Pinker pred anđelima bolje prirode

bemty wrote:

William Murderface wrote:
Pa to piše i Stiven Pinker, da mu kvare grafikone

ma daaaj    kakva je ovo salata od prepricha   pinkerova teza je vrlo jednostavna. kaze da se radi o relativnom odnosu mladi:stari u populaciji (jer mladi prednjace kriminalnim aktima i kroz istoriju i kroz geografiju), a odnos je posle rata bio malo pomeren. dalje spekulise da je u nekom momentu dostignuta nekakva kriticna masa, sto i ne predstavlja nekako drugacije do spekulaciju. 

An obvious place to look is demographics. The 1940s and 1950s, when crime rates hugged the floor, were the great age of marriage. Americans got married in numbers not seen before or since, which removed men from the streets and planted them in suburbs (Courtwright 1996). One consequence was a bust in violence. But the other was a boom in babies. The first baby boomers, born in 1946, entered their crime-prone years in 1961; the ones born in the peak year, 1954, entered in 1969. A natural conclusion is that the crime boom was an echo of the baby boom. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t add up. If it were just a matter of there being more teenagers and twenty-somethings who were committing crimes at their usual rates, the increase in crime from 1960 to 1970 would have been 13 percent, not 135 percent.[2] Young men weren’t simply more numerous than their predecessors; they were more violent, too.

A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times. But this decivilizing process was magnified by a trend that had been gathering momentum throughout the 20th century. The sociologist Cas Wouters, a translator and intellectual heir of Elias, has argued that after the European Civilizing Process had run its course, it was superseded by an informalizing process. The Civilizing Process had been a flow of norms and manners from the upper classes downward. But as Western countries became more democratic, the upper classes became increasingly discredited as moral paragons, and hierarchies of taste and manners were leveled. The informalization affected the way people dressed, as they abandoned hats, gloves, ties, and dresses for casual sportswear. It affected the language, as people started to address their friends with first names instead of Mr. and Mrs. and Miss. And it could be seen in countless other ways in which speech and demeanor became less mannered and more spontaneous.[5] The stuffy high-society lady, like the Margaret Dumont character in the Marx Brothers movies, became a target of ridicule rather than emulation.

Another target of the counterculture was the ideal that individuals should be embedded in webs of dependency that obligate them to other people in stable economies and organizations. If you wanted an image that contradicted this ideal as starkly as possible, it might be a rolling stone. Originally from a song by Muddy Waters, the image resonated with the times so well that it lent itself to three icons of the culture: the rock group, the magazine, and the famous song by Bob Dylan (in which he taunts an upper-class woman who has become homeless). ‘Tune in, turn on, drop out,’ the motto of onetime Harvard psychology instructor Timothy Leary, became a watchword of the psychdelia movement. The idea of coordinating one’s interests with others in a job was treated as selling out. As Dylan put it:
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They say sing while you slave and I just get bored.
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.
Elias had written that the demands of self-control and the embedding of the self into webs of interdependence were historically reflected in the development of timekeeping devices and a consciousness of time: ‘This is why tendencies in the individual so often rebel against social time as represented by his or her super-ego, and why so many people come into conflict with themselves when they wish to be punctual’ (Elias 1939/2000: 380). In the opening scene of the 1969 movie Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda conspicuously toss their wristwatches into the dirt before setting off on their motorcycles to find America. In a similar vein, the first album by the band Chicago (when they were known as the Chicago Transit Authority) contains the lyrics ‘Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? If so I can’t imagine why.’ All this made sense to me when I was sixteen, and so I discarded my own Timex. When my grandmother saw my naked wrist, she was incredulous: ‘How can you be a mensch without a zager?’ She ran to a drawer and pulled out a Seiko she had bought during a visit to the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka. I have it to this day.

bemty wrote:

William Murderface wrote:Bob Dilan kriv za porast kriminala. I kid you not.

pa i ovo je neozbiljno. dilan je u onom sto citiras cak ne ni spekulacija, nego ilustracija necega sto je (opet, ocigledno cista) spekulacija. a tv (tj. mogucnost komunikacije) opisuje kao katalizator, sto opet nije nuzno vrednovanje samo po sebi nego osnova za kriticnu masu koju spominjem gore. 

(inace meni je better angels prilicno mnjah knjiga, cim se odvoji od grafika postaje mi dosadna jer samo redja spekulaciju na spekulaciju, a spekulacije si umem i sama proizvesti)

All this made sense to me when I was sixteen, and so I discarded my own Timex. When my grandmother saw my naked wrist, she was incredulous: ‘How can you be a mensch without a zager?’ She ran to a drawer and pulled out a Seiko she had bought during a visit to the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka. I have it to this day.

The stated enemy of the Western establishment, Marxism, gained prestige as it made inroads in third-world ‘liberation’ movements, and it was increasingly embraced by bohemians and fashionable intellectuals. Surveys of popular opinion from the 1960s through the 1990s showed a plummeting of trust in every social institution (Fukuyama 1999).

One of them was a self-handicapping of the criminal justice Leviathan. Though rock musicians seldom influence public policy directly, writers and intellectuals do, and they got caught up in the zeitgeist and began to rationalize the new licentiousness. Marxism made violent class conflict seem like a route to a better world. Influential thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman tried to merge Marxism or anarchism with a new interpretation of Freud that connected sexual and emotional repression to political repression and championed a release from inhibitions as part of the revolutionary struggle. Troublemakers were increasingly seen as rebels and nonconformists, or as victims of racism, poverty, and bad parenting. Graffiti vandals were now ‘artists,’ thieves were ‘class warriors,’ and neighborhood hooligans were ‘community leaders.’ Many smart people, intoxicated by radical chic, did incredibly stupid things. Graduates of elite universities built bombs to be set off at army social functions, or drove getaway cars while ‘radicals’ shot guards during armed robberies. New York intellectuals were conned by Marxobabble-spouting psychopaths into lobbying for their release from prison (Pinker 2002: 261–262).

timur chevket wrote:eto. ne moze covek ni da se svadja sa vama. meni je jednostavno pik na ekipu pinker, doukins, heris prosao. bio je jedan trenutak kada bih se bez razmisljanja zaleteo u raspravu no taj trenutak je prosao. jednostavno mislim da je to njihovo popularno popularno-politicko pisanje porazila savremenost. cela ta ideja da je osnov nase drustvenosti jedan jak bioloski signal tek povrsno prekriven drustvenom statikom i da stoga se vozimo u najboljem od svih vozova koji ide tacno po redu voznje je jednostavno toliko redukcionisticka da se urusila sa prvim slozenijim potresom.

bemty wrote:ali skoro svi podaci koje navodi su u skladu sa suprotnom tvrdnjom, da se malo bioloskog vidi ispod mnogo kulture. 

kad covek tumaci po starom modelu u kom su geni i sredina od pocetka postavljeni kao odvojeni entiteti - modelu koji on odbacuje na pocetku - trosi jedno sto strana na to - onda deluje kao da genetski deo objasnjava uzasno mnogo toga. ali, to nije zbog toga sto je to stvarno tako, nego zato sto model dovodi do toga da sve sto predstavlja interakciju genetskog i sredinskog na silu upadne pod 'genetsko'. to je posledica cinjenice da se genetske razlike mnogo lakse i preciznije kvantifikuju od sredinskih koje su podeljene u neke jako grube kategorije. kad se primeni interaktivni model, na cisto genetsko obicno otpadne nesto tipa 2-3% medjuljudskih razlika, u najvecem delu studija koje navodi. tako da uopste nisam izvukla taj zakljucak kad sam citala, dapace. a better angels je nastavak teze da je kultura bitna.

The ultimate irony of the Standard Social Science Model is that it failed to
accomplish the very goal that brought it into being: explaining the different
fortunes of human societies without invoking race. The best explanation
today is thoroughly cultural, but it depends on seeing a culture as a product of
human desires rather than as a shaper of them.

Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living
flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm,
or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying
them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can
only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate
neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than blank slates,
amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.