Kahneman, Dyson; Freud and James; plus Pinker (expanded)

Daniel Kahneman is an intellectual grey-eminence of the past several decades.  If you read at all, you have met some of his ideas (usually written in conjunction with his trusty sidekick Tversky) , though generally at second-hand.  Now he has written his own lengthy and systematic account of his research, aimed at a lay audience.

Most reviews of Daniel Kahneman’s new book (Thinking:  Fast and Slow) simply choose a few from his wealth of anecdotes  and recount them.  Not a bad plan -- they are all worth hearing.  By contrast, Freeman Dyson, in a typically canny offering in the current New York Review of Books, goes beyond the usual review, offering some trenchant personal experiences that illustrate the cognitive case being made, and -- quite surprisingly in the current climate -- puts in a word for Freud:  not the Freud of Die Traumdeutung or the cigars, but of the seminal Psychopathologie des Alltaglebens.   He concludes: “The insights of Kahneman and Freud  are complementary rather than contradictory.”

Noting that neither Sigmund Freud nor William James comes in for mention in Kahneman’s long book, Dyson also outlines the present relevance of this giant of psychology (and one of the heroes of this blog).

Make no mistake -- Kahneman, like Steven Pinker, is one of psychology’s good-guys, plumbing the richness of human experience  though coming to mostly dry and deflating conclusions.   Unlike the eliminative materialists (which includes many of the tribe of neuroscientists), they do not take mere mechanism as a posit, rather than as an occasional result.  James and Dyson, unlike most of their scientific colleagues then and now, have thought deeply about religion and take it quite seriously;  our family had the benefit of Dyson’s teaching at the Presbyterian Church in Princeton.   His invariably broad and thoughtful perspective is ever welcome.

Footnote:  I subsequently borrowed an audiobook of Thinking:  Fast and Slow from the library, to listen through in stages along my commute.   Alas, it turns out not to be suitable for that medium, save perhaps for a beginner.   Far too much of it is platitudinous  -- boring to sit through, while the reader-aloud drones on.    With a printed work, your eyes rapidly scans past the overly familiar, and plucks the occasional novel niblet.

Part of the problem is adumbrated in this passage from America’s premier psychologist of the nineteenth century:

Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that mere familiarity with things is able to produced a feeling of their rationality.

-- William James,  “The Sentiment of Rationality”, in The Will to Believe (1897).

Kahneman rediscovers that remarkable fact, with much spilling of ink, waving of hands, and conducting of unsurprising experiments. 

More interesting is what James writes immediately after that, showing that today’s postmodernist-style relativists  have also not brought forth something new under the sun:

The empiricist school has been so much struck by this circumstance  as to have laid it down that the feeling of rationality and the feeling of familiarity  are one and the same thing, and that no other kind of rationality than this exists.

(I have satirized that dreadful mindset  here.)

~

In an earlier essay, we examined the politics and natural selection of sex as reflected in the writings of Steven Pinker.   There is a Kahnemanian cognitive dimension here as well, of which we now give an example.

Pinker wades patiently through the swamps of Political Correctness;  we salute his perseverence.   It really is remarkable, the sort of emotionally-founded cognitive distortions he must contend with.

Thus, consider this thought-experiment:  Imagine that some researchers published a study suggesting that the higher crime rate for American Blacks is a consequence of innate criminality.  They would of course be denounced by Blacks and their champions;  but would scarcely be denounced as blaming White crime victims.  So much is obvious.

Yet now put in different substitutions for x and y, and though the logical structure has not changed, the political picture has changed entirely.   The Blank Slate, p. 161:

Even heavier bipartisan fire has recently been aimed at Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer  for suggesting in their book A Natural History of Rape  that rape is a consequence of men’s sexuality.  A spokesperson from the Feminist Majority Foundation called the book “scary” and “regressive” because it “almost validates the crime and blames the victim.”

By contrast,  men as such  did not object.  We’re used to it.

The average zealot would be quite incapable of perceiving the logical parallelism between the two accounts.
Similarly Pinker, op. cit., p. 372, re the "Laws of Behavior Genetics":  "It is because the laws run roughshod over the Blank Slate, and the Blank Slate is so entrenched,  that many intellectuals cannot comprehend an alternative to it, let alone argue about whether it is right or wrong."  A depressing, accurate, and important observation.

~

Here and elsewhere, Pinker counters the Noble-Savage ideology that whatever is found in nature must be good.  P. 164

It is inherent to our value system that the interests of women should not be subordinated to those of men, and that control over one’s body is a fundamental right  that trumps other people’s desires.  So rape is not tolerated, regardless of any possible connection to the nature of men’s sexuality.

So far, the standard viewpoint, sensibly put.  But then Pinker, whose logical scalpel is sharp, cuts down another level to make a quite interesting philosophical point:

Note how this calculus requires a “deterministic” and “essentialist” claim about human nature:  that women abhor being raped.  Without that claim  we would have no way to choose between trying to deter rape  and trying to socialize women to accept it, which would be perfectly compatible with the supposedly progressive doctrine that we are malleable raw material.

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~ Commercial break ~

Nook lovers are book lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

For college psychology instructors:

Here is an experiment you can do with your class, if you don’t mind being denied tenure.

Divide your students randomly into two groups, and send them to separate rooms.  To the first group, present the sentence:

Men are hot;  women are cold.

(This is along the lines of such parlor-game titles as “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”.)

To the other group, present this sentence:

Women are hot;  men are cold.

Assignment:  Discuss.

Prediction:  Both groups will denounce their respective sentence as sexist and anti-woman.

[Postscript]  Chesterton anticipated this sally:

Re G.B. Shaw:

He has pleased all the bohemians  by suggesting that women are equal to men;  but he has infuriated them by suggesting that men are equal to women.

-- G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905)

~

Kahneman, as Dyson points out, avoids discussing religion; this is probably just as well.  Pinker -- whose range of interests is extraordinarily broad -- to his credit  does not avoid it;  indeed he quotes (pp. 186-7) from the magnificent 1996 address by Pope John Paul II on the subject of Natural Selection and the “ontological  discontinuity” (we have treated of this subject here);    but analytically, in this arena, he is not at his best.  On page 189  he dishes up an absurd false-dichotomy:

Who says the doctrine of the soul is more humane than the understanding of the mind as a physical organ?

Already so much has gone wrong.  We do not adhere to the doctrine of the soul (or of free will) because it is “humane”, but because it is true, and we experience it as such.   Nor does such a doctrine impede or even impinge upon the understanding of the brain as a physical organ.  As for the mind as a physical organ, um, did you really mean to write that?  Are we back with Descartes and his lodgement of the soul in the pituitary or the pineal gland or wherever the hell he placed it?

It gets worse.  The consequences of the “doctrine” of the soul (though, in our view, this is rather like speaking of the “doctrine” of the existence of the physical world)  is “letting people die of hepatitis  or be ravaged by Parkinson’s disease  when a cure may lie in research on stem cells…”  Indeed a cure might be thus expedited, or it might not;  the soul is nothing to the issue.   The moral quandary is rather to what extent society is willing to go, to benefit group A at the expense of group B.   Effective but morally debateable maneuvers include:  harvesting stem cells from embroyos;  harvesting embryos; harvesting aborted fetuses; harvesting fetuses not yet aborted but which, for a fittybone, the unwed mother would be happy to sell you.  Plus harvesting organs from dead adults; from living but brain-dead adults; from criminals; from political prisoners; from the luckless, kidnapped for this very purpose.  Perhaps less effective from a flinty Western medical perspective, but quite real and effective to its practitioners, is harvesting such organs as genitals from living children (our group B, here rather at a disadvantage) for use in sorcery to benefit group A (which in their own estimation, includes all the best people).  All these practices may be found in the world today, though generally not in places where the influence of the Holy Mother Church is at its strongest.   John draws the line at one place, Mary at another; and if you were to do a statistical study, it might well be that churchgoers, on average, place it somewhat more towards the less-interventionist end  than do vivisectionists, grave-robbers or eliminative materialists.   That would be sociologically rather interesting, if true;  Pinker has however made no logical point.   Nor does his heroically rising to the defense of helpless Alzheimer’s patients, who apparently are being abused by nuns when these are not otherwise engaged in cackling over the sufferings of Parkinsonians,  contradict anything a theist would say (apart perhaps from heretics like Christian Scientists):  “Sources of immense misery” (notice the purely emotion-evoking addition of the adjective) “such as Alzheimer’s disease … will be alleviated   not by treating thought and emotion of manifestations of an immaterial soul  but by treating them as manifestations of physiology and genetics.”   Amen; hear, hear;  we can all of us drink to that.  Pinker’s lance has pierced a straw-man.

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~ Commercial break ~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwzOXzZWUik

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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Pinker touches bottom with this assertion:  “The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body  is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on earth.”   (Compare:  "The doctrine that we should become adults  is offensive, as it devalues childhood.")
Leave aside that outsider’s-assessment-word “righteous”, analogous to the skewed perspective of the word “humane” above (We believe, or disbelieve, or simply hope, as the case may be, in eternal life, from conviction or revelation or even logic or what have you, but not because such a belief -- true or false -- seems “righteous”).  Notice, though, that qualifier “necessarily”, which changes the assertion from a sociological generalization or barroom opinion  into one of logico-philosophical apodixis.  Yet the only evidence he offers for this extraordinary doctrine  is the self-serving rationalizations (or irrationalizations) of maniacs who kill their kids, and the rants of al-Qaeda suicide-bombers.  (Page 189 -- look it up if you can’t believe your eyes.)

Good - Heavens!  For all we know, some serial killer has excused his crime-spree by an allusion to the Riemann Hypothesis;  the effect of such grotesques upon number theory  will rightly be nil.

Beyond the logical point, Pinker’s assertion is psychologically absurd.   It may well be the case (though God forbid), that those who hope they may one day rest in the bosom of Abraham  are destined to be cruelly disabused;  but their doctrine does tend rather to distinguish this view of life  from that of scorpions in a bottle.

For a glimpse at the value placed upon human life  among a proud, free people  unpolluted by Christian superstitions, click here, and here.
[update 8 May 2012] And now here:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/05/south-koreans-confiscated-pills-human-remains.html
South Korean customs said it had confiscated more than 17,000 “health” capsules smuggled from China that contain human flesh, most likely extracted from aborted fetuses or stillborn babies.



(Note, though:  these are quibbles;  just a turf thang, folks.  Pinker's book overall is broad, sound, and beautifully written.)

(For more along these lines: )

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

“Legitimate Rape”

“Crime is common.  Logic is rare.  Therefore it is upon the logic  rather than upon the crime  that you should dwell.”

-- Sherlock Holmes (“Adventure of the Copper Beeches”, 1892)

What! (you say) Is Dr Justice about to deliver a lazy late-hit, and -- quite superfluously -- join the ever-rising pious pile-on atop this season’s easiest target?

Not a bit of it;  nor shall I defend that hapless man.   But by way of linguistic hygiene, it is time to make a basic point.   There has been a lot of linguistically illiterate (or pretendedly so) chortling over that unfortunate phrase “legitimate rape”.    I assumed that folks were simply seizing the opportunity of taking a swipe at a political opponent in the inviting shape of a juicy asking-for-it butt;  yet the same semantic paltering is promoted in the lead editorial of this week’s New Yorker, so the matter needs a note.

Consider a phrase like a strong cup of coffee. 

I pause, while you see if anything seems amiss.  It does not.  Yet strictly, this is a case of what philologers call enallage adjectivi (en-AL-uh-jee ad-YEK-tiv-ee) -- logically, the modifier is misplaced.   The intended meaning is :  a cup of strong coffee;  the cup itself is neither weak nor strong, and indeed might serve  upon subsequent occasion  for a weak cup of tea.

Now consider a company announcement:

“In cases of legitimate illness, employees are permitted to…”   The intent is not a medical pronunciamento, classifying illnesses themselves, sheep- and goat-wise, into “legitimate” and “illegitimate”;  the refererence is to claims of illness :  cases where the worker is (as one might say) “legitimately ill” (which means no more than:  really/actually/indeed ill) as opposed to taking one of those “sick” days (I am told that such things exist, by a friend of a friend) that have less to do with pathology than with the fact that you’re expecting the cable guy, or you’re sulking in your tent because you didn’t get a raise, or it’s the opening game of the season.  A company might well have a policy to the effect that  cases of the latter sort will be indulgently overlooked if they don’t become too frequent, but that, if you personally have promised to deliver the keynote address at the annual stockholders’ meeting, or to scan the morning’s query against the imminent threat of the dirty bomb, then if you don’t show up, it had better be for some reason other than the cable guy.

So now to our phrase of the day.

“I’ve heard that, in cases of legitimate rape, a woman is able to…” whereupon follows some idiosyncratic endocrinology.   Deride the latter as freely as you please, it is nothing to our point;  but with our newly refreshed semantic sensorium, let us explicate what the ham-handed wordsmith intended by his ill-coined phrase.

We have not far to seek:  He meant, of course legitimate claims of rape;  that is to say, truthful assertions of the form “this fetus is the result of rape”.   He was not saying or thinking or implying that sometimes it is legitimate -- morally okay -- to rape someone;  and to pretend that he meant that, or that such is the natural construal of his words, is disingenuous.

Now -- the phrase, so construed, still does legitimately raise a red flag (er, raise a legitimate red flag, a flag of legitimate redness -- ah, you know what I mean).   For, that occurrence of “legitimate illness” made sense  only against a shared pragmatic background of knowledge that a fairish percentage of sick-day claims are not founded upon any actual physical illness (as opposed to coming down with a case of Primavera baseballia and the like).  So:  Is our politician maintaining -- or rather, not overtly maintaining, but assuming, as a discourse presupposition -- that many claims of having been raped are false? 

Actually -- follow me closely, now -- he need not be assuming anything of the sort, since the specific cases in question are not those of “I was raped” generally, but “This pregnancy resulted from rape” -- a far, far narrower class.   Is the speaker claiming (or rather  -- again -- taking the proposition as given) that a significant number of those (far rarer and more serious) claims are false?

[Answer after I have had dinner.   In the meantime, write down your own analysis, using a well-sharpened number-two pencil.  Or post a Comment.

C U soon …]

~

[So!  Back from my humble repast (rich in proteins, and well-watered by wine) -- time for some post-prandial ratiocination.]

The political background is this.

Nowadays, post-Roe-v.-Wade, abortion is (at least legally) relatively easy to obtain.  (Whether it is easy in practice, depends on personal circumstances; after all, a lot of people have difficulty either finding or affording adequate dental care, though there is no law against dentists.)   In this context, there are basically two camps:

(1a) “ “Pro-Choice” “, supporting “abortion on demand” (sometimes sharpened into (1b) “free abortion on demand”, which makes about as much sense as “free root-canals on demand”).

(2a) Moderate “ “ Pro-Life “ “, urging the criminalization of abortion except in cases of rape or incest.

Our logical readers will have noticed that (2a) is neither the contrary nor the contradictory of (1).  And indeed, there is a faction -- let us call them the “Ultras”, who uphold the direct antithesis:

(2b)  No abortions.  No exceptions.  Period.

It is into this latter camp  that our ill-starred wordwright  falls.

(Please continue to bear in mind that, politically, I am not here advocating or opposed anything, since, to that debate, I have nothing to add, beyond logico-linguistical clarity.)

[Whoa!  "The Big Broadcast" -- Johnny Dollar.  Gotta go.

 Not claiming a "sick day", just taking a break.]

~

[Intermezzo caprizioso]   A word on that fixed phrase, “rape or incest”, inscribed in stone like “peanut-butter and jelly” or “Laurel and Hardy”.   Sociologically, morally, the collocation makes perfect sense.  But practically, there is a certain redundancy:  for, in practice, any claim of having participated in incest is also accompanied by a claim of having been raped.  No-one simply shrugs and says, “Sure we got it on, so what?  You don’t understand -- My dad is really hot.  Only  I don’t want a kid with two heads.”

Now, most conservatives fall into (2a).   So, any proponent of (2b) has his work cut out for him, since he must face the massed forces -- strange bedfellows -- of both (1) and (2a).  What to do?

Obviously, he must somehow attack the rape-exception.  (The matter of incest  may, for reasons noted above, be left aside.)  What to do?

The honest way would be to make the unimpeachably logical point  (let us call it “Argument A”) that such an exception would constitute a “moral hazard” (I don’t mean “moral i.e. sex”, I mean the technical legal term that applies, for instance, to 100% federal deposit insurance).  For, before such a proposed ban on abortion, women had no incentive to claim rape (let alone incest).  But under (2a), they could not obtain an abortion -- unless they claimed rape.  Such claims are difficult (and politically untouchable) to disprove(**); hence -- again logically -- a moral hazard would obviously exist (and this, apart from some possible contingent anthropological fact that no woman, ever, anywhere, would ever lodge such a false claim (perish the thought ....) ).

[** Difficult, since, for the claim to prevail, the claimant need by no means identify or convict the perpetrator, any more than an insurance claim for a murdered spouse  is impaired, unless the beneficiary can bring the murderer to justice and obtain a conviction.   The logical bar is very low, much lower than for the already notoriously thickety “She said -- He said” class of actions, for in this case there need be no identified “he” who might respond. Whoso should say “Ortcutt did it”, incurs a burden of proof;  but “Someone did it” incurs nothing of the sort.]

Now, most of my readers undoubtedly fall into (1) or (2a), simply by statistics.  But I do hope that you can see that Argument A is, for someone who (for whatever reasons) holds (2b), both politically necessary, and logically unassailable; and that, furthermore, if for some reason (divine revelation, or whatever -- just take this as a temporary axiom here, for the sake of logical argument) (2b) were in fact the correct position (in some transcendent realm of fact), then deploying Argument A would be justified -- nay, imperative.

But our phrasemaker did not do this (at least, not in the passage quoted out of context, which is all anyone is going on, myself included).   What he put forward instead  was really quite illogical.  He maintained (contrary, apparently, to gynecological reality, though that contingent point is irrelevant to the logic of our argument) that, for such and such contingent physiological reasons, cases of actual impregnation by rape  are rare or nonexistent.

 

But if that were the case, why sweat it?  Why not simply join the (2a) camp, which has a much better chance of making its case?  -- As, suppose that the only politically possible constitutional amendment before Congress said, “No abortion except in cases of pregnancy induced by space-aliens via anal probes.”   A few wackos would object even to that (come to think of it, the objectors would largely fall into that sector of the voting public  most vulnerable to UFO abduction);  but most conservatives would probably say, Y’know, we can live with that.

What he should have said is:  If we allow a rape-exception, it will be abused, much as claims of sick-days are abused, or as every other loophole has been abused  throughout legal history. 

Mental Health and Gun Control (updated)

[Update 13 Jan 2013]  From this morning's Los Angeles Times:

Many mentally ill missing from gun background check system

~     ~     ~

Our principal essay on gun control simpliciter  may be viewed here.   The present note concerns a much narrower topic:   namely, the present national discussion of mental health policy as specifically influenced by the recent events in Newtown.   Once again, we shall refrain from the political as such, our focus being logical and psychological.

 

The nation was recently treated to an extraordinary spectacle.   After lurking for several days in their tents, the NRA sent out a spokesman to proclaim that the solution to school shootings was for the Federal government (pause for emphasis) to do the following things:

            (1) Place armed guards in every school in the nation

            (2) Draw up a list of loonies (again, the Federal government apparently to make the determination of who is loony and who is not) and (presumably, since otherwise it would be an empty gesture) detain them pre-emptively, in (again, presumably, since prison space is at a premium) giant sprawling concentration camps.

Now, both of these may be jolly ideas -- as promised, not taking any political positions here -- but they are … quite … surprising, coming from a milieu as viscerally opposed to Federal intervention as the NRA.   After all, the main reason they demand “semi”-automatic weapons with armor-piercing ordnance, is for an anticipated showdown, not with aggressive squirrels (as they would have us believe), but rather (Waco-style) with Federal officers.

But apart from this politico-cognitive dissonance (which is not, after all, unprecedented:  the supposedly anti-big-government Dubya administration  instituted the most intrusive Federal education policy since forced busing), there is the matter of, well, the facts.  Keeping assault rifles out of the hands of homicidal maniacs  is, perhaps, a laudable goal (and you see, once again, how scrupulously we maintain our distance  from any sort of political axe-grinding:  Perhaps you believe that arming homicidal maniacs is a good thing, since they keep down overpopulation and provide grist for Hollywood script-writers -- being completely non-committal here), but -- sticking to the subject here, folks, as so few are able to do -- the specific Newtown events  in no wise buttress the case for more intensive screening/waterboarding/castration/whatever  of raving loonies.  For:

(1)  Existing regulations (passed over the screams of the NRA) requiring a 14-day waiting-period  did in fact, in this case, prevent the perp from buying a weapon.

(2)  The actual perp  had no police record whatsoever.  He had not been diagnosed as either a paranoid schizophrenic or a sociopath -- the kind you worry about.  Simply being a tad Asperger’s  won’t cut it -- if you detentioned all the aspies, there would be no-one left working at Microsoft or N[additional alphabetic characters redacted].  His mother had money to burn and plenty of time (alimony, no job) and lived in an upscale area, so access to premium mental-health services  was not an issue.

Now, there is in fact an interesting mental-health aspect to the Newtown case, but it is scarcely one that the NRA and their lapdogs will be comfortable with. Namely -- his enabler -- his more-than-enabler, his agent provocateur:   his possibly paranoid, definitely gun-fetishist mother, who took him to shooting ranges to improve his aim.  And the awkward thing for the wingnutters is:  She fits (like a fingerprint-withholding glove) the profile of the Tea-Party/tin-hat/NRA flake.  So (to continue our earlier thought-experiment) if we were to intern everyone fitting that profile … there would be nobody left to pay dues to the NRA, and the Republican side of the aisle in the House  would lie empty.

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~ Commercial break ~

Nook lovers are book lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

So, are we going to detain everyone with weird or toxic parents?  Pretty extreme -- but even that would not work, as you may glean from a rather remarkable article in this morning’s New York Times, by a reporter (Andrew Solomon) who was, so to speak, “embedded” with the parents of one of the Columbine shooters:

Over a period of eight years, I spent hundreds of hours with the Klebolds.  I began  convinced that, if I dug deeply enough into their character, I would understand why Columbine happened -- that I would recognize damage in their household that spilled over into catastrophe.

(An aside:  This was truly a heroic repertorial undertaking.   He had every reason to suspect that he would be embedding himself, long-term,  into a den of vipers.  Personally, I would not -- simply going by what little we know --  have wanted to spend ten minutes in the company of Nancy Lanza.)

Instead, I came to view the Klebolds  not only as inculpable, but as admirable, moral, intelligent and kind people  whom I would gladly have had as parents myself.  [This] made Columbine far more bewildering, and forced me to acknowledge that people are unknowable.

That last generalization, strictly speaking, goes beyond the facts;  yet my own experience, over sixty-some-odd years, serves only to buttress this deep dark truth.

“Only connect,” E. M. Forster proposed.

“Only  we can’t,” the psychoanalyst knows.

-- Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981)

 

And yet, having learned that, and said that, he delivers himself, a propos of the Newtown case, of the following extraordinary obtusity:  “We’d have wished for more intrusiveness … from Nancy Lanza.”  (sic).

There was no lack of intrusiveness.  She home-schooled him on and off, beginning in elementary school, and again in high school.  She battled with his high-school.  She shoved him prematurely into college, where he floundered.  She bathed him in a fine broth of “prepper” paranoia.  She kept her home walled-off  even to her card-game friends.  And by her own lights, she was absolutely devoted to him (give her credit -- a thankless task).

So:  We shall never be able to predict, when this or that one might crack;  and the police-state measures required to prevent all such outbreaks  would  in any case  be intolerable.  But we can ensure that, when they do crack, they’re not packing rapid-fire weapons with armor-piercing ordnance  and hundred-bullet magazines.

* * *

Disclaimer:

Lest anyone imagine that I harbor mean and hurtful thoughts about guns per se,

check out the action at the site of my buddy,

the two-fisted, pistol-packing, wise-cracking pre-Consiliar private eye,

Murphy!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/

* * *

[Psychological appendix, 24 December 2012]

Considered as an objective, empirical discussion of relevant and knowable issues, the debate (or dialogue, or parallel monologues) on the mental health angle of the Newtown shooting,  doesn’t make sense.  Even now, weeks afterwards, nothing is known of the shooter's  ‘motive’ (seeing the thing as end-directed, and which assumes that the shooter himself knew what he wanted) or even the trigger of the attack (the immediate cause or 'releaser', not requiring any conscious knowledge:  a term applicable to animals and psychotics  as well as to rational actors).   The young man himself was not on anybody’s radar;  indeed, he seems to be one of only a handful of Americans who have not broadcast intimate details about themselves on Facebook, including rants which, seen in retrospect from some disaster, might seem telling.   And unlike many other would-be teen assassins, he did not tip his hand in advance.

From the plain standpoint of reducing the likely deadliness of future such attacks (deadliness, not frequency;  the latter would be difficult to effect) we would be talking of such things as longer waiting periods (to frustrate the impulsive), a sharp limit on the size of ammo clips and armor- (or glass-door-)piercing capabilities of the ordnance, and, yes, things like armed guards in schools, or dressing the pupils in body-armor (**), patroling the halls with a rhinoceros -- things like that.  [**Note:  I wrote that part as a joke, but reality is already way past fantasy -- and each twist and turn of this amazing case is being commented on in a watchful Europe:

Newtown : le boom des sacs pare-balles

Depuis la terrible fusillade, les parents américains cherchent à protéger leurs enfants avec des équipements de sécurité. Produit phare : le sac à dos blindé à l'effigie des princesses Disney ou de The Avengers.

So far, though, no reports of a Rhinoceros in the Room.]

~

Gratuit !

Lisez le conte entier

“Le détective et la fillette”

~

These matters are practical, technological, not psychological.   True, you will have to deal with psychological factors, here as in any case of government regulation, namely the normal non-pathological attitudes among the general public, but that is quite different from the psychopathology of potential perps:

There is no psychological profile specific enough to pinpoint school shooters in advance. But one common thread may offer the best opportunity to intercept them: They tend to be indiscreet during their planning stages. The difference between a tragedy and a tragedy averted, experts say, is often somebody who knows something deciding to speak up.

Ironically, the security measures instituted by many schools after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado may discourage students from sharing potentially life-saving information.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-massacre-prevention-20121224,0,5399322.story

And yet, post-Newtown,  the mental-health theme  is very much present.

And the reason is, it is not really the cleidoic and probably forever unknowable Adam Lanza who is on the couch, nor even (a potentially more interesting analysand) his fearful, armed mom, who at least left behind more by way of documentation and obiter dicta.  No,  the patient recumbent and free-associating away, is the American psyche -- for the moment, distracted by the tragedy   from our usual daily distractions and diversions.  For the sleeping beast of the id is but slumbering, and can be shaken awake by a shock.  As, this curent story, from this morning’s New York Times:

India Clamps Down on Gang-Rape Protests

Indian authorities throttled movement in the heart of the capital on Monday, shutting roads and railway stations in a bid to restore law and order after police fought pitched battles with protesters enraged by the gang rape of a young woman.

Singh’s government … has been caught off-guard by the depth of the popular outrage as protests have snowballed and spread to other cities. India is seen as one of the most unsafe places in the world to be a woman.

Seen only thus far, the Indian popular response to the rape incident  is as mysterious as the American popular response to the killings at Newtown.  For,  grotesque and violent events, far worse than that one, happen all the time in India  without leading to pitched battles in the streets.  And as one observer wisely remarks:

“People are not reacting to just one rape case. They are reacting to the general malaise, the frustration with the leadership. There is a feeling that the leadership is completely disconnected,” said political analyst Neerja Chowdhury.

In other words, the incident was a trigger, a final camel’s-back-breaking straw, la goutte qui fait déborder le vase.

And that is a good thing;  only,  we need to be conscious of the true nature of the debate, else we get mired in the particularities of one given incident, or, worse, talk past each other since we are only nominally discussing the actual incident, but are in reality doing such things as pushing pre-set agendas (that is almost always the politicians’ response) or flailing about, sincerely but semi-unconsciously, in the roiled-up juices of our own psyche.

[Update 28 December 2012]  In case you thought the observation that comparable violent events happen in India all the time, was overblown, here is just the latest  among those that happened to make it into the world press:

Inde: suicide d'une adolescente violée

Une adolescente indienne, victime d'un viol collectif, s'est suicidée après qu'un policier eut tenté de la convaincre de retirer sa plainte et d'épouser un de ses violeurs, a-t-on appris aujourd'hui auprès de la police et de ses proches. La jeune fille, âgée de 17 ans, a avalé du poison et a été retrouvée morte hier soir. Son suicide intervient après un autre viol collectif d'une étudiante dans un autobus à New Delhi le 16 décembre, qui a provoqué une vague d'indignation en Inde. L'état de santé de la victime est extrêmement grave.

L'adolescente qui s'est suicidée avait subi un viol en bande le 13 novembre pendant un festival à Diwali dans la région de Patiala, dans l'Etat du Pendjab.

[Update 13 Jan 2013] For the latest on the psychosociology of recent events in India, and their impact on America, check this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/01/la-nostalgie-de-la-boue.html

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While we are on the subject of national psyches and armed violence,   let us consider an earlier case involving guns:  the Guns of August, 1914.

The English psychoanalyst Ernest Jones writes:

After the First World War, the strong dislike in England of everything German  was incomparably stronger than it was after the Second World War, although one might have thought it was more justified on the latter occasion.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: The Last Phase (1957), p. 48

Younger readers, well acquainted with the atrocities of the Second World War,  while barely cognizant of the First, may nod absently in agreement;   but from a historian’s standpoint, there is more to it than that, and Jones’ fascinating observation is an understatement.   For there seems to be a sort of consensus among historians, that, unlike the long-prepared and go-for-broke Axis aggression that launched WWII, the outbreak of the earlier war had been something of a muddle, not due primarily to enraged war-aims of a consciously aggressive German nation, aroused as one man, but owing more to the pig-headedness of its fumbling leaders, together with a continent-spanning web of secret treaties and entangling alliances, which wound up dragging everybody in after some stupid little incident in Sarajevo, -- a juggernaut rolling along unstoppably with a momentum and logic (or illogic) of its own:  rather the way the pre-set tolerance-levels of programmed trading unleashed the shuddering stock-market meltdown of the 1980s.   Nor did the Germans or anyone else have any idea how deadly and how interminable the conflict would turn out to be: soldiers from several nations marched off to the front with cockades on their caps, figuring the bloody thing would be over and done with in time for tiffin.

As historian Gordon Craig put it (Germany: 1866-1945 [1978], p. 303), the Wilhelmine diplomats “allowed themselves fatalistically to be borne away by the flood in 1914” (a curiously feminine and sexual image for those stiff-collared Prussian militarists, by the way);  whereas the Nazis were themselves the flood.

And yet, during and after that conflict, Englishmen (and many Americans) reacted to Germans (and to German-Americans) with loathing; whereas, after the truly deep German guilt for the 1939-45 conflict (a guilt that definitely includes the women, who thought Hitler was just adorable), we reacted instead  with the Marshall Plan.

Go figure.

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We might pursue this line of musing  to armed conflicts  closer to home.

(1)  First, Vietnam, from which -- as from the Edenic Fall -- we date all our later woes.

In psychoanalytic terms, it represented a true repetition compulsion, since, as most of us were unaware at the time, the French had already been down that road, and lost.   Rather than let well enough alone, we poked the same tarbaby, then punched it, then pummeled it, then grasped it with both arms.  Harder -- More -- Escalate!  (The French term for this is:  fuite en avant.)

(2)  Next, the war in Afghanistan, which  in terms of sheer duration  actually does make the Great War somewhat resemble a pre-tiffen stroll.

Now, as to our essential reason for invading, there are no psychological questions to pose.  Al-Qaeda had hit us with intolerable attacks, of which 9/11 was only the most recent, and they were sitting in Taliban territory, thumbing their noses.   An armed response was a no-brainer, and most of the world was with us (not only in spirit, but some of them  with boots on the ground).   The fact that we charged in there, and single-mindedly pursued al-Qaeda until we had captured Ben Laden in his cave … oh, wait.  At this point, the narrative does get a bit muddled.

A thorny problem for future psychohistorians.  Myself, I cannot begin to unravel it.  Those later in a position to take a long view back  will doubtless notice certain odd features:

(a)  The initial use of the term “Crusade” by the Bush Administration.  It was soon retracted as a gaffe, but was the sort of gaffe quite familiar to Freudians.

(b)  The truly odd fact that Bush-the-Younger or Dubya-the-Young   had explicitly campaigned in 2000 against “nation-building” (though it was an odd issue to choose), and yet, one year later, swiveled around 180 degrees.   Some Oedipal scenario involved Bush Senior?   I have no idea.

(c)  The feminist vendetta against the Taliban, which predated 9/11 and had entirely other grounds.

(3)  Finally (and let's hope that it really is final), the war against Iraq.   Here the motivations were much more obscure, and some of them fabricated.    Much about the whole thing seems delusional.   A soldier of my acquaintance was part of a platoon ordered to go out and dig around randomly in the desert, on the chance that their shovels might strike a hidden cache of “red mercury” (which is one of the more imaginary varieties of WMD).   With all the time in the world to plan for the thing -- since, after all, Iraq had not attacked us, nor was poised for attack -- the superhawks rushed the thing, sending in troops with inadequately armored Humvees.    Allowing for a certain quantum of sheer Bushie stupidity ("Dubya, yer doin' a heckuva job"), there are still several anomalies that remain unexplained.

Countering later criticism of a long list of such DoD inadequacies, Donald Rumsfeld famously quipped, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.”   That sally was widely derided, in part because of commentators’ eventual awareness that the fact we did not have the army we might have wished we had, was in part due, not to military necessity, but to the Bush desire to have it all, actually lowering taxes in wartime.  (Again, possibly an Oedipal note, against his one-term loser of a father?  And a late-hit against  Bush Senior’s “Read my lips” fiasco.)  But more to our present purpose  is a possible unconscious subtext to that epigram:  “You go to war against the enemy you have, not the enemy you wish you had.”    There are several layers to this.

(i)   For some of its proponents, the Iraq war seems to have elements of an actual displacement (Verschiebung), in the Freudian sense, the real target being Iran.   As, indeed, some of the superhawks quipped at the time:  “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad; real men want to go to Tehran.”  (The reasons for Iran as target  are interesting, but are not to our present purpose.)

(ii)  The United States had plainly little to gain from this adventure.  Cynics on the left said it was all about oil,  but that really didn’t happen at all.   If you wish cynically to seek an economic motivation, it would be in plum contracts for Dick Cheney’s pals in Halliburton and the like -- a windfall for a few, but the bill for which was picked up by the tax-payers (or would be, by tomorrow’s tax-payers), and which thus harmed the nation as a whole.   Another motivation (for a few) was to do a favor for Country A, by way of compensation for not taking on Iran for them.

(iii)  Again, speculatively, our old friend Oedipus.   Dad had done everything right throughout his long life, while the wastrel son  goofed and fooled.   But Dad had fallen down (one could argue onself into believing, though in retrospect the caution of Bush Senior seems providential) in his curtain-raiser Gulf War;  now the son would show him and do it right.   It is difficult to put any other construction on Dubya’s astonishing premature-ejaculation of “Mission Accomplished”, playing dress-up in a flight uniform and prancing atop an aircraft carrier.   Many of us boys used to do such things, safety-pinning a towel around our necks capewise, and pretending to be Superman.  But most of us knocked it off by around six years old.

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[24 Dec 2012]  Update re the Webster matter.

It is as if Satan, savoring his Newtown escapade like a fine wine, had asked himself:  What can I do for an encore?

True, I could shoot up another school;  but that would be … derivative.  Been there done that.

-- Hey, I’ve got it! (he says to himSelf).  Lure some first responders into an ambush!!

Far be it from me  to empathize into the thought-processes of Satan (that task defeated Murphy, here).   But -- just on a hunch -- we’d better get some armed guards at the nunnery …

Practical legal lessons to derive from this latest incident:

(1)  In the first instance, none.  The guy was a convicted felon, already forbidden to buy arms.  No new laws needed  in that respect.

(2) (and this is admittedly weaker)  Then how did he get that semi-automatic? -- Presumably, stole it.  -- But then, if the proposed ban on such weapons  were put into effect, he wouldn’t have had anything to steal.

(3)  But as against that -- In this particular instance, luring a handful  into a trap, machine-gun-style shooting was not the point.  Any sniper rifle would do just fine.

One further legal lesson (nothing to do with gun control per se):

(4)  Anyone who kills his grandmother with a hammer, is permanently too dangerous to be paroled.

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[Appendix, 26 December 2012]   
In an effort  better to understand the psychology of gun nuts  Second-Amendment fundamentalists, we’ll post from time to time  such anecdotes as may throw light on this.  The point is not to highlight fringe cases, but to explore what is indisputably a large part of the American mainstream -- and which has, after all, largely had its way, via the legislative process.

The following, for instance, which appeared in this morning’s Washington Post, does not concern some marginal wacko, but an actual Republican House majority leader.  Oh, wait …

FreedomWorks tea party group  nearly falls apart in fight between old and new guard

December 25

The day after Labor Day, just as campaign season was entering its final frenzy, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based tea party organization, went into free fall.

Richard K. Armey, the group’s chairman and a former House majority leader, walked into the group’s Capitol Hill offices with his wife, Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.

The coup lasted all of six days. By Sept. 10, Armey was gone — with a promise of $8 million — and the five ousted employees were back.

Presumably the moral of the story (NRA-style)  is that this tragic incident never would have happened, if only those two top employees had themselves been heavily armed.   Then Armey would have been outgunned.  Or, if he too was packing (concealed), they could have simply had a shoot-out, may the better man win.

The fellow who is to cough up the eight million is himself a pretty interesting character:

The force behind their return was Richard J. Stephenson, a reclusive Illinois millionaire who has exerted increasing control over one of Washington’s most influential conservative grass-roots organizations.

Stephenson wanted a substantial sum spent in support of Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.), a tea party favorite and Stephenson’s local congressman, several who attended the retreat recalled. Walsh garnered national headlines during the campaign when he questioned whether his opponent, Tammy Duckworth, a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot who lost both legs in Iraq, was a “true hero.”

It is apparent that such thinking cannot be understood as simply lying at this point or that point on the traditional politico-economic spectrum from liberal to conservative.   Something else -- something darker -- is going on.

[Update]  That crack about the “shoot-out” was intended as satire -- and not very trenchant satire at that, since it presumably portrays the principles as more extreme than they really are.  And yet someone just posted the following response to the WaPo article:

Liberals and other misguided leftists (are there really any other kind?) of course fail to take the lesson that this article contains. 
 Well, here's one lone American patriot who has. 
 If the three weeping women had Bushmasters--the gun of choice of patriots and "responsible" gun owners, they wouldn't have been weeping. And they might have watered the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  
 …  It seems that Brother Dick hasn't got his "man card" yet or he would have been carrying. 

Now, to me, that reads like satire as well, and rather broader.  Yet apparently a number of readers took it seriously,  and got all in a worrit.  These were then scolded by another poster,  saying that the original poster showed “irony …  so plain that his tongue was practically sticking out the other cheek? Lighten up, people.”

Since I don’t know anything about the original poster, I can’t be sure whether it reflects his actual politics.  Nor is that in itself of the least importance.    The point here is simply that it has become difficult, in some cases, to distinguish between satire and actual delusion.

[Update 5 janvier 2013]  Tel un bacille:

Four people were dead including the gunman following a hostage-taking incident on Saturday in Aurora, Colorado, the same town where a man shot dead 12 people and wounded 58 more at a movie theater last July. 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/05/us-usa-shooting-colorado-idUSBRE90408W20130105

(This world is too weird;  I should get back to math...)

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For further productions from this pen, click here:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html