Monthly Archive for October, 2010

From 3 Quarks Daily,

In Philip Ball’s Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, he articulates something rather profound: statistics destroys superstition. The idea, once expressed, is simple but does not stem its profundity. Incidents in small numbers sometimes become ‘miraculous’ only because they appear unique, within a context that fuels such thinking. Ball’s own example is Uri Geller: in the 1970’s, the self-proclaimed psychic stated he would stop the watches of several viewers. He, perhaps, twisted his face and furrowed his brow and all over America watches stopped. America, no doubt, turned into an exclamation mark of incredulity. What takes the incident out of the sphere of the miraculous, however, is the consideration of statistics: With so many millions of people watching, what was the likelihood of at least some people’s watches stopping anyway? What about all those watches that did not stop?

Our psychological make-up seeks a chain in disparate events. Our mind is a bridge-builder across chasms of unrelated incidents; a credulity stone-hopper, crouching at each juncture awaiting the next link in a chain of causality. To paraphrase David Hume, we tend to see armies in the clouds, faces in trees, ghosts in shadows, and god in pizza-slices.

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From Deirdre N. McCloskey, Times Higher Education

The Marxists, of course, once passionately held the idea that ideas are rubbish. As it was put in 1848 by a pair of historical materialists: “Man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life. What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed?”

It has been a long time, though, since even the Marxists depended on such a materialist postulate. Stuart Hall in cultural studies denies the materialism of a Louis Althusser. It’s an old story. While in prison in Italy during the 1930s, Antonio Gramsci wrote that “the claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism”. Marxism, he contended, “is itself a superstructure…the terrain on which determinate social groups (for example, the proletariat; for another, the bourgeoisie) become conscious of their own social being”. The bourgeoisie survived, he said, because its intellectuals had done their job and made capitalism seem natural. Gramsci’s very career, and especially the career of his writings after his death, illustrates the importance of mere non-material ideas.

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