A Beautiful and Arbitrary Grand Fabrication

I'm listening to Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain[1] and he just concluded a chapter with the death of Candice Newmaker that resulted from the practice of quack "attachment therapy."[2]

He says the "therapists" were not evil, but victims of paternicity - behavioral responses to patterns that are wired into our brains - eg, recognizing faces by only 4 data points (2 eyes, a nose and mouth), and so we get the Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars.

I'm not so sure that explains Candice Newmaker's death, I want something deeper, darker, satisfyingly punishable. But if it DOES explain it, it says much more to me. It says that some of us sometimes are mere victims of a poorly wired brain, or a combination of poor wiring and an unfortunate assortment of events and people, or we are simply receptive victims influenced by such people, with no more moral accountability than a shorted circuit.

And if that is true, there is no more reason we should mourn the death of Candice Newmaker than we should the mosquito I stepped on this morning, and that is nearly unthinkable unless you are the Buddha.[3]

There is likely a middle path in which some of us are accountable for our actions and some of us are not (or not as much), having been denied (by nature or nurture) the basic tools to critically evaluate ideas and people and events and ourselves.

If all of us are accountable, there is no need for mercy, bell curves, forgiveness, second chances, etc.

If none of us are accountable, everything we are and react to is a grand fabrication, beautiful and arbitrary.


[1]
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
http://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies---How-Construct-Reinforce/dp/0805091254/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1315963811&sr=8-1

[2]
Attachment Therapy on Trial: The Torture and Death of Candace Newmaker
http://www.amazon.com/Attachment-Therapy-Trial-Newmaker-Psychology/dp/0275976750/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1315963872&sr=1-1

[3]
I am the first to insist that you can't dismiss something just because it is too terrible to imagine, but the death of a child at the hands of ignorant monsters crosses any boundary behind which I might have some sympathy and mercy. Buddha, BTW, if I recall correctly, was so moved by the destruction of a termite hill that he wept; I don't know much about Buddhism, I'm going by memory of something I saw on PBS.