Category Archives: Books

Books Feminism Science

Women and men and thinking straight about emotions

March 8, 2009 – 2:02 pm

Sometimes irony can be so sharp it is agonising. And so it is with the case of the dichotomy that’s been at the heart of Western thought for around two and a half millennium: man equals rational; woman equals emotional (and no prizes for identifying which was good and which bad). Its a trope that’s battled with Eve and the apple as the primary cause by which to do women down, to oppress and repress them.

The irony comes from our growing knowledge of brain function, and the fact that this dichotomy is entirely false, and, moreover that emotion is the dominant factor in the great majority of decisions that we, human beings, make.

The simplest proof comes from brain injury. People who have lost a tiny section of their brain, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which sits just behind the eyes, as a result of malignancy or injury, can apparently fully recover, score at the same level on IQ tests as before, show no obvious sign of disability. But what they lose is all emotional reaction to anything. And what’s more, they find making decisions about the simplest things – what time to arrange an appointment, what to choose from a restaurant menu – almost impossible to make.

This is reported in Jonah Lehrer’s The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind. This is a decisively, self-consciously, sometimes annoyingly popular science book – the actual science being so heavily interweaved with entertaining anecdote, some illuminating and relevant, some less so, that you’d really like to find a pure science alternative. But still, the science is lucidly explained in the gaps between anecdotes, and the story it tells is compelling.

Lehrer explains that the OFC is “response for integrating visceral emotions into the decisionmaking process. It connects the feelings generated by the ‘primitive’ brain – areas like the brain stem and the amygdala, which is in the limbic system – with the stream of conscious thought”. And it is one of the few cortical regions noticeably bigger in humans than other primates. As Lehrer concludes, Plato and Freud were wrong, “Homo sapiens is the most emotional animal of all”.

How well this can work is illustrated with a case from the Iraq war, when a radar operator on a British destroyer decide to shot down a blip on his radar screen heading for an American battleship. It could have been an Iraqi missile, or an American jet; no rational analysis at that time could determine which, yet something about the blip filled him with cold, dreadful fear, although he couldn’t explain what. It was travelling at 550 miles an hour, and he had 40 seconds to decide what to do. He fired his ship’s missiles, and they brought do the Silkworm just short of the American battleship. He still didn’t know why, and it was only years after that intense analysis showed that the missiles appeared on the radar screen a little later than American jets: the radar man’s emotions knew this, but his conscious mind didn’t.

Lehrer explains how experts develop their expertise by training the emotional system – they practice and practice, which produce learned patterns of dopamine release in a part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Then, if something deviates from the pattern, the ACC sends an immediate signal to the hypothalmus. In serious cases that produces what we know as the fright or flight response – pure “gut feeling” or emotion.

The Decisive Brain goes on to get highly topical, by exploring how the human desire to find patterns has fed into the current financial crisis, and this emotional decisionmaking also has its weaknesses. The stock market is a random system in statistic terms. But when an investor randomly makes some money, instead of being happy, they tend to feel regret, that they hadn’t gambled more money. So they dive in further, as do many of their compatriots. So the market surges, and keeps surging. Until bust point. Then people start to despair, and sell out “because the brain doesn’t want to regret staying in”.

And it looks at other situations where emotional thinking only may produce bad results (such as buying with credit cards, where the normal emotional weighting of the value of the good to you versus the loss of the lightening of your wallet is shortcircuited).

So in the end too this is also a self-help book, concluding with the advice:

“Whenever you make a decision, be aware of the kind of decision you are making and the kind of thought process that it requires. … The best way to make sure you are using your brain properly is to study your brain at work, to listen to the argument inside your head.”
Further: “The best decisionmakers don’t despair [at mistakes]. Instead, they become students of error, determined to learn from what went wrong. They think about what they could have done differently so that the next time their neurons will know what to do.”

Good advice. Now all we’ve got to do is employ it to abolish all those errors arising from the false “women equals emotional decisionmaking equals bad”.

Permalink | Comments (5)
Books Travel

Getting to grips with France beyond Paris

February 19, 2009 – 12:24 am

A Frenchman I happen to know has lived all of his 73 years in one small hamlet of around 100 houses, except for a couple of unhappy years of national service in North Africa. He’s now half surrounded by the holiday homes of assorted Dutch, English and other nationalities, which he tries very hard to adjust to by trying to educate those who are amenable into the ethos and behaviour that he considers appropriate, and traditional. He’s friendly and keen to chat, but loses interest as soon as the topic moves beyond the hamlet.

Having read Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, I now understand him a great deal more – for its thesis is that France, at least until the First World War, was not a nation, or at least was many, many nations, payes, which might be best defined as an area in which you could hear one church bell. Anyone with an interest in history knows that Germany was very late in European terms in forming as a “nation”, yet in Robb’s account France was scarcely more of one .

To set the scene he looks at the experiences of a series of intrepid mapmakers, some of whom paid with their lives for their efforts, not because of natural accidents but because their “foreign” status and “strange” tools made them targets. So the first mapster to see Le Gerbier de Jonc, 350 miles south of Paris on the watershed dividing the Med from the Atlantic, after trekking for three days through rugged, bare rock, in the early 1740s met his end: the locals took him for a sorcerer, and hacked him to death. Even in Murray’s Handbook for Travellers (1854), while it was suggested that this was a fine region for viewing by balloon, the writer added that this was “only if the aeronaut can remain out of range of a rifle”.

Beyond the main roads, there was wilderness and total isolation. So a girl of eight could get lost in the Issaux Forest, in the Basque Country, and only be found eight years later by shepherds in 1730, having lost her speech. In the mid-18th century a 300-strong band of smugglers roamed one-fifth of France, evading three regiments for a year and half, only captured when the leader, Louis Mandrin, was betrayed by his mistress. It was a land of tiny communities. In the late 18th and early 19th century, almost a third of the population, about 10 million people, lived in isolated farms, or hamlets with fewer than 35 inhabitants. “The known universe, for many people, had a radius of less than 15 miles and a population that could easily fit into a small barn.” Newcomers did arrive over the centuries, such as the Scottish mercenaries given forest land between Moulins and Bourges in the 15th-century by Charles VII, but were absorbed, and almost lost in the folk history that seldom stretched beyond three generations. (They became the Foratin people.)

It was a world that stopped for many months of the year, out of necessity, Robb quotes the diaries of Jules Renard about the Nievre: “the peasant at homes moves little more than the sloth”; “in winter, they pass their lives asleep, curled up like snails”. Official reports (this of 1844 on the Burgundy day labourers of the Nievre) were shocked: “these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.” Yet as Robb says, clearly hibernation was a necessity: a lowered metabolic rate prevented food stocks being exhausted..

And what industry there was often had different motives from the purely economic. In parts of the Auvergne, Robb has found, women got together in the evening, sometimes until after midnight, to sew and knit clothes that were sold to travelling merchants. The profits were tiny, but the proceeds were enough to pay for the lamp oil that enabled them to get together in the first place. And antidote to boredom and a place (almost) of their own.

The established church had little real hold, Robb contends. The “pagan” gods – from pagus or pays – were still around, and saints were regarded much as they had been: “the Church was important in the same way that a shopping mall is important to shoppers: the customers were not especially interested in the creator and owner of the mall; they came to see the saints, who sold their wares in little chapels around the nave”. And the idea of hierarchy among the “congregation” may well not have matched that of the priest. Robb quotes a lovely case from 1872 in Chartes of a woman asked to move out of the way of “le bon Dieu” in a procession. “She retorted, ’Huh! I didn’t come here for him, I came for her, pointing at the Virgin.’”
read more »

Permalink | Comments (3)
Blogging/IT Books Friday Femmes Fatales Politics

Britblog Roundup No 207

February 1, 2009 – 7:16 pm

Beginning this week by picking out a few highlights:

* On the F-word, Louise (rightfully) tears strips off an old fart who’s “making a stand” by displaying soft porn in his office. The one good thing is that he’s an elected official – I do hope the women of Nottinghamshire are fully informed of his actions before the next vote.

* Sharon on Early Modern Notes makes a critical comparison of Wikipedia and the press – and the latter doesn’t come out too well.

* Simon on LibDem Voice is meanwhile launching another swinging attack, this time on jargon – his “Genesis in PR jargon” is a hoot.

*And I may be being a touch mischievous in putting these two together, since there’s rather a lot of jargon in Stumbling and Mumling’s exploration of organisational failure, but there is an interesting thought in there about private sector failure.

Looking on the lighter side, Genna on gem-ish explains why she’s happy her school years weren’t the best of her life. And Huw indulges in a little hiccup nostalgia.

And Ed Fordham on 474 Votes to Win (what will he do after the election, I wonder?) wants to preserve an important piece of Joe Orton history, of the lavatorial kind.

Getting back into politics, Blood and Treasure analyses the relationship between Gordon Brown’s words and the sudden outbreak of British industrial anger.

And Chicken Yoghurt exposes the murky business of nuclear industry “insurance”, while The Yorkshire Ranter explores the darker depths of NHS computing.

Two Doctors have the word from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, the Green Party view of the Scottish budget wrangling.

And Jim on The Daily (Maybe), who’s doing rather well just now living up to that semi-promise, explores the idea of what Progressive London means. And new blogger Joseph Healy reports back from the Convention of the Left in Manchester last weekend.

The Magistrate looks at the basic fallacy in the theory of deterrence with reference to the >reclassification of marijuana, and Witterings from Whitney suggests David Cameron should live by his own words and hold a referendum on EU membership.

In local politics, Jason Kitcat brings the details of Brighton government, with the aid of YouTube, to the voters. And yes, garbage does matter.

And Antonia has a fine tribute to Maureen Christian, Oxford Labour councillor.

In the “interesting new ideas” category is an exploration on Amused Cynicism of a proposed new broadband tax, the money to go to creative providers. I’m not quite sure how the administration would work out, but it is an interesting idea, possibly particularly for the BBC…

And on Heresy Corner, measures of religiosity and wealth in the US have been plotted against each other, showing interesting correlations – not necessarily causal, but certainly a blow to the “God will make you wealthy” crowd.

But there’s nothing new, really: Roy on Early Modern Whale is exploring an early mass murderer-cum-werewolf. And staying in history I’m going to point to one of my own, my review of the Darwin exhibition at the Natural History Museum – really worth seeing, even if it is preaching to the converted.

In the miscellaneous category:
* Jonathan on Liberal England offer his thoughts on the BBC Gaza appeal controversy, findnig some interesting evidence of differing approaches in recent history.

* On Text and the World, an exploration of the work of the feminist theorist Gayle Rubin, perhaps for the more academically inclined.

* Charles Crawford on forms of anti-Semitism.

*In the Shadow of the Olive Tree is exploring the issue of reparations.

Finally, be afraid, be very afraid. No not the economy, or the environment, but the pigeons are massing at a new HQ, and they don’t even care who knows it…

Last week’s roundup was with Mick; next week the host will be Matt. As usual, email your nominations to britblog AT gmail DOT com – don’t be shy; you can nominate yourself. And (usually) all nominations are included, whatever the politics of that week’s host…

Permalink | Comments (5)
Books Women's history

A canon of early modern women

February 1, 2009 – 10:52 am

There has developed, over the past decade or so, agreement on a modest canon of early modern Englishwomen’s autobiography (or life-writing – which term you prefer will show your academic associations).

It begins with Margaret Hoby, the Puritan Yorkshirewoman who would probably be astonished to know her modest daily accounting of her time of religious study, household work and village duties has come to achieve such attention.

The canon then moves on to the far more obviously formidable and Lady Anne Clifford, who was clearly constructing her text for the future, then the Civil War pair of Lucy Hutchinson and Ann Fanshawe, and the romantic Anne Halkett.

Finally, towering above them all in output and ambition is Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, who now has a society all of her own.

Many who read and write about these texts are often concerned not with them as writing, but as evidence; these rare and valuable words, women’s accounts of themselves, are subject to anatomising and theorising, so that the words themselves almost disappear. Sharon Cadman Seelig’s Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature can in this light almost be read as a recovery of the words, and the women who wrote them.

Seelig aims to rediscover the texts as literature, to read them asking, in now what seems to be surprisingly simple terms, what did the women mean, how were they feeling, and how do I feel when I read them?

What this produces is both a celebration and a defence of the quality and value of the words in their own right. Seelig makes the obvious but oft neglected point that while these texts might waver across genre forms, lack the well-shaped purpose and direction that we’d expect from a published diary or memoir today, this is equally true of male writers of the same period. Autobiography as a form was just being developed; these women were helping to invent it as they wrote.

The light touch academic approach here makes Seelig’s book an ideal introduction to the field of early modern women’s autobiography – indeed her short account of Cavendish made me dig out a biography that has been sitting in my “to read” pile for years.

So this is an ideal, and short, introduction to these women; a pity then that it is only available in expensive hardback – this is surely a monograph that cries out for an accessible paperback.

Permalink | Comment (1)
Books Environmental politics Science

The baiji, or a cautionary tale of how the human race can ignore approaching disaster

January 18, 2009 – 1:52 pm

In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy series, the dolphins disappear suddenly from the earth leaving only a cryptic message: “So long, and thanks for all of the fish.” Should Qi Qi, one of the last ever Yangtze river dolphins, have been able to leave a message before his sad death after decades of life in a sterile, small concrete tank, it might well have been a variant of that: “So long, and thanks for nothing.”*

For this dolphin species, indeed this whole mammalian family, the Lipotidae, which has existed for around 21.5 million years, is now extinct. The story of how that was allowed to happen is told by the British conservation biologist Samuel Turvey, in Witness to Extinction: How We Failed to Save the Yangtze River Dolphin.

It is a story from which almost no one, except Turvey himself, and a handful of other individuals, emerges well. No one knows, and no one probably will ever now know, exactly what killed the baiji (its Chinese name. It’s scientific name is Lipotes vexilifer). It might have been the hideous pollution of the river, it might have been the illegal and vicious fishing methods in regular use, it might have been the river’s use as a major transport highway that made it a cacophonous obstacle course of deadly propellers: probably it was a combination of all of these things.

The Chinese government was culpable, certainly. It never made any serious effort not only to address these issues (which clearly would be a mammoth undertaking), but also failed to develop a safe refuge area in which the species might have been preserved. Yet this, as Turvey shows, is a developing world government in a country with no tradition at all of conservation, so that is perhaps understandable, if not excusable.

But clearly on this account even greater opprobrium should be laid at the feet of the international conservation organisations and prominent experts, which might have been expected to throw every conceivable resource at preserving this beautiful, charismatic, important species. Instead, Turvey finds, they are handicapped by a fear of failure, by an unpractical ideology, by a simple failure to face the facts.

That ideology comes down to a persistent belief that species should be preserved by preserving their habitat, not captive breeding programmes. Of course that’s a fine ideal, but clearly also sometimes — particularly in developing countries, and increasingly in a climate-changed world — is going to be impossible.

Turvey, in partnership with one other individual, Leigh Barrett, wrenched together enough money to create the starting point for what might have been a captive breeding programme. But sadly, when the careful scientific survey that they arranged was carried out in 2007, there were no baiji left.

Now, the only real memory of the baiji, what will give it a faint, ghostlike existence, is this book, which tells as much as will ever be known of its complete story: how the Chinese traditionally regarded it as a tragic maiden transformed into this beautiful, graceful creature, revered as a goddess; how ancient writers reported how it was used by boat people as a warning of danger; and how it was brought to scientific recognition by a 17-year-old son of a missionary (inevitably pictured here with one he shot). You might consider it one very small stroke of luck for the species that it has such a fine euologist – a scientific expert who writes with passion and style.
read more »

Permalink | Comments (5)
Arts Books

Elsewhere…

January 8, 2009 – 11:06 pm

I’ve been reading about the architecture and social history of St Pancras train station, which has given me something I’d never have predicted, interest in train sheds.

And writing about the wonderful Egyptian paintings of the tomb of Nebamun, soon to be back on display, of which I’ve had a sneak preview.

Permalink | Comment (0)

« Previous Page — Next Page »

« Previous Page — Next Page »