Crazy Kanazawa

I mentioned a while ago that LSE evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa recently launched a blog, The Scientific Fundamentalist. I was quite excited about this - there are a dearth of evolutionary psychology blogs, so I thought it was great an up and coming researcher was taking on the blogosphere. Kanazawa, however, is worrying me a bit...

In his very first post, "If the truth offends, it’s our job to offend", he defended the laudable notion that scientists should follow the evidence wherever it may lead. He took it a bit far for my liking though, by arguing scientists should never think about the consequences of their research. Said Kanazawa, "Scientists are not responsible for the potential or actual consequences of the knowledge they create." Really? If a physicist's experiment might, say, create a black hole and destroy the earth, should she ignore this possibility? Were the Manhattan Project scientists wrong to worry about igniting the atmosphere (pdf)? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for PC-bashing, academic freedom and following the evidence where it leads, but the notion that scientists should never consider the consequences of their research is absurd. Bacon was right: knowledge is power. But it's not necessarily or always a power for good. In some cases - the extreme ones - scientists should most certainly consider this.

The above, however, is pretty minor compared to Kanazawa's latest post, "Why we are losing this war". Why is it, he asks, that WWI and WWII lasted only four years but the "war on terror" has lasted seven years, with no end in sight? (Ignore for the moment the fact that, by any reasonable definition, WWII lasted six years, not four). Why is it that the West did not quickly defeat enemies who are much poorer, less well-equipped, and comparatively technologically backward? Kanazawa answers:

It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire... We may be losing this war because our enemies have a full range of human emotions while we don’t.

This is an interesting theory, and it could be right, but it's not clear to me why Kanazawa highlights this single factor. Firstly, he doesn't seem to have enough evidence to argue this is the only or even most important variable. Where are his citations to rigorous academic research demonstrating his 'hate theory' is anything more than only vaguely inspired by evolutionary considerations, anything but feral speculation? Secondly, the war on terror is asymmetric and regular armies have always had trouble with enemies who employ terrorist and guerrilla tactics, no matter how much they hated them. Thirdly, it's unclear whether the war on terror really qualifies as a "war" in the traditional sense and can thus be settled by military means. Lastly, there is a much better argument for why powerful countries lose wars against less capable enemies: Andrew Mack (1975)'s application of the life-dinner principle to international politics. Mack argued that when powerful countries, like the United States, are defeated by weak ones, like Vietnam, it is not because of the 'insurgents' military victory on the ground', but because of "the progressive attrition of their opponents' political capability to wage war" (1975: 177). That is, relatively weak enemies win exactly because they are weak, because the conflict is asymmetric: weak enemies do not pose an existential risk to their opponents, but powerful ones do. Consequently, the war is necessarily "total" for the weak and "limited" for the powerful. (That's where the life-dinner principle comes in: why does the hare run faster than the hound? Because the hare is running for its life, but the hound merely for its dinner). There are, I admit, a number of wrinkles here (most importantly, terrorists may pose an existential risk if they acquire weapons of mass destruction and it could be that people only hate powerful enemies) but I'll skip over these and ask the concerned reader to look at Mack's paper (who addresses a number of potential concerns that might arise).

The real reason I'm worried about Kanazawa, however, only emerges in the second to last paragraph, when he writes:

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.

The above, to be sure, is somewhat ambiguous. It could be that what he's saying is that, were Coulter president, she would have hated her new-found enemies appropriately, nuked the Middle East and thus "won" the war on terror in a day. But it could be that Kanazawa doesn't think that would have been a good idea, it could be that he's simply arguing hypothetically without endorsing that course of action. And yet... it really doesn't read that way. The tone, the context, and the register all suggest to me that Kanazawa would have approved of a nuclear response to 9/11. And this, I submit, is a little extreme. Forget for the moment that killing millions of innocent people is a Bad Thing, forget that the Middle East contains a good proportion of the world's oil, forget that America's democratic ally Israel is in the Middle East, forget that the fall-out would do extensive damage to other parts of the world, forget that there are tens of thousands of Americans (and far more other foreigners) living in the area, forget that the environmental damage would be enormous, forget that the Middle East contains innumerable priceless cultural artifacts, forget that there are hundreds of millions of Muslims living outside the Middle East (India, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc.), and forget that 9/11 was planned from Afghanistan, outside the Middle East. Have you forgotten all of these factors (and any others you came up with for yourself)? Good. Now it's a good idea to nuke the entire Middle East. Now only does it make any sense whatsoever to call the hypothetical nuclear destruction of the entire Middle East a "victory" for America.

Kanazawa ends his article with, "Yes, we need a woman in the White House, but not the one who’s running." I agree this too is somewhat ambiguous, but, wow, he really seems to be saying Ann Coulter would make a better president than Hillary Clinton. Coulter, for those of you who don't know, is a batshit crazy, deeply uninformed Creationist, extreme right-wing, fundamentalist Christian. (Have a look at her website or her page on Wikiquote). I find it hard to think of someone who would be a worse president.

Unless I have been uncharitable, unless I have misrepresented his position, and unless he was joking, Kanazawa is crazy. Frankly, he gives evolutionary psychology a bad name by associating it with this kind of extremism. Evolutionary psychologists are not the heartless right-wingers they're sometimes characterized as being (Tybur, Miller & Gangestad, 2007), but Kanazawa is hardly helping to combat that erroneous perception with posts like these.

Reference

Mack, A. (1975) "Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict," World Politics, 27(2): 175-200.

Tybur, J. M., Miller, G. F., & Gangestad, S. W. (2007) "Testing the controversy: An empirical examination of adaptationists' attitudes towards politics and science," Human Nature, 18(4): 313-328.

Voting for authoritarianism

This is the last Facebook note I'm reposting here. It might not be of particularly wide interest, but I think the piece is pretty good. I wrote it at the beginning of 2007 when I got angry at one of South Africa's votes at the United Nations Security Council.

In its first major action since being elected to the United Nations Security Council, on January 12th [2007] South Africa voted with Russia and China against a draft Security Council (SC) resolution that censured Burmaⁱ over its continued human rights abuses and called for democratic reform. (Among other issues, see the draft’s full text). Obviously, since both China and Russia wield vetoes, South Africa’s vote was technically moot, but this action bodes ill for both our international reputation and for a clear-headed pro-democratic foreign policy.

Background
After gaining independence from Britain in 1948, Burma had a fairly democratic governance system until Ne Win led a military coup d’etat, became dictator and introduced a disastrous set of policies called the “Burmese Way to Socialism". Pro-democratic protests and unrest sporadically erupted from the 1970s onwards (particularly after U Thant’s funeral in 1974), culminating in the 8888 Uprising in 1988 which was brutally suppressed by the military after a second coup. Quite possibly due to pressures created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1990 free and fair legislative elections were held which the National League of Democracy (NLD) won overwhelmingly, taking 392 out of 492 seats (369 more than its closest competitor – full results here). Sadly, the military refused to accept the outcome of the election, placed the NLD’s leader – the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Aung San Suu Kyi – under house arrest and continued both with its irrational economic policies that have impoverished the country and with serious human rights abuses.

The resolution and the vote
As noted above, the draft resolution censured Burma’s junta for continued human rights abuses, called on the military to cease its attacks on ethnic minorities (including widespread rape and sexual violence), and urged the government to initiate political dialogue with the NLD.

Of the 15 members of the SC, 3 voted against (SA, Russia & China), 3 abstained (Congo-Brazzaville, Indonesia & Qatar) whilst the remaining 9 (Belgium, Ghana, Italy, Panama, Peru, Slovakia, UK, US and France) voted for. Shockingly, South Africa is the only liberal democracy that voted against the resolution (Indonesia, who abstained, is also a democracy). While Russia and China’s no votes were expected (they fear setting precedents that could be used against their own regimes or against their authoritarian allies), South Africa’s vote was utterly baffling. According to the South Africa’s representative, Dumisani Kumalo, government is extremely concerned about the situation in Burma but had three reasons for its position: adopting the resolution (1) would compromise the work of the Secretary General’s envoy to Burma, (2) dealt with issues best left to the Human Rights Council (HRC) and (3) did not fit the mandate given to the SC by the UN Charter.

Analysis
It seems clear to me all three arguments South Africa offered to justify its position are bunk or, at the very least, reasons for abstaining, not for opposing.

The first argument is, in effect, a defense of “quiet diplomacy" – something there is good reason to believe doesn’t work. It’s a basic principle of the theory of games as applied to negotiations that mere talking, by itself, rarely produces desirable outcomes if the real world incentives of the parties involved are not changed somehow. Dictatorial governments very rarely (or never) give up power voluntarily; the idea, therefore, that the UN Secretary General (or his envoy) can talk “sense into" the junta and convince them to open negotiations with the NLD is naïve at best.

The second argument, though perfectly correct in a narrowly legalistic sense, fails on two counts: firstly, the HRC has almost no power whatsoever (so it’s a talking shop, nothing more) and, secondly, its structure is inherently flawed. Though the HRC is something of an improvement over its immediate predecessor, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, a large number of countries on the council have poor human rights records themselves, including China, Pakistan, Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia and others. (See the full list). Thankfully, liberal democracies have a slight majority (~54%), but non-democracies, and countries with a strong agenda to discourage the protection human rights (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc.), nonetheless have an important say on the Council, especially with the decline of America’s soft power. In short, referring a case like this to the HRC is the international equivalent of “killing legislation in committee".

The third argument is arguably the most powerful – there is certainly something to this position – but I still think it fails to justify SA’s vote. Firstly, both the UK and the US made strong arguments that Burma’s domestic problems have important regional security consequences. Narcotics and human trafficking, millions of refugees, the radicalization of minority groups (leading to the adoption of terror tactics), and the political instability of Burma are serious regional, and perhaps even global, security concerns. Secondly, from the mid-1990s there has been a growing consensus that the world’s nations have a collective responsibility towards oppressed peoples. As Kofi Annan put it eloquently in his final speech in office:

[Collective responsibility] also includes our shared responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity – a responsibility solemnly accepted by all nations at last year's UN summit. That means that respect for national sovereignty can no longer be used as a shield by governments intent on massacring their own people, or as an excuse for the rest of us to do nothing when such heinous crimes are committed.

The idea that national sovereignty – adopted as a governing principle of international relations for purely pragmatic reasons at the Treaty of Westphalia – is some sort of grand, unbreakable moral principle is patently absurd. South Africa should not pretend governments have the right to slaughter their own population if they feel like it. Indeed, it’s somewhat ironic that the ANC, who benefited from South Africa’s isolation over the purely sovereign issue of Apartheid, would adopt a reactionary position with respect to the right to freedom of other peoples. Moreover, even ignoring the above considerations, the narrowly legalistic interpretation that the SC can only do what the Charter says it can is itself incoherent. There is an important sense in which there just is no such thing as international law (for states, there manifestly is international law for individuals) – consequently, the SC, not the Charter, is sovereign. If this is right, then there is no reason whatsoever for South Africa not to support resolutions like these – unless, of course, our foreign policy is to be dictated by old-style Resistance loyalties or if the content of the resolution is being objected to.

Note
i. Burma officially changed its name to the Union of Myanmar in 1989, but since the regime that changed the name is illegitimate, many nations don’t recognize the emendation. (Much like Mabutu Sese Seko’s attempt to rename the DRC “Zaire" was widely unrecognized). See Explanation of the names of Burma/Myanmar for further information.