An interview with Norman Levitt: “Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition appeared in 1994, rattled a good many cages, and prompted the Sokal Hoax. The book describes a bizarre situation in American universities in which academics in various (mostly new-minted) fields such as Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, and Science Studies, plus a few more familiar ones such as Sociology, Comparative Literature and the like, make a career of writing about science without taking the trouble to know anything about it. Gross and Levitt have a good deal of fun exposing the absurd mistakes perpetrated by people who rhapsodise about quantum mechanics and chaos theory without having the faintest idea what they’re talking about.” butterfiles and wheels

Also at butterflies and wheels (“fighting fashionable nonsense”), the Fashionable Dictionary: “Your guide to the language of pseudoscience and fashionable nonsense. Written by woolly-thinkers for woolly thinkers. A must read for post-modernists, dialectical biologists, Gaia theorists and Freudians.”

Robert Kuttner considers ‘the best the hawks have to offer’ and finds they still come up short. Rafe Colburn has also written a recent admiring piece in rc3 about one of the participants in the TAP-sponsored debate which Kuttner reviews here — Kenneth Pollack, “a former CIA analyst, National Security Council staffer under Clinton and author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, whose central tenet is that Iraq will acquire nuclear weapons and will not hesitate to use them, but that “the United States should not go it alone; it should have a clear plan for the reconstruction of Iraq, and the war should be about geopolitical security, not about oil.” However, I agree with Kuttner’s and others’ objection, essentially, that ‘what we are facing in Iraq will be George Bush’s war, not Ken Pollack’s war.’

US unilateralism and hegemonist aspirations, the lack of investment in ‘nation-building’ , the likely exploitaiton of Iraqi oil as the spoils of war, the danger of further radicalizing Islamic anti-Americans, and the dangerous precedent embodied in The-Only-Superpower®’s adopting a preemptive first strike policy are about as likely to be precluded by more thoughtful hawks as by opponents of the war.

But the mother of all issues here is whether Saddam Hussein really would use nuclear weapons. On this point, Pollack makes dire assumptions but doesn’t prove his case. On the contrary, he concedes in his book that in the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein was deterred from using weapons of mass destruction and notes, “As long as some form of sanctions remains on Iraq, Baghdad’s ability to use any of its weapons of mass destruction as elements of Iraq’s foreign policy will be constrained. … If Saddam believes his regime is threatened, of course, all bets are off.” In other words, all this war talk makes an insane action by Baghdad more likely, not less. The American Prospect

Adam Christian: The more soul-searching Democrats do, the weaker they look: “Amid the din of competing analyses, one thing is certain: The impulse toward self-reflection is a thoroughly liberal one. Indeed, the introspective reflex seems ingrained in the liberal psyche, which engages in far more soul-searching and self-recrimination than its conservative counterpart.” The American Prospect

Social rejection has a host of behavioral consequences, none of them good. The school shooting epidemic has revived interest in psychological research into the effects of social rejection. The assumption had been that its negative behavioral consequences, such as extreme aggression, were mediated by the negative emotions triggered by rejection. A new series of studies by Case Western Reserve psychologist Roy Baumeister, presented at the American Psychological Association’s 2002 annual meeting in Chicago, claims to demonstrate that “while social rejection does have powerful effects on behavior, those effects are unlikely to be mediated by emotion.” Without the benefits of belonging, self-regulation of antisocial impulses seems to fall apart directly, he asserts. “Social exclusion undermines the basis for these sacrifices–it ceases to be worth it. The whole purpose of controlling yourself, behaving appropriately and making sacrifices is defeated. And so behavior may become impulsive, chaotic, selfish, disorganized and even destructive.” Reading the news coverage of these findings does not make it immediately clear how his study designs showed that the consequences were not mediated by the negative emotional effects of rejection. It certainly seems, however, to be consistent with Baumeister’s earlier work on violent offenders, which focused on the role their violent actions played in the maintenance and expression of fragile narcissism and asserted that, by and large, they did not suffer from low self-esteem. Here’s “Violent Pride”, a renowned 2001 Scientific American article summarizing his thesis. I have from time to time posted to FmH on this theme, and have long been interested in the worrisome interrelationship between the degradation of social connectedness and community, the culture of narcissism, and violent disinhibition.

Related: Beyond Anger: Studying the Subconscious Nature of Rage: Dr Richard Friedman, writing in the New York Times, reviews the evidence “disproving the common assumption that we have to understand something consciously before we can have feelings about it. In fact, …emotions can be rapidly processed by limbic brain networks that operate outside consciousness.” It has long been known in animal behavior studies that aggression comes in two varieties mediated by different brain pathways — “affective” aggression, with physiological arousal, usually a defensive response to threat; and “instrumental” or “predatory” aggression without affective arousal. Friedman discusses evidence supporting the notion, which I have long assumed, that a similar distinction holds in humans as well:

An intriguing clue to how the brain may process rage comes from a recent brain imaging study of convicted murderers. Using a PET scan, which measures glucose metabolism in neurons, Dr. Adrian Raine at the University of Southern California, compared a group of impulsive murderers with premeditative murderers.

In this preliminary study, yet to be replicated, he found that impulsive murderers had significantly lower activity in the prefrontal cortex than premeditative murderers.

Those who committed planned murder had equivalent prefrontal cortical activity to the normal subjects in a control group.

The prefrontal cortex, a brain region just behind the eyes, serves an executive function, integrating information and inhibiting emotional impulses that arise from deeper brain centers like the limbic system. So it may be that violent impulsive murderers are less able to resist their own impulses. Cold-blooded killers, in contrast, are as able as other people to control their violent impulses; they just choose not to.

We have long known that prefrontal functioning can be compromised by organic factors such as lesions, traumatic injury, metabolic or toxic factors, or developmental abnormalities in the ‘bad brain’, leading to an ‘impulse disorder’. I had long assumed that inhibition could similarly be compromised by motivational factors, such as the reduced social payoffs available to the socially excluded. In a sense, inhibitory capacities may atrophy if there are insufficient incentives to exercise them. But, if Baumeister’s new work is correct, the interaction between threat, rage and insufficient motivation to inhibit it may not be the operative factors at all in Columbine-like massacres.

And what is at play in purposeful terrorist violence? Someone has clearly been interested in finding out:

Hunt for Red Army Faction’s vanished organs:

The brains of Germany’s most notorious far-left urban guerrillas were taken away to be examined by scientists, secretly preserved in formaldehyde for a quarter of a century – and have now mostly vanished without trace.

The bizarre story of the ‘terrorists’ brains’ is one that could have come from the pen of Mel Brooks or Joe Orton.

But it also carries echoes of some of 19th century Germany’s weirder medical experiments.

Central to the affair is a clandestine attempt to show that anti-social behaviour is caused by physical abnormality.

The news magazine Der Spiegel reported yesterday that the brains of three prominent Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorists who died in 1977 – Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe – had all been stored in jars in the university clinic of Tübingen at the time of their deaths. Guardian UK

Finally, Cults of hatred: “Panelists at a convention session on hatred asked APA to form a task force to investigate mind control among destructive cults.”

“Extreme influence [such as mind control and cults] has remained dormant in the field of psychology,” Alan W. Scheflin, professor of law at Santa Clara University, told the audience.

Mind control, or “brainwashing” as it’s commonly referred to by the media, is often viewed by many psychologists as science fiction. However, panelists stressed that mind control is being used by cults to recruit and maintain followers and can have dangerous and lasting psychological consequences.

Cults that use mind-control techniques “have been able to do so with impunity, and the people who are victims of these techniques get no treatment,” Scheflin said.

In fact, psychologists who do treat someone claiming to be a mind-control victim from a destructive cult might face a malpractice action. “There are no legitimate treatments that are scientifically validated that appear in peer review journals, although they are effective clinically,” Scheflin said. “Therefore, they are vulnerable to challenge in the courts. That has to stop. There is no reason why people who are true victims of mind control or people who think they are victims and are wrong should not receive treatment when they need it or want it.” APA Monitor

“The online community of sci-fi fans can’t quite agree on what they think of Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, an upcoming remake of an obscure but treasured Russian film. Some have high hopes. … But many purists dread the new Solaris, which stars George Clooney and will be released Nov. 27. They worry that Soderbergh will trample on two sacred sci-fi texts: the 1961 novel by Stanislaw Lem and the 1971 film by Andrei Tarkovsky.” Wired Even though I am a big fan of the Tarkovsky film, I’m looking forward to this. I’m just not expecting it to be a remake.