The Importance of Civil Liberties and the Dangerous Illusion of Safety

[I must disclaim that I've utmost respect for Mr Lee and that this post is not directly related to whether his rule was good or bad. It's unfortunate that such political correctness is needed but considering the emotionally charged atmosphere currently sweeping the country, this is necessary. This post is directed at former NMP Calvin Cheng's http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-west-has-it-totally-wrong-on-lee-kuan-yew-10135641.html which is a laughable piece of social commentary.]

Some people have recently lauded Calvin Cheng's post about how we're better off not having the fundamental civil liberty of freedom that the West rattles on and on about, because we're free in our own way. We're definitely safe from general harm on the streets because we're orderly and safe from disease in the water because our infrastructure is good. We're also possibly free from discrimination, and Calvin hints at the meritocratic education system for providing fair access to opportunity (although that's at best contentious). I'm definitely grateful for these things. But the article has a severe misunderstanding of what fundamental civil liberties are and why they're important.

Fundamental civil liberties are personal guarantees and freedoms that the government cannot abridge, either by law or by judicial interpretation. Some examples of civil liberties include freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom from torture, the right to security and liberty, the right to privacy, the right to equal treatment and due process, the right to a fair trial, and the right to life. These civil liberties did not arise overnight; through long periods of philosophical inquiry undergirded by significant historical events, these ideals materialized in order to protect people from societal harm. Calvin Cheng's poor treatment of this important philosophical tradition reduces his article pretty much to noise.

It’s tempting to think of safety as a kind of freedom, and safety appears to be loosely interchanged with freedom in Calvin Cheng's article. However, safety is not freedom; a bird that is well fed in it's pristine golden cage with rations of food and water every day and is kept safe from the cat while behind metal bars still isn't free. Some people prefer safety to the proper civil liberty of freedom. That’s fine; people (should) have the right to choose whichever side of the fence they want to be on.

But why then, if Singapore appears to be able to do without civil liberties such as freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial (as in the case of political opposers who were detained or bankrupted), or even the right to life (the legalized death penalty simply makes the state a legalized killer which has its fair share of problems, such as in the recent case of Yong Vui Kong), should we perhaps care about civil liberties?

Civil liberties are important because they concern how much power the state should have when dealing with people who have compromised the law, especially when of course the state itself determines what the law should be. Caring about civil liberties is therefore important because the state is a powerful political tool, and whoever becomes the head of state has these political tools at his or her disposal. If you do not enforce and constitutionalize civil liberties, the balance of power falls heavily in favor of the state. If anything, the rhetoric of safety has been a useful political veil to stop people from questioning whether we truly are free. A country that does not value human freedoms puts its people at risk of anyone hungry enough to want and acquire that power for his or her own personal interests.

Why am I grateful for LKY? Because despite having so much power in his hands, he used it with more rather than less decency (and with such courage against so many odds too, I have to add). I am grateful because I am lucky. Yeah, people who are either legitimately marginalized or simply perceiving that they are marginalized by his rule will disagree, but as a beneficiary myself of the system I can’t not be grateful that he has been, on the whole, very kind to me. But are we always going to be this lucky that good leaders will keep getting behind the steering wheel of such powerful political apparatus? None of us can say for sure. To assume that Singapore will keep being such a pristine cage because we have chosen safety over freedom just shows how little thought we have and can put into the sort of political lives that we lead.

Fundamental civil liberties matter because they keep the government in check. They provide at least some means to challenge the state and protect the people should a less than competent leader come to power. Calvin Cheng's rhetoric about safety is embarrassing, to say the least. It’s rather funny and ironic how he ends off with "there was no trade-off. not for us", happy and unaware that anything has been lost. You can't really tradeoff when you're unaware that there’s a tradeoff at all.

Lee Kuan Yew Tribute

Power and politics. The ethics of the state are distinct from the ethics of humanity. Those who do not or cannot partake in the struggle for power can only hope that, amidst the chaos, the biggest badass that remains standing has his own interests aligned as much as possible with the public's. And for better or worse, we've had a pretty decent run.

To your guile, cunning, foresight, political acumen, and leadership, here's a toast. Have a good rest, old man.

A moralist's free will puts him in chains.

Thank You God

Quite deliciously delightful.

Je Suis Charlie.

Satire is a fundamentally important check-and-balance tool. It assists uneducated, uninformed, or unmotivated audiences to accomplish the mental journey necessary to understand the flaws of any dogma.

"Political satire to be most effective
is caustic, unfair and never objective
with all this in mind, you may ask why im for it
the answer is simple: tyrants abhor it”
– Leonard Freedman, The Offensive Art

National Stories

Beauty

This is Moscow's Kristina Pimenova, described as the "most beautiful girl in the world." As of today at the tender age of 6, Kristina has appeared on the cover of Vogue Bambini and has already had fashion collaborations with designer brands like Roberto Cavalli and Benetton. You can see more of her pictures at http://www.womendailymagazine.com/beautiful-girl-world-kristina-pimenova/.


Beauty is, to put it squarely, an enthralling subject. There is no line that captures the power of beauty as succinctly as that of Faustus in Christopher Marlowe's 1604 play, Doctor Faustus: "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" (Act V, Scene I.) Chuck Palahniuk also attests to this as he wrote in Invisible Monsters, "It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power." Beauty is powerful because historically, traditionally, and conventionally, beauty is scarce. To borrow another great quote from H. L. Dietrich, beauty is endowed upon those who have it because it's a destiny that's "decided by a cosmic roll of the dice". Beauty is something you're born with. Beauty is a gift. Beauty is a privilege of the lucky few who have it. Some people indeed see this as a matter of life being unfair. But that's how it is because if life is fair and the qualities that we value are no longer scarce because everyone is entitled to their share of them, then they will no longer be valuable.

This is happening in our world today though. Cosmetic products are increasingly available and sophisticated. People are becoming more and more adept at manipulating beauty. And if that's not enough, surgery can change everything. This shift in the perception and value of beauty is monumental, because beauty now becomes a commodity like many other common goods. Beauty is no longer given the due respect it has garnered in the past. If you weren't born beautiful, you had to find another place and role in society that you could be content with. To be fair, there are historical stories of people so envious of the beauty of their rivals that they kill. But there are also countless other stories of people who accept their lot and focus on other qualities that they have. The most degrading aspect of this modern change against beauty is that people are feeling increasingly entitled to beauty. With the vast number of people in the world today who have cosmetically enhanced their looks (certainly at a standard much higher than people in the past could), beauty's power and sacred place in the world is undermined.

Life isn't fair, maybe. But that's how life is. Perhaps with god-given aspects such as structural poverty, redistributive justice can go a long way to help those dealt with a bad hand in life. But with god-given beauty, life is fair in its unfairness, and rightly so, and our obsession to right this "wrong" has sadly turned beauty into something so ugly today.

Why Study History?

"People often ask, what is the purpose of studying history? They sometimes imagine that we study history in order to predict the future, or in order to learn from past mistakes. In my view, we should study history not in order to learn from the past, but in order to be free of it.

Each of us is born into a particular world, governed by a particular system of norms and values, and a particular economic and political order. Since we are born into it, we take the surrounding reality to be natural and inevitable, and we tend to think that the way people today live their lives is the only possible way. We seldom realize that the world we know is the accidental outcome of chance historical events, which condition not only our technology, politics and economics but even the way we think and dream. This is how the past grips us by the back of the head, and turn our eyes towards a single possible future. We have felt the grip of the past from the moment we were born, so we don’t even notice it. The study of history aims to loosen this grip, and to enable us to turn our head around more freely, to think in new ways, and to see many more possible futures."

- Yuval Noah Harari

Check out www.talentoday.com for a look at your personality and motivations profile.

I'm quite unmotivated according to these rubrics LOL

Female Vs. Male Identity Crises

Men and women chugged along just fine in their roles for the last 20,000 years or so (or earlier if you want to consider our evolutionary ancestors along the homo genus line). When and why does gender role and identity confusion come about?

This happens when the expectations of the role and identity no longer accord with "tradition". It is arguable what tradition really means, but if we go back to our evolutionary roots, males and females perform particular biological functions, and it all then branches out from there. While this may seem somewhat deterministic, it is the very basis of how we got to where we are. Tough luck.

Our gender identities are then a subsequent product of these biological functions. By the roll of nature's dice (which isn't actually all that random), mammalian females tend to be the more selective sex while mammalian males have to compete for access to the sexual resources provided by conspecific females (of course this pattern is moderated by all sorts of other environmental factors, such as sex ratio and the social status of males, but the general pattern holds true). Therefore, women have traditionally been bestowed nurturing and homely roles, while men have traditionally been expected to go out and bring home the bacon, so to speak. Females often are expected to be coy and charm the males when on the mating market, and then expected to spend a larger of proportion of time than males taking care of children. All of this, in general and on average, of course.

Fast-forward then to the world of today. The proliferation of gender studies associated with the female identity is certainly an offshoot of the changing expectations on females. The modern, urban, and professional world is increasingly a world that blurs the divide between men and women. The more that people are obliged, compelled, or attracted to work in big multinational companies and take up professional working roles, the more that people have to behave.... well, like men. Simply put, the competitive world out there is a world that men have traditionally populated. Whether men created the rules of the game or not, it's pretty much a masculine environment.

This picture pretty much sums a lot of things up:

Although veiled behind the issue of physical attractiveness, females constantly struggle with expectations (and their associated effects with self-esteem) as a consequence of standards that are varied and often contradictory. Is she supposed to be submissive or strong? Is she supposed to stay home or work? Contemporary expectations of females do not make it easy. On the other hand, the male role tends to be very specific, and has remained stable relative to the female role. In short, for men, often there is no issue. Either you fit (good for you), or you don't (better buck up, or lose the benefits associated with being manly).

As we move along, if expectations on the male identity become more complicated (as is starting to happen now with the expansion of stereotypes of men), we can also expect to see an associated boom in the number of studies and attention accorded to the male identity crisis.

Community

Was having lunch at the coffee shop, when the cries of "Lai loh! Lai loh!" (i.e., "coming!") filled the air. The carpark ticketing uncle had been spotted, and now off go the sirens! All the guilty patrons paused mid-activity, got off their seats, and scampered over to the carpark to generally do something about the situation. The ticketing uncle looked over at the coffee shop and raised his hands exasperatedly, his facial expressions spelling out "walaoeh" rather palpably.

This is a community at work, and in this seemingly trivial example lies a powerful message. Power doesn't exist in a vacuum. There is no power without social endorsement of that power, and when a group of people do not obey, then the powers that be no longer exist. This is a trivial example, but the logic prevails in other, more consequential circumstances - such as in corrupt police forces and illegitimate authoritarian governments.

The community and its sounders at the coffeeshop serve to police the neighbourhood they care about in their own way, and that's why this silly little example is trivial yet heartwarming. The community is the most important, protective, and inclusive unit of society and through it the abuse of power from a source external to the community can be prevented. There are so many things that compromise on community spirit these days. When we lose community, we lose what is rightly ours.

Function before Form

We heat dead meat over a fire to kill bacteria before consumption. Then we make all sorts of cuisines as varied expressions of the ability to do this, to ascribe status differences to different groups of people, to satisfy tastes and preferences.

We wear the skin of dead animals or the woven products of plants. Then we make all sorts of fashion styles to denote rank and satisfy whims and fancies.

Survival defines the function, culture defines the form.

You're in the house, but you're not sure if you are.

You ask desperately to clarify this, but the reply is in a foreign language.

Life Lessons by Walter Mitty

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Wow. What a movie.

There are three wows about this. Firstly, it's the first proper movie I've watched in a long time (since The Dark Knight Rises, which wasn't exactly great either compared to The Dark Knight). The recent Hobbit movie and Wolverine were terrible. This one was a good hit.

Secondly, wow Ben Stiller. You've done good, really good, compared to your comedy counterparts.

Thirdly, there are so many feels about this movie.

Where to start? (There are potentially spoilers here, so don't read on if you don't want to know before you've watched the show)

There's the theme of taking the leap. Just going on a limb, listening to your heart, and taking the plunge. What's there to lose? We spend so much time nowadays letting our soul decay, as our bodies that were designed to totally take in the vastness of the world are left wanting.

I wonder if this movie benefits eHarmony. In some ways, it's publicity, but in other ways, it's such a dig at the whole concept of online virtual (read: unrealistic) dating. By actually going out there and really doing things, one becomes a valuable person. Very often, we hear of people complaining and whining about that crush who did not reciprocate his or her feelings. Look inside. Build yourself up as a person, and be someone that people want to know better. Have goals in life, and pursue them wholeheartedly. Be attractive not because you're hot, but because you can offer something of value to others. Your confidence will grow with your self-worth.

"Beautiful things don't ask for attention." What a quote. To seek it, you've lost it. True beauty radiates naturally.

When Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn) refuses to take the picture of the snow leopard immediately, that's it right there. That we as an audience can be surprised at this act underlies the fact that many of us have forgotten how to enjoy the moment for what it is. This is one of my favorite scenes from the movie.

In our technologically advanced modern world, we are obsessed with certainty. It's true that uncertainty generally sucks, but with our modern technology, we are getting better at quantifying everything. It's fucking obsessive. We can increase precision to unfathomable lengths, we have numbers for everything, we want to know what time the bus is coming. There was a time when most of these things were unimportant, except for specialists whose jobs to ensure accuracy and precision we depend on if necessary. Technology enables us to do more things, but at the same time makes us crave for certainty. It's a mindfuck. The moment we know we can put a number to things, we will want to do it, even if we don't have to or were doing fine without quantifying things. Weighing scales telling us our weight to two decimal places make us obsess about how heavy we are. Prices on things make us count what people owe us. All this obsessive photography of all the most inane things as if we are afraid we will forget what we saw is craziness. We forget how to view life without lenses that will capture every goddamned moment, when instead we should be in the moment - the feelings that come along with that moment last a life time. The details - How did this food look? How did the singer look? How did the fucking giraffe look? - are far less important. And we kill feelings when we are overwhelmingly obsessed with capturing every single minute detail.

Embrace uncertainty. Let the numbers go. Be in control by letting go of certainty. Have meaningful pursuits, and don't be afraid to go for them.

Evolutionary Mismatch Theory

One of the more recent perspectives to have guided our understanding of psychology and human behavior has been evolution and natural selection, and one very important theory derived from an evolutionary perspective is the theory of evolutionary mismatch. I think this is worth presenting at a layman level because it answers so many questions about why on earth we behave in such weird ways.

Dan Ariely's book, Predictably Irrational, outlines an array of seemingly irrational ways that humans behave. A more comprehensive list of such irrationalities, technically known as cognitive biases, can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases. Cognitive biases distort the way we perceive the world away from its objective features towards some other (incorrect) perception or interpretation of it.

Why do these psychological biases happen? The environment we live in today is drastically different from the environment we used to live in during ancestral times. Ancestral environments were particularly harsh, and many events were significantly a matter of life or death (and more accurately, a matter of reproduction or failure to reproduce). Harsh environments exert greater selection pressure on its inhabitants, since only those who survived could pass on their genes. Today's world is relatively secure and safe compared to the past and, as such, changes in our human nature are less likely. Additionally, our world has developed extremely rapidly such that our genetic makeup has not caught up. Our skulls therefore house stone-age brains, as described by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. Our mind (and body) was forged through the trials and tribulations of an ancient world, and has remained largely suited for that ancient world, while the world itself changed to become more technologically advanced. As a result, we are still more afraid of snakes than cars and electric sockets, even though we're less likely to encounter and get killed by snakes than cars and electric sockets. In the psychological realm of human mating, women still care very much about how much a man earns (men don't care as much about how much women earn), despite the fact that many modern women today are capable of being financially independent, because women are still adapted to an environment where gaining the provision and protection of a resourceful mate increased her chances of survival.

Quite importantly, these biases suggest to us that we were not evolved to know the truth. We could, in principle, seek the truth consciously (which is what scientists do vocationally). However, the senses we are equipped with do not directly lead us to perceiving reality accurately; rather, they bias our thoughts and behavior in a way that best maximizes survival and reproduction. For instance, in a harsh ancestral environment, "losses" (such as injury or loss of food) may soon lead to death or failure to reproduce; people are therefore adapted to generally be more sensitive to losses than gains. Advertisements that tell consumers what they stand to lose are more effective than those informing consumers what they stand to gain. If a certain delusion enables an individual to survive and reproduce better, then that inaccurate, indeed irrational, way of perceiving the world will be more likely passed down into future generations. Rational truth is a luxury of our modern world.

We evolved in an outdated environment, but today's world doesn't facilitate the updating of many of the psychological traits that we have. Our irrationalities are a result of the mismatch between today's world and the ancestral world that our ancestors evolved in. And we were evolved to survive and reproduce first and foremost; truth-seeking comes later.

Don't make promises when you're happy. Don't reply when you're angry. Don't make decisions when you're sad.

And don't text when you're drunk LOL

Implied Value and Actual Value

Past a quarter of a century, I think I've had some fairly decent life experiences to be able to justifiably start making some observations and claims which may hold true (aside from the fact that study and research is a profession I'm engaged in).

One of these aspects of life is value, or more specifically how others see value in you. Value leads to being desired, being preferred, and being attractive (not always in the sense of looking good - although that is certainly one form of it - but in the sense of garnering attention either because the attractiveness is an end in itself, or implies some other underlying quality).

Value is made up broadly of two things - implied value and actual value. Both are important in the long-term, particularly actual value, but sad to say, in the short-term and for immediate assessment purposes implied value is more critical and important. Humans are evolved to take cognitive shortcuts in many decision-making moments, especially when there is a lot of uncertainty, so they rely on heuristic cues and snap-judgments; indeed, people form first impressions rapidly and seldom waver from that first impression. If a person has high actual value but low implied value, nobody would give him the chance to demonstrate his actual value. Implied value is the gateway to demonstrating one's actual worth and substance.

I'm far from being a successful person, but I suppose my life so far has been rather charmed. I'm on a path towards something I'm passionate about, I have balance between various social domains ranging from friends to solitude to work to relationships, it's easy to build meaningful connections with people, and I'm handed roles and opportunities wherever I go from people who are confident that I can deliver. There is little else more fulfilling for a man to be judged as competent, or of value. Self-esteem is hinged on how much one is accepted and included in social relations, and male emotional and psychological well-being is highly dependent on being respected for his capability. I think I'm doing okay there.

I think this has a lot to do with how I've capitalized upon implied value so far in my life. Whether I learnt it somewhere along the way or was lucky enough to have reaped the benefits of putting up a strong front since young, I have known for quite a while that first impressions are critical for anyone else to give a damn about anything else you might have to offer. I think an interesting example of this is my ability, from a very young age, to juggle a football quite well. Football juggling, while fancy and perhaps implies good ball control, has little to do with actual field performance, such as being able to dribble past opponents or coordinate well with teammates. However, people still link good football juggling skills (very visible and easily executed implied value) with good football playing skills (requires longer term assessment of actual value), and as a result I have always been associated with being rather good at playing football and often got selected to make the team (the reality is that while I think I was an above average player in my younger days, over the years I never really fulfilled this promise). And boy, did I dedicate an obsessive amount of effort to perfecting the art of keeping a football in the air. The point is that these two levels of value require investment of time and effort towards, and it is woeful to neglect one over the other.

There are people who have far more implied value than actual value. In dating, these are douchebags and players who jack up implied mate value, such as by using suave lines, deliberately gaming the mating psychology of women using pick-up tricks, and utilizing social proof by surrounding themselves with lots of women, while having very little relationship building substance to offer in the long run. In marketing, these are products that have extremely gimmicky advertising and branding but are actually rather subpar in performance. In the office, these are office rats who do everything to look good, such as sucking up to the boss and doing things well only when their effort is conspicuous, but actually skive and slack off on projects when nobody's looking, resulting in loss of efficiency and productivity for the company as a whole. The reality is that a person can exploit a very high implied value so that the trust, reciprocity, and investment from others can be acquired because they fall for a shiny exterior believing that there is more to be gained back from the person having high implied value. A person using such a strategy can get away with it these days because our highly socially mobile world allows him or her to move on to others quickly. The fact that s/he has little actual value requires repeated interactions with the same people before they can catch him or her out on the bullshit.

However, on the other hand, there are people who have a great deal of actual value, but tragically have implied value that is too low for anyone to bother. In our fast-paced world, people gauge actual value from implied value, and as a result these folks with high actual value but low implied value get passed over.

People can do this unknowingly. There are nice, decent guys who think it is good enough to just work hard and that just desserts will come later. This is clearly not always the case anymore - girls pass over a guy who does all the hardwork of chasing her for relationship commitment, employers pass over an employee with years of valuable experience but who has a badly written CV, consumers pass over superior products with poor advertising and branding. It is unfortunate, but this is the reality of human nature.

On the other hand, people can also do this knowingly. I have little sympathy for this camp. People who knowingly have low implied value but do nothing about it often do so to uphold some kind of ideological stance, but the underlying justification is often somewhere along the lines of: "why should I bother, people should see me for who I am, I am fighting a just war against superficiality." This is plainly petulant and immature thinking.

Understanding that there are two levels to value provides hope for those who have high actual value but unknowingly have not been working on their implied value. It is surprisingly easy to increase implied value, and the rewards are immense. It is not difficult to be more presentable. Throw on some fitting clothes, hit a neighbourhood gym that does not charge exorbitant membership rates, go get a decent haircut. Image is the first step that people take to gauge whether somebody bothers to put in the effort. It is not difficult to be more interesting. Take part in a wine tasting event, sign up to learn a new dance, explore a new language, give diving or skiing a try, and/or travel. Even if you're not particularly skilled at the end of the day in any of these activities, having any experience at all in these other areas of life besides your 9-5 job gives people the impression that you potentially have more to offer, which makes you more interesting. It is not difficult to seem competent (which is just another way of saying implied value). Walk straight, do not slouch, maintain a confident poise, be bold, dare to talk to people, listen with a keen ear, and have something interesting to say in return (which is therefore dependent on trying out all those other experience-building activities). People follow when you take the lead.

If in the unfortunate circumstance you realize that you have high actual value but low implied value, you are now a knowingly low implied value individual already by definition. There is then no longer any excuse to not work on being presentable or interesting. It should be a personal responsibility. Your life quality will increase with this, and everyone else who would now bother to access your actual value will gain too from what you can offer. To lament the superficiality of this reality is to cop out. Do not allow that. Take active and positive steps to enhance implied value, while quietly working on your actual value in the background so that you can return on the trust that others have given as a result of being attracted to your implied value.

These are two critical aspects to being of value to others, and implied value is often tragically neglected, either knowingly or unknowingly.

Keep it nice and vague. Black and white is boring; I thrive right in the grey.

Mental Complexity and why Everything Seems so Seamless

In Chapter 3 (The Kind of Mind it Takes) of Pascal Boyer's book, Religion Explained, he provides what I personally consider to be one of the best analogies for the complexity, specialization, and efficiency of the human mind.


"About halfway through Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the heroine Elizabeth and her relatives are given a tour of the house and grounds at Pemberley, the vast estate of her proud acquaintance and spurned suitor Mr. Darcy. The place is grand (“The rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture suitable to the fortune of their proprietor”) and promises pleasures thus far unfamiliar to Elizabeth (“To be mistress of Pemberley might be something!”). Being no social historian, Elizabeth is more interested in the many delights of owning these commodious apartments and lush gardens than in the hard work involved in maintaining this kind of household. She lives Upstairs and does not talk much about (or even consider) what happens Downstairs.

But a lot happened downstairs. The efficient running of large households like Pemberley, with stables and fields, gardens and kitchens, guest rooms and dependents’ quarters, required the execution of precisely defined tasks distributed among dozens of specialists—house steward, housekeeper, groom of the chambers, butler, valet, lady’s maid, chef, footman, underbufler, young ladies’ maid, housemaid, stillroom maid, scullery maid, kitchen maid, laundry maid, dairymaid, coachman, groom, postilion, candleman, oddman, steward’s room man and servants’ hail boy, to name but a few. These specialists all had a precisely defined position in a hierarchy (there were several castes of servants, such as the Upper Ten or the Lower Five, which dined separately) and specific duties. The chef cooked but had no control over wine. The butler decanted wine but the stiilroom maid handled the china. With this complex division of labor came a complex chain of command. The housekeeper hired and directed all the female servants but not the lady’s maids and nurses; the steward, not the butler, could give orders to the chef; the chef controlled the preparation of food but not its serving, which was the butler’s domain.’

What is truly impressive about this system is how invisible it remained to the denizens of upstairs rooms, especially to house guests. Food and drink would appear magically at the appointed time, freshly shined boots would be brought to bedrooms in the morning. Even the owners of such places had but a vague notion of the complicated hierarchy and distribution of tasks, which was the steward’s full-time occupation. As a guest, you would not even perceive any of this but only marvel at how efficiently it all seemed to work. However, another feeling (commonly evinced by visitors to such places) was that getting everything you could possibly need is not quite the same as getting what you want. For the complex hierarchy came with a certain measure of independence and rigidity. Footmen were not supposed to do a valet’s work and vice versa. Kitchen maids who cleaned floors would not make breakfast for you. Your boots would be shined, but only in the morning—the relevant people were busy at other times. So master and guest could certainly nudge this organizational juggernaut in certain directions but they could neither really direct it nor in fact clearly understand how it worked.

THE GUEST’S VIEW OF THE MIND

It is unfortunate, and almost inevitable, that when we talk about religion we quite literally do not know what we are talking about. We may think we know our own thoughts (“I know what I believe; I believe that ghosts can walk through walls”), but a good part of religious concepts is hidden from conscious inspection: for instance the expectation that ghosts see what is in front of them, that they remember what happened after it happened, that they believe what they remember and remember what they perceived (not the other way around) and so on. This is so because a good part of what makes all concepts remains beyond conscious access.

Another misconception is that we can explain people’s having particular thoughts if we can understand their reasons for holding them. (“They believe in ghosts because they cannot bear the grief of losing people”; “they believe in God because otherwise human existence does not make sense,” etc.) But the mind is a complex set of biological machines that produce all sorts of thoughts. For many thoughts there is no reasonable reason, as it were, except that they are the inevitable result of the way the machines work. Do we have a good reason for having a precise memory of people’s faces and forgetting their names? No, but that is the way human memory works. The same applies to religious concepts, whose persistence and effects are explained by the way various mental systems work.

Now having a complex brain is like being a guest at Pemberley. We enjoy the many advantages of that efficient organization, but we have no real knowledge of what happens downstairs, of how many different systems are involved in making mental life possible. The organization of mental systems is in fact far more complex than anything you would find in the most extravagant household.

At Pemberley, different servants poured wine and tea; in a more modest household, the same person would have carried out both tasks. Because our mental basement usually works very well, we tend to think that it must be simple in organization. We often have a suburban view of the mind, assuming that a few servants may be enough; but that is only an illusion, and the brain is much more like a grand estate. What makes the system work smoothly is the exquisite coordination of many specialized systems, each of which handles only a fragment of the information with which we are constantly bombarded."



Boyer, P. (2001). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Inequality, Marriage, and Republican Irony

Income inequality is a major factor contributing to either delayed marriages, lower rates of marriage, or divorce. From an evolutionary perspective, women value status in men as long-term partners, and likewise men can use their status as a bargaining chip to attract women. In highly unequal countries, very rich men have less of an incentive to commit to one partner, while very poor men have problems attracting a mate. Constants are also less interesting when it comes to observable preferences - we can only exert selective behavior based on variations, not constants (e.g., if everyone's good looking, it's no longer interesting; you'll find personality traits to be more appealing). In highly unequal societies, women therefore may also become more selective about long term marriage partners as they calibrate their standards in relation to the men who are more successful.

One immediate irony of the Republican Party elucidated by this insight is that although they claim that gay rights undermine marriage, their advocacy of capitalism and pro-business policies actually lead to greater income inequality (for which they actually consider as justifiable), which ultimately undermines marriage.