Urge to kill…fading…fading…fading

Steven Pinker has a new book coming out next week, and I’m very much looking forward to it. It is titled The Better Angels Of Our Nature: How Violence Has Declined, and its premise is that humans have been becoming increasingly less violent over time. I’m very sympathetic to this view: I think cooperation, not conflict, has been the hallmark of human evolution.

There’s an overview of Pinker’s argument at Edge.

Believe it or not–and I know most people do not–violence has been in decline over long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence. The decline of violence, to be sure, has not been steady; it has not brought violence down to zero (to put it mildly); and it is not guaranteed to continue. But I hope to convince you that it’s a persistent historical development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars and perpetration of genocides to the spanking of children and the treatment of animals.

It’s full of charts — all kinds of graphs illustrating correlations and changing rates of war fatalities, homicide, slavery, etc. He identifies five causes of violence: exploitation, dominance, revenge, and ideology (I know, that’s four…I guess he left one out). He also identifies four forces that counter violence: the state as a mediator of justice, trade, an expanding circle of empathy, and reason.

I think the final and perhaps the most profound pacifying force is an “escalator of reason.” As literacy, education, and the intensity of public discourse increase, people are encouraged to think more abstractly and more universally, and that will inevitably push in the direction of a reduction of violence. People will be tempted to rise above their parochial vantage point, making it harder to privilege their own interests over others. Reason leads to the replacement of a morality based on tribalism, authority and puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules. And it encourages people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, and to see violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won.

It would be so nice to read a book that’s optimistic about humanity’s future. I’m definitely getting a copy.

(Also on FtB)

The magic of denying reality

Ophelia deals with a review of Dawkins’ new book, The Magic of Reality. The reviewer makes a common accusation that atheists everywhere have heard a thousand times before: if we believe that the universe is nothing but matter and energy, then what about love? Usually about this time they acquire a triumphant tone of voice — they have backed us into a corner in which we have to confess to be soulless automatons, or we must recognize that there must be something more, something…spiritual. It’s these wacky woo-peddlers, though, who are shoehorning the universe into a tidy black and white box where either love is unreal and doesn’t actually exist, or love is real and therefore, God exists! Presto!

So this reviewer paints a stark picture of Dawkins denying love.

Thus he tells us that “reality is everything that exists” – and “exists”, he makes clear, means whatever we can see or stub our toes on, albeit with the aid of telescopes and seismographs. Everything else – including things we might think exist, like jealousy and love – derive from that material base and are to a large extent illusory. This, he implies, is what emerges from science, and science is true.

Ophelia is rightly skeptical, and doubts that Dawkins actually denies the existence of love, but she doesn’t have a copy of the book yet — it’s not going to be released in America for a couple of weeks yet.

But, aha, I get to have a McLuhan moment. I have a copy! Richard Dawkins’ publisher sent it to me, and it arrived just this afternoon, so I can pull it out right here on the spot.

Unfortunately, I haven’t read it all myself. Like I said, it just arrived today, and I’ve been bogged down in grant writing all day. And then, when I took some time over lunch to savor it, I got distracted — man, this is a gorgeous book. I just leafed through it, savoring the illustrations and dipping now and then into the text. It’s really lovely and going through it is an esthetic experience (oh, are atheists allowed to have those? I think so.)

But fortunately, the reviewer didn’t dig very deeply either. The source of his accusation is in the very first chapter, on page 19, and it’s all so well laid out it was rather easy to almost intuitively flip to the right page and find where Dawkins called love and jealousy “illusory”. Oh, wait…he didn’t.

Does this mean reality only contains things that can be detected, directly or indirectly, by our senses and by the methods of science? What about things like jealousy and joy? Are these not also real?

→ Yes, they are real ←. But they depend for their existence on brains: human brains, certainly, and probably the brains of other advanced animal species, such as chimpanzees, dogs, and whales, too.

OK, I put the emphasis in there myself, because obviously religious apologists need all the help they can get. A simple four word declarative sentence isn’t plain enough for them, I guess. I also added the bright red arrows. I’m afraid they’d miss it otherwise. Propriety forbade me from using the blink tag. Should I have put in a 72pt font?

It’s amazing, though. The reviewer practically quotes Dawkins on love and jealousy, and then suggests an interpretation that is directly contradicted by a short plain English sentence in the next paragraph.

What would you call me?

I’ve got this book off at my publisher, and we’re still arguing over the title. Everything else looks good, but we can’t agree on this one rather big thing: my editor definitely wants it to be something personal and about me, of all people. So I have an exercise for everyone. Imagine an infidel like me with a book that skewers religion and triumphantly praises the godless way of life. Imagine the cover. There, in big bold print it says…

The __________ Atheist

Fill in the blank. Remember, it’s got to be provocative but positive, catchy and descriptive. I know you’re all thinking “Poopyhead”, but I’m gonna squelch that one right now. No scatology or obscenity, ’cause while it would be fine to be banned for the content, it’s so petty and superficial to be banned for the cover. It should be something that makes you want to reach out and buy it, too.

Oh, and no, you don’t get a cut for suggesting one adjective.

Freebie!

As Jerry Coyne has alerted us, there is a free evolutionary biology textbook available on Kindle — grab it while you can (if you don’t have a kindle, just put the free Kindle app on your computer).

I haven’t had a chance to look the book over myself. Eugene Koonin is a respected name, but books that claim to establish a “Fundamentally New Evolutionary Synthesis” put me off a bit. Other stuff in the summary sounds interesting, though, just downplay the grandiose claims a bit when reading it.

(Also on FtB)

Freebie!

As Jerry Coyne has alerted us, there is a free evolutionary biology textbook available on Kindle — grab it while you can (if you don’t have a kindle, just put the free Kindle app on your computer).

I haven’t had a chance to look the book over myself. Eugene Koonin is a respected name, but books that claim to establish a “Fundamentally New Evolutionary Synthesis” put me off a bit. Other stuff in the summary sounds interesting, though, just downplay the grandiose claims a bit when reading it.

(Also on Sb)

Game of Drones

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have dragged myself through George R. R. Martin’s latest, A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in his Game of Thrones series.

I’m done. No more. I’m not reading any of his books any more.

It’s terrible. Martin has taken the concept of the pot-boiler to an extreme — it’s a novel where nothing happens other than continual seething, roiling turmoil. He whipsaws the reader through a dozen different, complex story lines where characters struggle to survive in a world wrecked by civil war — one other problem is that I’d hit a chapter about some minor character from the previous four books, and struggled to remember who the heck this person is, and why I’m supposed to care — and again, nothing is resolved. Well, not quite: major characters are brutally killed, if they’re male, and graphically and degradingly humiliated into irrelevance if they’re female. I guess that’s a resolution, all right — perhaps the last book will be a lovingly detailed description of a graveyard, draped with naked women mourning?

And all the death and destruction accomplishes nothing. It doesn’t further the plot, it doesn’t change any situations.

There is still a mysterious, supernatural menace lurking beyond the great wall to the North; but don’t worry about them, they do absolutely nothing in the entire book. That’s the problem with the undead: inertia. They just kind of lie there.

The expatriate princess with the dragons was supposed to be a great threat, promising invasion. She decides to hole up in one city and dither with palace intrigues for the whole book, while everything falls apart around her. She takes a lot of baths, though, and I felt like her primary role in Martin’s mind is to provide nude scenes for the HBO serialization. The dragons? Pffft. Random SFX carnage.

The dwarf ping-pongs about from place to place, commenting cynically. We’re supposed to care about what imaginary continent he’s on in this chapter, or what city or boat or troop of rapscallions he finds himself in now. I didn’t.

There’s a war going on, you know, and one of the kings in this multi-sided conflict is marching his army off to attack a castle. In a snowstorm. Which leads to the army being mired down and starving. For the entire last half of the book. Those chapters would have benefited greatly if they’d just been left blank and white (blizzard, get it?)

In his afterword, Martin complains about how his last book “was a bitch. This one was three bitches and a bastard.” I can sympathize. Writing over a thousand pages of dull, dragging, incestuously self-referential, soap-opera style narrative in which nothing happens must have been a torment. I understand he’s committed to writing at least two more of these overblown pop fantasy novels, but I don’t think he’s at all committed to bringing anything to a conclusion. George R. R. Martin has successfully penned himself into a lucrative writerly hell of his own creation. I have a recommendation that would spare him some pain: stop now. Roll around happily in your money, and enjoy a prosperous retirement. It’s not as if anyone expects anything to ever be resolved in your fantasy world, so just ending it now is the same as ending it at book #7. Or book #1, for that matter. I’ve reached an end that is as satisfying as anything I expect from this story, which is not satisfying at all.

Illustrations that make you want to read the book

OK, this is no fair. This is an illustration for an alternative history novel, a book about World War I as fought between biotechnology (Darwinists) vs. industrialists (Clankers).

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Now I really want to read Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. I’m unfamiliar with the author, I have only the vaguest notions about the content of the book, but I just put it on my Amazon wish list for that picture alone.

I think we’ve been insulted by American book publishers

Richard Wiseman, the fabulously funny and enlightening skeptical psychologist, has written a book called Paranormality which is a fabulously funny and enlightening dissection of paranormal claims; I got an advance copy because I’m special and I recommend it highly, and so do Skepchicks. However, something strange happened. Wiseman is British, and he published in the UK, but when he tried to get it picked up in the US, publishers balked.

The book has done well in the UK and has been bought by publishers in lots of other countries. However, the major American publishers were reluctant to support a skeptical book, with some suggesting that I re-write it to suggest that ghosts were real and psychic powers actually existed! We didn’t get any serious offers and so it looked like the American public (around 75% of whom believe in the paranormal) wouldn’t get the opportunity to read about skepticism.

Bizarre. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, isn’t it? Since so many of us are gullible cretins, books and TV are tailored to pander to error rather than to challenge and criticize, so the population becomes increasingly more gullible. I guess that makes sense if your goal is to educate a public to buy more soap and toasters.

Anyway, you’re still in luck: Wiseman has decided to bypass the American publishers, and is shipping boatloads (I hope) of his books over here to our benighted shores, so the wiser members of our populace can get wiser still. So next time you turn on the TV and see another of those odious and silly ‘ghosthunter’ shows, just turn it off and pick up a copy of Paranormality. It’s not just good for you, it’s tasty.

I just got word that the physical copies are all sold out. Until they buy a gigantic freighter to haul over a mountain of new copies, you’ll have to settle for the Kindle edition.