These things are not the same as these other things

Today, a couple of similar-ish pieces from Pscyhe I think I can get away with combining into a single post.

The first one is very simple, describing how wanting things and liking things aren't the same. This may well seem obvious : I like Star Wars but don't ever want to become a Jedi Knight, I like reading history but have no desire to actually meet Genghis Khan, and I really like chocolate cake but don't want to stuff my face with it continuously. But I have some sympathy for those who, like the researcher in the article, "thought that liking and wanting were just two words for the same process", because I strongly suspect the second piece is also similarly obvious.

Anyway, the neurological distinction between liking and wanting is interesting, especially as to how this was discovered :

When the neuroscientist Roy Wise blocked dopamine in the brains of rodents, he found that they eventually stopped eating, stopped having sex and stopped socialising, presumably because they lost the pleasure of those rewards... By blocking dopamine in the rats’ brains with a drug, Berridge expected to show how their facial expressions switched from liking to disliking. To his surprise, that’s not what happened. Blocking the rats’ dopamine did strip them of their motivation to eat, but it didn’t alter their liking response when they were fed.

I'm going to leave aside the fascinating nugget here that rats have facial expressions otherwise this will spiral into another post altogether.  

A key part of what dopamine actually does is cause wanting: it’s related to the anticipation of rewards, as opposed to the enjoyment of them. Wanting and liking are both associated with a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, but within this region are two distinct areas: some that are involved in generating pleasure and, others, motivation.

By increasing dopamine, Berridge can even make a rat want something that hurts – like an electrified probe.

You might recall this piece from a few years back on Trump becoming addicted to and damaged by the negative attention from his idiotic tweets. I suspect any psychologist who's familiar with gambling addictions or children acting out for attention wouldn't be surprised that people can want to do things they don't enjoy. And I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of thing was especially common in politicians, who are basically compelled into doing things they personally don't enjoy or want to do*. A demographic study on this would be fascinating. Something something "authentic self", something something...

* There are probably unique factors at work in the Trump case and certainly not all politicians are even remotely like this, however. Still the general tendency might be interesting.

The only other thing I want to mention from this piece is this bit :

There’s an important distinction between the kind of wanting Berridge is talking about and ‘wanting’ in a more aspirational sense. ‘I want to work out more, I want to stop spending so much time on social media, I want to eat healthier – those are cognitive plans,’ Robinson says. This kind of wanting can go along with a more primal want, but it doesn’t have to. It’s the more intense wanting that is affected in addiction.

Well, as before, that's just liking the idea of something, isn't it ? Or liking and wanting the consequences but not the process, not the thing itself. Everyone wants to be fit but lots of people don't enjoy exercise : we want the end result but don't enjoy the process. We might say we want to work out but that's not what we really mean. So there's nothing problematic here, just a bit of nuance about language and the distinction between the ends and the means.

On to the second piece, which is about appreciating things you already have. This one resonates with me. I've long made it a habit, whenever things are pleasantly stable, to a take a moment from time to time to deliberately and actively appreciate that : to realise that things could be much worse, and that because the background level of my daily activity is stable and not a rollercoaster of exciting adventures it's none the worse for that. When things aren't changing, it's easy to miss that you're actually in a very happy place. To deliberately recognise, just occasionally, that you'd miss the things you have if they were ever gone (even those which have really no chance of being lost) is definitely beneficial.

What does this have to do with things that seem similar but aren't the same ? Hold up, I'll get to that. I'm not going to go through the whole "how-to" guide in the essay but there are a few points I want to remark on.

Appreciation, as I use it here, may begin with thankfulness for what you have, but it goes beyond that to a broader understanding of how the world works and what is valuable in that. Appreciation can also lead us to a critical attitude in a way that gratitude does not, because we may recognise that the world and its inhabitants are not cared for as they should be.

A certain kind of appreciation might be thought of as a desire for cultivation and continuity, then. I'm not really sure I agree with the author's characterisation of a human desire for a "boom and bust hedonistic treadmill" – that's probably overstating the case. Still I do think we often want a certain sort of combination of stable novelty, something that's unpredictable but with clear boundaries. As I've said before, this is why socialising with friends is so appealing. We get interactions we like but are never quite the same.

The author then raises the excellent point of how the old adage that you should "be happy with what you've got" can be a declaration of repression. And this is where the article does an excellent job of breaking a distinction I've sort of always been aware of but never been able to properly articulate :

If you’re like me, you might also have some political resistance to the idea of appreciation. The idea that we should ‘appreciate what we have’ can strike one as a ruling-class ideology: ‘You peasants should be grateful we feed you slop at all.’ We shouldn’t appreciate – we should have a revolution! I understand this resistance. But over time, I have come to believe that not appreciating what I have is an even crueller way of looking at the world. It’s like a little voice in your head saying: ‘Not only do you not have enough, but you should also be miserable about it.’ 

Just as we should appreciate things in spite of difficulty, so we should appreciate difficulty in spite of progress. It’s this balance that makes for a productive version of ‘elsewhereism’: seeking a better place, collectively, not because we fail to appreciate where we are, but because we know that the good of our time and place is still not enough.

Yes ! The word the author is looking for here is "satisfied". You can enjoy things but still want more without being greedy. To enjoy the latest game but wish it had extra features is not necessarily to be entitled or ungrateful. You can recognise and appreciate the good in progress and development while simultaneously wanting more, for things to be better than they are. Wishing a game had better graphics but enjoying it anyway isn't greedy, but wanting more than would actually satisfy your hunger is. A desire for continual progress isn't the same as being dissatisfied with the current state of development, though these aren't mutually exclusive either.

Should you be "happy with what you've got", then ? Sure, as long as what you've got meets your material needs and you've got things which are uniquely special to you. Here I think the author falls down a bit by advocating us all to appreciate the stars and public libraries and roads and suchlike – sure, but everyone has those, so it's difficult psychologically to see them as special. More importantly, just because you're happy doesn't mean you don't have a right to wish for improvements. And if you are miserable despite living in material and social luxury, well, maybe that's a you problem.

Elsewhereism is, I think, based on a specific kind of forgetfulness: that is, forgetting that even in the new, better elsewhere, there will still be problems. You will still suffer from accidents, from unrequited love, from natural disasters, from new psychological foibles that will simply emerge. That’s just part of our human condition. To better appreciate what you have isn’t to give up on an elsewhere. It’s to understand that there is no elsewhere that is beyond some degree of difficulty, and that, if you’re not appreciative of what you have now, you never will be.

This I think is important. It especially hits a nerve because there is so, so much journalism which is exclusively and ludicrously negative. If you don't take a moment to recognise when you've reached your goals, if it's all about just setting more and more difficult objectives, you'll never be happy. That's not healthy and I think it's a major source of toxicity in the media. That said, I'd add a caveat to the above quote that this probably only applies if your base needs are already at least met and/or exceeded; if there's something fundamental missing from your life, it's not your lack of appreciation that's the problem. And sometimes a change is as good as a rest. Novelty for novelty's sake can be important, it's just a perpetual hunger for change that can be psychologically damaging. There are things we can continuously appreciate but this is not true of all things.

Two final points. First, a favourite pet point about how awful Stephen Pinker is :

It is good to appreciate, for example, that humans now have longer life expectancies than in the past and that we have the technical capacity to feed everyone alive. Those are amazing accomplishments. But sometimes it’s suggested that such progress means the world’s institutions are basically good and progress is inevitable. In a world where billions of people still live in poverty, this is over-appreciation for the progress we’ve made.

Nailed it. Just because things are better now doesn't mean they're anywhere near as good as they could and should be, especially when the causes largely appear to be insane levels of inequality, corruption, naked greed, entitlement and wilful ignorance. Pinker would have us all believe we should "be happy with what we've got" in the worse and most repressive sense; conversely, the media wallows in perpetual misery despite any and all accomplishments. A better, middle way is possible.

Finally :

Because we are all imperfect in some ways, none of us can claim much superiority over others. By appreciating our own imperfections, we come to see that others’ imperfections are not irreparable flaws, but aspects of what makes them equal and meaningful members of our communities.

This is a bit self-helpy but it's valuable nonetheless. We seem to expect not just perfection but also continuously-varying perfection, not just in our own lives but, perhaps more dangerously, in those of others too. Neil Gaiman's preface to Pratchett's A Stroke of the Pen makes it abundantly clear that Pratchett the man was not the same as Pratchett the legend, as capable of anyone else as being a bit of a grumpy old twit from time to time, and not the all-forgiving, ever-wise public figure that's so (rightly) frequently celebrated. I often wonder what it must be like for celebrities, especially new celebrities, trying to juggle this public demand for a perfect persona with a desire to just do normal people things and not be harangued for it. Surely the advice here to expect everyone to be basically like us, warts and all, is at least a decent starting point.

Review : Ordinary Men

As promised last time I'm going to do a more thorough review of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men. I already mentioned the Netflix documentary, which is excellent (if you want a counter to this, see the extraordinary movie One Life with Anthony Hopkins). The book of course is even more nuanced – and terrifying. It covers the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101's role in the Nazi holocaust. If that's not your thing, you should stop reading immediately.

I previously described this as horror beyond horror, and that's exactly what it is. Unlike other books I won't even try to rate this one; to do so feels disrespectful. Like One Life, this is in a category all of its own, the kind of book everyone needs to read but not necessarily more than once. Rather than review it, instead I'll try to just summarise the author's main conclusions : a task made easier because Browning lays them all out very clearly and directly. Quite properly, he first covers the history purely as a factual series of events, and this makes up the bulk of the book. He reserves his wider thoughts almost exclusively to the final two chapters, where he sets out his findings in some detail.

In large part Browning presents his arguments as in direct opposition to another work, Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which claimed that it took extreme anti-Semitism for the holocaust to happen. Browning shows, I think all too convincingly, that this is far from the whole story. In this particular case it seems abundantly clear that it can be all too easy to turn ordinary, educated, middle-aged, happily-married men into the most brutal sort of killers. This is much, much more disturbing than ascribing it to a horrific but uniquely peculiar happenstance of history.

The book in brief

First some preliminaries. Ordinary Men is a work that must have truly taken nerves of steel to compile. In fact I think I've never read anything that made me so viscerally, deeply angry that human beings could ever act like this. I've read of the ghastly practises of the Aztecs and Vlad the Impaler and so many other historical nasties in lurid and highly graphic detail, and I'm not easily disturbed by reading about such things. Yet the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were, in their own uniquely terrifying way, worse than all of them.

Part of it is lack of distance. One expects the distant past to be a different place, for extinct cultures to have radically different values and beliefs to us. That's a large part of the appeal in studying it, like visiting another world, safe and secure behind the impregnable mental shield provided by the lens of the text. Ordinary Men is different. While of course there have been enormous cultural changes in the course of the intervening 90-odd years, there are unnerving similarities. It is after all still within living memory, an age of cars, electricity, medicine, global travel, cinema and television, not the almost alien realm of medieval feudalism or or even a Victorian stately home. And the main subjects of the book were, as Browning makes clear, men who were in no significant way different from us. They were recognisably normal.

The book begins with a rather dry documentation of the policing system, how the Nazis sent the reserve police forces (mostly men in their forties, married with children and who had been policemen for many years) into occupied countries to enforce German rule. It's a rather tedious list detailing exactly who went where, who gave which orders to whom, etc. Tedious but necessary : Browning wants the readers to know exactly much unique detail we have about this case, that this is documented thoroughly and actually provably happened. There isn't any doubt about it, as there is in many of the more ancient historical atrocities.

I won't go into the full gruesome details. Browning justifiably does do this, not for the sake of some ghastly titillation but because the public has the right to know and because the full horror of it is necessary to have any hope of understanding it psychologically : to comprehend how such ordinary men could behave so profoundly abnormally.

What happened ?

Nevertheless, I must necessarily lay out the basics. The police battalions were used to supplement the military forces in rounding up Jews for the holocaust. Primarily this consisted of forcibly deporting them on trains to extermination camps but it also involved a very great deal of direct murder. There was overlap between the two : transportation could often involving shooting Jews in the street if they refused to move, leaving the bodies where they lay. On the trains alone, hundreds or thousands died from heat exhaustion. 

But the direct actions were the most disturbing of all, marching men, women and children into the forest and shooting them at point-blank range with high powered rifles. As I said, horror beyond horror, and I need not go into the full grim detail as Browning does. 

Browning estimates the number of Jews shot by Reserve Police Battalion 101 alone at 38,000. The number they crammed onto trains to the Treblinka extermination camp was about 45,000. In some individual actions each policeman shot on average 14 Jews, with that figure rising to about 80 for their whole period of deployment in Poland. The great majority of them quite literally became serial killers. Unlike soldiers fighting armed opponents, they were virtually never under threat : their victims were unarmed civilians.

These averages reflect the disturbing fact that the "smallest group comprised the non-shooters". Some did object to the action, though only one single individual made a stand on moral principles : the rest tried to excuse themselves on grounds of illness or by making themselves scarce. Perhaps 10 or at most 20% managed to avoid personally killing anyone. At the other extreme there were of course traditional sadists and psychopaths who actively enjoyed murder and torture. But crucially :

The largest group within the battalion did whatever they were asked to do, without ever risking the onus of confronting authority or appearing weak, but they did not volunteer for or celebrate the killing. Increasingly numb and brutalised, they felt more pity for themselves for the "unpleasant" work they had been assigned than they did for their dehumanised victims. For the most part, they did not think what they were doing was wrong or immoral, because the killing was sanctioned by legitimate authority. Indeed, for the most part they did not think, period. As one policeman stated : "Truthfully, I must say that at the time we didn't reflect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then." Heavy drinking helped : "most of the other men drank so much solely because of the many shootings of Jews, for such a life was quite intolerable sober."

Few of them actually wanted to take part, let alone enjoyed it, yet the majority committed the worst of atrocities. In the initial actions most were sick afterwards, physically disgusted with what they had done. One officer in particular expressed no emotional or intellectual disapproval (if anything the opposite) with the actions but still fell ill every time a killing was ordered. As time went on this subsided, with Browning speaking of a group who massacred elderly Polish villagers (importantly, not Jews, as I'll return to) by day and relaxing in the cinema in the evening.

After the war, none of them did anything remotely like this ever again. They were "willing executioners" in that they followed orders, but they were also hardly enthusiastic genocidal maniacs in the way Hitler was* : had they not been ordered to, it's doubtful any of them would every have killed anyone. This is in spite of them brutally murdering entire families.

* 75% were not Nazi Party members, though Browning notes that the 25% who were is an unusually high fraction for a police battalion.

Why did they do this ? How could it happen ?

The obvious explanation : racism

Browning takes us through this point by point. While he firmly rejects demonization of the killers, trying to see them as real, multi-layered, complex individuals, that doesn't mean he has any sympathy for them. "Explaining is not excusing. Understanding is not forgiving."

Why does he so firmly reject the obvious, simple demonization of people who carried out unarguably evil and monstrous acts ? The afterword of the book is a prolonged rebuttal of Hitler's Willing Executioners, which Browning quotes Goldhagen as describing the perpetrators' "Jewish blood lust" and "killing for pleasure". This is an obvious explanation, but as Browning notes, there are many arguments against it. Without doubt, anti-Semitism must surely be the driving factor behind the "desk murderers" who formulated policy and strategy, but this is not Browning's remit : he wants to know about the people pulling the triggers.

Undeniably some of them were simply evil sadists, but most were not. They were willing to kill but hardly enthusiastic about it. Even the battalion commander Major Trapp hated the whole prospect, openly weeping when he gave the initial orders. In fact Trapp not only allowed anyone who wanted to freely excuse themselves, but actively protected those who did.

At the larger scale, Browning draws a picture of a more complex relation between anti-Semitism and Naziism than is usually given (but for an intelligent counter-argument, see Niall Ferguson's The War of the World). To discriminate against something, he says, is not the same as wanting to stop it entirely, especially when that concerns people. He quotes another historian as saying that "Ordinary Germans knew how to distinguish between an acceptable discrimination... and the unacceptable horror of genoicde." 

This is an important point, one which is often difficult to keep in mind. On reading some chapters I felt a physical level of disgust and outrage at anyone agreeing with even the mildest form of racial or xenophobic policies, because why would you ever want to take even a single step down this road ? And yet, if they were really so closely linked, human history would be far more bloody than it already is. This is in fact something I've pointed out previously, though I have to admit it was very hard to maintain any sort of rational perspective while reading the book.

Anti-Semitism is now of course the main thing associated with the Nazis, but at the time it wasn't their main selling point. Achieving no more than 37% of the vote, it seems very unlikely that all those who did vote for them were of the same order of evil as the party leaders. Browning suggests that the primary attractions of economic policies, authoritarianism and nationalism acted as the draw to anti-Semitism, rather than the other way around. And as he sets out at length, there were plenty of killings of non-Jewish people that were just as horrific as those of the Jews. Furthermore, the non-German peoples participating in the holocaust behaved much the same despite lacking a supposedly uniquely-German anti-Semitic cultural brainwashing.

The biggest role anti-Semitism may have played was not in causing ordinary people to actively and personally shoot Jews, but in apathy. The general population might not have actually wanted to kill anyone or even wanted anyone else to kill on their behalf, but they were open to the idea of "limiting, or even ending, the role of Jews in German society." Indifference may have allowed the holocaust to happen but anti-Semitism wasn't the reason that ordinary middle-aged policeman would murder entire families in the forest. As Browning says, the relationship between discrimination, hatred and actual cruelty is more complex :

But we are still left with an unresolved question that cannot be solved by simple assertion : is a culture of hatred the necessary precondition for such a culture of cruelty ? Goldhagen has posed an important question. I do not believe that we have found a satisfactory answer.

If anti-Semitism is not the explanation for why hundreds of policeman committed acts of barbarity, then what is ? Browning carefully and systematically addresses many suggestions before settling on a single likely root cause. 

The calculated banality of evil

First, this was atrocity by policy, not a series of barbarous acts committed in an uncontrolled frenzy. Like the extermination camps it was a coldly calculated procedure which actively and deliberately accounted for the natural human tendency not to want to murder each other. The amount of direct shootings the policeman were ordered to undertake was (with some exceptions of the truly sadistic commanders) "minimised" and their roles limited as much as possible to loading the Jews onto trains – this was itself a barbaric process, but a step removed from direct murder; or limited only to cordon or other duties. The policemen were not told in advance of their tasks so not given a prior opportunity to withdraw, but if anyone asked to be excused (such as for being unable to shoot women and children), they were allowed. After the first shootings, volunteers were requested or policeman chosen who were already known to be willing to carry out further killings.

All of this was anticipated by and accounted for by Nazi High Command :

Being too weak to continue shooting, of course, posed problems for the "productivity" and morale of the battalion, but it did not challenge basic police discipline or the authority of the regime in general. Indeed, Heinrich Himmler himself sanctioned the toleration of this kind of weakness in his notorious Posen speech of October 4, 1943, to the SS leadership. While exalting obedience as one of the key virtues of all SS men, he explicitly noted an exception, namely, "one whose nerves are finished, one who is weak. Then one can say : Good, go take your pension."

This was a regime which was absolutely focused on its goal. They knew they were asking things fundamentally opposed to basic (or rather, civilised) human nature but they didn't demand making men into "mad dogs". Rather, says Browning, brutalisation was the effect, not the cause, of the killings. In fact while the policeman were no less indoctrinated with anti-Semitism than everyone else at the time, they were not especially more so either. While they were given some additional propaganda materials, none of it was designed to appeal to middle-aged married men with families, and none of it was designed to excite them to such bestial acts.

Instead, the killings themselves brutalised the men. They became inured to it, initially witnessing horrific injuries caused by their tendency to aim too high (quite possibly so as to subconsciously try and miss), and then adjusting to point-blank, careful shots aimed along the bayonet to guarantee a kill. Likewise, some of them justified killing entire families as a "kindness" as opposed to the cruelty of leaving the children alive. 

Nor were the policeman an especially unusual bunch. If anything, says Browning, they were the dregs, the only source of manpower available for their assigned task, and not the sort anyone would normally choose for something like this. There was certainly no deliberate selection on the part of the government nor any self-selection at work in who joined up, because they weren't told in advance as to what they would do, only learning of their initial duties on the morning of the first massacre. Officers certainly weren't selected for their sadistic tendencies either, with their being no indication of Major Trapp's open weeping as being anything other than sincere.

Another key point is that they weren't "only following orders".

Quite simply, in the past forty-five years no defence attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of post-war trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly dire punishment... even putative duress dot not hold for Reserve Police Battalion 101. From the time Major Trapp, with choked voice and tears streaming down his cheeks, offered to excuse those "not up to it" at Józefów and protected the first man to take up his offer from Captain Hoffmann's wrath, a situation of putative duress did not exist in the battalion.

That is, the men knew they didn't have to kill anyone and no serious consequences would befall them. Yes, they might be shamed by their comrades and yes, shame is unpleasant. But one would reasonably expect that the shame of murder would be infinitely greater. 

So what was going on ?

Group conformity

Browning's answer is group conformity. This is not the same as obedience to authority : rather, the men carried out their orders out of the expectation that everyone else would too. This was a government-approved, legitimate action, so while they might not have believed it to be a good thing (certainly few were ever enthusiastic about it), they did accept that it was necessary. Just as in Milgram's shock experiments, the most successful encouragement to action was not in emphasising that the order was given, but that the action was necessary and beneficial to society.

Browning does a better disection of Milgram's findings than Bregman here (see previous post), acknowledging the differences between the situations. He notes that Major Trapp was a somewhat weak authority figure but invoked the "anything but weak" authority of the Nazi government, and respected by the men. He seems to have been genuinely sympathetic to the men's obvious disturbance at the prospect of their horrifying task, which may have made them respect him more, not less. That they knew they had a get-out option may, ironically, have helped many of them to overcome their discomfort. It wasn't so much fear of being shamed by the group that may have been the crucial factor in compliance, but in the fear that by not doing their fair share of this grisly task, they would be letting their friends down.

The battalion had orders to kill Jews, but each individual did not. Yet 80 to 90 percent of the men proceeded to kill, though almost all of them – at least initially – were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behaviour, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot.

Why ? First of all, by breaking ranks, nonshooters were leaving the "dirty work" to their comrades. Since the battalion had to shoot even if individuals did not, refusing to shoot constituted refusing one's share of an unpleasant collective obligation. It was in effect an asocial act vis-à-vis one's comrades. Those who did not shoot risked isolation, rejection, and ostracism – a very uncomfortable prospect within the tight-knit unit stationed abroad among a hostile population.

For this reason those who objected did so almost entirely on the grounds of "weakness", not moral principles. Weakness, it seems, is excusable, but moral objection meant open defiance of the group. Anti-Semitism and widespread cultural notions of German superiority, of what it meant to be a good citizen, definitely played a role here, even if only a second-order effect. Defying orders wasn't a problem so much out because of the disobedience itself, but because you'd be going against cultural norms. Conversely by obeying these terrible orders, you would, so the perverted reasoning goes, actually be helping your fellow men and wider society.

This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.

Conclusions 

Perhaps the most disturbing implication of Ordinary Men is not that racism leads to genocide, but that genocide can be perpetrated by those with no great ideological commitments. Yes, it took extreme racism coupled with hatred and a particular kind of evil intelligence for the "desk murderers" to formulate their policy. These men were diabolically evil. The brand of extreme malevolence that ran wild with the Nazi faithful is, fortunately, rare, and to couple this with the analytic intelligence needed to implement its insane policy in a workable, coherent way is rarer still. But the same simply cannot be said of those who actually pulled the triggers. Their motivations were altogether both more subtle and more common.

Circumstance, I think, appears to be very heavily dominant in human behaviour. Whether raising awareness of this helps us to make better choices, to be less swayed by group behaviour which goes against our own moral principles, remains poorly unanswered. Balancing the strengths of our collectivist and individualist tendencies against their respective deficiencies is a formidable challenge, and until we solve this most subtle of problems, I think we will remain forever haunted by the threat of hatred, war, and genocide. 

Review : Human Kind

I suppose I really should review Bregman's Human Kind : A Hopeful History, though I'm not sure I want to. This was a deeply frustrating read when at various times I wanted to grab Bregman by the shoulders, give him a good hard shake and scream "Not like that, you fool !" and at other times I just wanted to tell him to sod off for being a twat. It ranks among the most idiotic things I've ever read.

In terms of a book it reminds me very much of Planta Sapiens : it's highly, pro-actively defensive to the point of often saying very little. It isn't quite as bad as that one (it at least presents a great deal of evidence) but it wastes a lot of time saying how much the author has been derided for ideas instead of actually making claims, and after a little while one has to wonder that if everyone hates it, maybe it's just stupid. After all, if everyone around you is an arse, maybe you're the arse.

The annoying thing is that I liked his previous book Utopia For Realists very much. I did find it a bit breathless though, so this time I forced myself to slow down a little and try more actively to critique things as I went along. But I think I needn't have worried. While there are some genuinely insightful bits here and there, most of this is pop psychology I knew anyway, with the conclusions painted with a brush so broad you could fly a plane through them and so rabidly, uncritically ideologically driven that.... sigh. I despair. I suspect the author is really just another Suella Braverman or Lee Anderson, on the other side of the fence to be sure, but utterly lacking in self-awareness. 

In terms of writing, as with UFR it's highly readable, although towards the end the short, impactful statements become over-used and extremely irritating. Other than that it's only the content which lets it down : it's an eminently readable bit of absolute tripe. Whereas UFR was a persuasive appeal but backed by a pretty solid analysis, this one is much more of a straightforward polemic.

Here's a very brief TLDR summary :

The central claim is that humans are, basically, when you get right down to it, fundamentally good. They want to be nice to each other unless they themselves are ill-treated by others, and it's civilisation that's the main reason this happens. We were all much happier as chillaxing apes in the jungle living our best, anarcho-communist-hippie lifestyles. I swear to goodness that I am not exaggerating this at all – this is literally what he claims.

The main strength of the the work is in writing popular summaries of individual incidents. He's genuinely very good at this. Give him something specific to tackle and he does a good job of analysing it in a decently-critical way, looking at things from different perspectives to see if there was any missing data or confounding facts. He even does include some examples which run counter to his main conclusion, and tried quite sincerely to account for them, toning down his conclusion in response. Few authors with an axe to grind ever do this, so kudos to him for that.

The principle weakness is in drawing wider conclusions. At this he's shite. Absolutely shite. Here his critical thinking skills abandon him like rats leaving a sinking ship, which does, in fact, sink. He totally and utterly fails to consider any alternative hypotheses whatsoever and drones on and on about how he must be right because nobody believes him. At times, he reaches an almost Liz Truss level of lack of self-awareness. His conclusions simply don't make any sense and he can't accept any of the (often fairly obvious) counter-arguments. He's driven here by pure ideology and nothing else.

If you just want to know if you should leave it on the shelf, you can stop here (if I have to rate it, I give it a dismal 3/10). For those who want a bit more depth, let us continue.

The Good

Credit where credit is due, Bregman does have some good points to make. For example, he covers the famous Prison Experiment quite well and reinforces (as I already knew) that it was a literal fraud. I also knew about the bystander effect being something of a fallacy, but Bregman's debunking is especially thorough and convincing. In particular he digs into the details of the famous case of Kitty Genovese, supposedly left to die by 38 eye-witnesses and finds that nothing of the sort took place : of those 38, only two actually saw anything. One of those was a racist and the other a homosexual (this was the 1960s) drunk and worried about contacting the police.

What's less widely reported, and was news to me, was that the famous Robber's Cave experiment was also little better than any of these misconstrued and misreported incidents. In this experiment a summer camp of two "tribes" of children were contrived to fight each other and then unified by a common enemy. But Bregman digs into the research and finds that all the hyper-competitive games the children played were chosen for them by the experimenter, with any spontaneous attempts at cooperation (of which there were many) immediately suppressed. It's hardly the compelling proof of how naturally vicious tribalism develops that it's so often been portrayed to be. And the experimenter had actually tried the same thing a previous year, which hadn't worked : the assistants didn't like it, the children didn't like it, and ultimately realised they were being manipulated so the whole thing was called off.

Probably Bregman's best point concerns the famous electro-shock experiments of Stanley Milgram. He notes that only half the participants actually believed they were inflicting electrical shocks on the supposed victim, and most of those who believed it was a setup (as of course it was) refused to continue. Milgram himself, in private at least, expressed some pretty strong doubts about the validity of the experiment. And in fact excessive pressure by the experimenter for the subjects to keep going actually had the opposite effect : the stronger the pressure, the more likely they were to stop. This hardly fits the common "we're all slaves to authority" take-home message that the experiment is so often associated with. 

To his great credit, however, Bregman admits that still, many people did simply continue with the experiment and these results have been replicated many times. There is an aspect of obedience to authority, sort-of, but I'll get back to that later. Elsewhere he concedes that other experiments do show an innate tribalism, or at least that it's relatively easy to induce – though not nearly so much as the Prison Experiment and Robber's Cave would suggest. You can't make ordinary people into villains that easily, or so he claims.

Finally, he makes the important point that that humans' main cognitive strength is in social learning. There are few true geniuses, but once someone figures out a solution, we're very good at copying them. Tribalism has its weaknesses but this can be a tremendous strength : what requires genius to figure out for the first time can become commonly utilised by almost everyone.

The Bad

Unfortunately the 500-odd words in the above claims really are the sum total of the best bits of a 400 page book. All the rest, apart from a handful of trivialities here and there, is considerably worse. Let's start with the assertions he makes which are straightforwardly wrong or absolutely unprovable.

One thing that Bregman keeps coming back to is that nomads are all lovely people. They would "rather talk out their problems or just move on", he says, and they're "constantly getting together to party". They also "got plenty of exercise". For thousands of years they kept clear of conflicts, and "the chiefs of nomadic tribes were all modesty."

FFS. Anyone who knows anything about the fall of the Roman Empire or the Great Wall of China will be immediately screaming : MONGOLS ! HUNS ! XIONGNU ! ALANS ! VISIGOTHS ! SCYTHIANS ! And literally hordes of others besides. Bregman's idea of the hippie nomadic lifestyles is cherry-picking run amok. The Mongols alone had the second largest empire the world has ever seen. Tamerlame was famous for grinding cities into dust, sowing fields of barley among the ruins and building towers of skulls out of the victims. They. Were. Not. Nice.

To blatantly ignore all of these very famous examples (none of the above are ever mentioned) is pretty insulting to one's intelligence. Furthermore, he insists that nomads manage to do this despite having large social networks far exceeding the monkeysphere, thus supposedly questioning how many people we can associate with before we dehumanise them. The problem is that this ignores the obvious point that they probably didn't know all of their sometime friends all at once.

It's true that evidence for ancient warfare is sparse. War may well have had a beginning, but Bregman is reaching here : plenty of other animals do get into conflict with each other, so quite possibly it's always been with us. Especially given the difficulty of obtaining evidence. Even some of the more recent battlefields don't leave much in the way of archaeological traces; plenty of well-documented Roman battles have never been found at all (neither for that matter have entire cities). Couple this insistence that humans are "simply not wired for war" with the rabid belief in perfectly peaceful nomads (!) and things start to get downright silly. It's just daft. War keeps happening, over and over and over again. His denials of this seem to be based on the flimsiest of evidence, that sometimes the soldiers wanted to stop fighting. Well of course they fucking did you twit. Anyone who's ever watched the news will be able to tell you instantly that this in no way diminishes human propensity for warfare.

Perhaps worse, he simply states without any justification that early hunter-gathers were likely "proto feminists" for some reason. Well, that's entirely possible, but without explaining how we know this it's a vacuously stupid statement. With similarly little justification, Bregman claims that the Enlightenment invented racism. I mean, sure, Enlightenment values can absolutely be questioned. But this is a garbage claim with no merit to it. It's incredibly, deeply frustrating to reduce deep and complex issues to absurdly over-simplified barely coherent nonsense, especially coming from someone who is clearly capable of careful and critical thinking.

Finally, some modern stuff. I don't really disagree with the idea that we should prefer intrinsic motivation to trying to give people rewards as motivation : as long as we're paid fairly, a whopping great big bonus is more of an incentive to greed than to doing a good job. But the idea that teachers give bad grades as a punishment to children is deeply offensive. I would never do that. My mum would never do that. None of the schoolteachers I've ever met would ever do that, not would any of the lecturers. It's a moronic, throwaway claim that insults an entire and extremely valuable profession for no reason whatever.

And for crying out loud... the idea that the government will violently assault us if we give up our desk jobs (sorry, "cages", as Bregman calls offices)... dude, what are you even talking about. This is the kind of uber-cynical, ultra-naïve meme-based protest politics that is such a big problem on the internet. It is not the slightest bit worthy of a published book, even if intended as hyperbole. Even weirder, and far less excusable as rhetoric, is that Bregman appears to be genuinely against the idea of political checks and balances. This is mad. Properly mad, to the point I have to start seriously wondering if the guy is feeling okay.

The Ugly

By far the biggest problem, however, are the weird claims. The ones that are a mixture of truths, half-truths, mistakes, incomplete data, and wild speculation; likewise ones where a conclusion that's perfectly valid for a specific case is deemed without proper consideration to apply to the whole of human society in perpetuity.

Bregman begins the book with a summary of the failure of strategic bombing in WWII to have the devastating affects on morale that both respective sides hoped they would inflict. But much like this article on the myth of panic, it's ill thought-through. Yes, true, it didn't lead to nationwide calls to end the war, or simply make everyone too depressed or panic-stricken to fight. Fair enough, that's a good point and worth making, especially since it was true of both sides. But both authors view the effects not so much as simply "not as depressing as expected", which is perfectly respectable, but "actually good".

'Scuse me ? So you'd... want to live in a war zone then, would you ? What's that ? Didn't quite catch it. Oh, you wouldn't want to live there ! No, I thought not.

There's a subtlety here that both of them seem to miss, and it's nothing terribly complicated. Surely, having a foreign nation bomb your cities will make you hate the enemy, and cause most people to band together in a state of nationalistic fervour against the oppressor, but that doesn't mean it makes them fundamentally happy. They don't enjoy watching their loved ones get blown to bits. They don't actually like making do with mediocre and minimal food, poor shelter, lack of power... good lord man, just because it makes them more determined to fight back doesn't for a moment mean that they actually want to live like that. Honestly, this isn't difficult*. 

* See Lucy Worsley's excellent documentary Blitz Spirit for a more detailed analysis, which unarguably shows that actually yes, the bombing did induce a measure of panic amongst the population, if still not anywhere near breaking national morale. She also makes very good points about how much the government controlled the flow of information.

One of the most serious aspects of the book is also the most deeply frustrating. Bregman notes at various points the reluctance of soldiers to fire on the enemy, claiming that contact reduces conflict and distance causes hate. I appreciate the sentiment; I've heard others make the same claims. And it's definitely a very interesting conundrum. The problem is that Bregman hasn't read Ordinary Men (which I plan to review properly in the next post). This is an incredibly powerful counter-example in which ordinary German policeman rounded up Jews in WWII and shot them at point-blank range with high powered rifles. These weren't indoctrinated fanatics or even soldiers – they were normal, mostly educated, middle-aged policeman who, except for this one ghastly moment of horror beyond horror, would live completely unremarkable lives.

But when the moment claim, they did as they were told : they rounded up the Jews, shot them in the street and left them there, rammed others onto overcrowded trains were hundreds died of sheer heat, and took others into the forest and shot them in the head. These weren't clean kills. It was gruesome in the extreme, and they did this not because they even wanted to, or because of consequences if they refused (which were negligible). No, they did it largely out of simple group conformity, and with precious little in the way of any serious reluctance.

This is very different from simple obedience to authority. To be fair, Bregman understands this, stressing that Nazi soldiers fought out of a sense not of ideology but of group camaraderie, something lacking from the one-on-one experiments of Milgram (though, interestingly, those who did continue to inflict shocks were often persuaded by the value of the research to the community). The problem is, that since he also acknowledges that tribalism and racism are easy to induce, this would seem to render his whole project a colossal waste of time. If you concede that it's actually quite easy to transform ordinary people into a bunch of bloodthirsty killers, you have conceded everything. Maintaining that humans are basically nice in spite of this is as mad a claim as anything I've ever heard.

On a related note, Bregman notes that empathy can be a key part of racism in binding us together with people who seem to be like us. This is something Paul Bloom, who he cites, has examined in some detail. I'm still not convinced by this (though Bloom's arguments are intelligent and lucid), but Bregman does himself no favours by immediately claiming in the very next chapter that empathy is central to compassion – with no reference to the previous claims that it's an essential part of racism !

Finally, there are the wild extrapolations. Okay, Bregman likes Agora/Montessori schools, but doesn't offer any evidence at all that these less structured methods actually result in cleverer or nicer people : he just takes it for granted that they do. Then there's the claim that private property is the root of all evil, based on the deeply absurd claim that peaceful nomads became warlike settled peoples only when they decided that they could own things (likewise the idea that farming led to...wait for it... bestiality). That's so stupid I don't know where to start, so I won't. And then there's the part where he advocates for full-on literal Communism, cherry-picking all the times it actually worked out quite well while happily ignoring the much more famous examples where it really, really didn't.

The idea that we were built to "chill out", though, (but racism comes naturally when we live together) ... that's the heart of it. I mean, sure, there's far more to life than material concerns, but it's fucking stupid to pretend they don't matter at all. And there's something much more fundamental here that Bregman simply cannot understand. He insists we must have some base, primal, instinctive nature, and that culture only obscures and corrupts it. He cannot consider the possibility that, in spite of understanding our deeply social nature, maybe being social is our nature. That maybe we simply don't have any innate higher-level tendencies, any more than we are hard-wired to play the flute or build cathode-ray tubes. He's caught in a trap of his own making.

Summary : A Hopeless History

Bregman falls into his principle error fairly early on. He gives a nice overview of Rosseau and Hobbes – Rosseau depicted mankind as being fundamentally good and it was only ever that pesky veneer of "civilization" that led us all astray, whereas Hobbes viewed as all as naturally in a state of "war against all", and only a powerful ruler could save us from ourselves. While Bregman does sometimes consider nuanced versions of this, for example acknowledging that sometimes tribal peoples commit violence (and I think trying earnestly to keep everything consistent), he utterly fails to consider the underlying premise. The lack of any discussion whatever about feral children is, in a book about our innate nature, a criminally silly omission.

His sometimes astonishing lack of self-awareness betrays him. Having examined many theories very carefully and critically, he'll sometimes go off on one about something absolutely silly and irrelevant, like a bizarre connection between sin and the nature of eyes. Worse, having acutely demonstrated the errors of previous experiments and their conclusions, he has an unshakeable "we've got it right this time" attitude which does him no credit. Nobody reading this long and well-compiled series of different mistakes and interpretations ought to go away with anything like this much self-belief. The right response to this series of changing conclusions isn't to be crippled with doubt, but it damn well demands a measure of caution, a careful tempering of findings and a willing acceptance that they must be provisional.

And this whole notion that we lived in a sort of blissful paradise until about 1800, that 95% of human history was quite lovely until only very recently... this is so palpably silly that I don't have adequate words to express just how daft the whole thing is. I mean, okay, you like the hunter-gatherer tribal people lifestyle, eh ? Well, go and live in the jungle then. No, seriously, off you pop. Oh, you actually quite like living in a solid house and not having to deal with innumerable dangers and diseases ? You'd love to go but you won't be able to charge your laptop in the jungle ? Oh deary deary me, what a terrible shame that must be. 

Idiot. It takes some seriously next-level weirdness to conclude that mankind would be happiest if we all lived in the jungle with other people lobbing high explosives at us all day, but that's literally what Bregman is claiming. It's the old "noble savage" fallacy but supercharged to the nth degree.

The thing that's most stuck in my head from the whole book is a diagram Bregman reproduces from a psychology review paper. This compares the evolution of wolves to dogs with early hominids to modern humans. The more I've let this one mull over, the more I've concluded that it's practically a modern version of phrenology : claiming that big eyes and small brow ridges are a mark of friendliness, and that the opposite traits are clearly indicative of nasty, brutish attitudes. We are, Bregman says, Homo Puppy, whereas the Neanderthals clearly weren't.

Righto then. The claim is essentially that early, ugly humans were beastly thugs, whereas modern ones are clearly much better-looking and lovely. To my mind this is very, very racist, a prospect which never seems to even occur to Bregman.

Yet Homo Puppy is deeply flawed concept. The big problem here, the root problem, is that he's determined to find the earliest humans who lived in a "state of nature". This in my view is a nonsense idea. I say instead not that there is no such thing as society, but rather no such thing as a natural society. There is no one right way in which we're supposed to live, any one way in which we're meant to be. We are far, far more adaptable and malleable than that. If we have a base nature it's that we're governed by our circumstances : our resources and culture alike. 

It's not that there's no such thing as society, as that ghastly witch Maggie claimed, but that we are society. This I will develop more in a couple of posts time. For now, I'll just say that I'll never read anything by Bregman ever again, because he's clearly a complete pillock.

EDIT : I decided to give this one the PotC treatment, and you can read my expanded conclusions here.

It's okay to like vinyl

Here's a nice if somewhat over-lengthy piece about why people prefer antiquated technologies like vinyl records instead of digital media. The main point seems to be quite simple :

Work, effort, meaning – these ideas are all interconnected for users and consumers of analogue technology. Whereas work is often seen as a means to an end, from earning a living to exercising, "analoguers" get a buzz out of the processes of setting things up, getting things right, trial and error, and building up skills. This "love of the process" was backed up by another photographer, Dan, during a Zoom discussion held amid one of the Covid lockdowns :

"When I'm serious, I don't want to get distracted by what [image] I'm going to end up with. Even with instant photography, I know I'm going to see the shot soon – just not now. I love everything up until pressing the shutter. I love searching for the frame, I like the output, but the whole process is important."

This makes a lot of sense to me, and also echoes both Chris Hatfield and Tim Peake's books in which they say that as an astronaut, you have to enjoy the training. You can't make it all about the big payoff of going to space because that might never happen, and is only a very small part of the end result. As for vinyl records, I think enjoying them because they offer a "richer sound" is frankly silly, but if you actually prefer the slightly slower process of retrieving a disc, putting the needle on the record and pressing a big chunky mechanical button... I'm not going to stop you. In fact I completely sympathise with the need for tactile sensation even in this very limited case. Physical contact gives a feeling of realness you'll never get from playing a digital file. It's the difference between porn and sex, I suppose...

Ahem. Anyway it's got sod-all to do with the sound quality, so just stop pretending that it does. I'm more inclined to the argument that actually it's the poorer sound quality that has value here :

"Half of what you do trying to make music is like a happy accident that ends up sounding better than what you intended. If the machine doesn't do exactly what you thought it was going to do, or goes a bit out of tune, it is all part of the process. You get a little bit of randomness in it, and that randomness can add to what you are trying to achieve."

Similarly, many of Mick Rock's legendary music photographs are technically very grainy because he was shooting in low light and "pushing" the film to its limits, but as a result, they have a painterly feel that has enhanced their appeal and power.

In a sense, while analogue users feel they have greater control over their creativity, this occurs through surrendering to the demands of one's device – along the lines of German electronic legends Kraftwerk's menschmaschine (Man-Machine) philosophy. This runs contrary to the promise of most consumer-driven innovation: functional superiority and increased ease of use.

Again this makes a lot of sense to me. Having to deal with limitations and errors forces you to think a little bit, to really get creative : if you have absolute control then it all becomes a bit overwhelming, whereas if things are more restricted, perhaps it's a bit easier to accept these limitations which are not of your own making. And I suggest that people want these authentic imperfections. Sure, you could recreate it all with digital, but this wouldn't be the same as a genuine accident. We like feeling that we're not totally in control of the process.

The process of slowing it all down also adds value. As a follow-up to a post on my ReMarkable, I really like this tablet. It's just as indispensable six months later as it was on day one. Having to slow down a bit to write, with it more difficult (but not impossible) to undo, forces me to think more carefully. It also helps keep things a bit shorter. And of course, it's got that vital tactile sensation that's quite different, though not necessarily better, than a boring old clunky keyboard* (I do still enjoy also typing on a keyboard). Analogue writing has a different, more deliberate flavour to it than typing. All that being true :

* It's also really useful as a storage device for the long interesting pieces I find and don't want to forget.

Yet none of the people we've interviewed are analogue purists. These vinyl lovers mostly also have Spotify lists; film photographers will sometimes take out their phone to capture material quickly; and modular synth fans often have tablets full of apps to replicate sounds on the go.

Well, sometimes the process matters and sometimes it doesn't. As in the solarigraphy conference I attended/co-organised last year : sometimes people take photographs as a means of self-expression but not for the sake of art. I take photos even of famous landmarks because I want to remember things as I saw it, what the weather was like, were their crowds of tourists or was it empty, under construction, etc. I want to capture my experience, not necessarily evoke any emotions. It matters to me because it's mine.

I suggest we all sometimes want to either enjoy the process or the result, and we value both differently at different times. Sometimes we want to actually create things and enjoy the process, and that act of self-expression by doing things the hard way has value. But sometimes we just want the end result, and that's perfectly fine too. AI tools are in that sense a democratisation of creativity, taking the hard work out of our hands : if you want to see a pug on the Moon and just think that would be amusing in itself, and don't want to attend a six-month painting course to get good enough to produce the end result... that's fine ! If you want to read a silly story about said pug fighting Moon monsters, and don't want it hand-crafted but just value the output, that's fine too. And of course if you want to do it the hard way, nobody should have a problem with that either.

This has consequences everywhere. At work I'm currently in the process of preparing a couple of papers on visual source extraction. A great many people don't want to have to do this, and I quite understand that. Finding every galaxy in a large data set is inevitably a slow and sometimes tedious process regardless of how good the inspection tools are. But for me it's the main enjoyable part of the whole procedure. I like having to carefully sift through the data, clicking when I see a source, adjusting the region used for measurements, comparing this rawest of data with optical images... it's a relaxing and therapeutic process, up to a point. It enriches the whole experience, gives it meaning, and is anyway provably better than most automatic techniques. But I don't mind at all that other people prefer to avoid this and would rather focus their energies on understanding the final catalogues – I only object to anyone saying that visual source extraction isn't a good idea, because it demonstrably is.

Well, there we are. From astronauts to vinyl-loving pretentious hipsters, to astronomers hunting galaxies and doing calculations with circular slide rules, humans love touching things and literally feeling a connection to what they're doing. We value the process and we value the output. And it's all fine... it just won't stop me making fun of vinyl-loving hipsters. Thank goodness cassette tapes don't seem to be making a comeback though, because that would be a different conversation.

Philosophers be like, "?"

In the Science of Discworld books the authors postulate Homo Sapiens is actually Pan Narrans, the storytelling ape. Telling stories is, they suggest, a fundamental way in which we think. Similarly in Hogfather, in which there's a finite quantity of belief in the universe : stop believing in something and you have to belief in something else instead. It's not that you have any choice about it. You just will, because that's how human beings work. 

I suppose it's Nietzsche++, in a way... God is dead, and we have killed him, and that's why we're believing in Jewish space lasers and all the other increasingly boring conspiracy theories.

But I digress. No doubt there's much to be said about the conservation of belief but I leave that for another time. Instead, here's a nice Aeon piece about the nature of philosophy which examines the role of storytelling in philosophy. Is it art ? Is it science ? Is it something else ?

Early proponents of the ‘analytic’ method in philosophy such as Bertrand Russell saw good philosophy as science-like and were dismissive of philosophy that was overly poetic or unscientific. Russell, for example, took issue with the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was something of a bête-noire for early analytic philosophers. Bergson’s theorising (Russell thought) did not depend on argument but rather on expressing ‘truths’, so-called, arrived at by introspection.

For Macdonald, philosophical theories are very much like ‘pictures’ or ‘stories’ and, perhaps even more controversially, she suggests that philosophical debates often come down to ‘temperamental differences’. For example, whether you are willing to believe (in accordance with thinkers like René Descartes) that we have an immaterial soul will come down to more than just the philosophical arguments you are presented with. Your view on this matter, Macdonald thinks, will more likely be determined by your own personal values, life experiences, religion and so on. In this way, she thinks, temperamental differences account for many philosophical disagreements.

Well, surely temperamental differences have to play a role in which theory you like best (see also this post). Science can make rational and objective judgements about the world, this is true. Facts are facts. Facts don't care about feelings, and of course feelings don't care about facts. Since you will never have all the facts, you're going to have to rely on irrational factors to determine which interpretation suits you best. Like the need to tell stories and believe in things, this isn't something we can directly control. We can mitigate it as much as possible (that's what science is for), but not to zero. That's impossible, in the strong sense of the word.

So this seems pretty solid so far : we can't help being ourselves. Of course this applies universally, but the specifics are where it gets interesting :

Macdonald subjects philosophical enquiry itself to scrutiny, analysing the sorts of ways that philosophers talk and write – especially in comparison with scientists. This kind of linguistic analysis is a way of taking a step back and taking a look at the practice of philosophy itself. It involves answering questions like: What do philosophical disagreements involve and what do philosophical theories look like ? What do philosophers mean when they talk about philosophical ‘theories’? And is it the same thing that scientists mean when they use the word ‘theory’? Macdonald’s answer is a categorical ‘No’.

This of course raises whether philosophical ideas can be tested. Macdonald says no, that philosophy only provides new interpretations, not new data : "Every philosophical theory of perception is compatible with all perceptual facts", she says, or as Aeon puts it, "philosophical theories, unlike scientific theories, are not in the business of discovering new facts."

Before I tackle whether I agree with this or not, in the finest Aeon tradition, the author immediately produces an analogy which seems to me to be deeply flawed. I don't know why they do this, but I suspect some contractual obligation in order to drive site engagement. At least, that's the best reason I can come up with.

Two opposing positions in the philosophy of perception are direct realism and indirect realism (I’m going to oversimplify both here). Direct realism is the view that we directly perceive external objects in the world around us. When I look out of my window, I directly see a tree – and the nature of my perceptual experience informs me (directly) about the nature of the tree. Indirect realism, on the other hand, is the view that I only ever indirectly perceive objects like trees. What I directly perceive are mental representations – i.e., ideas of trees – that are produced in my mind when my sense organs (eg, my eyes) are stimulated in the right way and send signals to my brain. 

Right. It seems to me that direct realism is self-evidently mad. When we see a tree, we don't experience the same thing as when we hear or touch a tree. That would be utterly bonkers. Of course, our sensory data must correspond with something external that induces the sensory data, because most of the time we don't see things that aren't there (i.e. perception from one sense can be validated with others). The alternative is idealism, that ideas about things are all there are, but that in my view is just as weird. 

So yeah, in this case I think some philosophical ideas can be tested, without calling them science. You don't need empirical measurements for any of this. You can contrive an interpretation from existing data and discard it because it's clearly wrong or incoherent. Or maybe you can't, in which case you need to find more data...

(I have of course waxed lyrical about this many times before, not least of which can be found here, so I won't dwell on this again. Either you believe what I'm saying is tickety-boo, or you probably think I'm a loony. It's fine either way !)

Both the direct realist and the indirect realist agree that, when I look out my window, I see a tree. What they disagree on is what it means to say that ‘I see a tree’ – they disagree on the mechanics of what is going on, or how best to explain the fact that I see a tree. Most importantly, for Macdonald, there’s no empirical test available to draw a line between the two theories. We can’t run an experiment to test for the truth of either theory because, on the level of experience, both parties agree that it’s true to say: ‘I see a tree.’

Okay, bad analogy aside, this seems to do a decent job of getting to the key issue. But, why can't it be both ? Why can't some philosophy issues be testable and others be purely interpretative ? Moral philosophy doesn't seem to me to be the same as philosophy of mind, yet alone philosophy of science, so why the need to pigeon-hole these disparate fields together ?

Macdonald claims that philosophy’s value is much closer to that of art, literature or poetry than science. She explains that the arts inform us that ‘Language has many uses besides that of giving factual information or drawing deductive conclusions.’ A philosophical theory may not provide ‘information in a scientific sense’, she writes, ‘but, as poetry shows, it is far from worthless.’

A good work of poetry, art or literature, Macdonald explains, can ‘enlarge’ certain aspects of human life to help us see and think about them differently. For example, Shakespeare’s Othello encourages us to think about jealousy by making it the centrepiece of the play. Or consider the emphasis on humanity’s relationship with nature in Romantic poetry. In both cases, the artist has ‘zoomed in’ on, or ‘enlarged’, an aspect of life – in a way that it is not typically enlarged in real life – to encourage the audience to reflect on it.

To re-use one of my favourite Guy Consolmagno quotes, "The importance of poetry is that it carries you into a place where ordinary words can no longer carry you." Art is not philosophy, and philosophy isn't art, but surely, like science, they are all forms of creative processes. They just operate with different (but not always mutually exclusive) intentions and constraints. A scientist must be creative to interpret the data in new but testable ways, and cannot allow themselves to imagine the data is wrong just because they wish it was. A philosopher has fewer constraints, and the artist perhaps none at all : they express emotions and seek to invoke them in others for its own sake. They may or may not attempt to convince their audience of any wider point.

Art is probably the least constrained or defined field of human endeavour there is. It doesn't distinguish itself neatly from other fields because you can be self-expressive in science and engineering, though only to a degree. You can't really express much by assembling a catalogue or galaxies or measuring the length of a bacterium. But you do get a measure of self expression in how you choose to communicate this to others, which facts you think are pertinent to your interpretation and which the reader doesn't need to know, how you choose to visualise or express the data to convey the message you think is correct.

This may sound a little manipulative, even sinister, but it's not so. In true art emotion is selected consciously. In other fields – all other fields, to varying degrees – emotion plays a role, but only at the subconscious level. Science acknowledges that these factors are at work and actively tries to eliminate them, always probing issues from new directions to see if the established interpretation still holds up. It's not that scientists are actively trying to make their work into Ciceronian invective, far from it. But they do acknowledge that human biases are at work. The overlap with art in the deliberate sense of emotional self-expression comes at the front end, in presenting ideas to the audience once that idea has been established, not in formulating it to begin with. Scientists use creativity to solve problems and express their ideas, but they don't consciously decide to use a particular sort of barometer because it's a lovely shade of pink.

For Macdonald, the job of a moral philosopher is akin to that of an art critic: both are in the business of defending or justifying certain judgments or preferences. It’s not, as Russell says, as simple as liking one image more than another. There’s an onus on being able to justify or rationalise that preference.

I suppose that's fine (though I don't think I've ever encountered a critique that's changed my mind about any sort of work of art at all), but I would say : what need for categorisation ? It won't change how anyone does anything. It might be interesting to think about and perhaps useful as a rough guide, but that's about it. It's completely fine that there are overlaps between the fields. It's completely fine that scientists need to be philosophical in determining their own biases, and it's completely fine if some philosophical theories are quasi-scientific in their testability. And it's completely fine that art, science, philosophy and innumerable other fields all employ human creativity. None of this in any way invalidates anything whatsoever.

Which I suppose makes this post a complete waste of time. Oh well, my brain is fried from a seemingly endless of reports to write, and I physically needed to do something more expressive than suggesting which bit of the sky to look at next.

Positive effects from negative history

Most books I read tend to be text-heavy. I tend to like stuff which is analytical but lively, preferably chronological and focused on either a specific event, time, or place. I usually plump for depth over breadth, but sometimes I make exceptions. One was Towers of Defiance, a comprehensive look at the castles of the Welsh Princes. Another more interesting read, which I've just finished, is Philip Matyszak's Lost Cities of the Ancient World. 

You can read my short review-assessment here. In even briefer form, it's a wonderful hardback coffee-table compendium of an assortment of lost cities from classical antiquity, meaning Europe and its immediate surroundings from ~5,000 BC onwards. I was lured by the wonderful photographs and, to be honest, the thickness of the paper, which just made it feel so dang... high quality. As a souvenir-treat from my recent Berlin trip it's just a lovely thing to have.

But what I want to elaborate on here is not the factual content of the book (which is excellently presented – Matyszak writes in a much more readable style than the authors of most other compendiums) but a concept that it made me think about. In Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites, the protagonists develop a form of magic which revolves around not... doing any magic. That is, not summoning specific demons and not turning people into frogs. Matyszak explores something equivalent here : negative history.

Lost Cities is a fascinating look at cities which died. Some were destroyed, others suffered climate change or other natural disasters that rendered them uninhabitable. A few were out-competed by their neighbours, sometimes (in the case of what Matyszak calls a "vampire city") deliberately, much as though cities were agents in an ecosystem. Despite the title only a few were actually lost in the usual sense of being forgotten and then rediscovered; Matyszak generally means they were abandoned. A few don't really even fit this category, evolving into modern versions of their original selves which are at only slightly different locations.

But some were truly lost in the fullest sense of the world. A few remain so : we know that cities like Tigranocerta existed, we know roughly where, but the precise site has yet to be discovered. And even of those which were only abandoned, Matyszak seems to deliberately pick the ones which are largely forgotten by the modern public, eschewing obvious candidates like Pompeii and Herculaneum in favour of the nearby Stabiae. Some cities were great administrative capitals in their day, while others seem to have played no great role in any important historical events whatsoever. All were once thriving metropolises, but for a host of reasons they failed and faded.

This is truly negative history, the known unknowns : we know the gaps in our knowledge, can see the rough size and shape of them, but have little idea as to what to fill them with.

By drawing attention to these gaps directly, Matyszak reminds us just how incomplete our understanding is. Not only have vast amounts of written records succumbed to the ravages of time, but dozens upon dozens of cities have literally crumbled into dust. Whole cultures and lived experiences are now vanished. And all this reminds us that what we have left is so easily susceptible to misinterpretation. Just as in astronomical catalogues of poor completeness, without proper context things can look very different.

With a degree of mild frustration, many's the book I've read where a throwaway statement makes it clear that there whopping great fundamental gaps in what we know that, if filled, would surely transform how we think about historical events and peoples. Most of the time even the best of history books tend to gloss over this; look, I love everything Tom Holland writes, but he's the absolute master of creating a filled narrative. Matyszak instead opts to draw our attention to the gaps head-on. He doesn't explicitly point out the importance of doing this because he doesn't have to : once a gap is noticed, its importance becomes self-evident.

To be fair, sometimes other popular historians do do this as well. Marc Morris is particularly adept at making the unknown gaps almost something to celebrate by inflaming the reader's curiosity. Trow's Spartacus is another one which is commendable in emphasising how little source material it has to go on; he tries his best to look at what the Romans didn't say to recreate what probably happened. But overwhelmingly, historians (though not archaeologists) tend to prefer actual hard data, verifiable facts and records, rather than inferring things from non-statements and gaps.

Which is all quite understandable, of course. Still, I feel that Matyszak's offering is a welcome change (so much so that immediately on completion I ordered his other book : Forgotten Peoples). Exploring the gaps, even – or especially – if we have to speculate, reminds us of how little of what we have to rely on and how our interpretations might be subject to change. We often only have what one side would wish us to have, but history is written perhaps not so much by the victors as the survivors.

There are obvious parallels to science. In astronomy we're actually really keen on this, "knowing" that so much of the Universe is invisible and inexplicable : exploring the gaps is what we do. In popular history books this is no doubt difficult, and I suppose that professional historians are more like scientists than the storytellers one gets from the bookshop. Even so, perhaps this is something to consider for the popular history author. Trying to feel out the size and shapes of the gaps, inferring what might be inside them... surely this too is interesting for the lay reader ? It's a bit like if we were to have charted the whole boundary of the Pacific Ocean but not bothered to even speculate as to whether there were any islands or continents lurking inside it : except worse, because often in history it seems we know there are massive gaps in which something very important must have happened.

Similarly in philosophy, understanding the mindset of ancient peoples can benefit greatly by looking at what they don't say. At least, when we have good reason to expect them to. Again the parallels to astronomy, in which non-detections are genuinely very interesting but only if we expected to find something. A galaxy without any gas isn't especially interesting, but if it's in a group and all the rest are chock-full of hydrogen, well, that non-detection becomes a bit more exciting.

Take Plato's non-discussion of the morality of slavery. Naively, given his minute, word-by-word dissections of other issues, we might expect him to discuss this, so why didn't he ? Likewise, why didn't he come up with a more liberal (in the strong sense of the word) basis for his ideal societies ? The concept today that everyone should allowed to do as they wish except when that interferes with others seems simple enough.

To be fair to historians, Michael Scott made very interesting suggestions in this area, namely that society at the time was concerned far more with the collective than the individual, and that such a spirit of individualism (epitomised by Plato's mentor Socrates) would have seemed alien indeed. Socrates and Plato alike were not pseudo-fascists or pseudo-Communists, despite advocating certain policies that the more modern extremists on both sides would happily go along with. No, they were just more individualistic than many of their contemporaries. Individualism is sometimes a derided word, but it no more makes one a fascist than it makes one a liberal or a libertarian. All these concepts simply did not exist in ancient Athens. Without considering these vital negatives, one gets a limited and perverted view of history that warps too easily in moralising, entirely missing out on the changes in human thought that have evolved over the last two thousand years or more.

Anyway, rant over. My take-home message is very simple : sometimes, directly drawing attention to the gaps is important and you can't rely on readers doing it for themselves. A degree of speculation about what they might contain and how this would influence the facts you do know is extremely useful. It's not good to go nuts with this, but if you don't do it at all it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all the facts you have are all the facts there are.

And I'm currently reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, surely a classic example of the importance of negatives. The esteemed author apparently thought that recording the appointment of individual bishops and noting epidemics of bird flu was tremendously useful, but cared little for any details of battle tactics or political allegiances or, well, basically anything else. It's a rather fascinating but strange read, and I'm definitely looking forward to more Matyszak.

Dune part two : first impressions

I covered Dune : Part One when it came out, so it seems only fair I should cover the "concluding" part as well. I'm gonna do this in two sections, first without and then with spoilers. I added the suffix "first impressions" because Czech cinema doesn't provide English subtitles for the Fremen-language scenes. There are quite a lot more of these than in the first film, and while not understanding them didn't spoil my enjoyment, I did feel there were some substantial sections missing. I'll update this when I see it at home with full subtitling.

Without Spoilers

Technically this is a masterpiece and anyone who disagrees is a bit weird. The story is a clever blend of the truly science-fictional and contemporary sociological commentary, which in many ways is less subtle but more emphatic than Herbert's original. The message is clear and unapologetic without being overbearing or distracting, and, crucially, both sticks to and aligns with the theme of the original book(s).

The audio-visuals are simply stunning. To paraphrase Herbert himself, this is a movie to be experienced. It's loud – very, very loud – to the point where it becomes genuinely physically exhausting. In fact I don't think I've seen any other movie which has this sheer, visceral, brutal physical power. It's like being punched in the face, but somehow in a good way. The sandworm-riding scenes... these are seat-grippingly intense. I would not have done it like that, and I'd have been wrong. They're better than I ever dared hope.

The acting... well, Rebecca Ferguson is a fucking terrifying Jessica to the point where it's hard to imagine anyone ever equalling this performance. Even, perhaps especially, when she's not doing the Voice with a capital V she's got one of the scariest, almost horror-film voices of anyone. Chalamet too has really dialled it up to 11. At one point, even though it was all in Fremen with no English subtitles, I would probably have risen from my seat with a cry of "LISAN AL GAIB !" and charged into battle against... well, whoever, really. The ushers, probably.

The Harkonnens remain suitably villainous, the Baron a virtual demon and Feyd a true sadistic psychopath. These simple monsters aside, all the other characters feel if anything more human and developed than in the novel. As in the first movie, the added humour makes them feel more believable than the virtual archetypes of the novel, and from this much is gained while very little is lost. Chani especially feels like a more developed person; Jessica's progression to full Revered Mother is also commendably well-done. The Fremen as a whole have more diversity of cultures and beliefs which I feel adds something, even if it's a little too explicit in pointing out how diverse they are.

I don't have much I could honestly find fault with. There are certainly choices in how to do things which I personally would have done differently, but to my mind I feel Villeneuve's decisions are perfectly valid. Certainly they don't undermine the original story and if anything they tend to enhance its clarity for the viewers who haven't read the books, without dumbing anything down for the fans. 

Perhaps the one thing I would say could be improved is the mysticism. Dune is primarily a science fiction rather than a fantasy story, but the one genuine element of magic (prescience) is underdeveloped, in marked contrast to the first movie. It's there, but its importance is underplayed, and the interesting theme that Herbert developed of how to know the future is to be constrained by it is not much explored. This is a shame, but it's a theme which is lacking rather than absent. Everything that needs to be there is there, even if the balance is occasionally questionable. If you've read the book, you can fill in a lot of the blanks for yourself without being inconsistent with the movie's version of the story.

Finally, pacing. I perhaps would have liked the film to be about 30 minutes longer, not to develop the story any further (nothing much is needed here, though more of the Imperium would have been nice) but just to slow things down, just a bit. It would have been beneficial to rebalance things to have a bit less of the relentless pounding of the lasguns for the first two thirds of the film and develop to a longer final battle sequence.

All these thoughts, I stress, are petty in the extreme. They are minor quibbles, not complaints. Similarly for the ending. I love the original, incredibly rounded ending : I think Herbert was at his narratively most magnificent in suddenly and satisfyingly bringing the whole, hugely complex tale to a clear and decisive conclusion in the space of a few pages of shining brilliance. Villeneuve opts not to do this, going for a more open, ominous ending (hence I termed it the "concluding" part) that is nevertheless distinctly an ending. It's not how I would have done it, but it works.

As I said of part one, this isn't the decisive version of the movie adaptation but it's a damn good one. All my quibbles really are a matter of personal preference and no more than that. I'm giving this 9/10 : this is, realistically, the best version of Dune we can ever hope to see.

With (Minor) Spoilers

Okay, now for the juicy bits ! Don't worry, there's a big gap so you won't accidentally read any shock revelations about how Paul is actually an elephant in disguise or whatnot. I don't think I give away anything that would actually spoil someone's enjoyment of the movie, but you have been warned just in case.

I first read Dune when I was a teenager. It's safe to say I was more enthralled by the world itself than anything else at the time : the sheer brutality of Arrakis, the magnificence of the ships and sandworms, the blend of psychology, science, politics and mysticism all at once, with some enormously complex character interactions. There were elements of the classical heroes and villains, the truly good and truly evil, richly blended with subtly of difficult moral choices.

It would never have occurred to me that it's about oil because my mind just doesn't work like that, I always enjoy stories on their own basis first and only read in any analogies (if at all) much later. Indeed, to create a world you can enjoy on its own terms, without needing to draw parallels with real life, this is the highest form of imagination : a story that only works in its contemporary context is in my view a shallower thing.

In the book, if I remember correctly, Paul falls for his own mythology. He may know he's a man, and often doubt his own choices, but he tries to actually behave as a god or prophet. There's a mood that something truly supernatural and inexplicable is at work, that the gift of seeing the future is, in a way that's never clearly stated, far more advanced than the similar abilities of the Guild navigators. Paul may have the emotional turmoil of a real person but he does not, so far as I remember, ever really doubt his own messianic duty. And duty it is. He doesn't relish the choices he has to make, indeed he can be repelled by them, but he makes them nonetheless because he believes he must. He finds a way forward which is the only possible way, and makes that choice despite its terrible purpose and abominable moral cost.

Teenage me was to an extent happy to go along with this from Paul's own perspective. In this way the ending of the book definitely gives the reader the legitimate option to accept it as something basically optimistic, that while tragedies have occurred, a better future awaits and justice has been served. This isn't the only interpretation but it is possible to read the book in this way. Not so in the movie. Here the moral ambiguity is thrust more directly in the viewer's face, and Paul's own doubt makes it unavoidable that he's not the messiah he's a very naughty Fremen. This definitely does work and is absolutely consistent with the underlying message of the book. Intellectually, I have to say I prefer it. But emotionally, I equally have to say I preferred my original reading and Kyle McLaughlin's' creepy-demigod 1984 depiction of Paul. This version was to me more impactful but less thoughtful. As I say, I regard Villeneuve's choice as an absolutely valid one.

Of course, it fits the complexity of the story perfectly that the differences from movie and novel are here only that : differences, neither better nor worse in and of themselves.

Likewise Chani. In the movie, the Fremen are more fragmented in their religious beliefs than the novel : firmly united against the Harkonnen but culturally more diverse than what I remember from the book. Chani, as Paul's not-wife, is a sensible choice to represent the more prophesy-skeptical Fremen faction. Having made the decision that Paul himself doesn't believe in his own divinity, it makes good sense to have Chani, the woman he falls in love with, be someone who is publicly against the notion of prophesy. It gives her a more active role in the story, even though it's occasionally a bit too blunt in its moral delivery.

That morality is an important point, however. Certainly there's an element of the white saviour trope at work behind the novel, but only at most subconsciously. Anyone seeing it as being Desert Avatar has very badly missed the point, for several reasons. First, the Bene Gesserit planted superstitions among the Fremen as a means of control (as a safety option in the book if I remember correctly, but deliberately to facilitate the Kwisatz Haderach in the movie). And this is Chani's key point, that the prophesy is a means of enslavement. Paul in this sense is a saviour only because the situation was engineered. It isn't any innate racial superiority that gives the Atreides an advantage, it's political manipulation and deliberate military repression of the Fremen by the other peoples of the Imperium.

Second, as someone pointed out elsewhere, Paul could never have succeeded anywhere else but on Arrakis. Without constant exposure to the spice and the Water of Life, the sleeper would never awaken : had the Harkonnen attacked the Atreides on another world, Paul would simply have died. Paul without the Fremen is really not much of anything; a key part of the story is that Paul is a genuine blend of cultures. He is shaped both by the gentleness of Caladan and by the bitterness of Arrakis, both an Atreides and a Fremen. They lead him as much as he leads them, they raise him from boy to manhood more than his own parents do (albeit this aspect is present in many white saviour stories). And it's the Fremen themselves who, though with some coaxing, almost actively choose to make Paul into a Messiah, rather than merely passively accepting him as such. They have genuine agency and awareness in how they respond to the situation.

Thirdly, and arguably most importantly... Paul is just not a saviour in the classical sense. Here too the movie makes this clearer than the book, having been informed by the sequels. Paul is in no sense a despotic villain, but he isn't a white knight. The only way to save the Fremen is jihad, or "holy war" in the movies understandably more political terminology. The consequences of this are unimaginable horrors on a galactic scale. You could call him a saviour, but only if you think salvation should be soaked in the blood of a million worlds.

That latter is the part I'm most uncomfortable with. I still like the simpler, good-versus-evil vibe of my teenage reading of the book, but I respect Villeneuve for going down this darker path. It's a discomfort that I'm actively comfortable with, so to speak.

For this reason I get even more annoyed (as per last time) about any efforts to make Dune more diverse or appealing to modern moral sensibilities. That is exactly what it should not do. Dune revolves around unpleasant choices in an unpleasant dystopian reality. Making Liet Kynes a woman is of no import whatever because it has no bearing on the story; making any Bene Gesserit male would be insulting to the point of bordering on the offensive. The whole point of the story is that some aspects of reality are simply bad. It doesn't promote anything, in any way. It simply presents. I'm far from adverse to direct morality tales which present an author's personal opinion, but Dune is not it, and trying to make it into one would have been farcical.

All in all, a stunning piece of cinema, and I might well go and see it in 4DX just so I can be blasted with sand and really get the full sandworm experience.

What's next ?

I've recently come across two discussions in which the moral point of an argument seemed to be absent. Consequently the whole point of the debate seemed to be missed, with everyone dancing in circles around the target while never getting anywhere near it. Specifically, these boil down to :

1. What do you want to do with this information ? For example, why do you want to know if two demographics have fundamentally different abilities ? 
2. What do you think will happen next if this policy is implemented ? I mean the immediate consequences of, saying, giving more rights to an underprivileged group. Do you think that this is in and of itself inherently bad, or is it only the foreseen slippery slope that causes you problems ?

The first was about whether men and women have similar abilities. It's an interesting question, I suppose, but... why ask it ? What are you going to do with the answer ?

The second was about the rising debate in the UK on legalising assisted dying. Okay, fair enough, those campaigning against it say it will ultimately lead to (in essence) public suicide booths. As the worse-case scenario, that's clearly bad. But what about the best case ? What about the cases where someone was properly informed, repeatedly consented well ahead of time and at the moment of decision, to ending their life to escape unendurable agony – should those people actually be forced to continue against their own wishes ?

Now proclaiming a slippery slope is not itself a fallacy. It can happen that one thing will lead to another, ending in a position that nobody wanted. But it's a fallacy to insist that this will happen without justifying why this would be so. In particular, when other countries have implemented similar legislation and found that actually, yes, people do want to end their own suffering but (amazingly enough) remain steadfastly against suicide booths... then why do you think it would happen in some countries but not others ? Or even if sometimes a slippery slope has happened but not universally, still you must then justify why it would be likely to occur in the particular case under consideration.

It's far safer and simpler to first say what you believe about the thing-in-itself. If you say that mercy killings are fundamentally immoral, then we don't have to worry about all the paraphernalia and secondary concerns. We can skip the complex pragmatic issues and go directly to the basic moral issue at hand. Otherwise, these objections to AD feel similar to me to early objections to gay marriage : that it would eventually end in people marrying their cars and pets and siblings and suchlike. Okay, those scenarios, which failed to happen, would be bad, but what about the issue at hand, the thing-in-itself ? What exactly was supposedly wrong with gay marriage ?

Now if you don't object to the TII, that's okay. At that point we can proceed to the pragmatics and potential for a slippery slope. But we shouldn't skip the phase of discussing the TII, because this is the most important and morally interesting part of the discussion. It also provides vital information about the basis on which the debate should proceed : if we both agree on gay marriage or AD or whatever being fundamentally moral, but only disagree on what's likely to be the practical result, that's different from having a really basic moral disagreement.

And after all, your pragmatic objections might be valid. There's nothing inherently wrong or false about presuming that one good thing will lead to other bad things; sometimes one thing does carry unintended consequences. The problem is that you must demonstrate that this is (a) likely to actually occur (e.g. gay marriage has not led to incest or auto-erotica and there was never the slightest reason to think that it would, because these are not sexual desires that are inherent but repressed in any sizeable fraction of the population), and (b) that any consequences you see happening definitely would be problematic in themselves, that they would have some intrinsic moral problems.

As for why you want to know... it might be that you want to account for genuine differences and allow for people of different abilities, providing facilities to accommodate them. But here you generally only need to know what abilities and ability levels actually exist, and how common they are. Demographics are often irrelevant, except for schemes to deliberately uplift targeted underprivileged groups. You need to know what the abilities are, not who has them, because you can meritocratically test for this on an individual basis.

If you insist on judging people based on demographics... well, that's why the question, "what will you do with this information ?" is an important one. It may well be that you're just curious. Okay but why pursue the issue at all ? Why do you apparently want it to be true ? Why exactly does it matter to you ? If you have some good evidence that the groups are different then you probably don't need a study to confirm it. If you don't, it's probably safe to assume they're the same. Presuming a difference is, in general, a very strange thing to do, and I don't think it's at all unfair to want to know why it should matter.

There is of course a major exception : medical data. Men and women do have physical and physiological differences, and especially if one group is more prevalent in some area than another, it makes sense to be prepared for this eventuality. Presuming similarity here should be no more than a starting assumption, which you can actively test for to determine the proper course of treatment. Here though, the obvious physical differences should make it equally obvious that there might be medical differences as well, whereas in the case of mental skills, the case is (to put it mildly) infinitely weaker. It would seem that there is an obvious need to allow for medical differences existing; there is no such case for mathematical or creative faculties.

But in general, if you can recognise that the question of demographic differences might be unpleasant, and take steps to address this, and show that your response won't be simple unfair discrimination... well then, perhaps you have a case to make. Until you do this, however, you should be able to understand why I might view your curiosity as being uncomfortably close to bigotry.

The unifying factor in these cases, of what happens next and why do you need to know, is that metadata is essential. Knowing the moral preferences of each side changes the entire tone of the debate. So it's incredibly helpful to present this information first, i.e. state what you think is fundamentally wrong with the proposal in and of itself, or tell me what you want to do with the information which you think is very important. Do this first, I repeat, and only then we can move on to discussing the secondary effects. If we both accept that there's nothing wrong the with TII, then we can debate the slippery slope; if neither of us is clearly trying to be a bigoted twat, then we can discuss demographic differences.

Moral issues are anyway often complicated. Perhaps this guidance might help simplify the discussions, if only just a little bit.