Michael Prescott's Blog

Natural born killers?

Some time ago we had a discussion about whether some people are just born bad — the "bad seed" idea. Here's a lengthy article from The Atlantic dealing sympathetically but realistically with this issue. (You may be required to disable ad blocking on that page.)

Starting at age 6, Samantha began drawing pictures of murder weapons: a knife, a bow and arrow, chemicals for poisoning, a plastic bag for suffocating. She tells me that she pretended to kill her stuffed animals.

“You were practicing on your stuffed animals?,” I ask her.

She nods.

“How did you feel when you were doing that to your stuffed animals?”

“Happy.”

“Why did it make you feel happy?”

“Because I thought that someday I was going to end up doing it on somebody.”...

Samantha had just turned 6. Suddenly Jen heard screaming from the back seat, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw Samantha with her hands around the throat of her 2-year-old sister, who was trapped in her car seat. Jen separated them, and once they were home, she pulled Samantha aside.

“What were you doing?,” Jen asked.

“I was trying to choke her,” Samantha said.

“You realize that would have killed her? She would not have been able to breathe. She would have died.”

“I know.”

“What about the rest of us?”

“I want to kill all of you.”...

Four months later, Samantha tried to strangle her baby brother, who was just two months old....

Samantha was diagnosed with conduct disorder with callous and unemotional traits. She had all the characteristics of a budding psychopath.... Researchers shy away from calling children psychopaths; the term carries too much stigma, and too much determinism. They prefer to describe children like Samantha as having “callous and unemotional traits,” shorthand for a cluster of characteristics and behaviors, including a lack of empathy, remorse, or guilt; shallow emotions; aggression and even cruelty; and a seeming indifference to punishment. Callous and unemotional children have no trouble hurting others to get what they want. If they do seem caring or empathetic, they’re probably trying to manipulate you.

Researchers believe that nearly 1 percent of children exhibit these traits, about as many as have autism or bipolar disorder....

Researchers believe that two paths can lead to psychopathy: one dominated by nature, the other by nurture. For some children, their environment—growing up in poverty, living with abusive parents, fending for themselves in dangerous neighborhoods—can turn them violent and coldhearted. These kids aren’t born callous and unemotional; many experts suggest that if they’re given a reprieve from their environment, they can be pulled back from psychopathy’s edge.

But other children display callous and unemotional traits even though they are raised by loving parents in safe neighborhoods. Large studies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have found that this early-onset condition is highly hereditary, hardwired in the brain—and especially difficult to treat. “We’d like to think a mother and father’s love can turn everything around,” Raine says. “But there are times where parents are doing the very best they can, but the kid—even from the get-go—is just a bad kid.”

Still, researchers stress that a callous child—even one who was born that way—is not automatically destined for psychopathy. By some estimates, four out of five children with these traits do not grow up to be psychopaths. The mystery—the one everyone is trying to solve—is why some of these children develop into normal adults while others end up on death row.

There's a lot more. Read the whole thing.

Whoever fights monsters

I was thinking of doing a post on opinions and keeping an open mind and not demonizing one's opponents and so forth. Then I came across a column in the Village Voice (of all places) that said it better than I ever could.

The political blog Ace of Spades introduced me to this item. Ace does a great job of setting the table. He talks about how goofy the columnist is, how he tweets absurd messages and weird pics of himself, how he writes silly songs and apparently considers himself a master of the art of partying. All of this is intended to convince us that the guy cannot possibly have anything intelligent to say, and that his reply to a reader's question about getting along with his "right-wing a--hole" father will be a comical exercise.

And then we get a surprise (bold emphases added by me):

Go back and read the opening sentences of your letter. Read them again. Then read the rest of your letter. Then read it again. Try to find a single instance where you referred to your dad as a human being, a person, or a man. There isn't one. You've reduced your father -- the person who created you -- to a set of beliefs and political views and how it relates to you. And you don't consider your dad a person of his own standing -- he's just "your dad." You've also reduced yourself to a set of opposing views, and reduced your relationship with him to a fight between the two. The humanity has been reduced to nothingness and all that's left in its place is an argument that can never really be won. And even if one side did win, it probably wouldn't satisfy the deeper desire to be in a state of inflamed passionate conflict.

The world isn't being destroyed by democrats or republicans, red or blue, liberal or conservative, religious or atheist -- the world is being destroyed by one side believing the other side is destroying the world. The world is being hurt and damaged by one group of people believing they're truly better people than the others who think differently. The world officially ends when we let our beliefs conquer love. We must not let this happen.

When we lump people into groups, quickly label them, and assume we know everything about them and their life based on a perceived world view, how they look, where they come from, etc., we are not behaving as full human beings. When we truly believe that some people are monsters, that they fundamentally are less human than we are, and that they deserve to have less than we do, we ourselves become the monsters. When we allow our emotions to be hypnotized by the excitement of petty bickering about seemingly important topics, we drift further and further away from the fragile and crucial human bond holding everything together. When we anticipate with ferocious glee the next chance we have to prove someone "wrong" and ourselves "right," all the while disregarding the vast complexity of almost every subject -- not to mention the universe as a whole -- we are reducing the beauty and magic of life to a "side" or a "type," or worst of all, an "answer." This is the power of politics at its most sinister.

And much more. As they say on the intertubes, read the whole thing.

Of is and ought

I was watching the Fox News Channel late-night program Red Eye the other night, when for some reason the topic of the is-ought dichotomy came up. 

As you probably know, the is-ought dichotomy was first identified by the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, who observed that it's impossible to derive a value judgment -- an ought -- from facts alone. The problem was largely ignored in his time, but has proved vexing to more recent philosophers. Many attempts have been made to bridge the gulf between is and ought. All have failed. There does not seem to be any way of resolving the dichotomy.

On Red Eye, one of the panelists suggested that the dichotomy posed no real problem by giving this example: "It is raining. Therefore I ought to take my umbrella." He then shrugged, as if to say: See? Solved it for you.

Red Eye is a pretty unserious show, which consists mostly of playful banter broken up by YouTube clips of funny animals, so I don't know if the brief discussion was meant to be taken seriously or not. But if this was a legitimate suggestion, it was mistaken. The example given does not resolve the dichotomy. The reason is that the line of reasoning presented includes a hidden step, which is implied but not stated. Let's restate the argument with the hidden step made explicit.

1. It is raining.

2. I prefer not to get wet.

3. Therefore I ought to take my umbrella.

Here we can clearly see that the ought statement is predicated on step two, a personal preference.

Now, no one has ever denied that ought statements can be derived from personal preferences. The point of the is-ought dichotomy is that ought statements cannot be derived from neutral facts. And that is indeed true. It is impossible to derive step three from step one without the intervention of step two.

In fact, virtually all ought statements derive from statements of preference, even if these statements are implicit. You can easily test this yourself by making just about any ought statement you can think of, and then identifying the preference that underlies it. The only arguable exceptions are ought statements based on instincts, such as the will to live. An instinct may be seen as only a deeply ingrained preference, or it may be seen as brute biological fact, depending on one's point of view. 

Does this mean that all moral values are based on personal subjective preferences and, possibly, a few biological drives? That's the position taken by most contemporary secular humanists. 

The alternative is that objective moral values unconnected to biology do exist, but that they are not derived not from empirical observations. Instead, they are derived from a deep, intuitive insight into the nature and purpose of the universe and/or its Creator - a precious gift, a pearl beyond price, handed down to the rest of us by a small number of gifted spiritual teachers. Of course, this takes us into the realm of mysticism and revelation, a step which is understandably offputting to many moderns, and which gives rise to problems of its own. 

Still, if we are going to live in a world of objective moral values instead of mere subjective preferences and blind animalistic instincts, then the is-ought dichotomy tells us we must go beyond the limits of logic. Because logic, it seems, can take us only so far. 

Narcissism, scapegoating, and the end of the world

Recently I've read several essays by the online columnist Bob Wallace, who has a fascinating and insightful perspective on what he calls "narcissism and scapegoating." Wallace identifies the basic problem of human nature as the inordinate, childish egoism that refuses to accept any criticism or blame, and instead projects its own shortcomings, fears, and hostilities onto other people. These other people become scapegoats for the narcissist's own failings, and dreadful results ensue.

That's the gist of it, anyway. What follows is my attempt to flesh out these ideas in my own terms. I don't want to put my words in Bob Wallace's mouth, so please take this blog entry as my personal statement, and refer to Wallace's essays for his own presentation. A good place to start is with his essays "Narcissism in the Bible," "The Necessity of Enemies," and "The Mind of the Terrorist." (For the record, I don't endorse every statement Wallace makes, but I agree with his general thesis.)

At the heart of narcissism is our tendency to divide the world into "self" and "other," with the corollary that what pertains to the self is good and safe and desirable, while what pertains to the other may be bad and threatening and unwanted.

This tendency is particularly obvious in political ideologies, which often divide the population into good and evil and then imagine that we can achieve safety, and perhaps even Utopia, simply by eliminating all the bad people. If only "those people" didn't exist, our community (or our country, or our planet) would be so much better, we say.

From here it is only a short step to the active elimination of one's enemies. We can even feel good about doing it. We are, after all, building a better world, protecting ourselves and our loved ones, and eradicating evil.

If good and evil did come neatly packaged this way, then perhaps we really could achieve paradise on earth by wiping out the bad people. But we have tried this strategy for centuries, and while we have indeed wiped out millions -- even hundreds of millions -- of people, all of whom were presumed to be bad by someone, we have not succeeded in our quest for paradise. This sorry outcome ought to be enough to prompt us to reconsider our approach.

When we do, we discover something very obvious -- so obvious that only our own narcissism could have allowed us to overlook it. Namely, that the tendency for evil exists in all of us, and the only way we can really erase evil from the world is if we erase all of humanity.

And certainly some of the more ambitious tyrants of the 20th century went a long way toward the utter erasure of the human race. If they failed, it was not for want of trying.

The trouble, then -- the real trouble -- is not the particular people who plague us, no matter how bad some of them may be. The trouble is our own tendency to project our fears and hostilities onto others -- to make them scapegoats for our own failings.

Now, this is not to say that we should not strike back against a legitimate enemy. But there's a difference between retaliating for a specific attack against the party responsible, and issuing blanket condemnations of whole groups of people, implicitly denigrating them as subhuman and therefore as fair game.

The latter has been the tactic of narcissists and tyrants throughout history. The enemy is always someone else -- the Jews, the Christians, the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, one racial group or another, the capitalists, the communists, the rich, the poor ... At one time or another, all of these groups have been attacked as the root of society's problems. But the real root of our problems is our demonizing of other people and substituting psychological (and physical) warfare for actual dialogue.

A current example may make this principle clearer. Recently, France has been beset by rioting, mostly by Islamic youth -- immigrants or the children of immigrants from African and Middle Eastern countries, who have not been assimilated into French culture. When these riots began, some voices were quick to assert that the unrest was part of a larger plot to incite a civil war in France and perhaps elsewhere, and that "Muslims" were seeking to take over Europe. The riots were then linked, in some people's minds, with Islamic terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, and the French response was implicitly connected with the greater War on Terror.

In other words, there was a problem (rioting), and the natural response of many people was to blame the problem on a very large worldwide population (Muslims) and to lump together all the disparate members of this population as a common enemy (terrorists or terrorist sympathizers).

Some of these same voices then urged the French government to put down the riots by any means possible, regardless of loss of life. The idea was that "the enemy" must be defeated at any cost -- with the enemy consisting not just of the rioters themselves, but of Muslims in other countries, who had nothing to do with the riots at all.

And let's face it -- there would have been something gratifying to those of us still somewhat traumatized by the events of September 11 in seeing the rioters suppressed with maximum force, or for that matter, seeing Muslim crowds in other countries subjected to violent repression. What would have been gratified was the narcissistic, egoistic part of ourselves that projects all negative feelings outward onto other people and then feels temporarily assuaged when those "others" are made to pay the price.

In fact, however, the French riots probably had more to do with the poverty and alienation of these Muslim immigrants in their insular ghettos than with any worldwide movement. Add to this the narcissism of the rioting "youths," who naturally projected their frustrations onto the government (their scapegoat). Finally, add the fact that French popular culture tends to glamorize civil disobedience -- and you have a sufficient recipe for the riots, without any need to generalize to other Muslims, let alone "all" Muslims.

I think we all need to be on guard against this all-too-human propensity for deflecting and generalizing blame. It has done serious harm throughout history, counting millions of people among its victims, even in ages when no weapons of mass death were available. In today's world, with our staggering technological capacities, we need to hold ourselves to the strictest standard, and to avoid the easy ego gratification that comes from giving in to the narcissistic and scapegoating proclivities that Bob Wallace correctly identifies.

Otherwise, we may finally achieve the age-old dream of tyrants and utopians, and eliminate all human evil from the world.

The downside is, none of us will be around to see it.

Rome and Amherst

The other day, while waiting in a doctor's office, I picked up a copy of Smithsonian magazine. There was an interesting article on Rome, which included a sidebar on the HBO series of the same name. The article noted that the show tries to depict ancient Rome as it really was, "without judging by modern, Christian morality." It then quoted Bruno Heller, one of the show's creators, as saying,

Certain things are repressed in our culture, like the open enjoyment of others' pain, the desire to make people submit to your will, the guilt-free use of slaves ... This was all quite normal to the Romans.

(Since I didn't steal the magazine, I'm quoting from memory.)

This is an insightful comment, and it made me think of an article I'd read just a few days earlier, about a conference of skeptics in Amherst, New York, organized by the humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz.

For three days, participants planned to explore issues such as physician-assisted suicide, evolution and ethics through the lens of science.

"Unfortunately," Kurtz said, "too many well-meaning people base their conceptions of the universe on ancient books, such as the Quran and the Bible, rather than going directly to the book of nature."

The congress coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Council for Secular Humanism, the arm of the center dedicated to promoting a nonreligious philosophy.

"Going directly to the book of nature" to determine one's moral outlook certainly sounds like a good idea - in theory. But in practice, as Bruno Heller reminds us, it means:

• "the open enjoyment of others' pain"
• "the desire to make people submit to your will," and
• "the guilt-free use of slaves."

Not to mention exposing unwanted infants to the elements, another ancient Roman practice that was ended by "modern, Christian morality."

The dangers of religious extremism are obvious today. What's less obvious are the dangers of the "nonreligious philosophy" Kurtz & Co. advocate. Yes, religion has given us the Inquisition, the Crusades,  witch-burnings, and jihads. But it's also given us the concepts of charity, brother-love, respect for innocent life, nonviolent resistance, and the Golden Rule.

The skeptics might want to think about that - before they rush headlong back to the gory glory days of Rome.