Hotheads
Penguin Books has turned 70 years old. To mark the milestone, Penguin Books has released a col- lection of 70 short paperbacks.
When Robert Oppenheimer successfully tested the atomic bomb, his infamous first utterance was a translation of an ancient Sanskrit verse. ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ Humanity now had a self-destructing technology. Nuclear war would destroy the planet. Imagine…
It is 1962, and you are the president of the United States… the Soviet Union has dropped an atomic bomb on New York… you can retaliate… the nation’s policy is to retaliate… the policy was designed to deter attackers; if you don’t follow through, the deterrent would have been a sham… on the other hand … the damage has been done… you will go down in history as one of the worst mass murderers of all time… retaliation would be sheer spite... but then it is precisely this line of thinking that emboldened the Soviets to attack. (Pinker, 2005).
Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, explains a well-known solution to this problem: to hand decision-making to a computer and tell the world about the automatic retaliating architecture. A ‘doomsday machine’ would not be reprogrammable. It would retaliate if the USA was attacked, the paradox being that safety comes from the credible threat that a counter-attack is inevitable.
Pinker analyses the nature of conflict. Common sense indicates that having options is a good idea. Common sense is wrong. Options can harm you. Pinker describes other examples that run counter to common sense. Communication ability can be a liability. If you want to meet a friend at 6.30pm near the clock tower, call them from a payphone: declare your intentions and hang up.
Other paradoxes are quirky. Being rational is not necessarily an asset. If someone knocks on your door requesting £10, otherwise threatening suicide, you will probably ignore the request. If that same someone has bloodshot eyes, the probabilities change. Terrorists, kidnappers, and dictators have an interest in displaying mental imbalance.
Even information can be a handicap. The driver of a security van is better off not knowing the security code of the vaults, provided that there is also a message on the van saying, ‘Driver does not know the security code’.
However, some behaviour carried out for purpose of credibility can prove very costly. Pinker describes the case of the Falklands War. There was no significant British empire to defend by the 1980s. There was no significant strategic or economic importance to fight for the Falklands. Yet Britain went to war with Argentina to reclaim the Falklands. Some calculations suggest that, with the cost involved, each Falkland islander could have been given a lifetime pension and a handsome property.
Pinker’s essays also discuss the more pleasant things in life. He discusses altruism. Pinker notes that an animal acting in the interest of the group is actually a counter-Darwinian explanation of survival. Instead, genes spread, by wiring animal brains to love their kin and try to help them survive. This is the ‘selfish gene’ theory. He writes about happiness. You feel happier when you are paid more, but less happy when you learn of the extra pay rise of your colleagues. Moreover, despite decades of economic growth in developed nations, reported happiness has remained broadly the same. Pinker discusses love. Dating is a marketplace, and the marriage contract is beneficial to both parties in the long run.
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