Lausten, I was afraid you might ask that. I was so proud of that compact little quote.Okay, so I'll go back read it slowly before continuing. :- )
“Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments.Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers:
ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand,
dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.”
Okay, excellent observation in and of itself.
If you want to translate it into The Human Pageant, consider the course of human history. Up until recently it’s been driven by young people (generations) who couldn’t handle the confines of their traditional homelands any longer. That cohesion with local lore and Sense Of Place were lost for the restless. They had to get away, move on and start over with their own fine tuned stories of reality as they perceived it. Take the risk, do the hardships that needed to be done, take advantage of the environments they found after peerless journeys, all thanks to the ability of our incredible learning brains. All the while growing that brain and its Mindscape.
Right? Do you agree that’s an accurate description of the current running through all of humanity over the past couple hundred thousand years?
I don’t have the time to double check but either David Wootton, perhaps also Yuval Noah Harari, write about humanity being achieved when we learned to believe the stories we tell each other. The one did a nice job of discussing Peugeot the person, then Peugeot the business idea. The “story” we tell ourselves wrapped around with all the majesty of religion, contracts, seals, stories we tell each other - as it relates to the Peugeot entity that remained after the person died. (in their “The Invention of Science” (Unabridged), “Sapiens” (Unabridged) respectively)
I agree a society’s cohesion depends on how much individuals buy into the story, and from that, how much they buy into the control structure they live within.
(we remember communist nations, that we’d grown up believing were granite solid, but hell, some sort of tipping point was reached, poop, it all fell apart and all bets were off. It’s like there was a run on the Belief Bank causing it all collapsed. Well sort of. Like in the Bmovies, the victorious final scene is disturbed by the slain beast opening its eye. Still, we all most continue believing someone’s story. And if enough people believe it, the few who don’t, don’t matter.)
Am I getting close, in my rambling sort of fashion, to the point you are trying to make?
Very close. The Peugeot story is a good one. What sets it apart from religion is that a corporation it is technically called a fiction. They’re the same as religion because most people don’t think of them as such. But I’ve been with groups that discuss changing how we give corporate charters and I’m pretty sure we aren’t going to make that happen. Imagine a world where Ford had to justify it’s existence every 10 years, including explaining why it keeps making gas guzzling SUVs. I can imagine it being a better world, but I can’t imagine changing the culture to get that accepted.
Lausten: You could speculate that we could have taken a different path, but you are really heading toward science fiction with theories like that.Have I led you to believe I'm trying to do that?
Try rolling the clock back, see where it goes.Indeed, I like to think I've done that. Not just in experiencing moments of discovery such as sharp rocks, or geologic structures that show exactly how to build walls, and that challenge the eye and keen mind to replication, and other such primal lessons that helped us along our way. Not that I'm any great survivalist, or wilderness traveler, heck no, too busy working all my life up until recently, I've simply spend a lot of time outdoors feeling at home and being attentive to my surroundings. And had just enough adventures along the way to at least taste it out there in the raw.
Here’s the way I’d try to rewrite your one paragraph up there. 
In this perspective we acknowledge that Earth and her physical processes and the pageant of evolution are the fundamental timeless touchstones of reality. Part of Earth’s physical reality is that we humans were created by Earth out of her processes.Science shows us that we belong to the mammalian branch of Earth’s animal kingdom. Yet, it’s undeniable that something quite unique happened some six million years ago when certain apes took a wild improbable evolutionary turn.
By and by besides the marvel of our two hands, we developed two feet and legs that could stand tall or run for hours and a brain that learned rapidly. During that evolutionary process something extraordinary fantastical was born, the Human Mindscape.
On the outside hominids learned to make tools, hunt, fish, and select plants, plus they mastered fire for cooking and better living.
On the inside our brains were benefiting from the new super nourishment while human curiosity and adventures started filling and stretching our mindscapes with experiences and knowledge beyond anything the “natural” physical Earth ever knew.
While the human mind and spirit are ineffable mysteries, they are also of tremendous consequence and real-world physical power. They drove our growing ability to study and manipulate our world, to communicate and record our experiences and to formulate explanations for a world full of mysteries, threats and wonders.
People learned to think and gossip and paint pictures upon the canvas of cave walls, and even better, upon the canvas of each other’s imaginations. We’ve been adding to our brain’s awareness and complexity ever since.
Of course, while all this was going on the human mind was also wondering about the ‘Why’ of the world it observed and the difficult, fragile, short lives we were allotted. In seeking answers to unknowable questions it seems inevitable that Gods would inhabit our mindscape. I suspect inspired by buried memories of being coddled within mom’s protective loving bosom those first couple years of life.
No doubt these “Gods” enabled further successes, though not through super-natural interventions, but rather through their ability to form, conform, reform and transform the mindscapes of the masses of people beginning to congregate. Thus, combining pragmatic civil societal needs with universally felt, but keenly personal questions, fears, and dreams.
After the middle ages tribal stories, accepted ancient doctrines and religious “truths” were no longer enough to satisfy our mindscape’s growing desire for ever more understanding and power over the Earth. The human brain took another tremendous leap forward in awareness with the Intellectual Enlightenment and the birth of serious disciplined scientific study.
Science’s success was dazzling in its ability to learn about, control and manipulate Earth’s physical resources and to transform entire environments. . . .
Right and “fiction” was used more than ‘story’ wasn’t it.
Also this has nothing to do with car industry, or even business, it was simply exploring the connections between reality and the stories/fictions we tell and why its important.
Imagine a world where Ford had to justify it’s existence every 10 years, including explaining why it keeps making gas guzzling SUVs. I can imagine it being a better world, but I can’t imagine changing the culture to get that accepted.Imagine such an outrageous thing. Sounds like something Jefferson would like. Or better imagine forcing some exec.to explain this act of self-destructive idiocy.
So why did General Motors crush its fleet of EV1 electric vehicles in the Arizona desert? ~2000
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRnUY6V2Knk
Yeah, yeah I know guy, it makes perfect sense in a world where personal power and profits is all that matters to our leaders
I’ll try to get some reflective time on the above from you. Meanwhile, here’s something from the great givers of this forum space, Skeptic.com. Steven Pinker points out that we have just as strong of an innate sense of rational reasoning as we do for our sometimes troublesome agency detection. Rather than be paralyzed by the need to have all data and make perfect decisions, we sometimes use irrational thinking as a shortcut and this is a rational thing to do. I haven’t finished the article yet, but he does provide some ideas for how we move forward. Ideas that have experimental backing.
Oh dear, Pinker. Okay, but only because I trust you. I’ve listened to him before and must admit, he irritated me way more than impresses. But, I’ll try.
Cmon’ CC, the guy is waiting to go trick or treating. (Or is he in a Shakespearian play? “Alas! Poor Yorik. I knew him well Horatio.”)
Have I led you to believe I’m trying to do that? -- CCNo, not really. I was substantiating my point that you we don’t know the sources of our nature.
After the middle ages tribal stories, accepted ancient doctrines and religious “truths” were no longer enough to … -- CCYou lost me about here. Too speculative. Science can be found in Greek culture and in the Pinker article, he talks about interviews with hunter gatherers of today (people not exposed to modern educations) showing plenty of ability to reason. The debate that Haidt talks about is; were our brains essentially the same 50,000 years ago as they are now, or did group selection select for those who valued cohesion over questioning. And did that cohesion come with ideas about tradition and purity.
Well 5oK yrs ago, we did not have as complex verbal behavior, because for one thing, if we had textual behavior (a sub type of verbal behavior), it was pretty rudimentary. I imagine that our brains have evolved somewhat since then, as I would guess that persons who had more complex verbal skills would have had differential advantages in surviving to reproduction.
I think cohesion would have lead to more survival of persons in large groups, but cohesion is probably a product, in large part, of our much more ancient basic characteristics of our social behaviors. Maybe the advent of agrarian societies just set the occasion for larger groups to be together and thereby to develop cohesion. i.e., Cohesion may have naturally developed when larger groups came to be. Ideas about tradition and purity? Uh that probably evolved culturally somewhere along the way.
Thanks! I’m here every Tuesday evening. Be sure to tip your waitress!
Cmon’ CC, the guy is waiting to go trick or treating. (Or is he in a Shakespearian play? “Alas! Poor Yorik. I knew him well Horatio.”)Or perhaps he's just admiring himself in the mirror. ;- )
Lausten, I’ll try to get some reflective time on the above from you. Meanwhile, here’s something from the great givers of this forum space, Skeptic.com. Steven Pinker points out that we have just as strong of an innate sense of rational reasoning as we do for our sometimes troublesome agency detection. Rather than be paralyzed by the need to have all data and make perfect decisions, we sometimes use irrational thinking as a shortcut and this is a rational thing to do. I haven’t finished the article yet, but he does provide some ideas for how we move forward. Ideas that have experimental backing.
Well, it started out better than I thought and I enjoyed the first half, then it simply seemed less and less relevant, though I kept reading, I did start drifting off the page - guess I’m not really too concerned with worrying about what happens in the universities. Remember I’m the one who’s lost all faith in the future considering how childish and utterly self-serving leaders across the board seem to have become. There’s no long term future for any of them anymore, we all blew our window of opportunity to retain the living biosphere we needed for our complex human society and institutions to continue existing into the next century. But that’s a completely different story.
Before I continue with items I think worth pointing out, I need to ask you Lausten if you can explain what it was about this article you thought was relevant to what I’d written about the development of the Human Mindscape?
but (Pinkert) does provide some ideas for how we move forward.
Pinker: “A final danger to allowing universities to repress open debate is that it sets off equal and opposite backlashes. The regressive left is an incubator of the alt-right.”
But where does he discuss the critical need for “honesty” when discussing scientific and political issues? Even as he trumpets the need to allow open debate, he never discusses the difference between a cynical agenda driven debate and a debate that demands honest discussion of facts, both our own and how we communicate another’s facts.
A debate where learning rather that winning is the goal.
Why should I be impressed with a showman, if he can’t even enunciate those simple principles. Yeah sure get me on stage with him and he’d run circles around me with his fancy dancing rhetoric and tie me in a bow fit for the christmas tree - but in the end where’s his substance? To me it all seems like reflecting on a hall of mirrors within his Mindscape - Rather than a reflection on the world he sees around him. I can understanding it happening if you spend your entire life reading and writing and talking about what you’ve read and imagined, he’s celebratory constantly being crowded while grooming an image, when, were would he have the time for some serious reflection on the world itself.
What is he really telling us, that’s interesting or new? Seriously. Because from where I’m watching it’s all simply rehashing the hash, while missing the opportunity to enunciate the difference between the physical world that created us and the mindscapes we use to understand that world.
At one point Pinker makes the point we’ve always lied to each other, leaving us with the dangling impression that today’s is no different than any other time in human history.
Seriously? (yes he does point out the massive information at our finger tips, but just sort of leaves it at that. But all the ready access to a universe of information is useless if you don’t know what to do with it beyond winning trivia contests. )
So great, we’ve always been liars, and we have more information at our finger tips than ever - where (or how) does that help us deal with today and the political chaos being instigated by that major political party, yes, teabagger/trumster Republicans, that cynically, but in absolute seriousness tells us Americans we should ignore fundamental physical facts and objective evidence because we still aren’t rich and fat enough yet? Well, okay, they’ll tell us it’s not about the money -> it’s about their need to do God’s Will. Why does that make the lying and disconnecting from physical reality okay? But I digress.
Maybe I should go to the beginning because he did write a few things I was surprised and impressed with.
“…So great, we’ve always been liars, and we have more information at our finger tips than ever – where (or how) does that help us deal with today and the political chaos being instigated by that major political party, yes, teabagger/trumster Republicans…”
Yeah, so lying is part of the human repertoire, and always has been. Pinker is a clever chap, he can say things that are obvious and make it seem that he has enlightened us. He makes a good living at it.
But did he say anything about there being times within or across cultures that lies are suppressed as something to disdain, vs when lies become a normalized part of the society, such that the best liars are in control?
My society used to be the former. Now it is the latter. I don’t like lies or liars. I hate liars being in charge.
Pinker: "But the main reason we should retire the post truth cliché is that it’s corrosive, perhaps self-fulfilling.'The implication is we may as well give up on reason and truth and just fight the bad guys’ lies and intimidation with lies and intimidation of our own. We can aim higher.
What the hell? It’s as though he thinks: "lies and intimidation with lies and intimidation of our own. " Is all we have. I say that because all Pinker offers is changing the subject: “Let’s return to the claim that Homo sapiens is irredeemably irrational, …” That’s simply more dog chasing its tail.
Is all we have to offer?
I’m asking - Why the hell not enunciate that it’s about confronting lies and intimidation with exposure and harsh demanding questions about who the hell gives these people that right to ignore facts and answer everything with lies, diversions, transference of motivations, slander and intimidation???
What about a little militancy for honesty?
In his book The Last Word, the philosopher Thomas Nagel showed that truth, objectivity, and reason are not negotiable. [2]Why not a little more focus on that thought and how to re-impress that on today's people?
Next
In a wonderful paper by John Tooby and Irven DeVore (with Leda Cosmides as an unacknowledged coauthor),5 these evolutionary psychologists argue that Homo sapiens evolved to fill the “Cognitive Niche,” living by a combination of social cooperation, language, and technological know-how. ...These next few paragraphs are fascinating about the way hunter gathers were skeptical observers and rational processes of information. It all seems pretty self-evident to me, so no revelation here but it was wonderfully written, even if Pinker was just doing the reporting on someone else's work.
Why were truth and rationality selected for? The answer is that reality is a powerful selection pressure.As the science fiction author Philip K. Dick put it, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” [10]
Very cool, now that’s a quotable.
The cognitive psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has shown that many of illusions and fallacies vanish when information is framed in ways that harmonize with human intuition. [13]Very cool point. One that deserves more attention I imagine.
Though I would add that harmonize doesn’t mean to coddle, it’s about resonating with something inside of people. That can happen by hitting 'em below their dogma belt. Why not strive to create doubt in people’s faith-shackled dogmas?
Especially when you can do it on a foundation of honesty, rational constructive evaluation, respecting physical facts over ego driven desires.
Group loyalty is an underestimated source of irrationality in the public sphere, especially when it comes to politicized scientific issues like evolution and climate change. Dan Kahan has shown that, contrary to what most scientists believe, a denial of the facts of human evolution or anthropogenic climate change is not a symptom of scientific illiteracy [16]The problem is that what’s rational for the individual may not be rational for the nation or the planet. Kahan calls it the “Tragedy of the Belief Commons.” [17]
Another paradox of rationality is pluralistic ignorance, or the “spiral of silence,” in which everyone believes that everyone else believes something but no one actually believes it. …
Need to work all that into one’s calculations, for sure.
The drags on reason—boundedness rationality, the novelty of truth-enhancing institutions, self-presentation, costly signaling, pluralistic ignorance—are depressing in their number and weight. But there are also forces that can empower the rational angels of our nature. These rationality enhancers have been explored by psychologists such as Jonathan Baron, Dan Sperber, Hugo Mercier, Steven Sloman, and Jason Fernbach, [22] and many of them draw their power from another principle articulated by Abraham Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” There are prods and nudges and norms and institutions that allow us to be more rational collectively than any of us is individually. [23]Hmmm, think they mean, we need each other to keep ourselves honest?
Oh jeez, I spent all that time writing all that up there, then Tim goes and puts it all so succinctly, before I even got started.
But did he say anything about there being times within or across cultures that lies are suppressed as something to disdain, vs when lies become a normalized part of the society, such that the best liars are in control?My society used to be the former. Now it is the latter. I don’t like lies or liars. I hate liars being in charge.
I’ll drink to that.
{Happy Halloween, am back in big city for the big evening, little guy is 6months already, been 9 wks since saying bye last time, infant no longer.}
But where does he discuss the critical need for “honesty” when discussing scientific and political issues? -- CCBut did he say anything about there being times within or across cultures that lies are suppressed as something to disdain, vs when lies become a normalized part of the society, such that the best liars are in control? –Tim
I’m trying to grapple with your questions, but it seems we’re reading different articles. One of us is missing something. The theme is that if you can spot fake news, then by definition we are addressing it. The danger is in switching to a focus on calling out fakers and making up things about who they are and why they are doing it. We aren’t irredeemably irrational. If you give in to that then the tendency is to excuse your own irrational behavior, which is what I see in statements like:
What about a little militancy for honesty?That can happen by hitting ’em below their dogma belt. – CC
He goes on to say we can change people’s minds with data and evidence, and he shows how to do it.