Last night, I completed Glen Beck’s The Overton Window, although I am not sure why – light reading that was just sitting there, perhaps, to punctuate my progress through Gone with the Wind.  In many respects, I did enjoy the book. No doubt less noble material currently sits on the shelves of the local book store. Yet, I was left confused over just what precisely I had read.  Still sorting it out, here are some timely thoughts. Today is the day before Beck’s “Restore America” event.

Beck is not a conspiracy theorist, he tells us.  In the opening “Note From the Author,” Beck prophecies that his enemies will try to spin such an attack without even reading the book – so goes Beck’s spin against his critics before they have yet written anything to not read.  No, not a conspiracy theorist, nor a spin-scum sophist appealing to the more crass emotions of the populist. Beck is rather a novelist, a master of humanities and critical thinking, a creative artist fostering “deeper conversations”.  In the Afterward, Beck writes:

It’s one of the intriguing potentials of this sort of fiction: When your mind suspends disbelief, it may also become more willing to consider a broader spectrum of possible outcomes to the events and agendas that are playing out around us every day (294).

But even here, in this one brief didactic attempt to set the record straight and explain his sober educational intentions, Beck cannot help but suggest a little bit more:  “It’s unlikely we’ll face anything close to the challenges” the protagonists are up against in the story.  “But after experiencing their scenario in its fictional setting, maybe it will become a little easier to have deeper conversations about the important forces that are actually at work in the real world.”  I call your attention to the critical phrases “anything close”, “experiencing their scenario,” and “the important forces that are actually at work in the real world.”  So the reader is given the green light to imagine just how non-fictional the simplistic, conspiratorial plot really is.

Character development within the story does little to mitigate a concern over conspiratorial intentions, even though Beck seems to make great efforts to moralize just here. The popular rhetorician, Danny Bailey, learns the importance in setting up careful boundaries on his own rhetoric and lust for attention, but only in so far as Danny might unwittingly incite literal violence, more specifically, the use of an atomic bomb on the city of Las Vegas.  That is not setting a high bar for carefulness, scholarship, self-critical inquiry, humility, and sobriety – to put it mildly. 

Therefore, despite how much I did enjoy the story and many of the interesting facts and cool quotes about authoritarianism and freedom, I can find little evidence from The Overton Window to warrant a rejection of Steven Benet’s hypothesis today regarding Glen Beck’s mental state (found in his Washington Monthly article ‘Political Animal’). This hypothesis was captured well by Benet’s quote from Atrius of the Eschaton blog: “The slightly interesting thing about Beck is that he appears to be an insane megalomaniac who is self-aware enough to be aware of that fact. It’s what allows him to be a huckster clown on top of it.”  

Benent’s on-line article provides Beck’s brief video advertising the event set for tomorrow.   The video’s narrator explains that “Man has always searched for a better way. . . . a new world founded on faith . . . by a people who believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was a power greater than man guiding them.” Beck gets the nature of faith right here.  Faith is the unquestioned certainty that one knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that one’s thoughts are in fact Gods thoughts and that one’s will is in fact God’s will.  A monstrous proposition of course, and so it is not surprising that the narrator double-speaks: “Men guided by their own reason.” 

The Overton Window is not silent here.  The wisest sage of the story, Molly, explains that the difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution was that “We believed we had the will of God behind us.”  Beware, I say, of someone who makes a career out of mocking Ivy League institutions and the ‘elitists,’ for it is perhaps only there where our history may be rightly preserved. 

But all this is perhaps too much rigor over the profoundly banal. If Beck wanted to gain the respect of someone like me, he would not be sharing the stage with Sarah Palin, and he would certainly not then state on Fox news that her presence was “nothing political.”  But we need not ponder even these facets of the man’s psychology. The tail was already pinned on the donkey. Earlier, Beck explained his expectations for tomorrow’s event:

And that’s kind of the point of 8/28: you just have to stand where the Lord wants you to stand. He’ll explain it to you when the time comes. You can feel the presence of the Lord. I mean, the Spirit is so strong. When you, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred thousand people on the Mall in that space right there between Washington and Lincoln with the Reflecting Poll – a spiritual space in our nation – the Spirit of the Lord is going to be unleashed like I think you’ve never felt it before. 

I comfort myself with the possibility that within some halls of our Universities, there remains a small flickering flame of what we are inclined to call progress.

 Four Items:

1) Mind Science
Benforado (of the Situationist) let’s us know after the fact of the interdisciplinary embodied cognition conference at Columbia University in NYC.  Or maybe he did let us know. I’ve been too busy writing my book the last three weeks to be checking up on these things.  But crickets!  Gallese, Barsalou, and Lakoff, three of my favorite mind researchers, were there.  And here is a list of the others with links to their websites.

2) Novel
So far coming to 50 chapters and 380 pages. 

3) Hitch-22
I completed Christopher Hitchens’ Memoir Hitch-22.  I think I am going to frame the last three pages for my . . . well, for walls of willing hosts?  . . . makes a nice metaphor anyway.

4) Making of Law, Science, and Prop 8
Dahlia Lithwick writes in Slate magazine on the “Brilliant Ruling” of Judge Vaughn R. Walker:

It’s hard to read Judge Walker’s opinion without sensing that what really won out today was science, methodology, and hard work. Had the proponents of Prop 8 made even a minimal effort to put on a case, to track down real experts, to do more than try to assert their way to legal victory, this would have been a closer case. But faced with one team that mounted a serious effort and another team that did little more than fire up their big, gay boogeyman screensaver for two straight weeks, it wasn’t much of a fight. Judge Walker scolds them at the outset for promising in their trial brief to prove that same-sex marriage would “effect some twenty-three harmful consequences” and then putting on almost no case.

Walker notes that the plaintiffs presented eight lay witnesses and nine expert witnesses, including historians, economists, psychologists, and a political scientist. Walker lays out their testimony in detail. Then he turns to the proponents’ tactical decision to withdraw several of their witnesses, claiming “extreme concern about their personal safety” and unwillingness to testify if there were to be “recording of any sort.” Even when it was determined that there would be no recording, counsel declined to call them. They were left with two trial witnesses, one of whom, David Blankenhorn, founder and president of the Institute for American Values, the judge found “lacks the qualifications to offer opinion testimony and, in any event, failed to provide cogent testimony in support of proponent’s factual assertions.” Blankenhorn’s credentials, methodology, lack of peer-reviewed studies, and general shiftiness on cross examination didn’t impress Walker. And once he was done with Blankenhorn, he turned to the only other witness—Kenneth P. Miller—who testified only to the limited question of the plaintiffs’ political power. Walker wasn’t much more impressed by Miller, giving his opinions “little weight.”

. . . The real triumph of Perry v. Schwarzenegger may be that it talks in the very loftiest terms about matters rooted in logic, science, money, social psychology, and fact.

Conservative response?

“Abusive”. “Tyrannical”.  “Judicial arrogance”.

The Mormon church, on the other hand, says  (from Rawstory.com):

 ”There is no doubt that today’s ruling will add to the marriage debate in this country and we urge people on all sides of this issue to act in a spirit of mutual respect and civility toward those with a different opinion,” church spokeswoman Kim Farah said, as quoted at the Associated Press. 

In a recent article  for Slate,  Farhad Manjoo offers a critical look at WikiLeaks  through the lens of the release of Afghanistan war logs. Manjoo asks, “Is radical transparency compatible with total anonymity?”.  With total anonymity of sources, which means that even WikiLeaks does not know and cannot know the sources of the leaks it provides, WikiLeaks has become “an opaque, insular organization” and has “shrouded itself in secrecy.”  As if the pejorative ‘insular’ and ‘shrouded’ and ‘secrecy’ were not enough, this is “a problem” Manjoo informs us, since “most whistle-blowers” have “some sort of agenda” and this agenda is “part of the story” and “could provide valuable context.”  Manjoo concludes, “would many leakers balk if WikiLeaks began asking them simple questions? Let me offer a few suggestions: Who are you, how did you find this document, and why are you leaking it now?”

As one who has been on the WikiLeak side of this kind of criticism (an experience originating a mild theme for my book in progress), I felt compelled to offer a reply.  I have not in the past spent much time on the political.  Perhaps I am finally getting drawn in, or perhaps it is not just politics at stake here. This issue regards our appreciation, or lack thereof, for the endearing role totalitarianism has played through human history, particularly with respect to the gruesomely attained discovery of that still globally rare and precious form of life we call freedom.  Freedom to think, freedom to know, freedom to talk, freedom to act.  Freedom from unknown microphones in one’s bedside phone and freedom from imprisonment and torture for failure to whoop it up for the local big-mouthed pathological monomaniac.  I speak of a Freedom not only for the guru or the state sponsored saint or the patriarch or the dear leader or all those deluded murderous tyrants we apparently cannot live without. I speak of a Freedom of the human mammal, which, by categorical definition, possesses some extent of at least a rough similarity to my own consciousness, emotions, and nervous system.

In answer to Manjoo’s question then—and I am glad he asks it—‘NO’, I do not think many leakers would “balk.”  They after all are in a position of simply trying to find a way to “balk” about their own immediate affiliations and social ties and daily life routines without the ramifications of, on the mild end of the whipping stick, the fine-tuned mechanisms of discrimination, shunning, ridicule, shame, and psychological torture.  These leakers would hardly have the arrogance, motivation, emotional energy, or concern to “balk” at WikiLeak for asking such questions.  These would-be leakers would simply not leak, but go on, oppressed by their knowledge of the truth that powerful people have so far succeeded in keeping under wraps.  The suggestion that “most whistle-blowers” have some “sort of agenda” is an insult to all those men and women who have suffered for the cause of truth.  I do hope that Manjoo’s easy dismissal of this possibility from even a quick reference does not reflect his own inability to empathize with this kind of “agenda”.  As WikiLeak alleges, globally, “Whistleblowers account for around half of all exposures of fraud.”  It is hard to imagine that this important source of truth in the world is primarily guided by private ambitions or more neutral selfish drives like “agendas”, irrelevant if not counter to, the knowledge of the truth. 

As for the charge of insularity and secrecy:  How does this smear—that is all it can be, right or wrong: a smear apt to cue strong emotions—fall even near the argumentative crux?  The military needs a mechanism to secure some information.  In this case, this mechanism failed. This was only ‘secret’ information though. So far, we have seen no ‘top secret’ information.  We have laws about leaking this information.  The leaker still stands the risk of discovery and prosecution according to law and under the protections of the U.S. Constitution—although the leaker is currently ‘innocent’ and will remain so until declared guilty by someone other than Obama and James Jones—while Wikileaks has established itself even more as a safe source to leak important information from within oppressive regimes throughout the world.

Manjoo stays clear of this more sticky point of law and the peculiar power of the executive branch and military to the more interesting epistemological point: how do we know? How do we know why the documents were leaked, or if these are all the relevant documents or if the documents have been tampered?  But the argument here is mangled.  Manjoo confuses two kinds of evidence: the evidence of primary documents and the evidence of testimony.  Understanding the source indeed will provide narrative context and such context is always “helpful”—as well as entertaining—but after 90,000 of official military documents have been presented to the court of public opinion, such “helpfulness” diminishes up an asymptotic curve.  The media has been concerned about what these documents say, with the interpretive context well secured over the fact that they do not know who leaked, why, if these are all the documents and, prima facie, if they have been tampered. And alternatively, the government simply wants the leaker’s head on a stick, regardless of who he is and why he leaked the information.  Manjoo has therefore simply played into the hands of the authoritarian and helped weaken our always tentative grasp on freedom.  

I leave you with Wikileak’s nailing of the epistemological point:

WikiLeaks believes that best way to truly determine if a story is authentic, is not just our expertise, but to provide the full source document to the broader community – and particularly the community of interest around the document. So for example, let’s say a WikiLeaks’ document reveals human rights abuses and it is purportedly from a regional Chinese government. Some of the best people to analyze the document’s veracity are the local dissident community, human rights groups and regional experts (such as academics). They may be particularly interested in this sort of document. But of course WikiLeaks will be open for anyone to comment.

George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things is back in the news.  Mind Hacks has directed attention  to the recent article ‘Tongue Twisters’, published by the The Economist December 17th. Mid-stream, the article modestly notes Lakoff’s memorable contribution to the intellectual history of the 20th century:

 Twain’s joke about German gender shows that in most languages it often has little to do with physical sex. “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”.

 But one cannot mention Lakoff without also mentioning the orthodox:

A fierce debate exists in linguistics between those, such as Noam Chomsky, who think that all languages function roughly the same way in the brain and those who do not. The latter view was propounded by Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist of the early 20th century, who argued that different languages condition or constrain the mind’s habits of thought.

 Whorfianism has been criticised for years, but it has been making a comeback. Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University, for example [you can see Boroditsky recently discussed at Newsweek here  -MPM ], points to the Kuuk Thaayorre, aboriginals of northern Australia who have no words for “left” or “right”, using instead absolute directions such as “north” and “south-east” (as in “You have an ant on your south-west leg”). Ms Boroditsky says that any Kuuk Thaayorre child knows which way is south-east at any given time, whereas a roomful of Stanford professors, if asked to point south-east quickly, do little better than chance. The standard Kuuk Thayoorre greeting is “where are you going?”, with an answer being something like “north-north-east, in the middle distance.” Not knowing which direction is which, Ms Boroditsky notes, a Westerner could not get past “hello”. Universalists retort that such neo-Whorfians are finding trivial surface features of language: the claim that language truly constricts thinking is still not proven.

The author of this article (I cannot find the author’s name) provides evidence for the fact that language does indeed constrict thinking, and references to Lakoff, Boroditsky, and Whorf are not counterbalanced by the hat tipped to Chomsky. Even this tipped hat is a gesture too kind, veiling what is really no kindness at all. Coyly left unsaid – a quality of good journalism I have come to appreciate – is the fact that a universal language of thought is more strikingly “not proven” than its competitor. 

Yet, I would wish to frame the issue a little differently.  I do agree that language constrains thought. Inserting oneself into another language community will constrain how one will or must think.  And it seems right that language development will form ways of thinking particular to that language. As Boroditsky concludes in Cognitive Psychology 43, 1–22 (2001): “When sensory information is scarce or inconclusive (as with the direction of motion of time), languages may play the most important role in shaping how their speakers think.”  Alternatively, the experience of speaking and hearing a language can influence overall ‘world view’, for lack of a better word – an idea I had years ago as my dark, inner warrior came alive to the tune of my friend’s recitation of Homer’s Illiad in the original language.

But what currently appears to me a more important point is that observable language provides evidence for the sort of cognition responsible for producing and sustaining it. So I would want to emphasize the photo-negative of Boroditsky’s thesis: the culturally developed mind/brain constricts what form of language is observed. In other words, thought conditions speech, at least as much as speech conditions thought. Whether or not the chicken comes before the egg is here an empirical question. Boroditsky (2001) does not address this question, but she does provide reason to consider it relevant. For example, the age of acquisition determines the extent to which a Mandarin’s concept of time is influenced by learning English (Mandarins speak more often of time along the vertical axis than English speakers). This suggests that once a conceptual system is in place, language acquisition might have little influence (although, Boroditsky does provide mitigating evidence here to preserve her original thesis). But regardless, the mature conceptual system will continue to produce the form of language that originally evidenced that very conceptual system, a point I will return to momentarily.

Boroditsky appears to agree that a direct, universal experience of the world provides the semantic grounding of any language, whereas language and other cultural conventions, such as direction of reading (the Mandarin read along the vertical axis), determine the unique features of more abstract thought. So in reality, Boroditsky has shown that language is one powerful environmental influence on how we think, whereas I want to emphasize that language is likewise a powerful source of empirical data that provide evidence for the more general cognitive mechanisms language makes use of.  ”Language is, after all”, as Lakoff put it, “an aspect of cognition” (1987, 21). Lakoff expands the point later: “Linguistic categories, like conceptual categories, show prototype effects . . . I take the existence of such effects as prima facie evidence that linguistic categories have the same character as other conceptual categories” (67).

Speaking of Lakoff, women, and other sundry dangerous things, I make further note of how our basic-level domain of experience grounds, metaphorically (metaphorically speaking), higher level cognition, as this article from The Economist evinces:   

The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.

I have pictures of myself while naked (and three years old) peeling bark from a large pine tree, and I think it probable that this experience, hardwired into my brain (and perhaps body), has helped me conceive of the disintegration of asteroids as they plummet through the earth’s atmosphere and of the force binding the negative and positive charges of a penny (separate them the diameter of the earth and still, even given the inverse proportionality of distance and force, we are left with thousands of tons of pressure – from what I recollect anyway).  More strikingly here: the cultural attire of baggy trousers and the adverse effects of getting plywood wet are conceptualized, as evidenced by an observable noun class, in terms of this basic level experience with trees and bark. But these Tuyuca users were not poetic softies. If you are a user of Tuyuca you are constrained to be more of a scientist and a philosopher than 80 percent of the current U.S. population:

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

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Lakoff and Johnson (1980) offered a fresh understanding of an old saying: Life is a journey. Well, to travel back up into the article a bit we can land on a section that has something to teach us a bit more about this fact:

Slavic languages force speakers, when talking about the past, to say whether an action was completed or not. . . And to say “go” requires different Slavic verbs for going by foot, car, plane, boat or other conveyance. For Russians or Poles, the journey does matter more than the destination.

When asking someone from Ojibwa how they got to the party, they would say something like “I stepped into a canoe” (Lakoff, 78). In addition to metonymy this might show a conceptual similarly with people speaking Slavic languages, in contrast with the American’s life: ‘I do not know how I am going to get there, baby, but I am on my way.’  It might prove fruitful to formulate some experiments comparing different language communities’ abstract use of both vehicle of travel and destination.

 A motion-picture is worth a thousand words:

That is just so like Palin.  You know?  But I refuse to resign my dignitity as an alumnus of the Universtiy of Idaho. Palin, as you can certainly see, is an alumna (We were both taught by the distinguished Dr. Roy Atwood too).

Newsweek has responded to the poltical noise generated from this cover.  But you can hear a pin drop as you turn the page to this edition’s article  by Christopher Hitchens. Please read. It is ambrosial – and true.  Hitchens somehow punches numerous 10d nails all the way in with one swing of the hammer.  Palin best not comment on the actual written content of this week’s issue.

I worked with a couple guys last year who said they voted for Palin. She was “hot”, they explained.  They invisioned a movie called “Nailin’ Pailin”.  Not that’s sexist, if you ask me.

Update: For what appears to be an excellent, scientifically informed response to these illegally obtained emails, see Real Climate’s original entry and their subsequent entry  intended to provide proper context to key issues and players. Will Powerline and other head-in-sand political hacks apologize? Doubt it.  Will the spin-scum cleric quoted below retract his statement about “fraud”? Of course not. They will all, as Hitchens once said, “just keep talking”.

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Powerline’s analysis of the emails illegally obtained from a leading climatic research center appears to be somewhat meretricious (if you search my blog, you will not find anything on global warming). You can see the primary, leaked documents here.

Powerline’s first post  explains:

Someone hacked into a computer at the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre, one of the main centers of anthropogenic global warming research. The hacker downloaded 62 megabytes of data from the server, consisting of around 1,000 emails and a variety of other documents.

I was eager to observe groupthink and system justification tendencies within a small scientific community, and although I do find some interesting data, I was disappointed in the largely innocuous material that was “cherry picked” by Powerline from 1000 emails. With such robust resources at hand, I would have hoped for more intriguing results, considering that scientists are only human mammals. Yet, Powerline seems to admit more than intended by the comment: “They are remarkably candid; these individuals talk to each other with the knowledge that they are among friends.” Powerline proceeds to build a vague case for the mass readership, equivocating between natural mechanisms of bias and intentional fabrication of facts. Compare the two statements:

1) The emails I’ve reviewed so far do not suggest that these scientists are perpetrating a knowing and deliberate hoax.

2) . . . this story was told about accountants: A CEO is going to hire a new accountant and summons a series of candidates. He asks each applicant, “What is two plus two?” The first two candidates answer, “Four.” They don’t get the job. The third responds, “What do you want it to be?” He gets hired. The climate alarmists’ attitude toward data appears to me much the same . . .

But Powerline concludes with the hedging disclaimer:

The language is certainly suggestive. . . but it’s possible the words used could have a relatively benign explanation. The surrounding emails do not provide context that sheds any light on what those words mean.

Determined to take a “political” stance on this issue, instead of providing an impartial analysis of these emails and what they broadly suggest in their entirety, a second post  was made, revealing very little not already made public through corporate scientific investigation and journalism.

This is perhaps one reason why it is illegal to procure information in this fashion: it leaves sensitive, private correspondence open to irresponsible hacks. Yes, I know these hacks at Powerline are practicing attorneys. (Perhaps I could just say that I rest my case – although they are well published, and one was trained at Harvard Law).  In turn, these hacks then provide further meat that anti-science, anti-civilization spin-scum clerics can throw out to their philistine admirers, as can be seen here :

And what we now know is that global warming is not just an egregious scientific mistake (which it always was). It is a mistake that certain dedicated true believers are prepared to persist in, by means of scientific fraud as necessary. . . . the thing will be completely over. Stick a fork in it; it’s done.

All the while, ultra-conservative leaders continue to warn their followers of the liberal bias and lies of big media. Hopefully, a more responsible story comes out of all this. I bet it does.