Hitch is my favorite drunk pundit in the same way Grant was Lincoln's favorite drunk general. Sherman mentioned to Lincoln once that Grant was drunk. Lincoln replied that all his generals should receive a case of whatever whiskey Grant was drinking, as he was the most effective general he had.

My amygdala is stuck in 'threat' mode I think.

No seriously, I agree with what you're saying, but there's another portion that comes into play. My brain is finite. It can only hold X amount of information and only perform several tasks at one time. Therefore, I take the information I am given, apply what logic I have set up throughout the years, process, then dump. Gotta make way for the next tidbit.

As a quick example, and then I'll get back to my point. Let me talk about my early days in the Marine Corps learning about electronics. We studied the atom, looked at covalent shells, determined when an electron would jump, etc. I learned how the windings of an inductor and the collapsing of the electromagnetic field effected other inductors. I knew so much about electricity it was staggering.

Today, I know that electrons flow from negative to positive and that sticking a fork in a socket will hurt. That's about it. But you know what? I can work with electronics quite well.

I do the same thing with politics. I process what info I can, make my decision, attach that decision to my amygdala and move on. When it comes time to argue my point, I'm not always prepared because I've done the dump. I think that has come into play with humans and how they interact and become flustered (name calling, sarcasm, etc) when backed into a conversational corner.

Just like I don't have to remember that the outer covalent shell needs 8 electrons for stability in order to fix a light switch, remembering every talking point isn't needed for all decisions. Then again, I don't normally converse with light switches so the analogy falls short.

I think what makes someone intelligent is the ability to take in opposing views, ignore the cognitive dissonance and process it the same way they would anything else. It's perfectly OK to still reject the idea, but at least listening is a sign of intelligence.

I think very few people actually listen to arguments and even fewer can adequately state theirs well enough to not automatically trigger the 'threat' warning.

Bush is not Satan incarnate. Kerry isn't the puff ball we on the right want to make him out to be. Dean, however, was a complete nut job regardless of how you slice it.

(sorry for the ramble, but I'm at work and wrote this over quite a long period of time)

I like that article, but as a former biologist I have to take issue with his evolutionary analogy. It is essentially correct but it makes a silly star trek mistake. That is the assumption that more highly evolved things would be less ruled by such emotions etc. He is right that these are strong motivations in the human species but I think he makes a bad assumption. These emotions have their purposes. The real problem is the silly notion of people being "civilized" not that we aren't evolved enough. In modern times westerners have fooled themselves into thinking these things are beyond intelligent educated people. You hear it all the time, alot of people actually think having a college education makes less likely to be racist.

Hitchens point is important to understand, but its equally important to realize that people are this way because evolution selected it because it was advantagous. Thinking that we shouldn't have these motivations can cause you to draw some very wrong conclusions about the nature of the world.

ctob -

A couple of things 0

1. to be clear, the bottom section below the fold is me, not Hitch.

2. I think it's completely proper to say that the threat identification purposes of the amygdala are "less evolved," in the sense that they are still catching up to a proper contextualization in modern society.

Beyond politics, for example, so many people suffer from panic and anxiety disorders because they can't contextualize alarming or negative everyday stimuli as mee annoyances vs. perceived existential threats.

This inability to contextualize and appropriately apply the amygdala's intended use translates to politics as well, and can be successfully interpreted as a "less-evolved" MO.

marble -

My brain is finite.

Exactly. Which is why a hardcore pro-choice activist may not be able to contextualize based on his or her limited experience with strategic foreign policy, for example. In contrast, hawks may have little understanding of the even longer term complications that will arise from bad environmental policy.

Both excellent responses to an intelligent post. I have many friends on the left whom I talk to about politics and what not. I *try* to listen objectively because I figure I'm not always right and there are two (sometimes more) sides to every story.

I think Marble's post was very appropriate - there's no middle ground in today's political rhetoric and everything's a jugular issue. The Left hates Bush like the Right hated Clinton. It was (and is) a deep, personal loathing of someone that most folks have never met or seen except on TV. Both sides are utterly convinced of their opinion, and afraid to give any ground by listening to alternative points of view that may invalidate it.

We have a "soundbite culture" these days, where people assimilate points of view from their peers, family, TV, etc. without taking the time to understand the details themselves. We're not stupid, just intellectually lazy and willing to digest the information what's being spoonfed to us. Even better if the information confirms our opinion, be it critically formed or not.

Still, this is not a NEW phenomenon - we saw the same sort of thing happen in Vietnam during the Tet offensive. Home grown activism, an "unpopular war" with slanted news coverage, etc. The parallels are there as is the potential result if we choose to follow the same path. Problem is, the bad guys in North Vietnam were separated by the Pacific ocean and part of a sovereign nation-state, albeit communist. These bad guys in Iraq are not, and will follow us home to cause more damage if we don't help them meet Allah first.

Another major problem I have in debate on the internet is the immense lag in time between a comment and it's response. While I love the net, I think it's better for static information gathering rather than promoting discussion (at least at the level you and I would talk at). I wouldn't mind setting up audio chat sessions with people and having them transcribed as a good way of talking through opposing views, and even that's not a great solution!

Another thing that doesn't help is anonymity. I would never walk up to anyone wearing a Bush or Kerry shirt and call them a fascist assplow. Seems most people don't have that type of inhibition on the web.

Plus, it's hard to keep tabs on all conversations. And, ocassionally I get sidetracked by pictures of large breasted women swimming in jello, but that might just be my problem.

bill:

To be clear I disagree with none of either yours nor hitchens points about human nature.

I understand your point about contextualization. However a couple points:

1) the fact that some people seem to exhibit certain phentypic symptoms of something that seems to you to be bad does not mean they won't be selected for. Paranoia may be good for survival sometimes. It may be that if we evolved some more we may be selected for a bit more irrationality. Who knows it might cause less dissent and be advantageous for social animals. I don't personally think that is true but second guessing selection is generally a bad idea imho.

2) Second if we assume that what you discribe is, in fact, selectively unfavorable we still cannot say conclusively that this is because we haven't evolved enough it may simply be an unfavorable trait that has become more prevalent because the population of the US is no longer under selective pressures and we are now seeing a greater incidence of aberration due to genetic drift.

Evolution is what it is. Its neither good nor bad, slow nor fast. Strictly speaking there is no "design". My liver has no function, it just happens to filter things. If I were more evolved there is no guarantee my liver would work better. In fact the human liver could begin to work worse in favor of some other body if conditions changed over time. That decrease in efficacy would then actually be due to being "more" evolved. Its human nature ;) to project design and functions on these things. And its human nature to speculate about how it would work better if it did this or that. But saying that things are more or less evolved is misleading. It is a bad idea to assume that evolution is the same as progress. Evolution is merely change it may be good or bad. It may be good in one situation and bad in another. Selective pressures determine this and those change over time.

Evolution is what it is.

That being said, there are various types of evolution, the strict biological definition and the broader term that encompasses things like going from inventing the wheel to nuclear technology. In these respects, the guy taht invented the wheel was biologically identical to Oppenheimmer, but the technological "evolution" outpaces and plays by diff rules than our biological ability to adapt a survval instinct taht's appropriately complex.

The survival instinct is outdated for a new, complex paradigm. The appropriate selective pressures aren't sheparding humans away from instincts that will destroy us when combined with more complex reasoning centers, thus, I'm saying it's "bad."

No real disagreement here, just saying. I hereby pass judgment that our evolutionary process is insufficient to help us survive, which is arguably considered the ends to the means of the process.

I always have to laugh at the notion of people not being "evolved" enough. Virtually everything we do is controlled by our hormonal urges (even the useful output of such "highly evolved" specialists as physicists and mathemetician is highly correlated to testosterone levels) and without them we would cease to be human. Reason is not purpose; it exists to serve purpose, just as law is not morality but exists to serve it.

I think leftist intellectuals are too often drawn to this false light of alleged "higher evolution," mistaking their self-congratulatory moral relativism for selfless objectivity. Evolution is survival of the fittest; and that requires self-interest.

...OTOH, (and now totally OT) in some sense evolution will probably become somewhat obsolete, maybe within our lifetimes. To this point, information encoded in three-dimensional protein-folding has been both impossible to decipher and too massive in amount to process, and we had zero hope of synthesizing anything new and useful beyond the level of a virus. This will not be the case for too much longer (the IBM supercomputer Blue Gene was built specifically to work on the second problem), and once they are overcome we will be able to do something truly remarkable: design complete chromosomes intended to produce (entirely artificial) desired organisms with traits as far beyond our imagination as the Internet was to the builders of the first computers.

A couple other points I thought worth making:

Most debates of this kind boil down to one question: free will vs. determinism.

It's interesting to note that in the 1930s, determinism was totally ascendant among intelligentsia due to our understanding of physics at the time. It was believed that knowing all the particles and velocities of a system allowed you to predict all interactions within that system precisely. Quantum mechanics destroyed that notion by demnstrating only probabilities can be predicted on a quantum level, and revived the quaint notion that Man might have free will (under the loose definition of free will that says your decisions are "free" if they physically cannot be predicted with certainty, even in theory).

If you believe we have free will, then people have the ability and responsibility to act morally despite whatever impulses evolution gave us. If you believe our actions are all predetermined, then holding people responsible for their actions is as silly as punishing a bullet for being propelled from a gun.

So unreason has nothing to do with anything, and the Islamofascists and Leftists can simply shrug and say "nothing to be done about it, our glands are too big"?

I don't understand why the concept of *bad ideas* being the reason why people do wrong things is so hard for people to swallow. Might it be the attendant moral responsibility that is so scary?

"...a very poorly-evolved mammarian species..."

Mammarian? As in "of the breast," i.e. "mammarian cancer?"

Maybe he meant mammalian?

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