Review: The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves

The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves by Alexandra Hudson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: Bible and Sword

Bible and Sword by Barbara W. Tuchman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: Social Intelligence: The Revolutionary New Science of Human Relationships

Social Intelligence: The Revolutionary New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like books that explore understanding the brain as an organ (neurology) connecting to our understanding of the mind (psychology).

While I do not recall the phrase "micro expressions", I am fascinated by the idea that human evolution has longer relied on facial expressions than language. Now, we live in an age when the expressions still transmit, but the understanding is largely unconscious.

Edgar Allan Poe had an intuitive grasp of this principle. He wrote: "When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression."

Things like this rate the book an entry in the My philosophy list. Because, concepts like Primal empathy, Attunement, and Empathic accuracy directly correspond to foundations of my personal philosophy such as The Golden Rule and seeing the other's P.O.V., called here "Mindsight".

Social awareness refers to a spectrum that runs from instantaneously sensing another's inner state, to understanding her feelings and thoughts, to "getting" complicated social situations. It includes:

• Primal empathy: Feeling with others; sensing non- verbal emotional signals.
• Attunement: Listening with full receptivity; attuning to a person.
• Empathic accuracy: Understanding another person's thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Social cognition: Knowing how the social world works.

Social Facility

Simply sensing how another feels, or knowing what they think or intend, does not guarantee fruitful interactions. Social facility builds on social awareness to allow smooth, effective interactions. The spectrum of social facility includes:

• Synchrony: Interacting smoothly at the nonverbal level.
• Self-presentation: Presenting ourselves effectively. • Influence: Shaping the outcome of social interactions.
• Concern: Caring about others' needs and acting accordingly.

...

This ability to apprehend what seems to be going through someone else's mind is one of our most invaluable human skills. Neuroscientists call it "mindsight."

Mindsight amounts to peering into the mind of a person to sense their feelings and deduce their thoughts-the fundamental ability of empathic accuracy. While we can't actually read another person's mind, we do pick up enough clues from their face, voice, and eyes-reading between the lines of what they say and do-to make remarkably accurate inferences.

I was fascinated by the review of the work of John C. Crabbe. This gets into the environmental effects. This is interesting in the nature vs. nurture argument and to me the fascinating topic of epigenetics.

Crabbe was now a behavior geneticist at the Oregon Health and Science University and the Portland VA Medical Center—and of all things, renowned for his studies of alcoholic rodents. He has for years done research on mice from a strain called C57BL/6J, who are unique in their voracious appetite for alcohol. Studying them holds the promise of clues to the causes and, one hopes, cures for alcoholism in humans.

This strain of alcohol-loving mice is one of a hundred or so that are useful for medical research, such as a susceptibility to diabetes or heart disease. Each mouse in a given inbred strain is, in effect, a clone of every other such mouse; they share their genes like identical twins. One virtue of these strains for scientific researchers is their stability; a mouse of a given strain tested in various labs around the world should react like every other such mouse. But this very assumption of stability was questioned by Crabbe, in a now famous, simple experiment.

“We asked just how stable is ‘stable,’” Crabbe told me when I called. “We did the identical tests in three different laboratories, trying to make every aspect of their environment identical, from the brand of mouse feed they ate—Purina—and their age, to their shipping history. We had them tested at the same hour on the same day with identical apparatus.”

So at the identical point—April 20, 1998, between 8:30 and 9:00 A.M. local time—all the mice from eight different inbred strains, including C57BL/6J, were tested. One test simply offered them a choice of drinking regular water or an alcohol solution. True to form, the liquor-lovers chose the rodent martini far more often than did other mouse strains.

Next was a standard test for mouse anxiety. A mouse is placed at the crossroads of two runways, elevated three feet off the ground. Two arms of the crossroads have walls while the other two are open, which can be scary. Anxious mice cower next to the walls, while more adventurous ones explore the open runways.

To the great surprise of those who believe that genes alone determine behavior, however, within a given strain some decided differences on the anxiety test were found from lab to lab. For example, one strain, BALB/cByJ, was very anxious in Portland but quite adventurous in Albany.

As Crabbe noted, “If genes were all, you’d expect to find no differences whatever.” What could have caused the differences? Certain variables were beyond control from lab to lab, like the humidity and the water the mice drank—and perhaps most important, the people who handled them. One research assistant, for example, was allergic to mice and wore a respirator while holding them.

“Some people are confident and skilled at handling mice, while others are anxious or too rough,” Crabbe told me. “My bet is that mice can ‘read’ the emotional state of the person handling them, and that state in turn has an impact on the mouse’s behavior.” His study, featured in the prestigious journal Science, aroused a storm of debate among neuroscientists. They had to grapple with the disturbing news that minor differences from one laboratory to another, such as how the mice were handled, created disparities in how the mice behaved—which implied a difference in how the identical genes acted.

Crabbe’s experiment, together with similar findings from other labs, suggests that genes are more dynamic than most people—and science for more than a century—have assumed. It’s not just which genes we are born with, but their expression, that matters.

To understand how our genes operate, we must appreciate the difference between possessing a
given gene and the degree to which that gene expresses its signature proteins. In gene expression, essentially, a bit of DNA makes RNA, which in turn creates a protein that makes something happen in our biology. Of the thirty thousand or so genes in the human body, some are expressed only during embryonic development, then shut off forever. Others turn on and off constantly. Some express themselves only in the liver, others only in the brain.

Crabbe’s finding stands as a landmark in “epigenetics,” the study of ways the experiences we undergo change how our genes operate—without altering our DNA sequence an iota. Only when a gene directs the synthesis of RNA does it actually make a practical difference in the body. Epigenetics shows how our environment, translated into the immediate chemical surround of a given cell, programs our genes in ways that determine just how active they will be.

Research in epigenetics has identified many of the biological mechanisms that control gene expression. One of them, involving the methyl molecule, not only turns genes on or off but also tones down or speeds up their activity. Methyl activity likewise helps determine where in the brain the more than 100 billion neurons end up, and which other neurons their ten thousand connections will link to. The methyl molecule sculpts the body, including the brain.

Such insights put to rest the century-old debate on nature versus nurture: do our genes or our
experiences determine who we become? That debate turns out to be pointless, based on the fallacy that our genes and our environment are independent of each other; it’s like arguing over which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, the length or the width.

Back to the neurological/physiological underpinnings of human nature, the "OFC" is the orbitofrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in decision making and other cognitive functions. This is a channel to take input to the amygdala leading to unruly, impulsive behavior.

The OFC also goes awry this way in those war veterans who, on seeing a battle scene on the evening news or hearing a truck back- fire, are flooded with traumatic memories from their own wartime nightmares. The culprit is an overactive amygdala, one that sends surges of panic in mistaken reaction to cues vaguely reminiscent of the original trauma. Ordinarily the OFC would evaluate such primal feelings of fear and clarify that it's just a television show or a truck we're hearing rather than enemy guns.

While it is kept in line by high-road systems, the amygdala cannot play the brain's bad boy. The OFC contains one of the array of neurons that can inhibit those amygdala-driven surges, that can just say no to limbic impulses. As low-road circuitry sends up primitive emotional impulses (I feel like yelling, or She's making me so nervous I want to get out of here), the OFC evaluates them in terms of a more sophisticated understanding of the moment (This is a library, or It's only our first date) and modulates them accordingly, acting as an emotional brake.

When those brakes falter, we act inappropriately. Consider the results from a study where college students who did not know each other came to a lab and were "virtually" put together in pairs in an online chat room to get acquainted. 28 About one in five of these Internet con- versations quickly became startlingly sexual, with explicit terms, graphic discussions of sex acts, and outright solicitation of sex.

But when the experimenter who conducted these sessions later read the transcripts, he was astounded. As far as he had seen while escorting the students in and out of the cubicles, they all had been low key, unassuming, and invariably polite-completely out of keeping with their uninhibited licentiousness online.

Presumably none would have dared plunge into such blatantly sexual talk had they instead been having a live, face-to-face conversation with someone they had met only minutes before. That is just the point: during in-person interactions we loop, getting an ongoing flow of feedback, mainly from the person's facial expressions and tone of voice, which instantly tell us when we are on track and off.

Something like the out-of-place sex talk in the lab has been documented ever since the earliest years of the Internet: "flaming," in which adults make childishly offensive comments online.

More biology affecting how we act, such as the methyl molecule during development phases leading to lifelong effects, stress leading to disease and cortisol's impact on learning -

We know that low levels of vitamin C, smoking, and sleeping poorly all increase the likelihood of infection. The question is, can a stressful relationship be added to that list? Cohen's answer: definitely.

Cohen assigns precise numerical values to the factors that make one person come down with a cold while another stays healthy. Those with an ongoing personal conflict were 2.5 times as likely as the others to get a cold, putting rocky relationships in the same causal range as vitamin C deficiency and poor sleep. (Smoking, the most damaging unhealthy habit, made people three times more likely to succumb.) Conflicts that lasted a month or longer boosted susceptibility, but an occasional argument presented no health hazard.

While perpetual arguments are bad for our health, isolating our- selves is worse. Compared to those with a rich web of social connections, those with the fewest close relationships were 4.2 times more likely to come down with the cold, making loneliness riskier than smoking.

The more we socialize, the less susceptible to colds we become. This idea seems counterintuitive: don’t we increase the likelihood of being exposed to a cold virus the more people we interact with?
Sure. But vibrant social connections boost our good moods and limit our negative ones, suppressing cortisol and enhancing immune function under stress.

...

In a simulation of the impact of cortisol on learning, college students volunteered to get injections that raised their cortisol levels, then to memorize a series of words and images. The result reflected the inverted U: in mild to moderate ranges, the cortisol helped the students remember what they had studied when tested on it two days later. But at extreme levels, the cortisol impaired their recall, apparently because it inhibited the crucial role of the hippocampus." This has profound implications for the kind of classroom atmosphere that fosters learning. The social environment, remember, affects the rate and fate of newly created brain cells. New cells take a month to mature and four more to fully link to other neurons; during this window the environment determines in part the final shape and function of the cell. The new cells that facilitate memory during the course of a semester will encode in their links what has been learned during that time-and the more conducive the atmosphere for learning, the better that encoding will be.

Distress kills learning. One classic finding dates back almost half a century to 1960, when Richard Alpert, then at Stanford, showed experimentally what every student already knew: high anxiety cripples test-taking ability." A more recent study of college students taking math exams found that when they were told the test was a practice, they scored 10 percent better than when they thought they were part of a team that depended on their score to win a cash prize-under social stress their working memory was hampered. Intriguingly, the deficit in this most basic cognitive ability was greatest for the smartest students.

A group of sixteen-year-olds scored in the top 5 percent on a national test of potential in math. Some were doing extremely well in their math class, but others did poorly despite their aptitude for the subject. The crucial difference was that the high-achieving students experienced focused pleasure about 40 percent of the time they were immersed in their studies-more often than they felt anxious (about 30 percent). By contrast, while studying math the low achievers experienced such optimal states only 16 percent of the time and great anxiety 55 percent.

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Review: Piece by Piece: How I Built My Life

Piece by Piece: How I Built My Life by David Aguilar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: Most Dope: The Extraordinary Life of Mac Miller

Most Dope: The Extraordinary Life of Mac Miller by Paul Cantor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Malcolm James McCormick was born on January 19, 1992. He began making music at a young age and by 15 was already releasing mixtapes. One of the first true viral superstars, his early records earned him a rabid legion of die-hard fans—as well as a few noteworthy detractors. But despite his undeniable success, Miller was plagued by struggles with substance abuse and depression, both of which fueled his raw and genre-defying music, yet ultimately led to his demise.

Through detailed reporting and interviews with dozens of Miller's confidants, Paul Cantor brings you to leafy Pittsburgh, seductive Los Angeles, and frenzied New York, where you will meet Miller's collaborators, producers, business partners, best friends, and even his roommates. Traveling deep into...

... what was going on in the crowd paled in comparison to what was happening behind the scenes. Malcolm had a real problem. He was fully addicted to lean.

...Malcolm and Donald Trump were only loosely acquainted. Malcolm had the song named after him, and Trump liked that. Trump wasn’t sitting around listening to rap music, but by slapping his name on anything that could be built or sold—from steaks to buildings to suits—he had turned narcissism into an extreme sport. He reveled in anything that seemed to make his name more valuable.

Malcolm wasn’t exactly a Trump fan. He didn’t know much about him. “There was a phase that kind of happened where I liked making songs named after people,” he said. “Like, I did one called ‘Bruce Wayne.’ The idea of the song—it’s not like it’s a song about Donald Trump. But the aura of the song is, kind of.”

“This is a time where people were making a lot of name songs,” producer SAP said. “[Future’s] ‘Tony Montana,’ all of that.”

And Malcolm just knew of Trump the way most people knew of him, as a rich guy symbolically linked to American excess, the crass commercialism and alpha male posturing that was the lifeblood of many a great hip-hop song. Trump himself had been name-dropped by countless artists, from the Beastie Boys and Prince to Rick Ross and Lil Wayne.

“Donald Trump” was a hit. But in the years that had passed since the song’s release, a different Donald Trump had emerged.

No longer a playful and fun guy, Trump had spent the better part of a year arguing that Barack Obama hadn’t been born in the United States and was thus ineligible to be president. “Show us your birth certificate,” he demanded. It was the early days of the birtherism movement. He was toying with running for president himself.

All the while, he was endearing himself to an angry and aggrieved faction of the right-wing political establishment. These were the furthest things from his mind when Malcolm made the song.

“I think [Trump’s] a dick,” he told Marc Ecko when he was given the Fisker Karma. “When he started running for president I was like, ‘Oh, fuck—this is horrible, I have a fucking song with this dude’s name and now he’s being such a douchebag.’”

To add insult to injury, Trump felt he was responsible for the song’s success. And that bothered Malcolm. He could have named it after Bill Gates; except, well, he didn’t. And Trump was . . . Trump. He was a lightning rod for controversy, and Complex smelled drama.

“We had a policy at Complex when we would promote an article on Twitter. If it was something negative, we would never @ the artist,” said Ahmed. “But when we were doing a tweet for that video, I was like, ‘We have to @ Donald Trump because that guy’s gonna respond, he’s got thin skin.’ And Donald Trump responded like fifteen minutes later.”

Trump was livid, and on January 31, 2013, he wrote in a series of tweets: “Little @macmiller, you illegally used my name for your song ‘Donald Trump’ which now has over 75 million hits! Little @macmiller, I want the money not the plaque you gave me! Little @macmiller, I’m now going to teach you a big boy lesson about lawsuits and finance. You ungrateful dog!”

It made for great headlines. But it stressed Malcolm out. He had just settled his lawsuit with Lord Finesse. Now this. “I was with him that day when he saw the tweets,” said Statik Selektah. “He was like, ‘Dude, this guy’s fuckin’ coming at me, he was just telling me he loves me.’”

And yet for all his tough talk, Trump never appeared to do anything. There are no public records of a lawsuit.

“He was just trolling,” said the song’s producer, SAP. “Just being a dickhead.”

Malcolm soon took it all in stride. “I realized, who does Donald Trump beef with?” he said. “Me and Obama. So like, hey.”

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Review: Death and Society: A Book of Readings and Sources

Death and Society: A Book of Readings and Sources by James P. Carse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Review: The Anatomy of Fascism

The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[I read the Audible.com edition.]

Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites.72 Whereas citizens in a parliamentary democracy voted to choose a few fellow citizens to serve as their representatives, fascists expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent. The propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated issues among a small group of legislators who (according to liberal ideals) were supposed to be better informed than the mass of the citizenry. Fascism could well seem to offer to the opponents of the Left efficacious new techniques for controlling, managing, and channeling the “nationalization of the masses," at a moment when the Left threatened to enlist a majority of the population around two nonnational poles: class and international pacifism.
One may also perceive the crisis of liberalism after 1918 in a second way, as a “crisis of transition," a rough passage along the journey into industrialization and modernity. It seems clear that nations that industrialized late faced more social strains than did Britain, the first to industrialize. For one thing, the pace was faster for the latecomers; for another, labor was by then much more powerfully organized. One does not have to be a Marxist to perceive the crisis of the liberal state in terms of a stressful transition to industrialization, unless one injects inevitability into the explanatory model. Marxists, until fairly recently, saw this crisis as an ineluctable stage in capitalist development, where the economic system can no longer function without reinforced discipline of the working class and/or a forceful conquest of external resources and markets. One can argue, much less sweepingly, that the latecomers simply faced higher levels of social turmoil which required new forms of control.
A third way of looking at the crisis of the liberal state envisions the same problem of late industrialization in social terms. Certain liberal states, according to this version, were unable to deal with either the “nationalization of the masses" or the “transition to industrial society" because their social structure was too heterogeneous, divided between pre-industrial groups that had not yet disappeared—artisans, great landowners, rentiers—alongside new industrial managerial and working classes. Where the pre-industrial middle class was particularly powerful, according to this reading of the crisis of the liberal state, it could block peaceful settlement of industrial issues, and could provide manpower to fascism in order to save the privileges and prestige of the old social order.73
Yet another “take" on the crisis of the liberal order focuses on stressful transitions to modernity in cultural terms. According to this reading, universal literacy, cheap mass media, and invasive alien cultures (from within as well as from without) made it harder as the twentieth century opened for the liberal intelligentsia to perpetuate the traditional intellectual and cultural order.74 Fascism offered the defenders of a cultural canon new propaganda skills along with a new shamelessness about using them.
It may not be absolutely necessary to choose only one among these various diagnoses of the difficulties faced by the liberal regimes of Europe after the end of World War I. Italy and Germany do indeed seem to fit all four. They were among the last major states in Europe to learn to live with a mass electorate: Italy in 1912, Germany only fully in 1919. Russia, another newcomer to mass politics, fell to the Left as befitted an even less developed society where even the middle class was not yet fully enfranchised. Industrially, Italy, as “the least of the Great Powers,"75 had been engaged in an energetic catching-up sprint since the 1890s. Germany, to be sure, was already a highly industrial nation in 1914, but it had been the last of the Great Powers to industrialize, after the 1860s, and then, after the defeat of 1918, desperately needed repair and reconstruction. In social structure, both Italy and Germany contained large pre-industrial sectors (though so did France and even England).76 Cultural conservatives in both countries felt intensely threatened by artistic experiment and popular culture; Weimar Germany was indeed at the very epicenter of postwar cultural experimentalism.77
One needs to interject a warning at this point against inevitability. Identifying the crisis of liberal regimes as crucial to the success of fascism suggests that some kind of environmental determinism is at work. If the setting is conducive, according to this way of thinking, one gets fascism. I prefer to leave space for national differences and for human choices in our explanation.

....

At issue was not merely a few meters of urban “turf." The Nazis sought to portray themselves as the most vigorous and effective force against the communists—and, at the same time, to portray the liberal state as incapable of preserving public security. The communists, at the same time, were showing that the Social Democrats were unequipped to deal with an incipient revolutionary situation that needed a fighting vanguard. Polarization was in the interest of both.
Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate. It carried a well-calculated set of coded messages: that communist violence was rising, that the democratic state was responding to it ineptly, and that only the fascists were tough enough to save the nation from antinational terrorists. An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation.84 It helped, of course, that many ordinary citizens never feared fascist violence against themselves, because they were reassured that it was reserved for national enemies and “terrorists" who deserved it.85
Fascists encouraged a distinction between members of the nation who merited protection and outsiders who deserved rough handling. One of the most sensational cases of Nazi violence before power was the murder of a communist laborer of Polish descent in the town of Potempa, in Silesia, by five SA men in August 1932. It became sensational when the killers’ death sentences were commuted, under Nazi pressure, to life imprisonment. Party theorist Alfred Rosenberg took the occasion to underscore the difference between “bourgeois justice," according to which “one Polish Communist has the same weighting as five Germans, front-soldiers," and National Socialist ideology, according to which “one soul does not equal another soul, one person not another." Indeed, Rosenberg went on, for National Socialism, “there is no ‘law as such.’ "86 The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism.

Like The Mass Psychology of Fascism mystic

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity.71 The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war.

...

...fascist leaders enjoyed a kind of supremacy that was not quite like leadership in other kinds of regime. The Führer and the Duce could claim legitimacy neither by election nor conquest. It rested on charisma,42 a mysterious direct communication with the Volk or razza that needs no mediation by priests or party chieftains. Their charisma resembled media-era celebrity “stardom," raised to a higher power by its say over war and death. It rested on a claim to a unique and mystical status as the incarnation of the people’s will and the bearer of the people’s destiny. A whiff of charisma is not unknown among traditional dictators, of course, and even some democratically elected leaders, such as Churchill, de Gaulle, and the two Roosevelts, had it. Stalin surely had charisma, as the public hysteria at his funeral showed. But Stalin shared his role as the bearer of historical destiny with the Communist Party, which made succession possible even if palace intrigues and murders multiplied before the successor could emerge. But fascist rule is more nakedly dependent on charisma than any other kind, which may help explain why no fascist regime has so far managed to pass power to a successor. Both Hitler and Mussolini had charisma, though Mussolini’s declining vitality in middle age and his tawdry end made most people forget the magnetism he had once exerted, even outside Italy.

Charisma helps us understand several curious features of fascist leadership. The notorious indolence of Hitler, far from making Nazism more tepid, freed his subordinates to compete in driving the regime toward ever more extreme radicalization. A charismatic leader is also immune from the surprisingly widespread grumbling against the administration that quickly arose in both Germany and Italy. At the same time, charismatic leadership is brittle. It promises to the Volk or the razza, as Adrian Lyttelton once noted, “a privileged relation with history."47 Having raised expectations so high, a fascist leader unable to deliver the promised triumphs risks losing his magic...



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Review: Vaccines and Bayonets: Fighting Smallpox in Africa amid Tribalism, Terror and the Cold War

Vaccines and Bayonets: Fighting Smallpox in Africa amid Tribalism, Terror and the Cold War by Bee Bloeser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: Trump in Exile

Trump in Exile by Meridith McGraw
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



[I read the Audible version narrated by [author:Beth Hicks|11679934].]

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