What are they waiting for?

Look at the photo. What are these people doing there? They are waiting. Apparently they are waiting for something special, for all have their faces in more or less the same direction, the direction where the object they are waiting for is or will come from. It is obvious what this object is: It is the tram in front of them. By they don’t go into the tram. Why not? It is because the doors of the tram are closed. So, these people are waiting till the doors of the tram will be opened, so that they can go into the tram. They are not so much waiting for the tram itself but for a certain event related to the tram. While waiting, some people are watching their smartphones. Others do nothing special. They are just waiting.
But look to the people at the right. They are looking at something: They are looking at the man near the front door of the tram. What is the man doing there? He is opening the door of the tram, for the man is the tram driver. Yet a few moments waiting and the doors of the tram will be open; people will enter and the whole scene has disappeared. And that was actually what these people were waiting for: for the end of the waiting.

Random quote
When you’re just trying to “neutralize” the opponent, you’re being nice to them. More often, you’re trying to “crush” the opponent.

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) 

The importance of waiting

Most of the time, sociologists pay attention to striking social phenomena and philosophers do so as well in their way. Or they study problems that need to be solved. Usually they study problems that catch the eye. However, some sociologists and philosophers study less striking if not inconspicuous phenomena of everyday life, or phenomena that just happen, because they just happen, like those who use an ethnomethodological approach often do (mainly in the Anglo-Saxon countries; for example Erving Goffman), or (mainly in the francophone area) those who apply and develop the ideas of the French scholar Michel de Certeau, who studied society from philosophical, sociological and other perspectives, and the ethnologist Marc Augé. They and their students investigated or still investigate such everyday practices like living in a house, cooking, or making a ride on the metro. Indeed, some sociologists and philosophers do pay attention to themes of everyday of life in their studies. However, as Kalekin-Fishman has shown “From the diversity of theoretical approaches to everyday life it is clear that this area of study has no single empirical orientation.” (Kalekin-Fishman, 2013, p. 718) Moreover, “[d]espite the fact that everyday life has been important to social theory since the initiation of sociology as a science, the interest in investigating it as a phenomenon in its own right is relatively recent”. (id. p. 724) In fact, till today the study of everyday life has been a casual approach and not an independent field of interest, as it should be for such an important aspect of life. Even more, everyday life is not just an aspect of life, but it is life. Be it is it may, and whatever the approach is and whether it is embedded in other studies or whether it isn’t, studies of daily life are very interesting and important, if not significant, since they touch real life as it is lived most of the time. Nevertheless, the present investigations of everyday life still ignore or overlook some of the most basic but also frequent human activities. Take waiting. A closer look at it makes clear that waiting is one of the most common “activities” we perform. Moreover, it is an “activity” we spend much time on, maybe more than on anything else we do, with the exception of sleeping (which should be investigated, however). Nonetheless, when searching the internet, I haven’t found any study that pays attention to waiting. It is, as if from the perspective of the social sciences and from the philosophical perspective the phenomenon doesn’t exist or at least that it doesn’t deserve attention. But can an activity we spend so much time on be so trivial that we can ignore it? To ask the question is already to answer it. I think that it is weird to ignore waiting in sociology and philosophy, since it is an essential activity in life. It is not without reason that so much money is spent on making waiting spaces, like at bus stops, in railway stations, in airports, etc. Why spending this money if waiting is a ghost idea. Why spending this money if nobody would be waiting, not only now and then but often and sometimes for quite a long time? It’s true, planners think about where to make waiting areas; what is the best place for them; how many people probably will use a certain waiting space; and so on. I don’t doubt the value of their capacities and their work, but on a general social scientific and philosophical level the idea of waiting doesn’t exist. The most common is often the least perceived, and just this makes that it deserves attention.

Some literature
- Augé, Marc, Non-Lieux, Paris: Seuil, 1992.
- Augé, Marc, Un ethnologue dans le métro. Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 2013.
- Certeau, Michel de, The practice of everyday life. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1984.
- Certeau, Michel de; L. Giard; P. Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life. Volume 2: Living and
Cooking. Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press. 1998.
- Goffman, Erving, Relations in public. New York, etc.: Harper & Row, 1972.
- Goffman, Erving, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986.
- Kalekin-Fishman, Devorah, “Sociology of everyday life”, in Current Sociology Review, vol. 61 (5-6), 2013, pp. 714–732.

Random quote
The world is the future of man, because man is the creator of his “world”.

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991)

The nature of the countryside

The peatdigger

It’s summertime. Many people go on holiday and many people visit the countryside. Or it’s just a beautiful day, and people decide to leave the city and to go for a stroll in nature or to take their bikes. It’s nice to be outdoors and to enjoy the sunshine and to feel the wind blowing through your hair. And so you took your bike and made a ride. You hear the birds singing, especially if it is yet early summer. Later in the season, you’ll see birds gathering together in the fields, preparing their soon to come long flights to southern countries, where they’ll stay in winter. By nightfall, huge flocks of thousands, no tens of thousands of starlings are looking for their sleeping places, moving as black clouds through the sky in spectacular movements. You hear a cow mooing. Other cows follow the sound with theirs. The bleating of sheep completes the choir. In the distance, a boy is singing a sad song. A dog barks. Other people enjoy the landscape as such: The woods they are walking through; a rippling stream; fields enclosed by hedges. The world around is wonderful and they enjoy its peace and its beauty. You feel yourself in nature and so do many with you.
Nature? Sometimes I wonder whether nature yet exists, for a deeper awareness will tell you that, especially around the cities, but not only there, most of the countryside is human-made. Even, where it isn’t, the human impact is inescapable. Some countries – mine, the Netherlands, in the first place – are completely human-made. There is a saying that “God created the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands”, but I think that it applies to many parts of the world in its own context. However, many people don’t realize it when walking in the countryside; or they don’t know it. As Henri Lefebvre makes clear in its Critique de la vie quotidienne (p. 163): when looking at the countryside and at much that we call “nature”, we confuse the facts of nature with human facts. When we walk through the countryside and see it as nature, we look at it in the way as “we look at the sea or the sky, in which each human trace is wiped out.” In the countryside “the human facts escape us.” We even don’t know anymore where to see them, where to look at them, where to find them, namely in the simple, familiar everyday objects, like the forms of the fields, the courses of the streams, the routes of the roads, the positions of the houses, the places of the forests. They are not simply there, guided by the will of nature. Everything in the countryside is human-made; even each grain of sand and clump of soil is, so to speak. The simple facts of human construction and artificiality are everywhere. And – what also many people don’t know – there is often much human misery and suffering behind these human facts; behind this human-made landscape. The work to make it often has been done by people enforced to work there, by direct force or enforced to take work because of the misery of their living conditions. People got meagre wages, too much to die from, too little to live on, and they lived as slaves or were enslaved. A plunge in history will make this clear to everybody who is interested in it and wants to know it. Enjoy your walk!

Random quote
Man will be daily or he will not be.

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) 

Bread and games

I think that I could fill this website each week with a blog about Montaigne and his Essays. The man and his work are very inspiring. But that’s not what I want, so after two blogs about Montaigne, I should switch again to another theme. However, this time yet another Montaigne blog, so that you get a kind of trilogy. Next week, I’ll write about something else again, although I don’t know yet what it will be.Last week we saw Montaigne as a psychologist. As a psychologist, he had to be a good observer, which he certainly was. This is especially clear in the journal he kept during his journey through Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Italy. But also in his own country he looked around with a sharp eye. He praised what he liked and he criticized what he didn’t like or considered stupid, like in the essay “Of vain subtleties” (Essays I-54). This essay starts with a remarkable sentence: “There are a sort of little knacks and frivolous subtleties from which men sometimes expect to derive reputation and applause: as poets, who compose whole poems with every line beginning with the same letter…” This was done in Montaigne’s days, indeed, and I can understand that he thought that such artificialities were stupid. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable sentence, for what Montaigne probably didn’t know is that some time before, a Dutchman had written a long poem and the first letters of the fifteen verses of the poem put in succession made the name Willem van Nassov (= William of Nassau). William of Nassau was count of Nassau in Germany, and also, prince of Orange and Stadtholder of Holland (representative of the Spanish King there). Willem of Orange-Nassau, became the leader of the Dutch rebellion against the Spanish King, which led to the independence of the Netherlands. The poem just mentioned describes William’s doubts, problems and struggles as a leader of this rebellion. Now it is the national anthem of the Netherlands and it is also the oldest national anthem in use today. Moreover, the author of the poem is not known, so who got the reputation and applause of this poem? And was it the product of a vain effort? Yes, and no. In the same Book I of the Essays, Montaigne had written an essay titled “That men are not to judge of our happiness till after death”. Analogously, we can say that this also applies to the first sentence of his “Of vain subtleties”. But if we would apply this statement rigorously, it would be difficult to have an opinion, and that’s not what we want.
Must we accept then any activity as potentially useful, since later history may show it is, even if this would be very unlikely? Also in essay I-54 Montaigne tells us about a man who was praised and rewarded, because he “had learned to throw a grain of millet with such dexterity and assurance as never to miss the eye of a needle”. This made Montaigne remark: “Tis a strong evidence of a weak judgment when men approve of things for their being rare and new, or for their difficulty, where worth and usefulness are not conjoined to recommend them.”
If he had lived now, Montaigne could still make this remark. I know of a TV show that is about such “vain” activities. Central are questions like: Could this man throw hundred grains of millet with such dexterity and assurance as never to miss the eye of a needle? Is such a TV show senseless? Yes, it is, but then one should ask: Is amusement senseless? I think it isn’t for humans cannot live without it. Nevertheless, it can be a problem. Nowadays, we can see many videos with such “vain” activities in the internet. Many people like them. No problem. No problem? No, unless you see then another one, and another one, and another one… for hours, as some people do. And the next day maybe again, etc. No problem, unless you become addicted to them and spend your time on them and not or no longer on things that must be done. People may feel guilty that they have spent so much time on vain activities and that other things are not done. That’s already bad enough, but more and more websites have videos that are made that you become addicted to them; and especially that children and young people become addicted to them. It’s the revenue model of such websites. Is it a problem? Yes, it is. Since then the choice to become addicted (if such a choice exists) is no longer yours but the choice of another: You are manipulated. In view of this, Montaigne is right. Of course, he did not and could not foresee the internet and all that belongs to it. Montaigne warned us for the weakness of the human mind, which is of all times. Humans have a weak judgment, because they approve of things that are rare and new. Others try to misuse this weakness and make you addicted so that they can manipulate you. And then I haven’t talked yet about the political side of this. Bread and games, is that all we need?

Random quote
It is generally surprising these days that war could arise in our time, in our Europe, between civilized states. … But waging war, that is, trying to give themselves justice through the arms, at some point does every person and every group, who feel no law, protective or threatening, above them.

Albert Verwey (1856-1937)

Montaigne as a psychologist

When psychology did not yet exist as a separate science, so before the mid-19th century, it was part of philosophy and especially philosophers wrote about psychological themes. So, if you didn’t want to follow the commonsense psychological advices of your family and friends or other persons you trusted, or if you didn’t trust your own commonsense views, you tried to find out what philosophers had written about your problem or how philosophers could provide an answer to your question. So you turned to Aristotle, or Spinoza or to another thinker. Also Montaigne wrote sometimes about philosophical themes, for example in essay 4 of Book I of his Essays: “How the soul expends its passions upon false objects, when the true are missed”. Here, Montaigne tells us that people who are frustrated often direct themselves to the wrong object in order to take it out; especially, when there is no other way or no decent way to do something about your frustration. For instance, Montaigne tells us that “a gentleman of [his] country] marvellously tormented with the gout … [said] in the extremity of his [pains] he must needs have something to quarrel with, and that railing at and cursing, one while the Bologna sausages, and another the dried tongues and the hams, was some mitigation to his pain.”
Some other examples mentioned by Montaigne: Pulling your hair out of sorrow. Or the Persian King Xerxes who whipped the Hellespont because a gale had destroyed the bridges he was building. Or “Caligula demolished a very beautiful palace for the pleasure his mother had once enjoyed there.” Some wanted to punish even God or their gods, because they hadn’t helped them or had obstructed their plans.
I think it is a kind of behaviour that most of us know or even have performed themselves. You give a kick against the door or other object, because you are frustrated, although these objects don’t have any relationship with your frustration (and if they would have, even then they couldn’t help, for objects have no will). Others become aggressive, for instance football supporters, because their club has lost a match. Examples abound, and you’ll certainly find more, either because you sometimes behaved so, or because you have seen others doing so or have heard of it.
At first glance, it seems that Montaigne mocks this kind of behaviour, and some Montaigne interpreters explain the essay this way. Doesn’t Montaigne mention such behaviour “folly”? However, a closer reading of the essay shows a deep psychological insight into the matter. For Montaigne doesn’t only ridicule the behaviour, but he explains also its causes: “So it seems that the soul, being transported and discomposed, turns its violence upon itself, if not supplied with something to oppose it, and therefore always requires an object at which to aim, and whereon to act.” And if we cannot find an object that fits the frustration, we look for something else, even if it has nothing to do with the frustration. “And we see that the soul, in its passions, inclines rather to deceive itself, by creating a false and fantastical subject, even contrary to its own belief, than not to have something to work upon.”
This is a deep insight, for once we know the causes of our frustrated and irrational behaviour, we can try to do something about it and to look for a reasonable alternative or to learn to behave ourselves. And that’s what modern psychologists do. On the internet, for instance, you can find many tips how to control your frustration and how to lead it in a positive direction. To give your soul an object, in Montaigne’s terms. Montaigne himself did not do so, but at the end of the essay, he gives us the good advice to restrain ourselves, for it has no sense to let yourself go. Or address your frustration to yourself: “We can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.” But isn’t this what we do, when we pull our hair out of sorrow?

Random quote
A lot of the ideas that appear silly only appear silly because you’ve looked at the surface of them

Anthony Gottlieb (1956-)

On sorrow

“The Grieving Parents” by Kathe Kollwitz, a memorial to her son Peter,

killed during the First World War (German war cemetery, Vladslo, Belgium)

Emotions are complex, and we all have them. It’s why Montaigne writes so often about them. For example, the second essay in Book I of his Essays is dedicated to the emotion “tristesse”, which can be translated as sorrow, sadness or grief. It’s an emotion many people have and maybe he has it more than the average people, Montaigne says. And – what he doesn’t say in this essay, though –wasn’t his whole essay-project built on this same emotion? Hadn’t Montaigne started to write his essays because of his grief for his late friend Étienne de la Boétie, a grief that again and again comes to the surface in his Essays? And the whole world is steeped in this emotion, whether we call it sorrow, sadness or grief, which are all aspects of the same, to that extent that the world “is pleased to grace it with a particular esteem, clothing therewith wisdom, virtue, and conscience.” Montaigne doesn’t like this. It is “foolish and sordid guise”.
Sorrow is a fickle, multi-faced emotion. It’s not “what you see is what you get”. The emotion you see on the face or in the behaviour of a human, doesn’t need to be the emotion that this person feels in the heart. It’s so for all emotions but maybe in particular it is so for the emotion of sorrow (to use one word for the sorrow-sadness-grief emotional complex). Montaigne illustrates this with several examples. First he tells us the story of Psammenitus, an Egyptian king who was defeated and taken prisoner. He saw his daughter passing, who had been made a slave, and he showed no emotion. Then Psammenitus saw his son led away to execution, and still he showed no emotion. Then he saw one of his domestic and familiar friends brought in among the captives, and only then did Psammenitus show extreme sadness. Why only then? Didn’t he care about his daughter and son? No. When asked, Psammenitus said: “It is … because only this last affliction was to be manifested by tears, the two first far exceeding all manner of expression.” Our sorrow can be so great and intense that we cannot express it.
A second case told by Montaigne is at first sight the same. It is about “a prince of our own nation, who is at Trent and has news there brought him of the death of his elder brother, a brother on whom depended the whole support and honour of his house, and soon after of that of a younger brother, the second hope of his family.” The prince received the news apparently emotionless and cold-hearted. However, when a few days later one of his servants died, the prince was overcome with sorrow to that extent that “that some thence were forward to conclude that he was only touched to the quick by this last stroke of fortune”. However, “in truth, it was, that being before brimful of grief, the least addition overflowed the bounds of all patience.” Sorrow can become more than we can bear.
We can become petrified with sorrow, as these and other examples by Montaigne show. And just this is the deepest, the strongest sorrow. Quoting Petrarca, Montaigne tells us that those who can tell us how much they suffer, actually don’t suffer very much. However, as Montaigne also shows in this essay, sorrow is not too different from joy. They are the opposite poles of the same emotions and in that respect they are the same. Actually, pure emotions don’t exist, so Montaigne tells us in his essay “That we taste nothing pure” (Book II, 20). Both our sorrows and our joys, both our negative experiences and our positive experiences are mixed and contain at least a bit of the opposite. “Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience”, as he says there, which he illustrates with a quotation from Lucretius: “From the very fountain of our pleasure, something rises that is bitter, which even in flowers destroys”. “Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it…”. Montaigne would certainly agree with the opposite, since it follows from what he writes in both essays discussed here. Death often means the end of suffering. A soldier who has fallen has contributed to saving his country. In his essay “That we taste nothing pure” Montaigne tells us that the “confusion” between joy and sadness can be seen well, when painters hold, “that the same motions and grimaces of the face that serve for weeping; serve for laughter too”. This is actually an exemplification of the fact that both pure delight and pure sorrow do not exist. Besides this, expressions of joy are often not too different from expressions of sorrow. We don’t know what to say when an extreme happiness overcomes us.
And Montaigne himself? Sadness of the death of his dear friend Étienne de La Boétie is in the background of his essays and sometimes it comes to the surface. It is also the background of his life. But as we see in Book III of the Essays, in the end gradually the sadness fades away, although it never becomes zero. The good memories remain, but sorrow is seldom eternal in the sense that it remains to dominate life. As such, Montaigne has never been very subject to violent emotions, he says. “I am naturally of a stubborn apprehension, which also, by reasoning, I every day harden and fortify.” After a difficult time, we often come back stronger.

Random quote
It’s quite remarkable how much of what gets into print, especially in journalism but also, I’ve found, in books, is wrong, just because people copy what they’ve seen elsewhere.

Anthony Gottlieb (1956-)

What is true

Theories are like bubbles: In the end they splash

anarchism                     anthropomorphism          atheism

atomism                       Bayesianism                    behaviourism

Buddhism                     capitalism                       Cartesianism

Christianism                  cohenterism                   communism

communitarism             compatibilism                  computationalism

conceptualism               Confucianism                  connectionism

consequentialism           constitutivism                 constructivism

contextualism                conventionalism              critical rationalism

cynism                          Daoism                          Darwinisme

decisionism                   deconstructivism             deism

determinism                  disjunctivism                  dualism

egalitarianism               eliminativism                   empiricism

enactivism                    Epicurism                       epiphenomalism

essentialism                  existentialism                 expressivism

externalism                   fallibilism                       falsificationism

fascism                         feminism                       Fichteanisme

fictionalism                   fideism                          finitism

formalism                     foundationalism              foundherentism

functionalism                Hegelianism                   Hinduism

historicism                    holism                           humanism

hylomorfism                  idealism                        illusionism

incompatibilism             indeterminism                inductivism

infallibilism                    infinitism                       innatism

internalism                    interpretivism                Jainism

Kantianism                    Leninism                        liberalism

libertarianism                Marxism                         materialism

mentalism                     mercantilism                  modernism

monism                        nationalism                    naturalism

Nazism                         Neo-Marxism                  Neo-Platonism

nihilism                        nominalism                     normativism

objectivism                   Orthodoxism                   panpsychism

particularism                 personalism                    perspectivism

physicalism                   Platonism                       populism

positivism                     postmodernism               pragmatism

probabilism                   proceduralism                 Protestantism

Pyrrhonism                   quietism                          rationalism

realism                         reductionism                    reformism

relativism                     reliabilism                        representationalism

republicanism                Roman-Catholicism          scientism

secularianism                situationism                     socialism

skepticism                     solipsism                        Spinozism

Stalinism                       Stoicism                         structuralism

subjectivism                  Sufism                           Taoism

theism                          Thomism                        totalitarianism

transactionalism             utopism                         veritism

verificationism                vitalism                         voluntarism

                                     wokeism 

Etc. 

The above list is an arbitrary list of -isms that I have found on the internet and in my own computer files. It is certainly not all there is! Moreover, many of the specific -isms in the list have a different meaning according to the theme you are interested in. For example there is realism in political science and in philosophy. The -isms in this list are mainly philosophical but not only. Besides this, many -isms can be subdivided. Take dualism. There is an ontological dualism and a methodological dualism. Ontological dualism can be divided into three types of dualism: substance dualism, property dualism and predicate dualisms. Seen that way, my list is not more than an introduction to the ism-theory. In addition, many -isms have a neo-, post-, and/or anti- version (some are in the list). So, besides positivism, there is a neo-positivism, an anti-positivism and a post-positivism. Or, to mention another limitation of my list: It refers mainly to Western philosophy. The list is also arbitrary and one-sided since it contains only -isms and no -ologies, -anities, etc. (it’s up to you to make such lists).
However, with so many -isms inside and outside philosophy, the main question in this blog is: Which -ism is true or which -isms are true? But is this important? There simply is a view for everybody. Suum cuique (To each their own) 

Random quote
The most common mistake people make is to have got part of the truth and to think they’ve got all of it

Jonathan Wolff (1959-)

Polarisation

Who we are and what we do depends a lot on the people in our social environment; especially on those we directly interact with in one way or another. We see some we interact with as “us” and the rest as “the others”, and we behave accordingly, even to that extent that we may come to see “the others” as enemies; and sometimes even to that extent that we behave violently towards “the others”. It’s a well-established fact from social psychology. To see how it works, the Turkish-American social psychologist Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues performed in 1954 the so-called Robbers Cave Experiment. In this experiment, two groups of eleven 11 years old boys took part in a summer camp in Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma, USA. The boys in each group didn’t know about the other group. During the first part of the experiment the boys

“spent time with members of their own group... The groups chose names (the Eagles and the Rattlers), and each group developed their own group norms and group hierarchies. After a short period of time, the boys became aware that there was another group at camp and, upon learning of the other group, the campers group spoke negatively about the other group. At this point, the researchers began the next phase of the study: a competitive tournament between the groups, consisting of games such as baseball and tug-of-war, for which the winners would receive prizes and a trophy. [From now on] the relationship between the two groups quickly became tense. The groups began trading insults, and the conflict quickly spiraled. The teams each burned the other group’s team flag, and raided the other group’s cabin. The researchers also found that the group hostilities were apparent on surveys distributed to the campers: campers were asked to rate their own team and the other team on positive and negative traits, and the campers rated their own group more positively than the rival group. During this time, the researchers also noticed a change within the groups as well: the groups became more cohesive.” (quoted from the ThoughtCo website)

Before I’ll describe how the experiment ended, I want to look at what is happening around us in many countries in the world and especially in the Western world, but not only there. It was important for the experiment, that there were no fundamental differences between the Eagles and the Rattlers. The researchers had composed the groups (the background characteristics of the boys) as equal as possible, and the boys didn’t know each other before the camp started. So it was not this that the group rivalry could explain. Nevertheless, once they knew about the existence of each other, they began to see each other as rivals if not enemies. Just this makes the Robbers Camp Experiment interesting and important for understanding the growing polarisation in many countries, like the USA, the Netherlands, France, etc. For are the differences between the poles – let’s call them R and L for short – really that large that it is obvious that the present societies become polarized? Is there a real basis for the polarisation in the countries concerned and is the R-L split a reflection of real differences? Although I don’t want to deny that such differences exist, I think that the basic ground for the growing polarization is different, namely a sharp decrease in the number of contacts between different groups, views, ways of life, etc. in society. Nowadays. people interact with, deal with and get along with other people who are different from themselves less frequently than they did in the past. People interact less with people who are unlike themselves, have different views and opinions, have different lifestyles, are younger or older, etc. It is not that we should adopt the opinions, lifestyles, etc. from the people we meet, but by meeting others who are unlike “us”, we see that they are in many respects like “us”; they are as human as we are. In such a situation, if we disagree with “the others”, we are more prepared to try to make a deal with them, to find a consensus and to find common solutions, in case of conflict. However, nowadays it’s just the opposite that happens: People tend to limit their contacts more and more to their own bubbles. What happens then is shown by the Robbers Cave Experiment: Limited to your own bubble, more and more you tend to think: We are right and they are wrong. You tend to see those in other bubbles as rivals and enemies, with the use of violence against those you don’t agree with as the ultimate consequence. Society becomes polarized and once there this polarization increases itself.
But let me tell now how the Robbers Camp Experiment ended. I quote again from the ThoughtCo website:

To reduce the group conflict, the researchers “tried having the two groups work on what psychologists call superordinate goals, goals that both groups cared about, which they had to work together to achieve. For example, the camp’s water supply was cut off …, and the Eagles and Rattlers worked together to fix the problem. In another instance, a truck bringing the campers food wouldn’t start (again, an incident staged by the researchers), so members of both groups pulled on a rope to pull the broken truck. These activities didn’t immediately repair the relationship between the groups …, but working on shared goals eventually reduced conflict. The groups stopped calling each other names, perceptions of the other group (as measured by the researchers’ surveys) improved, and friendships even began to form with members of the other group. By the end of camp, some of the campers requested that everyone (from both groups) take the bus home together, and one group bought beverages for the other group on the ride home.”

So, once there, polarization can be reduced: Create common goals. Moreover, I think that as important as common goals – which creates an external enemy, and I wonder whether that is a good idea – are the interpersonal contacts that common goals involve. Since the present polarization in society is largely the consequence of the decrease of interactions between people with different backgrounds, I think that it is very important to restore such contacts again. Try to demolish interpersonal barriers between people and even more between groups of people. Make that people of different backgrounds come into contact with each other again. Institutionalize that people talk with each other; and then better in a café than in an official meeting. Mix them!

Random quote
Given that non-binding agreements have always failed to slow greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently in the past, is it rational to expect them to suddenly start doing so in the future? If the parties at an intergovernmental conference proclaim, ‘This time it’s different’, aren’t we right to disbelieve them?

Julian Baggini (1968-)

Ten reasons why the global warming will not be stopped

A catastrophe is happening on this earth: the global warming. Experts and international organisations agree that it must be stopped; anyway that a 1.5 degree global warming is the maximum acceptable; okay, let’s say 2 degrees, for a recent report says that in the period from February 2023 to January 2024 the global warming was already 1.52C compared with the preindustrial era. [1] In the meantime many measures have already been taken to combat the global warming. But will humanity succeed or can it keep the temperature rise within the 2% limit? Here are ten reasons why the answer is NO.

- Planners and politicians tend to overestimate their skills and capabilities, leading to an underestimation of the time and costs needed for the projects concerned. So, the measures and plans proposed are often too optimistic or not realistic.
- Pressure to present too optimistic plans. Environmental groups put pressure on governments to take action. That’s okay, but the result is that the targets set are often not realistic and accordingly the plans and measures aren’t. This provokes resistance from groups hit by the measures, which makes the implementation of the plans is delayed.
- The effects of the global warming become increasingly clear but often they are still vague (they might have happened by chance; happen gradually, etc.) and casual (they hit some people more than others and also some people hardly or not). Moreover, there is no clear end date in the sense that at date X the world will collapse and come to an end because of the warming. This leads to, what I want to call, the “procrastination effect”: too many people (governments, international organisations but also individuals) tend to postpone measures that are necessary.
- Conflicting interests. A part of the measures against the global warming must be taken at world level, but, for example, oil producing countries will try to slow down the implementation, because they’ll lose a part of their income, while countries that are dependent on oil import have a reason for a quick implementation.
- The rich countries, which contribute much to the global warming, should have to give up their rich lifestyle and privileges, which they don’t want to do. At most, they want to stay at the level they have reached. In the first place, within the rich countries the richest people should give up their lifestyle and privileges, since they contribute by far above average to the global warming compared with the less rich people in the rich countries, but as yet there is no sign that this will happen.
- The poor countries, which contribute by far below average to the global warming, will not give up their plans for improving the standard of living of the poorest people in their already poor countries. With right, but the implementation of these plans will contribute to the global warming.
- Corruption. Although leaders of corrupt countries pay lip service to the need to stop the global warming, they put (at least) a part of the money needed for the implementation of the plans to stop it in their own pockets and spend the money on expenses for their own rich lifestyle which just contributes to the global warming.
- Viscosity. National political measures and measures by international organisations are rarely a matter of “this must be done so we’ll immediately carry them out”. Many people must be consulted. Conflicting interests must be reconciled. Those who are hit negatively must be compensated. Decision procedures take time. Etc. So, it’s a long way from what must be done to the realization of a plan.
- Nobody can force individual countries to fulfil targets set during international conferences. The leaders of individual countries may say “yes” and think “no”. Or there are all kinds of reasons that they cannot or are not prepared to make (realistic) national plans that have been agreed upon internationally.
- Possible risks and uncertainties. Once measures against the global warming have been taken, often they don’t work the way that was expected. This can have both technical causes and human causes. You cannot foresee everything, there are many physical and natural uncertainties and humans react always in a different manner than planners and politicians think. Reality is simply too complicated for human beings.

Without a doubt there are many other factors that will make it very difficult if not impossible to stop the global warming. I just listed ten reasons that came to my mind. The factors mentioned are mainly sociological and political, but I should have added psychological factors as well. But the message is clear: The current approach will not stop the global warming. Maybe we must prepare ourselves for the posthuman era (but of course this is a contradiction, for where there are no humans there is nothing to prepare for humans).

Source
Most of my argument is based on older blogs. 

Random quote
A clever person with bad motives is dangerous, as they can generate persuasive arguments to serve their interests rather than truth.

Julian Baggini (1968-)

Equivocation

When I was writing my blog about types of fallacies last week, I realized that I had given hardly any attention to fallacies of ambiguity, while I regularly explained fallacies of presumption and relevance. This is not surprising for in Arp et al. 2019, 43 fallacies of presumption and 34 fallacies of relevance are discussed but only 16 fallacies of ambiguity. If this is a measure, then the latter are by far in the minority, which doesn’t involve, however, that they are less frequent. The only fallacy of ambiguity I discussed is the conjunction fallacy, while I mentioned the sorites fallacy only in passing. So, a good reason to treat such a fallacy now.
I think – though it is just a guess – that one of the most common fallacies of this type is the fallacy of equivocation. It often appears in discussions and political speeches. This fallacy involves that a word or phrase is used with different meanings in an argumentation. You may think: Of course, that’s a matter of false reasoning. However, the distinctions between the different meanings are often subtle and you may not see them or you must be a logical expert, and maybe also the speaker didn’t notice the mistake. Here is a clear case: “The loss made Jones mad [= angry]; mad [= insane] people should be institutionalized; so Jones should be institutionalized.”) [1] “Mad” has two different meanings here, so the conclusion doesn’t follow. Here is another rather simple example of this type: Only man [human] is rational, and no woman is a man [male]. Therefore, no woman is rational. [2]
However, an equivocation can be rather subtle, as said. Bertha Alvarez Manninen starts her explanation of the fallacy in Arp et al 2019 with an equivocation by Pres. John F. Kennedy, who said: “And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” The equivocation is here, so Manninen, that first “country” refers to the elected officials and then to something like your homeland, nation, or your fellow citizens.
The equivocation is even more subtle in a case analysed by the philosopher Mary Anne Warren and discussed by Manninen: I quote (pp. 262=3:

“Typically, a common pro-life argument runs as follows:

(1) All human beings have a right to life.
(2) A fetus is a human being.
(3) Therefore, the fetus has a right to life.

Warren … argues that an equivocation is made here with the term ‘human being’. In the first premise, [it] is a moral term, denoting the kinds of beings who are ‘a full-fledged member of the moral community.’… In the second premise, [it] is a biological term, denoting a member of the species Homo Sapiens. … A useful tool for determining whether an argument commits the fallacy of equivocation can be applied here: replace the premises of the argument explicitly with the term having the same meaning and then gauge whether the argument is successful.

(1) All human beings (in the moral sense) have a right to life.
(2) A fetus is a human being (in the moral sense).
(3) Therefore, the fetus has a right to life.

Seen this way, Warren argues that the pro-life argument commits the begging of the question fallacy in Premise 2 by assuming the very thing that needs to be argued [, namely] whether the fetus is a human being in the moral sense of the term... That is not to say that the fetus isn’t such a being but rather that this is the very thing that need to be argued rather than assumed.”

So far the quotation. Of course, alternatively one can add “(in the genetic sense)” in the premises instead of “(in the moral sense)”, etc. What this example makes clear is that discovering an equivocation often is hard, but it is necessary in order to get a meaningful debate. Its obscurity makes it an easy instrument of manipulation for politicians and orators by using ambiguous words or by using words in an ambiguous way.
However, you don’t need to be a politician, orator or a simple member of their public to commit the fallacy of equivocation. Also philosophers do, although they are supposedly experts in argumentation. Then we call it a category mistake. So, Heraclitus committed the fallacy of equivocation, or made a category mistake, when he said that you cannot step twice in the same river. By saying so, he confused the river and the water in the river. Another example is to confuse the mind and the brain. It is not our brain that thinks but our mind does. Also Descartes committed this fallacy, when he saw the mind sometimes as a thing and sometimes as a mental capacity.

Sources
- The numbers in brackets [ ] refer to the sources: Follow the links.
- Robert Arp; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019. Esp. Bertha Alvarez Manninen, “Equivocation”, pp. 261-5.

Random quote
The most dangerous liars are always those who believe they are telling the truth.

Thomas Metzinger (1958-)

Types of fallacies

In these blogs, now and then I write about fallacies. I think that this is important since the way we think has a big impact on the way we behave; on our private behaviour and our public behaviour. Therefore, it is better to avoid mistakes. As for public behaviour, one can think of political decisions and juridical verdicts, for instance. Especially, mistakes in juridical decisions can have dramatic consequences; for example, that an innocent suspect is sentenced to long prison terms, if not to the death penalty. Political decisions can lead to war or peace, so the reasoning that leads to such decisions must be sound. As for private behaviour, reasoning errors can have an impact on private life, such as wrong or too expensive purchases or voting for a president who doesn’t represent your interests, although you thought so. This time, I don’t want to discuss a special fallacy, but I want to give some background information.
Basically, there are two types of fallacies: Formal fallacies and informal fallacies. Both types of fallacies are based on incorrect deductive reasoning, but the difference is that in a formal fallacy, the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises, because the structure or form of the reasoning is not correct, while in an informal fallacy the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises because of the content of the argumentation. An important example of a formal fallacy we often come across in daily life is the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy (“post hoc ergo propter hoc” literally means “after this, so because of this”). An example: “If it has rained, the street is wet. This morning, when I woke up, the street was wet, so it has rained tonight.” This need not be true, for maybe a leaking tank lorry has passed. See this and this blog for more examples.
Although formal fallacies often happen in daily life, I think that informal fallacies are more frequent, especially in political discussions and other public discussions. Basically, there are three types of informal fallacies:
- Fallacy of presumption. It occurs, so Arp et.al (p. 22), “when an argument rests on some hidden assumption – it could be an unknown factor, a condition, set of circumstances, state of affairs, or idea – that, if not hidden, would make it clear that the assumption is not sufficient to be able to reason to (draw, infer) the conclusion.” The conjunction fallacy, discussed in one of my blogs (see link), is a case in point.
- Fallacy of relevance. It occurs, so Arp et.al (p. 25), when the premise or premises are irrelevant to the conclusion, even though they may appear so, because of an appeal to psychological or emotional relevance. Best known is the ad hominem fallacy (“playing the man instead of the ball”), discussed by me, for example, here and here. Also the “red herring” and “straw man” are fallacies of relevance.
- Fallacy of ambiguity. A fallacy of this type, so Arp et al. (p. 26), relies on some ambiguity (vagueness, obscurity, non-clarity) in wording or phrasing, the meanings of which shift/change to various degrees of subtlety during the course of the argument. The Sorites paradox is a case in point (“Take away again and again a grain of sand from a pile of sand; when is it no longer a pile?”) (see, for example, this blog). How often doesn’t it happen that the meaning of a word shifts during a discussion, or that it is so vague that you can use it for “any” conclusion by way of speaking?
This is how we often reason or how we try to convince others. But when we are doing so, we are on the wrong track.

Source
This blog is mainly based on the Introduction to Robert Arp; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019. 

Random quote
Groups and individuals with weak positions in society are faced with weak enforcement of their rights, while at the same time with strong enforcement of their duties. Conversely, groups with strong positions in society are well able to combine strict enforcement of their rights with weak enforcement of their duties.

Kees Schuyt (1943-)

Elephant paths

Paved paths, roads and streets, and often unpaved ones as well, lead us where we want to go, from A to B. Some came into existence long ago, sometimes even in prehistory, and later they have become official roads. Other roads are new. Whatever their origin is, roads are ways for directing people. In modern society, they are the trails we are supposed to follow. As Michel de Certeau tells us (p.98): “[A] spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities … and interdictions” and roads are part of such a social order. If we leave them, maybe we come on private ground, or we violate some law or traffic rule.
Therefore, it is right to say that roads are manners of directing people and they are also often made that way. Roads are constructed that way that people follow them to their destinations in an orderly manner, and that way that people will avoid places where authorities don’t want to have them go. For instance, think of the main roads that avoid cities, towns and villages, discussed in my blog last week. Or, another example, parks have paths, so that the visitors don’t walk on the grass, – or not too much – even if it is allowed. Nevertheless, often people don’t follow them the prefab roads and paths. They think – intentionally or without being aware of it – that they are wiser than the planners. Often people don’t accept certain constructed roads or paths, for practical reasons, or for pleasure, or for other reasons, and they make their own shortcuts. Car drivers leave the main roads and follow secondary roads, when they think that by doing so they can reach their destinations faster or that they can avoid traffic jams; often to the annoyance of local residents and local authorities. Or it can happen that pedestrians don’t follow the constructed footpaths in a park but walk where they like and take shortcuts through the grass. When many people follow the same shortcut, finally you get a path. I think that everybody knows the spontaneous trails that come to exist in parks, on lawns, between roads, between official footpaths, etc. that are known by many names like desire paths, game trails, goat tracks, elephant paths and so on. Although there may be some slight differences between these kinds of unofficial footpaths, I want to summarize them under the name “elephant paths”. Maybe a shortcut is used only once by one person and then it will fade away. If that person uses the shortcut regularly, it has become a kind of private shortcut; a private passage. Maybe the passage will wear out or it will not. However, as soon as many people are going to use the same shortcut regularly, it will certainly wear out. Then, what was once a hardly visible trail has become a clear path, and it has become an unofficial passage; a path that came into existence by habit. It has become an “elephant path”. Once it is there, people may come to see it as an official path; as a real path. They will use it, if it leads to where they want to go. What once was a trail or even not more than a casual shortcut has become institutionalized by habit. Although by definition an elephant path originates spontaneously, sometimes it is recognized by the authorities and turned into an official path, for example by paving it. Sometimes planners leave a piece of land partially or fully unpaved, waiting till elephant paths have been created spontaneously and then paving them. Then elephant paths are used to make path networks.

Random quote
It.is a curious thing that the public always hates its benefactors

Ronald Ross(1857-1932)

Highways and bypasses

Do you have to be an ethnologist to have an eye for the subtleties of daily life and for the subtle and small impact that social change has on daily life and on the way we live? It was the French ethnologist Marc Augé, for instance, who wrote that the names of metro stations in Paris reflect the time that these stations were built. I know that there is a Floppy Disk Road in a nearby Dutch town, and also in this case the name gives an indication about when the road was built. Floppy disks were magnetic disks for storing computer data and programs. They were developed in the 1960s and the production stopped in 2011. Once you know this, you can make a guess about when this road probably was built.
Augé is especially known for having developed the concept of non-place (non-lieu, in French), which I discussed in another blog (see here). He has drawn my attention also to a seemingly obvious phenomenon, which nevertheless had a very deep impact on society: the construction of ring roads and bypasses – bypasses, for short – around towns and villages. I grew up in a provincial capital with about 30,000 inhabitants and I can still remember that in those days all through traffic had to pass through the narrow streets in the centre. However, with the spectacularly growing numbers of cars and trucks in the 1960s this became a practically impossible situation. The solution was that the traffic was diverted around the city by building ring roads and bypasses. It goes without saying that this situation was not typical for the town where I grew up. Nearly all cities, towns and villages had the same problem, and the result is that nowadays main roads do not lead from town to town, from village to village and from village to town, but that they avoid populated areas and pass around them.
This reasonable and necessary change in the construction of road patterns was not without consequences for the now avoided cities, towns and villages. Roads that go through built-up areas, “penetrate the intimacy of daily life”, as Augé says it. Before bypasses were built, they crossed city centres, where people come together for all kinds of reasons, and they passed through residential areas where people live (who therefore screened themselves off from the often too curious eyes of passers-by). But travelling longer distances was then not as normal as it is today and as is possible today with the modern means of transport, like faster cars. Transport was slow and main roads had always been built through the towns and to the towns and villages, because you had to be there; because you wanted to go there to the market; because it was the administrative centre of your region; because your family and business relations lived there; etc. In case you didn’t need to be there, because your destination was farther away, you still had to go through the towns and villages, since there were no other roads. The traffic was not that heavy that it was necessary to build bypasses. In this way, passers-by learned about the local customs and about what was locally interesting. And many people enjoyed stopping at the local markets, taking a rest in a local café or spend the night in the city, for travelling was a slow affair anyway, and often you had to split up your travel into several stages.
This changed with the development of modern and faster means of transport and with the increasing number of people on the move. On the one hand, it became impossible to lead all traffic through built-up areas if not to speak of city centres any longer; on the other hand, people also became more in a hurry; they had no time to slow down and didn’t want to stop in intermediate places. Therefore, gradually, the main roads that went through those places were replaced by bypasses and highways that avoided them. The new main roads now passed the towns and villages; they passed around the towns and literally they became passages. Even more, modern highways often don’t connect places as such but begin and end somewhere near an important city or otherwise on the city’s edge. Intermediate places and the beginning and end of modern highways are connected with the highways by feeder roads, approach roads and exits. As a result, towns and villages which are passed by the highways are no longer meaningful market towns, historic towns, places worth stopping there on your trip etc., but they have become nothing but names on road signs from the viewpoint of the car drivers, even in case a highway happens to pass through a certain town. This is not only so for small towns and villages, but even so for metropolises. I have often been geographically in Paris, for the autoroute from the Netherlands to the south of France passes through the outskirts of Paris. Then you can even see the Eiffel Tower. Nevertheless, I have seldom really been there, for usually I didn’t turn off, and Paris was nothing more than a place to be passed for me, an insignificant town like any other place where I didn’t stop.
Because today main roads avoid intermediate places, their local markets, their local festivities, their historical buildings, etc. tend to be forgotten. Often only local people and people from the region still know them. They have kept a meaning only for local residents. Therefore, local authorities and tourist agencies place billboards along the highways with texts like: “Visit us, we are very interesting.” It is an attempt to rescue their towns or villages from oblivion. But most car drivers don’t stop; they don’t take the exits that lead to the temptations mentioned on the billboards. Once important and meaningful places have turned into quiet and forgotten local oddities.

Sources: Marc Augé, Un ethnologue dans le métro and Non-Lieux (here esp. pp. 122 ff.).

Random quote
War is sweet to those who haven’t experienced it.

Pindaros (c. 518 BC – c. 438 BC)

Why hawks win (and doves lose)

Kahneman is known for his contributions to psychology and especially to economic psychology. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics for them. However, his work has a wider application. For example, it can be useful for the study of war and peace, as the article “Why Hawks Win” shows, which he has written with Jonathan Reshon. The authors argue that hawks usually get the upper hand over doves, when political decisions must be taken, although often wrongly. In this blog, I’ll follow Kahneman’s and Reshon’s article.
Hawks are people who “tend to favour coercive action, are more willing to use military force, and are more likely to doubt the value of offering concessions”. They think that enemies will “only understand the language of force”. Doves, on the other hand, doubt the usefulness of such means and prefer dialogue. Generally, there may be good arguments for both positions, but psychology suggests that politicians – and humans in general – have “a bias in favour of hawkish beliefs and preferences”, at the cost of dovish views. This is a consequence of a general human trait: to overestimate your capabilities and possibilities. Don’t most of us think that they are better drivers than the average driver? About 80% think so. Of course, that’s not possible, but “the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favourable estimates of the outcomes of war”, on both sides of a conflict, and this “is likely to produce a disaster.” The authors have listed 40 human biases and all of them appeared to favour hawks. They stress that this doesn’t mean that hawkish advisors are wrong, but they are likely to be more persuasive than they deserve to be.
Below I present the main factors that lead to pro-hawkish behaviour in times of conflict, as discussed by Kahneman and Reshon.

- Vision problems. People ignore the context in which others speak and behave and ignore their constraints, even if they know them. However, they assume that the other side knows their own context and restraints and takes them into account. In an international conflict setting this means that “a policy maker or diplomat involved in a tense exchange with a foreign government is likely to observe a great deal of hostile behaviour by that country’s representatives.” The other side behaves from a deep hostility or a striving for power, they think, and they “explain away their own behaviour as a result of being ‘pushed into a corner’ by an adversary.” However, the adversary thinks the same of you. Each side sees what the other does as provocation and as more hostile than it actually is. “The effect of this failure in conflict situations can be pernicious.”
- Excessive optimism. Most people believe themselves to be smarter, more attractive, and more talented than average, and they commonly overestimate their future success. (see the “planning fallacy in my blog last week). They also think that they can control the situation, while in fact this is not so. When politicians behave that way, it can have disastrous effects, especially if politicians are in the grip of this bias in the early phases of a conflict. “A hawk’s preference for military action over diplomatic measures is often built upon the assumption that victory will come easily and swiftly.” In August 1914, when Germany invaded Belgium on its way to France – which was the start of the First World War – both Germany and France thought that the war would end before Christmas. However, the war would last for more than four years instead of for four months.
- Underappreciating the proposals by others. In negotiations, proposals of the other side are seen as less valuable than the same or equal proposals done by yourself. There is an intuition that something is worth less simply because the other side has offered it. This makes “that a concession …  offered by somebody perceived as hostile undermines the content of the proposal.” And this makes that violent solutions (like war) are chosen, when dovish solutions are still open, since “this bias is a significant stumbling block in negotiations between adversaries.”
- Loss aversion. (also mentioned in my blog last week) People have a deep aversion against cutting their losses, and prefer to go on even if there is only a very small chance to gain, instead of accepting a reasonable or actually inevitable loss. Therefore, politicians prefer to go on with a war, even if the consequences are worse for the citizens they lead.

These factors, and many more, make that the approaches proposed by hawks in international conflicts are more easily accepted than those proposed by doves. Now it is so that, according to Kahneman and Reshon, as such a hawkish position towards an adversary need not be bad. Show your teeth, I would characterize this view; or show that you are not a softy. However, too often, so the authors, a hawkish approach wins since hawkish approaches are overvalued because of an innate bias in the mind, with all its dangerous if not fatal consequences. Understanding the human biases can help preventing them.