Author: ken

What Does it Mean?

According to a recent Pew poll, 18 percent of Americans believe that the President is a Muslim, and the percentage is growing.  Apparently, according to Time, a majority of Republicans believe it too.

Why do people believe what they do?  Common sense suggests it is because of the supporting evidence, the weight of reality.  In this case there doesn’t seem to be much evidence.  The President’s statements have been pored over and analyzed, and the few people who seem to have taken the trouble to examine what he said about his past and his religious convictions don’t seem to find any significant evidence for this particular belief.

But actually most of us seldom bother to review the evidence we have about anything we believe.  That’s not the point about beliefs.  Our convictions get established in our minds for essentially two reasons:  either they fit in with other things we believe or else they are believed by others, those who surround us.  The link with reality is second.

In this case, it seems clear that the first reason is true:  according to the Pew poll, “Beliefs about Obama’s religion are closely linked to political judgments about him. Those who say he is a Muslim overwhelmingly disapprove of his job performance, while a majority of those who think he is a Christian approve of the job Obama is doing.” (See, “When Is a Muslim Not a Muslim.”)

No surprise.  That comes across in the news.  Those who call him a Muslim clearly don’t like him or trust him.

But the other reason for our beliefs suggests that this false conviction may continue to grow.  If more people believe something is true, that, in itself, becomes a source of conviction for others.  The others have to want to believe it first, of course, but then the convictions of like-minded others become “evidence,” and the process snowballs.  “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” people like to say.

Eventually, in circles where those ideas are repeated, it becomes more and more difficult not to believe.  It becomes an article of faith, a sign of membership in our communities.  To take a different position is to risk being seen as naïve or deluded, believing what “they” want you to believe.

That seems to be happening here.  And it will probably continue to happen, as the idea gets repeated and spreads.  Gossip, here, is more powerful and convincing than arguments or evidence.

This is yet another sign of how we are splitting up into opposing camps.  It seems an inexorable process of our politics and economy.  And that means that in the future there will be even less interest in evidence.

The Compassion Deficit

It’s not news anymore, but it’s still a surprise:  the poor are more generous than the rich. “For decades, surveys have shown that upper-income Americans … are particularly undistinguished as givers when compared with the poor…. lower-income Americans give proportionally more of their incomes to charity than do upper-income Americans.”  See, “The Charitable-Giving Divide” in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

A PhD candidate at Berkeley, Paul Piff, recently repeated that finding – and more:  “lower-income people were more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than were those with more wealth. They were more attuned to the needs of others and more committed generally to the values of egalitarianism.”

It’s tempting to think that the rich are richer because they are more selfish or single-mindedly focused on their own advancement, but Piff’s research suggests otherwise.  His experiment primed subjects by showing sympathy inducing videos and encouraging them to imagine themselves in different financial circumstances.  That changed their reactions — for both sets of subjects.  In other words, the poor, imagining themselves rich, became less altruistic.   The rich, imagining themselves poor, became more generous to the destitute and ill.  Piff concluded:  “Empathy and compassion appeared to be the key ingredients” in the generosity of the poor.

If we think of this in group terms, it makes perfect sense.  Members of each group will identify with other members of the group to which they belong.  Their issues will resonate more deeply.  The rich will find it easier to give to the cultural institutions they and their friends patronize as well as the colleges and universities they attended.  The poor will give to the neighbors suffering from the same problems they are struggling with or to the causes closer to home.

As the gap between the rich and poor in our society grows – as it has been growing — this divide will only get greater.  Crossing over will not only be more difficult to accomplish economically, it will be harder for us to project ourselves imaginatively across it.  The rich will not get the point of extending unemployment insurance, and could even easily talk themselves into believing that such a helping hand might make workers lazy.  The poor will get bitter about the tax cuts the rich keep insisting will trickle down benefits for all.

In other words, the psychological effects of group process will intensify our social ills and make it more difficult for us to function politically as a whole.  It’s already on the edge of impossible.

What Is the Link?

A recent study appears to confirm that exercise can reduce anger. According to Nathaniel Thom, a stress physiologist, “exercise, even a single bout of it, can have a robust prophylactic effect” against the buildup of anger. (See, “Phys Ed – Can Exercise Moderate Anger?” in The New York Times Sunday Magazine)

Why is that a surprise?  Most therapists have a good, intuitive understanding of the link.  But it might be counter-intuitive to those who think anger is a negative and dangerous eruption in the brain.  How could something as positive and normal as exercise have an effect on an experience as toxic as anger is often thought to be?  On another level, some might wonder, how can the body affect the mind?

Anger is a normal and adaptive response to an attack or a threat.  It has been useful in our evolutionary struggle for survival.  The brain detects the danger and the body is aroused and energized to react with fight or flight.

Sometimes, of course, it gets out of hand.  Some people, clearly, see threats where there are none, or where the danger is minimal.  Their bodies get aroused inappropriately.  They could use some help in understanding the signals that trigger their responses, and finding ways to get their anger under better control.

According to The Times, researchers are trying to find the physiological and chemical roots of anger.  Meanwhile, Mr. Thom suggested: “if you know that you’re going to be entering into a situation that is likely to make you angry, go for a run first.”

Not a bad idea.  But the run might be useful not just because it works off some excess energy but also because it gives you a chance to think about what made you angry in the first place – or what you really want to do about it.

As a culture we seem to fear anger.  As this study implies, we want to find its physiological and chemical “causes,” as if it were a disease.  We are trying to convert a normal experience that is occasionally uncomfortable, like depression, into a pathology that can treated pharmacologically and eliminated.

The real danger is that researchers might actually succeed in finding such a pill.  We would then risk losing touch with the meaning our anger has for us as well as the energy it can provide.

The English poet William Blake once wrote:  “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”  He had a point.  Well-directed anger, stemming from clarity of thought, gets through to others more effectively than platitudes.  And it can be a welcome relief.

The Politics, the Science and the PR

The recent floods in Pakistan, the drought in Russia, melting glaciers and record-breaking temperatures in New York are bringing home the real threat of global warming.  Extreme weather conditions are convincing people that the problem is real.

But the case for global warming involves sophisticated analysis of averages and statistical trends, and so there are different measures, different theories and considerable room for debate.  The evidence is converging, and the consensus now seems pretty firm.  Personally, I am convinced myself.  Yet the science is abstract, hypothetical, while real weather is always local and immediate.  It’s hard for most people to believe in the reality of global warming in the midst of a snowstorm.

So this spate of extreme weather is turning out to have the fortunate side effect of turning skeptics into true believers.  As The New York Times noted last week, even climate scientists note that weather has always been varied and often unpredictable: “the averages do not necessarily make it easier to link specific weather events, like a given flood or hurricane or heat wave, to climate change.”  That makes it easier not to believe what we don’t want to believe.

In Russia, long skeptical about the issue, the drought and heat wave has brought about a dramatic change in public opinion. “Everyone is talking about climate change now,” President Dmitri A. Medvedev said earlier this month. “Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.”  (See, “In Weather Chaos, A Case for Global Warming.”)

This makes it clear that it takes more than a good argument to get us to change our minds.  We tend to go on believing what we have always believed, what we want to believe, what it is in our interest to believe — that is, until something dislodges us from our habits.  Logic and science do not carry as much weight in the mind as uncomfortable and threatening experiences.

In the on-going public relations campaign to get us to reform our polluting habits, we need books and articles, congressional testimony, and films like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.  But, sad to say, nothing will work as well as disaster to get us to sit up and take notice.

The trick will be to keep our memory of these disasters alive and fresh.

A New Plague of Plagiarism

In an age where so much information and so many texts are freely available and free of cost – not to mention movies, songs and video clips – it is not surprising that plagiarism is thriving. Authorship and ownership have come to mean less and less.

Students are challenging what meaning may remain in the concept. As The New York Times noted last week: “many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.” Worse, “the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes ‘serious cheating’ is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.” There is just so much out there for the taking on the web that it seems to matter less and less. (See, “Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age.”)

As we move beyond the age of “possessive individualism,” moreover, we have a more sophisticated appreciation of how hard it is to claim pure ownership of any text. Scholars now see how virtually all texts are built up by allusions to other texts if not outright borrowings from the ideas and words of others.

The Times cited anthropologist, Susan D. Blum, who conducted ethnographic research among 234 Notre Dame undergraduates. “Ms. Blum argued that student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today — TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs.”

The article went on to say: “the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.”

Both traditions are also hard to reconcile with what neurobiology is teaching us about how memory is built up in the mind. Because new perceptions and ideas are layered on top of familiar old categories, we are hard put to distinguish what came first – or what belonged to whom. As a result, the ownership of words – and hence the stealing of them – is turning out to be more complicated than we once thought.

Still plagiarism is a practical problem, requiring us to distinguish between outright theft, in which the reader is being intentionally misled, and the kind of nuanced blending that adds richness and allusive depth to a text, not to mention the daily mash-ups we rely upon to communicate with others. Arguably, as well, the student who passes off someone else’s words as his own is also cheating himself.

Perhaps a more useful concept is personal or authentic thought. That is, the words and phrases may have complex derivations, the ownership of which cannot be definitively determined, but the author of any given text must have to think about what he or she is trying to say. The author must engage the ideas and struggle to find the words in order to make them his own.

That is, he may not own them, but he has to take possession of them if he is to be considered the author of the text.