America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for – until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.
People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.
I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.
We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them.
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism.
Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday.
Roads, better harnesses for horses, time-keeping devices, financial instruments like a currency that was recognized everywhere in the kingdom, enforceable contracts – all of this made commerce more appealing than plunder.
The brain is not a bag of traits. It’s startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.
Everyone’s pedigree merges into everyone else’s pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts – decoration of surfaces and bodies – appears to be a human universal.
If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called ‘pure evil’ because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable.
Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can’t understand many things unless you know something about astrology – the plays of Shakespeare and so on.
One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected.
All of the violence that doesn’t occur doesn’t get reported on the news.
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.
If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.
No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you’re still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.
The decline of violence isn’t a steady inclined plane from an original state of maximal and universal bloodshed. Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.
Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.
Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.
As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we’re interested in what makes one person different from another. We’ve got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.
Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business.
Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity – which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.
Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.
I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.
I’m very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.
Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.
But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don’t depend on information coming in from the senses.
It’s likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.
M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.
‘Capitalism’ is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.
Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things – not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.
Violent movements attract thugs and firebrands who enjoy the mayhem. Violent tactics provide a pretext for retaliation by the enemy and alienate third parties who might otherwise support the movement.
Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent.
People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.
You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself.
I don’t think aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think aggression is more elicited by particular situations. I think it can be mitigated.
No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves.
My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one’s convictions can be subjected to empirical test.
Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young.
If crime is going down, you shouldn’t be increasing resources for crime prevention. Or you should be taking note of what has worked and concentrate the crime-prevention methods on policies that have a track record of success.
Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain.
Commerce, trade and exchange make other people more valuable alive than dead, and mean that people try to anticipate what the other guy needs and wants. It engages the mechanisms of reciprocal altruism, as the evolutionary biologists call it, as opposed to raw dominance.
Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.
Look at almost any passage, and you’ll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It’s not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it’s just that that’s the way language works.
Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point.
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.
