There is a rather good article on Ayn Rand called Mrs. Logic at NYmag.com. The author, Sam Anderson, is an admitted ex-devotee but he keeps a careful path in the article between the good and the bad. It’s hard to do with people like Ayn Rand.

What strikes me about human lone wolves – people like Ayn Rand and Christopher McCandless – is not so much them, but their followers.  I mean there will always be those who are mad hatters.  The world is very hard on some of us, and sometimes we simply cannot cope with what happens.  Rand’s terrible childhood, McCandless’ schizophrenia, these are things that made them what they were, and because of what they were – the madness, the intelligence and the ferocious desire – they became our mad hatters.
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Coming home from class there was a seriously beautiful crescent moon setting in the south west. Its upper tip looked like it was embedded in cloud and so it appeared to hang there, a pendulous yellow sliver hung from a cloud.

The air felt wet but the rain clouds had broken up during the 4 hours of class. The roads and fields were still sodden and it was warm so earth smells carried high and clear. Running home was like swimming through a light scented sea. Odd way to put it, but true to the experience.

I really like the class. Partly this is because the material is of deep personal interest, but partly it is because the way in which analytical philosophers disarticulate the body of any theory is so alien to me, it feels as if I am an anthropologist in an alien world – and I love that. It is really hard and takes a lot of work to learn to see in this new way, to predict how the next step of the argument for or against any position will go, or to, more generally, see the body of an argument as an articulated thing that can be dis-membered and re-membered.
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There is an article in Chronicle of Higher Education called “Moral in Tooth and Claw.” It cites people like Frans de Waal, Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson and essentially says that, despite some arguments to the contrary, “recent research in cognitive neuroscience and moral psychology suggests that human morality may be much more “animalistic” than Western philosophy has generally assumed.”

It seems to me obvious that human moral behaviour must have evolved from behavioural forms already existent in the species’ lineage.  Otherwise, how did it get there? No one (of any real knowledge) seriously questions the fact that the vestigal limbs of any number of creatures are there because there was once a set of ancestors to whom those limbs were not vestigal but very useful. No one (same caveat) questions the fact that development of things like eyes are based on, and evolve from, earlier visual-center forms.  That makes perfect sense.

It seems that there are only two reasons to question the development of morality from earlier forms. The first is because many of us still seem to have a stake in seeing human beings as fundamentally separate from non-human animals, and the second is because it is the mind.

The species chauvinism I think we will get over, as we have learned to get over thinking of other groups of people as something other than human. The ability to see the mind as something of the earth, of matter, that may take longer.

Still, my question stands. If not of our evolutionary history, then where does it come from?

How compassionate are humans compared to other animals?

This is what I mean about needing to be careful when assessing others by virtue of the content of our feeling complexes (see post just before this). Clearly, both humans and macaques have compassion but the content of that feeling complex is also clearly different when comparing the human and macaque versions. Of course, what is also true, is that the causal relations differ between our species when comparing the various complexes (say between the complex known as compassion, and the one known as respect [for authority]) and their place in the overall set of complexes.

This video is also rather strong support for the contention that we need to continually assess our intuitions about our own states and those of others using empirical evidence. If we don’t do this, then all we really do is assess what we believe to be true by virtue of what we believe to be true. And of course, doing this isn’t going to get us anywhere sane.

Originally seen on Pharylngula, but also part of National Geographic’s Visions of Earth 2009, here is Dorothy’s body, and her troop’s witness of her passing.

Although I still have trouble understanding why, it still seems contentious to interpret the stance of this gathering of chimpanzees as some set of feelings related to grief. I suppose it must be the implications of those apparently expressed beliefs that is so disturbing. If they have grief, for example, that means they know something about what death means, which, in its turn, means the gathered chimps have a capacity to understand and express consequences to not just self but the group, which is an ability to abstract, which leads to the idea that they have what we usually think of as morality.
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I’ve been watching the Discovery episode that aired last Sunday on the 4.4 million year old fossil skeleton of “Ardi” (Ardipithecus ramidus). I’ve also started reading the articles that Science Magazine has made available online.

At this point all I have to say is “Wow!”

Well, not quite all…I remember when (see how old I sound!) there was fervid conversation about whether in the hominid line we were bipedal or large-brained first. Such vehemence there was. Then Lucy came along and decided that argument once and for all. Now there’s another female ancestor who is blowing apart questions we didn’t even know we had. This thing about knuckle-walking as an evolutionary change that came after the split of the evolutionary line that produced both the chimpanzee and humans — it raises the possibility of the question about whether uprightness was present prior to that lineage division. Maybe not a strong possibility — in fact probably absurd since it would involve the chimp/human ancestor having made the “decision” to become bipedal, and then the chimp “un-deciding” — but there nonetheless. Such notions, if nothing else, are fun to think about.

And the question of the grasping toe. Goodness. Such delights to ponder.

I’m reading Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics by Clifford Geertz. I have read only the first two chapters. I am moved by it.

It’s been a long time since I last read Geertz, and when I did, I loved his facility with both words and thought. The man can write, but more importantly, he can think while doing it.

Here he is from chapter two:

“…to judge without understanding constitutes an offense against morality.”

“To engage in that style of thinking called social scientific is to attempt to transcend the logical gap that separates them by a pattern of conduct, which, enfolding them into a unitary experience, rationally connects them.”

“In the field, the anthropologist has to learn to live and think at the same time.”

“As I have suggested, this learning process can advance only so far, even under the best of conditions, which anyhow never obtain. The anthropologist inevitably remains more alien than he desires and less cerebral than he imagines. But it does enforce, day in and day out, the effort to advance it, to combine two fundamental orientations toward reality—the engaged and the analytic—into a single attitude. It is this attitude, not moral blankness, which we call detachment or disinterestedness. And whatever small degree of it one manages to attain comes not by adopting an I-am-camera ideology or by enfolding oneself in layers of methodological armor, but simply by trying to do, in such an equivocal situation, the scientific work one has come to do. And as the ability to look at persons and events (and at oneself) with an eye at once cold and concerned is one of the surest signs of maturity in either an individual or a people, this sort of research experience has rather deeper, and rather different, moral implications for our culture than those usually proposed.”

“The professional ethic rests on the personal and draws its strength from it; we force ourselves to see out of a conviction that blindness—or illusion—cripples virtue as it cripples people.”

I am in a hotel room. It’s civil twilight, just before dawn. The day of the wedding, the air is cool coming in the open windows, the sky as it lightens looks clear. This morning at 10 we will drive up to the reservation to start the visiting process.

When I crossed the Columbia yesterday and pulled off the road at the horse monument (yesterday’s posted photo) I could smell the sage brush. It’s a smell I find incredibly welcoming; I felt welcomed, like by a relative. It’s exactly the same feeling I get when I run across a friend I haven’t seen in ages, that quick glad burst of happiness, the sense of familiarity, belonging, family.
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I’ve been thinking about my mixed feelings with Verluis’ book. Around 3 AM today I found myself thinking about that book and about an essay I deeply admire by Cynthia Ozick called “Mrs. Virginia Woolf and Her Nurse“. When I caught myself thinking of them together, I searched for the connection I had subconsciously perceived, because apart from the fact that they are both in English, they are very different bits of work. What came to me was was the phrase “compassionate writing.” I now think that I didn’t respond whole-heartedly to Verluis’ book is because it isn’t what I think of as compassionate writing. So, in fact, it wasn’t a connection I was seeking between Ozick and Versluis but a difference.

When reading Verluis, I got the strongest sense that he was hiding something. Not data, of course. And no, I do not think he misrepresents his study. Rather, I think he is hiding himself, hiding something essential about his response to his subject, and by doing that he is unintentionally hiding his subject from me.
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Final bits from Scott Atran’s and Douglas Medin’s The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature

Our data show that expertise cannot be separated from cultural milieu, even when people engage in more or less the same activities. The parallels between the Itza’ and the Menominee are striking, especially when one notes that both groups also have sustainable forestry practices. As with Itza’ and Lacandon, some Menominee men express the belief that if a person treats nature in a greedy or wasteful manner then spirits will punish them and offer tobacco as a prayer of thanks. Cultural paths (in the sense of reliable distributions of conceptual representations in a population of minds) appear to provide something of a framework theory for organizing experience. This is seen, for example, in the Itza’ Maya tendency to see reciprocal relations (animals helping plants as well as being helped by them) and in Menominee fishermen’s ecological orientation.

This is a great paragraph but give me a moment to speak some of the sub-text. The non-Itza’ and non-Menominee in the study (i.e. the “culturally dominant” folk) also cannot separate out their expertise from their cultural milieu. They also have their cultural paths and “reliable distributions of conceptual representations” that organize their experience (i.e. constrain what they perceive into belief categories). In this case it is the tendency not to see reciprocal relations, whether they be between plants and animals or between groups of humans .

Let me clear about that last statement, there is the abstract knowledge of interrelationships and reciprocal relations, but the cultural conceptual relations extant in the “dominant cultures” divert individuals from experiencing specific instances of those relations. What that does is impoverish conceptually – see next paragraph for explanation of “impoverish”…
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