9/11 15 years On

All of us remember where we were on 9/11. I was teaching an International Relations class when two of the students came in late, stood in the doorway, and said we should all go to the cafeteria where we the big TV had been turned to CNN. They mentioned the WTC and that the first tower had fallen.

I wasn’t really sure what was going on. I frankly didn’t believe a single airplane could knock over a WTC tower. It all sounded a little far-fetched. But the students looked very distraught and were insistent so I elected to break early and we all got there in time to see the second tower fall.

We saw many reruns of the airplanes which hit the buildings in the hours which followed. Classes were not suspended but a lot of people at the university gathered around the numerous cafeteria television sets for the rest of the day.

It was obviously early in the term but ironically (or not) I was already discussing Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden. At that time I was already very worried about him.

Because of this I was quite quick to blame the whole thing on him. Even before North American air travel had been resumed I had been cautioned not to jump to conclusions about what still had not been officially determined to be a deliberate act.

We must not be too hasty. We must get in all of the evidence and then only judge carefully.

A few days after air travel resumed I found a newspaper article supporting the idea that bin Laden and Al Qaeda was responsible. I cut it out and put it on the bulletin board next to my office door (*my* bulletin board) and a day later it was gone.

I also note that Samsung has recalled 2.5 million Galaxy Note 7 phones because 35 of them worldwide have exploded.

That’s about 0.0014%

A recent opinion poll showed that 33% of US followers of Islam believe Sharia law should be given higher priority than the US Constitution.

If someone offers you a Samsung Galaxy Note 7, just take it. Don’t risk being called a Samsungphone-o-phobe.

BTW. There is only one kind of battery which explodes. Not all Note 7s have them. But this is the very first Note 7 which is sealed. Users can not remove the back and see if they have the funny battery.

There is no way for the “lay observer” to know if any particular phone is dangerous or harmless. There is no way to interrogate the phone’s “about phone” information to find this out. No app can do this. Only a factory-trained expert can make the determination.

They don’t have special cover-patterns or screen images or cases. They all look the same from the outside.

So some airlines have banned them from all their flights. And all of them have to go back to Samsung for inspection and replacement. Samsung is instructing the owners to turn them all off immediately and use other devices instead.

The perception of threat and reasonable risk appears to be contextual. As does the response to that perception.

Politically Correct Phone Ownership?

Burkini Bans: The Iconography of Attire

It’s all a matter of terminology.

The French are not banning “burkinis” but “Hijrakinis”.  Not all of them really know it yet but this is what is actually happening.

Banning the veil is not banning a “headscarf” it’s banning a “Sharia Shawl”

Banning the Islamic beard is not banning “facial hair” but “Jizya Beards” or “Believer Beards”.

Banning the wearing of headgear is not banning  hats, it’s banning “Submission Caps”

Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister gave voice to the iconographic dimension of attire when he defended the depiction of Marianne – herself perhaps not actually a real person but an icon in her own right – as bare-breasted and a visible face. Her face is unveiled, Valls said, because she is free. Her breast is bare because the Republic nourishes the people of France.

“Vous parlez de Marianne ! Marianne, le symbole de la République ! Elle a le sein nu parce qu’elle nourrit le peuple ! Elle n’est pas voilée, parce qu’elle est libre ! C’est ça la République ! C’est ça Marianne ! C’est ça que nous devons toujours porter !”

 

The relabelling from “attire” to “symbol” is relevant. It moves the taxonomic location of the item out of the “individual choice” level of analysis and into the “cultural symbolism” level.

After all. The Swastika is banned in Germany not because it’s a Hindu/Buddhist Symbol (one culture on the cultural level) but because it was adopted by the National Socialists (a different culture on the cultural level) and was not therefore a simple and ancient way of drawing a pattern with straight lines.

The Secularists forget that they are not “generic secularists” but “Christian secularists”.

If the roots of an Apple tree are cut, the fruit remains “apples”.

If the roots of a Peach tree are cut, the fruit remains “peaches”.

Cutting the roots of the trees does not make apples into peaches.

But in time neither tree will bear any fruit at all.

Multiculturalism argues that since the roots of the apple tree force the fruit to be apples, and thereby discourage the kind of diversity which would allow peaches, pears, and plums to grow equally alongside — even after Affirmative Action Laws passed by the insects living on the tree-trunk mandated it — over the objections of the leaves, by the way, that it became obvious the way to the Ultimate Harmony of Diversity was to poison the roots.  To deracinate the tree.

Trees, once free of their dictatorial roots sunk as they were into some long-forgotten historical ground, could then be home to a Veritable Rainbow of All Possible Fruits. True Diversity at last.

And if the relabelling, the use of terms which appear to shift the level from “individual” to “culture” and by so doing bring into consciousness the possibility of “cultural displacement” produces unease and dismay – if this relabelling generates anxiety – then this response itself is confirmation of at least the subconscious awareness of the existence of these levels.

Responses which systematically exclude relevant levels, perspectives, and dimensions are known examples  of “systematically distorted communication”.

This term was introduced by Habermas in his analysis of political propaganda. Noam Chomsky makes note of this approach in his work on “manufacturing consent”. George Lakoff calls it “reframing”. Stage magicians and pickpockets call it “misdirection”.

Related forms are ‘trigger warnings’ and the many categories of ‘hate speech’.

When a culture has lost its icons it has lost its symbolic connection to its own history. To deracinate the icons and make them mere “personal fashion choices” or expressions of “individual preference” is to forget the cultural ground in which these very ideas  — the idea of “personal choice” and “individual preference – are grounded. Our iconography is a daily reminder of our commitment to these values. Other icons depict other values and other commitments.

If all we see is “personal choice” and if we cannot see or appreciate the iconography and the values that iconography symbolises then we are deracinated.

Our loss of cultural foundations is echoed in our growing fascination with finding our biological roots.  Those of us who have no icons to use to tell us about our roots instead have the option of having DNA tests to find out what percentage of our genome belongs to what racial group.  That this should be taking place in a population of people more and more inundated with the ideology of “self-identification” a certain irony is obvious.

Some cultures naturally die out. Others evolve gradually. Still others are subjected to assaults from without and treachery from within. Such assaults are best understood as cultural genocide.  Assaults from without have been seen in Palmyra, Bamiyam, Timbuktu, and

A culture which forgets its icons and has lost its iconography is deracinated. Deracinated cultures are dying cultures. 

When a culture’s rulers are unable or unwilling to deal with the “cultural level of discourse” with the members of that culture, when those cultures whose elites systematically engage in denying the iconographic roots of the culture even as the mass of members wish to preserve them are in danger of violent convulsion.

Here endeth the lesson.

Prophet Donald: Reframing the Narrative

Earlier today I was sent an e-mail link to an article by Victor Davis Hanson in which he describes Donald Trump as a “Post Modern” candidate.

http://m.townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2016/08/04/donald-trump-postmodern-candidate-n2201514

Below is my e-mailed response with just a few of the infelicities of e-mail removed.

In it I offer an “alternative narrative” to that which is presently employed.

The idea of “Reframing” or of  “Reframing Narratives” is an idea which has political significance since George Lakoff advised the Obama campaign that the important thing was not “the message” but how the message was “framed”.

Trump’s message is almost never the topic of the discussion. What the media discussion does is focus on the rudeness and inappropriateness of the way he expresses the facts. It’s not about the message but the messenger. It’s not about the “values” but the way they are “framed”.

In the overarching spirit of this blog I offer a way to “reframe” the current Trump commentaries. The deeper reason for this is, as always, to reveal the techniques of rhetoric and manipulation so that when we reach a decision or a conclusion it will be the one we ourselves wanted to reach and not the one we were “sold” or “spun into believing”.

Now on to the comments of Victor Davis Hanson.

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I think he’s basically correct in the appeal but he’s missing the real historical parallel.

Donald Trump is a recapitulation of the Hebrew Prophets.

For those who don’t remember them, the Hebrew Prophets were generally well known for telling everyone else exactly what was wrong and for being detested for doing so. All of them were hated. Some of them had to run for their lives.  Others did not run fast enough. 

Trump is Prophet Donald. I only came to this conclusion yesterday.  It came to me when President Obama called him “unfit for the presidency” and thereby did something that no US president has ever done – get involved in the re-election campaign to replace him. This has never been done in any civilised country. It is the hallmark of a dysfunctional political system.

I was also aided in seeing the problems when I asked myself why it was that the Democrats appear to be on the one had highly confident of victory and yet they are acting as if they had a great deal to hide and their chances were less than good.

We are also told that Julian Assange is planning to release some more files which will fill in the missing blanks on the Clinton Cash and Libyan military intervention against Gaddafi which resulted in the present disaster in Libya. Both of these could provide information highly damaging to Hillary Clinton’s election chances.

This would account for the timing of the furious attacks against Trump: Get rid of him now so he’s already gone if Hillary has to be dumped as well.

The overriding desire seems to be to make sure that no matter what happens Trump does not get elected. If Hillary is fatally compromised in September or October then it will be necessary to have Trump gone by then.

Why does Trump inspire so much unvarnished fear in some people while others (including  his children) see him as someone who is reasonable and conciliatory?

Is it because he is brash, outspoken, and “post modern” as Victor Davis Hansen says, or is it because he fearlessly speaks what he believes to be the truth and is sufficiently insulated from the indirect methods of censorship (he’s rich, after all) that he can actually exercise his rights to free speech fully?

As I suggested in an earlier post, Trump and at that time Sanders both had one thing in common: they attacked the “puppetmaster” of the “political establishment” and they could do it because they were both outsiders and not beholden to the existing power brokers for their political survival.

The recent revelations of the DNC’s furious plotting to derail Sanders produced the destruction of Debbie Wasserman Schulz as collateral damage but Sanders was stopped.

The Puppetmaster’s left flank was therefore protected.

Trump, however, still threatens the right flank.

Donald Trump calls ugly people ugly, stupid people stupid, dissembling people liars, dishonest people crooks, racist people racist, incompetent people incompetent and so on.

Even when these people are rich, famous, and widely admired. Even when it is “politically incorrect” to find fault with them as is Prof. Hanson’s major argument.

Hanson reminds us that the foremost advocates of all of the socially corrosive actions Trump so dislikes have veiled themselves in the shroud of Politically Unassailability by virtue of Victimhood.

Attacking them as Trump does is manifestly “politically incorrect” but that appellation only appeals to the faction of the population which agrees with him.

Those who advocate all of this destructive lunacy attack Trump for being rude and unkind and all manner of other “personal” rebukes.

Then I started asking myself “why do the people who say they hate him get so angry?” After all, as we have seen in the leaked emails, all manner of Politically Correct Luminaries have revealed themselves to be every bit as bigoted and thick-witted as those they denounce.

Once I asked this question, Trump started to remind me of the Hebrew Prophet Amos.

I’m not that up on my prophets so maybe another one will serve better.

But to suggest to the Politically Correct Party Establishment that they hate Trump for the same reasons the Ancient Israelites hated Amos then it might be possible to switch the debate away from Trump’s message and to the refusal of his attackers from asking if they themselves are in any way at fault.

Pope Francis in his comments on the martyrdom of Fr Jacques Hamel has revealed himself yet again as a “sentimental” Christian and an “ontological” Marxist. He doesn’t want anyone to get hurt and the root of all the world’s ills is to be found in economics.  All religions are inherently peaceful. All religions have violent people in their numbers. The root causes of such violence is always social and economic.

What would Amos say to him? What would Trump say to him?

For the more “spiritually inclined” people we can tell them “Trump is Channeling Amos”.

If Amos isn’t exactly right for this comparison my apologies.

But Trump is still reminding me of the Old Prophets.

Prophet Donald is reading the Riot Act to America.

Trump is only chronologically “post modern”. In terms of his own motivations — at least as far as I can discern them — he is a classical American Patriot who just can’t stand seeing his country destroyed. “He’s mad as hell and he just can’t take it any more.”

He’s not a capitalist. He’s not a communist. He’s not a protectionist. He’s not a globalist.

He’s an American.

It’s been so long I almost forgot what they looked like.

He’s also an American Prophet. Prophet Donald.

That’s why he gets all the free air time, all the attention, and all the acrimony.  Because he’s saying things that even those in the news media who detest him know will pull in huge ratings and make them massive profits.

Donald Trump. American Prophet.

Cognitive Epigenetics and Europe’s Migrant Crisis

OK. What’s “Cognitive Epigenetics” anyway?

It’s a term I made up to describe something which may in fact soon be shown to be true … a process by which basic personality traits can be passed on from parents to children directly without having to wait for evolution to modify the DNA of the children. 

We are often told that twins raised apart have very similar personalities and we are also aware of the studies which show  various aspects of personality to be rooted in genetics.  This is part of the ongoing “nature/nurture” debate in which we are repeatedly reminded that the genes we inherit get shaped by the social and environmental influences we experience throughout childhood.

Epigenetics is the process which relates how inherited genes are either expressed or suppressed in their expression as a result of environmental influences.  It’s the means by which offspring which are genetically identical can exhibit fundamentally different physiological and psychological attributes in life and (and this is the really important part) these differences will be transmitted to their offspring directly.

Epigenetics refers to the patterns of how  genes are expressed or suppressed is transmitted from one generation to the next. 

So what?

At this writing the evidence only relates directly to creatures such as chickens and carpenter ants. But if the mechanisms of genetic inheritance, psychological genetics, and epigenetics are the same for humans as well as other evolving entities then we may be well advised to consider how these factors influence such immediate human social policies as migration and multiculturalism.

Considering the rather long stretch from ant societies to human societies it is obvious this speculation is more a call to research than a basis for policy analysis. All the same, since the vast majority of our political leaders do not seem to defend their policy positions using anything other than emotional and moralistic arguments, putting a little bit of “scientific” speculation into this mix of moral certitude and emotional bullying may be worthwhile. Or at least provocative.

Schizophrenic Chickens

Researchers in Linköping, Sweden, have recently published a paper showing the genetic basis for “anxiety behaviour” in chickens. Most people reading this paper will not be as surprised by the genetic basis for personality traits as they will with the idea that chickens are treated anthropomorphically as having the ability to experience “anxiety”.

All that is really needed to take away from this study is the evidence it provides for personality traits having some basis in genetics. The debates over the heritability of intelligence and personality are rooted in the theory of eugenics and as such is all but guaranteed to run afoul of those who embrace political correctness as a worldview. People are more than willing to discuss at length the idea that some breeds of dogs are more intelligent or more vicious than others. Those same people will almost certainly exhibit extreme unease (perhaps even “anxiety”) if the organism under consideration stops being “canine” and becomes “homo sapiens”.  If they become uneasy enough then any number of aggressive and punitive behaviours may result.

Free speech can in fact be very expensive. Never say anything you can’t afford.

It’s safer to study chickens.

Carpenter Ant Castes

Another recent study shows that epigenetics can “program” or “re-program” genetically identical carpenter ants into one of three types: the Queen, the “major” caste, and the “minor” caste. The queen is the largest and lives the longest. The majors outlive the minors. All three types are genetically identical so which one a given ant becomes is entirely due to the environment in which they live before they hatch.

After they hatch they don’t just look different, they behave differently. They carry out their caste-specific roles in the carpenter ant community without complaint. The researchers don’t have any realistic way of trying to get the “minor” ants to engage in political action to establish a more equitable nest but this does not prevent us from asking if the epigenetic changes are so robust as to make it all but impossible for changes to the “social environment” to have any impact at all on the ant-caste system.

It doesn’t take much imagination to extrapolate this observation to other living societies.  Can epigenetics program “genetically identical” or “genetically very similar” individuals in violent or dishonest or distrusting societies not only to  be prone to violence, dishonesty, and corruption themselves but to pass these epigenetic adaptations on to their offspring?  And can these changes take place before the offspring are born?

If so then changing the “childhood” environment will be either wholly or partly insufficient.  Epigenetic changes – for carpenter ants at least –  occur before, as well as after, birth. Could this also be the case for humans? Dare we ask?

Migrants and Cultures

On New Year’s Eve in Köln about 1000 men who were described as appearing to be of “Arab or North African origin” sexually assaulted and robbed over 90 women during public celebrations.  German chancellor Angela Merkel and Köln’s mayor Henriette Reker both insisted it was unwise to blame this on “migrants” even as they announced their disgust at the actions themselves and suggested the real blame should fall on the police. Mayor Reker also suggested it would be wise for the women of her city to be more aware of the new realities of their social environment and change their behaviours accordingly. Epigenetics in action.

About a decade ago, Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan gave the same basic kind of advice to Norwegian women when she cautioned them against dressing “too provocatively” in those parts of the country where Muslim men were found.  Is this advice a concession to the realities of the environmental influences Norwegian women must now anticipate? Is more going on?

Culturally Scandinavian men have been enduring such provocations from Scandinavian women without incident for centuries. Is this also “epigenetics” in action?  And what of those “genes” which are presently suppressed? With sufficient environmental inducement can we anticipate the Viking genes to be expressed again?

We can go farther.  

Are the attitudes of progressive multiculturalists also the product of their environmental influences?  Do Unni Wikan, Angela Merkel, and Henriette Reker react they way they do because they are wiser and more ethical and better informed than those who attack them – or – are they using their intelligence and positions of social influence to rationalise a worldview which was given to them before they were old enough and self-aware enough to see it objectively? People are not carpenter ants to be sure but the general biological mechanisms of evolution and adaptation are shared by all life on this planet.

To what extent to we – any of us – have “free will” anyway? Brain scans tell us that the brain initiates the neuroelectrical signals for some actions before we are consciously aware of the options and “decide” to do one of them.  There is in fact a very short time-window in which our higher cognitive centres can veto the action which has been initiated. Which may mean that free will is often little more than the conscious awareness of the brain’s decision to act just before our bodies do it.

What’s “free will” got to do with it?

Distraction. If we only have a limited period of time to make a decision before the “unconscious wiring” makes thought irrelevant then browbeating people, denying them time for calm and deliberate reflection, and subjecting them to group pressure will result in actions which will later need to be “rationalised” through the processes of cognitive dissonance rather than rejected before being carried out.

By the purposive use of the above techniques in daily life people can be “habituated” (with apologies to Aristotle) to political correctness.  But the same techniques can just as easily habituate us to any other series of attitudes as the fate  of Winston Smith shows.  The German women in Köln on New Year’s Eve had been habituated to expect one kind of treatment. The 1000 or so men from a different culture had been habituated to act differently. 

The doctrine of multiculturalism, at its most abstract, tells us that “all cultures are equal”. This is not the kind of equality that extends all the way down from the heights of theory to the realities of the public square.  It is a bounded, bracketed, and local equality.

All cultures may be equal in the sense that they are “cultures” but they are decidedly not equal in terms of the life-chances enjoyed by those who participate in them.  All cultures exhibit corruption, violence, structured social inequality, the hierarchy of social roles assigned by achievement or ascription, and ideologies which explain why such patterns of social life are good, bad, transient, inevitable, or matters of fate.  All of them list the means by which actions can be termed either appropriate or inappropriate. All of them address the matter of adaptation and change to the forces of the world outside the direct control of those who share the culture. And so on.

At this level of abstraction cultures are generally equal.

They become unequal at the level where people actually live their lives. They become unequal for women who wander around unescorted in public while attired provocatively, for people who while born into Islam have decided to renounce it and declare themselves to be nonbelievers, for civilians who do not wish to be slaves even though they were captured by armed fighters in their homes. And so on.

Cultures which regard Islamic Sharia law as the “appropriate” way to ogranise society are different from – unequal to – cultures which seek to organise society in accordance with the Christian concept of subsidiarity.

Here we confront the embedded logical incoherence of Multiculturalism. All cultures are equal and all cultures are different.  It almost always works in the abstract. It almost never works in reality.

Epigenetics and Cognition Again

Culture is a word we use to indicate the cognitive environment within which we learn not only the language we will call our “mother tongue” and the kinds of foods we will regard as “comforting” throughout our lives, it indicates the environment in which we learn to categorise the world and the proper way to contend with these categories. The cultural environment lets us know who are the “superiors” and who are the “inferiors” of our social world. It lets us know who gets deference and who defers. It tells us what is just and what is unjust.

Those who grew up expecting their cultural inferiors to defer to them may mistake “politeness” for “weakness”. Those who grew up considering all cultures to be equal may regard the thugishness of newcomers as an “individual” rather than a “cultural” attribute. Both of these misunderstandings will only lead to more misunderstanding.

And despite the abstracted long-term moralism of such urgings of Angela Merkel and Henriette Reker, the concrete and immediately present realities of assault and violence will most likely prove to be too distracting for those who are victimised to appreciate the high-minded ideals of political leaders who have bodyguards, servants, and handsome state pensions to fall back on.

It takes generations, not weeks, to bring about any meaningful cultural changes in large populations. Historians have always known this. Now additional weight it being added to this conclusion by both cognitive psychology and epigenetics.

The world’s political elites are just as incapable of seeing their own biases as anyone else. In their case, however, the consequences of this ignorance extend to the lives of those who have no choice but to trust them. 

The migrant crisis of Europe is not entirely due to the lack of self-knowledge of the leaders of the EU but their ignorance of their own motivations and their collective unwillingness to examine the most logical consequences of their decisions is manifestly going to make the future worse than it needed to be.

 

 

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M. Johnsson, M.J. Williams, P. Jensen & D. Wright. Genetics. A novel chicken genomic model for anxiety behaviour. Genetics, January 2016 DOI:10.1534/genetics.116.179010

D.F. Simola,  R. J. Graham, C. M. Brady, B. L. Enzmann, C. Desplan, A. Ray, L. J. Zwiebel, R. Bonasio, D. Reinberg, J. Liebig, S. L. Berger. 2015. “Epigenetic (re)programming of caste-specific behavior in the ant Camponotus floridanus.”Science, 2015; 351 (6268): aac6633 DOI:10.1126/science.aac6633