Physical versus Psychological Harm

The concept of harm plays a central role in moral and political theorizing.  We generally tend to believe that every person has the right to be free from harm inflicted by other.  But exactly counts as harm?  This is a tough concept to analyze.  I'm not going to pretend to give anything close to a complete analysis here.  I just want to think about it a little bit and maybe make a few sketches.

Okay, so let's think of life as dynamic.  Either things are moving forward, or things move in circles.  Life moves forward by growing, learning, adapting, achieving goals, etc.  Things move in circles via some kind of maintenance, like the nitrogen cycle, homeostasis, etc.  The idea is that there is some kind of action or movement, and the right kinds of movement are considered good.

So with that metaphor, we might consider harm to be either an impediment to this kind of movement, or movement in the wrong direction.  For example, oxygen deprivation is considered harmful because it impedes the respiratory and circulatory process in the body.  Degenerative diseases are harmful because it reverses the growth process.

So if we have the notion of harm as either impediment or regression, then we can make a further distinction.  For persons, harm can be either physical or psychological.  This distinction is pretty self-explanatory.  Physical harm is harm done to the body.  Psychological harm is harm done to the mind.

In most societies, we try to legislate against harm.  For instance, aggravated assault is a kind of physical harm, and it is illegal in most societies.  In general, we think that harm is morally bad.

What I want to note here is that psychological harm is worse than physical harm.  In fact it seems true that a lot of physical harm is bad only because it also inflicts psychological harm.  This seems particularly true when it comes to harm inflicted by another person.  For instance, two guys fighting in a boxing ring inflict harm on each other.  But we don't think that this kind of physical harm is morally bad.  However, two guys fighting in a parking lot is considered bad.  Why?  Because we think that there is also some psychological harm involved.  In this case it the exertion of dominance by one over the other.

So it seems that much physical harm, at least the physical harm inflicted by persons, reduces to psychological harm.  If we want to legislate against harm, then we should be legislating against psychological harm.  But note that there is not much in terms of laws against pure psychological harm, i.e. psychological harm without physical harm.  For instance, there are laws against child abuse, but this is child abuse primarily understood as physical abuse.  I'm not aware of very many cases where a child was taken from his/her parents solely because of what the parents said to the child, even though such words can deal irreparable psychological harm to the child.  Likewise, there are no criminal laws against adultery.  Adultery is another example of psychological harm that is not physical harm.

Why is this?  Well the easiest and most obvious answer is that it is difficult to enforce laws against pure psychological harm, especially when such harm is inflicted through speech.  If a child accuses her parents of psychological harm through emotionally damaging criticism, what evidences can she provide?

To further corroborate this point, we already do have some laws against pure psychological harm.  These are laws related to libel and slander.  More recently, states have passed laws against bullying and cyber-bullying in particular.  Libel, slander, and cyber-bullying are all instances of pure psychological harm.  These laws are considered enforceable because evidence can be mustered for this kind of harm.  This is the interesting about technology and psychological harm.  As technology advances more and more communication becomes of the type that can be preserved and documented.  We communicate via text, video chat, social media, email, etc.  All of these can be recorded and saved.  Thus evidence of psychological harm can be preserved, and laws prohibiting forms of psychological harm can be enforced.

So it'll be interesting to see how technology affects our legislation regarding psychological harm.  What will also be interesting to see is how this interacts with our concern for privacy.  Being able to access these forms of communication is often seen as an invasion of privacy, but it also enables society to control instances of psychological harm.

Travel and technology

Traveling, i.e. going to from point A to point B, was initially done out of the need to find food.  You traveled to follow herds of buffalo, or to find where the edible plants are in season.  I'm guessing that travel was done initially by foot.  Then come animal domestication, followed by mechanical forms of travel.

Technological advances in travel allow for more people to travel greater distances in shorter periods of time.  What sort of cultural consequences are there to technological advances in travel?

As societies became agrarian, groups traveled in order to look for arable land.  It was inevitable that as more people were able come into contact with other groups.  This led to such consequences as trade, conflict, cooperation, etc.

Technological advances in travel are accompanied by at least two cultural consequences.

First, travelers are able to physically interact with more people.  The further you can go in a shorter period of time, the more opportunities you will have to interact with more people.

Second, technological advances in travel allow individuals to travel for leisure, rather than out of necessity.  This comes in at least two forms.  First, the mode of travel itself can be a recreational activity, like horseback riding, driving, flying airplanes, etc.  Second, destinations can now be purely recreational, like camping, going to the beach, skiing, etc.

Now, suppose that something like teleportation were possible.  Suppose that people could travel anywhere in the world in a moment's time.  It would take me just as much time to travel from New York to China as it would take me to walk from my bedroom to my kitchen.  At this point, it seems that there is no longer travel in the sense that there is some kind of process or journey.  Older forms of travel are now done solely out of recreation.  What would society be like if everyone were able to travel via instantaneous teleportation?

Communication, Technology, and Culture

Let's start with communication itself.  There are two parts to communication: the content of what is being communicated, and the medium through which communication occurs.  Technology obviously has a direct effect on communication media.  This is what I'll focus on here.  I'll also speculate on the relationship between technology and communicated content.  Finally, I'll also wonder aloud about the relationship between changes in communication brought about by technology and culture.

Assuming there is no such thing as telepathy, communication is always mediated by the five physical senses.  Although it is certainly possible to communicate to some extent via taste, smell, and touch, communication is most commonly received via sight and hearing.  It is through sight and hearing that we communicate propositions, i.e. pieces of information that report facts and states of affairs.  Taste, touch, and smell, aren't so efficient at receiving these kinds of information, with the exception of the use of braille.  The aforementioned senses are more of the evocative variety.  They bring to mind certain kinds of experiences, but these experiences tend to be highly subjective.  Communication received via sight and hearing in the form of written and spoken language allow for some intersubjectivity between the participants of communication.

So, I'll be focusing on communication via language.  As mentioned above, language is employed either in either written or spoken form.  There are ways in which technology can affect the way in which language is transmitted.

Oral Language
Spoken language is constrained by the ability of the audience to hear the message.  Without technology, the speaker's audience is limited to those within earshot.  Technology can alleviate this constraint in a few ways.  First, it can amplify the volume of the spoken message so that the message is intelligible at further distances.  Examples include megaphones and public address systems.  Second, it can convert a spoken message to something else, transmit it, and reconvert it back to a spoken message available to any audience anywhere who possesses to the means to reconvert that message.  Examples include, radio, television, telephones, internet, etc.  With the advent of recording, a spoken message can reach anyone potentially anywhere at any time.

One effect that technology has on spoken language is that it separates the message from the physical interaction that usually comes with it.  Typically, a spoken message is given with the speaker and audience physically present.  With technology, neither party is required to by physically present when the message is given.  How does this affect culture?

Written Language
Of course, the fact that a message can reach an audience that is separated from the speaker by time and place has already been established by written language.  The advent of written language ushered in major changes in culture.  Messages can now be preserved across time and distributed across distant geographic locations.  How did this affect culture?

With respect to the written word, technology has different effect than it does with the spoken word.  Primitive ways of creating the written word were slow, costly, and difficult to distribute.  Think of messages engraved into stone.  As technology advances, these effects were ameliorated.  Paper made messages easier to distribute.  The printing press significantly lowered the cost of distribution.  Typewriters sped up the process of creating written messages.  How has this affected culture?  Are there significant ways in which culture differs because written messages can be created and distributed quickly and cheaply?

The Original State of Human Nature

In an earlier post, I briefly discussed my thoughts on Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs, and Steel.  The book attempts to explain why certain societies came to dominate over others.  What I found fascinating was learning how technology developed, and the role that it played in the history of nations.

Now, I'm interested in how culture is affected by technology.  In order to get a better handle on this project, it's helpful to know what culture was like at the dawn of human civilization.  Did individuals during this time have moral beliefs?  If so, what were they?  How can we even know if these individuals had moral beliefs, and if they did, what these beliefs were?

Diamond, in his new book, The World Until Yesterday, speculates on the culture of proto-societies by observing hunter-gatherer groups still present today.  How much one can infer about the state of humans back in the day by observing these groups is a matter of debate.  For one thing, these groups have often interacted with modern societies, thus introducing some cultural contamination.

Another possibility is to make inferences based on archaeological findings.  We can look at the sort of stuff these people had and infer what might be important to them.  The argument goes as follows.  If people are willing to take the time and effort to make stuff, then the function of the things that they make reflect their own values.  Something like that.

I don't know very much about archaeology, but I think I can make some rather general claims about the values of early man.

Early man valued survival.  This much is obvious.  It seems that the first stage in the development of technology was the crafting of rudimentary tools to hunt and to gather food.

Other than survival, what did early man value?  How about procreation?  That would be the second part of the Darwinian theoretical tag team.  It's obvious that early man reproduced.  It might be safe to say that reproduction was important to early man.  But here there are some questions.  Why not reproduction with anyone and everyone?  Was early man selective in choosing their mating partners?  If so, why?  One standard answer might be that human infants are not like other animals in that they can hit the ground running.  They require a lot of care and maintenance before they become independent.  Just making babies without caring for them would result in a lot of dead babies, and a lot of wasted effort.  However, caring for babies is costly.  The woman caring for the baby incurs a large cost, and thus may have an incentive to be picky about who she mates with.

This might explain that it's not just reproduction that matters, but reproduction of a certain kind.  It's all about the guy trying to woo the girl, and the girl trying to keep the guy after.  This narrative is present in all of human history.  I'll call this sort of thing, "courtship reproduction."

So, it might be safe to say that there were at least two values held by early man, survival and courtship reproduction.  A few questions follow.  First, were these the only values?  Are all other values derivative of these two.  Second, how were these values affected by the development of technology?  For instance, the development of technology can make survival easier.  If survival isn't as hard as it used to be, what happens then?  How are human values affected?

Guns, Germs, and Steel: Reflections

I recently just finished listening to the audiobook version of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.  It's a fascinating book fill with all kinds of tidbits and facts about anthropology.  The book breaks down as follows.

We observe the following:  Some nations have dominated and colonized other nations and groups in modern history.

What best explains this observation?

Diamond divides up the explanation between proximate and ultimate causes.  The proximate causes, i.e. what more directly explains this fact about history is that the dominating countries had the technology, communication via writing, and political structure that provided the means by which they could colonize other lands and subjugate other societies.  Moreover, the germs and diseases carried by members of dominating societies decimated those of the conquered societies.  These proximate causes are what are summed up in the title "Guns, Germs, and Steel."

The ultimate causes are supposed explain why certain societies ended up with the guns, germs, and the steel.  For Diamond, there is one ultimate cause: food production.  Societies that settled down and mass produced food, as opposed to hunter-gatherer groups, were the ones that ended with the means to advance technology, form complex political organizations, and build immunity to certain kinds of diseases.

Much of the book goes on to explain in detail what sorts of environmental factors led certain societies to transition into agrarian food producers.  It also attempts to establish the causal connections between mass food production and advancements in technology, writing, and political organization, as well as the introduction of certain diseases that proved to be fatal to other groups.  The last third book consists of case studies on various groups.

Here are two thoughts about this book.  First, what Diamond deems as ultimate and proximate causes give necessary conditions, but themselves don't seem jointly sufficient.  Stuff like technology gives groups the ability to invade and conquer someone else's land, but technology itself doesn't compel groups to go out and take other peoples' lands.  Why do people feel the need to take over other societies?  Where does this motivation come from?  There doesn't seem to be much in terms of explanation regarding the collective psychological of dominating societies.

This in turn leads to another thought.  The desire to expand and conquer, is this desire innate?  I'm of course interested in the intersection between culture and technology, so it would be good to get some idea of what culture was like at the dawn of civilization.  Did early man have values?  A sense of aesthetic?  In general, what sorts of normative beliefs did the earliest hunter-gatherer groups share?  Having some idea about this helps us to see how those beliefs might have evolved as technology progressed.  This I'll save for a later post.

Culture and Technology: Preliminaries

I've been fascinated by the relationship between culture and technology recently.  So, I've decided that it will be one of the major themes of this blog.  Every so often I'll write about these two notions in an attempt to systematize their relationship.

This is my primary question:

How does technology affect culture, and vice versa?

First, my definitions of the two terms.

By 'culture' I mean both the beliefs, positive and normative, of a particular community and the ways in which those beliefs are expressed.  A community can be grouped in any particular way.  Positive beliefs are beliefs about purported states of affairs of the world.  Examples of positive beliefs include the following:

Barack Obama was the president of the United States in 2010.
A water molecule is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
A square has four sides that are equal in length.

Normative beliefs are value-laden beliefs.  They express claims regarding what is good, bad, moral, immoral, beautiful, or ugly.  Here are some examples.

Nickelback is the worst band of all time.
Murder is wrong.
I should write a thank you note to my job interviewer.
This sandwich is delicious.

Here are examples of different aspects of culture.

Arts & Entertainment
Politics & Government
Religion
Education
Scholarship
Business, Economy and Industry
Public Health
Family, Relationships, and Sex
Food & Drink
Media and Communication

I think these categories exhaust all the aspects.  You can get more aspects of culture by combining various categories.  Do these categories exhaust the non-reducible aspects of culture?  I'm not sure.  I may not have enough, or too many.  If I need to change things, I'll come back and revise.

My definition of culture is intentionally broad.  Is it too broad?  Does it all certain things to be defined as culture that really aren't culture?  Maybe.  But, this should work for now.  If I need to tighten up the definition, I'll come back and revise.

Similarly, my definition of 'technology' is broad.  Technology is any means apart from the human body itself that mankind uses to engage with the surrounding environment.  As with culture, here are the different categories of technology.

Food and Drink
Transportation
Communication
Medicine
Infrastructure
Housing
Communication
Warfare
Clothing
Energy
Manufacturing

This list is surely inconclusive.  I'll come back and revise if needed.

So, now I've got a working definition of culture and technology.  It's time to start waxing philosophical about how these two relate.