Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood mogul, declared that celebrities supported Polanski ("it's not rape-rape"), because they "have more compassion" — than the unwashed, I guess. That is an affectation of the extreme Left — they wear their misbegotten compassion on their sleeve. I think that might be called pride rather than compassion. But compassion on the Left, individual freedom on the Right. That's the debate. For the Right, individual freedom somehow is conflated with corporations, which are legal entities, not individuals at all. Go figure.
Anyway, I thought about that as I listened to parts of PBS' Botany of Desire, the Michael Pollan book made into a most righteous show. It has all those elements of compassion. Compassion for the smart plants and implied derision for the duped humans who serve those plants. We are so dumb plants can jerk us around. I tried reading Pollan's book but found it tendentious. The PBS version however had probably what the book contained, but without quite so heavy a dose of personality. Lots of interesting facts, a sympathetic view of organic farming — real shocker there, as middle America has fully embraced the idea already — but without the messy practicalities of whether organic gardening can produce enough food for everyone.
The hypocrisy of partisanship is in full bloom in the PBS piece. You have an audience that would deride Creationism, as their leader, The Cackling Richard Dawkins does — all filled with fundamentalist evangelical belief in his non-belief — yet the PBS show reverentially shows Peruvian's performing ceremonies to their gods as part of their planting rituals.
Coffee table thinking is characteristic of partisan mindset, inherited from long ago New Yorker readers, who wanted to be open to all ideas, but sophisticated. Nothing wrong with compassion. It is better though when compassion is served with critical thinking and a desire to embrace the idea and not the wonderfulness of Self.
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On the other hand, there are interesting ideas in the not exactly scientific, but in hypotheses that generate an arena of philosophical / psychological inquiry. One such is the "uncanny valley" hypothesis of a roboticist who was trying to explain the revulsion people feel at "almost human" robots. People think robots are cute, but once they approach human-like appearance, people are repelled, as witness the CGI representations in Polar Express, or the baby in Toy Story. People were disturbed. The roboticist however noted that once the robots become truly human-like — hard to define, with a world of philosophical / psychological investigation requisite — those "truly lifelike" robots are accepted and elicit empathy.
It's not science, but it is something. Look at the theories about why this revulsion might occur on Wikipedia — absolutely fascinating:
A number of theories have been proposed to explain the cognitive mechanism underlying the phenomenon:▪ Mate selection. Automatic, stimulus-driven appraisals of uncanny stimuli elicit aversion by activating an evolved cognitive mechanism for the avoidance of selecting mates with low fertility, poor hormonal health, or ineffective immune systems based on visible features of the face and body that are predictive of those traits.
▪ Mortality salience. An "uncanny robot elicits an innate fear of death and culturally-supported defenses for coping with death’s inevitability.... [P]artially disassembled androids... play on subconscious fears of reduction, replacement, and annihilation: (1) A mechanism with a human facade and a mechanical interior plays on our subconscious fear that we are all just soulless machines. (2) Androids in various states of mutilation, decapitation, or disassembly are reminiscent of a battlefield after a conflict and, as such, serve as a reminder of our mortality. (3) Since most androids are copies of actual people, they are Doppelgaenger and may elicit a fear of being replaced, on the job, in a relationship, and so on. (4) The jerkiness of an android’s movements could be unsettling because it elicits a fear of losing bodily control."
▪ Pathogen avoidance. Uncanny stimuli may activate a cognitive mechanism that originally evolved to motivate the avoidance of potential sources of pathogens by eliciting a disgust response. “The more human an organism looks, the stronger the aversion to its defects, because (1) defects indicate disease, (2) more human-looking organisms are more closely related to human beings genetically, and (3) the probability of contracting disease-causing bacteria, viruses, and other parasites increases with genetic similarity.” Thus, the visual anomalies of android robots and animated human characters have the same effect as those of corpses and visibly diseased individuals: the elicitation of alarm and revulsion.
▪ Sorites paradoxes. Stimuli with human and nonhuman traits undermine our sense of human identity by linking qualitatively different categories, human and nonhuman, by a quantitative metric, degree of human likeness.
▪ Violation of human norms. The uncanny valley may "be symptomatic of entities that elicit a model of a human other but do not measure up to it." If an entity looks sufficiently nonhuman, its human characteristics will be noticeable, generating empathy. However, if the entity looks almost human, it will elicit our model of a human other and its detailed normative expectations. The nonhuman characteristics will be noticeable, giving the human viewer a sense of strangeness. In other words, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer being judged by the standards of a robot doing a passable job at pretending to be human, but is instead being judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person.
▪ Western constructions of human identity. The existence of artificial but humanlike entities is a threat to human identity as socially constructed in the West and the Middle East but not in the Far East, partly because Western philosophy and religions (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) emphasize human uniqueness as compared to Eastern philosophies and religions (e.g., Buddhism, neo-Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, Japanese adaptation of biological materialism). An example can be found in the theoretical framework of the western psychologist Irvin Yalom. Yalom explains that humans construct psychological defenses in order to avoid existential anxiety stemming from death. One of these defenses is "specialness", the irrational belief that aging and death as central premises of life apply to all others but oneself. The experience of the very humanlike "living" robot can be so rich and compelling that it challenges humans' notions of "specialness" and existential defenses, eliciting existential anxiety.
So on Halloween, you will now know why Zombie's are repellant and Werewolves aren't.
