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Ginger and Richard Rhodes

the breakfast table
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from: Richard Rhodes

Call Me "Veritist"

Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2001, at 2:45 PM ET

Cinnamon,

I notice we both spent our lunchtime catching up on magazines. All those subscriptions you mention pile up when we're traveling. I was reading Nature (26 April 2001--I'm weeks behind). Great stuff. Russia facing a potato famine because of potato blight. A review of a collection of essays, The Origins of Creativity, with contributions from Gunther Stent, Howard Gardner, Francoise Gilot on her life with Picasso, Benoit Mandelbrot. The reviewer misses an essay on creativity ("or the lack of it," he adds) in computers and thinks Darwinian evolution should have been discussed since it's "the most creative process we know" even though it's "lacking in emotion." Is that scientist humor? Is evolution creative in the sense that the word applies to humans? God knows it has produced some extraordinary forms, including featherless bipeds that send e-mail.

I also liked a brief essay, titled "Scientist's Birthright,"on how scientists came to be called that. Up to 1843 they were "friends of science," "cultivators of science," etc.-- in French savans, in German Natur-forscher ("nature-poker," typical German formation!). Then the British friend of science, William Whewell, picked up on a suggestion of "some ingenious gentleman that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist." None of the cultivators of science liked the idea, but here we are.

And: Three separate analyses of oral polio vaccine used in Africa in the late 1950s exonerated the Wistar Institute of having inadvertently started the HIV/AIDS epidemic, contrary to Edward Hooper's book, The River. Honeybees sleep except for those that have to nurse the new larvae; they have mechanisms to keep them going 24/seven. (Something medical interns could use? Or maybe clinical psychology graduate students?) And a phrase I like: "A phenomenological description of space-time foam." Might make a title for a play?

Thanks to the Frayer (Frayist? Fraynian?) who noticed my faun/fawn bollix. Just shows I should take my own advice about looking it up. I've never quite grasped the difference. I went to the O.E.D. and learned it: Faun is the mythological species, fawn the mammalian. Fawns eat your flowers, fauns seduce your daughters.

Speaking of words, our bring/take discussion will be obscure. Moving to the East from the Midwest 10 years ago, our ears clearly heard "Bring that to him" as dissonant; where we came from, we said, "Take that to him." Ten years later, I can't hear the difference anymore. Goes with all the other quaint New England words: cellar for basement, tag sale for garage sale, stone for rock. But "bring" is moving into standard English because people hear it on television. I'm not sure that's progress, so I thought I'd bring/take it up.

This is a good place to ride my "nonfiction" hobbyhorse: hate that word, a derivative negative invented by a librarian early in the 20th century to describe a category of narrative prose with a much longer and more noble tradition than fiction. So I've invented a dignified name for the kind of writing I do that I've been trying to get the, what else, O.E.D. to recognize as a new word: verity. I write verity; therefore I'm a veritist ("by analogy with artist" and "scientist"). It has the added virtue, since it means "truth," of subtly implying that the other guys write lies, which of course they do ("fiction" derives from "feign"). If people start using "verity" in place of "nonfiction" (yuck), it will catch on. Fraymanians take notice.

All that from one magazine on one lunch hour. Just keeping up.

You have to go see clients soon, no? I'll miss you. As the famous greeting card said, "It's been hard since you've been gone."

ox, ;))
Rhodeman

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Richard Rhodes

Call Me "Veritist"

Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2001, at 2:45 PM ET
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Ginger Rhodes is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology who studies violence. Richard Rhodes is the author of 19 books, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Why They Kill.
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: This week's "Breakfast Table"-ers did a terrific job of summarizing the Fray entries, taking up their points and answering them in the column--Fray industry workers could have taken the week off. As new star Mangar put it: "Richard Rhodes was very gracious in his willingness to directly address comments from the Fray. It's a brave thing to do, and I wish more authors had the guts. Thanks to Richard, and I'll try to reply with that respect in mind." Though Mr Rhodes' claim that Fraymanians "blow off while hiding behind the anonymity of your nicknames" did not go down well. Several posters gently and politely defended their right to Fraynames, for example here.

An interesting discussion on Mr Rhodes theories, and of his comments on The Fray (Fraymers didn't like the bit about "can't read very well" either), started here, with the splendid title "An attempted ex post facto clarity?"--if there's one thing Fraysters are going to catch you out on, it is that. Some of the Fray's finest pitched in. A brave and honest (and not anonymous) post about brutalization in schools came from Roy Jaruk, here.

Violence was the overwhelming topic of choice, but there are a few posts on verity, fawns ("fauns are those things that have afternoons, unless your woods are much more interesting than mine"), lekking, and other matters. Use the Fray Editor's Picks button, or just look for the checkmarks and stars. And Claude Scales took up the question of what we should call Fraypersons here.]


What sociologists and psychologists try to do is find a reason for a behavior or pattern of behavior. They don't use these reasons as "excuses" to pardon criminals, just as a way to understand the root of criminal action. These reasons have been badly skewed in courts as they have become excuses for heinous crimes--true to history, people have used science irresponsibly for ridiculous and damaging profit. (By the way I am a biologist and no, this has nothing to do with cloning). So take it to heart and realize behavioral scientists are simply trying to find explanation for such actions to end this pattern in the future.

--Mel

(To reply, click here.)


 You don't have to delve very deeply into the human psyche to find out why some people are violent. It's not some strange perversion or disease that needs an explanation from genetics or childhood trauma or sociological circumstance. Put quite simply, it works. It's an efficient and effective way of acquiring immediate power over people, and of gaining their enduring fear, if not their respect. Someone who stands to gain more than he loses from using violence is going to be quite tempted to use it. So in order to combat violence, we need have an ongoing legal, social, and moral campaign against it, to make sure most people who commit violent acts lose more (in terms of money, respect, and social approval) than they gain.

--Jane Grey

(To reply, click here.)


My personal belief (and so it is only opinion based on observation) is that we are not teaching children (males in particular) how to channel aggressiveness positively or when certain levels of violence are a reasonable response (and which are not). We are simply condemning aggressiveness and violence but the children in learning that things are not that simple are making up their own rules.

--Michael Murray

(To reply, click here.)


 [People] talk about "violence" as if it were a simple and agreed upon quality, like the flavor vanilla, and could be discussed as a single unified thing. In point of fact, though, soldiers jumping out of trenches into machine-gun fire, cold-blooded poisoners, domestic batterers, schoolyard bullies, and generals who order airstrikes, although they are all engaging in "violence" of one sort or another, have nothing else in common, and it's disingenuous (at best) to discuss them as if their actions were interchangeable.

The "problem of violence" is an illusion. It is not tuberculosis. It is not vanilla. And it does not have a "cure".

--Thrasymachus

(To reply, click here.)

 (5/17)


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