Scribal Terror

Petty and Cacciopo on Low-Level Argument Processing

"When either the motivation or the ability to process issue-relevant arguments is low, attitudes may be changed by associating an issue position with various affective cues, or people may attempt to form a reasonable opinion position by making an inference about the likely correctness or desirability of a particular attitude position based on cues such as message discrepancy, one's own behavior, and the characteristics of the message source." Petty and Cacciopo, "Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion."

On the Stupidity of Crowds

“Ideas being only accessible to crowds after having assumed a very simple shape must often undergo the most thoroughgoing transformations to become popular. It is especially when we are dealing with somewhat lofty philosophical or scientific ideas that we see how far-reaching are the modifications they require in order to lower them to the level of the intelligence of crowds. [….] However great or true an idea may have been to begin with, it is deprived of almost all that which constituted its elevation and its greatness by the mere fact that it has come within the intellectual range of crowds and exerts an influence upon them.” --Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931)

 

If you want to learn more about Le Bon's theories of crowd psychology, check out this video.

The Grosse Wedding Party (1910)

The wedding of my paternal grandparents, June 15, 1910. The bride and groom, seated, are Christina Pelzel and Edward Hugo Grosse. The best man and bridesmaid, standing, are William Grosse, the groom's brother, and Kathryn Stoffregen, the bride's sister.

Aunt Ida

Here's my great aunt Ida Myers Seidell in her hot, hot roadster. Ida was my maternal grandmother's sister. She married Jake Seidell and moved to Racine Wisconsin (from Cincinnati) to open a drinking establishment. During Prohibition those drinks were frequently transferred into the trunk of that roadster on a dark lane somewhere near the Canadian border.

Cincinnati, 1916

One of the reasons I love museums is that most of them I've dealt with LOVE to help the public. I sent this picture to the Cincinnati History Museum and got the following reply:

The picture that you have is of the Miami and Erie Canal at what is now Central Parkway in Cincinnati. The building in the lower right corner of the picture is 15 W. Central Parkway and currently houses the main office of AAA. The hill in the background is Mt. Adams, and the bridge over the canal in the center left is where Vine Street crossed the canal. The picture was taken around 1916, and is looking towards the East.

Prayer Beads

Did you know that the word "bead" comes from the Old English word "gebed," meaning ask or pray? As in "prayer bead." (We've added "prayer" to the term because we've forgotten what "bead" originally meant.)

And a rosary (rosaria) is a garland of roses.

Theory of Mind, The Lack Thereof

Sometimes I suspect the entire internet lacks a "theory of mind":

 

"The term 'theory of mind' is commonly understood to be an ability emerging in the minds of young children that allows

them to attribute thoughts and feelings to others. Before the age of about four years, toddlers are unable to make distinctions

between appearance and reality; however, in their fourth year, they slowly acquire the ability to predict what others are

thinking. . . .

 

"Although theory of mind is now taken for granted as a unique and natural human ability, research, mostly conducted among secondary and tertiary students, shows that when students of all ages are writing argumentative essays, they often do not take full advantage of their ability to appreciate the thoughts and beliefs of others. Rather, their writing displays a “myside bias,” ignoring the opinions that others may have on certain topics. . . ." From Liu & Stapleton, "Counterargumentation on the Primary Level"

What Is a Cat's Paw?

In common parlance, a cat's paw is a person who is used as a dupe to serve someone else's interests, but where did it come from? According to the OED, it refers to “the fable or tale of a monkey (or a fox) using the foot or paw of a cat to rake roasted chestnuts out of the burning coals.” The earliest use in English was in 1657 in a political pamphlet by one Michael Hawke: “These he useth as the Monkey did the Cat’s paw to scrape the nuts out of the fire.” Fans of Fontaine will recognize this as the plot of "Le Singe et le Chat."

Loki's Wager

Loki is the trickster god of Norse mythology. At one point in the Prose Edda, a 12th century compilation of Norse mythology by the Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson, Loki wagers his own head in a bet with the dwarf Brokkr. Loki loses the bet but doesn't lose his head because he insists that his neck was never included in the bargain. Since Loki and Brokkr cannot reach a consensus as to where Loki's neck ends and his head begins, the dispute remains forever unresolved, and Loki retains his head. It's pretty much the same principle as the "pound of flesh but not a drop of blood" in The Merchant of Venice.

In the theory of argumentation, the fallacy of Loki's Wager is "the unreasonable insistence that a concept cannot be defined, and therefore cannot be discussed." It tends to be used, whether intentionally or not, as a stalling or diversionary tactic which ensures that the real issue need never be debated because there can be no consensus on the terms of debate. In my opinion, it lies somewhere between a red herring and an equivocation on the continuum  of logical errors. It is also one of the most commonly seen fallacies on the internet, especially in political debate, and sometimes devolves into name calling when the term that is being negotiated is one of opprobrium, like "terrorist," "murderer," or "liar." Usually this happens when such terms are broadened rather than narrowed so that the term of opprobrium threatens to wash over the opposing party in the debate. For example, most people can agree that they are against "murder" when it is defined as "the unlawful taking of a human life with malice aforethought," but when one party of the debate insists on defining "murder" as any form of killing and then calls for the killing of animals for food to be condemned as murder, the ethics of a commitment to vegetarianism can never be argued because the debate will remain forever in the realm of contested definitions -- obviously so, since meat-eaters cannot agree to call themselves murderers. A brief survey of the blogosphere will reveal Loki's Wager in active use for practically every contested issue in the body politic, from abortion to Iraq to globalization to fast food to health insurance to cigarette smoking.

This is not to say that arguments about word boundaries are invalid, but that an insistence on boundaries that can't be agreed upon is a barrier to further debate on issues that require consensus if those terms are to be used. The solution is to set aside the semantic debate and use mutually acceptable terminology to continue the discussion. This can't be done when the contested term forms the philosophical basis or warrant of the debate. It is virtually impossible to argue the abortion issue without a consensus on the word "person," for instance, and since the definition of the word "person" is the basis of the disagreement it is impossible to set it aside.

Wu Wei

What is wu-wei? As Elizabeth Reninger writes:

 

"One of Taoism’s most important concepts is wu wei, which is sometimes translated as “non-doing” or “non-action.” A better way to think of it, however, is as a paradoxical “Action of non-action.” Wu wei refers to the cultivation of a state of being in which our actions are quite effortlessly in alignment with the ebb and flow of the elemental cycles of the natural world. It is a kind of “going with the flow” that is characterized by great ease and awareness, in which—without even trying—we’re able to respond perfectly to whatever situations arise."

 

You really don't want to interfere with anyone else's wu-wei. Back in the day, I would have said, "It's my mellow. Don't harsh it."

 

 

Daoism and Inauthenticity

Interesting quote from "Acting without Regarding: Daoist Self-cultivation as Education for Non-Dichotomous Thinking" by Joseph de Santa Maria:

"The Daoist thinkers . . .express how uncritical adherence to artificial values tends to lead people to impose such ideas harmfully on others. For example, in the Zhuangzi, the horsemaster Bo Le carelessly imposes human technology on his horses in order to domesticate them. This though results in more than half his horses dying."

This is always the danger of artifice-driven ideology: because of its fundamental inauthenticity and unnaturalness, it must be sustained by coercion and rarely in turn sustains the community or the environment. In other words, it ends up existing for its own sake.

Two Weddings

The first pic is the wedding photo of my great grandparents, Christina Hauser and Herman Kinz. Herman didn't last long after this was taken. The wedding was on June 20, 1887 at St. Francis Seraph Catholic Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Herman died on Nov. 8, 1888, and my grandmother, also named Christina, but generally known as Nellie, was born on April 26, 1888. So she was a posthumous child who grew up with a step-father, Vincent Pelzel, and a large number of younger step-sisters and brothers. The second pic is the wedding photo of Christina and Vincent.

Cognitive Pitfalls

Aaron Beck’s classifications of cognitive distortions:

• Arbitrary inference: “the process of forming an interpretation of a situation, event, or experience when there is no factual evidence to support the conclusion or where the conclusion is contrary to the evidence”

• Selective abstraction: “the process of focusing on a detail taken out of context, ignoring other more salient features of the situation, and conceptualizing the whole experience on the basis of this element”

• Overgeneralization: the process of “drawing a general conclusion about their ability, performance, or worth on the basis of a single incident”

• Magnification and minimization: “errors in evaluation which are so gross as to constitute distortions”

• Inexact labeling: “the affective reaction is proportional to the descriptive labelling of the event rather than to the actual intensity of a traumatic situation”

• Personalization: “the proclivity to relate external events to himself when there is no basis for making such a connection”

Absolutistic, dichotomous thinking: “the tendency to place all experiences in one of two opposite categories; for example, flawless or defective, immaculate or filthy, saint or sinner”

--Whalley on "Unhelpful Thinking Styles"

Where Do Moral Panics Come From?

 

Where do moral panics come from? Some are bottom-up, but here is an example of a top-down origin, as described in "Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction" by Goode and Ben-Yehuda:

 

Howard Becker (1963: 135-46) argued that the passage of the marijuana laws, and the attendant media and public attention, was a product of the efforts of key moral entrepreneurs, specifically officials in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), who "perceived an area of wrongdoing that properly belonged in their jurisdiction and moved to put it there" (Becker 1963:138). The Bureau's thrust was made up of two prongs. First, FBN officials worked with state legislatures-including drafting model legislation-to facilitate the passage of the state anti-marijuana laws. And second, they provided "facts and figures" to the media which formed the basis for articles in national magazines. Thus, "through the press and other communications media," the Bureau sought to generate "a favorable public attitude toward the proposed" law (Becker 1963: 139). The "national menace" or threat posed by marijuana use did not have an objective reality. The FBN created a crisis where no basis for it existed,and the campaign created a "new class of outsiders-marihuana users."

How a Moral Panic Ends

 

Ann Putnam was one of the witnesses who accused people of witchcraft during the Salem incident in 1692-3. She got people hanged, and she thought she was doing the right thing. Here is the public apology she delivered in 1706, once the moral panic had fizzled out, and the participants were left with nothing but their grief and their guilt:

 

"I desire to be humbled before God for that sad and humbling providence that befell my father's family in the year about '92; that I, then being in my childhood, should, by such a providence of God, be made an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons; and that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time, whereby I justly fear I have been instrumental, with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood; though what was said or done by me against any person I can truly and uprightly say, before God and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them; but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded by Satan. And particularly, as I was a chief instrument of accusing of Goodwife Nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lie in the dust, and to be humbled for it, in that I was a cause, with others, of so sad a calamity to them and their families; for which cause I desire to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence, whose relations were taken away or accused."

The European Witchcraft Panic

One example of moral panic was the witchcraft craze in Europe:

 

"On the continent of Europe, roughly between 1 400 and 1650, hundreds of thousands of people-perhaps as many as half a million, up to 85% of whom were women-were judged to have "consorted with the devil" and were put to death. Much of Europe, especially France, Switzerland, and Germany, was in turmoil with suspicion, accusations, trials, and the punishment of supposed evildoers. A kind of fever-a craze or panic---concerning witchcraft and accusations of witchcraft swept over the land. Once an accusation was made, there was little the accused could do to protect herself. Children, women, and "entire families were sent to the stake .... Entire villages were exterminated ....Germany was covered with stakes, where witches were burning alive." Said one inquisitor, "I wish [the witches] had but one body, so that we could bum them all at once, in one fire!" (Ben-Yehuda 1985)

 

I want to come back to a Colonial American version of this, the Salem episode, which I think is even more typical of the idea of moral panic than the European manifestation.

Moral Panics

I've been thinking about this phenomenon a lot, for reasons that I would hope are obvious. But maybe they're only obvious to me. I'll keep coming back to this as the day goes by. See what you think.

At times, substantial numbers of the members of societies are subject to intense feelings of concern about a given threat which a sober assessment of the evidence suggests is either nonexistent or considerably less than would be expected from the concrete harm posed by the threat. Such over-heated periods of intense concern are typically short-lived. In such periods, which sociologists refer to as "moral panics," the agents responsible for the threat-"folk devils"-are stereotyped and classified as deviants.

Goode and Ben-Yehuda, "Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction"

Having Dostoyevskian Thoughts

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Lost My Damn Owl. Had to Make Do

Old terriers will understand.

A Short Story by Jonathan Webb

This is a short story Jonathan shared with us in 2005. He said it was a work in progress, but I like it the way it is.

A portrait of the author, right side up.

Bill Rossington wiped his wellingtons, grunted and straightened up painfully. Thirty-four well-tended acres trailed away in an indistinct haze of wheat and barley.

"Aye, Mum." he mumbled. "Snatched ye from yer big city to the dales, now, didn' aye? Forty years be comin' to whet now belong to we alone. E'en tho ye not be seein' er now nor again eh, lovie?" The can cap screwed down with difficulty but was done. "Well then." He moved forward slowly, boots clomping. "Two down, seventeen to go, I'll warrant. God save the Queen, me arse."

 

**********

 

"The same today as yesterday. And the day before and the day before that." Byron gave one last flick to his brows and marched to the tubes. God, he hated the Underground. Teeming masses, jumbling, skittering as one live organism going to make a "living" And he hated it. Same route day in, day out. All faces looked identical. Dulled. All on auto-pilot to slave away the day just to bring bread back home.

  He jumped into the flow. The tunnel walls blurred by monotonously. He'd be at the job site all too soon, he knew. Then what? "Why, work the bloody day away as yesterday. All for country and Queen," he grimaced.

"So you think they'll be missing us for half a day then?" It was Harry, his coworker. They had taken this same route together all these days, weeks, years - who knew how long?  Acknowledging one another, yet rarely speaking.

"I say, mate. Will they be missing us for a bit? I mean, what with all the other workers about the site, who would know?"

Ah, Harry. Always the free spirit. "But this leg takes us direct to the job," Byron said. "We'd be seen skipping."

"May'nt be the case, lad. Aways up and to the right is a new excavation for a tube spur to the downs. Not far now. Whadya say. Offboard and scamper out to God's green fields, a bit 'o sunshine and clean air - no crowds. Think fast!"

Byron saw a darker splotch on the tunnel walls ahead approaching quickly. Yes, he thought. Why not, indeed? Who would miss us? We're hard workers. They owe us.

"I'm in!" Byron said.

"We're out!" Harry yelled.

They swayed alone in the darkness as the masses faded into the blackness of the underground. Slowly, as Byron's eyes became accustomed to the darkness, a faint light was noticeable.

"This way, mate," Harry said, pushing him forward. "Next stop, freedom!"

They slowly picked their way towards a pinprick of light that grew with each passing step. "New earthworks for the Bywater Terminal juncture, this," Harry said.

On they went, never given notice by the teams of excavators, backs bent, asses busting to meet the deadlines for the new tube station opening.

Finally! They were above ground. Fresh air washed their faces and they laughed, scampering a distance to a patch of wonderful heather beneath skyscraper trees. They collapsed on the ground laughing. "Gawd almighty in the mornin'," Harry said. "#[email protected]! the bosses and #[email protected]! the job!" He took a bit of grass between his teeth and grew somber. "What ya suppose it's all about, friend?"

Harry and Byron spoke of many things yet nothing at all that afternoon. Byron dreamed of owning his own plot of land, away from the city crowds, working only for himself. Harry said his antennae were pricked for the first eligible damsel that would give him hearth, home and kiddos, be she ugly as the gawdawful Queen Mother herself.

"But who are we kidding, mate?" he asked Byron. "We're just working stiffs, born to our class and probably to die in it."

"No, Harry. I'm sure you're wrong," said Byron. "We work hard and keep our noses clean, get the attention of the bosses, show them what we can do. We climb the ladder. Fuck the Queen and those born to favor. We can make our lives count with hard work and succeed in the bargain. The royals will eat our dust!"

"Yes. Yes, I believe you. We must have a goal. We'll show the bosses. We can do 'er. But, er, first we must make sure we still have bosses. Off we go now to the underground. To the tubes and to work before we're missed and fired. . .or worse."

 

Sweaty but happy, Byron and Harry rejoined the throngs on the underground. Indiscriminate faces, dulled by the workaday world, all looking identical. Except two. Two who smiled with new purpose and a goal.

"Aye, we can do 'er Harry. We can. And we must." Off in the distance, a faint light grew at the tube terminus. Soon they would vomit out onto the work site with all the other dour faces - but now they didn't dread it. They would not be just any other workers. They were going for the prize.

 

But traffic slowed abruptly. The crowds ahead looked back, brows raised in question. Behind, workers strained to see what the slowup was about. "What's that?" said Harry.

There was a dull tremble. Soon it became distinct. Whump, whump, WHUMP - then fumes, noxious, choking! Panic - bodies flailing and banging. Harry was down and still. Byron choked, eyes streaming. He fell beside his friend. Sloshing darkness. His last thought was, "Why? Why me? Why now?"

 

********

 

Bill Rossington wiped his wellingtons, grunted and straightened up painfully. "Aye, my land now, free and clear. Ain't no swarmin' beggars to be gettin' naught off it but me."

He screwed the gas can cap down with difficulty, but it was done. Hand shading eyes, he spotted another brown mound by the fence on the hill.

"Well, then." He moved forward slowly, boots clomping. "Three down, sixteen to go, I'll warrant," he said. "And God save the Queen my arse."

 

 

 

*******