The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

And here's another book I might assign in the future - The Dish talked it up in this post.

This fits with recent class discussions on stereotyping and how it helps build - or confirm - opinions.

The narrow point concerns beliefs about the Puritans. The broader point is our collective refusal to use available resources to determine whether our beliefs are actually true. Aside from being lazy, it leads us to make incorrect evaluations of historical events and people. Here's some text highlighted by the Dish:

Puritans are thought to have taken a lurid pleasure in the notion of hell, and certainly hell seems to have been much in their thoughts, though not more than it was in the thoughts of Dante, for example. We speak as though John Calvin invented the Fall of Man, when that was an article of faith universal in Christian culture…

Yet the way we speak and think about the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism.

Very simply, it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved. And it demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry. I know from experience that if one says the Puritans were a more impressive and ingratiating culture than they are assumed to have been, one will be heard to say that one finds repressiveness and intolerance ingratiating. Unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension, not intentionally and not to anyone’s benefit, but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus. This instinct is so powerful that I would suspect it had a survival value, if history or current events gave me the least encouragement to believe we are equipped to survive.

Houston is so cheap / humid / populated / ugly

Those are the results of a fun off the cuff study of stereotypes of the largest cities in the US.

Obama as a Rorschach Test

Frank Rich tries to figure why so many people have so many conflicting attitudes about Obama. Attitudes about him, he argues, say less about him than they do about us. He's a Rorschach test where we see what we want to see whether it is good or bad.

Others have hit upon this before:

- Obama As Ideological Rorschach : NPR
- The Oil Drilling Rorschach Test - Swampland - TIME.com
- A plain blog about politics: Rorschach

Understanding Your Enemy

Britain, and by extension we, are still coming to terms with the fact that many of the bombers affiliated with Al Qaeda, who we have stereotyped into being poor, hopeless and driven to violence by a lack of opportunity, do not fit that stereotype at all.

The recent bombings in Britain were carried out by doctors who had other opportunities, but seemed fueled by an ideological hatred of the west. The problem that poses is that while we feel that we understand poverty and its solutions (though we are not quite successful in implementing the solutions), we are at a loss to understand ideologically motivated animosity.

Writing in the London Observer, Henry Potter points to Sayyid Qutb, the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, who spent critical moments in his life in the United States and saw materialism, individual freedom and an equal role for women as evidence of the west's decadence and a justification for attacks on it.

Potter agues that Qutb's theories on how to do it owed more to Lenin than Islam and suggests that our strategies be adjusted accordingly. Potter is short on specifics, but his analysis rests on what some argue may be liberal democracy's Achilles heel: A open, tolerant nation may resist efforts to restrict the inclusion of groups that seek to undermine it. Censorship and exclusion violate the principles of democracy, but to not censor and exclude puts the security of the republic at risk. This violates the primary responsibility of government--to secure unalienable rights.

To complicate the discussion, David Warren points to other writings which argue that groups like Al Qaeda do in fact base their ideas on the religious underpinnings of the societies they exist within. his makes them a larger long term threat than either Nazism or Communism could have been since each cut against the (religious) grain of the culture they emerged within.

Pleasant thoughts on a Sunday morning.

Both build of a concept we hit when we cover public opinion: the role of stereotypes--or schemas--in the development of opinion. We find it very difficult to process information unless it can fit within a general concept we are already comfortable with--like a western political ideology or the rules of baseball. New information about a foreign concept is very difficult for us to process because we attempt to fit it into a known concept first rather than develop a completely new framework for it.

Both articles suggest that we have yet to completely figure out what we are fighting in Al Qaeda and similar organizations and we are unlikely to achieve any success until we do.