Nature, nurture, and second nature: on shallow and deep embodiment

[ismnotwasm]

Whole thing is interesting.

Following up on last week's post on sessions at the APA Central, today I want to link the book sessions on Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender and on Jesse Prinz's Beyond Human Nature. The central issue of Fine's book, and one of the key ones of Prinz's book, is the role of social experience in accounting for gender variability in behavior and in neurological function.

I think the discussions in the books demonstrate a slogan of mine, that "our nature is to be so open to our nurture that it becomes second nature."* What I mean by this is that we are "bodies politic," that is to say, due to our neuroendrocrinological plasticity, social experience will shape our bodies in accord with the subjectification practices in which we participate more or less consciously and willingly. Experience goes deep, you could say, right down to the brain's neurons and hormones. But there's a variation in that depth, I think; some depths are deeper than others.

First, let me cite my discussion of this work in Political Affect:

Nisbett and Cohen 1996 goes below and above the subject in studying its topic. They go below the subject (political physiology of the first-order body politic) to examine physiological response, demonstrating that white males of the southern United States have markedly greater outputs of cortisol and testosterone in response to insults than a control group of northern white males (44-45). They go above the subject to examine social policy forms (the political physiology and psychology of the second-order body politic, regulating material and affective flows), showing that southern states have looser gun control laws, more lenient laws regarding the use of violence in defense of self and property, and more lenient practices regarding use of violence for social control (domestic violence, corporal punishment in schools, and capital punishment) (57-73). They also offer in passing some speculation as to the role played by slavery in the South in the constructing these bodies politic in which social institutions and somatic affect are intertwined and mutually reinforcing in diachronically developing and intensifying mutual reinforcement, what complexity theorists call "dynamic coupling."

So even if the notion of political affect is underappreciated among philosophers, as I believe it to be, it is not so among other academics, for whom the notion is not strange in the least. For instance, Richerson and Boyd (2005), in discussing Nisbett and Cohen's work, don't blink an eye in writing: "An insult that has trivial effects in a Northerner sets off a cascade of physiological changes in a southern male that prepare him to harm the insulter and cope with the likelihood that the insulter is prepared to retaliate violently. This example is merely one strand in a skein of connections that enmesh culturally acquired information in other aspects of human biology" (4). Although I would prefer a complex notion of developmentally plastic and environmentally co-constituted corporeal patterns, thresholds, and triggers to that of "information," it is the term "enmesh" that is the key to the thought of political affect contained in this last sentence.

http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/03/nature-nurture-and-second-nature.html


Hmm, what does this remind me of?


Well here's a nice quote anyway

“Repartee is perfect when it effects its purpose with a double edge. It is the highest order of wit, as it indicates the coolest yet quickest exercise of genius, at a moment when the passions are roused.”

[seabeyond]

1. i love this stuff. i have to read Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender.

that is a long article. i have it up to read later, as i get thru the posts. very interesting. thanks.