normblog

Situations and moral actors

Philip Zimbardo explains his perspective on what makes ordinary people behave in evil ways. That perspective is to give priority to situational pressures more than to personal traits. He's right to an extent: studies by others have pointed in the same direction. Christopher Browning's excellent book on Police Battalion 101 suggests that it was a desire to conform, not to let down their fellow police reservists, that played a key role in the willingness of most of the men whose testimony he studied to shoot down unarmed, helpless and innocent people in wartime Poland.

But Zimbardo overstates his case. Though he himself points out that 'there are always some who refuse and resist', who do not succumb to the pressure to conform, he at once goes on to propose 'a situational perspective for heroism'. People who bravely stand out and do something special don't necessarily do so because of their personal characteristics: it may be that 'they are more sensitive to these situational pressures' and so have mental strategies of resistance against negative social influences; in any case, we must foster an heroic imagination that would enable individuals to strengthen themselves against the noxious social forces that might one day tempt them into dehumanizing and aggressive conduct.

But this is to say, then, that some do have the inner moral strength, the moral compass, the fidelity to some basic standards of right and wrong, to withstand the type of situational pressures Zimbardo's work has been concerned with, and that he thinks that moral education, loosely speaking, can be effective. Which means that it is not only the situation that matters, it is also the nature of the actors, their courage, their moral character, their individual strength of mind.

The point here is not very profound; it is obvious in fact. But Zimbardo's exaggeration of the situational perspective undermines his own practical message. If you tell people too much that they are creatures of the situations they find themselves in, you draw attention away from the contribution they can make as individuals to changing the balance of influences that define the situation in the first place.

Impositions

A poll carried out by Gallup of more than 50,000 Muslims from 35 nations is to be published next month:

The largest survey to date of Muslims worldwide suggests the vast majority want Western democracy and freedoms, but do not want them to be imposed.

It's easy to understand that people wanting democracy prefer not to have it imposed. Democracy is the most transparent form of self-determination and it harmonizes better with it than do other political forms. Also easy to understand should be that, if democracy is what people want, then when they don't have it, non-democracy - you know, dictatorship, tyranny - is what is in fact imposed on them. (Thanks: RB.)

The normblog profile 232: TheBigHenry

TheBigHenry was born in Nazi-occupied Poland. He came to America in 1949, and at the age of 13 became an American citizen in 1955, the same year the Brooklyn Dodgers won their first and only World Series. He graduated from Hicksville High School (yes, that one - Billy Joel attended several years later) in 1959. He received a bachelor's degree from Cornell, and a master's and doctorate from Columbia. Before retiring from Los Alamos National Laboratory, he became an ACBL life master. He and wife Trish, a grad student at Duke, are happily unemployed in Durham, North Carolina. Henry blogs at Remembrance in Spacetime.

What has been your best blogging experience? > Collaborating with wifey, 'tristein' (her web moniker), on my semi-autobiographical novel The Pilot's Saga, which we are serializing on my blog.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Get a wife. She'll make sure you remember to eat.

What are your favourite blogs? > normblog; Fat Man on a Keyboard; Last of the Few. Surprisingly, all Brits.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > Einstein; Lincoln; Tolstoy.

What are you reading at the moment? > Proust, Remembrance of Things Past; Podhoretz, World War IV; Nemirovsky, Suite Française; Montaigne, The Complete Essays. Three translated from the French.

What is the best novel you've ever read? > Anna Karenina.

What is your favourite movie? > Sea of Love has the most satisfying final scene I have ever seen. Fateless (Lajos Koltai) includes a scene I cannot watch without sobbing. On the Waterfront will always be my favourite contender.

What is your favourite song? > Schubert's 'Ständchen' is the most beautiful melody known to man.

Who is your favourite composer? > Beethoven.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > I used to be a liberal, until the Democratic Party became an insane asylum.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > Can't improve on Winnie, can only paraphrase: 'Democracy imperfect; everything else a bloody disaster'. A close second is Truman's exhortation for personal accountability: 'The buck stops here'.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Montaigne, The Complete Essays. Montaigne himself said it best: 'I have no more made my book than my book has made me'.

Who are your political heroes? > Abraham Lincoln; Winston Churchill; Harry Truman.

What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > IQ testing of candidates for elected office should be mandatory, with results made publicly accessible before the election.

What would you do with the UN? > Move it to Baghdad.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > Fascism of any stripe, including liberal.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > The critical conflict between clockwise and counter-clockwise forces is on. If the former prevail, humanity will witness a virtual heaven on earth. If the latter, humanity is doomed to repeat its history, beginning with the dark ages, only next time with depleted resources. To doubt the criticality of this conflict is to accept the inevitability of civilization's counter-clockwise downward spiral to an irreversible phase transition.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Get one. Strive for more.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Recognition that the brain is your friend.

In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > To save a life worth saving.

Do you have any prejudices you're willing to acknowledge? > I lead A from AK, unless it's a doubleton.

What is your favourite proverb? > 'Thou shalt not f*ck with America.'

What, if anything, do you worry about? > The adjoint list - of what I don't worry about - is much shorter.

If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you'd do differently? > I should have listened to Mom and learned to play the piano. She also wanted me to be a real doctor (MD), but I think I made a good choice anyway.

What would you call your autobiography? > Remembrance in Spacetime.

What is your most treasured possession? > Wifey's heart.

Which baseball team do you support? > Brooklyn Dodgers.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > I would become a renowned philanthropist, like Bill Gates.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Imagine the conversation: Moses (ethics, justice, investing); Lincoln (leadership, wisdom); Einstein (what it all means).

[The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature. A list of all the profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Not classy

Jonathan Alter thinks that Hillary Clinton is going out and that her only choices are whether she goes out ugly or goes out with class. I don't follow this thing closely enough to know if he's right. But on the evidence of the exchange here she's chosen ugly. Barack Obama is asked what he thinks of Louis Farrakhan's declaration of support for him. Obama replies clearly enough that he has repeatedly denounced Farrakhan's anti-Semitism. Clinton says that Obama denounces Farrakhan, but that he should reject his support - at which point Obama says, fine, he will reject it as well as denounce him. To me it comes across as an attempt on her part to score a petty electoral point, where classy would have been to affirm a community of viewpoint between the two of them.

Tradition, tradition

If you set out deliberately to write a column which would be so obviously laughable a decade or three on that it already is laughable, to put together a sad rant about how everything is going to the dogs, you couldn't do much better than the piece I've just read by David Gelernter. It's an 'end of civilization as we know it' lament, and the particular thing that's at stake for him is our language. Why so? Well, it's because there are ideologues who now use words like 'chairperson' and 'humankind'; but mainly it's because - oh, prepare yourself for the horror of horrors - such people use 'he or she' where they could just use 'he', and they sometimes use 'they' as a gender-neutral singular, and they sometimes use 'she' on its own, where from the context it is clear that the subject isn't necessarily female.

If you can recover from the feeling of outrage this may have induced in you and from the sense of a terrifying threat to acceptable English at which you will have trembled, you should be able to discern in Gelernter's argument the absence of even a single reason explaining why the effects of tradition that turned the usage he approves of - 'he' - into a standard one should not do the same for the alternatives to it that he deplores.

House of Edith

It's a precious thing to be able to walk through the worlds of individual writers, to stand in a room that they stood in and wonder what they thought.

You don't have to stand in the room where they stood to be able to wonder what they thought; but, still, it's good. This is about raising the ruboolas to save The Mount - the house in Lenox where Edith Wharton lived and which is now a museum. If you want to help...

Cooking up an XI (by Bob Borsley)

There have been some strange teams in the history of cricket. In 1867 a team of one-legged cricketers played a team of one-armed cricketers (the match was drawn), and in 1892 a team of married men played a team of single men (the single men won). But cricket fans can always think of new teams to pick. People have even picked teams of philosophers and literary figures. The current England one-day opening bats are Cook and Mustard. What, then, could be more natural for a cricket fan than to pick a team of food-related cricketers?

But what exactly counts as food-related? Norm suggested Graeme Fowler as a candidate for selection. No doubt fowlers play a role in providing food, but they are, it seems to me, quite a long way from the dining table (about as far as millers). I have to include Cook since he is half of the inspiration for picking the team, but otherwise I propose to limit myself to items of food and drink. Here are the results of my deliberations.

Alastair Cook. A good opening bat, and what is food without a cook?

Phil Mustard. As far as I am aware, the only edible wicketkeeper. Gilchrist, Knott, Oldfield, and Evans are all quite useless from this point of view.

Graeme Pollock. Possibly the best left-handed batsman ever, and apparently Pollock is 'consumed as an economic and versatile alternative to cod and haddock in the West Country'. So we have a fish course.

Phil Mead. A good left-handed bat, who might have played more Tests, and something to drink. (Thanks to my son for this one.)

Alan Lamb. A good middle-order bat and one of three meat options.

Clive Rice. A fine all-rounder who supplies some carbohydrates.

Shaun Pollock. A fine all-rounder and more fish.

Peter Pollock. An excellent opening bowler and even more fish.

Rodney Hogg. A good opening bowler, who gives us a choice of meat. (Thanks to Norm.)

Graham Onions. A useful medium-fast bowler, who ensures that we have one vegetable.

Joe Partridge. A useful fast-medium bowler who provides us with some game.

12th man - Cec Pepper. A 'rumbustious' all-rounder and some extra seasoning.

There we have it. Not a bad team, with some useful batting and lots of good quick bowling, but a shortage of spin bowling and vegetables. I hope none of them is out for a duck! (Bob Borsley)

[Postcript from the editor. Here are a few players who failed to make Bob's team: George Bean, Cecil Parkin and Fred Root (for when you're really hungry); and, assisting in the dressing room, Mervyn Kitchen, Michael Kettle and Dominic Cork. - NG.]

London bound

I have to go off to London at short notice; my father is unwell and in hospital. Blogging frequency here will be unpredictable for the next while.

Slaves and slaves

The words 'liberty' and 'freedom' are often used interchangeably but they don't have to be. It's open to anyone to propose a distinction between them and then operate accordingly. Stein Ringen proposes a distinction:

Liberty is not freedom. It is a condition of freedom. To live freely is to be... the author of one's own life. For those of us who are blessed with liberty, that means not just indulging but taking control.

Again:

[P]eople who demand liberty to indulge unexamined impulses are slaves... After liberty, the second condition of freedom is control, specifically the self-control that is required to avoid becoming a prisoner of one's own immediate desires.

The argument isn't a new one: if you don't command your own impulses, subject them to reason and deliberation, they control you rather than the other way round and you're unfree. But this argument works better for some wants than it does for others: low wants, so to say, smoking, boozing, physical 'excesses' of one kind and another. Think, however, of Philippa. What she wants to do is to read lots of books, go to the opera occasionally, likewise a movie now and again, see her friends, knit, grow flowers. This is, by chance, just what her friend Meg also gets up to. The difference is that Meg has thought a lot about how it would be best to spend her time, and decided on her bundle of activities, whereas Philippa has never given it a moment of consideration - she simply goes with the flow, doing as she pleases in more or less spontaneous fashion.

Using 'freedom' as Ringen proposes you can't tell whether a person is free without knowing of their inner mental and emotional processes or assessing how rational they are; you're also involved, arguably, in a value judgement about how worthwhile their chosen activities are. It seems clearer to say that Philippa is free when she satisfies her wants - to read, go to the opera, knit, and so on - and so is Gary when he drinks every night; even though, you might think, she could make better use of her freedom than by going to the opera, and he of his than by drinking so much.

Here's another kind of unfreedom (subscription only) than being a slave to your wants:

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. Before you go, let's be clear on what you are buying. A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Agreed? Good.

Most people imagine that slavery died in the 19th century. Since 1817, more than a dozen international conventions have been signed banning the slave trade. Yet, today there are more slaves than at any time in human history.

Though I do like Raymond Chandler

There are people who like lists and people who don't, and I'm the former kind of people; so that even when the list isn't of my sort of thing, I can find it interesting. Here's one such - for all of you who are devoted (as I am not) to crime fiction, 50 crime writers to read before you die.