Notes: Extremism And the Left

Quillette Is doing well this week! Here's another article I found compelling and interesting. The first point of the article makes it I found most in need of sharing Is that the extreme left is growing and, unless it is reigned in, will become as extreme and anti-intellectual as the extreme right.

>Those on the right once were the main enemies of evolutionary theory, but today, as Colin Wright argues, those on the extreme left are the “new evolution deniers.”<

And in answer to all those extremist you choose to throw science into the garbage can:

 > But science should be in the business of advancing knowledge of the world and its inhabitants rather than advancing certain groups or sides over others. Like any discipline of science, evolutionary psychology has not been untouched by prejudice and ridiculous theories. But most of them were either unfalsifiable and thus unscientific or were falsifiable and subsequently refuted by experimental tests. <

The Five and Dime

Some of you remember them, the five and dimes. They were not simply the economic equivalent of the dollar stores. Today you walk in, get a cart and pace down aisles which aren't that different from the aisles in any other store.

The five and dime. It was different.

It tended to be a little dark inside. Certainly darker than a modern store. And where there were patches of light they were exactly that, patches. There were spots of bright and shade in various places. It was almost like walking through a forest. Not that it was actually dark anywhere. There was plenty of light wherever you were standing. It's just that it wasn't all equally illuminated, some places were not quite as bright as others and it all seemed very much alive.

There were bins. There were wooden shelves. Some were waist high. Some taller. All were different. Einstein would've said five and dimes were very woody, not marble at all.

But maybe best of all, the packaging was minimal. Nothing in bubble wrap. Nothing in plastic. Little bags, cloth bags, net bags, you name it bags. Little cardboard boxes. Little wooden boxes. But no damned blister packs. Some things were just sitting there, you scooped up a handful of whatever, walked up to the counter and they were toted up, one by one.

Oh, I know, a lot of this is pure nostalgia . Being a child is so different from being an adult. But I assure you, the world has changed. In some ways, I won't deny, for the better. In some ways, however, it has changed for the worst. I go to dollar stores, they're a great place to get Friday prizes for my grandkids. But I have to admit, I wish I could take the kids out to a real five and dime, with shelves of tired old wood that they could see into if they stood on tiptoe. There was a certain magic such stores had about them. The magic that just doesn't exist in a modern store of any kind.

The moderns are all carved out of Einstein marble or injected out of plastic into certain forms and molds. They all look the same no matter what they sell. The organic, individual character is gone. Oh well, just put it down to me being old.

Notes: Friday prizes grew out of the celebration of the weekend between my son and me. They started out as Friday surprises. But when you're dealing with a small one, expressions tend to evolve rather rapidly into new words and phrases. I kept on hand a collection of this and that. Every Friday when we got home from school, it was time for something. He got to choose. Meat sticks were popular, but so was a stop at the ballon store. Eventually, Cory, my grandson joined in on the Friday tradition, and now it has moved on to James' and Cory's kids.

A word about Einstein: He loved a world, no, the universe, made of marble, not of wood. In his mind, marble was a planned and beautiful city built of stone mathematically measured and carved. And by wood he meant a forest, tangled, organic, messy. As models of reality, he liked the marble. He didn't like the wood.

Which is why he hated the random messiness of quantum physics, even though quantum mechanics was a direct consequence of his own work. I wonder if he had lived long enough to have known of the strange structure of fractals, which give a mathematical clarity even to forests, might he have found woodiness to be at least a bit more tolerable?

Me vs Society

New York Times columnist David Brooks reports that in the 1950 the Gallup organization asked high school seniors, "Are you a very important person?". 12% said yes

They asked the same question of the same group in 2005 and 80% said they were very important. 

TIME Magazine asked Americans, "Are you in the top 1% of earners?" 19% of Americans thought they were! 

This brings me to the question, "Is self-esteem important?". I answer, "Yes of course!  However, an inflated sense of self-worth, making you think you are better than other people, absolutely not!"

In a related issue, Mr. Brooks also points out that economic consumption in the 20th Century is flat until the 1970's when it suddenly takes off.  Over most of the 20th century, that was consistently at 43% of GDP, when 1970 arrived it suddenly jumped to 133% of GDP.  Note that we are approaching the era of Reagan. Similarly, corporate executives did not make vast amounts of money,although course they were wealthy, until the late 70's and early 80's when they suddenly began demanding tens of millions of dollars a year and golden parachutes which would save them from economic loss – even if they destroyed the company.

Mr. Brooks contends that this is due to a conviction of being absolutely correct which possesses these individuals. They have a high self-esteem, indeed an overinflated self-esteem. They have an absolute certainty about the correctness of their beliefs and if you disagree with them, you must be regarded as an object that is in the way.  I recall a philosopher who once said something along the line of: the more certain you are that you are absolutely correct, the more likely you are to be wrong.

Mr. Brooks also points out that, given a test psychologists utilize to identify narcissism, which is an excess of belief in and even adoration of oneself, in the last 20 years, the median number of people who are identified as narcissistic has gone up 30%! My own view of the self-esteem movement is that it is very important to build self-esteem of youngsters, but it should not be based on the sense of the individual is significant and important as opposed to other individuals. In other words, the lesson should be; yes, I am an important, special, unique individual, and so is everyone else! What we have lost, in my opinion, is the sense that everyone is important, that we all matter, and that we are a part of a society, a family -- a group; and that that group is important and we are simply one important part of it, not the most important part.

I no longer have the article, but I recall in long-term study which extended over decades. The study listed 100 attributes of  children, and asked parents, utilizing a forced choice methodology, to rank those characteristics as to which were most important for their offspring.

In the 1950s, parents ranked traits such as "is a good citizen" and "gets along with others" at the top of the list and ranked "stands up for his rights" in the middle. By the 1980s, this had been reversed.  I think this is profoundly significant. Being a good citizen, doing one's duty, having a sense that one is a part of things greater than oneself, were once considered essential to a child's well-being by American parents. Today, this is no longer so. It is considered much more important for a child to stand up for his rights, as opposed to the rights of others, or the welfare and benefit of his society. It seems to me that this is not an exemple of our social decay, but rather a root cause of the problems our nation is facing today.