools.

The Republican representative Bobby Cleveland, who plans to introduce one such bill next year, said many Christians feel they are under attack as a result of political correctness. He dismissed the notion of Satanists erecting a monument at the Capitol.

"I think these Satanists are a different group," Cleveland said. "You put them under the nut category."

Brady Henderson, the legal director for ACLU Oklahoma, said if state officials allow one type of religious expression, they must allow alternative forms of expression, although he said a better solution might be to allow none at all on state property.

"We would prefer to see Oklahoma's government officials work to faithfully serve our communities and improve the lives of Oklahomans instead of erecting granite monuments to show us all how righteous they are," Henderson said. "But if the Ten Commandments, with its overtly Christian message, is allowed to stay at the Capitol, the Satanic Temple's proposed monument cannot be rejected because of its different religious viewpoint."

Many of the GOP political party should take this course...Chinese philosophy

"Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy?"

The professor who teaches Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory claims, "This course will change your life."

by

Christine Gross-Loh

October 8th 2013

The Atlantic

Picture a world where human relationships are challenging, narcissism and self-centeredness are on the rise, and there is disagreement on the best way for people to live harmoniously together.

It sounds like 21st-century America. But the society that Michael Puett, a tall, 48-year-old bespectacled professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, is describing to more than 700 rapt undergraduates is China, 2,500 years ago.

Puett's course Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory has become the third most popular course at the university. The only classes with higher enrollment are Intro to Economics and Intro to Computer Science. The second time Puett offered it, in 2007, so many students crowded into the assigned room that they were sitting on the stairs and stage and spilling out into the hallway. Harvard moved the class to Sanders Theater, the biggest venue on campus.

Why are so many undergraduates spending a semester poring over abstruse Chinese philosophy by scholars who lived thousands of years ago? For one thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard's more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It's clear, though, that students are also lured in by Puett's bold promise: “This course will change your life.”

His students tell me it is true: that Puett uses Chinese philosophy as a way to give undergraduates concrete, counter-intuitive, and even revolutionary ideas, which teach them how to live a better life.  Elizabeth Malkin, a student in the course last year, says, “The class absolutely changed my perspective of myself, my peers, and of the way I view the world.” Puett puts a fresh spin on the questions that Chinese scholars grappled with centuries ago. He requires his students to closely read original texts (in translation) such as Confucius’s Analects, the Mencius, and the Daodejing and then actively put the teachings into practice in their daily lives. His lectures use Chinese thought in the context of contemporary American life to help 18- and 19-year-olds who are struggling to find their place in the world figure out how to be good human beings; how to create a good society; how to have a flourishing life.

Puett began offering his course to introduce his students not just to a completely different cultural worldview but also to a different set of tools. He told me he is seeing more students who are “feeling pushed onto a very specific path towards very concrete career goals” than he did when he began teaching nearly 20 years ago.  A recent report shows a steep decline over the last decade in the number of Harvard students who are choosing to major in the humanities, a trend roughly seen across the nation’s liberal arts schools. Finance remains the most popular career for Harvard graduates. Puett sees students who orient all their courses and even their extracurricular activities towards practical, predetermined career goals and plans.

Puett tells his students that being calculating and rationally deciding on plans is precisely the wrong way to make any sort of important life decision. The Chinese philosophers they are reading would say that this strategy makes it harder to remain open to other possibilities that don’t fit into that plan. Students who do this “are not paying enough attention to the daily things that actually invigorate and inspire them, out of which could come a really fulfilling, exciting life,” he explains. If what excites a student is not the same as what he has decided is best for him, he becomes trapped on a misguided path, slated to begin an unfulfilling career. Puett aims to open his students’ eyes to a different way to approach everything from relationships to career decisions. He teaches them that: 

The smallest actions have the most profound ramifications. Confucius, Mencius, and other Chinese philosophers taught that the most mundane actions can have a ripple effect, and Puett urges his students to become more self-aware, to notice how even the most quotidian acts—holding open the door for someone, smiling at the grocery clerk—change the course of the day by affecting how we feel.

That rush of good feeling that comes after a daily run, the inspiring conversation with a good friend, or the momentary flash of anger that arises when someone cuts in front of us in line—what could they have to do with big life matters? Everything, actually. From a Chinese philosophical point of view, these small daily experiences provide us endless opportunities to understand ourselves. When we notice and understand what makes us tick, react, feel joyful or angry, we develop a better sense of who we are that helps us when approaching new situations. Mencius, a late Confucian thinker (4th century B.C.E.), taught that if you cultivate your better nature in these small ways, you can become an extraordinary person with an incredible influence, altering your own life as well as that of those around you, until finally “you can turn the whole world in the palm of your hand.”

Decisions are made from the heart. Americans tend to believe that humans are rational creatures who make decisions logically, using our brains. But in Chinese, the word for “mind” and “heart” are the same. Puett teaches that the heart and the mind are inextricably linked, and that one does not exist without the other. Whenever we make decisions, from the prosaic to the profound (what to make for dinner; which courses to take next semester; what career path to follow; whom to marry), we will make better ones when we intuit how to integrate heart and mind and let our rational and emotional sides blend into one.  Zhuangzi, a Daoist philosopher, taught that we should train ourselves to become “spontaneous” through daily living, rather than closing ourselves off through what we think of as rational decision-making. In the same way that one deliberately practices the piano in order to eventually play it effortlessly, through our everyday activities we train ourselves to become more open to experiences and phenomena so that eventually the right responses and decisions come spontaneously, without angst, from the heart-mind.

Recent research into neuroscience is confirming that the Chinese philosophers are correct: Brain scans reveal that our unconscious awareness of emotions and phenomena around us are actually what drive the decisions we believe we are making with such logical rationality. According to Marianne LaFrance, a psychology professor at Yale, if we see a happy face for just a fraction of a second (4 milliseconds to be exact), that’s long enough to elicit a mini emotional high. In one study viewers who were flashed a smile—even though it was shown too quickly for them to even realize they had seen it—perceived the things around them more positively.

If the body leads, the mind will follow. Behaving kindly (even when you are not feeling kindly), or smiling at someone (even if you aren’t feeling particularly friendly at the moment) can cause actual differences in how you end up feeling and behaving, even ultimately changing the outcome of a situation.

While all this might sound like hooey-wooey self-help, much of what Puett teaches is previously accepted cultural wisdom that has been lost in the modern age. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do,” a view shared by thinkers such as Confucius, who taught that the importance of rituals lies in how they inculcate a certain sensibility in a person.  In research published in Psychological Science, social psychologist Amy Cuddy and her colleagues found that when we take a power stance (stand with our legs apart, arms thrust out, taking up space), the pose does not only cause other people to view us as more confident and powerful; it actually causes a hormonal surge that makes us become more confident.

At the end of each class, Puett challenges his students to put the Chinese philosophy they have been learning into tangible practice in their everyday lives. “The Chinese philosophers we read taught that the way to really change lives for the better is from a very mundane level, changing the way people experience and respond to the world, so what I try to do is to hit them at that level. I’m not trying to give my students really big advice about what to do with their lives. I just want to give them a sense of what they can do daily to transform how they live.” Their assignments are small ones: to first observe how they feel when they smile at a stranger, hold open a door for someone, engage in a hobby. He asks them to take note of what happens next: how every action, gesture, or word dramatically affects how others respond to them. Then Puett asks them to pursue more of the activities that they notice arouse positive, excited feelings. In their papers and discussion sections students discuss what it means to live life according to the teachings of these philosophers.

Once they’ve understood themselves better and discovered what they love to do they can then work to become adept at those activities through ample practice and self-cultivation. Self-cultivation is related to another classical Chinese concept: that effort is what counts the most, more than talent or aptitude. We aren’t limited to our innate talents; we all have enormous potential to expand our abilities if we cultivate them. You don’t have to be stuck doing what you happen to be good at; merely pay attention to what you love and proceed from there. Chinese philosophers taught that paying attention to small clues “can literally change everything that we can become as human beings,” says Puett.  

To be interconnected, focus on mundane, everyday practices, and understand that great things begin with the very smallest of acts are radical ideas for young people living in a society that pressures them to think big and achieve individual excellence. This might be one reason why, according to the Chronicle for Higher Education, interest in Chinese philosophy is taking off around the nation—not just at Harvard. And it’s a message that’s especially resonating with those yearning for an alternative to the fast track they have been on all their lives.

One of Puett’s former students, Adam Mitchell, was a math and science whiz who went to Harvard intending to major in economics. At Harvard specifically and in society in general, he told me, “we’re expected to think of our future in this rational way: to add up the pros and cons and then make a decision. That leads you down the road of ‘Stick with what you’re good at’”—a road with little risk but little reward. But after his introduction to Chinese philosophy during his sophomore year, he realized this wasn’t the only way to think about the future. Instead, he tried courses he was drawn to but wasn’t naturally adroit at because he had learned how much value lies in working hard to become better at what you love. He became more aware of the way he was affected by those around him, and how they were affected by his own actions in turn. Mitchell threw himself into foreign language learning, feels his relationships have deepened, and is today working towards a master’s degree in regional studies. He told me, “I can happily say that Professor Puett lived up to his promise, that the course did in fact change my life.”

Hannah Arendt...a new biopic of an almost forgotten political philosopher

"Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think."

Barbara Sukowa in “Hannah Arendt,” a film that follows the German-American philosophy professor as she covered Adolph Eichmann’s war-crimes trial in Jerusalem.

Hannah Arendt

Trailer

"Hannah Arendt Biopic Offers Rare Onscreen View of Political Philosophy"

Movie Paints Vivid Picture of German-Jewish Émigrés

by 

Beate Sissenich

May 26th, 2013

The Jewish Daily Forward

Biopics about philosophers are rare, and they favor activists over ivory-tower thinkers. The life of the mind, unless it directly shapes social action, is not easily captured in film.

Hence, Richard Attenborough’s film “Gandhi” exposed the Indian independence leader’s ideas on nonviolent struggle through his political activism, not through his writings. Likewise, Margarethe von Trotta’s cinematic portrayal of the Marxist dissident writer Rosa Luxemburg wasted little time on the latter’s considerable written output and instead explored Luxemburg’s role in the founding of organized social democracy in Poland, and later in the founding of the Communist Party in Germany, in opposition both to Russian Bolsheviks and German social democrats.

Given the challenge of translating philosophy into drama, it is understandable that Von Trotta’s latest film, about the German Jewish writer Hannah Arendt, has little to say about the political theorist’s extensive oeuvre on the nature of political action or her analysis of totalitarianism.

Instead, the film concentrates on a turbulent period in Arendt’s life, during which she came under severe attack for her reporting on Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial. First published as a series of essays in The New Yorker, the report was later expanded into a book under the title “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

The film is an engaging portrayal of a woman who did not back down in the face of massive hostility generated by her ideas. Arendt’s counterintuitive interpretation of the behavior and motivations of Holocaust perpetrators created a chasm among New York Jewish intellectuals, many of whom, like her, were German exiles.

“Hannah Arendt” is a logical continuation of von Trotta’s earlier films about women articulating perspectives in opposition to mainstream ideology; beyond “Rosa Luxemburg,” these films include “Vision,” about the medieval mystic, composer and writer Hildegard von Bingen, and “Rosenstrasse,” about a successful protest of gentile women against the incarceration of their Jewish husbands in Berlin in 1943.

The opening scene of “Hannah Arendt” depicts the capture of Nazi criminal Eichmann on a dark and lonely road in Buenos Aires. Much later in the film, Arendt finds herself similarly confronted by Mossad agents while on a meditative walk in the woods away from the tumult that her interpretation of the trial had caused.

This odd parallel suggests that Arendt, according to her critics, was culpable of empathizing with Nazi perpetrators while condemning victims’ actions. She shocked her contemporaries by claiming that the Holocaust was the deed not of raging anti-Semitic brutes devoid of basic civilization, but of unthinking bureaucrats who had deactivated their own moral reasoning in favor of absolute obedience to the Führer.

She considered Eichmann a midlevel career opportunist of second-rate intellect who organized the deportation and slaughter of European Jews because it was his job and he wanted to do it well.

The Holocaust, Arendt argued, was not a collective decision in which Eichmann participated; Hitler alone had ordered the complete extermination of Europe’s Jews, but the order’s implementation depended on the willing participation of vast numbers of German and other functionaries across Europe who were unwilling to think from any standpoint other than the law of the land. This interpretation led Arendt to question the legal concept of culpability.

A traditional understanding of guilt, she pointed out, was inadequate for convicting Eichmann of crimes against Jews or crimes against humanity. Eichmann had knowingly engineered the deportation and slaughter of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, but he had never personally murdered a single individual. Contrary to allegations by her critics, Arendt’s assessment of the shortcomings of existing legal theory was a far cry from exculpating Eichmann, whom she did consider evil and deserving of the death penalty.

But it explained her scorn for the prosecutor, who in her opinion misconstrued the nature of the crime and of Eichmann’s role in it.

Arendt’s view of genocide by unthinking managers did not deny the notion of agency; she certainly did not consider the Holocaust inevitable.

In her book, Arendt took great pains to report on the scope of resistance to and noncooperation with the deportations in various occupied countries, most notably Denmark, where, she wrote, even career Nazis “changed their minds” about “the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course” in the face of principled resistance.

But even if people had been willing to grant Arendt her idea that evil in the person of Eichmann seemed remarkably ordinary, Arendt’s insistence that Jewish community leaders had a choice in whether to cooperate with the Nazi regime and that they used the opportunity for self-aggrandizement seemed to turn notions of moral responsibility upside down.

Without Jewish help in administrative and police work… there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower,” she wrote. This issue had already been addressed extensively by the historian Raul Hilberg (“The Destruction of the European Jews,” 1961), to whom Arendt’s report was heavily indebted.

But rather than seeing cooperation as a rational response that sought to lessen the impact of unfathomable evil, Arendt alleged that the Jewish community leaders “enjoyed their new power” derived from compiling lists, acquiring money from the victims to cover transportation costs, policing the deportations and transferring Jewish assets into Nazi hands.

To Arendt, the frequently posed question at the trial — Why had there not been any rebellion? — was misguided. Instead, what called for explanation was the scale of cooperation on the part of the victims’ leaders.

“The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery, but the total number of victims would hardly have been between 4 ½ and 6 million people.”

Ultimately, Arendt explained, this aspect of the Holocaust illustrated how completely the calculus of Nazism had replaced traditional moral conscience.

The main issues in the debates stirred up by Arendt’s report remain unresolved. The “Goldhagen controversy” during the 1990s juxtaposed an intentionalist interpretation of the Holocaust to the functionalist account of genocide engineered by unthinking bureaucrats.

Daniel J. Goldhagen’s 1996 book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” claimed the Holocaust was possible because German anti-Semitism differed from its counterparts elsewhere in Europe insofar as it aimed at the complete elimination of Jews.

Whereas the latter argument is somewhat tautological, the functionalist thesis has no answer for why modernity engendered mass slaughter on an industrial scale only in Germany and why European societies under Nazi occupation varied widely in their response to the Nazis’ expulsion, deportation and murder of Jews.

The question of Jewish cooperation was taken up in a vastly more nuanced way than Arendt’s by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Instead of accusing Jewish leaders of self-aggrandizement, Bauman, author of the 1989 book “Modernity and the Holocaust,” emphasized the paradoxical nature of bureaucratically organized genocide in which victims’ cooperation seemed like a perfectly rational, yet of course self-defeating, strategy.

As a period film, “Hannah Arendt” pays little homage to the 50 years of research that have been produced since Eichmann’s death. It paints a vivid picture of the German Jewish émigré community in New York, which continued to cultivate German language and customs and made Arendt’s American friends, notably Mary McCarthy, feel oddly out of place.

The film portrays the falling-out between Arendt and her erstwhile mentor, Zionist Kurt Blumenfeld, sensitively and without taking sides. It seems less even-handed in its rendering of Arendt’s interactions with her friend and New School colleague Hans Jonas. Arendt’s complex relationship with her former teacher, the philosopher and Nazi apologist Martin Heidegger, is treated only superficially and somewhat sappily.

The script, written jointly by Von Trotta and Pam Katz, a New York-based screenwriter, is smart and nimble, weaving together dialogue on the political and the personal in multiple languages. Original footage from the Eichmann trial is interspersed with the film’s account of Arendt in the court’s pressroom and in conversation with colleagues and friends in Jerusalem and New York.

Barbara Sukowa bears no physical resemblance whatsoever to Arendt, which has the effect of letting us focus on the character while leaving behind any sentimental fixation on looks. Janet McTeer gives a forceful performance as the novelist McCarthy, a close friend of Arendt’s who stood by her when most others abandoned her.

Anyone with a passing interest in 20th-century social theory will benefit from seeing this film, but no one should expect to receive from it an education in either philosophy or Holocaust history. It succeeds best as a sociology of intellectuals who were grappling with one of the fundamental cataclysms of the 20th century that they themselves had barely escaped — genocide on an industrial scale.
 
[Beate Sissenich is a visiting scholar at New York University’s Center for European and Mediterranean Studies and author of “Building States Without Society”....]

"The Woman Who Saw Banality in Evil"

by

Fred Kaplan

May 24th, 2013

The New York Times

Fifty years ago, a small book called “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” by a New School philosophy professor named Hannah Arendt set off a storm like few books before or since. Among Upper West Side intellectuals it sparked, as the critic Irving Howe put it, “a civil war,” siring vicious debates and souring lifelong friendships. It also sold more than 100,000 copies and reshaped the way people have thought about the Holocaust, genocide and the puzzle of evil ever since.

“The Controversy” — as people simply called the growing dispute — is largely forgotten now, and the intense rancor it inspired might seem improbable. But a new movie about the episode, “Hannah Arendt,” which opens Wednesday at Film Forum, revives the debates and the era.

Its director, Margarethe von Trotta, a veteran of the New German Cinema, was skeptical when a friend suggested she make this film 10 years ago. “My first reaction was, how can I make a film about a philosopher, someone who sits and thinks?” she recalled in a phone interview from her home in Paris.

She and her American screenwriter, Pamela Katz, wrote a treatment that covered Arendt’s whole life, but it was too long and diffuse. They decided to focus instead on the Eichmann affair. “It’s better for filmmakers to have a confrontation, not just abstraction,” Ms. von Trotta said.

In May 1960, Adolf Eichmann — the last surviving Nazi higher-up, who had fled to Argentina at the end of the war — was kidnapped by Mossad agents, flown to Jerusalem and tried for crimes against humanity.

Arendt, a Jewish-German refugee and author of a celebrated tome, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” offered to cover the trial for The New Yorker. (Her book originally ran as a five-part article.)

She made two particularly provocative points. The first was that Eichmann, a senior SS officer, was not the malicious organizer of the Nazi death camps, as Israeli prosecutors charged, but rather a mediocre bureaucrat, “a leaf in the whirlwind of time,” as Arendt put it; “not a monster” but “a clown.” Hence the enduring phrase from her book’s subtitle: “the banality of evil.”

Arendt’s second point was that the “Jewish Councils” in Germany and Poland were complicit in the mass murder of their own people. They helped the Nazis round up the victims, confiscate their property and send them off on trains to their doom. Without these Jewish leaders, Arendt wrote, “there would have been chaos and plenty of misery, but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four-and-a-half and six million people.” She added, “To a Jew, this role of the Jewish leaders” was “undoubtedly the darkest chapter of this whole dark story.”

For these ideas, Arendt was pilloried as a self-hating Jew. The Anti-Defamation League sent out letters urging rabbis to denounce her on the High Holy Days. Jewish organizations paid researchers to peruse her book for errors. Some of her closest friends didn’t speak to her for years, if ever again.

At the time, Israel was just 15 years old: tiny, weak and impoverished. The prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had ballyhooed the Eichmann trial — one of the first global media events — to build support for his fledgling state and to educate people about the Holocaust. In America, Jewish professionals, especially in academia, were just coming into their own, as blacklists and quotas withered away. And here was the great scholar Hannah Arendt downplaying their great catch and airing their dirty laundry.

Some of the attacks on Arendt — that she sympathized with Eichmann or demonized the Jewish victims more than their Nazi killers — were over the top. But some of Arendt’s views were over the top as well, not least her portrait of Eichmann. Her “banality of evil” thesis rests on the premise that Eichmann committed his deeds with no awareness of their evil, not even with virulent anti-Semitism. In fact, though, much evidence — some of it known at the time, some unearthed since — indicates that Eichmann very much knew what he was doing.

In 1957 in Argentina, a former SS officer named Willem Sassen interviewed Eichmann at length. The tapes, which were rediscovered only a few years ago, reveal Eichmann boasting that he had helped draft the letter ordering the Final Solution and that several times, he refused requests from fellow officers to free a favored Jew.

“I worked relentlessly to kindle the fire,” he says. “I was not just a recipient of orders. Had I been that, I would have been an imbecile. I was an idealist.”

David Cesarani, in his 2004 biography, “Becoming Eichmann,” unearthed a speech from as far back as 1937 in which the idealist was clearly “in the grip of a fantasy that there was a world Jewish conspiracy against Germany,” an enemy that must be destroyed.

At the time of the trial, much was made of Eichmann’s remark to a comrade toward the end of the war: “I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals.” Arendt wrote that he had been merely “boasting” — which led Howe to comment, “That kind of boast was hardly the talk of a featureless cog in a bureaucratic machine.”

Amos Elon, a prominent Israeli journalist who generally defended Arendt, allowed in his introduction to her book’s paperback edition that Arendt “had a tendency to draw absolute conclusions on the basis of casual evidence.”

The casual evidence of Eichmann’s banality was his cliché-ridden testimony on the witness stand. “His inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” she wrote. He testified that he was just doing his job, unthinkingly, and Arendt believed him.

Even Arendt’s friends spoke of her snobbery. In this case, her snobbery toward Eichmann’s bad grammar blocked her from seeing what was obvious to everyone else, that he was lying in an attempt to save his skin.

Arendt misread Eichmann, but she did hit on something broader about how ordinary people become brutal killers. The postwar generation of young Germans took Arendt’s book as inspiration to rebel against their parents, who may not have personally killed Jews during the war but knew what was going on and did nothing.

In America, protesters invoked the “banality of evil” to rail against the outwardly decent family men who dropped bombs on North Vietnam or sat in nuclear-missile silos, ready to push the button — seeing them as the cold war’s version of Arendt’s “desk murderers.”

Ms. von Trotta has built a career making films about strong women who go their own way, at times alienating everyone around them. “Rosa Luxemburg” was about the Communist rebel who didn’t fit in with any party sect. “Vision” was about Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century nun-mystic who composed music that transcended all ages. (Both figures, as is Arendt, were played by Barbara Sukowa, who in the new film really seems to be a philosopher locked in deep thought.)

“I identify with these women,” Ms. von Trotta said. “Maybe it’s because I grew up stateless.”
(Her mother came from an aristocratic Russian family, fled after the revolution and settled in Berlin, where Margarethe was born — though, under German law, that didn’t make her a citizen).

“There’s a bit of this in Hannah,” she went on. “She left Germany when the Nazis took over. She was imprisoned in France for being German. She didn’t feel she had a home until she came to America. Then the attacks on the Eichmann book felt like a third exile.

“I’m not a missionary,” she added. “I don’t make films to have a message. I make films about people that I like or that interest me. But if there’s a message in this film, it’s that you should think for yourself, don’t follow an ideology or a fashion. Hannah called this ‘thinking without banisters.’ ”

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by

Hannah Arendt

ISBN-10: 0140187650
ISBN-13: 978-0140187656

Hannah Arendt [Wikipedia]

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Evolutionary psychology, ethics--Thomas de Zengotita's perspective

"Ethics and the Limits of Evolutionary Psychology"

by

Thomas de Zengotita

The Hedgehog Review

Volume 15, No. 1

Spring 2013

Introduction

In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre offers a hilarious portrayal of philosopher G. E. Moore at Bloomsbury convincing his enraptured audience (it was not difficult) that their particular tastes in art and love reflected quasi-platonic values to which their exquisitely refined sensibilities gave them special access. 1 While Moore’s positive claims in Principia Ethica (1903) cannot survive MacIntyre’s withering caricature, Moore’s own critique, exposing a “naturalistic fallacy” in the work of predecessors as diverse as Herbert Spencer and Immanuel Kant, holds up well. This essay will apply it to efforts by evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt to reduce the ethical dimension of human existence to the vicissitudes of natural selection and genetic programming.

The Place of Ethics in Early Modern Nature

…the negligence or perverseness of mankind cannot be excused, if their discourses on morality be not much more clear than those in natural philosophy

—John Locke 2

To place evolutionary psychology in context, one must exercise the imagination on this question: what did the natural world look like to educated men and women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? They were through with mythologies; even the Book of Genesis was, for most of them, just a fable when compared to the achievements of science. It was the work of Robert Boyle, William Harvey, Christiaan Huygens, Galileo Galilei, and, above all, Isaac Newton that informed their perceptions of nature. This exercise demands a suspension of our knowledge of cosmology, geology, and biology. No billions of years since the formation of the solar system. No fossil record. No dinosaurs. No genes. No speciation, no natural selection—no evolution. The panorama of life, the stunning diversity of its forms and adaptations, the intricacies of anatomy and physiology—all this was apparent, and it was the object of devoted attention, even awe, but the assumption was that all of it had always been more or less as it now appeared, ever since it came to be.

Under those circumstances the (almost) inevitable conclusion was that some intelligent Maker was responsible for the order of the universe, especially for organs and organisms. 3 Innovations in human manufacture (telescopes, microscopes, pumps, automata of all kinds) made that conclusion the more inevitable. To look at nature, at the inorganic bodies dancing to Newtonian measures and the organic bodies sensing, respirating, locomoting, ingesting, digesting, reproducing—to look at all that and not apprehend design would have been like coming across an array of pebbles on a beach spelling out some message and perceiving it as the effect of surf and tide.

What early moderns saw in nature was purpose—rational purpose, divine purpose. When they looked at an equation in classical mechanics, they saw a “law” in the full sense of the word, and when they looked at the relevant experimental results, they saw something like obedience to that law. “Let there be light” made for beautiful poetry, but F = MA was the word of God. When they looked at a healthy body, early moderns also saw conformity to a designer’s intentions. But, in this realm, one also encountered mortality and disease. Here, for some reason, a sort of disobedience came to pass, a malfunctioning. Why that should be so was the subject of debate, but almost no one questioned the framework of interpretation. Modern medicine was founded on the metaphor of repairing malfunctions of bodily mechanisms.

And so it was, and all the more so, when early moderns looked upon human history—the carnage, the absurd superstitions, the institutionalized barbarities. The conclusion was inevitable. Here was disease of another order, a malfunctioning of another kind. Again, there was much debate over why this should be, but the basic framework of interpretation remained. The question became: what were the Maker’s designs for His human creatures as social beings, what were those natural laws and how could His creatures cure the diseases of history in accordance with them? Modern political and ethical thought took shape on that foundation, dependent on the idea that nature was, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “the art whereby God hath made and governs the world.” 4

When Friedrich Nietzsche, who had fully absorbed the implications of Darwinian evolution, announced that “God is dead,” he was not merely addressing orthodox religion. He was telling moderns that there was no meaning or direction to be found in nature or history at all. He was telling them that Georg W. F. Hegel, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx were victims of the residual influence of the idea of Providence, that their visions of an unfolding historical necessity were delusions. The thing that really mattered in the long run about Charles Darwin wasn’t the impact of “we are descended from monkeys” on reactionaries; it was the impact of “we are a meaningless accident” on progressives. Think of the tone in Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Theodor Adorno, the stoic willingness to face up to irredeemable loss and make the best of it. Think of the ferocious absolutism of twentieth century totalitarian regimes. These represent opposing but characteristic moods, and both were responses to a condition of utter abandonment and a consequent shift of the burden of responsibility for human practices to human beings.

But those who believed in positivist sciences of human nature soldiered on, undeterred by existential crises—and the way they thought about human beings did not fundamentally change when the Darwinian view of nature replaced the Deistic view of nature. Scientific thought about humanity continues to mimic scientific thought about the rest of nature. It steps back and asks how human-things work. The idea that we were designed by Newton’s Clockmaker God is no longer credible, but the objectifying posture survives and so does what qualifies as explanation: functionality, adaptation—which means design, only now, thanks to the concept of natural selection, without a designer.

The ethical naturalists of today’s evolutionary psychology still work under taken-for-granted, seventeenth-century epistemic guidelines, with this fundamental difference: In the context of Deism, to say nothing of orthodoxy, there was no categorical problem of value. Exactly what the Maker’s laws enjoined might be debated, but whatever it was, there was no question of the absolute value of the Maker’s values, as it were. Conceiving of humanity’s rights and duties as essentially functional made perfect sense under circumstances in which ultimate axiological responsibility was both real and supra-human.

A brief perusal of John Locke’s Second Treatise reminds us that he actually derived the natural rights he so influentially identified from a fundamental duty of self-preservation owed by creatures to their Creator since they are “sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are.” 5 How could Locke have thought that human “discourses on morality” would be clearer than scientific explanations of the physical world? From our vantage point, that expectation is almost impossible to fathom. But the answer is simple: obviously, Locke reasoned, the Maker’s top priority would be to provide his creatures with access to His instructions for their conduct—whatever else they might figure out was up to them.

Evolutionary psychologists have been ironically, but richly, equipped with an explanatory apparatus derived from that “whatever else,” and they have come full circle. Now, at long last, those designer specs for human behavior are being described. There is just one problem. Where once there was a locus of absolute value, there is now a vacuum.

Modular Morality

Evolutionary psychology has come a long way since E. O. Wilson launched the program in 1975. But the most compelling developments in the field still depend upon foundational breakthroughs made by George C. Williams and W. D. Hamilton in the 1960s. They depend upon explanations of self-sacrificing behaviors that seem to run counter to the imperatives of the survival (and therefore reproduction) of the innate programs that trigger such behaviors in the first place. But the machinations of what would be called The Selfish Gene (1976) were equal to the challenge: the willingness of young men to die in battle for the sake of others, for example, boils down to this: under the conditions in which such behaviors originally evolved, those others were likely to be kinfolk who carried the same genes. That is why, throughout history, long after extended family gene pools were absorbed into mass societies, so many have continued to owe so much to so few.

Building upon that basic argument in various ingenious ways, evolutionary psychologists have laid claim to the whole of human morality. They have “explained” (an important word) why human beings hold some things to be good and some things to be bad. They have even explained why different groups of people hold different things to be good and bad. That is, they have finally solved the problem that has stymied ethical nativism since Francis Hutcheson and David Hume first posited an innate “moral sense” and partisans of nurture first invoked the diversity of human customs in rebuttal. They have created an argument for innate morality that positively embraces that diversity as evidence for innate morality. Womens’ rights, women as chattel, radical democracy, caste hierarchy, orgiastic hedonism, rigorous asceticism—all so different, yet all based on genetic programming.

This audacious move was authorized by the notion of psychological modularity. Instead of a picture of the brain as an information processor that works in pretty much the same way across the whole field of inputs and outputs, modular psychology proposes a picture of the brain as divided into domain-specific programs for various psychological processes in various circumstances. Noam Chomsky’s language acquisition device is one such program, another kicks in for facial recognition, yet another estimates size in relation to distance, and so on.

The most persuasive uses of modular psychology to explain human morality can be found in The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker (2003) and The Righteous Mind (2012) in which Jonathan Haidt sums up decades of work on “moral foundations theory” and tries to explain American political attitudes in those terms. The basic arguments and supporting research were neatly outlined by Pinker in a New York Times Magazine piece called “The Moral Instinct” (2008). The essential claim, as framed by Haidt, depends upon a comparison of moral modules with taste buds (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory). “We humans,” he writes, “all have the same five taste receptors, but we don’t all like the same foods.” 6 And he appeals, in the usual way, to influences of culture, upbringing, and individual variation to explain that. 7 But he also offers a specific account of how that plasticity works, and, once again, a metaphor supplies the platform. He calls upon neurologist Greg Marcus, who wants us to see innateness as “prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.” 8 Instead of thinking of the brain we are born with as a “wiring diagram,” we should think of it as the “first draft” of a book to be written during development. 9

Haidt’s five moral “taste buds” are Care, Fairness, Loyalty (or Community), Authority, and Sanctity (or Purity). He explains cultural variation in terms of 1) the ability of cultures to “shrink or expand the current triggers” of any module and 2) the ability of cultures to assign behaviors to different modules. 10 An example of the first is how much smaller the scope of “disgusting sex acts” has become for many people in modern society—miscegenation, homosexuality, etc. An example of the second is how spanking children triggers the Care/Harm module in people who disapprove of it, but falls under the Authority and even Sanctity (respect) modules for those who approve of it. 11

That’s the gist. It is important, however, to link the argument to the book’s title: The Righteous Mind. Haidt is calling attention to the lived experience of moral indignation. Explaining attitudes toward, say, burning the American flag as dependent upon whether or not it “triggers” Loyalty and Sanctity modules has a prima facie plausibility—the term fits the experience and lends momentum to the whole argument.

But the suspicion that something is amiss will not dissipate. It comes into focus when Pinker, at the end of his New York Times Magazine article, makes the inevitable pitch for “how all this can be useful to us going forward.” In a section called “Doing Better by Knowing Ourselves,” he breaks with the rigorous Hume and tries to rescue “moral reasoning” from the insignificance to which moral sense theory consigned it. 12 He speaks of how salutary it would be if we all recognized that opponents in political debates share a moral foundation. But then, as he presses his point home, stressing that the moral sense is as subject to illusions as the other senses, cracks appear in the veneer of sprightly optimism. We get a glimpse of the modules he favors when he describes these illusions as “apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity.” 13 What happened to Harm and Fairness? Could it be that he actually believes that “morality per se” is to be found in the vicinity of those modules? And what to make of the penultimate gesture: “our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.”  14

“Doing the right thing”? “Morality per se”? Moore would take much pleasure in these maneuvers. No matter how advanced the natural science—the naturalistic fallacy—the assumption that something is morally good because it is natural—is philosophically secure. This fallacy is exposed when any definition of good offered by an ethical naturalist is subjected to a particular linguistic test. For example, when hedonism tries to define good by claiming that “pleasure is good,” the sentence itself is obviously saying something other than “pleasure is pleasure.” The two sentences are not synonymous, therefore good and pleasure are not identical. More broadly, given the claim that “Action X is good because the genetic program that triggers it, and our approval of it, was naturally selected for,” one can still ask whether it is good to do what we are genetically inclined to do. That is, asking that question still makes sense because—even using examples favored by evolutionary psychologists—the answer would appear to be: sometimes yes (help a friend) and sometimes no (kill the “other”).

It comes down to this: we cannot find truly ethical guidance in a nature shaped by evolution. Natural selection is random—random as to the mutations that produce variation, random as to the accidents of circumstance that make one variant adaptive and another fatal. Natural selection may indeed be responsible for something like a “mother instinct” that inspires tender mammalian behaviors of which we all approve. But natural selection may also be responsible for our instinctive tendency to fear what is strange and attack what is feared, thus contributing to the pageant of slaughter that has been human history. Ethical thought must take into account what Darwinian nature has made of us, and political provision must be made for that. But nothing ethical per se—nothing good or bad or even meaningful is to be found there.

Understanding Right and Wrong

But there is another way to think about ethics, one that derives from the phenomenological tradition and the work of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. It begins by refusing the Cartesian analogy Gilbert Ryle identified long ago in The Concept of Mind (1949). Ryle focused on the moment when psychology was born with Cartesian dualism. The Cartesian formulation—“But what then am I? A thing that thinks”—seemed innocent enough, but it forced upon us the assumption that, just as the natural sciences posit physical things with certain attributes or properties (shape, mass), so a nascent psychology would posit mental-things with certain attributes and properties (willing, imagining) and study them accordingly—as Locke did in the exhaustive taxonomy of “Ideas” that was his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

Ryle identified “category mistakes” that were the fruit of that analogy—noticing that, for example, saying you have ideas “in your head” puts more strain on the word “in” than saying “she came home in a flood of tears”—but the strain goes unnoticed, and we end up talking as if a surgeon might open one’s skull and see images floating around like holograms amidst the brain tissue. 15 With exquisite subtlety, Wittgenstein would expose absurdities that follow from this false picture of private mind in his Philosophical Investigations (1953). And in Being and Time (1927), Heidegger pounded relentlessly away at descriptions of consciousness that assumed this objectified subject.

This other way of thinking about ethics does not deny that one can make human beings objects of scientific study. It does not deny that extraordinary results have followed from so doing, in medicine, most obviously, but also in psychology, genetics, and the brain sciences. Insofar as human nature is physically determined, the scientific study of it has been successful. But refusing that analogy does imply that, insofar as human nature is not physical, insofar as it is mental or historical or aesthetic—or ethical—then studying it as if it were physical is bound to miss the mark. The claim is that you cannot understand what it means to be human, what it is to be human, by way of science. Neurologists of the future may map brain activity so precisely that they will someday be able to read out what a person is consciously experiencing from that map—but the map will never be conscious experience. It can help explain a conscious experience, but only a person can understand it. Nature can only be explained; humanity can be understood, and understanding is a matter of meaning.

Take jokes, for example. An explanation of a joke is notoriously unfunny. It may be true in every detail, but it inevitably falls short in that crucial respect. A joke is only funny when you get it—that is, understand it to begin with. The spirit of this alternative enterprise can be evoked in this way: any theory of humor it might produce would aspire to be funny.

When the distinction between explanation and understanding is clear, much controversy can be laid to rest. There is no inherent conflict between the analytic and phenomenological traditions in philosophy—nor between phenomenology and objectifying science-inspired studies of human beings generally, anymore than there is between Cubism and Expressionism. 16 To see why, suppose that something like Haidt’s modular theory of an innate morality is true. 17 One can then reflect upon his spheres of moral taste to see if there is an aspect of the phenomena that might bring ethical unity to the modules—an aspect that would not need explaining, an aspect we simply understand as the rightness or wrongness in them all. But what to look for? What is the ethical analogue of funniness?

Locke expected natural laws for human behavior to be logical—a priori truths provided by the designer for the guidance of his creatures. “Where there is no property, there is no injustice,” he declared, “is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid.” 18 Not quite that, perhaps, but it points to a phenomenological truth of great disclosive power. Have you ever been robbed? That is, have you ever come home to find your place ransacked? Your drawers opened, your personal things strewn around, kitchen cabinets in disarray, and some half-eaten food left out? If you have ever had that experience, and if you did not happen to have your life savings in one of the drawers, then you will know that “theft” is not the essential crime here. It isn’t so much that they took your DVD player—it is those hands in your personal spaces, pawing your clothes, that mouth on your food. It is a contamination, a violation.

Have you ever been mugged, when they put their hands on your actual body, when they make you lift your arms, when they shove you against a wall, threaten you with a weapon, rummage through your pockets? You can smell their breath; you notice the moles on their skin. It is very intimate. When your actual body is arranged in accordance with someone else’s will, the experience is much more intense than in the case of burglary, when it is your other “bodies” that get interfered with. But the essence of the crime, the violation of self that is the crime, remains. Assault and rape and murder fall along the same continuum. And consider how humiliating it is to lose control of your bodily functions in illness or old age. That is a violation too.

All these cases are different. Phenomenology enjoins us to give each difference its due, while looking for a constant element. Call it: the violation of embodied mind, the embodiment of another mind in bodies that are yours, without your invitation or consent. 19 Now we take in at a glance what is encoded in law—the reason for the relative severity of the crimes—and also why old age cannot really be called a crime, even though it feels like one. For what agency takes possession of your body in that last case? Shake your fist at the sky, if you will. Or submit with as much humor and grace as you can muster, as sages of all persuasions counsel, for there should be no humiliation in submitting to nobody—or to a God who owns us all.

And this continuum includes not just obvious things like burglaries and muggings, but a field of nuanced application that, as objectifying moderns, we are inclined to think of as metaphor. The regions of being-in-the-world in which “my” is justly placed are vast and varied and caught up in constant improvisation as well—for they follow the contingent logic of Wittgenstein’s language games; they are as historical as we are. People are not poeticizing, still less are they mistaken, when they speak of “my neighborhood” or “our song” or “her mother.” In all those cases, beyond the merely legal, we are talking about ways of being in the world that have property dimensions, as it were—an ethical aspect that subsists in all embodiments of mind.

This continuum highlights the aspect of human deeds and situations that we recognize as essentially ethical, and irreducibly so. In those violations, we understand wrongness immediately, and in their complements, we apprehend a rightness in the arrangement of things. The ethical aspect of the human condition emerges with consciousness itself, constitutive of Being-in-the-world and the human form of life. And where consciousness is not—in brain modules, for example—there is no ethics either.

Back to Haidt’s moral taste buds. He asked subjects in an experiment how much money they would have to be paid to perform each of the acts listed below:

Harm
Stick a pin into your palm.
Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know.

Fairness
Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.
Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family.

Community
Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.
Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation.

Authority
Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.
Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.

Purity
Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.
Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. 20

The second term in each pair represents the more repugnant prospect and provides dramatic evidence for the existence of the separate modules. But it is impossible to miss what these responses have in common—and that is what actually makes them wrong. They are all violations of embodiment, of an arrangement of things “possessed” in various ways and to various degrees by the sources of the intentions that constitute them, by the agents embodied in them.

The first one speaks for itself—although it is worth pointing out the rhetorical effect of “the palm of a child you don’t know.” Utter innocence is thus secured—a complete absence of relationship that might leave open the possibility of implicit collaboration, a degree of consent, if only in anticipation of the deed.

The next case is nearly as transparent. “Computer error” is another way of saying dumb luck, no agency at all—hence no prior embodiment in the gifted item. The “wealthy family” as rightful owner in the second scenario is a nice touch. Out to explain differences between Left and Right in American politics, Haidt probably got the correlations he expected. If an Occupy Wall Street sympathizer is more likely to shrug off the theft than a Tea Party patriot, that reinforces his point. A larger social “fairness” is implicated in the first case, a more individualistic application in the second. But the difference in modular scope leaves the truly ethical aspect undisturbed. For what has been at issue between bourgeois capitalism and socialism all these years if not a just assignment of ownership based on whose intentions the products of human labor embody?

In the third case, the difference between the pronoun “your” and the word “foreign” is sufficient. We are familiar with the mechanisms by which modern media reassign sentiments of belonging from local settings, in which our intentions actually are embodied, to imagined communities like “nations” in which we are virtually embodied. The parenthetical “which you don’t believe” is a bit clunky, an ad hoc device designed to bracket the issue of sincere criticism.

The fourth case—Authority—is poorly framed. Haidt uses “minister” instead of father or teacher or boss because he knows his subject pool is full of people who would be happy to slap such authority figures. “Minister” is more about purity—Pinker even cites veneration of religious leaders as an instance of purity in the next paragraph! There is not enough space for a full discussion of authority here, but in outline, it would go like this: 1) Both property and power involve the embodiment of intentions and are inherently ethical for that reason. 2) Property embodies intentions in things; power embodies intentions in people and their activities. 3) Power works by command or by habit or by inspiration—and through an open-ended range of fusional and occasional combinations of both. Think slavery, unorganized wage labor, military conscription, but also Gandhi, a symphony conductor, or Churchill during the Battle of Britain, Tahrir Square, sports teams, people stuck in an elevator—someone takes charge and others follow or they collaborate. There may be an instinctive basis for deference to authority—an authority module—but if there is, the ethical aspect of authority will show up in the distribution of embodied intentions in the family of cases like the ones just sampled, not in the neurophysiology of dominant and submissive primate behavior.

Finally, the fifth case, Purity, properly so called. The ethnographic archive shows that human communities everywhere define the boundaries of acceptable behavior (the appropriate embodiment of intentions) with the marker “like an animal”: don’t eat like an animal, don’t have sex like an animal, don’t relieve yourself like an animal. That stricture represents the most inclusive case of the various category enforcements that embed society’s ways in the furniture of everyday life, in the habits such settings sustain—in tables and chairs and doors and doorbells and keys and stores and sidewalks and on and on, across all the regions of a life-world. Purity and Danger (1966) by Mary Douglas (greatly influenced by the later Wittgenstein) is the classic text here. The little shock you would feel if you opened your refrigerator and found your shoes in there is an example of the response you have when customary categories are violated. The disgust you would feel if you opened your desk drawer and found a reeking puddle of vomit all over your papers would be another example—the intensity greater because, except in certain ritual and liminal situations, bodily emissions (fluid and goopy) are threats to the most precious category of all, the one that constitutes the container that is your actual body, at the center of all its equipmental extensions. And so on, up the scale into the Durkheimian sacred: elephant dung on a picture of the Virgin, the Mohammed video. These are also violations of embodied intentions—the intentions of groups of people embodying themselves as a group for the sake of the group, which is to say, religiously.

But all along the continuum, from arrangements of hearth and home to the altar that beckons the light from on high and evokes the worldhood of the world—these arrangements are “culture” in a phenomenological anthropology, sites of the ethical aspect of conscious existence, anchors of embodied minds that can never be secure. Wittgenstein sums this up for us: “if I want to fix my mind on what I mean by absolute or ethical value…I wonder at the existence of the world.” 21

Endnotes...
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) 14–17.
John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689; New York: Dover, 1959) III, xi, 17.
David Hume—the great infidel—famously rejected the design argument. So did Denis Diderot, in his unpublished manuscripts. And radical materialists among the philosophes, Claude Helvétius, Baron D’Holbach, inspired by certain ancients (Epicurus, Lucretius)—they too rejected it.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) 3.
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689) II, 6.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012) 113. 
Haidt 113.
Greg Marcus as quoted by Haidt 130.
Haidt 130–31.
Haidt 124.
Haidt 124–25.
Hume called reason the “slave of the passions.” Haidt compares reason to a man riding an elephant that goes where it wills—leaving reason to explain why afterwards.
Steven Pinker, “The Moral Instinct,” New York Times Magazine (13 January 2008): 13.
Pinker 13 (italics mine).
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949) 22.
Conflict arises because the two modes of inquiry are implicated in larger, essentially political, battles. Broadly speaking, phenomenology is accused of inspiring obfuscating jargon in service of radical and relativist agendas, while objectifying analytic systems are affiliated with economic and technological domination and exploitation.
I think this is likely. Ever since Noam Chomsky launched this program, evidence of domain-specific innate programming has been accumulating in every department of psychology. Which simply means: the brain is like a computer. The fact that wired-up quadriplegics can move a cursor with their thoughts is sufficient evidence of that. Binary codes do not care what the platform is made of.
John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, iii, 18.
Martin Heidegger called the kind of being that consciousness is “Being-in-the-World.” Ludwig Wittgenstein used the “human form of life” to the same end: an exorcism of the Cartesian ghost from the machine. A detailed summary is not possible here. Broadly speaking, what we as moderns think of as mental states or acts get re-described as the way things go on, the arrangements of things in the world. The expression “embodied mind” conveys the basic idea, inflected so as to highlight the ethical aspect.
Haidt as cited by Pinker 7.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “The Lecture on Ethics” (1929), The Philosophical Review 74.1 (1965): 8.

[Thomas de Zengotita teaches for the Draper Program at New York University and at the Dalton School and is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine. His essay, “On the Politics of Pastiche and Depthless Intensities: The Case of Barack Obama,” appeared in The Hedgehog Review in the spring of 2011. His book, Mediated, won the Marshall McLuhan award in 2006.]

Thanks to POSP stringer Tim.