Is it possible to recognize and express different opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while maintaining reasoned debate?

This is going to be a long post – and I enter it feeling nervous. Is this going to simply further and entrench existing arguments, or does it open, just a little bit, a door to constructive debate? Can I hold honestly to my own conclusions while doing this? It’s all been prompted by a conversation with my colleague and very well informed friend, Mike Arkus.

If you do read part of this, or even all of this, of course I’d be interested in hearing your views – in the spirit of reasoned debate in which we can look at our differing opinions through a fair lens.

Firstly, where do I come from and why am I interested in this conflict?

As a British student I volunteered to teach English to Palestinians, and ended up teaching Palestinian trainee-teachers in Bethlehem on the West Bank one summer in the early 80s. Yes, I’m that old.

I knew little about the conflict before going (some might argue I haven’t learned much in the meantime) but I enjoyed my stay there, was intrigued by the conversations I had, and felt a connection to the Palestinians I met. Since then I’ve returned a couple of times with the UN filming stories on the West Bank and Gaza, and I’ve made multiple visits to Middle Eastern countries, and have followed the debate closely wherever I’ve been.

So do I feel a closer connection with the Palestinians? Yes, I plead guilty. I have spoken and listened to Israelis fairly frequently too, but I have more of an emotional connection to Palestinians, since I’ve simply spent more time with them.

Broadly and crudely speaking, I think my views on the conflict are probably similar to a Haaretz-reading Israeli liberal, probably a supporter of Peace Now or similar (even though these strands have been under attack in Israel and are certainly less popular and widespread recently, as far as I understand.)

Does that disqualify me from stating a public opinion on the conflict? I don’t think so. Firstly, I try to read carefully and to inform myself on the subject, while clearly recognizing that many are better informed, and that to be either Israeli or Palestinian will give a different dimension and perspective.

But that raises a question: are you disqualified from having a public opinion on this subject if you feel more affinity for one of the peoples involved? If so, then, presumably, the overwhelming majority of both the Israeli and Palestinian populations would be disqualified, and anyone who has family or ethnic ties to either of the groups. Yes, sure, there probably are some people who have a perfect equilibrium of emotional empathy and sympathy, but my guess is that they are in the minority.

(By the way, please don’t misread this: in reality I think it’s quite right that we should give more weight to the opinions of Israelis and Palestinians, than to mine for example – since it’s their lives that are on the line.)

So I would submit that we can have a reasoned debate while being upfront about where we are coming from and what ties and affinities we feel for the people involved in the conflict.

“BOTH AND” NOT “EITHER OR” – COMPLEX NOT SIMPLE.

I see the conflict as a “both and” conflict. In many debates – not just the Israeli-Palestinian one, which I’ll name IP for convenience – I observe that it’s hard for many of us to hold two simultaneous but contrasting thoughts at the same time – or to admit to doing so.

Just to pluck one example: I believe that Obamacare has created a great improvement in American lives. At the same time I believe that a single-payer health system would be better. One thought does not, in fact, contradict the other.

Of all the conflicts I know of around the world, to me IP is the exemplar of a “both and” conflict. For every pro-Palestinian point, there is a pro-Israeli point. For every Israeli perspective (and of course there are many more than one Israeli perspective – my second theme) there is a Palestinian perspective (Palestinian perspectives).

If significant perspectives are left out or rejected, I believe the hope for forward progress is minimised.

It’s probable – inevitable, that I miss some Israeli perspectives – and very likely Palestinian ones two. But what drives me frankly nuts, and what finds me involved in vociferous debates about IP, is that I often see only one view being expressed. That’s a big, big problem in this debate. (And yes, I’m sometimes guilty of this myself: one example: it was pointed out to me that an early draft of a piece on the West Bank I did for the UN had excluded lines referring to Israeli perspectives. I duly inserted them).

Secondly – to the BOTH AND point: for every bald, simple statement on IP, there’s a more complex and far more accurate (in my view) statement.

Two examples:

• Hamas is a terrorist organization.
• Israelis support right-wing politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu.

While there’s some truth to both statements, I argue that both statements are misleading and incomplete and don’t lead (in isolation) to constructive debate.

I’ll refer more to this later.

OK – some “BOTH ANDS” – starting with some basic, and for me, essential ones.

Without grounding an approach on these, we are not going to have reasoned debate:

BOTH

Israelis have the right to live securely, autonomously, independently with full political freedoms, without being subject to threat and attack. They are human beings. They have all the rights bestowed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

AND

Palestinians have the right to live securely, autonomously, independently with full political freedoms, without being subject to threat and attack. They are human beings. They have all the rights bestowed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I often see instances in public debate that contradict this: enormous discussion of Israelis’ legitimate security needs, with virtually no mention of the Palestinians’ own need for security, for example. OR enormous discussion of military aggression against the Palestinians without mentioning that Israelis are also under attack and feel afraid and have a legitimate right of self-defense.

The problem is that personally I find myself arguing vociferously for the Palestinian case, when I’m confronted by a version of events that excludes the Palestinian side entirely.

BOTH

Hamas and other militant groups commit war crimes by indiscriminately firing thousands of missiles at civilian targets. This of course must be condemned, and I do. The evidence for this is overwhelming and I don’t think I need document it.

AND

Israel stands accused of committing war crimes by legitimate human rights groups such as the Israeli organization B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch (I will refer to accusations against HRW later) for breaching international law with unlawful and disproportionate attacks:

See for example HRW’s report on Israeli attacks on three schools during the 2014 Gaza conflict: https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/09/11/israel-depth-look-gaza-school-attacks

B’Tselem on the 2014 conflict generally: they conclude that international humanitarian law was violated by both sides: http://www.btselem.org/publications/summaries/201501_black_flag

By saying “both and” I’m not saying there is direct equivalence on both sides. Clearly there are differences.

On one side, for example, Hamas and other groups openly target civilians in a very obvious way.

On the Israeli side, I quote David Shulman, (David Shulman is the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an activist in Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership): “anyone who knows the Israeli army knows that, for all its faults and failings, it does not have a policy of deliberately targeting innocent civilians.”

However, Shulman is extremely critical of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, and describes the adoption in recent years of a “zero risk” strategy – “My claim, on the basis of direct testimonies from soldiers who took part in the Cast Lead campaign, is that previously accepted rules of engagement were changed and that a “zero-risk” policy was adopted—for the first time in Israel’s history. In effect, this can only mean greater civilian casualties.” He later writes: “Moreover, the absence of a policy to kill civilians deliberately is not enough; actions that inevitably result in high civilian casualties, and that follow from premeditated decisions on the part of the army command, remain crimes of war.” (Source: NY Review of Books).

So of course, we are in the weeds of the dispute here.

BOTH

It’s a war crime for Hamas to use civilians as human shields, and to fire from densely civilian areas – and it poses a very difficult dilemma for the Israeli military.

AND

It’s a war crime to kill civilians disproportionately to the military advantage gained. And there are choices, as Shulman posits above, about a military’s actions and policies. Also, it’s been pointed out that some weapons are more notoriously inaccurate than others: for example artillery shells tend to be less accurate than air-dropped smart bombs. So, say, for example, a small group of militants fires a mortar from near a school and quickly departs. Is it legitimate for the military to fire an artillery shell at that location, knowing there’s a high possibility of killing dozens of people in the school (and there’s no doubt whatsoever about the location of the school or that there are children and families sheltering there, since the school has repeatedly informed the IDF of both these things)?

BOTH

The Israeli military has probably done more than most and perhaps all other militaries in sending warnings via leaflets, or warning missiles to people in Gaza.

AND

Frequently the warnings came too late, or were not seen. And in Gaza there is, almost literally, no single safe space a Gazan can go to when under attack. Quite a few were unable to move anyway – elderly, infirm, small children.

BOTH

The IDF is arguably morally superior to the majority of other armies, and certainly to Hamas in issuing warnings in advance.

AND

The fact that a warning has been given doesn’t absolve the military in question from observing international law. If you give a warning, and then kill a disproportionate number of civilians compared to the military advantage gained, it’s still a war crime. The civilians don’t become fair game. It’s also a war crime to deliberately destroy civilian infrastructure like electricity plants.

Back to equivalence issues. Yes, Hamas more brazenly and more clearly violates human rights law. On the other hand the Israeli military kill far more Palestinians. Over recent years scores of Palestinians have been killed to every one Israeli killed. So the practical impact of the two sides’ military actions and decisions are vastly unequal. Of the more than 2000 Palestinians killed in Gaza in the 2014 conflict, around 500 were minors. According to UNICEF 70% of the minors who died were under the age of twelve. 66 Israeli soldiers and 5 Israeli civilians were killed.

BOTH

Israelis have every right to live without fear of being rocketed, or blown up by suicide bombers.

AND

Palestinians have every right to live without fear of being shelled, bombed or shot, in large numbers.

BOTH

Israelis are surrounded by large hostile countries that have either attacked the country or supported terror attacks over the years. Given history and the holocaust it is completely understandable if many suffer from existential terror.

AND

If you are a Palestinian you face a regional military superpower, which has overwhelming military superiority over any entity in the region and a proven willingness to use it on a large scale. Israel is also backed to the hilt by the largest military power in the world – the US. It is also the only nuclear-armed state in the region, possessing up to 200 weapons. If you are a Palestinian, or a citizen from Lebanon or Iran for example, you have reason to feel terror as well.

BOTH AND SIMPLE COMPLEX

Hamas is a terrorist organization. Its charter calls for the destruction of Israel. It has supported rocket attacks fired indiscriminately against Israeli citizens.

AND

Hamas provides a broad array of municipal services to the population of Gaza, and it was initially elected in a democratic election. By participating in the elections, and in its more recent rapprochement with the Palestinian Authority, it implicitly endorsed the PA’s agreement with Israel, which involves recognition of Israel.

Hamas has frequently restrained militant groups from firing rockets at Israel, and has upheld ceasefires, arguably at times more reliably than the IDF.

Should the Israelis and others talk to Hamas? Some prominent Israelis have argued that they should. For example, former Labour Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami who argued that Hamas took a decision to “enter politics” and that you therefore need to talk with them. Others, such as Amos Oz, one of the founders of Peace Now, have long been in favour of negotiations. He has frequently argued something to the effect that you don’t have to love your enemies, in fact you might hate their guts, but it’s better to come to practical agreements with them.

(Just as an aside I’m a huge admirer of Amos Oz, partly because he’s an absolutely excellent novelist, but also for his insight and knowledge. I interviewed him once when I was at the BBC.)

Ehud Olmert, the ex-PM, also argued something similar.

So do Israelis uniformly support the policies of PM Benjamin Netanyahu?

Of course not. Many disagree with him strongly on the Palestinian issue – or, for that matter, on Iran (including senior former intelligence officials). It’s probably under-reported that many of the human rights activists that protest evictions and settler activity in the occupied territories are Israeli.

Have Palestinians often been let down by their leaders? Yes, quite a few have been corrupt, undemocratic and removed from the needs of ordinary Palestinians. But I also think personally that Israelis are not served by leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu who seems to put all of his considerable cunning into blocking any real chance of peaceful negotiation.

AND

Should Hamas officially and publicly drop its call for the destruction of Israel? Of course it should.

AND

The Palestinians (the PA, not Hamas) have officially recognized Israel’s right to exist as a state. The Israelis have never officially recognized the Palestinians’ right to exist as a state.

BOTH

I’ve been told by people who live in Israel that the threat of missiles and the fear of missiles (and of suicide attacks) makes an enormous impact – especially since it’s not a large country and doesn’t have a massive population. I’m sure that’s absolutely true.

AND

Palestinians don’t live in a large area and they aren’t a vast population either. Many more Palestinians have died in the conflict than Israelis. The impact is enormous on both sides.

Note on Human Rights Watch.

I’m aware that there are those who argue that it’s biased against Israel and I’ve seen what looks like a campaign against HRW on line. I don’t agree. Human Rights Watch (and Amnesty along with it) are generally respected as being thorough and impartial organizations reporting on human rights violations the world over. There was a kerfuffle after the last Israel-Lebanon war, after HRW criticized the IDF’s wide use of cluster bombs among other things. A study based on the previous two years of HRW’s work showed that it had issued 60 reports on the Middle East. Three of them were on Israel – the rest on other countries. That doesn’t suggest bias to me.

I have anecdotal experience. I read that HRW is cosy with Saudi Arabia and doesn’t criticize it. False. I interviewed HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson about Saudi Arabia’s rehab programme for terrorists. She was highly critical of the Saudi justice system. I included her interview in my piece for the UN.

B’Tselem is excoriated by the Israeli right, but I’m afraid I don’t think that disqualifies it. In fact, more widely, it has a reputation for stringent accuracy. Their figures and those issued by the UN on the conflict are probably some of the most rigorously vetted statistics on any conflict on the planet. Both organizations carry out their own investigations and take into account the figures issued by the IDF and Hamas, by organizations on the ground, and by the media. All of these sources are checked against each other.

OTHER CONTENTIOUS ISSUES

One argument or at least question I’ve seen often is: why does IP get so much attention, when there are so many other conflicts around the world?

BOTH

Some people have suggested that this is because of anti-semitism. There is undoubtedly a massive amount of anti-semitism in the world and it’s a very serious problem. It’s quite probably got worse in recent years – and there’s certainly anti-semitism in the US and Europe, and in the Middle East – it’s common in Arab-speaking countries – and Asia, and undoubtedly elsewhere.

There has been some stringent questioning of some figures on the left in the UK. One MP from Bradford definitely did pass along anti-semitic remarks and was suspended. Another high profile Labour person (Ken Livingstone) defended her and was also suspended. So there is an issue at least with some on the left. (I don’t however, think it’s fair to say that anti-semitism has become institutionalized on the British left. It’s something that’s hard to bring out figures or statistics on, but I’m quite sure that there are millions upon millions of people on the left in the UK who are not anti-semitic – from my brother and sister who voted for Labour’s current left-leaning leader to, for example, the previous (also) left-leaning Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, elected democratically by the party and who led the party in last year’s election campaign, who happens to be Jewish, and his brother David the former Foreign Secretary.)

But anyway, back to the attention given to IP. Yes, there are anti-semites who love to bring up the dispute

AND

There are other reasons why IP is so prominent, among them: a large Jewish population in the US and especially in the major media centre, New York; strong historic UK ties to IP (the UK was given the mandate to govern Palestine from World War 1 to 1948); IP is an issue that can divide people – either on the left or right – who would agree about 99% of other subjects: so because there are differences on this issue, unlike others, it leads to greater debate and contention.

In an ideal world would other conflicts receive the same amount of attention and produce the same amount of debate? Ideally yes. But human beings are not like that – they give attention to things they feel connected to – either kith and kin, historical connections, or physical proximity. It’s the same law that leads to a small incident in the West being covered very extensively, while a much bigger, similar incident in Asia gets much less coverage – in the Western media. Terrorist attacks in Paris get massively more coverage than a terrorist attack in Lebanon that shortly preceded it.

IP is part of that phenomenon – but to repeat – yes, some of the attention comes because there’s anti-semitism, but not all of it. And I don’t think it’s illegitimate in any way to debate IP.

AND

Something I feel is left out, often, in this discussion. There’s also a massive amount of anti-Arab feeling – certainly in the US, certainly in Europe and in countries like Israel. This also contributes to the debate – and also possibly exacerbates the violence – just as anti-semitism might well fan violence – but the fanning of violence comes from both directions. (And this is not even to mention the massive amount of anti-Muslim feeling).

Anti-Arab sentiment is strong, dangerous and virulent as well. There are plentiful attacks on Arabs and much discrimination. On a more superficial level in the US I’ve heard people make anti-Arab comments in my presence, which indicates to me that making an anti-Arab comment isn’t always considered beyond the pale in ‘polite’ society. Not only that, I’m pretty sure they were expecting me to agree with it.

BOTH anti-semitism AND anti-Arab racism are serious problems – why can’t we mention them both – rather than – as so often happens – only mention one of them? Can’t we be conscious of – and committed to eliminating – both?

QUESTIONS

I’m only scratching the surface here. The danger – which I might well be contributing to – is that we now get enmeshed in arguments over each point for either side. (I haven’t even mentioned for example the 50-year occupation of Palestinian territories, the Lebanon wars, and the 70 years of threats against Israelis and terror attacks.)

The arguments are probably important in themselves, but maybe what’s even more important is to try to step back to the big picture.

The most essential thing of all from my perspective is the statement of rights that I stated early on. If people focused only on that, perhaps there would be more chance of a breakthrough. So I’ll repeat them:

BOTH

Israelis have the right to live securely, autonomously, independently with full political freedoms, without being subject to threat and attack. They are human beings. They have all the rights bestowed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

AND

Palestinians have the right to live securely, autonomously, independently with full political freedoms, without being subject to threat and attack. They are human beings. They have all the rights bestowed under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

What would be the fairest solution to the conflict? Presumably a solution that would respect and fulfil the full range of human rights of both sides. There’s an enormous amount of scepticism at the moment about the two-state solution.

But is there a better solution than that? I ask genuinely.

I’d be particularly interested in people’s different views on ways forward.

What is the best or most promising way to achieve a just peace?

More deaths, conflict and destruction lie ahead if there isn’t reasonable debate and a sensible discussion of practical solutions.

Is there a better way forward other than continuing with the same depressing and destructive cycle of uneasy stasis, interrupted again and again by upsurges of violence?

or…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Passing on an exchange, from NY Review of Books, between Marty Seligman, prominent psychologist at University of Pennsylvania, and an author, Tamsin Shaw, who suggested in an article that he was possibly complicit when the CIA developed torture techniques under former President Bush. Seligman first, then the author second.

 

‘Learned Helplessness’ & Torture: An Exchange Martin Seligman, reply by Tamsin Shaw APRIL 21, 2016 ISSUE In response to: The Psychologists Take Power from the February 25, 2016 issue Saddam Saleh, a former prisoner at Abu Ghraib, showing a photograph of himself and other prisoners being abused there in November 2003 by US soldiers, Baghdad, May 2004 To the Editors: In her defamatory article [“The Psychologists Take Power,” NYR, February 25], Tamsin Shaw seeks to portray me as aiding and abetting torture. I strongly disapprove of torture and I have never and would never aid, abet, or provide any assistance in its process. I have spent my life trying to cure and prevent learned helplessness, so I am horrified that good science, which has helped so many people overcome depression, may have been used for such a bad purpose as torture. If you accuse a fellow academic of supporting torture, you’d better have some pretty good evidence. Shaw does not. Here is her evidence and my responses: Seligman was one of only three witnesses out of 148 who refused to speak directly with Hoffman’s investigators, demanding instead that they send him questions in writing… Shaw seems to imply that I was trying to hide something by being interviewed in writing. On the contrary, I wanted the record to be public if necessary and Hoffman has refused to provide transcripts of others’ spoken interviews. Hoffman and I went back and forth for several weeks and I answered all his queries at great length. In December 2001, Seligman convened a meeting at his home to discuss the participation of academics in national security efforts following September 11. Among those present were CIA psychologist James Mitchell and the chief of research and analysis in the CIA’s Operational Division, Kirk Hubbard. This meeting occurred as described. The meeting was about how academics could counter jihadi violence. There was no mention of torture, interrogations, detainees, or any remotely related topic. Mitchell and Hubbard were entirely silent throughout the proceedings. Seligman claimed to remember meeting with Hubbard on one subsequent occasion at his home, in April 2002, to discuss his theory of “learned helplessness” with Hubbard and a female lawyer, and that on this occasion he was invited to speak on the theory of learned helplessness at the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school, sponsored by the US government. Hubbard, however, recalled meeting Seligman at his home several times after the initial meeting, including a meeting in April 2002 at which, according the Hoffman report, “he, Mitchell, and Jessen met with Seligman in his home to invite him to speak about learned helplessness at the SERE school.” My discussions with Hubbard and Mitchell were entirely about how captured Americans could resist and evade torture. All of their questions were about captured American soldiers and what our soldiers could do. The Hoffman report verified this and Hubbard and Mitchell testified that they never discussed interrogations with Seligman and did not provide him information about the interrogation program. The extent of Seligman’s further involvement has not been established, but in an e-mail sent by Hubbard in 2004, he expressed gratitude for Seligman’s help “over the past four years.” The reason that my “further involvement has not been established” is because there was none. I assume Hubbard was thanking me for the meetings above and for my pro bono lecture in May 2002 to the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency on how what is known about learned helplessness could be used to help captured American soldiers resist and escape torture. Shaw might have gone to the trouble of asking Hubbard what he was thanking me for, as did David Hoffman, uncovering no further involvement. The Hoffman report twice states that Seligman’s denial of any suspicion that the CIA’s interest in his theories was for use in interrogations is not credible. The first I heard that the CIA might be using torture in interrogation was only years later when I read Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article. It never occurred to me before that. If I had known about the methods employed, I would not have discussed learned helplessness with them. Shaw ends her reply by denouncing “groundless psychological assumption.” But her charge against me is essentially that I might have guessed how my work was being misused, and therefore I support torture. To throw around such serious charges based on such a flimsy psychological assumption is, as Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker noted [“Moral Psychology: An Exchange,” NYR, April 7], conduct unbecoming a philosopher. Martin Seligman Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Tamsin Shaw replies: Martin Seligman has repeatedly insisted that he is an opponent of torture. He tells us in his letter that he “strongly disapproves” of it. If he found himself at the very center of the terrible episode in our recent history in which the United States inflicted brutal torture on detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison, the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, and at CIA black sites, this was, he maintains, entirely unwittingly. And yet, since he was at the center of this episode, being in direct contact with the architects of the CIA’s torture program at the moment of its devising, there are some clear questions that a declared opponent of torture might have asked in his position. In April 2002, Seligman was invited to give a lecture on his theory of learned helplessness (a theory perhaps better called “induced helplessness,” since it involves being placed under such psychologically devastating stress that the subject becomes helpless) at the SERE school in May of that year. He says he believed that this was solely for the purposes of helping captured American soldiers resist and evade torture. But he was not invited by the military. He was invited by members of the CIA. His principal contacts were James Mitchell and Kirk Hubbard, who attended a meeting at Seligman’s home in December 2001 and whose affiliations are listed, in the document produced by Seligman on that occasion, as CIA (Mitchell had moved to the CIA in 2001 after retiring from his position as a US Air Force instructor in the SERE school). We now know from the 2008 report by the Senate Committee on Armed Services that Mitchell was working with Bruce Jessen, his former fellow SERE instructor, to write a report on the resistance techniques used by al-Qaeda and also to study ways in which the theory of learned helplessness, employed by them both previously in SERE training, could be used in interrogations. Seligman may have been ignorant of the fact that in April and May of 2002 he was participating in a new initiative in which the CIA and the US military would collaborate via the SERE program to devise “enhanced interrogation techniques.” But it might have occurred to him ask why the CIA should suddenly have made the resistance and survival of US military personnel a priority for agency psychologists, even if no clear explanation presented itself at the time. One explanation for the CIA’s interest in SERE techniques was certainly available in 2002, in the form of press reports of CIA interrogations during this period. A story by Philip Shenon, published in The New York Times on April 26, 2002, stated that “non-violent forms of coercion” were being employed, with the assistance of psychologists, in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, though the Bush administration claimed that the techniques used, such as sleep deprivation, fell short of torture. In December 2002 The Washington Post published a lengthy article by Dana Priest and Barton Gellman on CIA interrogations, describing the use of techniques that many people would consider torture, such as blindfolding, being bound in painful positions, being subjected to loud noises, and sleep deprivation. And yet Seligman claims in his letter that he had no suspicions that the CIA might be using torture in interrogations until he read Jane Mayer’s article “The Experiment” inThe New Yorker in July 2005. This is an extraordinary claim. Since CBS first broadcast, on April 28, 2004, photographs of prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib, there had been tremendous public debate about the issue in America. Seymour Hersh, writing inThe New Yorker in May 2004, had explicitly linked the abuses to CIA-led interrogations. The use of psychological techniques against prisoners featured heavily in many of the media reports. And social psychology was discussed very frequently in attempts to explain the abuse, with former American Psychological Association President Philip Zimbardo writing Op-Eds and giving interviews on the psychological conditions under which the prison guards had acted. He raised significant issues concerning the resilience of prisoners under stressful conditions (resilience being one of Seligman’s core research interests). In June 2004, a memo issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 was leaked (as reported, for example, in a Washington Post story of June 8, by Dana Priest and R. Jeffrey Smith), in which it was made clear that the line between legal interrogation techniques and torture was being blurred. The 2002 memo, moreover, referred directly to an issue central to Seligman’s area of psychological expertise. In the Washington Post article of June 8, 2004, Priest and Smith wrote: “For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture,” the memo said, “it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.” Examples include the development of mental disorders, drug-induced dementia, “post traumatic stress disorder which can last months or even years, or even chronic depression.” And yet Seligman, one of the most prominent behavioral scientists in the country, with direct links to the CIA and the military, on his own account somehow, according to his letter, remained unaware of the reports I have cited in The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as The New Yorker report by Seymour Hersh, and the grave moral and psychological questions they raised. On January 1, 2005, The New York Times published an article by Neil Lewis that, according to the Hoffman report, alarmed many senior members of the APA. It described in some detail the way in which psychologists were assisting in “break[ing] down” detainees at Guántanamo Bay. In early 2005, well before Jane Mayer’s article inThe New Yorker, further details emerged in articles by Gregg Bloche (in The New England Journal of Medicine) and Jonathan Marks (in the Los Angeles Times). But Martin Seligman insists that he remained oblivious to this crisis in his profession. As I reported in my review, David Hoffman, the author of the Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture, concludes: “We think it would have been difficult not to suspect that one reason for the CIA’s interest in learned helplessness was to consider how it could be used in the interrogation of others.” But he also tells us, “We do not have enough information to know what Seligman knew or thought at the time.” The question of what Seligman was thinking remains a mystery. He has not offered us an account to replace our “groundless psychological assumption.” That question has significance as a small part of a much broader set of concerns for the psychological profession. Hoffman notes that psychologists possess “a special skill regarding how our mind and emotions work,” one that permits them to heal damaged psyches but also confers on them a special ability to cause harm. At the same time, they are especially vulnerable to conflicts of interest, owing to the enormous sums of money that the Department of Defense pours into their field. They are therefore in a position in which very serious moral failings may possibly be enacted on a very large scale. When this happens they have a special moral responsibility to analyze what went wrong. In discussing the actions of the leadership of the APA between 2004 and 2008, Hoffman tells us that “by June 2005, it would have been clear to all well-informed observers that abusive interrogation techniques had almost certainly occurred and that there was a substantial risk they were still occurring.” Senior APA officials, the report claims, failed to investigate unsubstantiated assurances from the Department of Defense that the abuse had been halted. Hoffman tells us: In this situation in a criminal case, one would ask whether this intentional decision not to seek more information constituted “willful blindness” or “deliberate avoidance….” One common legal definition of “deliberate avoidance” in this context is “cutting off one’s curiosity through an effort of the will.” But Hoffman and his team were not prosecuting a criminal case. Instead, they have provided us with an important public document and information on the basis of which any concerned person might reasonably ask questions of the leading psychologists involved. Such public questioning will inevitably make deliberate avoidance harder and we can hope that it might even elicit valuable insights and explanations. It should in any case be welcomed by all those concerned with the moral standing of an exceptionally powerful profession.

 

 

 

 

It’s inevitable and natural that we think about our own kith and kin before foreigners, and I think it’s all but inevitable that we overestimate our participation in any large-scale international enterprise – and overestimate how much others esteem, admire and even know about what we’ve done (or not done). This is all the more the case in an enterprise that is seen as a) good and b) successful.

World War 11 fits these criteria. What follows is not an exhaustive examination of the facts, but some anecdotal impressions with a sprinkling of fact.

Certainly when I was growing up in the UK the phrase “we won the war” was not controversial. And I don’t think it would be controversial today. I remember yelling “we won the war in 1964” at my nursery school (such a satisfying rhyme) – only to be informed that it was 1962. It’s not the first time I’ve been slightly off about the war. I’m also obviously old enough to remember endlessly playing battle games with “Airfix” men – plastic soldiers – always Germans against English – and, via my older brother, ceaselessly reading black and white war comics in which German pilots were always crying out “Teufel – Englander!!” as they were shot down. Such was my moral universe.

The thing is, the phrase “we won the war” – as far as I can guess – is also not controversial today in either the US or Russia. And while of course this doesn’t strictly mean that no one else participated, it does have a tendency to play up the role of one’s own country at the expense of others.

The more I read about the war, the more fascinated I am. And then there are chance meetings. Last year I talked with a well-educated Russian guy about the war. Having read some accounts by Max Hastings, the British historian, I’d become aware – according to Hastings – that the Russian perspective on the Great Patriotic War, as they call it, is that the Western front was a side-show to the main event of the war – the enormous battles between the Germans and Russians. Hastings writes the Russians have some reason to support this view- their losses were colossal – around 26 million or even more – and some of the battles, involving millions of soldiers, were the largest in history. Sure enough, my Russian interlocutor assured me that Russians, generally speaking, think they were responsible for about 80% of the fighting and the winning of the war. He told me that he was surprised and interested on visiting the UK to hear about something called the “Battle of Britain.”

So to the UK. We of course couldn’t possibly have won the war on our own (supposing that that claim has been made seriously…): the German military were far more powerful than the British – at least at the beginning of hostilities. Hastings writes also that generally speaking the British army performed abysmally during the war – suffered defeat after defeat and only came up to a barely satisfactory level by the end of the conflict. He does say though the RAF and the navy performed with distinction. The other thing that is not always remembered is how close the British came to parlaying with Hitler – ie negotiating a truce after the fall of France. It was one of Churchill’s signal achievements that he persuaded the cabinet not to do this – but it was a close run thing, and could have gone the other way. Churchill himself was a mixture of inspiring brilliance and an overly gung-ho loose cannon who also made some serious military blunders.

Did the Americans win the war? Undoubtedly they were the major force in the Pacific war against the Japanese – but the British and others also fought campaigns against the Japanese. The US industrial might was a major factor in winning the war in the West too, but their losses compared to the Russians, for example, were puny and their involvement much more short-lived. The US didn’t join in the war for the first two years – since most of the American public were (understandably) opposed to joining in the European war.

And then there was a remark by a well-educated UNICEF colleague years ago, after I must have irritated her.

“You should be grateful that we saved your neck in the war,” she growled at me. A fair response would be: yes, the US did sell destroyers and some ships to the UK in the first years of the war, in return for large amounts of money and control of some naval bases – and this was undoubtedly useful. However, it’s perfectly clear that if Nazi Germany had succeeded in invading the UK in 1940 the US would not have intervened. (The US didn’t join until after Pearl Harbor, Dec. 1941). We were saved by a number of things: the English Channel, our navy and air force  – and the fact that Hitler eventually turned his attention to the USSR. So we preserved ourselves through our own efforts (yep that “Battle of Britain” thing, which was the air war over the Channel – in which we managed to hold off the Germans sufficiently so that an invasion wasn’t practical – and we also had the largest navy in the world which also made it more difficult) and a fair bit of luck. And after the disastrous series of defeats and withdrawals at the beginning of the war, the UK’s military was in a complete shambles – so there really was a fair bit of luck.

But then again – you come to D-Day – and popular representations of it – as in the US movie Saving Private Ryan. From that film you wouldn’t have the slightest inkling that 50% of the troops that landed that day in France were not American – the other 50% being mostly British with Canadians and others.

But another sobering thing for me – I read recently that 2.5 million Indian soldiers served overseas in the war – 2.5 million!! – and was I really aware of that? No. I wasn’t really even aware that Canadians had helped out our air force until some time ago. Oh convenient ignorance!  More than one million Indians served in the First World War as well (more than the US, one Indian writer wrote recently).

But back to my Russian friend – he told me that the annual celebration of victory in the Great Patriotic War is overwhelming and somewhat overblown – and he ruefully acknowledged my prod that – as I expected – the fact that Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler for the first two years of the war is quietly glossed over. Plus the fact that the Soviets began the war by invading Poland from the East, in coordination with Germany, which invaded Poland from the West.

So who did win the war?  Well I guess a bunch of different countries – many of which I haven’t even mentioned – some of them were called the United Nations – the forerunner group to the current organization – the group of allies that formed during hostilities.

But I’ve learned I need to be a bit careful about my own country’s myths.

Extract from Max Hastings:

But the principal reality of subsequent military operations would be that Russians did most of the dying necessary to undo Nazism, while the Western powers advanced at their own measured pace towards a long-delayed confrontation with the Wehrmacht. For many years after 1945, the democracies found it gratifying to perceive the Second World War in Europe as a struggle for survival between themselves and Nazi tyranny. Yet the military outcome of the contest was overwhelmingly decided by the forces of Soviet tyranny, rather than by Anglo-American armies. Perversely, this reality was better understood by contemporary Americans and British than it has been by many of their descendants.

Hastings, Max (2010-04-17). Winston’s War (p. 146). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

A relevant passage from Tolstoy’s War and Peace:

“He asked him to tell them how and where he got his wound. This pleased Rostov and he began talking about it, and as he went on became more and more animated. He told them of his Schon Grabern affair, just as those who have taken part in a battle generally do describe it, that is, as they would like it to have been, as they have heard it described by others, and as sounds well, but not at all as it really was. Rostov was a truthful young man and would on no account have told a deliberate lie. He began his story meaning to tell everything just as it happened, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably he lapsed into falsehood. If he had told the truth to his hearers—who like himself had often heard stories of attacks and had formed a definite idea of what an attack was and were expecting to hear just such a story—they would either not have believed him or, still worse, would have thought that Rostov was himself to blame since what generally happens to the narrators of cavalry attacks had not happened to him. He could not tell them simply that everyone went at a trot and that he fell off his horse and sprained his arm and then ran as hard as he could from a Frenchman into the wood. Besides, to tell everything as it really happened, it would have been necessary to make an effort of will to tell only what happened. It is very difficult to tell the truth, and young people are rarely capable of it. His hearers expected a story of how beside himself and all aflame with excitement, he had flown like a storm at the square, cut his way in, slashed right and left, how his saber had tasted flesh and he had fallen exhausted, and so on. And so he told them all that.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace (Complete Version, Best Navigation, Active TOC) (p. 268). Flip. Kindle Edition.

 

Well, often and mostly (but not always.)

Why am I talking about this? Because I frequently hear, from other people, an expression of global scepticism, along the lines of:

• you can’t believe anything the media says
• you can’t believe what scientists say
• you can’t believe any official statistics, ESPECIALLY government statistics

Well I believe quite a lot of what the media says, a lot of what scientists say, and a lot of official and government statistics. Do I believe uncritically and without exercising judgement? No.

With the media, I tend to believe sources that have a well established tradition of balanced reporting – I would cite the BBC in this. There are no entirely objective media outlets of course – they all report from a perspective – the BBC from a British/European perspective, and it can’t, for practical reasons, always report on the complete spectrum of opinions – it tends to focus on those opinions which are supported by significant proportions of the population. And yes, it’s imperfect, it sometimes makes mistakes. I read the New York Times and listen to NPR – and I don’t claim these are entirely objective either, though overall my judgement is that there is a commitment to accurate reporting. Sometimes they fail and I’m also aware that both organizations are slightly left of centre – so to be fair I try to listen, read from more right-wing outlets too – pretty easy with the internet. What’s critical for me is an evident commitment to accurate and balanced reporting – organizations may fail, but if the overall commitment is there, then I am much more trusting.

With scientists I need to check who is funding the research, I need to check if it’s a minority position, and I need to check whether what is being said is towards a consensus position. (Yes, as astro-physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson points out, science DOES in practice proceed by consensus – viz the systematic review in health science which assesses a large range of well conducted trials and averages them out.) And if a scientist is making a claim that contradicts the large body of accumulated evidence, the scientist had better have extraordinary evidence to make extraordinary claims. Are scientists infallible? Of course not. But is science the best means we have of establishing the mostly likely explanation for phenomena? Yes. If science hadn’t been successful, it wouldn’t a) have transformed the world over the past few centuries and b) would not be in widespread use today, if its predictive powers had proven to be non-existent.

One example: after my recent concussion I had consultations with two experts in the field – both with decades of experience in handling concussion cases. Both had an international reputation and lectured around the world. I was urged by an acquaintance, with no medical training, that I should check alternative websites and try out, among other things, vitamin supplements. I told her to get lost. Why?  Should I put more weight on the opinions of two people with medical expertise and decades of experience (who hadn’t suggested vitamins), or someone with no medical training and no expertise in the area? By the way, it’s not that the two experts in question were closed to “alternative” methods – in fact I tried out one approach, using running, which was being explored by a lab in Buffalo. The difference though was that there was some scientific plausibility to this “alternative” approach and it was being carried out by credible scientists. There is no evidence, incidentally, that vitamins can help with a concussion.

Government and official statistics: it depends on the government. I will tend to give more weight to statistics issued by democratically accountable governments, and much less when there isn’t real democracy. I will tend to be accepting if there is no sufficient and specific reason to disbelieve them (and the fact that they come from government is not of itself a reason). I tend to think that figures, say, from the Centers for Disease Control, are issued with the genuine intention of spreading knowledge and improving medicine. Or, for that matter, economic analyses from the Congressional Budget Office, which was set up specifically to do non-partisan research. I might, though, be more sceptical of statements from the Environmental Protection Agency on fracking, since I’ve read specific media reports from a reliable source (Propublica) that they have come under commercial pressure to soften their conclusions about fracking. (The same might apply to the FDA, but again I’d use judgement and it would depend on what subject they were reporting.)

All of this is influenced by a paper from the philosopher Crispin Wright – who I had the good fortune to attend lectures with at NYU – he’s actually a Brit, but was visiting. The paper is “Warrant for Nothing” and it’s basically an attempt at a serious and considered answer to the global sceptic who says we don’t know anything – we might be a brain being manipulated in a vat, or everything might be a dream. In others words, according to the radical, global sceptic, we can take absolutely nothing for granted and don’t know anything. You can maybe see why I think there’s a broad analogy with the global scepticism mentioned above.

Anyhow, Wright sets out to argue that there is a way we can rationally justify saying we know stuff. He argues that we are “entitled” to accept and trust things as they are – even without absolutely conclusive evidence – provided a number of conditions are met. I won’t mention all of them – but one is that we have no sufficient or specific reason to doubt, for example, that my cognitive faculties are working OK at this time, or that what I’m asserting is true. Secondly, I should behave in a way that indicates I accept whatever it is I’m asserting – ie whatever from “I’m hungry”, to “there’s a table in front of me.” My actions should confirm that I really do hold those beliefs. We are entitled to assume that the laws of nature are uniform, Wright argues, so long as there is no better way to understand nature (other than observing and assuming regularities), and since making this assumption allows us to live happy and stable lives and since also we have no specific or sufficient reason to doubt that the laws of nature are uniform. Sure, we need to examine and investigate our assumptions in a responsible way, and we shouldn’t use methods and assumptions that we have reason to doubt before coming to conclusions.

On these bases, Wright concludes, we are rationally entitled to say we know stuff DESPITE the attack of the sceptic, and even though we can’t base everything on absolutely rock solid evidence – we trust instead in certain assumptions, that Wright argues, are reasonable to make. If you’re interested it’s a really interesting and dense article – it certainly took me several reads to get a grasp of it, but I think he has some really, really important insights. (I admit I haven’t done full justice to it – it’s very elegantly and subtly argued – I’ve reduced it to a few, crude extracts – which are hopefully not wholly misleading.)

In short, I think scepticism is often a valuable approach, but when it’s applied globally, it’s not warranted or useful, and ultimately leads to paralysis. If we believe nothing that we see or hear, we can’t function as a society, and hardly even as an individual. The old saying “Question Everything” has some value in its spirit but taken literally it’s an absurd and destructive idea. Quite a lot of the time, there are good reasons for accepting information, and for deferring to expertise.

End of term report from the UN

Fifteen years ago, world leaders agreed to a set of development goals to be achieved by this year – on broad measures like education, poverty, healthcare etc. (The Millennium Development Goals). There’s been massive progress in many areas.

One or two highlights:

• MDG 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger:
• Extreme poverty: In 1990, nearly half of the population in the developing regions lived on less than $1.25 a day. This rate dropped to 14 per cent in 2015. Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined by more than half, falling from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million in 2015, with most progress occurring since 2000.
• Hunger: The proportion of undernourished people in the developing regions has fallen by almost half since 1990, from 23.3 per cent in 1990–1992 to 12.9 per cent in 2014–2016.
• MDG 4: Reduce child mortality:
• Child mortality rate: Globally, the under-five mortality rate dropped from 90 to 43 deaths per 1,000 live births between 1990 and 2015. Despite population growth in the developing regions, the number of deaths of children under five declined from 12.7 million in 1990 to almost 6 million in 2015 globally.
• Infectious diseases: Measles vaccination helped prevent nearly 15.6 million deaths between 2000 and 2013. The number of globally reported measles cases declined by 67 per cent. About 84 per cent of children worldwide received at least one dose of measles-containing vaccine in 2013, up from 73 per cent in 2000.
• MDG 2: Achieve universal primary education:
• Primary school enrolment: In the developing regions, the primary school net enrolment rate has reached 91 per cent in 2015, up from 83 per cent in 2000.
• Sub-Saharan Africa recorded the best progress in primary education, with a 20 percentage-point increase in the net enrolment ratio from 2000 to 2015, compared to an 8 percentage-point gain between 1990 and 2000.
• Out-of-school children: Globally, the number of out-of-school children of primary school age has fallen to an estimated 57 million in 2015, down from 100 million in 2000.
• Literacy rate: Among youth aged 15 to 24, the literacy rate has improved globally from 83 per cent to 91 per cent between 1990 and 2015, and the gap between women and men has narrowed.

In short, much still needed to be done – but also massive, positive progress.

Source: the UN

Things have never been this good in human history, Part 1

Things have never been this good in human history, Part 2

Michael Sandel on Kant:

Acting morally means acting out of duty—for the sake of the moral law. The moral law consists of a categorical imperative, a principle that requires us to treat persons with respect, as ends in themselves. Only when I act in accordance with the categorical imperative am I acting freely. For whenever I act according to a hypothetical imperative, I act for the sake of some interest or end given outside of me. But in that case, I’m not really free; my will is determined not by me, but by outside forces—by the necessities of my circumstance or by the wants and desires I happen to have. I can escape the dictates of nature and circumstance only by acting autonomously, according to a law I give myself. Such a law must be unconditioned by my particular wants and desires. So Kant’s demanding notions of freedom and morality are connected. Acting freely, that is, autonomously, and acting morally, according to the categorical imperative, are one and the same.

Sandel, Michael J. (2009-09-15). Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (pp. 123-124). Macmillan. Kindle Edition.

I can’t really agree wholly with what Kant says (according to Sandel’s interpretation.) The problem here is in the phrase “according to a law I give myself.” Since how are we free to give a law to ourselves – and how can we be free from my wants and desires, or the necessities of my circumstances, when we do so? I don’t think we can be free of these things when we “give a law to ourselves” so it’s not clear how we can be free according to this definition.

However, I quite like the idea of adapting this slightly. I think for free will to make sense we have to move away from “acting without constraint” since I don’t think that’s possible – and I think Kant opens up a pathway of thinking toward this.

But first of all here’s the problem. We always have constraints – namely our environment, genes, upbringing, concomitant wants and desires etc. etc. In that sense I am a strict determinist. I can’t see how we can do anything other than we actually do in any given moment – since every atom in our body is already set in a certain way. So to me the traditional, conventional idea of free will doesn’t make sense – since it can’t escape the above – it’s based on a bogus idea of an individual who is somehow completely autonomous who can will something into existence that is not defined and controlled by precursors.

(Side note: OK quantum physics says events at that level can happen without precursors, however, that doesn’t provide the sense of agency required for us to have free will: according to the traditional idea, we have to generate acts ourselves, not be subject to some unknown process that we have no say or control over. And secondly, while there may be events without causes at the quantum level, this doesn’t at all mean that there are therefore events without causes at the level of human activity and implementation – and I’m not aware that physicists have been able to show anything of the sort – so quantum doesn’t satisfy the requirements of traditional free will and hasn’t been shown to have an effect at the human level of implementation.)

The conventional idea, I think, is that we have the capacity to act spontaneously WITHOUT any constraint – but this involves a weirdly unrealistic idea of the self. Our self is already and inevitably embedded in the environment and the universe – it’s not separate or autonomous – there simply is nowhere that a separate or autonomous choice can be generated from. In order to make a choice there has to be an agent – ie ourselves – and our self is made up out of the universe and not sui generis. Therefore as far as we can tell, only one outcome at a time is possible or conceivable for every human act. Therefore I can’t see how this traditional idea of free will makes sense.

But following on from Kant I propose a different definition of free will: to exercise free will is to follow a rational course of behaviour or behaviours.

Yes, following such a course would still be entirely deterministic, but I say (and I’m not of course being hugely original – Daniel Dennett to quote just one has a similar concept) that this is a workable and more useful definition of free will.

There’s a second practical challenge with this definition (though we don’t necessarily have to solve it for my proposal to be true) – how do we know or decide what’s rational? Since this is at the very least very difficult to determine in practice, we’d have to decide it by discussion, consensus and comparison, using the best information we have, and making use of the input of well-informed people.

The Kant article did make me think of things that are NOT determined by physical forces, or in fact the laws of physics – ie the laws of logic for example. And logic can make a contribution to our actions – it can be a factor in our decision-making. Thus it’s true that we are not necessarily entirely physically determined.

However, logic – and rationality based on logic – are still wholly deterministic and still, as I think about it, effectively part of our environment. It’s just that I hadn’t thought about the role of logic and rationality – as non-physical entities that nevertheless influence behaviour – before. This made me more open to the Kantian idea that free will is following a law, and following reason. This doesn’t give us free will in the traditional (and as I argue, flawed) concept of free will – but it does provide an opening for a new definition.

Free will therefore, could be “to follow the laws dictated by reason – or rationality.”

IF we are following the laws dictated by reason – even though we can do no other and are completely subject to a deterministic universe – we are exercising free will.

Jared Diamond’s article, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” written in 1987, has reportedly become a standard discussion point in anthropology classes – and it’s definitely a fascinating and provocative statement. His central thesis is as follows:

Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.

Article: http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

I’ve read Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” and found it fascinating and convincing – although I know there are disputes about it – but I have a feeling I should look at it again.

In that book, he at the least raises some very good questions and makes some good points. I remember from “Guns” how certain diseases – especially those that transferred over from animals – only developed after humans adopted agriculture etc. So it’s clearly the case that agriculture produced problems. The question raised by his article is whether on balance agriculture was a good or a bad thing for the human race.

So these are the questions and comments the article provoked in me:

Interestingly, since I would have expected Diamond to go the other way, given his strongly implied critique of modern society in this piece, Diamond agrees with other experts – including Steven Pinker (see link to my other blog post below) – that early, hunter-gatherer societies were considerably more violent than modern societies – based on the evidence we have.

See: http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Rousseau_Revisited.html

So I would take that to be a significant counter-example to his argument that introducing agriculture (by implication entailing the subsequent development course of the human race) was a mistake – given that presumably one would agree that lower average levels of violence among human beings is a good thing.

A very basic point – in terms of survival and in terms of becoming the dominant form of human existence: hunter-gatherer societies have clearly not been successful comparatively. They are now minuscule by comparison to humans living based on agriculture and its consequences.

I frequently find that Diamond’s evidence is unsatisfying and rather unconvincing. For example – his argument that the average amount of time spent obtaining food appears less IF we compare it (by implication) to people’s average work hours today. But first of all this is based on TWO examples of hunter-gatherer groups. Which begs the question – what is the AVERAGE time spent by hunter-gatherers obtaining food? If Diamond is also including “working” for food (rather than simply “obtaining” – although this is left unclear *see updated note below), then modern-day people do spend considerably more time than 12, 14 or 19 hours a week working (on average), but they are certainly working for more things than just food, many of which wouldn’t have been available to Bushmen – which we can debate the merits of – but it’s certainly not just food. And the reference also leaves out how much time hunter-gatherers spend working for things other than food.

Same point with his reference to ONE study of bushmen’s diets, saying its calorific input was high – what was the average including the OTHER studies?

There seems to me to be a basic undermining retort to his overall argument: even if we allow that conditions for human beings were INITIALLY worse under agriculture, that of course doesn’t mean that it didn’t eventually lead to much better conditions. And remember Diamond is boldly playing the long game in his argument – he’s talking about the last million years of history – so he’s inviting a critique on these terms.

For example – he says that lifestyles of hunter-gatherers weren’t nasty or brutish – but they were definitely short.

Quote, from a study in Illinois:

Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years,” says Armelagos, “but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years.

Great – but 26 years is supposed to compare favourably to now? Average life expectancy for ALL humans born in 2013, according to WHO, was 71.

More trivially, he comes up with the interesting fact that hunter-gatherers in the region of Turkey and Greece averaged 5ft 9 for men – and was considerably lower in 3000 BC under agriculture. I checked and it has risen above that today – even it took a long time!

But given these considerations above, his following statement,

“Thus with the advent of agriculture an elite became better off, but most people became worse off,” is demonstrably false – in the long-term.

Despite continuing, serious problems, most people – a large majority of the current 7 billion on the planet – are definitely better off today by most of the usual measurements, than they were as hunter-gatherers. (ie the classic health outcome measurements of under five mortality and longevity, and they are much less likely to die violently, not to mention access to things that hunter-gatherers couldn’t have had – like information about far away places, new and different ideas, far away peoples).

See for example “Getting Better” by Economist Charles Kenny. (Though in fact, even the blurb for this is misleadingly pessimistic – the overall trend is for convergence between economies and incomes world wide (yes between the developed and developing world) – even if there’s been increasing inequality recently within the west – see economist Thomas Piketty:

A global convergence process in which emerging countries are catching up with developed countries seems well under way today, even though substantial inequalities between rich and poor countries remain.

Piketty, Thomas (2014-03-10). Capital in the Twenty-First Century (p. 72). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

Lurking behind (or not so behind) much of his argument is a critique of population growth: “Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production.”

But while population growth is an important issue, most experts expect it to shade off during this century and to level out:

The rate of global population growth peaked in the period 1950– 1970 at nearly 2 percent per year and since then has decreased steadily. Although one can never be sure of anything in this realm, it is likely that this process will continue and that global demographic growth rates will decline to near zero in the second half of the twenty-first century. The shape of the bell curve is quite well defined (see Figure 2.2). Piketty, Thomas (2014-03-10). Capital in the Twenty-First Century (p. 99). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

And according to the World Bank: “In 1960, women worldwide had an average of 5 children. The rate has since halved, and in 2012, women had an average of 2.5 children across all regions.”

Warnings by population alarmists like Paul Ehrlich, who predicted that “hundreds of millions” would die of famine in the 70s and 80s have proven to be wildly off target. (A very generous reading of famines in that period might put it at 4.5 million deaths – meaning that at the very least, Ehrlich was off by a factor of more than 40).

And the average person lives with an abundance of food available to him or her, not to mention safe water (yes, many don’t, but the vast majority do have these things).

And finally, without agriculture we could not have organized or developed our current societies – with its chain of government, education, technical advances, massive developments in healthcare, education, transport, dissemination of information and overall knowledge. We now have the most extraordinary access to an enormous wealth of information and knowledge, literally at our fingertips. For me that is an absolutely stupendous development. We would not have had the transformation provided by the scientific process. We would have no books, internet, the spread of abstract thinking, the intellectual architecture that developed after the Enlightenment – including human rights and international law; and, indeed, no discussions like this; and maybe more trivially we wouldn’t have had comforts like heating, refrigeration, and far greater protection from the elements. Less trivially (I suppose) I wouldn’t have been alive to write this and it’s a fair guess that friends of mine reading this wouldn’t be alive. And while he argues there was art under the hunter-gatherers – of course, beautiful stuff – we have had an unimaginable outpouring of creativity in all the arts for centuries – most of it made possible (not to mention the consumption of said art) by living in settled, organized societies.

So the question remains, on balance, whether agriculture was a good thing or bad thing for humanity – whether agriculture was a “mistake”. It’s a question that’s hard to answer, because you can’t distance yourself to make a disinterested choice, and I don’t think humanity really “chose” its course, in any meaningful sense. I think it’s more of a gut level, emotional question. Does modern society fill me with such despair that I think it would better – let’s say if it was practically feasible – to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? I think I definitely come to a different conclusion from Jared Diamond.

And here’s why I’m more of an optimist – another of my blog posts.

https://francismead.com/2015/03/16/things-have-never-been-this-good-in-human-history/

 

Post script – this recent article confirms many of my questions – working time was much longer than the claims above; and leisure time was undercut by the conditions of violence and threat hunter-gatherers usually live under. The claim about working hours had to be radically revised when the original author admitted that he hadn’t included time for food processing, tool making, or general housework.

The threat of disease was actually higher in mobile groups than in more sedentary groups that used horticulture: “Much is made of the increased risk of infectious disease in large, concentrated, sedentary populations, but comparatively little attention has been given to the risk of ‘traveler’s diarrhea’ common among hunter-gatherers. For mobile groups, infants, the elderly, and other vulnerable individuals have little opportunity to develop resistance to local pathogens. This may help explain why infant and child mortality among hunter-gatherers tends to be so high. Across hunter-gatherer societies, only about 57% of children born survive to the age of 15. Sedentary populations of forager-horticulturalists, and acculturated hunter-gatherers, have a greater number of children surviving into adulthood, with 64% and 67%, respectively, surviving to the age of 15.”