They have greatly disappointed me

It is possible that one purpose of the (for lack of a better categorization) self-actualization reading list was to learn that people can be wrong about some things and right about others, or not to completely discount someone for their shortcomings. If that was the case, it may not have worked.

I have no problems with Alexander, Maslow, or Erdman for that matter, but before I got to reading the books I started having some problems with Pinker and Grossman.

I did not change my plans for reading the books, though that has happened with other authors. (I learned how to delete books from my Goodreads reading list because of Malcolm Gladwell.)

I think I am going to go over the basics today, and then try and make a point tomorrow.

There were actually two things with Grossman. In the original interview along with mentioning how the changes in training - and specifically shooting practice - increased the kill rate, he did mention video games then as damaging. I heard it but it wasn't my focus.

Later when I was reading Killing Monsters: Our Children's Need for Fantasy, Heroism and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones, Jones made a much better case for the safety of video games and the role they play. Jones' work made me more skeptical of Grossman, but not nearly as much as someone attributing the sheepdog analogy to Grossman.

The idea is that there are wolves, which are dangerous to the sheep, and sheepdogs are scary because they look like wolves and sometimes act like wolves, but they are needed to protect the sheep. I have referred to it before. At the time some police were passing it around as kind of a justification for some police brutality that happened.

Grossman referred to it in On Killing, but as an analogy he had heard from an old soldier, and that he didn't strongly endorse. It felt to me that he was telling it more as an interesting viewpoint. It also goes against pretty much everything else he had written, because a lot of people tell the story as if the sheep couldn't do what the sheepdogs do. Grossman's point is that we train them to be killers for a specific purpose, and then we need to have a means of bringing them out of that mode through ritual or a readjustment time. (Therefore, anyone can become a sheepdog and we need to be careful not to leave them in sheepdog mode.)

That is more practical to do with soldiers than with law enforcement, which may be just one more reason to completely rethink law enforcement. Grossman does not get there at all. After making this very strong case for all that their training does to make soldiers and police killers, suddenly violence in society is due to video games and soldier's adjustment problems are because people were not welcoming to Vietnam vets. The book was first published in 1995, so he wouldn't have had a chance to observe a lot of post-Gulf War issues, back when "Support Our Troops" was everywhere. Still, it was such a sudden and mystifying shift. I guess it was less of a let-down because I'd had reasons to suspect that he would let me down before I got there.

I still think Grossman's intentions are good, and probably 70% of the book is really good. That may sound tepid, but it is absolutely glowing compared to my thoughts on Steven Pinker.

Pinker attacked rape culture. No, he's not attacking that there is a culture where women are devalued, and the common response to any report of rape is to wonder how the person was asking for it, and that it should be dismantled. He attacked the idea that this is a thing.

To some extent I could see where he was coming from. Since Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape came out in 1975, there has been a growing understanding that rape is about power. Movies and television shows will often have it as a throwaway line, "Rape's not about sex; it's about power." That is routine now, but it took a while. The first time I remember hearing it was in the ads for Disclosure, a 1994 movie.

Pinker says rape is about sex.

I won't deny that Against Our Will has it's shortcomings, and there are a lot of contemporary issues that it doesn't cover. At forty years old, that's not surprising. For the time it was groundbreaking, but as soon as you figure some things out that gives you new things to figure out.

I have no objection to someone re-examining rape culture, or what roles sex and power play in rape, but just dismissing something for which there is so much evidence, and which causes so much damage, and which I can't help but know is unlikely to happen to Pinker himself does make him seem like kind of an arrogant ass.

And his book was greatly disappointing too. He had some great writing samples from other people, and I am glad I read those, but there was so much that just dragged in between. Furthermore, if the whole point of this style guide is that it was written by a cognitive scientist instead of one more writer or editor, why did it read so much like all the other style guides by writers and editors?

So perhaps one way of analyzing this is that some people may be good at collecting data or examples, but not at interpreting them, and these two writers happened to be good collectors. I think there is something else going on though (which I hinted at in the third paragraph), and we will get to that tomorrow.