The below video reminds me of what I consider the most shameful aspect of Western intellectuals and journalists of the last 50 years: the failure to tell the truth about Communism. This failure, in my view, has fatally undermined any appeal to authority or morality that academics of elite journalists might make.
The failure of simply telling the truth is staggering. Western intellectuals, by and large, knew that Lenin was guilty of mass murder. They knew what Stalin was doing. They chose to sympathize with Hiss and Rosenberg and vilify Chambers. They knew that 'cultural leaders' like Sartre and his ilk supported mass murderers and, by and large, did not blacklist or censure such star academics; academics had no qualms with turning, en masse, on Mencken in the '30s when he vilified the New Deal. By and large they chose not censure Duranty and other apologists, knowing that these 'reporters' were not telling the truth. Western academics and journalists knew about Mao and Ho Chi Minh and Ceasescu; even when confronted with the enormity of the crimes of these mass murderers, Western academics and journalists did not even come close to a united front in simply telling the truth.
The learned members of our society have discredited their generation, forever, as a source of authority and morality by engaging in the most consequential dishonesty in the history of the world. The magnitude of the resultant moral injury will always be with the Learned West until it uniformly refutes the blood and horror of the 20th century.
The effects of such dishonesty are with us daily, even if we don't recognize them, and it creates a Kafkaesque sense of incongruity. This is why in the United States our students will study Anne Frank and the Holocaust (rightfully so) in middle school and high school, but will graduate without ever hearing of what Mao did in the late 50s or what Stalin did in the 30s or what has gone on a hundred miles off Florida for the past 60 years. This is why college students will be censured for wearing a t-shirt with a swastika on it but will receive bemused smiles when they were t-shirt emblazoned with Mao or Che. This is why there is (rightfully so) a national monument to the Holocaust in DC; a testament of truth, that the blood of the innocent that cries from the ground will be heard. Where is the monument for the millions deliberately murdered by Mao? Where is monument to the millions of Ukrainians and Russians killed by Stalin? Where is the monument.
This is why something like Oliver Stone's asinine paean to a murdering thug like Che can get funded, produced, and reviewed by the NYtimes. This is why Michael Moore can do the same with his recent film about Cuban healthcare. This is why the Hammer and Sickle, instead of being viewed as the symbol under which more innocent civilians were murdered than under any other simple is not condemned. Nazism, slavery, fascism, Japanese Militarism are all rightfully censured and condemned. That communism has not been condemned as widely and forcefully as the other crimes against humanity is the great dishonesty of the 20th century. Why? I think Orwell was correct when he said to the effect that people overlook the crimes committed in the names of causes they approved of; it is hubris and pretention to imagine that we dispassionate observers simply reporting the truth. Psychologists in later decades would identify Confirmation Bias as a major cognitive bias (although the observation of the prevalence of Confirmation Bias goes back to the ancient world). The desire for utopia here on earth - as well as the necessary corollary truth that such a Platonist utopia will have to ministered by someone, say, intellectuals - has been so strong that Western academics and journalists have been unable, for nearly 100 years now, to simply tell the truth.
At some basic level, the man in the street will wonder, "why is some mass murder bad and other mass murder not worthy of condemnation? Why are some dictators worthy of revulsion but other dictators are not?" And the man in the street will then conclude with Machiavelli, that if the cause/goal is just, then the means do not really matter.
Which leads us to the video. Only now in 2014 are statues to a murderous dictator being pulled down in Ukraine. These statues are not being pulled down by blowhard intellectuals like French philosopher Bernard Levy, but by common people. Why is it that such statues were not pulled down decades ago?
http://live.wsj.com/video/ukraine-protesters-topple-lenin-statues/AD94C51C-921B-46DA-9AE0-B1B6B876D9C9.html?mod=trending_now_video_4#!AD94C51C-921B-46DA-9AE0-B1B6B876D9C9
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Response to Patton's Feb 13 Wsj Article
In the February 13 WSJ opinion section, Susan Patton gave some unfortunate advice on dating. My short response, which the WSJ did not publish:
Susan Patton has given the most unfortunate type of advice: falsehood wrapped around a kernel of truth. Ms. Patton is correct that "for most...the cornerstone of future happiness will be [in marriage]." Empirical research as well as the cross-cultural wisdom of ages supports this premise.
Unfortunately, Ms. Patton conflates happiness in marriage with intellectual compatibility. On this point, empirical evidence is lacking. Rather, the research indicates that kindness, mutual respect, and devotion to the well being of your significant other provide the bedrock for happiness in marriage. Very few marriages were ever made successful via pillow talk discussing Foucault. For the few individuals who claim to have found happiness in such marriages based upon intellectualism as hobby, the participants might have been better off seeking treatment for neuroses instead.
...
I'd follow the above letter with the addendum:
I don't deny that being able to discuss intellectual interests with a spouse can be a gratifying experience in marriage, but it is not the foundation or source of happiness in marriage. If intellectual interests (or any interest for that matter, from strat-o-matic baseball to scrapbooking) are the primary sources of fulfillment in your marriage, then what do you really need your spouse for? Wouldn't he/she be interchangeable for any amicable intellectual? Such an attitude seems to suggest that your spouse is a means to an end, the end the being whatever hobby you value. Valuing your spouse primarily for what he/she can do for you, besides being narcissistic, is not a value system that will allow a marriage to weather the inevitable stresses of life.
Susan Patton has given the most unfortunate type of advice: falsehood wrapped around a kernel of truth. Ms. Patton is correct that "for most...the cornerstone of future happiness will be [in marriage]." Empirical research as well as the cross-cultural wisdom of ages supports this premise.
Unfortunately, Ms. Patton conflates happiness in marriage with intellectual compatibility. On this point, empirical evidence is lacking. Rather, the research indicates that kindness, mutual respect, and devotion to the well being of your significant other provide the bedrock for happiness in marriage. Very few marriages were ever made successful via pillow talk discussing Foucault. For the few individuals who claim to have found happiness in such marriages based upon intellectualism as hobby, the participants might have been better off seeking treatment for neuroses instead.
...
I'd follow the above letter with the addendum:
I don't deny that being able to discuss intellectual interests with a spouse can be a gratifying experience in marriage, but it is not the foundation or source of happiness in marriage. If intellectual interests (or any interest for that matter, from strat-o-matic baseball to scrapbooking) are the primary sources of fulfillment in your marriage, then what do you really need your spouse for? Wouldn't he/she be interchangeable for any amicable intellectual? Such an attitude seems to suggest that your spouse is a means to an end, the end the being whatever hobby you value. Valuing your spouse primarily for what he/she can do for you, besides being narcissistic, is not a value system that will allow a marriage to weather the inevitable stresses of life.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Book Reviews, Paragraph Style
I initially planned on doing "extensive" book reviews, but extensive book reviews are time intensive and require that bothersome task of tracking down citations and being "accurate." Solution: paragraph book reviews, where citations, context, and thoughtful analysis are not required.
The Dead Hand - David Hoffman
Account of the Soviet Union's nuclear and biological weapons programs.
Takeaways:
1. The Soviet Union spent some 30% of its GDP on defense (at the height of the Cold War the US only spent some 6-8%), which produced a military significantly inferior in nearly all aspects to the United States', in addition to the waiting lines for toilet paper and shoe laces.
2. The Soviet Union continued its biological weapons program all the way up through Yeltsin, despite signing a treaty for abandoning such research. The US stopped its biological weapons research under Nixon.
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
I swore after reading Suite Francaise that I would never again read a book solely upon the rave reviews of critics. Alas, I did not learn my lesson, and read this book solely because there exist critics who think this is book is swell. This book is not swell. Not worthy of further comment.
Mere Christianity - CS Lewis
Excellent book. Accessible to the learned and the lay alike. In my experience, this is the clearest and most parsimonious treatment of Christianity and Christian morality that I've come across. The section on the trinity is probably the weakest link in the book. Lewis' insights on human behavior are profound. I'm confident that one day Lewis will be recognized as a better psychologist than all the Ainsworths, Bowlbys, and Skinners of the 20th century.
From my view as a psychiatrist, I find it interesting that as the views of Freud and Erickson (in addition to the rest of the dustbin of theory based psychologists) have been ignored and/or rejected, the evidence based psychotherapy of our day, namely in the form Beck's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, confirms most of the psychological guesses and hunches that CS Lewis jotted down in 1940.
Why is this important? Prior to the slow rise of evidence based medicine in the past 50 or so years, psychotherapy was largely theoretical. There were no randomized controlled clinical trials. No placebo or control groups. No inter-observer reliability ratings. No meta analyses. No peer review of the data or the findings. Psychotherapy primarily consisted of the "psychotherapists" working from a theory that was developed ostensibly to explain human behavior that ultimately came from data sets slightly larger than a handful of case studies. It is a remarkable commentary on the inexhaustible supply of hubris that nearly the entire learned community of university professors of psychiatry and psychology, in fifty years following Freud all believed in theories that have now been empirically falsified; that one Cambridge Don untrained in psychogloy, repeating little more than folk wisdom from the vulgar masses should put forth explanations of human behavior that he hurriedly wrote down for a 1940 radio broadcast that now have far more empirical support than anything that the great learned professors believed put forth over a total of fifty years.
The basics of evidence based medicine: What do I know and how do I know it? What reason do I have to make a certain diagnosis? What reason do I have to prescribe a certain treatment? Why do I believe what I believe?
Anyhow, I apologize for the four paragraph book review. All following book reviews will be one paragraph.
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Bryan Caplan
I detest libertarianism. Not libertarians mind you, it seems most of my good friends are libertarians. Every now and then I read a libertarian book. Why? Because libertarianism is the pornography of economics. Initially exciting and appealing, but with dreadful consequences later on. This disclaimer aside, libertarian economist Bryan Caplan has written an unsettling and alluring book. His thesis is that adoption studies of monozygotic twins (The type who are genetic copies of each other) have decisively shown that the traits parents care about - intellect, future earning ability, personality - are primarily (but not exclusively) determined by genes and not parenting. Caplan claims that amongst the middle class, parenting actually has very little influence over these issues. Caplan's conclusion: thus, since your kids will largely turn out as they do despite your parenting (as long as you don't molest or abandon them), parents should relax, not stress about TV or the SAT, adopt hands off, less stressful parenting, and enjoy the ride. Since excellent parenting requires nowhere near the amount of investment that most parents think, have more kids! The payoff is huge 20 years down the road. The book is alluring because it absolves parents of guilt if their kids don't get into fancy schools and make money. The book is disturbing since it sometimes gets close to biological reductionism.
A History of the Jews - Paul Johnson
I've always been curious as to how such a small ethnicity, having endured incredible persecution for, oh, some 3500 years nevertheless somehow is able to remain an ethnic group for 3500 years and along the way give birth to Monotheism, Christianity, and Islam (according to various historians, hotly disputed by other various historians), and overcome the persecution and pogroms to disproportionately represent themselves in all academic and business endeavors. Johnson doesn't really answer those questions, but I came away even more impressed with Judaism that before (except for Trotsky, Marx, Freud, and Spinoza. Screw those guys.) Johnson writes in an engaging style, as always, and I highly recommend him to the lay man interested in history. One cannot read this book without coming away impressed with the history of the Jewish People.
Dr. Faustus - Marlowe
Marlowe's take on an old German folk tale. Faustus is a worldly professor, the devil offers him unlimited worldly success in exchange for his soul (I hear this is the same thing that happened to Jimmy Page), and Faustus agrees, because he doesn't believe in the supernatural, and, anyway, what could be more sweet than earthly pleasures? So...hmmm, excuse the lame Joycean moment, but I read this about 6 months ago and I can't quit remember what happened. I think that in the sad version Faustus goes to hell for seducing women and signing the contract and in the happy version the soul of his girlfriend that he betrayed pleads with God to forgive him, he repents, and is forgiven and snatched from hell to heaven. Moral of the story is best summed up by the line at the end of that immortal movie, Patton: "All glory is fleeting." Yep.
The Dead Hand - David Hoffman
Account of the Soviet Union's nuclear and biological weapons programs.
Takeaways:
1. The Soviet Union spent some 30% of its GDP on defense (at the height of the Cold War the US only spent some 6-8%), which produced a military significantly inferior in nearly all aspects to the United States', in addition to the waiting lines for toilet paper and shoe laces.
2. The Soviet Union continued its biological weapons program all the way up through Yeltsin, despite signing a treaty for abandoning such research. The US stopped its biological weapons research under Nixon.
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
I swore after reading Suite Francaise that I would never again read a book solely upon the rave reviews of critics. Alas, I did not learn my lesson, and read this book solely because there exist critics who think this is book is swell. This book is not swell. Not worthy of further comment.
Mere Christianity - CS Lewis
Excellent book. Accessible to the learned and the lay alike. In my experience, this is the clearest and most parsimonious treatment of Christianity and Christian morality that I've come across. The section on the trinity is probably the weakest link in the book. Lewis' insights on human behavior are profound. I'm confident that one day Lewis will be recognized as a better psychologist than all the Ainsworths, Bowlbys, and Skinners of the 20th century.
From my view as a psychiatrist, I find it interesting that as the views of Freud and Erickson (in addition to the rest of the dustbin of theory based psychologists) have been ignored and/or rejected, the evidence based psychotherapy of our day, namely in the form Beck's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, confirms most of the psychological guesses and hunches that CS Lewis jotted down in 1940.
Why is this important? Prior to the slow rise of evidence based medicine in the past 50 or so years, psychotherapy was largely theoretical. There were no randomized controlled clinical trials. No placebo or control groups. No inter-observer reliability ratings. No meta analyses. No peer review of the data or the findings. Psychotherapy primarily consisted of the "psychotherapists" working from a theory that was developed ostensibly to explain human behavior that ultimately came from data sets slightly larger than a handful of case studies. It is a remarkable commentary on the inexhaustible supply of hubris that nearly the entire learned community of university professors of psychiatry and psychology, in fifty years following Freud all believed in theories that have now been empirically falsified; that one Cambridge Don untrained in psychogloy, repeating little more than folk wisdom from the vulgar masses should put forth explanations of human behavior that he hurriedly wrote down for a 1940 radio broadcast that now have far more empirical support than anything that the great learned professors believed put forth over a total of fifty years.
The basics of evidence based medicine: What do I know and how do I know it? What reason do I have to make a certain diagnosis? What reason do I have to prescribe a certain treatment? Why do I believe what I believe?
Anyhow, I apologize for the four paragraph book review. All following book reviews will be one paragraph.
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Bryan Caplan
I detest libertarianism. Not libertarians mind you, it seems most of my good friends are libertarians. Every now and then I read a libertarian book. Why? Because libertarianism is the pornography of economics. Initially exciting and appealing, but with dreadful consequences later on. This disclaimer aside, libertarian economist Bryan Caplan has written an unsettling and alluring book. His thesis is that adoption studies of monozygotic twins (The type who are genetic copies of each other) have decisively shown that the traits parents care about - intellect, future earning ability, personality - are primarily (but not exclusively) determined by genes and not parenting. Caplan claims that amongst the middle class, parenting actually has very little influence over these issues. Caplan's conclusion: thus, since your kids will largely turn out as they do despite your parenting (as long as you don't molest or abandon them), parents should relax, not stress about TV or the SAT, adopt hands off, less stressful parenting, and enjoy the ride. Since excellent parenting requires nowhere near the amount of investment that most parents think, have more kids! The payoff is huge 20 years down the road. The book is alluring because it absolves parents of guilt if their kids don't get into fancy schools and make money. The book is disturbing since it sometimes gets close to biological reductionism.
A History of the Jews - Paul Johnson
I've always been curious as to how such a small ethnicity, having endured incredible persecution for, oh, some 3500 years nevertheless somehow is able to remain an ethnic group for 3500 years and along the way give birth to Monotheism, Christianity, and Islam (according to various historians, hotly disputed by other various historians), and overcome the persecution and pogroms to disproportionately represent themselves in all academic and business endeavors. Johnson doesn't really answer those questions, but I came away even more impressed with Judaism that before (except for Trotsky, Marx, Freud, and Spinoza. Screw those guys.) Johnson writes in an engaging style, as always, and I highly recommend him to the lay man interested in history. One cannot read this book without coming away impressed with the history of the Jewish People.
Dr. Faustus - Marlowe
Marlowe's take on an old German folk tale. Faustus is a worldly professor, the devil offers him unlimited worldly success in exchange for his soul (I hear this is the same thing that happened to Jimmy Page), and Faustus agrees, because he doesn't believe in the supernatural, and, anyway, what could be more sweet than earthly pleasures? So...hmmm, excuse the lame Joycean moment, but I read this about 6 months ago and I can't quit remember what happened. I think that in the sad version Faustus goes to hell for seducing women and signing the contract and in the happy version the soul of his girlfriend that he betrayed pleads with God to forgive him, he repents, and is forgiven and snatched from hell to heaven. Moral of the story is best summed up by the line at the end of that immortal movie, Patton: "All glory is fleeting." Yep.
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