Why eugenics wouldn’t work

Further to my previous post, my friend Wolfboy wrote this in the comments:

I also detect a leftover whiff of eugenics in this line of thought – the idea that people who are “bad” represent a taint we need to clear from the gene pool. That seems to be in conflict with modern understanding of how genes work. I may be wrong here, but my understanding was that modern research showed that genes get turned on and off by environmental stimuli. If that’s the case then any genetic predisposition to be an awful person is better handled by stopping it from being triggered (by looking after people better in general) than by trying to breed it out.

Eugenics. That is presumably why the original inquiry was about the prevalence of sterilize-bad-parents views specifically “in the atheist / rationalist community”. Eugenics, the idea of breeding humans for qualities like intelligence or athletic performance, was proposed by Francis Galton as a practical application of the theories of his cousin Charles Darwin. Darwin himself went along with the idea, although never enthusiastically, and with reservations about the social justice implications. The support it enjoyed for the next seventy-odd years came from places all along the left-right political spectrum, but almost entirely from the atheist-materialist side of the religious divide. That is quite possibly the basis for the (otherwise absurd) notion that the Nazis were a scientific and rationalistic bunch.

The Nazis showed the world what it would take to actually implement a eugenics programme, and since then the idea has been anathema among people of conscience. And rightly so, but when a problematic idea or practice becomes unthinkable within a culture, it doesn’t get cut out cleanly. “Not only will we not do this any more,” people decide, “we won’t even go near it.” The classic example (see Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, and yes, I know I cite that book a lot) is the odd little superstitions that have grown up around knives in European culture, such as not eating with them. Europeans used to use big sharp knives for all sorts of things, notably settling arguments. In Māori culture there are several prohibitions, like “never sit on a table”, which put together underline the point that people are not food. And in modern political discourse, ever since World War II people have been unduly chary of applying genetic science to Homo sapiens.

The state has no business sterilizing people

Recently someone asked this in a rationalist Facebook group I follow, and I thought I might have enough to say about it to fill a blog post:

I’ve come across some rather scary views on how to deal with child abuse and want to test how widespread these policy views are in the atheist / rationalist community. So please tell me what your thoughts are on the idea that the state should sterilize people who have been shown to be bad parents. I think that we need to come up with less extreme ways to combat child abuse such as having a social worker come into the home every month for the first 10 years of a child’s life to check up on the home environment and to make sure there is no abuse going on.

For starters, it gets scarier than that. Sterilizing people who have been “shown to be bad parents” is, in fact, a toned-down version of the idea you often hear, which is that every woman should be sterilized who is on a government benefit. Or – and this has been suggested by certain Members of Parliament – that the benefit should be made contingent on the woman’s use of contraceptives. (Why yes, these remarks are always directed at women.)

My instinctive response to this is a mental wail of despair at the inhumanity of humankind. What kind of person looks at a suffering child and says “You’re costing me money, your mother needs to get her tubes tied”? Apparently, an alarming proportion of New Zealanders. It may be relevant that the “bad parents” who get thrown into the media and spark these kinds of conversations are almost always Māori or Pacific Islanders – way out of proportion to their actual presence in the child abuse statistics. When right-wing columnists, cartoonists, or bloggers pour scorn on “ferals”, that’s who they’re referring to.

At the root of this attitude is a thoughtless misdiagnosis of the motivations of people at the bottom of the social heap. No, women on benefits are not indiscriminate sex maniacs, nor do they have babies so as to get more money from the government. Childbirth statistics around the world paint a very clear picture. People choose to have fewer children when (a) women are empowered, (b) contraceptives are widely available, and (c) the few children they do have are certain to survive. Women pump out baby after baby when they have no choice, when their only hope of gaining respect is in the role of a mother, or (especially) when they know their children are going to be the only support network available in their old age.

Ironically, that point about family as support network may also account for the higher rate of child abuse among the poor. I admit I’m speculating here, but most kinds of violence are reduced when people see each other as fellow human beings with their own feelings and rights. If you are depending on your children to support you when you are old, on the other hand, then their independence is a threat to your future well-being. What if they find a job and a partner in another city and you are left all alone? Better to instil habits of obedience and dependence on you from an early age.

I’d better wrap this up before I go off on a tangent in areas where I really don’t know what I’m talking about. One of those areas is how you can take an abusive parent or partner and turn them into someone who is not an abusive parent or partner. But in this era when everyone has a different theory of what’s good or bad parenting, giving the state the power to perform non-consensual surgery on people deemed to be bad parents is surely one of the worse ideas around.

Funnily enough, the same people recommending sterilization for “ferals” are often the ones most angry at the Government for clamping down on the use of force in parental discipline. Do they realize that a government with the powers they want to give it would use those powers first on the same “strict but loving parents” they champion?

Reason is not the property of the West

The University of Otago’s second semester ends in October. I knew there were Summer School classes in January and February, because I’ve taken notes in them. I never knew there were also classes in November and December. But here I am. Turns out there’s a five-week course on titled “Introduction to the Māori World”, and one of the students taking it wants notes. My first class was last Tuesday. The lecture was about fundamental concepts in Māori culture, such as tapu and mana, and the polytheistic cosmology which underpins them.

A quick summary of that class. Tapu is of course the origin of the English word taboo, but it’s pronounced differently – both syllables are short and the stress is on the first one. Tapu is the presence or influence of an atua, a god. The gods are present everywhere, and one must treat them with deference and caution. But sometimes it is necessary to lift the tapu so that we humans can go about our ordinary lives without having to worry about it. Then, it becomes noa, which is simply the converse of tapu.

Which gods? On Tuesday we were introduced to four: Papa-tū-ā-nuku, Mother Earth; Tāne-mahuta, god of light and life and the forest; Tangaroa, god of all water, including the water in people’s bodies; and Ranginui, the Sky, Papa-tū-ā-nuku’s lover, who was separated from her by Tāne-mahuta to create the world of light. The gods are the ancestors of all life, including human beings. Most iwi (chiefdom-nations, though the word is usually translated “tribe”) trace their genealogy back to Tāne-mahuta. The chiefs belong to the elder line in each case.

Tangaroa’s dominion over water seems to be responsible for the tapu of blood, which in turn explains why women have a special power over tapu. A man can lift tapu by saying an incantation (a karakia) or using water, but a woman can lift it simply by virtue of being a woman, because women handle blood every month. When you enter or leave a marae – the space built at the hub of every Māori community to house formal gatherings – you pass through a gateway that symbolizes a woman’s legs, so that you don’t bring in any tapu you may have picked up on the outside.

Having just come back from Japan, I can’t help noticing the parallels with Shintō. There again, the kami are immanent in water, earth, and forests. Again, the kami are ancestors rather than creators of the human race, and the Imperial Family is the elder line of descent. And again you have that detail of the symbolic gateway, the torī in front of the shrine, through which you enter or leave the presence of divine power.

But there’s also a big difference. Japan is much more centralized than traditional Māori society, and you might expect to see that reflected in their religions – that Māoritanga would have lots of local spirits and Shintō would have a few big, important gods, like the pre-Christian Greek or Norse pantheons. In fact it’s the other way around. Each mountain, lake, river, and ancient tree in Japan has its own personal kami, but in tikanga Māori it is Tāne-mahuta in every patch of bush and Tangaroa in every body of water.

Mana is the other Māori word, besides tapu / taboo, that has been borrowed into English outside of New Zealand. Both syllables are short, so that to a New Zealand English speaker it sounds like “munna” – “monna” to an American. It’s been appropriated in crap fantasy books and games to denote a limiting resource for magic-users, like pixie-dust but slightly more badass. In fact mana is prestige, charisma, honour, dignity, authority; social power, not magical power. It’s about one’s standing with the gods. Duties and privileges in Māori culture are doled out entirely according to who has what kind of mana.

What are we escaping?

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me in a while, it’s not the usual reason (i.e. procrastination plus Nearly Finished Syndrome) this time. It’s because I’m in Japan on the last day of my first ever overseas holiday, and I didn’t spend much of it sitting in hotel rooms typing. I have picked up enough of the language to compose a few simple sentences and say them, but I still need a lot of help understanding what other people are saying to me. So far I have not experienced anything like what people call “culture shock”. Maybe this is because, with my social disability, I have never found that my own culture makes all that much sense either.

I guess it’s the same principle as learning to pronounce other languages. People have commented with favourable surprise on how quickly I master the pronunciation of Norwegian and Finnish – my choir had a Scandinavian-themed concert recently. The secret is quite simple: English is not the centre. The sound of the Norwegian word meg (“me”), for instance, is halfway between the sound of the English words may and my. It is quite comfortable there. It is not trying to be one or the other, as if English vowels were the underlying structure and Norwegian vowels had to be propped up between them.

I’ve been here two weeks now, which obviously isn’t enough time to have gained any deep ethnographic insight into Japanese culture. Still, superficial as they are, I have found the cultural differences I’ve observed quite easy to adapt to, simply because I wasn’t assuming that the way things are done in New Zealand is the most sensible or obvious way to do them. For example, in Japan, aesthetic and artistic sensibilities aren’t felt to be unmanly. Why should they be? In New Zealand, a real man drinks crappy beer, watches rugby avidly, and is disgusted by any form of entertainment that requires more than a kindergarten education to understand. This is presented as a “low-key” or “easy-going” or, of course, “un-PC” way to live; in fact it’s aggressively policed with homophobic ridicule.

But it’s not a difference between Japanese and New Zealand culture that’s really grabbed my attention this last couple of weeks – it’s a similarity. New Zealand and Japan are both modern countries, with advertising and traffic lights and shopping malls and, in Japan’s case, public transport. And both have that quintessentially modern phenomenon: abundant fantasies about not being modern. In amongst its narrow high-rise boxes, Japan has magnificent temples and shrines and old market areas, all clearly preserved with close attention. In New Zealand, of course, an “old” building is at most Victorian, but we made the Lord of the Rings movies, and we like to go out into what little remains of our wilderness areas and pretend we’re conquering undiscovered territory.

Cut the crap and give me my country back

(Shout-out to my friend Steve King, who wrote the protest song I’ve nicked the post title from.)

So last week, our beloved leaders signed up to the TPPA (Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement). They were always going to, of course. Since this National Government was first elected in 2008 there have been three clear, consistent patterns to their behaviour. One is dismissing objections to their decisions, as with child poverty, charter school outcomes, river pollution from intensive dairy farming, and the revelations that the GCSB has spied on New Zealanders. Another is favouring business in any way they can, as in asset sales, tax cuts, 90-day “trial period” no-fault firings, and the various formerly protected parcels of land and seabed now opened to mining. And the third is undermining democracy, as with Environment Canterbury, students’ associations, tertiary education governing bodies, and the number of times they’ve used Parliamentary urgency – i.e. skipping the pesky “public submission” part of the legislative process – for controversial but non-urgent Bills.

All three of these patterns are perfectly embodied in the TPPA. Dismissing objections: the text of the TPPA has been kept strictly secret, which means nobody can object to anything specific (but Trade Minister Tim Groser gets to call us all “ignorant” and “fools” for not knowing what we have been expressly prevented from knowing). Favouring business: what we do know about the TPPA is that it’s about removing tariffs and price controls imposed by governments, while extending intellectual property rights. Undermining democracy: the TPPA will allow corporations to sue governments for imposing laws or regulations that hurt their profits.

It turns out that, despite all Groser’s prior reassurances, New Zealand actually gets a pretty crap deal out of the TPPA. The best we get is a small tariff reduction on dairy – dairy being the one great super-product that two successive governments have bet New Zealand’s future on, the thing we’re destroying our rivers and lying to the world about it for. All the rest is what Idiot/Savant over at No Right Turn calls “margin of error stuff”. Danyl McLauchlan at The DimPost notes that “the TPP will deliver the equivalent of a couple of months of growth in ten years time.” And yet we went ahead and signed it anyway, because it’s better than not being in a secretive trade partnership that could sue the crap out of us, right guys? Right, guys? What this tells me is that the cynical view of National’s motives is wrong. They’re not amoral manipulators just out to score cash for their CEO cronies; if they were, they would have turned this down. It’s much worse than that. They’re true believers with an ideology. No matter the evidence, no matter what actually happens, the way forward is always to boost business and remove impediments to it. No other option is on the table.

Obsessed

Dear Adam Ford, we need to talk about one of your recent comics.

Well, no, we don’t need to. But I’ve been struggling to come up with blog posts lately and you were an easy target. As a webcomic artist I know you understand.

No, I’m not talking about any of the recent ones where you’ve breached the Ninth Commandment and borne false witness against thy neighbour, thy neighbour in this instance being Planned Parenthood. I’m talking about this one:

Cartoon strip, three panels: a dialogue between two people, one wearing a T-shirt saying “Culture”, the other a sweatshirt saying “Christian”. “Culture” is surrounded by posters, and holds a megaphone in one hand and several placards in the other.
The mouse-over text at Ford’s site reads: “Agree with me, you intolerant savage! demands Culture, gun trained on Christian.”

“Culture”: Sex is life! Every kind of sex! All kinds of sex! Having sex with lots of people is pretty much the meaning of life, you know! The only people who are not promiscuous are weird sad losers! Woo yay sex! And porn! Love it! More porn pls! Also, homosexuality! It’s like the greatest thing ever, period end of story! Gay gay gay gay yay for gay! And transgenderism! So beautiful! So heroic! So perfect in every way! Don’t you agree with everything I’m saying? Don’t you? Oh wait you don’t have a choice! LOL!
Signs read:
SEX
Sex! Every imaginable variety! All up in ur face! All day every day! Woo!
[partially obscured] ...hyperse[xual] homosexual transsexual
[Picture of bald bearded face] Say this is a woman. Say this woman is beautiful. Do it now.
Roses are red. Violets are blue. You should have sex with tons of people.

“Christian”: I, uh, I disagree with you. About that sex stuff. I don’t agree.

“Culture” [ugly angry face]: Ugh why are Christians so obsessed with sex???

Well, you’re upholding the proud old tradition of substituting visual stereotyping for argument, but there’s an element of that in most editorial cartoons so I won’t dwell on it. I picked this cartoon because I have a keen taste for irony. Why does the majority culture think your particular subculture is obsessed with sex? Largely because of the bizarre hallucinations your subculture promulgates about the majority culture’s sexual ethics, as demonstrated in your first panel.

Let’s start with the most minor point and work up from there. I’m sure you’ve seen those lists of terms for different sexual and gender identities that queer advocacy groups put about. I’m sure, because you tried to copy one – that placard at the back that says “hypersexual, homosexual, transsexual”. Did you realize you didn’t get even one of those words right? Nobody says “hypersexual”. Nobody. And for the other two, the words are “gay” and “transgender” in queer-friendly parlance. “Homosexual” and “transsexual” are words used by people who aren’t au fait with sexual or gender diversity. Already I’m getting the impression you couldn’t be bothered taking two seconds to Google anything.

Identity politics and its limits

First up, sorry it’s been so long between blog posts. What happens sometimes is I get a post past the planning stage and I think, OK, I’m nearly done, I’ll have it finished tomorrow. Only the next day it’s not done, but it’s so close to done that I know I’ll have it finished the day after that, no big drama, no need to find something else to post about while I’m working on it. Sometimes, and this was one of those times, this can go on for weeks. And then just as I was finishing I came down with an unusually virulent upper respiratory tract infection, which kept me at home, away from the internet, for nearly a week. Content note: I discuss racism, homophobia, and ableism below, including repeating some slurs.

If you ever need confirmation that there’s more to politics than Left versus Right, utter the word “transphobia” in a reasonably broad left-wing forum and stand back and watch. (I’m not sure what the equivalent would be in a right-wing space; libertarians and conservatives take different views on how many gender identities and sexual orientations are legitimate, but they seem to agree that oppression only counts if it’s the government doing it.) If you do try the experiment, you can probably then count down under your breath how long it takes until somebody starts muttering about “identity politics”.

I don’t know. Maybe this was more of a thing five or six years ago, at least in this country, when the Left was still busy looking for something to blame the Right’s then-recent victory on. One thing a lot of people fixed on was the prominence of queer and feminist interests in the broad Left portfolio, which many claimed was a fatal distraction from the real troubles of the poor and the working class. Because, apparently, only bourgeois women mind being hit on by creepy men, and only the bourgeoisie ever feel attracted to their own gender or identify as a gender that doesn’t match their genital anatomy at birth.

But I think that was one manifestation of a wider political trope that goes: “Social justice struggles A, B, and C were about equal rights for everybody, but social justice struggles X, Y, and Z are about special rights for a bunch of whiners.” Struggles A, B, and C aren’t always in the past tense, at least not among the Left, but that’s the usual pattern. The “special rights” part is where “identity politics” comes into it. The idea is that the social justice movement gives people special rights according to their identity as women, or as people of colour, or as queer people or as trans people or disabled people or whichever one it might be today. And that, say the critics, isn’t justice. Lady Justice wears a blindfold.

Yes, but Lady Justice also carries a pair of scales. If one person misses out on a benefit that others are enjoying, when they’ve made no less effort to deserve it than those others, then that’s unfair. If the benefit is a basic human right, then that’s injustice. And if lots of people are missing out on it because of some aspect of their identity – be it cultural identity, gender identity, sexual identity, whatever – then Lady Justice’s blindfold has slipped. Fixing it will be measured by whether people of that identity are still missing out, and if you didn’t realize they were missing out then fixing it will look like “identity politics” to you.

An atheist reflects on death

I’ve mostly tried to keep my personal life out of this blog, because that’s what I use Facebook for. But this post was prompted by the recent, unexpected death of my friend Brent. Brent had cerebral palsy, which in his case limited his movement to his head and one arm, slurred his speech, and also affected his cognition. (I never heard the official diagnosis until his funeral on Wednesday.) We met through a volunteer outfit called FriendLink about eight years ago; since then we’ve had a weekly appointment to visit museums and art galleries and libraries in town to look at art or books together. I think he preferred the art, which allowed us to move around and meet people rather than sit in one place as we would with books. Brent was a sunny, sociable person who would say “Hi” to just about everyone we passed.

But he was also sensitive. He could tell if someone had had a bad day, and it would distress him. He would worry, if I coughed or sneezed, that I was “sick”. He commented on death and dying from time to time. Once I remarked that my cat was at the vet, and this reminded Brent that his dog had not long since gone to the vet and then, as he put it, gone to Heaven. He cried. Sometimes, he had questions I couldn’t answer. This past April there were WWI-related exhibits everywhere, and Brent asked me two or three times “Why do they have wars?” I doubt I’m the only person who’s been stumped by that question. Museum displays are often about people who lived a long time ago, and sometimes it would bother Brent that they were dead. He would say things like “I’m sorry to hear that,” or “Oh no, that’s terrible,” or “How did they die?” – the way one speaks of people who have just recently died, who still have people mourning them.

He was right, of course. Most of us partition off the people of the distant past in our minds. They were people, obviously, but we don’t think of them as people people. Well, when I say “we”, it differs between cultures – the dead seem to be much more present to Māori than they are to Pākehā, if my limited cross-cultural observations can be trusted – but there comes a point when we shrug it off. That was the olden days, what do you expect? But the reality is that every name fading in a dusty genealogical manuscript, every fragmentary human skeleton dug up from under two metres of sand, had someone somewhere who grieved over either their stilled body or their absence. Everybody has somebody to say goodbye to them. (Fortunately the dead cannot suffer from our dehumanizing them, making this probably the most benign instance of that disastrous human habit.)

The last time I saw Brent he was in hospital, but that wasn’t all that unusual given the impact his disability had on his health, so I was not remotely expecting the phone call the following morning telling me he had succumbed to a suspected stroke or heart attack some time between eleven and midnight. This kind of bad news takes a long time to go into your head. For those first few minutes I couldn’t tell you what I was feeling, because Brent’s departure left a gap in my mind that no feeling filled – though it did gradually fill up with grief over the rest of the day. I guess when people say they’re “blindsided” or “dumbfounded” or “numb” in the wake of tragedy, that’s what they’re talking about. And there is some part of my mind that still doesn’t quite believe it, thinking of things to talk about when we meet up as usual on Thursday. After all, that’s what I promised him the last time I saw him.

A plague o’ both your houses

Years and years ago, I earned a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology. I thought at the time I might end up in academia, but graduate study didn’t work out. This past couple of weeks, I’ve taken a couple of sociology lectures for another note-taker who was away. Most of my classes in the last three years have been in dentistry or other clinical sciences, so I found the sudden familiarity a little jarring, like Temuera Morrison’s New Zealand accent in that Star Wars prequel. And kind of embarrassing, actually. Blimey (I thought), we humanities students really think we’re all that, don’t we?

Lest you think I’m solely ragging on sociology: last semester, I took one of the two weekly lectures in an economics paper, to which I had much the same reaction, although there it was more comfortable because, as a former humanities student active in politics, I have a long-established habit of looking down my nose at the Commerce Division. And Health Sci too, now I come to think about it – “medicalization” is a favourite tut-tut word in certain academic circles. Well, Commerce deserved it, Health Sci didn’t, and we in Humanities really weren’t holding the high ground we thought we were.

Let me try and explain what it’s like. When I was a kid, one of the many books knocking around our house was a shabby little paperback from about the 1960s entitled “100 puzzles for kids” or something, and I remember it because it actually had 101 puzzles but the last one was a trick one that didn’t have a proper answer. A hotel has fifty rooms, and one day fifty-one people turn up wanting accommodation. The hotelier thinks for a bit. He puts the first guest in the first room, then takes the second guest aside and says “If you could just wait here while we get this sorted out.” Then he puts guest number three in room number two, guest number four in room number three, and so on until guest number fifty-one is placed in room number fifty and the hotel is full.

Now this was one of the first hints I had that my brain doesn’t work quite like other people’s. According to the book, most people are bamboozled – they know there’s a flaw somewhere, but they can turn it over and over in their heads for hours before they suddenly go “Of course! The second person hasn’t got a room!” But to me, reading the puzzle, it was so obvious that the second person hadn’t got a room that I turned it over and over in my head for hours wondering what the mystery was supposed to be.

In economics and sociology, it’s not a guest who hasn’t got a room; it’s a foundational concept that hasn’t got a basis. You introduce that concept, and proceed to derive the rest of the course from it. It becomes a sort of base-camp assumption for the students’ thoughts, like mass-energy conservation for physics students or Darwinian natural selection for biology students. By the end of the first semester, it’s become so familiar that they assume anyone who questions it is simply ignorant.

The Kiwi bloke is an environmental hazard

It’s winter where I live, and it’s a doozy. We’ve had snow to sea level and frosts like I remember from the 1990s, and this year New Zealand’s annual 100-year flood happened to hit my town – I have the good fortune of living on a slight rise, but less than a block away people were wading. Naturally people are arguing this shows global warming isn’t happening. Of course that gets it all backwards. If you’re standing outside a tramping hut in the mountains on a sunny morning, and a shovelful of snow falls off the roof and goes down your neck, you end up colder, but it’s because the roof is warming up (and melting the snow). The roof in this analogy stands for the South Polar Vortex, where the air around Antarctica gets so cold in the winter that it slams down, walling off the polar weather from the rest of us. Usually. Up until now.

Recently, we found out that New Zealand is a world front-runner in climate change denial. The good news is it only takes 13% to be a world front-runner. But I guess this is where we finally kiss our vaunted “clean, green image” goodbye. Though admitting how we’re actually doing on the environmental front would instantly lose us our world market for dairy products, tourism, and filming locations, which put together are nearly our entire national income, so maybe not. Actually shaping up is, of course, out of the question. That would cost rich people money.

I’m not going to rehearse all the evidence that human industry is driving climate change; that would take far more time and energy than I have, it would be too wordy to hold any denier’s attention long enough to convince them, and there are plenty of other sites that do it better than I could – here are three. I will spare a brief word for the idea that humans are too puny and insignificant to affect the cycles of Nature. That’s an intuitive percept rather than an evidential argument, so it needs an intuitive answer.

I’ll confidently bet that practically all my readers are reading this in a built-up environment of some kind, or at least a farm, not out in the wilderness. Well, Earth was all wilderness until humans came along. The last thing that changed the surface of the planet as much as humans have was the emergence of the first land plants and animals back in the Carboniferous Period. For hundreds of millions of years the world was forests, deserts, plains, savannah. Then suddenly, in less than a ten-thousandth of that time – farms, buildings, quarries, mines, roads, towns, reservoirs, aqueducts, cities, railways, landfills, sewage outfalls. Is it really so hard to believe our activities might have had unintended environmental effects as profound as the intended ones? No, we aren’t big enough to chop down the entire tree of life on Earth, but we could easily break off the branches holding up our own treehouse.

But I don’t think that’s the main reason why New Zealanders don’t believe in climate change. I think the main reason looks like this:

No, I’m not accusing Cameron Slater of running New Zealand’s denialist platform singlehandedly, though he does have disproportionate influence for a blogger (which is why I’m not linking to his blog; Google “whale oil” if you want to find him). It’s the expression I’m talking about, and the attitude underneath it. I am quite familiar with it; this is the look on a playground bully’s face right before he hits you. This face is what comes to my mind when people wax poetic about the good old sports-loving, beer-drinking, do-it-yourselfing, supposedly-maligned Kiwi Bloke. Because this is also the face of a New Zealand male when someone tries to alert him to a problem that doesn’t, as far as he can see, affect him personally.

It’s not just climate change. The Bloke Sneer is the standard response to a precaution recommended against any harm that hasn’t so far materialized in the Bloke’s own life. Boating safety measures, for instance. Hence (I surmise) why New Zealand men drown at such high rates. That might be considered grist for the Darwin Awards, but often it’s other people’s safety that gets sneered away – we have a higher rate of workplace injury than most OECD countries, as employers Bloke-Sneer at the health and safety regulations. And it’s not just a matter of harming people negligently; New Zealand schools have a chronic bullying problem. I think that’s a root of the Bloke Sneer problem as well as a fruit of it, insofar as surviving in that environment forces you to develop a highly-tuned scorn reflex. Anything you are seen to genuinely care about can be used to hurt you.

I suspect the Bloke Sneer is also the main reason why New Zealand isn’t as religious as the United States. I must admit, it does bear a certain superficial resemblance to scientific scepticism. However, the Bloke Sneer yawns at evidence and snickers at reason. Being primarily an emotional reflex, it’s not going to form a completely consistent philosophy; but if you were to write down its underlying logic, the epistemic component would read “Anyone coming at you with an agenda – of any kind – can be dismissed without a hearing”.

It’s perfectly sensible to be wary of people with axes to grind, of course. We humans instinctively set the evidentiary bar lower for propositions that suit us than for propositions that don’t, and a prudent sceptic will adjust for their informants’ biases. But the sceptic should know to take especial care to adjust for their own biases, and the Bloke Sneer does the opposite. An “agenda” just means something you want or hope for, and are prepared to work for. And if you see a real problem looming in the future, you’re going to want to change it, aren’t you?

Logically, therefore, “All agendas should be dismissed” is functionally equivalent to “There is no such thing as a problem”. The Bloke Sneer is a sign not of tough-mindedness or scepticism, but of the woolliest kind of wishful thinking.

Why we don’t celebrate “straight pride”

A few days ago, around when the US Supreme Court made marriage equality constitutional, an old friend posted this on Facebook:

The quickest way to see the problem with this is to take the word “straight” each time it occurs in the image and replace it with “white”. There’s nothing wrong with being white any more than there is with being straight, but the phrase “white pride” is disturbing nonetheless, and for good reason. See, “black pride” and “queer pride” both have a history behind them: a history of disempowerment, marginalization, humiliation; a history of being “lesser” in the eyes of society. The “pride” movements are about defying that humiliation and that disempowerment, about refusing to be “lesser”. They’re about raising oneself up to the level of the white or straight majority and demanding to be treated like a fellow human being. Now, the white people and the straight people are already on the higher level, being treated as human beings; if they raise themselves higher than they already are, the result is that we once again have a two-tier society, with white / straight people on top and everyone else a step down. That’s why “straight pride” is a bad thing, even though being straight isn’t.

It’s entirely possible that this simply didn’t occur to my friend. It happens. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve hurt people or crossed boundaries without meaning to, I would be cringing in retrospective shame in a much fancier house. But intention, as I’ve been told a couple of those times, isn’t magic. Harm done by mistake is still harm. If someone stands on your toe completely by accident, it hurts just as much as if it was on purpose. You’ll still probably yell out in pain and ask them to move their foot. It’s not that whether they intended to hurt you doesn’t matter, but that it matters because of how it drives their response to your pain. Let’s suppose someone’s trodden on you; you’ve yelled “Ow! You’re on my toe!”; and they make one of the following possible responses. I think you’ll agree with me that only one of these is acceptable.

1. [hastily removes foot] “Oh! I’m so sorry! Are you badly hurt? I hope I haven’t broken anything. Can you walk? If it’s serious I’ll take you to the emergency doctor. I’m so sorry.”
2. [still standing on you] “Well, I didn’t do it with the intention of hurting you. It’s not my fault your foot got in my way. How dare you accuse me of being the kind of person who stomps on people’s toes on purpose! Maybe you need stronger shoes.”
3. [silence, aims another stomp at your toes]

Now let’s switch roles: you’ve stood on someone else’s foot by mistake. It’s natural to want them to be very clear that you are not in category C, so even people who are genuinely in category A usually mix in a lot of “I didn’t mean to!”s with their apologies. But if that’s your primary concern, and especially if you think that your innocent intentions excuse you from the effort of repairing the harm you’ve done, then – sorry – you are in category B.

Only I’m not sure that’s what’s actually going on here. Look again at the wording on the Straight Pride image: the writer thinks the widespread rejection of “straight pride” shows our society to be “upside-down” and “politically correct”. In discussions of sexual diversity, these are red flags that someone is in category C: that is, they act harmfully towards non-conforming genders and sexualities, if only in terms of public expression. Well, there are highly specific situations in which an otherwise harmful act is an appropriate response, and it’s my bet that the writer thought the Supreme Court decision was one of them. Some examples might be

• smacking a toddler away from a hot stove
• performing the Heimlich manoeuvre on someone who’s choking
• amputating a gangrenous foot

These acts all have something fairly obvious in common: a context of imminent, severe danger, which justifies drastic steps to counteract it. Imagine smacking a toddler away from a harmless cupboard, or doing the Heimlich on someone who’s not choking, or amputating a healthy foot. It wouldn’t be enough to plead that you sincerely believed there was danger; you have to have a compelling reason to believe there was danger. Precisely because you’re trying to do the right thing and help somebody, it’s crucial to get the facts right. Granted, a “straight pride” meme doesn’t do very serious harm compared to some other things people do to those who don’t conform to gender norms; but those other things are motivated by the same attitude, which therefore needs to be confronted wherever it appears.

Only, when I say “attitude”, you’re picturing someone nasty, right? My mental image is of the boys at my schools who called me “poofter” and “fag” and various other synonyms (pretty sure they weren’t detecting my actual bisexuality, which I was in ironclad denial about; I just fit their stereotype of what a gay person was like). But there’s a reason why no-one admits to being one of the Nasty People, and it’s the paragraph above this one. Occasionally, harmful acts are genuinely justified by the context – and the sincere belief that one of those occasions has arrived is the state of mind in which approximately 90% of violence is committed. Mostly, when people hurt other people, it’s through trying to do the right thing. Hatred, from the inside, feels like “I am a good person and this has to stop.”

Which is why I am not remotely impressed by this webcomic, which also crossed my Facebook feed in the day or two after the Supreme Court decision. A guy called Adam Ford is opposed to gay marriage, and what’s more he thinks gay sex is evil, but he wants gay people to be very clear that he doesn’t hate them, he loves them. What really gets me is when he insists that he is not trying to do this:

but rather this:

See what’s wrong here? Ford, here represented by the guy on the left, believes certain things about God – at minimum, that (s)he exists, that (s)he disapproves of gay sex and gay marriage, that her/his approval is a sound basis for moral judgement. The generic gay person represented by the guy on the right presumably disbelieves at least one of these things. Ford presents no argument whatever in favour of any of them. So the second cartoon still amounts to no more than “My way (of thinking about God) is better than your way.” As the comic proceeds Ford starts citing the Bible, but again with no explanation of why the Bible would be a better moral guide than, say, the works of Shakespeare. His claims still don’t exceed “My way (of assessing the value of the Bible) is better than your way.”

For all his self-professed love of gay people, Ford offers no assurance that they will not be stigmatized, dehumanized, or made “lesser” if they stop having sex with the people they’re attracted to, like he wants. All he has to offer is a feeling. Here’s the thing, though: I don’t think love is the ultimate social value. I think trust is. I only need a dozen or so people in my life to love me; I need to be able to trust everyone I meet. I need to be sure they won’t harm me. If their interests clash with mine, which is what happens when you put independent individuals in a space with finite resources, I need to be able to enter a rational conversation with them to resolve the clash. There might be a good reason why they should get their way and I shouldn’t, but if so then both of us will be able to see that reason, because the truth is the truth for everybody. Whether it’s a selfish reason or a selfless one isn’t the point.

We humans have evolved part of the way to understanding the importance of trust. That’s where our moral instincts come from in the first place. Unfortunately, we’re adapted for survival in the world of the first 90% of human existence, which was like The Walking Dead with animal predators instead of zombies. You live in a small group of close friends and family, and if you meet strangers you can never be certain they aren’t planning to kill you and take your stuff – or on a hair-trigger in case you were planning to kill them and take their stuff.

We therefore have a flaw woven into our moral sense, which says that only people who do things our way deserve full respect as human beings. Except we don’t think of it as “our way”, or we’d see what an unjust attitude this is. We think of it as the “proper” way, like the three-year-old who, told to say “Spasibo” to a Russian visitor who was giving her an apple, haughtily replied “No. I will say ‘Thank you’ properly.” And sometimes, we can become morally outraged when people do things “improperly”, and harm them – all the while thinking we’re being especially upright. This is not conducive to mutual trust. Morality must be rational, or it is prejudice.

“Reverse racism” yet again turns out not to be

Apparently South Auckland police have been instructed not to ticket Māori drivers caught driving without a licence. Instead they’re to refer them to community services for support. Predictably, New Zealand political Facebook groups have gone ballistic. At least one of them banned people from discussing this topic just because the comments were coming in too thick, fast, and nasty.

This wasn’t a Government policy release, by the way. For a rare wonder a New Zealand news outfit actually seems to have done some digging; less encouragingly, they’ve pounced on a point guaranteed to get the Anti-PC Brigade frothing at the mouth about “Mowreys” getting “special treatment”. Those of us who have the patience to read past the headline soon encounter the sentence

And police say they have the discretion to do the same for non-Māori drivers, but that’s not spelt [out] in the document.

Which makes the statement a few paragraphs down all the more puzzling:

So how do police determine if a driver is in fact Māori? Police whom One News has spoken to in South Auckland say they find this confusing and they have not been with singling out Māori [sic] in the first place. They say they’ve raised concerns with their bosses but have been told it’s a new policy and they have to get used to it.

Well, here’s a hint, guys: you have the discretion to do the same for non-Māori drivers, so how about you go ahead and act on the new policy whenever you’re in doubt? (The Equal Justice Project reports that the policy has been in place for over ten years, it’s just that this one document happened to mention Māori in particular.)

One News didn’t follow up the bit where the police said the aim was to “reduce Māori offending”. I was never exactly a professional journalist even by the standards of student magazines, but I would have known enough to ask how the police thought that was going to work. Since they didn’t ask, we can only guess. Is it naïve to hope that the police are twigging on to the fact that people who can’t trust them aren’t likely to listen to them? Probably.

See, there was a time when my partner kept getting pulled over for licence checks when she was driving. After this had happened several times she asked one cop why he’d picked on her. He answered “General condition of the car.” And that car was in pretty shabby condition – she got rid of it soon after. You see the logic: drivers of shabby cars are more likely to be unlicensed, or committing some other crime that you can bust them for (such as cannabis possession), than the population average. Therefore, pulling shabby cars over will net them more arrests than randomly sampling the driving population.

Thing is, you can get rid of a shabby car. Unfortunately, exactly the same logic applies if you replace “shabby car” with “brown driver”. It’s not that there’s an especially strong correlation between being brown and being unlicensed or criminal; a weak correlation would be enough. What makes brownness a tempting criterion for profiling is that it’s visible at a glance, whereas more relevant variables like one’s degree of economic desperation or anger towards society are even harder to detect than the crimes themselves.

The problem, of course, is that this isn’t fair. And its unfairness causes two major problems, which together come back around and create a vicious circle. One is that people denied justice by the state are often left no choice but to pursue it themselves, a phenomenon which accounts for the great majority of violent crime. The other is that when a visibly different minority group are often seen in handcuffs or the dock, this creates a certain impression about them in the minds of the majority, which throws obstacles in the path of innocent members of the group whenever they seek employment, rental accommodation, bank loans, or what-have-you; and that, as well as being unjust, further undermines the minority group’s incentive to trust the system or obey its rules. I would confidently bet that these two conditions fully account for whatever real correlation there might be between brown skin and criminal behaviour.

So if South Auckland police have figured this out, and are trying to redress the balance that their own profiling practices have thrown off-kilter – well, better late than never. But good luck trying to get this country’s media to present that side of the story honestly.

Keeping the market honest

At least two people died last August due to New Zealand’s disgraceful lack of rental housing standards. And not in privately-owned rental accommodation either – these were both state houses. There is a Bill before Parliament to introduce “warrants of fitness” for houses like we already have for cars; I believe National have already voted it down once.

Here’s a comment from Facebook, representative of the National point of view:

Look at it from the other side: they voted against rising rents.

Maybe. But funnily enough, people seemed to manage in 18th-century England when – against exactly the same objection – a law was brought in mandating at least one toilet in every residence. Whatever extra the poor residents might have had to pay in rent, they gained back in not dying of cholera. Asthma is less often fatal than cholera, but the principle is the same.

I can hear the response now – “So what you’re saying is, people will willingly pay the higher rent if their family’s health is that important to them? Leave it to the market.” There are two problems with this. One is that these are state houses. They’re owned by Housing NZ, which dates back to the days when New Zealand’s government had a philosophy of actually doing something about things like homelessness. They’re not some middle-aged couple’s retirement fund. Housing NZ is not obliged to pass on refurbishment costs to its tenants. We wouldn’t even have to take more money off rich people whose houses aren’t giving their children asthma; we seem to have $27 million sitting around to change the national flag, for instance. I’m not enamoured of New Zealand’s current flag but children with asthma are more important.

The second problem is that the free-market model in economics assumes that both buyers and sellers have perfect market information. This assumption is behind a lot of the mismatches between economic theory and reality. In this particular case, imagine that landlords have the option of renting out both houses that meet the standard and houses that don’t. Now presumably it costs a certain amount of money to keep the houses patched up to standard, so those houses will have higher rents. But the tenant doesn’t know how much money it costs, so the landlord can whack the rent up by a good deal more than that and make a neat little profit on houses specifically advertised as “up to standard”. Tenants who can’t afford the higher price will have to be content with houses that are still substandard. If the standard is compulsory, on the other hand, then price-jacking like that will do nothing but lose you tenants. Regulations, in fact, fix the imperfect-information problem – and thereby keep the market honest.

How evolutionary psychology supports feminism

Yes, I know, that title could just about be my tag-line. Most of my blog these days seems to be about how various evo-psych concepts actually have feminist, rather than anti-feminist, implications. So I thought I’d gather it all together in one place for convenience of reference. (Indeed, parts of this post are directly copypasted from older ones.) Evolutionary biology is one of my persistent fascinations, and I really don’t like seeing misogynists using it as ammunition against social justice for women. Which is how it gets used a lot. Basically, if you get a guy on the internet mansplaining to you how oppression is due to biology and you should just accept it, please feel most free to link to this post.

Speaking of mansplainers, before I get into specifics: there’s a widespread double standard where, if something specific to women’s minds has a biological component, this means that women are irrational and their needs should be ignored, but if something specific to men’s minds has a biological component, this means that men can’t change and their needs should be pandered to. I’m making this explicit so you know that anyone trying to score that sort of point from what I say in this post is being deliberately dishonest, not just thoughtlessly inconsistent.

There’s another kind of dishonest quote-mining I’d like to forestall, too. Natural selection works on gene pools, that is populations of interbreeding individuals. “Women evolved to have trait X”, for instance, is a shorthand for “On average, women who had trait X had more surviving children than women who did not, and therefore trait X became more common in women of the next generation.” This does not mean to say that women who happen not to have trait X are therefore somehow not women, or not “proper” women, or any such nonsense. If you want to argue that, go do it on my previous post. Further, just because something is “natural” as in biological, that doesn’t mean it’s either desirable or unfixable. Actually, that’ll do for the first couple of points.

What kind of construct is gender?

I have told you this story once before, but it was buried deep in my screed on evo psych and I wouldn’t blame you if you missed it. At the age of three, one of my nephews announced to my mother (his grandmother) that girls have blue eyes and boys have brown eyes. About nine out of ten for observation, there; only one member of our local family group breaks this rule, and he must not have looked in a mirror that day.

When his mother and I were that age – we’re twins – we had a magnetic letter tray, with plastic letters in four colours. We spontaneously came up with a treaty to avoid precedence disputes over letters: green and blue were boys’ colours, whereas red and yellow were girls’ colours. The convention was readily extended to the crayons and felt pens. Girls’ colours also included pink, purple, and white, while boys’ colours extended to orange, brown, black and grey. Why orange was a boys’ colour when red and yellow were girls’ colours, I could not for the life of me tell you now. But we both agreed that it was. Sadly, when we graduated to a larger set of felts, that overlooked inconsistency proved the downfall of the system. I think the disputatious item may have had the word “vermilion” printed on the side.

I repeat these charming vignettes, I think the word is, to draw your attention to three common features. First, as you’ve surely picked already, both involve gender binaries. Second, both binaries are false to the point of silliness, such that you only excuse their proponents because we were all preschoolers. And third, just so’s you know, both were spontaneous. Neither was endorsed by the authorities in our lives. In our case, admittedly, we may very well have heard from on high that pink was a girls’ colour, and probably also our toothbrushes and hairbrushes and what not would have been colour-coded just so our parents could remember which to use on whom. But, whenever they overheard us negotiating settlements, those same adults also told us in so many words that the notion of girls’ colours and boys’ colours in general was daft. We ignored them. We weren’t about to give up any cultural convention that had proved such a powerful force for peace.

How political correctness saved civilization

Last week, a woman who works as a waitress at an Auckland café told the left-wing Daily Blog that whenever Prime Minister John Key patronized her place of work he would come up behind her and pull her hair, and he had laughed off her discomfort until her manager backed her up, after which he presented her with two bottles of wine as an apology, apparently under the misapprehension that pulling someone’s hair when they don’t want you to constitutes some kind of relationship. A reporter from the NZ Herald rang her posing as the café company’s PR department, and the following day her name was published nationwide without her consent. I guess they were betting that, being young, female, a worker, a Daily Blog follower, and willing to call out harassment by a powerful person, her political views would be significantly leftward of the Prime Minister’s. This proved to be the case, and so they’ve been able to frame the whole thing as a politically-motivated smear campaign.

I would just like to point out, before we go any further, that there’s been a case recently where someone identifiable only as “a prominent New Zealander” has been caught sexually assaulting underage girls. He – the perpetrator, I think this needs emphasis – has been granted permanent name suppression, contrary to the wishes of his victims and their families. That means I can’t spell out his connection to the Prime Minister here, nor link you to someone who can. But Google around the Australian news sites and you should find him. New Zealand is now a place where sexual perpetrators get more legal protection than their victims, if they happen to have government connections.

Now a friend of a friend wrote a Note on Facebook explaining exactly what the problem is with the Prime Minister’s behaviour; it’s here, with permissions set to Public, so if you have a Facebook account you should be able to read it. I have little to add to what he says in the Note, but I do have a response to make to the person who (at the time I read it) was the most prolific commenter.

Remembrance and hypocrisy

One hundred years ago the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) landed on the coast of Gallipoli in Turkey, their mission being to take out the Ottoman artillery which had held back the Allied navy from securing the region. The immediate objective was to allow military traffic between the West and Russia, while closing it off for the Austria-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires; in the longer term, the British Empire hoped to gain privileged access to Middle Eastern oil, having recently upgraded their navy from coal-powered to oil-powered ships. Reconnaissance of the area had been grossly inadequate, and the Anzacs found themselves facing a steep slope and a well-prepared enemy. The Ottoman army couldn’t stop the landing but easily prevented the Anzacs from advancing past the beach. A classic war of attrition followed, with corpses mounting on both sides for very little strategic gain.

New Zealand and Australia commemorate the anniversary every year on what we call Anzac Day. It’s become a bigger and bigger thing recently as the centenary approaches. Red poppies appear all over the place like Santa Clauses at Christmas, phrases like “Honour the Fallen” and “We Will Remember Them” being the equivalent of “Season’s Greetings”. Predictably, our cultural gatekeepers seem to have decided that the Fallen are best honoured by sanctifying the lies that got them killed. But they’ve revised and updated them, because “freedom and democracy” are more appealing causes nowadays than “king and country”. I suppose that’s progress of a sort. (World War II, at least the European arena of it, could reasonably be called a war for freedom and democracy; World War I cannot.)

At least the Anzacs at Gallipoli were all volunteer soldiers, not conscripts. The following year New Zealand passed an Act of Parliament drastically reducing the permissible grounds of conscientious objection – you only got out of military service if you belonged to one of three small religious groups who believed God forbade it. Otherwise, you were arrested and shipped to the front by force. Then you were punished like any disobedient soldier, which as flogging had recently been banned typically meant you were tied to something and left there for hours, often in places likely to come under enemy fire. Deserters were shot, and in some places advancing troops were followed by squads called “file closers” with orders to kill straggling men of their own side.

I wear a white poppy on Anzac Day, not a red one. I don’t do it to disrespect the soldiers who have died in war, though that accusation was certainly levelled at the white poppy when it first came into the public eye a few years ago. The thing is, wars kill more than just soldiers. We in the West are in the privileged position of losing only soldiers to war, because in the last seventy-odd years we’ve always been the invaders, and it’s been Johnny Foreign across the sea whose civilians get the pointy end. It is a terrible thing to be sent into harm’s way by your government, but it is also a terrible thing to be cluster-bombed, napalmed, mined, or drone-struck. Those who call my concern for the latter an insult to the former will get no respect from me.

Prime Ministers Tony Abbott and John Key, having zero sense of irony, have decided that the centenary of Gallipoli is a good time to have Australian and New Zealand military personnel headed for a conflict in the Middle East. This is particularly poignant for New Zealand, since we proudly abstained from George Bush’s Iraq War. OK, sure, ISIS are very bad people, and they are killing lots of people. That actually doesn’t make it OK to go around killing just as many people ourselves just in the hope that some of them will be ISIS.

ISIS may be doing things that are as bad as what the Nazis did, but they are not the threat that the Nazis were. They don’t have the industrial infrastructure to produce armaments, they don’t have productive land to feed soldiers on. Cut off their supply of weapons and they’ll be stuck. I’m no military strategist, but wouldn’t a moratorium on the arms trade be just a little bit helpful here? As for the human rights violations, surely the least the West could do is open our arms to refugees from the conflict. If we’re going to go in there at all, let it be to help smuggle innocent people out. Well, New Zealand isn’t increasing our refugee intake this year, and – look, just go and Google “Australia refugees”, OK? I’ll wait.

Science: you don’t get to pick and choose

Earlier this week, Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced a new policy: people on welfare benefits will lose their payments if they don’t get their children vaccinated. New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key responded with a statement that we will not be following suit, thus demonstrating that he is a wiser and better man than Tony Abbott. (This is such a low bar to clear that the fact that it needs pointing out actually reflects badly on Key. There are things growing on the bottom of ponds that are wiser and better than Tony Abbott.)

I am pro-vaccination – strongly so – and I think this is a terrible idea. I’m pro-vaccination because there are some children who can’t be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons, and their only hope of escaping diseases like measles or polio is if the children around them have all been vaccinated and hence are guaranteed not to be carriers. This policy will not help those children. It will harm them.

Since the announcement a couple of New Zealand public figures have stood up in support of Abbott. One is the Act party’s sole Member of Parliament, David Seymour. Another, I’m afraid, is a doctor. Now doctors have to clean up after the anti-vaxxers, so I guess I can understand why he would feel like something has to be done. While to a certain extent parents have to make medical decisions on their children’s behalf, children are human beings with rights too – including the right not to be needlessly exposed to the risk of horrible infections. But although something does indeed have to be done, this isn’t it.

Please, my fellow science enthusiasts on the internet, do not go holding up Tony Abbott as a role model for your own politicians. He supports punishing poor people if they don’t get vaccinations, but he is also an active climate change denier. Yes, a climate change denier in charge of a country. To Abbott, it appears, the measure of whether science is good or bad is whether policies derived from it inconvenience the poor or the rich. And that, folks, is the attitude we have to fight, if we ever want to live in a world not destined for a disastrous collision with reality.

On hipster beards and gender essentialism

The background: someone posted this Herald article, entitled “Hipster beards are just a way to get women – study”, on a feminist Facebook group that I follow. The first comment on it read “I would love to know what Daniel Copeland thinks of this.” I started to answer, and then found it was getting long enough to be a blog post, and hey, I haven’t got a blog post yet this week, so...

Well, since I’ve been asked for my opinion – the first thing I notice is the title. I used to work at a magazine, and I know what editors do to titles. “This will get people to click the link” always trumps “This actually has something to do with the content” (let alone “This summarizes the content non-misleadingly”, which seldom gets a look-in).

So it’s an evolutionary psychology study. There’s a solid core of good theory under evo psych, but there’s also a lot of poorly-evidenced studies around, especially in areas relating to gender. (Evo psych examines a much broader range of topics than just gender, but you’d never know it from the media coverage.) The science reporting in this instance is so bad that I can’t tell for sure whether this study is one of the good ones or one of the bad ones; my money’s on the latter. See, evo psych has a communication problem (quite apart from the number of poorly-evidenced studies it seems to generate). Actually, most biological sciences run into this problem at some point, but they’re particularly egregious in evo psych.

“Drives” and human behaviour

So I’ve been having a conversation with my friend Wolfboy in the comments to my recent post about Richard Dawkins – or rather, about the Drive Threshold Model that Dawkins discovered and what it teaches us about rape culture, i.e. that even if rapists are motivated by sex desire, “not dressing like a slut” still isn’t going to be an effective precaution against rape. And I was just on the point of writing another big reply as an addendum to my existing reply, when it occurred to me that the points I wanted to talk about could make their own blog post, which I’m accordingly writing now. Well, when I say “writing”, a lot of it is copypasted from that conversation.

In the original post I made a slightly misleading analogy:

It turns out all kinds of human drives and desires fit the Drive Threshold Model. So if it’s been an hour or two since lunch you may find yourself hungry for chocolate, say, or salted peanuts, or something specific. If you’ve got children you’ll know how often they’re “only hungry for pudding”. But if you haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday I’ll wager you’ll be happy with stale cheese and wilting lettuce.

The misleading bit was where I linked one’s level of hunger to how long it’s been since they’ve had food. That is how hunger works, more or less, but it’s not how sexual desire works. I mean, OK, there is a sort of urgent edge of feeling that builds up over time like that, but it can be discharged by, shall we say, taking matters into one’s own hands. Your level of attraction to other people doesn’t drop down when you have sex and then steadily build up again.

Wolfboy made a cogent response:

I think the complicating factor with sex drives and rape as compared to hunger and food is that a) without food you’ll die, so the drive is a bit more fundamental and b) you don’t need to have any sort of relationship with your food while you do need to decide what sort of relationship you want with a sex partner.

Morally and rationally, Wolfboy is correct. The problem is, we’re talking about drives here.

Goodbye and thank you, Sir Terry Pratchett

I still own several Discworld books with the old “About the author” blurb that begins “Terry Pratchett was born in 1948 and is still not dead.” That sentence is now only half true. Because of the International Date Line, it was Friday the 13th here when I found out he had died. This seemed appropriate.

I met him three times, if thirty seconds in a book-signing queue counts as “meeting”. The first time, I was fifteen, and the signing was at my high school. I remember hurrying to get to the auditorium in time for his talk, and very nearly bumping into him in the corridor – a small man, egg-bald, with a neatly trimmed grey beard, and eyes that looked like he had had some bad news earlier that day. That last impression stands out in my memory because it was so unusual for me to notice anything like that when I was fifteen. (Even today, I’m not fantastic at facial expressions.)

And now I’m sitting here trying to pick one thing or a few things out of his immense body of work, and tell you how it impacted on me. This is difficult. Even doing it chronologically is proving to be a problem, because it goes so far back that I honestly don’t remember what the first Pratchett book I read was. I’m almost sure it was either Wyrd Sisters or Moving Pictures. I do remember reading Reaper Man when it was new out, and that was the one after Moving Pictures. And I can tell you that Pratchett got me out of the endless loop of Tolkien that I got stuck in for a bit there in my teenage – not that there’s anything wrong with being a Tolkien fan, needless to say, but it’s better to read more than one author. Pratchett showed me that fantasy doesn’t have to be about battles and kings and the fate of the world. Ordinary people’s stories are worth reading too.

There was darkness under Pratchett’s good humour. When Robin Williams died last year a lot of people pointed out that comics tend to have honed their craft battling inner demons. Williams’ familiar demon was sadness; Pratchett’s, according to Neil Gaiman who knew him for nearly half his life, was anger. It’s no coincidence that his two most complex and fully realized protagonists, Granny Weatherwax and Commander Samuel Vimes, both wrestle perpetually to control pent-up inner fountains of rage. Rage at what? For their author, rage at the unfairness of the world; rage at how stupid people can be. I don’t mean the sneering “Why do I have to put up with you peasants?” kind of anger at stupidity – I mean that Pratchett saw how officialdom and pomposity and cant and petty-mindedness get people hurt. And he could never quite shrug it off with an “Oh well, life’s not fair, that’s how it is.” Pratchett always cared what happened to people. He stood for practicality and hard work like Kipling, and for social justice like Dickens.

But perhaps because he lived with darkness, Pratchett also learned to embrace it. He made Death a sympathetic character, “not cruel, just terribly good at his job” (and how those words sting just now!): calm, friendly, professional, fond of little pleasures like good food and the company of cats, but perpetually bemused by the foibles of humanity. I don’t have figures on how much that one creative choice has helped people cope with the inevitable end of life. Apparently elderly readers used to write to him, hoping he’d got Death right. Other fantasy franchises seem to be adopting the idea, at least partly. Much of Supernatural is blatantly pinched from Pratchett, though their Death character is slightly sterner and quicker on the uptake. Harry Potter may not have a personified Death, but Rowling’s treatment of it – calm, courageous acceptance – has a distinctly Pratchettian feel.

I toyed with the idea of writing a short story for this post, where Pratchett himself meets Death, but there’ve been a couple of good ones already that I won’t try and better. Let me instead say farewell by echoing the final few entries on his Twitter:

At last, Sir Terry, we must walk together.

Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.

The End.

Richard Dawkins’ biggest contribution to feminism

No, it’s not “nothing”. Look, hear me out, OK? Yes, as a public figure Dawkins has said a lot of bigoted things in the last few years about women and sexual assault. In his books he discusses sexism every so often; it seems he thinks that prejudice about people’s gender is an equally big mistake regardless of which gender one is prejudiced against. Which is perhaps true purely in terms of whether your judgement of an individual person is likely to be right or wrong, but our society is heavily biased towards some kinds of gender prejudice and away from others, with moral and political consequences that can’t be ignored – except he does ignore them. (He also, disturbingly regularly, comments sympathetically on paedophilia. I devoutly hope the reason he gives in his autobiography is the real one: that he feels guilty about having been party to driving the teacher who molested him in boyhood to suicide.)

But before Dawkins was a public figure or a popular writer, he was a scientist. His research was on animal behaviour. And his big discovery, back in the late 1960s, is called the Drive Threshold Model. He tested it in chicks, which apparently show a definite colour preference when pecking at small objects: blue is preferred to red and red to green. Now you might think that this means a chick will always choose to peck a blue object when there’s one available, and a red one when there isn’t, and a green one only if there’s nothing else. But apparently not. Rather, when a chick’s drive to peck is low, it will only peck at blue objects; if it gets higher, it will peck randomly at either blue or red objects and ignore green; at the heights it will peck at any colour indiscriminately. Hence the term “drive threshold”.

If this only applied to chicks it would be pretty pointless me repeating it. But Dawkins applied the mathematics to a wide range of psychological studies on humans, measuring preferential behaviour towards flavours, colours, vegetables, handwriting styles, and composers. It turns out all kinds of human drives and desires fit the Drive Threshold Model. So if it’s been an hour or two since lunch you may find yourself hungry for chocolate, say, or salted peanuts, or something specific. If you’ve got children you’ll know how often they’re “only hungry for pudding”. But if you haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday I’ll wager you’ll be happy with stale cheese and wilting lettuce.

Now here comes the point. Women want to keep themselves safe from rape. And lots of people, not all of them men, have a helpful suggestion: maybe women should not “dress like sluts”, especially when out after dark. And this, funnily enough, makes a lot of women angry, because it places the responsibility on women not to be raped instead of on men not to rape. To which those giving the warnings reply that it’s no different from warning people to keep their cars locked in areas prone to theft, which is hardly taking responsibility away from the thieves, is it? In fact it is different, as New Zealand discovered in 2013, when a man was acquitted of a sexual assault that he had confessed to committing, on the grounds that his two female victims were “foolish” to have been crossing a park at night while “dressed as they were”.

But setting aside the ethics of such precautions – do they work? Let’s suppose that most sexual assaults are committed by men trying to satisfy their own sexual desires (obviously in a predatory, totally objectifying way). Let’s also suppose that in general men have a sexual preference for some styles of dress over others. Both these suppositions seem plausible enough at first glance, but I don’t know what the actual evidence is for either one. Obviously if one of them is not true then the whole thing is moot, the precautions don’t work. The point is that you still can’t conclude that dressing down will make a woman safe, because of what happens above drive thresholds. If a man is prepared to sexually assault strangers at night to satisfy his sex drive, it’s a reasonable guess that he must have a high sex drive at the time – way over the threshold where his preferences about clothing make any difference. The Drive Threshold Model therefore predicts that his choice of victim will have nothing to do with the way she’s dressed.

From which I draw three conclusions. In ascending order of importance—

For social justice people: the findings of science are not biased, or at least not hopelessly biased, by the scientists’ ideology. Biology is not the enemy.

For evo psych buffs: feminism will usually turn out to be right. Go ahead and bet on it.

For everyone: stop freaking telling women not to dress like sluts and they’ll be safe from rape. It doesn’t work.

Ships that pass in the night

If I ever get my hands on a working time-machine, the first thing I shall do is organize a public debate between C. S. Lewis and Steven Pinker. Not (I’m sure they would both protest) that it would be an especially momentous encounter compared to what you could do with a time-machine. If all goes well, rest assured I will also talk to Shakespeare and Virgil and Homer and the author of Beowulf, document the Polynesian conquest of the Pacific and the first people in the Americas and Australia, film mammoths and indricotheres and dinosaurs in their natural habitat, witness the origin of life, and all that other guff. But the Lewis-Pinker debate will serve as a proof of concept.

Why those two in particular? Because they are so different and yet so similar. Both are fascinated by language, and by what it reveals about the mind. It seemed a little too good to be true, a few years ago, when a manuscript was discovered containing Lewis’s opening contribution to a planned collaborative work with J. R. R. Tolkien, to be entitled Language and Human Nature. Sadly, Seven magazine, which I gather printed the fragment, hasn’t uploaded it to the web. It was never completed because Tolkien was as bad at finishing things as I am, and also he was bogged down in The Lord of the Rings at the time the project began. But that tantalizing title could be the subtitle for most of Pinker’s popular works. On language, Pinker and Lewis nearly always agree.

Not in my name

Today New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key announced in Parliament that New Zealand would be sending troops to Iraq to help the US fight the Islamic State. There was no vote.

I could really just finish with that. When you look at the other parties’ responses it’s pretty clear why National didn’t risk putting it to a vote. The aim, Key says, is to protect “the rule of law”, which he identified with “the international rules-based system”. I’m not sure whether I’m alarmed or relieved that he didn’t claim to be acting for “democracy”. Was that because he thinks you can have the rule of law without democracy? Or was the irony of sending people to die for democracy without a vote just that little bit too uncomfortable even for him?

Here’s the thing, if you don’t see the problem. Every system of government is “rules-based”. Slavery was “rules-based”, with rules like “Slaves must not run away” and “Slaves may not be taught to read”. The Nazis had all sorts of rules – about who could marry whom, about what you could say about the Führer. There is no reason in principle why rules shouldn’t coexist comfortably with hideous violence. The question that matters is whether the rules are devised by the powerful or by the people.

But given the disgraceful behaviour of the New Zealand police at the Auckland Pride Parade on Saturday, I’d say the people who run our country have long since forgotten that.