Do You Think You're Clever? Page 14
It may be that many Americans are simply not sufficiently educated. The more people seem to know about science, the less unnerving they find the notion of evolution. Yet a study by Miller, Scott and Okamoto published in 2006 in Science, backed up by a recent Gallup poll, suggests that it really is religious beliefs that are at the heart of the issue. Regardless of education, over half of American non-churchgoers believe in evolution, while less than a quarter of churchgoers do. However, non-belief in evolution does seem to go hand-in-hand with strongly conservative politics and a pro-life stance – and moral certainty rather than spirituality. So it seems likely that the American distrust of evolution is maybe as much cultural as purely religious. There is a broad section in American society (proved to be in a minority, at least for a while, by the 2008 election of Barack Obama) which distrusts progress and distrusts outsiders – and distrusts science.
Just why so many Americans distrust science is hard to say. Maybe they see science as a danger to cherished values, as well as fundamental beliefs. Or maybe they dislike its democratising power, just as conservative elements distrusted the ascendancy of human logic in the eighteenth century over divine inspiration which helped spur the French and, ironically, American revolutions. Or maybe, in common with so many people in Europe, they are wary of science’s tendency to hubris – its negative associations with failed drugs and inflated claims – or the way it threatens to, as Keats put it, ‘unweave the rainbow’ and take the magic and mystery out of life. Yet, paradoxically, some anti-evolutionists happily embrace GM technology.
It’s not always entirely clear just what aspect of evolution unconvinced Americans actually disagree with. When questioned, most, but by no means all, are Creationists – that is, they believe that God created all life on earth. But they are not always specific about whether they believe it was created fully formed as it is today, or whether species have come and gone, and if so, how?
One powerful element among the evolution challengers in America has come from those who promote the concept of ‘Intelligent Design’. This is not an idea that has come from the Bible at all, but a pseudo-scientific notion aimed, apparently, at challenging evolution on intellectual grounds. In essence, it says that the astonishing complexity and aptness for their circumstances of most life forms on earth must indicate that they were designed intelligently, that is by God.
This argument from design is an old one, known by philosophers (and long-discredited) as the teleological argument, but the Intelligent Designers have given it a new scientific gloss with expensively funded ‘research’ institutes and apparently ‘scientific’ papers spread across the internet that trap the unwary. There have been many battles fought over whether Intelligent Design should be taught alongside evolution as a ‘theory’ in science lessons in American schools. The ‘Designers’ often, though not always, seem to win, but it’s ultimately a con; it’gds no more a scientific idea than basic Creationism and so should have no more place in the science curriculum. It’s hardly surprising, though, that so many Americans remain unconvinced by the notion of evolution, with so many powerful and persuasive voices lobbying against it.
How would you reduce crime through architecture?
(Architecture, Cambridge)
One of the big shocks of the last few decades has been how so many of the modernistic, highly prized housing schemes of the 1960s have quickly become crime hotspots – sink estates where nobody wants to live if they can help it, and where crime is endemic. Clearly the mix of people living here can sometimes play a part, but there has been a growing realisation that the built environment plays a much bigger part. The wrong kind of architecture not only fails to deter crime, but positively encourages it.
It helps when answering this question if you know a little about a whole new approach to architecture, known as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED), that has become popular in recent years. Its origins lie back in the 1960s in the USA when authors such as Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) observed just how alienating the new urban landscapes were, with their vast areas of ‘no-man’s land’ and the lack of interaction between neighbours. It’s now a major field of study that has attracted a lot of research because the implications are so important. Yet much of what CPTED promotes is simply common sense – so much so that it’s hard to appreciate just how badly architects once got it wrong. It’s about taking obvious preventive measures to make it harder to commit crimes, combined with more subtle measures that reduce the mentality that makes people actually want to commit crimes.
CPTED practitioners like the word ‘natural’. They talk about ‘natural surveillance’, for instance, ‘natural access control’ and ‘natural territorial reinforcement’. The idea is that instead of imposing military-level surveillance systems and building houses like fortresses, you exploit thoughtful design so that neighbourhoods become naturally self-policing, and access is discouraged. It’s about building a sense of ownership and community so that people look out for each other. Principles like these were used in the design of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and they are being used in the new Buckingham and Suffolk University campuses, with lots of glass, grass and people-friendly spaces.
Crime is much less likely in settings where people are more involved in each other’s lives and care about their shared spaces. This means housing must be ‘human’-scale. In a large development, housing should be divided into small enclaves with a shared communal space where neighbours are likely to meet casually all the time – something which can be enhanced by landscaping gardens. But each enclave needs to be at least subtly different to personalise it, and given features such as signs and ornaments in styles that may have special meaning for the residences. The shared space needs to be attractive, too, with places for sitting, and the boundaries between shared and private space need to be soft and appealing to encourage a sense of pride and shared ownership. This shared space, and the arrangement of doors and windows to face it, may help, too, to reduce social isolation, another factor behind crime. The sense of ownership is important, and this is what CPTED practitioners mean when they talk about ‘natural territorial reinforcement’ – making the most of design and layout so that people have a sense of ownership which makes intruders stand out.
‘Natural surveillance’ means doorways and windows should look out into brightly lit open spaces so that neighbours can easily see comings and goings, who’s in and who’s out. This is not just a question of making it easy to spot potential intruders, but encourages a casual knowledge of who lives where, which makes the individual dwellings less appealing for criminals. Dimly lit corridors and stairwells and dark, tucked away spaces should be avoided at all costs. Hidden away parking lots and rubbish areas always attract problems. Far better to have parking arrangements in full view (unless completely secure).
‘Natural access control’ means using architectural design to discourage intruders, rather than razor wire and concrete. It’s easy to underestimate the value of protecting potential targets architecturally. Break-ins happen, for instance, where ways of getting in are either weakly protected or out of sight. Windows and doors can be more strongly constructed and armed with deadbolts. They can also be sited in places that are well-lit and public, or, in the case of windows, hard to access. A second-floor window near a wheelie bin area, for instance, is an obvious target. But making somewhere look like a prison camp increases alienation and probably incites crime. So these features always need to look attractive and stylish, as well as strong. And it’s worth creating space for planting and plant barriers rather than building a lot of walls, bars and concrete. Planting not only gives a place a more attractive, cared-for look; burglars are actually more deterred by flower beds and hedges than they are by walls. It’s surprisingly hard to climb over a hedge!
Architectural devices like these are being used more and more, and police and social workers are now often brought in as consultants on architectural schemes. This is all
good. The strange thing, though, is that when communities built housing for themselves in the past, they often did all this as a matter of course, without the need for consultants …
Would you say greed is good or bad?
(Land Economy, Cambridge)
‘Greed is good’ is what Michael Douglas said as the ruthless financier Gordon Gekko in the 1986 film Wall Street, as he prepared to brutally shred a company and sell off the parts. Director Oliver Stone portrayed Gekko as a monster, yet back in those Thatcher and Reagan days that kind of high-powered acquisitiveness was actually very much in vogue and Gekko was something of a hero. Ambitious young men and women aimed for the City determined to clock up their first million before they were 30. The ‘loadsamoney’ ethos filtered right down through society, and if few people were quite so upfront about proclaiming their greed as Gekko, they had no qualms about showing an in-yer-face, get-rich-quick lifestyle.
It wasn’t simply that individual acquisitiveness had lost some of the stigma it once had; it was encouraged by economists as good for society. Famously, Milton Friedman advocated removing the fetters of regulation to allow individual self-interest to flourish. In an extreme version of Adam Smith’s laissez-faire capitalism, Friedman unabashedly insisted that greed was the real driving force behind societies, and giving it full rein was the only viable route to prosperity and political and social freedoms. Deregulation of the financial markets under Reagan and Thatcher – culminating in the London Stock Market’s ‘Big Bang’ on 27 October 1986 – was soon coupled with huge performance bonuses to lead to an explosion of the world of money.
The story is all too well-known now. Cities such as London and New York rose on a tide of money in the 1990s and early 2000s, revelling as property prices went through the roof and whizzkids indulged in a spree of spending on luxury goods such as £80 sandwiches. It seemed as if greed was very good. And then, of course, in autumn 2008, it all went wrong, as the massively overstretched banks were plunged into deep trouble, with the Midas touch of institutions like Lehmann Brothers suddenly turning to dross. As people felt their livelihoods threatened, the consensus switched almost overnight. Greed suddenly became BAD and synonymous with a cavalier selfishness that had brought the world to the brink of ruin. Greedy bankers became targets for vilification, and there were widespread calls for tough regulation to curb their wicked ways. Public anger at the revelation of the inflated expenses claims of British MPs in the spring of 2009 seemed to mark a final nail in the coffin for ‘greed is good’ as public figures stumbled over each other to proclaim ‘greed is bad’. Even if in private people were as committed to personal acquisition as ever, few, even bankers, now feel it’s acceptable to shout this out in public as they did twenty years ago.
Yet despite this apparent change, the influence of the 1970s and 80s on underlying beliefs will not be so easily dispersed. People may not say ‘greed is good’ but most believe it’s inevitable. The rampant individualism encouraged by Mrs Thatcher, characterised in her infamous comment, ‘There is no such thing as society’, was part of a picture, along with the title of Richard Dawkins’ groundbreaking book on evolution, The Selfish Gene, which seemed to imply that we are all selfish, right down to our genes. There is still a widespread assumption that people are essentially selfish and greedy underneath it all, and so there is no point in behaving as if they are not.
Indeed, the competitive individualism that came to the fore in the 1980s and 90s went hand-in-hand with a kind of paranoia – a feeling that you were likely to get ripped off or slighted if you didn’t make the right moves. People become pugnacious and determined to get their fair share – even suggesting that others are fools if they allow themselves to be ‘exploited’. Greed may be bad, many say, but it’s a fact of life. Very few people will declare like Gekko that greed is good, but they will maybe insist that it’s how we have to live if we are to survive and prosper in a tough world.
Yet the prevailing culture has a profound influence on how we all feel and behave. It’s my belief that selfishness and paranoia are simply reflections of a selfish and paranoid time in society rather than an intrinsic part of human nature. Put people in a different culture and they may behave entirely differently. I feel disinclined to criticise either bankers or politicians on expenses for being greedy simply because few are better or worse than the culture they moved in. In some ways, criticism is another kind of greed – greed for a sense of superiority. But I would say that greed is bad, not just because it’s morally disreputable, but because it’s bad for society. A world in which people are not generous – both emotionally as well as materially – and put too much energy into acquisition is much less likely to be a happy place.
If my friend locks me in a room and says I am free to come out whenever I like as long as I pay £5, is this a deprivation of liberty?
(Law, Cambridge)
Some friend, huh? The answer to this question must be simply ‘yes’. Even with no exit fee, simply by locking you in, your friend has deprived you of your liberty. Your freedom was restricted the moment the key was turned. What matters is that your choice to come and go was curtailed. Your friend’s demand for £5 before the door is unlocked simply compounds the issue.*
Liberty has long been seen in the West as one of the most fundamental human rights – so deeply engrained that most of us find any restriction on our freedom at best annoying and at worst a cause for outright defiance. ‘To renounce liberty,’ Rousseau said, ‘is to renounce being man.’ The problem, of course, is that we are not alone in the world, and so we cannot always be free to do anything we like, even in the most liberal of cultures. We cannot be free to rob, beat or kill other people, for instance. And so
* One other possibility is thrown up by the question. It may be that you are a young child and that your friend is the person responsible for your care. A carer may legally do whatever is reasonable in their duty of care, custody and control over a child in their care. This may sometimes include locking you in your room when you’re naughty, but certainly wouldn’t include locking you in to go out and party. The exchange of money to buy your freedom would suggest a very irresponsible carer and would probably give the authorities good grounds for taking you into care.
we accept that there are circumstances in which people’s freedom can reasonably be restricted. Criminals can be deprived of their physical liberty by prison sentences. Those who cause offence may find their freedom of expression curtailed by libel and slander laws. It’s all part of what philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke call the ‘social contract’ – the deal in which we give up some of our freedom to the state and in return the state maintains order. Rousseau argued that we may give up natural independence but in exchange we get real freedom.
The crucial point, though, is that the law has to specify the circumstances in which someone can be locked up – and the law also usually forbids anyone who is not legally authorised to deprive someone of their physical liberty. So although forceful abduction and kidnapping are more serious crimes than your friend’s game with the door lock, by shutting the door and turning the key he or she is nonetheless committing a crime. By insisting on a payment, he is probably adding extortion to his felonies! Of course, it may be that your friend is an officer of the law who is legally entitled to lock you in a room such as a prison cell because you have committed a crime, in which case his offer to accept payment to allow you out becomes a different crime!
There are certain circumstances in which someone may be deprived of liberty against their will even if they have not committed a crime, nor are about to. The Mental Health Act of April 2009 in the UK, for instance, allows for authorised hospital staff to deprive patients considered mentally unfit of their liberty for their own good – but there are safeguards to ensure that the patient is incapable of deciding for him- or herself and so on.
In recent years, of course, the rise of terrorism has thrown into the spotlight the issue of how long a suspected criminal can be detained by t
he authorities without a trial and whether, for the safety of society, it’s right to deprive of their liberty someone who might in future commit a crime but has not done so yet. The fears of what terrorists may do has definitely swung more people behind a willing trade-off of freedom to reduce the dangers, and yet the US government came under fire in the Bush era for the long-term detention without trial in Guantanamo Bay of people suspected of terrorist links. In 2008, the UK government pushed to extend the time that terrorist suspects could be detained before they were either released or brought to trial from 28 to 42 days. After fierce opposition in the House of Lords, they were forced to accept that this extension could only be allowed under specially introduced short-term emergency legislation.
It’s easy to say that we can lock people up when they’ve done wrong. The problem is that not everyone agrees just what is right and what is wrong. That’s why the great nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill argued in his 1859 book On Liberty that right and wrong are irrelevant; the only justification for any restriction on individual liberty is to prevent harm to others. By Mill’s argument, it doesn’t matter if nearly everyone considers something immoral; it should never be restricted by law if no one is harmed by it. There was a famous legal debate in the 1960s between H.L.A. Hart who argued that there should be no laws against ‘victimless crimes’ such as homosexual acts between consenting adults, and Sir Patrick Devlin who insisted that society has a right to enforce morals to prevent damage to the social fabric. Hart won then, but it remains a hot topic, surfacing in the debates over whether people should be allowed to air views encouraging racial tension or terrorism. When does their right to freedom of speech impinge on others’ rights to be free from harm?