Unrealpolitik
Aug. 17th, 2006 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
On 11th August Science magazine, under the low-key heading "Public Acceptance of Evolution", published research by Jon D. Miller, Eugenie C. Scott and Shinji Okamoto which showed that only 14% of adult Americans think the theory of evolution is "definitely true" (around 40% give more qualified consent to the idea). In Europe and Japan, in contrast, around 80% of the adult population believes that human beings developed from earlier species of animals. (There's a more accurate graph than the New York Times one I've used here.)In the days that followed, the story got picked up by National Geographic Magazine ("Evolution Less Accepted in U.S. Than Other Western Countries, Study Finds") and the New York Times ("Did humans evolve? Not us, say Americans") before spreading waves of amusement, despair and disbelief through the blogosphere ("Americans not developed from earlier species of animals").
The researchers, who found that American anti-Darwinism is growing quite quickly (from 7% of skeptics to 21% in the past 20 years), blamed "widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States" for the difference between the US and Europe and Japan. But by most measures the US differs quite radically from other advanced nations. Back in the early 90s Bantam Books published "Where We Stand", a comparison of the US with other wealthy nations. In table after table, the US ranked either at the top or the bottom, revealing its fundamental difference from European nations. Here's a brief summary (based on this page) of the factors on which the US was either the lowest or highest ranking (it's probable that most of these differences have only become more extreme in the intervening 15 years). The US has the:
Lowest overall tax rates as a percentage of GNP
Highest purchasing power
Highest individual worker productivity (but in both cases, other nations have been catching up)
Highest percentage of families earning two paychecks
Highest average household debt (double next nearest, UK)
Lowest average household savings
Biggest trade deficit
Biggest current account imbalance
Lowest investment levels as a percentage of GDP
Highest inequality of income (Gini)
Highest disparity between CEOs' pay and other workers' pay
Lowest percentage of unionized workers
Smallest middle class
Highest percentage of people below the poverty level
Highest percentage of below-poverty-level children
Most deaths from malnutrition per million
Highest healthcare expenditure as percentage of GDP
Highest doctor's incomes
Lowest percentage of population covered by public health care
Highest infant mortality rate
Highest toddler death rates
Highest rate of death in 15-24 year olds
Highest premature death rate
Highest number of people who think healthcare system needs fundamental change
Highest percentage of single-parent families
Lowest percentage of girls who are still virgins aged 20
Lowest percentage of sexually active single 15 to 19-year olds using birth control
Highest teen pregnancy rates
Highest teen abortion rates
Highest rates of reported police brutality
Biggest percentage of its population in prison
Largest number of death row inmates
Largest percentage of houses with a handgun
Largest number of handgun murders
Highest murder rate
Highest rape rate
Highest armed robbery rate
Lowest percentage of people using public transport
Highest annual air miles per person
Lowest average price of gallon of gas
Most oil energy used
Most carbon dioxide per person released
Most carbon monoxide per person released
Most CFCs emitted
Most major oil spills
Most forests cleared
Most coal burned
Most debris inhaled per person per year
Most municipal waste produced per person
Least glass recycled
Least paper and cardboard recycled
Shortest paid vacations
Least news as percentage of all TV
Most manufacturing employee turnover
Most employees fired
Lowest voter participation levels
Lowest number of referenda (zero)
Largest number of political scandals
A more up-to-date account of fundamental differences between the US and Europe appears in The Economist magazine. In an August 3rd story headed "To Israel With Love", the magazine reports a gulf between American and European perceptions of the current war in the Middle East.
"A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted on July 28th-30th," the Economist says, "showed that eight in ten Americans believed that Israel's action [in Lebanon] was justified... Americans are far more likely than Europeans to side with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Pew Global Attitudes survey taken between March and May found that 48% of Americans said that their sympathies lay with the Israelis; only 13% were sympathetic towards the Palestinians. By contrast, in Spain for example, 9% sympathised with the Israelis and 32% with the Palestinians."
This, says the magazine, is because Americans have strong cultural affinities with Israel; the average American is much more likely to find something in common with the attitudes of Israelis than the attitudes of Europeans:
"Americans are staunch nationalists, much readier to contemplate the use of force than Europeans. A German Marshall Fund survey in 2005 found 42% of Americans strongly agreeing that “under some conditions, war is necessary to obtain justice” compared with just 11% of Europeans. A Pew survey found that the same proportion of Americans and Israelis believe in the use of pre-emptive force: 66%. Continental European figures were far lower."
The article points to the power of the AIPAC (Israeli) and Christian fundamentalist lobbies on the American political system, and says:
"The Christian right is also solidly behind Israel. White evangelicals are significantly more pro-Israeli than Americans in general; more than half of them say they strongly sympathise with Israel. (A third of the Americans who claim sympathy with Israel say that this stems from their religious beliefs.) Two in five Americans believe that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, and one in three say that the creation of the state of Israel was a step towards the Second Coming."
Which brings us back to the refusal to believe in Darwinian evolution. Isn't there something tremendously dangerous in this combination of stubborn irrationality and tremendous geo-political power? Unrealpolitik, we could call it.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-18 12:33 am (UTC)And "right" in the sense that 'gravity' is 'right' or that the 'theory of light' is 'right' or that the 'theory of atoms' is 'right.' It explains the world in such away that is provable and testable and falsifiable. We have rockets and light bulbs and atomic bombs, all of which don't 'prove' the 'rightness' of the theories, but strongly suggest that they're getting something 'right.' Likewise, with bioengineering and genetic engineering and system science and cellular luminescence - those aren't proofs, merely applications of evolutionary ideas that seem to suggest that something is being done which seems to correspond with how the world actually exists and works.
That doesn't mean that the theory is right, only that it's the most right thing we have and it seems to work every time.
And from what I know, when scientists talk about the ultimate necessity of predictability, they are talking specifically about things that science can study. The reason science can't talk about things that aren't predictable is because they can't study things that aren't regular (nor regularity, no falsifiability, no predictability = no experiments). That's why they're having such a hard time with neutrinos; why string theory is just philosophy; why ball lightning was such a problem until they could create it in a lab; and, lastly, that's why science can't study the paranormal - because that stuff usually happens only once. Then again, your roommate could just be an asshole.
There are plenty of 'holes' in the theory of evolution, but there are also plenty of holes in the theory of gravity, and of light, and of atomic structure, on and on and on. Most theories are incomplete. There's a lot out there that is completely unknown. Evolution isn't one of them.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-18 10:22 am (UTC)In discussions or arguments, I think ego comes into play in that each person has identified with a particular set of information or mental construct. I have often wondered why people get so heated, myself included, and, I read the idea somewhere, which rings true to me, that it's ultimately the fear of death. That argument is part of the person's identity, and to have the identity nullified is death. Therefore, I try not to identify too strongly with mental constructs. I don't always manage to avoid identification, of course, but basically, I'm well aware that I know nothing. All I have to go on is what people tell me and my own experience.
I behave, as most people do, as if corporeality and causality exist. However, I don't actively believe in them. I really mean that. Perhaps 'believe' means something different to you. I'm sure that I have all sorts of unconscious beliefs, but in terms of conscious, rational convictions, I'm not really sure that I have any about how the world actually is. Corporeality and causality are concepts, mental constructs - that is really all they are. They are not pre-existent, unless you believe in some kind of Platonic existence for them.
You are clearly using the word 'right' in a way that I would not. I would say that the theories you mention 'work'. They are concepts that are not contradicted by experience. But they are basically language-based ways of organising and interpreting experience. I am a bit of a linguist, so I have experience that language does, in fact, go a long way to ordering reality, often in ways that we're not aware of, because they are so much part of our invisible assumptions about the world.
"Then again, your roommate could just be an asshole."
No, I would just like to say that, although I have been arguing against many of his views here, he is someone that I respect greatly. And that's not because he's going to read this blog (because he won't).
When I spent time in America, I found the omnipresence of religion, the assumption that one was Christian, rather oppressive. In the circles in which I mix in England, I find the opposite assumptions rather oppressive - that one will be a card-carrying atheist and subscribe wholeheartedly to whatever happens to be scientific theory. Personally, I do have 'problems' with science. I suppose I feel rather aligned with Blake on the subject. Sometimes when I ask myself why I have such problems, I think it's because of personal hang-ups. But then I wonder why I should think so when I don't think it's any kind of personal hang up to believe Christian fundamentalism is dangerous and insane. Why should science be beyond reproach? If we hold religion accountable, say, for the Spanish Inquisition, why can't we hold science accountable for something like the bombing of Hiroshima, or the destruction of the environment? Some people will say that 'science' didn't bomb Hiroshima, people did. Yes, and that's exactly the defence used in the case of religion. Neither religion nor science would exist without people; they are precisely what people make them into.
I don't even think it's as simple as it possibly sounds from a post such as this. Science is an extremely complex and nebulous phenomenon, as is religion. To criticise it is a bit like battling a cloud. Also, I don't see it (or religion) as all good or all bad. They both exist through people and have such myriad effects and consequences in the world that no single person could ever trace them to ultimately weigh up their merits. Nonetheless, I would like to challenge the assumption of the infallibility and the objectivity of science, and that is what I occasionally try to do, in conversation, or in posts such as this.
Ah! Now we can have a discussion I enjoy!
Date: 2006-08-18 06:55 pm (UTC)Are you a fan of philosophy? Do you know Kant? He (very roughly) believed that causality, corporeality, space, time, and a few others were constructs that we innately believed in, even though we could never know if they were true or not. (Science, btw, has done a good job of showing that time and space ARE actually constructs that we operate within.) They are pre-existent, since everyone acts as if they exist - a universality of that magnitude is a compelling suggestion that these are not new constructs, but constructs that pre-dated humanity, and possibly/probably incorporate more creatures than just humans.
About corporeality and causality
If you didn't actually believe in corporeality and causality then there would be no reason for you go about your daily existence. For example, if you believed you were living in a Matrix world, why did you go to your shitty job today? Why didn't you ravish that hot person walking down the street? They're not real and there is no ramifications for your actions, so why not?
Again, I don't really believe you. A lot of people question causality and corporeality, but very few people actually disbelieve those things. Despite what they say, their actions disprove their words. (At one point I was lucid dreaming a lot. When reality started to seem questionable, I would try to do what I did when I was lucid dreaming: fly or walk through walls. That shows a disbelief in corporeality.)
My use of the word 'right'
Philosophically, I'm close aligned to the American pragmatitists and late Wittgenstein. I'm using right less in a metaphyiscal way, and more in a way that suggests that what is 'right' is a concept or idea that works in the world and is not contradicted by experience. Language does, in fact, go a long way to ordering reality, but linguists (esp. of the Derridian school) tend to take it to far. They do not create the external reality, only the way we order and organize corporeality in levels of abstration.
Science and ethics
Science is really bad at ethics. As far as I know, it has no ethical precepts what-so-ever. It's more like 'painting' in that it's a way of knowing that world that just so happens to give it's intiates great power over the world. Imagine if painters could destroy civilizations with their paintings and you get my drift. People would talk about how they hate painting, but painting is a process, not a belief system.
Great example of destructive science include phrenology, the social biology of the 1800s, some of the Nazi experiments, etc. (Destruction of the environment is a problem of industrialism and capitalism, which isn't the fault of science.)
Science is just a way of exploring the world and figuring out how it works - it can't deal with what you should do, only with what things are and how they operate. So even when it looks at ethics, it's only explaining what they are and how they got that way. I don't think that science can be a complete way of dealing with the world.
Re: Ah! Now we can have a discussion I enjoy!
Date: 2006-08-18 08:11 pm (UTC)I am interested in philosophy, though my formal study of it has been limited. I also sometimes find myself thinking, as Borges stated, that all philosophy is just a branch of fantastic literature.
I hope you don't mind if I respond to the rest of what you say later, as I'm cooking an omelette.
Re: Ah! Now we can have a discussion I enjoy!
Date: 2006-08-18 11:13 pm (UTC)"If you didn't actually believe in corporeality and causality then there would be no reason for you go about your daily existence. "
Well, I don't actually know what reality is. I'm in some kind of environment over which I seem to have very limited control. I don't know how I got here - I mean, my memory breaks off at some indeterminate point. It's really a rather dreamlike situation. Of course, I am subject to things like pain and so on. And I do tend to assume that other people are real in some way analogous to myself, but is solipsism necessary to incorporeality? Perhaps I do believe in corporeality, but I find it hard to tell. In some ways it doesn't seem to make a difference. I seem to switch back and forth between a sense of a dream-like existence - a bit like lucid dreaming, maybe - and a getting caught up in the concrete details, so to speak, of my existence without questioning them too closely.
With many of these questions, I don't have a very defined position for myself, but only a kind of recurring pattern of wonderings, feelings and so on, occasionally interspersed with some new perception. So with causality. Of course, it's the most convenient thing in the world to assume causality, but I find myself slipping out of that sometimes. How does causality work with time, by the way? That's something I've wondered about without looking into very deeply. Apparently the direction of time is still a mystery - doesn't that have some kind of implications for causality?
Science, in its strict definition may not be a belief system, but it does seem to entail beliefs of one sort or another, or why talk about believing in evolution? Perhaps if evolution is pre-existent then then it could be said to be 'right', but I can't help thinking that it is still a means of interpreting reality rather than reality itself, and therefore expressive of values of one kind or another, even if it's only a question of framing information - natural selectiveness, if you like. Perhaps I need more data.