Dr Reiss said women seemed to analyse the cartoons more before rating them funny, because they were not necessarily expecting them to be as rewarding as men.

"Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punchline of the cartoon," said Dr Reiss."So when they got to the joke's punchline, they were more pleased about it." The funnier the cartoon, the more women's reward centres were activated.

This was not the case for men, who seemed to expect the cartoons to be funny from the start.

Reiss's causal hypothesis seems clear enough: women's lower expectation of reward explains both why they analyse the joke more than men do (thus the greater prefrontal activity) and why they experience more of a pleasant surprise at the punchline (thus the greater mesolimbic activity). But notice what Reiss then goes on to conclude:

Dr Reiss said this had implications for the treatment of depression in women -- if their reward centres are more sensitive to emotional stimuli, it may help explain why depression strikes twice as many women as men.

Clearly Reiss is assuming that these differences in brain activity between men and women are the factors that explain the psychological and behavioural differences. If women have lower expectations of reward, or get depressed more easily than men do, it's just because the reward centers of their brains are"more sensitive" than men's -- a fact about their biology, not about their circumstances.

Yet consider how odd it would be for differing expectations of reward to be hardwired by our biology. We identify mental states -- beliefs, desires, feelings, expectations -- largely in terms of the role they play in our lives and activities. Part (only part -- I'm not advocating functionalism) of what it means for something to be a"desire to eat X," for example, is that it leads to pursuit of X, that together with the belief that Y is a means to getting X it generates a desire for Y, that it decreases in response to the information that X is poisonous, and so forth. A mental state that didn't interact with other mental states and with overt behaviour in something like these ways simply wouldn't count as a desire to eat X. Likewise then, an"expectation" that was invariant across changing experiences, that was immune to this sort of feedback, not strengthening with positive evidence or weakening with negative, would hardly count as an"expectation" at all; it would be a mere tropism. And this places a limit on the sorts of explanations of human behaviour we can regard as intelligible while still applying psychological concepts to it.

Suppose it's true that women enjoy the punchlines of jokes more than men do. (I have no idea whether that's true, but I'm happy to grant it for the sake of argument.) And suppose that Reiss's proposed explanation is correct -- that it's because women have less expectation of reward. (I likewise have no idea whether that's the correct explanation, but hey, I'll play along.) Why on earth should we infer that it's differences between men's and women's brains, rather than differences in their social circumstances, that explain these results? Might not women's lower expectation of reward owe something to the fact that in our society women receive fewer rewards than men -- that they bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid labour such as housework, that they earn less than men in the job market, that they are less likely to be credited for their accomplishments, that they are socialised to be nurturing and other-directed, etc.?

Now if women and men do have differing expectations of reward when they read cartoons, it's hardly surprising that this difference is correlated with a difference in brain activity; we are embodied beings, after all. But it would be a mistake to infer that the difference must therefore be innate rather than acquired; surely acquired psychological characteristics have neurophysiological correlates just as much as innate ones do. (The alternative would be rather weird, no?)

Likewise, if women are more depression-prone than men, no doubt this psychological fact is correlated with some neurophysiological fact about women's brains. I think it would be rather odd, though, to talk about this neurophysiological fact as the cause of the psychological fact; rather it just is the physical side of the psychological fact, the matter in which the form of depression-proneness is realised. At any rate, the correlation should not be taken as a license to disregard the possible (probable, surely) sociological causes of women's greater liability to depression. If this liability corresponds to greater mesolimbic sensitivity, that hardly settles the question of whether greater mesolimbic sensitivity itself has sociological causes. I worry that these studies'"implications for the treatment of depression in women" will be interpreted, mistakenly, as justifying a still greater emphasis on medicative rather than agentive approaches to therapy.

Neurophysiological determinism is bad philosophy -- and it's also bad politics. Placing the cause of women's depression-proneness and lower expectation of reward in their neurophysiology rather than in their social circumstances provides a convenient excuse for neglecting or denying the need for any change in those circumstances. This is how power structures reinforce themselves -- by generating their own ideological rationalisations.

I'm not making the silly charge that Dr. Reiss and the other scientists who produced this study are evil sexists deliberately plotting to perpetuate women's subjection. What I am saying is that the conceptual tools we use to analyse the societies in which we live are also the products of those societies and will often share their shortcomings. Facts that challenge the dominant paradigm tend to become invisible, not because anybody is actively covering them up (though of course that sometimes happens) but because the dominant paradigm determines what is salient.

This article from Business Week, in my view, nails it:

It's becoming quite clear how unsustainable a system is that actually fosters sky-high youth unemployment -- and not just in France Could the riots in France spell the beginning of the end of the European economic model? ....

Yet the outbursts were supercharged by an economic system that not only tolerates but actually fosters sky-high youth unemployment. In September, an incredible 21.7% of 15- to 24-year-olds in France were unemployed, compared to only 11% in the U.S. and 12.6% in Britain. France isn't alone -- other European countries, such as Belgium, Spain, Greece, Italy, and Finland -- also have persistent youth unemployment rates above 20%. Such sky-high levels of idle youth are a by-product of the welfare-state mentality that's still pervasive across much of Europe. The idea is that government's main role is to provide a safety net for the population, in terms of jobless and health benefits. Generating growth and creating jobs takes a distinctly lower priority, resulting in high unemployment, especially among the young.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike. Our L and P colleague Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty and Andy Morriss at St. Maximos' Hut each have a similar analysis of the riots.

"He literally said that," White recalled, adding that the Humvee came to a halt only after it rammed into a store....

The explosion drilled a hole the size of a softball in the driver's door, he said. The red-hot shrapnel severed the driver's legs while the Humvee was still moving.

"He probably would have bled out except the shaped charge made [the metal] so hot it actually cauterized his legs as it cut his legs off," White said.

One minor grisly detail from a recent Washington Post story on IEDs and 2,000 gone.

The Humvee driver in that case survived as an unintended byproduct of insurgent innovation with IEDs. Many others survive because of innovations in battlefield medicine. As this article from the New England Journal of Medicine makes clear, we're getting better at saving soldiers' lives. In WWII, 30 percent of those injured in combat died. In Vietnam--and even in the Gulf War--it was 24 percent. Now it's 10 percent. That is unquestionably a positive development. But it also means that a great many of those we save are horribly maimed.

One airman with devastating injuries from a mortar attack outside Balad on September 11, 2004, was on an operating table at Walter Reed just 36 hours later. In extremis from bilateral thigh injuries, abdominal wounds, shrapnel in the right hand, and facial injuries, he was taken from the field to the nearby 31st CSH in Balad. Bleeding was controlled, volume resuscitation begun, a guillotine amputation at the thigh performed. He underwent a laparotomy with diverting colostomy. His abdomen was left open, with a clear plastic bag as covering. He was then taken to Landstuhl by an Air Force Critical Care Transport team. When he arrived in Germany, Army surgeons determined that he would require more than 30 days' recovery, if he made it at all. Therefore, although resuscitation was continued and a further washout performed, he was sent on to Walter Reed. There, after weeks in intensive care and multiple operations, he did survive. This is itself remarkable. Injuries like his were unsurvivable in previous wars. The cost, however, can be high. The airman lost one leg above the knee, the other in a hip disarticulation, his right hand, and part of his face. How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question....

Still, for many new problems, the answers remain unclear. Early in the war, for example, Kevlar vests proved dramatically effective in preventing torso injuries. Surgeons, however, now find that IEDs are causing blast injuries that extend upward under the armor and inward through axillary vents. Blast injuries are also producing an unprecedented burden of what orthopedists term"mangled extremities" — limbs with severe soft-tissue, bone, and often vascular injuries. These can be devastating, potentially mortal injuries, and whether to amputate is one of the most difficult decisions in orthopedic surgery. Military surgeons have relied on civilian trauma criteria to guide their choices, but those criteria have not proved reliable in this war. Possibly because the limb injuries are more extreme or more often combined with injuries to other organs, attempts to salvage limbs following the criteria have frequently failed, with life-threatening blood loss, ischemia, and sepsis.

Every other Thursday, surgeons at Walter Reed hold War Rounds by telephone conference with surgeons in Baghdad to review the American casualties received in Washington during the previous two weeks. The case list from October 21 provides a picture of the extent of the injuries. There was one gunshot wound, one antitank-mine injury, one grenade injury, three rocket-propelled–grenade injuries, four mortar injuries, eight IED injuries, and seven patients with no cause of injury noted. The least seriously wounded of these patients was a 19-year-old who had sustained soft-tissue injuries to the face and neck from a mine and required an exploration of the left side of the neck. Other cases involved a partial hand amputation; a hip disarticulation on the right, through-knee amputation on the left, and open pelvic débridement; a left nephrectomy and colostomy; an axillary artery and vein reconstruction; and a splenectomy, with repair of a degloving scalp laceration and through-and-through tongue laceration. None of the soldiers were more than 25 years of age.

2. These large enterprises will frequently utilize government to secure and strengthen their position by both handicapping potential rivals, as described in Long's article, and in opening up new areas for their domination through manipulation of property rights (as we see today with intellectual property rights).

3. Along with competition within the market order, the chief checks to their strength will be social institutions and forces which themselves are neither purely market not purely government in nature. They are usually considered to be part of civil society - that part of society where voluntary cooperation occurs around values more complex than simply making money.

4. Civil society has two avenues for seeking to influence society as a whole: voluntary relations outside government and democracy. Here I want to elaborate a bit.

Probably 90% of my readers equate democracy with the state. But the state is a hierarchy of domination and a democracy is not. My book Persuasion, Power and Polity (2000) showed why a majoritarian model of democracy made no sense empirically or logically, whereas consensual models did. Once we clear away the confusions over terminology promulgated by right and left alike, Madison is the main thinker of consensual democratic theory. Democracy in Madison's sense is a spontaneous order as Hayek defined the term: an order arising from abstract procedural rules applying equally to all and relying on agreement to function.

Democracies are procedures whereby people within a society seek to make basic value choices for society as a whole that either need to be made on that scale, or that many believe would be made better of made on that scale. As such, a democracy is akin to a community cooperative - as I developed in some detail in PPP.

Like corporations in the market order, the executive branch and congress are rooted within the democratic process, come to power within it, and then often seek to subordinate it to the perpetuation of their own power and wealth. The situations are exactly analogous. In fact, I suggest that it is a waste of time to argue whether big business or politicians are to blame. Both are. They are generally symbiotes.

Recent events, as well as past wars, illustrate that Randolph Bourne was right in saying war is the health of the state - and conversely, war is a serious illness in a democracy. War is perhaps occasionally necessary for self-defense, but always creates a situation where government can try and subordinate democratic procedures to the dictates of rule and domination. This is why the ideological treason of so many classical liberals over George Bush and the Republican Right is so very serious. They gave enormous aid and comfort to the enemy. Permanent war is the death of democracy for it turns a free society into an organization.

Another way to put this general point: markets subordinate economic organizations to powers and processes they do not control. Democracy subordinates political organizations to powers and processes they do not control. Both are forced to be responsive - at the risk of losing their positions. So both are hostile to these processes and seek to insulate themselves from threat.

5. As spontaneous orders democracies and markets are oriented towards different values, but both are important and necessarily exist in tension with one another because we as human beings hold to both broad sets of values and they are in some tension in our own minds: concern with our selves as discrete individuals and concern with ourselves as members of communities.

One causualty of economistic classical liberalism is to obscure the distinction between private interest groups and public interest groups. The difference is vital - especially with respect to the issue of facsism. Private need not mean bad, public need nbot mean good. The terms refer to the kinds of values pursued: monetary or nonmonetary.

6. The alliance of classical liberals with economistic interpretations of society has not only pulled the teeth of their critique of power as it really manifests, it has set them at odds with important elements of civil society that are seeking to limit the power and privilege of the corporate/political oligarchy. While a book could be written filled with examples of this, I will stick to just one. Libertarians on balance have an irrational hatred of environmentalists. Reason magazine is an excellent example.

Yet consider the following: Why do environmentalists seek to influence government so much? To explore just one instance: because government owns national forests and parks where many natural values still remain. Further, government has passed laws saying that you cannot bid on a forest cut if you do not intend in fact to cut the trees. Attempts at voluntary buying out of forest cuts and then not cutting are illegal. Yet the companies given special privileges to cut forests portray themselves as the paragons of capitalism and the environmentalists as advocates of the state - and nearly all libertarians say “right on!” Too many libertarians and classical liberals then support efforts by this privileged elite to eliminate legal avenues whereby environmentalists can appeal decisions giving the woods over to the timber companies - in the name of “deregulation.” Others suggest simply selling the forests to the corporations, which is not much better.

There are civil society institutions that could offer a way to remove forests from the not so tender mercies of Congress and the timber companies and still provide wood to society - but I have found that free market think tanks and libertarians are usually not interested. They want to privatize (i.e. corporatize) the forests. Small wonder so many non-libertarians think of them as lap dogs to the privileged. They are.

7. The result is that IN PRACTICE libertarian and classical liberal thinkers today are more often allies of fascism than effective opponents of it. Long's important piece offers a way to begin getting clear of this weakness.

After last week's pronouncements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Israel should be"wiped off the map," there's been a lot of saber rattling about Iran. (I've written on the subject of Iran a number of times over the past few years; see here, here, and here, for example).

There is nothing shocking or unexpected about Ahmadinejad's rhetoric. The Iranian theocrats have been talking like that for years. Their overthrow of the US-backed Shah was a clarion call for fundamentalists across the Islamic world to mobilize against both Israel and the United States. Many others in the Islamic world have uttered the same view, including those who reside in countries that are, ostensibly, current US allies.

The fact is, of course, that US actions in Iraq have emboldened the Iranian regime significantly; some are even suggesting that the US was the"useful idiot" for Iranian foreign policy goals to undermine a hostile Baathist regime in Iraq, substituting a friendlier Shiite majoritarian theocracy in its place. With the antagonistic Taliban held at bay in Afghanistan on its eastern flank, and Hussein gone on the western side, Iran has emerged as a central geopolitical power in the Middle East—and was made so in significant part as the direct result of actions taken by the United States, purportedly in our own defense.

But it is a state that is in a deepening cultural crisis, a crisis that will have profound political ramifications over time.

Today, I've read an interesting NY Times essay about"Our Allies in Iran." It's the kind of title that is meant to surprise. The writer, Afshin Molavi, makes some very important points. Molavi states:

The new president's confrontational tone threatens to deepen the isolation of Iran's democrats, pushing them further behind his long shadow. Western powers have a dual challenge: to find a way to engage this population even as they struggle to address the new president's inflammatory rhetoric. By the time Mr. Ahmadinejad was elected in June, a sustained assault by hard-liners had left Iranian democrats disoriented and leaderless, their dissidents jailed, newspapers closed and reformist political figures popularly discredited. But democratic aspirations should not be written off as a passing fad that died with the failure of the reform movement and the replacement of a reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, with a hard-liner, Mr. Ahmadinejad. The historic roots of reform run deep in Iran, and support for democratic change remains widespread.

Iran's modern middle class, which is increasingly urbanized, wired and globally connected, provides particularly fertile soil for these aspirations. The Stanford University scholar Abbas Milani has described Iran's middle class as a"Trojan horse within the Islamic republic, supporting liberal values, democratic tolerance and civic responsibility." And so long as that class grows, so too will the pressure for democratic change.

Molavi warns, however, that war against Iran could have an adverse effect on that country's"democracy-minded middle class," providing"additional pretexts for the regime to frighten its people and crack down on dissent." Anything that undermines Iranian contact"with the foreign investors, educators, tourists and businessmen who link them to the outside world," says Molavi, undermines the movement toward political and cultural reform. That movement requires a strong private sector and a growing civil society in Iran, which can be encouraged by an extension of the global market. Such an extension would nourish"a strong and stable middle class" and the"inevitable winds of change" so crucial to peace and prosperity in the region.

It is ironic that those who speak glowingly about the need for"democratization" in Iraq as a key to Mideast peace are the same people who now speak about the need for military action in Iran, which would most assuredly sabotage the trends toward democratization in that country.

The saber-rattlers tell us that they are worried about the long-run problem of a"nuclear" Iran. Fair enough. But they don't seem to worry about the long-run consequences of military intervention in Iran, given the current context in Iraq, a context that the saber-rattlers themselves did much to create. As Arthur Silber writes here:

We now have a voluminous record, in news accounts, in government documents and in other forms, to prove beyond any doubt that the Bush administration gave almost no attention to the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. No one had any serious question about our taking down the Saddam Hussein regime, except about how long it might take and the details. Despite that certainty, we know that the Bush administration did not listen to many of its own experts and planners about what should be done once Saddam was gone. To put the point simply, the Bush administration never seriously addressed the multitude of inordinately complex issues encompassed in the question: What then?

This much is true, and this much we can agree with, as Arthur puts it:"Iran is run by viciously destructive and dangerous leaders." But as people clamor for military action against Iran, they are not asking and answering the crucial question:"What then?"

I often wonder, for example, how the Shiites in Iraq, with whom the US has cast its political lot, would deal with a US military strike against Iran. How long would it take for a strike against Iran to destabilize the situation with the US's Shiite-Iraqi allies? The Sunni insurgency against the Shiites in Iraq has been awful; I can't even begin to think of the conditions that might arise should a Shiite insurgency unfold against the US—a Shiite insurgency aided and abetted by its own ideological brethren in Tehran.

And what then? In addition to the internal combustion of Iraq, might there not be counterattacks from other Arab governments? Might not the Mideast be thrown into further chaos? And what if additional US troops are needed to"finish the job" started by planes and missiles? Where are these troops coming from? How long before military conscription is reinstituted?

As Richard Cohen tells us today in the New York Daily News, in the Middle East,"bad could get worse."

The central problem in the Middle East is not strategic. The central problem is not the spread of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The central problem is the spread of ideological and cultural weapons of mass destruction. And these weapons have been manufactured at a maddening pace for generations by countries like Saudi Arabia, a US"ally." As Jason Pappas reminds us (see here and here), the Saudis have been funding the worldwide proliferation of the very jihadist ideology that targets Western values and institutions.

But the odds are very slim that there will be any fundamental change in the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. That's because the House of Sa'ud remains a key player in US global political economy (see here). The dismantling of that neocorporatist politico-economic system is not likely to happen anytime soon.

And yet, despite its role in the proliferation of jihadist fanaticism, the collapse of the House of Sa'ud at this point could be catastrophic: it would most likely lead to the transference of power into the hands of the very worst jihadists, those who have been a by-product of Saudi education.

Yes, it's one gigantic mess of internal contradictions at work. But, currently, I have no reason to believe that a military attack upon Iran would resolve these contradictions, without engendering a host of newer and far more lethal ones.

Comments welcome. Cross-posted to Notablog.

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.
I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...
I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...
I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.
I believe in the reality of progress.
I - But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.