One of the dolts whose comments you generally don't read here because I moderate comments, skimming what I wrote yesterday, has made the massively ignorant accusation that I "sound like David Brooks". Now, I'm sure the boy as a skimmer of the New York Times and other such organs of the media knows that David Brooks has written some stuff about neuro-sci. What the dolt doesn't realize is that David Brooks is a huge fan of exactly the kind of so-called science I unambiguously reject. For example, in this interview where he advocates five books.
Two books to go.
Yes, so these are two gigantic books, both very famous, which really should be read by anyone interested in this world. And the first is called The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker and the second is called Consilience by Edward O Wilson. And these books are both landmarks of our time.
Stephen Pinker is a psychologist at Harvard, though until 2003 he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.
Yes. Blank Slate is an argument against the old view that there is no such thing as human nature, that we’re all culturally determined. He brings together a ton of evidence that that’s wrong. Some of it involves brain structure, a lot of it involves genetics. He doesn’t really think of it this way, but a lot of it is about the unique qualities that guide behaviour that we’re not aware of. I would say that he is overly reliant on genetic explanations, but it’s still a very important book.
So, although the book is called Blank Slate, he’s actually arguing the opposite. Would you say it’s accessible to a non-scientist?
Yes, all of these books I’ve chosen are very accessible.
Finally, Consilience, which was published in 1998 and is by the Harvard biologist and twice Pulitzer Prize-winning Edward Wilson.
Wilson makes the argument – or rather the prediction – that a lot of the disciplines we have separated human behaviour into are obsolete, and that we are on the verge of unifying knowledge in an inter-disciplinary way. And that’s important because if you look around at various fields, what Wilson predicted a decade ago is actually happening with neuroscience. There’s a field of neural economics, which is a combination of economics and neuroscience, there’s neural this and that, basically neural everything: literary critics, historians. People in many different disciplines are using this work on the brain to illuminate their thinking. And in this way, I think what they’re finding in our unconscious mind will have the same sort of influence that Marx had, and that Sigmund Freud had, namely an entire new vocabulary, that will help define a lot of different fields.
So this belief in the unity of knowledge, that there is one theory that will explain all we know and don’t know. Is this the return of the Renaissance man?
Well, except that in the Renaissance we thought we were masters of our destiny, and the whole idea was ‘what a glorious thing man is, with limitless capacities’. But here, each individual is not so special, we are shaped by genes, by social trends; individual decision-making is bounded. There are severe limits on free will.
Anyone who read and understood what I've said on this would know that what Brooks thinks is just nifty I see as a complete disaster, the general acceptance, as science of something which is not only baseless but an illogical and therefore impossible assertion of ideology as science. What Brooks promotes is exactly what I noted was epic intellectual decadence.
And in line with that intellectual decadence the middle-brow, college educated audience can't be bothered to know enough about what they numbly and noddingly accept to understand when someone is criticizing and rejecting those ideas, making substantial, evidence based refutations of them and someone else is promoting them for ideological reasons.
The idiotic belief that materialism is compatible with liberalism, in its traditional American sense of the word, a belief in equality and a moral responsibility to care for the least among us liberally, is total nonsense. There is no more degraded view of human beings than that they are physical objects. When you take that position and the logical consequences of it, that there is no endowment with equal rights by God, no endowment with moral obligations, you come out with a position that sees that liberalism as unrealistic at best, a delusion, most likely. The substitution of Marxist style management of "the masses" was tested in the field in the 20th century and proved to be just another total horror. Brook's button-down wonkery ruled population will, unsurprisingly, look like something from one of the dystopian novels that were imagined science-based futures, only worse. What is proposed will be presented as being hygienic, like Brave New World. But it will probably devolve into something closer to 1984 with a capitalist slant and far more chaotic and bloody.
"Blank Slate" and "Consilience"? Pop-Sic for the pop-informed.
ReplyDeleteThe explosion of books by thinkers who should know better is distressing. Of course it's just to chase money and fame. It's notable that Chomsky, although as well known as Pinker or Wilson, has never written a book for popular consumption. Even Hawkings confines his real work to the audience of people who can understand what he's talking about.
Pinker and Wilson like the bright lights, but Dawkins is their guide. He wrote a piece of pop-sci in a field he had no real knowledge of (behavorial science and genetics) and convinced the rubes he'd come out of the clouds with the tablets from Sinai. Once that ran out he turned to shouting at figures from his imagination. Pinker dribbles out some semi-scholarly nonsense about epistemology and cognitive science and to the ignorant he seems a very wise man. In his field (linguistics) he's not fit to tie Chomsky's shoes, so he never writes popular books in his field. Wilson decided he, too, was a great wise man who knew all and could tell all because he studied ants.
Good grief. They should embarrass the Ivy League into being forced to keep to the scholarly publications and stop selling snake oil to the rubes. But as Deep Throat said to Woodward: "Follow the money."
Randy Newman was right, too: "It's money that matters/in the U.S.A."