December 2009
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Educación estadística y democracia
“La estadística debe estar al alcance de todos porque su uso y abuso nos afecta a todos.” Otra columna más en El Espectador.
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Cualquier excusa es buena para odiar
No me gusta esa mujer de vestido amarillo y botas que me mira desde el otro lado del bus. No me gusta porque me recuerda a alguien que pensaba que conocía hasta que un día descubrí que era una gran farsa hecha mujer; una persona cruel que no se merecía mi aprecio ni mi apoyo ni mi interés sincero por su vida y su bienestar. Debo decir que antes de descubrir que era quien no era la quise. Debo...
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The move from 'is' to 'ought'
Alexandros Stavrakas: One other thing that is different between the US and Europe is the place religion has. In fact, judged by almost any standard, the US is a less secular country than Turkey. In no other highly industrialized country is there widespread belief in Satan or an official movement contesting Darwinian theory. In 2002, a poll in America revealed that a quarter of Americans believed that the events of 9/11 were predicted in the Bible. Where should we look for the origins of this phenomenon and what tools does it provide for the understanding of American society?
Noam Chomsky: It's a very important question -- and, definitely, too complex for me to answer it briefly. To begin with, we should look back to the early colonists who came from England. They came from a providentialist culture, namely, a culture immersed in the conception that providence has laid out a plan for history and we are carrying out God's will. For example, when the first colonists came to New England in the 1629s and King Charles II gave the Charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, this Charter said something along the lines of "The purpose for this plantation is to save the natives from their Pagan misery". When John Winthrop gave his famous sermon in which he said that "We are the city on the hill", he was using the framework of what is now called 'the responsibility to protect' or 'humanitarian intervention', the notion that we are coming to save you. In fact, the great seal of the colony of Massachusetts has on it a picture of an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth saying "Come over and help us". So, this is a perfect example of humanitarian intervention in the name of the Lord. And that runs through a good part of American history. It's a long stream of providentialism that has never ended and which has repeated revivals, like in the 1950s. So, in a word, yes, it's a deep feature of the culture and it goes way back to the origins. What influences us on policy, however, is debatable, since we're also a very secular society. Freedom is, actually, guaranteed to an extent that is probably unique in the world -- except in England maybe. But, still, there's nothing in the United States comparable to Britain's outrageous libel laws. That would be inconceivable here.
Alexandros Stavrakas: Let's extend this idea of belief further. Religion, for example, answers to universal human needs and only a credulous philosopher would believe that showing religion is an illusion would make it disappear. In this sense, your work also attempts to reveal the illusions, hypocrisies, frauds that reside in the way our modern world works. Does this really have any emancipatory potential?
Noam Chomsky: I'm in the mainstream of science. In this respect, as far as I can say, what we try to do is find the truth as best as we can, knowing that there are all kind of limits, cognitive limits, limits of understanding. But we keep trying to find the truth about the world and part of this truth is what you just said. Many people -- in fact, probably, a large majority -- find it a significant personal value to be part of a religious community. That's also true of people who have no religious beliefs at all. A great many of the people who are part of religious communities, are part of them because that gives them a sense of community, a structure to their lives -- holidays in which you meet your family and the like. Rituals bring up memories and so on and so forth. That can, also, coincide with no faith at all; in fact, I know this from my own background. But for many it does involve irrational faith. I'm not in a position to go to a grieving mother who believes that some days she'll see her dying child again and give her lectures on epistemology.
Alexandros Stavrakas: But you have spoken about human nature. Not only that, but you have ascribed a certain normative function to it, a morality, universals.
Noam Chomsky: I don't see how that's even debatable.
Alexandros Stavrakas: Well, Darwinism taken to its conceptual end takes us safely to the conclusion that life is ruled by chance and necessity and that there are just regularities, not prescriptions for good life.
Noam Chomsky: Here we're talking about the move from 'is' to 'ought'. We will discover what we can about the nature of the world and, among the truths about it, I believe, we will find that part of our genetic capacity, which evolved over millennia, is that certain moral principles are inscribed in it; probably genetically determined. To try to discover them is, of course, a big task. There's some empirical work on the subject. But their existence doesn't seem to me questionable. For reasons, actually, explained by Hume. David Hume was pretty clear about this. He pointed out that we have an almost infinite number of responsibilities and duties; meaning, we know how to behave properly in entirely new situations. And that can be the case only if there are certain principles inscribed in us which come from the original hand of nature -- from our genetic endowment we would say -- that somehow guide our choices and decisions. I think that's not at all implausible, and I cannot think of a coherent alternative that would permit a degree of adaptability to what appears to us as a wide variety of practices. It might not appear like a wide variety to some Martian looking at us from a different perspective. In that respect, it's a bit like language. From our perspective as humans, it looks as if language is arbitrarily varied. On the other hand, as soon as you learn anything about languages, you discover that they are pretty narrowly constrained. What applies to language will be true in the inquiry about tomorrow's systems; if it can ever become sufficiently advanced.
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“Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not...”
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