Us and Them: The Blog

Logical, analytical, arrogant, impatient with people who need time to understand ...

That's the type of blogger I am, according to this analysis from an automated blog-anatomist, to which a lot of bloggers are linking today, for obvious reasons. I like the diagram of my brain that accompanies the prose.

Actually, it doesn't seem too off-base, especially for an algorithm that took perhaps a second to render its verdict.

It says Drudge is among bloggers who are ``conservative by nature [,] they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.'' OTOH Josh Marshall and company apparently have the same brain I do.

A madman with an armload of gems . . .

I love this image, from a reader who is, I gather, a conservative Christian and who is not taken with Us and Them, my book.

He also says I'm smug. Ouch. I much prefer to be called a jewel-dropping lunatic.

No sighs but o' my sighing

The animal pictured on my website, a refugee lab rat, about which I wrote here, died a while back. Before that day, though, I had acquired a second rattus norvegicus, from a neuroscientist friend, who had named her Pinky.

Rats only live about two years, though. Pinky died a couple of days ago, and now the pet count around here is zero.

We are a social species, and not too fussy about it. Animal companionship is good for human health. And even though I ``live alone,'' in the sense that no other people live in my apartment, I have always kept animals of one sort or another for more than two decades.

So this creature-absence is deeply strange. There's no explanation for the odd sound in the quiet of the night; no sense that my mood will register with some other mind (even a mind the size of a hazelnut will do); no unconscious certainty that what happens to me here also happens to another being -- that I am plural, not singular. ``No sighs but o' my sighing, no tears but o' my shedding.'' The shock Shylock describes here is not the tears and sighs, but their being unshared, uncontradicted, unregistered. Part of the health benefit of pet animals, I'd bet, is their help in staving off a feeling of being nobody to nobody.

My first piece of published intentional fiction . . .

In the March 9, 2006 edition of the journal Nature. Click here to read.

Things Seem to be Going Well

This is probably what my Thanksgiving turkey was thinking the other day, right before he got the axe (I always get a fresh-killed one).

Still, I can't help being pleased by the reviews of my book, Us and Them. A thoughtful one by Henry Gee is in the December issue of Scientific American. One that links the book to recent events in France, and to philosophical concerns, appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer. It's by Carlin Romano, who is, not coincidentally, a philosopher by training as well as the paper's book critic.

Publication Day

Today, Oct. 24, is the official publication day for my book, Us and Them : Understanding Your Tribal Mind. Buy early and often.

I'm going to stay in a literary vein today, then, with a bit about the richest such vein there is.

Shakespeare thought about the problem of Us versus Them, as he thought about everything. Specifically, if modern scholarship is correct about the authorship of a play called ``Sir Thomas More,'' written in the 1590's by several hands, Shakespeare had a grip on the essence of the problem. In the passage of the play likely written by Shakespeare, Thomas More confronts a crowd which believes a depressingly modern, Peter Brimelow sort of idea: Foreigners are ruining everything, stealing our jobs, taking advantage of our generosity, and driving up prices. They're ruining us! Drive those foreigners out! (The play was based on histories of anti-foreign rioting in London in 1517.)

To which the probably Shakespearean More replies:

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage

Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,

And that you sit as kings in your desires.

Here, he tells the mob, is what will happen:

Not one of you should live an aged man,

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought

With selfsame hand, self reasons, and self right

Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another.

Suppose, for example, you all get exiled for this rioting against the King, he continues. What happens then?

Go you to France, or Flanders,

To any German province, Spain or Portugal,

Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,

Why, you must needs by strangers. Would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper

That breaking out in hideous violence

Would not afford you an abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements

Were not all appropriate to your comforts

But chartered unto them, what would you think

To be thus used? This is the strangers' case,

And this your mountainish inhumanity.

Self-Promotion Dep't: Our Little Flotilla is Joined by a Great Big Flagship

The theme of November's issue of O, the Oprah Magazine? ``Us and Them.'' Naturally, I think this is an excellent call.

Valerie Monroe's piece introduces an impressive package on the subject. The link works, but I prefer the print version, on page 256 of the mag, because it, ahem, mentions my book.

Shameless Self-Promotion, Part 1

The August 15th issue of Kirkus Reviews has some nice things to say about my book, Us and Them : Understanding Your Tribal Mind. The Kirkus person says the book's a ``provocative investigation'' of an ``absorbing question.''

I'm glad it wasn't a put-down.

I used to write sharp book reviews when I was a young ignoramus. Now, I would not. Writing books is hard, and people who do it should not be whacked upside the head, especially not by people who themselves haven't written a book.

I wish I could take back the clever lines and snarky critiques of my callow youth. John McCrone, I owe you an apology about that thing that ran in the early 90s. Jon Franklin, you too. Sorry.

I'm sure the karmic machinery of the world will pay me in harsh reviewer blows this fall. But not today: Kirkus writes, and having writ, moves on. I was weighed in the balance and not found wanting.

Whew.

We're Back

The blog has been quiet while I dealt with proofs of my book, available in fine stores everywhere this October.

Apologies to both my readers. From now on, this little enterprise will be much more avid in tracking relevant science news and relating political news to the science of Us and Them.

Empathy, sympathy and perspective

Sometimes we look at a creature and see a fellow member of a kind -- a warrior, a parent, a citizen same as me. At other times the same stranger can seem totally alien. A bizarro, a mystery, an eater of weird foods and doer of strange deeds. Nothing like us.

Empathy (the ability to feel what others feel) and sympathy (the ability to at least imagine what it must be like to feel as they do) are both much easier when accompanied by a perception that ``they're like us.''

Case in point: Look here at how the artist Tim Flach photographs bats. In these photos, he shows them at rest, not flitting about. And he presents the image upside down,so that, instead of eerily hanging before us, the animals seem to be standing up. They look like nice dogs, or even like people waiting for a bus. And that makes it easier to feel kind thoughts for them, doesn't it?