Following on from my previous post discussing historical parallels with the present situation in Iraq, Niall Ferguson has suggested that the experience of the British Empire in Iraq itself is the most appropriate one:

The problem with Ferguson’s thesis is that he is rather selective in his account. In particular, he takes the view that the brutality with which the British suppressed that revolt will have to be emulated by the Americans if any orderly transition of power is to be effected. It is certainly true that the British were subsequently able to do just that, but Ferguson neglects to mention that the Hashemite prince Faisal was subsequently deposed, thereby allowing a fascist dictatorship to sieze power. Suffice to say that this is not quite the inspiring example Ferguson appears to view it as.

I‘ve always rather liked the idea of counter-factuals (i.e. what if alternative versions of history), largely because it seems to me that understanding what didn’t happen is often as important as what did happen. So, I was rather struck by this critique of counter-factuals:

Accordingly, counter-factuals are seen as a preserve of the right, creating a narrative based on the actions of great men rather than of economic and technological forces. Of course, there is always a continuum in such things; only the most doctrinaire would deny a role to human agency in the face of wider forces or vice versa. But I must admit I became more favourable to this critique after reading an article by Victor Davis Hanson (who has contributed pieces to some of the counter factual books I have), imagining what if President Carter had responded with military action against Iran in 1979, comparing the actual events to the appeasement of Hitler and opposing them to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the hands of the Reagan doctrine. Firstly, this assumes that these are the correct analogies for present circumstances; it could as easily be argued that Vietnam is a better analogy than Munich, or indeed the Boer War. For what it’s worth, I think the Boer war is a good analogy, though I’d suggest that the Thuggee cult is possibly a better one.

Secondly, it should be observed that wider forces were indeed involved in all of these cases. To be specific, the economic and military capacity of Britain and France to defeat Germany at that point. Or the economic failure of the Soviet Union, leading to its inability to compete on military terms as the prime cause for perestroika and glasnost. That should also be set against the consequences of the Reagan doctrine in terms of instability and the risks had Gorbachev responded with force. In the present time, we might observe that the question of states is barely relevant (which makes appeasement a poor analogy), since much of the terrorism in question occurs quite independently of state structures and typically tends to thrive in opposition to them (as the history of the British Empire should testify as much as current events in Iraq). In short, I’m rather sceptical about Mr Hanson’s thesis. But I do have a counter-factual of my own: what if the US had not applied the Reagan doctrine to Afghanistan? Julie Burchill had some ideas on that point. Perhaps the left can benefit from counter-factuals after all (even if only as wish-fulfilment).

Update: Scott Martens suggests that far from being conservative, counter-factuals are whiggish, depicting scenarios wherein progress is derailed from its correct course (in other words, a past tense version of dystopian fiction). He further notes that conservatism tends to be determinist in its own fashion also; constrained by a fixed notion of human nature rather than history. I’m a little reluctant to describe the genre in terms that are quite so essentialist (the term covers a multitude of sins and Hunt has a point about wish-fulfilment from conservative writers wondering if the British Empire could have been saved), but it is a good point. Consider Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, a novel where the South wins the civil war and thereby creates a backward and primitive future. In fairness, I should also say that the Davis Hanson essay I alluded to above is in a similar vein; it dealt with the possibility of the Athenian navy being defeated at Salamis.

I‘ve long been interested in aspects of the Sapir-Lee Whorf hypothesis, which states that the structure of language has the capability to determine habits of thought. This piece seems to give the idea some validity:

The implication seems to be that language can exercise a determining influence in such cases as differing ways in which languages describe space. Conversely, the similar conceptual structures underpinning most languages would point to a limitation of this effect, presumably due to similar cognitive processing of the environment or to an innate transformative grammar of the kind postulated by Chomsky. That said, I am rather struck by the absence of any reference to linguistic change in the face of social change; I would have thought that should describe the ‘grue’ word formation rather well.

I took an enormous amount of malicious pleasure from this post at Crooked Timber, discussing the frivolous nature of evolutionary psychology just-so stories. In essence, one of the problems for evolutionary psychology is that it tends to offer genetic explanations of every facet of human nature, irrespective of evidence and without any significant prospect for either verification or falsification. The same people who denounce studies such as postmodernism will freely introduce concepts such as memes, which are then spoken of as if there was any empirical evidence for their existence. The most obvious example of this is Steven Pinker’s dismissal of modern art as being a cultural aberration, when he neatly forgot that popular art of the kind he views as being most compatible with human nature has been the exception and not the rule when it comes to the formation of literary canons. But beyond that, one can be quite sure that someone somewhere will have posited an evolutionary explanation for each and every aspect of our behaviour (not excepting the plumbing of kitchen sinks).

The more disturbing aspect is the question of political bias. Just as the age of Marx and Freud excluded such explanations in favour of environmental theories, I often feel that the present age is doing precisely the same thing in reverse. Certainly, in this case the genetic factors have associated environmental triggers and I tend to feel that the nature/nurture distinction is meaningless; since it is rarely possible to conceive of one without the other. In particular, the idea that human nature exists as a fixed quantity in the absence of a blank slate, is inherently conservative, being one of Hirschman’s central tropes in the Rhetoric of Reaction (not to mention fitting a Hobbesian/Burkean worldview far better than that of Locke or Dewey). Of course, this may simply be a matter that the conclusions of evolutionary psychology are simply more amenable to a right-wing standpoint and that to avoid this is a matter of denial, rather than a question of bias being behind the theories to begin with. But the fact that there are left-wing Darwinians like Singer and Dawkins suggests to me that this is much a matter of interpretation as of evidence.

Update: Here’s a rather good example of these problems, a piece by Steven Pinker dismissing evolutionary explanations for religion:

As it happens, my own view of religion is essentially very similar to what Pinker outlines here. The problem is the distinction he advances between evolutionary adaptation and by-products (Spandrels as Gould would have called them; odd to hear Pinker using a Gouldian argument) seems a rather arbitrary one in this context. Although I’ve always found the argument that religion is a guarantee of social order a poor argument for defending religion (since in such an argument the question of whether any deity actually exists is irrelevant) it does seem to have an obvious application, particularly if we consider the extensive evidence for a neurological basis to religion.

Update: An interesting piece from The Scientist further reinforces some prejudices:

It strikes me that evolutionary grounding actually makes evolutionary psychology less reliable than standard psychology for the very simple reason that the process of evolution is not something that can be easily observed while the question of whether a feature is an adaptation, a spandrel or a evironmental influence becomes arbitrary.

Camille Paglia has published a new piece in Arion, on the theme of the increased importance of the image to Western culture:

It’s an interesting thesis, namely that the increased importance of the visual imagination has led to an increased dimunition of the reasoning faculty, something that works through language rather than any visual medium. The particular interest for me is that I have always been most at home with language rather than with music or the visual arts; it took me years before I could appreciate music without lyrics. As always with Paglia, the problem lies with her inconsistency. Her magnum opus, Sexual Personae, suffered considerably from this, in that it suggested two opposed tendencies as dominating Western culture but presented a shifting picture of how each tendency should be considered. Paglia seemed unable to suggest which of the two should be allowed to surmount the other, and seemed equally unable to define any dialectical relation between the two. Accordingly, her tone was alternately moralistic and anarchic. Something of the same problem applies here.

The particular problem is that if Paglia’s thesis is correct, then her proposed remedy of ‘imagology’ (a unified study of art, history and criticism) seems to run the risk of being collaboration rather than resistance (if the only course of action is to dwell on study of the visual imagination, then it may well be that post-structuralism and postmodernism were wise to be suspicious of magic and mystique). Contrast Paglia’s argument to that of Neal Stephenson in his essay In the Beginning was the Command Line. Stephenson has a similar argument to Paglia in many respects:

Stephenson is wary of relying on the visual imagination; he sees it as offering mediated experiences and sees mediated experiences as being unreliable in comparison to the written word. By contrast, Paglia veers between proposing a course of education that simply adapts to this changed world and denouncing it, most obviously with the unintentionally ironic conclusion to her suggested visual studies:

Update: I’ve noticed a few other blogs criticising Paglia on a number of grounds. The most obvious is the dated nature of her argument, rehashing Mcluhanite theories at a time when the Internet has arguably restored text to primacy over images. Certainly, the Internet is in many ways a good analogue for the Victorian telegraphy system and by virtue of being initially conceived for military applications evolved through a completely different route to technologies such as television and DVD.