Determined, page 69
*As one measure of Nelson Mandela’s status as a moral giant, he insisted that the commission also investigate human rights violations by African National Congress fighters (i.e., his “side”).
*Why “bias”? Mallon, an Irish immigrant at a time when her people occupied the lowest rung of New York’s ethnic hierarchy, probably would not have been treated that way if her last name had been, say, Forbes or Sedgwick; as evidence, during the remainder of her lifetime, more than four hundred other asymptomatic spreaders were identified, with none forcibly quarantined in the same way. Actually, the bias had an additional motivation—Mallon’s transgressions included not only being Pestilential While Irish, not only sickening her fellow tenement dwellers, but also sickening the wealthy families whom she served as a cook. She was released from the island in 1910 and returned to working as a cook under an assumed name, again spreading the disease; apprehended in 1915, she unwillingly lived out her days on the island for roughly twenty-five years. That business about using a fake name kind of besmirches the picture of her as blameless victim; on the other hand, her only other possible work was as a laundress, where her wage would have been half the starvation-level wage she received as a cook.
*Caruso frames this as “incapacitating” the person with the “least infringement.”
*This raises an issue that really gets me into the weeds: If we’ve gotten to a point of recognizing that it is not right for anyone to be blamed or punished for something negative that they do, is it okay to not want to be around someone yearning for social contact because circumstance made them irritating, boring, irksome, chew with their mouth open, derail conversations with inane puns, whistle tunelessly in a crazy-making way, etc.? Are we teetering on the edge of the equivalent of convincing your child that everyone in their kindergarten class should be invited to their birthday party, including even the kid they don’t like?
*As some sort of cosmic joke, spell-check keeps turning funishment into punishment. Also, when you Google funishment, you get sent not only to various philosophical debates but also to BDSM sites, plus some beer maker whose product is supposedly ideal for someone who is a glutton for funishment.
*A comparison between Norway and the U.S. is obviously complicated by apples versus oranges, because the government of someplace like Norway already perceives moral obligations to take care of its citizens to an extent that Americans currently can only dream of.
*An instructive lesson came from a couple honeymooning on a small resort island in the Maldives when the pandemic hit; because of the timing of different countries shutting down air travel, they were stranded there for months, the lone guests, along with the resort staff, also marooned there. A dozen otherwise bored waiters scrambled to fill their water glasses after each sip, their pillows were fluffed up by room staff hourly. Basically, it sounded like hell with a private cabana. “Everyone says they want to be stuck on a tropical island, until you’re actually stuck. It only sounds good because you know you can leave,” said one of the tanned captives.
*His year of birth is unclear.
*Five African American lawyers attempted to appeal Bethea’s conviction on grounds of incompetent legal representation. They were told that, sorry, the appeals court was closed for the summer; by the time fall rolled around, Bethea was long dead.
*The executioner arrived too drunk to spring the trap; a deputy sheriff stepped in.
*Controversy on the national stage notwithstanding, Thompson was acclaimed in Owensboro. When she ran for reelection, she received all but 3 of the 9,814 votes cast.
*Numerous reporters from the North covered the event, drawn by the chance to see Thompson spring the trap; robbed of that, they instead filed stories about Southern barbarity. Embarrassed, the Kentucky legislature soon banned public hangings.
The notoriety weighed on Owensboro for decades, and the town developed a bristly, self-serving revisionism in which the twenty thousand attendees fighting for good spots and souvenir cloth were entirely outsiders, and that the town itself had shunned the spectacle.
I can’t resist noting that Owensboro’s most celebrated native son is Johnny Depp. Make of that what you will.
*Opening doors for people of color from one of the other hellholes on earth? Well, not so much. I suppose in that case, our striking human sociality is shown when nationalists cooperate in forming political parties charging that immigrants are destroying European culture.
*Long biology digression: Mitochondria, seventh-grade biology’s “powerhouses of the cell,” are at the center of one of the coolest events in the history of life. Mitochondria were once tiny, independent cells, with their own genes, willing to attack larger cells for their own benefit; those larger cells would counterattack with proteins that would perforate mitochondria, or by engulfing mitochondria and harvesting their molecules. Then, in the “endosymbiotic” revolution some 1.5 billion years ago, swords were hammered into plowshares, and when a large cell engulfed a mitochondrion, rather than destroy it, it allowed the mitochondrion to live there, to their mutual benefit. Mitochondria had evolved the capacity to use oxygen to generate energy, a hugely efficient move; they shared the plentiful fruits of their oxygen-based metabolism with the enveloping cell, which in turn protected mitochondria from the wear and tear of the outside world. And in a move reminiscent of two medieval rulers making a peace treaty but, not trusting each other, sending their sons to be guests/spies/prisoners in the other kingdom, mitochondria and the host cells even traded some of their own original genes (although it was overwhelmingly mitochondria transferring genes to the host cell).
Where does cheating come in? When it’s time for the cell to divide, you have to make new copies of everything, including the DNA in the nucleus, mitochondria, and so on. And some mitochondria will cheat, making way more new copies of themselves than they’re “supposed to,” dominating replicative resources for themselves. The cells’ countermeasure? We’ll get to that.
How about DNA cheating? The entire genome is a cooperative venture, individual genes and other DNA elements working collectively when replicating. It turns out that there are stretches of DNA called transposons that code for nothing useful and are usually derived from ancient viruses. And they are selfish, insofar as all they care about is making more copies of their useless selves, trying to monopolize the replication machinery. As a measure of the effectiveness of their cheating, about half of human DNA is derived from self-serving copies of useless transposons. And the cell’s response to that selfishness? We’ll get to that as well.
As a reminder, lionesses, fish, bats, bacteria, mitochondria, and transposons are not consciously plotting about how to cheat for their own benefit. This personifying language is just shorthand for things like “Over the course of time, transposons that evolved the capacity for preferential self-replication became more prevalent.”
*What do unfettered exploitation, restrained exploitation, and punishment look like in the Ultimatum Game? There are two players. The first player gets $100 and then divides it between the two of them however the first player pleases. Offering zero and keeping $100 is maximal exploitation. Fifty-fifty maximizes fairness. Most people start off somewhere around a restrained sixty-forty. Where does punishment come in? The only power that the second player has is to refuse the offer—in which case, neither gets anything.
*The folks who are really prosocial are the ones who readily do third-party punishment without bothering to do self-serving second-party punishing.
*The temporal-parietal junction.
*There’s an additional kind of punishment that is really messed up. Termed “perverse” or “antisocial” punishment, this is when someone is punished for making too generous of an offer; it is motivated by how unpunished generosity will make the rest of us look bad, pressuring everyone else to start being generous. Cross-cultural studies show that you find this malignant kind of punishment only in cultures that you wouldn’t want to live in—those with low social capital, with low levels of trust and cooperation.
*In traditional Fijian culture, being a third-party punisher of antisocial behavior isn’t costly—it is understood that you can do things like steal possessions of the miscreant with impunity.
*For example, a selection of the many books currently available on Amazon: The Ultimate Serial Killer Trivia Book (Jack Rosewood, 2022); True Crime Activity Book for Adults (making one wonder what the kids’ edition looks like; Brian Berry, 2021); and of course, Serial Killers Coloring Book with Facts and Their Last Words (Katys Corner, 2022).
*Whether humans or rhesus monkeys; in a paper entitled “Monkeys Pay per View: Adaptive Valuation of Social Images by Rhesus Macaques,” male rhesus monkeys were shown to be willing to “pay” the price of forgoing desirable juice in order to see, well, crotch shots of female monkeys. Meanwhile, female rhesus monkeys liked looking at pictures of high-ranking males (which, given the characteristic aggressiveness of male rhesus, is a bit like falling for the animal magnetism of Billy Bigelow) or crotch shots of both male and female rhesus. Okay, just to go further down the rabbit hole, when female rhesus are ovulating, they show a stronger preference for looking at the faces of male rhesus (but, in an oddly reassuring way, not the faces of male chimps or humans).
*I’m not remotely going to try to summarize what happened at either, as they will be mired in controversy forever; both have taken on near-sacred significance to the antigovernment militia movement.
*The process begins with the seemingly bizarre step of cleaning the infusion site with alcohol. What, so the person won’t get an infection after they’re dead? Why not also try to sell them a new coffee maker, to be delivered within three to five working days? In actuality, the alcohol makes it easier to find a vein.
*In Discipline and Punish (which begins with the execution of Damiens), Michel Foucault rejected this sanguine idea; instead, he framed this as part of the shift from the state asserting power by owning and breaking a person’s body—execution—to asserting it by owning and breaking their spirit and soul long before that, thanks to years of moldering imprisonment and the ceaseless surveillance of the panopticon. Political theorist C. Fred Alford of the University of Maryland rejects this interpretation. He lost me, though, when he started discussing what he called the microphysics of power (I was pretty lost with Foucault as well, actually).
*Linders speculates that the decision was made to include the press as witnesses precisely for this reason.
*In the words of legal scholar Pete Alces, the challenge of the death penalty is that it can feel intensely like both too much and too little, often for the same person (personal communication).
*It’s important, however, to point out the obvious factor that Texas and Minnesota differ from each other in lots of other dramatic ways, so these findings are merely correlative.
*It is important to note that, despite the time-limited funishment, Breivik has spent much of his time in solitary, because of the danger of his interacting with other prisoners, and his twenty-one-year sentence can be extended if he is deemed to still be a danger to society. At one point, he sued the Norwegian government over the cruel nature of his isolation (he was ultimately unsuccessful). In searching for a solution, a psychiatrist working for the prison suggested that retired police officers visit Breivik to socialize, drink coffee, and play card games.
*Breivik had bought the uniform and tchotchkes from military surplus dealers and sewed on the medals; it’s unclear if he knew what they signified, but he had awarded himself medals for, among other things, valor in the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard.
*And of course, as with all these examples, none of these were monolithic group responses. “You are Satan. Instead of a heart, you have a cold, dark space,” said the daughter of another victim, hoping that the shooter would “go straight to hell.”
*Just imagine the implausibility of the same if circumstances were such that Osama bin Laden were living out his days in a supermax prison.
*To my vast relief, the case never went to trial—there was a guilty plea for life without parole rather than the death penalty.
*The famous quote might actually be apocryphal; see quoteinvestigator.com/2011/02/09/darwinism-hope-pray/.
*A philosophical stance called illusionism, associated with philosopher Saul Smilansky, whose ideas were discussed in the previous chapter.
*Right around now, I’m concerned about my prattling on about “truth,” rejecting so many other people’s thinking about free will, worried that I’m going to come off as self-congratulatory. That I am self-congratulatory. Wow, all these super-smart people who run philosophical circles around me, and I’m one of the few who understand that you can’t successfully wish for what you want to wish for or will yourself to have willpower. Wow, I’m awesome. The previous few paragraphs suggest an additional route to being self-congratulatory—wow, all these thinkers fleeing from unpalatable truths to the point of irrationality, and I’m the one with the bollocks to lick truth’s smelly armpit.
This many pages into this book, I hope it’s clear that I don’t think it is valid for anyone to be self-congratulatory about anything. At some point in this writing process, I was struck with what seemed like the explanation for why I’ve been able to stick with an unshakable rejection of free will, despite the bummers of feelings it can evoke. A point made earlier in the chapter is personally very relevant. Since my teenage years, I’ve struggled with depression. Now and then, the meds work great and I’m completely free of it, and life seems like hiking above the tree line on a spectacular snow-capped mountain. This most reliably occurs when I’m actually doing that with my wife and children. Most of the time, though, the depression is just beneath the surface, kept at bay by a toxic combination of ambition and insecurity, manipulative shit, and a willingness to ignore who and what matter. And sometimes it incapacitates me, where I mistake every seated person as being in a wheelchair and every child I glance at as having Down syndrome.
And I think that the depressions explain a lot. Bummed out by the scientific evidence that there’s no free will? Try looking at your children, your perfect, beautiful children, playing and laughing, and somehow this seems so sad that your chest constricts enough to make you whimper for an instant. After that, dealing with the fact that our microtubules don’t set us free is a piece of cake.
*At the 2018 Harvard graduation, the poised, articulate student chosen to give a speech, Jin Park, showed that he understood turtles. Why was he there in that celebration of talents and accomplishments? Because, he explained, day after day, his undocumented immigrant father worked as a line cook in restaurants (that probably exploited the hell out of him, since he lacked papers), because his undocumented immigrant mother toiled endlessly, giving pedicures in beauty salons. “My talents are indistinguishable from their labors; they are one and the same.”
*And even phrased this way, this is a false dichotomy, making a distinction between the benighted few who can ignore all this and remain convinced that they deserve their superyacht and the unwashed majority who need to be convinced that it’s not their fault that they don’t own one. Every page really applies to all of us, because we are all destined at times to blame, be blamed, hate, be hated, feel entitled, and suffer the entitled.
*I’m making reference in the title to this section to the great intellectual hoax known as the Sokal affair. Physicist Alan Sokal of NYU and University College London got fed up with the intellectual emptiness, agitprop, and toeing of party line in a lot of postmodernist thinking. He thus wrote a paper that (a) agreed that physics and math are guilty of the sins of various antiprogressive -isms; (b) confessed that the supposed “truths” of science, as well as the supposed existence of “physical reality,” are mere social constructs; (c) fawningly cited leading postmodernists; and (d) was packed with science gibberish. It was submitted to and duly published in 1996 by Social Text, a leading postmodernist cultural studies journal, as “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The hoax was then revealed. Massive brouhaha, conferences of postmodernists condemning his “bad faith,” Jacques Derrida calling him “sad,” and so on. I thought the paper was glorious, a hilarious parody of postmodernist cant (e.g., “the content of any science is profoundly constrained by the language within which its discourses are formulated; and mainstream Western physical science has, since Galileo, been formulated in the language of mathematics. But whose mathematics?”). With tongue firmly in cheek, Sokal proclaimed the paper’s goal to be fostering a “liberatory science” that would be freed from the tyranny of “absolute truth” and “objective reality.” Thus, in the present case, I’m noting “without tongue in cheek,” because I’m going to argue that science dumping the concept of free will is truly liberating.
